Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween! May the razor blades find their way into the Butterfingers of your enemies!

Tall Dwarfs, The Sky Above the Mud Below
Luna, Bewitched
Yo La Tengo, They Shoot, We Score
Th' Faith Healers, Lido
Lilys, Precollection
Harmony Rockets, Paralyzed Mind of the Arcangel Void

• That's all I got.
• This week
• started out
• busier
• than is called for.

momentary smartypants

Juxtaposed

• The Louisiana Book Festival was a rejuvenating hoot. It is the weekend when soggy, scrappy Baton Rouge transcends its reticence to airs to become a momentary smartypants village blessed with fantastic weather.


• Mark Richard (below) let me be a pesky fanboy a number of times throughout the festival, which is very kind of him. His is a body of writing that is deserving of slobbery praise.
  
  
  
  I rode my bike claiming to offset all those paperback copies of my own book I'll be shilling out there next year. I like to pay it forward like that. My various editors in attendance all made me feel like a big shot even though I didn't have any product to push this time around.


• A certain once Oprah book actual big shot kinda flipped out a little during his talk, going WHO'S TALKING? WHO IS TALKING?! And then stormed off the podium to chew out a security guard in the marbled echoey lobby of the State Capitol who was probably for the 1000th time that morning sweetly directing a visitor to where you can put your finger in the Huey Long bullet holes. I like this person's books and his whole talk was generally about feeling out of his league as a success, which I can get with, but man, the security guards at State Capitol have great stories and know how to tell them with a surplus of dignity. So, settle down. I walked out.


• Not really because I am so sensitive to spectacle - my Saturday night of absinthe-and-roasted oyster-fueled holding of forth will establish my comfort with such. The green fairy and I make an unstoppable comedy duo.
  
  
  
  No, I split because Maya's band Black Diamond had their second live performance at St. Aloysius Fair, which is an excellent suburbanite counterpoint to the bookish types cavorting around Capitol grounds. While getting a round of corn dogs, the two dads manning the Red Bull stand were overheard saying, "Those Occupy Baton Rouge people oughta get out there after that." and the other was beside himself. "Occupy Baton Rouge! That is stupidest thi -" and collapsed into sputters. It really was stupidest thing he'd ever heard of. Protesting!
  
  
  
  I'm not offering this anecdote to make my fellow pinkos gasp; just to demonstrate the political baseline of the place and that our charms as a city come filtered through that kind of cheesecloth. I told someone that while New Orleans is taxonomically rooted in recreating Europe in the wilds of Ameriker, Baton Rouge is named for a bloody head on a stick.


• Back on the chain gang of Sunday, we listened to Dolly Parton sing
  
  Gimme a word, gimme a sign
  Show me where to look
  And tell me what will I find
  
  
  
  and had grits and grillades and did the sorority row trick-or-treat. Maya went as Ziggy Stardust - technically Aladdin Sane if you are going to be like that, but nobody out there had every heard of David Bowie anyway, so we be whatever leper messiah we wish.
  
  
  
  Tomorrow night is the kick ass trick-or-treating in the rich people sector of our neighborhood. There's one lady that sets up a table where you get a WHOLE Snickers and a grab bag size bag of potato chips. I think they gave out whole Cokes one year, but some killjoy probably complained. Dude. A whole Snickers. A richness anyone can respect. That's why I love it here.

let's hope I didn't just jinx it

Mason jar ghosts at the haunted park own the street. More pics!

Cockney Rebel, The Psychomodo
Dwight Yoakam, If There Was a Way
Simon Joyner, Heaven's Gate
Tom Waits, Bad As Me (streaming at NPR)
Swearing at Motorists, More Songs from the Mellow Struggle
The Glands, The Glands
Mount Eerie, Song Islands Vol. 2

• Ladies and gentlemen, Simon Joyner.
  
  
  Simon Joyner, "Prometheus",OK Hotel, Seattle, WA, July 23,2010
     
• Now that you are all cheered up, the Louisiana Book Festival is this Saturday!  I'm not reading or paneling or even selling anything this year, but I'm nonetheless excited! Traditionally, it is prettiest day of the year, so let's hope I didn't just jinx it.
      
• Also, my daughter's band Black Diamond is playing at the St. Aloysius Fair on Saturday at ~4pm!
   
• You counteract a jinx by acknowledging one, right? Isn't that how the stock market works?
      
• This took half-listening to half the song to get it, and I still am not sure I "get" it.
  
  
  The Microphones, "Get Off the Internet"

Saccharine darkness

T. Rex, Bolan's Zip Gun
Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel, The Human Menagerie
Haruki Murakami, 1Q94
Lou Reed & Metallica, Lulu (streaming from their website)
Various Artists, Monster Ballads (from the album's website)
Tom Waits, Bad As Me (streaming at NPR)
England in 1819, Alma (forthcoming)

• I've never heard of Cockney Rebel but they are my favorite band no one remembers now. And maybe didn't know then. Also, the Lou Reed/Metallica collaboration Lulu is the greatest terrible idea in modern rock practice. Like the later T.Rex albums, Lulu is in places hypnotically annoying and that is the foundation of its greatness. Saccharine darkness, like a doctored iPhone shot of the clouded sunset over Whole Foods. More on that and Monster Ballads the new Tom Waits forthcoming.
      
• I love writing for sweet ol' Country Roads magazine. I have two piece in the November issue: one where I convince my daughter to Cajun dance with me at Boutin's and discuss the Poche's mini-mart housed curiously within the restaurant.  Also, I let Nunu's mastermind George Marks do all  the talking on what's happening out in Arnaudville and beyond.
  
  
  Consider the booty jam is how I started my profile of Bobby Rush (playing VoodooFest on Saturday) in the November issue of  OffBeat. I could have probably just stopped after that sentence. Also I warble praise about Bergen's most melodious son Sondre Lerche, playing One Eyed Jacks on November 13.
   
• I wanted to lose interest in 1Q94 by chapter 3 (of approx. one billion short chapters) just to free myself of the loose contract I have with this phonebook and no, I am totally suckered in. Like, I didn't see that coming and I felt like I did see what was coming and I only have 900+ pages to go.
• When the morning was waking over the war He put on his clothes and stepped out and he died, The locks yawned loose and a blast blew them wide, He dropped where he loved on the burst pavement stone And the funeral grains of the slaughtered floor. Tell his street on its back he stopped a sun And the craters of his eyes grew springshots and fire When all the keys shot from the locks, and rang. Dig no more for the chains of his grey-haired heart. The heavenly ambulance drawn by a wound Assembling waits for the spade's ring on the cage. O keep his bones away from the common cart, The morning is flying on the wings of his age And a hundred storks perch on the sun's right hand. Dylan Thomas, "Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred"
• Happy what-would've-been-your-97^th birthday, you old drunken bastard. I think we've covered all the bases here. 

horror vacui

You can't fear a vacuum filled with cheeseballs

Tuxedomoon, Soundtracks/Urban Leisure
Per Petterson, I Curse the River of Time
Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
Tom Waits, Frank's Wild Years

• I feel hungover without the benefit of a hanging.
   
• I feel like 'writing something' is sitting right there in that kind of heavy plastic packaging that you end up using a steak knife to open. I just recently finished two big things so I should just let it shine inside the packaging a bit, let the want retain its integrity without spoiling it with the want for the want. But, I want to crack it open and play with it.
     
• I feel alright; I don't mean this to come off glum. My friend Terry looked at one of my paintings and said I have horror vacui, a fear of empty spaces, that I want to fill it all up. That's why I check out 10 library books I'm not going to read and then trade it in for one massive one that, if history is a fortune teller, won't get read either. I'm okay with playing things out that way.
      
• I feel vindicated! I just listened to Tom Waits' "Straight to the Top" for the first time in ages
  
  
  
  and there is a boxing match sound effect that came from an old sound effects record I once used in an audio piece back when I was a maker of audio pieces. I think Prince uses the same one in "Pop Life."  Funkadelic used some effects from that same record on "Wars of Armageddon". It's a weak form of vindication, but I'll take it. I got the sound effects record from the same library that I got those books from. One of the things I have a mind to write centers around checking out the same book from three different libraries. This sense of drama is precisely why I steer away from fiction. I have a flyer on my desk for a class on performance art that a friend of mine is teaching next spring. It has a picture of a naked woman laying on the floor with a skeleton lying on top of her.
  
  
     
• I feel a little like that. I like the look on her face. She had a touch of that now, what am I doing, again? look about her that I like. Maybe that's what I'm talking about doing, or maybe that's what I can call it. Isn't the nature of art being able to call it art? But, don't you have to do something to feel a way about it? To call it someting, don;t you need an "it"? You do! Okay! I feel a lot better! Thanks! I'm gonna listen to "Strange Powers" for the 100th time this week because I feel like I have them!
  
  
  "When we kiss it feels like a flying saucer landing" C'mon!
  
  Bonus: have you ever heard the Magnetic Fields cover of "Heroes"? Me either! But we can be them. Heroes, that is.
   
  

"test post"

The devil at the end of my driveway.

Per Petterson, I Curse the River of Time 
David Bowie, Heathen 
Cluster, Curiosum 
Various Artists, Night Watch/Black Music
The Dave Howard Singers, various tracks from their website
The Royal Family and the Poor, We Love the Moon
Gastr Del Sol, Camofleur
Tuxedomoon, Soundtracks/Urban Leisure

• The title I Curse the River of Time comes from a Mao poem. @MKupperman said something funny about the "let a thousand flowers bloom" quote but that was 3 days ago and I don't think you can go back that far on Twitter, so maybe it didn't happen. He will say other funny things, so he's worth looking at anyway. Also, it's a "hundred flowers." Not trying to be like that; I just found out myself.
      
• Cluster made video game music in the age of wooden toys.
  
  
  Cluster, "Proantipro"
  
  Is that an actual tuba in there? Like an old street musician in lederhosen wondering why these art students hired him to just go "wump wuuuump wump" for six minutes? I think they had to make their own synthesizers out of old watermill parts. I forgot Bowie did a Pixies song. There is a Jacques Derrida track on that Night Watch/Black Music compilation, so watch out.
       
• I've been trying for days to listen to Dave Howard Singers' "I Am a Bunny" from this compilation called (I thought) You Bet We've Got Something Against You, but last.fm has it as Absolute with most of the same songs. I'm not sure why; it is just him holding down most of the keys of an organ while going "I AM A BUNNY, I NEED A (garbled)" over and over, with an interlude of talking to a Dutch audience that doesn't understand what he's saying.
  
  
  Here he is mangling "Rock On."
  
  The heart wants what the heart wants. I could just buy the song, but what fun is that?
  Edited to add: I could also just look at their awesome website.
      
• I tested the bracketed, truncated media commentary but I think it proved to be even less readable than this mess. It's all testing, all the time up in here. I'm going to call this "test post" just to see if a thousand page hits bloom like last time. I'm gonna sandblast off with Tuxedomoon and the Royal Family and the Poor. Good day!
  
  
  The Royal Family and the Poor, "Dominion"

banana ketchup

So, you are saying your pantry is stocked with just the one style of banana ketchup?

Then:
NOWNESS [Set the controls on the heart of the [nowness]; best webzine I've seen in a while.]
The Bottle Rockets, Not So Loud: An Acoustic Evening with the Bottle Rockets [They are kinda the best band.]
The Gourds, Shinebox [Yes, for the cover of "Gin and Juice", so what?]
Drive-By Truckers, Gangstabilly [For Steve McQueen, God , and country]
Donna Lethal, Milk of Amnesia [Though it is not on Goodreads, I did finish and love it. More in-depth commentary hopefully forthcoming.]
Aloe Blacc, Good Things [I keep thinking this is an eponymous record, maybe because it sounds like a direct line from somebody.]
Per Petterson, I Curse the River of Time [I love a European novel that involves ferries or trains, which is convenient, since they all involve ferries or trains.]
Labyrinth [I saw it twice though Maya claims she's seen it seven times this weekend.]
Fringe [Getting caught up with time-travel shows means getting further behind, I think.]


Now:
Annie Gosfield/Lisa Moore, Lightning Slingers and Dead Ringers [HT to aworks]
Tim Hecker, Ravedeath, 1972 and Dropped Pianos [HT to everybody. This sounded particularly cool with Walter from Fringe intoning from another screen/dimension in the background.]
Dirty Projectorts + Björk, Mount Wittenberg Orca [Wasn't this out already? Did buying two kinds of banana ketchup before watching Fringe open some sort of causal wormhole? I could see this album resulting from such an intersection of causes. Or maybe if you played an Andrews Sisters record for Schrödinger's cat. Something.]
United Bible Studies, The Shore that Fears the Sea [Y'all know about these folks? Me neither!]
Zooey Deschanel singing the National Anthem at Game Four of the World Series [Not quite as bad Natasha Vargas-Cooper makes it, but I'm into her derision at Grantland. She has a point. "Where is the drama of a sweat-drenched Whitney Houston, steeped in struggle, unhinging her jaw to bellow out Our Song? The drums of war echo in her crack-ravaged throat! "]
The Magnetic Fields, Holiday [like riding a hoverboard through a puddle]
Joan of Arc, Life Like [Wow, Joan of Arc has a lot of albums with a lot of songs and they all have great titles even if that dude can't really sing any of them.]

Ed. to add: I first encountered banana ketchup at a very short lived Filipino restaurant here in BR, reviewed  in good ol' Country Roads.