It was a small loud day of famousness.

A sharply dressed man asked about the poetry section, and I noted his upturned collar, and as I pointed him past philosophy, I started to wonder. But I shook it off, pretty sure that the local population of nattily dressed black men had taken a pleasant uptick, but not willing to bet on it being one particular man in general. A handful of minutes later, at the register, I rustled through my coworker's receipt tape.
   "Hey, did that guy use his credit card?" And in a few seconds I was pointing out the name on the slip to her, and her eyes got real big, and then we were just bursting, tapping our friends' shoulders, playing it as cool as possible while still knowing that Saul Williams was walking around our aisles. 

   There was an older guy who came in to sell some books, and he knew our manager from way back, 35 years back, and so he made the rounds of the store and talked to a few people.  Seemed nice, had a few interesting and rare books of note, including a $600 oversize tibetan tome of art instruction. He called a lot of the women darling, and walked down to the grocery store with one of our buyers, the two of them discussing hemp milk as they walked out the door. "Will it get you bombed?" he was asking. I google his name and find a bookseller somewhere selling a $2000 copy of a William Burroughs book, notable for rarity and for being inscribed to the same nice man who just asked if I would check his bag behind the counter.

     A little later, he comes back and wants to know about one of the books in the locked case in literature, a signed Ken Kesey title.

          "This is the only one of his books that I'm a character in", he says, "It holds a special meaning to me." I set that aside as well, and he thanks me again and calls me dear and leaves, promising to bring back more books to sell tomorrow.  The other buyer leans against the counter and tells me about our visitor, one of the original Merry Pranksters.

 I only wish the two paths had overlapped, because I'm sure they would have gotten along swimmingly.

Tags: books, famous people, music
what i hear: sound waves where I will

Maybe you don't know about Grandaddy's song Miner At The Dial-A-View, but it's a really good song.
There's some harmonies and some deet-deeeztsing electronica influences, but it's not an electronica song at all.
It's more like a Ray Bradbury story brought to modern song form. And it's beautiful and poignant and is fully eligible for inclusion on the Best Songs Ever list.

Tags: grandaddy, music, songs
Current Location: somewhere so far away

     Bones and dogs and wolves and smoky skin and seasons pretty much only points to one thing: There's a new Iron & Wine album out, and I like to think I felt it in my marrow as it was being shipped to the record shops, or maybe it was just the changing leaves that had made me break out my old discs and listen through them, and start to think that maybe he was having something new sometime soon. Lo and behold, yesterday I am loitering at the front desk and a song from Creek Drank the Cradle came on, and I say to my fellow worker that really, shouldn't he have something new out by now, and she says that oh, he does have something coming out, and so I turn to the Google and ask, and sure enough, that very day, it came out. Shepherds Dog.


    I still don't have all those pictures from all my travels catalogued. It's almost criminal, but not quite yet. If I am happy and occupied, is it too much to ask that I linger on getting those put together? I don't think so, when all the cracks inbetween my moments of free time are filled with birthday parties and rollerskating and books, and camping, and art in an exponentially greater quantity. It's thus forgiveable.

Tags: fall, good things, music, no apologies, sam beam
Current Location: tied up in fuzzed-out southern chords
what i hear: ferrum & fermentation

   I've really appreciated Last.Fm, even though I'm still too close to it to have it reflect some sort of greater truth. I refresh it, sometimes, desperate to see that new line that tells me what I just listened to. I need that attention.

   It has flaws. I noticed them first when I realized that it couldn't show that I listened to Dylan's Temporary Like Achilles over and over in my  car, driving down a highway, and it can't hear my record player to know that I kept dropping the needle at the beginning of Patsy Cline singing about walking after rmidnight. It still doesn't realize that I put on hip-hop videos when I'm cleaning. The oversights, the gaps, go beyond that. I want it to know just how loud I was listening. Keeping Sam Cooke tuned low while we have dinner is one thing, playing the Weakerthans so loud that any radius closer than several feet from my computer's speakers fuzzes out the details, that's another thing, and an important thing. I song becomes more real the louder you play it.

    I want to tell Last.Fm the things it doesn't know, maybe check off boxes and fill in blanks. This is the song I was listening to while laying on the windowsill, on the sunny day off I had. I want it to know that while I was hearing M.Doughty's voice, I was looking at the way there was a startle of light dots on the ceiling, still reflections from the Mexican stained glass ornament hanging in the window. I want it to attach emotional value through new complex algorithms. I could click down the list of the names I was thinking about,  and how I didn't just hear the song, I had to let it fill the room while nobody was home. I had to listen to each word, and how he said it, how it builds to a phrase that kills me with its perfect simplicity. Record how much I like the way he catches at the end of a chorus, and the way the loop stutters behind. I volunteer to tag it with the label of "sweet melancholic joy", and Last.Fm can shuffle it into place. But websites don't listen like that, so I've just got my top charts, and tracks played, and meet your neighbors,  and I have to find other ways to keep notes.

Tags: music, namedropping, songs, summer
Current Location: a few feet from the windowsill
what i hear: m.doughty-ways & means

   Today was a good day, and it was sunny, and I drove with the windows down even though it was and is February. I did light mending, I had morning coffee with a boy, I rummaged through thrift store until I extracted what I needed at a discount price, and I ate salmon twice. There was homemade pie from half a state away, there was a walk in the evening that featured my favorite old gym and a tropical pet store, and there was a show at night that somehow surprised me marvelously and had local and almost local bands with bite & bark (Aweather, the Cave Singers, Laura Gibson, and Hide & Horn).

   Met the kids in Hide & Horn, who were sweet as hell, even for a Portland beard band. Wound up assisting them in the folding of their arigato packs (which I am near professional in assembling due to multiple Laura Gibson & personal projects I've put together), and landed a free cd in return, which was pleasantly unexpected and awesome. They've got this stellar technique for the production of the case where they do a brown crayon rubbing that looks like bark, and then print over it. Also, most all the songs are based on National Geographic articles. So notable.
     I almost fell in to a small panic when the members of the Cave Singers seemed to disappear without putting out their cds to sell, but I found one of them by lurking at the merch table and sellinc cds for Laura, and after some personal negotiation for cash, maneuvered a cd of theirs. And I listened to it on the way home, and I'm listening to it now. 

Tags: cds, moments, music, namedropping, portland
Current Location: Still the middle of the weekend.
what i hear: cave singers-dancing on our graves

  Let's go over the minutia, and let the great lumpen things take care of themselves.

First on the agenda,  my latest disappointment:

• lack of friends and/or aquaintances encounter'd on Last.fm. For the sake of my "scrobbling", as they refer to it, feel free to shuffle off and do something about this if you've already got an account there. I'd be the last to insist someone sign up against their will, but by all means, I dig the cross-referencing, and it's just not cutting it, currently.

Next, the list of recently finished titles:

• Iceland by Krusoe- Being a book I didn't actually experience a lot of bonding with, but I was given it with the admonishment that if I didn't like it I didn't deserve to work in a bookstore. Or maybe it was just that I didn't even deserve to go into a bookstore, I can't quite recall. So, uh, sure. It was a read, alright.
  
• Shadows In The Sun by Chad Oliver- A book that was made exponentially more awesome by the fact that when I had set it on the counter with that little note with my name on it that implied I wished to buy it, my coworker came up and just so happened to mention that he was friends with the man, back in Texas. And I desperately wanted to make really intelligent conversation with him about that, but I was hampered by the fact that I've spent the last seven years in a mild state of sci-fi deification regarding The Group, which, to my understanding, was this knit circle of men (including Ray Bradbury and good old William F. Nolan and I think Richard Matheson, too)  who all hung out together and wrote and swapped stories and ideas and were often Twilight Zone related, and I just thought they were the greatest thing ever since I heard of them, and so I just had a quiet little jaw drop at his statement and had to leave it at that.
• Writing In General & The Short Story In Particular by Rust Hill- Only pretty much the best book I've ever read about writing.
  
• Night Ride & Other Journeys &
• The Hunger & Other Stories, both by Chuck Beaumont- Yet another member of The Group, one who in particular wrote tons and tons of Twilight Zone episodes.
  

And am currently wading through the joys of A Short History Of Nearly Everything. Although to be rediculously honest, the only reason friend Lee and I picked it up was because we were having a confused discussion about how the tides worked, and we just assumed it would be covered in Bryson's book, since it does say "nearly everything". Turns out it's all mostly earth science and cosmology mostly related, but Bryson is so darn conversational we took up with the book, and are now slightly more comprehending of things like atoms, which we were previously variously dismissive of due to their lack of apparent relevance. To share another cup of honest tea, the other reason we thought to tackle it was in hopes of scoring big time allegory possibilities on top of shreds of better realism in our personal writing.

Also:

• It snowed here, and it was more or less thrilling, and I took pictures and have been listening to songs about Antarctica.

Tags: authors, books, links, lists, music, websites
Current Location: we live on bread and water, we live on toast and coffee
how i feel: Comment allez-vous ce soir?
what i hear: Page France-Antarctica (My Beloved Home)

     If growing older means that I sift myself into a position of admiring and adoring Bjork, than I am much more accepting of maturation, and of whatever newfound patience it is that had me glued to every moving pixel comprising her face onscreen tonight. I'd like to think that I was never given a good enough chance, that I never truly got to see her before, that the screen was never big enough. But perhaps it's that I never sat still and listened. All I know is she got to be larger than life and I was absolutely riveted, and there was her and the orchestra spread out below, and the harpist, and the Greenlandish choir, and she had a thick ostrich of cascaded feathers sweeping around her waist and every time she opened her mouth I held my breath some. I also said her children were all fey changelings, though, so take that as it falls, for some pleased gushing.

Tags: beauty, music, songs
Current Location: top of this mountain
what i hear: three guesses, first two don't count

    I drank loads and loads of coffee this morning, and I brewed it too strong, and in addition I steeped it with this yerba mate tea that I've been drinking. The mate tea (Yes, I left out the accent, so just read it as mah-teh or what-have-you regardless.) has this earthy almost vulgar taste to it and so I always think tempering it with another drink will lead to sure-fire hot beverage success but it is mostly hit or miss and I usually need to add near tons of sugar, which I consider to be cheating.  So it was that and hummus and egg on bread, and then, bam, round two o' the clock there was all of a sudden this jewelry hammer at the front of my skull starting to try and blacksmith out the One True Ring against my forehead, which was unfortunate, believe me. See, all morning I had been lapsing in my sworn duties to create/clean/cook, but it was all in vivid anticipation of truly wreaking good havoc in the afternoon, and, well, this headache just really messed me over.  And I don't get headaches very often at all, and I consume much caffeine or so I'd like to think, but this apparently took things too far and my synapses are in revolt. Viva La Revolucion! Except I don't speak Spanish or French really at all, so probably there are errors in that bit of anarchistic pride. But I took one of those little blue tablets I buy at Walmart every now and then when I think I need to stock a medicine cabinet, and then I got a nudging that said I wanted to listen to not only Atom but also His Package, so of all the things to listen to when one's head is being techy (Tetch-Ee), those sorts of stuttering beeps and the exclamations and churning simple chords, well, those aren't what you'd aim for, but I think my head is getting better.  

     But you know who does speak Spanish and French and Italian and Hebrew? Jonathan Richman does. Go find your sweet Bippy. Bet her that. You'll make an easy tenner out of it. I think Saturday night was something along the third or fourth time I'd seen him, and he, I think, escalates in charm by several x-ponential degrees each time. Which is pretty amazing. And I'm not even good at math, but I can do those sorts of calculations in my head when he is up on stage in a good striped shirt and he throws his hands out to the crowd and, yes, he swings those hips, and the guitar swings with them a bit, and I look over at the girl next to me and she looks back and we sort of nod but don't look much longer at each other because Jonathan is much more interesting at the moment. I like to imagine that time when he actually must have been in the Lesbian bar, and what that must have been like. Sweet Lord, I bet they adored him.

Tags: coffee, drinking, music, songs
Current Location: jiggity jig.
how i feel: Putting the "i" in "frenzied".
what i hear: atom and his package-alpha desperation march

Tags: links, music, video
Current Location: nineteen, in naples
how i feel: I know.
what i hear: Jonathan Richman

Who's the punk still disheartened by Yusuf Islam's return foray into the singer-songwriter scene? Shit, son, that just might be me, who's always been so vouchful of catty Mr.Stevens and his wild world of goodness, and also of the fact that he pivot-turned and disappeared off that folked-up scene all for the sake of what he believed. He never sold out, and I loved that so much, and so I talked it up all the time as an example as the one true goodness, when now he comes back and I am several types of crestfallen.

Chalk one up to life's little let downs. There's another pillar gone awry.

Tags: end of an era, music, songs
Current Location: air conditioned gardens
how i feel: hard-headed
what i hear: my favorite tunes