Still doing the seat-of-the-pants approach, not deciding what song to go with until the deadline is already here, typing this up at 8:30 on Tuesday, etc.  After the opera is done I’ll re-instill some discipline or at least some pro forma hand-wringing into this process.  I kind of like this song, but it doesn’t really work.  It’s two or three songs trying to be one song; put another way, it doesn’t really maintain a consistent tone, I think. The line about the Siamese twins moving to England, probably the best line in the song (though I like the carousel part too) is stolen.  According to the internet, it’s a Steven Wright joke.  Everybody steals from everybody now.  I don’t know what the internet is finally going to mean for the arts, at least not as long as you can sit there slobbering in front of youtube all day.  I think at some point new stuff will just stop being made, or at least be driven so far off the mainstream that you’ll have to work real hard to track it down.  Nothing will progress, nothing will get old, history will be over, we’ll all live in a Museum of the Everlasting Present.  We sort of already are.  (See my “Flipper” post several weeks ago.)

The picture came from walterkrudop.com.  I emailed him and told him if he objected I’d take it down. He has some nice stuff on his site.

Monsters of Folk.  But I did buy an album this weekend, a rare event for me and for most people.  I bought Monsters of Folk. It was at Target for $9.99. It’s not really my thing, it turns out.  I’d read a review of it, which was kind of a tepid review, but somehow I have got the impression, from that review and from other sources, that the four musicians who make up the Monsters of Folk are musicians I in particular ought to be interested in and support. I don’t know where I get these ideas.  I read way too much into most stuff.  I also thought I ought to buy an album now and then as sort of a gesture of faith that civilization isn’t doomed, the same reason people recycle their glass and sometimes vote, or more precisely a gesture toward engagement with the culture.  The Monsters of Folk is kind of a folk supergroup, I guess, though I’d heard of only two of the four guys:  Jim Jones (who for some reason spells his name with Ys instead of Js for purposes of this record.  No idea), the singer with the otherworldly voice who fronts the group called My Morning Jacket (no idea), and Conor Oberst, who either is in or in fact fully constitutes Bright Eyes.  See what I mean?  I get confused just at the name level, before I even listen to a song.  If I could just hear some of their songs first, maybe I’d get a foothold, but immediately they start throwing weird names and naming rules at me.  Are you Bright Eyes, Conor, or are you in Bright Eyes?  And is the Y-for-J substitution meaningful in any particular way, Yim-Jim?  I do not get it.  The other two guys are M. Ward and Michael Mogis.  M.’s first name is Michael, but apparently there’s some sensitivity there.  I just don’t know.  I guess Cher started all this crap.  Then the rappers naming themselves after WD-40.  Now sensitive white boys inventing themselves into bands. Not to mention nutcracker doll hijinx.

The CD sounds good.  That’s a backhanded compliment.  It sounds great, but the songs just don’t have any real thereness for me.  It’s just a compilation of very high production values.  I keep getting distracted because the influences for each song’s production are so obvious, and I wonder if that’s a joke, too.  “See how much we sound like Paul Simon?  See how much we sound like the Beatles?  See how much we sound like the Travelling Wilburys on this one?”  The first song on the album, “Dear God,” may be the first earnest parody I’ve ever heard.  I didn’t know it was possible to do an earnest parody.  In this case the song in question is a dead-on disco parody, but the message of the song seems to be “Wait, don’t think you understand why we’re doing disco as the first song on the album.  You would be too quick to judge us.  You assume that we are mocking disco.  In fact we are mocking only your appreciation of disco.  We in fact see other levels to appreciate in the genre of disco that you are incapable of discerning and appreciating.  Feel free to appreciate our song on any of those levels.”

I don’t want to rag on these guys.  I just don’t like this album and don’t understand why they did it.  I’ve heard some My Morning Jacket stuff (Yim Yones’s stuff), and while it’s not right over the plate for me, I can hear something going on in their songs.  His voice is really magnificent and doesn’t need much more justification.  I haven’t listened to much of Bright Conor Oberst’s Eyes, but I listened to “Breezy” yesterday and thought it was a powerful song in that “I just turned 23 and can’t believe it’s been five years since we graduated from high school” way.  That sounds belittling but it’s not meant to; 23 is the second most frightening you will ever  be, second only to your current age.  I’ve not yet looked any farther into the other two monsters but I will.  I’m just afraid that they represent who we are now:  fey lost souls with great production values.

Drive-By Truckers.  Here’s another group I’m supposed to like and support and which I do.  These guys write songs with all kinds of thereness:

Trip to Austin.  I went to Austin today (Tuesday) on business and got there kind of early and decided to drive around Hyde Park and get some video of the places I used to live.  My favorite of all the places I lived, the duplex apartment I still bemoan losing (3910 Avenue H), is gone.  I had no idea.  I think I literally gasped. Probably not.  But I figuratively gasped. I loved that place, and now there’s a huge new house there that takes up the whole lot. It’s been there since 2004, which is even more disconcerting; I’d have sworn I’d been by that address since then. (The house is for sale, too:  $699,000. My rent on the duplex in 1991-92 was $340 ABP.) Those of you who knew me then probably remember that place, that time I got the possum off the roof, the screen doors and the honeysuckle growing through the windows, my dead landlord who left me the pair of shoes he’d had since 1962, still in perfect condition, and the pet rabbit, Hank, that was forced upon me and who I plan to write a song about.  I’ll use the video in a later song.