How I spent the apocalypse

The Pacific Northwest was a nuclear furnace last weekend, but I wouldn't know, because I was down in California with my old bandmates. Fun times. First time on a plane since my son was born four years ago. We recorded music, drank a lot of wine (see previous post), hung out at the beach, ate excellent food. So good. The whole time, though, it was pressing on my mind that my mild forest home was broiling in 116 degrees of post-apocalyptic heat. 

I played my first solo set in forever at the end of the wine party. Unamplified, super punk rock. It felt great. I should have recorded it, but I was at the end of an alphabet's worth of wine tasting (see previous post). Oh well. It was made for the moment anyway.

We recorded in a really excellent studio in a really terrible part of LA. I played a Flying V for the first time. Ridiculous ergonomics on that thing, particularly for a smaller individual like myself, but it played well and I felt 100% like a rock star.

I swam in the ocean in Huntington Beach. I needed to get pummeled a little bit by the ocean and the ocean was only too glad to oblige.

I flew back to Portland after the hottest day in the city's history. I got in late enough that it was only 78 degrees out. I had ridden my bike to the airport. Hmm, do I dare to ride home at 1 am after the apocalypse? I did. The city felt dazed, punch-drunk. Rabbits were hopping all over the bike path. No humans except a few people staring from their encampments in the darkness. I rode past our daycare (power was out) in inky blackness. Traffic signals out, tow truck cleaning up wreckage at the intersection. I could swear I saw stars. I rode over the bike bridge and looked out at the people who were crazy enough to be on the freeway at 1:30 am after the apocalypse. 

When I opened the garage door at my house, the house blasted sauna furnace volcano heat at me. Somehow it was even hotter upstairs. Wife and boy were down in Tualatin soaking up my mom's AC. I fell asleep, woke up, and went back to work looking at squiggles.

Wine tasting with the Wine Weirdos

 

Mike had a ridiculous blind-tasting wine party for his birthday. I drew a cartoon for each wine. I don't know if I actually took a picture of the wine list, though.

Terminals - Last Days of the Sun

Classic New Zealand band plays what might be the ultimate climate change anthem if you listen to it just right:

I'm not sure if that's what it's actually about, but it sounds pretty perfect against our wildfire-scented hundred-degree air in (checks calendar) June.

I like the fact that Brian Crook (100% underappreciated guitar genius) misses a lot of notes in exactly the right way. I like the way that Peter Stapleton veers from playing drum iambs to playing trochees without warning, as he has been doing for decades. Another scorched/scorching guitar solo that sounds like the end of the world. Perfect.

The album itself gets lost in the weeds a bit at times, but when it hits it hits.

Homer Quincy Smith

 

 

Homer Quincy Smith "I Want Jesus to Talk with Me"

One of those songs that I forget about for years at a time, and then all of a sudden I remember it, and it is just as harrowing and perfect as the first time I listened to it.

Karlicki Sing Ukrainian Songs for You

This album is so good. Perfect for feeling a little bleak on a rainy day. Here's "The Fortune Teller." I wish I could upload the awesome cover image, but Blogggggggggger is giving me grief. Oh well - click through.

For some reason my mind is telling me to also mention Dara Puspita's wonderful A Go Go. The two don't really have anything in common other than that they were made in the 60s by female singers of languages I don't understand (Indonesian in this case). And Dara Puspita make me want to jump up and down rather than gently sway and mope. But they are both great.

Ukrainian love note to the Internet Archive

 

Oh Internet Archive, always with the new surprises. After doing one of my periodic gorges on Polkadon DB's YouTube channel (previously), I searched DuckDuckGo for "dance series by various ukrainian artists" - don't we all? - and it turns out that album, with its awesome if unsettling cover (in my favorite magenta-orange color scheme no less), is up on the Internet Archive, along with a squadillion other Ukrainian-Canadian LPs. Karlicki Sing Ukrainian Songs for You is there in all of its perfect melancholy glory. Multiple Interlake Polka Kings albums. You name it. Time to dig deeper.

 

Supercollider _Dual_

In the garage I found a little CD carrying case (with dubious counterfeit backwards Barbie printed on it). It contained a bunch of CDs that I must have burned for some road trip or other back in the day (my personal Geo Metro was cassette-only until its demise in 2015). ANYWAY there was a CD-R that said something like:

MP3s FOR CAR USE

How can I not throw that in my car's CD player, right? I throw it in my car's CD player. What's on there? Hmm, Bucket Owens, OK, I threw my own stuff on there. De Artsen's Conny Waves with a Shell, Good album, but "Farmers Attempt" is glitching out every fifteen seconds or so. Ah, Supercollider's Dual. Cool, I will never get tired of this album, its deep-well crystal reinvention of the electric guitar, poetic lyrics, perfectly flawed voice, made even more flawed by glitching-out mystery CD-R.

This morning I was driving to daycare, boy sitting in the background laughing his head off at The Complete Peanuts 1981-1982, so I turn on that CD and listen to guitar waves pulsing all around me on I-205. We get closer to daycare and I notice that boy is really vibing on the album. I park and wait for the person in front of me to drop off their kiddo. "Stainless" begins and they wave goodbye. Our turn. Boy refuses to leave. "I want to listen to the end of the song!" And even though I know he's being difficult on a Monday, I imagine that he's really into the album.