Additions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 --------->

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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