may it be at the Electric Cinema

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Lost Bayou Ramblers, Vermillionaire

There is a good chance I will be Xmasing in cheery olde England this year, plodding around take-out tea in hand by the very pub depicted above. Yesterday I was walking down the stairs still aglow form the news wondering if when I spy the actual place I'll be all "I saw that on Google Sreet View!" and giddily so. I'm scoping out the Balti shops as we speak and must admit the teenage me inside the old crusty me's heart skipped a beat when I Google Street Viewed onto an actual British record store. I expect it will be the same crappy stuff as in a US record store now, but  it was the only place in the world I wanted to go in my formative stage. I will now start cultivating both an outrageous southern accent to amuse the locals and a similarly pronounced "British" one to effectively communicate. I'm also thinking a large foam cowboy hat with a Union Jack sticker stuck upon is in order. "What's that, love?"

Last night my pretty lady and I heard David Sedaris read here in town and he is a master of the form: funny, personable, a litte distant, and totally lovable.  I'm not completely sold on  his new book, Squirrel Meets Chipmunk, a cheeky bestiary verging on fablery. He read a few stories from it and read them well and even gave over a minute to play Broadway doyenne Elaine Stritch tearing through one of the tales from the audio book. Squirrel is a brave step for a guy who made his name writing about himself, even if he is basically casting himself into his animal characters, and he might be at the precipice of super fiction, but the night was won with this New Yorker story and excerpts from his diary.

Also, class act, he paused to leap praise on Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, which I agree is the best book I've read in quite some time, at least until I got into Mark Richard. I have a Tom Franklin book sitting right here in my bag because I read a paragraph excerpted elsewhere that made me go dig a hole and drop in my preconceived notions of how to form a sentence. Also DS broke into anecdotes A'ing the Q's at the end of the show and they are the unmistakably the nuggets to his prose, which is a thrilling thing to witness. Also, also, fucking love David Sedaris.

But yeah, England. I don't expect to go to the movies while there but  if I did, may it be at the Electric Cinema.


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