http://www.boomkat.com/item.cfm?id=259002

buying tomorrow (today).

ive always liked saddle creek's stuff. never caught these guys though. so hard to believe that omaha, nebraska is so full of good bands. they gotta do something out there i suppose.

all these things in all positions

always a good one to go back to.

someday i will say hello to dave sitek.

someday i'll want a job so that i can get a pedal board the size of west-texas.

how to be offensive in 140 characters (or less) ((as it was received by the editors of the op-ed page at the ny times))

I'm a self-confessed Twitter addict. Its successes are well reported, for instance it played a major part in opening a window into Iran last year. It may have very nearly caused the fall of one of the most vile regimes on the planet. But, lets be realistic, so many tweets (such a cringe-worthy word) serve nothing of that sort of purpose. Tweets are just the ways our new culture explains the phenomena of daily life. The things we see, that which interests us, our plans. In this regard, Twitter might be the pulse of culture.

My family's heritage in central Europe is mostly a mystery to those of us still alive. In large part, the paternal side of my family doesn't want to know what occurred before we got off the boat in New York City and made our way to the steel city of Cleveland. We simply do not talk about it. Until i went to the Czech Republic last summer, no one in my family had been back to Bohemia, much less to Tábor and Písek, what we know to be our ancestral homes since the turn of the last century. My great aunt did her fair share of genealogical research, but that was in the 1950s and she was only able to go as far back as about the 1880s. She was able to follow some leads that seemed to indicate that some family members (the 2nd cousin twice removed type, or however that goes, the not directly blood-related kind, but close enough for them to have common ancestry) were in the camps in World War II.

Some lived. Some died. Some disappeared.

She thinks she traced some to Terezin, the main Czech transit camp, before being sent to Mauthausen and Flossenburg and perhaps Dachau (which were labor camps for mostly political prisoners). However, given the Iron Curtain's effect on information, we don't really know anything more than that.

Imagine my dismay/shock/horror when I read on Twitter today:

''I would love for this stupid sickness to go away so I can enjoy Dachau tomorrow and Neuschwanstein on Wednesday!!!''

Neuschwanstein is a perfectly lovely place, I hear. It is great great for tourists, a fine day out by all accounts. I hear it was built after such a thing could have been useful as a defensive fortress by some mad Bavarian royal. I don't know much about it really.

Enjoy Dachau. No two words can horrify me more. What is there to enjoy? How will you enjoy it? How will you know when you have 'enjoyed' sufficiently? Does it entail posing for pictures inside the barracks? Walking where they walked? Saying 'oh how horrific'-maybe you''ll say so sincerely, or maybe you just feel that you ought to. Maybe you'll tear up, maybe. Maybe you'll collapse on the ground. Maybe you'll vomit after looking at the exhibits. Maybe you will imagine what it truly would have been like for you to work for 16 hours without food, everyday of the week, until your merciful God finally saw fit to take you to a better place. Maybe you'll walk into the gas chamber and think: 'This is just like from the movies, I hope my friend doesnt try to close the door and shut me in here, that would suck!' Maybe you'll escape to a corner of the camp to have a quick talk, not realizing that it is the exact spot where a stack of sixty-pound bodies once stood in the sun. Maybe you'll be distracted by the three children playing hide and seek. Maybe you'll picture yourself there and imagine a guard randomly shoot and kill the person standing next to you, for fun, you won't though. Maybe you'll notice how close the camp is built to town, the same town where the folk plead ignorance to the atrocities after the liberation of the camps, but could see over the fences from their 2nd floor windows. It is their grandchildren who are no doubt still living in that very same town. It is their grandparents who probably spat and dumped wastewater on the prisoners if they were walked through town. Maybe you'll notice how the ovens look strikingly similar to those which cook food. You may even smell burning flesh. Maybe it will make it an impact on you. A real impact. I'll still wonder what were the first words out of your mouth when you walked out through those open wrought-iron gates. I hope you enjoyed your visit to Dachau.

via chicago

i love wilco, and i love chicago. there isnt any difference between the two.

supercities that ive been to that i could envision myself living in-chicago and london. and london and i have perhaps too much of a love/hate thing going on with ldn for me to last there. nyc, im sorry, it would just make too much sense. chicago has the real people. and it has wilco.

jeff tweedy though. my dad and someone else told me that tweedy and i act the same, when we were watching the 'i am trying to break your heart' documentary. i still dont know how to take that label. he tends to be impossible to work with and loads up on prescription meds. eh 2007-2008 was then, now is now.

talked with burns last thurs. he noticed my wilco shirt that i had worn a week or two before, went to asking me if i was going to see them in atlanta this month, said no, i have a bit of a cash flow crisis at the moment and ive gotten to see them a few times already ((chicago 2008, outdoors, grant park, lying/laying? in the grass as the sun set behind the city),etc etc the poetics arent really important). he said his kid is peeved at him for not jumping on tickets before they sold out, so hes looking on stubhub. told him theyll be around again. ill see to it. hopefully around october.

The cash machine is blue and green
For a hundred in twenties and a small service fee
I could spend three dollars and sixty-three cents
On Diet Coca-Cola and unlit cigarettes

I wonder why we listen to poets
When nobody gives a fuck
How hot and sorrowful
This machine begs for luck

All my lies are always wishes
I know I would die if I could come back new

blogexchangenachtconmigueldewitt

right so i told wordtruncheon.blogspot.com to write on the radio dept. song 'why wont you talk about it?' should be interesting read it there,etc. he has told me to write on otis taylor, any song. not what i was hoping for, i gotta say. this is going to be painful.

what is otis taylor. otis taylor is at least two things. otis taylor is the arts and entertainment reporter for the state newspaper who i run into everytime i go out in columbia. every.time. hes an interesting guy, congenial. knows his stuff. smokes a lot of cigarettes. a lot. the other otis taylor, and the otis taylor im going to write about, though i suppose i could have gotten away with the other one, is an iconoclastic bluesman. might be tempted to call him avant-blues, based on his lyrics. really does what he wants, which is perhaps anti-blues.

the song '10 million slaves' showed up on micheal mann's 'public enemies'. which was at times great, generally pretty good. though they did skew the chronology a bit. great duality between dillinger and purvis.

gonna talk about 3 things here, if i dont fall asleep first. try to get at least one in. might try to relate them later on into a monstermetanarrative, might not and probably wont.

1)lyrically, taylor attempts to create a metanarrative for the slave trade, specifically for those recently arrived in america. and some other stuff.

2)instrumentally, taylor offers an interpretation of walter benjamin's viewing of klee's 'angelus novulus/ angel of history' painting. i posted more on that specific subject sometime back in 2008. http://howtoliveinaglasshouse.blogspot.com/2008/02/benjamin.html I thought i wrote more on it, i think i did on another post, but this is all i can find. at least thats the painting.

3) the appearance of the song in a scene in 'public enemies' is used to create an argument for that lovely and very very nasty postpartisianship, and a few other things.

gonna talk about instruments first. pretty simple one here. if i was a good man id break this song down into its four composite parts on protools or garageband. cant do that at this hour though, or at least i wont tonight. should be able to get something meaningful out of this easily enough though.

so the start of the song, you get a junior kimbrough-esque delta blues motif. very iconic. so you start out with this reckoning buried within the music. the delta paradox of extremely fertile soil but rampant poverty and destitution. so youre getting the 'kimbrough track' at about an 80% fade in your right ear, and about 20% to the left. this is effectively full to the right, because if you do go 100% to the right then attempt to add anything in at a high level in the left, youre ears hurt like shit and they often pop. so basically you gotta always have some sound coming out of both ears. even if its negligible, youre brain will still register it as coming full in from the right. theres a crash course in mixing. anyway. the next motif to come in is the banjo line. too many think that the banjo is a cracker instrument. its actually not. really developed by slaves based on their 'remembrance' of west african instruments like the kora. so after about 4 bars with the banjo in, you realise that the song is a round. guitar->banjo, around and around,etc etc.

pretty revealing stuff for us. youve got the modern on one hand, the embodiment of the angel- the twangy guitar line-the guitar born out the civil rights act and the supposed creation of equality, but struck with the reality that these aims remain totally unfulfilled, economic inequality increases, as services increase for the haves, the have nots still are unable to attain the most basic standard of living. the kimbrough line's history is intrinsically tied to that of the banjo. the banjo line-the past, the history-with its late entrance, from the left-the past, signifies the angel peering backwards yet propelled forwards in time, never able to address/redress/remediate the problems of the past.

in benjamin's own words because he said it best:
His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

its a shitty world people, and i'll shamelessly plug for healthcare reform.

now it would be great to end the song after one guitar-> banjo cycle, but that doesnt adhere to the paradigms of music, and since we adhere to the paradigms of music, unless we are say, saul williams, we can/have to take it as it is. the theme remains the same. and i am going to bed.

parts 1 and 3 might come tomorrow, or they might not.

this is not african history

but damn its fascinating

kinda cool