No More Yesterday's Papers

Additions

2008-09-09T11:26:00.000-07:00

I have added a few new links. Paper Cuts is a blog by a colleague who's assignment for a class is to keep track of all the cuts in the newspaper industry. This may not affect these readers since most of the stuff I do is on a book or piece of music....But I'm interested.

As for that I've been following Paper Cuts the NYT's lit blog and Penguin's blog which has all sorts of information. The Orwell thing is a creative idea, but may not enthuse most as Orwell was writing about the scene of things from his hospital bed. Plans, intricate measurements of everyday items. But still nice to think of him as one of us blogging.

We have another ",Reflections," which is a diary of an American in Japan. Making that push that's hard for us to make if our roots are deep here, but easy with younger folks getting international sooner these days.

Blowing in the Wind

2008-08-27T08:56:00.001-07:00

My attitude toward alternative energies has always been Yay, let's do it. Just a progressive kneejerk reaction, that is to say.

What the picture of this story alone makes clear is that it'll be in part a fight/negotiation with property owners to get wind energy turbines built. We see them now mostly in remote areas (a la Weatherford). But think of this picture and these kids who are trying to swim in a pool. Are these space age looking things blowing all the water out ? Having these near a home must be a big distratction.

Differing state electrical rates and policies are also hindrances in a national schemed grid.

This story gets into the challenges that face the wind energy alternative plans that T. Boone Pickens has been advocating lately.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/business/27grid.html?hp

Steps Toward a New Kind of Music Writing

2008-08-20T13:30:00.001-07:00

Still hashing through my Irish memories. Listening to Mr. Lonnie Donegan, a true English gentleman.

I have been conversing with people on how music writing often sucks to read. You get the feeling the writer is having a good time writing it, maybe he's even analyzing it...But I've come to the conclusion that I'm in desperate search for a new kind I guess. Here's one try from Corked:

Betwixt, between the Twisted Stars, the faulty map that brought Lou Reed to Ireland

This will be short because I’ve already written a concert review that was so removed from reality that I don’t have it in me to include it here. One moment seems to cast a brighter light on the music I once consumed myself.

One day after seeing a TV news brief that Lou Reed, Antony, Nick Cave and Beth Orton would be singing the songs of Leonard Cohen I told Meike I’d skip the Anglo-Irish Fiction class and take a trip to Dublin. It was my first real time in Dublin. When the bus let me off I spent 10 minutes on one of the bridges leading to the fancy concert hall The Point. I stood watching boats drift away and photography societies next to me snap shots of the creamy Dublin sunset which looked like none other. I had my Kodak and tried to match their efforts.

The concert was fine. Leonard Cohen wasn’t there, and neither was Rufus Wainwright who appeared in the film version of the concert I was seeing. Lou Reed looked a bit like death, but he also looked like the street poet I had always imagined when I listened to his grungy songs about Heroin. A man who also, sweetly, knew a damn good pair of Pale Blue Eyes when he saw them. He had lived life and now here he was dragging this husk of his former self onto the stage to lend his presence to others who were hungry to live for him now that he couldn‘t, dammit.

But God if I wasn’t sitting next to the drabbest, most dull black suited men and smooth red silk, scarlet lipped ladies in all of Ireland. And they were all around me. I was at the top balcony, sitting. The rows and rows below me, sitting. And here was the black angel of death before us all, the man who in his underrated solo career wrote these words:

"Ill take Manhattan in a garbage bag/With Latin written on it that
says It’s hard to give a shit these days/ Manhattans sinking like a rock/ Into the
filthy Hudson what a shock/ They wrote a book about it. / They said it was like
ancient Rome"

And we were all dressed up. Who in this dapper mot was really listening when during his song Whitmanesque song about naked bodies, which featured his dirty Sister Ray style guitar skronk, the real flesh we came to see instead of his own (the beauty of music).

Did we really hear Antony (and this is on You Tube now) in his agony, writhing and face making with a cover of Cohen’s If it Be Your Will, with the consoling black ladies behind him:

From this broken hill/ your praises shall ring/ if it be your will to let me
sing/ If it be your will/ If there is a choice/ Let the rivers fill/ Let the
hills rejoice/ Let your mercy spill/ on all these burning hearts in hell/ if it
be your will to make us well.

God if we weren’t all listening, I know these guys next to me weren’t. Another cosmo black tie night. I needed a Guinness.

During intermission I stood in the beer line upstairs. The line shortened and the cluttered mass thinned. I asked for a 6 Euro Guiness and the 40 something woman poured it to me in a plastic cup. She handed me the drink, sized me up and looked around a bit lost.

“Who’s playing down there?”
“Oh, Lou Reed, Nick Cave and some others.”
“Oh, I’ve never heard them”
“Yeah. It’s pretty good.”
“If you don’t mind me asking, how much did you pay to get in?
“60 Euros.”
“Oh! No thank you … is it that good?”
“Yeah it is! I‘ve always wanted to see these guys.”
“Well, that’s good for you then.”

I seem to remember this exchange clearer than half of the concert, this glimpse of the Corkians who work these service jobs and serve beers to dry elites who like their Lou Reed, their street poetry with an aperitif. The woman had such a straight forward manner. She kind of made me feel like a teenager. She no doubt liked music like the rest of us blood pumpers, but she didn’t feel the need to spend a weeks, or half, pay on seeing it in the flesh.

The older I get the more I can enjoy music privately, forfeit the show. The stuff I saw that night was very good, the Antony was the best. But what better times I had had with the burned CD Lou Reed that a White Water lifeguard had burned for me so affectionately years ago. I Came So Far for Beauty was the name of the concert, and Meike appropriately noticed this was the theme of my trip with all my music chasing. But a lot of that stuff came from the past as I remembered it, or the streets (in the form of The Conservatory in Oklahoma City … or Oklahomans like Samantha Crain trying out brand new songs at the small Galileos for a 5$ cover).

It wasn’t there in Dublin where I had hopped the bus and tramped through the spacious Dublin streets past the cold Green statues. It wasn’t in such places where Lou Reed found the subjects to his songs, the pious and sexual Hispanic Romeos and Juliettes with diamond crucifixes in their ears. Man, if confronted with a 6 Euro/$8 stout the old Lou would probably take it and pour it on his crotch just to make the people around him feel uncomfortable and restore his own weird comfort level. People out there had mouths to feed and couldn‘t go anywhere for beauty or spend so much money looking, as this lady made clear to me. For the rest of the concert somehow I felt silly for putting her to work pouring my drought.

Future of Suburbia

2008-08-12T13:27:00.000-07:00

This is real long. A quorum! I can't read it all now.

I will read it soon because I wonder what will happen to the nice burb neighborhoods like the one I'm sitting in right now. I can see the backyard from here. It's not the Amazon, but it suits me darnnit!

I'm speakin in defense of the happy suburbanites.

The Link: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/what-is-the-future-of-suburbia-a-freakonomics-quorum/?hp

From the Dusties: Don McClean

2008-08-09T21:42:00.000-07:00

I coulda been most anything I put my mind to be,

But a cowboy's life was the only life for me.
It's a strong man's occupation ridin' herd and livin' free,

But strong men often fail

Where shrewd men can prevail,

I'm an old man now with nothin' left to say,

But oh god how I worked my youth away.

Well you may not recognise my face,

I used to be a star,

A cowboy hero known both near and far.

I perched upon a silver mount and sang with my guitar,

But the studio of course,owned my saddle and my horse,

But that six-gun on the wall belongs to me,

Oh god I can't live a memory.

You know I'd like to put my finger on that trigger once again,

And point that gun at all the prideful men.

All the voyeurs and the lawyers who can pull a fountain pen,

And put you where they choose,

With the language that they use,

And enslave you till you work your youth away,

Oh god how I worked my youth away.

Whoopee ty yioh

Whoopee ty yi ay,

One man's work is another man's play

Oh god how I worked my youth away.

You see I always liked the notion of a cowboy fighting crime,

This photograph was taken in my prime,

I could beat those desperados but there's no sense fightin' time,

But the singin' was a ball

Cause I'm not musical at all,

I moved my lips to someone else's voice.

I coulda been most anything I put my mind to be,
But a cowboy's life was the only life for me.

It's a strong man's occupation ridin' herd and livin' free,
But strong men often fail
Where shrewd men can prevail,

I'm an old man now

with nothing left to say

But Oh god how I worked my youth away.

What a sad, sad, sad song. Bronco Bill's Lament by Don McClean. It was brought to my attention the first time I saw Okemah native John Fullbright cover it in bar/basement in his hometown of Okemah. It sounded like his own.

He played again by my request a few weeks ago and I finally found the McClean LP it comes from at Trusty Size Records

Any songwriter who can dig up a lost gem like this song and sing it like the boy does, is going places. And I'll be sure to report on the upward mobility of this young country singer from our state of Oklahoma.

You can hear some of his originals here: http://www.myspace.com/johnrussellfullbright

Our Great Escape

2008-08-08T03:10:00.000-07:00

After years of reading, Oklahoma City is now in the travel section of the times. An Escape, they call it.
Crazy enough, half of the things this guy did I have not.

http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/08/08/travel/escapes/08American.html?ref=travel

At the Movies: The Fountain

2008-08-07T09:18:00.000-07:00

I very belatedly gave Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain a spin last night. Starring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz, the film navigates 3 narratives that more or less have the same story arc. And one of which may be a part of the the 2nd. I'm still confused a bit.

Scientist's woman is dying in the real world, man's country (Spain) is dying in the 2nd plot which is opened up to us because it is the book Weisz is writing to deal with her death, her husband cast as the hero conquistadore. The third plot concerns a man's tree (tree of life) forbidden to Adam and Eve and an obsession to Jackman's character in this world.

It's a movie with a hell of an imagination. The fantasy sequences were made by a French group of guys, the lighting in the hospital and science lab scenes is a kind of midnight yellow that render the characters always in a state of darkness and very pale light. It gets most of its dramatic juices from the relationship from Weisz and Hugh Jackman. It's the best role, in my opinion, that I've seen him play, particular when has to relive all a time he was too busy for a walk. Movies give us a vivid sense of our own subconscious workings that our brains simply can't imagine all by themselves, but that they think and feel.

There are plenty of rich themes to deal with. There are some buddhist influences and some Whitman notions of the cemetary being a celebrated place of life, death being regenerative.

As the dying woman accepts death, writing a book inspired by history and by the book of Genesis, it is the scientist who refuses and plunges on with his efforts of eradicating brain tumors in monkeys so that it will lead to a breakthrough in humans. In short, he wants to eliminate all death, and his colleagues watch the obsession consume him with concern. It's a Doctor Faustus struggle rooted in the natural yearning for eternal life.

But somehow, though the movie is pretty tense, the way Aronofsky constructs it gives it a calm buoyancy: there's subdued, tender flashbacks (a bathtub moment my favorite), the music of Clint Mansell (and one by Mogwai), and every word uttered by the serene Ellen Burstyn (thanks Darren for making her one of your regulars, is every one else sleeping!?).

I think this is one of those movies that will win more praise with time. It looks at the stars (or dying nebulas that the Mayans prized most of all--yes it's a think one) ... and refuses to look anywhere else. And it seems to me that it was made from a sincere place.

Busker, baby

2008-08-05T22:21:00.000-07:00

The new home has proved a good space for writing. I have a real good window, just as I remembered it. It appears the first completed long-form work of mine will be my memoir of 3 short months in Ireland and 3 days in Germany. This I can safely say as it has been the easiest to write. So far it meanders, lacks par descriptive elements and contains too many references and maybe one funny part. We'll try to stop her at 80 we think.

A few slices:

The dentist told me that I shouldn’t leave the country at such a dangerous time. Why leave him at a time like this? Of all the Daly’s, McCulloughs, McDonalds, McDonaughs and Murphys and Mulligans and that live here now, how could this person think my trip to Cork, Ireland a dangerous one?
I left my country on a plane to a place I didn’t know. Even if that place was one of the most Westernized, American friendly countries in Europe I knew it would still be strange to me. I wouldn’t know any one when my plane touched down. I was 21 and nervous in the excited way a cliff diver is, not caring the temperature of the water that is about to consume him just knowing he‘s going to hit it. For years my leg had bumped my foot up and down on the ground. I had wanted to breathe new air, see a new ocean. See an ocean.

Reading about rock in Dublin bus station...

The train station had large white windows and I entered it heavy with breathing, and feeling not nervous but just weird. I asked the man at the counter if the bus to Cork was ontime and he said of course. There was a little gift shot. There I found a rock and roll magazine. It would cost me 10 American dollars, but I still bought it. I had reviewed Cds for a few bucks in Oklahoma and the glossy pages full of new artists from all over the world in Uncut had always been a favorite. Now I could read it in the climate where it was printed!

I found a plastic seat with metal arm rests to plop my plenty. The Eastern European traveling girls laughed at me in their strange language. Their hair was knotty, their jackets were well used, and their shoes were narrow running shoe types. They rested their tough feet on big bags. I watched the girls shyly before returning to the pages. Sufjan Stevens had released Avalanches, a collection of B-Sides that was still a four star listen. He told an English reporter that he was a failure in his own eyes until he wrote a novel. He had ditched 8 or so. The big words in his albums haven’t aged so well with me, but at the time they were soothing ear serum. I read about the Cleveland punk band Peru Ubu and the re-release of their album The Modern Dance. Peter Laughner was in that band once, I remembered. He was the guy Lester Bangs wrote about in Peter Laughner Died for your Sins. Ha, bangs only wrote for his fellow New York club goers I think. I never tried to fashion my entire life like Lou Reed: dark shades, dark leather jacket, tough talk all the time, amphetamine, heroin habit. Just part of it.

What a time, I always thought. Those last two habits got Laughner kicked out of Peru Ubu, then killed him. My Morning Jacket released a live album that was apparently great. Lilly Allen was scatting about chavs: cheap, tacky, pot smoking English losers/walkers of the more beat down housing stacks Mike Skinner also poeticizes. All these earned good ratings with Uncut, which got me thinking in the Dublin bus station., these English rock writers like everything. Maybe I should become an English rock writer.
A young boy sold two expensive bikes to two American tourists. He checked their chains and shrugged and pointed, and told them if they needed anything else they could call him. The Americans knew nothing about bikes. The wife and man strapped on their happy helmets and took to the streets.

Clinton and the Irish....

American Airlines offered the cheapest flights to Ireland, so I took that one. On the first flight I went to Chicago O’Hare and experienced the wait that makes everyone in the United States grumble about O’Hare. Ever since I had opened up books in Yukon, Oklahoma I had been enamored with a photo of the journalist Hunter S. Thompson, let’s get it out of the way now, taken for a collection of his Fear and Loathing letters.

It’s a black and white photo. There he is, about to run you over as he marches out of a terminal with a front bent back like a rude boy in West Wide Story, a suitcase in hand and a cigarette in flapper case hanging from his tight mouth. Every paragraph of his story is lodged tight and suffering hilarious mutations in the ripples of a big, drug addled brain. But more to the point, here was a man who had seen many places.

Well, my weak lunges wouldn’t allow me to smoke as many cigarettes as Hunter S. Nor did a trip out of the country for 3 months allow me to take one really cool looking leather bag. I had an oversized backpack that one fashion editor at a school newspaper once laughed at when I suggested it might be a new thing. I was floundering down the wide, winding halls. There was another other 40 lb. coat case that I overloaded with a few essential books for the rainy provinces: Jon Savage’s punk rock bio England’s Dreaming, my then girlfriend’s book of Seamus Heaney poems. In a bag pocket was a New Yorker where the reporter, still Clinton struck, watched him give a speech in Africa where Bill quoted lines from Heaney’s Cure at Troy. Clinton like the ocean has ebbs and flows in the publics favor. As I write this the MSN “news” ticker is hinting at his racism. Months ago at a desperate juncture in his wife’s campaign Clinton condescended to compare Barack Obama to Jesse Jackson. It didn’t play well, and the motive has left some still sour.

If I may return to the eloquent Clinton who bridged a gap once here in my country I’d like to include The Heaney quote he read to African leaders at an AIDs education summit.

“History says, Don't hopeon this side of the grave.But then, once in a lifetimethe longed for tidal waveof justice can rise up,and hope and history rhyme.”

So I had a bit of Ireland in my foggy mind and an Irish poet in my bag. I don’t think Clinton’s a racist, but I think he’s a public official. Of them we don’t like to hear anything good. And I’ll do my very small part to counterbalance the hectoring of this public official by mentioning Bill’s taste in poetry.

I was later to be told that Seamus Heaney was Famous Seamus. People liked him all well and good. These faceless masses, as presented in the lecture, certainly liked him more than the professor who introduced his poems. To this day I admire his ability to write just as well about Greek battels as he does about the farm people’s loam, the spade, and most “famously” the wood coffin of one boy’s poor brother carried out on his own bitter graduation day. Our teacher told us that the young Heaney didn’t think he could be a poet until he read Patrick Kavanaugh. Yeats, who is spoken of first in Irish poetry, was a poet of puzzles, impenetrable at first....

.....

Famous Seamous points to an ancient battle to tell his readers of the present that in every lifetime there is a moment. Each generation has a chance to witness some kind of justice. It could be true for anything. Outside of a political contender. We can be moved very easily, and most people know redemption when they see it.

Seamous leaves a gap open to each reader with this “once in a lifetime” business. We are so nostalgic for the times that aren’t ours, but we are so silly not to expect them to be just the same…
For instance, people here still feel the need to hitchike. My mother and cousin in their youth in the 70s took a ride with some bikers from Texas to California. I know two people from OU who took the same random trips. One on bike, one hitchhiking. The need for flight doesn’t leave.
So it’s the waiting for the hope and history rhyming part that is hard. We have too many distractions and, while we wait, what if the rhyme has left. I can’t construct a sonnet or a moving iamb.
But there are those who are trying, I felt, and I wanted to look somewhere else for a while.

...

In my reminiscensesesssess (damn word) and in the search for an in into travel writing I discovered this flawed but searching essay I penned for a music web site. It attempted to weave the story of a Polish acquaintence with the plot of Once. I did respond to Once in a way I wouldn't have had I not seen the place for myself. I feel I have sung legitimate praises for the pic which is on video now

http://adequacy.net/feature.php?featureID=17&featureContentID=214

Listening: Conor Oberst "Cape Canaveral," Ola Podrida

Information about this Podcast --------->

2008-08-04T10:53:00.000-07:00

O,
Radio, Radio, where did you put my rock and roll Soul?

No More Yesterday's Paper's podcast is designed to give listeners, Oklahoma Gazette readers and others in the area and outside suggestions on new and overlooked music in as many time periods and genres as we can collect. We'll post 4 new songs every Sunday night with a little interruption by me to give you an idea of the band. They will be arranged under whatever theme I can come up with that week. This week features upcoming concerts in Oklahoma. Unfortunately, those shows have already happened....

No More Yesterday's Radio was produced with the help of Oklahoma videographer David Burkhart at his Ambient Picture Studios in Norman, Oklahoma.

Cast of charcters for Show #1: Me, Scott H. Biram, Health, Fleetwood Mac, The Neighborhood.

Anatomy of a Performance

2008-07-27T12:10:00.001-07:00

Well, this won't be all that. But I did catch Heath Ledger's movie Batman Begins yesterday. It was my first viewing. And I was not disappointed.

As with everyone else I'm sure I experienced that strange, woe feeling. You admire the performance, but ask "Is this what killed him?" And is it worth it to always put 1,000 percent of your energy into a work for which you will be known? For this I admire him still and can use as fuel. As can you.

It was like watching a stand up comic who is really, really good. And the way they push you and push you until you are completely in their arms waiting for the next weird place you were going to go. I cannot explain it any other way. Seeing that Dent campaign sticker on Joker's nurses outfit was especially great.

As a fellow viewer pointed out...He could have worn anything, but he chose a nurses outfit.
The method, indeed, he will be missed.

For director's address I'm with Manohla Dhargis who called that sunrise shot of Heath flapping his mop into the bright light purple air out of a police car is a masterpiece of the framing kind.

I did notice something in the voice characteristics that seemed like he may have gotten from seeing Tom Waits live. The way Tom Wait's nerdy, sooty, adolescent deepness quirkily navigates a joke in On The Road from his latest collection Orphans. There are a lot of strange ticks in his, as I've read it from clever critics, punk rock performance, of which the Waits influence may be one. There's a little androgyny, a little Clockwork Orange, a little Deniro in the stalking moments.

We can call Heath's Joker the ultimate Orphan, or juvenile delinquient. A mad genius boy who has been kicked too many times, shunted to the back of the pizza line, neglected by his parents, and fallen into the aegis of unsupervised academia and devious strategy. There is always something of the boy in his performance. And those are the boy who take guns to school and pore over maps to make it effecient and to put the indifferent layman in these horrible, ethically compromising situations.

Never did I feel like I was watching a comic book character, but a very real and sad unwanted byproduct of hostile American society. Those other Batman films succeeded in caricature. This in the gruesome reality of times we, it seems, can't shy away from anymore.

THAT is no country for old men

2008-07-20T00:30:00.000-07:00

Okay for all you Yeats heads out there...

W.B. Yeats is one of those old poets that lend resonance to the word protean. He went through phases and rolled with the times, adapted..fixed his mind...changed it. He was enthusiastic and crazy prolific as a result. And he was the author of those very catchy words "That is No Country for Old Men," a sobering, yet lyric musing on old manhood.

In America we tend to give a lot of credence to the art that burns young and dies before it can get old. But Yeats offers us a refreshing contrast. All through his life, Yeats was hitting literati with interesting angles and duplicities. His nationalism is otherworldly in the collection The Wind Among the Reeds. In the famous 1902 uprising poem where a he manages to sound cold, scientific and a believer at poem's end. As layman, guys you couldn't pay Yeats to have a stout with on a normal day, become martyrs for the new Irish state, Yeats realizes that "A Terrible Beauty is born..."

I think of Yeats the way I do because of my travels in Ireland. Yeats loved that land. It created the wild weather that blew any sense satisfaction away from him. It was the home of the woman who never returned his love for her. It was where his plays were booed...

I was talking to a musician/young idealist from Illinois at Galileos tonight and we talked about how we embrace new media, but like to hold the object as well. He wants to work in zines and likes to have one to carry around. I was reminded of the strengths of the online option. The NYTimes ran a story about Yeats, and they found this learned woman to dissect Yeat's whole process in slide shows and audio. This is what online journo is doing that's so great. It may be tough to handle with all 10 minutes, but it's nice to probe for a bit. I'll link it here...

http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=1d933b7a401812e13341edb76287c6574ce321a8

I don't have an ounce of Irish in me, but that place and its people still have enormous weight in my mind. Can one's nationality be transformed through the alchemy of words?.... That's a question Yeats probably couldn't answer if he had lived on miraculously until today. He might say that it's okay to like a little bit of them all.

Return of The Chainsaw Kitten

2008-07-15T13:04:00.000-07:00

Wrestled with Blogger for two hours yesterday to try to get a video a file of my first podcast uploaded. Videofile you say? We cut the thing on Final Cut Pro. As you can see, we are beating in the bushes here. And when we get out, we'll have four good tunes and some 'eh' narration.

Yesterday I grabbed Tyson Meade (former lead singer of The Chain Saw Kittens, Defenstration, Norman alterna power pop cult Godfathers) from a house he's staying in wait for his flight back to Shanghai and for one last show before then. The occaision was for an interview with The Gazette for an upcoming solo show that I found story worthy.
Tyson is the champion of Philip Rice, lead singer of The Neighborhood. The two will play solo sets.
I talked with both of them and let them talk to each other. Meade gave advice. Kind words all around and talks of the future and of this show coming up at Opolis July 26. Should be a good mix of folks there. The Norman hipsters of today, and the Norman hipsters of yore (whom I always assumed were a little crazier).

http://www.starlightmints.com/opolis.html

I took a break from transcribing to watch a video from The Kittens. I'm just coming to their music, and I find it invigorating, and sad and fun and everything that life in rock is supposed to be I think. Especially Loneliest China Place. Soaring guitars, sad topics.

I hear Meade's solo material is something to hear as well. Here's a video from the Kittens's good years.

http://isis67.multiply.com/video/item/336/Chainsaw_Kittens_-_Pop_Heiress_Dies

Scott Hiram Biram/Woody Fest

2008-07-08T23:17:00.000-07:00

Scott Biram ratcheted up some street (or trucker) cred for actually getting hit by a truck in a 70mph collision and living to tell about it. He's tough I think. It takes one to grow up and out of a place like Kingsbury, TX. His songs about that place are vivid and entertaining.

Talking with him he's pretty soft spoken which comes in handy during some of his softer songs like Lost Case of Being Found.

In addition to being a good stomper and a yeller he handles traditional American songs like The Rock Island Line and Wabash Cannonball.

He'll be at Opolis..Next Monday at the Hillgrass Bluebilly show with Bob Log.

I wrote him up here....May post a full transcript soon.

http://www.okgazette.com/p/12853/a/2291/Default.aspx?ReturnUrl=LwBEAGUAZgBhAHUAbAB0AC4AYQBzAHAAeAAslashAHAAPQAxADIANwA0ADgA

It'll be a good punctuation for a sweaty weekend with the old timers at Woody Guthrie Fest in Okemah, which every one should go to because it's free. One of my coworkers complimented the nil entrance fee with a Kristofferson quote. "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose....."

For specifics on this event jump to http://www.woodyguthrie.com/

David Amram will be there playing with his son the drummer. He was the cat playing Keyboard in some documentary they made about Kerouac spitting poetry at a New York museum for the first time. He wrote the score for Splendor in the Grass and the original Manchurian Candidate. Composed with Bernstein. Farmer. Cosmic traveler. He has recently written a symphony with Woody's songs and loves coming down here, especially for the Saturday morning Pancake Breakfast. He'll talk to you about his French horn jazz and beats all day and he wrote about those times in two books, one called Vibrations. The spirit lives.

John Fullbright is probably 20 now. He plays at the brickstreet grill basement at noon Friday. He's the real deal, a voice scratching sandpaper that's 30 years older than him. Excellent picker. He sings songs about his brother in Iraq and other heavys in the outlaw country style. He covers Earl Keen and Don McClean in a real easy way. He sounds like a natural. He's from this ghost town. I'm hoping he's kept up the skills.

My 2006 trip to Woody Fest is still my one Google worthy moment...Just riding on the tail of Woody's ramblin' legacy.

http://www.popmatters.com/music/features/060804-okemah.shtml

There will be camping. I'm told there are more peaceful spots out by the little Okemah Lake so any crew that jumps on with us may have that to look forward to....

End of an Era

2008-07-08T12:08:00.000-07:00

I've been a bit slow on the digital music. I download it. But then I immidiately burn it to CD. Compact Discs are disposable, easily scratched, yes. But they were there for me (used and new) when I needed them. And it's kind of hard to say goodbye to them.

Selfish nostalgia aside this New Yawka saw his community CD shop go under, and his "rock star" life disappear. I see a loss of community, and luckily here in Norman the kids have a place to talk about music matters with knowledgeable clerks. Market and rent aint' like it is in New York.

At any rate, here's Sal's story told in one of my favorite little features in Newsweek, My Turn.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/143754

OKG Cover Story

2008-07-02T21:41:00.001-07:00

If you are in the Oklahoma City area I encourage you to pick up a copy of the Gazette. It's my first cover story and a worthy one. It's on Jabee.

Well Jabee was worthy of a bigger story. If I'd a known when I set out on this one that it had a chance at the cover I would have tricked it out with some more sources and some language. But, no bodder, Jabee will tell it best Saturday night at the Conservatory with an LA artist who I hear from credible sources is grrrreat. His name is Blu.

See you there.

The link: http://www.okgazette.com/p/12857/a/2247/Default.aspx?ReturnUrl=LwBEAGUAZgBhAHUAbAB0AC4AYQBzAHAAeAAslashAHAAPQAxADIANwAzADAA

Coming Soon

2008-07-02T21:35:00.000-07:00

I began work today at my co-producer's house on a No More Yesterday's Papers music podcast. I probably won't have time to record one once a week. So we might shoot for every other week (tentatively). What we'll have is 4 songs with narration from me. These four songs will be good ones organized in streamline fashion across a larger theme. The first theme, not to give too much away, has a Coming Soon theme. Meaning you will be able to hear all of the podcasted artists live and loud in Oklahoma.

I don't want this to be just letters and symbols and pictures and things when we have the potential for more.

Mesh

2008-06-28T21:14:00.000-07:00

Who are the lovers of beauty?
Where do they roam?
Do they walk the streets from night to noon?
Do they still bark at the moon?
Do they stand up when they drink milk?
Or stare at white screens and blinking yardsticks
as they wait for the Word?
Are they still watching like big eyed birds?

A thousand blinking screens
In a thousand milling cafes
Mock the thousand blinking stars
If you must
I really could listen to this Mp3 all night, you know.

Is there a place for talk,
A shave with care
A woman to hold you still in a chair
Where they still watch mosquitoes eat skin
Tend the fresh bubble, the red rash?

We, linked and lured
The bug zapper of the soul

A thousand blinking screens
Brighter than flesh
Grip the guest
Loved, loved and lorn
The roamers are enmeshed

Summer of Books

2008-06-28T15:00:00.000-07:00

Yep.

The ladies at The Architecture and Engineering school are starting to think I"m nuts for not having a real job. But with freelancing and my summer of books project I keep from feeling...I don't know...worthless. But alas, dear American society I will contribute to your strange machinations one day.

For now these are the books that have been completely. A partner and I are both reading Ulysses with a companion of allusions. Our hands are by the phone. We call when we simply don't get it which is often. His theological training has come in very handy. We will do most of these U readings at Barnes and Noble at our counter.

I list the following books not to show off but to encourage a dialogue about them. To give a recommendation or not. And I do it for my own personal record.

Summer so far:

Les Miserables- Victor Hugo (worth the time, will return to it surely, never read the word "immensity" so much)

Old Man and the Sea- Hemingway (better than my first read, great ending)

Books of my Life-Henry Miller----makes me want to read more DH Lawrence and Whitman

Obama- Dreams of My Father (seems a good portrait of the man as ponderous wanderer)

Larry McMurtry- Walter Benjamin and the Dairy Queen

Kevin Costello- 14 Left (a screenplay by a friend

James Nghiem- The Kid in Manny. He still says the character isn't named after me. Deflating to the ego. But it is true I would never swallow so many caffeine pills and then drive!

On the Road- Jack Kerouac (He lived with his mom too....)

Snows of Kiliminjaro (short story)- Ernest Hemingway. All those stories he "didn't write" if he didn't write them.

Hart Crane (poem)- The Bridge

The Shipping News- Annie Proulx (great supplement to my brief brush with the journalism world, inventive descriptions, hillarious, good little kid characters, reminds me of my visit to the Aran Islands with its unforgiving Newfoundland setting. And like many books I like it has a theme of a dying era, for fishing, newspapers)

Much work to do with Joyce, Capote, some Oklahoma History and a little Chuck Klosterman for the death metal soul........

Air France

2008-06-27T11:47:00.001-07:00

Distraction of the moment. The head in the clouds, little girl la la floating in beat beats, horns and synthesizer music of Air France.

Collapsing at Your Front Door.

Aw what a sad sight full of pathos. A night of raving only to return home in the daylight shamefaced, dehydrated and a pocket empty. Sham on you.

But listening to this song will send you right back out to the rave.

Fork has it here.

http://www.imeem.com/pitchforkmedia/music/4GGsvyM1/air_france_collapsing_at_your_doorstep/

How I Blow my Money

2008-06-26T14:23:00.000-07:00

I told myself it was going to be a summer of books.

Last week I woke up with that restless feeling. I don't know if I'll ever lose this capacity to make such bad decisions.

So I filled my tank to the $30 mark and hit the turnpike. I drove through Elgin, Lawton, took an Exit at Wichita Falls and went 20 miles West to Archer City. There stands 4 buildings (almost the whole Archer City downtown) of bookstores. Booked Up is Larry McMurtry's (Lonesome Dove, Last Picture Show) book compound. He says in his collction of essays that Archer City has relatively cheap rent for such an endeavor.

I browsed for hours, even sitting at that little table there seeing what Aldous Huxley had to say about D.H. Lawrence. Did you know he lived in New Mexico and had a car he called One-Eyed Susan. Looks like Lady Chaterley's Lover will join the list.

His academy award certificate of nominatino for The Last Picture Show is in the main room as his Dr. Pepper Best Novel by a Customer award, accompanied by a bottle opener on the plaque.

I'm sad to say the guy wasn't there. Not like I would've said anything if he had been. With many antique book stores going out of business, Booked up still stands.

I only made it to two buildings, so I will have to return. One building had a journalism section. The organizing system was pretty all over the place. There's one funny shelf called "Painfully Boring Titles." A book I own The Powers that Be" was on that shelf.

Two touristy couples gave a goshlookatallthesebooks kind of a tour.

I strained and strained and ultimately settled on a first edition, salmon colored Sherwood Anderson. His collection of short stories Horses and Men. One chapter is dedicated to the journalist cum novelist Theo Dreiser. Winesburg, Ohio was a big deal to me my first year of college.

I also got this little cartoon pamphlet about animals killing humans in humorous ways. It was a buck. I won't disclose the price of the Anderson.

Perhaps the best thing about taking a trip like this to visit a regional book mecca is the time it allows you to rock out, enjoy the wind and look at grain and grass blurring by, figuring out what you are going to make of yourself. The wide open blue sky that caused Larry McMurtry's sickness when he tried to live near Virginia, a place without the Western skyline, also engulfs you on that 60 mph road leading to Archer. And with gas pricest through the roof, the roads were rather empty.

The Playlist:

Blood is the New Black by Jabee (Oklahoma rapper, see here: http://www.myspace.com/emceejabee) And look for him on the COVER of next week's Oklahoma Gazette

Fleet Foxes, self-titled (twice)

Bob Dylan (I Want You, Visions of Johanna)

My Morning Jacket- Okonokos (both discs)

Fionn Regan- The End of History

Coldplay- Viva Vida (Or death to all those haters..)

Explosions in the Sky--Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever

Leadbelly-- Ellis Pete, or something like it. He's got some thick syllables sometimes.

Tim Hardin- Reason to Believe

Hyper Politics

2008-06-18T09:41:00.000-07:00

There's the challenger Andrew Rice, D-below, and the incumbent James Inhofe, R-above. I made a news contribution this week at The Gazette. This one is about the super accelerated pace of politics with the You Tube. And I asked the two campaigns in the senate race how they would use the application.

The link: http://www.okgazette.com/p/12776/a/2193/Default.aspx?ReturnUrl=LwBEAGUAZgBhAHUAbAB0AC4AYQBzAHAAeAAslashAHAAPQAxADIANwAyADkA

Happy Late Bloomsday!

2008-06-18T09:26:00.001-07:00

This has always been my favorite picture of Irish literary legend James Joyce. Two of his works had a big impact on me and I have yet to get to the real butterfly of his career Ulysses. Dubliners celebrated Bloomsday Monday and all week, I think, with a free Irish breakfast and tours around the Joyce character's favorite haunts. From asking around I found the Irish breakfast is a tourist department concoction not a traditional breakfast as most Irish know it.

Bloomsday commemorates June 16 because that's the time of the first date James Joyce shared with his wife Nora. Ulysses at one time was not just used as an end cap to some elitist's bookshelf but was once a taboo object in America and had to purchased on the literary black market (just imagine the mules in this market) thanks to its sexually explicit parts.

At Guestroom records in Oklahoma City I found a $4 LP where an Irish actor reads a Leopold Bloom's soliloquy and an actress reads Molly Bleams yearning soliloquy from the chapter Penelope. It was purely inspired, lyrical writing that said "screw you!" to your grandma's notions of proper grammar. I'll reproduce a piece from the end of Molly's bit here:

"O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibralter as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Morrish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Thank you Writer's Almanac. And thank you James Joyce for not joining the priesthood. And thank you God for not striking him down for producing these works. Well, there was the eye thing...

Queer Folk

2008-06-16T14:34:00.000-07:00

Last week the Gazette ran two of my musicological adventures. I thought the interview with snarky, rude punk rock veterans The Queers was a good one and not very punk at all in that needle in your nose punch in the nose way. I caught Joe Queer on the e-mail shortly after watching a Ramones documentary. It brought back memories of all the fine people I knew in high school who got a motivational boost from Joey, Dee, Johnny and the gang. And it sounds like Joe Queer is just as indebted.

Interview with Joe Queer of The Queers
For The Oklahoma Gazette

How true is the song "Hi Mom it's me?" Despite the story of the lyrics, what does your mom think of your work?

Haha she doesn't think much of the band mainly cause of the name. When she saw us open for The Ramones once I dedicated the song to her.

Have you seen The Ramones documentary End of the Century? The film shows the impact the band had not just on big time musicians like Thurston Moore and Kirk Hammet of Metallica but on pissed off kids in South America and all over the world. And they really touched kids with three chord songs. They showed that any one could do it. And if you are young and self conscious, they were the band that gave a feeling of encouragement and self respect (that girls, drinking, drugs and old music).

Yeah I heard The Ramones and a light went off and I saw my path in life. They taught me so many important things-question things,don't take yourself too seriously,be able to laugh at yourself. They touched many kids. Dave our bassist and I toured Europe and China playing with Marky Ramone last year which was a thrill for both of us. Great guy.

Was there a time in your life when you had an epiphany of sorts, whether it was the Ramones or another band, where you realized you could write songs with your friends and connect to a wide audience with similar disgusts, crushes, life experiences, etc.?

Yeah-I had sent Joey Ramone and cassette tape with 4 songs on it around 1986 or '87. About 3 weeks later I got backstage at a Ramones' show and went up to him and told him I was from The Queers-he immediately told me he loved "Love Love Love" and "Goodbye California"-2 songs on our Grow Up album. He said he wanted to cover "Love Love Love" and that it was a great song. Right then I thought maybe I could do music if he believed in me. Really meant so much to me.

Are love songs (like I Think She's Starting to Like Me) the most fun to write?

Definitely. I wish I could play all those poppy songs all the time instead of the fast shit.
You've had a lot of different band mates. Did you ever find new members on tour? Was it easy to assimilate new guys into the band after one would leave?
We never added anyone new in the middle of a tour. Kicked a few people out and had a few fly in but they were all part of our 'family' and had played with us before. New guys bring enthusiasm and a new dynamic to the band when they come on board. We have a pretty set lineup again with Matt Drastic and Dangerous Dave on drums and bass respectively. We recorded one of our greatest albums-Pleasant Screams-together and we'll do a new album later this year.

Have you always been the main songwriter? Who (if there is one) ended up being a favorite songwriting partner?

Yeah I write most of the songs though I love writing with others. My faves are definitely Ben Weasel and Lisa Marr. We have come up with some great stuff.

What made you jump to the homey label Asian Man to re release some of the older records?

Well Lookout was going out of business and we needed to get the albums out of there. Mike Park had done the Screeching Weasel reissues so we went with him. Great label. Runs it out of his garage and always pays the bands on time.

Are the songs coming to you just as easy these days?

No I am on the down side of the hill. I am more into opening a recording studio in NH after tour and starting to produce bands. That's what gets me out of bed in the morning. We'll do a great album though this year. I am starting to get it together.

How are the fans on your most recent tour? Is it a good mix of older fans and newer ones? Are they just as crazy?

Yeah lots of new young kids and some old ones. Weird mix this tour.

What would you say is the single ( or top 3) biggest lesson (s) you've playing in a rock band since 1982?

I wanted to get laid and travel the world and do drugs and drink all the time and make money etc etc........but the real reason I have kept playing is cause something deep inside me told me to take that path to learn those lessons in life that I needed to learn. I haven't regretted a thing. Anyone can take the safe path and make their car payments on time and live that unfulfilling slothful life-never taking any chances and having a 2 week vacation once a year and working with assholes......that shit is all cool but not for me. So here I am and still wondering what's around the bend in the river as far as what life has in store for me and loving it. Still excited to get out of bed every day.

Big Fish

2008-06-14T14:20:00.000-07:00

I won't be posting for a few days, as I haven't the days before. Things are things and Tim Russert is dead, and the political world just feel darker.

The egos of Washington and media couldn't hold a candle to Russert's good natured grillings. Research, research. The 1 hour program ooooozed savvy research.

I watched Meet the Press every Sunday. He gathered politicians and columnists for the best show in politics.

Today I remember his Scott McClellan interview. How he finds the videos and incriminating statements he does was a gas. This McClellan video showed Scott leaving the white house. George Bush was putting his arm around Scott, sayings ooooh we'll be sharing old stories on the rocking chairs down in Texas.

Then it cuts out and Russert asks McClellan if that will still be happening.

He had it, he was old school and he was a pro. Light a candle for the good of the world. Here's a link.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/weekinreview/15leibovich.html?_r=1&oref=slogin#

Band Management

2008-06-11T08:25:00.000-07:00

Here at my home as I listened to the Oak Trees whisper in their rustle to me, I thought with my passion for collecting music that I might make a good label founder someday. I know nothing of the switches and knobs and of the copyrighting and everything else.
But I have a pair of friends, brothers (“We are a family band” I told people) who are writing songs together. So I thought I would help them on this one night.

I believe band management is a formal term for friendship.
Here some notes in a kind of bullet form taken from the first night.
June 7, 2008 The Conservatory: The Nghiems are 1st to play, openers for Mocha Band (friend from The Daily), Approaching August (good people) and Umbrellas.

12 demo Cds handed out.

Accepted donations, won 2 dollars. Handed one CD to Rhett Holmes, head of Neptunes concert and promotions.

Got James’s friend Boggs to sign his name on the fan list to set a precedent. 3 more folks signed.
Sound check @ 7:21, 2 hours after arrival

Never been to the Conservatory at 5:30 before. White light pours through windows. In the light, you can see the rubble, the chipped paint and smell the hot thickness of the place.
Take drums kit parts out of the mini van and into the building through the back. Dustin opens the gate and a big ole boy with a metal shirt and a mohawk straps our wristbands on.

Sound check @ 7:21

Perks: Each band crew gets a case of Aquafina water.

Seth from student film and his girlfriend, the music writer Beck Carmen sit next to me at the merch table. Becky gets more crossword words than I (architects build “to scale,” she figured, better than our civil engineer in the crew Andy Nghiem could remember).

Jim gives David advice after their performance, he watches every band. He works long days at Size Records and long nights at The Conservatory. He is a hairy man of the people. I tell him I bought a Bob Hadley “American Primitive” acoustic guitar album, and he knows what’s inside the cover, everything. He then gives me the names of three artists I have never heard of, but will probably like..

Sound check only lasts 2 mintues, this could be an asset for us in the future. Nghiems, the resourcefuls.

Nghiems begin set at 8:05

A few people bob heads

“Things are never quite interesting….” the lyric goes at 8:24, but it has been an interesting night I think. I didn't have to kill a man, but still had fun.

“It’s the end of the world, but I think it’ll be okay, with my hand touching yours...”
Set ends with Master David's best lyric.

One small girl who signs our list says she really likes the band's music and can’t wait for more… Her favorite song was the second to last one.

Minus: Need to know band catalogue better...

Plus: Talks to plenty of people. Generated a good feeling for the Nghiems.

Pending...The Nghiems spent two hours in the studio recording their first track the other night.

Obama

2008-06-06T17:39:00.000-07:00

I know that I haven't said anything about the biggest news story around. Perhaps I should learn how to lay out my pages better first. Nah. Anyway my thoughts on Barack Obama are almost instinctual. And with a lot of the people I talk to, I figure that's all we have sense the world of legislation, policies, history are so murky and mysterious to us. So I am going to make public a private music I wrote in January when Obama upset Hillary in Iowa. This, for me, was when the potential for this guy become real to me. It deals with Obama the rhetorician.

Thoughts on Obama, history and words on this morning of January 8th
Listening: Bob Dylan: "Changing of the Guard"

If I were Barack Obama this would be my campaign song. But I think he knows what he’s doing. Aretha Franklin, “Think.” Not bad at all. Lot of soul there. A song like that sounds a bit like Obama looks when he walks to the podium with his long, black (skin and suit) presidential arm. It’s incredible the feeling that has crept into the minds of people, columnists, the media. We workers of words.

After Obama charmed Iowa the media thusly tore down Hillary. Everyone from Scarborough to CNN anchors were calling her everything but ugly. Then I knew that this lifetime politician had no chance at the presidency.

And what is the presidency anyway? It’s the face. All we really require (and what hasn’t been done in 7 years, as far as I can tell) is for the man in the executive chair to make a few key executive decisions, stand on a few solid principles and make us feel calm and secure in times of duress. And I have little doubt that Obama can do these things after a few tough years of learning. Look at Diane Sawyer’s dreamy eyes when she interviews the man. He just shot her full of enough self confidence just by talking about JFK landing on the moon; and that…somehow…relates to his campaign?

Maybe in the logical realm Obama doesn’t make sense. But the idea of Obama is absolutely intoxicating. If a guy like him commands our television screens I could find it easier to see this age of irony (perpetuated by commercialism, internet choices, television, fashion, the old guard parents, suburban expansion, Adult Swim, pot, college, gentrification, poor rich divide etc, etc) slowly erode into dust like a fart in the wind. Life and having “fun” in America has always smelt a bit that way to me, the way people walk and talk like they are scared of something. The way they tear the pettiest things down because they are petty. The way we avoid argument.
No one thinks about that maybe life is about enduring and sacrifice, and Obama is the only guy I’ve seen talk about sacrfice, changing our tune which has been dissonant to me for quite some time.
….

Mostly when I think of Obama I think of him sitting alone (as pictured). Away from his family, the press, the campaign advisers. I think of him sitting alone being lit by the florescent rays emanating from his lap top. He noticed the wind outside cuz he’s sensitive to that kind of stuff. And I think of Obama, writer of 2 books. Obama who reads Phillip Roth to calm down (good God!). That I can really relate to this man seems clear. I can see him finding the perfect words to inspire people. Lumbering and laboring over his next piece of rhetoric, which in his mind feels like reality. The kind of emotions this kind of writing stirs in people is unique in today’s landscape.

And it was all over the place in the sixties.

No one really lived up to the words though. My first favorite journalist described an ethereal thing that I feel now.

...

Strange thoughts on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era--the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run … but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant…

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time --and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened …

You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…

And that, I think, was the handle -- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting -- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.

And upon reading those words I embarked on a career in journalism, not knowing really what it would entail, never all the way forgetting that a man wrote words like that about a real place. It was mysterious, and somehow to me it was all true. I forgot those words for a very long time, but I was still going in the direction where those words had initially shot me. It wasn’t until I saw Barack Obama give his speech at the Iowa caucus that those words came flooding back to me in all clarity. This “we don’t need to fight” was very apparent in the man’s cool demeanor upon subtle attacks on his race and experience at the last debate. He never lost his cool or played dirty politics. It was a peace attack of the first order.

The “long fine flash” of a generation in one moment seemed to me to be in the hands of this candidate. He doesn’t need a plan, I think, if he can hold on to that flash for a little while longer. And maybe he’s not our friend. But right now, we need one so bad, that we are willing to take a chance.
…

It’s nowhere in media or politics the kind of words we are now hearing on TV. And it’s always been in the finest American literature. So it’s been there. It’s just we’ve lost touch with the ineffable. We’ve lost touch with the mysterious. I think of Thompson, Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolffe and Melville writing as if their only muse was enthusiasm. And with that enthusiasm you can break rules and make your own. You step out of your role, that tired old European tradition, as an omniscient narrator and you talk man-to-man to the reader, or listener. You can lead your reader through the streets and big houses of your mind without it sounding like bankrupt bravado. What will the audience think of this brazen talk? As Joanna Newsom (an American poet of her own order) mentions in one of her epics, “they will follow you there.”

See, Obama has plenty of time to make this place reality. That’s what his cabinet will be for. That’s what citizens are for. What he has done here and now is much more mysterious and much harder; and it hasn‘t been done in quite some time. My friends and I may have never seen anything like it. He’s compelled us to follow him there, wherever that is.

Helio Sequence Transcript

2008-06-04T17:15:00.000-07:00

Thursday at Opolis the crafters of one of the 10 best albums of the year (hype machine, i know) Helio Sequence will play. Tickets will be around 12 bucks.

I interviewed the drummer of the Oregon band, and he had some cool things to say about the band's music, advertising and indie rock, an Elliot Smith homage as well as fielded my fan-ny Modest Mouse inquiries.

The feature form story ran in today's Gazette, but much more was covered in the conversation than I had room to include.

http://www.okgazette.com/p/12853/a/2153/Default.aspx?ReturnUrl=LwBEAGUAZgBhAHUAbAB0AC4AYQBzAHAAeAAslashAHAAPQAxADIANwA0ADgA

Though I would encourage you to pick up a real copy, because there's more to that one than the online version.

Interview with Benjamin Wiekel of Helio Sequence
For Oklahoma Gazette
May 15, 2007

You and Brandon have known each other since middle school. How did you meet, what did you bond over and how the hell have you been able to play music together for so many years?

We've met through my younger brother, he was friends with my younger brother and we really started hanging out because he would crash at our family's house back in the day and we'd stay up late watching 120 Minutes and Bohemia After Dark and other alternative video programs. We started to trade local bands CDs; eventually we'd mess around with instrument, just playing around the house. I don't know, we are just really good friends and we've had ups and downs and that's part of knowing anyone that long. I can't imagine playing with anyone else.

Where is Matt Pinfeld (host of 120 Minutes) these days?

It's always cool, there's different moments in time where there's actually different filters for music. And I'm sure some people today are super stoked about Pitchfork and different media filters. But there's definitely something cool about Bohemia. I really loved the Bohemia After Dark Show I found so many bands on that. Videos I think are really cool.

You made a recent video with Fred Armisen of Saturday Night Live?

It was a lot of fun to make it he's a really great guy and he was really serious about it. He was showing us these really obscure videos he wanted to kind of mimic. He just called one day and said, ' hey I heard your song and he told me all these ideas and I said sure.
I love the character he does on the Wilco dvd. That's amazing.

From the opening ambience of "Lately" to "Keep Your Eyes Ahead" and "Hallelujah" this album feels big and joyous. If there was a possibility the band wouldn't be able to go on with Brandon's vocal cord injury I wondered what the mindset going into recording was? Was this a celebration album?

I mean it really kind of was in a weird way. Not just from the vocal stand point. But also when I was playing with Modest Mouse I ended being a really weird time for our band. It really was. It was like, everything is behind us, let's make up. It felt really good. The whole process was really natural and super enjoyable.

When you drummed with Modest Mouse they had a hit record, and you toured on that. That must have been a confusing time.

Yeah. It wasn' t necessarily confusing. My plan was never to stick with it. It was certainly tempting, that's for sure. On one hand you can be in this huge band with all this success, on the other hand your best friend that you've been making music with since you were a kid. Well, it ended up not being a hard choice.
There are a lot of lyrics about youths being misguided, pacified by strip malls? I feel as if you are singing about me and my friends. What kind of differences in the young people who go to rock shows today compared to kids you may bump into in Oregon in the early 90s.
Well I mean I don't know if things are as innocent as they were in the early 90s. There was definitely something so pure about that era. But you know, maybe that' s just part of being young. Maybe they feel innocent . I'm not a kid anymore so it's tough to say. It just seemed like the early nineties were a pure, innocent point for music and it's interesting now what started in the late 80s, the early indie labels and that whole concept of alternative means of putting out music, has become almost mainstream.

And it's definitely grown but it's also partially because people are losing interest in bigger labels and that kind of sound and people just downloading music for free. It's a combination of different things. It's interesting at this point in time that indie bands can make a living without selling many records. There are so many great things happening every month. It's almost like a crazy saturation point. How much good music can you listen to?

I was just having a conversation with my brother about Lou Reed. He's downloading all the new songs every day, and I'm telling him, you have to work backward.

For any true music lover. I feel like at least a lot of my friends in Portland are having a hard time getting into newer things. Maybe that's a musician thing.

You mentioned bands making a living without selling many records. Some of the songs on your new record could attract the attention of commercial makers, or television shows. Have you or will you give your songs to something like that?

I mean you can't really say no when something offers . That's definitely a way a band can make a living these days. A license like that can float you. You can live off it for almost a year. When things like that come along I feel like it's kind of a blessing. I don't know that a whole lot of bands think about that when they are making music. Artists have found it's a way to make a living. It's kind of hard to turn it down. It depends on the company, what its ideals are.

Commercial is so bizarre. It's odd to me that people pay so much to produce and advertise and everything is advertising; it s interesting to me that it even works. They spend that much money, you know how expensive it is to advertise a CD sometimes, I wonder how people even afford that. And even ,like, it's a weird time too, on Myspace it seems like people are advertising themselves. It's a world of advertising. Me personally, I'm poor enough where I wouldn't feel weird doing it.

I just finished school at The University of Oklahoma journalism school. And it felt like half of our education was on how to advertise ourselves as journalists, not about some crooked city manager.

It's the same thing with music almost. You could come up with a cool sound and it may not matter. They'll ask you 'How are you going to sell this,' and most artists are like, 'I don't know. Isn't that what you are supposed to do?'

Hallelujah sounds like a song about faith, a kind of secular but strong faith in people. Did writing the lyrics and writing the music go hand in hand with this song?

Actually that one was definitely one of the songs we musically have been kicking around for a while. It has a few different incarnations. We were really unsure about it. We liked the music but without the right vocals we could never seem to pull it together. I was going through all of these songs on [Brandon's Summers, vocalist] hard drive.

Brandon visited the family over Christmas break in 2006, so I had his hard drive and he had all these diff songs. And I pulled that one up and was kind of blown away. It was funny because the demos were so you could tell he's kind of making things up on the spot. You could tell he did it really quickly. There wasn't any more than a verse that he recorde[on Hallelujah]. I kind of cut things up, kind of making it sound like it was a real take. He came back and said, 'oh wow I think this is actually really cool.

It was finally a song. That was a weird one. It took a while for that one to come together.

This may be a hard question to answer "Hallelujah" in particular the drums rain down on the track. And I feel like I can say, those are Ben Weikel drums. It's a unique drum style with high energy. I was wondering if there was a point where you settled into a particular style and found a way of playing that worked for The Helio Sequence.

I mean I guess so. I definitely. I don't if it's necessarily only dependent on Helio Sequence. [I interrupt with some crap about Modest Mouse]
It was different with Modest Mouse.
[He politely resumes] There is something about the way Brandon and I work together. Im sort of in rhythmic freedom. I feel like it's kind of like orchestrating. You could just have a regular fast beat ' 1, 2, 3, 4 and be kind of keeping time. There's something about the way we work together. I feel like I can put a lot more accents and more flowery rhythmic things there. I really enjoy playing with the Helio Sequence.

It's tough to say if there's a distinct point where I found something particular. I feel like I've been drumming all this time and our band evolved. As that evolved my playing is better, the lyrics and playing they kind of all evolved.

I read once that before recording Good News for People Who Love Bad News that Brock and the band played Dance Hall over and over for 12 hours or so? Is that true?

[Laughs] That might have been true with … I honestly think that Jeremiah was probably the person drumming when they did Dance Hall for hours and hours and hours. By the time I got into that project I literally had 6 days of practice before we went into the studio. They played me Dance Hall and I just did whatever I did to it. I do remember hearing the demo for it. I think when they were jamming I think it was a lot cooler, more how it was supposed to be. Also, there's something about that record that was kind of more of a polished thing. Dance hall is really supposed to be more of a crazy thing it didn't quite fit in with the other stuff we were working with.

Did touring with Mouse, then going out with Helio Sequence build endurance. Make you like a super drummer?

[Laughs] When I was playing 3 shows a night I think I got to be a better drummer. I'm in better shape now than I've ever been. I think about different things playing wise. I just try to be the best drummer I can. I definitely feel more [comfortable] now doing Helio Sequence.
You guys combine different musical eras very well. And Modest Mouse does this and I know you toured with the Ugly Casonva gang.

I'm going to go back to The Harmonica Song. The Harmonica is played in an old, old bluesy style on that song which is also very digital. On the new record No Regrets is straight up stomping and old in a record with a lot of futuristic ambient sound. Would you say that is a constant concern for the band, to pay homage to an old style of American music while making that music in the digital age, with ambience, keyboard, melody loops? What kind of impact has more traditional American music on you?

I think that you know we don't necessarily feel like we have to do anything like that. It's more over the years. When we made this record, we've always been into listening to all types of music. I think when Brandon lost his voice it wasn't just that either one of us was listening to that kind of music; he actually learned all these traditional American folk songs. It kind of became this, there's almost like there was this side thing going on with Brandon where we have these modern songs and then we had all these acoustic songs too that none of us really thought were going to fit together.

And in it seemed like this is what we were into and this what we've gone through. Lyrically, it makes sense. We try to not be afraid to take chances. Yeah there's definitely other types of music we are both very fond of. We are definitely conscious, too, of not trying to do anything where it's easy to hear rudimentary influences. We really try to express all these different things we love about music in each song.

You guys travel light. Guitar, drums, keys a computer. Has this made touring easier? What have you been bringing on this tour.

We actually don't travel that light. We probably have the equipment that four guys would have. It's actually a lot of work. Brandon has two huge guitar amps. I have two huge keyboard speakers, an amp our computer wrap. We definitely bring a lot of stuff and it's a lot of work.

You covered "Satellite" on a recent Portland group tribute to Elliot Smith. Did you know, share ideas with Smith back in the day in Portland? What brought you to "Satellite" and how did you go about putting your own stamp on the song while paying respect.

I mean. We really didn't get a chance. We were a little too young. We used to go and watch Heatmesier. We were definitely around and seeing what was going on and influenced by that era of Portland music. I never got a chance to meet him. By the time we hooked up with [Smith's early label] I think he already moved on to L.A. He was doing his thing down there.

As far as 'Satellite,' one of the reasons we chose it was we felt we could be truthful to the song and to what Elliot Smith did and also add some things that felt more like Helio Sequence, and something that seemed like a balance. We didn't want to take one of his songs and totally slaughter it and change it too much. Even changing the vocal sound. We really wanted to be respectful of the song and I was really happy with how it turned out.

The Onslaught Begins...

2008-06-04T07:53:00.000-07:00

Well, we, media watchers, will spend a good deal of time revisiting the good ole days. From the Michigan State/Indiana State match, to the commercials.

Granted nothing in the Kobe, Garnett matches up to the deep competetive history of Bird and Magic. But they may have their own fierce battle. I mean, it's two of the best, right? And 6 or 7 good games is all we can ask.

Former OU Daily colleague Baxter Holmes had the rare opportunitiy of talking to Bird and Magic on a conference call for his first story for The Boston Globe. Being a native Oklahoman, Bax settled on the home cookin' angle, which I'd say facilitiates nostalgia. It does me good as well:

http://www.boston.com/sports/basketball/celtics/articles/2008/06/04/bird_magic_still_linked/

Wolf at the Door

2008-06-02T20:24:00.000-07:00

The new Wolf Parade is epic, a complete departure from Apologies to Queen Mary. I haven't even begun to decipher the lyrics, as they are shrouded in fuzz and wacky guitar play. But there is a lot in there about the radio, radio (which I definitely miss).

But none of the guitar play is wacky, this one traverses dance rock, casio epiphanies, ritualistic chanting and pop hooks. The closer Kissing a Beehive I never would've expected and all 11 minutes is great. It doesn't feel like they are noodling but walking a taut, long tight rope. For me this is the album to beat this year.

The album comes out soon. For now I recommend Spencer with the Sunset Rubdowners in London for these neat Black Cab Sessions.

http://www.blackcabsessions.com/sessions.php?id=1211923942&sort=chronological#

Wolf Parade will be in Dallas July 24 and Austin in July 25. I may hit both of them.

Ah, back to work...

Chills

2008-06-01T10:31:00.000-07:00

I was able to secure advanced copies of my two most highly anticipated records and I'm currently having trouble doing anything productive (stories for next week) as the sounds of these records have me in grips.

In the liner notes of Fleet Foxes debut album, best taken as a listening companion to their EP, music is described as a private affair, a way of communing with the memory of the first time you heard a song. For them, it's the only medium that can transport you to another time. One track does this for me, to a time I cannot even conceive but can try.

How rare it is that people hear a sound that absolutely reminds of them of their own mortality. Fleet Foxes may be cribbing from beloved records of their mothers and fathers, but they have used them as a tin can telephone to the other world.

The example is the track Your Protector. Only listen to it moving 60 miles per hour or over. The acoustic stomp remembers the folk intensity of some Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young songs. The group harmonies resurrect the spirits that roll across the land and last longer than we do. It's not often that a track reminds you of forces beyond your control, but this one does.
Elsewhere, Blue Ridge Mountains affirms my decision to move near Carolina, Tennessee areas.

More on Wolf Parade soon which does remind one of the adventurous aim of Television's "Marquee Moon." Thank you press release...

I love you for sentimental reasons

2008-05-31T22:54:00.000-07:00

As Ben Gibbard sings us his thoughts as only he sings them, you can’t help but think about your own life. Whether you admit it or not, if you’re of this generation, your thoughts probably sound a lot like his. His are literal, they are emotional, and they come after benchmark decisions and encounters. Your lying in your twin sized bed, you are at the Bixby canyon bridge, you think you are drunk enough to drive her home, and you are no closer to any kind of truth.

He’s like the guy who talks to himself when he’s walking alone, and hates walking alone. I get the impression that his life has been a series of relationships that were glorious once and burned away. In a recent essay in Paste magazine he confesses that he thought rock stardom would give him all the answers, but instead he feels just as pulverized by life as ever.

This is what Jack Kerouac felt when he wrote Big Sur. He let utter helplessness, alcohol and the despair of the people he loved consume him on that canyon where so many moneyed people vacation now. What’s worse is when fans were showing up at his door looking for some cheap rub off super Darma cool inspiration, man. Like the kids who walk up to Ben G and say “You know, I know I’m not supposed to…but I really liked your major label album.” So this is what fame really brings, more crap.

The wandering life of Jack Kerouac would be fun to deal with, but for Gibbard at mid 30s it’s the Big Sur that must be address. Kerouac’s latter year soul haunts on Bixby Canyon Bridge, the opening track of the new Death Cab for Cutie album “Narrow Stairs.”

Gibbard wrote these songs at the sight where Kerouac realized he shouldn’t write anymore, Big Sur. That text I have read. And I read it because there was a time in my life where I would follow Jack anywhere. It was summer and Norman was sunny and not populated. I had a bike. And every sparkling pool seemed deserted. I put beers in a book bag and jumped on my bike. This was the routine I kept for a few weeks reading all of Kerouac’s follow-up texts, which never matched that first thrill. Kerouac gave voice to the feelings I felt when I read On the Road. He gave me the ideal and then with Big Sur he crushed it. I put the book down and settled into lethargy.

Thankfully Gibbard went one step further and went to Big Sur. He one upped Jack because he came away from inner arguments, battles with the darker demon thoughts/memories with his creation. It shouldn’t be of any real big surprise. Gibbard’s voice has had, more than many of his contemporaries if not all save James Mercer of The Shins, this quality of nice. You guess his intentions are sincere, each syllable.

And this album touches on dark spots of middle age malaise As a result this is a darker record full of people who stalk girls and guys with insecurities like Bens. There are portents of apocalypse imagined during a California fire. In that track “Grapevine Fires” to fight the doom and gloom, Gibbard offers us young life, a girl dancing against a horizon all ablaze and the girl next to him that he’s drinking wine with in a paper cup, apropos of an early Death Cab song that comes to mind (“Champagne in a Paper Cup is never quite the same”) I guess when you are older and throw away all your illusions about material things bringing you happiness, drinking from the paper cup is even sweeter.

So, in one track you are seeing utter peace and utter destruction in song, which makes for challenging, rewarding art in this case.
In the imaginary conversation with Jack, saying he’s searching “for the place where your soul had died.” After he leaves, he wanders back to his car “no closer to any kind of truth.”

If you are a dimestore existentialist you might say that because each person has a unique life experience. A guy named Kierkegaard once held that instead of dealing in abstract principles (for example THE IDEA OF On the Road which is very fucking abstract and alluring) we should focus on the particularity of experience and its essentially individual nature, and only in this way do we come to realize our utter freedom (I quote from some one else’s summation). You feel fear, but that is okay because the fear is indicating that you realize how utterly free you are.

So Ben says goodbye to Jack, the ideal wandering American troubadour of light, and he starts digging back into his own weird, awkward stories. And voila! It’s a hit record. Surprise, surprise.
I’ve always thought this band original and that thought hasn’t changed.

I credit the unique chemistry of the band. The atmospheres inspire thought, and the words give vivid images. This combination has given plenty of aimless Me Generationers something good to listen to. I’ve been listening to Ben’s little stories since my best friend in high school gave me a top five with DCFC written at the top.

“Which album?” I asked.

“All of them. Photo Album might be the best”

The lunch bell rang.

He gave me Death Cab, which I still have, just as I‘m sure everyone who has has that first time they read On the Road. When our friendship died it was dead. I didn’t realize it and I fought it. Only till we both realized the thing was dead, could we be alive again. Him there and me here. To miss my friend is to be alive. To listen to the music we shared is to be alive…

Memorial. Day

2008-05-26T20:18:00.000-07:00

The television news stations decided it was time to do stories about the soldiers themselves. No Chris Matthews tonight. I'd like topay respects to the boys and link to another piece of good writing from NYT folksy writer Dan Barry.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/us/26land.html

This story is about the lone Iraqi war vet in his particular health center.

Nothing for nothing means nothing

2008-05-25T23:44:00.000-07:00

The philosophy of nothing has found its way into my day. It’s Sunday and I should feel comfortable with nothing. Yet in doing the things I had planned for the day, I am crushed by how wasteful it all feels. It doesn’t help that each activity reminds me with spoken and printed words.
I think of one of the Taft kiddos, J, 13 female, who would get loud, letting you know when she was bored. Solutions. Checkers? No. Pool? No. Tell me a story, J. “There was this time me and my friend were climbing trees and she fell down. It was funny." Did you help her? "No.” This is not the exact story that was told to me, but it captures the spirit of the story. On that day, even the timeless, divine activity of storytelling resulted in a big fat nothing.

Nothing surrounds us every day, and we must crush it. Yet, maybe there are too many people “acting” to the point where they are destroying--this is an idea often posed. I have to keep finding ways to argue against it. What the pieces of art that I have been observing suggest is that it is sometimes noble to do nothing at all.

Richard Linklater’s “Slacker”

Slacker is the filmic Ulysses of “Austin, TX. This is consciously stated in the film when one guy throws a typewriter into the river while reading from Ulysses: “Listen, this is what Leopold says when he got fucked over (by a girl).” The homage is a bit of a tongue in cheek moment with drowning of writing instrument, but I feel the director sincerely loves this book or else he wouldn’t take stylistic choices from the book: its absurd , strange serendipitous moments, the talking to people on the streets, the ambitious scope of representing varieties of people in fragments.

Slacker is worth watching a few times, but dangerous to make yourself a disciple of the film. Its mission, the director says in the anniversary edition notebook, among many is to pose questions rather than answers by using characters without history. Without more than 10 minutes of screen time for each character, the viewer will give all his attention to the talk, the words, not the motives. If we are asked what we think of any of the characters, we would say they are all assholes.

Kant took his walks alone.

One man literally looks like death as he tells a couple university students with a camera that “all you workers out there, the commodities you produce are just another piece of your own death!”

Why is he not working?

I'm waiting for the true call.

What's the true call.

I'll know when I hear it!

Appropriately, and in synch with Linklater’s strict guidelines for casting, this man looks like the walking death with no job. But he is interesting to watch. Do we want to watch him forever? No.

The characters in Slacker are indeed characters. We listen to them talk. When I find real people like this in the past I have recoiled and have been intrigued. Part of it is passivity. I don’t know what I expect them, us to be doing.

The man billed as Dostoyevsky Wannabe sits in a coffee shop yakking at friends who don’t seem to care what he’s saying:

“Who’s ever written the great work about the immense effort required in order not to create? … the obsessiveness of the utterly passive … intensity without mastery…”

This man, like others in the film, make their slacking principled. Has the cult success of a film like this made Austin an unbearable place to be or The Athens of America? I don’t know. Or rather, how many Dostoyevsky wannabes can a city hold?

Hugo (also human inspiration for the Oklahoma town Hugo)

The drunks and hedonists of Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables” wax philosophical on their own indulgent living habits. Hugo is more of a moralist than Linklater, and his characters that wax on ennui and self indulgence are not portrayed in the text as artists in their own passive or exciting right.

Like Austin, Paris in 1832 is full of crazies who find principles while loafing, drinking and nibbling off the fat of the Paris land. Fringe societies are found inside and all around the luxuries of rich nations.

For one drunk, Grantaire, to drink is enough when revolutionaries are shedding blood in the beautiful June.

I criticize, but I don’t insult. I’m speaking here without malice and to ease my conscience. Receive, Father Eternal, the assurance of my distinguished respects. Oh! By all saints of Olympus and by all gods of Paradise, I wasn’t made to be a Parisian, that is to say, to ricochet forever, like a shuttlecock between two rackets, from the company of loafers to the company of rioters! I was made to be a Turk looking on all day long at Oriental hussies performing those exquisite Egyptian dances.

More wine drinking from a drunk wiseman who gets a lovely girl pregnant and leaves her to resume his lawyering. This is Tholomyes:

Down with wisdom! Forget all I’ve said. Let’s be neither prudes, nor prudent! I drink to joy; let’s be joyful. Let’s finish our course of study with folly and food. Indigestion and the Digest. The world is one big diamonds and I’m happy!

The all over the place points elsewhere in the rant contradict each other, and he uses none of his knowledge for noble deeds done by the likes of other characters in the novel who have the economic odds stacked against them. Like some of the Bud, Pacifico drinkers in Slacker, one could say that these two characters from Hugo’s world are wasting their intelligences.

That may be the biggest challenge that faces us: how to apply the knowledge we glean from others, school or elsewhere. We may be lucky if we find one application a year that contributes to the greater good. A film like Linklater's is good because it poses questions that most films don't give a shit about. It holds a window to you in hopes that you realize that you're own intelligence is unique and open, it could be wasted by your employer or you can own it and find avenues for independent expression (as Linklater and Hugo have) or you can search for….Well we are always searching aren’t we?

I think for Hugo what makes Paris great is that its young people are always so aware of their potential that they riot when they perceive society to be unjust, wasting their potential. Take the recent example of rioters. Kids were not getting jobs after college because old folks weren't leaving theirs. Their intellegences were being wasted, as they saw it and the young folks held protest in and around The Sorbonne.

Throw Hugo's freedom fighters in America and they will risk being strangled and pacified by internet and a pair of headphones, as I am right now. It's the 21st century, Thom Yorke is telling me.

There is this constant struggle of tone in the book between terrible and beautiful. It is beautiful to be a watchdog over society, and it is terrible when the group takes indignation way past the shoreline where unnecessary death is the result of the wave of protest. In which case Wannabe Dosteyfsky says, "I told you so!"

Paris is both those things, terrible and beautiful (as Yeats also said of Dublin, Ireland 1919). Riots are destructive, and little tragedies spurn from them, but they are the soul of Paris. And the people who so thrive to put ideas into action are beautiful in spirit. Some of these actions, Hugo says, have made Paris “The light of the world" (and certainly the American Revolution and the French Rev that the fighters in Hugos are nostalgic for are spiritual kin).

And it can be said that Slacker was the light of independent film in the early nineties, showing what young people could do with their energy, a camera and $20,000 bucks.

So how shall we find this balance? What are you going to do with your knowledge?

At the Movies: South Land Tales

2008-05-21T19:10:00.000-07:00

(May read like Greek if you haven't seen this film)

I suppose there are dozens of angles I could use to approach this sprawling, weird "tale."

First, I will say that it opened my eyes to talent that I once would have dismissed. Watching the star power of Sean William Scott, who flexes some nice subtle acting chops here, Duane (The Rock) Johnson and Justin Timberlake was something of a pleasure.

Second, an independent voice in the director Richard Kelly who boggled my imagination in high school with his film Donnie Darko. I'm tempted to put him in the arena with David Gordon Green, Gus Van Sant and Paul Thomas Anderson as uncompromising, lyrical directors. But Kelly has some focusing to do. But he's got the lyrical part down, and that's important.

This film has a doomsday plot that's, like Darko, hard to follow, and probably takes a few viewings for the average viewer to nail down.

But it's not really worth it. The movie takes so many chances visually, comedically, etc. The audacity, the nerve that this film has is incredible. I still can't believe it got made. And I don't exactly recommend it for all. It got boo'd at Cannes and it made no money (this it shares company with every other movie made which concerns the current war in Iraq).

The only angle I can focus on I think is the Iraq one, because it is the one plot thread that is grounded in some serious realism. Justin Timberlake and Stilfer (I'll take the liberty to call him) got back from Fallujah. This immediately resonated with me because I met at Chicago O'Hare airport a careful speaking black man who was a veteran of that foggy battle, or "push." He drained 3 margaritas during our short talk.

"Full Metal Jacket shit," I remember him telling me.

And when the shit is fucked up, why not be an anarchist in terms of addressing this issue on film terms. Kelly has a get-even tale in store for his characters, and it's the first movie i've seen that has fun with the war in a way that's still pretty indignant. It may be my favorite of the pictures though I haven't seen Kimberly Pierce's Stop Less yet.

One of the veterans in the film uses a kind of Soma (there are Huxley and Orwellian plot constructs at work in this film it can probably go without saying), and another character is a Soma, dreamy and numb, and he's been thwarted through time in a real scientific time portal kind of way. But any young man who sees the shit they see over there, are they not funneled into a weird portal that will warp their sense of time and place for the rest of their lives?

Southland Tales exists in a place that's science fiction, but not really. And this very contemporary part of the film made it very alive for me.

The film has a lot of crazy ideas and they are delivered in a plot that fails gorgeously. I'm willing to bet this film will endure as a kind of cult classic.

And the soundtrack kicks ass with its Moby, Pixie's B-sides and John Cale-d out National Anthem

At it's core, it's about our boys over there and the ones who make it back here, here being a place full of equal risk, violence, turmoil in this film.

Timberlake is a third man kind of character, you hear him but you don't meet him until near the end. That's when Mr. Kelly delivers a master stroke, a music video (a medium comprised of our language), a dream sequence that manages to speak for the young man's angst for this 5 years and going war and the young man's determination to fight against this war. JT is lip synching a song that's not his, and I can't reveal the song here.

He has made a kind of rock star sacrifice, showing the kid's got some serious pop culture savvy brains. His lip synching, the way it is presented for 2-3 minutes in this film, transports you out of the realm of plot and maybe even film. I'm pretty sure that for this 2-3 minutes film we are seeing art. That is this scene does what art is supposed to do. Says the things a lot of us feel, forget we feel, and then remember we feel it intensely when the art in question shows it to us, puts in our face. It's essential.

And the director doesn't care where it came from, he put it there and stood by it the way a good pimp stands by his ho. And since pimps never commit suicide, I trust Richard Kelly will keep making interesting films.

A Beautiful Day In The...

2008-05-19T18:31:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending the debut of Sunshine Bear and the release of a new EP from the dependable El Paso Hot Button.

But Saturday The Neighborhood made a permanent imprint on my musical consciousness. I rocked myself sweaty during their set.

I can say they are the most exciting band to watch in Oklahoma right now, and, from what I hear, Tyson Meade (DJ extraordinaire and former Chainsaw Kitten) thinks the same. He was gushing over a recent Neighborhood performance (seen here at Norman music festival/photo by Evan French, stolen off Facebook by Danny Marroquin).

Matt Duckworth's drums remind me of Death from Above 1979 in its different intensities and rhythms. The interplay between band mates is great. Phil Rice's vocals are sterling. The 3 piece manage to keep the sound slim enough to where you can enjoy each element, much the same way Vampire Weekend (who opened for The Neighborhood) and The Strokes command attention on first listen. Those bands have a sound that blew up fast, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the same happen with these guys.

Saturday they busted out The White Stripes "When I Hear My Name" and I almost rocked my head off. Their album Our Voices Choked with Fireworks is good, but the live show is better.

So if you get the chance to see these guys, go see them before they break out. I know I will again.

Book of the Week

2008-05-14T20:17:00.000-07:00

Yeah. Papa Ernest. Some people were just born with a writerly name.

One of my former colleagues said she makes room for a reading of "Old Man and the Sea" once a year, to remind herself of beautiful language.

I immidiately retreated to Barnes and Noble and read it in three separate sittings over three cups of coffee. And, I came away with a lot more than I did in 6th grade, when the book put me to sleep.

There's a lot one could dissect. The Big Blue Marlin is a metaphor for his career. But I guess every one has their big blue marlin. There's one big thing we want, and when we get it, it gets eaten by sharks. Life is hard for the fisherman. But the art of fishing, the beauty of the beast, the respect, the gamesmanship is where the thrill lies, not the outcome.

Others draw Biblical allusions to the Santiago character as he falls asleep with palms up and arms spread out.

All these things are fun to ponder. But the story is about a man with passion, a man who notices every trade wind, every fish and bird, a man who knows the environment. And that's what really stood out to me because I think our new generation of writers may not be so perceptive of nature in the way the old schoolers well. How well Hemingway can precisely describe the movements of the sea. And his word choices always feel right. I've never read the word "garbage" like I have today when I found it in the last ten pages of this novella.

I think he said himself that he tried to write about a real situation, a real man, a real boy. And if he did that, made things real, then others could seek meaning in it.

Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize for this, and it is a fitting last triumph. It feels like the work of an aged man (I wish I wasn't alone, but growing old is to grow alone, I think is the line where Santiago is reflecting on his age).

Favorite Line (approximately): Dimaggio was once poor like us, I bet the great Dimaggio would fish with us.

Recommended.

The Car Test

2008-05-11T10:03:00.000-07:00

Recently I've acquired. Two of them pass the road test. Well three. I was going to take Death Cab in the Buick to Lake Thunderbird but a thunderstorm won the day there. The new Billy Bragg felt a bit like age, while the new Black Keys haunts the blind spots of your mind just as much as it rocks. It's been the second highest rotation. Pitchfork rec. World's Tallest Man and his excellent Shallow Graves LP appeals to my Bob Dylan piety. It's kind of like "Freewheelin."

The recent playlist in descending order of times played.

1. Death Cab for Cutie- Narrow Stairs (* Grapevine Fire is a high water mark)

2. The Black Keys- Attack & Release

3. The World's Tallest Man- Shallow Graves

4. Neva Dinova- You May Already Be Dreaming (interviewed them)

5. Tom Waits- Orphans, Brawlers, Bastards (coming to Oklahoma! There's a song about a North Carolina diner on here that'll tear your heart out and pour scalding hot brown stuff on it)

6. Coldplay- Violet Hill (new layers of sound for the band; Produced by Eno and it shows!; also announced they'll be coming; can't wait to hear the rest of this; wonder if the French approve of having a Delacroix splattered on like this....)

7. The Fugs- "Boobs a lot" (Ben Clack of Dark Meat admitted the Fugs are a big influence on their own psychadelic sound. I recommend catching them this week at the Conservatory in OKC. 17 folks on stage blowing horns and yelling and playing blues licks).

The Readers

2008-05-09T00:46:00.000-07:00

Now seems as good enough time as any to address the issue of books.
On this point I agree with the Texas born, and Texas livin,’ author Larry McMurtry. One of the pleasures of having a library is that you can have these books around to look at in anticipation for the actual reading. The German philosopher Walter Benjamin called this “the aura of reading.”
In the same book of essays McMurtry calls Edmund Wilson (a giant of a lit critic whose personal library can now be seen at The University of Tulsa) an “accumulator” of literature not a “collector.”

I have been an accumulator of literature since I picked up a copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s “the Rum Diary” and was given a copy of “ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” by James Joyce that I had to give back after a class discussion (which somehow compelled one classmate to draw a parallel to the film Ghost Ship, a movie I’ll never see but perhaps should/ I did later call this kid a dick in front of a class and teacher but that‘s because he said my Pony Press editorial needed “an editor,” which it needed 5).

I remember disliking having to give back The Joyce. I have made up for it by collecting books I want to read in earnest and by going to Ireland to pay tribute to Mr. Joyce, unfortunately he had broken egg shells dripping rain water over his dandy bronzed shoes.

My hoarding is something of an extension of the enthusiasm I held for these two books the first time I read them, 12th grade. And still my accumulating leads me to similar joys. I haven’t felt so good in recent years as when I sat on my Target futon next to the cracked window of my living room in the early sunlight, finishing McMurtry’s “Terms of Endearment.” It told a good story. Who needs a job when you have books., and when you still don’t really know what a good story is!

Reading Thomas Wolffe’s Look Homeward Angel on the bench between Bizzell Library and Evans Hall felt particularly memorable. Borrowing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise from my friend James and connecting its narrative to my own college experience. Leave it to Kurtz to pick the best of the best writers to read for his book of the year. Getting AR points in middle school for John Grisham books. Tears for poor Holden Caulfield. Listening to professor Masopust read Homer and seeing how many sticky notes he fit in it. Reading The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay on the Crimson red wood planks of my old Emelyn front porch. Finally finding a Faulkner (As I Lay Dying) I could understand at Lake Thunderbird.

I like to go back to books as well, find things. My collecting, and I’ll steal a metaphor from McMurtry here, is the river my mind has traveled. In my life bodily obligations always interrupt things. I need to find a career, I need to work, I need to keep tending to my inherent social itch, a garden is on the way. But like McMurtry, I truly discovered that reading was a pleasure that would be central to my well-being, or personal sense of satisfaction, for the rest of my life. It probably also something to do with the fact that I get sick of people but I don’t get sick of them. Even when I’m alone, I want to meet some more people.

To play with the stereotype of the bookish worm that Jim James of My Morning Jacket excellently has fun with in the new song “Librarian:“ I don’t care what any one says, if you are good reader, you are a people person. You just might not be letting the 9-5 world know that you are.

I don’t fully make sense of all the things I read, I can’t finish a crossword puzzle, I’m given to pacing and taking walks. I like beer. I read 3 at a time sometimes. For instance I’m reading my friend James Nghiem’s novel, another friend’s screenplay, “Walter Benjamin and The Dairy Queen” by McMurtry, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserable…and I’m hearing Tom Yorke’s ominous generalizations on “In Rainbows” on a speaker somewhere off.

It’s really no wonder that I always drop shit and no one I can think of really depends on me to finish anything, ever.

But, going back to the library, all of these half read books bring me comfort. They are pleasures to be enjoyed at a later time. And I have met people with similar feelings about books. Some of these I have envied for their intellect and talent and discipline, some I have studied under. Most of them are my friends.

I find that when going back to a favorite book, or disc you are reminded of the people who have created these things. You realize that they were once young, and they once walked the earth and had the same suspicions about the outside world that you and your little case of phobias have right now. And you remember that they created. It probably hurt, it probably required sacrifice. But hey left their work for you. Writers are often perceived as egoists, but not to the point to reverse this fact: they have left something for you.

McMurtry talks about how literature classes mean nothing to him. He looks for the great readers. The mark of a great reader is someone who can give you something you never would’ve dreamed of, something that slips through the “market place” and the “academy.”
This is where my status as “a reader” falls by the wayside. I’m still very curious about getting caught up with the academy choices, and that has been the single biggest flaw in my reading. I hope this John Wesley Harding book will help get me out of it.

And all I’ve had is the market place. But I do consider many people who have peopled my life to be “readers” just the same. And they have given me books to put atop my tower of babel in my home that I wouldn’t give up for the world.

So I hope that you will know who “the readers” are and I hope you look for them. Because there are lot of things you don’t know about civilization, deserts, rivers, cooking, redemption, football, India and other things. Gotta find your readers.

(In the photo above) McMurtry says Susan Sontag, S.T. Coleridge are great readers, the former he has known, the later sets the precedent for every reader.

My friend Jimmy (in green) reads everything; his area of emphasis is in Southern matters. He has introduced me to more ideas of theosophy and philosophy than I thought I’d encounter at this point. He’s not ashamed of the popular fiction. When I gave him a Wilco album, he came back with his own Five Theses on the lyrics of Jeff Tweedy. Not so many music discussions that I have get penetrating so quickly.

The man doesn’t fuck around. He always has a book. He’s one friend I’ve continued to trust and consult on political matters as well, since the English class we took on Wordsworth and Coleridge. He’s also a Calvinist, and that takes a certain kind of discipline that you need to look for when finding the readers of the world.

I know that my friend Hunter S. was a reader. He pointed me toward all kinds of good stuff: Faulkner’s Barn Burning, Woody Guthrie, Norman Mailer, the old testament, Howl by Ginsberg. He made a point to put his reading life into his journalism, which has always made for good reading for this searcher. My friend Jimmy reads everything.

Chuck Klosterman does it. As Radiohead slivers out of my left ear I remember his words, more than any other I have read on the band: “Hanging out with Radiohead is a lot like smoking pot with librarians.” Do I remember these words better than Pitchfork’s because Chuck is a real reader and has read enough to see where people err and when they write a word that sticks? Maybe. When Chuck left Oxford, they sent him home with a book, and of course he referenced the book--passing his readerliness to other readers whether they liked it or not.

When I sit back and look at my library I like to think that I will read all of them. I know I won’t. But I’m still glad I have them. My friend Moneybags left my home with some Salinger and I’m sending Hesse to Big D Carter. Austin is reading Camus but not because of me. I’ll probably send some McMurtry to my Germans, whether they like it or not. These transactions are also a part of this river.

I would like to celebrate some of the “readers” I have met in my lifetime. I would turn to these people for a recommendation or I have noticed how they have carried books through their life in a way I perceived as meaningful to them. If you’re not on here, you probably should be, it is 1:42 a.m., as I post this late night reverie. I offer apologies now.

The Great Readers of my Young Life

The folks at blog.largeheartedboy.com. Their 52 books in 52 days series really helped me clue into the contemporary scene.

Jimmy Williamson- The man recently mourned my scuffed up John Coltrane CD. And he was right, this was a sad loss.

Terry Shiftsfleer- This man had read all kinds of hip American writers I hadn't touched yet like Jonathan Lethem! Tim doesn't go out a lot ("I have all these books!"). He's well versed in all the political philosophies. and like me he's not afriad to fumble his fries at McDonalds. Met him in Ireland, learned much about much especially life in Germany from him.

Meike Broscinski- She will teach literature in Germany. Her favorite author, or the one she talks about with me is Nick Hornby and Irvine Welsh. My time in Ireland was marked with books and talks about books with my new European friends. Meike was one of those who became distressed that she could not read everything and I can count on her for a list of “Book’s I’ve Read.”

Jasmin Ostermeyer- German. Bad horror movies and Bertolt Brecht. She was familiar with a world I never knew, but we still got on. She’s also working to be a lit teach in Germany. Like Meike, has written for the public.

Recommends things to me that I look at longingly. Someday.

Chris Steffen (staffer at Rolling Stone, former Daily colleague): Steffen would go out of his way to hassle real writers for Daily stories. Steve Almond he interviewed and published a story on the state of contemporary literature. I don’t know who read it, but Steffen enjoyed the interview. First person I met to trash Dave Eggers. He had Kerouac on his trip with a band on the road and his library is also a stack of books he will never get to. I can always count on him to talk about music biographies. Elvis, Sam cooke, Neil Young, etc.

Mrs. June Page- The teacher who let me borrow Portrait of the artist and gave me a few good marks and some bad ones. She has read everything. Her lecture on melancholy is memorable. Studied at Oxford recently after becoming a nationally certified teacher. Can find 4 copies of the same book and she told me never to read Faulkner, sentences that last a page, she laughed, knowing she loved that shit herself. A good teacher. Raised some good, inquisitive kids.

Allison Meier- Her tastes have influenced me big time lately. In Hugo, her favorite, I see why we have it wrong when we scoff at epics. The European writers created little universes of their novels. She wants to write for the rest of her life. And she has the same holistic ideas of the personal library I have. I now carry in my possession three of her books, and she doesn’t nag me about giving them back, which she should.

Tyler Moneybags Weinrich- He is the target audience for a writer. He can’t read all the time, but when he can he does so he wants a good story. He’s good to have drinks with as well. Knows a good thing when he sees it, I guess.

Stephanie Singer and Shandhini Raidoo- These two roommates talked like characters in some literature that has fallen out of fashion on the American scene. And that’s a good thing. I wouldn’t know Julia Child if it wasn’t for Stephanie and I don’t think of Marquez without thinking of Shan welcoming her summer with “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” And of course Steph was in love with “Love in a Time of Cholera.” Conan Doyle, Alan Dershowitz the lawyer and a book about a farm came from this place. Their curiosities seem bottomless.

Cati Harris- Girl carries a book with her everywhere. Worked at WLT. Knows a shit ton about Russian writers, speaks it too. She is well versed in the oral tradition as well. She’s kind of a traveler, wanderer and is able to articulate her misadventures very well.

Damon Akins- Always carried a book, shunned Newspapers. Lived in the land of the Frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner style. I’ve never seen such dense essay test questions. Could only be from a bookish American Frontier Professor. Also an indie rock pedant who teaches his kid Deerhoof songs.

Gene Perry- Wrote a sci fi novel when he was 12, or tried too. Like to talk about strange literary facts at parties, like how no one could make sense of the manuscript that Ralph Ellison left behind.

Nate Weygant- Because he truly wants to know how Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon would’ve turned out. Claims to shun fiction.

Rita Kerezstesi- My favorite person from the literature department at OU. Seems to have read everything. Loved her thoughts on black literature, her angles seemed fresh (Booker T Washington as a trickster figure? Never thought of that). Had a sense of humor about the real “important” writers like Eliot. Very concerned with Faulkner. Talked about geography a lot, different places she’d been. Why communist architecture sucks, why graffiti in Brazil is interesting. That was good.

Honorable Mentions:

Jess Brown- Parties too much. But loves to find new books and encourage poetry talks among other Norman kids. Gave me The People, Yes! And some regional stuff. Loves the road.

Connoly and Connoly's Used Book Sellers (Cork, Ireland).

Man was an Orwell junkie. We went through passages of Why I Write together while he smoked his pipe under an awning in the rain. It was again confirmed that my study abroad experience was complete. He preferred Wolffe and HST, probably because the proper thing. Good set up, disorganized.

Wilder- Wilder knows Latin, or will.

Darren Carter- Just beginning to wade in the waters.

Lindsey Brend- I feel this one does most of her reading on the internet. But you can always find something interesting to read at her place.

Josh Stoops- A college career and a dose of Kerouac has turned Stoops into a promising explorer.

Baxter Holmes- A sports writers encyclopedia. Studies the cigar chompin' old timers and the David Halberstam stuff. Keeps a book in each room his house, like stations. book on the toilet. Book in the parlor room next to the big exercise ball, three books by the bed. And a book for the TV room.

Mr. Burns- It has been 20 years since Burns was an avid reader. He did a lot of Ayn Rand and all American history. Wars. He’s a Korean War veteran himself with a biting wit who loves kids though he won’t admit it. I never have seen a person handle wild kids so gracefully. He’s got panache. Bought him some Hemingway because Bogey played in the movie. And he looks to kick start his reading again after he retires in 15 days.

Chris Dearner- The man is books. Versed in computer language and Steve Earle on the side.

Old Oklahoma, in signs

2008-05-07T12:38:00.000-07:00

I drive around a lot. And I have a camera. So I thought I'd put pictures of signs and things I thought stood the test of time here in my home state.

Some were taken in Kingfisher and Binger while storm chasing. Others in Guthrie. Still others on the north side of Oklahoma City where I have worked the past months.

The gas pumps are from Mustang!

Here's the flikr link:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dannymarr67/

Election Night coverage

2008-05-06T23:59:00.000-07:00

I won't blab too much about this night. There are plenty of professional bloggers out there. I saw two of 5 pundits pulling out their own Apples on the way to a commercial breaks. Keith Olberman read from the Washington Post blog on the air.

But it seemed over for Hillary Clinton to me during her half hearted pre-victory (it was still unsure at the time) speech. Her voice was flat. And look at Bill! You can't see it here, but he looked deflated and bored. This looked like a campaign on its last tottering wheel.

Though Wolf Blitzer over at CNN prefaced his lead-ins with "CNN is the best political team ever!" kind of tags, I thought MSNBC was the place to go. There was simply more reporting. Tim Russert has talked to everyone and can even give us a "sense" of the voices of the people he talks to. Chuck Todd gave his red marker "back of the napkin" calculations, county by county, super delegate by super delegate. Olberman and Chris Matthews try to one up each other with obscure references and metaphors. That is balanced by the solid analysis of Todd and Russert.
Put them together, great night of political TV.

Skinny Guys Move a Ton

2008-05-06T01:19:00.000-07:00

Exciting weekend.

My man James let me know that Andy Nunez, owner of Opolis, needed help moving a storage unit into his back yard. The thing was huge.

The pay was Pizza Shuttle and Miller High Life, a combination that never let me down before. It felt pretty old school to work directly for your meal.

I've always known Andy to be a good businessman and a fine drummer, but he really is the kind of guy with the vision to watch the History channel and put what he sees into action.

We moved the yellow box by placing it on 4 PVC pipes and rolling it, Egyptian style. When the back of the box reached the end pipe, the pipe was removed and placed at the front of the box.

With steering it took a few hours, but it was fun to watch the plan work out.

We successfully pushed the box safely into a discreet tree shading in the back yard, as you can see. Andy said if he was 20 he could live in it.

There were 8 guys or so. Most of us were not the biggest. We started with only one jack, that's why James has that towell there, to protect his hands from intense pressure.

Andy's brother worked the jack and gave directions while guys from The Separation and a nice fella with good sideburns pushed as well.

This along with the garden I've been digging have given me a good chance to work with the earth and my hands. More on the garden in another installment....

Am I My Brother's Keeper?

2008-05-01T09:56:00.000-07:00

I must warn that a good deal of postings will concern films. There will be subjects like forgotten films, cult classics, book of the week. I'll engage with the pieces of media I come across randomly. The more I stray away from arts reporting, the more you'll see about flicks on the NMYP.

I'd lump this entry under the forgotten films category.

Today on cable TV I found two not so well reviewed films that pitted brother against brother. In The Hi Lo Country a big King Ranch style ranching operation splits a town in two between authentic cowboys and company men who gave up the cattle drive lifestyle. Big Boy (Woody Harrelson) and his brother LV (Cole Hauser) don't get along when LV takes a job with the big money ranch when Big Boy is off to WWII being a hero.

In Undertow, the third film by the young prodigy Green, who has so far specialized in films about down home people in the South, tells the story of a psycho (Swet Home Alabama's Josh Lucas in a welcome change of tone) comes after his brother Del (Dermot Mulroney) who has taken his own family into hiding in the sticks of Georgia (somewhere near Savannah). The brothers have some issues to settle and things get pretty rough.

Green is obviously exploring new film techniques in Undertow. He freezes frames, uses the spooky score of composer Philip Glass to give the banjo acoustic music an otherworldly quality. He also explores themes from old American literature. When the boy (Billy Elliot star Jamie Bell) flees from his home and takes to the road we are taken on a weird southern odyssey. He meets a black family that feeds him and his brother pot pie, befriends some orphan girls, stealing goods from rickety corner stores along the way.

This part of the plot feels downright Huck Finn. The family head Dermot Mulroney also talks to his boys about a mythical river man of Hades and how he takes the Gold Coins from the dead as price of admittance. Del's father stole these coins and give them to his son. Psycho brother is after these coins, which Del keeps in hiding.

This feels confusing upon first viewing, but I kept in mind that in this film, like all of Green's, people in his universe tell jokes and stories orally. There is no video games or internet. Emphasis is placed on the story and the humans who must interact with each other to tell them. This concern of Green's will lead him toward more literary themes.

In Undertow as in Faulkner the past always comes bubbling up to the surface of the present.

Lastly, I'll comment on a scene at the end of the film. Our Huck Finn meets a pretty orphan girl with a flare for junkyard fashion.

They drain a green bottle of wine together. Most kids would throw the bottle away in the trash or in the woods. But there girl asks him for a piece of paper and a writing instrument. "Writer your wish," she tells him. They both write a wish, place it in a bottle. And the girl throws it in the river. If the bottle reaches the ocean, which can be rare, the wishes will come true.

There is no trash to Green. He uses every resource to put meaning to it. The guys working in the Marina, an abandoned green house, a junkyard tuba. Like Tom Waits and his incorporation of junkyard things into his music productions.

And both of these men have been dubbed "American" artists. Is the only way to become a poet laureate in America to film shots and write verse about junk?

Naw, there's more here. Green deals with stories about family (the ones we are stuck with and the ones we make out of our own experience) told in a natural landscape, with rivers and woods and scraps that more wasteful sorts have discarded-- and only kids have the imagination to put meaning into these things again.

The first film was a modern Western directed by Stephen Frears (The Queen) called Hi Lo Country. This film is worth checking out for Woody Harrelson's (sp.) performance. He eats up the screen as Big Boy, the cowboy who refuses to get any job in the Post WWII economy that doesn't concern the cattle drive "Cowboyin' is fun!." Also there's some great swing country music in it.
Sam Peckinpah wanted to make this film, but he never got around to it. Martin Scorsese put up some cash for it too, I think with Papa Peck in mind.
I think this film is out of print, but if you like bull fighting, Coca Cola in the bottle, Hank Williams and Bob Wills, whiskey drinking poker players, blue skies and a big sounding score it may be for you.

Both of these films are not perfect. The acting isn't always so hot in Hi Lo Country and Undertow is so bleak and you don't see what Green does best (young love) until the third act of the film when two orphans meet and wander about together. And people don't really go to the movies to watch kids dig around in a junkyard (another stopping point in the Undertow odyssey).

But these are ambitious films, and I enjoyed them. The fact that I watched two films with such Biblical themes (Cain and Abel) on the T-V seemed strange and rewarding.

A Yesterday's Paper

2008-04-29T22:33:00.000-07:00

I forgot to show you what a Yesterday's Paper looks like. Here you go. This one's from the beloved U.S. state I've never been to, North Carolina.

Welcome, things to come

2008-04-29T21:59:00.000-07:00

Hello.

This is a place where you'll be able to find bits and pieces of my world that don't make it into any other kind of print or conversation I may have had with you. This may include bits of freestyle music writing, a photo, a back road that looks good in the sun, a link to a news article.

It will also be an annex of sorts for my own reporting. Here, you may find excess verbal spew from an assigned story that didn't make it onto the web site or publication (full transcripts, sidebars and thoughts).

The title refers to the state of "the media" today, as they say (newspapers will die out, I heard in school). I don't quite believe it. The title just acknowledges that most folks are online these days visiting places like this full of all kinds perspective, political party lines, ideas, hobbies, marriage advice, etc. It is also a reference to the Rolling Stones song "Yesterday's Papers" from a favorite RS album "Between the Buttons." I hope this can be a place where I can report. I see the blogspot as a way of expanding my ambition to write about the things I see.

You will find I'm a bit nostalgic for older things, at times. My first link will be a magazine article on Chris Matthews. A feeling of sadness comes over me. Any one who quotes Hemingway and Fitzgerald so often, off-air and on, will earn cynic scolds from members of The Colbert Nation. But I for one will raise at least one whiskey on the rocks to the green light of political reporting that Chris Matthews looks at. He's fun to watch.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/magazine/13matthews-t.html

As far as my own work, I have a few things on the burner....

Delusions of Adequacy recently published my slightly unfair and meandering review of The Mars Volta's concert at Cain's Ballroom in Tulsa.

http://adequacy.net/review.php?reviewID=8667

I am currently reviewing the new album from the act Okay.

An interview with Ola Podria artist and composer of scores for David Gordon Green films (Snow Angels, All the Real Girls, Pineapple Express, George Washington, Undertow) will discuss the art of scoring films, and what it's like to work with your childhood friend on these films. This will be a good one to run on the Delusions site.

If you go to restaurants or bars in Norman, OKC or Edmond pick up a Gazette. I'll be writing music stories for them. First ones will appear the week of May 14 with a story on El Paso Hot Button and a visiting band called Dark Meat.

Come on back now!