trickgnosis

You're sorry for the inconvenience.

2011-09-26T17:00:00.004-04:00

Pals,
Google's anti-anonymity naming policy on Google+ recently led to them telling me that I had to start using another name or they would remove me. So I saved them the trouble. What they did not make clear, but I have since discovered, is that I can no longer use Google Buzz.

Now I don't claim to know what Google's supposed rationale is for their policy. But whatever it is, I do not agree with it. I have been using this identity online for more than ten years and I am not anonymous to anyone who is capable of doing a Google search. But that is not the point. In this day and age the need for anonymity is essential to free expression regardless of whether anyone chooses to use it.

Google is on the wrong side here.

So: though it will be a pain in my ass of major proportions I will be transitioning myself away from Google. Entirely. I have used their products for years so this may take a few days or weeks. If I seem to have fallen off the face of the virtual earth you will know why.

I am still available in meat-form in the meantime.

Thanks.

Christian Noble

p.s. I just received this friendly little note from Google.

Your profile is suspended

After reviewing your profile, we determined that the name provided violates the Google+ Names Policy.

While suspended, you will not be able to make full use of Google services that require an active profile, such as Google+, Buzz, Reader, and Picasa. This will not prevent you from using other Google services, like Gmail.

If you changed your name in accordance with our policies, please submit an appeal and we will review your profile again.

If you believe that your profile has been suspended in error, please submit your profile for reconsideration.

Your profile will be reviewed again and re-enabled if it complies with the Google+ Names Policy. Reviews are usually completed within a few days.

We're sorry for the inconvenience.

sign, no wonder

2011-09-15T13:56:00.000-04:00

The usual meeting
is extra-odious today
imaginary reveries
assert themselves with clarity
such that I find myself
at a table ringed with children
ridiculous in adult clothing
discussing open-source report modules
and their shortcomings

when a spiral-bound notebook
insists I notice it is
bound with a hebrew letter
whose name I can’t remember
doubled and repeated
a keystroke held too long
sign? or wonder?

Resolving then into the coiled razor wire
atop fences damning those
whose names will be forgotten.
Failing to impart its message
this mark, this letter, this ugly tool
of punishment,
this binding
casts itself finally
as the acromion process
source of impingement
and sore shoulders since always
A design flaw suggesting no designer
or perhaps a God of meetings?

Perhaps not, as this theodicy
will cease entertaining objections
promptly at noon

by prior agreement
Surely no theology so tidy
is worthy of the name.
Only later via more letters
do these things seem to reveal
themselves as signs less than wondrous

banal on the order of the functionary
little more than mirrors
of the ridiculous kid
resentful of meetings
and poorly implemented open-source reporting systems.

sign, no wonder by Christian Noble is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.trickgnosis.com.

the devil will know

2011-06-30T19:09:00.002-04:00

He usually sticks with the Tennessee but when Baby Bob gets into the Irish *interesting* things can happen.

Swedish nightmares

2011-06-30T16:36:00.001-04:00

This is good stuff: Mia Makila (there are umlauts in the last name, very metal, but I'm not going to figure out how to reproduce them).

She calls it "lowbrow horror" or some such thing. I'd probably disagree but either way many of the images are arresting, whether they induce repulsion or, occasionally, whimsy. Tip o the hat to Coilhouse.

Click for the larger images.

The power of the sky

2011-06-29T17:57:00.000-04:00

This guy, Markus Kayser is doing some really cool stuff. The video and his website explain sufficiently what he is doing and it succeeds both scientifically and artistically.

I must admit though that what really made me sit up and pay attention was the desert location of the video: Siwa. The first shots of the video took me straight back to a decade ago, as I suspect it would for anyone who's gone into the desert around Siwa. Even on video you get a sense of the immensity of the sky. When there's nothing else but sand for the eye to rest on, you grasp the enormity of the sky and it inspires a range of feelings from sublime and awe-inspiring to oppressive and anxiety inducing. And at night, my God, it's amazing. You realize quickly how religion, monotheism more specifically, would have its roots in this part of the world. I will get back someday.

Markus Kayser - Solar Sinter Project from Markus Kayser on Vimeo.

cadger cartography

2011-06-28T14:23:00.000-04:00

pinky

2011-06-26T03:34:00.000-04:00

dumpster diving

2011-05-24T14:33:00.000-04:00

Cleaning out a folder at work and thought I might preserve some of the detritus. I guess one's trash really does reveal something.

A gift. Thanks!

2011-03-24T18:03:00.000-04:00

There's just too much good stuff here. It's as though someone was thinking of me. How had I missed this blog? Black and WTF.

I've been trying to write this exact melody for years.


Speaks for itself no?

Krampus, on the cheap, but still effective!

rest in peace

2011-03-08T22:29:00.001-05:00

From the files of the barroom ethnographer: these two boozy buddies seem to have found the blissful side of ignorance. Scorn would hardly mask our envy.

"I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment."
Steinbeck

Amen.

nothing but hammers

2011-02-09T17:24:00.001-05:00

A nice take on technology and the narrative of decline:

We must, at some level, need this to be true, since we think it’s true about so many different kinds of things. We experience this sense of fracture so deeply that we ascribe it to machines that, viewed with retrospective detachment, don’t seem remotely capable of producing it. If all you have is a hammer, the saying goes, everything looks like a nail; and, if you think the world is broken, every machine looks like the hammer that broke it.

He sides with the folks saying "this ain't new" for the most part but still acknowledges that history is no guarantor of continuity. Quite the opposite. And new technologies do bring about changes. He argues that the interwebs have inverted the internal and the external. Absent actual physical interaction communication online can seem internalized:

Thus the limitless malice of Internet commenting: it’s not newly unleashed anger but what we all think in the first order, and have always in the past socially restrained if only thanks to the look on the listener’s face—the monstrous music that runs through our minds is now played out loud.

Perhaps that will change with time and our online interactions will become more civil. Or maybe we'll all just go to hell in a handbasket. If nothing else, the future is much more interesting than it was.

those days

2011-02-08T14:33:00.000-05:00

One of those days I despise the world with such intensity that it numbs me like an opiate. And I realize the extent to which I ignore or deflect this feeling the rest of the time. Given the lack of viable alternatives to this world and the intractable character of the realities that inspire this nauseating wave of loathing I am compelled to abandon any hope of workable strategies for fixing, improving or mitigating said dilemma and it is only when I reach this point that I find some small piece of ground, little more than a foothold, on which I might seek some refuge from these poisonous truths. Try to be kind. If I can do nothing else at least let me make the effort to be kind. It is not always my first impulse, and I am not as practiced as I ought to be, but the best people around me provide me examples, if not templates, that I can draw on. That itself is, I am forced to admit, a gift from the world and thus it seems that the tide recedes just a bit.

Space is the place Fred

2010-12-02T12:42:00.001-05:00

If only...

This is just too good to not share: Fred Sanford meets Sun Ra. To truly appreciate its brilliance you need to be familiar with both Sanford and Son and Sun Ra, which probably rules out most everyone under forty--and many over forty if we're being honest, but its specificity just makes it that much better. Hearty thanks to whoever created it.

Tip o my hat to Jesse Walker.

Spoils of forty

2010-08-31T01:09:00.001-04:00

A precious gift indeed.

Tasted as nice as it looks.

A few pals went a little overboard for my 40th birthday and got me a bottle of Jameson Rarest Vintage Reserve. It took me a couple of weeks to work up the nerve to taste it. I poured a little less than an ounce and had my first sip neat straight outta the bottle. Spicy pot still was the first impression and it warmed my entire trunk immediately. I let it sit for a minute and had another sip and it began to reveal itself. A really complex whiskey. Then I put a drop of water in and had a sip. Finally I put in one cube and waited a minute. This revealed its subtler side. By the time I was done I was wanting more. I look forward to the next sample but I'm going to wait and share it with the fellers who gave it to me. Thanks pals.

bursting at the seams

2010-08-04T12:05:00.000-04:00

So I have been counting down the last days of my thirties. Been burning the candle at both ends, partying hearty, living large, dancing like Zorba the Greek, offending the ghost of Orwell with my cliches, and all that. And it occurred to me this morning as I was driving to work--I do some of my best thinking on the way to work, sadly it's a brief window--that I have learned something these past few weeks. It's a modest insight and probably not significant enough to justify the cost in brain cells incurred but so be it. And it's one of those small epiphanies that one could come by simply by asking a trusted friend but when it pops into the head unannounced it feels like a revelation. Put simply: I am full of shit. There's a lot going on in those five words. Much more than meets the eye. Banal on the surface to be sure. The slightly more interesting thought followed: people kind of like it. There are different ways in which one might be full of shit. And my variety is generally harmless, maybe even entertaining at times, and it helps, I think, that I am self-aware enough to recognize it. Makes it rather more palatable in comparison to the more loathsome flavors of bullshit. And it has produced benefits I think. I have expanded my circle of friends as I discovered last night. That was, to be honest, the true revelation. Interesting perhaps insofar as it runs counter to what one might expect. A good barroom anthropologist would just shake her head at my naivete but I can't help but wonder what might have been had I realized this earlier in life. But that's a useless lament and the wrong kind of bullshit. I've learned something and I aim to use it. Here's to forty pals.

30/30

2010-07-15T11:59:00.000-04:00

Today begins the final thirty days of my thirties.

In my forties I shall endeavor to assume a means of comportment appropriate to an ~~wizened~~ experienced gentleman like myself. Certain demeanors require a little authentic weathering, a musty decadence, that the youth, and their cartoonish attempts at facial hair, simply cannot appropriate despite their feigning and fawning efforts.

Old is old motherfuckers. You can't fake it.

Oh no, you can't take that away from me.

But. Thirty days. Dios Mio! I can have a lot of fun in thirty days. Yes I can.

Baby Bob

2010-06-26T15:40:00.000-04:00

crunch-porn and crash-lit

2010-06-13T16:45:00.000-04:00

Those of us interested in the sordid world of finance and the events of recent history face a glut of books in the marketplace. Luckily, we have Satyajit Ras to save us lots of time and money. And for those of us who love a choice book review, his are always full of gems. In this recent article he reviews seven, yes seven, recent books.

Here are some of my favorite bits. On what all these books seem to have in common:

A key characteristic of the emerging tidal wave of books is the fact that almost everyone saw the writing on the wall, predicted the crisis and now moreover have solutions that can ensure that this was the crisis to end all crises.

On future regulation:

...embrace regulation and regulators freely whilst being critical of regulators as lacking in skills and beholden to special interests. The faith in government activism is perverse. It fails to consider why a new set of rules will necessarily be more effective and existing regulators will be able to deal with complex issues well above their pay grades. This is particularly the case when the same regulators failed in the very same tasks in the lead up to this crisis. This dissonance is striking.

Most amusingly, on style:

The style of these books varies. The tone is mostly the desiccated drone (reminiscent of John Cage’s experimental work from the 1960s). Some are deliberately academic in tone to achieve the correct type of unreadability. One assumes that they are weapons deployed in the dawn duels between economic scholars.

r.i.p.

2010-06-03T01:33:00.000-04:00

Just got home from my bar. Found out that one of my drinking pals of the last three or so years died Monday night. She was up at the bar with us Monday night, went home and died in her sleep. She had some troubles but she was too young to die. That said, and with all due respect, she died peaceably. She liked to have a good time and loved some good music on the jukebox. Rest in peace Pat.

John and Johnny

2010-05-09T16:15:00.001-04:00

John Brown was born 210 years ago today. And we still have yet to come to terms with him.

I admit to having been completely unaware of this, but on some abstract level it makes perfect sense:

that wacky William Vollman

2010-05-02T14:50:00.004-04:00

This might just be a new feature here: collecting reviews of William Vollman's work. I rarely read Vollman, but he's fascinating, and the reviews of his books tend to be entertainments in and of themselves. This newest review is a winner:

It’s customary at about this point in a review to tell the reader what’s in the book under investigation and how it proceeds. In this case, sadly, I wouldn’t know where to stop. Vollmann describes spending $1,000 an hour and more to watch a geisha and her apprentice dance for him in Kyoto. He spends an additional $700, while invoking Gandhi, to get himself professionally made up in Tokyo and dressed as a woman (an unexpected extravagance for a man who, just three years ago, gave us a book called “Poor People”). He throws in a chapter on Andrew Wyeth; he offers an appendix listing adjectives in Sappho; he thinks of buying women’s clothes from a Guatemalan cowboy turned transvestite he’s met near Sunset Boulevard, trawling for new friends. He gives us sketches of temples, photographs of suggestive grass patterns in eastern California, assessments of Mengloth in the Norse saga “The Lay of Svipdag” and pictures of himself in drag. There are 49 pages of endnotes and compulsive footnotes at every turn (“What is fetish, what is stylization, and what is simple specificity?”).
If the Oxford English Dictionary had a listing for “all over the place,” Vollmann would take up the entire entry. And the next one. Suddenly, apropos of not so much, he starts telling us about a “ghetto prostitute” he met at a bus stop in California. In the next paragraph he’s discussing Heinrich Böll (“whose Nobel Prize was in my opinion otherwise deserved”). Then he’s on to Cicero reporting to Atticus about a man in woman’s clothes who stole into a Vestal Virgin sacrifice at Caesar’s house. The beauty of this procedure — for the admirer — is that you never know what’s coming next, and all the world and its works seem to be part of one huge scroll that could unroll forever. The challenge is that reading for more than 30 minutes at a time can induce headaches, seasickness and worse.

auditing the Fed...with fuzzy puppies!

2010-05-02T12:52:00.004-04:00

I have little hope for the finance reform bill that's on the horizon.With but a handful of exceptions from both parties, democrats and republicans are both hopelessly compromised by Wall Street. What I will watch with interest is whether the legislation includes any sort of component to make the workings of the Federal Reserve more transparent. The damage from the original bailouts is already done but the Fed, Geithner, and the rest of the Obama administration will fight tooth and nail to avoid anyone auditing the Fed. Why? Because we might begin to grasp the full extent of the chicanery that went on under Paulson and which continues under Geithner. I don't ever expect to see any sort of retroactive justice but I do hold on to a sliver of hope for more transparency going forward. Naive probably. But there's so much riding on it that I cannot resign myself to cynicism. Yet. I can't help but chuckle, though, to recall Obama's promises of greater transparency from his administration. His flavor of government has proven every bit as opaque and nefarious as his predecessor's.

p.s. the pic is my offering to those whose capacity for grim reality is easily exceeded. Enjoy!

the wrong kind of trickgnosis

2010-04-26T11:20:00.005-04:00

I've been reading a lot about the financial crisis trying to bring myself up to speed. I really knew nothing about this shit. But when I started to hear the "too big to fail" rhetoric I made a mental note and filed it away. In the last couple of months I got around to opening that file and doing a little research.

I now spend too much time reading blogs written by investment bankers and economists. I just finished this disappointing book (interesting as a journalistic account of the history of Bear Stearns, which surprisingly is kind of interesting, but really pretty lame in providing the larger context of the meltdown). I'm about to read this book which I have higher hopes for. What's most alarming to me is that the folks who actually understand all this shit (and much of it is indeed shit, and it isn't inherently complex it's just that much of it was designed that way: purposeful obfuscation) are clear on one point: nothing has changed. In fact, it may be worse. This is in contrast to much of the media noise we hear about the economy rebounding.

Why? I mean didn't Goldman Sachs and the rest of them pay back all that bailout money? Aren't they raking in record setting profits? Can't we trust Jamie Dimon and Lucas Van Praag? Well, the recent successes of the mega banks seems to be the result of one thing: free money. Yes, the bailouts saved these institutions from insolvency and yes, technically, they paid that money back.

So how did they manage that? Well, they repaid all that free government money with more free government money. We're not calling it a bailout anymore. Nope, that's toxic terminology. Gets folks on Main Street all upset. And instead of just being handed the money it's now a two step process.

First, they "borrow" money from the Fed discount window. What the fuck is the fed discount window? Note the rate table here. What wikipedia does not mention is that the discount window had been closed to investment banks. But when Paulson and Geithner lowered the rates and extended the length of the loans, they also opened up the discount window to the mega banks. So now the likes of Citi, J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs can all borrow money for virtually, or literally, nothing. The second step: they take all that free government money and they turn around and buy U.S. Treasury bonds or bills or whatnot that even with their tiny interest rates add up to huge profits when you're buying them by the billion with free money.

Apparently, the Federal Reserve’s free money is paying off. Citigroup’s trading desks kicked ass by capturing $8 billion. Most of these gains came from the bond traders who were borrowing free money from the Fed Discount Window and parking them in higher yielding Treasuries. I refer to this as the “Bailout Carry Trade”.

The Fed has tried hard to keep this borrowing secret, even refusing Freedom of Information Act requests. Thankfully their secrecy appears endangered.

In separate rulings Friday, the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court's decision granting a request by Bloomberg LP's Bloomberg News for documents related to use of the Fed's discount window and other programs and vacated a separate ruling denying a request for documents by Fox News Network LLC's Fox Business.

Both news organizations had sought Fed documents under the Freedom of Information Act and ultimately brought lawsuits after the Fed denied their requests.

Matthew M. Collette, a lawyer for the Fed's board of governors, argued in January that banks would be less likely to use the discount window and other lending-of-last-resort programs if they know their use would be made public. He said at the time that accessing the window carries a negative connotation if use was made public, even when a healthy bank suffering a short-term liquidity issue does it.

My emphasis there. Note that last little bit. What a piece of work.

Call it the Fed/Treasury Two-step. Borrow from the Fed Discount Window, turn around and buy from the Treasury. Almost instant money. They may as well give them the keys to their own mint. And who pays for it? You and me.

The confusing part of this for many is that it doesn't fit into the simple-minded liberal/conservative dichotomy that has turned our country into one big Miller Lite commercial. Both sides have been bought off by the mega banks. They hedge their bets. Blame for the crisis is shared by both parties. Obama, like W, has left the foxes in charge of the Hen House. His recent rhetoric is mostly just that. We'll see what this reform bill actually looks like. I fear it will be toothless.

I will wait and see what comes of the SEC's case against Goldman Sachs. Handmaidens of the mega banks are trying to cast aspersions on the SEC by drawing attention to the porn some SEC employees have watched while at work. Really. Is this a good precedent? Can only prosecutors and police who've never seen pornography enforce the law? Good luck with that.

I fear for our country's well being. I say that without sarcasm or drama. I don't want to be reading all this shit. I don't want to think about Timothy Geithner or Hank Paulson or Jimmy Cayne or Lloyd Blankfein. I really don't. But I felt like this was serious enough that anyone with a vestige of old-fashioned citizenship left in them ought to at least try to understand what's going on. And what I learned was sobering. I believe the banks should have been allowed to fail. That was the free market verdict. Their malfeasance got the better of them and they were fucked. Was it going to hurt the rest of us? You bet. But we Americans don't like our medicine. So here we are.

wondertarium

2010-04-17T23:20:00.002-04:00

Detail of new addition to the Wondertarium.

what's left of the rocks

2010-04-17T23:16:00.000-04:00

My favorite drink at my favorite bar.

2009 reading list

2010-02-14T18:21:00.004-05:00

So many books, so little time. My year in reading 2009. Some pleasant surprises, some surprising disappointments. Among a number of good reads, a few that stand out after the fact: Atonement (no surprise there really), 2666 (still puzzle over this one), and Before I Die, which was really fabulous. If you're interested in perusing my pithy (usually) thoughts on individual books, you can check out goodreads. In reverse chronological order:

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
In the Woods by Tana French
Atonement by Ian McEwan
The Forever War by Dexter Filkins
Man in the Dark by Paul Auster
Twilight of the Superheroes: Stories by Deborah Eisenberg
Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy
Hairstyles of the Damned by Joe Meno
How Fiction Works by James Wood
That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo
Lush Life by Richard Price
Bangkok 8 by John Burdett
The Drunkard's Walk by Leonard Mlodinow
The Brothers K by David James Duncan
Hunter's Moon by Randy Wayne White
Knights of the Cornerstone by James P. Blaylock
The Anatomy of Deception by Lawrence Goldstone
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
The Steel Wave by Jeff Shaara
The Turnaround by George Pelecanos
Darkness Take My Hand by Dennis Lehane
Ten Thousand Islands by Randy Wayne White
A Prayer for the Dying by Stewart O'nan
The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy
2666 by Roberto Bolano
Towing Jehovah by James Morrow
Code of the Street: Decency, Violence and the Moral Life of the Inner City by Elijah Anderson
Radical Evolution by Joel Garreau
Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen
Before I Die by Jenny Downham
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks
The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq
The Battle of New Orleans by Robert V. Remini
The Night Gardener by George Pelecanos
The Man Who Watched Trains Go By by Georges Simenon
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust
The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
Cop in the Hood by Peter Moskos
Christine Falls by John Banville nee Benjamin Black
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
The Moon is Down by Steinbeck
The Pearl by Steinbeck
Spirit of 69: A Skinhead Bible by George Marshall
The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley
God's Pocket by Pete Dexter
Nobody's Fool by Richard Russo
A Mercy by Toni Morrison

the old, the new, the old that's new

2009-12-01T13:49:00.003-05:00

1. I have just discovered Krampus. How had I gone four decades without encountering Krampus? Suddenly all my cherished holiday memories seem diminished. In case you too have missed out, Krampus is a devil who travels with Santa Claus and threatens the bad children, and sometimes confiscates them in his sack. Sex with women is his weakness, and he is particularly fond of whipping their bare buttocks with a birch switch. Some sort of running of the Krampus is an annual event in some parts of Germany/Austria on December 5th. Somehow this needs to become part of my holidays.

2. I have a new belly button. Before my unexpected appendectomy the surgeon examined the old one and asked if it was tender. I said yes sometimes it was and he said something like "I'll make you a new one as long as I'm in there." I wasn't sure if he was kidding until about ten days later when I peeled the old one off to find a new, pink, more svelte belly button underneath. I keep the old one in a jar.

3. Speaking of things reptilian...we recently accompanied some friends to see the Jesus Lizard. I went mostly for the company and the nostalgia. I'd seen the Jesus Lizard many times many years ago but hadn't listened to them in quite some time despite my memories of some mighty fine shows. Well, the venue we saw them in was probably too big and the show was just alright. I remembered seeing them in some small venues, one show in Los Angeles in particular, that allowed their sound to really shine. No, not shine, suffocate and bludgeon you. In a good way. This bigger venue simply didn't allow for that sort of experience. But I went home and dug out my old Goat record and started listening to it again. I was amazed at how well it stood the test of time twenty years later. Much of the music their peers were making now sounds very dated. Nirvana is a good example. When they come on the classic rock station I am always suprised at how disappointing I find it. It sounds like its historical moment, which is fine, but it doesn't transcend it. So I was pleasantly surprised by the Goat record. It's distinguished by Duane Dennison's guitar playing--far ahead of what the grunge folks were doing: appregiated extended chords are common and the flamenco training is evident--which is supported nicely by the powerful, serpentine rythm section. Add in Yow's strange vocal stylings and the odd narratives his lyrics suggest and you come away with an unexpected cinematic sort of quality. It's still an intriguing listen two decades later.

4. We bought our house in a community I have come to really appreciate and am happy to call home. It's the first time in all my years in the Atlanta area that I've been able to say that.

Vollman

2009-11-19T15:04:00.002-05:00

I doubt that I will ever read the new William Vollman--I like him, admire him even, but it's just so much--but nonetheless I find this description of it worth sharing and storing:

I was sitting on the train one day chipping away at William T. Vollmann’s latest slab of obsessional nonfiction when my friend Tsia, who incidentally is not an underage Thai street whore, offered to save me time with a blurby one-sentence review based entirely on the book’s cover and my synopsis of its first 50 pages. “Just write that it’s like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker,” she said, “but with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz.” This struck me as good advice, and I was all set to take it, but as I worked my way through the book’s final 1,250 pages, I found I had to modify it, slightly, to read as follows: Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange.

wondertarium

2009-10-07T21:15:00.003-04:00

Hello again pals. I've been away for a while. Things have been afoot. Spent quite a while searching for, finding, buying, moving into, getting settled into, our new house. I dub it the Tricky Wondertarium. Me and Mrs. Tricky are quite happy with our new pad. Other things have been going on too, but those things aren't nearly as cool so no need to mention them. Come visit soon!

a summer morning's reverie

2009-06-28T13:24:00.002-04:00

this poem brought to you by the subject lines of the crap in my work email:

floated down
scissor ocean
in the lost continent

It's kind of sad that the malicious malware infected spam is some of the most interesting reading in my work email.

reps

2009-06-12T15:14:00.001-04:00

We see things when we repeat them.

Things are revealed through repetition.

sesquicentennial

2009-06-02T18:13:00.002-04:00

Read an interesting article about the upcoming sesquicentennial of the Civil War. I was reminded that I'd thought it would be fun to get back to Gettysburg for that. But being who I am I considered reasons for not doing it, one of which was, well it would be more fun to be there for the bicentennial. Then I realized that I will almost certainly be dead when that rolls around. Barring the singularity or any other wacky sci-fi shit that I am not banking on. Yup I'll be dead. I won't be. So it's 150 or nothing. There's a reason for a trip!

Sambo's

2009-05-14T14:01:00.003-04:00

I'm not sure why but today I found myself remembering Sambo's. We did not have them in Philly or Jersey that I recall but my dad often worked in upstate New York and I spent some time there as a kid and that's where I got to eat at Sambo's. I believe I was familiar then with the story of "Little Black Sambo" but I don't think I was old enough yet to understand why it might be an issue as the name of a restaurant. In my mind I thought I remembered that Sambo was African rather than Indian but of course our memories are thoroughly unreliable as documentary devices. As Roger Clemens would say, I misremembered. I did however correctly recall the tigers and pancakes part of the motif. Things were different in the 70's.

April songs

2009-04-30T17:30:00.004-04:00

via my twits, the songs of the day for April (each song is chosen on a particular day because of some historical event that happened on the day, or an anniversary of some sort on the day, or some current event of the day, but we will let the rationale fade away like tweets on the breeze):

4/30: devil in the bayou
4/29: if I only had a home sweet home
4/22: don't sell it don't give it away
4/16: hobo's life is lonely
4/15: Prisoner's lament
4/14: take your burden to the Lord and leave it there
4/9: The night they drove old Dixie down
4/7: loverman
4/6: Ain't misbehavin'
4/3: Jesse James
4/2: Bonnie and Clyde
4/1: I may be crazy but I ain't no fool

not too intersting but thankfully brief

2009-04-22T19:44:00.004-04:00

1. The twitter and reader stuff continues. I suspect I'm a little bored with myself. Don't find much worth reporting.

2. For instance: I bought a new pair of shoes. Brown shoes. Very out of character for me. Very adult shoes. Snazzy, but adult. When I wore them to work they started squeaking. Lots of shoes squeak. But I work in a library. Might as well be a farting clown strolling through the stacks. I have this problem with many of my nicer shoes. But I really wanted to wear these particular shoes so I got online and found some possible solutions. One of which I tried out: lip balm. It worked. Lip balm will cure your squeaky shoes. Is there anything teh interweb can't teach us?

3. See? That just wasn't terribly interesting.

4. I am getting a piano. That could be interesting.

5. I don't do much these days but work and train. The training is going well and I am in a nice little groove. My body composition has changed noticeably. Whiskey gut long gone. Alas, there is no demand for hirsute, middle-aged fitness models. Timing is everything they say.

6. Finished reading Bolano's 2666. Nothing like 900 pages of darkness and death. But you have to admire his...brio? cojones? as a writer. He was swinging for the fences. More on that later perhaps.

7. This is funny.

Dan Zanes for free for now

2009-04-14T13:24:00.004-04:00

I insist on sharing this with you: a free Dan Zanes sampler at Amazon.

Ostensibly children's music, it is in fact good music that can be appreciated by everyone. It was recommended to me by a sharp two year old with good taste in Tennessee.

Zanes, as some of you considerably older than two might remember, was once part of The Del Fuegos. It's lots of fun and You should check it out while it's still available.

gizmos and crap

2009-04-01T22:02:00.002-04:00

1. So I'm trying out a couple of the new gizmos, namely Twitter and the Google reader. Between the two of them I'm doing more of the traditionally bloggy kind of crap, which I haven't really been doing much of around here. I've given both a home here on this page though so even if you don't care to use either, you can keep up if you like. I've been kind of glad to have them as of late since I haven't had a lot to say for myself. Their brevity and ease of use suit me at the moment.

2. Though I do want to create the anti-Twitter: nothing shorter than 250 words allowed. Suggested name: Bloviator. Sure to be a hit with academics.

3. I don't use the Twitter to say much about my actual doings, they aren't especially interesting, but just to point out some fun stuff I've been considering, listening to, reading etc...bloggy kind of crap.

4. So if you click on the page and there's no new post, have a look at the tweets or click on the reader link, that's where the action is.

not failing better

2009-03-18T22:21:00.002-04:00

1. Saw a couple of shows last week: William Elliot Whitmore and The Pogues. Both enjoyable though neither one blew me away. Which given my love for The Pogues is perhaps surprising. Others who saw the show absolutely loved it. It would be tempting to chalk it up to my tendency to be critical mixed with sobriety--who the hell sees The Pogues without having anything to drink?--but I don't think that accounts for it. Shane Macgown can still sing but he has clearly suffered some serious neurological damage as a result of many years of various types of self-abuse (it was interesting to see him having just read the Oliver Sacks book Musicophilia). He doesn't walk, he shuffles like a much older man and his speaking voice, unlike his singing voice, is often incomprehensible. Combine that with a little knowledge of the band's turbulent history and it couldn't help but color my perception of the show. I never got the feeling that they were truly happy being on stage playing their music. I hope I'm wrong. All that said, I'm glad I got to see them and I particularly enjoyed "Body of an American."

2. Although the economic shitstorm has rained on my household too, and we will certainly feel some pain next year, we have nonetheless enjoyed the fruit of some good fiscal karma. I am no longer propping up Citigroup so without any further government money they are sure to fail.

3. I'm no economist, thank you God, but I can't help but think that the shitstorm is the correction. And that while we may need to mitigate its worst effects we cannot simply wish it away by throwing money at it. We are being shortsighted. The most broken parts of the system truly need to fail for the longterm health of the system itself. But it appears we will continue trying to play the rigged game while avoiding the accounting.

treasure chest

2009-03-10T13:53:00.002-04:00

Seriously. It's The Roots Music Listening Room. I found some things here that I'd been hunting for a while. And no doubt there's great stuff that will be completely new to me.

A tip: if you don't already use it, get DownThemAll for Firefox and you can download dozens of mp3's in seconds. It's really a useful tool.

better duck

2009-03-06T14:56:00.001-05:00

It was a good day pals. Been a good weekend thus far. Unexpected windfalls abound.

On the more prosaic side of things:

1. Just had the excellent brisket "burger" at Fox Bros bbq. Finally some decent bbq in Atlanta. The brisket has improved dramatically since they opened and they top it with bacon, pimento cheese and jalapeno mayo. It is huge and obscene. I wish I had another right now.

2.Almost through with the Oliver Sacks book on music and the brain. Long but fascinating read.

3. Been really enjoying Joe Henry's *Trampoline*. It's not new by any means but it is relatively new to me, and it took a few listens to truly reveal its colors. But it's good stuff. You have to be in its mood though. Also, been spending a lot of time with some of Beethoven's string quartets.

fail better

2009-02-23T18:42:00.002-05:00

1. We understand so little.

2. Finished reading the Houellebecq and have lots of thoughts about it--so many ideas he has! some so wrong!--and have moved on to reading Oliver Sacks's Musicophilia. Fascinating stories about music and the brain that impress upon me how little we understand. How, contra Houellebecq, we are still at the beginning. Shit is wondrous, we just can't remember.

3. Saw this from Beckett's Worstward Ho: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”

4. Still muddled. Quite. But failing better, that's an inspirational goal.

muddle

2009-02-17T15:43:00.004-05:00

1. My aunt--Grandma's sister--died yesterday. She was the last of her generation of my family. They are all memory now. The last few years had not been particularly good to her and I understand that she'd been suffering quite a bit from various medical problems for several months. She was genuinely a kind and loving person.

2. My family has shrunk dramatically in the last few years. It was never all that big to begin with. One of the more profound lessons of age. I know there are some sad days out there waiting.

3. Routine and distraction are valuable but we can rely too heavily upon them.

4. I am muddled.

turn and face the strange

2009-02-12T12:31:00.003-05:00

1. I am mostly retired to my tee-totaling cocoon these days.

2. I am dry, and to be honest, so is my flow of words. Haven't had too much to say.

3. This hasn't felt like a problem really. Maybe that's a problem.

4. Mostly I think I'm in kind of a liminal place.

5. I sleep for long periods, but still not very well. I think I am more tired lately because I am going to the gym more often and with a renewed intensity of sorts.

6. So overall I am healthier but still observing the changes taking place.

7. I've been reading a lot.

8. I am forced to acknowledge that I could lose my job (simply within the realm of possibility mind you--what is quite certain is that there will be no raises for at least two years possibly longer) as my employer has announced that there will be jobs lost.

9. They announced this on the same day that they announced they were halfway to their record-setting fundraising goal. It would be hard for an observer to avoid the conclusion that the purpose of an academic institution is to grow the endowment at all costs.

10. Things have changed a lot in seven weeks.

just acting human

2009-01-25T17:08:00.003-05:00

This interview with Marilynne Robinson is the best thing I've read in a while. Great stuff. I'd never read an interview with her before, or heard her speak, and didn't really know anything about her other than her novels.*

Plucking out some good stuff here:

on religion (and writing): "I don’t like categories like religious and not religious. As soon as religion draws a line around itself it becomes falsified. It seems to me that anything that is written compassionately and perceptively probably satisfies every definition of religious whether a writer intends it to be religious or not. "

on the narrative of decline:

At the same time, there has always been a basic human tendency toward a dubious notion of beauty. Think about cultures that rarify themselves into courts in which people paint themselves with lead paint and get dumber by the day, or women have ribs removed to have their waists cinched tighter. There’s no question that we have our versions of that now. The most destructive thing we can do is act as though this is some sign of cultural, spiritual decay rather than humans just acting human, which is what we’re doing most of the time.

on religion as a framing mechanism:

Religion is a framing mechanism. It is a language of orientation that presents itself as a series of questions. It talks about the arc of life and the quality of experience in ways that I’ve found fruitful to think about. Religion has been profoundly effective in enlarging human imagination and expression. It’s only very recently that you couldn’t see how the high arts are intimately connected to religion.

There was a time when people felt as if structure in most forms were a constraint and they attacked it, which in a culture is like an autoimmune problem: the organism is not allowing itself the conditions of its own existence. We’re cultural creatures and meaning doesn’t simply generate itself out of thin air; it’s sustained by a cultural framework. It’s like deciding how much more interesting it would be if you had no skeleton: you could just slide under the door.

on fear and our humanity:

People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

on the arbitrariness of being: "No physicist can tell you why things persist as they are, why one moment follows another. The reality we inhabit and treat like an old shoe is amazingly arbitrary. "

And that's really just scratching the surface. It's well worth the read even, I think, if you aren't familiar with her work.

* (A tangent here: I did not like Home. This was especially disappointing to me as I really liked Housekeeping and loved Gilead. I thought Home was well written, and successful as far as that goes, I just did not like it. And that's ok of course. On some level it doesn't matter at all. I frequently found myself angry at the characters, incredulous at their failure to realize their own roles in their problems, and I realize that this is much like life, and perhaps says more about me than the novel. It's good that I did not live in a small town in Iowa in the middle of the twentieth century. Of course I wouldn't have been me then would I?)

Praise song for the day

2009-01-22T13:25:00.004-05:00

I guess the inaugural poem has gotten mixed reviews--I've read positive and negative--but after reading it myself I like it. I wasn't too sure about it hearing it read live, I get a feel for its rhythm better on paper, but I imagine that was a tough way to read a poem. Of course I'm a bumpkin when it comes to poetry but I appreciate the way it addresses a big, Historical moment with common everyday images. Yet the last four lines are deceptively powerful.

A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other's
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what's on the other side.

I know there's something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.


Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

stuff, grub, flicks

2009-01-21T21:38:00.002-05:00

1. The new year greeted me with a nasty head cold that lasted longer than it should have because I tried to go back to work too soon out of boredom.

2. My two week long holiday vacation was nice. Stayed at home mostly but did make one brief trip to Nashville to see some old pals and a couple of new ones.

3. Ate some good grub recently, guess something's gotta replace the drinking:

A. Banh Mi from Lee's bakery on Buford Highway.
B. Tortas from Holy Taco in East Atlanta.
C. Al Pastor torta from El Pastor on Buford Hwy. Sort of like a Mexican gyro, meaty, greasy, good. And huge and cheap.
D. Bbq at Jack's in Nashville. I like the shoulder and the sausage best, but the brisket is pretty good too. I prefer the KC style sauce with some Texas as backup when I want a bit of heat.
E. Burgers at Flip, the hot new spot in Atlanta. I had the pork belly and the hangar steak, both were very good. I didn't try the Foie Gras milkshake. Nor the Krispy Kreme.

4. Saw a few movies recently:

A. The Wrestler. Much better than I would have thought. Rourke is, as everyone is saying, perfect for this part. What I liked best was that a movie was the perfect means for this story. Nothing was really missing, nothing was really extraneous. It worked.
B. Gran Torino. Was there a cliche or stereotype that didn't make it into this movie? Sort of Dirty Harry meets the after-school special. Still managed a certain charm but come on. This could have been so much better.
C. Nobody's Fool. I'd never seen this before and I had just re-read the book. Paul Newman was excellent but this was an example of a movie being a terrible vehicle for a story. You simply can't do justice to the narrative complexity and depth of character development present in the novel in ninety-some minutes.

Presidential wheels

2009-01-21T21:34:00.002-05:00

I would like Obama's new car. It's not quite as expensive as I would've imagined.

2008 in music

2009-01-13T13:13:00.007-05:00

I can't really do any sort of a top ten list for music as I don't make it a point to listen to enough new music. I did however listen to more new music in 2008 than I had in a long time...not that it's saying much. And I did hear at least some of most of the music that wound up on all the best of lists out there on the interwebs. So I can offer a few thoughts. First, 2008 was mostly about songs for me, rather than albums. I gather this is generally true these days thanks to ipods and downloading. I don't own an ipod but I do download stuff from Amazon as it's easy and cheap and there's none of the corporate drm bullshit you have to deal with at Itunes (though I understand that's going away and I applaud that while noting it's long overdue). Singles became the thing for me because the bar where I spent too much of my free time has one of those internet jukeboxes. They are ingeniously designed to separate drunks from their money. Most of the songs I listened to in that context were older songs but it did get me in a song sort of mindset. And what I found when I began checking out the newer music was that there were lots of good songs but not so many good albums. And that's ok I think.

Frankly I can't remember everything I listened to, but off the top of my head the two new albums I listened to, and enjoyed, the most in 2008 were:

Brighter Than Creation's Dark by The Drive By Truckers
Stay Positive by The Hold Steady

Neither is great from start to finish. The DBT is a double album and with the proper editing would have been one great record. There are a number of songs I skip when listening to it. But the good songs, man, they are good. Stay Positive has a handful of great songs, the kind that make an old fella like me smile and feel a little less cynical. There are lines from this album that stick in my head: "I was a skeptic at first but these miracles work" and "Let this be my annual reminder that we can all be something bigger" and a number of others. There are a few castaways but overall the batting average is impressive on this record.

There were a few others I listened to a fair bit but they yielded mostly singles. In no particular order some of my favorite new songs were:

Lights Out by Santogold
I like this album but it's really two very different EPs stuck together in one package and they don't always get along. One identity is ready for pop-stardom what with the beats and the dancing and all, and the other is reliable guitar-based indie-rock that owes a nod, like all its brethren, to the Pixies. Both have their merits. This song is bubble gum, but it's guitar based bubble gum and it's really good.

Time to Pretend by MGMT
I ought to hate this song. Pretentious skinny guys who aren't nearly as clever as they seem to think, and all the keyboards and whatnot, but I can't help it. This is a great song. I don't care for the album it comes from, but this is a great song. The hook is great and the production suits the material perfectly. I heard it once in a bar not knowing what it was and it took me far too long to find it hiding in plain sight.

Bag of Hammers by Thao
More tasty guitar based pop with a gal singing. Yeah it fits the mold of music for ipod commercials but it's edgier than say...Feist. A number of good songs on this album.

Good Time by Alan Jackson
I have been forced to admit that not all contemporary country music is terrible. Most of it is. But not all of it. No one is likely to suggest that this be placed alongside the best of Hank or JC, but it does what it sets out to do, and its intentions are good. It took hearing it in a bar with a number of drunks happily singing along for me to realize that. I'm glad I did.

The More I Drink by Blake Shelton
See above, though thus far I would not say Shelton measures up to Jackson or, God help me, Toby Keith. If you actually listen to this song, it's kind of an odd candidate to be a hit: an upbeat, sing-along argument for sobriety.

Paper Planes by MIA
Hard to go wrong when you steal most of your song from the Clash--and I don't say that with any derision. A very unlikely hit to say the least.

Stay Positive by The Hold Steady
This song is written for aging ex-punk dudes. Kinda hard to pull this off but they manage it without irony. I think.

The Righteous Path by The Drive By Truckers
One of several really good songs on this record. This one really captures a number of people I hold very dear.

And some old songs that were either new to me or that I got reacquainted with:

54-46 was my number by Toots and the Maytals
Atlantic City by Springsteen
Mama Tried by Merle Haggard
Shotgun by Junior Walker
Chug a lug by Roger Miller
How do you like me now? by Toby Keith
Jump in the line by Harry Belafonte
Tequila Shiela by Bobby Bare
Just a Gigolo/I ain't go nobody by Louis Prima
Bo Mambo by Yma Sumac
Six Appeal (My daddy rocks me) by Charlie Christian

And that's just off the top of my head. There were many more. It was a rich year in music listening even as it was a slack year in music making. I resolve to balance that out in aught-nine.

2008 reading list

2009-01-12T18:25:00.005-05:00

The reading list for the year that was.

I read more than I realized and I'm glad. A habit worth keeping. There were some disappointments: Edgar Sawtelle and Carse spring to mind, and some real pleasures: The New Measures, discovering Jon Hassler, and Don Paterson all stand out, and overall I read a bunch of good books. I see that I maintained about a 3 to 1 fiction to non-fiction ratio, and although I mean to balance that out in the future I'm not going to worry about it. I suppose it's still a reaction to years of reading mostly academic non-fiction.

* Best Thought, Worst Thought: On Work, Art, Sex and Death by Don Paterson
* The Risk Pool by Richard Russo
* Mohawk by Richard Russo
* A Green Journey by Jon Hassler
* Home by Marilynne Robinson
* The Love Hunter by Jon Hassler
* My Staggerford Journal by Jon Hassler
* The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
* Simon's Night by Jon Hassler
* Plainsong by Kent Haruf
* The Confidence Man by Melville
* Grand Opening by Jon Hassler
* Staggerford by Jon Hassler
* A Time Gone By by William Heffernan
* All or Nothing by Preston Allen
* South of the Pumphouse by Les Claypool
* The Religious Case Against Belief by James P. Carse
* The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
* Clockers by Richard Price
* The Book Against God by James Wood

* The Gathering by Anne Enright
* The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
* Maigret in New York's Underworld by Georges Simenon
* The Dogs of Bedlam Farm by Jon Katz
* The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh
* Heart of the Old Country by Tim McLoughlin
*The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by Dave Wroblewski
*The Man Who Invented Florida by Randy Wayne White
*Captiva by Randy Wayne White
*Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen
*The Sand Cafe by Neil MacFarquhar
* Hubert's Freaks byGregory Gibson
* Times Like These by Rachel Ingalls
* Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
* Katz on Dogs by Jon Katz
* The Men Who Stare At Goats by Jon Ronson
* Dirty Work by Larry Brown
* The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood by Simon and Burns
* Heyday by Kurt Andersen
* Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
* Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O'nan
* The New Measures: A Theological History of Democratic Practice by Ted A. Smith
* Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
* On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho by Basho
* The Art of War by Sun Tzu

not all bad

2009-01-03T23:58:00.002-05:00

A little good news for the New Year.

Christmas frenzy

2008-12-25T14:11:00.003-05:00

Christmas circumspection

2008-12-25T14:08:00.002-05:00

Florida pt 4

2008-12-19T00:06:00.009-05:00

Some random Florida sights, including the world's largest Confederate flag. We stopped to talk to the Sons of Confederate Veterans members who were working on erecting a memorial park beneath the flag. It seems that the flag is actually too big--it takes a powerful wind to make it fly. Most of the time it hangs limp.

The ingeniously named strip club in Gibsonton: The Liquor Box.

The roosters of Ybor City. That big fella was the Cock o' the walk, watching over his hen harem.

Florida pt 3

2008-12-18T22:42:00.007-05:00

The other neat place we visited was the Showman's Club. It's a private club but my good buddy has a membership and some family history there. They have all kinds of great carnival and circus memorabilia. The fez collection made me very happy and the collection of posters and the old photos were amazing.

Florida pt 2

2008-12-14T00:22:00.007-05:00

A few of the murals inside of Showtown. I especially love the "Ringmaster in the Sky" painting.

Florida pt 1

2008-12-13T22:57:00.015-05:00

So the trip to Florida was quite an experience. In Gibsonton we visited the Showtown restaurant and lounge. It's a colorful place, in every sense. The building, inside and out, is covered with murals. The pics below are just a sampling.

The winner of the Showtown beauty contest below. The loser is the pretty blond in the pic above.

the change we need

2008-12-10T23:23:00.003-05:00

One Bush goes, another returns?

Perhaps a change of political regime and economic reality results in other, more personal, changes?

One can only hope:

It should probably come as no surprise that the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression would inspire a little fuzz. Conspicuous spending is out, after all. And maintaining a stripper-worthy wax job ain't cheap.

off to see the carnies

2008-12-04T00:39:00.002-05:00

Well I'm off to Gibtown pals. Be back in a few days.

In other news, The Pogues are coming to Atlanta in March. How bout that? That makes two of my favorite acts ever in the course of one year.

foreshadowing

2008-11-26T09:28:00.004-05:00

I saw this on the intertubes yesterday, and it inspired some weird, apocalyptic dreams last night.

I woke up with Hank Williams singing "I'll never get out of this world alive" in my head.

carnie yarns round a bottle

2008-11-25T15:05:00.004-05:00

Next week I'll be heading to Gibsonton Fla, aka Gibtown, with a couple of old carnies to hang out and drink and listen to other old carnies tell stories in places like this and this.

How could I pass on that?

Should be interesting.

hibernation and happiness

2008-11-23T17:16:00.002-05:00

1. We have had our first real cold weather of the season. It makes me want to hibernate. The last few mornings I have wanted nothing more than to crawl under the covers and stay there all day.

2. I wish Obama had done better with his attorney general nominee. Holder promises to perpetuate the completely useless and ridiculously expensive war on drugs.

3. Been doing better about keeping up with pals lately. That makes for happiness. Still folks I need to see though.

4.That said, bearing witness to someone else's intense pain and suffering is difficult. Words just seem so...not just useless, but somehow inappropriate at certain times. Platitudes can be insulting. I do my best to be present, and hopefully, supportive via my presence. I'm not sure what else to do.

5. I pulled my first 500 lb. deadlift since my back troubles earlier this year. Pulled it with a trap-bar, which is a little bit different than a conventional deadlift, but it was still a good, solid pull and I have more in me. But I don't hurry with this stuff now that I'm a middle aged dude. Slow, steady improvement is the philosophy these days.

recent reading

2008-11-15T13:45:00.003-05:00

Some of my recent book blurbs from Goodreads:

The Book Against God by Woods
I like reading Woods the critic and I liked reading his novel, but was surprised a bit by the tone of the novel. Despite its concern with theodicy it manages to be--almost--lighthearted. It pokes fun at academic life with a lead who owes a little to Ignatius J. Reilly, albeit in a more restrained, more English fashion. Which, really, is high praise. The theodicy debate goes unresolved of course as does the ending but it hardly matters as it's a fun read. Who would've guessed?

The Religious Case Against Belief by Carse
I like Carse and his approach to things (see Finite and Infinite Games) and I had high hopes for this book. I was hoping for a little inspiration, a shot of wonder. I was left wanting. Parts of the book are interesting and he makes a few important points but you have to get through the first section of the book, which is rather dry. With some good editing this could have been one very tight, article-length essay.

South of the Pumphouse by Claypool
An odd first novel. Claypool is pretty raw as a writer but this was likable despite its flaws.

All or Nothing by Allen
This is a damn good read, the best I've sampled thus far from Akashic Books (the Brooklyn publisher). Allen is a talented writer. The first part of the book nails addiction so well that it was kind of tough to read despite the page-turning quality of the writing. The big turn the plot takes is a bit of a stretch, but not so much as to strain our suspension of disbelief, and it does lift the book beyond being simply a depressing account of a small-time addict. There's some fascinating stuff in here about the...epistemology of gambling I suppose you could say, that I might like to have seen more of as it really gets you inside the head of an addicted gambler. But this is a tight, fast novel that offers just enough introspection to give it depth, any more might have slowed the pace and made it a different sort of story. One less easily adapted to film, which I expect this will be before long. Allen is more than simply a genre writer and I look forward to his next book.

A Time Gone By by Heffernan
Reading a really good genre novel is like eating a great steak. There aren't any surprises--insofar as you know where the surprises are likely to be before you even start--and it doesn't do anything you haven't seen done before, for which you are grateful because it's just really damn satisfying as it is. So if you like a novel with a good dose of noir that's full of crooked power brokers, gangsters, Irish cops and beautiful dames with secrets, this will make you happy.

he felt bad

2008-11-13T14:23:00.000-05:00

Kingsley Amis on hangovers:

He lay...spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum....He felt bad.

Yup.

God bless America

2008-11-06T17:27:00.004-05:00

1. Strange days in America. Sort of surreal really. Who knows what might happen next? He sure has his work cut out for him though.

2. I managed the entire voting process in eight or nine minutes. I owe thanks to all the early voters I guess.

3. I was pleased that the post-election mood was far more gracious, from all quarters, than the election itself. Even Karl Rove--Karl Rove!--was level-headed and fair on Fox News.

4. My web shopping today:

Palin's future

Future of the GOP roundtable

Tucker Carlson at Wikipedia

Ann Coulter is a deadhead: interview at Jambands.com (seriously)

Bush using last days to push agenda

Violent play endured by actors

and revisited from yesterday:

the new Black Panthers in Philly

the new Keystone State Skinheads

nostrums

2008-11-04T16:32:00.003-05:00

The Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, a branch of the FDA, has a neat gallery of American Patent Medicines.

enough

2008-11-03T11:25:00.002-05:00

1. Goddamn Google grammar Nazis. Just try typing Google with a lower-case g. It is a proper noun after all. And don't even think about using contractions. Did Orwell write this code? I can't type a paragraph without half a dozen red underlines.

2. Please let this election be over. I'm not sure I can take even one more day. Of course I still have yet to actually vote. So I have that ordeal to look forward to.

3. How, please tell me, can anyone be idealistic about a political party? How? That says a lot about someone right there. And it doesn't matter which particular party they root for. And that's what it has come to: it's like a fucking football game.

4. People are selfish, ignorant and hateful. We depress me.

Phillies win! Disaster just around corner...

2008-10-30T12:20:00.002-04:00

Every dog has its day!

The NYT titles its article "Victory in a Place Used to Heartbreak."

Some choice tidbits extracted without context:

PHILADELPHIA — In a place where the glass always seems half empty...

In the Manayunk section of northwest Philadelphia, bar patrons jubilantly body-surfed through the streets.

Defeat has been regular and excruciating in this city, which has long viewed success, not as a sign of ultimate victory, but as an ominous warning that disaster was just around the corner.

Fans here have a reputation for boorishness, but they are as undyingly faithful as they are sometimes ill tempered.

Philadelphia fans are so used to being cautious and cynical that it is going to take a period of transition.
And while the city was exultant Wednesday, some cautioned against getting carried away with victory.
“This is Philadelphia,” said Ken Krieg, a police officer in the suburb of Havertown. “The curse is never really over. They’re toying with us.”

sandwich craft

2008-10-28T15:51:00.002-04:00

1. October is often an interesting weather month in Atlanta. Two weeks ago we had temps in the eighties. Today we are struggling to get out of the forties. Imagine how cold it would be if we didn't have global warming.

2. I just ate a terrible sandwich at Blimpie. I forgot to grab my lunch on the way out the door this morning so I had to go out. It is possible to get a decent sandwich at Blimpie but this abomination violated nearly every fundamental tenet of the sandwich craft. Deli meat should be sliced thin. Thin. I don't want a ham-steak on my sandwich. This is a matter of taste and texture. The bread was sponge-like not just in appearance but in taste. A big puffy sponge completely out of proportion to the contents of the sandwich. The ham-steak was covered in shriveled lettuce that had probably turned two days ago, a sad, mushy slice of tomato and huge, thick chunks of onion. Onion on a sandwich should be sliced thin, just like the meat, otherwise all you can taste is onion. I did not enjoy my ham-steak-onion-sponge sandwich. Why aren't there more Italians in the south? Can we ship some in for sandwich training?

laxative

2008-10-28T13:30:00.005-04:00

1. Nature itself conspired to deny joy to Philadelphia sports fans.

2. David Brooks talks about the flaws of traditional economics and talks up the behavioral economists. Two good bits regarding Taleb, the "Black Swan" guy: "Taleb believes that our brains evolved to suit a world much simpler than the one we now face." Interesting. Of course our brains continue to evolve and one wonders what this new complexity might result in. One also wonders if this complexity is really all that new. But this is the thing when talking about evolution: time as a point of reference is tricky. "New" and "old" are such amorphous concepts but we throw them around without much thought as though they were somehow specific. Time, as Richard Dawkins points out (he annoys me but he is very good at explaining natural selection in terms even eighteen year olds in philosophy class can grasp), is one of the primary impediments to understanding evolution. The sense of time that our own mortal existence imposes on us is so far removed from the vast timeframes involved in natural selection that it is literally hard to imagine. So are we using outdated mental hardware? Maybe. Maybe that's always the case though. Aren't we always playing catch up in a sense?

I'm rambling a bit, but that makes me happy because I haven't been able to ramble as of late. Anyway, the other bit about Taleb:

Taleb is characteristically vituperative about the quantitative risk models, which try to model something that defies modelization. He subscribes to what he calls the tragic vision of humankind, which “believes in the existence of inherent limitations and flaws in the way we think and act and requires an acknowledgement of this fact as a basis for any individual and collective action.” If recent events don’t underline this worldview, nothing will.

Yes. I don't have much to add here, I just like it when others reinforce my worldview. There's an inherent limitation for you! Everything is "metrics" these days and our metrics are supposed to explain everything, improve productivity and solve all our problems. Going along with the metrics program requires lots of pretending and a fair bit of cooking the books. (This is just another way in which The Wire was so brilliant: it showed what happens when institutions become obsessed with statistics) And we see what it's gotten us.

3. The enthusiasm for metrics has made its way into my academic world as of late. Which is really just what we need--to be more corporate! Two recent examples of my academic institution acting like a big corporate shitbag: they raised our parking rates, hey these things happen, but they refused to say this. Instead they claimed that they were "removing our parking subsidies." They'd never mentioned that any such parking subsidies even existed, but now they were going away and we would have to pull our full weight! I'm being kicked off of parking welfare! Second, in the wake of the financial crisis our institution announced that it would continue in its bid to raise 1.6 BILLION in funds. Why quit now when we're already halfway there? This is in addition to the already ginormous endowment. A few days later our president sends out a letter explaining that no budget increases will be allowed for the next fiscal year because of the financial crisis. This translates to: no raises coming folks. But he encourages individual departments to find creative budgetary ways to continue to fund merit-based raises. Bottom line: our institution is swimming in money, unbelievably filthy rich, but if employees don't get raises it is because times are tough and your local administrator is lacking creativity. Or you are lacking in merit. Bravo!

4. I have just discovered that I cannot truly do two things at once. I can listen to music and do something else but the music becomes pleasant background noise. But I cannot type or do most anything else requiring a degree of concentration while also indulging in the wonderful world of free podcasts that Br'er Bunni has introduced me too.

5. I am feeling less blocked. I think this is because I am sort of tired. I would try to explain that but this has already gone on long enough.

no confidence

2008-10-27T19:04:00.005-04:00

1. It's that time of year when the heat first starts coming on at night. My allergies do not approve and my sinuses are a mess. I hacked up something truly frightening at work today.

2. My dog expressed her lack of confidence in Melville by chewing up my copy of The Confidence Man. I had maybe fifty pages left. I suspect that the book may have taken on some sort of a vibe that she could sense and thus she attacked it. I will have to attain another copy. Not finishing it would be akin to quitting with five miles left to run in a marathon. Tough read.

3. The Phillies appear poised to win the World Series. I said "appear" so there's no jinx here. But this is how a Philly sports fan thinks: hope fervently for victory while braced for crushing defeat. And losing at this point would probably top the long and colorful list of Philadelphia sports failures. I can only imagine the party they'll have in Philly tonight if they win.

4. Life goes on, but I still fear that I may yet see my country go bankrupt.

5. On a happier note, I spent some time today listening to a recording of the Tom Waits concert I attended back in July. It's available via NPR and it's worth the long listen. Thanks to br'er Bunni for first making me aware of it.

clogged up

2008-10-22T22:00:00.004-04:00

I have been mentally/emotionally/creatively constipated. That's how it feels anyway. My projects have been mostly domestic as of late and don't require constant tending. Routine and I have never been on the best of terms, except perhaps in the gym where I believe fervently in the amazing power of consistency, and even there lately the returns on investment have been poor. The weather will change.

Lately I have been enjoying a few songs:

54-46 was my number by Toots and the Maytals
Good Time by Alan Jackson
Paper Planes by MIA (can't go too far wrong sampling Straight to Hell by the Clash)
Mojo Box by Southern Culture on the Skids

My music habits as of late have tended toward songs rather than albums, in part due to the Jukebox in my favorite bar, and in part because of Itunes. Listening to so many singles has perhaps made me a bit impatient with songs that lack strong hooks. I've also been hearing the latest hip-hop singles at the new gym where that tends to be the radio of choice. It is a vast improvement over the music at the previous gym. Sometimes the latest popular rock songs are on and I find them to be no fun at all. Melodramatic, pointlessly angry, the same boring sorts of structures and chord progressions. No fun. The hip-hop on the other hand rarely fails to sound like a good time. Many of the songs have strong hooks and some approach structure in interesting ways. Hence the MIA tune, and a few others I recognize but don't know the names of.

I have also enjoyed hanging out with old friends the last three weekends. Thanks friends.

washed up country star rescues poor bankers

2008-10-15T22:12:00.002-04:00

My good buddy in England alerts me to the fact that Hank Williams Jr. has recorded a song for the McCain/Palin ticket. It's to the tune of "Family Tradition" and contains this little nugget:

The democrats bankrupted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
Like 1-2-3
The bankers didn't want to make all those bad loans
Bill Clinton said "you got to!"
Now they wanna bail out

I just heard his daddy turn over in his grave.

"The bankers didn't want to make all those bad loans." I don't care what your politics are, that's the single dumbest thing I've heard since this mess began, and that's saying something. I would hope the stupidity of that line would turn off even the most fervent wingnuts. Maybe someone should remind Jr. that populists don't like the fatcats.

You can read the whole thing here if you must.

hard times?

2008-10-12T18:29:00.003-04:00

The sky continues to fall but life goes on.

1. It might be wise for me to avoid reading Nouriel Roubini if only for my own sense of security. But then I've always preferred to know, even when the news is grim. And there's no denying that Roubini was one of the few economists who saw this coming from far off and raised the alarm when most other egghead number-crunchers were patting themselves on the back and crowing about how great the economy was. (Tangential note: most economists irritate the shit out of me. The conceptual foundations of traditional economics--rational actors and all that--are woefully inadequate. I am happy to see that the behavioral economics folks are rethinking all that stuff.)

2. Doing some timely reading:

The Confidence Man by Melville

Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel.

3. For various annoying reasons, we've been without the interwebs at home for a while now. Truth be told, I don't miss it.

4. The gas crunch in Atlanta is over. One way they solved it was by allowing dirtier gas into the Atlanta market. Normally gas has to meet tougher environmental standards here because of all the traffic and the poor air quality and this was slowing down the flow of gas to the area. Honestly though, the way people reacted to the gas shortage here has made the financial crisis that much scarier to me.

5. Seems tis the month for catching up with friends. That's one way to offset the otherwise grim climate these days. So let's catch up friends!

6. I fear that no matter who wins, the next president may very well be fucked from the get-go.

...they'll say just a gigolo

2008-09-30T14:22:00.003-04:00

I think it was Bertolt Brecht who said something to the effect of "because things are the way they are, things will not remain the way they are." I've been thinking about this lately while watching the financial fissures grow and wondering if we are witnessing the crumbling of our civilization.

I suspect that maybe the grimness of it all is amplified here in Atlanta by the gas panic. I don't even know if this is being reported by the media outside of Atlanta.

If not, let me tell you: it is bad.

People wait in long, long lines to get the gas as soon as it delivered. When all the gas has been sold they race off to find the next station taking delivery of a tanker's worth of gas. And so on. The lines of cars waiting for gas block traffic and add to the general misery of driving in Atlanta.

I myself am almost down to empty and the prospects for finding gas today are discouraging.

Add that to the bailout mess and oy vey.

I go back and forth on this. From day to day things generally stay the same more or less and odds are that things will make their way back to the norm. But as Brecht cautions, we are foolish to take things for granted. If we look at the bigger picture we can't avoid the conclusion that the end has to come sometime and the ascendancy of civilizations is cyclical and blah blah blah.

If nothing else it's a pleasant confirmation of the Philadelphia worldview.

Just try and tell me things aren't going to hell in a hand-basket. Have a look at your 401K first. And as long as I'm bragging, I'll add that this confirms something I've been whining about for years: we do not live in a free market economy, we live in a corporate welfare state. The game was rigged to allow them to avoid the corrections of the market. The profits were always private but now we are going to socialize the losses. That is not the free market my friends. (Not that I am advocating for a completely free market with no regulation or controls at all--I'm just tired of all the nonsense I've been hearing and reading. We need to name things correctly to the extent that we are able).

On the bright side, it's a beautiful day. So go stock up on canned goods and ammo and remember that when the end comes cigarettes will probably be very valuable.

married skin

2008-09-10T22:09:00.003-04:00

I've been off for a few weeks settling into married skin.

1. Celebrated a birthday. Had a good dinner at the trendy new spot in town, which managed to live up to its reputation.

2. Celebrated a good friend's fortieth birthday. That was a fun, if too brief, weekend trip. We all came away with a good story.

3. Decided to ring in my new year with four weeks of fitness. (I found a new gym out here in the sticks where I'm staying these days. The new gym is the answer to my prayer. I now spend approximately eighty percent less time bitching about douchebags. And my training is reinvigorated.) So it's been lots of exercise, no booze, protein, fish oil, fruit and salads.

4. It was an active summer, just as it was last year. I enjoyed it, and I'm glad it is giving way to fall.

5. I will be glad when this election is over. Just get it over with.

6. The Wire is gone. Bye-bye Wire. I'll miss you.

7. Married life is nice. I don't get to see my wife as much as I might like now that a new semester has started but such is academic life (her's mostly, mine is somewhere on the inconsequential fringes, thankfully, of academia). The fabric of daily existence looks much the same as it did before but we are officially a team now. A unified front. We are one name even. And that does make things feel different, better.

8. I hope that you are well. Odds are if you are reading this that I have been thinking of you.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

2008-08-11T12:11:00.002-04:00

Finally finished Edgar Sawtelle and was both disappointed and irritated. It's clearly a first novel. The book labors toward profundity but never arrives. Heaping loads of suffering on your characters is not a surefire strategy to achieve the status of great literature. I had really high hopes when I bought this--high enough that I felt compelled to pay retail for it just so I could read it right away--but it wasn't long before my skepticism awoke. Let's see: a sentimentalized account of dogs, a coming of age story about an amazingly intelligent boy with a peculiar disability, some ghosts, a riff on Hamlet, yeah it's got "Book Club Reader's Guide" written all over it. I'll be curious to see if those folks are let down or manage to convince themselves that tragedy is inherently profound. But the suffering here does not redeem the easy sentimentality, it simply smothers it. The book is ambitious, I'll grant that, and a compelling read despite the ending being foretold, but it is too long and too calculating and in the end The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is most like its primary antagonist: skillfully manipulative and cold-hearted.

One night in Bangkok

2008-08-06T20:44:00.002-04:00

I stumbled upon a reference to this today and my vague memory of it compelled me to listen for a minute.

Oh, the 80s. The hideous production values of music in the eighties are instantly recognizable. Many a good song was ruined. This is not a good song.

Howdy Tobias!

2008-08-06T20:41:00.001-04:00

Welcome to the world.

Things are strange here.

Benjamin on the left

2008-07-30T13:21:00.003-04:00

This line from Walter Benjamin made me wince and chuckle at the same time:

"The intellectuals, as always, were the first to acclaim the builder of their own scaffold."

Context, if you're interested, here. It's the context that really gives the line its weight, but something Benjamin says of another writer certainly applies here as well: "This makes his work full of passages that, like double exposures, project information of immediate interest onto a background of the recent past." Recent being a relative term of course.

the secret to editing

2008-07-26T15:13:00.003-04:00

Zadie Smith has good advice for novelists but I think it applies well to most creative endeavors:

When you finish your novel, if money is not a desperate priority, if you do not need to sell it at once or be published that very second - put it in a drawer. For as long as you can manage. A year of more is ideal - but even three months will do. Step away from the vehicle. The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer. I can't tell you how many times I've sat backstage with a line of novelists at some festival, all of us with red pens in hand, frantically editing our published novels into fit form so that we might go on stage and read from them. It's an unfortunate thing, but it turns out that the perfect state of mind to edit your novel is two years after it's published, ten minutes before you go on stage at a literary festival. At that moment every redundant phrase, each show-off, pointless metaphor, all of the pieces of dead wood, stupidity, vanity, and tedium are distressingly obvious to you.

It's from this article (can't see the whole thing here) in the Believer.

Hitched

2008-07-22T19:06:00.003-04:00

I'm back here at my little shack on the fringes of the interweb.

I had a good excuse for being gone.

I'm a husband now.

Done good for myself too. A right pretty gal and smart too.

Thanks to all y'all who helped make it happen and to all y'all that came and celebrated with us. It meant a lot.

Tom Waits in Atlanta

2008-07-06T16:59:00.003-04:00

So I saw Tom Waits last night at the Fox.

It was fucking awesome.

This was the Waits show I'd been waiting to see. Especially after I found the show two years ago a bit underwhelming. If I ever get the chance to see Waits with one of the classic Ribot/Carney/Taylor/Cohen/Blair lineups I will be able to die happy, but last night's show will tide me over until then.

Some random thoughts:

1. The stage design was really neat.

2. The sound was good. There was no clarity in the low end at the beginning but the soundman quickly got it straightened out. I don't know if the acoustics in the Fox are especially good or not, but we were sitting about five rows behind the soundman right in the center of the room. Pretty much the sweet spot.

3. I liked the set list. Or rather I was almost indifferent to the set list. They did not play any number of my favorite songs--did not play either of my two favorite Waits tunes in fact--but it didn't matter. The band was on, and I knew I would enjoy anything they played.

4. Vincent Henry is a talented feller. He invoked Rahsaan Roland Kirk with his double sax playing. He played a mean harmonica too. Shit I even liked his clarinet playing and I'm not a huge fan of the clarinet.

5. Omar Torres did a good job on guitar. There's a lot riding on the guitar player in a Tom Waits band and frankly I was worried. I heard some of his solo stuff and it's not my thing. It made me wonder how he'd approach the Waits tunes. There was no need to worry. He handled the material admirably and when he added a little something of his own to the mix it worked without being obtrusive. I'm thinking in particular of the Latin sounding acoustic work he used to introduce "All the world is green." It was nice. As was the trading fours he did with the drummer and the keyboard player during "Hoist that rag."

6. Casey Waits has improved. He was a bit of a liability two years ago, playing above his head. But now he's a reliable part of the fabric even if he doesn't do anything particularly noteworthy.

7. Larry Taylor, longtime Waits collaborator, joined the band on guitar for two songs. He was supposed to be the bass player on this tour but apparently had to cancel at the last moment. His replacement Seth Ford-Young does a fine job.

8. You really do have to experience his voice live. I've been listening to Tom Waits since 1985 when Rain Dogs came out* and I cherish his recorded music but hearing him use his voice live is just essential. It's an astounding instrument.

* I bought Rain Dogs on vinyl in 1985 because I saw an ad for it in Rolling Stone and thought the picture in the ad looked cool. It wasn't the album cover but another picture that actually had Waits in it. I vaguely remember putting the record on and being absolutely baffled. What was this? What's he doing? I put it away. I came back to it about a year later after the noisy likes of Husker Du and Black Flag had broken me in and suddenly I could hear Rain Dogs. Oh! That's what he's doing! And it was great. And it still is.

Junebox

2008-07-06T16:37:00.004-04:00

Dreamtime Jukebox for June.

6/1: Wiggle It by (had to look this up) 2 in a room. Thankfully segued to It's Not Unusual by Tom Jones.

This was one of those mornings where I wake up scratching my head and wondering where the fuck that came from. K-tel, or someone, needs to put together a compilation of one hit wonders with anatomical themes. Or even just an album devoted to ass songs. The ass album. Where is the Harry Smith of ass songs? He's out there somewhere. You know he is.

6/2: Don't touch me tomato by George Symonette (the video I've linked to is a tacky homemade effort that plays on "tomato," & may be NSFW. I use it because it has the audio of the entire song)

This was on a Calypso sampler I got from the public library. It was a surprisingly good disc. This is a fun song. I've always meant to delve more into the history of Calypso but have yet to get around to it.

6/4: How do you like me now? by Toby Keith

The folks in my favorite bar like much of the good music that I play on the jukebox. They also like Toby Keith. Having heard more of it than I ever thought I would I must grudgingly admit that he is a serviceable contemporary country star. He is capable of crafting a good hook ( I believe he actually writes much of his own material--a rarity in Nashville these days) and his voice is tolerable. He is too willing to pander to the lowest common denominator (hence his popularity) but there are worse things to be encountered in the jukebox.

6/5: Scythian Empires by Andrew Bird

This is one of my favorite songs of the last two or three years. Like much of Bird's stuff it features impeccable craftsmanship, a sticky melody and an intellectual opacity that is dreamlike, or, dreamy if you prefer.

6/6: Take the place by The Rent Boys

The Rent Boys were an Atlanta band that I never did get to see live. It's a shame.

6/8: The Limbo Song by Frankie Anderson

6/9: Werewolves of London by Warren Zevon

One of those songs I don't hear too often but I always enjoy when I do.

6/15: Long Haired Country Boy by Charlie Daniels

6/16: King of the Road by Roger Miller

I know I heard this song as a child, but my first real memory of it came much later. On a warm summer evening my Ma and a few of her condo cronies were out in their courtyard drinking beer and soaking their feet in a tub and singing this song. But they couldn't remember all the words. So someone went inside and found them on the internet and they were able to sing the whole song. Through rigorous empirical testing I have since confirmed that this song is indeed a great drunken sing-a-long. I have also learned to appreciate Roger Miller as more than a novelty.

6/17: The Body of an American by The Pogues

Such a good song and tells a great story. I remember how surprised I was to hear it used on The Wire during the barroom Irish wake. It was used so well in that scene, and sounded so good, that I wondered why I didn't listen to it more over the years. Maybe because it was on an E.P. (Poguetry in Motion if I recall) rather than one of the classic L.P.s. But it's become a staple for me since. After all, I'm a free-born man of the USA.

6/19: Don't Think Twice, It's Alright covered by Waylon Jennings

This is young Waylon and he does a really good job with this tune. I'd never heard his version before but it popped up on Pandora and I liked it enough to buy it. Need to check out more of his older stuff like this, the pre-Outlaw years. I dig his voice.

mystery solved

2008-07-01T18:26:00.003-04:00

I've been busy solving the mystery at Owl Creek Bridge. Turns out that, just as in Scooby Doo, the real estate developers did it. But in the real world they get away with it. And thus I had to move. Again. So that's what I've been doing for the last week and a half or so. Packed up the missus and the bulldog and away we went. It was miserable business. But it's done. And the new place is much nicer. It's not as convenient a location but I'll take the trade-off.

Now that I'm done with all that I just have to finish preparing for this wedding.

whither the future?

2008-06-19T18:08:00.004-04:00

Yesterday my daily perusing started with the Chronicle of Higher Ed where I learned of a new book by James P. Carse. I was once quite fond of the two or three of his books I'd read, but I'd kind of forgotten about him. A quick look for the book led me to something called The Long Now, which led me to a very neat little essay by Michael Chabon about the future and how we've kind of abandoned it on a cultural level:

This is the paradox that lies at the heart of our loss of belief or interest in the Future, which has in turn produced a collective cultural failure to imagine that future, any Future, beyond the rim of a couple of centuries. The Future was represented so often
and for so long, in the terms and characteristic styles of so many historical periods from, say, Jules Verne forward, that at some point the idea of the Future—along with the cultural appetite for it—came itself to feel like something historical, outmoded, no longer viable or attainable.

It touches on a theme I've mentioned before, our been there done that attitude toward history.

"My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. He sees himself as living on the last page, if not in the last paragraph, of a long, strange and bewildering book. If you had told me, when I was eight, that a little kid of the future would feel that way—and that what’s more, he would see a certain justice in our eventual extinction, would think the world was better off without human beings in it—that would have been even worse than hearing that in 2006 there are no hydroponic megafarms, no human colonies on Mars, no personal jetpacks for everyone. That would truly have broken my heart.

This--the "we're at the end" sentiment--is the Tony Soprano attitude I've talked about before. I understand its pull but I have come to view it with disdain. It's regrettable, maybe even laughable. Somewhere in the midst of all the other perusing I stumbled on this interview with Julian Barbour, a physicist who claims that time isn't real. Obviously I don't understand a good bit of what he's talking about but it reinforced something I've been thinking about quite a bit. We don't know much. Saying so does not discount what knowledge we do possess or its value, it's simply an admission that we're still at the beginning.

the mystery at owl creek bridge

2008-06-16T09:36:00.001-04:00

It's a smash!

2008-06-15T17:28:00.007-04:00

Oh those British critics can make me laugh:

"Hulk. Smash!" Yes. Hulk. Smash. Yes. Smash. Big Hulk smash. Smash cars. Buildings. Army tanks. Hulk not just smash. Hulk also go rarrr! Then smash again. Smash important, obviously. Smash Hulk's USP. What Hulk smash most? Hulk smash all hope of interesting time in cinema. Hulk take all effort of cinema, effort getting babysitter, effort finding parking, and Hulk put great green fist right through it. Hulk crush all hopes of entertainment.

The bit about Tim Roth's ambiguous groin is especially amusing, and the conclusion wise: "Film take away two hours of critic's life. Critic not get time back. Ever. Rarrrrr."

the postmodern legacy

2008-06-09T11:04:00.003-04:00

Quick and dirty here, but I know if I don't do it now I won't get around to it later...

Interesting bits from a review (it's behind a wall so no point linking to it but it's in the Chronicle of Higher Ed if you have access and are interested) of a new book about the American embrace of French critical theory:

"As Cusset recounts, another major irony of French theory's American reception is that a paradigm radically opposed to the idea of a centered and cohesive "self" became the basis for American-style identity politics." This made me chuckle. It gets right to the heart of the postmodern legacy here.

French theory's "antifoundationalism" jibes surprisingly well with the precepts of American pluralism. Both traditions are deeply wary of metaphysical absolutes and high-flown theoretical speculation. Liberalism can be frustratingly nonprescriptive: It democratically allows everyone the luxury of having his or her own opinion. Deconstruction — which, under Derrida's stewardship, embraced the confusions of "undecidability" instead of taking a firm position — similarly ended up in a state of self-canceling judgmental paralysis.

He claims that it is the "sturdiness" of our liberalism that allows us to flirt with ideas and movements that call into question the very foundations of that same liberalism. The end result being that we defanged poststructuralism: "By appropriating the precepts of French theory, we Americans undermined its residual claims to theoretical and political radicalism — and thereby succeeded in domesticating it. In the end, it became grist for the mill of liberal pluralism."

I find that kind of comforting. I have no idea what kind of reception the book is getting in academic circles, and don't much care, but it seems to uh, depuff, if you will, a certain brand of self-important postmodern critical theory. Mind you, I really do mean a certain brand. I don't have much of a problem with Derrida.

hot enough for me

2008-06-08T16:30:00.002-04:00

The weather has turned unseasonably hot. Really hot. After a strange spring of tornadoes and cool temps, this is unexpected. It usually does not get this hot until August. My tolerance for the heat diminishes as I age. And grow heavier. I used to like it. Even lived in Atlanta in a house with no air conditioning for several years. That would be unthinkable now. Of course, I probably have thirty years, at the outside, before I get to the age where I'm always cold and have to wear a sweater in the summertime. So I should enjoy my sweat-soaked drawers while I can.

Taleb's tips

2008-06-05T18:59:00.003-04:00

Life tips from Nassim Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. He sounds like an interesting guy, I've been meaning to peruse his stuff for a while now. I especially like his opinion of economists: they're shite. I'm inclined to agree.

1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

You can read the whole profile here.

more shorties

2008-06-02T18:21:00.008-04:00

Men who Stare at Goats: readable journalistic account of military absurdity

Katz on Dogs: reasonable, thoughtful guide to dog stewardship

Times Like These: chilly prose drives these unsettling stories (a considerably longer tangential rant: I have acknowledged and mourned the loss of good professional copy editing in the media in all its forms, but I still expect it in a published volume like this. Unfortunately, my expectations are frequently dashed and this book is a glaring example. Shame on the publisher. Good fiction like this deserves a careful eye. It's not as though it's a fucking blog we're talking about...)

dreamtime jukebox for May

2008-06-01T17:58:00.004-04:00

So, I've been keeping track of the songs that are in my head when I wake up. I thought it might be fun to keep a record because of the number of times I've woken up and wondered where in the hell this or that particular song came from. Sometimes it's obvious, but occasionally it's a real mystery. Perhaps it has something to do with memory consolidation? Who knows. What also interests me is the way my brain pieces together separate pieces of music. It sometimes recognizes connections I would not have consciously noted. One song might be connected to another rhythmically or harmonically or melodically and though I might not always get it at first, I can hear it if I listen carefully to the weirdness in my head for just a moment. And sometimes it's novel and pleasing.

5/18: Odds and Ends from the Basement Tapes by Dylan and The Band. Mental mashup: I Hate Myself for Loving You by Joan Jett. A weird one. This is one of my favorite songs from the Basement Tapes. I would not have heard the Joan Jett connection but it works. The Jett comes in right after the Dylan line "lost time is not found again." I think it's the rhythm of the Dylan melody that suggests the later melody. If I cared enough I'd get out a guitar and figure it out, but I don't. I'll take my brain's, and my ear's, word for it.

5/19: Torn and Frayed from Exile on Main Street. I like this song and I really love this album. Seriously, it's probably in the top five. The critical consensus is right on this one. This is one of those songs where I realize I probably don't know the actual words but have sort of made up my own. Jagger downplays Exile but it's probably because a) Keith is all over this record and b) Mick had already become a nancy-boy by this point, content to marry into the world of the trendy jet set.

5/20: Straight to Hell by Drivin n' Cryin segeuing later into Sitting on the Dock of the Bay by Otis Redding. The only Drivin n' Cryin song I really ever have a desire to hear. Not that I know all that many of them. Saw them once in the late eighties in Atlanta back when they were perpetually on the verge of making it big. They never did. Still a great song, all chorus. Does anyone even know the words to the verses? I don't think I do. The Otis tune is what it is at this point. I think both tunes are in G and that's probably how they got knotted in my head. It's a fine song, mind you, and Steve Cropper is one of my two or three favorite guitar players but there are a bunch of other Stax songs I'd want to hear before this one. I think I'd recently read something about Otis's death too and it's hard to hear this song without thinking about that.

5/21: Nothing initially, but then Straight to Hell bubbled up to the surface and quickly mashed up with Okie From Muskogee. That DNC chorus really is catchy, not surprised that it's stuck for a second night. The Haggard song is a favorite. Also in G I believe, hence the mixing. Both great to sing along with too, as long as you fudge the verses of the Drivin n' Cryin. I grew up hearing lots of Merle Haggard, and though I don't care for a lot of the crying in my beer stuff, I love most of the rest of it (this is probably true of my taste in country music generally). He had a few good songs in the 80's as well, but the production styles of the day weren't kind to him (shoot, weren't kind to most). I'd like to hear some of those songs recorded properly. By the way, did you note that the fine folks of Muskogee recently elected a 19 year old mayor? Have things changed out there?

5/22: Three Dimes Down by the Drive By Truckers. One of the few real rockers on this most recent DBT album. In my limited experience, I tend to prefer the Mike Cooley songs. You can hear the Stones and the Skynyrd in this one from the get go. This album had been in regular rotation for me for a few months now, so no surprise that this should bubble up.

5/23: Liquored Up and Lacquered Down by SCOTS. I've been revisiting them lately, mostly via the jukebox at my favorite joint. I have to wait until it clears out a bit before I play them as they are a bit much for some of the older folks. I have managed to win them at least one new fan though. There are plenty of Southern Culture on the Skids songs that I can take or leave but I've always admired them. They do a number of different things really well and their schtick keeps it all tied together. Rick Miller is a seriously underrated guitar player. I like this tune for the Mexican sounding horns and the surprise they add to the song.

5/24: Perfect Timing by the Drive By Truckers. I really like this song, another Cooley tune. What a great line: "I used to hate the fool in me, but only in the morning. Now I tolerate him all day long."

5/29: I'll Take You There by the Staple Singers segeuing to Junior Walker's cover of Money (that's what I want). Don't need to say much about either of these classics. Probably something about the bass lines and the vocal stylings that suggests the pairing.

5/30: Brazen by the Heartless Bastards. I really dig these guys. I don't listen to them all that much and I'm not sure why, so when I was cleaning up and stumbled on this I put it in the car to make sure it would get some ear-time. They aren't much in the way of a live band as I recall--she comes off as painfully shy on stage and her rhythm section is a bit subdued in their stage presence--but the records manage to capture her voice and the way it drives the very simple, straight forward songs.

Hmmm. Looking at it now, nothing too surprising or odd really. Dylan and Joan Jett maybe, but I expected something a bit kookier. I suspect that I tend to remember the anomalies more than the stuff you'd expect to find. Still, kind of a fun exercise that I'll keep up for a bit.

shorties

2008-05-29T22:56:00.001-04:00

The Corner: Simon is reliably enthralling and depressing.

Dirty Work: The casualties of war linger on.

should have stuck to whiskey

2008-05-29T21:51:00.007-04:00

It would seem a new weekend is upon me. Seems like the last one just ended. It was eventful, relatively speaking:

1. Had four days off in a row. Whew.

2. Finalized some wedding stuff and made good progress on other wedding stuff.

3. Went to the baseball game and, despite using sunblock, got badly sunburned. This left me ill and feverish for a couple of days. The Braves lost.

4. Ate something that left my plumbing amiss. Either chicken or sausage or chicken sausage. I'm not sure.

5. Wound up longing for the relative comfort of a hangover. You'd think I might have managed to acquire one with four days off and all. But no, just sunburn and diarrhea.

6. Saw Why Are We Building Such A Big Ship? at Mondohomo, an annual event here in Cabbagetown. Saw them in the last of the daylight in a little park with no amplification. It was nice. The band is from New Orleans. They are good. The wiry little hobbit who leads them plays a mean accordion and has the sort of voice I appreciate. He's talented. His horn section was, at times, not up to the material. He shouldn't have any trouble finding talented horn players in New Orleans. See them should you ever get the chance.

7. Now I am home with a sore throat. And a bulldog.

I'll drink to that

2008-05-28T21:22:00.002-04:00

Not sure how I managed to miss this over the years:

Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.

~ William James, 1902

It's true. It's not the whole story--drunkenness has been known to do a few other, less appealing, things now and again--but there is truth to it.

soup

2008-05-28T20:45:00.002-04:00

It's a good thing that no one but me is here at work tonight because there are tears running down my face. And I am out of breath. Nothing has made me laugh this hard in a long time. I wish I could say why. I'm pretty sure whoever did this is a little g genius.

still in Kansas

2008-05-21T21:22:00.004-04:00

Yesterday we had tornadoes in the area again. Emergency sirens were going off and the television was telling everyone to take cover immediately. The weatherman said the possible tornado was headed, if not straight for me, at least too close for comfort. Took the dog out and she wanted nothing more than to get back inside. It was eerie. The wind was blowing the trees around and the sky was many shades of dark and trying to come to a boil. We headed back in and Chloe got under the table and I started getting a mattress ready just in case. Once I felt as prepared as I could I went back out to take some pictures of any tornadoes that might be on the horizon. I've been dreaming of them for years after all, and deja vu was in the air. Thankfully, it had calmed considerably. I waited a few minutes until it was evident that we were in the clear. We didn't even get any of the hail or lightning that brought the interstates to a stop just a few miles away. By eight it was all gone and after all the previous tornado damage this year the city just shrugs off a near miss and goes back to business.

more Bird

2008-05-19T18:35:00.002-04:00

Another Andrew Bird piece in the Times. Good stuff about the sausage making of music:

Writing songs and performing live have with time become almost the same process for me. The improvisation and conversation with the audience from show to show keep the songs fluid and alive. On the other hand, making a record is like a show that gets drawn out over a year or more, but with no cathartic resolution. When I’m in the studio things can quickly unravel and that’s not surprising. The audience has disappeared and you are given the attractive, but dangerous option to control everything.

And the tricky act of recording vocals:

Recording vocals can be fraught with aural illusions akin to the weirdness of hearing your own voice on your answering machine. ”That’s not me, is it?” You sing into a device that converts your voice into an electric current, which travels through wires and gadgets to a tape machine. You scrutinize that voice, make adjustments to your proximity to the microphone, switching between “head voice” and “chest voice.” When you belt it out it almost always sounds thin and small but when you sing quiet, close and intimate it sounds thick, warm and huge — but then it can lose gusto. Recording is full of counterintuitive stuff like this, so you can see how quickly the original sentiment of a song can get derailed.

Good stuff. I am surprised at some of the distinctions he draws between performing and recording, but knowing his music and having seen him live, I can hear how those distinctions work for him. I'm just not sure that it has to be that way.

popless

2008-05-19T17:55:00.003-04:00

For a number of weeks now I've been reading "Popless" by Noel Murray over at the Onion AV Club. The idea of Popless is that Murray takes a year off from listening to new music and works his way alphabetically through his collection, weeding and reflecting as he goes. I find myself scoffing at many of his critical choices but I enjoy reading it. I find his personal tastes rather tepid (too much bland pop and rock for me) but he knows his tastes and the limits they impose and is not afraid to be honest about it. Many critics could learn from this. I appreciate the reasonable character that comes through in his prose.

He must also be just about my age and his musical story sounds fairly similar to mine (some of the early parts anyway) so there's a fair bit of overlap there and it's fun to see how someone else reacted to many of the same records and trends I was reacting to. For instance, Murray acknowledges what a huge influence Husker Du was but then admits that he never listens to them anymore. Ditto.

Buried in all the writing about music from week to week is an autobiography of sorts, and while I might find that irritating and solipsistic coming from some critics, it works here, in part because it's in the background and in service of exploring the music and his necessarily subjective tastes. Plus, he seems like a nice guy, if a bit straightlaced at times. I could've been his friend in high school or college but I think eventually I would've gotten him in trouble or scared him off.

If you want to read back through it you'll have to search around the site a bit as there's no one archive for the feature. Which seems shortsighted somehow.

tired Tom Waits fan

2008-05-16T09:31:00.004-04:00

That's about how I feel at the moment. I have dragged my sorry ass out of bed early this morning, on my day off, to try and score some Tom Waits tickets. We'll see how it goes. On the last tour I wasn't crazy about the fit between the music and Duke Robillard's guitar stylings. It was fine mind you, and I enjoyed the show, but Marc Ribot is the Tom Waits guitar player as far as I'm concerned. And having checked out the new guy for this tour I'm a little skeptical. He seems slick: too rounded, smooth surfaces, no grit. But we'll see.

addendum: the early bird gets the ridiculously expensive worm. I guess it'll be a wedding present to ourselves.