Clearly in this Afternoon

Clearly we will have to turn and come home soon.

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Axolotl speaks: Hum is playing a reunion a reunion show on New Year’s Eve at Chicago’s Double Door.

I have my tickets.

In that emotional space between a good drunk and sobriety, I’m sitting here on this Sunday morning listening to Hum’s monument to perfection, 1997’s Downward is Heavenward, at the infinite and revealing mercy of every moment in that beautiful album that swept off the Illinois prairie and into my permanent regard.

I am particularly vulnerable to the band’s sound for reasons of my nativity, perhaps, with the spacey thunder of those guitars that imply infinity so akin to the endless flat expanses of Illinois fields over which the unbearable heat and humidity of summer shiver. This does not change the fact that this criminally overlooked album should qualify as one of humanity’s few fingertip brushes with G-d.

Boots

A city girl’s eyes atop two braziers

Eyes flying on a stalag leather jag and heels

Flying on a dream of penitence and force

A dream with elevators wrapping the thigh

A wry dream of innocence in the prevalence of a style

A common dream whose fall from the mold yet arches the long legs taller

A Luftwaffe of a dream of achievement through the penance implied by crime

A knowing joke of complicit endurance

In which there is no joke, and there is no sex, and there is no horror

Your Days at Fermilab are Numbered

They turned their noses up at him- they, of all people. These second rate Einsteinian hangers on and their pathetic jumping rope of a particle accelerator locked in the strange pre-urban Eastern hell of Batavia, Illinois.

Couldn’t these losers, these dead-enders, these limited lifers see he was just doing a penance, he was serving a sentence, lowering himself to undeserved depths to prove his superiority, to stay in the game, to show everyone he was right?

They turned their nose up at his Von Agassi science shorts, so short and tight his white, academic flesh could feel the wind of science giving him goosebumps through the very scientific curled mat of hair all the mannish men in his family sported in tight dark coils in the hidden reaches.

They turned their noses up when they could plainly see that his jacket was an original Donna Plaasma. He had cultures more cultured than these backwater Quebecois furriers.

And Danil “Dan” Ostrov, the middle-built, round of face Russian Jew string theorist, with his jokes and good nature, his soviet-era glasses that never seemed to revert back from their polarized state when he came in from the sun… that sonofabitch wouldn’t even acknowledge that he hated him. Hated him for tagging the only piece of Nobel quality tail from this wintry grove of twigs to New York City, the kind of place where he really belonged.

He deserved to fuck Bergdora Fafnirsdottir, not that Cossack-fleeing turnip peddler, with her easygoing straightforwardness and her great, photogenic tits- those tits that stood up like a veteran at during a ballgame rendition of the national anthem even in her dowdy, stock-issue Fischer Scientific lab coat, straight and stock still as though they had compensated for her going into a pacifist life devoted to bettering the plight of mankind by enlisting in the army and making general.

He deserved the recognition he had been deprived of when he was shipped off of the CERN Large Hadron Collider project for being caught trying to put his dick in it right before putting it in a curious grad student. Shortly after that that opportunist Blake Onionplaatz had finally won approval for his experiments that stood to create food for the hungry built from the cosmos’ limitless beams of free energy.

These people should show more respect for someone who was almost the incredible hulk below the waist.

T/L + N/A + D4

A tiny moment of confluence that I write down here just to remember as an articulated thought.

Nelson Algren’s Nonconformity: Writing on Writing I was yesterday morning reading. Ted Leo’s early solo single, work of supreme retro styling and contemporary reflection “The Great Communicator” I have now more than 8 years been repeating the act of committing to the grooves of my inconstant human memory.
The chorus of Ted Leo’s song runs something like this:

You get detached from what’s been going on/they feed you crap you can’t keep growing on/they give you stats that tell you nothing at all/about who you want to be

I have been deafening myself now and again with Dillinger Four’s catalog for near on the same amount of time.
Their very piquant pop song entitled “A Floater Left with Pleasure in the Executive Washroom” on 2002’s Situationist Comedy sports the chorus,

This isn’t what we want/this isn’t what we need/this is what we can afford

Algren writes:

Ours no longer being the lonesome prairie’s desolation, but the spiritual desolation of men and women made incapable of using themselves for anything more satisfying than the promotion of chewing gum, a goo with a special ingredient or some detergent ever-urgent. Working one trap or another for others, the aging salesman of bonds or used cars, having made his little pile, senses dimly that he’s backed up into a trap of his own devising.

The tiger-pit of loneliness out of which there is no climbing. Alone at last with his little pile, the weary years in and the weary years out haven’t brought him a thing he wanted in his heart. It was only that which he was taught he was supposed to desire that he now owns so uselessly.
…
From the coolest zoot-suit cat getting leaping-drunk on straight gin to the gentlest suburban matron getting discreetly tipsy on Alexanders, the feeling is that of having too much of something not really needed, and nothing at all of something needed desperately. They both want to live, and neither knows how. That’s the trap.

The funny bankruptcy we brick ourselves in with is observed and trumpeted with clarion calls throughout the century by our artists, our artists who believe in keeping ideas in writing, in speaking, in singing.

The desperate traps we ensare ourselves in seemingly for lack of anything better to do, when in this short life we should instead be remembering how to live without insipid diversions and games of aging uselessly.

Melt Yer Face with Torche

Torche, from Miami, Fl, play face-melting, satisfying low-end-intensive positive metal that is guaranteed to melt any face it comes in contact with, even jaded faces that belong men of demanding musical tastes like me. Here is a typical scenario:

I cue up a Torche song. I press play. All vestiges of my face are removed by the force, and I begin hopping around the room with a glowing, grinning skull atop my shoulders screaming neon streamers of lipless joy. “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Motherfucking Torche is melting my fucking face right the fuck off! I’m in outer friggin’ space, right now, man!”

I do this on the subway on the way to work as often as I do it in my bedroom at home, and in either place it is clear that I am not in outer space.

So powerful is the elemental shred of this band Miami bred that I am willing to publicly come off as a guy who believes himself to be in outer space when he might, in fact, be standing in front of the United Nations or standing on a table in the middle of an Olive Garden when this declaration is made.

Look at Torche:

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Click on Torche. They will lead you through the swampy wood to their Myspace page. On that page, you will be able to hear songs from all of their releases.

I think they sing the name of dearly departed, beloved Cubs sportscaster Harry Caray in the song “Vampyro” on their S/T. This is quite amazing.

Look at Harry Caray:

Their most recent record, Meanderthal, released April 8 this year on Hydrahead Industries, and they have since been touring with, among others, Boris and Pelican.
Just, holy shit.

Days and Works of Hands Tongues Hips

The city creaks open on Friday morning.
Make ready.
In seven languages read with seven eyes set in a head of solid rock I read the cuneiform morning, I read the dregs of beers swilled late dried like tea leaves on my tongue, I gutter and mumble new prayers.
I shower.
Friday morning will become Friday night. Friday night will make way for other days more hotly anticipated when my fingertips will tell better prayers we would murder to remember forever, to keep time from stealing us from where we are dug in, to stay in those places where we exercise the luxury of silence in rooms stockpiled with words.

A Few Things: Wilco Plays a New Song, Vivian Girls are Teh Hotness, The World Is Your Clam

Hi,
Wilco played a new song at Lollapalooza this weekend, and you can listen to it at You Ain’t No Picasso. I wonder how many other people discovered their Wilco fandom in the same way I did- a slow buildup of Wilco songs in the iTunes and CDs on the shelving until suddenly you find that this band is the air you are breathing, the water the fish are swimming in, the codes through which you build the poetry to speak. It’s like a long, silent dance with radon, with peeling lead paint, a marriage to a homicidal housewife with access to arsenic- take any one of these things and turn it into a positive experience that slowly ushers in a total change of state in your being.

Next, the Vivian girls are very hot.

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They have this sixties black magic soul/garage thing mixed with the distant romance of the magnetic fields applied to the beautiful girl gospel they belt out and the nearly but not quite totally restraining ambivalence of delivery of Electrelane.
And, also, forget about it. Most brain-ing is deactivated at this point, post-photograph. No more can I say.

Also, the world is your clam. Make some pearls.