Hotel Godiva

This is the store to buy the strange
and the old and their hopeless kin:
dead schoolgirls' sweaters, shoes rejected
by Elvis, miniature porcelain fish
angrily carved, held aloft
by black, strong string. We who have given
away our minds, been betrayed
by the bitter coasts, search now
through the belongings of others.
These mapped, blue and green walls
become our eco-system, a thrift lighthouse
of stuff lived in by drunken movie stars,
dandies named Barney, his great aunts,
their dark mauve skirts faded
from trips up the stairs, they who mend
the insane and the weak, us,
we who plow through the circular racks,
grabbing disco bric-a-brac over 50's rayons,
knowing, deep in our addled souls,
that we'll buy instead the goldfish platforms,
black, scraped buckle and all.
These clothes are tested and sound;
scarred from past falls or misuse, but true
and tireless, as with our second spouses' hands.
We seek connections, a participatory democracy
of textiles and no-longer-chic shapes and shirts,
ruins dismissed on many Sundays,
traces of rouge on lapels, dead labels,
maybe tiny burnholes now vivid,
small perfect eyes that know exactly
when wars ended, when to go next door
to borrow slim, white leather gloves,
gaps easily sewn with re-cycled thread,
re-made paisleys and plaids now ours
for pool halls and weddings, parties
of patchy dreams, half joyous
that we will never again be as alone.

Help

my son, my savior, my doom

martin bernard baker, also known as martini

Theolonius Monk - Nutty (live)

Made most famous in a quartet setting in ’58 at the legendary Five Spot (has the Five Spot ever had a different adjective?); that quartet was Griffin on tenor, Haynes on skins, and Ahmed Abdul-Malik. Compared to this group (Rouse, tenor; Riley, drums; Gales, bass), especially Griffin, the earlier group was more adept at time changes and more imaginative in soloing. They can be heard on Misterioso a pretty great collection of tunes and performances. However, this date we are watching does feature an elongated version and Gales is superb throughout. Also, it wasn’t long after this that Monk retired to his Weehawken home (built for great filmmaker Josef von Sternberg) and his Princess and her 30 cats, a mile or so from where I am as I write this reverentially. The song itself, covered by Trane, Miles, John Hicks, Sonny Fortune (and a half dozen lesser lights), first showed up in 1953, a full 6 years after his ground breaking Blue Note recordings which changed Western music. 6 years is a long time in jazz and especially in the nascent era of bebop, but “Nutty”—a sad title that prophetically conjured Monk’s mental instabilities (nearly full blown by the time of this era)—is firmly ensconced architecturally within the earlier mold, a mold that remained steady and sturdy for the 25 years after Monk sat down in ’47 and carved out the angular stride/bop masterpieces that belong on Rushmore: “Epistrophy,” “Ruby My Dear,” “In Walked Bud,” and “Round About Midnight.” There are many days when Monk is both my hero and my fave musician.

I'm Gonna Booglarize You

jumping around in the perfect hat is the manic rockette (mark Boston) morton, the mind-expanding bassist from trout mask; art tripp (ed marimba) is on stellar drums; the great ex little feat, ex mothers bassist is roy estrada; the tall guitarist is zoot horn rollo—bill harkleroad; the other equally magnificent guitarist—the one with the hair—is eliot ingber (winged eel fingerling), the finest jewish guitarist since michael bloomfield.

this band shd be in the hall of fame.

Rick Astley vs Nirvana Never gonna give/smells like teen spirit MSAH UP!

Cape Cod. 1960. Peking. 1997

Over there! There’s a fat man
striding across the beach, beer
in hand, chasing
his photographic negative,
wanting to buy up the property.
In front, addled images,
me and myself, digging with fury
into the white hot sand. Father,
you could never slow down.
Even in the sliced surface of this photo
of heaving tides and out-of-sight skies
I can hear your voice
flirting with neighbors, phoning sitters
as your scotch-soaked pals
from New York grimace and giggle.
Your illegible notes home made it clear
we needed scorecards, maps,
decoding rings just to find out
which end was up. Taxis
sped you away as you screamed
about important business meetings.
Miami? Las Vegas? Canton, Ohio?

We tried cement in your Florsheims
but ultimately feared martyrdom;
the headlines would blame us:
HANDSOME MAN, LIPSTICK, RIVER.
Saltpeter on Wheaties was easier
but as with Mithridates you got stronger,
pumping pints of coffee into your cancerous
organs. You were our candy,
our canoe up the Cuyahoga, our glib
majordomo, so we took ads out
warning future broken families
about your pills and your fuck up
at Three Mile Island and the lies
and cover-ups as the press
learned to sleep perfect sleep.
We were the children wide awake,

obnoxious with our ludicrous prayers,
our catcher’s equipment and comics,
the TV on all night, watching
Welles’s “Macbeth” 2, 3, 20 times,
thinking by 5AM that that was you--
drunk, sweaty in your armor--
leaping through dark and fog
and over battlements, rescuing us.

Mother could never take pictures:
unsteady hands, failed reverence
for facsimiles and technology.
Jesus, there’s sand everywhere. And father,
you and your engineering soul,
like Horace at Philippi, said see
you later, and there was your exposed son,
idiot shoveller, on some shore,
grinning for other moronic white families, saying Hi There!
to flag-waving picnickers. I could never
complete a task. If I had, I would have dug
through the earth’s core, I’d be radioactive,
I’d be the Vice-President of China,
where my million tiny, yellow children
would stiffly salute me, hourly.

The Yardbirds - Stroll On (Jeff Beck & Jimmy Page 1966)

i'm a loser

top twenty lp's of this century

Badly Drawn Boy The Hour of Bewilderbeast (2000)
Soundtrack of Our Lives Behind the Music (2001)
Gorky's Zygotic Mynci How I Long to Feel That Summer in My Heart (2001)
Rufus Wainwright: Poses (2001)
Of Montreal Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies: A Variety of Whimsical Verse (2001)
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds No More Shall We Part (2001)
Sigur Rós () (2002)
Drive-By Truckers The Dirty South (2004)
The Sadies Favourite Colours (2004)
The Reigning Sound Too Much Guitar (2004)
Sufjan Stevens Illinoise (2005)
The Mountain Goats The Sunset Tree (2005)
Antony & the Johnsons I Am a Bird Now (2005)
Architecture in Helsinki In Case We Die (2005)
Scott Walker The Drift (2006)
The King Khan and BBQ Show What's For Dinner? (2006)
Johnny Dowd Cruel Words (2006)
Eddy Current Suppression Ring S/t (2006)
Danielson Famile Ships (2006)
Robert Wyatt Comicopera (2007)
The Hex Dispensers S/T (2007)
Thomas Function Celebration (2008)
Bonnie Prince Billy The Letting Go (2009)

Parading Paranoids

I. Marriage

Don’t bring grief into someone’s life
immediately: be deliberate, delicate,
and begin slowly--hide keys, have lover
call mid-day, refuse relations’ feasts.
You must seek balance. Have your penitentiary
correct routine annoyances of vagabondage,
pickpocketings, but never relax surveillance.
Organize your reign with monstrous glee:
fertilize the sober soil so that vice
multiplies. Squeeze the toothpaste’s top,
never remember trash night, stuff joints
under the cushions, be blissful when strangers
ring the bell. Don’t bicker or slap--
better that you simulate the South Pole,
tentless, carving your own fingernail grave.
Keep the fruit bowl filled, the sheets clean.
Pay the bills, whisper in your sleep, and open
your windows and your veins: wet back
against wet back, inch near the edge.
Remove yourself from yourself.

II. Divorce

For the perfect crime add layers:
hang out at thrift stores,
buying flannel shirts and extra-large
wing-tips. In your dead man’s clothes
and rusty Pinto breathe in
the sooty scent of the Seventies
as you glue yourself to the VCR,
viewing and re-viewing Gimme Shelter.
Live in an abandoned water tank
and fool the small-town neighbors
by miking your voice through banks
of suspended speakers. Inhale helium.
Sharpen knives daily. Gloved, clean
with peroxide, dry with black napkins.
Stock up on duct tape, valium,
fruit juice, books by Genet,
and gauze, in case of accidents.
For your victim, choose an ex-lover.
She will be suitably depressed, angered,
gullible. Lure her to the river
with cocaine and pirate tapes of the Stones.
Bring tequila: salt, shot, then suck.
Confuse police with no signs of struggle.
Perform pagan pranks--a slow dance,
an orderly fire. Send odors downwind.
Beneath the four-dog moon avoid iron
insects. Ease your pain. Leave town.

Miike Snow - The Rabbit

Napoleon's Second Love

That’s the type of womb that I want to marry.
N Bonaparte


I want to make one thing clear: it all starts
with the downstairs, the potential lap dance
from the widow from Albuquerque. Lacking sea brine
and the heft from an obsolete pulley, most things
become dull, underused, as if sunshine and rapture
are things to be mocked? A piecing of the left lip
is not for you. My lesbian daughter calls: Everything in Utica
stays the same—shithole weather, blue laws:
We all circle answer E, the last resort of idiots.

Midgets are taller than dwarfs according to my neighbor.
I reply: Firemen like it hot. Josephine laughs. You are not
the first, or second, her pet cockatoo screeches. Nothing that
stays stays put. Say it better: Everything
that will change will change
back to its first caged shape. And here
the great man, Emperor Me, stands, pomegranate in hand,
estranged father to the King of Rome, guilty of leading
droopy generals into humdrum wars, exiled to Elba,
serving up platters of cured meat to Greek tourists.

Diminuendo & Crescendo In Blue - Part 2

There are so many things to worship in this vid: paul's humility; duke's excited exhortations; cat's piercing wails at end; the pounding clock of the drummer's beat;
the rhythmic muscularity of the bass line; the band's digging paul's (crazy) solo; duke checking out his fingernails; the nuanced signature duke horns (live!!). But what I love most is at 6:13 Satan himself seems to be digging the beat. Yeah, crazy, man.