Happy new year!

Double rainbow over Kilkenny, Ireland. I've been putting up pics on the FaceBook if you wanna follow along.

2011 was OK 'n'all, but 2012 is gonna happen! Less talk, more rock! I'm resolved! Happy new year!

go, ho ho

Loathe I may be to introduce another cat picture to the Internet, Here is Sukie contemplating what trials face her at Grandma's while we are on vacation.


Yule log from Ambrosia, photo by Jerri Jensen. The meringue mushrooms are painted with chocolate underneath the cap to create the shadow. So much cake and buttercream that you kinda have to lean in to get your fork through it.

Thursday:
John Sayles, A Moment in the Sun
Nicholas Jaar, Space is Only Noise
Timber Timbre, Creep on Creepin' On
The Dirk Hartung Combo, Drained Wait
John Cale, Circus Live
Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Rhizoma

Friday:
David Bowie, Tonight and Let's Dance
Jack Oblivian, Rat City

We busted out the yule log, put on Rat City and had a rock 'n' roll, mac 'n' cheese, chocolate cake party with Sammy and Junebug from down the street. It seems that being able to make the previous statement is a sign of living the good life.



I toyed with how badly I could get away with signing off on the proof of my book when I found on small but, to a very small but vocal audience, critical change that needed to be made, so here we go, ho ho. It's OK because I like the thing better with each re-read, which is a gift unto itself.

Saturday:
Star Trek: Generations
Independence Day



Here is the landscape upon which we grazed this Christmas Eve. I had this thought: is the reason we all are so into Christmas this year (doesn't it seem so?) because of a nascent fear that in Incan calendar end times deal is true? Like its the last Christmas? I've watched two terrible movies on cable today, weirdly both featuring Brent Spiner, and had another thought - Why has no one made an end-of-the-world Christmas movie? Melancholia meets Armageddon meets Miracle on 34th Street. Maybe I have a new project for the new year. Happy holidays, everybody!

mama fried chicken

2011 is burning down to an ash, just how I like it.

Mem Shannon, A Cab Driver's Blues
Shrimp City Slim, I Work Nights
Carol Fran and Clarence Holliman, It's About Time

• Happy birthday, Mem Shannon!
  
  "I keep telling everybody, you know, po-boy sandwiches don't taste like they used to taste."
  "No, you right."
  "I don't know if it was the mayonnaise they were using or what."
  "It's because we'd eat one of them every now and then, then."
  "Yeah, it was special."
  "I remember when I was a youngster, and I'm 71 now, when my mama fried chicken, that was a special supper. Now, chicken, it's common."
  
  - Dialogue snippet from Mem Shannon's "5th Ward Horseman" from A Cab Driver's Blues, maybe the best Louisiana blues album there is, alternating between tasty, anecdotal funky blues and actual New Orleans taxi cab confessions. Check out "$17.00 Brunette". Doctors and lawyers don't tip for shit.
  
  
• Also, happy birthday to my mother-in-law Frances sitting on a porch somewhere up in the hereafter, tapping her foot. One of the first times I met her, she fried up some chicken in a little electric skillet. So good, it's about ruined me for fried chicken ever since.
  
  


• My annual list of the five most intriguing Baton Rouge CD's of 2011 is up in this week's Record Crate blog for 225. Read em' and weep. Or cheer, or tear at your flesh, or whatever reaction lists like these bring out in you.
  
  
• Some of you better get busy proofing your books, you.
  
  
• I am such a short timer for this year. In four days we embark on an Emerald Isle trip that will hopefully be accompanied by spotty wireless so that I may enjoy moments just for themselves for a bit, refocus my lens a little. I am excited about the whole itinerary but realized that I will get to watch the season two premiere of Sherlock on actual BBC One which lit a match around an already combustible tableau.
  
  
  

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"