request for a Mountain Goats/Coldplay mashup

I woke up with both the Mountain Goats "No Children" and Coldplay's "Clocks" in my head, perhaps soundtracking the dream I had where I was supposed to sing a song in a play with my daughter. Typical to logistical planning with a 10-year-old, she reminded me of the play the night before and had complete confidence that I had my act together, and typical to me, I'd forgotten that I signed up to sing a song and didn't know what song it was or anything. I flurried around the set before the show bothering people who'd spent months rehearsing if they had the words or even knew what song it was, but they were all busy with their parts. The ones they were prepared and qualified to perform. I wondered aloud in the dream why I was even being allowed to participate.

Subtle, brain. The generalized fear of being discovered to be a fraud is so fun. It makes for uneventful drama with a flatter ending, when it actually has one. I wish in the dream I'd decided to sing "No Children"  in front of all the parents sitting uncomfortably in metal chairs in the school auditorium, or, at least brought down the house with a stirring rendition of "Clocks." One of the bands at Maya's big Black Diamond concert last December did so, stage lights in full dramatic swing, and I cried a little. It was touching, seeing band after band really lean into to these empty bubble pop songs, filling them up with their lives. But no, I fretted in my dream and woke up before I could see what happened.

So, I hereby issue this request for a Mountain Goats/Coldplay mashup of these two songs. Give my lousy dreams some meaning, lend some purpose to those brain cells flaring up in the anxious void of my subconscious. I'd do it if I was any good at that sort of thing.

I'm going to see the Mountain Goats in New Orleans this weekend. Maybe they'll hear this plea and work it out on stage.

The windup playlist (to be updated until we go)
The Mountain Goats, Tallahassee
Badly Drawn Boy, About a Boy soundtrack
The Mountain Goats, Heretic Pride
Arthur Allgood, I Have Not Seen The Wind (d/l-able from his Facebook page)
The Mountain Goats, Ghana
Fred Eaglesmith, Indiana Road
Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Beware

party time

Last night, I went out and partied with these folks at the Rainbow Inn in Pierre Part, LA. The Rainbow Inn appears in a Country Roads piece this coming February and on page 121 of my book this coming March. The people from Swamp People hang out there all the time; Miss Cora (right) says she even got a speaking part this season.

Swamp pop legend Don Rich plays a regular gig there every Thursday, but is taking a break until March.


Don Rich, "Party Time"

Wednesday:
Matthew Dear, Headcage and Black City
A bunch of Clams Casino songs on YouTube (via YouTube/Google)
Shawn Lee's Incredible Tabla Band, Tabla Rock 
A bunch of rare funk songs on YouTube, notably The Soulfadelic's "The Big Chase"
Lou Donaldson, Alligator Boogaloo

Thursday:
The Montesas, Wrong Side of Town
Clogging videos on YouTube
Wau Y Los Arrrghs!!!, Canten En Español

Hey! Louisiana Saturday Night tumbled up on the @LSUNews tumblr!

If that seems like a string of gibberish typos to you, it means LSU made an announcement about my book on one of their new sites.  It is a humbling thing to have a respected press and subsequent giant parent organization help promote one's book. Thanks, LSU!

Louisiana Saturday Night (published by LSU Press) should be in stores early March (You can pre-order, I think) and this site will be partially, if not, significantly conscripted in the book's promotion. If any of you out there are media folks/book reviewers/book store owners/book festival organizers/people who like to fly authors out and put them up in luxury accommodations so they can talk about their own obsessive interests, please hit me up! The publicity machine is in gear.

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I got the new year off to a perfect late start by listing my favorite records of 2011 in this week's Record Crate blog for 225. Also this week in Baton Rouge: Rough 7, the Tipitina's Co-Op benefit and get your tickets for Fred Eaglesmith.

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The savvy self-publicist would post some Louisiana music to coincide with these announcements, but the following is the path I am currently walking. Or clogging. Or doing the hully gully to, or something. Whatever it is, it's party time.

Edited to add:  I've never heard of the Montesas before today but I love these guys!

Damien Hirst isn't dead

Some heavy-handed sarcasm from a Village Voice writer is perpetuating a rumor that Damien Hirst is dead.
Unless the SOPA/PIPA blackout is keeping any other obituaries from appearing, I believe it is safe to say Damien Hirst isn't dead. My sympathies to all those prepared to trot out their pickled shark jokes and totally riveting reasons why they hate contemporary art.

 And I had such a clever obituary picture, too.

dust collection

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Mark Leyner, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
Werner Herzog, Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Sherlock
Owl & the Pussycat, Owl & the Pussycat
10 Secs from Every Hit Song of the '90s (via WFMU's Beware of the Blog)
World Party, Private Revolution
Bombay Bicycle Club, A Different Kind of Fix
Matthew Dear, Headcage
Chick Corea/Eddie Gomez/Paul Motian, Further Exploations
Ultra-slow version of Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" (via YouTube)

I finished Nutsack. I'll have a formalized review forthcoming somewhere/how for Nutsack is a book that calls for one, but really, I think I just like saying "nutsack." Who doesn't?

I watched Cave of Forgotten Dreams last night on Netflix on my iPad and had a salient point to make about how they know it is the same cave painter throughout because his/her handprint has a crooked little finger, and how you put your crooked little fingers on the iPad screen to make things happen and that when I went to put my hand on his, the movie stopped and it was a meta-cave-drawing-discovery, frozen in time. That wasn't the point I had at the  time, but that point is now lost. I also liked how there are preserved cave bear tracks in the dust.

I did almost nothing this weekend but watch season 2 of BBC One's Sherlock on the laptop, and I could talk about the sensation of watching a detective genius on his laptop on my laptop, but the point I'm working is there is a scene where old Sher is trying to clear his name on something and wanting to know if his housekeeper (who forever claims to be not his housekeeper) if his room had been dusted. "In dust lies the truth" he claims with great dramatic flourish, or something to that effect.

Sherlock is great TV, my favorite show going. The English, through the focused projector of The BBC Dramatic Series, understand how to work an archetype. These episodes are based on the old stories, the original episodes as it were, and yet are fresh. You want to know how old horsey Benedict Cumberbatch manifests the great detective's opium problem or his seedy connections, and it all falls perfectly into place like dust in a sunbeam. The hat becomes a great meta-joke.

My friend Clarke and I had a conversation about swamp pop, a curious strain of oldies as practiced here in South Louisiana. I mentioned that in writing my book, it was the music I was least prepared to embrace really, but I've come to love it. It's like when Jasper Johns painted that same flag over and over different ways, images the mind already knows is his phrase, I believe. These swamp pop guys take the tiredest of old songs and breathe stunning life into them.

Speaking of old songs, or maybe just dust collection, I got an email that World Party was assembling a 5CD collection of hits and outtakes. Didn't they just have the one song, albeit a good one?


World Party, "Ship of Fools"

but then I remembered "Private Revolution" with hot ass Sinead O'Connor shimmying in the background


World Party, "Private Revolution"

In 1987, it was pointless to try to not sound like Prince, whose revolution was unstoppable. We all wanted to look like Karl Wallinger and have someone who looked like Sinead O'Connor dancing like that behind us.

rock city

Would it were this was a close-up of an area marquee and not the sign at the hardware store near my house.

Rock City, Rock City
Ron Franklin, Ron Franklin
Rory Gallagher, Rory Gallagher
Baby Bee, Drop It Like a Bomb  
The Seeds, The Seeds
Dash Rip Rock, Dash Rip Rock
I'm letting the music do the self-reflection for me today.



Happy Dash Rip Rock day! I suggest we paint DMZ on all neighborhood association signs in tribute!


Dash Rip Rock, "DMZ"

This is pretty much what they were like when I saw then in 1987 at the Chimes, across the street form where my office is now. Meanwhile, back in rock city...


The Seeds, "Evil Hoodoo"


Baby Bee (from my hometown of Houma), "High-Heeled Leather Boots"


Rory Gallagher, "Laundromat"


Rock City, "My Life is Right"

and for good measure...

Go see Joe's show

Joseph Winterhalter, Installation view, BBAC, Birmingham, Michigan, 2010.

My old friend Joe and two other fine artists have a show titled Forms of Authority up at Prairie

 (4035 Hamilton Avenue, Cincinnati OH). The reception is Jan. 14, 7-9 PM. Any of you Ohioans/Kentuckians in the range of this call and the gallery, go and raise a cup of art opening wine with Joe for me.

Wednesday:

Harris Newman, Dark Was the Night, Decorated, and Accidents with Nature and Each Other
Tetzui Akiyama, Low cloud means death
alva noto, UTP_
Mark Leyner, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

Thursday:

Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra, Kollaps Tradixionales and 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons 
Efrim Manuel Menuck, plays "High Gospel"

I told Joe in an email "They look so clean in the photo but I suspect inspection would reveal that clean leaves a lot of traces of its own messy formation." Which is the way of formation. One of the really cool things we saw at Bunratty Castle in Ireland were a couplet sets of antlers from Irish Elk mounted on the wall of the great room. The Irish Elk notably exemplifies the neutral purpose of evolution's slog; their antlers grew to a point where their heads could no longer support them, and the beasts died out recently enough in the evolutionary timeline that they got mounted up on castle walls and turned into really stunning things like mermaid chandeliers.

Perhaps an ignominious end to such a noble beast, going from having a head too big for God's plan to allow to being scraps in some German craftsman's atelier, something about which he could muse "That'll work for the mermaid!"

The Process is just that, a process. We want to attribute a goal, a  higher purpose because it impresses meaning to our triumph and suffering. It plasters bright exit arrows on our mendacity. We believe in our hearts, It'll all be worthwhile because in the end, we become this awesome mermaid in a castle!

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Joe's work embodies this, using institutional construction materials as his elk horns, (re)working them so that time is refracted through them, that the fourth dimension is just like the other three, meticulously rendered on equal footing on the canvas, which becomes a fifth dimension of sorts, another angle added to the evolutionary process. I suppose the viewing of the canvas is a sixth dimension; the writing about the viewing a seventh, and so on. If we were both high or quantum physicists right now, it would all make sense.

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The Sugar Frosted Nutsack rolls along with evolutionary recursion as the main character.  It's a story about a story that absorbs each retelling of the story into the story. Picking up and losing things along the way. 

 
Yesterday, I was working on a data process that mirrored it - get some more data, aggregate it, then get some more data and aggregate all that. All the pensive Japanese guitar music and glitchy techno I listened to while working on that report was about that.  I'm to talk to Efrim from Thee Silver Mt. Zion today; their music is very much about this, a song ravaged to become a new song, about society ravaging its way into becoming a new one, only to sing another song.

Thee Silver Mt. Zion, "1,000,000 Died to Make This Sound"

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This post mirrors the Process. The story sitting right here in front of me waiting to be finished mirrors the Process. Everything does. The action begets the artifact which bears the trace of the action to give the artifact its dimension. That sounds like the kind of thing Joe or I would say to each other after that third vodka tonic back in the heady days of burgeoning alcohol problems and art talk. Except we would've brought the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence into it and then played pool. Or, like Mr. Leyner in Nutsack says about his story whose telling becomes a story whose telling...

Everything about it becomes it.

So, yeah, go see Joe's show at Prairie if you can. Should be a good one.

Nutsack made me snort

Bright spot.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
Mark Leyner, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
Owen Pallett, Heartland
The Doors, The Soft Parade
The Books, Thought For Food
Paul Haines, Darn It!
 
More dreams. I had a dream last night where I was at a party Ornette Coleman was also attending and I had a chance to ask him about the 1958 incident in Baton Rouge area bar where he was beat up and his saxophone was thrown down a hill. I've never been able to nail down the particulars of where it happened - the most solid lead I've gotten is that it happened at a club called the Sans Souci across the river in Port Allen - and true-to-life, I didn't get the answer from the Mr. Coleman in my dream.

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All the Pretty Horses is really good, but you probably knew that already. You might not know (but might suspect) that Mark Leyner's The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, his first novel in fourteen years, is as electric and funny as his novels ever were. Back when I devoured them all in the 90's, they were the electricest and funniest. Nutsack made me snort so loud in the library coffee shop,  the barista was forced to briefly stop telling her friend at the counter how great the food at Epcot was. There's a blurb for you!

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Owen Pallett, "Oh, Heartland, Up Yours"

Sometimes listening to a chorus of a particular song is like relaxing in a bean-bag chair filled with pain killers.

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I have my first-ever guitar lesson tonight. Crazy notion, I know, being taught how to do something as opposed to learning it the hard way. Imagine if that same concept had been applied to my day. Snorting in the library was the best part.