Toot the horns, me!

Felt, Forever Breathes the Lonely Word and Poem of the River
Blut Aus Nord, 777 - Sect(s) and 777 - The Desanctification
Julian Cope, Jehovahkill
Skrillex, Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites

• The big news is that my forthcoming book Louisiana Saturday Night: Looking for a Good Time in South Louisiana's Juke Joints, Honky Tonks, and Dance Halls is featured (or rather the sumptuous cover photo of Teddy's Juke Joint, taken by Frank McMains) is featured on the cover of the LSU Press Spring 2012 catalog. Then, four pages in, the book is included as well! Top of the world! Toot the horns, me!
     
• One of my students interviewed me for the student paper about Google Maps stealing peoples numbers with their little camera cars. I hope I got the bit about packets right.
     
• Then, HTMLGiant ran a thing I wrote about Joshua Cohen's writing that proved to be surprisingly contentious. The wrecking ball always completes its parabola.
     
• I was thinking about Felt, the worlds greatest cult band, and the phrase "forever breathes the lonely word" and the crematory smoke in my Cohen piece and where words go when they leave your mouth or the printers or in a digital sense, the submit button.  I was thinking about how Lawrence from Felt came up with a plan to do ten (10) albums and ten (10) singles and then dissolved the project and stuck with plan and for the most part clammed up about the whole thing, and how that says so much more than saying something does. Then I was thinking about what a perfect little world "Declaration" is.
  
  
  Felt, "Declaration"
     
• The gentlest of 80's English bedsit pop (Felt) and contemporary French obscuro metal (Blut Aus Nord) may be indeed curious bedfellows, but they both speak to me from the depths of their respective hermetic lairs. Each act has a tentacle in the circle of the mystic.
  
  
  Blut Aus Nord, "Epitome IV"
  
  Speaking of strange bedfellows, in the December 2012 issue of OffBeat, I have a profile of Finnish, accordion-and-fiddle-wielding folk metal horde Korpiklaani, appearing at the Hangar on Dec. 11.  Surely that is something we can all get behind.
  
  
  Korpiklaani, "Surma"

I need to scratch my head

Image of Ken Russell from "A Ken Russell Interlude" by Kimberly Linbergs in Cinebeats.

Wild Billy Childish's the Buff Medways, The Medway Wheelers
Coco Robicheaux, Hoodoo Party
The Prisoners, The Last Fourfathers
The Nightingales, Out of True
The Nectarine No. 9, It's Just the Way Things are, Joe. It's Just the Way They Are

• RIP Coco Robicheaux. I talked to Coco a couple of times but never in a professional hipster-interfacing capacity and somehow never saw him perform, which I will now forever regret. But his incense smokin', voodoo talkin', Stagger Lee walkin' demeanor was for real, the New Orleans thing that gives the city its shimmer.
  
  
  Coco Robicheaux, "Time Has Come Today"
    
• RIP Ken Russell. Ken Russell's films were a revelation to me in my early film snob days. They possessed a Felini level of brittle charmed ennui with a late night Skinemax level of depravity, all wrapped up in absurd magic. It was the kind of film practice that you couldn't fence in as "good" or "bad" but more just "wow."
    
• Altered States, Tommy and Gothic are probably the best known of his films, but I particularly loved The Music Lovers, a histrionic biopic about Tchaikovsky. More pointedly, the train scene where Richard Chamberlain and Glenda Jackson don't get it on in the most hallucinatory manner. (NSFW)
  
  
      
• There is a short essay about Ken Russell in my first book Darkness, Racket and Twang (Only $5.99 for the Kindle version)
  
  

  I AM WATCHING THE BEST SHOW EVER RIGHT NOW

  Ken Russell's In Search of the English Folksong on OvationYou might know Ken from his cult faves "Gothic" or "Lair of the White Worm" or from odder affairs such as "The Lovers," his hallucinatory soap-operatic feature about Tchaikovsky. Ken operates on a weird plane at the corner of Fellini and Pee Wee Herman, with a little Argento thrown in for flava, in a tea-and-crumpets English pomp stylee. 

  It opened with a dream sequence with Ken wearing these square sunglasses that had the word "falling" built into the frame. He was seated in a Lawrence Welk-vivid garden gazebo, where a dowdy English soprano is lolling out a sea shanty. He awakes, plays some 78's for his dog, and then announces, pushing his face through a bouquet of flowers, that he was going to go in search of folk music among the folk.He stumbles through some Teletubbies countryside to a pub, where a metal outfit named "So What" appears and breaks into song. Ken focuses a camcorder on the trashy/foxy lead singer, and then they are all of a sudden outside, with the band playing atop picnic tables. Throngs of English youth appear from the bushes to do what seems a modified frug around them. Ken then has a drink with the guitarist and follows him home, where he poses in front of a corvette festooned with a rebel flag license plate and sings a country-ish song. Then, here come the fruggers again...This was all in the first ten minutes. And I fear that I'm not making it sound random enough. After the first commercial break, it seems that he's calmed down and is now documenting actual folksingers, sadly sans frug. Eventually it has Fairport Convention frolicking in a church under a disco ball, but nothing else so far is up to par with the opening sequence. Ken Russell has a particular talent for walking that fine line between the perverse and the asinine, and this BBC budget affair captures it better than anything I've ever seen of his.
  (2002)

  
  Here is a scene with his dog..
  
  
• Somebody asked me if I was serious when I said I actually liked Lulu, the almost categorically panned recent collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica and my answer can be found at the end of the Ken Russell piece. It walks a line between perverse and asinine. It is a risky flailing of artistic emotion from a group of people who have long paid their dues, crafting personae. Sure, Lulu is head scratcher, but good. I need to scratch my head. I wish more art made me scratch my head rather than does the absurdity of the news. I wish there were more guys like Coco around about whom I wondered if the voodoo thing was for real than demon-scared politicians about whom I'm compelled to ask the same question.
  
  I wish there were more Ken Russells steering the vast resources of the BBC into the choppy waters of the puzzling. I'm thrilled Lou Reed convinced the most boring metal band in the world to bellow "I AM THE TABLET" with the confidence of a madman. The more I listen to music of the 70's, like even the hugely popular music like Chicago, I'm struck how weird it all is. How surprising things were. The world could fall apart any minute back then, just like it can now.  I am glad a few people are willing to keep it appropriately weird.

"I might enjoy falconry"

Black Butler
Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

I reviewed A Time of Gifts over at the Goodreads and offer it here for your reading pleasure:

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Patrick Fermor possesses in this text a conversational way with history that I openly envy. He can talk about the first Apostlic King of Christian Hungary as easily and normally as we might allude to so-and-so from the office. Plus, I am a sucker for any book where someone walks from one place to a distant other - in the is case, from Holland to the Danube; this book details the first half of a trek to Constantinople at the eve of World War II. He captures the all-encompassing hallucinatory intake of a walk. He leaves no little musings out, which can make a reader glaze over pretty quickly. It did so to me enough times that I had to thumb back plenty of times just to remember where we actually were in the trip.

So, if the destination and the expediency of getting there are the key points to your travelling, this book is not for you. If you need to grasp everything that is said in a conversation, read elsewhere. But, if you believe that life's literal and literary journeys are like auditing an infinitude of brilliant lectures, and that each traveller arrives at their own destinations on said journeys, then this will beckon you down the road. I have BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER, volume two of this set waiting for me in my bag just as soon as I'm ready to resume our walk.

There is a great joint profile of Fermor and similar writer Bruce Chatwin in the Decembe 2011 Harper's that led me to his cuious doorstep.

View all my reviews

Maya is immediately deep into this anime series she saw at a friend's house called Black Butler. I am relieved that it is not about the exploits of an wisecracking African-American servant, but is instead a Victorian, Jack the Ripper mystery being solved by a moody boy with hair dangling over one of his giant glistening eyes and a tall Anime-English unflappable butler who wears all black. The best part in each episode is the 3-second intermission.


Black Butler intermission.
Like, that's it. It us actually two little scenes with the weird clarinet ditty, but still only a few seconds. Is it a meta-intermission, or do they just have like a flash screen when they originally appeared n TV in Japan. Does anime appear n TV in japan first? The main thing I like about anime is that I don't really get it. Otherwise, it's not my bag. Maya has watched about 20 episodes of it and is right now indoctrinating a friend and about to corrupt another as soon as they get here.

I am pecking this out on an Android tablet I have for work, partially so I can surrender my iPad to them so they can watch 20 more episodes on Netflix later, and partially because I am under the iSpell and am curious how life is hunched over an Android. After the robot wars and post the Age of Man, we will be all too familiar with such a feeling.

It's not so bad; some things are better, like the Spotify layout is better and I like how they do the text cursor, but overall it is still a little counterintuitive. Immediate understanding is how the iPad gets you. It's like you muse, "I might enjoy falconry" into the air and suddenly you have this gorgeous falcon looking badass on your wrist, awaiting your silent command. Android is a little more like a cool remote control car from Radio Shack. Plus, the whole design ethos is very Space Mountain on Android vs. the antiseptic HAL-like sociopathic calm of the iPad.

Ugh. I'm even boring myself with this. I'm going to embark on a more meaningful product comparison as displayed below.

Don't get me started on the camera.

the curvature of the earth

I always forget how flat it is when I drive down to Houma, where I grew up one of those times I grew up.

The Clash, Sandinista!
Duke Ellington, Live at Newport
Radiohead, OK Computer


My favorite part of my favorite route there is this marshy, palmetto festooned stretch of LA 20 around Vacherie. I half expect a dinosaur to emerge from either side of the road.


I was going to say something about the curvature of the earth in regards to the first photograph, but I think this photo better demonstrates the phenomenon of charting one's fleeting existence at one point in the warp of time-space. Stare at the deviled egg spiral atop the potato salad and learn the secrets of the Freemasons. My mom said it this is how her mom always served it. I'm certain my grandma served this same dish at many a function of Eastern Star, the Masonic Ladies Auxiliary.


Some people are members of cabals, the nature of whose activities remain obscured.


Wrap your brain around this process: strawberries in peach Jell-O over a layer of sweetened cream cheese over a layer of crushed pretzels. Church picnic good.


Somehow I dislodged the memory battery of my camera and it reset the date to Jan. 1, 1980, and this photo, enhanced with Snapseed's more dramatic filers, likely depicts my feelings about the place mid that decade. Put on a New Order tape and you'd nail it. I've come to appreciate Houma in a new light, having grown up a few times since then.

Thanksgiving is exciting!

Happy Anniversary to us! Thirteen years!

Beecher's Issue One
Various Artists, Zabriskie Point: Original Soundtrack
Sandy Denny, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens
Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts


She's in charge of getting the turkey this year.


The lumpia meat is asmimmer! The banana ketchup is at the ready! The ham is in the crock pot! The world famous jalapeño sausage cheese bread from Bourque's Supermarket is in the little foil thing it comes in! Someone else is doing pies! Thanksgiving is exciting!


William S. Burroughs, "A Thanksgiving Prayer"

Seems like last Thanksgiving I read "Howl" for some reason. You want to apply reasons for going back to the classics. Instead, I wanted to be the first to post "A Thanksgiving Prayer" on Facebook, but one other up beat me to it. Happy Thanksgiving everybody! Watch out for those in philanderer's ties and murderer's shoes! Eat through your imperialist shame! Did I mention banana ketchup? I did!

Look at the pretty flower!

Abutilon × hybridum. Lantern Tree or, Flowering Maple

Sunday:
Chicago, Chicago III
Charles Mingus, The Clown
National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Varèse: Orchestral Works, Vol 1 

Monday:
Matthew Dear, Black City
YACHT, Shangri-La
Terry Riley, A Rainbow in Curved Air and In C
Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts (via this profile in Harper's, which I guess you can't see unless you already have the magazine, but its a good article anyway.)

Tuesday:
Klaus Schulze, X
Future Sound of London/Amorphous Androgynous, The Otherness

It's been a busy week. I did the NYT puzzle everyday. I got ~2,000 words down on a new possible book project. A student just showed up. Gotta go. Look at the pretty flower!

R.I.P. David Rush

David Rush, "Free Radicals" 2006. More of David's art can be seen at his Flickr page.

Back in the early 1990's I hosted a radio show for experimental music on KLSU with one of my friends. It ran late Saturday nights when no one was listening, a perfect place for Geoff and I to vent our needs for aural weirdness. We had our preferences: Geoff went for highly textured sample-driven pieces; I was all about 60's free jazz loft catharsis and dada art pranks. It worked because these puzzle-less pieces started to find a way to fit together.

This show attracted like-minded disparate thinkers. A grad student with a difficult personality and even more difficult jazz records started showing up. One of our regular callers resided in a halfway house. Another was a sixteen year old misfit who we met in person one evening when her dad dropped her off at the back door of the station at 11 PM and drove off. It also attracted David Rush.

David was then, and on into adulthood, a calming influence. His deep voice, always deeper than you expected to be coming out of his sweet, round head, took on the mannered hush of an air conditioner kicking on when he spoke. While the rest of us were turning our personal manifestos into unlistenable playlists, David played calm music. Music that moved but stood still. Stuff woven of calm methodologies and a willingness to wonder. There were clashes among this gaggle of radio hosts with something to prove to our no listeners, so much so that another friend did an ethnography of this late night dysfunctional family. David just quietly waited until he could play his records. The last conversation David and I had in person was about Klaus Schultze.


Klaus Schultze, "Floating"

I lost touch with David over the years until I encountered him at a local art show, or more correctly, encountered his work. His paintings are joyous, curious things, as dense and methodical as the music he loved. They are fantasies and sci-fi landscapes and computational grids, vivid and purposed, but not looking bully your eye. He believed in science and process and philosophy and I gathered that those things coalesced into a form of spirituality for him, which is how a spirituality should form.

The circumstances of his passing are unclear, but it seems that he had an ongoing medical problem that overcame him and and he died in his sleep. So, wherever/whatever that spirit is now, here's hoping the sky is filled with nice, round stars and the wind makes a low electronic throb through the trees.