We're all friends around here

Cushman Electric Truck

XTC, Apple Venus Volume One
Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
alva noto, summvrs
Wilco, The Whole Love
The Jayhawks, Mockingbird Time
Thee Headcoats Sect, Ready Sect Go!

• I quite enjoy how Snapseed allowed me to lend that Cushman electric truck a buttery sheen. It's like a   Wayne Thiebauld/John Chamberlain collaboration The truck is up at Ragusa Automotive if you are interested. The guy saw me taking a photo through the fence of his lot and caught up with me two blocks down the street asking to make him an offer, so he's looking to deal.
     
• The October 2011 issue of Country Roads might be one of the best issues ever, but perhaps I'm biased. I have pieces about how New Orleans drank its way through Prohibition and about the best donut shop kolaches in town.
  
  In that same issue, my friend Frank McMains has a story about chasing meteor showers. BTW, check out this amazing lightning shot on his blog. The guy can take a damn picture.
  
  Another friend, Sam Irwin, breaks down Le Tournoi, the annual jousting competition they have in the little town of Ville Platte, LA. Ruth Laney interviews Johnny Palazzotto, both friends, about blues musician Slim Harpo.
  
  And if my social/professional web wasn't tangled enough, my boss at the day job and his wife has a piece in the magazine about a little museum dedicated to vanished town.  We're all friends around here.


• 10% into the library's OverDrive ebook (they do Kindle books now!(#excitedaboutthelibrary (#nerd))) of it, Ready Player One is spot on: not-too-distant future social dystopia where reality sucks so bad it is abandoned whenever possible for something between SecondLife and the Web that corporations are poised to ruin for everyone. AND, and, the framework of the action is both transparently and slyly modeled on Adventure for the Atari 2600. Hits me right where I lived, live and will live.
    
• Here is a Flash version of Adventure designed by Scott Pehnke, just in case you need to kiss your day goodbye. All I need now is a pitcher of Kool-aid and this
  
  
  Check out the butter well! The lid to a Parkay tub snaps right onto that ridge at the top.
  
  and about two hours before my mom pulls in the driveway and my sister and I rush to the kitchen to make it seem like we were in the process of making dinner to feel that warm glow of adolescence.
      
• OK, I did not know that chamber-glitch artist alva noto is also German sculptor Carsten Nicolai. I have been independently flattened by the work of both and now shattered by the combination.
  
  
  the experimental nature of carsten nicolai's work often results in his exhibitions seeming to be like scientific laboratories where various calculations and tests with partly open results are performed. from here.
  
  
  alva noto + Ruichi Sakamoto, "By This River"
    

100,000

The Wilson $100,000 dollar bill, from here. If I had one, I'd cut each of you a square.

I just hit 100,000 alltime pageviews!* Thank you, web crawling robots and people who will click on anything presented to them! You did the bulk of the work!

What's my secret?  I just keep livin'. IN HD!



To those of you who actually read this thing, day in and day out like oxen yoked to a sakia wheel, helping to mill culture down into bullet points, I don't know how you do it. Your contributions do not go unnoticed! Thanks!

*according to the internal Blogger stats meter. Google Analytics tells a slightly less exciting story, but who wants to listen to a less exciting story? Don't kill my buzz!

drama filters

Strausbourg Philharmonic Orchestra, Marc Albrecht cond., Christiane Iven, Soprano, Berg: 3 Orchester Stucke, 7 Altenberg Lieder, 7 Fruhe Lieder
Helmut Lachenmann, Musique Concrète
Jody Redhage, Of Minutiae and Memory
Wilco, The Whole Love
   

• I just scrolled down and saw the grunge and drama filters in Snapseed. They turn the lowliest bus window snapshot into an Eastern European folk tale. Above: "The Whale That Ate Bratislava".
     
• I'm tempted to make a Facebook page for "the flying boat explosion scene in Face/Off" just so I may, in a contemporary manner, express how much I like it .


• And while I'm on the subject of movies: you may think Tom Hanks is a hack long past his prime, that Jonathan Safran Foer is an over-sentimental, precious lit-schmo, that Nico Muhly is large on Sonic the Hedgehog persona and short on compositional prowess... one could make an argument for any or all of the above, but all those factors conspiring to make a hyper-manipulative Hollywood-ass movie out of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close already sounds so perfect I wanna cry a little. I love that book. More than even Facebook can convey.
  
  
  
  I assume Tom 'n' Sandra are the parents who largely exist (in the book anyway) as vacuums through which Oskar's comet streaks. The fact that Oskar will be played by a kid that won some landmark prize on Jeopardy seems even perfecter.
    
• Just to keep the hi/low culture friction going: a moment with Workaholics
  
  
      
• Dude, I don't know if any of you human/robot readers actively follow through on the linking of obtuse music, but Helmut Lachermann is out there by even my standards. Salut Für Caudwell is like a junkyard fight scene in the acoustic room at Guitar Center. Salut!
  
  

a unicorn appearing on the roof of a Hooters

Kreayshawn, from here.

The Sequoia String Quartet, Benjamin Britten: String Quartet No. 2 / John Crawford: String Quartet No. 2 / Paul Chihara: Sequioa & Ellington Fantasy
Rene Leibowitz, Anton Webern: Concerto for Nine Instruments, Op. 24, Piano Variations Op. 24; Four Songs, Op. 12; Quartet Op. 22

• In this week's Record Crate blog for 225: new albums by Wilco, So Percussion; RAIN and Wanda Jackson in concert.
    
• Thanks to these weird daily blasts of a ~1000 readers that started about month ago, my little blog is going to hit 100,000 pageviews any day now. I'm gonna start looking into incorporating more robot humor, should that be the audience. Nothing against robots; I wanted to be one as a child, so I'm happy to at least provide some sort of entertainment for them.
   
• I think string quartets are maybe the the most human means of musical expression: manageable social scale, simple enough to be self-regulating, enough sonic real estate to let everybody display their wonder (there is a reason the modern rock quartet of two guitars, bass and drums follows this same general model). It is also as close as we get musically to robot precision.
  
  
  "String Quartet No. 2 in C major" Benjamin Britten - Sage Quartet
   
• I don't know what to make of Chihara's Ellington Fantasy. I mean, I hesitate to say it's nice enough, given the fervent love people have with Ellington's music. It is nice enough. But sing-song, whereas Chihara's other string music I've heard has a misty, dream-logic take on melodiousness that is my favorite kind of art music. Lose me in your dream cloud, don't take me for a ride I feel I've been on already.
    
• With Webern, you feel like he doesn't even know where he's going.
  
  
  Webern: "Concerto For Nine Instruments" Op. 24
  
  That's what I find so appealing the other day (and always) about Cage's Concerto for Prepared Piano; the piano is the only thing prepared for what's gonna happen.
  
  One of my favorite things about the free Spotify is the sudden burst of the ads, the non-sequitirs that spiral therefrom. Like Kreayshawn gettin' all up with her Popsicle in the middle of Webern's mouse-furtive Concerto for Nine Instruments had a singular sort of juxta-beauty. It was like seeing a unicorn appearing on the roof of a Hooters. There, that should bring in 2000 readers. All demographics covered.
  
  
  I said, CAN I SPEND THE NIGHT AT YOUR HOUSE?!

"Nice earholes!"

R.E.M., Automatic for the People
David Essex, Rock On
Cocteau Twins, Four-Calendar Cafe
Prefab Sprout, Protest Songs
Lost Bayou Ramblers and Gordon Gano, "Bastille"

• "Nice earholes!" said my beautiful wife upon seeing this gecko picture.
  


• I got the new Facebook to work. I can already hearing the beating of breasts about this free thing that is weirdly not behaving exactly how we want, but I like it. The world is an organically choreographed monkey trapeze show anyway; the new Facebook is just a way to watch the monkeys go, to flatten the non-Euclidian state of reality for your hapless linear understanding.
  


• The calculus behind the dubby remix of Lost Bayou Ramblers' "Bastille" (GIVERS at the cont-rols) is the limit as x approaches no-longer-Cajun without crossing the "why?" axis. See what I did there? Math jokes!
  


• The R.E.M. Smackdown was a lot of fun, even with some phoneline issues. Thanks WNYC! I look forward to my next opportunity to put forth an unpopular opinion about popular music.


• I had something else but Fringe is on. New season! on demand! Peter doesn't exist because he fell in a wormhole or something! Plus the extra quantum reality character looks just like the cashier at Zoe's Kitchen like an hour ago! Or is it at the same time, but different space-time? Why am I shouting?!
  

with whom they were all a lover

Losing my religion; finding it in a driveway around the corner.

Ian McEwan, Amsterdam
Ryan Adams, Ashes and Fire (streaming at NPR) and Easy Tiger
Fleetwood Mac, Tusk
R.E.M., Up and Around the Sun
Nico, Avance
Serge Gainsbourg, Indifférente
Various artists, Allons Boire Un Coup: A Collection of Cajun and Creole Drinking Songs

• I'm going to be a guest on WNYC's Soundcheck Tuesday afternoon (1pm CST/2pm EST) for the R.E.M. break-up smackdown, ostensibly to speak ill of the dead.
   
• The idea of speaking ill of the dead permeates my trouble with Ian McEwan's Amsterdam, a book I am enjoying while reading but feeling nonplussed about the second I step away from the text. It's about a consortium of men dealing with the passing of a vivacious, free-spirited woman, with whom they were all a lover. No one can say a bad thing about the gal though she seems like she might have been fun but also a bit of a pain in the ass. People are never clear cut in life, why should they be expected to be so out of life? Why is that our tendency to make them so? Is it because the closest we get to understanding is "calling it" ? I'm waiting for Amsterdam to coalesce, make a pearl from this grain of sand or another.
    
• Like Ryan Adams? Is he really that puzzling? I mean, I've too played the erratic card with reviewing him, but generally, I find that an attractive feature in an artist. I don't know how many artists to whom I've said form my critical armchair: you know, you can do anything now, so why do you choose to still do that same thing? Has anyone ever asked Fleetwood Mac that question? I've never asked Ryan Adams that question. Ashes and Fire is slow and pretty and complete sounding like he sounds when he does his thing. No one in my adult lifetime has made a better record than Heartbreaker and I still love Easy Tiger. GUITAR SOLO!
  
  
  Ryan Adams, "Halloweenhead"
   
• So, this thing about Sly Stone living in his van is true? I mean, if any big star ever invited the wrath of causality upon himself, it is arguably Sly Stone, crazy is as crazy does, but it's still a bummer. Stone is likely a hard cat to love in toto, but who isn't. We all have moments where the world should love us, surrounded by other moments where hopefully some runoff of that love will sustain us in the shadows until we again become lovable, or recede into memory where we aren't afforded the opportunity to fuck things up.
  
  You wanna think, it's a sweet van.
   
• This post is kinda bumming me out. I didn't mean for it to. I'm having a great day leading into a great week and even enjoying those mid-2000's R.E.M. records more than I intended to. The Nico on Avance is not the Velvet Underground one but I was all you know, what the hell, let it play, y'all. Let the music play, like Shannon told us to do! I love everybody today and wish them the best!
  
  
  Shannon, "Let the Music Play"

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.