Doc Chey's opens in Grant Park today!

Peace, love, and noodles for all!

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Madeline, Ha Ha Tonka, and some musico-literary analysis on the way

Madeline - WonderRoot, Atlanta - this Sunday, Feb 7

Madeline Adams and the White Flag Band are touring behind a new EP. Madeline herself has several solo albums and has been performing live music since she was 15. She hails from Athens, GA, and builds sweet folk melodies with intimate and sometimes serrated lyrics. I have made vigilant attempts to feminize my music catalog over the last three years. She is ranks in the top three, next to Thao and Kimya Dawson. I am excited to see her this weekend.

Ha Ha Tonka - The Star Bar, Atlanta - March 5

These guys are an eclectic mix I have been digesting and re-chewing for months. I grabbed their first album off of Emusic just because of the cover art, the title (Buckle in the Bible Belt) and 2 of the 30-second track previews. Since then, my oldest son and I have become strong fans. Their newest album, Novel Sounds of the Nouveau South, is richer and more mature than the first. The band's songs are powerfully literary; they construct the rare experience of a unified aesthetic product. As the concert grows closer, I plan to post  short pieces of scholarly reflection on a handful of the newer songs, maybe one per day for a week.

For anyone who needs an introduction, Ha Ha Tonka have live sessions you can listen to on Daytrotter and HearYa. The narrative of their time in the HearYa studio and Woody's excitement about introducing his son to the band struck chords with me.

When you least expect it . . .

. . . the carpet-raptor may strike. Ouch!

At the end of kid-times this week, we have lots of things to remember: roller-hockey gear inauguration, KNEX dinosaur set exploration, Pop-Pop's 4 hour wooden owl project, peer-tutor success, sloppy joes, Astro-Boy, reading together at night, earlier bedtimes, chocolate-covered pretzels, awaiting Doc Chey's openingin the 'hood, and the Avett Brothers (again).

Rise and shine wood-chuck chuckers . . .

. . . put on your booties, 'cause it's cooooold out there.

You want a prediction about the weather? You're asking the wrong Phil. It's going to be cold. It's going to be gray. And it's going to last you for the rest of your life.

Just a quick blog tribute to one of the 3 best comedy movies of all time. Where do you see yourself in five years?

Snow mountain and my dad's rapier wit

Here's what you find at Snow Mountain, all of which is machine-fabricated, for $25/person:

Snow Mountain is really a way for Stone Mountain, Georgia to make money when it's cold. Today, my Dad said, "You know what that is," gesturing to the Stone Mountain carving:

"It's the biggest second place trophy in the world." Sharp, that one.

J.D. Salinger's passing and cultural shadows

J.D. Salinger has passed away, and the New York Times obit is here.

What I have read on Salinger over the years makes him out to sound like a rather ornery person to deal with, raising the issue that art does not necessarily inform character. Of course, the harder someone tries to stay away from public attention sometimes, the more ways culture finds to tell the seediest stories.

Who, other than Salinger, gives English teachers more of an in-class rush than the analytical moment in Catcher when we can break down the meanings of Holden Caulfield's name during the rye field dream sequence? I have done it several times, and, though it's cheap thrills, it always gives me chill bumps.

Here's a quick brainstormed list of figures, actual and fictional, who bear the stamp of Salinger's influence:

Thomas Pynchon - Reclusive novelist
Cormac McCarthy - Nearly reclusive novelist, reforming a bit as of late
Max Fischer - Prep school flunky, hypocrite barometer, and genius in Rushmore
William Forrester - Reclusive fictional novelist  in Finding Forrester

Help me make a more comprehensive list. Who else?

The Lovely Bones . . . review on the way!

AiD 3: Partial Faiths provides more than a partial boost

Adventures in Dissertating, Ep. 3:
In my rodeo-roundup of library books today to fuel the completion of my introductory chapter on (Augustine, Kenneth Burke, sermons in American novels, Greek and Roman rhetoric, and postmodernism) a bunch of stuff, I came across this gem of a book from 2007:

Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison, by John A. McClure.

Is it is the most promising academic treatment of some of my subject matter  since The Rites of Identity (which marries the work of Ralph Ellison with the theory of Kenneth Burke). After a cursory and breathless read of the introduction, I am excited about McClure's use of and constant redefinition of postsecularism. Here are some sharp excerpts:

"These novelists [Morrison, Erdrich, and DeLillo, to name a few], whom critics often relegate to separate domains within conemporary fiction, are all thinking in the narrative mode about postsecular movements and possibilities that the theorists and sociologists treat more abstractly. All of them tell stories about new forms of religiously inflected seeing and being. And in each case, the forms of faith they invent, study, and affirm are dramatically partial and open-ended. Tey do not provide, or even aspire to provide, any full "mapping" of the reenchanged cosmos. They do not promise anything like full redemption" (ix).

And . . .
"Certain features are constant across the field of postsecular texts. The partial conversions of postsecular fiction do not deliver those who experience them from worldliness into well-ordered systems of religious belief. Instead, they tend to strand those who experience tem in the ideologically mixed and confusing middle zones of the conventional conversion narrative, zones through which the conventional protagonist passes with all possible haste, on his way to a domain of secure religious dwelling. And yet the postsecular characters depoisted in thse zones do not seem particularly uncomfortable there nor particularly impatient to move on to some more fully elaborated form of belief and practice. In a similar manner, the break with secular versions of the real does not lead the postsecular narrative to the triumphant reapprearce of  well-mapped, familiar, religious cosmos, as it often does in conventional narratives of conversion . . . One does not sense, in spite of the dramatic instability of the worlds thus defined, that either the novelists or their characters are anxious to 'straighten things out.'" (4).

And finally . . .
"I want to sketch out a map of the broader postsecular movements with which [postsecular fiction] is engaged. These movements -- including the explosve growth of fundamentalism and the pneumatic forms of organized religious practice, 'New Age' experiments in alternative spiritualities, and the turn toward religion in certain philosophical circles -- all reflect a strong but selective disenchantment with secular values and modes of being and a determination to invent alternatives. The novelists whose work I explore share this disenchantment and determination: they seek at once to evaluate the culturally dominant modes of postsecular innovation and to develop their own religiously inflected alternatives to secularism. With what specific practical and theoretical projects, then, are contemporary postecular novelists in conversation?" (7).

What projects, indeed. How about a rebuilding of the ethos and formalized structure of the Christian sermon to create newly charged postsecular sermons that continue the tendency of American novels toward the "sermonic urge",  evident in the fiction of Ellison, Updike, Morrison, Erdrich, and McCarthy? Thank you, Mr. McClure.

By the way, you know you're an egg-headed geek when language like this has the effect on you that Indiana Jones did, when you were a kid. Sheesh.

AiD 2.5: Fresh meat for the research machine . . .

. . . but they're so pretty, so maybe I won't eat them.

Music Monday: Hear Ya and Daytrotter are indie radio

I grew up, like most people older than 22 or so, learning about new music by listening to a 20th century device called the radio. Radio in the car, radio at home. They even, at one point, made a radio that you could carry around and listen to in privacy; it was called a Walkman. I remember that in elementary school, Casey Kassem was my guide to what was popular.

Later on, in high school, I wanted to listen to what was important so I went backwards to The Beatles, The Clash, Paul Simon, Bob Marley, The Rolling Stones, and Run DMC. I left the radio behind; now my choices were fueled by word of mouth and album reviews.

In college, I settled on the rubric that I have kept, in various forms, ever since: "what is new and fresh that I can eventually see live?"

The music-blog-cum-studios Hear Ya and Daytrotter have become, if not how I always hear about new music, at least the way that I am introduced to new sounds. I never read blogs before I started a blog. Now I regularly digest bands by listening to the streaming MP3s or downloads these sites offer. If I like it, I buy it, somewhere, because I am still picky and guilty about listening to something more than a couple of times for free. Finally, writers on both Hear Ya and Daytrotter have mentioned the joy of introducing their children to the music they love, a passion that I share.

Hear Ya is a well-styled blog because it is streamlined, has a consistent editorial voice, and demonstrates impeccable taste (mine, by the way, fails on at least two of these accounts). The work of the site is compiled by several writers in different cities and one studio (in Chicago) where bands who have garnered Hear Ya favor are invited to play. The most enjoyable part of keeping with Hear Ya, for me, is that the main writer, Oz, poses interesting questions on the music he's spotlighting. Good music writing can seem like a close cousin of thorough literary criticism with a more populist edge, and Oz's writing in particular achieves this quality. He and Hear Ya have introduced me, in the last six months, to the Avett Brothers, Surfer Blood, and Justin Townes Earle, while supporting already-interests in the Rural Alberta Advantage, Port O'Brien, and Ha Ha Tonka.  Also, Oz just moved to A-town, so we may even bump into each other at a show.

Here is a link to Hear Ya's top 25 albums of last year. It's quite a list.

Daytrotter's site has a more academic and aesthetic feel, though it's also a blog/studio collaboration where musicians are invited to come play songs that are then posted on the site. The band art on Daytrotter is beautifully consistent, florid, and iconic. One day, I want Daytrotter original paintings in my house of my favorite bands. "This is the Daytrotter Room," I will say, nonchalantly, as my guests gawk at the beauty and significance of the images and sounds there collected. Sometimes I enjoy the Kerouac-ian introductions the site gives the bands; sometimes they are a bit wordy. But Daytrotter promises to "contribute to the musical landscape, not just toss it around like a used book or a stolen pick-up line," and I will keep paying attention to the bands it chooses and the music they make there because it's always rich.

Kudos to Daytrotter for engaging, some months back, my open-heared love of Thao and the Get Down Stay Down. Here's a link to her session last year and here's a link to the Rural Alberta Advantage's session.