hand-drawn blog

mutant pink strawberry

David Bowie, Space Oddity
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Unstoppable
Scott Walker, Climate of Hunter
Queen, Hot Space
tUnE-YaRdS, W H O K I L L
Afrika Bambaataa, Death Mix Live
Broadcasts from The Radio Bar
Mad Professor, Beyond the Realms of Dub
Grace Jones, Hurricane Dub
Cyril Vetter, Dirtdobber Blues

• My review of Angus Woodward's Americanization: Lessons in American Culture and Language: A Novel, a funny, postmodern (those two words are usually separated by more than a comma) satire fitted into the shell of a citizenship textbook, is up on the Oxford American website. Keep scrolling, it's there.
   
• Man, I love David Bowie lately. It's partly because I'm forever trying to turn Maya onto something and Bowie is sticking, partly because Bowie's art is one of constant unveiling. It is Major Tom lost in space reentering orbits. It is how to use a swooning string section to such key effect that you don't even know it's there. It's crafting a song so good that even Vanilla Ice couldn't ruin it. Take a second to listen to "Under Pressure" empirically.
   
  
  Queen and David Bowie, "Under Pressure"
     
• Sure, it's a primarily a Queen song from their least rock'n' roll record - in 1982, everything was Thriller or it was filler -  but when Bowie proclaims it our last dance/ourselves and we are but a few fingerclicks from the ensuing void from which this song springs, it's the last breathy gasp in the world.
     
• Jerri took my author photo (above), the last thing needed for my book. It seems weird to say "finished," and maybe a jinx to say that I am. I accidentally pulled up the full size version on Flickr and each pore was like the seed of a mutant pink strawberry. Never look at your picture closeup. It's like looking at your blog stats; what you thought was your best feature gets overshadowed by something everyone else can't see around. I got my hair did by my girl Carla at Salon Dolce, should you find yourself looking shaggy and skulking around Beauregard Town.
      
• I just had so many windows open and the weirdest tune coming from one of them. I kept shutting them trying to find it and the music still played until I found it beaming out of the Radio Bar, a new bar/online radio station thing soon to be open on my way home from work. If I were programming the station right now, and I suppose I could be if I wanted, I'd just play the Grace Jones Hurricane Dub record over and over until we are all made space oddity plazzzzma and become one with the void from which things spring. Have a great weekend!
  
  
  Grace Jones, "Devil Dub"

become its own mountain

On the walk to school.

Grace Jones, Hurricane Dub
Ian McEwan, Amsterdam
Matthew Dear, Black City
Cerebral Ballzy, The Griptape, Vol. 2
Roots Manuva vs. Wrongtom, Duppy Writer
Aceyalone & the Lonely Ones, The Lonely Ones
Various Artists, ATP I'll Be Your Mirror USA Mixtape

• It's been a busy couple of days.
   
• I'm debating whether it is worth the labyrinthine Special Collections library process required to read LSU's remote storage copy of René Daumal's Mount Analogue. (hat tip to 50 Watts for introducing it to my world) I suspect the process would become its own mountain. I might find wisdom at the top. Or just another mountain.
   
• Zadie Smith prefaces her Believer conversation with Ian McEwan with
    I have often thought Ian McEwan a writer as unlike me as it is possible to be.
   
  despite the fact that the first chapter of Amsterdam seemed Zadie Smith as hell, or maybe vice-sersa. The posturing of semi-ineffectual men-in-authority over a wild woman caged by unfortunate destiny, c'mon. Maybe that is just the Modern English Novel talking and she means something finer that I'm too coarsely American to detect.
  
  Coming off like either writer is not a bad thing, by the way.
     
• Aceyalone comes off awesome, as does Ms. Treasure Davis in this ri-cheer.
  
  
  Aceyalone, "Can't Hold Back" feat. Treasure Davis
    
• There is another copy of Mount Analogue sitting at another library to which I ostensibly have borrowing rights, but I believe I owe fines. I can't log in to see. The question is: do I go through the shuffle of paperwork and endure the restrictions (I'd have to read it under watch in a reading room) to read the free copy, go across town and pay my fines to get it from the less complicated institution, or just buy the damn thing outright? In terms of work-hours, option three is the bargain. I think this might be a question of politics. Do I just choose to own it because it is easier than sharing? Is it time or money, or the mix of both, that is the big hurdle to my not reading right now? Should I own, rent, or just use the thing? Or forget it existed?
  
  If it was available for Kindle, we'd probably not even be having this discussion, presuming you are still listening. Is this a discussion if you, dear reader, have smartly stopped reading at this point? Also, I wonder if actually reading the book will provoke as much thought as have the potentialities around acquiring the book. Is there a difference between acquisition and having? I think I'm at the foothills of a media theory. I'm going to title the resulting book about the experience Climbing Mount Analogue: What is a Book and How Do We Read One. You can forget I said anything and then congratulate me via Facebook after hearing me talking about it on Fresh Air. Yep, it'll be sweet. Wait, where did you go? Hello?

a riding lawnmower on the moon

Country music legend George Jones received a special visitor on Christmas Day when fellow recording artist Ronnie McDowell showed up at his home in Franklin, Tenn., bearing the gift of a portrait --commissioned by George's wife, Nancy -- depicting his DUI arrest while operating a riding lawn mower. From here.

George Jones, The Bradley Barn Sessions

• We should put a riding lawnmower on the moon to commemorate George Jones surviving being George Jones for 80 years!
  
  
  Drive-By Truckers, "George Jones Talkin' Cell Phone Blues"
   
• I've been playing with the stats part of the new Blogger and this old post suggesting that George Jones and Irma Thomas get together has gotten more play than I previously realized, so here it is.
   
• I saw old No-Show Jones that Thursday night. His pipes were shot and his band did most of the heavy lifting. It was a run through the numbers; the real George Jones in the room, not the old man in the windbreaker or the wife-beating drunken nightmare, was the one projected into the stale air of the River Center by the audience clinging to that amorphous thing classic country music now represents.
   
• The Bradley Sessions is a good place to go. Jones and Ricky Skaggs and Keith Richards and even Tammy showed up in Owen Bradley's barn during a thunderstorm and made it happen. the reviews complain that it's too clean, but George Jones is generally smooth as whiskey spilled 'cross and Ethan Allen table.
  
  
  George Jones & Keith Richards, "Say It's Not You"
  
  Not from that session, but this is my all-time favorite George Jones tune. Best appearance of Elvis and Fred Flintstone in the same song.
  
  
  George Jones, "The King is Gone"
   
• This is the second DBT video I've sent out this morning. Happy birthday, Lisa and to all the other Lisas out there.
  
  
  Drive-By Truckers, "Lisa's Birthday"

Edited to add: Speaking of the moon, look at that dirty old moon from last night.

My life is a rainbow on fire!

Orange Juice, Rip It Up, Texas Fever
The Pastels, Mobile Safari
[The] Magnetic Fields, Holiday
The National, High Violet
Slowdive, Pygmalion
This Mortal Coil, Filigree and Shadow
Rain Tree Crow, Rain Tree Crow

• The key to navigating modernity is knowing your cocktail. Maya's is pomegranate with brownie chunks, sour gummy bears and "mango drops" from Pinkberry. I am open to frozen yogurt sponsorship of these pages, by the way.
   
• I had a dream the alarm app on my iPad wasn't going off because I hadn't set it right, so I woke up in the dream to check it and then woke up in real life. And a minute late the alarm went off. My life is a rainbow on fire!
   
• Similarly, I when I got to work, I dumped out the latte that had been sitting on my desk since Friday in the office bathroom sink and it was brown and curd-y and splattered everywhere and the sink wouldn't drain. It looked exactly like someone had done - I had done - the most horrible thing a person could do in the sink at the bathroom at the office. I was certain someone was going to walk in and see it and we'd have a Larry David moment while I tried to explain it off, when the sink gurgled and started draining. Spit spot!
   
• Is there a "the" in Magnetic Fields? I replied to a question (possibly from a robot) that "I truly wish I was well-heeled enough in spellcasting to answer." I am into what this day is asking of me.
  
  
  [The] Magnetic Fields, "Strange Powers"
   
• I haven't listened to that last National album since it came out and Bret Easton Ellis reminded me how good they are again.  The infinitude of my day! I won't even go into how we couldn't find a table at the Union for lunch. Not one! Just swoon along with the dour indie baritones.
  
  
  The National, "Lemonworld"

in the sphere of loving

XTC, Oranges and Lemons
Nick Lowe, Labour of Lust
Pere Ubu, Dub Housing
The Rolling Stones, Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out: The Rolling Stones in Concert

• I heard Jesus gave the "all-clear" that you can stop hating Muslims now.


• Making an impromptu New Orleans visit is one of the things I really love about not living in New Orleans. I'm not sure I'd make the most of it if I did live there. The weather was magic, the pizza at Slice is right on the money and I don't know why I've never walked through Audubon Park before. I've been there, like, to go to the zoo or, well, maybe that is the only reason I've been there.
  
  
  
  I dig the stinky, crittery thicket that is Bird Island. I love wondering if the hippos Pablo Escobar bought off the financially strapped Audubon Zoo in the 1970's once menaced these fetid waters. I love the pale flowers of the city defying the onset of autumn with bikinis and beach towels. I love how New Orleans loves itself. Sometimes I get tired of how much New Orleans loves itself, getting in there with tweezers and a magnifying glass with its self-love, but today, I was loving its loving.


• Nick Lowe, it must be said, is the best songwriter. Even when the song part isn't the best, the writing is.
  
  
  Nick Lowe, "Dose of You"
  
  Down there at the 2:30 mark, does he not say, "a heel made of high / a dress made of tight" ? Somebody make him poet laureate of wherever. But I digress.


• How the crowd doesn't go apeshit after The sublime reading of "Sympathy For the Devil" on Ya-Ya's I'll never know. Could it be that they were exhausted by the preceding 45-minute deconstruction of "Midnight Rambler", watching a perfectly good song be vivisected and coldly inspected by Victorian scientists looking to scry the future in its entrails? Could it be that Keith Richards and his guitar had been replaced at that point of show by Wile E. Coyote manning an enormous Acme Electromagnet pulling in mailboxes and washing machines and battleships and Sputnik into Madison Square Garden?
  
  
  "Compressed Hare", 1961
  
  Or is that Mick Taylor at the controls? Or was it understood in 1969 that everything was cool ('cept for that overlong confusing war, wait a second...), the Rolling Stones roamed the Earth and didn't suck, so folks were harder to please? All I know is that it bent time so that I could shave off 30 minutes from my usual drive back from New Orleans. Love that. Circling in.


• I think it was magnets. I woke up with an edge on me, and smoothed it down best I could. Maya asks to listen to Oranges and Lemons every time we're in the car - she loves XTC so much that she draws cartoons about them + plus she's becoming a sullen, unresponsive teenager so I'll take what I can get - and since I choose to spend this weird anniversary, about which none of us knows how to feel, in the sphere of loving, here is the only band in her world on the subject.
  
  
  XTC, "The Loving"
  
  All around the world,
  Every boy and every girl,
  Need the loving.
  The humble and the great,
  Even those we think we hate,
  Need the loving.
  
  Soldiers of the Queen,
  All the hard men that we've seen,
  Need the loving.
  Babies at the breast,
  Those in power and those suppressed,
  Need the loving.
  
  Let's face it you just can't hide,
  Your first taste'll send you reeling,
  Like a firework to which we're tied,
  Be prepared to go through your ceiling now.
  
  The loving's coming,
  The loving's more than just an ad man's vision.
  The loving's strumming,
  On your heart strings,
  So loud that you can't help but listen.
  
  Sailors on the seas,
  Or the clergy on their knees,
  Need the loving.
  All the rich and poor,
  Even those we fight at war,
  Need the loving.
  
  That thing that we need most of,
  That stuff we should try before we've died.
  Everyone is begging to be loved,
  With a free gift, a working heart inside.
  
  The loving's coming,
  The loving's advertised in all the papers.
  The loving's humming,
  Your favourite song,
  For once it won't annoy the neighbours.
  
  The loving, the loving.
  
  All round the world,
  Every boy and every girl,
  Need the loving.
  Cold-hearted or warm,
  Every single person born,
  Needs the loving.
  
  Way out there in space,
  Think we'll find that alien race,
  Needs the loving.
  And just to end the list,
  Everything that could exist,
  Needs the loving.
  
  The loving's coming!

"bacon sandwich"

You have to take a lot of blurry pictures of an abandoned feeder to get one discernible hummingbird.

XTC, Black Sea
Oingo Boingo, Nothing to Fear
David Bowie The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars
Badly Drawn Boy, The Hour of the Bewilderbeast
Denis Cooper, Train Dreams

• The first tailgate of the season was a bust, but then I am merely a consumer of my buddy John's tailgating largess, and not remotely involved in what it takes to make it happen, so no complaints here. It was a gorgeous day to stroll around campus, traditional game day bacon sandwich or no. Plus, I got the front yard mowed and the hummingbirds were in full stuntshow display, buzzing my heads as I tried to keep the damn camera steady and learn photography on the fly. Still, none of that has the same ring as "bacon sandwich".
  


• I just spent the last hour reading the non-sports facets of ESPN's Grantland webzine thing, and can only imagine how knocked out I'd be if I was into sports. The Chuck Klosterman interview with/profile of Oasis' Noel Gallagher is luminous and this Wright Thompson piece is the best thing written about mescal since Under The Volcano. Volcano has the edge of being one of the best things ever written period. So, anyway, Grantland. Great stuff.
  


• Speaking of great, Denis Johnson's Train Dreams is so great that I''m going to stop blogging right now and go finish it ...


• ... And so I did. I attempt to show the fireflies trapped in the jar that is this book over at Goodreads but trying to put in words how good a book it is, it's like using cheap perfume to describe the expensive stuff.
  


• I just walked out under this very moon with my best girl to get a grocery bag full of chips and salsa.

Location:Baton Rouge,United States