As I’m going to try and bang out more thoughts—diaries, really—here on PrettyFakes (I hope for many of them to have accompanying illustrations, once we can hurdle the 2k9/Zune:bomb errors we’re getting), I’ll likely slap the “do no read” label on them. You can read, but you won’t care. Ha! Just like a John Updike story in the latest issue of the New Yorker! Warning: I am also going through all my old records and cassettes and re-re-evaluating them.
Later this week: The Golden Palominos v. the Barenaked Ladies!
My favorite things right now:
Man On Wire: “Eem-poss-ee-bell.” If you’d have said I’d fall in love a semi-documentary about a nimble French street performer scaling the heights of 1970’s American excess/permanent invisible symbol of our unipower vulnerability, I would have thought you were crazy. And yet there I was, absolutely red-cheeked sobbing and in love, shouting ‘BRAVO! BRAVO!’ Glorious.
Louise Carter, by Casey Parks. Heart-fluttering stories about frog-filled ponds and the instant majesty of school buses. This would be a short-story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez were it set a little further South around the turn of the (twentieth) century.
Yesterday Sally was asking me what I was reading. So: in October, the aforementioned Casey Parks debuted I was so sad, an audio construct featuring dozens of people reading the poem “I Was So Sad” by David Lerner. Go; go: listen to it; it will make you feel good (“accepted Saran wrap as my personal savior! . . . was washed in the blood of the Chrysler” strikes me as something fans of the HOG will giggle definantly about).
Okay, so you go “I gotta get some more of this sweet poetry,” rat? So you e-mail the conductress and then you get mixed up and you buy a book by David Berman, not Lerner, but it’s called Actual Air and you realize he’s in the Silver Jews and the gig starts like this:
Walking through a field with my little brother SethI pointed to a place where kids had made angels in the snow.
For some reason, I told him that a troop of angels
had been shot and dissolved when they hit the ground.He asked who shot them I said a farmer.
And that is what we call a happy coincidence.
Tags: Casey Parks, David Berman, David Lerner, Frog Island, I Was So Sad, Man On Wire, Silver Jews
I LOVE Actual Air. It’s one of my favorite books. I like Self-Portrait at 28 and Cassette County, as well as this little bit from Governors on Sominex:
P.K. was in the precinct house, using his one phone call
to dedicate a song to Tammy, for she was the light
by which he traveled into this and that
—-
I’m so glad you like the video of my grandma! I have some podcasts featuring her coming up soon, too!
I’ve been in a D. Berman frame of mind these last few months, so I suppose I need to check out that poetry. I keep hearing good things.
Hi, Gorjus. Just a note to say what you probably already know. Tangential, really, but did you know that bared naked ladies is a folk name for surprise lilies, those tall pink things that burst out in early spring?
[...] Actual Air, David Berman. The book peaked on the first poem, “Snow,” but man, what a [...]