From: Rutherford X. Spindlemaker
Subject: PBW POSTS GAINS MINERAL STOCKS PHARMA!

“LIST MONITORS ARRIVE WITH PETITION:”

A critical cliché is the review that cribs limp rhetoric from one-sheets. Why? Why do you do that? I’ve been saving my spam for months. Spam is a treasure trove. Spam is a haven for New Language poetry. Spam is a place where ideas explode. V1agra. Your health, Pagoda sleeve. Long passages from Charles Dickens novels. happily orbiting sun nearly One morning billion. ??????ó??????(???. Play exquisite corpse with stamped out praise from presskits. Make them eat their words. Gnom gnom gnom.

Dear J. from XXXXX Promotions,

Yes! I like the Joanna Newsom album just fine. Some early thoughts:

got one Less harp whimsy. R O L full 18k Albiniphone. St1ff meds. Even now w1th younger control size. Wonder, new blog yap. Economize **OLDER, surreal Joni Denny Perhacs number one source. Get your we sell premium old values ALBUM scratch and match any 1deals. Hard inches longer in Main Stream Media. Moon-born, pansy-growing, your health extends. Key words you satisfy girlfriend with mixtape song cycle last longer but soft always.

XO!
mp

Little Cartoons: Boss

From a recent, unpublished interview with me in Creative Spaces: A Psychogeographical Digest for the Working Artist (recently condemned by the University of Central Arkansas Press):

CS: So, where do you do most of your blogging these days? I guess you can sort of do it anywhere, right? So wild.

PBW: I recently developed this new game called PRIVATE HEAT. I use the wireless signal in the parking lot of the Community Bakery on North 7th and Main in Little Rock after hours. I try to see if I can get all my stuff done before my laptop battery runs out. The kicker is that I also drink a liter of seltzer and have a quart of homemade vegetable soup before leaving. Plus, I’m still sorta obsessed with my ex-girlfriend and my old boss always said I run a fuckload too many browser tabs–personal handicaps I’m trying to overcome.

CS: So it’s sort of like a battle between your mind, your body, and technology.

PBW: At least. I mean, those three things at least.

CS: How often do you win?

PBW (pretending he can’t hear): Sorry, what was the question?

From an interview conducted this morning between me and a guy in some band that was sleeping on our living room floor:

Mutton chops, too many band pins: What time is it?

PBW, white boxer shorts and a pink collared shirt: A little before 8.

MC, TMBP: Cool.

A minute later.

MC, TMBP (nervously): Hey, is there any toilet paper here?

PBW, WBSPCS: It’s always a problem here. I mean, your best bet is–do you want a cup of coffee?–go out and get a cup of coffee and use the bathroom. Sorry. There’s never any toilet paper here.

MC, TMBP: Yeah. Well, okay. Yeah, I guess that would be a good idea… yes (slowly closing the door)

Algorithmic Thrusting

I just destroyed my cute, half-deviously obtained iPod Nano listening to Momus’s “Nervous Heartbeat” because, as Milan Kundera (who I’ve never read) says, “Happiness is the longing for repetition.” And even machines get tired (see above). The video is crap, so close your eyes and click on the YouTube link.

“Nervous Heartbeat” was, for three minutes, my favorite single of 2006; now it is my second-favorite single of 2006. I remember getting the promo for Momus’s 2005 album, Otto Spooky, and then refusing to review it for Stylus. Because as I’ve been recently reminded, working through the flaws of people and things you deeply love isn’t very satisfying.

The best scene in Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 is when the protagonist in the future–for those who haven’t seen it, the narrative is split between the 60s and 2046–is stripped of all direction and begins flopping at the feet of every ladytron in stone’s throw. “Will you leave with me?” He repeats the words over and over. It’s the same phrase another one of the characters (from the past) practices on her rooftop but can never say to the one she loves. Everything is scripted. Tourettic vows. And the queasy, uncanny gap between those cliches and committment is what I’ve always found incredible about that movie (and about Badlands and Julee Cruise). Love for love’s sake; yes for the sake of yes. Happiness might be the longing for repetition, but it’s not the repetition of longing.

So it kind of blows my fucking face off that dandy Momus, disaffected supplier of sex punch lines, has managed to produce such transcendent pap. His pillowtalk gets autotuned and contorted like V/Vm. Strings hang in restaurant smoke like that Richard Hawley schmaltz all the Stylus kids were twirling for last year. Tremendous.

Freedom Rock

Now there are two guys playing bass and a 45-year-old who looks like an overgrown fratboy in tennis sneakers—a realtor maybe?—positively shredding a sky blue Stratocaster. He has spared the appearance of funk to make room for the actual state. I have a $2 pint and am vainly reading an article in the Atlantic about the current state of al Qaeda. This is Jam Night; this is Labor Day; this is the Thunderbird Café in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The band plays 6-minute versions of Steve Miller and Johnny Watson songs. “Take me to church!” the singer pleads. “Hey Bob, yeah, can you get that church organ up in here?” Bob is getting nervous changing the patch on his synthesizer. When Bob gets loose he slaps the keys like a duck tail on the surface of the water and scrunches his face up. All of my friends are deep in their fantasy football draft.

Richard, Your Postman (an indie-pop band I’m in with my friend Thomas) recorded four new songs in the bathroom of a vascular surgeon’s house. The surgeon and his wife came home early and I scrambled to pack things up. We were not supposed to be there. They had a nice rec room and V8 and VH1 Classics. Sorry, Steve; sorry, Susan; I played some music and used your wireless and then walked your dog and showered and took a sleeping pill on your couch. Nothing funny.

This article in Salon was a bell. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to have pop music exist in restrictive societies or political climates. I sorta realize that it’s a capitulation of historical fetishes I’ve had since I was a teenager—Soviet art, the Cultural Revolution, the amazing dynamic between African musicians and the regimes they function in. Thaddeus Russell says “Hey, if you’re a transient, which sounds good to me by the way, why not go to one of these countries and write about music there?” I am looking into it. In my email to him I’d said “While I can’t say that Beyonce is exactly who I’d pick to fly our cultural flag, that’s not really the issue–the fact that it happens voluntarily is what makes it fascinating (sigh, marketing, I know, but still).” My morals are sliding around. The people at the Thunderbird just want some light funk and an Iron City; the UAE wants more booty popping. I’d sooner ship Animal Collective, but okay. We’ll see. Maybe I will go. Today the world is big and the world is small.

The internet is no place. Greenpoint, Brooklyn is a place and I am moving away from it today. Goodbye, Greenpoint.

1. I keep listening to the new Joanna Newsom album and fear that it is a complicated whiskey dream. Jim O’Rourke, Nuts and Who Cares: “At one moment during the mixing of this record, I said to Joanna, ‘I’ve got an idea for the ad for this record, just a picture of you, and above it says ‘music’ and below it says ‘is back.’”

2. Short Reviews of Two Tapes I Found While Cleaning: One of music I made with a friend who went crazy like driving cars into walls crazy, one of a friend who passed away very suddenly a week after turning 21—A-/A+

3. Mighty Sparrow, the calypso singer, was born with the name Slinger Francisco. To change a name like Slinger Francisco is either a sign of great courage or great stupidity. Go listen to calypso. A gallingly favorable current events/danceability ratio. I’ve been taken with the London is the Place for Me series on Honest Jon’s, which is fucking excellent, but compilations are always frames and somehow, someone didn’t see it fit to anthologize Kitchener’s extended dick/experimental healthcare metaphor “Doctor Kitchener” or Sparrow’s cannibal envy/jungle fever boogie “Congo Man” for the hipsters. No, you have to go to the artist comps for those and god damn are they worth it.

4. Under sheets of sarcasm, hear my voice quiver with love and sincerity on my farewell to the Stycast with Todd Burns on The Boogie Woogie Resurrection Hour.

Thanks to everyone for sticking with me; PBW will be back in full force soon. I am sharing a dilapidated place in Little Rock with a guy named Slaughterhouse. Keep your fingers crossed.