Disambiguations for July 22, 2009

I. Over at Driftwood Singers Present:

Remember when your whole M.O. was to avoid living a life of "quiet desperation"? Books and music were going to save us. By the time you realize your liberal arts education was designed to fulfill the self-indulgent solipsism of youth, you've become a "content provider" scraping for a shred of dignity in the digital age. How poetic! Then one day you wake up and find yourself on your knees on the sidewalk flipping through boxes of crappy $1 vinyl like some vagrant off his meds: Hey, maybe this Strawbs album will be good. Pathetic. (Btw, it's horrible.)

II. A little oeuvre sleuthing over at Paper Cuts, on Nabokov and Lolita:

Nabokov himself may well have deplored this combing of his work for clues to his life, or vice versa. The alchemy between the two was among his great subjects, and even in this memoir (subtitled, significantly, “An Autobiography Revisited“) he suggests there can be no literal translation from life to literature. But he wasn’t averse to leaving a trail of bread crumbs; indeed, he left so many of them that his books sometimes seem like solid loaves of hints and puzzles.

(Solid loaves! Very funny.)

III. Re-reading around the edges: Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections. This book is TOO GOOD. I can't write about it here.

IV. The Believer music issue is also TOO GOOD to be blogged about..................I'll just say GO GET IT.......then tell me which song you liked best on the CD. (The CD is really good but there is one song in particular that is TOO GOOD to be blogged about.)

V. Why is "The Dizzies" now called "Disambiguation"? (For that matter, why was it briefly "As I Please"?) These questions are TOO MYSTERIOUS to be blogged about.

VI. Laird Hunt has an original take on the Living With Music playlist-format at Paper Cuts. Example:

6) Inflammatory Writ, Joanna Newsom. “Oh, where is your inflammatory writ? Your text that would incite a light, ‘Be lit’ ?” “The Exquisite” was, I’d like to hope, my inflammatory writ.

“Ray of the Star”: Written in one mad six-week sprint during the fall of 2007 after a visit to La Rambla in Barcelona, where the most elaborate living statues coexist with newspaper stands, flower stalls, bird vendors, locals and tourists. My fever-dream version of Barcelona includes bathing ghosts, haunted shoes, bargains with devils and demonic art critics.

Love that he ends with Sonic Youth's "Providence." (Secret source for the Psychic Envelopes "Providence #3?). Mix idea: Songs with/mentioning/utilizing answering machines/their ingoing/outgoing messages...Replacements, "Answering Machine"...that weird tidbit at the end of one of those early TMBG singles/EPs...uh...the list goes on...

VII. Am very late on this: Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker's Significant Objects project...I have written something for it (not posted yet)...More info at Paper Cuts (your one-stop shop for Disambiguation fodder)....also more at Jacket Copy.

VIII. On Sung J. Woo's site: Photos from the 7/1 Korea Society panel.

"Motion-picture lost and found"

Video for first Psychic Envelopes single discovered!

Call it a "double A"!

The Psychic Envelopes haven't finished—recorded, written, nuttin'—any new songs in quite some time....

To tide you over, here's a slim Muxtape featuring two covers of P.E. songs: Chicago-based Virgin Acrylic's Shinsian take on "Winter Losses," and Little Rock–based Team Knucklehead's cowbell-driven "Raleigh."

WOW!

(The other two Muxtapes are here and here.)

Secret Documents

With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.

The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.” —NYT

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"Secret Documents" sounds like a Psychic Envelopes splinter group/tribute band.

Where's the beef?

I. Headline of the day: "Beef dispute confronts Rice on Korean visit." —AP
(From Cousin Jane)

II. Unprecedented? Two weeks, two NYT reviews of books by Psychic Envelopes members!

III. Nomen-omening? "Actor Charles Ogle" appears on Weekend Stubble.

IV. Are Tiger Woods and Roger Federer...Ourobori?

We are talking about a powerful, almost violent swing that puts inordinate stress on a left knee that is about to undergo a third operation within five years....Woods is 32, comfortably in a golfer’s prime. It is nonetheless time to acknowledge that the singular rival he has lacked over the past decade has finally emerged. It is himself.

V. Personal Days = menswear forecaster?

Musical Table-Talk for May 27, 2008

I. Friend Ian (a Dzyd? I don't know) has started posting his acoustic blues stylings on YouTube, under the nom de ax "Barefinger Bill"—a real treat:



II. It was a conversation with Ian at a party (early '07?) that eventually led me to start experimenting with GarageBand and creating the Psychic Envelopes; my guitar-playing is pat-ball to Ian's great game (as VN said of his English vs. Joyce's), but it's been a lot of fun for me to finally get these songs recorded. (Most of the PE originals date from the mid/late ’90s!)

Mysteriously, and a little distressingly, the second Psychic Envelopes Muxtape appears to have deleted itself...has this happened to any muxtapers before? (The first one is still up.)

III. Ian curates (cocurates?) an occasional musical program called the Good Coffeehouse at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture, and this Friday's show features two interesting-sounding performers:

Tokio Uchida is Japan's best-known acoustic blues guitarist. He has released five solo blues and fingerstyle CDs, and last summer he and Stefan Grossman released their first duet CD, Bermuda Triangle Exit. Bob Brozman says of Uchida:"His playing is soulful and, most importantly, very original and adventurous." Stefan Grossman has had perhaps a greater influence than anyone over the past four decades in popularizing country blues guitar playing. A onetime student of legendary bluesmen such as Reverend Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James and Son House, Grossman has been a performer, producer, teacher and record label founder. He is a master of most blues and ragtime guitar styles and runs Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop, which has educated thousands of budding guitar players over the years through video and DVD lessons.

Abridged Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for Monday, May 5, 2008

I. Time to pre-order Personal Days!

II. John Darnielle is blogging at Powell's...or wait—it looks like he just finished. (I will be blogging there next month.)

III. Side B of the Psychic Envelopes' Cryspace now available as a Muxtape!

IV. Remind me to return my library book!

V. Via Linksmeister General Thomas: "The question of an international language has now become important..." (1936)

Learn the International System Of TYpographic Picture Education! (Is there a term for an acronym in which the first two letters of one word get snatched up, as above?)

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for April 13-14

I. The _________: Dzs Linksmeister-General Thomas sends in Martijn Hendriks's Give Us Today Our Daily Terror, an "[e]xact copy of Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds from which all birds have been removed."



II. In the NYT: Going by Marily Stasio's review, a Henry Darger–like character figures in a new crime novel:

The object of unhealthy devotion in THE GENIUS (Putnam, $24.95) isn’t a person, it’s a monumental work of art — some 135,000 drawings comprising a singular vision of a surreal world — discovered when Victor Cracke, the reclusive artist, disappears from the slum apartment where he has spent decades drawing his insane masterpiece and stashing it away in cardboard boxes.

Also: Dzyd/Psychic E. crooner Sarah's "The Cure" is in the magazine's "Lives" section today (an excerpt from her forthcoming book, The Two Kinds of Decay)...The droll Jeff Byles (in last week's City section): "The idea of blocking off streets so children can play rousing games of skelly and the like dates to at least 1916, when worried city officials called for shutting 100 streets in congested areas during certain times of day." (Skelly!)...Also from last week:

The bizarre-looking assemblage, which was once known as Float Bridge No. 4 and which dates to 1911, offers a sharp contrast to the park’s pathways and ornamental grasses, and its presence has not gone unnoticed by local residents.

“It’s junk, and it ought to be removed,” said Jeff Jadin, a retiree who lives in Trump Place, not far from the park, and was staring at the machinery the other day from a bench near the waterfront.... —Martin Pollak, "Hope Floats"

(My Blogger "profile" was taken just up the river...)

III. I'll be doing a pre-publication reading from Personal Days this Wednesday (April 16) at that Keeler-friendly place known as the Mercantile Library, 17 E. 47th St., with Jane F. Kotapish...(I'll be announcing more reading dates shortly—both here and on the soon-to-be unveiled official site, ed-park.com.) ¶ I just got the first copies of the U.K. edition, delightful design!

Muxtape!

I like how large the font is! Here is Side A of the Psychic Envelopes' Cryspace, with a bonus track.

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for March 31, 2008

1. Tomorrow: Dzyd Dennis in conversation with Wong Kar-wai (!!??) at the Apple Store in Soho!

2. Vocabulary builder: "Rubber tires like these will never touch regolith, the abrasive dust and rock that covers the moon."

Preview

—"Not a Mercury or Saturn, but It Goes Way off the Road," NYT, 3/30/2008

3. For the 26 files: Dzyd Kosiya sends us Stereolab's "Olv 26." (Dzyd Hannah has some other examples.)

4. In other music news, Driftwood Singers mentions the Psychic Envelopes song "Raleigh"—download your copy today!

5. On Harriet, Ada Limón hails Jennifer L. Knox's Drunk By Noon, which I highly recommend!
(Also: The Canarium cheekily offers reviews of individual poems from its own pages.)

A Psychic Thanksgiving

"Indian summer"!

Dizzies Newsfeeds for November 5

It's a Dizzyhead Ed-Supp ("Edlife"?!) in the Times: Christine answers your questions....Rachel: “These are the quietest classes you’ll ever be in."....Sweeney on a samurai movie, Love and Honor: "Emotions burble, framings are precise, katanas get polished, and the plot flows smoothly until the ritualized duel that may restore Shinnojo's dignity"...In music news: Psychic Envelopes have posted the track listing for Cryspace, available incrementally on their MySpace page. (The second installment has just gone up.)...The Spinster Aunt investigates old Nancy Drew adaptations....Jane Dark on Michael Clayton: "With his blocky size, his surfeit of charisma and screen gravitas, Clooney looks like something beyond the mere human, like he has swallowed every leading man in Hollywood and perhaps had Casey Affleck for a palate cleanser."...Someone remind me to return my library books....

Cryspace

Supposedly not in response to Radiohead's decision to release their latest album online and have listeners pay what they wish, Psychic Envelopes have announced that their album Cryspace will be available as a perpetual free download. (More here.)

It's like Brooklyn when they stop all the trains

"Berlin Wall," the new Psychic Envelopes single, is available now...a ukulele-driven technopop duet just in time for your own private Oktoberfest!

(Berlin photos: C. Lagorio.)

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Tuesday, September 25—how is it the last week of September?!

Friend Leland sends in this new bit of one-word poetry, "Lion-eating poet in the stone den," to give "Buffalo buffalo..." a run for its money...New Psychic Envelopes activity—no, not the mega-single "Berlin Wall," but a double cover of Team Knucklehead and some unknown band out of Liverpool!...Finally saw Once, and I concur with Atkinson and the Termites—loved this movie! Termite Matt points out that a version of "Falling Slowly" that stars Glen Hansard (of the Frames) and Marketa Irglova played on The Tonight Show "doesn't have the same heat, the same exhilarating release of energy as the version in Once." The song gets embedded in your head—I was humming it as I walked home—and I think part of the reason is the very canny way it's presented in the film: We watch and listen as Hansard teaches the song to Irglova (they are nameless in the movie), at the back of the music store where she sometimes goes to practice piano; he sings out the parts for her before he starts playing the song proper, and this makes our encounter with the song as fresh as hers (as theirs, really, since this is the first time they've played it together)—we're learning it at the same time...Once opens on Hansard playing Van Morrison's "And the Healing Has Begun"; here's footage of him singing VM's "Astral Weeks"...Dizzyhead L. muses on post-apocalyptic lit—and film—and TV—and music...Dizzyhead Thomas has a blog..."Things I Learned in 2002," a short prose piece by Dizzyhead/Psychic E. chanteuse Sarah is the basis for this terrific short film...She looks Asian!...I have a Dizzyhead meme/contest in the works...STAY TUNED...

The year 1988 was kind of a blur for me

Hot of the presses—in the Times, Dizzies Team Member Hua (has the blog stopped?!) listens to Top Shelf 8/8/88, a hip-hop CD of dubious provenance.

Afrika Baby Bam of the Jungle Brothers, who contributed the track “Back in the Jungle,” which he said was recorded in 2003, dismissed concerns about the authenticity of the project. “We still remember the culture and tradition,” he said. “How much more do you need, outside of the actual date, to make a record as authentic as you would have made on Aug. 8, 1988?”

Other Dizzies Newsfeeds™: Vocabulary via Edmund Gosse via Levi: jobation is "a lengthy and tedious rebuke"...quinduncs are "gossips or busybodies"...Levi's also got some delightful posts on Ring Lardner and Proust via Powell...Am excited for these 145 short-shorts from McSweeney's, three books by Dave Eggers, Deb Olin Unferth, and (Psychic E. singer!) Sarah Manguso....I don't play a lot of video/computer games, but this Fancy Pants adventure is simple and cheering...A new New-York Ghost is out, the nearly one-year-anniversary edition...How long will it last?!...Press release/reminder, I'll be at the Brooklyn Book Festival tomorrow—here is the official listing...it's at "Mainstage (Borough Hall Plaza)":

5:00 p.m. EVERYONE'S A (FORMER) CRITIC.
Three music and arts critics known for their humor discuss what it means to be a critic and the art of writing beyond the review. Featuring popular essayist, memoirist, critic and soon-to-be novelist Chuck Klosterman, Rolling Stone music critic and new memoirist Rob Sheffield, and Believer editor and former Village Voice editor/critic Ed Park whose comic novel Personal Days will be released in 2008.

Dizzies Press Release — Brooklyn Book Festival

Though I don't live in Brooklyn, I'll be on a panel at next Sunday's Brooklyn Book Festival, with Chuck Klosterman and Rob Sheffield! It's at 5 p.m., on the main stage at Borough Hall Plaza. (OK, I have no idea where that is...) Lots of good stuff going on—more info here....

* * *

In other news...Restricted View on For Better or For Worse..............Does one italicize comic strip names?................Speaking of copy-editing mysteries: Molls on Pilates—or is that pilates?.............................New Psychic Envelopes single is out..........(more info here).................................Slate says no to exclamation points (via Dizzyhead Jen)...but Jenny D is on a quest to reclaim them! So am I!.............Jonathan Franzen: "It sat in a drawer for twenty years".............Jonathan Lethem: "the hapless and poignant Julian Lennon"..........Thought: My favorite humor site might actually be Cracked, when they do their musical lists........Thought: This lyric (from Cream) has always bugged me:

I told you not to wander 'round in the dark
I told you 'bout the swans, that they live in the park
Then I told you 'bout our kid, now he's married to Mabel

...........................Mabel?...This also doesn't sound so great, alas (via Dizzyhead Brent):

Across the Universe takes place in a ‘60s England and America in which there are no Beatles, only Beatles songs. Jude, a Liverpool dockworker, jumps off a steamer in America to find his father; at Princeton, he meets up with happy-go-lucky soon-to-be-dropout Max and his ethereally beautiful sister Lucy.

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for September 5

New Believer is out!...Mediabistro has an article ("Scoring an Article at Your Dream Pub") about an article in this issue (Jason Boog's excellent "Skinning the Americans"), which I can't read, as it's behind a subscription wall; it possibly contains some quotes from me...who knows?!...Really cool piece on Borges by Gustavo Turner...Some Psychic activity...Alter-Ed has news of Nicholson Baker's upcoming book...(I guess you can't say he never does the same book twice—A Box of Matches and Room Temperature were perhaps variations on the strategy of The Mezzanine—but his range is impressive and I'm thinking about Perec these days and Baker might be one of the more Perecqian writers working today, in terms of appetite, range? This new book is "an 800-page opus"!...vs. the superslim Checkpoint, which really would work as a playlet)...("writers working today" = FormulaWatch™ would not be pleased!)...Want to inaugurate a new meme/contest via Jenny D but will do so next week...Sure, it's preaching to the converted, but this might be the hottest Atkinson blog post yet..."smirking Barbary ape"..."every limb-scattered intervention"..."teeters on the cliff-edge of nonsense"...This Poetry Foundation podcast is pretty great (listening to New Yorkers read aloud from those "Poetry in Motion" things on the subway)...

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for September 4

1. Today's timewaster, courtesy the Poetry Foundation: Dizzyhead Jessica's roundup of "where poets go online" (including Dizzies faves Cathy Park Hong and Sampson Starkweather, and new Psychic Envelopes vocalist Sarah!)...

2. In the NYT: A delightful review (?) of the new Rolls-Royce (price: $400,000).

Should you be lucky enough to obtain one, would you like it? I found it sublime, although the glovebox is too small for most sizes of the finer mustards.

(I like this sort of wit—the joke that doesn't connect all the dots for you instantly...)

3. Dizzies Team Member R. Emmet Sweeney fondly remembers the Buffalo Drive-In, which closed over the weekend. Another paper also covered the closing—Sweeney's got some issues with it!

That's what they say about the summer...

The Dizzies is closing up shop for a bit—but for now there's a brand new tune up at the Psychic Envelopes MySpace page, to help see the summer out. It features a new vocalist...

Enjoy...even while you weep!