Red Shift

moving too fast

2006-11-07T22:36:00.000-05:00

real deal pt two

2006-09-20T19:53:00.000-04:00

Cafe du Monde, still working the chicory cafe au laits and beignets, spitting distance from the mississippi.

The Saenger

2006-09-03T16:52:00.000-04:00

This historic theater on Canal St. in New Orleans was battered but still standing on my recent visit.

isaac with paint

2006-08-29T11:07:00.000-04:00

our favorite berliner pal isaac trogden making with the paint in a work of nyc performance artist patty chang's.

real deal

2006-08-15T22:08:00.000-04:00

fresh, salty and straight from appalachicola. can't wait to see you, wintzell's.

she likes coca cola

2006-08-15T21:59:00.000-04:00

this female monkey (note frock) was brought to the boardwalk at n myrtle beach, in the landmark o.d. pavilion, where she sipped from his soda cup and hooked onto his hand with her tail, sashaying away.

peanuts at north myrtle

2006-08-15T21:56:00.000-04:00

just down the street...shag dancing meccas ducks' and fat harold's

Dan Flavin

2005-12-15T15:21:00.001-05:00

On a recent trip to Chicago, among all too brief visits with friends, I caught the minimalist light artist/sculptor's retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art. He'd had his first solos how there, so the return was fitting. To walk around an entire (huge) gallery completely adorned with these fluorescent sculptures, bathing the place in soft, often colored, light was dreamlike and euphoric. There were mementos from his peers, like environmental sculptor Robert Smithson, another favorite, who worked with/inspired Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth.

Flavin was on his own though. A blazing loner, trying to wring emotion from glass tubes, tinting them with chemicals from the inside.

Friend: Memory

2005-11-18T09:35:00.000-05:00

A good friend passed recently, with whom I shared such childhood adventures as a tradeoff between his beloved fish tanks and the above, then-brand new, album.
It was a heated debate, but both parties left satisfied. Rest well, pal.

Whitman's North Carolina Disciple

2005-11-17T09:58:00.000-05:00

A.R. Ammons was born in Whiteville, NC in 1926. He would apply a free verse style to epic-length poems, notable here are Tape for the Turn of the Year and Garbage. He wrote each on adding machine tape as a writer's "own distraction, improvisationally." When the tape ran out, the poem was over. Line breaks were dictated somewhat, too. A friend and I embarked on reading Tape last year, on the day Ammons's entries started in December.
Every day, we would read the entry, making notes in a journal of our impressions. Ammons's intimate knowledge of nature and man's connections comes from growing up on a farm during the depression, and inform his work in Tape. The act of writing about his confessional, song-of-myself bursts seemed more interactive than would be with some poets. Now we're doing Garbage.
Here's a beginning to Tape, lucid, but humble in his approach to the thing:

because I’ve decided, the
Muse willing,
to do this foolish
long
thin
poem, I
especially, beg
assistance:
help me!
a fool who
plays with fool things:
so fools and play
can rise in the regard of
the people,
provide serious rest
and sweet engagement
to willing minds:

and the Muse be manifest.

The Fred Astaire of Southern Photography

2005-10-05T08:53:00.000-04:00

Photographer William Eggleston, caused a big old stir when he was the first solo show at the MOMA in 1976--COLOR photographs. The NY Times called it the most hated art show at the time. But since, his work has been recognized as an important step in the lush, painterly color seen in modern photography, but most interestingly, Eggleston's subjects. He chose to use what he called a "democratic" method, wherein even the most ordinary things in life were included. Eggleston grew up on a cotton farm in Mississippi, and still lives in Memphis, and much of his work reflects the Southern landscape. A new documentary about Eggleston just came out, William Eggleston in the Real World. I understand there is another, and am seeking out both.

Eggleston also spent a lot of time in New York City, once living in the Chelsea Hotel with roommate Viva, the Warhol superstar. The hotel, of course, was also home to many other debauch diviners, (as mentioned in this New Yorker piece) like Johnny Rotten.

Larry Clark once called Eggleston the "Fred Astaire of Southern photography," a term I think Eggelston really resembles. Like Robert Frank, he shows the beauty in "everyday," and the rich colors coming from his large/medium format camera flow through my favorite contemporary photog Nan Goldin's work. This fall, they are travelling to Bangkok together, along with Juergen Teller. "Quite a crew" as Eggelston put it.

Cardinal

2005-09-27T12:15:00.000-04:00

Richard Davies and Eric Matthews made one record together in Boston, this self-titled little epiphany that garnered great critical acclaim and a number of closet cultish freaks over the band, myself included. It's just been rereleased on Empyrean Records, with another eleven extra takes and new ones. Bright with harmonies, an aesthetic for recording clean as new silver, this is one of the few pop records that really does stand to repeated play without wearing thin. Simple notions in the lyrics, odes to natural beauty, with Davies' sharp nasal rising over Matthews breathiness. The two were introduced by drummer Bob Fay, who played in Deluxx, a MA jazz-informed rock band, and was the drummer for Sebadoh. He adds great shuffling beats to things here, and on some of the extras, a bit more bombast so the sound approaches Davies' earlier work in The Moles. Sublime, and downright peace-inducing when frazzled by the day to days of living in the '05.

Dream Photo

2005-05-26T10:51:00.000-04:00

Originally uploaded by C@md3n.

Shake your Pants

2005-05-03T09:13:00.000-04:00

In the hubub and circumstance of grime, gar-udge, and UK rap hype going today, somebody that's been doin it and doin it and doin it well has a new album.

Rodney Smith, aka Roots Manuva, was born to Jamaican parents living in South London. From his parents' history in the town Banana Hole, the riddims and self-expression came from young Rodney like his own sweat. Awfully Deep, his latest, runs from the swagger and 'tude of much of the UK hip-hop scene, positioning the Rootsy Roots as a jaded observer, possibly bottomed out, but feeling it just the same. The beats have never been better, and the digging into subconscious self-loathing, scene-hating and self-uplift is damned engaging. On the mark, this one. His Heart of Darkness in the jungles of London.

Basketball Jones v. The Muzik Peoples

2005-04-13T10:25:00.000-04:00

Here's a piece that was initially due to run in the Independent in my column, two days after UNC won the national championship. Maybe cut for space, maybe in the case that we didn't win. Think it bears repeating now.

You can also get one of these:



here

Which you should post-haste.

Digging in your Heels

One need not stand on Franklin Street, licking a finger and waving it to see how the wind's blowing in Chapel Hill in this maddest of Marches. The Heels are in the Final Four for the first time in five years, and from powder-blue streams of parents and students lining the shops of campus-centric East Franklin to the dog-eared record bins of points West, the crackle in the air is audible. Here's a representative conversation overheard at a local music bistro this week between two women discussing the evening's social agenda from both sides of the sales counter:

"What're you doing tonight?"

"I'm watching basketball…"

"Oh no, not another one…but, I mean…"

"I've got two words for you: Sean May."

"Oh, yeah."

"I mean, yeah, I think I'll probably try to cut back on my TV-watching of games after this, er…"

"Yeah, that's what they all say. But it's like crack!"

Xgau does the blues

2005-04-08T10:28:00.000-04:00

Robert Christgau's tawdry review is downright pungent with the smell of sex. On the mark, as they say. How better to write a review of a bunch of box sets of artists that are so storied and held up in the canon than clipping it down to a...well, you see what I mean. Does the Dean give us the most direct-to-the-libido review of 2005? I'm not starting a list for that category, because no others will exist in it but this.

Here we come...

2005-03-21T14:42:00.000-05:00




Basketball fever is spilling out onto the streets here, 
so I ventured out onto the court again last week. 
Trying to get back in the swing. 
No double double action like our friend Sean here, but still...

Meet young Ellie, the new roomie

2005-02-21T14:19:00.000-05:00

The days after and after

2004-11-04T12:12:00.000-05:00

I'm finally getting accustomed to talking to people again, after having a fearful bout of silence after the election. I worked in a poll for four hours with my partner, as an election protection coordinator, and wouldn't trade that experience for anything. People emerging from this precinct's school gym, pumping their fist in the air "Yeah! I voted!" Some would later return with a friend who they wanted to get to vote. But somehow the stars did not align this time.

It's my birthday today. I was always stricken with a funny feeling after realizing at a median age that since my birthday often falls close to election days, that my own birthday was when Nixon was elected. Okay. So, now I have a cold, it's raining outside and for the first time this year, you can see your breath mist up in the breeze. Another election, another birthday, another gloomy result. Must do more on some individual level for myself to reverse things that this administration has chalked up on that greaseboard Karl Rove has in The Batcave. I'm going with a pal for some hot pho at a local Asian eatery, to clean out all the muck from my head, literally and figuratively. More soon.

Debut salvo

2004-10-28T17:45:00.000-04:00

Starting this one off with a bango, as I leave to vote early, continue my pursuit of the soulless , hit-and-run bastard who dented my back and totalled my car this weekend, thanks to his tank of a late-Eighties, jocks-at-my-high-school SUV before they were called SUVs, and cranking out a few clicks on the keyboard on the muzik. Tally ho, and beware the falling blogsteroids.