Desolation Row/Champaign, Illinois

Happened to catch Old 97's on Leno last week and they played this great song....

Best Coast

I've Been Busy

Thankfully RSS feeds make infrequent posters (posers?) from fading into the vast ether. Quick reading update and a pre-GBV show shout out. GBV @ the Bluebird in Bloomington tonight!

Finished:
Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell
First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham
The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave

Started:
Shutter Island by Dennis LeHane
Addiction and Grace by Gerald May

I'm anxious to see the movie Winter's Bone which just came out on dvd. Also waiting to see this german film White Ribbon. I've read about it and it sounds fascinating.

Books

Finished The Summer He Didn't Die by Jim Harrison. Started Winter's Bones by Daniel Woodrell. Trying to finish First, Break all the Rules by Marcus Buckingham for a job satisfaction project at work. Re-reading Harrison's latest book of poems called In Search of Small Gods. It's brilliant. Also started reading a cookbook called The Food of Portugal by Jean Anderson.

Le Noise

Saturday Surprise

13 Most Beautiful.......

This is a wonderful, amazing, cool, strange movie. Dean & Britta were commissioned to sift through 500 of Andy Warhol's 4 minute 'screen tests' that he filmed in the late 60's and write and perform songs for 13 of them. Warhol often used 13 Most... as a theme for many of his performance or artistic pieces. The cd & dvd are both crazy good. I have watched the dvd twice, and you find yourself just staring at it, right into Nico or Edie's eyes as they stare at you. Two of the individuals chosen by Dean and Britta are Lou Reed and Dennis Hopper. The Lou Reed piece features a recently found Velvets unreleased song, I'm Not a Young Man Anymore. If you are unfamiliar with Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips, they were Luna, he was Galaxie 500. Here's Lou's screen test.

Super-Matic Lovers

Emusic Downloads for August:
Here's to Shutting Up by Superchunk (this one sounds like a Portastatic release to me)

Here's Where the Strings Come In by Superchunk (Going to see them in Vegas, trying to complete my collection)

The Static vs. The Strings vol. 1 by Centro-Matic (Somehow missed this, I think its the follow up to Re-do the Stacks, a top 10 all time for me)

Let Freedom Ring by Chuck Prophet

The Resterberg by Paul Westerberg

Transference by Spoon

Modern Lovers '88 by Jonathan Richman

Life in Vain

One of my favorite t.v. performances. Enjoy!

Morel Memory

"When Brown Dog and Berry returned to the car with their leeks and morels they were high in spirits despite being cold and wet. There is something inscrutably satisfying about finding a good patch of morel mushrooms that travels far beyond their excellent flavor, perhaps a trace of the glad hearts of hungry earlier gatherers in the long path of evolution."


Started reading another Harrison selection of novella's. The section above reminds me of being a kid in Marshall and at that just perfect time in the spring when dad would grab a handful of bread bags and say "let's go mushroom hunting." We would drive down the road not too far to "the other place." Brett and I would get our own bread bag and by then we knew the gig. Start looking for ash trees, old fallen logs, moist creek bed banks, and just keep your eyes peeled. After awhile you could spot them 20 yards away. Especially the big yellow ones. We ate them dusted in flour and fried in butter. Usually with pork chops or pork steaks at dinner or with eggs for breakfast. Harrison's statement rings true. Although I loved eating them, the hunt is what makes the special memory.

Medium Raw

Finished this before the trip to NYC. Another great read from Tony. A whole chapter on the fish butcher at Le Bernardin. Awesome. Heroes & Villians. Awesome. A wonderful sense of humor and a big heart. Check it out.

NYC, Man!

That's my black sea bass dish from Le Bernardin! (and the sea urchin risotto is the best thing I've ever eaten. Ever. Really) 3 nights & 3 days in the city for a NERVES Board meeting. Ate well. Went to the Whitney, finally, and saw this great exhibit on Charles Burchfield, see above. Yakatori Totto!! New restaurant idea for Indy. DBGB! (sausage & punk rock soundtrack, perfect? Yes) Momofuko SSam! (Oysters, Greek sardines, pork buns) You get the picture, I like to eat. And of course, Lou singing NYC Man.

Books and Tunes

Been on a reading drought recently. Many reasons, none good.

But after waking up Friday with lower back spasms that by Saturday rendered me completely bed-ridden, I was able to finish off some reading and start some others.

Finished:

Blue Movie by Terry Southern

A Great American Cook by Jonathan Waxman

Started:

The Other Great Depression by Richard Lewis (the comedian's autobiography and tale of beating alcoholism)

Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain (I've read half of this in one sitting. Another honest, human and personal piece of work. Tony, at least in his non-fiction writing, stands next to his hero Jim Harrison, in this kind of down to earth, funny & unabashadedly forthright prose.)

New downloads for July:

Shrunken Heads by Ian Hunter
Crazy for You by Best Coast (my current favorite. extremely fun and satisfying)
Chronicles by Verbow (an oldie from the 90's. Jason Narducy missed the bigtime somehow)
Leaves in the Gutter by Superchunk (new ep)
First Bear on the Moon by Jon Dee Graham (live acoustic set. Has the great song Big Sweet Life on it)

Also picked up a couple of cd's:

Dark Night of the Soul - the collaboration of Dangermouse, Sparklehorse & David Lynch. Love it.

Twistable, Turntable Man: Tribute to the Songs of Shel Silverstein

Tin Ears by The Punkin Holler Boys - a 26 song retrospective from Indy's own. They played our company party a couple of weeks ago and it was so much fun. The evening set around an enormous bonfire was the best. Only about 10 of us left to enjoy, but the hits just kept coming!

Horseshoe Lake (Diggit's Theme Song)

And the Glitter is Gone

Matador @ 21 Update

Amy & I, along with Brian and Jonny V, are headed to Vegas in October for this fantastic lineup.

Bourdain Eulogizes Harvey Pekar, Our Man from Cleveland

From Tony's blog at Travel Channel


The Original (Goodbye Splendor)
Jul 13, 2010, 10:45 AM


A few days ago, the city of Cleveland lost a truly great and important man. And I'm not talking about LeBron James. A hundred years from now, few--other than a few sports nerds--will remember him as much more than statistics on a long ago basketball court.

They will, however, remember Harvey Pekar, whose life and works will surely remain an enduring reference point of late 20th and early 21st century cultural history. Like those other giants of their eras, Twain, Whitman, Dos Passos, Kerouac, Kesey, the times he lived in cannot adequately be remembered without him.

It is true enough to say that he was the "poet laureate of Cleveland" or to describe his American Splendor as "Homeric", but those descriptives are still inadequate. He was the perfect man for his times, straddling...everything: the underground comic revolution of the 60's, the creation and transformation of the graphic novel, independent film, television, music (the classic jazz he championed relentlessly throughout his life).

He was famed as a "curmudgeon", a "crank" and a "misanthrope" yet found beauty and heroism where few others even bothered to look. In a post-ironic and post-Seinfeldian universe he was the last romantic--his work sincere, heartfelt, alternately dead serious and wryly affectionate. The last man standing to wonder out loud, "what happened here?"

His continuing compulsion to wonder what's wrong with everybody else was both source of entertainment and the only position of conscience a man could take.

After all, Cleveland, the city he lived in and loved, had, he reminded us, lost half it's population since the 1950s. A place whose great buildings and bridges and factories had once exemplified 20th century optimism needed its Harvey Pekar.

"What went wrong here?" is an unpopular question with the type of city fathers and civic boosters for whom convention centers and pedestrian malls are the answers to all society's ills but Harvey captured and chronicled every day what was--and will always be--beautiful about Cleveland: the still majestic gorgeousness of what once was--the uniquely quirky charm of what remains, the delightfully offbeat attitude of those who struggle to go on in a city they love and would never dream of leaving.
What a two minute overview might depict as a dying, post-industrial town, Harvey celebrated as a living, breathing, richly textured society.

A place so incongruously and uniquely...seductive that I often fantasize about making my home there. Though I've made television all over the world, often in faraway and "exotic" places, it's the Cleveland episode that is my favorite--and one about which I am most proud.

That show was unique among over a hundred others in that everything--absolutely everything--went perfectly and exactly as planned. Unlike every other episode, pretty much everything had been "written" (or at least planned out) in advance: the look, the American Splendor graphics, destinations, subjects and content. In the middle of a blizzard in the dead of winter, we got exactly what we were looking for. We wanted American Splendor and that's what we got.

This is due entirely to Harvey (and the incredible Joyce). Harvey may have had a reputation as cantankerous, TV-averse and difficult but from the very first minute he and his family were a delight. They opened up their lives to us in every way they could. They were exactly as they appeared in the great graphic novels and in the film--only warmer and even nicer.

The look, the tone, the sound, the whole feel of the episode that followed was Harvey's. There was a moment at Sokolowski's I'll always remember as quintessential Pekar--that perfectly encapsulated the way we all felt absorbed in to PekarWorld. We'd just finished shooting a scene with Harvey, Toby Radloff and Michael Ruhlman--and Danielle, Harvey's daughter, who'd been hanging out off- camera, temporarily went missing--out of Harvey's watchful gaze. I remember looking at him, swiveling his head frantically, the very picture of parental concern and exasperation and actually SEEING comic book curlicues, exclamation points, question marks and smoke emanating from his head. He had made the world around him his world. We were--all of us-- just passing through.

A few great artists come to "own" their territory.
As Joseph Mitchell once owned New York and Zola owned Paris, Harvey Pekar owned not just Cleveland but all those places in the American Heartland where people wake up every day, go to work, do the best they can--and in spite of the vast and overwhelming forces that conspire to disappoint them--go on, try as best as possible to do right by the people around them, to attain that most difficult of ideals: to be "good" people.

"Our man" as Harvey often referred to himself in his work, was a good man. An important man. A "great American" is an expression that has been cheapened with over-use, but if these words ever meant anything, they surely describe Harvey Pekar.

He was great. He was American.

For him to have come from anywhere else would be unthinkable. He will be remembered. He will be missed.

=================================================================

Tony's piece on Pekar is exactly what makes me enjoy Tony's show and books so much. Like Pekar, his heart is in the right place. Describing their sense of place was/is a gift both of them have received. Sure Tony is a chef, but his words are what really make a difference in this world. Thanks Tony and we will miss you Harvey.

You Learn from Books.....Ringo

Just finished this cool book. Terry Southern, who I knew nothing about, co-wrote the screenplays to Easy Rider and Dr. Strangelove. Not bad. He also wrote several novels and essays. This book collects essays and interviews from the 1960's-1980's. He toured with the Rolling Stones, hung with Ginsberg & Burroughs at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, is on the cover of Sgt. Pepper.........on and on.........

Matador @ 21

Most everyone who watches this lil' blog likely knows about this crazy show that Matador is putting on in Vegas. The likeliehood that I will score tickets seems pretty low. But I've blocked my calendar Friday in order to give it my best shot. GBV, Superchunk, YLT, Sonic Youth, Spoon, JSBX ........... amazing line up!

Portastatic/Keith Newton/Phil Morrison

I Wanna Know Girls is one of my favorite songs, maybe all-time. It's by Portastatic, Mac from Superchunks other band. I found this today and haven't been able to find the entire story. I believe the poem, I Lived Among Girls by Keith Newton, overlayed through the video is a response to the song. Powerful. Phil Morrison directed the video.