Tighten the Bunions, Screw Down the Tennis Shoes, Make Fast Loose Tread


So, into Friday. Are our teeth loose yet? We’re burning up on entry to R&R, and I’m so tired I can hardly see straight.

Lambchop’s Damaged came out in August of 2006. You might remember it as “The Summer What Meltede My Face Like Soe Muche Gumme, Oy Vey, What Withe Alle This Uff Da Heate.”

I personally thought the summer before was worse, but then I didn’t have an air conditioner that summer.

I have made this Lambchop recording a part of my daily ablutions. I know what you might be thinking- “What, another band that started with an adjusted country twang and has since shot well into the experimental left field? I have a LOT of Wilco records, thank you.”

Well, alright. However, if you travel that pernicious path, traveler, you will not know the rich sentimental tonality of Kurt Wagner’s nearly spoken, rumbling musings. You will not be treated with intimacy by the wry sense of humor that is the spool of yarn from which the songs are darned. You will not meander, fork in hand, through this garden to the feast of non-sequiturs, surprise revelations, instantaneous understandings of things past, that a story as then currently unfolding brought to the singer’s memory.

It was the final track on the record that came on my headphones during a shuffle play sometime in the recent few months that remembered the album to me- the track “The Decline of Country and Western Civilization”. It’s a surprise cloudburst, erupting from a clear atmosphere of noise into something so dramatic it ought to be on stage evoking tears from the aristocracy. But, then, I’m a sucker for songs that subjugate all the most evil tendencies of humanity in order to tell an object of affection how good-looking they are.

This is a drum. Today you can buy it from Musician’s Friend for $69.99 in American Currency (or the approximation of said currency floating in digital internets your web browser draws pictures of when you log on to your bank account).

When you hit this, everything becomes more awesome. That especially applies to rock band practice, which we had last night, and which included a guy who was nice enough to hit- not one of these, but a whole set of them- not once, but many, many times. I needn’t tell you how much more awesome everything became with each successive strike of drumstick to drum. When you’re a member of a band that has been seeking a drummer for a couple of months following the departure of your original drummer after your first show at the now-defunct Siberia, you get a real hard-on for having a drummer in band practice. Everything just fell together with the drunken synergy of a group of people who are on the same page, squeezing the juice that is music from our respective instruments like so many fucking amazing oranges into very tastefully designed juice glasses- perhaps the kind one might buy at Crate & Barrel.

I have been a fan of the glassware for sale at Crate & Barrel for some time. Very classy.

Man, my ears are ringing.


In addition to the above-mentioned Lambchop record, I have also been hearting Destroyer’s Rubies by Destroyer. Hearting is something my girlfriend says, and it’s pretty cool. It’s when you replace your blood with something else, and your heart pumps that through your circulatory system, instead. Did you know that there is about 60,000 miles worth of tubing that comprises the human circulatory system? Needless to say, Destroyer’s Rubies is really tired. Sorry, Destroyer’s Rubies– you’re going around a few more times, I’m afraid.

It’s Friday, ya’ll. Catch the girls, kiss them and make them cry.

The Activity that Necessitates Women Covering their Heads

Last night I braved the straits of late adolescence and shambled to Sin-e here on the Lower East Side to take in a performance by one Joel Bravo and his Sex with an Angel.

In the early morning of the religions we know (the Christian religions) women were bade cover their pates, tresses, for fear that the greater beings watching them from Heaven, the Angels, would become so tempted by the shine and sway of woman’s hair that they would lose their heads and give the earth girls the shag they were so obviously gagging for.

Early in the world we didn’t widely have condoms. So, when the Angels would knock the bottoms out they hoes, they hoes would sometimes give birth to monsters and demigods- the giant Cyclops, for example.

No such monsters will issue from the efforts colliding in the union of Mr. Bravo’s lush musicality and his current willing cadre of fellow traveler musicians. It was a brilliant end-cap to a disappointing night of pseudo-irony and the poorly executed inside jokes of privileged white kids a bit drunk with a little bit of musical knowledge, flush with a willing scene of kids excited to be out and sexy, and just enough self-awareness to know they thought it was funny they were scamming folks out of $8 at the door. To summarize- Joel Bravo/Sex with an Angel: Talented. Opening bands- Fucking idiots, working through some identity stuff, sons of nobility.

Keep it up, Mr. Bravo. Your theatricality is sincere. Your backup singers- (and I wouldn’t just say this because one of them is my roommate)- a superb group that keep your vision vast and pretty. Thanks for getting up on the stage, playing a well-executed set, and not overstaying your welcome. Thanks for trying. Your effort is evident.

Belvedere is to Tactical Disadvantage as Retirement in Resplendence is to the Ghetto of the Now

Consigned to the ghetto of the present, it is obvious to me that our forebears could have gotten nothing done had they been prescient.

Or, then again- look at the psychopaths littering the path of prescience throughout written history. Mojave 3 has a song, Return to Sender, goes something like “The word on the street/is that hell is complete/when you think that you know where you’re going.”

But whose hell would that be? Suppose that depends on who the “you” is in the song. Did you force everyone into 5-year-plans or gulags? Did you find it to be a good idea to gather all your bits of science like kindling to build a burning black hole the size of a quarter on Long Island?

Memory is a prism, a honeycomb of mirrors- looking down the right rabbit’s cubbyhole can steel you at the crucial hour or break you on the jagged ends of doubt.

Curse|Oath

Oath: 1. a. A solemn or formal declaration invoking God (or a god, or other object of reverence) as witness to the truth of a statement, or to the binding nature of a promise or undertaking

Curse: 1. a. An utterance consigning, or supposed or intended to consign, (a person or thing) to spiritual and temporal evil, the vengeance of the deity, the blasting of malignant fate, etc. It may be uttered by the deity, or by persons supposed to speak in his name, or to be listened to by him.

She was enamored with the curses she learned in her Spanish class. There was one she felt particularly privileged to know, something to do with cutting the candles at- what was it? What ceremony? Your funeral? Your wedding? Your birthday? Already my bland ethnocentrism, my midwestern-ness was creeping in to my fourth-level understanding of my 3rd-generation daughter of Little Italy girlfriend’s 3rd-level understanding of her Spanish instructor’s 2nd-level understanding of pinto beans, sea breezes, things more passionate, less rational, more colorful- ah, again, I’m there again- in the way of everything Latin.
I see small plates. I see women.

I see women everywhere.

And that was a curse. That was the curse she told me about, over and over again, excited, incredulous.

“Can you imagine saying something like that?”

No, no- we didn’t have the tools. I was too tired, for one, and my language didn’t rest on an old tapestry of traditions, symbols stretching back to cave walls that became wine cellars. I spoke English- I had long summers, I had miles of cornfields I never worked in a day in my life, big meals that came from boxes or needed salt. On top of that, I needed sleep. It was college. I always needed sleep. I was none too quick on the uptake. What was I taking up? Where would I be going with it?

Maybe it was on my graduation from high school that my family took me to dinner at a big German restaurant in Peoria built to look like a castle, decorated darkly and heavily with German antiques up and down every floor. It really was a castle. There was a long wooden buffet table, one of very dark wood, behind me. Upon it stood a candelabra whose every candlestick at one point during the meal suddenly snapped in half with a crack. Did one of those halves land on my shoulder? Had I missed something, some missile in the form of a champagne cork that had made its miraculous mark above and behind me as I sat eating something German?

That was the instance I would remember when she would tell me about the curses her Spanish instructor would teach to her class.

She was a sad one. I was a sad one. We lived our lives like they were curses. I wonder if she ever got happier.

We mocked real human suffering with the zealous, excited abandon of the village’s tolerated ignoramus, with our youth, with our fascination with curses- with the way we lived our life with our mouths turned down like our life itself was a curse. Like something that twisted in our fresh viscera then would be big outside of us and our getting bigger, big enough that God would listen.

Life could have been weirder then. We didn’t have much to be sad about.

And then we become a little older, and hopefully not as sad, and remembering the girl that scared you with her bohemian wreck of a lifestyle becomes the project that requires seriously undertaken veracity. Not romantic, not painful, but an act of witness. The labor comes through more as an oath, a testament that things are in this world, a slightly funny, backhanded smile at your own expense that is a record and also a redemption.

Eventually, you tell yourself, you learn not to manufacture your woes.

To the center

Halfway through Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart, and I’m at the point where the tease of fairy-tale wonder is rearing its erection. (ah! but too late! Too late again, Haruki! Why do you insist on page after page of descriptions of your meals???)
All the way through glass two of a nip of Suntory Yamazaki 12-year, and I am at the point where fairy tale wonder is wreaking havoc on my liver.
The day came to it’s Monday’s end with all possible haste. I am here, and here I will remain until laundry calls me to even more prosaic duty.
I’m reduced to observing things, merely observing things.
I am elevated to an appreciation of Lambchop’s Damaged robust as Babe the Blue Ox, and a full hand higher if it’s an inch.
I don’t mix my metaphors- they mix reflexively, like verbs in sing-songy languages. Not passively like in my surgical English.

DJ For Hire

DJ For Hire: S/T


It’s good to step out of a scene obsessed with itself, good to get away from feeling bored, good to get away from conceits like status, nostalgia, the dictates of history, and the rules of composure. It’s good because once you’re there, you can’t go back.

Try this:
Turn on your CD player or boot your computer. Put the DJ For Hire S/T in the tray. Load up the playlist in your digital playback platform of choice. Back away. You can’t.

Big hooks and guitar virtuosity layered over waves of noise and distortion- oases of directed chaos between stretches of sparse pop- have obscured the way back to the affect of disaffected malaise. Tiny notes in furious succession beating needlepricks of color on your tympani are heralds for the hum washing up behind.

The excitement that I felt, signing up for a rotation as a DJ at my college radio station, as I was pulled off the axis of corporate radio and major label distribution, stemmed from my discovery of a universe of finished, real, fantastic music that was living, breathing, and throwing parties without so much as a “how’s your father” to any judge but enjoyment, wherever it happened to be executed. Cities as nearby to me then as Champaign, Illinois and as distant from where I was, but just as cut off from much else (excepting the Vast Expanse) as the towns I was living in (Omaha?), were the physical site of cultural frontiers, epicenters of changes that scared the limits of the mind into retreat.

From the first notes of DJ for Hire’s opening track, Pensive Purple Porpoises, there’s that same taste of fresh discontinuity with everything you’ve unwittingly become comfortable with. The break is there in the Japanese influence of many notes plucked from guitar strings in succession, the break is there in the narrative themes that backbone the songs. My Grandmother Hitchhiked in the Sidecar of a Nazi BMW R-75 Military Motorcycle points to the wonder that could at anytime spring from prosaic roots. Track Bum is an energetic standout showcase of guitar virtuosity and a boisterous anti-apology for prolonged insouciance. Passion without conceit, the music of Fukuoka, Japan’s DJ for Hire carries that weird change of kilter that brightens you awake with the youth hidden in what you know. Fukuoka, Japan, home to DJ For Hire, is now hard-coded into the authoritative astral version of google maps under the search strings “where it’s happening,” “Where it’s at,” and “that ain’t no bullshit.”

Look for them on itunes or at their website.