The annotated Mercer Mayer

The drummer's all like, "Damn, saxophone player. A frog just jumped out of my snare drum and I know you are somehow responsible. This is insanity." The sax player's all like, "Hmm, well." The frog's all like, "Fuck yeeeeeeessss." The waiter doesn't give a damn about anything except carrying trays. The customers are all like, "I didn't spend 80 bucks for a bunch of nonsense." The trumpet player's all like, "Oh, my sides."

This has been the annotated Mercer Mayer. Join us next week for a special audio version of the annotated masters when the Human Beatbox takes on Kierkegaard.

Adam Yauch R.I.P.

 I should really just change the name of the blog to Cancer Is Killing Awesome Music People. Adam Yauch was only 47. He was one of the Beastie Boys, of course, and one of the only musicians in the Free Tibet movement who did more than just slap a bumper sticker on a car. He directed a few documentaries, one about his own band and the other about street basketball. I was surprised to learn from his obituaries that he founded Oscilloscope Laboratories, a film production company that fought the good fight against multiplex CGI-rot by bringing Meek's Cutoff, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Wendy and Lucy, Dark Days, Rare Exports, Exit Through the Gift Shop, Nicholas Ray's We Can't Go Home Again, and documentaries about Nicholas Ray, Scott Walker, John Cazale, and William S. Burroughs to theaters, festivals, and video stores. He did a lot in the relatively short lifetime he unluckily drew from the genetic pile.

Chris Ethridge R.I.P.

Chris Ethridge was the last bassist in the International Submarine Band and the first bassist in the Flying Burrito Brothers. He played on Safe at Home and The Gilded Palace of Sin, and he spent a lot of time in Willie Nelson's band. He was a damn good bassist, and now he's dead from cancer, four days after fellow cosmic American musician Levon Helm's cancer death.

 

Levon Helm R.I.P.

Levon Helm was an Arkansan in a band of Canadians who worshiped Southern music. He was a great drummer and a great singer and one of that small, impressive club who could do both at the same time. He wrote a lot of good songs and was a gifted, natural actor, particularly as Loretta Lynn's dad in Coal Miner's Daughter and a small but wonderful role in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. He's on at least four of the greatest rock records of all time: The Basement Tapes, On the Beach, Music from Big Pink, and The Band. That's a good life by any measure.

A song for every year of my life #20: 1996

Boy, I've been away from this blog for awhile. You know why? I'm fuckin' tired, that's why. My new job is exhausting (in both good and bad ways), my wife and I are buying a house, and I've rekindled my love affair with falling asleep on the couch. Don't worry, chum-mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmps, this time I'm falling asleep on the couch on a regular basis because I'm actually sleepy, not because I'm praying for death. I spent the first part of 1996 praying for death and sitting aimlessly on the floor in my dorm room's walk-in closet and sleeping and watching 17 movies in one sitting and taking only three classes and barely getting by. That was a rough time. Then I reconnected with a friend from the previous year's unsuccessful dorm experiment and made a bunch of new friends and spent the second half of the year having the antics, mirth, hijinks, shenanigans, hoopla, fracases, melees, barnburners, and disco infernos that young people are supposed to have as sophomores in college. Long story short, box socials every night. I've been slacking on these posts in recent days because I'm kinda tired of the '90s. I'm not that tired of the next two jams in the series, though.
Silkworm is so goddamn underrated. That's what happens when you consistently make good music and present yourselves in the least sensational way possible. No one gives a shit except rabid weirdo shut-ins like yours truly. The surviving members of Silkworm are in another great band now, Bottomless Pit, that gets even less attention than Silkworm. Bigger crimes have been committed, but not much bigger.
Silkworm fun fact: I picked up an accidental hobby of collecting awkward conversations with members of seminal indie rock bands in bathroom lines. I sprung an effusive fanboy gush on Silkworm bassist Tim Midgett while he was waiting to use an outdoor facility at a SXSW several years ago. Others in this series include Mike Watt, Clawhammer's Bob Lee, Pavement's Steve West, and, most recently, Ted Leo. Collect them all in a limited-edition box set. Every 12th box contains a stick of unwrapped, pre-moistened gum.



Alternate choice: R.L. Burnside - "Goin Down South"
This song makes me want to fire a mini-cannon out of a full-sized cannon and then drive a tank through a couple of miniature golf courses while arm-wrestling a bear for a flask of gin. Fuck yeah it does.

Heads up

Hey Internetters,
My brother has restarted and retooled his blog. After a long break, he's started drawing again and posting some of those drawings. I particularly like the goat and the Harry Dean Stanton. Here's the link.

Mad titties, or the varieties of human experience

I haven't mentioned it here yet, but I'm once again gainfully employed and have been since December. I don't know why I haven't let the news slip even in passing on this blog, especially since the tumultuous events of the past several years have become a near-constant topic in this rarely visited corner of the artist formerly known as the information superhighway. Now that I'm no longer praying to a deity I never believed in to strike me dead, I'd like to raise a glass to my first three months of regained sanity and another glass to hopes of continuing trends in no-longer-looney-tunes monkey business. I'm not being that hyperbolic. I was nuts. I wasn't really a person anymore, just a kind of slug-robot-sad-old-country-song hybrid. Because I have an amazing wife, I am still here and I am employed. If she wasn't a part of my life, my last few years would have been an extended, real-life, tragic version of the first three episodes of season two of Eastbound & Down. I would also be dead, a homeless alcoholic, or the accidental cockfighting impresario of Ciudad Juarez.
I am now a case worker for a state Health and Human Resources office, deciding if people qualify for food stamps and/or Medicaid. My new job requires extensive training because I have to learn a lot of state and federal policy and apply that policy to individual situations using a needlessly complicated computer system while talking to needy, hungry people who are sitting in front of me or talking to me on the phone. I also have access to all kinds of private information about these people, which can get me fired if I compromise it in any way. Since I'm a new guy with a limited caseload who's only partially finished with training, I sometimes have to help out in the front lobby. This part of the job is pretty mindless, consisting of finding out why people are visiting the office and giving them a corresponding ticket with a number on it that will eventually be announced over a loudspeaker. I don't mind doing this because I know it's only temporary, and I also don't mind because it's some pretty amazing people-watching. Frighteningly, the lobby is massively overcrowded about two-thirds of the time, thanks to the Bush/Obama never-ending war economy. (A retired Army vet who recently started working there told me that our beautiful government was spending one million dollars a month on Gatorade delivery alone. Halliburton contract employees made $95,000 a year hitting the play button on DVD players in base media rooms. That was the entirety of the job. And that's the small-potatoes, anecdotal shit.)
The shortcut to the point is, I see a wildly varied cross-section of humanity. On Tuesday, a chubby boy with corn rows and glasses, estimated age of nine or ten, walked into the office. I said hello. He stopped, pivoted in my direction, lowered his head and glared directly at me with withering contempt over his glasses, hands on hips, foot slowly tapping. He then walked over to the security guards, gave them the same silent stare of disdain, and strutted over to his mother, whose application was being screened. He stood next to her and began loudly tapping the wall with his open palm. Two or three minutes later, this same boy sits down in the vacant chair next to me at the front desk and makes himself at home. "My dad's a security guard, so whenever I go anywhere, I just start being a security guard," he tells me, by way of explanation. "Shut your mouth," he then yells at the security guard sitting directly across from me. A woman comes up to me with a new application for aid. I direct her to the coworker behind me, who can help her set up an Internet account. "(Name redacted) can help you get started," I tell the woman. "(Name redacted) is gay," the kid tells the woman. He then turns toward me and whispers conspiratorially, "Did you ever notice how gay this day is?" Another woman comes in for help. The boy sighs, leans toward me, and says, "Oh boy. Here comes another crackhead." A woman tells me she's just been accepted for Medicaid and asks me when her benefits take effect. "A year and a half," the kid tells her. Several women come in who speak only Spanish. The kid starts talking to them in Spanish. My high school and college Spanish has slowly been coming back to me at this job. I can understand him. He says hello to each woman, then tells them that he's in love with them and wants to give them a good time. The kid then informs the male security guard that the guard has "mad titties." Finally, the child's mother and both grandmothers tell him he has to go wait in the car. On his way out, he says to me, "Here, have a Taco Bell hot sauce packet." He then takes a Taco Bell hot sauce packet (mild) out of his pocket and places it on the desk in front of me and leaves.