I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK:THEM CROOKED VULTURES-Live on Austin City Limits, Feb 13, 2010 (2010).

This set from Them Crooked Vultures is outstanding. I really like the album, but in a live setting these three (technically 4) guys are on fire.  They extend the songs a bit but are always tight as a drum.  Josh Homme is a great front man, even if he’s not that animated.  He shares guitar duties with Alain Johannes who is not on the album, but who gets some great sounds out of his guitar.

Dave Grohl is in his drum-pounding glory back there.  Man, he hits the drums hard.  And he seems to be really enjoying himself .

 And the biggest surprise (sort of, but not really) is John Paul Jones.  He fits in perfectly with the two younguns, and he really shows them how it’s done.  His bass work is phenomenal: fast, furious and accurate to a fault.  He also plays keyboards, an LED pulsing 12-(at least) string bass and a fascinating purple electric slide guitar contraption on “Nobody Loves Me and Neither Do I”.   Matt Rosoff from cnet explains this guitar here:

You can watch the show online on PBS.

[READ: July 27, 2011] Five Dials Number 20

I didn’t expect to get caught up to Five Dials issues so quickly (has it really been 20 weeks already?).  This is the most recently releases issue!  They aren’t getting published as often as I expected.  Which is fine.  But the funny thing with this issue is that there were several printing errors in the initial run of this issue.  I don’t know if this has happened before, but it seemed so noticeable to me, that I had to wonder how it slipped by everyone.  The most obvious was that the front page had many ƒƒƒƒ characters (these were also evident in the Word Cloud later on).  There’s a word missing from the fiction “the thin cold stillness you got [  ] this part of the country” and there’s a crazy typo in the Fiction story later on. The errors have now been fixed.  But, the letter to the editor (and this has not been fixed) promises us a picture which isn’t there. “Here’s a photo of Doni at the reading – he did a brilliant job.”  I’ll assume they were partying too hard at the Port Eliot Festival to make sure  the issue was launch-ready

CRAIG TAYLOR-A Letter from the Editor: On Cable Street and General Interests
There were some serious race riots on Cable Street back in 1936.  Indeed,the head of the British Union of Fascists, Mosley, and his aggressive supporters were turned back by a noisy crowd (Irish women throwing fishy potatoes at them).  The rest of the magazine he says is general Interest, an anachronistic term from the 20th century before all magazines had to specialize in something.  I mentioned in my introduction that there was a photo error here.  Doni Gewirtzman performed a reading at the launch of Five Dials 19.  They couldn’t out the picture there, so they added it here.  Perhaps in Issue 21?

DONI GEWIRTZMAN-A Continuation: Woodcuts
Gewirtzman related a story of how his mother and father separated when he was young, but the strange thing is their living situation.  They lived ia n rent controlled apartment in NYC.  So his mom wouldn’t leave.  The woman who his father had the affair with, and eventually married, lived in the same building also in a rent controlled apartment, so they wouldn’t leave either.  Rather, they prefered to walk past each other every day.  And they have stayed in this same situation now for thirty years.  The woodcuts in the title are prints that his father made which now, more than every, resemble his home life: bifurcated.

MORGAN MEIS-A Letter from Someone Else: What Guru Told Us
This is a wonderful remembrance of Gang Starr, specifically the song “Just to Get a Rep.”  I’d never heard the song but once I got my Spotify account I had to play it.  Guru was the rapper in Gang Starr–he died last year but his music still lives on.  Meis is particularly impressed with the kind of music that Gang Starr sampled: Robert Moog synth stuff and even jazz in 5/4 time.  Or

What, for instance, are all those crazy space noises dancing around the baseline in the background of ‘Just to Get a Rep?’ That’s a sample from Jean-Jacques Perrey’s E.V.A.

Check it out :

NIVEN GOVINDEN-Our Town: W8
Goviden goes in search of a repast in two sections of London.  He eats a Madeleine the size of a brick and has a long chat with the owner of the place (who asks about Niven crossing himself).  Whereas the waitress in the Savoy across town barely speaks.  But when she spills his tea on his cake, the boss orders her to give him a new one.

THE EDITORS-Our Town: N7
The editors talk about the utter excitement of the Pound Shop–Everything for £1–and how crazy that seems.  And yet closer scrutiny reveals flaws, like why are pens so crazily assorted:

£1 will buy you seven ballpoint pens or four rollerball pens or three executive gel pens or six ball pens or six handwriting pens or ten gel pens or sixteen retractable pens or two never-get-lost pens (belt clips attached). What, you might ask, is the substantive difference between a rollerball pen and a ball pen, or a gel pen and an executive gel pen? Is an executive gel pen so fine, so executive, that it is a good thing, a recommendation, that you only get three compared to ten (non-executive) gel pens? Or is the executive-ness of the executive gel pen overblown? What, in fact, is the divergent feature of an executive gel pen? (Also, what is a handwriting pen?)

AMBER QURESHI-A List: A Letter from Fukushima
A list of 20 ways to know an earthquake has happened (which is really a detailed list of life in Fukushima after the earthquake–it shows you how much simple things have changed).

JON McGREGOR-On Footers: Excessive Annotation and the Anxiety of Influence: A Footnote to the David Foster Wallace Tribute Issue
McGregor states “Language is born of imitation.”  He postulates that David Foster Wallace is so well known for his footnotes that people don’t use them (especially in fiction) because it would be seen as copying him.  The article is more or less silly, although the underlying idea is sound.  His article includes lots of footnotes (33 in all) the last of which mentions A Footnote Moratorium Cessation Treaty (Proposed) and wants people to sign up at Facebook.  When I “Liked” the page (on the day this issue came out) there were 4 likes.  Today there are 15!  A groundswell!  This was a fun article and I enjoyed it very much.

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER-An Excerpt of Sorts: Tree of Codes
Tree of Codes is a book that has to be seen to be believed.  Foer has carved a book out of another book.  When you see the actual book, it is full of holes. It is fragile and delicate and dangerous to leave lying around.  It’s hard to read.  It’s wonderful.

Check out this one minute video about it:

and even more interesting is this making of video!

which goes some way to explaining the book’s price.

Anyhow, you can see 6 photographed pages from the book here.

JEREMY GAVRON-Notes from the Hospice: The Word Cloud
Gavron started creating word clouds at a hospice.  He walked around to patients all over the hospice and asked them what was on their minds that day.  He would then organize them into unpunctuated blocks.  Then he would hand the out to all the residents.  It’s a fascinating idea of words and art as therapy.  There are three examples here.

MARK DOW-Memoir: Insistence is a Form of Pressing
This is a fascinating memoir that falls into a couple different sections.  It jumps around and feels kind of disconnected.  It also feels like there may have been something missing–the story ends without the customary diamond at the end and there is a star in the middle of the piece that seems like it might be a footnote marker, but there is nothing to follow it up.

The first is that Mark Dow’s father stood up to Joseph McCarthy’s unAmerican hearings (when McCarthy tried to get the army to give up names).  Dow even made it into the history books.  And yet for all of his father’s attitudes (they called his work the Fuck You Letter in the Pentagon) he finds it distasteful when a celebrity tells his wife he loves her at the Academy Awards (he feels that it is a private thing to be said in private).

My favorite part of the memoir is the Rules for the Pinball Machine which were written up for his family of 5 boys when they bought a lime green pinball machine:

PINBALL MACHINE RULE # 3 states: ‘If person “B” is playing with the machine, and person “A” has just finished, then if person “C” walks into the room and wishes to play, he will be allowed to play when person “B” gets finished.’

My favorite rule is

Rule #6: ‘All disputes over the pinball machine will be settled by the children. If it is necessary to take the argument to the parents, the parents will decide who is at fault and that person will be punished accordingly. The parents may also find it necessary to punish the boy who brought the argument to them if they feel that it could have been settled without them.’

The memoir ends with a touching note about his great-grandfather.

KIRSTY GUNN-Fiction: The Wolf on the Road
This story follows a woman in her inevitable decision to cheat on her husband of ten years.  She met a man at a party in London.  She vacations in the same area where he lives and she promises that when her family goes on their annual vacation, she will sneak out and visit him.  And she goes, without thinking, as if it were destiny.  Then something in the road (presumably a wolf from the title, bt the description is beyond bizarre) makes her rethink her decisions and her destiny.  I didn’t really like this story.  The opening destiny part was a little too ponderous yet bland and the thing in the road part was way too blurry to justify the end.

KEITH RIDGWAY-The Writing Life: How to Deal with a Literary Agent
This was a short fiction in which a writer talks with his agent.  It was quite funny.  The agent, buttering up the writer in every way possible eventually asks if he ever thought of getting a job.  A sad reflection on the state of writing, although I suspect it was always this way.

ALAIN DE BOTTON-The Agony Uncle
Two wondrous answers from the much missed De Botton.  The first questioner asks how come he hated history in school but can’t get enough of it now.  The solemn answer is that as we grow older, we learn more about ourselves and we use history to learn more about ourselves. The second question asks whether Alain watches Oprah and what he thinks of her.  He thinks that Oprah’s biggest contribution to society is that people now speak their emotions instead of bottling them up (of course, others have advocated that earlier as well, but she put it into the mainstream.  Although we have no doubt taken this self-expression too far.

ADAM LEITH GOLLNER-On Wine: Hemingway on Mâcon
This is an essay about Hemingway’s appreciation of Mâcon as a white wine (as seen in A Memorable Feast).

SONIA FALERIO-A Letter from India: Official Numbers
The “official numbers” of the title refer to adoption in India.  The author says she has been hearing a lot about people adopting babies lately and wonders if the stigma is no longer there.  But her research shows that the numbers really haven’t changes that much over the years, although legal adoption has a lot of obstacles.  And since there are so many avenues towards illegal adoption, it’s unclear how many adoptions there actually are.

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This was another fun issue of Five Dials.  I enjoyed the excerpt and the Word Clouds and of course, it’s wonderful to have De Botton back.  I also feel like I have a “limited edition” printout of the magazine because my printout has the errors that were later fixed.

The launch party was from the Port Eliot Festival, and here’s a picture of Latetia Sadler from Stereloab pressing Send to launch the issue.