Birthday

On Thursday a tornado touched the ground here. Very, very close, like within a mile. Laura was at a meeting in another city; I was at home getting Forrest’s bath ready. He was pulling out the roll of toilet paper while I got the water the right temperature and then the sirens sounded, and I looked down at my phone and the news was telling me to seek shelter, to go into the basement. I heard branches cracking in the wind outside as I snatched a shirt and a diaper, and my hands were shaking as I got him dressed again downstairs in the laundry room. He looked up at me like, “No bath?”

I pulled an Ikea chair into the windowless storage room and the two of us stayed there, waiting and listening, and I talked softly to him and stared at my phone for updates. Before the storm had passed he fell asleep, there in the storage room, his head in the crook of my left arm. Then it was over.

When I put him down in his bed he went right to sleep. An hour later he woke up with three loud, sharp cries like he was scared, like a delayed reaction. I went to his room and picked him up and sat with him and calmed him for a few moments in the usual, comfortable rocking chair. After that he slept all the way through the rest of the night.

He turned one today. In fact he turned one this hour. Happy birthday! I am glad you are here.

Thoughts on the day MCA died

1.

I believe it can be scientifically proven that this is the best MCA couplet:

If you try to knock me you’ll get mocked
I’ll stir fry you in my wok

Has everything.

2.

I notice that a lot of people, in response to Adam Yauch’s death, have been posting songs like “Gratitude” and “Sabotage” that Yauch doesn’t even have a verse on. The Beasties really were a unit, certainly more so than any modern hip-hop group but really more so than many rock bands, too.

3.

Lots of good pieces memorializing Yauch today, like this one and this one and this one. I am waiting for Jody Rosen’s, though.

4.

Listened to a lot of songs tonight I haven’t listened to in a long time, which is the right thing to do when a musician dies. Some that were as good as I remember: “Get it Together,” “Intergalactic,” “No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn.” Some were actually better than I remembered — when is the last time you listened to “The New Style”? Also I sort of forgot about “Professor Booty” but it is hilarious. I remember it was part of a CD single that was one of the first CDs I ever owned.

The only ones I was not so interested in tonight were the punk songs and, actually, the rockish hits like “Sabotage.” I don’t know. All the rock songs seem a little less immediate than all the rap songs to my ears tonight.

5.

I saw the Beastie Boys in St. Louis, Missouri, with my brother and one of his friends. Hello Nasty tour, with A Tribe Called Quest. Obviously this is one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen. It’s also true that for a period of time the Beastie Boys were probably the single main topic of conversation I shared with my brother. That’s not true now but it was true for some years.

6.

When Michael Jackson died and Whitney Houston died we had a few days of people circulating interesting outtakes and rare tracks. I wonder if that will happen again and I hope so but sort of doubt it. In some ways the entire Beastie Boys catalog sounds, by design, like outtakes and rarities.

7.

I nominate “Root Down” for best Beastie Boys song of all time. Who’s with me?

8.

True story. This is an email I sent tonight to a friend:

Hey remember in the summer of 2000 when we were in Chinatown and on the other side of the street we saw Adam Yauch pushing a stroller? And we turned around to follow him to try to say hi, and he must’ve known what was going on because he started walking really fast and then running, and then he disappeared into some shop or something and lost us, and still we spent the rest of the day amazed and practically sort of high because we almost met MCA?

That was a good day.

R.I.P. Adam Yauch.

New music

Willis Earl Beal, Acousmatic Sorcery

I don’t know that it is really any weirder than some of the ’90s lo-fi steez from, like, K Records, but it does have a weird backstory and also Willis Earl Beal is black and therefore easier for white audiences to primitivize, and also, let’s be honest, clearly is possessed of the outsider artist’s compulsion to create even when the product is rough and odd and singular. And so here is Acousmatic Sorcery, this record of amazing odds and ends, weird plinky-plonks and tape hiss, and above it some just lovely vocals and fine poems. Not normal. Very good. Things it reminds me of: The Microphones (remember them?), plus Captain Beefheart plus Cody ChesnuTT a little. It also reminds me of the bedroom-recorded tapes my friend Mark used to make, which I listened to in my car sometimes. I wonder how Mark is doing. The last time I saw him he was not doing great. RM

—-

Amadou & Mariam, Folila

What you get still is the ultracosmopolitan world sound that Manu Chao sort of first brought out of this blind Malian husband and wife. You could say this record is their most pop but maybe you shouldn’t. It does have more guest stars than a Young Money compilation, but who’s complaining? Maybe just a little: It is definitely overstuffed and at worst, it is Wyclef Jean and Shakira. (That is not such a bad thing to be if you are Wyclef and/or Shakira but we long for more from Amadou and Mariam.) But it also is harmonicas and horns and guitars that are half Mali and half Arthur Lee (go listen to “A House is not a Motel” if you don’t believe me) and boy oh boy it can transport you. Joy music from everywhere. RM

Great Horned Owlet eats a mouse, April 23, 2012

Donna Brown was bad off in the grips of drug and alcohol addiction. After her fifth time being picked up for drunken driving, she was headed to prison. Instead, she was referred to the OWI court, a new program in Marathon County. Today she is nearing one year clean and sober, and on track to be one of the program’s first graduates in June.

I wrote about her experience here.

Thoughts after watching “Bill Cunningham New York”

Something beautiful about someone whose whole life, literally his entire life, is dedicated to his art, and something sad. Bill Cunningham’s art is taking pictures of people wearing clothes on the street in New York City, all day, every day, for decades. A weird admixture of high snobbishness and total chaotic democracy to that art form. I don’t quite get it but I understand Bill Cunningham sees things I don’t see.

But what makes Cunningham seem holy and tragic is his asceticism, the spartanness of his life, an octogenarian who lives at Carnegie Hall and sleeps on a cot amid filing cabinets full of negatives, endless negatives, and rides a bike through the city and eats and dresses simply and has no lovers. He’s genial and generous and enthusiastic but it’s a monastic existence and that is what you get.

Why Bill Cunningham left Women’s Wear Daily: Editors in one issue twisted his work into something crass and snarky and he couldn’t bear it. They changed his copy and used his photos for a what’s-in-what’s-out feature. They made fun of people. So he quit that job and good for him. To Cunningham, a friend explains, it’s all in; everyone he photographs is in, always in all the time.

I always flipped past his page in the Sunday New York Times but no more.

From the “Grocery Store Forrest” series.

The Rent is Too Damn High by Matthew Yglesias

The Rent Is Too Damn High by Matthew Yglesias


Short, which is nice. More books should be short like this. You get to the end of the chapter and you’re like, oh, great, that chapter is done. Substance? Well it is a good analytic argument in favor of urban density or more specifically against zoning regulations that limit urban density. I guess the argument is correct and it is certainly not an area of public policy that many people think much about, which makes it worthwhile. I live in a small city so I wondered how the basic framework might apply here or not. The Wausau area like a lot of small cities has been growing in the direction of sprawl but lately the city seems to be building a denser city center with more multi-unit residences, so maybe we are moving in the right direction.

View all my reviews

View high resolution

Graffiti in Wausau, April 2012.

Poem for the Mega Millions

These were the days
of Americans standing
in lotto lines.
I would buy a boat.
I would tell off
my boss. Who
wouldn’t?

Someone on NPR
said the lottery
is a stupidity tax.
Which is true but
so not the point.

I bought a ticket
because I wanted
to be included
and before
my car door
closed
I was worrying
about how the
money
would change my life.
Would my relatives
hit me up?
Would I feel guilty
saying no?

Would I have to
establish a foundation
and if so would
I have to run it?
Would I have to move?

What a nightmare. I didn’t
even check the numbers
that night
for fear I’d won.