but look at what you're missing

Missing nothing from Christmas buffet at work

John Sayles, A Moment in the Sun
Robyn Hitchcock, Tromsø, Kaptein
Common, The Dreamer/The Believer (streaming at AOL)
Robert Wyatt, Drury Lane
Arthur Russell, World of Echo

• This snippet of dialog from A Moment in the Sun might be the best thing I've read all year.
  
  “I been thinkin bout peach pie,” says Wilbert.
  “Aint none on that wagon.”
  “Man needs a dream.”
  “Not me."
  
  I think it sums everything up. The whole human condition.
    
• Maya Angelou is surprised at the language surrounding her reading included on "The Dreamer" from the new Common album, though it must be said that she completely owns the track (starting at the 4:40 mark).
  
  
  Common featuring Maya Angelou, "The Dreamer"
      
• My wife came across this bit from Umberto Eco's Travels in Hyperreality about the Madonna Inn of San Luis Obispo, CA. We spent our honeymoon in the "Rock Bottom" room - each has its own theme - and still talk about the strawberry champagne wedding cake obtained from their in-house Swiss bakery. We had a steak in here:
  
  
  
  Anyway, Umberto Eco nails the place by describing as follows:
  
  Let's say that Albert Speer, while leafing through a book on Gaudi, swallowed an overgenerous dose of LSD and began to build a nuptial catacomb for Liza Minnelli.
     
• Joe Bonomo pointed to this story about M. Henry Jones, an artist in the East Village who has been for decades pursuing the perfection of an arcane form of 3-D photography, who is being forced to move to a new studio because of rent prices. The landlord, for what it's worth, comes off like he's really helping the guy out as much as possible.
       
• It brought up Mr. Jones connections to the New York underground film scene, one of the greatest microperiods of art history (Jonas Mekas' ecstatic compendium Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-1971 is the best book on the subject) , and this old post about Harry Smith's films and the tedious and luck-of-the-draw manner by which knowledge was once obtained and now, just from clicking around, emerges a film by another of that scene that I've read about but never seen.
  
  
  Bruce Baillie, Mass for the Dakota Sioux, parts 1 and 2
  and over on Facebook I see that my friend Dickie Landry is going to be doing a solo saxophone concert in the Guggenheim rotunda in March and then I glance over at Spotify and see the profile of someone who's recently passed away, and like this post, it's all too much, it's a buffet table with too many hands in the food, and I have friends that proudly opt out of the din of social media or the Internet in general which, whatever, they seem to do just fine, but I want to pull them over and say but look at what you're missing.
  
  
  
  
  

the kids are alright

Maya: coolest kid.

Saturday:



My daughter's band Black Diamond, "And Run", "Let it Be" and  band interview at the Manship Theatre.

I could not be prouder, they sounded and looked great. Thanks to Doug Gay for the great work he does over at Baton Rouge Music Studios. Send your kids over there instead of wasting everyone's time with whatever you have them doing! You get a lightshow like that at a soccer tournament?

Sunday:

Gregg Ginn & the Royal We at a house party in Baton Rouge. Former Black Flag guitarist/SST label honcho Greg Ginn played guitar, laptop and theremin, occassionally accompanying Kim Vodicka's spoken word.

I am by nature led to make smartass comments about the one man laptop/guitar/Theremin act of Greg Ginn & the Royal We - "one inch nail" and "open mike night at a bar in Blade Runner" and "experimental music can be defined as being more fun to make than it is to listen to" among them - but once that is out of the way, it was very cool and singular and extra awesome that it was going down in a darkened smoky apartment show in Baton Rouge early on Sunday evening. It's like a Portland dream but cooler and weirder and more post-punk fulfilling. The poet in the second clip, Kim Vodicka, put on the show and I would've picked up her chapbook had the door guy ever reappeared with my change, but whatever. It would please me if there was no actual door guy and some kid just made off with my money. The kids are alright.

Monday:
The Kills, Blood Pressures
Guided By Voices, Let's Go Eat the Factory (streaming at NPR)
Atlas Sound, Parallax
Jacks, Vacant World
The Jesus and Mary Chain, Psychcandy
Love and Rockets, Earth Sun Moon

My suggestions for the new Beach Boys album

Thursday:
Graham Bond Organization, Live at Klook's Kleek
Mitch Ryder, How I Spent My Vacation
Dead Boys, Young, Loud and Snotty
The Undertones, Hypnotised
The Cramps, Off the Bone

Friday:
Karen Russell, Swamplandia!
Flatbed Honeymoon, The Traveler
England in 1819, Alma
Shearwater, Palo Santo
The Beach Boys, Love You, Sunflower, Surf's Up
Au, Versions
Matmos, Supreme Balloon
   
The Beach Boys (including Brian Wilson) are reuniting for an appearance at JazzFest and a new album. My suggestion for the album is that Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips be tapped to produce it and that he be given the following:

• One million dollars
• One of Phil Spector's handguns
• An abandoned Midwestern missile silo in which to record the album; Mr. Coyne should be given the only key
• Temporary full creative control over the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and
• A signed document from the mayor of Oklahoma City to Mr. Coyne mandating that he make it "the best fucking Beach Boys record ever."

Otherwise, I'm not expecting much.


The Beach Boys, "All I Wanna Do"

to peck away

Painting studio lobby after the end of the semester

Wednesday:
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Silversun Pickups, Seasick
M83, Hurry Up, We're Dreaming
My Morning Jacket, Circuital

Thursday:
William Gaddis, Agape Agape
Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, The River

• First time I read Neuromancer about 15 years ago, I was excited about the profligacy of computer networks that laid before me, and now that I taught a course in digital branding last semester, it is interesting to see how we are still catching up to Gibson's fever dream of dicey cognitive perception and dissolution of the physical self into a loosely wrought digital world. Great science fiction is like great science (and great fiction, too) in that the world it proposes is both terrifying and dazzling, impossible and very real. I'd finished the book sooner had I not read it in my iPad where I could with a few gestures leave the stream and join my own shimmering digital environment. When you check Facebook a few times during a passage where a character is jacking into different digital existences like flipping TV channels, the story starts to bleed into life.
  
  I should add: Neuromancer is what got me into dub. The long distance space pilots are all Rastafarians who listen to dub across the vast stretches of space, which sounds alright to me.
    
• I just executed a productive transaction via LinkedIn. I think it's the first time LinkedIn has proven to be useful. Not just for me, but maybe ever.
      
• This song is speaking to me right now.
  
  
  My Morning Jacket, "Outta My System". I'll hold on to black metal in case things get dicier.
   
• I had an occasion recently to peck away on someone else's manual typewriter - it was at a  party a poet was having and a poem was sitting there reeled up on his little desk being ruined by his guests, so I joined in and I added a line and then suddenly couldn't remember how to do a carriage return. I grew up with the things so I knew but technological adoption had pushed this minor skill to a box in the attic. I knew there was a bell when you got to the end and the speed by which you get to that bell is very satisfying, tethering the text to the paper, making the word a very real thing. I can see why poets like these things.
  
  I feel that schism is one of the many being bridged in Agapē Agape, one endless paragraph that went on for a tidy 100 Kindle screens in which a fading Beckettian old man bounced around his walls, lamenting the passing of how you used to do things. I like the way Mr. Gaddis frequently finishes a phrase with "the" e.g., "...the only game in town, because that's what America's wait, little card falling on the, there!" It's like this thing is dying to be a poem but he's long forgotten how to do a carriage return. It's like a thought starts dying the second it hits the air, like the aliens in War of the Worlds.
  
  One of the supplemental essays offers that Agapē Agape started as an essay on player pianos, and I can see that, but it diminishes what's going on here. It's about a million little alliterative conceits, mixing up Pushkin and pushpin, Agapē vs. Agape, pitting Plato and Philo T. Farnsworth against each other. It is hallucinatory and gibberish-y in the best way, like a hose put to your brain one last time before the tower is drained of water.
     
• It should be added that formatting both of these reviews (x-posted from Goodreads) for this post took much longer than it would have if I'd just used a typewriter and rabbit glue. Perhaps Heraclitus is right and it all ends up in the river no matter what we do.
  
  
  Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, "Point Blank"

power pop language

Black Diamond

William Gibson, Neuromancer
No Reservations Holiday Special
Stephen King's Bag of Bones
David Sandström Overdrive, Pigs Lose
P.J. Harvey, Let England Shake
Guided By Voices, Bee Thousand

• Maya's band Black Diamond plays twice this weekend, Sat. night at the Manship Theatre and Sunday afternoon at Brew-Ha-Ha.
     
• I just had a publicity planning meeting about Louisiana Saturday Night where we began mapping out my forthcoming omnipresence on the Louisiana music book talking circuit. If you have an event you'd like me to be at hawking my wares, let me know.
    
• Late last night, I was reading Neuromancer with the No Reservations holiday special going on in the background, and while I'll confess getting easily lost in Gibson's classic of perceptive dissonance,  it still made a lot more sense than whatever was going on with Bourdain over there on the TV. I'm guessing it was a post-modern take on the old narrative holiday special, but I dunno, more mama's cookin', less drama lookin'. Or something.  The pooping Santa thing was cool until it became to a cartoon, then it lost me. Pooping Santa is interesting enough on it's own.
      
• Also, it felt like Bag of Bones was on for hours and hours, getting more and more ridiculous, but in a great terrible TV way. At 1:43 AM, you want to look over see Pierce Brosnan lumber around pretending to cry in the rain.
      
• I've resisted until now, but yeah, that new P.J. Harvey record is pretty special. Today, though, belongs to David Sandström Overdrive, for they are totally speaking my power pop language. I've never heard of him or them either.
  
  
  David Sandström Overdrive, "Not a Good Boy Now"

minus the Univac

Katie Naquin, "Orange as Hippos". Oil on canvas, on display at LSU's Middleton Library.
See more of her work at WallsCanTalkGalley.com.

Friday:
New Order, "Blue Monday" (12" Mix)
Can, Tago Mago
Various Artists, Tackhead Sound Crash Slash and Mix by Adrian Sherwood
Ruts D.C. vs. Zion Train, Rhythm Collision Vol. 1
Ghost, Opus Eponymous
Kvelertak, Kvelertak
Sleep, Jerusalem

Saturday: 
Jimbo Mathus & the Tri-State Coalition at Chelsea's Cafe, Baton Rouge, LA


Sunday: 
Roberto Bolaño, The Third Reich

Monday:
Songs: Ohia, Axxess & Ace and The LionessPhosphorescent, Here's To Taking it EasySol Invictus, Black Europe
Henry Brant, Wesleyan Gamelan, and others, Meteor Farm
Joe Byrd & the Field Hippies, The American Metaphysical Circus
Jimbo Mathus, Knockdown South

• According to the Blogger stats, we've hit 125K page views on this little blog. Thanks!
     
• I'm not really sure how to describe Henry Brant's Meteor Farm. It sounds like a live dress rehearsal of Glee, a phalanx of beplumed native drummers, a holiday jazz band concert, and a Univac going to town on interstellar gas cloud data all happening on the same stage, each rotating through their parts like serves in volleyball, all muttering "I got it" when the ball comes back over the net. Does that help?
  
  I just found some liner notes that pretty much line up with my description, minus the Univac. Brant's music as I understand it, is very much about sounds' position  in space. I'm picturing all these groups on a massive stage with a harried stage director, clipboard in sweaty palm just trying to keep everything moving.
  
  Whatever is going on, it has the massive the-earth-is-moving consciousness about it that I appreciate from the large-scale activities of the avant-garde composers. I suppose this is the thrill of any symphony or symphonic pop configuration, but when guys like Brant pull things apart and leave them all stretched out under the proscenium arch is when things really click in my brain. Section 12, when it all sounds like it's about to be run over by a train, is a dazzling constellation of anxiety.
     
• Jimbo Mathus's cosmic crew might be the best bar band I've ever seen, in a meta-bar band way, or even maybe in a meta-meta-bar band that circles around to just being a great bar band and finding the material to suit (and Nudie suit) the context. I was gonna regret not shooting a video but thankfully some kind obsessive did it for me and us, one and all. My world blogs itself!
  
  
  Jimbo Mathus & the Tri-State Coalition, "Tell It to the Judge"
      
• See, if I had his band, or his position to have a similar band or at least the wherewithal to wear a Nudie suit on occasion, I'd want to do songs like this.
  
  
  Joe Byrd & the Field Hippies, "Nightmare Train"
     
• and talk about avant-garde composers between the songs, and nobody wants that.  It's probably best that this is my venue.
  
  125,000 idle blog clicks can't be wrong!

livewire voodoo

Digital screen in the new plaza under construction in downtown Baton Rouge. I kinda hope it stays like this.

William Gibson, Neuromancer
Premiata Forneria Marconi, Storia Di Un Minuto
Brainticket, Celestial Ocean
John Cage, Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake
Brad Mehidau, Places
The Bad Plus, Never Stop
Ornette Coleman, The Complete Science Fictions Sessions

• Brainticket is the only ticket you need.
  
  
  Brainticket, "Era of Technology"
     
• I'd like to think there are layers of techno-irony involved reading a digital copy of Neuromancer checked out from the library on the iPad while riding the bus home, but really it seems second nature to me. For Case, the protagonist in William Gibson's novel which introduced the word cyberspace in its first chapter, the pains of going back to analog attack him in his dreams.
  
  But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach a console that wasn't there.
     
• I don't talk about my day job much because here's why: I've been watching this data replication job fail over and over, each time for one small little glitch that happens ten minutes into the process and so you have to re start it. It's like teaching someone to ride a bike except when they fall or get scared, you have to go buy a new bike.
  
  Oh, wait, it worked! Maybe I just needed to channel my frustrations into this screen instead of that one. Now to see if I can make the schedule work. It didn't.
  
  Again, this is why I don't talk much about my day job.
    
• It's screen separation anxiety. Once when my co-teacher was giving our class on the virtues of being unplugged, I basically had to sit on my hands to not check Facebook or email on my phone while he was talking.
     
• That is one of the many things to look forward to on our week in Ireland over the holidays, where I suspect the WiFi will be as spotty as the Guinness is foamy and there are castles and leprechauns and I might be able to wander a dreamland of something besides electric sheep for a bit.
  
  
  
  Or, because I'm like this...
  
  
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