Dippers _Clastic Rock_/Cargo Bike Summer 2023/big words

The newish Dippers album Clastic Rock has been on frequent rotation on both my cargo bike speaker and my office turntable this summer. Good stuff - the time signatures are irregular, the melodies catchy, the words large* and compellingly assembled. The first four songs are as solid as anything I've heard recently. Could a couple songs be trimmed? Yes, but I can deal. Summer hit of 2023? Yes.

The album cover art echoes the art for the first Wipers record. (I'll need to post pictures a little later.) Coincidence? The song titles are these weird little poems on their own, so I kind of wish they were not broken up in all directions, but we'll always have online streaming to present all fourteen titles in one unbroken unit.

Cargo Bike Summer 2023 is just about done - last day of summer care camp is tomorrow - and I'll miss it. I found a way to school that is beautiful and calm (with the exception of an unavoidable quarter-mile of stroad noise and speed) and relatively flat, and I took it every day. When I was deadheading to or from school without the boy on the back, I listened to albums - the Dippers record for the past few weeks - and their rhythms have overlaid themselves onto the path I rode. "Drop to Inoperant" (good title) will always be linked to this particular intersection, though the long-shadowed October light in the Street View doesn't quite match the full-bodied summer sunlight in my memory.

* OK, I have to say it: There are a couple words that are pronounced... well, I don't want to say incorrectly, but I couldn't find any dictionaries where "amygdalae" is pronounced the way it is on the record.  Maybe it's an Australian thing? Not that I can talk. As someone who is still haunted by his own mispronunciations on long-forgotten CDRs, I know how that feels. I've read a lot of books and learned big words and then sounded like a dope when I went to put said words into action. Ask me about the time I read Childcraft's Guide for Parents and then mispronounced "vagina" with the ladies in my grandma's small-town bridge club, where nothing was ever forgotten. That's why, as the old pin says, we never guess, we look it up.

Cargo Bike Morning (predicted high 105) and "Hijack the Barber"

Speaker algo selects King Tubby, "Hijack the Barber," speaker hijacks bass response, we're left with hi-hat sibilance and echoed flutes and stabs of horns on sunbaked Sandview, unsidewalked, a squirrel bounds in perfect time, its tail well groomed and sinusoidal, turn blind corner, roll through stop sign, Diane is out and watering sunflowers, left on my street, flip the PINpad, garage door creaks and roars to open.

Suburban Saturday

This morning we went to an all-you-can-eat pancake fundraiser at a certain local whole-grain institution. Out of the corner of my eye I glanced a mustachioed individual wearing a "Reagan Bush '84" hat. Instantly my early-aughts lizard brain started making calculations: is this an ironic hat? Said gentleman looked like he was in diapers at most when my boy Fritz lost the '84 election in a landslide. Anyway, we set up with our flapjacks outside, and dude and his family entourage coincidentally set up next to us. The matriarch figure starts telling jokes along the lines of "What do you call a man sitting in a basketball hoop? Duncan!!!!" and absolutely just losing it with laughter. Like, dozens of jokes of this caliber, each one causing more laughter than the last. It was like a performance art piece and I wasn't sure what to make of it. The wheat-free vegan pancakes were excellent though.

We stopped by a yard sale on the way home. One of the proprietors (wearing an NRA shirt) was going on at length about the evils of a certain ballot measure that I voted for and contributed to. By the time we finished looking at their stuff he was still going on about how it was going to be overturned by the Supreme Court. I kept my mouth shut and we bought our stepstool and guilty-pleasure 80s CD.

I rode my bike to another yard sale in an attempt to work off some of the carbs. They had an Inst*nt P*t upgrade model and ours is on the fritz (note the clever double fritzing). Realizing that this appliance would not fit in my bag, I told the seller that I'd be back in a more appropriate vehicle. I rode up the hill and realized that it would be funny if I came back with my cargo bike. So I did. The seller was amused and I burned off another quarter pancake or so. I bought an appliance and petted their pug.

Cosmonox/garage sales/archives.design

Cosmonox played the second of its two weekly shows last night (thanks to grandma for babysitting). Jason and I leaned into some Village People-esque identities (I was the "third-string 70s power forward" and Jason the "digital cowboy" - thanks to JL for taking the photo:)

Jason modded my Cardmaster to bring the full speed/half speed switch to the front, and while I miss the visual aspect of digging into the battery compartment to access that switch, I have to admit that it is expressively useful to have it accessible at all times. Anyway, it was awesome, as is the new album Labelmaker.

I biked to a bunch of yard sales yesterday - found some quality stuff, got some exercise. At one of the sales I leaned my bike up against a towering Douglas fir and got a bunch of pitch all over my left handlebar. People at various yard sales had various solutions for the problem, but the best one was, "oh, rub a bunch of peanut butter or mayonnaise on your hands!" When I got home, I tried it out, and I have to admit that it was pretty pleasurable to rub a bunch of Jif on my hands. My kid was not a fan of the way my hands smelled afterwards.

Archives.design (ht: Recomendo) links to a bunch of Internet Archive-hosted scans of design importance. I was glad to see the maniacal kids' book Honeybees included (we picked up a copy at The Clackamas Bookshelf for ten cents and I always try to foist it on my kid at bedtime), plus of course the collection of scanned floppy disk sleeves is right up my alley...

Desperate Bicycles "Grief Is Very Private"

I made Hot Cargo Bike Summer 2023 a little more interesting by buying a really terrible Bluetooth speaker with a very good handlebar mount. In painfully obvious bicycle listening, I was listening to (The) Desperate Bicycles. Their whole discography is great and totally not legally accessible except through the collector-scum market. Since most of the online anthologies are chronological, I never end up playing their last single as often as the rest. But every time I do, it rearranges my mind. '

Who makes music like this? It's reasonable to call it "post-punk," I guess (a term which I was struggling to define for Cosmonox live-dub enthusiast Jason recently). But what sort of post-punk is built like this? Things are jammed together in totally non-linear and exciting ways, it's all built around some sort of asthmatic organ/Stylophone sound, there are chords I can't figure out on the guitar, and then on top of it the bassist is positively shredding, on an emphatically fretless bass no less. (Important to note that even on their early stuff the bass is fretless and all over the place.) The last song, "Conundrum", is both super catchy and completely bewildering.  

New Cosmonox album, plus live shows

Cosmonox has a new album and I think it's great. We are branching out from our initial four-track-and-language master sounds into something a little more expansive. Getting maximum value out of the Casio CZ-101 and the melodica, sometimes at the same time.

Shows in Portland, Oregon:
July 15: at Turn! Turn! Turn! with The Vardaman Ensemble and Otolithia
July 22: at Starday Tavern with Dr. Something and ///supersun///

Mention the key word "lethologica" to the awkward-looking dude with the squeaky card machine at either show and I will give you a dollar or a mostly-filled-out punchcard for Great American Video and Espresso in Milwaukie. (Side note: I love the fact that there is a fully-functional video store within a few minutes of my house, even though the only videos I watch these days are from the library, and that they serve pretty good Italian ice!)

Paul Evans "Lullaby Tissue Paper Company"

 

I've got a soft spot for high-concept country novelty weepers. The more famous A side of this single, "Hello This Is Joannie (The Telephone Answering Machine Song)," is kind of a high-water mark for the genre, but it's also a sore spot in our household given the title character's name (basically identical to my wife's) and, well, she dies driving drunk and then the narrator keeps calling her answering machine to hear her voice! Morbid! 

So this one, then. A song about "the makers of the softest tissue paper to ever wipe a teardrop from your eye," personally endorsed by the narrator, as they are gentle and strong enough to handle the copious tears brought on by "she left me over some dumb thing that I said."* 

More importantly, the version that was floating around on YouChoob for years has a skip in a really key part of the ludicrous narrative, so now that I'm hearing it without that particular skip, it makes me almost uneasy - wait, that's the spot where my shoulders are supposed to tense up - why am I not tense?

*I really like how he condenses all of the conflict to one concise sentence - let's focus on the tears and the off-brand Kleenex instead.