If You Find Earth Boring...

this post is a little homage to my buddy Mike

a dude who shares my mania for all things Ra

thing is, as I wrote this, Diane Sawyer was talking about aliens

are they out there?

I don't really care, I just dig me some space jazz

for the inquisitive, that flute-ish stuff is an ocarina I bought in Santa Fe

also, I admit to being inspired by Eugene Chadbourne's practice of taking

free jazz oddities & making 'em folk tunes from the other side of the galaxy

space, it's the place

It's After The End Of The World

Outerspaceways Incorporated

John Sinclair, the blues

had an "it" moment this weekend

standing outside the space gallery, saturday evening

listening to John Sinclair wax rhapsodic 'bout one of my favorites,

the incomparable Jimmy Giuffre

maybe you've heard John Lennon's song 'bout freein' John Sinclair

's a cool tune

nowadays, John does a blues radio show in Amsterdam

one of the last beat survivors, still extolling the greatness of Monk

made me wanna play the blues

You Gonna Bake Me A Pie

all day

same thoughts

PBR, Borbetomagus

these dudes were in Houston a few months back

go figure

also, here's a nothing tune

's a shame

Crash On The Levee

so I decided, on a whim, to stumble into this beer joint in Portland called

Novare Res Bier Cafe

& to prove I had made a fatefully inevitable decision,

they were playing Lightnin' Hopkins

what else could a fella ask for?

good Belgian beer & some perfect blues

recently had the good fortune of checking out this downtempo doom jazz group

from Germany called

Bohren & der Club of Gore

their best album is called Dolores and if you ever see it on vinyl, steal it, send it to me

and I'll be sure to get you a Christmas card...forever

best I could say about their music - it seems to capture the essence of comfortable melancholy

also, when I've been nostalgic for the crazies on the streets of San Francisco, I find the crash'n thrash of the Bay's own Pink & Brown to be a welcome whiff of drunko stink...

ahh, just like the BART

finally, time well spent digging Bob Dylan & The Band's Basement Tapes, Blood Ulmer, & Earth's "The Bees Made Honey In The Lion's Skull"

helped give me some ideas for a rendition of Dylan's

Crash On The Levee (Down In The Flood)

...& blues

Sundays are best when you can walk in the sun
listen to some Tony Conrad & Faust

sip on some evening ‘gnac to the sounds of
Boris with Michio Kurihara

oh and here’s this other song I wrote –

Going To Houston

little nod to Lightnin’ Hopkins, Eric Dolphy, and Houstonians

tight like that

here's my version of a Tampa Red song

tight like that

song, the hook, is his

the new verses are mine

sort of like an "hommage"

hope it's not too much like "fromage"

I'll be playing at Strange Maine in Portand on Thursday night, it'll be tight like that

Nights Of Future Days

how many Mai Tais does it take for your buddy to forget you

as in, leave the bar without you

it was one year ago, Southern California

the blues club had turned me away for stupid reasons

maybe they were my stupid reasons, maybe they are all stupid reasons

but whatever they were, I couldn't remember 'em

& then after philosophical debates about nothing (aren't they all?)

some hotel, San Diego

with the noise of sidewalk saturday night drones in my bones

listing towards the morning

I dreamed amidst the soup of Future Days...

here they are & yes, we CAN!

music to wash dishes to

Mainers are nice folks, they introduce me to their dogs, they laugh at my jokes

After all the fun out at the coast, I just wanted to peruse the shops for loud music that pairs well with Pernod (the way an antiquer might seek an armoire that suits their guest bedroom)

The two recordings I procured at Strange Maine were -

A)Ophibre – Music for Casio Keyboard and Heavy Objects

B)The Ghastly Grimey Orchestra – Edward Gorey Tribute

Then I walked down Congress to Enterprise Records

Came in and “The Grass Is Greener” by Grassella Oliphant was playing.

Never heard it before, but dug it.

Got three records there –

A)John Coltrane – Coltrane Plays The Blues

B)Thelonious Monk – Quartet & Big Band Live

C)Lennie Tristano - Tristano

And in the cool-down of the evening, I gave Moon Duo and Ilyas Ahmed’s “Between Two Skies” a listen.

Today has had its fair share of quandratic moments, like a parade of neh-ked-ish folks down Free Street in the afternoon, but I think a sure remedy is a bit of Pemaquid Ale and then Sleep.

Support local music, if you know you shouldn’t take your shirt off…please don’t (take your shirt off)

as the sea exhales after each breath of wave
the slippery waterocks slide beneath the shoreline

thousands of tiny black spiders in squiglin’ rhythms unaligned guard their beach
no baptizing dips is ever easy to reach

wrote a friend back in the fall that I’d been driven to noise
well I have a stone I picked up outta the sand in Carmel

ain’t much different from the one I found near the lighthouse
the greedy gulls swarming the fish boat comin’ in behind the buoy tender

‘s just something that’ll sink to the bottom
hell, there’s a desert where the ocean used to be

Coffee, Black Vomit and Hoda Kotb (who I'm sure is very nice)

the skip in my step with every sip of morning poison

& then even the sun, the welcome light of Spring can't keep me

keep me from needing the release of some Black Vomit

'cause I come home and morning TV

Hoda Kotb, who is, I'm sure, very nice, is there in purple

game shows, "ain't nobody here but us chickens"

the chuckle clucks of this middle class gutter of the mind

the mind that has given me peep nightmares

brings a small tear to my eyes when I hear

hear Wolf Eyes with Dr. Anthony Braxton

with my coffee

then this chick on Martha says

"kids love chickens" and I definitely want to throw up

Black Vomit

(it's a picture I took of a work by Dan Flavin at the MOMA in New York)