The show last night went well. We played ok despite some technical difficulties, and the other bands - Sally Crewe & the Sudden Moves and The Distant Seconds - rocked the house.

Also, check this out.

Q: Thursday at the Carousel? Really?

A: By "Thursday," you mean this Thursday, April 27, 2006. Parks & Wildlife are playing with The Distant Seconds and Sally Crewe, no less.

Q: Wow! Where is this fabulous Carousel Lounge? And what time does the music start?

A: The fabulous Carousel Lounge is located at 1110 52nd Street in Austin. Parks & Wildlife are playing around 9, Sally Crewe & The Sudden Moves around 10, and the Distant Seconds around 11.

Q: You seem to be prevaricating about the estimated time of rockage.

A: Was that a question?

Q: Actually, it was a statement intended to provoke a response. A conversational gambit, if you will. But now the tables are turned! You are the questioner while I am the answerer! Ha!

A: Our official response to that is "Whatev, dude."

Q: I'd like to switch letters. Seriously. It sucks being a "Q." People stare in the supermarket.

A: Ummmmmmmmmm, wellllllll... Hm. No.

Q: You still didn't clarify about the start times on Thursday.

A: I have already answered the question. We will not comment about an investigation that is ongoing. We'll be happy to explain about the start times when the investigation is over, and we promise that anyone found tampering with these start times will lose their job. However, in no way should this be interpreted to mean that we are actually promising that anyone actually found tampering with the actual start times will lose his or her actual job. Next question, please. I think Sumil had one.

Q: Why did these guys hire you to promote their show, anyway?

A: This press conference is over.

Q: Fuck you, McClellan.

Too busy to write any thinkin'-type words, but here's some pictures...

Apparently some sickos out there are finding my website by googling the words "child nudist" based on a lousy joke about Jandek and a photo of my son that used to live here. This message is to those people: either get therapy now or go blow your goddamn brains out, you fucks. If you choose the latter option, be sure give everything you own to the International Society for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect here: http://www.ispcan.org/. You owe this to humanity if you aren't trying to get better, shitbird.

I read Beto Hernandez's Palomar, but I'm waiting on a promised review from my friend Joe so I can post his and my own review side-by-side.

In the meantime, here's an entertaining flyer.

Pitchfork has a great article on the RIAA lawsuits against their own customers.

I think Steve Gordon is far too kind, if anything, to record industry executives with his suggestion that they have some worth to music biz. Well, maybe I'm going too far here. They have some worth in terms of promotion, but that worth is nowhere near the compensation they receive.

Gordon is dead-on, though, in his argument about the willingness-to-pay of customers and the prevalence of risk assessment, however subconscious. For instance, putting ethical issues aside, most people don't shoplift because there's a, say, 50% or greater chance that they'll get caught. If caught, they'll have not just the public shame to deal with, but the costs associated with reimbursement, court costs, lost work, and so on. It's not only that it's wrong; it's potentially very expensive to try to swipe that new Wilco album from one of the (disappearing) big box stores. With P2P file sharing, though, the potential of being caught - the risk - is far less. The RIAA has quite a bit of hassle to go through just to get your name once they've identified you as a person with music files on your computer (which is apparently the gold standard, as the RIAA now seems to believe that all ripping and burning violates fair use). However, some people are being caught and the RIAA is asking for a settlement that would be cheaper for the defendant than court costs. On the user end, the number of legal downloads are up significantly (although not enough to cover the drop in record sales). This shows that despite the low risk of being caught illegally downloading music, people will use legal sources if the price is right. Clearly, a high-quality, low-cost alternative to illegal downloads would be successful if the price is right, but it is just a clear that the RIAA would rather pretend that they are the mafia and it's 1954 than attempting to come up with such an alternative.

Gordon also nails the reason behind this: the RIAA is concerned that legal downloading is not as profitable to the executives, promotional departments, and other music biz leeches (wanna meet these bozos? Come to SXSW). Although this means greater profits for the artists themselves,* who gives a shit about those people?

Thus, the RIAA's current strategy is deplorable. When faced with the crisis of shifting paradigms (see how I use the biz talk correctly?), the only incorrect stances are digging in one's heels and attacking one's own reluctant supporters.

* Excluding Metallica (natch) and/or the other multi-gazillionaire artists who are the ~1% that actually profit from the current record industry.

Book No. 7: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach



Roach, a sometimes Salon columnist, has written a witty, breezy book about dead bodies. You've probably heard about this book from friends or on NPR, but it's well worth a read. Roach somehow turns the subject into something so light that the stories stick with you without any distaste for the subject. There's a lot of reviews about this one out there, so I'm going to just mention that I read and recommend it.

Book No. 6: The Devil and Sonny Liston by Nick Tosches



This is the best Tosches book I've read thus far. The arc of Sonny Liston's life is laid out as a tragedy on the grand scale. The marriage of boxing, mafia, and race relations in the mid-20th century are the real story here, playing Liston like more rook than pawn, pushing him forward in straight lines towards some goal that he could not possibly understand. Someone should write an opera.

Book No. 4: Love's Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans (33 1/3)
Book No. 5: Elvis Costello's Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno (33 1/3)



In preparing myself to start working on my book, I thought it best to read a few more 33 1/3 titles, and these two, which I'd been wanting to read, seemed the most promising choices. I read Forever Changes back around the end of January/early February and Armed Forces through the middle of February, so my impressions are a bit duller than they were when I had just finished the books.

Hultkrans's book is much more enjoyable than Barney Hoskins's Arthur Lee book, which I read last year, although he uses Hoskins as a source. Hultkrans is mainly concerned with the voice of Forever Changes, a voice he calls prophetic in the Old Testament sense. I'm a little distanced from my initial impressions now, but I have a new, greater appreciation for the lyrics of the album, which I had already thought fantastic. "Live and Let Live," in particular, sounds even more like the end of the world, and maybe it is.

Bruno's book doesn't seem to have a central thesis about the album, but is full of fascinating little details and detours (rather like Bruno's music, I think) and similarly heightened my appreciation for an album already near the top of my personal pantheon. One of my brother music geeks described this one as the greatest 33 1/3 book thus far. I don't think I'm willing to go that far, but it's certainly a damn sight better than the one on The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, and definitely in my top rung.