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Tuesday, August 05, 2003
On the other hand, my ol' chum is probably right and now it behooves me to qualify the latest round of complaints with some positivity, man. ("It behooves me" …man! Strange phrase, that. Sounds like a paraphrase could be: "This… this THING is turning me into an… an… ungulate!")
Firstly, all my loved ones are, today, alive. And reasonably well in general, all things considered. More or less. Miles and Lily were recently glimpsed through the sonar, frugging in their enviable amnioblissage like bioluminescent Monchichis. Out here, I have secured a vintage recipe (from "21" back when it was a speakeasy) for an "Absinthe Frappe." I've also taken possession of more Hai Karate cologne and aftershave. But here's something REALLY cool:
Last weekend, Shelley and I went to a local outdoor antique show since, soon, her need for increasing rest and my surgical recup would preclude such activity. We used to go to these things so often that it felt like we owned everything there and just visited it every week. By last week it had been a while, so there were some new vendors and lots of new stuff. So I snagged some cool shit (a headline from the deathbed vigil over Dutch Schultz… a small, old, hard rubber clothespin shaped like a bug-eyed, armless man… Some tin thing that made some kind of noise I liked… a rhino-shaped decanter of Avon spice cologne… the usual) and was about ready to rejoin Shelley, resting in the car. That's when I spotted a whole furshlugginer box of MAD mags from '62 through '69 along with some Cracked (sucked mostly, but John Severin was always good) and Sick (sucked always, despite Jack Davis) issues from the same era, to remind me how incredibly superior Mad has always been, over any and all competish.
I ask the kid how much and he says a buck each unless I buy a bunch or even the whole box in which case they'd be less. How much less for the box? A quarter each says mom. Now these are in GREAT shape; many are annuals, some with intact premiums like the "Mad Mobile" one can assemble so that plaques reading POTRZEBIE can circle above one's head. So I tally 'em up and it comes to 17 bucks, but I give her a twenty and say keep the change. What a deal! She's pleased that I am not a stickler for the three bucks and I'm just tickled pink to have a box of guffaws to consume at my leisure.
I tote the box not 12 feet to another table and there's a french horn in its case. No dents, no scuff, nothing. Guy says he'll take 60. Sold! Now ain't that grand! Building up the brass.
This will come into play, I imagine, on the now-it-can-be-announced upcoming FOURTH album for KRS. After stressful negotiations, Slim has managed to keep me on the label. I aim to make an album that will -oddly enough- concern itself with "consolations" of various kinds. Something constructive to put out into an apathetic world that, nevertheless, needs it. Ol' pal Thomas, on the very night I last spent as a smoker, suggested: "Why not challenge yourself by trying to make an album people will actually LIKE?" The idea of it does interest me… to prove I could - if motivated - make something possessing all the "qualities" people look for, but none of the more overt idiosyncrasies I myself enjoy but which strike the ordinary listener as "flaws."
After all, I do appreciate ordinary music as well. My embrace is vast, my tastes unimpeachable. Maybe I will make a deliberately accessible thing. Fewer songs. Songs that hit hip listeners with the approved kind of oddball touches they are not actually hip enough to do without, and which invite unhipsters into imagined realms of borrowed cool and Saturday Night Con-Temporary swank. I could do that. Maybe so. We'll see. Check back in a year.
But another little thing is that I was assigned a new David Bowie album ( entitled REALITY ) to review. I do that kind of thing, under pseudonyms, for money. Boy, it's a good album. Bowie is writing and performing in the straight-ahead-est mode I've heard from him in ages. The result, to be issued this fall, is at least as good as "Scary Monsters" / "Lodger" era work and, to me, better than anything this side of "Heroes." That's saying plenty, since Bowie knocked me flat at the Concert for New York doing that song (after a version of Paul Simon's "America" that ranks as the most gracious statement of humility I've ever seen a performer pull off) and, with it, igniting the souls of all assembled, during the darkest possible time in the lives of so many of us.
Sometimes Bowie, who became my first "personal rock star" (as opposed to inherited-from-the-brothers faves like the Stones and Dylan) with "Ziggy Stardust," seems to strain for contemporary validity by working with people like Reznor. It's not fair, but it seems that way. It's sort of like Disney World's Tomorrowland. In the 1970s, it presented a vision of the future that, in architectural terms at least, aged real bad real fast. So Disney eventually revamped the corny and anachronistic area with a "retro-futurist" style full of Jules Verne fins and golden turrets. Just like the geniuses who gutted Vegas exactly one hour before the tatters of Rat Pack glamour became au courant in the 90s, Disney's GENUINE anachronistic "future" would have been IDEAL if they'd just held on to it for one more year!!!!! Instead they came up with a "timeless" future-o-the-past schematic as stillborn as those 80s "nostalgia" mirrors (with silkscreen James Dean images) and Betty Boop-as-Marilyn cutouts that hang in ice cream parlors only to remind you that it is not now - and will never again be - the good ol' days.
Disney has pulled off a strange retro-future-that-never-was-vs-discarded-future-revitalized-as-postmodern-blown-opportunity conundrum that I promise to investigate fully as soon as my MacArthur grant comes through. But ponder on these implied Escherian bafflements quietly to yourselves as I return to the topic of Bowie. He did… well… like that.
Bowie is the eternal futureman just as Neil Young is the eternal ol' man of the mountain, provided they don't TRY too hard and just make silly stuff below their respective huge talents in a forlorn effort to seem relevant to the wrong youngsters. Bowie wrote this album more or less about New York City. Nothing too literal; it's just imbued with the town's static and frazz. Several tunes are flat out beautiful. Most are exciting and all are worthwhile. He covers Jonathan's PABLO PICASSO! Good work, mister!
Oh there's so much else to wax positive about, really. So I'll stop this and go enjoy some. Meanwhile, those of you who believe in cosmic hoodoo… please say a prayer or speak a mantra or cast a spell or whatever, on my behalf, regarding a current venture I am unwilling to mention just yet, less out of superstition than pessimism about the measure of unprecedented luck this wish would require. If it goes well (as something MUST), much of the sorrow and rancor in my soul will leave instantly.
And then I'll find BRAND NEW shit to whine about!
So focus a thought for me toward your chosen agent of serendipity, and if this happens to work I'm taking you all out to dinner.
Cheers, Rich!
Firstly, all my loved ones are, today, alive. And reasonably well in general, all things considered. More or less. Miles and Lily were recently glimpsed through the sonar, frugging in their enviable amnioblissage like bioluminescent Monchichis. Out here, I have secured a vintage recipe (from "21" back when it was a speakeasy) for an "Absinthe Frappe." I've also taken possession of more Hai Karate cologne and aftershave. But here's something REALLY cool:
Last weekend, Shelley and I went to a local outdoor antique show since, soon, her need for increasing rest and my surgical recup would preclude such activity. We used to go to these things so often that it felt like we owned everything there and just visited it every week. By last week it had been a while, so there were some new vendors and lots of new stuff. So I snagged some cool shit (a headline from the deathbed vigil over Dutch Schultz… a small, old, hard rubber clothespin shaped like a bug-eyed, armless man… Some tin thing that made some kind of noise I liked… a rhino-shaped decanter of Avon spice cologne… the usual) and was about ready to rejoin Shelley, resting in the car. That's when I spotted a whole furshlugginer box of MAD mags from '62 through '69 along with some Cracked (sucked mostly, but John Severin was always good) and Sick (sucked always, despite Jack Davis) issues from the same era, to remind me how incredibly superior Mad has always been, over any and all competish.
I ask the kid how much and he says a buck each unless I buy a bunch or even the whole box in which case they'd be less. How much less for the box? A quarter each says mom. Now these are in GREAT shape; many are annuals, some with intact premiums like the "Mad Mobile" one can assemble so that plaques reading POTRZEBIE can circle above one's head. So I tally 'em up and it comes to 17 bucks, but I give her a twenty and say keep the change. What a deal! She's pleased that I am not a stickler for the three bucks and I'm just tickled pink to have a box of guffaws to consume at my leisure.
I tote the box not 12 feet to another table and there's a french horn in its case. No dents, no scuff, nothing. Guy says he'll take 60. Sold! Now ain't that grand! Building up the brass.
This will come into play, I imagine, on the now-it-can-be-announced upcoming FOURTH album for KRS. After stressful negotiations, Slim has managed to keep me on the label. I aim to make an album that will -oddly enough- concern itself with "consolations" of various kinds. Something constructive to put out into an apathetic world that, nevertheless, needs it. Ol' pal Thomas, on the very night I last spent as a smoker, suggested: "Why not challenge yourself by trying to make an album people will actually LIKE?" The idea of it does interest me… to prove I could - if motivated - make something possessing all the "qualities" people look for, but none of the more overt idiosyncrasies I myself enjoy but which strike the ordinary listener as "flaws."
After all, I do appreciate ordinary music as well. My embrace is vast, my tastes unimpeachable. Maybe I will make a deliberately accessible thing. Fewer songs. Songs that hit hip listeners with the approved kind of oddball touches they are not actually hip enough to do without, and which invite unhipsters into imagined realms of borrowed cool and Saturday Night Con-Temporary swank. I could do that. Maybe so. We'll see. Check back in a year.
But another little thing is that I was assigned a new David Bowie album ( entitled REALITY ) to review. I do that kind of thing, under pseudonyms, for money. Boy, it's a good album. Bowie is writing and performing in the straight-ahead-est mode I've heard from him in ages. The result, to be issued this fall, is at least as good as "Scary Monsters" / "Lodger" era work and, to me, better than anything this side of "Heroes." That's saying plenty, since Bowie knocked me flat at the Concert for New York doing that song (after a version of Paul Simon's "America" that ranks as the most gracious statement of humility I've ever seen a performer pull off) and, with it, igniting the souls of all assembled, during the darkest possible time in the lives of so many of us.
Sometimes Bowie, who became my first "personal rock star" (as opposed to inherited-from-the-brothers faves like the Stones and Dylan) with "Ziggy Stardust," seems to strain for contemporary validity by working with people like Reznor. It's not fair, but it seems that way. It's sort of like Disney World's Tomorrowland. In the 1970s, it presented a vision of the future that, in architectural terms at least, aged real bad real fast. So Disney eventually revamped the corny and anachronistic area with a "retro-futurist" style full of Jules Verne fins and golden turrets. Just like the geniuses who gutted Vegas exactly one hour before the tatters of Rat Pack glamour became au courant in the 90s, Disney's GENUINE anachronistic "future" would have been IDEAL if they'd just held on to it for one more year!!!!! Instead they came up with a "timeless" future-o-the-past schematic as stillborn as those 80s "nostalgia" mirrors (with silkscreen James Dean images) and Betty Boop-as-Marilyn cutouts that hang in ice cream parlors only to remind you that it is not now - and will never again be - the good ol' days.
Disney has pulled off a strange retro-future-that-never-was-vs-discarded-future-revitalized-as-postmodern-blown-opportunity conundrum that I promise to investigate fully as soon as my MacArthur grant comes through. But ponder on these implied Escherian bafflements quietly to yourselves as I return to the topic of Bowie. He did… well… like that.
Bowie is the eternal futureman just as Neil Young is the eternal ol' man of the mountain, provided they don't TRY too hard and just make silly stuff below their respective huge talents in a forlorn effort to seem relevant to the wrong youngsters. Bowie wrote this album more or less about New York City. Nothing too literal; it's just imbued with the town's static and frazz. Several tunes are flat out beautiful. Most are exciting and all are worthwhile. He covers Jonathan's PABLO PICASSO! Good work, mister!
Oh there's so much else to wax positive about, really. So I'll stop this and go enjoy some. Meanwhile, those of you who believe in cosmic hoodoo… please say a prayer or speak a mantra or cast a spell or whatever, on my behalf, regarding a current venture I am unwilling to mention just yet, less out of superstition than pessimism about the measure of unprecedented luck this wish would require. If it goes well (as something MUST), much of the sorrow and rancor in my soul will leave instantly.
And then I'll find BRAND NEW shit to whine about!
So focus a thought for me toward your chosen agent of serendipity, and if this happens to work I'm taking you all out to dinner.
Cheers, Rich!
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