not reconciled

"FOR THE LISTENER, WHO LISTENS IN THE SNOW..."

2012-01-27T20:29:00.000-08:00

Winter
H. L. Hix
from "The God of Window Screens and Honeysuckle"

Stubble rows, four matte, four shiny in morning sun,/
show the combine’s direction. What can be preserved/
must be preserved as some self other than its own./
Bent cattails mimic stubble in the frozen pond./
Suet nearly gone, chickadees cling upside down/
to the feeder. Above it, a hedgeapple wedged/
between branches since fall. Past that, changing direction/
at once, fast as mackerel, a thousand blackbirds./
Skaters on a pond, we fall into what we know,/
drown in disorienting light before we freeze./
In angled afternoon sun, the fence’s shadow/
caresses the snow’s contours like tight-fitting clothes./
Even when grass greens to re-enact spring, the snow/
will linger, longest in the shadows of houses.

"HALF WAY TO A BREAKDOWN..."

2012-01-26T10:48:00.000-08:00

w/o his band, the hold steady, to push him, finn just lays low & lets the story do the talking. there aren't too many more christ-haunted rockers out there than mr finn but he gives the devil his due as well.

i remember a guy at new college who had a christ complex, actually believed he WAS christ. his delusion, it was explained to me, emerged from the detritus of a bad acid trip: he sat, paralyzed & sweating for hours, hallucinating the devil & christ literally wrestling for possession of his soul. he claimed that christ was victorious but it seemed clear enough to me that the devil was the actual winner.

if he'd learned to play guitar & write songs, i'd have given the win to christ.

WHY THE BAY AREA DOESN'T DESERVE THEIR SPORTS TEAMS

2012-01-24T18:35:00.000-08:00

KYLE WILLIAMS GETTING DEATH THREATS

http://kluc.radio.com/2012/01/24/kyle-williams-getting-death-threats/

that's a current head-line around the bay area & the source of much discussion. the bay area seems to have the rock bottom worse kind of sports fans: petulant & ugly when things don't go their way; gut-churningly arrogant & over-bearing when they do. same applies to the local media(w/a few exceptions)which explains why i felt no joy in the giant's unlikely world series victory two years ago or the niner's excellent season this year. the media & the fans simply drained all that's good out of both stories & replaced it w/their own petty egos.

these people don't deserve kyle williams. they don't deserve winning teams. losers deserve losers. they deserve something commensurate w/the void of their own lives.

sickening.

SUNDAY DINNER

2012-01-22T19:14:00.000-08:00

ROASTED WILD COD, ROASTED JAPANESE SHISHITO PEPPERS, & WINTER CITRUS SALAD W/DATES & MINT

RETURN TO FOREVER

2012-01-20T15:10:00.001-08:00

LAST NIGHT I HEARD JOHN BOUTTE SINGING THE THEME SONG FROM THE HBO SERIES TREME COMING FROM ANN'S BEDROOM. "SHE'S GEARING UP," I THOUGHT TO MYSELF. WE'RE HEADED FOR NEW ORLEANS IN A MONTH FOR THIS YEARS MARDI GRAS. I CAN THANK TREME FOR EXCITING ANN ENOUGH FOR HER TO STATE A DESIRE TO BE IN NEW ORLEANS FOR MARDI GRAS. I JUMPED AT THE CHANCE. I WILL JUMP AT ANY CHANCE TO GO TO THE CITY OF MY DREAMS.
I WROTE THIS OVER 3 YEARS AGO. IT SPEAKS DIRECTLY TO MY LOVE FOR THE CRESCENT CITY.

i was staying w/mark applegate down in key west. walker was w/me. we stayed for several weeks on the downstairs couches in a large old key west house. there were seven or so other folks staying too. i remember it was winter. one of the guys wore his wetsuit to bed at night. this probably had something to do w/the fact that there were only a few extant windows in the whole house. when you're way down in the sub-tropics, who needs windows, right?

this was a real introduction to the key west experience for me. the guys in the house took us to several bars that were off the beaten path(green parrot, boat bar, the bar w/no name over on shell island). this was when the shrimpers still ran the town. there were no tourists. i remember seeing a college kid in the boat bar beaten savagely & thrown out onto duval street because he insisted to one of the shrimpers that he hadn't hit the 8 ball. he wouldn't drop it, even when a voice from the darkness in the bar bluntly stated, "that's how we play it here, kid." the kid didn't even finish his next sentence. things happened to him quickly & very violently & then it was over & he was gone. there was a kind of general shrug in the bar. no police were ever involved. this happened before we were run out of the house because walker used & ruined spider's delicate leather work tools to open a coconut he'd proudly obtained by climbing up a coconut tree. when we were told it would be best for us to leave NOW, we did. no questions asked. we understood. but before that i'd noticed that everyone in key west seemed to be harboring the same life plan, or shall we say, the same dream. "i'm gonna build a boat & get offa this rock," came out most often unsolicited but it came out nevertheless. it came out of the mouths of bums, strippers, waiters & cooks. it came out of the mouths of people at the pier house & down in the marina. everyone said it. it was kind of like the pod-people in "body snatchers." deeply creepy. it began to stike me(before we were unceremoniously hussled out of town)that these folks might actually be dangerous. men w/dreams, no matter how outlandish, are dangerous because they had something to aspire to.

i've been thinking about new orleans lately. i got an email from my buddy mark talking about mardi gras(which actually lasts for a month there in the city)& some of the lesser, tho no less exuberant, krewes. he was planning on attending a happening over in the marigny on frenchman. we've been going to that neighborhood for years(i remember slow dancing w/nat there at cafe brasil to the iguanas)& it's become my home base area when i'm there now. my new college buddy, nancy, also called & since she & i had just spent an eventful week there last summer, her call served to also stir up all the memories & desires that city conjures.

nan got pierced there last summer & broke my long standing(so to speak)record of falling down drunk. i'm giving her the benefit of the doubt here because several of her falls were in the privacy of the hotel room while, i believe, most of mine were done right out in public. the outrigger kids loved to tell the story of leaving a bar & joking that 'we'll probably find jones in some gutter' & me rising up from said gutter to greet them & begin round 3 or 4 of the evening. fun times were had by all &, of course, we all have stories of new orleans.

right before i got accepted to new college, i'd been debating on which city i wanted to flee p'cola to, new orleans or key west. philip & i had just had a great trip to new orleans. we'd spent time w/philip's gay friend, marty. philip introduced me to several older men, prefacing each intro w/"i'm not really sure that he's gay," whereupon a door would swing open & the most flamboyantly gay man would come mincing out, exclaiming & gesturing about this or that in diva-like dramatics. it never bothered me &, in this case, i liked marty a lot. educated & cultured & well-traveled. w/him as our guide, we went to quite a few off the beaten track places too. these weren't as life threatening as the key west dives that walker & i had been to w/mark & spider.

actually, what struck me back then was how life affirming the places & people of new orleans were. no one i met was planning on building a boat. did i meet people who were planning to leave? you bet. i met people who'd just arrived too. the comings & goings had nothing to do w/dreams or life plans, at least as they were articulated. when you left you didn't sail away on a boat; you had stories. when you arrived, you heard stories from & about others. i was run out of here too. i was asked to leave new orleans by no less of an eminence than jim monahan(rip), owner of the molly's empire. as menacing as the request was, i knew it would work itself out & it did. but i did leave, taking cirota & jayne w/me(the toxic combo that landed me in rehab...along w/my own bad habits). this was a fundamental difference between key west & new orleans as far as i was concerned. things would & could be forgiven. they'd be forgiven because you were needed to add to the life & times of new orleans. at least, i think that's why i was renting another room from mr monahan 6 months later(w/o cirota & janie this time). i didn't think about key west much after that.

of course, key west didn't have the music or the food either. new orleans stands as the only major city w/its own indigenous music & food cultures. that's frosting on the cake to me. new orleans was & is a city in which living & loving is primary to the project of being in the world. & then, you tell the stories.

"I DON'T WANNA WAIT..."

2012-01-20T12:22:00.000-08:00

one of the best things to come out of alabama since the drive-by truckers, these folks know how to lay down a groove & she can belt out what needs to be said as forcefully as any of them. there are shades of joplin here, which i don't mind a bit since it's more the texture of the voice than any imitative thing.
after a few bad days for pop music, it's always nice to hear something like this. it's what helps us hold on, i suppose.

ETTA JAMES RIP

2012-01-20T10:40:00.001-08:00

a bad couple of days for pop music.

JOHNNY OTIS RIP

2012-01-19T13:19:00.000-08:00

born to greek emigrants in vallejo ca, otis was commonly referred to as "the godfather of rhythm & blues." his life is just more proof that american pop culture is a mutt, lovable & handsome but a mutt nonetheless.

PRAYERFUL SIMPLICITY

2012-01-15T10:48:00.000-08:00

from watching & waiting, a photography collection by steve mccurry. these are prayer flags in amdo, tibet. at odiyan, they used to hang the old worn-out prayer flags on a barren, lighting-struck tree that used to stand on the property where the new cintamani temple was built. prayers are not directed towards a god but rather generally aimed at the welfare of everyone, including enemies.

here's the link to more of mccurry's pics:
http://www.soulcatcherstudio.com/exhibitions/mccurry/index.htm

TONIGHT'S DESSERT

2012-01-13T18:54:00.000-08:00

APPLE & CHERRY PIE

LAST NIGHT'S DINNER

2012-01-13T11:37:00.000-08:00

HALIBUT W/SHORSHE BATA MAACH(BENGALI MUSTARD SEED SAUCE), ROASTED MAITAKE MUSHROOM, CASTELFRANCO GREENS W/AVOCADO,PARSLEY ROOT

FAVORITE 2011 MUSIC

2012-01-13T11:28:00.000-08:00

here's my list of favorite music from 2011 that i posted over at the no depression site just before c'mas. this does not include new jazz or new classical. it would have included the black key's el camino but it came out after i'd drawn up the list.

in no particular order:

1) bonnie "prince" billy: WOLFROY GOES TO TOWN

2)tab benoit: MEDICINE

3)the low anthem: THE SMART FLESH

4)gillian welch: THE HARROW & THE HARVEST

5)tom waits: BAD AS ME

6)tom russell: MESABI

7)jeffrey foucault: THE HORSE LATITUDES

8)jessica lea mayfield: TELL ME

9)malcolm holcolme: TO DRINK THE RAIN

10)wilco: THE WHOLE LOVE

honorable mentions: the decemberists, jason isbell, gregg allman, monk boudreux, willem maker(agapao), austin lucas, slackeye slim, hellbound glory, glossary, the bo-keys, big harp, the deep dark woods, mike doughty, john hiatt, joseph arthur, dave alvin, buddy miller.

re-release of the year: mickey newbury, an american trilogy.

& i have to mention my new orleans friend, the great transcendent coco robicheaux. rip

A PERFECT BOWL

2012-01-12T11:01:00.000-08:00

RANCHO GORDO BEANS, BRAISED PORK BELLY, GARLIC PEA SPROUTS,& A FRIED EGG

"YOU LET THE DEVIL IN YOUR HOME..."

2012-01-02T23:20:00.000-08:00

the new millenium's version of spector's wall of sound but now they just bring all the instruments onto the stage & do it live. this is a portland band. if they don't go the pompous route, they could be very good.

enjoy.

"OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND..."

2012-01-02T10:33:00.000-08:00

today would be smithson's 73rd birthday if he hadn't been accidently killed back in 1973. this is a recent picture, taken by greg lindquist during a winter pilgrimage out to the remote area of smithson's spiral jetty. i've always loved everything about the jetty: the conception, the realization, the end result which is in constant flux while seeming to be immutable. i was struck by the beauty of this particular picture.

here's a link:

http://hyperallergic.com/16412/winter-spiral-jetty/

"IF YOU GO CHASING RABBITS..."

2011-12-31T23:56:00.000-08:00

oddly enough, i'm feeling like i've gone down the rabbit hole but i only spent six months w/several brain-addled folks. alice or all her pills couldn't have helped much but we're hoping for a better new year.

i just chased this down after hearing about it. ms welch & mr rawlings(& if the sight on his ten gallon hat doesn't do it for you, someone needs to check your pulse) do it justice &, i think, improve on the original.

happy new year.

enjoy

HELEN FRANKENTHALER RIP

2011-12-27T21:21:00.000-08:00

"big bags of sand/ until they came/
the flattering end/
of the world/
the gulls were swooping and gulping and filling/
the bags/
as helpful creatures everywhere were helping/
to end/
the world/
so we could be together at last one by one" FRANK O'HARA

there were some powerful ladies painting in ny city right at the mid-point of the 20th century. joan mitchell, jane freilicher, elaine de kooning, lee krasner, helen frankenthaler. i was first made aware of them through o'hara's poems. the testosterone fueled abstract expressionists wouldn't have made it easy for them to be taken seriously but, as the following article mentions, the next group of men were heavily "influenced" by frankenthaler's technique(& colors, which always appealed to me). of course, the real story is that noland & louis simply copied her & took the credit(since she was having a hard time being "shown" around town).

FROM ART IN AMERICA:
"Helen Frankenthaler, the pioneering American abstractionist, whose preferred technique of staining thinned paints into unprimed canvas became the hallmark of Color Field painting, died today at her home in Darien, Conn. She was 83.

Born to wealthy New Yorkers, Frankenthaler attended high school at New York's Dalton School (1945) and college at Bennington in Vermont, studying with Paul Feeley and graduating in 1949. In 1950 she met Clement Greenberg, and a five-year-long relationship with the influential New York critic ensued. Equally significant for the young artist was her friendship with the New York School poet and curator Frank O'Hara, whom she met in 1951 and remained close to until his death in 1966. Frankenthaler and O'Hara were among the brilliant artists and poets associated with Tibor de Nagy Gallery, directed in the 1950s by John Bernard Myers; she had her first solo show there in 1951. She was friends with all the major Abstract Expressionist painters, and in 1958 married Robert Motherwell. They divorced in 1971.

In 1952, following a trip to Nova Scotia, Frankenthaler produced her transformative painting Mountains and Sea (currently on extended loan to the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.) by applying thinned, delicately pigmented oils to unprimed canvas attached to the floor. She was not the first to use what she called a "soak-stain" technique, but artists prior to her had stained their canvases only selectively. Here, in combination with charcoal drawing, Frankenthaler deployed staining as her primary technique on a scale (the painting was 7-1/2 by 9 feet) that rivaled "first-generation" Abstract Expressionist colossi.

She notably departed from her predecessors, favoring an unfinished look, refined palette and overtly lyrical quality, as well as a fairly explicit conjuring of landscape elements. Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland saw Mountains and Sea in Frankenthaler's studio in 1953, and her stained canvases influenced them and other Color Field painters.

Frankenthaler disliked being identified as a "lady painter" (unlike Joan Mitchell, who used the sobriquet defiantly), though she was one of just a few female Abstract Expressionists to be critically noted from the start. She was given a retrospective at the Jewish Museum early on, in 1960, when O'Hara was still a curator there, and in 1969 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. A large exhibition of works on paper was mounted at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1985, and in 1989 she had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

She was also an important printmaker, experimenting first in lithography at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in 1961, but exploring all print mediums at one time or another. Her most significant contribution was in woodcut, in which she grew quite adventurous, particularly in her collaborations with master printer Ken Tyler, with whom she began working in 1976. Using porous handmade paper and numerous blocks, Frankenthaler conceived over a dozen large-scale woodcut projects in which a subtle, dreamy painterliness defies the inherently graphic nature of the medium. There was a traveling retrospective of her prints at the National Gallery of Art in 1993, and, in 2002, a survey of her 23 woodcut projects at the Yale University Art Gallery and Naples Museum of Art, in Florida." FAYE HIRSCH

"SINGING SONGS OF JOY & PEACE..."

2011-12-25T10:23:00.000-08:00

not really a song of joy & peace, more like those rueful end of the year reflections we're all prone to subjecting ourselves to, ms mitchell was writing some potent stuff way back when. lynn & i saw her in tuscaloosa a few years after blue was released. she did a ton of new material that night & most of it didn't show up on albums for several years after. the only other performer i've seen do that was leonard cohen in atlanta. he did half a dozen new songs over the two nights we saw him & it took nearly 10 years for those songs to show up on official album releases.

this is my melancholy c'mas offering.
happy holidays.
enjoy.

JOHN CHAMBERLAIN RIP

2011-12-25T01:55:00.000-08:00

i can't think of anything that represented action in the late 20th century more than a car. judging by the many commercials for the damned things on tv, it seems like it still carries that meaning, now semiotically. mid-20th century american painting was dominated by the abstract expressionists, pollock & de kooning particularly. theirs was an art defined by action, by drips & swirls & slashing smears. chamberlain just took that idea & made it 3 dimensional. i say "just" but it involved a big jump for sculptural art at the time & it operated on many levels. there was the tangential reference to de kooning but there was the implicit critique of consumerism & the rejection of the minimalist "object." duchamp's ready-mades were lurking in the background & maybe even a critique of the museum.

i think he came to the color much later &, personally, i like it. that first piece looks like what frank stella was putting on walls just recently.

many of the new college sculpture students apprenticed w/chamberlain. his studio was somewhere on the purlieus of a bad neighborhood in sarasota as i recall. according to a few of the new college students, chamberlain had many bad habits. the common idea was that he wasn't going to last very long. that was back in the 80s. he lasted a long while past all predictions to the contrary & i think his art will pull him along for a longer while still.

"AN ALTERCATION POSSUM-LIKE..."

2011-12-24T23:47:00.000-08:00

sitting here on c'mas eve, w/a bad year behind me, i still can't complain too much about anything. i have my health(kind of)& ann & our beautiful cats. i've got some friends & only a couple of enemies & that's not too bad considering the wayward course my life has taken. like mr johnson's cat, carlton, w/death & darkness all around, it is finally our resolve to act & then acting that saves the day. i feel too young to die.

CESARIA EVORA RIP

2011-12-19T16:13:00.000-08:00

with etta james near to shuffling off her mortal coil, this news was not necessarily surprising but still a little sad. i started listening to ms evora during the last year or so of the outrigger. this song was the first song on the first album i owned by her, miss perfumado(1992). her music was beautifully intoxicating, delicate but alive w/an insistent rhythm. the band here does a fine job & her voice is a treasure to behold & savor.
i guess that annual rush of end of the year deaths has begun.

"ALL I COULD DO WAS CRY..."

2011-12-16T18:38:00.000-08:00

the reports sound bad. her condition is "terminal." apparently, there are some issues about her care(her two sons want her in the hospital, while it seems like she's in hospice care)but when she goes, she leaves chuck berry as the last living chess artist. if you think those chess recordings of hers were the last time she rocked or was relevant, check out her newest album, the dreamer, released just last month. christ, she moved me w/her version of a guns & roses' song. THAT is an artist.

this song was & still is electrifying. those horns just propel the song but it's her voice that closes the deal. the full range of her vocal textures reveal themselves as she importunes her way-ward lover to relieve himself of his burdens & offers to take them on herself. how could anyone resist?

i heard this song for the first time done by marcia ball at the maple leaf bar in new orleans eons ago. i remember being utterly floored by the simple but stunningly radical admission the singer makes. now THAT is love!, i thought to myself. i stuck w/marcia's version for a long time, mainly because of the fond memories of the maple leaf, nan, steph & joe & how astonished i was by the desperate kind of love the song invokes. ms. ball would be the first to acknowledge the superiority of ms. james' version.

"THE FIRST ADDICTION'S TO THE FUTURE..."

2011-12-16T16:54:00.000-08:00

Inventory
by Richard Hoffman

What I have given to sorrow,
though I have poured out
all I am again and again,
does not amount to much.

One winter’s snows.
Two loves I could not welcome.
A year of mostly silence.
Another man I might have been.

"WE LIVE IN THE SIGH OF OUR PRESENT..."

2011-12-14T00:41:00.000-08:00

Not Beyond All Conjecture

December 10th, 2011
John Ashbery

Oblivion scattereth her poppy, and besides
it’s time to go inside now,
feed the aggressive pets, forgive our trespasses
for trespassing against us.

Other times
monotony is like a cave, the air is fresh,
tedium tonic.

We lie in a museum of helpful objects,
leaning toward the accomplishment of a small,
complicated task, like sailors in rigging.
Something no American has yet achieved.

"SHE SINGS LIKE SHE RUNS..."

2011-12-13T16:47:00.000-08:00

philip used to sit in stair-wells & practice his guitar. of course, it was a way for him to meet tourist girls out on p'beach but i will say he always sounded good w/that echo amplifying his voice & finger-picking.

these girls sound pretty good too. neko posted: "wow! that just made me bawl my eyes out. what beautiful singers! i'm not worthy...holy god! they broke the shit out of my heart!" i remember watching neko cry when jesse winchester sang "sham-a-ling-dong-ding' on elvis costello's show. seeing beauty weep because of beauty is quite a sight to behold.

these are canadian school kids & this song really speaks to that experience in a lovely way. their school in peterborough ontario is being closed & this is a kind of protest.

here's where you can get that story: http://www.nodepression.com/profiles/blogs/how-to-break-neko-case-s-heart-sing-star-witness-like-angels

enjoy.

"AIN'T NO GOD IN MY HOUSE..."

2011-12-06T11:52:00.000-08:00

their new album el camino is on my top albums list of 2011. they keep finding & exploring variations to their fundamental equation which adds depth & range while staying true to the original project. their unwavering devotion to that project is the first step on the visionary journey they began back in akron, ohio in 2001.

enjoy.

COCO ROBICHEAUX RIP

2011-11-28T22:13:00.000-08:00

my last time in the city of my dreams i sat w/mr robicheaux in molly's. we took turns buying each other shots of tequila for several hours. he talked about fess & booker & earl king & cosimo. he invited me to lunch(someone else was buying)but i declined, knowing that i was headed for a tequila-induced nap.

sitting there w/mr wu the cat as our only audience & the decatur st morning slowly unfolding outside the large open street window of molly's, i simply listened to coco spin out a non-stop monologue about everything i love.

what a gift.

http://offbeat.com/2011/11/26/coco-robicheaux-passes-after-collapsing-on-frenchmen-street/

HOW I LOVE THEM OLD SONGS...

2011-11-22T17:14:00.000-08:00

there's not much out there of mickey video-wise & i just stumbled onto this gorgeous piece at the no depression website. it covers all of the bases, as far as his appeal to me goes: voice, lyrics, & emotive delivery w/quiet grace & power. o, & he's doing it live too.

enjoy

"BURN ANY KNOT WITH A KISS"

2011-11-17T20:43:00.001-08:00

this is black dub.
that's daniel lanois, brady blade, & daryl johnson laying down an incredible groove for trixie whitley to slip & slide along w/jaw-dropping intensity. there's quite a story behind these folks working together(it has a lot to do w/ms. whitley's father, the late, much & deservedly lamented, chris whitley). i'm just going to let this beauty speak for itself.

enjoy.

JOE FRAZIER RIP

2011-11-07T21:46:00.000-08:00

"I WAS THE MORNING AFTER..."

2011-09-21T11:22:00.000-07:00

LEONARD COHEN BORN SEPTEMBER 21 1934
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE

2011-07-28T10:48:00.000-07:00

At North Farm
Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

John Ashbery
born july 28 1927

CY TWOMBLY RIP

2011-07-06T15:00:00.000-07:00

i think it may be impossible to understand what visual artists were faced w/at the end of the 20th century after pollock & warhol had answered picasso & duchamp. i'm not even sure a lot of them knew that pollock & warhol had answered the old man & the scamp. pollock's solutions seemed more of a cul de sac, while warhol seemed to open a lot of possibilites while closing off where & what an "artist" might do to "create art". the bone had really been gnawed nearly bare.

i think ellsworth kelly & cy twombly had some answers that kept them operating in an area that pushed irony away & still embraced art & the project of the artist. tracking the evolution of "olympia" from manet through dubuffet to twombly is a way of getting a sense of how visual artists approach the issue of tradition, innovation, & how working both produces a real & true advance.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/arts/cy-twombly-american-artist-is-dead-at-83.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries

FROM THE CORNER TO THE BLOCK

2011-06-16T16:43:00.000-07:00

it does not seem a distant memory seeing carrie dancing to the dirty dozen brass band down in sarasota at the ringling art museum & thinking that this music would lift new orleans & it's incredible music scene up into the big time. at the time, james booker was still alive & katrina existed only as an abstact possibility in a world of seemingly deeper & clearer certitude.

booker died soon after & the dozen never exploded onto the music scene the way that anyone & everyone just knew they would if only anyone & everyone could see them perform live. we also know now that possibilites spin through the certain world in endless combinations but every so often they manifest in astonishing ways both good & bad.

before all that, right about the time carrie was dancing away, a group of young black kids started playing together in the treme neighborhood. they would take the lessons of the dirty dozen & move them further into contemporary music & on into the 21st century. the marching brass bands of new orleans would begin to incorporate funk & modern jazz & hip-hop while working within the brass band tradition. following the great modern dictum, they were making their tradition new. in fact, they were making "it out of a mouthful of air."

just last year, nan & i got to see the rebirth at the ogden museum of art in new orleans. to say that they rocked the joint is indulging in understatement. what struck me most about their nearly flamable performance was the mix of the crowd. high school kids, tulane preppies, businessmen & the blue bloods of new orleans high society were not just tolerating the rebirth while sipping cocktails; they were dancing their asses off.

i suppose i could write more here about the need to see new orleans music live but i'll save that for another time. right now, i just want to salute the rebirth on their 28th birthday. most marriages don't last that long nowadays.

we're hoping to see them in a second-line next year during mardi gras.

PORCHETTA PLEASE

2011-06-15T17:06:00.000-07:00

apparently, this dish is all the rage at the moment. making it in the tight confines of our ridiculous apartment kitchen made it a little harder to knock out than usual, i suppose, but i'm still not following why it's considered such a daunting task.

i brined the pork belly, cooked it slow & low, & then, let it sit in the refrigerator weighted down over-night. the next day, i wrapped the pork loin in the pork belly &, once again, cooked it low & slow. when done, the pork got to spend another night in the fridge, this time unweighted. this made it easy to slice into perfect serving pieces that i crisped in a skillet. i guess that's a lot of time consumed(though most of it didn't require me to be engaged at all)but the end result is worth it.

this was ann's dinner just prior to the chaos that opened up to swallow us both alive. there were other variations on this theme & then there were the porchetta sandwiches which she took on the plane back to north carolina. so a little work went a long long way, both literally & figuratively.

GIL SCOTT-HERON RIP

2011-05-27T22:01:00.000-07:00

THE PALE KING

2011-05-24T11:18:00.000-07:00

ROBERT ZIMMERMAN, 70 YEARS OLD TODAY.
"MAY YOU STAY FOREVER YOUNG"

"More than thirty years ago, when a world now most often spoken of as an error of history was taking shape and form--and when far older worlds were reappearing like ghosts that had yet to make up their minds, cruel and paradisiac worlds that in 1965 felt at once present and impossibly distant--Bob Dylan seemed less to occupy a turning point in cultural space and time than to be that turning point. As if culture would turn according to his wishes or even his whim; the fact was, for a long moment it did." GREIL MARCUS

'I'LL MELT YOUR HEART LIKE BUTTER..."

2011-05-08T10:14:00.000-07:00

"Gilded Splinters" by the Glen David Andrews Band featuring Paul Sanchez from Come See About Me on Vimeo.

obviously, nola is on my mind. i'll be there in a week.

last time we were there, we caught glen david andrews at dba. mr andrew is a member of another astonishing new orleans musical families. there's got to be something in the water there. glen david caught sight of ann & spent the rest of his set "boning" her. you figure it out.

this is the old mac rebennack song from his long ago gris-gris album. it simply roars here. this is the kind of thing you can easily just stumble upon in various venues around the city.

ENJOY.

KEEPING THINGS WHOLE

2011-04-12T11:09:00.000-07:00

Not Dying Mark Strand
These wrinkles are nothing,
These gray hairs are nothing.
This stomach which sags
with old food, these bruised
and swollen ankles,
my darkening brain,
They are nothing.
I am the same boy
my mother used to kiss.

HAPPY B'DAY. APRIL 11TH

DRINK UP

2011-04-01T12:31:00.000-07:00

i remember an old review of a gordon lightfoot album that started by saying how lucky we are that lightfoot hadn't just ended up being the guy that pulls out a guitar at the neighborhood bbq. i never really bought that kind of thinking about lightfoot. he was way too handsome & talented to be consigned to being a nobody &, of course, there was that voice.

on the other hand, malcolm holcombe IS someone that description fits to a tee. he's flown under most everyone's radar & if it hadn't been for a no depression article on him a few years back, i'd have missed out too. i was fortunate enough to actually catch holcombe at a tiny charlotte venue, the evening muse. he's suited to smaller audiences, his between song stories ramble but the intensity of his music radiates perfectly in a small packed room. there are times when his lyric syntax mirrors david milch's odd shakespearian constructions in deadwood but his guitar playing recalls lightin' hopkins run through richard thompson.

his new album, to drink the rain, is one of his best. it's got at least five of his strongest songs to date & no throwaways at all.

"A KINGDOM BUILT TO HUMAN SCALE"

2011-03-31T11:10:00.000-07:00

if any of you were like me last year, watching in slack-jawed disbelief as the sf giants made their improbable run through much better teams to win the world series, you soothed yourself w/that old maxim: "any team can beat any other team on any given day." it was impossible not to think immediately after, "yeah maybe but not the giants." i'm not here to dwell on the past or try to take anything away from the giants. unlike mike, who still has bile rise into his mouth everytime someone mentions the twins unlikely win in '87(or '91, i forget), i just shook my head & started thinking about next season, which is now this season beginning today.

since i've always believed thomas boswell's assertion that "baseball gives us more pleasure, more gentle unobtrusive sustenance, away from the park than it does inside it," i'm here to offer up my 2011 baseball predictions that i've come up w/during these days of sickness, craziness, & dark thoughts about death.

A.L. EAST: i have boston beating out the yankees. in fact, i'm not sure that the yankees will even make the playoffs as the wildcard this year. my oddball pick here is that the baltimore orioles will finish higher than last place.

A.L. CENTRAL: i have the tigers & twins battling it out, w/the winner being whoever's pitching staff holds up. i think ozzie's shtick has jumped the shark & i wouldn't be surprised to see him given his walking papers during the season.

A.L WEST: this one is a tough one. texas didn't need cliff lee to win the division outright last year(tho they needed him during the playoffs)but oakland's manager is too much like bruce bochy across the bay: he manages to try not to lose as opposed to managing to win. i also have a lot of faith in mike scosia's angelic ways. i think this will be texas again, w/the angels coming up behind them. despite it's terrific pitching staff, oakland's offense is still too weak to play w/the big boys & geren too passive to go up against a high-roller like ron washington.

N.L. EAST: c'mon, really? of course i'm picking the phillies here. atlanta will be the wild card again this year, though my oddball pick here is that the marlins play hard all season & threaten the braves for the wildcard.

N.L. CENTRAL: reds again. i like dusty too much maybe. my oddball pick here is that milwaukee will threaten the reds & finish just behind them. the cardinals can't do it w/o wainwright & the cubs are, well, the cubs. sorry. i still wear my cubbie tee-shirt proudly but it ain't happening this year.

N.L. WEST: yes, the giants have that pitching. who can deny that after seeing them rise to the occasion last year? still, they are managed by bochy & are relying on pat burrell, mark derosa, & aaron rowand for offense. that's not going to happen, though what will happen is that a lot of the breaks they caught last year won't be coming their way a second time around. they're fortunate to be in the weakest & most unstable division in baseball but i still think the rockies will come through in the end & unseat them atop the division. i'm not sure the wildcard will come out of this division, leaving the giants at home come late october.

i'll return to these picks at the all-star break & see just how wrong i am. i'm hoping to be back in the bay area by the time things start shaking out in the first half of the season.

"Born to an age where horror has become commonplace, where tragedy has, by its monotonous repetition, become a parody of sorrow, we need to fence off a few parks where humans try to be fair, where skill has some hope of reward, where absurdity has a harder time than usual getting a ticket." TOM BOSWELL

RALPH MOONEY RIP

2011-03-22T10:16:00.000-07:00

another unsung honky tonk hero bites the dust. this guy's influence is wide & undeniable.

"Ralph Mooney’s strings ring eternal with the most infinite beauty, his life’s work reverberates in our souls with zero diminish till kingdom come. When our society downfalls from selfishness, over-consumptive hedonism, and a wanton unappreciation of art, and the archeologists of the future sift through our ashes to find something, anything worth preserving and paying forward, they will find the sound of Ralph Mooney’s steel guitar, and make sure it is heard by the future to stir the souls of mankind forever." TRIGGERMAN from SAVINGCOUNTRYMUSIC.COM

"To me, the most unique thing about country music is the pedal steel guitar. All kinds of instruments have been used, but, the ringing tone of a pedal steel defines what country music is.

You hear it, and you know what you’re listening to. It’s rarely used in any other style of music, and if it is, it’s only on a song or two on an album that the artist wanted to show their country influence on. Fiddle is kinda the same way, but, it also runs through bluegrass. Pedal steel is country music and country music alone.

So, to have such a defining instrument run throughout the genre, to be given the title of “The Best There Ever Was” defines that person as one of the most important people in country music ever. That man was Ralph Mooney" JERMEMY MCKINDER

"THIS IS THE UNSTABLE WORLD & WE IN IT UNSTABLE"

2011-03-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

On the twentyseventh May eleven hundred
and seventyseven, eight p.m., fire broke out
at the corner of Tomi and Higuchi streets.
In a night
palace, ministries, university, parliament
were destroyed. As the wind veered
flames spread out in the shape of an open fan.
Tongues torn by gusts stretched and leapt.
In the sky clouds of cinders lit red with the blaze.
Some choked, some burned, some barely escaped.
Sixteen great officials lost houses and
very many poor. A third of the city burned;
several thousands died; and of beasts,
limitless numbers.

Men are fools to invest in real estate.

Basil Bunting from Chomei at Toyama first published in Poetry, September 1933

LIKE SOME KIND OF CURRENCY I CAN'T OWN

2011-03-17T12:01:00.000-07:00

i saw foucault at berkeley's little gem of a venue, freight & salvage, over 3 years ago. i'm not sure how i stumbled onto his work, probably just dumb luck. i was immediately drawn to that voice(almost as alluring as jay farrar's), then, the songs themselves. at that time, he'd put out 3 albums & he announced that night that his new album was due out shortly. it would be an entire album of john prine songs. i remember my brain's reaction to that annoucement: "i'll just stick w/prine, thank you." foucault's original material was pretty damned strong & he put on a fine show. i'm glad mr. marcus drew my attention back to him. he's put out two strong albums since the prine covers. it's always gratifying to find yourself on the same page as greil marcus.

(1) Jeffrey Foucault, Cold Satellite (JeffreyFoucault.com)." A collaboration with the poet Lisa Olstein, who wrote the words for Foucault’s drawl—a drawl that sometimes grows a tail so long it curls around itself, with a country feel that puts the people who live in the Nashville charts to shame. Then a deep-ditch electric guitar takes a country song into the blues, and lets it go back where it came from. Nothing is pressed, to the point that sometimes the way the voice pulls away from a word or a guitar from a phrase is its own kind of preciousness—but not in “Twice I Left Her,” which shifts the music into a more resolute kind of quiet, a bigger emptiness in a single room. An acoustic guitar figure comes up against drums buried far away, like a memory. The story creeps out, and stops well short of its end, though you can glimpse it. Foucault drifts over the words so lightly that they seem to fade as they’re sung, and you might stop trying to hear them as words, let them come as sounds." GREIL MARCUS REAL LIFE ROCK TOP TEN FEB 2011

WRITERS DO NOT DANCE

2011-03-15T10:21:00.000-07:00

Write this. We have burned all their villages

Write this. We have burned all the villages and the people in them

Write this. We have adopted their customs and their manner of dress

Write this. A word may be shaped like a bed, a basket of tears or an X

In the notebook it says, It is the time of mutations, laughter at jokes, secrets beyond the boundaries of speech

(....)
Say this. I was born on an island among the dead. I learned language on this island but did not speak on this island. I am writing to you from this island. I am writing to the dancers from this island. The writers do not dance on this island

Say this. There is a sentence in my mouth, there is a chariot in my mouth. There is a ladder. There is a lamp whose light fills empty space and a space which swallows light

from SUN michael palmer

SACRED/PROFANE/ELIADE/ARBUS

2011-03-14T08:41:00.000-07:00

As long as you have not grasped that you have to die to grow, you are a troubled guest on the dark earth — MIRCEA ELIADE also born today MARCH 14TH

STARING DOWN A VOODOO QUEEN

2011-03-08T08:04:00.000-08:00

IN HONOR OF FAT TUESDAY.

if there's any doubt that the white boys who comprise galactic haven't absorbed the new orleans groove, i adduce this stunning piece of funk as evidence to the contrary. furthermore, if there's any doubt that irma thomas can still reach way down & give up everything to a song, just sit back & listen.

this is off galactic's ya-ka-may from last year.

TIME ISN'T KIND OR UNKIND

2011-03-04T11:29:00.001-08:00

i suppose the audience wag who yelled "traitor" at sam beam was just shivering at how clever AND ironic he was being in front of all those people. of course he didn't mean it. we've come a long way from having a folksinger cause any kind of commotion at all. nowadays, that sort of thing comes from the ladies & kanye.

there are enough excellent songs on iron & wine's new album, kiss each other clean, to give beam the benefit of the doubt about the other "experiments." his lyricism is still very much intact & most of the melodies support the extra instrumentation. the duds are really where he clutters things up just a bit too much or where he revisits a scene he's already explored on other albums.

dylan warmed up w/bringing it all back home & highway 61 revisited & then he dropped blonde on blonde. i'm not suggesting that beam is one of the many "new dylans" who come along every so often. i'm saying that the move from delicate quirky melodist to full-blown band leader is a tricky one & it usually involves some growing pains. this isn't new coke. it's a strong progression that depends on where he's been & what he's done but points towards new concerns & approaches.

i'll take what's good here & wait for his next move.

kiss each other clean iron & wine

RUN MYSELF INTO THE GROUND

2011-02-17T11:44:00.000-08:00

sounding very much like a bored waitress at the local woolworth's lunch counter on palafox in pensacola, ms mayfield delivers a dark & deep album filled w/shame & anger & the occasional glimpse of some kind of solace, which is about all the redemption she's willing to offer. i hear flannery o'connor here; the pre-lupus flannery who went to new york pursuing the idealized literary life, breaking hearts & having hers broken by boys of callow youth. flannery's early work had pain & shame & anger in it too. it was only when the disease drove her back to the "christ haunted" south that she was able to see a way out of quotidian suffering. of course, her way out wasn't easy & ms mayfield seems to pretty much agree.

i think of bob mould's line, "i always find the broken ones, what does that say about me." this album rises out of the debris of a damaged life & insists on finding beauty & redemption whereever it can.

tell me jessica lea mayfield

YANCY SPENCER RIP

2011-02-15T13:41:00.000-08:00

he played a big part in popularizing surfing along the gulf. there were others like brad english, glenn curle, bezar turner, ken roose. back then, the "real" surfers were the ones who surfed in the winter. the lousy wetsuits, the lack of surf leashes, the cold cold winters thinned the surf crowd to maybe several dozen. i remember brad english(my idol)beating yancy in the first actual surf contest on p'beach. it was sponsored by coca-cola, mainly due to george pryor(his father was president of the local bottling plant in p'cola). yancy had the sense to make a decent living off surfing(before the big bucks arrived)&, after his re-birth as a christian, the lack of bad habits to continue on into the new millenium.

he died doing the thing he loved for so many years. trust me, most of us won't be so lucky.

THE ENDLESS ENDS

2011-02-11T09:28:00.001-08:00

"Of course political power is meant to protect social life, even to the extent of challenging and altering its inherited arrangements. But that’s the point. Power is in place to enable societized human beings to work out their own goals for themselves, goals over which power as such is powerless: the endless ends of meaning (les fins sans fin du sens), of meanings, of forms, of intensities of desire. The power drive outstrips or surpasses power, while at the same time seeking power for its own sake. The surpassing of power is the very principle of democracy—but as its truth and grandeur (indeed its majesty), not as its annihilation."

JEAN-LUC NANCY

HEAVEN SENT THIS CARD

2011-02-10T09:38:00.000-08:00

i remember running into pat rosenthal at machine gun kelly's when we were just out of high school. he was w/a well-dressed clubby group. the ladies were attractive so i thought, "what the hell?" & joined them on the periphery. i couldn't really tell what was wrong w/the picture until i realized they were all affecting british accents. "if everyone is doing it," pat explained later, " it's not weird."

years later, dona introduced me to one of her ex-boyfriends who was in a band. onstage, he sang w/a british accent. why's he doing that, i wondered out loud to her. "that's the way the music sounds on the records," was her answer.

i hadn't cared for this band, despite all the hype. the songwriter couldn't seem to decide if he wanted to be a bad poet or a decent songwriter(& yes, there is a big difference). they were all very young & very very serious. he affected a british accent when he sang, even though he hailed from oregon(by way of montana).

thankfully, they've abandoned most of the affectation. the lyrics still snag on a few overly poetic words & phrases but, for the most part, this is straight ahead alt americana done well. they are not breaking new ground(hello, mr buck)but i defy you not to like this. i just don't think you can.

for one album anyway, they've hit the nail on the head.
the decemberists the king is dead

NIGHT MOVES

2011-02-07T15:11:00.000-08:00

during all my years of surfing i think i paddled out for one night surf session. philip & todd were probably involved. i can guarantee that the surf was no more than a few feet in height. for me, it was less a concern for actually seeing what needed to be seen & more a real fear of sharks who feel that the night time is the right time for feeding.

what this guy is doing is beyond my capacity to really understand, though i can somewhat imagine the exhilarated feelings coursing through every fiber of his being. this is truly a monumental visual thrill.

MILTON BABBITT RIP

2011-01-31T08:21:00.000-08:00

" And so, I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute, and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media, with its very real possibility of complete elimination of the public and social aspects of musical composition. By so doing, the separation between the domains would be defined beyond any possibility of confusion of categories, and the composer would be free to pursue a private life of professional achievement, as opposed to a public life of unprofessional compromise and exhibitionism "

CHARLIE LOUVIN RIP

2011-01-26T14:32:00.000-08:00

"We won all the awards gospel music had to offer, but in those days the gospel people didn’t like us because we played stringed instruments. They thought of us as a carnival act. The country folks didn’t dig us that much because we would quiet an audience, actually make them feel guilty that they were out instead of in church"

i started playing he & his brother's music when emmylou harris released her first album, pieces of the sky, which had "if i could only win your love" on it. their vocal harmonies have that uncanny resonance so many sibling duets evince. check out their astonishing "satan is real." i'm pretty sure the spirit will move you.

REYNOLDS PRICE rip

2011-01-26T10:47:00.000-08:00

"I think we Southerners have talked a fair amount of malarkey about the mystique of being Southern."

DON VON VLIET RIP

2010-12-19T01:03:00.000-08:00

JAMES MOODY RIP

2010-12-10T15:14:00.001-08:00

SOLOMON BURKE RIP

2010-10-12T11:33:00.000-07:00

THIS WAS A MAN-MADE DISASTER

2010-08-29T23:37:00.000-07:00

DO NOT EVER FORGET THAT THIS WAS MAN-MADE!

FLANNERY O'CONNOR b MARCH 25TH 1925

2010-03-25T16:21:00.001-07:00

"Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not."

i've believed for a while now that college freshmen should be handed copies of augustine's confessions, o'connor's collected short stories, dashiell hammett's the maltese falcon, charles olson's call me ishamel, w.c williams' in the american grain, ralph ellison's invisible man & james baldwin's the fire next time & be left alone to digest what's found in the pages of those books.
what the hell do i know?

UNCIVIL WAR

2010-03-25T15:48:00.000-07:00

"Congress was voting on my well-being Sunday night. Congress was voting on the survivability of my family. And one political party voted unanimously against my family. That is something I will never, ever forget." ron silliman

the rest of his eloquent analysis on his blog here. silliman is a poet, not a pundit.

"They are the people who have "invaded" "us." The hippie commie queers, the blacks who "snuck in" on slave ships, Africans, Asians & Latin Americans who took Emma Lazarus at her word. Ultimately, I think that this is what all this lack of comity is about – one group of Americans (largely tho not entirely white males) look in the mirror & what they see does not look like America, although they may pretend that it does. That other America of difference & diversity has in their view wrested control of the government. Which of course is why everything government does has, for them, become illegitimate. (Tho they would like government, such as the courts, to do whatever it can to preserve their dying stranglehold on power.) " ron silliman

ai, poet, RIP

2010-03-25T00:00:00.000-07:00

Abortion

Coming home, I find you still in bed,
but when I pull back the blanket
I see your stomach is flat as an iron.
You've done it, as you warned me you would
and left the fetus wrapped in wax paper
for me to look at. My son.
Woman, loving you no matter what you do,
what can I say, except that I've heard
the poor have no children, just small people
and there is room only for one man in this house.

i first read her in the american poetry review in the early 70s. it was the first year of their venture & i'd already been blown away by john ashbery & soon, thomas mcgrath. ai's poetry was visceral & spoke plainly & bluntly like someone you'd meet in a dark bar drinking during daylight hours. as troubling as some of the poems were, they never strained credulity. if the outrigger experience taught me anything, it's that some of the most awful things that happen to us can seem so mundane. if i'd paid more attention to her poetry, i might have skipped the direct experience of that truism.
the cover of her first book of poems(my own copy now long gone):

her l.a. times obit here.
more on ai here.

SPRING & ALL

2010-03-24T17:21:00.000-07:00

well, we had our 10 or so days of winter here in the bay area. rain & temps in the 30s, lots of snow up in the sierras but mostly a relatively mild winter. springing forward w/the time change doesn't make me think spring as much as the birds returning to our pool area to build their nests & drive our girls crazy. this weekend ann came into the living room & there on the cat tree was a little sparrow. luckily, the girls were asleep in the bedroom.

our balcony gets lots of sun in the spring & summer too, which results in cat naps out there. hence, this peaceful shot of the two step-sisters blissing out.

i imagine if i were a cat i'd be out there w/them. however, being human i must do what humans do in the spring & summer. i must grill. yesterday was the first day i broke open the grill this year. in the summer, all that sun blazing through the balcony doors might be nice for the cats but it turns the apartment into a kiln. grilling mitigates this by making the stove unnecessary.
here, a cheap piece of meat(skirt steak) transformed into a thing of delicious beauty by smoke & fire. an even cheaper piece of meat, my toe, was transformed into something too by smoke & fire. i stepped on a small piece of burning coals barefoot. the cats remained profoundly indifferent to my fire walk.

last year,i really got into grilling pizzas. ann loves them & i just think the whole idea is cool. the first time i heard about grilled pizzas was way back in the early outrigger days. i had bought a cookbook in new orleans i'd read about, cucina simpatica, from an italian restaurant, al forno, in providence rhode island. george germon & johanne killeen were the folks who introduced the idea to america in the 80s.

"everybody goes, leaving those who fall behind..."

2010-03-19T01:02:00.000-07:00

ALEX CHILTON RIP

it's hard nowadays to see irony in anything since alanis morisette famously &, w/the immutable belief only found in teabaggers & young hipsters, wrongly mauled the meaning of the word in her song "ironic". still, the idea that alex chilton was scheduled to play this weekend at the sXsw fest w/a faux big star is hard NOT to label that way. the sXsw fest wouldn't exist w/o the idea of big star. that idea, that there's a band playing somewhere, anywhere that no-one is noticing but will soon influence the future of pop music only after an acrimonious breakup is pretty much the Ur-myth of pop music. the festival is where in-the-know hipsters can "make" that discovery before all the messy stuff happens, like an acrimonious break-up that would require forming a faux version of the band 20years hence. that chilton hasn't done anything near the quality of big star since the break-up(& yes, i know this point is up to rabid debate) just adds some poignancy to the "ironic" mix here. well, that & the fact that he died this week prior to his sXsw appearance, once more shoving his finger up the ass of the industry & fan expectation.

personally, i loved the big hits from chilton's first pop music success, the boxtops. i still play a version of "the letter" on guitar myself & "soul deep" & "cry like a baby" bring teenaged dance parties, w/their mix of excitement, anxiety & disapointment, back to my mind like tea-cakes brought back the past to proust. chilton had less than an ecstatic experience in his first(&, really, only)experience w/pop stardom & its necessary corollary, the pop music business. that sour experience influenced him, good & bad, for the rest of his life. he eventually embodied the american outsider as pop music icon w/o any of the success usually reserved for icons. he earned this status by anamnesis, the recognition by others of his role in THEIR history.

initially, big star flew under our p'cola radar. #1 record came out in 1972, when i was a junior at washington high school. the two subsequent albums didn't register w/our gang either. in invisible republic, greil marcus writes about how something in the present can't be heard or understood for a myriad of reasons but, as history stretches out & shakes loose the oddball or irrelevant or mundane, something that may have appeared oddball or irrelevant or mundane asserts itself in a new way. from a place in the future that past speaks to the present as it's contemporary.

"In my opinion, Alex was the most talented triple threat musician out of Memphis - and that's saying a ton," said Paul Westerberg, the former Replacements frontman. "His versatility at soulful singing, pop rock songwriting, master of the folk idiom, and his delving into the avant-garde goes without equal. He was also a hell of a guitar player and a great guy."

in the interim between big star's break-up in 1975 & my discovery of them twenty years later, we had the replacements & rem & uncle tupelo & the various manifestations of those bands & their styles. as the impact of rock & roll splintered out over the country & world like the debris from a meteor hit, chilton's many musical personae insinuated themselves, discretely, into the disparate lines that erupted out of that impact. if you can't hear big star's "kangaroo" in wilco, you're deaf. if you don't hear "when my baby's beside me" in all of the power pop acts still going strong, i can't help you. what about rem? listen to "the ballad of el goodo". i think jay farrar makes my point most eloquently w/his cover version on another one of my favorite big star songs.

chilton gave direction to westerberg & stinson, stipe & buck, & tweedy & farrar about how to embody the project of pop music & he did it by example. it really only matters that those truly engaged in that project learned his lesson. as a consequence, the american outsider was invited to sit at the table where he's always belonged & the present insures the past w/its future.

ALEX CHILTON/MARK LINKOUS RIP

2010-03-18T14:37:00.000-07:00

this is not shaping up to be a stellar year for lo-fi, diy, outsider southern musicians. we lost the great vic chestnut on c'mas day to suicide & now mark linkous, better known i suppose as sparklehorse, has checked out. today we get news that memphis born & based oddball, alex chilton, has simply given up the ghost in new orleans. it can't be easy doing things your own way in the music business & each of these guys did so w/o apology. in fact, chilton just got weirder.

i have no memory of what my sources were back in c'ville during the mid-90s but i somehow stumbled onto will oldham, sparklehorse, soul coughing, vic chestnut, & the "reconsideration" of big star. w/the exception of mike doughty of soul coughing, all of these guys were southern boys doing the lo-fi thing themselves. something about their music & their approach appealed to me then(& it still does). some of it had to do w/the subjects they chose to write/sing about(greil marcus' "old weird america"), some of it w/the simplicity of the presentation.

oldham, linkous, & chestnut got better as they settled into their various, variable creative terrains & each became more musically accomplished. i'll write more about chilton later this week but here are several linkous videos, the first two songs from his first album, vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot, which i owned back in c'ville & the last two from later work.

enjoy & lament. really. lament. this is a huge loss.

WILLIAM GIBSON b. MARCH 17 1948

2010-03-18T00:50:00.000-07:00

"Give us the fucking code...if you don't, what'll change? what'll ever fucking change? I got no idea at all what'll happen if Wintermute wins, but it'll change something." Neuromancer

as far as i'm concerned, this is one of the greatest climaxes in modern literature. when i read that passage, i was stunned. along w/haruki murakami, gibson presents the 21st century's ethical impasse w/humor, clarity, & precision. too bad the solutions aren't as funny or clear.

"the blackbird whistling or just after..."

2010-03-17T17:12:00.000-07:00

RUDOLF NUREYEV b. MARCH 17 1938

if there is a thing we could call male beauty(& i KNOW ann would say there is) i think this is it. i remember rudy in james toback's(a truly nutty auteur)film, exposed. i went hoping to see nastassia kinski naked. i can't remember if she was but i remember clearly the weirdness that nureyev brought to that role: "tick tock, tick tock, tick tock," he mumbled, kind of imitating the march hare.

he brought his male beauty to his idea of dance. it was left to barishnikov to combine it w/astonishing athleticism.

"I ONCE HAD A HEART..."

2010-03-16T17:08:00.000-07:00

New Roky Erickson & Okkervil River: "Goodbye Sweet Dreams"
"Here's a feelgood story for you: The troubled Texas psych legend and former 13th Floor Elevators frontman Roky Erickson is back. Anyone who's seen the documentary You're Gonna Miss Me knows that this guy has not had an easy life. The image of Erickson, his hair matted and his fingernails long, cranking up several TVs and radios to top volume because the resulting ungodly din was the only way he could fall asleep-- well, he didn't exactly look like someone ready to jump back into a recording studio. So consider his return a happy surprise." posted by TOM BREIHAN for pitchfork

i think i ran across roky erickson's story when i stumbled across another texas lunatic's story, daniel johnston. both have had astonishing & deeply disturbing movies made about their sad lives. while johnston is more a diy music outsider, erickson was, at one point w/the 13th floor elevators, on the cutting edge of rock music in the 60s. drugs, the rockstar life, inherent craziness, all caught up w/both of them but unlike, say, skip spense or syd barrett, both have survived for the most part. based on the strength of this cut by erickson, i'd say he seems to be doing quite well.
i've already posted here about the young band that's helpfully backing erickson, okkervil river. they've put out several strong albums themselves.

you have to scroll down past the picture of roky to get to the mpeg.
enjoy.

"NOT INDECISION..."

2010-03-16T15:06:00.000-07:00

CECIL TAYLOR b. MARCH 15 1929

back during the outrigger days, i could clear my apartment of 15 or more hipsters by putting on anything by coleman or taylor. these kids, who took such pride in listening to loud, sometimes dissonant pop music, would run screaming from the hard musical truths of jazz. jazz requires some intellectual engagement; that was not something that the outrigger crew had in abundance.

i can guarantee that some of the jazz dilettantes that i know don't have a single recording by coleman or taylor in their "jazz collections". they'll follow miles up until bitches' brew or sonny rollins up until his great solo work but they can't or won't make the effort to follow coleman or taylor. like art snobs who "like" picasso but don't get barnett newman's zips or flee from the sight of donald judd's objects, they approach art not as a challenge to be engaged but as some delectation to be consumed. jazz ends up being pleasant background music.

you can't use these guys as pleasant background music. these guys have taken it upon themselves to engage w/the history of music & extend & deepen it. there is a deliberateness to their approaches even while their methods differ. they have continued the difficult expansion of possibility that jazz has explored since its beginning. born just a year apart & still actively working, they continue to explore & articulate their individual journeys.

we should really be listening to them.

ORNETTE COLEMAN b MARCH 9 1930

DIANE ARBUS b MARCH 14 1923

2010-03-15T16:56:00.000-07:00

i'm not sure if any of the things exist at this point in time but this arbus pic was on the front of our infamous "outrigger" t-shirts back in the day. our motto was "sun & scum." we were also "home of the world famous crab-burger." ah, memories.

the craven thieves who worked at the outrigger had no idea who arbus was or her place in the history of photography. they just saw "grotesque" & sniggered as young know-nothing hipsters do. i thought the t-shirt was spot-on & the motto apt. it certainly fit well w/my own attitude at the time.

WEEKEND BREAKFAST

2010-03-15T14:00:00.000-07:00

CORNED BEEF HASH
mike & i had a discussion last week about various approaches to hash & even the various types of hash that exist. bette's oceanfront diner in berkeley has the best corned beef hash i've ever had in a restaurant. mike says that postrio used to do a brisket hash back when they had their phenomenal sunday brunch. (my mother made a roast beef hash but it was a dinner dish, not for breakfast.) of course, there's the cool sounding "red flannel" hash too. there was some discussion about cubed or shredded potatoes, the danger of too large a cube, etc. i went w/the shred.

after serving ann tripe w/o telling her what she was getting, she's gotten a little suspicious whenever i serve her something that's not automatically recognizable. when she asked what i'd given her, i simply said, "hash." she bravely dove in & finished it pretty quickly. i then told her it was corned beef. she thought she didn't like corned beef but this dish won her over.

ANN'S SUNDAY BRUNCH

2010-03-07T12:25:00.000-08:00

BREAKFAST PASTA: SPAGHETTI W/SCRAMBLED EGGS, SCALLIONS, HOT PEPPERS.

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ b. MARCH 6 1928

2010-03-06T17:21:00.001-08:00

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. . ."

past, present, future all woven inextricably into that first sentence of his first masterpiece, one hundred years of solitude, marquez made it clear from the beginning that we can't escape our destinies but we can rise above them in the end.

BREAD PUDDING!!!

2010-03-06T11:35:00.001-08:00

INDIVIDUAL BREAD PUDDINGS MADE W/CROISSANTS & SHAVED CHOCOLATE

JAMES MERRILL b. MARCH 3 1926

2010-03-03T16:15:00.000-08:00

no one, NO ONE in the 20th century, wrote more elegant poetry than james merrill. yes, that declaration includes the lordly mr auden. he might well have been a minor though accomplished poet but for the magisterial & remarkable the changing light at sandover. i read the entire work several times way back when & what astonished me was the final sections of the poem were as strong, as alive, as beautiful as the earlier ones written 20 years before. the endurance & power of the poetic vision that possessed merrill was remarkable. the poem is simply a masterwork of the 20th century, as great as any other great work by any other great poet you can name.

"The Changing Light at Sandover is a 560-page epic poem by James Merrill (1926–1995). Sometimes described as a postmodern apocalyptic epic, the poem was published in three separate installments between 1976 and 1980, and in its entirety in 1982. Already established in the 1970s among the finest poets of his generation, Merrill made a surprising detour when he began incorporating occult messages into his work. The result, a 560-page apocalyptic epic published as The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), documents two decades of messages dictated from otherworldly spirits during Ouija séances hosted by Merrill and his partner David Noyes Jackson. The Changing Light at Sandover is one of the longest epics in any language, and features the voices of recently deceased poet W. H. Auden, Merrill's late friends Maya Deren and Greek socialite Maria Mitsotáki, as well has heavenly beings including the Archangel Michael. Channeling voices through a Ouija board "made me think twice about the imagination," Merrill later explained. "If the spirits aren't external, how astonishing the mediums become! Victor Hugo said of his voices that they were like his own mental powers multiplied by five."(wiki)

An Urban Convalescence

by James Merrill

Out for a walk, after a week in bed,
I find them tearing up part of my block
And, chilled through, dazed and lonely, join the dozen
In meek attitudes, watching a huge crane
Fumble luxuriously in the filth of years.
Her jaws dribble rubble. An old man
Laughs and curses in her brain,
Bringing to mind the close of The White Goddess.

As usual in New York, everything is torn down
Before you have had time to care for it.
Head bowed, at the shrine of noise, let me try to recall
What building stood here. Was there a building at all?
I have lived on this same street for a decade.

Wait. Yes. Vaguely a presence rises
Some five floors high, of shabby stone
—Or am I confusing it with another one
In another part of town, or of the world?—
And over its lintel into focus vaguely
Misted with blood (my eyes are shut)
A single garland sways, stone fruit, stone leaves,
Which years of grit had etched until it thrust
Roots down, even into the poor soil of my seeing.
When did the garland become part of me?
I ask myself, amused almost,
Then shiver once from head to toe,

Transfixed by a particular cheap engraving of garlands
Bought for a few francs long ago,
All calligraphic tendril and cross-hatched rondure,
Ten years ago, and crumpled up to stanch
Boughs dripping, whose white gestures filled a cab,
And thought of neither then nor since.
Also, to clasp them, the small, red-nailed hand
Of no one I can place. Wait. No. Her name, her features

Lie toppled underneath that year’s fashions.
The words she must have spoken, setting her face
To fluttering like a veil, I cannot hear now,
Let alone understand. (the rest of the poem, here.)

LIBOKE DE VIANDE VARIATION

2010-03-03T11:45:00.000-08:00

GLUTINOUS RICE CRUSTED MARINATED SKIRT STEAK STEAMED IN BANANA LEAVES
served w/a thai coconut/chili sauce & baby bok choy

BANANA LEAF PACKAGES AWAITING THEIR STEAMING

"the last refuge of scoundrels..."

2010-03-02T16:39:00.000-08:00

"Such violent imagery and invective, once largely confined to blogs and talk radio, is now spreading among Republicans in public office or aspiring to it. Last year Michele Bachmann, the redoubtable Tea Party hero and Minnesota congresswoman, set the pace by announcing that she wanted “people in Minnesota armed and dangerous” to oppose Obama administration climate change initiatives. In Texas, the Tea Party favorite for governor, Debra Medina, is positioning herself to the right of the incumbent, Rick Perry — no mean feat given that Perry has suggested that Texas could secede from the union. A state sovereignty zealot, Medina reminded those at a rally that 'the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.'"

the entire chilling op-ed.

if anyone has a hard time imagining just how these kinds of lunatics & crazies could become not just a potent political force in america but assume the positions of power in the country, we should perhaps consult john dos passos' usa trilogy or philip roth's 1990s newark trilogy. w/simple twists of fate, a whole other history could easily unfold & it's not pretty, to say the least.
my old friend bill thorton, a closet neo-con if there ever was one, would do well to consult these books & reflect on their wisdom.

THE RAW & THE COOKED

2010-03-02T15:59:00.000-08:00

sometime before my new college days(circa 1978-80), i found an article on this guy in one of the art magazines i'd read at uwf. it seems to me it was art in america. i don't think uwf got artforum at the time. anyway, for some reason this guy's art struck a chord w/me. i may have been thinking that the carastro girls would find it "cute" but i think i was drawn to the entire project: the creation of a mythological space that intruded into & upon "profane" modern space in minute ways. it could have been my lifelong attraction to ruins, the idea that other lives, other ways of life, have existed, could exist & their meaning be wiped away & only barren, mysterious structures remain as ciphers of that meaning.

who knows? i will say that his stuff still impresses me, still actually haunts me. that he gave his art up, so simply, to the savage & ineluctable ravages of time & place just confirms what we know about civilizations in general. each tiny ruin, as it was washed away or stepped on or run over, contained worlds & stories & experiences, pretty much like all of us.

"Charles Simonds has created an entirely imaginary civilization of a race he calls Little People, complete with its own history, belief system, and way of life. The people themselves are never seen; we know them only through the architecture they have left behind. The forms of the architecture are reminiscent of Native-American structures, especially those of the Southwest, which Simonds visited as a child. These references are also appropriate since, like the Native Americans, the Little People’s lives are centered "around belief attitudes towards nature, toward the land." Their buildings are made of clay, which comes from the earth, and other natural elements such as twigs, bones, or sand."

"Simonds has two types of exhibition space for his work: inside galleries and museums and outside in the streets. The indoor pieces, such as this work, are larger and more complex than their ephemeral outdoor counterparts. This particular structure is subtitled "Ritual Furnace." A path leads through an opening in the dilapidated wall to a staircase that ascends to the upper section of the building. One has to imagine the inside configuration and how a person would reach the staircase at the back of the structure, which exits directly onto the roof. On the roof is a hexagonal construction with a circular wall in the center. Inside the circle is black pigment, which implies that something was burned, perhaps a ritual sacrifice of some sort."

"Simonds began his career creating miniature buildings in the streets of New York. Working primarily on the Lower East Side, he built structures out of these tiny clay bricks inside broken segments of wall and other unusual openings. People gathered to watch him work, children were allowed to help, and he soon become well known in the neighborhood. He explained: "At first I was just a crazy man to the people on the Lower East Side….I was a phenomenon, an anonymous vagabond who made visionary things. As time passed, I became a folk hero, then an active member of many community groups." With these groups, he has worked on housing, the development of open space, and other activities designed to promote community awareness. He finds his street creations more satisfying than those in museums because, as he says: "the streets are where my work finds its meaning and direction, in people’s reactions to it. I’ve often sensed the feeling of loss about the brutalization of that fragile fantasy which is emblematic of the lives they themselves lead, that sense of ‘well, every time you try to do something good or beautiful around here, it’s always destroyed.’ It awakens and politicizes that consciousness. The park [that Simonds help to plan and build on the Lower East Side] is gathering those energies and a channeling of them through existing community organizations so they have a positive result. That’s a political act. It’s intended that way."

"Thus, in evoking a past time, Simonds guides viewers to think about the present. The structures of the Little People are not intended as an escape from reality, but as a stimulus to consider our society today: what we create, what we destroy, what we value, what we believe, and what we will leave behind as our ruins."

— Mariann Smith and Nancy Spector

"IN THE FACE OF THE MEANTIME..."

2010-03-02T15:50:00.000-08:00

New Track From New Pornographers: "Your Hands (Together)"

just in case you're thinking i'm just a big grouch, here's something i really like & i'm looking forward to the release of the whole album. as a "real" collective, i find the new pornographers to be much more interesting than, say, the arcade fire. that's just me.

enjoy.

a bonus video just in case the first track didn't remind you just how cool these folks are.

"I TAUGHT YOU THE HUNGER..."

2010-03-02T15:09:00.001-08:00

this guy is a big deal in l.a. right now. comparisons to cohen have been naively made but he sounds more like matt berninger of the national & the modest accomplishments of the song craft are more akin to that band too w/a little shoegazing thrown in. i'm not knocking it really but i do seem to get a little ornery when 20something hipsters try to make connections w/the great & enduring pop artists of the past to legitimate what they're listening to currently.
i don't remember any of us trying to read sinatra into jagger or even, more accurately, cole porter into lennon/mccartney. there didn't seem to be a need to rationalize why or how the music spoke to us. that's not to say we didn't read bangs & landau & marcus but they weren't trying to legitimate the music so much as promote it & they didn't do that w/facile comparisons.

all that being said, i like this song & i think the video works too.
enjoy.

"We started out, we were much younger
you taught me the fire, and i taught you the hunger
i remember love ,but love don’t remember me
...i’ll wait at the bar rooms, and you’ll wait at the station
and we’ll dream of each other, in our old situation..."

"ANGELS WILL FOLLOW ME..."

2010-03-02T14:58:00.000-08:00

ok, ok. there's more than a hint of jewel here but she really SINGS the damn song &, yeah, there's more than a hint of showboating too but she really SINGS the damn song & i'll take it. this song was used in the final episode of the chaotic mess that was joss whedon's dollhouse. joss & company have always used pop music effectively & it worked so well in the closing minutes of that final episode that i almost forgot how bad the experience of the show had been.

BASIL BUNTING b MARCH 1 1900

2010-03-02T14:26:00.000-08:00

"Poetry, like music, is to be heard. It deals in sound - long sounds and short sounds, heavy beats and light beats, the tone relations of vowels, the relations of consonants to one another . . . Reading in silence is the source of half the misconceptions that have caused the public to distrust poetry."

he was one of the last "old school" modernists in the poundian mode. not as inventive as pound nor as profound as eliot, his ear for the musicality of the english language is pretty damned finely tuned. read these next few lines out loud & you can't help but experience what he was trying to accomplish.
unfortunately, his connection w/pound personally caused him to be viewed suspiciously & his poetry to be casually ignored or dismissed as "minor".

Every birth a crime,
every sentence life.
Wiped of mould and mites
would the ball run true?
No hope of going back.
Hounds falter and stray,
shame deflects the pen.
Love murdered neither bleeds nor stifles
but jogs the draftsman’s elbow.
What can he, changed, tell
her, changed, perhaps dead?
Delight dwindles. Blame
stays the same. from BRIGGFLATTS

"I'M DYING FOR A WAY OUT..."

2010-03-02T12:36:00.000-08:00

someone i stumbled over while cruising the web. this is lovely stuff. i'm not so sure i approve of the vocal affectation(a celt from seattle? a northwest sinead?)but it works in & for this song.

outside my head i cast a shadow
im not someone whose seen this side of me
but it drifts accross the ground so down i look
and i could spend my time wondering who i was
i could count the times that i have lost or won
i could turn toward you and ask you what you saw
but what do these feelings mean?

come meet me on this path of wonder
take my hand i'd like to share with you
what can we learn when we cant understand?
we could spend our time wondering what could be
we could ask of god to show us where we stand
you could follow me back to where we met
but what have you been dreaming of?

im going to live
but im living far away

im going to die
im dying for a way out

"Tiny Vipers is the stage name of Jesy Fortino, an acoustic musician from Seattle, Washington. After having started as out a more conventional pop singer-songwriter, she has since developed a very distinct style. She uses both minimal but complicated melodies and techniques that move her away from the pop sound of Hands Across the Void into more abstract music."

"MEET ME IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AIR..."

2010-02-26T18:01:00.000-08:00

JOHN CASH b. FEBRUARY 26 1932

cash & rick rubin were so prescient in their understanding of what made cash cash & what made american music american. we're on the 6th album of these sepulchral recordings &, for me, i want them to go on & on. sure, there are some clunkers here & there but i'll tell you what: you do something like this as the curtain closes & we'll see how it stacks up, ok?. w/the exception of warren zevon, i don't think anyone else in american music got to close it out as profoundly & self-consciously as cash. the trick w/both of them was that as the self fell away(as it always does)Being(heidegger's big "B") asserted itself in its most fundamental way.

we'd do well to listen very very closely.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS RIP FEBRUARY 23 or 24 or 25 1983

2010-02-24T11:32:00.001-08:00

"All good art is an indiscretion."

oddly, i found three different death dates for williams from five different sources. i'm sure this is something that would have amused him. i mean, they know when pliny the elder died; it seems like they'd have a handle on someone from the 20th century.
be that as it may, i've mentioned before how i took williams lightly back in high school, especially when i compared him w/o'neill. seeing his plays actually performed by professionals opened up a whole other side to his writing for me & convinced me of his true genius. i believe now he had a much better sense of the stage than o'neill did.
i met williams in key west. i was there w/frank & di in our new college days. there was a huge gay bar down on front st. it had several levels & the top one was an open air bar built around a huge kapok tree. there was a swiss family robinson aspect to it but for mature audiences. williams was very drunk but very gentlemanly. he said nothing memorable & paid more attention to di(faghag that she was/is)which should have offended me but didn't. the whole encounter amounted to us being able to say we bought tennessee williams a drink, tho i suppose it exposed the origins of one of his great lines about strangers.
he didn't buy any of us a drink.

"Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory."

"PLEASURE BOMBS..."

2010-02-23T12:35:00.000-08:00

william grimes described craft restaurant's gnocchi as "light-weight, butter-laden eye-rolling pleasure bombs" & that description fits this version from mark vetri. i taught a skillful means seminar at the nyingma institute that included making gnocchi. they're relatively easy & quick to make if you use a light hand. these were served w/cremini & golden chanterelle mushrooms in a porcini cream w/shredded baby spinach. they were also ann's lunch on monday.

SOLO DESSERT

2010-02-22T12:04:00.001-08:00

INDIVIDUAL BLACKBERRY CRISPS
there are any number of similar desserts & they all have cool names like grunts, slump, betty, cobbler, buckle, pandowdy, crumbles & crisps(& let's not forget their french ancestor, the clafoutis). i used to like crisps & cobblers when i was a little kid because i could scrape the fruit away & just eat the fruit flavored sweet crusts.

"MADE ME FEEL LIKE A BUCK & A QUARTER..."

2010-02-22T12:00:00.000-08:00

prine was mike's "discovery". i have to say that at the time i wasn't as impressed as he seemed to be but kristofferson was big on prine & i was big on kris so i went along. eventually, i was playing most of the songs off prine's first album at the quaint lounge. still, i remember being the first in the group to get springsteen's born to run. we played it in philip's cave & as the last extraordinary notes of "jungleland" faded, mike blurted out, "o john!" he'd conceded whatever point there was to concede.
funny but when ken or mike or philip & i talk, prine usually isn't in the conversation but the fact is, he's endured & continues to produce good music. the same can't be said of some of our other music heroes. the second video here is from costello's show & it's a song from his 1995 album, lost dogs and mixed blessings. the duet w/iris dement is from his 1999 album, in spite of ourselves.
i've been fortunate to see prine twice. once way back when in atlanta & just recently at the hardly bluegrass festival out here in cali. the atlanta show was in a tiny venue & i sat just a few feet away from him. he had an odd stage presence back then, very nervous & spasmodic. he seems to have mellowed w/age.

HOT POCKETS of deliciousness

2010-02-20T12:53:00.000-08:00

POTSTICKERS for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. i could eat a million of these little guys. they featured in one of ann's bento box lunches last week but just barely. i kept "taste testing" them.

EATING MEMORIES

2010-02-20T12:51:00.000-08:00

actually, i have no idea why the foods of my past have begun to haunt me. maybe it's seeing mike's senile post & hearing time's winged chariot but i've gotten all nostalgic thinking about lemon & chocolate pudding cakes, coconut cakes, fudge cakes, rocky road, etc. i'm researching the best coca-cola cake but this 7up cake caught my attention before i could decide on the right cola cake; it's all about the lemon-lime frisson.

GNARLY DUDE

2010-02-19T12:52:00.000-08:00

i don't remember who came up w/the bit back when we were little surf-rats but it went something like this: as we were traveling around, looking for great surf spots, we'd see some incredible break, up against a jetty or near some river mouth. no one was out surfing what were clearly incredibly breaking perfect waves. wtf?, we'd all ask as we paddled out into the water. in our little scenario, we'd imagine locals looking out from their sun-decks or cars or where ever & them sceaming, "my god, stop them, don't they know about shark pit or the whirlpool or the crushing rocks or the rip tide suck?" we'd all laugh. myth & story telling have been used throughout history to bind anxieties. i don't think philip & i ever paddled out somewhere where others weren't already out if we hadn't been there before. there was alabama point & destin jetty & the jacksonville jetty & the south ft pierce jetty(known as sharkpit) & a few others. none of these breaks featured 15ft waves. for the most part, 15ft waves weren't a part of our surfing experience. thank god.

i mention all this because the great origin story of mavericks kind of works off this teenaged scenario that used to break us up. for years & years, locals watched mavericks break, in awe of the size & violence of the break. no one anywhere on the continental usa was surfing a wave like mavericks. it was pretty much common knowledge you wouldn't last 15minutes out there. however, it was a sight to see.

for years, it remained that way. finally, one day:

"Jeff Clark, having grown up near Half Moon Bay, learned about Maverick's at an early age. At that time the location was deemed too dangerous to surf. He spent time watching the break, and conceived the possibility of riding Hawaii-sized waves in Northern California. One day in 1975, with the waves topping out at 10 to 12 feet, Clark paddled out alone to face Maverick's. He was successful, catching a number of left-breaking waves, thereby becoming one of the very first persons (documented) to tackle Maverick's head-on.

For the next 15 years, Clark continued surfing Maverick's alone. It was Clark's secret winter 'giant north shore-sized surf' surfing spot. Other than a few close friends who had paddled out and seen Maverick's themselves, no one believed in its existence. The popular opinion of the time was that there simply were no large, Hawaii-sized waves in California."

the rest, for the most part, is history. mavericks is now surfed by anyone & everyone who has the nerve to paddle out there. of course, they're doing that w/companions. unlike(& because of) clark, no one is paddling out there alone anymore. of course, surfing isn't immune to cruel ironies & clark is now barred from participating in or consulting on the big money($50,000 first prize)maverick's surf contest that they try to hold each year, depending on conditions. clark is locked up in a legal battle w/the organization that controls the contest.

the contest hadn't been held the last two winters due to lack of ideal conditions but they finally called for one last weekend. it was held in less that ideal conditions but the waves were big. i mean, really big. i mean, huge: 50ft faces. that's something i can't even conceive. i surfed steamer's lane at santa cruz & the faces were probably 12-15 ft. i was scared shitless. i surfed the outside sandbar in p'cola during storms when the faces were probably 10-12 ft. i was scared shitless then too. don't get me wrong: i loved surfing & would probably still be trying to do it if it weren't for foot operations & broken ribs & a necrotic hip but i was never a fan of big waves. we didn't have leashes back when i started in p'cola, so if you lost your board on a wave, you had to swim ALL the way to shore(say, 150 yards)in rough water & strong currents. big waves usually excited sharks too. nothing ended a good surf buzz more than seeing a 10ft hammerhead gliding through a big swell. it just seemed to me that big waves presented more possibilities for a fun time to end badly. i mean, broken bones, concussion, free-bleeding badly. take for example this poor fellow:

i can tell you from experience you would NOT want to be where he was last weekend. i believe he was spitting up blood when they fished him from the cold north cali waters. that's just par for the course at maverick's. most everyone got beat up during the contest & kept on surfing. as i recall, back in p'cola philip broke ribs, split his skull open, & received various cuts & slashes & sandbar rubs. george had his front two teeth knocked out as did todd hugues. fate can intervene in small surf too. we knew that. no doubt, it's what inspired our little "myth" of horrific perfection way back when & why the origin story of mavericks is so appealing even now.

DANCING THE TARANTINO

2010-02-19T12:27:00.000-08:00

yeah, i know, it's actually the tarantella, the italian folk dance but i heard a good one yesterday about re-naming the filibuster the tarantino because it "kills bills." i think chait is right on the money here. i heard similar ideas in reaction to the supreme court ruling for corporate america, that it would force politicians to "do the right thing" & make real substantive changes to the election finance laws. yeah. right. it's a rare politician whose "better angels" continue to advise a year after their first election.

"The belief that the filibuster is okay, but minority parties should just use it less often and start acting nicer is the equivalent of the belief that the financial system was totally fine, there just needs to be less greed and more caution. Of course, there are people on Wall Street who believe that, too -- you don't need to change the incentive structure that rewards taking on systemic risk, they say, you just need people to listen to their better angels. This sort of misguided notion is probably endemic to people who sit on the inside of any institution and see it in personal rather than systemic terms. The belief among official Washington that moral restraint can persuade politicians from ignoring their political interests is exactly such a fallacy." jonathan chait

here's the link of the whole article.

HAPPY FAT TUESDAY

2010-02-16T00:06:00.000-08:00

"Carnival is a pageant without footlights and without a division into performers and spectactors. In carnival everyone is an active participant, everyone communes in the carnival act. Carnival is not contemplated, and, strictly speaking, not even performed; its participants live in it, they live by its laws as long as those laws are in effect; that is, they live a carnivalesque life." bakhtin

VALENTINE'S DAY BREAKFAST

2010-02-15T12:50:00.000-08:00

MEXICAN TINGA(BRAISED SHREDDED PORK SHOULDER)W/CHIPOTLE SAUCE & FRIED PEPPER EGGS W/BUTTERMILK CORNMEAL BISCUITS

MY THREE VALENTINES

2010-02-14T11:51:00.001-08:00

And all the roads we have to walk along are winding
And all the lights that lead us there are blinding
There are many things that I would
Like to say to you
I don't know how

And after all
You're my wonderwall

FRESH CHICKEN & CHOW MEIN NOODLES

2010-02-10T15:15:00.001-08:00

ANN'S TUESDAY LUNCH.

HOMEMADE DONUT MUFFINS!!!

2010-02-10T15:14:00.000-08:00

ann loves healdsburg, lots of earring shops. dan loves healdsburg, lots of great places to eat. one of my initial favorites was downtown bakery & creamery, where i had donut muffins for the first time. next to the amazing morning buns that originated in berkeley at la farine(tho they've been superseded by the ones at tartine over in the city), these morning beauties are my breakfast favorites, dense & sweet & nutmeg-y. they're a breeze to make at home.

here's an easy version of the recipe.

ONE MORE CASSADY

2010-02-08T22:02:00.000-08:00

"Neal Cassady and his love of that year Natalie Jackson conscious of their roles in Eternity, Market Street San Francisco. Cassady had been prototype for Kerouac’s late 1940’s ON THE ROAD saga hero, Dean Moriarity, as in later 1960’s he would take the wheel of Ken Kesey’s psychedelic-era Crosscountry bus “”Further.”” His illuminated American Automobile mania and erotic energy had already written his name in bright-lit signs of our literary imagination before movies were made imitating his charm. That’s why we stopped under the marquee to fix the passing hand on the watch, 1955." -

picture taken & text written by Allen Ginsberg

JOHN RUSKIN b FEBRUARY 8 1819

2010-02-08T21:53:00.000-08:00

"The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, — all in one." - Ruskin, Modern Painters

he pretty much single-handedly gave us the pre-raphelites. w/o him, they would have been laughed off the scene & consigned to mere footnotes in the history of art. of course, he was dead wrong about whistler.