California Month continued, tremor #28:
American Music Club - "Sick Of Food"
(Alias Records, 1991)
Well, this is probably the most intense n' passionate vocal performance ever laid to tape. You can keep your Cookie Monster death metal growlers and skinny-jean-clad screamo bleaters. This song is closely related to another one from the same album, "Rise".
In summer of '05 I bought AMC's sprawling '93 opus Mercury on cassette at some thrift store and was floored by it, so I quickly set about buying lots more of their stuff. I bought this CD, Everclear, on eBay that fall for a few bucks. American Music Club are from San Francisco. In 1991, Rolling Stone magazine named Mark Eitzel its Songwriter Of The Year, and it also put Everclear in its top 5 albums of the year. I think it's an uneven album with a few great songs.
Before going out to the concert last night, I watched the second half of the movie Apocalypto with my sister. Then we watched the beginning of Mysterious Skin, since she has had a crush on Joseph Gordon-Levitt since seeing seeing him in a restaurant. Yikes. It was so disturbing that we couldn't even keep watching it. I told Emily it reminded me a bit of Gummo, which she hasn't seen, so I showed her some weird Gummo clips on YouTube. (Spaghetti in bathtub scene; chair wrestling scene; tapdance scene; swimming pool scene.) Das Racist were pretty dope, though they unfortunately didn't do "Hahahaha jk." The film clips they played were very surreal and generally hilarious. Danny Brown was emulating Andre 3000 pretty blatantly, but with lots of explicit lyrics that grew a bit tiresome. Despot is a short white dude. I wore my NBA TV t-shirt. Here's a pic I took which miraculously squeezes in all seven of the dudes doing a collabo at the very end:
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| L-R: Dapwell (Das Racist), Heems (Das Racist), Despot, Kool A.D. (Das Racist), Danny Brown, DJ dude, Danny's hype man texting |
We stayed out till about 3:30 AM, stopping at the Saint and then at the Balcony Bar. A punk dude was karaoke-ing NSync's "Bye Bye Bye" at the former establishment. We played some Faith No More, Interpol, Das Racist, Kreayshawn, Verve and Pixies on the "internet jukebox" at the latter, and I got a huge chicken calzone and a Guinness Draught. Someone at the bar was loudly talking about how 15 of her friends were currently pregnant, down from a recent high of 22.
I made a mental note to get up at 8, so I woke up at 7:59 without an alarm clock. (I'm really good at that.) I lent a Rahsaan Roland Kirk CD to Bruce, the security guy at my sister's apartment, and he said we should play hoops soon. I cruised by Harold's nursery (plant store), then went to Chalmette. Later bought a mint copy of Miles Davis' Get Up With It on double LP at The Mushroom, mainly for its mind-blowing first track, "He Loved Him Madly." I asked Chris at The Mushroom why he wasn't at the D.R. show, and he said he was, so we talked about it. I noticed Justin Warfield's first album in the $3 used CD rack and recommended it to him. Ate some food and fed my lizard. Bought two artsy foreign DVDs at a pawn shoppe.
At 4PM I had a very strange and unnerving incident on the Luling bridge, wherein I was tailgated aggressively by a big silver Ford pickup with a totally black-tinted windshield, which had sped up onto my tail going way over the speed limit. Rather than accelerate, I maintained my speed and flicked him off. He tailgated me down the lengthy cloverleaf off-ramp, then he finally flashed red and blue lights and pulled me over. It turns out it was two narcotics officers in an unmarked vehicle. I know this because they were wearing shirts that said "NARCOTICS" in big yellow letters. The driver, a Jersey Shore-esque would-be bodybuilder, bellows at me and asked me if I knew who I was messing with. I asked him "Why are you flexing your arms?," which didn't go over too well with him. After I laid out my case that he was drastically speeding in a construction zone that probably had cameras, I watched him go back to his truck and converse with his buddy in my rearview. I think they realized I'd beat them in court, and any video footage of what they did might cause them to get in trouble. So Jersey dude gives me a ticket for Careless Operation, which is pretty much the mildest offense there is. "I could've given you 5 different citations, but I'm just giving you one." So I can't complain too much. To make a long story short, I was the only person driving the speed limit over that bridge, with everyone else going at least 10 MPH too fast, yet I was the only one who got a ticket. Amazingly, Das Racist had a running joke about "narcs" at the show last night, in which they claimed they could sense that some people in the crowd were narcs. (Presumably a joke about the paranoia of potheads?) So of course I deal with narcs for the first time in my life about half a day later. Weird.
Anyway, the moral is that I now know how quickly and easily one can be intimidated into signing a document that one knows is unfair. I used to scoff when I would hear about prisoners who signed confessions after, say, 10 hours of nonstop questioning, but I won't do that anymore.
This morning I snapped pics at my sister's apartment of two paintings I've given to her:
The first one is about 2x2.5', depicts coconut palms (Cocos nucifera), and is the first palm painting I ever did, in Sept. '09. I think it has the best fronds I've ever done, and it sucks that I'll never be able to top those. The second one is big, like 2'x3', depicts date palms (Phoenix dactylifera), and I think I did it last year. That one is, aesthetically, my favorite painting I've ever done. I don't paint from photos, I just freehand from my head based on my growing, studying, pruning and photographing of various palms over the years. I have a strict rule about never painting green fronds, and hopefully The Man won't ever coerce me into breaking it.
Planets with similar climates: The Sheila Divine - "Back To The Cradle" (2002), Hüsker Dü - "59 Times The Pain" (1984), Idaho - "You Are There" (1993).
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