between my job and the research i’m doing for a prof, i feel like i’m falling in hate with free market economics all over again. i wonder if it’ll make a trot out of me, yet.
i’m interested in exploring an absurd ‘Trots for Romney’ angle in future posts.
i write so few pomes that sometimes i run repeat episodes.
Nobody Bless Me, Please
(for Philip Larkin)
I can’t quite make it – I’m unavailable.
I’ve been detained, you see?
Variables such as this and that proved un-vanquishable.
And all my best wishes and fond ambitions find themselves
reigned in, you understand?
And all your hopes have subsequently waned- pride proved
malleable, stone proved permeable –
And a loss so vibrant some called it electrical
sizzled out into our crowd, reminding us just who is not pliable after all.
And if time is the fancy dandy in charge of who
Ambles up to which place at which table, I fancy
I’ll still try to dine. Willing, if unable, I might
glimpse a sun ray between winces. I might
figure how flesh makes fodder for games of chance,
unfolding willy-nilly
besides fabled reiterations of spirits, moralities,
and so many other, untoward imponderables.
favorite mp3 blog is back online again. maybe i’ll start reading them things again.. maybe just this one and a few others, rather then surveying my bookmark folder of 6million.
perhaps you remebmber months ago the Employee Free Choice Act passed the House. the bill promised to make union elections more fair (i.e., slightly less corrupt than Eastern Bloc ‘elections’)… well the Senate GOP saw to it that said Act died yesterday, and apparently that wasn’t worthy of the front page.
here’s AFL-CIO frontman John Sweeney on the matter. if you believe the contention that 60million Americans would join a union if they could – and i do – there’s something to be said for remembering how much politics goes on beyond the purview of the front page, and how there are plenty of Americans left who cannot even afford sub-prime mortgages yet and haven’t been coddled into apathy by debt-financed suburbo-lethargy.
slobs vs. snobs, people. the snobs own the papers but there’s more of us.
my brother testface has a blog now. you should buy his record doctor…, which sits on the top shelf of eugene albs (next to white hot oddysey.)
but you should just read the blog, too, the guy’s a great wroter.
and speaking of blogging, i am trying to get back into some sort of rhythym. at this point i’m on the cmptr all day, and go outside maybe thrice daily for a coffee. i need to find an mp3 host, but i’m trying to find the time/space to raise questions rather than linking to clips/blips. it also hurts that i don’t want to talk about my job, because that and fam’re so foremost in my mind that i’m hard-pressed for comment.
jordan mp3d some practice recordings of ours the other day, so mebbe i’ll unleash a doubles demo soon.
Chris Brokaw
i cultivate a lot of brownhaired, monotone role models, eh? brokaw is a godfather of the pattyjoe/testface school.
shellac gig notwithstanding, the tara jane o’neil set (feat. brokaw) was the real highlight of touch and go fest.
Husker Du – 22. Diane 9/5/81 7th Street Entry
scary. is that a flange and a chorus? how can you have those high-end shards piercing through the modulations?
the dog shines on a porcelain dog’s back door once in a while, even. similarly, this pitchfork dude’s review of the underwhelming but not bad easy tiger.
the lyrics are totally half-done, which can be good in the sense that i always enjoyed trefz hayden glossing over important plot points with a slap-dash ‘a series of events later…’ but this isn’t that. i’ve felt ryan’s syndrome in my own tiny way, too – what happens when you write too many songs isn’t that the riffs run dry. the problem is that you run out of lyrics. note how bob pollard had shifted to mostly rhyme-driven abstractions before gbv even started releasing records that anyone heard. and tweedy hasn’t really written a memorable (maybe i mean ‘personable’) line since ‘company in my back.’ when i finally get around to addressing sn vlt again, we’ll talk about similar problems on that end (though nowhere near as pronounced as tweedy/ry-ry’s.)
i really like the ’solo album jerry’-ish opening track, though. and the duet w/ crow. it’s really the album tracks that suck.
on the most recent scharpling episode Paul F. Tomkins calls in to answer the show’s topic question – which five people would you least like to have dinner with? – and rounds out his quintet with the two protagonists of the song ‘America’ by Simon and Garfunkel. the comment was so satisfying to me – mebbe i’m not alone in my incoherent, persistent slob/snobbery, i thought – that by the time i’d finished nodding and grinning, i realized that I’d simultaneously figured out just what it is about the Decemberists that annoys me so. what is it preppies think they know about jack kerouac? there’s this sort of LL Bean vanguard-ism that i’ve always associated with New England (i.e. i’ve always loathed.)
new england. i’d even been enjoying some S + G deep cuts lately, and a weird live recording from god knows when, featuring a young paul simon wanking on between songs in a kind of would-be, beatnick dick cavett vibe. i mean, really, paul? it’s fair to say that some early tom waits suffered from this odd kind of beat worship, but tom waits seems like he might have at least known a guy who drove a truck or something at some point.
then i realize that the reason i feel this way (tomkins too, i bet) is of course because i am guiltier (if less accomplished) than all involved of greater contrivances and irrelevant erudition. i’m still glad it’d never occur to me to start making “ethnic” albums, though. but a lot of us did go to college at the University of the South, so really.. nobody gets away clean, you know? which i think is actually a good thing.
