orbis quintus

I plan on getting back to my ’80s obsession, manybe, but last night my father bought a couple of old-timey country and bluegrass records. I skipped the news this morning (which I will explain in a momnet,) and listened to Roscoe Holcomb first thing this morning. I don’t advise anyone else do that, as it’s akin to a cold shower, and will wake you up with a jolt. The first track is acappella, and it’s so plaintive and grating that it yanks out your spine to drag it across a chalkboard. When he starts plucking along on his banjo though, I’m back in the comfort zone. Roscoe was not an influence on anyone else really. These song were recorded in the ’60s and ’70s, but he was so isolated in Kentucky, that he becomes a man out of time. It’s strange, and makes me wonder what else is still surviving in those hills.

I grew up on Flatt and Scruggs, but everything we had was on scratched up vinyl which i cannot find, and on 8 tracks which are long since torn apart. Having “The Complete Mercury Sessions” around is great, and while i cannot sing along to these things, the melodies were instantly familiar. In case anyone forgot already, i didn’t listen to rock music until my late teens, and had nothing but bluegrass and folk records around the house.

On the news in Pitchfork. the Apples in Stereo are going to work with XTC. It sounds liek a dream gone wrong. I enjoy both bands, and i like nervy, Beatlesque pop, but this effort just seems to cry out TEPID. I’m scared for them, as XTC is on the road of recovery, and the Apples seem to be the last of the Big Three of Elephant Six standing.

Salon points out that the scandal about the Clintons being “tacky” and taking tons of gifts under questionable circumstances is just more slander. I even remembered that the Reagans took tons of questionable gifts and deals at the end of Ronnie’s precidency, and George I rewarded his friends with the Persian Gulf War, meaning that oil profits skyrocketed, and they kicked some money back to him later. Now the media wants to fake disgust with Clinton on accepting some expensive glass bowls from his old classmates? That’s why i might not be listening to NPR for awhile. Scott Simon of Weekend Editon bristled self righteous about the behavior of the Clintons while they let Shrub’s people spread lies about the damge in the White House.

Am feeling a little empty of thought today, but how’s that supposed to stop me? I just watched Chicken Run on video. For those who complain that it’s no Wallace and Gromit, stop messing up the minds of kids, you jaded hipsters. It might be too American, but Wallace and Gromit, as perfect as it is, sometimes is a little too English for the general American audiences. That might sound weird from a rabid Harry Potter fan who hates the idea of a movie adaptation, but so there, punk!

No, I have not seen “Sullivan’s Travels” yet. A nice guy named Gary Childress mentioned it in email. a friend at work has mentioned it as well as someone on Raindogs, but until recently, I simply had never heard of the film. While i have not checked out Gary’s music yet, as I have to go to work in a few minutes, he has a site on MP3.com. He says that it’s influenced by Robyn Hitchcock, so I’m going to have to give it a shot later this week.

What’s happening before work today is that I have in the background the Elvis “56” playing that the same time that “Hardboiled” in Cantonese is on the DVD player. I’m not listening to either one of them intently, but it’s making me feel very fucked up inside. It’s not a good fucked-up either. The worst thing is that I don’t want to turn it off, as I want to see if there’s a kind of Wizard of Oz/Dark Side of the Moon connection. i just have to check. You never know. I’ll report the details of the experiment in a thesis to be delivered in the next finanacial quarter, as I await a grant to further my research.

Has anyone else been noticing a strange trend in the mainstream media that “civil disobedience” is being changed into a negative phrase? They changed “partisan” into a dirty word, and now they implying that civil disobedience is illegal, unlawful, and must be stopped at any cost. Well, what are we supposed to do when laws and policies are not working, and our votes don’t count anymore? Uncivil disobedience? That’s definitely against the law. If uncivil and civil disobedience are both outlawed, isn’t it telling us that are not allowed to disobey in any manner whatsoever, or we are criminals? Yeah, yeah, i know that to “disobey” is supposed to be illegal, but the outrage that’s being hurled against people who are choosing to behave in a civil manner is just hateful.

It might be worth pointing out that the new photo really is me on an ordinary day, more or less. And again, it was taken by Elizabeth Black, even though it’s not one of her “real” photos. That damned jacket means everything to me. I’ve had it perhaps twelve years now, and it seems to be made of iron. Since I don’t have an anorak to go with my passing ’80s fixation, a fatigued fatigue jacket will have to do.

Watched the first episode of the new season of Survivor last night. I was surprised that I didn’t hate every last one of them on sight, but I was not crazy about them either. Knowing that they know how the last season turned out, they already have their guards up, and are not going to give a hint of their real personalities. When it came to the vote, I was certain that they were going to boot Jeff, not Debb. It’s fairly obvious that Jeff is the new “Rich”, but there’s so many “Kellys” that I’m confused. A lot of people seem to be flying under radar. I don’t even know the name of the girl who conveniently misquoted Debb to Jeff, but she even used the same phrase of, “I’m just telling you what I heard,” while pretending to focus on some mundane task, because it’s a lie. i wanted them to boot Jeff not only because he’s too much like Rich in personality, and I don’t want a re-run of last season, but because he was sick as can be. Yes, i understand why now the tribes want to boot the strong ones first, but this is getting a little absurd.

Back when Lou was here, I bought a couple of used reissues of Orange Juice at the Magic Bus. I’ve never forgotten the Magic Bus, but it’s so rare that a chance to get down to the French Quarter arises. There’s a ton of discs there that I want, or even need for my collection, but… between “Orange Juice” and “You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever”, my favorite is… the Teardrop Explodes! Sorry, Edwyn, but as cool as you are, you just ain’t weird enough for me. And if the TX comparison is not fair, I also must admit that I’m still absorbing those Go-Betweens reissues as well, putting them on in the background without bothering to learn the names of the songs, as i never checked them when i listened to them on Damien’s comp tapes anyway. I still need to get “Rip It Up” one day though, as it has the song “Louise Louise”. So that’s corny.

I also must confess that I am as slow to catching onto the new stuff as Rolling Stone sometimes. the humiliation nver ends. Yes, i do like At the Drive-In, and they might be nice to see as the new “Next Big Thing” as RS claims that they are in the new issue with horrid J-Lo cover. I read the piece on them Saturday on a 15 minute break, and they on on the verge of being devoured by the corporate beast. they have Bush and Papa Roach fawning all over them. Gavin Tossdale (i meant to put the R, but hit T, and it looks so much better) actually told them that “Relationship of Command” is his and Stephani’s makeout music. Warped! Or should i say, Warped Tour? Ha ha ha! Bloody damned hell! What on earth is wrong with me today? the cheesiness is so bad that my skin feels orange.

So it’s the Onion, and everyone has probably already seen it, but it’s yet another swipe at the Shrub regime. At least Alf doesn’t have to worry about the blue jean ban, since he doesn’t wear pants at all, but what is J.R. going to say? The only other weird point is that now that I’m old enough, I now know that James Watt, despite being a complete creep and a corporate whore, actually had a point when he said that the Beach Boys were not wholesome.

Someone explain to me why these shoes exist. Aside for rodeo clowns. Please.

t’s a Sunday morning, so it’s time for a little Blind Willie Johnson. Lou and i bought this last week, and a hellish gospel croak, with some coarse slide runs down an acoustic guitar is just what is called for.

I rather like this account of one man’s account of inauguration day. The rumor that Shrub might still be on coke is new to me. I have noticed that he still touches his nose far too much, but the mainstream media has not even mentioned that Shrub was a coke user in the past, let alone still using it. And while I know that Greenspan is a Republican and a fixer for corporation, I didn’t think he was going to let Shrub pull this ridiculous tax cut stunt. The New York Times even comes out to chide Greenspan. These tax cuts are not even going to be good for the evil corporations. they seem just to be good for short term profits for Shrub’s rich buddies. Where’s the evil conspiracy here? Where’s the world domination? Why do we have to put up with a small-time crook who squanders the powerful organiztion backing him like this?

And yet again, the Guardian takes the piss out of Shrub, this time on the ban of blue jeans in the White House. What a jackass prig he is.

Julian Cope is being utterly obtuse, and picked Montrose’s first album as his album of the month. Hearing his last effort, I still think Cope has it musically, even if there’s a lot of guitar wankery on it. However, his continual championing of David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar is archly perverse. In a way, I get where he’s coming from, even though sometimes it simply seems like he’s deliberately kicking dirt in the faces of uppity collectors who fixate on miniscule pressings of ’60s Texas garage bands or bizarre Musique Concrete outta ’70s Germany. Montrose is just… there. Yeah, he must be doing this on purpose. Damien even pointed out the cover of a David Lee Roth solo album, “Skyscraper” and it has Roth climbing the side of a huge rock…. and how it looks eerily like Copey on the side of a monolith.If Cope released an album called Skyscraper with a cover like that, would I listen to it? Uh…. yeah, actually i would. Damn…

Back to zines! I found that white plastic garbage bag, and dug out a couple of old zines. While I found a few of Robert’s, I could not find Gretchen’s (meaning it is probably in the locked filing cabinet that my old journals and letters are hidden in) i did mange to find a zine by Art Boonparn, the feature rock star of many of Turducken‘s projects. I now have a splitting headache from the dust that I stirred up, but I shall do my best to muddle through, and describe the zines, or at least, what I got out of them when I read them.

Vienna Sausage #4 was one the very first zines that I managed to read. I had already been doing zines without ever seeing one, so a waitress at Mariner’s Inn handed me a zine by an exboyfriend of hers, which was basically a full-sized leaflet with a lot of poorly xeroxed photos of GG Allen, and a loopy theory that Johnny Thunders was murdered by the CIA. In the back were a few addresses of other local zines, and Robert “Sausage” was the only one to write back. I quickly learned that most zine editors rip you off, almost always by accident. Robert had just relocated from New Orleans to LSU in Baton Rouge, and most of the episode was devoted to exploring his new surroundings, with a few contributions from his friends who stayed in N.O. It was filled with odd stories, and it made sense that he would eventually study creative writing, and write some pretty good short stories, including an amazing one about a man who was professional performer on talk shows.

He made me a few compilation tapes too. He introduced me to the new punk explosion, not the crap stuff that wound up all over the radio in 1994, but nutty stuff like Nation of Ulysses, Six Finger Satellite, and Plaid Retina. While I didn’t really get anywhere in this genre, I thought this stuff was cool as hell. If i had money to spend, I’d probably blow it all tomorrow in nostalgia for how cool the tapes he made me were, totally unlike the hack, punk-by-numbers stuff that flooded Maximumrockandroll.

This zine seemed to be dated even when it showed up in the mailbox, as the interviews an reviews were old even then, but it’s aged well. In fact, it’s aged great. I knew nothing about Art, aside from the fact that he seemed to have a rock star reputation among his friends even then. Hell, I still know nothing about him, aside from he plays bass in Zoom sometimes, and has a project called Hotchkiss that I don’t care much for. The zine though, reeked of cool attitude, the nonpretentious variety, and was absorbed into all sorts of fringe bands that didn’t quite fit any genre. Thye were not quite punk. They were not all hardcore. Indie had not yet become the rallying cry it became a few years later. And it all came with a Thai flavor, which bled through mostly from part two of his three part diary of going to Thailand. I only got the one issue, so I have no clue if he kept putting out great zines like this one. It even had interviews with relatively high profile acts like Superchunk and David Yow, And all of this was in my own backyard, and i didn’t know a thing about it.

Be warned. I might be continuing this nostalgia trip. I cannot budget wasting hundreds of dollars on music and movies just to write a line or two about it in my journal anymore, especially since a lot fo the time, I’d ignore the new stuff anyone, and go back to stuff I’ve had for years.

I miss zines. At the bookstore yesterday, I found a book that was supposed to be sent back to the warehouse, and it interested me so much that i rescued it from being boxed up so that i can read it during lunch. It was a slight book, so I’ve nearly finished it already. It was Zine Scene, and it was how to make and distribute a zine. It was fun, as it was zinish, but as a book it didn’t work, as zines are nearly intuitive. No one really needs a guide on how to make one. If it stayed as a survey of writings or interviews, that probably would have worked better.

I’ve worked on two zines before, first Plague in 1993 (or was it 1992?) and then Fugue shortly after that. Plague was really Damien’s idea, and since I was working on putting something together, he invited me to team up with him. We had grand plans of it becoming this insane collective, with all of our friends turning it into our full-time amusement. As we hung around his house, we indulged in all sorts of crazy schemes and jokes, and with so much creativity around, it seemed easy to make a zine out of it. While it was supposed to have poetry and opinions in it as well, by the fourth and last issue, it was nearly all comedy. It really came down to Damien quickly tossing off great gems of comedy, with me doing most of the editing and layout, while harrassing at least a dozen other people to submit the contributions that they promised and almost never delivered. When it came to my own creativity, I only had a few cartoons in each issue and hid behind some characters that Damien created, like the astrologer Father Magan and the advice columnist Dr. Langley. It did tickle me to see some people get furious at Damien for a few things that I wrote though. It was easy to target certain people that I knew would be reading the zine, and then dissect every ugly nuance of their character in a fradulent horoscope.

I didn’t feel comfortable writing in Plague though, as it never felt like my own creation. I wound up doing Fugue, which was a quiet personal zine that stemmed out of my obsessive letter writing. In a way, it was not very different from this webpage. While Plague was immensely popular in Hammond for awhile, as it skewered many of the locals (everyone feared that they might be in it, so they just had to see each issue,) Fugue only appeared in Factsheet 5 and Maximumrockandroll once or twice, and was traded to other people who wrote personal zines. The weird thing is that I nearly sold or traded as many copies of Fugue through the mail as we sold of the Plague in Hammond!

Plague was the coolest though, and while doing Fugue on my own helped stave off some of my insecurity, I’m most proud of the Plague, even though the best stuff was always Damien’s ideas. (“Fun with Turds” was the crowning achievement.) It’s hard to remember whether we just lost the energy to do it anymore or whether we ran out of money to print it, as everyone seemed to want a free copy. The Plague was retired after the fourth issue.

Doing the zines was a way of trying to stop writing absurdly long letters to a girl who wanted no contact with me at all, but told me to write her anyway. (I actually had to hound her to get her address in Alabama though.) After Fugue, I threw myself back into writing those crazed letters, although that cold girl was long gone. Some of the people who traded zines with me became penpals (Robert and Gretchen, most significantly) and we corresponded for a couple of years, until my battle with depression and antidepressants grew so black that I lost contact with them all. I think that I even pissed Gretchen off with some strange tantrum. Weirdly, as soon as I quit the antidepressants, the obsessive writing began to appear again, as soon as I had a regular email address on the internet. Come to think of that… I owe you a letter, don’t I, Vale?

Anyway, somewhere under my bed is a white plastic garbage bag full of many of the zines that I collected. I hate to think of the ones that I didn’t get, the ones that might have been flashes of genius but no one thought to send a dollar or two to a certain post office box, and that person became discouraged, giving up on writing, not out of lack of talent, but because of lack of belief in himself. Maybe they just needed one fan to continue. This might sound absurd, but without the luck that I had, I quite possibly might have killed myself. Because of my passion for zines was entwined with an oppressively bleak period of my life, each zine quite possibly became a cry for help to my eyes. I would read the reviews looking for that strange mixture of pathos and hope, and then wonder if I should intrude.

Or perhaps there was a little too much projection in that.

A United Nations study says that the temperature might rise as much as 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century. This Salon article speculates on what the Shrub administration might do in answer to it. I’m not going to speculate. I’m just going to tell you…. Shrub’s people are going to keep telling us that we still don’t have all of the facts, and it’s most healthy for the economy if we keep burning oil.

Lots of water could have been on Venus and I’ll be damned if I know what that means. It’s obvious that there was water on Mars (and still is!) and almost certainly life, but even I’m left scratching my head on the possibility of life-sustaining water on Venus.

To hell with the Super Bowl! (I knew the Saint never had a chance anyway, as they are eternal losers.) The second season of Survivor starts tomorrow night on CBS! And yeah, I saw all but one episode last summer! My favorite Survivor was Greg, but i don’t see any weirdos like him in the new cast. I read all of the summaries here and then all of the speculation and spoilers on the message boards. There’s even a decent page devoted to the best bets on who shall be booted first. Yes, it’s an awful confession, but i even read the book that came out as a companion to the first season.

It’s funny to read yet another article about how lame Limp Bizkit is. After shaking some fo the cobwebs out of my skull, I now remember that there was a painfully awful Hammond band that presaged Limp Bizkit by six years!!!! They were called Loon, and they looked the same, they acted the same, and they sounded the same! Okay, so the Q article bashes them for being sell-outs, but my problem with them is that they are tired old hacks. Loon’s most hilarious lyric was “Get up and slam! God damn!” Quick! Somebody pass that one along to Fred Durst! At the time, I thought that they were just 311 ripoffs, but with all of their bullyboy posturing and insincere handpressing, their hokey rhymes and their silly skateboards, I now see their foresight to year 2001.

And I must admit my shame… despite being an obsessive Beatle fan, I don’t own any John Lennon or George Harrison solo albums on CD. Oh yes, I own Macca’s first few efforts, and play them frequently, but for some reason I’ve ignored albums like “Plastic Ono Band” just because I deeply loathe Yoko Ono (and not because I believe she’s responsible for breaking up the Beatles.) Now “All Things Must Pass” is being reissued yet again. Do I dare? Ah… probably not…

One more Q link… what the hell is this article about the worst album cover art? NONE of these are even runners up for awful album covers! I take this as a challenge. I will start looking for awful album covers, and almost certainly none of the albums that Q picked will appear on there.

Listening to NPR’s “Car Talk” right now, the Magliozzi brothers are reading an article on temporal dementia! They said that these people frequently lose a lot of capacity for abstract thought become obsessed with pop music! It all makes sense now! They also mentioned some old news about people who inexplicably develop thick foreign accents. Oh, shit! I think I have that too!

It may seem weird, but this week, I have more time to read about music than to listen to it. In reading the new Magnet, in the absurdly short Elliott Smith “interview”, it surprised me to see that Elliott is a fan of the Stooges’ Raw Power, an album that I’ve only recently discovered the full glory of. As anyone can see since the intro line changed, I’ve been playing the album nearly every other day. It also surprised me to read that Elliott will be playing keyboards on three tracks on the next Guided by Voices album. Is this supposed to make sense?

Certain things i just don’t know what to make of. Honestly, I never warmed up to the last Pavement album. Vale likes it, and i gave it a listen, and instead of good or bad, the only thing that crossed my mind is “mature”. Pavement cannot mature for me. they may have been devastatingly influential in their time, but to me, they are a Cretacious fly, trapped in amber. Every time i hear Pavement, I think of Jason Harrison, and getting drunk in Cate Square on whiskey and malt liquor after working all day in the carpentry shop or weedeating along sidewalks. One particularly great drunken moment had me convinced one song was an in-depth exploration of the aftermath of the Irish Potato Famine. No… really..

Anyway, it makes no sense to have Elliott connected to Guided by Voices, as Elliott is here and now for me, as he makes me think of Lou (even though I listened to him long before Lou and I met,) and Guided by Voices is another fly in amber from the mid ’90s. So very, very strange.

More strange is to envision Jeff Tweedy’s description of the upcoming Wilco album, “Flock of Seagulls doing Beggars Banquet.”

And not to obsess on NYLPM, but Tom Ewing is almost certainly wrong. I have the Q magazine issue on drugs, and it goes over that same thought that many of drug obsessed music lovers go over every few months… what effect drugs have on music. Cocaine is certainly not the best drug for the creation of music. It’s heroin. How can we make this official?

What the hell are these “Alien Choir” photos? And why would some glowing green aliens being hanging out on a garage roof in Alabama?

Last night on the ride home, I got fed up with all of the tapes that I had, and tried to listen to the radio. It was an insane decision, as I have heard many of the songs on the radio more than I have heard most of the ones that were on those tapes. I switched it off oldies and classic rock when I remembered that KSLU exists! There was even a student radio show on… except it was almost all metal with a heavy dash of thirdrate punk revival and pop grunge! Leave it to Hammond to provide a voice for clenched teeth headbangers. The weird thing is that I was fascinated, as this seems to be the flipside of Hammond’s underground (with the other half being obsessed with the Grateful Dead, the Eagles, and the Doobie Brothers.) Somebody remind me to explain this some other time.

Lou gave me Never Trust a Rabbit by Jeremy Dyson the day that she arrived, and I’m finally making progress on it. I like it. He’s the producer of League of Gentlemen, and some of that quirkiness comes through. The stories all have a twist, but that’s not what makes them good. Often halfway through the story, I know just which way it is going to twist, but Dyson still manages to evoke a real sense of humanity from his characters, which is odd, in that many of them are mere sketches…. tin men to be knocked down by the twists. I’d recommend it without hesitation to anyone who is not a pretentious literary critic.

Weirdly, Lou reported that Liam Gallagher has six toes on each foot! A synchronicity to add to that is that I was reading yesterday about an extra in Get Carter (yes, with Michael Caine) in a scene in a pub had five fingers and a thumb on each hand, and the director didn’t even notice it until it was pointed out to him in the dailies!

And this indie movie site was in that same magazine, and it seems rather interesting. Okay, so I’m getting stuck on a film obsession now that I have this DVD player. It’s pathetic. If my internet connection was only faster, I’d be watching every digital indie film that I could click my cursor on.

To make matters worse, I’m starting to visit the Hollywood Stock Exchange again, and found that my account is in the top 98%! I hadn’t used the account in two years! Of course, 10,000 people rank higher than me, but most of them probably have several other accounts that they abandoned in favor for more profitable ones. This was my only account! Oddly, i made most of my imaginary money betting on the success of the Blair Witch Project. That’s almost embarrassing.

And again, my main source of cool links turns out to be from Raindogs (actually just Juanita Benedicto.) The first one is an article on the Washington Post about how country format radios refuse to play the “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack. It goes right back to why I know commercial radio sucks. What is absolutely bizarre is that the country stations still refuse to play it even though it’s a best selling record. Is this because they know that the people buying it are actually not “real” county fans… in other words… not fans of “watered-down pop-rock with greeting card lyrics”?

And a few details about Jesus that very few of you have heard before.

I just saw Lou off at the airport two hours ago, and I’m quite depressed. As I have very little interesting to write to her yet, it’s time to work on the webpage that no one reads! Yeah!

The only one of those movies that we went to see was “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” This was no disappointment, as Lou and I have been listening to the soundtrack about twice a day, and she had been singing “Man of Constant Sorrow” and “Down to the Valley to Pray” nonstop! As for the movie itself, it was as faithful to the spirit of the Old South as it could be. I’ve been reading nonsense on the Raindogs listserve that it’s disappointing, trying to cash in the new bluegrass revival. Oh, bullshit! I love Raindogs, but sometimes there’s so much posturing on there about who is the original and who is an imitator that i get sick! And for that matter, the people who seem most hung up on the movie being “illusion” and “smoke and mirrors” on the Coen Brother’s part are almost all Yankees! Yeah, i really need Yankees telling me what the South was really like!

No, i don’t believe it was really based on the Odyssey. Sure, there’s Sirens, a Cyclops, and a damned long journey, but it takes a lot more than some cameos to make the Odyssey. However, look at the “inauthentic” music. Most of it was presented as “old timey” music…. as the heyday of the “real” bluegrass and folk was really just a bunch of people cashing in on the new availability of recording and radio. The so-called roots of bluegrass was merely another revival. So does it sound any less good to these people now? I don’t want to hear any dry theses on how recording changed the way the music was passed on to the next generation. If it sounds good, then it is good.

It was rather cool to find that John Hartford was on the soundtrack too. I grew up listening to him on albums like Mark Twang and Aeroplane, and know the lyrics of his songs better than any Beatles song. I hope that doesn’t scare anyone.

In other news, Damien Youth has released Jinx on CD-R. Get it. It’s one of the best albums he has ever recorded. However, this is NOT a new album, but a 1998 release. He managed to equal it with Sunfield, but i still have my fingers crossed on him topping these two albums in 2001! It might not be possible, but…

I finally found out where the new Jodi Hates the World webpage is. I just got a couple of emails from them today, and it was tacked on there, almost like a secret. Their tagline is “…putting the pain pills back in rock…” and that’s a damned accurate description. They are playing the Bayou in Baton Rouge with a band called Estereo, who I’ve never heard of, as I hate Baton Rouge and almost never go there. That’s on January 25th, this Thursday night. I feel slightly guilty as some of their bands might be fantastic, but I just cannot set foot in that city without getting an awful vibe. The scary thing is that looking at who has been playing at the Blue Room, there might actually be a more active indie scene going on there.

Anyway, Damien Youth is still playing that same night at the Circle Bar in New Orleans.

Not much time today, as i have to go to work at the bookstore for the day shift, and then pick up Lou at the airport! However, this turned up on the nearly defunct SFA listserv:

“Super Furry Animals are currently in hiding, finishing of their most ambitious project to date. They will then travel to Haiti to record a remix album with the legendary engineer Mosis Baptiste II – tentatively titled ‘Text Messaging Is Killing The Dub Quiz As We Know It’. After the international success of ‘Mwng’, the band’s label Placid Casual will utilise the ‘Mwng’ millions with a series of releases. The first will be a Gorwel Owen produced four-track EP by Teflon Monkey, which scheduled for late February. Other releases in the can include the debut single by the hellrasing Out Of Order and a release by an unspecified Big Name Act”

“Teflon Monkey + Mountain Men Anonymous will be releasing a limited edition split 7″ on As The Duck Bit Back…”

What? A remix album? Does this mean a remix album of the new album, or the new album will be a remix album? It damned well better be the former! And what Big Name Act? Maybe Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci? Are they still labelless at the moment?

Lou and I are going to have more important things to do than watch a bunch of movies, but considering how few movies I’ve been able to see for the last several months, and Lou’s obsession with movies, maybe not! There’s three movies on my list, that might not be on Lou’s (please don’t try to force me to watch “Cast Away”!) with the first being “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon”. This movie has had me aching to see it since last fall, when i heard rumors of it, and every review I’ve read has lived up to my expectations. Now, if only the real thing can live up to those expectations! It only opened in New Orleans last week.

The second movie is “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and it probably should be at the top of the list, since Lou really should immerse herself in the Southern experience. The weird thing is that I’ve never actually seen a Coen Brothers film in a cinema, so this will be quite an odd event in another way.

The third movie is one that might get vetoed, but it has John Malkovich, and last time Lou was here, we failed multiple times in our attempts to see “Being John Malkovich” Since Lou watched that movie yesterday, that resolves that thread, as i bought the DVD to show to her. Now it must be “Shadow of the Vampire”! Not only does it have John Malkovich, but it has my own favorite Jesus (Willem Dafoe) playing Nosferatu/Max Schreck! Ah, we will never have the time to see all of these, or possibly even one, but now with DVD, I don’t really mind. I just wish Lou could see them!