This

The Avett Brothers, I and Love and You
Atlas Sound, Parallax
The Flaming Lips, At War With the Mystics
The Magnetic Fields, House of Tomorrow
Kitchener Waterloo Symphony, Nico Muhly, Jonny Greenwood, Richard Reed Parry: From Here on Out
Zoe Keating, One Cello x 16: Natoma

• This above scene almost blinded me while taking a shot; the sun suddenly lasered through when the flag fluttered, momentarily lifting the shield I took for granted.
       
• This week, I can't stop listening to Atlas Sound. My wife can't stop listening to the Avett Brothers. I suspect this is how Friday Night Lights was conceived.
     
• This unreleased documentary on the Fall is worth your hip priest eyeballin'.
     
  
  Unreleased documentary on the Fall.
      
• This airing of my unpopular opinions about the Beach Boys comprises most of this week's Record Crate for 225 Magazine. Also included: the Decemberists and Florence + the Machine, both of whom I do like.
       
• This day's highlight was a PR agent from England emailing for an advanced copy of my book! No such thing exists, though another email says the proofs are forthcoming and another email indicates they might want another! Email! Nice work!

"I got wild mushrooms growin' in my yard"

"I got wild mushrooms growin' in my yard"


Lloyd Cole & the Commotions, Mainstream
The Blue Nile, A Walk Across the Rooftops
Papa M: November 18, 2009 Knitting Factory (via NYCTaper)
Morton Subotnick, Volume 2: Electronic Works
Roedelius, Geschenk des Augenblicks (ht Pretty Goes With Pretty)

• I actually don't - those are from a neighbor's yard this morning - but it reminded me of the best line (caption above) from the greatest cocaine song of all time.
  
  
  Lloyd Cole & the Commotions, "My Bag"
       
• The fire escape open window led me here. One of the first album reviews I ever wrote for outsideleft was for a Blue Nile record, to which I would link but it appears we've run behind on our hosting bill. Here it is at the Wayback Machine.
  
  Best line: See, we in that pre-alternative era had to get excited about something, otherwise Mario Van Peebles would've lobbied congress to have the entire nation soundtracked with fat drum machines and sub-Cameo synth washes.
  
  
  The Blue Nile, "From Rags to Riches"
  
  Best line: "I write a new book everyday, the love theme for the wilderness."
  Note to self: write a book called "The Love Theme for the Wilderness"
        
• But speaking of hosting and vanished and "the first" and notes to self, I found my first website on the Wayback Machine. Dig this great animations I made for the "life" section.
  
  
  
  There are no best lines here. This general statement is pretty precious. This 1996 artist statement is better than I remember it being, but like most artist statements, doesn't say much. My mid-1990's was all about making statements. Evidently I was into Ed Paschke back then, but I couldn't remember who that is until I looked him up. I like how I left convenient blank spots for future interests.
         
• I got pulled into a friend's class to talk about writing artist statements, which turned into my general lecture about writing about art, which involves an onion/layers-of-the-earth diagram and some dramatic scribbling, but here is the general advice on artist statements:
       
  Say what your art is about. You want your art to do all the talking, and unfortunately, it doesn't. Either your art isn't good enough, or the viewers aren't good enough, or the setting isn't good enough, or some combination of factors keeps your art from generating a pearl of understanding in the viewer's mind, so you provide an artist statement. You want that statement to cleanly and most expediently bridge that gap that exists between your art and the viewing of that art. If you say you don't know what your art is about, you are full of shit; you just don't want to say what your art is about, or conversely, your art might not be about much, which puts you in a tough position. But, if your art is about something, if there is a reason you made it, say that.
     
  If your art is really all about -isms and theory, say that, but honestly, I doubt that it is. So, then, what is it really about? Say that. And if possible, make it funny. People like things that are funny.

technoörganic

picture : 1,000 words :: blurry picture : 140 characters


Monday:
Surfer Blood, Tarot Classics

Oneohtrix Point Never, Returnal
North Sea Radio Orchestra, I a Moon
Yellow Moon Band, Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World


Tuesday:
Nels Cline, Dirty Baby
 
Wednesday:
Atlas Sound, Parallax

• I've been thinking about social media and electronic communications platforms as technoörganic means of storytelling, ironically enabling us to be immediate through the supposed artifice of digitalization. We appear a lot more clearly through the filters. Plus, I like the idea of a writer being "good at Twitter." Not everybody is. I certainly haven't found my groove with it; conversations on Twitter feel like I am shouting to another person across a crowded room. They gain unintended theatricality.
      
• I end up deleting and retyping a tweet (I cringe when "tweet" is spoken as a noun) over and over. Like this
  
  
  
  

  @cookalexvAlex V. Cook

  (insert Andy Rooney joke about why they are called pearly gates when they are made of wrought iron like normal gates)
  5 Nov via Twitter for iPhone
  took me three tries to get it right. Too mannered. I suspect Andy Rooney could rattle these things off all day. Being good at Twitter is a similarly specific skill.
     
• Bret Easton Ellis is great at Twitter. I think he might be better at Twitter than at writing novels. See this little interchange about Joan Didion's new book
  
  
• I thought these three tweets made a great story when I read them the other morning - funny, a little too intimate, a little too creepy, what I like about BEE compressed into bite-size Snickers format -  and then felt validation when Choire Sicha (whose own writing I like) at the Awl reposted/Storify-ed it.  
      
• I love the folk transmission of embedding things online.  It seems like the most natural form of storytelling there is. It's all "come see what I see." I love that I can see that my wife is listening to the Mountain Goats and that a friend across town is listening to Big Star, and I love what everybody is eating and doing. The people that complain about that filling up their Facebook page - what are you going to your page for? To hear people complain about customer service? To announce they too support the local football team? Farmville? People still do Farmville?
  
  To the "I don't see why anybody cares what I am doing..." posts, er, you are the one sharing things. I think you actually do care. Just saying. Check out my blurry satsuma! You know you want to.

only one moon

"What are you talking about? There's only one moon up there. Something must be wrong with your eyes."
Haruki Murakami, 1Q94, p. 196




"All I want to do is lift weights and praise Jesus all day."
Ramsay Midwood, "Jesus Is #1"

coriander sauce

Chicago, Chicago III and Chicago II
Yes, Fragile
XTC, Apple Venus Volume One
David Bowie, Hunky Dory
Billy Squier, Emotions in Motion

• Happy birthday, Jerri! You are the coriander sauce on my samosa!


• I have almost completely switched over to Spotify from Rhapsody, a change nobody cares about except for Maya. For whatever reason, Apple Venus is not available on Spotify and is therefore, in her eyes, junk software.


• A fella can get down with some early Chicago if a fella lets himself. I was looking for the Ramsay Midwood "Chicago" the other night while jetting across the expanse of the Atchafalaya bridge and landed in the realm of my departed stepbrother's Chicago records. I still have his vinyl copy of IV, the wood grain one, and played it for Maya when she got her turntable. After this morning's dad funk Chicago infusion, she's said they weren't half bad. She was kinda digging Yes, too. I still can't get her into my brother's copy of Tommy though.


• "You don't read books because it takes time?" he asked, not quite sure he was understanding her properly.
  Haruki Murakami, 1Q94, page 95 out of 925.
  


• Driving around to Chicago and Yes and XTC's new-wave hesitant embrace of progressive excess, it struck me how daring all this is. Go complicated, don't give them what they want. Give them what you want. I think that's what draws me to the outsize music of the 70's. Thing is, I don't feel that way when it comes to fiction. I prefer a short, punk rock 45 of a book to an epic opera of a thing. It really does take a lot of time! The short chapters of 1Q94 alternate back and forth between the two protagonists creating a strobe effect across the text. I would love this book if it was delivered a chapter at a time by daily email, which hits me as sort of a really good idea. Maybe not for me; I decided to not even talk about NaNoWriMo because I don't have time to commit to it and I'm not sure sure it's a No I wanna Wri anyway.
  
  Ed. to add: That was a dumb thing to say about NaNoWriMo. How about this instead: I had a dream last night that Stephen King was my new stepdad somehow, and we were having an awkward "getting to know you" interlude. I was trying to ease into saying I hadn't really read any of his books, but he picked up on it and said, whatever, millions of people have read my books. He was sorting through new titles of his that had just come back from the printers, massive hardbacks the size of dictionaries. I saw one of them was a book of writing exercises. It had these old woodcuts and you were supposed to write stories about each in various ways. He was lamenting that it ended up with a really long title. I told him I thought the title was funny, that it fit the struggle to make a story. He shrugged. Then I gave I'm a slim volume of writing advice I'd published in my dream. He flipped through it, and wrote "Seems like a juvenile work of nonfiction" inside the cover.

Ramsay Midwood at Bourque's Social Club

Ramsay Midwood at Bourque's Social Club, Scott, LA 11/3/2011

I'm not trying to be overly arty here. The battery on my good camera was giving out and the lighting was too low for the iPhone. I tried to shoot one camera through the other to generally disastrous results. I don't advise that technique. If you want, you can read it as a meditation on cowboy hats.

Last night:
Chicago, V
Ramsay Midwood, Drew Landry, Sam Doores & the Tumbleweeds at Bourque's Social Club, Scott LA
Ramsay Midwood, Larry Bought a Lighter

Today:
Polly Pry, Two Warm Minutes
The Beach Boys, The Smile Sessions
The Decemberists, Long Live the King
John Fahey, Requia and Other Compositions
The Drew Landry Band, Sharecropper's Whine
Psychic Ills, Hazed Dream
Giant Sand, Chore of Enchantment

It was a pretty amazing show. At one point he was backed up by a fiddle, three guitars, drums, upright bass, keyboards (doubling on accordion), and a singing saw. And an old lady under an afghan playing a t-fer or Cajun triangle, though Ramsay pointed out there was no try, it was a do-angle.

Thanks to Ramsay for coming out and to Sam Doores and his band and Drew  "John Cougar Fishin' Camp" Landry for putting this on. Y'all should go but Ramsay's new CD Larry Buys a Lighter for no other reason that it a great name for a record. It's good music too, but really, that title.

more American and more beautiful

What I'm saying is: if you are choosing between crockpot filled with taco soup or one selectively half-empty, you are mulling over the wrong choices in life.

Kurt Vile, Childish Prodigy
Ramsay Midwood, Shootout at the OK Chinese Restaurant
The Grateful Dead, The Closing of Winterland,: December 31, 1978
Reigning Sound, Abdication... For Your Love (free d/l via Scion)

• I would be cool to own a jukebox that just had this one single in it. I'd have a bucket of quarters labeled "Play Hunchback #100"
   
  
  Kurt Vile, "Hunchback"
      
• Ramsay Midwood is playing out at Bourque's Social Club tonight! His Shootout at the OK Chinese Restaurant is the greatest moonshine country burnout record of all time. Like American Beauty but more American and more beautiful.
   
  
  Ramsay Midwoiod, "Chicago
      
• Really, I bought OK on a whim because some crazy Russian dude on some obscure Americana message board was going on about the Ramsay Midwood board he set up, so I joined and he was the only one there and still posted all the time. I've lost that CD at least three times and rebought it each time. And I generally get music for free.
       
• I am blowing all my good lines here by posting them on Facebook first.
       
• There is a concept of "saving it for that stage" to which I never adhere. It's the kind of thinking that keeps people from creating as a common practice, a fallacy of holding back for a non-existent later showcase. To be great when it counts, you have to be great when it doesn't. It's the thing I like about blogs and social media; you are always on and sure, you could spend time honing the finished message, or you could instead hone the you that produces and on some level, IS the message.