Friday, March 25, 2005

Thursday, March 24, 2005

Vernal Equinox as Birthday

"A great deal of critical rancour has been wasted through a failure to distinguish between two totally different kinds of writing.
A: Books a man reads to develop his capacities: in order to know more and perceive more, and more quickly, than he did before he read them.
and
B: Books that are intended and that serve as REPOSE, dope, opiates, mental beds.

You don't sleep on a hammer or lawn mower, you don't drive nails with a mattress. Why should people go on applying the same critical standards to writings as different in purpose and effect as a lawn mower or sofa cushion?"

Ezra Pound, The ABC of Reading

By this time of year I am often tired of my pants. Shoes, too. Haven't I been wearing the same pair of purplish cords since September? And switching off between my black Danskos and the Vasque trail runners since Christmas?

Winter holds on here in the Midatlantic with dull, stony fingers. And by the end of every winter I truly feel like I've been down in a trench in Ypres sharing my foxhole with a couple of tubercular midgets. We've been trading a cold in this house since before C- went to Egypt in January. This is one evil phenomonon they don't teach you in birth classes. Those parents among us who occupy the higher levels of the parenting guild are sworn to uphold certain codes of secrecy and the utter brutality of this cold-trading cycle is something that we're supposed to keep to ourselves in order to keep the fresh and naive breeding recruits pumping out new humans without any notion of the horrors to follow. But here it is: one kid comes home from school with a cold, not the flu which, when established in a household moves through it as efficiently as any blood-seeking wolf, but the lowly cold: sniffles, itchy throat, swollen sinuses, non-productive cough, general loginess. So Kid 1 comes home with it--usually signalled by coughing in the middle of the night and sleeptalking, two sounds as lonely and blood-chilling as any I could imagine--and about a week later someone else will catch it, usually Adult 1. Only one person. So for a week there will be two sickish people in the house, until Kid 1 starts getting better, at which point Kid 2 will catch the cold. Note that approximately three weeks have elapsed. By the time Adult 2 has caught the cold Kid 1, the original bringer of the cold, will have pretty much gotten rid of it, Adult 1 will be on the mend, while Adult 2 and Kid 2 will be sick with the cold. A month of compromised sleep, endless sniffling and for the adults, the onset of sinusoidal infections. Sweet.

Here's where it gets diabolical: At this point Kid 1 will RECATCH THE COLD. Yes, the cold that he brought into the house a month ago. Either that or he's caught a new one...because, you must understand that throughout these winter months we move among our friends as 17th century Londoners might've, wondering who's hiding their buboes under laters of polyfill. And as Kid 1 recatches the cold, the entire cycle starts again. Our immune systems are completely befuddled, confusedly inviting the cold back into our bodies in a recursive loop...Didn't you just leave? Soon come the dreaded nostril blisters and the full feeling of a band of gypsies living in the caves behind your eyeballs.

Eldest cold-bearer turned 7 on SUnday, March 20, the first day of "spring" in our hemisphere.

Aside from my confusing crush on Elastigirl and being harangued by anonymous former students--Snay, unmask yourself!--I am moving towards SPring with a great sense of purpose and relief. April finds the ANomoanon going on a blessedly short East Coast trip with our cohorts Bonnie and Matt, and sometime soon, maybe even today, I will shave off the winter beard, a tradition that goes back a number of years (I cant remember how many exactly, but let it be know that I not only started the beard fad, but also the goatee fad: I grew my first in 1985 after seeing the picture of Peter Buck on the back of Reckoning).

And also to get my annual haircut.

And now, I leave you with a junk email I received in my yahoo account. THose Nigerian scammers seem to be taking hints from my former students, really having tightened up their narrative focus, gotten rid of the "look how fancily I can make no sense!"- impulse and adding a bit of character-based intrigue into the mix:

FROM: Dr.Joel Williams(PHD),
GRAND FINANCE AND TRUST BANK.
RUE CLUB DE L' AMITIE,
0251 B.P. 1625 COTONOU,
BéNIN REPUBLIQUE.

My Dear Friend,

In Oder to transfer to overseas $28.5 million(USD)
from GRAND FINANCE AND TRUST BANK,Bénin Republique.
I want to ask you to quietly look for a reliable
and honest person who will be capable and fit to provide
either an existing bank account or to set up a new Bank
a/c immediately to receive this money, even an empty a/c
can serve to receive this funds quitely.

I am Dr.Joel Williams(PHD), the accountant/auditor of
the above Finance Corporation in Cotonou,Bénin Republique
and personal confidant to Mr.Alvaro Quesada
of Dominican Republic in Caribbean Island who died in a Plane
Crash accident(2002-04-19) on his way to attend a weddind
ceremony together with his wife and only Child (Alvaro Jr).

Mr.Alvaro Quesada, is From Dominican Republic in Caribbean Island,
and a prosperous Tobacco merchant, he died in the year 2002
without having any beneficiary to his assets including his account
here in Bénin which he opened in the above stated bank in the year
2001 as his personal savings for the purpose of expansion
and developement of his company in Africa before his
untimely death in 2002.Until his death,he was the president
of the Dominican Tobacco Exporters Association.

And from my Investigation,i found out that No other person
knows about this account because he( Mr.Alvaro Quesada )
never knew that he is going to die so soon, and so
his purpose was not achieved. If i don't remit this money
immediately, it will get lost(may be it will go into the
pockets of the corrupt government officials who will never
use it for any reasonable thing at all).
I dont want to miss this opportunity because it comes ones
in a life time.

The amount involved is $28.5 million(USD)Twenty eight
million,five hundred United States Dollars and no other
person knows about this account. I am contacting you for
us to transfer this funds to your account as the beneficiary,
I want to first transfer $16,000.000.00(Sixteen million USD)
from this money into a safe account abroad, after which we
will transfer the remaining (12.5M). I am only contacting
you as a foreigner because this money cannot be approved
to a local person here, without a valid foreign
international passport, but can only be approved to any
foreigner with valid international passport or drivers
license and foreign a/c, this is because the money is in
US Dollars and the former owner of the a/c, Alvaro Quesada
is a foreigner too, and as such the money can only be
approved into a foreign a/c.

However, I am revealing this to you with belief in God
that you will never let me down in this business.I don't
know you and have never seen you before,i only got your
contacts from an international directory which my
secretary provided for me. You are the first and the only
person that I am contacting for this business, so please
reply urgently so that I will inform you the next step to
take. Send also your private telephone and fax number.

I need your full co-operation to make this work because
the management is ready to approve this payment to any
foreigner who has correct information of this account,
which I will give to you, upon your positive response and
once I am convinced that you are capable and will meet up
with instruction of a keybank official who is deeply
involved with me in this business.
I want to tell you that this transaction is 100% risk free
and legal because all the documents that will back up this
transaction will be available, so that no body will
question the fund when it is finaly tranfered to your
account.

At the conclusion of this business, you will be given 40%
of the total amount and 60% will be for me. I look forward
to your earliest reply through this email.

Thanks for your time.

Your's faithfully,

Dr.Joel Williams(PHD,)

Friday, March 11, 2005

Son of Nanook: or, What Is This, the Hollywood Remake?

Thanks to all interested parties, fans or not, who braved the Baffin Bay-like chill we had piped in from the Arctic Circle to Baltimore, in order to attend the Nanook screening at the Creative Alliance. It blew our budget, unfortunately, but was worth it as far as authenticity's sake. Not to mention making our fans happy. And winning over some new ones!

So the day of the show our local Laughing Man Marc Steiner, on his eponymous radio show, interviewed one of the cats from the Alloy Orchestra . It was a fun interview to hear on the very day of the Balt-Ano's debut as silent film accompanists, a genre I am told is incredibly hot right now. The AO, according to Rog "the Mod" Ebert, are the best silent film accompanists ever in the history of the world! (as per the thumb upper/downer, did you know that you actually pronounce his last name in the Cajun fashion, that is, Ay-bare, and not EE-burt? And that, as a boy, he was called Roggie, with a hard 'g'? Yes, it's true: he grew up wrestling tiny alligators in the Delta of Lousiana and did not wear underpants until college). Marc, in his gristly, gravelly, stoned-sounding way asked the AO cat what lessons he'd learned about this new but old means of entertaining the public, that is, playing live to a silent film. What kind of things go wrong? Steiner asked schadenfreudenly. AO, sounding at best like he lived in the bottom of a gigantic tin bucket (WYPR engineers: fix that!), admitted that they'd long ago learned to score/practice to the EXACT PRINT of the film that would be screened during the show. Why? Isn't this copy of Griselda the Forlorn Ragpicker starring Lil Gish the same as that one? Apparently not, chuckles AO. Back when they were tyros, they'd made the mistake of writing and arranging a score and then practicing for weeks (!!?) or months (!!!???!!!) based on and while watching DVD or VHS copies rented from a local store, only to find upon the night of the show that the venue had discovered some ancient film reel of same show, and finding, of course, during the opening moments of the movie, that the old print was totally different from the mastered and pumped up DVD copy they'd based their whole arrangement on. Thereby making their music ridiculous.

I laughed out loud. How funny. What poor preparation! And Roggie called these guys the best...

Then I remembered that we'd been huddling around a brand new DVD playing on a laptop in Ned's basement trying in a very un-ANo-like way to arrange our themes in perfect aural/visual alignment with the action unfolding on the screen...a fanfare-style 'a' to 'g' flourish here when Nanook pulls the snow fox out of the hole, a seamless transition into JB's "It's a Man's World" when they all awake in the igloo and Nanook's cute and very naked wife chews on his sealskin boots in order to make them all warm and deliciously slimy for the Nookster's feet. Could our plans to be perfect be scuttled? Well, we laughed in a manner that, to an objective bystander, would've sounded very confident and exuded our innate sense of the absurdity of all things: the prints the Creative Alliance uses are old-skool reel film, as a matter of fact, and it seemed unlikely that it would be the exact same as the dvd. Who cared if it was a little different, though? We've played together for many years and have been lost onstage more times than any of us could count; God knows it'll be an odd day when the ANo takes the stage having polished our style to any physical state even distantly related to frictionlessness. And, to paraphrase Coltrane, we always seem able to "resolve", to, um, "bring it all (and I mean ALL!) back home."

Are you, dear reader, smellling what is cooking?

The show started and of course first three scenes were completely different than those on the DVD. We'd never seen them before. Like the first five minutes. Our intro theme went out the window. So did Scott's jauntily canine-like "Dog Theme". What the hell? Are those *seal pups* smiling cutely at Flaherty's camera? No, dear God, do not let Nanook club them...Tragedy narrowly averted (thanks Bob "Mumbleton" Weir!). Perpetually un-fazable, our bodies and brains working off the sublime chemistry of Matthew's crab pizza--Yes! Crab! All Baltimorons Bow Down to the Master Crustacean Who Owns our Souls!--and being such master manipulators of our tiny yet grand instruments, and masters also of our instruments' interconnected destinies, we delivered a solid and amusing, and oftentimes quite fearful, set of sounds and tunes. And had a great time doing so.

* * *

I have Bill Faulkner to thank for keeping my incredibly flabby Quicksilver muscles from becoming totally atrophied. I re-read Unvanquished and Absalom! Absalom! this winter and not a night passed that didn't find me jotting unknown words into my bedside small Moleskine; the day following I'd usually refer to my trusty American Heritage dictionary to find out what, oh, "faience" meant (a type of primitive glazed pottery, used to describe Sutpen's face: what a fucking master, you know?), or "virago" (a man-like woman, used to describe Drusilla in Unvanq'ed). But my AH dictionary did not have the very strange word "retromingent" listed, so I called up Quicksilver and typed period, then "retromingent", hit tab, typed define, return...only to learn the following from Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913):

Retromingent \Re`tro*min"gent\, a. [Pref. retro- + L. mingens,
p. pr. of mingere to urinate.]
Organized so as to discharge the urine backward. -- n.
(Zo["o]l.) An animal that discharges its urine backward.

Monday, March 07, 2005

Nanook of Highlandtown

First, just kidding about the Robo! This isn't 1988, after all.

Second, The Anomoanon, Baltimore-mark, are geared up for our show at the Creative Alliance, Wednesday at 8. The "Baltimore-mark" version of this band is: me, Ned O., Dave Human and Walker of the 'Retum, and master arranger Scott "Red" Wallace Brown , ivorystroker of many Charm City combos. We've actually worked out some themes, if not complete songs, and have buried some surprises down in the cake-mix; as much as we (at least those of us not named Scott) love improvised freak music, THE REVOLUTION (of the film reels) WILL NOT BE (accompanied by) IMPROVISED (music). We'll save that one for Faust and the Boxheads!

Third, if you own a Mac, get on over to here and enjoy the delights within. I've given props to Merlin before; little did I know that he's famous! Among nerds, anyway. We go back to the Tallahassee days, those wondrous times filled with Rays of Bacon, a band I had the pleasure of watching a bunch of times and who inhabits an even higher pedestal in my hall of estimation for so openly and unselfishly giving their drummer Bruce full-on props whenever possible: such a rare and wondrous thing to hear from the mic-smelling mouth of a frontstagist! Le Merlon at the time was working in some capacity for some company in what I supposed then was "technical assistance" or "i.t."; I understood anyhow that he "fixed computers". So, without adieu, I offer you this email I wrote to Merlopotomous verbatim in honor of Monday: it's a true story.

Merlin
lissen, funny story that I've been telling a lot lately which includes you: remember back in the day when I had the powerbook 145B that crashed, taking everything I'd written in 5 years with it? Yes, you say out loud (then, to yourself, the dumbass didn't back up any of it! He didn't really even know what 'backing up' was! sheez! He also rarely cleaned off his grill, claiming that the bad stuff would just "burn off". Burn off? BURN OFF? Like right onto the goddam steak, right? Mutherscratcher, I'm not reading any further!).

ANyhow, you took a gander at it, pronounced it dead. I looked into hard drive recovery: a grand (about a grand more than I had at the time). So Merlin tells Jack, Hey pal, don't throw it away. Keep it. Put it in the closet, try turning it on once a year. You never know. Thought to myself, WHat does this clown know? He couldnt even fix my computer. Yeah, sure Merlin, I'll, uhh, hang onto this worthless plastic box. THanks for your help!

I did as told. It sat in my old closet in my old room at my mom and dad's house in richmond while we gallivanted about the wider world, west africa precisely, and thence home to richmond and baltimore. Once a year during our visits to ma and pa's I'd plug in the old 145 and try to crank her up. Nada, ever. Not a fucking peep. This summer, august, I take the kids to richmond to see their grannies while chris goes to india for work. It's pouring rain outside. I begin the series of worthless tasks one often begins when one is bored out of their skulls; going through the old shoes in my old closet to see if any of them have come back in style; looking through the clothes my father has retired by throwing on the floor of my closet, etc., to see if I can use any of them. I see the computer sitting there, dumb and grey. I decide to throw it away.

The story's almost over. Did I throw it away? Well, I sure was about to but figured that she deserved one more try.

Can you fucking belive that it started up? I fell flat back on my ass when I heard the chord. The screen was shot but if I looked at it above and from an oblique angle I could see my desktop---looking at it straight on, nothing. I found some old formatted floppys and proceeded to copy all old text files (os 3 or something?) onto them, plugged those into a retarded old pc my parents had lying around, changed them all to ms word, & voila, over 30 stories and parts of stories from a chapter of my life I never thought I'd be reintroduced to. I can only assume you recognize the vastly mysterious and strange nature of this phenomenon.

Sunday, March 06, 2005

Across the Droniverse

First, regarding the droning radio transimission writ about below, check this out. Probably many of you have heard of this release, either through our homesqueezins in Wilco or mayhaps you, like me, are hopelessly addicted to the Aquarius Records monthly updates and know that this bizarre compendium of found noise ranks up there with, oh, Village of Savoonga (?) as one of their faves of awl tymez.. Either way, it's not so hard for me to believe that I'd tapped into some kind of weird transmission...

The below entry, the one about driving while listening to the tone and not the one about Spud, was in part pulled from my memory by an angry email from an old pal'o'mine, Spoxman. Last year I mentioned to Sr. Duertos that I'd really enjoyed a few of the Sun City Girls' Carnival Folklore series, particularly the ones entitled High Asia Low Pacific, Sumatran Electric Chair and Resurrection Radio. This series--I think they were going to try to release a cd a month for a year; a couple years later they've tallied 13 or 14--has been notable for what some might phrase its missive-like nature(see above review)--jotted postcards from the strange practice space of a working band--or their "unlistenableness".

Even as a fan of what I've characterized (to him) as unlistenable jazz music in the past, Spox agreed with the latter description. Angrily, as it were. As Spox is semi-undergrounded, and he who shall remain nom de plumed, I print in full from the recent missive, to wit: "Did you ever find that SSG record-- Electric Chair for the Fernando Lamas or whatever? I think my days of being an Abduction (or whatever) consumer are numbered-- hopefully there are fewer days left than there are bad Sun City Girls records. I think the last three I've bought were basically all unlistenable. No wait, I bought one last week, but have been too scared to put it near an apparatus that will play it-- the jury's still out! Of there (sic) minds!!!!"

Spox and I go way back to middle school. We played in bands together, along with Stevie. Spox's Dad, like my parents, had a good record collection but, unlike my parents, he continued to buy records through the 80s (this reminds me of when Dad promised to stop by Woolworth's on his way home from work in order to by what I thought would be a KISS 8-track; instead he bought the Big Brother and the Holding Company with the RCrumb cover, Cheap Thrills it was. Already Dad was lamenting my straying from the road of Beatles, Elvis, Platters into this realm of glam cartoon rock; Janis Joplin of all people was who he enlisted to bring me back). I can remember that Spox's dad really liked Heaven 17 and some other sort of pansyish british gelled hair bands, but I can also assume he bought stuff that we liked, like Squeeze and Game Theory. Spox might argue about his dad's degree of coolness, but it seemed he let ol' Spoxer do what he wanted to do, which was pretty much play music and listen to music and play music. And pin gigantic semi-scatalogical pictures on his bedroom wall, which was all dark corkboard. Anyhow, Spox had a Replacements boot with a cover of Radio Free Europe; naturally I loathed what those drunken louts did to my fave song of 10th grade! Spox also tried to get me to like Big Black. He thought the title Songs About Fucking was intense and hilarious! meanwhile I was listening to Squeeze's ARGYBARGY and CHRONIC TOWN. Pretty wimpy, I guess.

(By the way, the kids've been having me play ARGYBARGY without cease recently and it is absolutely a great record. I thought this in 1983 or 84 but of course I was in high school and also liked the Alarm, ABC, REM, and Transistor. But ARGYBARGY stands the test of time which those others, except ABC, who still seem pretty damn cool, certainly do not (really, the Alarm? Lord. And aside from Bill Berry leaving, what on earth happened to REM? Send theories.). The playing on Argy is great; drummer Gilson Lavis's "just the beat and tasty fills ma'am" style was an influence on me, and I think Difford's guitar playing is good, too, all those nice Kirkwoody leadlines in the verses. Jools Hollands keyboards remind me in places of Garth Hudson, particularly the multi-octave synth swells on Another Nail. Tillbrook sings good. And the lyrics! Frankly I started losing interest in them when some p.r. flacky started promoting all this Difford/Tillbrook as the next Lennon/McCartney guff. That was the first dong of the death knell. Who could stand up to that? SQUEEZE disappeared. Diff/Till tried to put out a Spandau Ballet-like record but it was...too SPandau Balletish. But those ARGYBARGY lyrics...hilarious and perfect.)

Enough: Why is it that all I listen to these days is this?. Or this?. Or Argybargy? Or this? .

I blame it on the drone-spirit that took over a large portion of my conscious mind that afternoon out west. Or the fact that I drank over a pint of Robitussin only one hour ago.

And now, SQUEEZE's "Misadventure":

Hitched a hiker
Up above the border
She'd spent some time
In morocco and gibraltar
And stole my wallet
With a picture of my misses
With fond remembrance
Of everything with kisses

From the isle of dogs
To the egyptian sands
Where the arabs chew on dates
And i haven't forgot what it's like to be
With misadventure and her mates

I miss the east end
High up on the khyber
And i'm the target
For a dozen rebel snipers
It's not so bad though
With some beers in the freezer
And something fancy
In the airconditioned sleeper

From the isle of dogs
To the egyptian sands
Where the arabs chew on dates
And i haven't forgot what it's like to be
With misadventure and her mates

In moving carpets
Through the customs at dover
Thinking my journey
Was going to be over
Then they discovered
A shipment of moroccan
And said excuse me sir
There's something you've forgotten

From the isle of dogs
To the egyptian sands
Where the arabs chew on dates
And i haven't forgot what it's like to be
With misadventure and her mates