9:20PM this evening

Tonight at the bus stop at Geneva and Naples, I let out the sort of loud hooting laugh that I do when I really can't help it. Immediately I looked around and noticed a pretty young Asian girl to my left, and I felt slightly embarrassed (NOTE: NOT BECAUSE I WANTED TO MAKE IT WITH HER. SHE IS LIKE SEVENTEEN OR SOMETHING). But then I saw that she was safely ensconced in iPodland, and had most likely not heard me. I returned to the book that had inspired the maniacal cackle in the first place. After a moment, I caught movement from the corner of my eye. I glanced back at the girl to find her doing a sort of awkward shuffling, bouncing sort of hip hop kind of dance (I suppose, like I said, she's like seventeen, and that age group falls well without the bounds of my knowledge of terpsichorean taxonomy). She has a huge black purse under one arm and a heavy blue plaid backpack, so it can't be said that her dancing was entirely graceful, but it seemed fairly rhythmic, and certainly enthusiastic. And it was all of the sudden this beautiful moment, where I don't care if she hears my stupid laugh and she doesn't care if I see her (let's be fair) goofy dancing. And then the bus comes.

Imaginary music, 2

Scholars of the American Delta Blues are notoriously as fickle in their allegiances as a high school lunch room. The discovery of a stack of warped 78 rpm records by an obscure songster will be fêted in the obscure mimeographed journals that are the lifesblood of the field. Cassette tapes will be traded, and thousands of words will unfold in contrarian letters and in heated posts on internet forums. Sooner or later, the most marketable of these forgotten artists filter in to the mainstream. With luck, an expensive boxed set of that artist's works will eventually follow, usually with a fulsome essay or two by one of the critical eminenses grises of the blues field. Adulation and Grammy to follow. After a few years of this, there will in invariably a backlash, and the artist will be found to be derivative of some newly-discovered predecessor, their songs trite, their former critical praise rooted in some complex form of racism that takes ten years of calculus and a very sharp knife to understand.

This tendency may have reached its pinnacle in the recent lionization of Blind Pat Morita Jones. Jones may or may not have been a native of Greasetrap, Mississippi, born around 1895 (there is a burgeoning literature devoted singly to the issue of his birthdate. Some scholars believe him to have been born at least six centuries previous to this date). He was apparently the master of a sort of homemade ukelele fabricated from a cigar box and, according to Lomax, the femur of Leadbelly's uncle Rex. This is all highly speculative. In the thousands of hours of interviews done by various folklorists with his putative contemporaries, no one so much as mentions him in passing. There is no birth certificate or gravesite. And in spite of the best efforts of several anthropology faculties, no descendants have been uncovered.

There are no extant recordings of Jones' work. Some authorities believe that he at one point had a record contract, or at least had heard of one. Two years ago there was a moment of delirious academic excitement when Dr. Ted Bissup of the University of Toronto claimed to have evidence that the notorious "lost" Comanche singles (CR 105-108), always listed in the contemporary catalogs with a blank where the artist and title information should be, were in fact Blind Pat Morita Jones recordings. This theory remained current until the discovery of a test pressing of CR-107, which proved to be a pornographic recording geared towards the nascent rubber fetishist niche market, far-sighted marketing well in line with what this writer described in The Comanche Story: The Story of Comanche Records (Tulpa Press, 2007). Nevertheless, Arthur Q. Lomax (no relation) is hard at work on a boxed set of the Complete Blind Pat Morita Jones. The theory at work there is that any of the handful of structures still standing that may have been roadhouses where Jones may or may not have played (see "Is You is or Is You Ain't Mama Joon's Saloon," Delta Blues News and Review June 2002) contain in their very walls some acoustic artifact of the theoretical performance or performances, in that the soundwaves emitted necessarily caused infinitessimal changes in the structure of the building. At the time of this writing, there is no information available concerning the technology that will be used to reconstruct Jones' music from the decades of layers that these phenomena have been overlaid by other acoustic evernt, or even if such technology is at all possible.

In related work, Dr. Denis Donadieu is currently engaged in a tentative reconstruction of Blind Pat Morita Jones' lyrics, based on a subtractive analysis of back numbers of Colliers magazine, the dimensions of contemporary McCormick harvester blades, and a computer-generated composite model of the performers who might have been Jones' inspirations. A sample verse:

Baby [...]
[...]
[...]treefrog[...]
Well pemmican wine[...]
[...]mm-hmmm.

As you can see, there are more exciting developments to come.

this is beautiful

Jonathan Coulton's "I'm Still Alive" performed by the famous-on-the-internet Molly, a.k.a. Sweetafton23.

boris videos

A Bao A Qu
When people ask me (they don't, but humor me) why I like Boris, the above pretty much sums it up. Yeah, it's metal. There is some shredding and some tearing a trapset a new asshole. But it's so dreamlike, so enveloping. I love the way that they can manage to make metal feel like modernist poetry. Yes folks, you read it here first: Boris is the Wallace Stevens of metal.


Flower Sun Rain
Or maybe this one, apparently a live Merzbow mix of "Flower Sun Rain" from Rock Dream. To be so aggressively noisy and so damned pretty at the same time.


Rainbow
Or just plain pretty.


Ibitsu
But then again, if I was a Boris video, "Ibitsu" would be me.

Imaginary musical genres, 1

As a sort of thought exercise, I have been trying to come up with a few imaginary genres of music that do not yet exist. The first one is

Greasecore

Car culture has for too long been caught up in the flamejob, hellbilly, Bettie Page bangs thing. As our culture of excess begins to devour itself, it seems natural that automobile enthusiasts must, like their hobby, change or die. I am envisioning a grafting of the motorhead, hotrodder scene with the blazing zealotry of some aspects of the alternative fuel movement. Yes, I run my car on stale fryer grease, but man does it go!

The cheeseball hippy bullshit and defanged world music preferred by the current biodiesel acolytes will most emphatically NOT transfer to the custom car crowd (should it be Kustom Kar Krowd?), whether they are more Big Daddy Roth, or more Lowrider Magazine. What is needed is a fusion of the amphetamine-crazed spirit of the subculture with the utopian vision that is their only hope for salvation. I am envisioning something that combines the perfect aural vistas of classic Kraftwerk with the musique concrete aesthetic of early-period Einsturzende Neubaten, peppered with the sense of danger and abandon of rockabilly (because, really, can you really purge the rockabilly from the hotrod scene?). A sonic dreamscape of a perfect future where the individual can travel wherever they like at breakneck speed, without destroying the world. An epic poetry of automotion, told in the voices of the very machines they love, with the reminder of the grinning face of death (black cat clutching a firecracker on the forehead of a skull with snake-eyes dice in its sockets, skeletal hand wrapped around an 8-ball gearshift wearing a Bettie Page wig) never very far away.

So, if I were a creative person, I would write some gripping content, and not rely upon Youtube videos to make up the bulk of these posts.

This is how I feel most days. Frank Black really does a better job than I can of explaining it all.

Mark E. Smith has made a career of that moment when you're singing a karaoke song that you think you know, and you suddenly realize that you have no idea how the verse goes. Only he writes the songs. I know it sounds like a bloody mess. You should see them live; it all will make sense.
There are a few questions that arise in any assessment of the late '70s U.K. punk rock scene. How did Joy Division become New Order? How did Johnny Rotten have the wherewithal to bring together PIL? And how did Howard Devoto manage to create pop-punk and move on to Magazine?

more wordles

"Ça Plane Pour Moi," by Plastic Bertrand


"Surfin' Bird," by The Trashmen


"The Classical," by The Fall

Han Bennink in Ethiopia

And people say that free improv is inaccessable music.

It's here folks

The summer jam of the year has arrived:

another thing i like

I bought this shortwave radio at Goodwill last week, and I must say that I am mostly disappointed. Instead of the crazy newscasts in unknown languages and cryptic numbers stations that I was eagerly anticipating, I get mostly squelch and static. But we do what we can with what we're given (or purchase for 7.49), and so I am learning to enjoy the odd accidental collaborations that I stumble across. For a few minutes, a piece from a Chinese opera is mangled by ionospheric artifacts, the gongs splashing strangely, as if Joe Meek had been engineering the session, the erhu shattering in and out of audability. Later, a commercial break on what might be a Spanish language radio station, the voices boiled down to a one-note stutter, the only hope for identifying what language is being spoken is by listening to the rhythm of the words, until the fickle kami of radio waves causes this station too, to melt into pink noise.