ST PATRIX

Scenes from the St. Patrick's Day Parade, Baton Rouge, LA, March 17, 2012

Thanks to my buddy Clarke for opening up his house and a portal to the ST PATRIX and, like every year, kicking off the crawfish eating season for me. Not pictured: the brisket, which I will say with a modicum of authority, might be the butteriest, richest brisket I've ever had. I'd be willing to judge any challengers.

This weekend also included laser tag, article writing, flowchart making, grocery shopping, endless episodes of The Killing Season 2 and I might buy a suit. May you all be kissed for whatever nationality you claim, and a mad saint drive all the snakes from your foggy little island. Cheers!

I vow to trot this one out every year: My favorite St. Patrick anecdote, courtesy of Antonin Artaud.

(three rock 'n' roll contexts)

Elvis Presley and Muhammad Ali from the hypnotic  Awesome People Hanging Out Together

Thursday:
Bowerbirds, The Clearing
Perfume Genius, Put Your Back N 2 It
Cotton Jones, Paranoid Cocoon
The National, High Violet
Pentangle, Basket of Light (hat tip to Randy Black-Chaos Johnston)
Sufjan Stevens, All Delighted People  






Friday:
The Ventures, Live in Japan '65
Cliff Richard, Cliff "Live" in Japan '72
Albert Collins and the Icebreakers, Live in Japan
The Runaways, Live in Japan
Cheap Trick, BUDOKHAN! (30th Anniversary)

your Wednesday afternoon music suggestion session

Leo Wyndham, "Veins" (via his Bandcamp site; hat tip to Augusta Wind)
Delta Spirit, Delta Spirit
Lindsey Buckingham, Gift of Screws
Steve Earle, Live at the BBC
Lucero, Women & Work (streaming at JamBase)
Lee Fields & the Impressions, Faithful Man (hat tip to Todd Gautreaux) and My World (Instrumentals)

Let's get this show rolling with Mr. Leo Wyndham, blowing in on the request line from sunny Germany c/o Miss Augusta Wind. Pretty sure that is her real name.

Delta Spirit, "Tear it Up" off Delta Spirit

I was going to say the new album by Delta Spirit sounds like a fussy Lindsey Buckingham record


Lindsey Buckingham, "Great Day" off Gift of Screws


until I listened to a fussy Lindsey Buckingham record. No record is as fussy as a fussy Lindsey Buckingham record. Maya is up at the office today because school was canceled today - a mass of teachers called in sick so they could protest the Jindal administration's proposed changes to the Louisiana public school system. I don't want to get into it much deeper than saying I believe in public education, and less importantly, perhaps, that Lindsey Buckingham is great music by which to check math worksheets.


Lucero, "Juniper" off Women & Work

I never could get into Lucero before, too Young Man Earnest, lemme-tell-ya-about-me-boots-and-whiskey of a band. Suffering the alt-country fever which invariably can only be cured when your alt-country band happens upon some synthesizers and tries to sound like ELO. Thier new album sounds all the world like a Reigning Sound record, which is likely why I like it. The general consensus among Luceroites that it is has diverted heavily from the script. Same for this new Delta Spirit record. There are times in the past when that kind of thing has bothered me - a part of me is still holding out for Wilco to make AM II - but really, we all move on and find something else to do.


Lee Fields & the Expressions " You're the Kind of Girl" off Faithful Man

Toddy G. From Dallas TX, mastermind behind his own luminous band Crushed Stars sent me sailing into the neo-retro-soul of Lee Fields and that sent me further into the instrumental sister album to Mr. Fields' My World.


Lee Fields & the Expressions, "Money I$ King (instrumental) off My World (Instrumentals)


This concludes your Wednesday afternoon music suggestion session. 'Til next time, be good to each other and be good to your self.

Modern physics

Mushrooms weird me out a little. This one came up on its own in just a day , like mushrooms do, defying modern physics.

Tuesday:
Nathan Englander, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank
The Replacements, Stink
Paul Weller, Sonik Kicks
Caetano Veloso & David Byrne, Live at Carnegie Hall
The Gossip, "Perfect World" and That's Not What I Heard
Ray Charles and Billy Preston, "Agent Double-O Soul" (below)
Hoodoo Gurus, Mars Needs Guitars!



Modern physics still cannot account for Billy Preston's dance moves or the color of his suit in this video.

Modern physics can account for my appearance on on Susan Larson's The Reading Life, where I talk about Louisiana Saturday Night. It airs this evening at 6:30 PM and Saturday at 12:30 on WWNO 89.9 FM in New Orleans and at WWNO.org

Except, funkier

Wow. OK, that was best book launch party ever. Thanks, LSU Press, Teddy's Juke Joint, Floyd Patterson and the OMT band, Danny over at Cottonwood Books and everybody that came and packed the house. I got up and spoke for only about a minute -  why compete with this kind of action? My phone was acting funny, otherwise I'd have shown you more than 17 seconds worth

They sold and I signed about sixty copies of Louisiana Saturday Night, which I say is a good first night out. More to come; particularly ones booked at Maple St. Books in Bayou St, John, New Orleans on March 22 and  Baton Rouge Gallery on March 25. They look to be slightly more sober affairs, but perhaps we can drop a few party gauntlets and see what we can do.

Monday:
The Clash, "The Magnificent Seven"
LCD Soundsystem, London Sessions
The Fall, Levitate (via some kind soul's YouTube playlist)
Metronomy, Nights Out
M83, Hurry Up, We're Dreaming

I'm listening to LCD Soundsystem's "Daft Punk is Playing at My House" as I type this, and I imagine the above video is what that song's experience actually feels like. Except, funkier.

I love the 1997 album Levitate by the Fall. It's one of the lesser-known of their storied (anti-)career but on of the treasures in that shadowed vein. It's the record where they simultaneously laid the groundwork for post-OK Computer Radiohead and LCD Soundstytem and never got their due. Which is fine; they would have just squandered said due had it been granted.. It contains their most fun cover tune (this side of "Mr. Pharmacist", anyway).


The Fall, "I'm a Mummy"

I heard the London Sessions version of LCD Soundsystem's "Pow Pow" on the radio while driving back from the book party.



It sounded electric, shouting "ADVANTAGES TO BOTH!" along with them, ablaze in the ego high of having one of the best parties you ever went to having been thrown in your honor and the unstoppable theory-funk of New Wave. Then, I looked off to each less-advantaged side of Scenic Highway flashing by at midnight, jetting from the gas refineries to the on-ramp to massive concrete Interstate that further disadvantaged the parts of those neighborhoods, the parts that were not leveled in the erecting of that interstate, which is in my experience mostly a ghost highway to the airport.  "ADVANTAGES TO BOTH!"   One's vantage is key in assessing the relative merit of one's advantage.


View Larger Map

I was floored and humbled we had such a great turnout. Teddy's is a great place and I think the book is a great book but there is a stretch of reality that prevents us from bridging out of our comfort zone, whatever that comfort zone is. Acknowledging how precious this sounds, I hope this book gets a few people on that bridge.

See? That's why I didn't make a speech at the event.

party

I have a party only once every twenty years or so. Please come!

Here's the Facebook event if you roll that way

Friday:
Sun Ra & His Arkestra, Strange Worlds in my Mind (Space Poetry Volume One)
Dizzy Gillespie, The Champ (though Milt Jackson is the MVP on this one)
Lalo Schifrin, Enter the Dragon soundtrack
Nicola Conte, The Modern Sound of Nicola Conte - Versions in Jazz-Dub
Nostalgia 77, The Sleepwalking Society
Nostalgia 77 Octet, Weapons of Jazz Destruction and Borderlands


I'm considering just showing this video instead of doing a reading. By the way, if you have this 45 just sitting around your house taking up space, I'll take it!

rabbit hole

I updated my iPhone's to iOS5.1 and though I don't quite know what the camera button on the lock screen does since it doesn't, like, take a picture, it seems like a bright new world anyway.

Thursday:
Eric Chenaux, Guitar & Voice
Robbie Basho, Bonn Ist Supreme
Henry Flynt, Hillbilly Tape Music
Peter Grudzien, Album No. One (in two sides): The Unicorn
Mark Fry, Dreaming with Alice
Van Dyke Parks, Discover America

No matter where I start the day, I can easily find myself spiraling down to some hidden corner of 1972.


Mark Fry, "The Witch"

Right next to the Gil Scott-Heron memoir on my living room table is Rob Young's Electric Eden, a detailed, obsessive account of "England's Visionary Music"  -  a rabbit hole from which I suspect I will never emerge.


American visionary music form Van Dyke Parks

Speaking of rabbit holes, I wrote a chapter for the new book. Not the first chapter I wrote, but the first one formatted right and put in the "book chapter" folder. Boom!


Henry Flynt, "Leather High in A"

Oh, wait! The camera button slides the phone open into camera mode so you don't stand there like a stupe waiting for your revolutionary lifestyle device to figure itself out while an amazing photo opportunity ducks right out of sight. Nice!