Leftover Stories to Tell

A tribute performance of Spalding Gray's work begins in New York this week. Gray's suicide was devastating -- of course suicide always is. However, Gray always seemed so amiable in his performances, like a friend who would always be there.

Writes the NYT:

"The show also captures what brought so many fans to Mr. Gray in the first place: a voyeuristic glimpse into the life of a wayward WASP, someone willing to unstintingly report on his own weaknesses and neuroses while using them to create an incisive portrait of relationships, sex, therapy, politics, ambition and family. And he was reliable: always seated at his desk with a shimmering glass of water, always ready to tell a captivating story."

Tempus Fugit

They've finally done it! Those bastards have finally done it! They've invented the alarm clock that will run away from you.

Bill Lives!

Bye-bye Coit and Spring Valley. Bill's Records and Tapes, a Dallas music institution for decades, will not be riding off into the sunset soon. He's just moving to the Southside next to the new Poor David's.

Francois!

The new Wes Anderson American Express Ad I guess qualifies as the first new Wes Anderson movie in a while. It's pretty funny. Plus, there's another essay about why it takes so long for him and his contemporaries to roll out movies.

There Will Be Music Despite Everything

NPR gave us a wonderful little feature on one of my favorite poets, Jack Gilbert.

Last week, my daughter read a Gilbert poem at her elementary school poetry slam. Hope you like it:

Horses at midnight without a moon
by Jack Gilbert

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there’s music in us. Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
The summer mornings begin inch by inch
while we sleep, and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through
the dirty streets. It is no surprise
that danger and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing.
We know the horses are there in the dark
meadow because we can smell them,
Can hear them breathing.
Our spirit persists like a man struggling
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on the top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun.

Typerotica ... Um, Wow.

Now, you would think The Virtual Typewriter Museum would be a little bit of a snooze. I mean, I love typewriters as much as the next guy, but come on

Well, I was wrong.

Turns out there was a lot more going on that just stenography and a little light clerical. There was some down and dirty going on back in the day behind the old Underwood. And this is the tame stuff. Wowza!

If more museums were like this, we wouldn't need topless bars.

There's even a book about sex and typewriters! That kind of research is almost -- almost -- enough to make me go back to grad school.

Some Last Words About Buck

I was thinking about Buck Owens today. I’ve been meaning to write something about him since he died recently, but my thoughts hadn’t come together yet. I still don’t know that they have, but I figured I’d take a shot anyway.

The music of Buck Owens was about sheer exuberance – you can’t listen to his music and not smile. It’s like the old CCR song about sitting on the back porch and listening to Buck Owens. The sound of his guitar generates an emotional response.

It’s too bad that most people will only remember him for Hee-Haw, a magnificent piece of pop culture cheese that seems almost surreal looking back on it. The man was a guitar virtuoso who managed to blend many opposing musical tangents of the 1960s into the Bakersfield Sound, a sound as American and relevant as bee-bop.

When you compare him to Johnny Cash, another mega-entertainer of his generation, they may have shared the genre but their art was substantially different. JR Cash was more of a poet fueled by anger and pills and it’s easy to trace an arc of redemption through his life and music. Buck isn’t quite so complicated. He was more of a pure entertainer and was more of a Horatio Alger story of a poor boy making good. He just wanted to put on a good show and make a little scratch.

Perhaps a more apt comparison would be Merle Haggard. Both Buck and Merle were products of the Dust Bowl and the Okie migration, but where Merle would continue to dwell on this in his music, Buck just kept steaming forward with good-time Honky-Tonk music. The music of Buck Owens wasn’t about rage or introspection, it was the great American postwar music of laughter and forgetting.

Maybe the lack of deeper themes will keep Buck from assuming his rightful place in the pantheon of country music gods. Now maybe he’s not a poet the way Johnny and Merle are, but if you listen to the bridge of Foolin’ Round, you will hear a caliber of American poetry that would humble Walt Whitman.

Godspeed, Buck. We’ll miss you.

We Are All Little Before Him

I have a new hero. His name is Eric Harshbarger and not only does he do cool Lego Skylines of Fort Worth (pictured above), he does Lego sculptures of Milhouse Van Houten, Dean Cain, and Conan O'Brien. Check him out!

Thinking of Walt Whitman

April is National Poetry Month and I am looking for a poem for my daughter to read at her elementary school poetry slam. And I stumbled on a poem by that grand old man of American poetry, Walt Whitman. It's totally not appropriate for the occasion but thought provoking nonetheless, especially the end:

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
What do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Walker Evans Wannabe

I'm giving it my best shot here. I took this in Marfa last summer.

I Like This One The Best

Abbey Road
Originally uploaded by Digger Digger Dogstar.

It has a cool Paint By Numbers quality.

All You Need Is ... Legos?

Sgt Peppers Lego Hearts Club Band
Originally uploaded by Digger Digger Dogstar.

Not quite as cool as the Lego Aircraft Carrier, but cool nonetheless.

Come Fly With Me

The ring-a-ding spirit of old time Vegas is alive and well in Dallas thanks to one Mr. Ricki Derek. Ricki and his 15-piece band launched their first attempt to channel the spirit of the Copa at last Saturday night's Supper Club and they were successful -- mostly.

Ricki is an unbelieveably charismatic performer who doesn't possess a voice as rich as Ol' Blue Eyes but his stage presence establishes him as the real deal. He nailed it Saturday when he covered my favorite Bobby Darin song, More. He has star-power and makes you believe he could hang with Frank and Dino. And his band was as dead-on as any of the Nelson Riddle orchestras from the Capitol Records years. And although he stuck with a vintage set on Saturday, he's not above a loungy cover of The Doors' People Are Strange or The Church's Under The Milky Way.

All this was hosted at Victoria Hall next to Tucker Restaurant. The place gets its name because it is housed in an old Tucker dealership, but thankfully it's not an automotive-themed TGIFriday's monstrosity, its tastefully done with lots of wine bottles and wood paneling. I suspect the food is pretty good, but the meals didn't reflect it at the Supper Club. Food was lukewarm, hors d'oeurves were MIA, the servers surly. And the band overwhelmed the space and conversation was hard to come by. Ricki's six-piece outfit would have done fine. And I would have preferred to eat first, then see the show.

I'm hoping they get the bugs worked out because this is an idea whose time has come.

Alive

Another photo I took during my Magnolia Street jaunt. It may be immodest to say, but I love this picture.

Donald Judd Auction Scheduled

Donald Judd’s children work hard to preserve their father’s legacy.

On May 9 the Donald Judd Foundation, established after Judd's death at 66, in 1994, will put 35 sculptures up for sale at Christie's in New York, in an effort to create a $20 million endowment for the support of its properties in New York and Marfa, where Judd owned 3 ranches and 15 buildings.

Update on the Kinkster

A thoughtful write-up on Kinky Friedman inthe Dallas Morning News (registration required).

255-Year-Old Tortoise ... Dead

A 255-year-old giant tortoise named Adwaitya died at the Calcutta Zoo on Wednesday. The animal had been brought to India from the Seychelles Islands in the mid-18th century as a gift to the British colonial ruler Robert Clive.

What to do now? Make one big, nasty bowl of turtle soup. Yum.

What's the Coolest Thing in the World?

That would be a Lego Aircraft Carrier, of course.

Neko Case Esta Bueno

Neko Case. Is there anything more to say? Her voice is amazing, clear and haunting. Her new album, Fox Confessor Brings Flood is my album of the year pick. But, my, she has a little bitterness toward her parents. But don't we all.

Must I Paint You A Picture?

I love me some Billy Bragg and always have since the 80s. There's an interesting interview with him on the Onion's AV Club. Couple of interesting things about it.

Says Billy: "I think the politics that we had in the 1980s in America and in the UK were a lot more ideological than they are now. Reaganomics and the essence of what Margaret Thatcher was trying to do was a lot more aimed at pushing back at what had been achieved in the 1960s." Wow. I remember the 80s, too, and I think this is most poisonous political climate in my memory. Not only are there many in the U.S. interested in undoing the Sixties, they want to undo the New Deal. And they're doing it. That is much more frightening.

However, one thing he said that I completely agree with:

"One thing that's always impressed me about America is your ability to do things when you set your mind to it, even if it is something fucked-up like invading Iraq. You know, you guys logistically are right up there. None of us have got that capacity for moving shit from A to B. It's very powerful. And I would like America per se really to get back in touch with what you Americans refer to as "barn-raising." You know what I'm talking about? When someone in a community wants to build a barn or a house, everybody in the community gets together and spends an entire weekend to help the person to raise the A-frame of their house or their barn. That ability to go out and help people.

"You know, if everyone in the Middle East who met an American met one who had come to help them, rather than an American armed to the teeth who had come to police them, I think we could begin to move away from the situation we've found ourselves in. There's a great film to be made, or maybe a book to be written, called Go Home, Yankee, And Take Me With You. So many people out there look to the United States as a place of great opportunity. And I think that maybe your manifest destiny is to help people rather than to hinder people. I would like to see the American people live up to that."