Wow. Richard and Linda Thompson playing "A Heart Needs A Home" sometime between 1972 and 1974.

Here's a noisy & dark video from Parks & Wildlife's Sept. 9 show at the Carousel Lounge in Austin. The song is titled "My Only One," and I wrote the basic melody ten or eleven years ago, before I started dating Mrs. Obscurity. I've never been able to write another part for the song that had the immediacy as this basic melody, so this one is basically about dynamics. Using my Boomerang phrase sampler, I record the break by playing the melody forward and backwards at the same time and layering it so often that it builds up to a My Bloody Valentine-like wall of noise. At least that's the idea. Amber plays a beautiful trumpet part on this song, too, pulling some wonderful Miles Davis-over-the-skronk moments out of thin air, and K.C.'s woozy keyboard parts bring the psychedelia home. For me, that is; I wouldn't presume to say what brings psychedelia home for you.

At long last, do we have no decency? Why the fuck haven't we impeached this joker already?

One more season guaranteed! Fuck yeah!

Saturday's show went well. Follow That Bird were even better in the Carousel's more intimate setting than at Trophy's. The Dialtones are somewhat hard to describe (electro-folk? ambient Childe ballads?), but were wonderful. We had a good time during our set, too.

Last weekend I read David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas while traveling, and I highly recommend it. It's a series of matryoshka first-person narratives, leaping (sometimes mid-sentence) from a 19th-century Pacific sea-voyage to a preening young composer caught up in family intrigue in 1930s Belgium to a 1970s Silkwood-style journalist to an aging foppish British publisher in roughly current times to an enslaved clone awakening to consciousness in a horrible corpocracy in the near future (shades of Never Let Me Go) to a tribal Hawaiian at the end of civilization hundreds of years from now, then back again through all the narratives. Somehow it manages to integrate all the stories, despite the widely disparate styles and scopes, and while I was a bit bored and confused at first, the narrative caught me completely before the first temporal shift.

Last night Mrs. Obscurity and I watched the first episode of S4 of The Wire (thanks, Scott!) , and this one's going to be a motherfucker. There was so much to love about the episode. The show got the mix between spending time with familiar characters and introducing new characters just right. My favorite things about the older characters: Carcetti going bugfuck crazy in a hellish situation of his own devising (and I got the biggest laugh of the episode out of his deputy campaign manager explaining why he wasn't going to vote for Carcetti), Herc missing Carver (and it's clever to have him working for Mayor Royce), Carver's interactions with Bodie, McNulty turning Daniels AND Bunk down, Daniels filling Bunny's shoes, the comparison of the Homeland Security briefing at the Western with the teacher training day, how Prez's introduction to his classroom mirrored his first visit to the Major Crimes Unit, that Snoop more or less used the nail gun appropriately, Kima and Lester's complete duping of their new Lt., Syndor's role as the new Prez, and shit, I could go on and on.

Wire-heads don't often enough emphasize how funny the show is. Hey, folks, it's hilarious.

Emlyn Lewis, I'm calling you out in particular: go rent the dvds, now. You can thank me later.

Verbatim from Slate:

Caesarian sections may nearly triple the chance of infant death among low-risk U.S. women, according to a huge study. The death rate is 0.062 percent for vaginal births and 0.177 percent for C-sections.

Speculated reasons: 1) Labor produces hormones that improve babies' lungs. 2) Labor squeezes dangerous fluid from their lungs. 3) C-sections may cause cuts and infections. 4) C-sections delay breastfeeding.

Skeptical reactions: 1) The rest of the world would kill for a neonatal mortality rate under 0.2 percent. 2) The reason C-sections correlate with more deaths is that the riskiest women get C-sections.

Authors' replies: 1) We restricted the study to low-risk women. 2) C-sections correlate with more deaths from multiple causes even after we adjusted the samples for medical factors and socioeconomic status. 3) C-sections are up nearly 50 percent in a decade; maybe we should stop this train. A second, much smaller study suggests that the risk of maternal death is also three times higher in C-sections. (For Human Nature's previous update on births to women over 50, click here.)

Long article on Season 4 of The Wire, which starts Sunday, you feel me?

This show says more about American culture than any number of documentaries, newsmagazine thought-pieces, or op-eds - it's more real than real - and it's crazy entertaining, too. When TV wants to give you this much love, you gotta give some back, y'know. So watch it.