facing evil; conquering evil

Friday:
Nirvana, Nevermind  [Holds up on repeted listens 20 years later]
XTC, Black Sea and Skylarking[Needed to hear "Living Through Another Cuba" after hearing New Orleans is getting flights to Cuba]
The Twilight Singers, Dynamite Steps [Louche act]
Spoon, Transference [Ever notice how much Spoon sounds like Billy Joel?]


Saturday:
Black Diamond at the St. George Fair [So proud]
Smoke Fairies, Blitzen Trapper, and Dawes at the Manship Theatre [Great show]
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road [This book is going to kill me]

Sunday:
Terry Riley, You're Nogood [Brilliant and even hilarious if you are the precise kind of minimalism dork I am]
Parliament, Chocolate City [How have I never listened to this album before?]
Donald Byrd, Electric Byrd  [Kinda like  BULLFIGHTERS IN SPACE! at points]
Björk, Biophilia [Maya's new discovery + a friend of mine made me want to kill him when he detailed hanging out with Björk and her family over memorial Day weekend.]



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There are worse people with whom one could spend a weekend. Maya facing evil at Super Science Saturday; our grand walking tour from Canal Place to Euclid Records and back (New Orleans. this weather makes me fall for you all over again even though you still smoke); addressing the unknown (stuffed crab legs) at Kim Anh Noodle House; pre-flight ritual, dipping things in chemicals; Black Diamond playing their debut at the St. George Fair (videos up at their Facebook page); conquering evil

rock 'n' roll transference dreams

This Google Image search page of Adele is Warhol hypnotic. It's like she can see me rolling in something far deeper than I realize.

Work of Art: The Next Great Artist
The Cure, Seventeen Seconds
Clinic, Bubblegum
Electrelane, Axes
Deerhunter, Halcyon Digest
Tame Impala, InnerSpeaker

• My daughter's band Black Diamond is playing their debut show at the St. George Fair as part of the Baton Rouge Music Studios showcase on Saturday, Oct. 15 from 2-5pm. I will be the one upfront with the camera and the rock 'n' roll transference dreams coming true.
  
  
  4/5 of Black Diamond. The singer escaped before the photoshoot. Their setlist is the Beatles, "Let it Be", Adele's "Someone Like You" and the Cure's "Friday I'm in Love."
     
• This week's Record Crate for 225: DJ Shadow, Blitzen Trapper, Dawes, Bettye Lavette, John Pizzarelli.
     
• I am an unabashed fan of the Cure's "A Forest." Into the trees, y'all! I wish to shout to my compatriots in Cure-dom. So simple. I could listen to an hour-long loop of it, just let it build and build with more and more echo until there's nothing but grey.
  
  
  The Cure, "A Forest"
   
• You forget entirely about a thing you for a moment loved and then the circumstances of the day conjures it. E.g., Electrelane.
  
  
  Electrelane, "These Pockets are People"
  
  
• Work of Art Season 2, ep. 1 recap: The cast is good, the art wasn't bad, though Bayete the video artist missed a great opportunity in remaking this piece of thrift store art with his face  under all that hair. He couldn't just straight-faced read from the Preppy Handbook or a society column of the New York Times or a Sarah Palin speech and won.
  
  
  
  Though it only got cursory presentation on the program, I thought Kymia's transformation sculpture was my favorite. It is the simple move that professional ego politicians like the Sucklord tend to miss. Jazz-Minh's painting was good too, plus she gets bonus points for the craziest name. Hers should have won, really; it was the only piece that stood on its own without understanding that it had an origin in thrift store art, but maybe because she ventured too far form the original work. It was the only one of this round that I'd actually like to own.
  
  The Keith Haring dude's losing piece wasn't all that bad, though I wanted him to weave brightly colored string and things into the original Chinese restaurant bas-relief thing he got. Or rather, I wanted to. 

cold dill pickles

They have cold dill pickles at Sweet's Outdoor Grill. I was tempted by the frozen pickle juice shot, but settled for sopping up pulled pork juice with a piece of white bread.

Jack Oblivian, Rat City
American Death Ray, Welcome to the Strange and Erotic World of the American Death Ray
Viva L'American Death Ray Music, Behold! A Pale Horse
Frank Black, The Cult of Ray


Jack Oblivian, "Rat City"

• I think Rat City is really great. Jack Oblivian makes the music a juvenile delinquent turned community college professor makes when they pick up that guitar in the garage again. It's the kind of music that makes me want to pretend to be a rock star so I will.
       
• I would be a rock star like Nicholas Ray of American Death Ray and Viva L'American Death Ray Music and have a bunch of trash art projects under similar but different variations of my own name.
   
• I would use the cold dill pickles sign for the front cover of every record, releasing no less than three a year. In very limited quantities on obscure labels. Play no shows. It would be so great.
     
• I would be taxonomically severe with the band/album names. "The Alex V. Cook Experience Presents the Sounds of the Alex V. Cook Experience" or "Alex V. Cook, Ltd. Limited Alex V. Cook Recordings" printed in very small block print on the back would be the only outwardly distinguishable demarcations between the projects. They would be widely stylistically divergent.
     
• I wouldn't mind being Frank Black either. He once sang in a song: I wanna be a singer like a Lou Reed, but I think I'd rather be a singer like a Frank Black being a singer like a Lou Reed than be a Lou Reed directly. As a member of Alex V. Cook Unlimited II, appearing on Greatest Hits of Alex V. Cook Unlimited II, Vol. 1.
     

Viva L'American Death Ray Music, "Out of the Pink"

fall reading list

My fall reading list, not including Revolutionary Road and Donald Ray Pollock's The Devil All the Time queued up on Kindle from the library. You do know you can check out books on your Kindle now, right?

Richard Yates, Revolutionary RoadJoe Henry, Reverie
Chris D., Love Cannot Die

• I'm particularly excited about delving into Jujitsu for Christ, lent to me by Professor Fury who is writing a forward for a forthcoming new edition. Also I was so excited to see I Curse the River of Time on new books shelf at the library that I didn't realize it was the large print edition until it was already checked out and then got a little more excited because I can actually read it. I grow blinder as each mote of youth tumbles out of eyeshot; the reason I lately prefer iPad reading to actual book reading is because I can blow up the text huge.
     
• Thanks to Fred for extracting Petal Pusher from a Pennsylvania Big Lots and sending it. New Texture has a great fall lineup - I haven't thought about Chris D. in years; his A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die lies legs up at the bottom. I'm particularly stoked about Donna Lethal's Milk of Amnesia, excellently hyped by Jim Linderman at his Dull Tool Dim Bulb blog. It is moving up the stack as soon as Richard Yates gets done operating The Existential Literary Bummer like a leaf blower on my psychic driveway.
       
• A student of mine brought up Reality is Broken, which would serve as an excellent non-fiction data-backed-up companion to Ready Player One except, jeez, why do books about the infectious immediacy of new media all have to be so long? Perhaps the reason new media is so engaging is because it gets to it. Like, parts at the onset of The Information blew my mind, but it became a bit of a dust storm 200 pages later.
       
• I'm also thinking about doing NaNoWriMo, but then I think about a lot of things. I should focus on  not racking up library fines with this stack.
         
• So yeah, this fall is all angst, technological saturation, divorce, not writing, and drug problems. Whee!

get the ö

The rotating, cosmic game menu in the Biophilia app. The constellation in the top left corner spells björk when you come at it from the right angle.

Monday:
Sandro Perri, "Changes" (via Pitchfork) and Tiny Mirrors
Sondre Lerche, Sondre Lerche
Arabian Safari, "Flood"/"Newspaper Man" (via their Bandcamp site)
My Brightest Diamond, All Things Will Unwind (via NPR)
Sufjan Stevens, All Delighted People
Erykah Badu, Worldwide Underground
The Abyssinians, Satta Dub
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road


Tuesday:
Björk, Biophilia
The Knife, Tomorrow, in a Year
Radiohead, The King of Limbs

• The secret to getting an education is readily admitting one's ignorance and admitting that knowing how to do things makes doing things easier. For instance, I usually have to copy and paste Björk's name or use the clunky insert symbols thing in Word to get the ö, and it took a decade plus of doing so before I looked up the diacritic keyboard shortcuts. It's like someone showed me I've been using the wrong end of the hammer all this time.
     
• I've been listening to Biophilia for months now as the fractured soundtrack to her album-as-Universe-as-video game suite-as-iPad-app, and am just now loading up the whole thing. The app might be revolutionary, but I think it's more of a prototype of revolutionary. Björk fans are the types of obsessives that will jump through the hoops to get her apps and do updates and then buy things through the app and then not even be sure what they have at the end. Björk's fans will go through the lengths required to type her name. But others' fans, not so much. I think Gwen Stefani or Kanye West could take this album/platform  thing, simplify it, and really do make it happen. Imagine if Peter Gabriel had iPad album/app capability available during his heyday. The Sledgehammer app would've been the Angry Birds of its time.
  
  
  Björk, Biophilia live set. Having David Attenborough do the introduction is a smart touch.
  
  Biophilia as an album is lovely, maybe as engaging an album she's done since Vespertine. Parts of it sound that that really pretty backwards vocal part at the end of the Purple Rain album extended all the way out to touch the dying sunset. I've yet to full explore the Biophilia app/universe to have a real take.
        
• Think about the lengths we go to use new technology when technology is supposed to make things easier to do and how we pay for extension of our abilities with frustration with the means. We tear our flesh over changes in Facebook which is ostensibly something we don't need or want to use for myriad perfectly good reasons, except when you do use it, you use it all the time, right up to the limit of need, so you bend around the interface changes or the shortcomings of how it works on the phone now or whatever. Total princess problems compared to the needs of people tearing their flesh about changing their governments, going forth into a palpable, potentially fatal unknown platform change and using old free-ass Facebook and whatever to help do it because everything becomes a great tool when everything seems broken. I didn't see anyone abandon the Arab Spring because they didn't like the ticker.
      
• I am quite enjoying being the LSU Reveille's go to app expert interview subject. Someone was just here to talk about the pros and cons of location services on your phone and my insights on Google+ and Blendr can be found therein, once their site comes back up.
     
• Speaking of creating a universe in one's art and not understanding the interface changes, Revolutionary Road makes a world as brutal as The Road set in the desperate apocalypse of the middle class family. I'm sure everyone's read it ages ago, but I'm a late adopter in some things. I'm scared to read the next page and witness how that guy is going to fuck up things this time. You wanna yell at the page like people do at the screen in horror movies. No, man! Don't go in there! Just say she was good in the play! Don't try to fix things!

Then: Now: Above: Below:

Then:
Ernest Cline, Ready Player One (reviewed fully on Goodreads)
Nirvana, Nevermind
David Bowie, Space Oddity and Hunky Dory
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

Now:
electric eels, The Eyeball of Hell

Above: Eichhornia crassipes, aka water hyacinth, invading the LSU lakes.

Below: chili dog; Robert Wilson, an accidental Impressionistic take on the Radio Bar;  ornamental grass competing with the hyacinths for invasiveness.

The weekend looks like

Detail from the wall at Boutin's. My next book might be a coffee table album analyzing south Louisiana restaurant murals.

DJ Shadow, The Less You Know the Better
Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, Philip Glass: Symphony No. 3; Music from "The Voyage" and "the CIVIL warS"; The Light
Max Richter, infra
William Basinski, The Disintegration Loops IV
Earnest Cline, Ready Player One
Smoke Fairies, Through Low Light and Trees

The weekend looks like a  bunch of lecture mulling, story writing, book reading, house cleaning, tailgating, gator tail eating, gravitational wave observatory-going, TV watching, in-front-of-TV-sleep-falling, bicycling. It might ending up looking a little like that mural when it's all put together.