Geek Weekly #10

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{photo} The tar pits look like big weird ponds full ob bubbling gas and oil. Lots of prehistoric creatures apparently died in them. Unfortunately, the associated Page museum was closed when I was there, or I'd have learned more than I did. Cool photo of fake animals, though, eh?

{photo} Bela Lugosi's grave at Holy Cross cemetary [sic]. Notice the fucking stake through his heart! He's down there in his cape, and now with a sprinkler through his heart. There are also lots of other famous people buried here. They'll give you a map of the graves inside the mausoleum.

{photo} Drove all around the hills seeing the sights. The Griffith Park Observatory was closed for renovations, but I still got to walk all around it. I loved the statues of the astronomers.

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{photo} LaInferioria turned me on to this place which makes most of its merchandise in house. They have some extremely foxy stuff, but the prices are a little steep for me. You have to buy a $2 annual member ship to go into the shop. {Photo} {Photo} Santa Monica (above) was lovely and so was the rest of the beachfront I saw. The Watts Towers (right) were amazing! The structure is an intricately constructed labor of love which claims to be "the largest single work of art created by one man using tile-setters' simple tools." It was created by an Italian immigrant carpenter over the course of 33 years, from 1921-1954.

-Jennifer La Suprema {footer} Spring 2003 27

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ILL-SAID ILL-HEARD ILL RECAPTURED

Let's start where I once left off, Austin, Texas (near the corner of Avenue B and 45th Street), because it's the 500th night of Brooklyn winter this year and while I dig the seasons muchly, the long stretches of bitter cold have played havoc with my, uh, “training” for bike racing season. This is a silly hobby, I can hardly disagree, and whether I do it out of love or as a convenient beard for shaving my legs, only the two cats sleeping in this room with me (one curled up on a chair, the other sprawled out atop some dirty clothes on the floor of this crooked aparment's single closet) truly know and they're not talking. They are listening, however, because I've spent an inordinate amount of time on the trainer this year (Tacx Swing Force for all two of you who might even fake an interest) and lately, when I ride, I rock.

It wasn't always so. In recent years, I've sweated (and mumbled inane encour agement to my suffering self) to Jimmie Lunceford (especially the hot “30s recordings), the Monteverdi opera L'Orfeo, Capitol-era Frank Sinatra, Charley Patton, Freddy King, mucho Terry Allen... even Townes Van Zandt Live at the Old Quarter! Other things didn't work so well. The Grateful Dead (whom I frequently dig while driving to and from races), Jelly Roll Morton, J.S. Bach (his son C.P.E. Bach fares better), I tried 'em all and more and what the hell: some days you eat the bear, some days the bear the you. This year, for the sake of fuck knows what, I listened to a lot of Spoon. I can't tell you why but I bought Girls Can Tell on a whim and kinda hated it. Sounds good, but where's the, ya'know, content? Know that I'm hardy a pop fiend maybe it makes sense, the songwriting bar set pretty goddamn high from Dylan, Leonard Cohen and the Minutemen (“Shit From An Old Notebook”) to Dave Schramm and Richard Buckner. (Luke Haines of the Auteurs sometimes too: when the revolution comes, “The Upper Classes,” from When I Was a Cowboy will be the glam anthem of my new sovereign nation.)

But winter dragged and dragged, I was busy with nonsense and slogging through a morass of uncertainty and indecision. Perversion maybe too: unsatis fied with spending $12.99 for one record I didn't like, I bought two more and to quote the title of the first song on the album I did not at first enjoy, “Everything Hits at Once.” I'm still not slain by the songs as units of expression with words (if that's your bag, dig the Mountain Goats' superb All Hail West Texas for one, almost any Chris Knox or Tall Dwarfs record for twosies and threesies ) but as sounds upon sound, Britt Daniel is so onto something, I almost feel bad about

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scorning or ignoring him all the while I lived in Austin -- a shaggy pop dude with an amplified acoustic guitar playing Pixies-ish (once and always: fuck the Pixies), no thanks. Listener's note: Series of Sneaks, which has some of my favorite Spoon songs, sounds like comparative shit, blame producer John Croslin or give even more credit to Spoon drummer, Jim Eno than you already should. Not only does Eno swing like a monster (a rarity that), but whatever he's doing in his home studio, he should be strongly encouraged to do more it: both Girls Can Tell and Kill The Moonlight sound fantastic, a fact which makes soaking the floor and multiple towels in sweat pedaling absolutely fucking nowhere a slightly less enervating way to spend 35-40 minutes (once in rare while an hour) a night.

Speaking, slowly, slowly, slowly and rather softly as well, of enervation, lemme say a word or umpty-three about Stars of the Lid. Make that The Tired Sounds of the Stars of the Lid and let it not be said these guys don't have a sense of humor. Anyway, the last straight job I worked in Austin was in the classical department at Tower. Besides getting to bullshit music and play cds all afternoon and night (for a princely wage of $5 hour), the best part of the job was the girls -- what better, easier way to talk someone up than to listen to and enthuse about the orchestral works of Anton Bruckner or Frederick Delius, Handel opera or Franz Schubert and the sublime? I can't recall, it could have been Schubert although not the west Austin nanny/Shakespeare-at-Winedale gal (she played Stephano in The Tempest). I fell in love with the moment she started humming me the second movement from Schubert's piano Trio No. 1 in B flat major. In any case, this girl was blonde and pretty and didn't seem to think it overly weird I was reading Ezra Pound and studying ancient greek at the register, it turned out she'd studied latin herself, right on. One the great fleeting sorrows of that fall was that while I managed to get her number, almost as soon as I did so her boyfriend and a pal of theirs also showed up. (Uh-oh.) I cooled it somewhat in disappointment but learned that one of them dudes was in Windsor for the Derby or Stars of the Lid or fuck knows what band.

Six years later: it must have been Stars of the Lid because how else could I have been so goddamn startled to see a triple lp by the band on a hot and hazy early summer afternoon? I had no idea what the hell it'd sound like but anything that could so quickly remind me of that blonde latin gal, her brown corduroy pants and green cardigan sweater, scuffed up boots, so yeah. I'll bite and... and... and... uh, well, it's six sides of mostly soft, sweeping moodscapes that don't resemble Schubert in the least. Satie maybe a little and in spirit, Morton Feldman maybe a little more. It's quite accomplished and if you listen very closely, it's not nearly as soothing as it first seems. Song titles like "Requiem for Dying Mothers," "Austin Texas Mental Hospital" and the charming "The Lonely People (Are Getting Lonelier)" suggest some of the tumult that lurks between

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the notes and tones but I'm not certain what place music like this has in my life. At the moment, it mostly makes me wanna listen to Mimi and Richard Farina's "Pack Up Your Sorrows" from Celebrations For a Grey Day and that's not a bad thing.

Beneath the underground and sometimes even better are the twined muses of Austin heroes Christina and Tom Carter, the duo otherwise known as Charlambides. They were a trio (with Jason Bill) based in Houston at the time of their earliest recordings and while I might have been hanging out in Sound Exchange (RIP) one time they came in there to drop off some cassettes, I never met them nor heard their music; now I wish I had. Among the records of theirs I've been able to find, my favorites are the heavily psyche-damaged ones such as Our Bed Is Green (a self-released cassette, later on cd) and the massive Historic 6th Ward, but their half (split with the wonderful, Sandy Bull-inspired Six Organs of Admittance) of a recent Popul Vuh tribute, Songs From the Entropic Garden, is nothing less than lovely too. For the sake of late night reverie and Whitmanesque effusion and, let me say that Historic 6th Ward in its vinyl form (it too was originally released only on cassette) is one of the great double albums of all-motherfucking-Texas-all-the-time. I hear crickets and lizards, feel the swamps, stars over cedar in tape gunk and oscillations, Lightnin' Hopkins' electric guitar, Washington Phillips' dulceola, the ghost of Desert Shore Nico and this drone, that drone, the 13th Floor Elevators go on forever, banjos too.

brian berger, south brooklyn, 11 march 2003

PACKING UP FOR PARADISE

1. Bonnie Prince Billy Master and Everyone (Drag City cd, 2003): good enough for some sorta followup to McCabe and Mrs. Miller, I swear it. I ignored Will Oldham after an exercrable live show in Iowa City c. winter 1994 but this is pretty brilliant, "Hard Life" especially. 2. John Fahey Red Cross (Revenant cd, 2003): Requiem aeternum dona eis Domine et lux perpetua luceat eis. 3. Dirty Three She has No Strings Apollo (Touch and Go lp, 2003): More reasons I wish Robert Altman or someone (anyone) could still make a great western. 4. Texas Instruments (Rabid Cat lp, 1987): their only inconsistent album but still at least half superb ("No Wonder I'm Confused" stands tall next to one of the best ever Dylan covers, "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall.") in case you don't remember or, uh, accidentally ditched your record player. Someone please rediscover David Woody and buy if you see Ron, Steve and Clay anywhere, buy 'em a beer.

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