coming soon (rough mix)

song is a strong thing

Some writing on Langston Hughes is live. So are myself and Matt, dba as The Human Hearts, tomorrow at Pete's Candy Store, Bklyn. 9 p.m.

a vampire who faints at the sight of blood

Quick TONY review of Jarvis Cocker, Further Complications.

pinchbeck copse

Two notes from NYT Magazine, 5/17: 1) From an interview w/ Nobel economist Myron Scholes (arguably the father of the credit default swap), recently retired from Stanford: Q: What are you doing these days? A: I split my time between giving talks around the world and running a hedge fund, Platinum Grove Asset Management. Q: Does a place or city called Platinum Grove exist on any map? A: No. One of my partners is Chinese, and he said we needed a name that had one metal in it and one wood. [This also works for freak-folk.] 2) In the top 1 percent of previous purchases indicating a high risk of consumer credit-card default: chrome-skull accessories.

routine disruption

OK, so Monday was actually Kenward Elmslie's 80th birthday. But tonight is his big birthday tribute reading/performance with longtime friends Bill Berkson, Ron Padgett, Ann Lauterbach and Ned Rorem (whom I've certainly never seen in the flesh). In honor of the occasion, here's a hastily digitized mp3 of his first published song, "Love-Wise" (music by Marvin Fisher). This was apparently written, circa 1959, for a show that never got off the ground, but it was taken up by Nat King Cole, for who it was a jukebox "hitlet" (Elmslie's term). The recording below, by cabaret legend Mabel Mercer backed by the Jimmy Lyon, is even less well-known (at least, I'd never heard of it until Bree brought the record home, and I dote on both the singer and the writer); it's from the Atlantic album Merely Marvelous. Happy Birthday!

not obvious

My acquaintance David Lester, one-half of the redoubtable Mecca Normal, has kindly offered to post one of his paintings here: I'm quite honored, because what David and Jean have done over the years, and how they've done it, have been massively important for me. MN is celebrating their 25th year of music- and politics-making, and David's revisiting some moments in their history. More installments will be popping up here and elsewhere; they'll also be touring the U.S. for most of April. I've you have not seen Mecca Normal, you should. If you have seen Mecca Normal, you should see them again. David's note: “The politics are not obvious” is a painting I did that a banjo player bought after seeing it displayed when Mecca Normal played a barber shop in Olympia and a bookshop in Seattle during a west coast tour in 2004. The man later sent me a cassette of his banjo playing. He recorded just this one copy to send to me. This was art. This was political.

with a whimper

Well, 'round our way, 365 dreamt-of review posts turned into 100 hoped-for posts (not that I mentioned it), turned in to a scant 86, for a variety of reasons, including the add'l chaos introduced into what I laughingly call my workflow by the long delays in getting our (Bree's and my) co-op in Jackson Heights completely squared away, my inability to bring along to So. Cal. some things I wanted to write about over the holidays, a symptomatic relapse of my Dragnet (radio version) addiction when I discovered that nearly every episode is available at archive.org, and, I think most decisively, my inability to say - at least in this venue - one think about a given piece of work without it leading to several other observations, comments, etc. -- and ramifying onward from there. Oh, sure, I could try to stick to the pith, could write, say: [8x] Slajov Zizek, Violence (2008, Profile). Anti-foundationalist potboiler. without going on and on about (i) what's wrong with that Adam Kirsch review, (ii) Kirsch's rightness, whatever his motivation, in pointing out the odiousness of Z.'s structuralist-inflected treatment of homosexuality as "inversion," (iii) the hit-and-missness of Z.'s pop instancing this time out, (iv) the tension between Z.'s strategy of make explicit the unappealing logical consequences of certain seemingly inoffensive starting points, a strategy in which I do, actually, recognize what I think of as philosophy being done, and his seeming lack of interest in avoiding self-contradiction at any level other than the most local, or (iv) how puzzling the discussion of not-voting is, read against a recent TLS piece which invokes Kant (or maybe even Rawls), in suggesting that, upon the election of Obama, "Whatever our doubts, for that moment each of us was free and participating in the universal freedom of humanity." (Would he have said this whatever the outcome of the election?) I had some other last thoughts for the year, mostly about the president-elect and Bon Iver, but it's now seven minutes to midnight, and there are other ways I'd rather spend them. I don't know what, if much of anything at all, will appear here in 2009 -- except possibly to a top-ten for Dragnet beginners. Health to you all.