"Speaking Of Seeger: Gary Snyder Heard From."

Is there anything more absurd than Pete Seeger singing "Stagolee"? Like he was a "bad man"? It's like listening to Kermit the Frog croon the works of G.G. Allin.

(Nearly said "the hits of G.G. Allin" –– which would have been a paradoxical remark.)

Pete Seeger is, I believe, more in his "natural comfort zone" or (to choose another cliché) his "wheelhouse" when he is channeling the little rooster "who went cock-a-doodle-doo-dee-doodle-dee-doo" on "I Had a Rooster."

"Pete Seeger was a moral simpleton." –– GARY SNYDER.

"I mean by that that he was a rookie about the foggy and tortuous and subtile complexities of human morality –– not that he was a highly ethical moron."  –– GARY SNYDER.

"He wasn't."  –– GARY SNYDER.

"Not that he was immoral."  –– GARY SNYDER.

"He wasn't that either."  –– GARY SNYDER.

"Just that he was a moron."  –– GARY SNYDER.

"We both married Japanese women, but what of that." –– GARY SNYDER.

"Lots of men like Japanese women." –– GARY SNYDER.

"It's not all that unusual." –– GARY SNYDER.

"Imaginary Fight." Or, "A Warren Is Not a Warzone."

Imagine a fight between Pete Seeger and Gary Snyder.

As my wife would say, "Can you imagine it?"

They wouldn't want to do it, either one of them. They'd try to wriggle out of it. But when we had impressed upon them that they really had to do it, it would be downright lowdown, cruel and vicious. 

It'd be the meanest most ungraceful eye-gougingest half-alligator half-horse 100% rooster-strutting diamond-back down-and-out warpig black-ops folk-fest warzone smallpox smackdown poetry slam you ever did saw.

Let me pause from this joke to remark how ardently sick I'm getting of autocorrect. You have to be so vigilant against autocorrect! It changed "slampig" into "smallpox" –– did it so persistently that I kept "smallpox" in the sentence and abandoned the "slampig" outright, even though it didn't make a lick of sense –– and changed "warzone" into "warren".

All right, slampig is perhaps peculiar for the "mainstream media" as Sarah Palin, echoing Mykel Board, used to call it. But "warzone" is as conventional a usage as it comes. Goodness gracious and great gravy, I'm sorry to report that there are more warzones [autocorrect: "wariness"] around these days than there are warrens!

"Make warrens, not warzones."

A warren is not a warzone –– and a house is not a home. 

Now: who would win in that fight do you suppose?

(Answer's simple –– it's Gary Snyder.)

"Howlers of Sonic Youth."

I nearly miswrote the title and called the group "Stoic Youth."

Idea for a band name.

"Sitcom Youth."

Last week I was inundated by two instances of crass ignorance from the mouths of former Sonic Youth octogenarians.

One was on an Amoeba video, "What's In My Bag?" with Lee Ranaldo in the SF branch of Amoeba. Boring predictable guy. Not like Lou Barlow. Lou was great –– he bought a CD of himself that he didn't even have a copy of.

Does Amoeba actually give them the records they pick up or is it make-believe? I think they give them the records –– because people often get brand-new shrink–wrapped "180 gm" copies of records they must surely already have. Plainly greedy and opportunistic, Lee "Acne is My Acme" Ranaldo gets the Godard Histoire du Cinema DVD box set and he mispronounced "Histoire". Wotta dummy. What a specious poseur impostor.

They should have named the group Chronic Acne –– after him.

Okay the other occasion was Kim Gordon claiming that Britain had a Socialist government in her autobiography, She Knew He Was Wrong.

This group used to sail all over the civilized world being conspicuously cultural. Remember on SNUB TV when Lee sat there in a velvet jacket and green-tinted tortoise-shell sunglasses cradling a Raymond Carver book to his bosom. Sorrows of the Young Werther!

What a prat he was.

Incredible –– a Sonic Youth post without me once taking a swing at Thurston.

"The Naked Lunch."

I found this in an old email to Pricey and thought of you.

         You remember Lydia Lunch don't you.
         When you were a teenager and you snuck furtive looks at the cover of the Queen of Siam in Our Price. 
         It defined a type for you for the next twenty years. 
         Not-gorgeous but voluptuous sulky punkoid girls lounging in the swamp among the lily pads.
         You wished you could afford to buy it and only look at the cover with moonstruck eyes.
         But it wasn't worth it. 
         You already knew by then that the record would be mortal unkind to the human ear; you had the Foetus retrospective double LP and you knew how bad music associated with these people could get, but the cover was all right.
         I suppose that when I say "you" here I actually, strictly, mean "me". 
 
                                                       

 
                                                  CAPTION: Oh Lydia, oh Lydia, say, have you met Lydia?
                                                                    Lydia the Tattooed Lady.
                                                                    She has eyes that folks adore so,
                                                                    And a torso even more so.
                                                                    Lydia, oh Lydia, that encyclo-pidia.
                                                                    Oh Lydia The Queen of Tattoo.
                                                                    On her back is The Battle of Waterloo.
                                                                    Beside it, The Wreck of the Hesperus too.
                                                                    And proudly above waves the red, white, and blue.
                                                                    You can learn a lot from Lydia! 
 
                             NEXT VERSE:   Oh Lydia, oh Lydia, say, would you fuck Lydia?
                                                         Lydia the small-time no-wave temptress.
                                                         She's a volptuous goth-type,
                                                         She's fucked Julian Cope and Thurston Moore.
                                                         Nick Cave and probably that spotty tool Lee Ranaldo. 
                                                         ("No, she just gave me a five-quid hand-job" 
                                                                                                                         – LEE RANALDO)
                                                         Lydia oh Lydia she's 
                                                         Not as good looking as Chloe Vevrier
                                                         But after all, who is? 
                                                         Lydia, oh Lydia, that encyclo-pidia.
                                                         Of sulky teenager grotesque exaggerations.
                                                         On her back is one of those familiar tattoos
                                                         That a good 70% of the females aged 17–55 now have.
                                                         You can learn a lot from Lydia! 

"J. Mascis Does Not Equal Susan Sontag."

I made a joke to my wife, and got a good gratifying laugh out of her for it, which after eleven years of marriage is not bad odds. Unfortunately, looking into it I found out the thing wasn't a legitimate joke.

It was technically illegal.

My joke, which I've been casually doing for a number of years in fact, is about J. Mascis as he is now, with his long white hair and his paunch. My wife said, "Have you seen him now?" I said, "Yeah. He looks like Susan Sontag."

I said it tonight, as I mentioned, and got the good laugh. I thought, "I should set this gold down in writing for future generations." I thought I'd do a picture comparison. I found pictures of J. Mascis with long white hair and a fat face, although I think he's lost weight since, easily enough.

But when I tried to find a picture of Susan Sontag looking like J. Mascis, no such thing existed on the internet. Either I was completely mistaken and she never looked like Mascis, or that particular look of hers has not been documented on the internet.

I put in, "Susan Sontag with white hair" and up comes a picture of her looking slim with short white hair. She looks more like John Updike.

Where did I come up with this misapprehension? I've been dining out on that joke for years.

"Hard Admission." Or, "According to Kreiter."

I was on the phone to my brother the other day, and I was detailing with some sheepishness the elaborate method I have developed for ingesting new music into my cells and even sub-cellular matter ("sub-space").

"How It Is Done."

When I buy a recording, it might sit in a pile for the next five or twenty years (there being several stacks of maybe a hundred titles each to get through). Some CDs you buy one day and they sit there for years and you come to resent them, and then to dread having to listen to them. "It'd only be at most seventy minutes," you might tell yourself, but still you put it off. Must I listen to that Sublime Frequencies album of crackling raw Algerian radio that seemed like such a good idea a lifetime ago? One day, when the time is convenient for it, I will take it down, coolly unwrap it from its neolithic shrink-wrap, and put it on. In the course of that listen, I will retrieve a little notebook and note the tracks worth inclusion on a cassette compilation.

When I have recorded the track on to an ongoing cassette compilation (and it may take another thirty years for this next stage to occur, even though I might have fifty separate tape compilations on the go at any one time), I circle the track number in coloured pencil to tell my future self (and my scholarly annotators, for when I am gone from this earthly plain of fumbling illusions) that the track has been formally absorbed and assimilated into the cell walls of my tape collection.

The second stage of ingestion, to detect any good tracks missed by the first check, comes later, when a more mature and reflective re-listen to the album might follow. This second round could result in further tracks, more subtle in their charms, going onto a CDR compilation. I also have a little pocket-sized volume for that express purpose: "Compable Tracks on Disks According to Kreiter, Vol. III."

I described all this rather neurotic putzing around I do in the name of listening to any new album to my brother, and apologised immediately for it, expecting the deserved downfall of scorn. There was a pause and my brother said, "Yes, well actually I was just thinking that it sounded like something I might like to do."

There's something particularly neurotic, certainly, about putting off the best stuff 'til the rank rubbish has been exhaustively gone through. I do this with all the media –– books, comics, TV, film –– as though I have all the time in the world. Put the best off til another day –– let's read something bad. Let us you and I read the complete run of Punisher 2009 rather than The Marble Faun.

Today, while I was reading (or rather sifting through) Horace Greeley's Recollections of a Busy Life, I had on some LPs from the second-go-round listen list. Background music I wasn't expecting much from. And yet the Ramleh album gets better with age (would you believe), much better than all those disappointing Skullflower LPs, while the Box of Chocolates album, despite a couple of tracks with a young Will Oldham singing on them, ain't a lick better than I remember it. I want to like that Red Simpson trucking album but it's strictly generic and for the birds.

Now I am sitting through the Carter Family and it's a tough pill to swallow. That's the "hard admission" of this article's title. We all like to like the Carter Family, and sometimes we actually do like them. "My Clinch Mountain Home" is a beautiful song. Of course, it's that rantankerous unreconstructed old-timey reprobate Old Man Carter singing lead on that one. But "Chewing Gum," "Single Girl, Married Girl" "I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes," "Little Darling Pal of Mine," these are all the golden hits that got us through the Oughties, after we'd bought the reissue of the Harry Smith box and found we wanted more. The two skits with Jimmy Rodgers are priceless.

OLD MAN CARTER: How about a little drink, Jimmie?
JIMMIE RODGERS: Ah HAHHH! Boy that sounds good to me! Yodel-ay-EE-hee!

(Damian Morgan has "self-fashioned" his whole adult life around these three minutes of recorded sound.)

JIMMIE: Hey hey doggone boy it shore is pretty up here. Man look at them hills over there. Say what is that mountain layin' over there, ain't that a pretty old mou–– what is that mountain over there?
OLD MAN CARTER: [Through grit teeth] That's Clinch Mountain, Jimmie.
JIMMIE: Boy, that that ole mountain y'all been singin' about so much, "My Clinch Mountain Home", that it?
OLD MAN CARTER: Yes sir.

It's too bad that the Old Man didn't say, "Now Jimmie, how did you ever fucking guess? I'm genuinely impressed that that giant mountain 'jest-a layin over there' penetrated your cerebral cortex through the prodigious wine vapors and good blue grass or should I say purple skunk you obviously been smoking, fugging it all up."

Instead he patiently tells Jimmie, apropos of nothing, how he "went out last night" and his "old coon-dog treed two possums up one tree." Jimmie doesn't, alas, say, "Wha's that got to do with what we wuz jest a-sayin' before, Parson?" Instead Jimmie famously goes, "Y–– huh?!"
Reverend Carter, script in hand, carefully repeats the cue, sounding for all the world like Oliver Hardy, "Two possums up one tree."
"Two possums up one tree?"
"Yes sir."
Flummoxed momentarily Jimmie emits the most mellifluous –– and the most pointless –– yodel.  "Yodel-ay-EE-hee!" Then he squints, tries to concentrate, and rallies: "Eh HEH, oh man, boy that's too many possums up one tree... eh... heh... so you got two up one tree?"
He sniggers, there is some dead air, and you can feel the Revered Carter urging Jimmie on with his eyes, "Do the fucking line! Do it!"
 Instead Jimmie prefers to ramble a bit longer, "Doggone, I ain't never heard of that before, what kind of tree was it?"
"That's a BLACK GUM TREE."
"Y–– AW aw. DOGgone."
That's when Jimmie suggests a bit of "ridiculously harmonizing round here like we used to do," to which the Old Man, calmly placing the script in the trash, assents resignedly. They do a nice passage of "It's Gonna Be A Hot Time In This Old Town Tonight". Mother Carter seems to have been sniffing some of Jimmie's special stash, because she reels back on set going "BA BA BA, BUH-BUH BA BA BA BA BA" until they get to the chorus.

Gold like this you obviously cannot sustain, but damn it all, Mother Carter, won't you even try? Listening to three albums put out cheaply by fly-by-night labels because the recordings are now outside copyright, I think only: How you did like to sing the same song again and again with only marginally varying lyrics, Mother!

And so I trawl wearily through these tracks. Amazing to recall how I nearly bought one of those box sets of the Carters in Academy Records on 18th Street.

A rare case indeed of a "bullet dodged" by me.

"Terminal Cheesecake Is a Group!"

Terminal Cheesecake is a noise band.  
"Blondie is a group." 
"Terminal Cheesecake is a group." 
English pretenders to Butthole Surfers. Remember the type. Herne Bay 1992.* 
Rough Trade Shop chancers. 
Peel Session chancers. 
Gary Wiiija wants ter buy yez a drink chancers.  
Your correspondent had their CD and sold it now it can't be got cheap at all chancers.

Then thirty years on they blew the windsocks out of my head last week. Then they respectfully replaced them with cobwebs of their own intricate crafting. They blew my fake white natty dreds clean off and forced them down my throat. 

I said to Wash, "You ever been in Reading before?" He'd been to a rugby match there a couple of times. That's not a Reading association I would of made. "That's not right Reading living." The show was advertised as playing from 10:30AM – 11:30 PM so we facetiously (semi-seriously) wondered if it was going to be a thirteen-hour sludge-drone arse-quake fuck-fest the sort you could walk in to and out of as you would at a shitty video installation at the Whitney Biennial. It wasn't. So we drank at "the Lyndhurst" [HARRY METCALF voice: "Nice boozer Fabe"] for seven hours til South Street opened up. Gotted badly blotted out. Staggered in in the middle of Workin' Man Noise Unit and I quickly established myself as that well-beloved type, piss artist at noise show. 

Johnny Cash is the killer on this Columbo. By the way, did you ever notice the resemblance between Johnny Cash and Mark E. Smith. By jove the acting is bad. But amazingly Ida Lupino played his wife who he killed. Did you ever see that noir movie she directed, The Hitch Hiker? Super superb. She also made Road House with Richard Widmark and two other masterpieces back to back, On Dangerous Ground  and Beware My Lovely, both with the master, Bob Ryan. Like when Katsu Shintaro & Toshiro Mifune made Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo and Incident at Blood Pass back to back. Remember that? A golden age.

I have got to amend my last remarks. Yes Johnny Cash can't act yes he blunders about like a stuck lungfish but the Columbo producers seem to have known he was very lousy and they were on to something farcical and they just shit-grinned and saw it out. To accommodate Johnny's floundering bad disgrace "on the boards" they came up with several set-piece vignettes, bits to wit, by classic TV character actors that more than make up for the immoral bad flatfish and potato-chip shit Johnny Cash was hawking in his scenes. There's a great scene with a sort of has-been Air Force general who is now a "desk jockey," and then the one with a comic religious seamstress –– also the scene with "Pangbourne" the air crash expert. 

___________________________________________________________________________

* Not always a good combination. For instance I have given Skullflower more leeway than possibly anybody else on the face of this planet. You know when people say, "We do not own the Earth, we are just passing through, we are mere humble custodians." That's how I feel about Skullflower. "I don't own this CD. It is merely passing through me. I'm just buying it at an exorbitant price, listening to it once queasily, then selling it on for next to peanuts."