Cosmonox @ Firkin Tavern Portland 2/28/25

I'll be playing the squeaky card reader thingy plus a couple actual instruments this Friday at the Firkin Tavern in the rainy city of Portland, Oregon, USA. We open up the evening, hooray! Our musical brothers and sisters in the Vardaman Ensemble will be showing their latest evolution. (I'm not sure they've actually changed since the last time I saw them, but I think it's fair to assume.) I don't know Water Shrews yet, but they do have good taste in opening and closing bands.

Eternal Gormless Youth and Obscurity

The video for Snowy Band's "Looking Back" is very funny and a little poignant. Present-day Snowy discovers a video of himself in his tender years and copies the backgrounds and, um, choreography? I had some extreme feelings of recognition of myself in my gormless Guitar Vanity* years in my own nondescript suburban home. 

In a similar vein, I checked out Simon Hanselmann's Below Ambition from the library (yay libraries) and its depictions of self-indulgent patience-testing noise band squalor ring exceptionally true. His stuff has a strong flavor that I can't always take too much of, but I like this one.

The game Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip has been very popular with adult and youth alike in my household. It is sweetly anarchic and goofy. The writing is great. You smack everything in sight with a pipe. And importantly, it features a controller button solely devoted to having Terry make silly noises.

I plowed through Toni Tennille: A Memoir in a couple quick sittings. Not a great book necessarily, but earnest and readable. I now appreciate how much of a weirdo the Captain (RIP) was, and how difficult. The 70s were a weird time all right.

Is this a hot take? "Love Will Keep Us Together" > "Love Will Tear Us Apart." 

Also, I remember writing a blog post a couple decades ago about how it was comforting that you could always find a copy of Love Will Keep Us Together in the thrift bins, but I looked through the overpriced $3 records at my local Mormon thrift and didn't see it. The churning sea of thrift-store records does change eventually. Somehow I only seem to own a copy of the Spanish version Por Amor Viviremos.

I'm buying an Electrix Filter Factory from a friend and finally broke it out in Cosmonox Mode the other night. Holy mackerel that thing has the power. It will feature prominently at the show this Friday, hint hint, see next blog post.

* I need to put my album Eternal Youth and Obscurity up on Internet Archive

Cosmic Future Groove/Rose City Reads/Voice of Harold

Always interesting to see what sort of things the kid likes. Unexpected recent passion: Cosmic Future Groove Vol. 2. I did not expect my son to want to listen to 70s library disco over and over again, but I am not complaining. Today after the bath he mentioned that he would like to have a time machine so he could go to the 70s and listen to this music. He has been warned that the 70s also include "Muskrat Love." I think he thinks I'm joking about that being a real thing.

Because I cannot refuse a good segue: I had a chance to stop by the Friends of the Library's new book store Rose City Reads the other day. I picked up Toni Tennille: A Memoir because I had to. Will report back. Anyway: While the cheapskate in me misses the low low prices and beat-up library discards of the former Title Wave, the joy of discovery is still there, and a lot closer to me no less.

Sick boy. Lots of library Bluey DVDs. Sometimes things that are popular are good.

We've been reading old Childcraft stories at bedtime. One must tread carefully around some of the dated racial attitudes etc., including "The Five Chinese Brothers," yikes, but in any case that got the R.E.M. song of a similar name stuck in my head, quickly to be supplanted by the far superior "Voice of Harold," and my thanks go to rschreck for syncing up the song with its source material, the liner notes from the Revelaires' The Joy of Knowing Jesus: