moonflowers

• I love moonflowers. Ipomoea alba.
  


• The fact that they just pop out one night while no one is looking and fill the air with perfume while no one is smelling and the get the hell out before the people show up and ruin everything with their stupid admiration. People, the moonflowers sneer. Look at what they do to the roses.


• These were perched up in a wire strung up over a party, hoping we'd be so absorbed in our boring human absorptions to ignore them so they could summon the affections of some kind of cool moon moth or something. Whatever they do up there. Leave us alone, we just got this one night.
  


• There were a lot of absorptive conversations and a fire and this great pork chili made with 30 peppers and some fresh homemade warm sauerkraut (Dude!) and tequila and this stuff
  
  
  
  so the moonflowers were well guarded from our attention.
  


• In fact, we were on our way out when one of the papery blooms fell to the ground and Maya was all, Dad! Moonflowers! And the moonflowers probably sighed, Shit, knowing their jig was up.
  
  
  

mirror ball

Home: Halloween
Teddy's Juke Joint: mirror ball, Jack and Coke setup, Teddy, Oscar "Harpo" Davis
Home: butterfly, cypress vine, hummingbird
House of God Ministries: chicken plate

testier post

Laura Marling, A Creature I Don't Know
R.E.M., New Adventures in Hi-Fi
David Bowie, Aladdin Sane
Milagres, Glowing Mouth
Wild Flag, Wild Flag
Disappears, Lux
The Fall, The Infotainment Scan
Lotus Plaza, The Floodlight Collective
Atlas Sound, Bedroom Databank 3 (from the Atlas Sound blog)

• I turned the above cloudy day into the End Times with Snapseed. So fun, this sort of power! Little did my fellow bus riders realize the power I was wielding with each little finger swipe. Where's the button for adding locusts?
      
• Visits to the blog have shot through the roof! Hi, everybody! It is a bit of a blow to my writerly ego that "test post" is one of the most popular things I've ever done, but I'm not one to argue with the numbers. But why that one? Is it a post-irony thing? I don't get it. If I write a testier post about "test post", will it bridge the meta-hungry new readers and my old minscule audience, creating a super-audience? Will you all then say in unison, "Thank you, People's Poet!" ?
  
  
  Bokko! Only time and Blogger stats will tell.
   
• An ad on Spotify worked! I clicked and am listening to Milagres' new album and liking it. I was gonna say I'm not "liking" it in a  Facebook kinda way but I'm not sure that's even a valid statement anymore so I'll do what the robots tell me* and move on. I think I shared it... I dunno, it's on there now. Imagine if Pandora set up a concession stand in that little corner of the Spotify screen. Imagine what we'd click on then!
    
• I'm being half-sarcastic about all this. There is a convergence feeling about the way these goofy networks are overlaying our actual lives that I'm into. The scramble to understand them has an eschatological sheen to it, a get right with Jesus 'fore it's too late thing. I'm sure someone is out there mapping every new Facebook interface change onto Revelations and tweeting/sharing/posting/liking/plussing it. It's exhilarating to scramble for the Rapture.
    
• Here I am spreading the good word to my friend Chip's class.
  
  
  
  To my fellow Wisdom Conveyors of Today: doing your thing via iPad + projector makes you feel like you are doing a TED talk. You are a genius from the future, even when you are just putting a little spin on a Slate article using a drawing program your kid downloaded. F U T U R E !

* Spotify is not gonna make me listen to Pearl Jam, no matter how many times Eddie Vetter says in his self-effacing soundbite, "it's not gonna happen..." I see what you're doing there!

The Art of Vision

Last night:
Los Campesinos!, Romance is Boring
Cyril Vetter, Dirtdobber Blues

Today:
The Flaming Lips, "I Found a Star on the Ground" (via Blurt and Slow Nerve Action's SoundCloud)

• Frank is right; Snapseed is a boss iPad photo editor. I thought original of the above was a pretty good shot until I started seeing what else it could look like. Imagine if I embraced subtlety as a creative dictate!
   
• Making a public note to myself to settle down and see things as they are.
    
• I might be too close to Dirtdobber Blues to give it an objective review: my class is doing an digital marketing plan for it, same publisher as my forthcoming book, I know personally some of the people in the book, and my house is down the street from one of the locations in which shoulda-been Louisiana singer-songwriter Butch Hornsby's troubled yet charmed life plays out. I can say the people and places I know are depicted accurately, and that Butch, who I didn't know, comes vividly alive.
  
  Butch thrives in accelerated glory time, when the world seemingly stands still while he drunkenly destroys/builds the mythic presence that sustains him when he downshifts into human time, where the pound of flesh gets collected. Similarly, Vetter's prose is the most lucid in the glory days, though at points during the quiet years, you can almost hear the tree frogs in the yard.
  
  The Kindle version begins each chapter with a link to a song (nice touch!); the paper book comes with a CD, both allowing the reader to tap into Butch's unique gifts as a songwriter, as a visual artist - his primitivist paintings and collages permeate the text as well. You get to know a guy you wish you'd known, which seems the highest compliment one can pay a biography. If you are a Bobby Charles, Townes Van Zandt, Jerry Jeff Walker type, you need some Butch Hornsby in your liquor cabinet.
  (x-posted to Goodreads and Amazon)
   
• I just let the six-hour Flaming Lips song play away in my office all day, even when I wasn't in there. I feel it will activate the surfaces of my area in the manner of my pleasing. Leave its sparkle.
  
   The Flaming Lips - I Found a Star On the Ground [Part One of Three] by Slow•Nerve•Action 3
   The Flaming Lips - I Found a Star On the Ground [Part Two of Three] by Slow•Nerve•Action 2
   The Flaming Lips - I Found a Star On the Ground [Part Three of Three] by Slow•Nerve•Action
      
• I once went to see Stan Brakhage's The Art of Vision, a six-hour deconstructive remake of his already long Dog Star Man. Only me and one other guy made it through the whole thing; I'm pretty sure Stan Brakhage himself was sitting up in the back row of the Anthology Film Archives theatre and even he left early. After the show, I shook the hand of the other guy and asked if he wanted to get a drink, thinking we'd just seen a thing only a handful of people had plus I was being a gregarious Southerner loose in New York City. He said he was going to ask the projectionist if he could watch it again.
  
  
  Stan Brakhage, Dog Star Man (Prelude) Imagine this but 6 hours long.

excellent and excellently-titled

Supergroup dynamics at play.

Wilco, The Whole Love (streaming at NPR)
John Cale, The Academy in Peril
So Percussion, Mackey: It Is Time
Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, Berio/Xenakis /Turnage: Trombone Concertos Dedicated to Christian Lindberg
David Tudor and Ensemble Modern, John Cage's Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (on YouTube)
Yvar Mikhashoff, Yvar Mikhashoff's Incitaion to Desire
SuperHeavy, SuperHeavy

• Along with the comments on Wilco's new album, I'm holding off my comments on So Percussion for the 225 Record Crate blog as well. I'm sure the suspense is killing you, but think about how excited you'll be when they finally get here next Wednesday. It's like being a week out from Christmas, the most anticipatory time of the year! Like Advent!. You can wear purple and sing "O antiphons" to bide your time.
      
• This week's Record Crate discusses the Radio Bar, new music by Blitzen Trapper and Grace Jones and tonight's local performance by jazz master McCoy Tyner, whose 1970's music I summed up as
  
  if it can be summed up, is atomized, clouds of notes forming the melodies.
  
  Sounds like something I'd say. I also got a new picture! It's the same one as on here, but it's new over there! It's like when you have that second, less-exciting Christmas over at a relative's house after real Christmas!
    
• There was a time when this was my favorite album.
  
  
  
  Below is not the same recording (Cagey sorts: Is there a difference between Concerto for Prepared Piano & Orchestra and ...& Chamber Orchestra?), which is important with Cage given all the chance operation stuff, but it puts the same kind of smoke in the room.
  
  
  It is in three parts (part 2 and 3), but really, it sounds not that different with all three parts going at once. Maybe more "eventful." The Slinky-laser zaps about a minute into part 3 go with everything.
    
• The excellent label copy for the excellent and excellently-titled Yvar Mikhashoff's Incitaion to Desire:  Yvar was an internationally known virtuoso pianist, bon vivant and ballroom dancer who died of AIDS a few years ago. One of his obsessive passions in life was to commission tangos from living composers of all ilk. This collection is drawn from sessions we recorded near the end of his life, when his sight was failing but his playing was still brilliant. These short pieces are mostly played from memory and include some terrifically funny titles: "Fromage Dangereux", which is self explanatory, and the final "Thorn Torn Lips" which observes the condition of the gypsy dancer who was kissed before the rose in her mouth was removed.
      
• OK, I don't usually bother to throw stuff under the bus from this comfy perch, but SuperHeavy is a supergroup involving Mick Jagger, Joss Stone, Damien Marley,  Bollywood composer A.R. Raham, and Dave Stewart of Eurythmics. It's like a special music episode of The Love Boat where Captain Stubing steers the Pacific Princess into an iceberg and the guest stars wake up shipwrecked on Bad Idea Island, doomed to overcome their differences and cobble together a new kind of popular music to brighten their lost horizon and perhaps, learn from one another.
  
  
  SuperHeavy, "Miracle Worker"

Everything is groovy

Hurricane lily; clothesline

Cyril Vetter, Dirtdobber Blues
The Jam, All Mod Cons
The Electric Prunes, I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night and Underground
13th Floor Elevators, Easter Everywhere

• The virtues of being well-connected: I decided I needed to bring my bike to work on the little rack on the bus and thankfully Hope the Grooviest Printmaker of All was at the stop to show me how to pull the bike rack down and pull up the wheel thing and so on. She's spent time in the Pacific Northwest and therefore her bike rack ability is instinctual. Otherwise I'd been left to fumble and cry like a feeble old man.
     
• I've had a fiction idea rolling around, partially about the dark but funny period of someone I know and I'm conflicted. I'm compelled to say it should be non-fiction and do it clean, but I'm not sure the subject would participate nor would anyone want to read it that way. Some of the characters in the "faction" Dirtdobber Blues are people I know in real life, so I know it can be done, but I can also see the fine line one must walk. This might be a job for NaNoWriMo.
   
• The Electric Prunes "I"
  
  
  
  reminds me of this groovy classic from Sesame Street
  
  
  
  which reminds me that I was lucky to have a 70's childhood.
  
  
• Everything is groovy today!
  
  
• Class was great, then I zipped across campus to do a guest lecture that i'd prepared on the iPad and it all worked like presentations, especially ones where you fly in and have zero setup time, never do. The students seemed into it, I was into it. I was less into my bike ride home when the water fountain by the park entrance wasn't working and I was about to barf up every poorly-thought-through plan in my life that led up to that very moment but I made the rest home and after a shower and some China 1 and Workaholics comin' on, s'all groovy.

"a radical statement about the possibilities of heaviness"

A gecko displaced by the fall garden cull.

Last night:
Vic Chesnutt, At the Cut
Giant Sand, Swerve
Smoke, It's Smoke Time

This afternoon:
Vanilla Fudge, Vanilla Fudge
Wilco, The Whole Love (streaming at NPR)
Frank Black and the Catholics, Pistolero

• I don't know I wholly agree with JFRARRAR's assessment of Vanilla Fudge on the Rhapsody site, but I'd love for any product of my creativity to one day been described as "a radical statement about the possibilities of heaviness".
   
• I'm going to hold my comments on the new Wilco for the 225 blog except that at one point I thought, this sounds like a Seal record. I'll have it be known that two of my good friends from high school play in Seal's current band and were my musical influences to be cut up like a pizza, those two friends each have a bigger slice than Wilco does. So there's that.
    
• Upon my announcing Vic Chesnutt's demise at the coffee shop like some breathless page from dispatched from a distant kingdom, a friend of mine replied, " I went to see Night of the Iguana with Vic Chesnutt." which sounds like something to have on one's cultural resume. I thought while listening to Giant Sand on the long, dark Interstate bridge across the Atchafalaya Swamp, I could do this! I want to do this! but of course I cannot nor will I. Giant Sand's Howe Gelb wants you to think these thoughts and then realize that's all they are, thoughts you have, while he turns similar thoughts of his directly into songs. I picture sausage grinder being used in his process, but I'm likely romanticizing. This song sounds great driving across a swamp in the dark.
  
  
  Giant Sand, "Angels at Night"
    
• I remembered Jack Pendarvis describing in a article something Howe Gelb did as, "such a Howe Gelb thing to do" and then I remembered Jack mentioning Atlanta band Smoke to me once and I was all Smoke! and dialed them up. The first song title seemed like kismet!
  
  
  Smoke, "My Friend Jack"
  
  I realized I had the wrong Smoke. This happened once before with the Jody Grind, another band from that same conversation with Jack.
     
• I turned off the wrong Smoke and started making up a Giant Sand-ish song about things falling. The song was pretty bad, but I like one bit about a cop who fell asleep at a donut shop counter with his gun about to fall out of his holster and thought Pistolero!  The second Frank and the Catholics album might just be the sharpest arrow in Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV's vast quiver! If I may mix up my weapon metaphors. Which I can. No matter what Howe Gelb or anybody says.
  
  
  Frank Black & the Catholics, "Western Star"