Orangutan Breaks into Car and Steals Beer

The SMU Jones/WFAA archives are always a good deep dig. Here's a delightful slice of 1975:

 "Tonight, as it sits in protective custody, the animal can consider what it did."

Also, SO MANY CIGARETTES

 

Ibon Errazkin / Tsai Ming-Liang

First off: ugh

Second: On a dreadful day amidst the wreckage of my inbox, there was an announcement from Elefant that Ibon Errazkin's new album Claros del Bosque is coming out later this month. His previous album Foto Aérea has also been a source of calm and clarity for me in weird times and I'm looking forward to seeing what he does as he continues to hone his obsessive craft. Here, watch the video(s):

He mentions at the end of the video that he was inspired by Tsai Ming-Liang's Walker series, in which people very very slowly walk across a landscape. Number one, not familiar, number two, must investigate immediately.

Computers: Expressway to Tomorrow

Sometimes you click around on Internet Archive and end up in 1983. I found this cache of feedback letters for the delightfully named "Computers: Expressway to Tomorrow" presentation that went around to high school gymnasiums in 1983, sponsored by Atari. It is interesting to see which IBM Selectric typeballs were in fashion at the time (Letter Gothic, always my favorite), how many ways the name Ronnie Anastasio can be misspelled, how high school administrators expressed themselves through people taking dictation. Other fun stuff too.

I like these bits of arcana from the dowdy 1980s, the 80s that happened in fluorescent-lit buildings in beige outfits rather than in neon leg warmers under bright lights in the aerobics studio.

Dumb cargo bike adventures part ???

 

I went to a rummage sale on the cargo bike today. I saw an upright vacuum and asked myself, hmm, will I be able to get this thing home safely? Answer: OF COURSE. And drivers, for some crazy reason, seemed to give me more room than usual! Memo to myself: always carry a vacuum cleaner on bike

"When the Song Begins"

Always interesting when something you did twenty-five years ago comes up on shuffle. This 10-minute number was recorded, if I recall correctly, on my blue Tascam Porta 02, probably using a single microphone. The title is the first line uttered, nearly five minutes in, and I like how the coda is actually kind of pretty. I also like how my guitar is borderline inaudible, but it is clearly providing invisible structure to the proceedings:

Not my favorite album by said group, but definitely the edgiest GW album cover, Wegman weimaraners photoshopped onto that infamous gun photo, with faux-Crass typography to boot. And in any case GW's albums don't necessarily function to be good or bad, they just are, they exist to propagate themselves in used record bins. This one was particularly good at that function since it was on what I recall being a pretty hip record label? And I appreciate how this particular song has a whopping 16 plays on YouChoob.

Early September / Herbie Flowers

I took the last couple days off work. Burning off some PTO. Felt good.

Yesterday I rode my bike to hike on Mt. Talbert, which I don't think I'd been to since my kid started going to daycare. It felt weird not having 25 pounds of snoozing toddler in a hiking backpack on my person. I felt free. The dappled sunlight, overmemorized paths, and hyperactive squirrels pleased me greatly. It smelled like September 10th. And now that I know I can bike there, hike from the bottom to the top, and get back all in an hour and a half, I may need to go more frequently.

On Monday I biked up to Little Axe Records, always a good time, both the biking part and the record store part. The clerk was playing his personal (original!) copy of Pari Zangeneh's The Series of Music for Young Adults, part of my soundtrack from Cargo Bike Summer 2023, and I was soaking it up. I bought a reasonably-priced copy of Jody Harris/Robert Quine's Escape (c.f. this blog in May)

I also bought a reasonably-priced copy of the Craven Fops' Pleasure. I love saying the name "Craven Fops" and it's a good record in the inconvenient 10" format.

I looked for anything on them besides the singles I'd heard previously. This ended me up on r/vintageobscura, which showed me that session bassist par excellence Herbie Flowers died a week ago. RIP to the man whose lateral-thinking downtuned floppy heavy bass solo on Nilsson's "Jump into the Fire" showed me that another world is possible.

Beach trip Aug 2024 (long)

We took a trip to Pacific City. Hanging out with the brother-in-law, his wife, and the three nieces. 6th, 9th, 11th grades, three amazing different flavors of sass and joy. The sort of tridirectional female relationships that I as the older of two boys would never understand, nor would my only son.

The boy's joy in the water. Shrieking with delight when a wave would come and swamp his entirely beach-inappropriate western-shirt-and-sweatpants ensemble.

Night walk in Pacific City to get some sleep medicine after a rough night before. Various off-road yahoos whistling their diesels off the beach** back to their respective rentals. A very bored grocery clerk at closing time. Walking past a noisy party, I hear Cher's "Believe" start up. A woman's voice singing "Believe." A woman says "They always give me this song!" It pauses and another woman's voice continues to sing "Believe" while someone fumbles to get Pandora to play a different song.

(The previous night, I had been repeating the phrase BLING WOLF over again for some reason, thinking of different words that begun with those letters, trying to get to sleep.) 

The cool flat river. Insect sounds louder than the surf. A deer with a limp in its back leg. The Pere Ubu lyric "My baby says/We can live in the empty spaces of this life."

**Don't get me started

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8/26/24: We drove down the always awe-inspiring Oregon coast to North Bend. It is crazy that we live a couple hours from this. Magnificent vistas at every turn. Places we marked to return to someday.

We're in an Airbeeandbee near the delightfully named Pony Village Mall, near the Pony Slough. I mean how cute is that. Said slough is totally beautiful - and - totally obscured from view by dumb things like car washes, defunct restaurants, an airport. Million dollar views with a roaring highway in the way and no real way to see the magnificent vista of the bridge short of sneaking into an urgent care parking lot.

The typography on the sign for this funeral home:

It feels like only crazy people walk here (NB: I've done a lot of walking). A guy with wild hair walked past me in a restaurant parking lot next to Pony Slough.
Guy: (raises fist and says "woo woo"). I miss when people used to do that.
Me: (raises fist and says "woop woop")
Guy: No, "woop woop" is so cringe.

The family went out to Coquille to do a rail bike ride through Joy Rails and - free plug - there was indeed much joy to be had. I was happy to ride bikes. My kid was happy to be on the rails. And my wife was happy to look at hawks and deer and dragonflies, of which there were many. Totally great.  

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Lake Marie, in Umpqua Lighthouse State Park. Super peaceful even with the occasional roar of dune buggies over a distant hill.

Oh yeah, the boy found a cowboy hat in a coastal thrift store (going down the coast, that has historically been our thing) and basically kept it on his head the rest of the journey.

A dude with a p*rcupine followed us down the coast. Two blocks away from the house in Pacific City to two blocks from the house in North Bend at a traffic island near Pony Village. Not sure if his MO was to get spare change, find love, or just interact with other human beings. All valid, I guess. The p*rcupine seemed cool.

A day earlier I had seen someone playing wild fiddle on said traffic island with her case open. I appreciated the madness of this particular endeavor, playing an instrument against the roar of a thousand lifted trucks next to a moribund mall across the street from an unseen million dollar coastal vista. There's a weird beating heart like that in the Coos Bay area, the same beating heart that animates the quite good vegan restaurant, the hippies and wonderful earnest weirdos who haven't gone sour and jaded in this lumber town. 

I meant to put a dollar in her violin case, but doing so would have meant crossing a lot of unpredictable mall traffic lanes on foot. I walked on. She was gone half an hour later when I came back.