Rip It Up

 Well, I have caught up on most of the reading that has come in through the email. I have some church lectures to listen to, but those will wait for a different frame of mind.

Except for a nap, I have been up since around 6. I made a trip to McClure's. From that trip, I learned that there was no money on the card supplied by my former employee, Chili's. I will call them tomorrow, after I double-check the internet. This did not cause me any mental stress, just a level of annoyance. It might be different if the Social Security check had not come in this past week.

I also went out this afternoon for more groceries. Now I have enough for most of the upcoming week.

Then it was back to writing and reading.

I want to work on "True Love Ways Gone Astray" and will close out here.

Read this evening, but which I do not think will work as a separate post:

The Church Meets in Volos from Public Orthodoxy and written by Fr. Jonathan Proctor may interest curious about the Orthodox Church, but I offer Father Proctor's conclusion has a wide application:

How humbling it is, then, to feel at the conference a growing sense of the church submitting to herself. Both clergy and lay academics in session after session reveal something biblical in their academic restraint—something not often seen in contemporary preaching, as far as I know, and often dismissed as irrelevant (or even disingenuous) by the preaching classes. It feels like an almost apostolic virtue, a Pauline “submitting to one another.” The academic method as an act of restraint and conscience. Sobriety and a watchfulness. Faith.

I think there is proof in Flora Cassen's Hidden in translation – Jewish resistance to Spanish empire how the written word can be subversive, if not the last word.

Pitchfork reviewed Lana Del Rey's new CD and the remastering of some Joe Ely records. 

Listening to WXPN during my stay in prison led me to falling under Del Rey's spell. I cannot peg her into a place, and I like that.

... Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd arrives as a sweeping, confounding work-in-process. It’s full of quiet ruminations and loud interruptions; of visible seams and unhemmed edges, from the choir rehearsal that runs through its opening moments to the sound of the piano’s sustain pedal releasing at its end. Beauty—long Lana’s virtue and her burden—fades or is forgotten, like that titular tunnel, its mosaic ceilings and painted tiles sealed up and abandoned. Here, Lana is after something more enduring, the matters “at the very heart of things”: family, love, healing, art, legacy, wisdom—and all the contradictions and consternation that come along with the pursuit.

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Lana is a postmodern collagist and a chronic cataloguer of her references: Take “Peppers,” which samples Tommy Genesis’ ribald 2015 track “Angelina,” name-checks the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and interpolates a surf-rock classic, all in the span of four minutes. At her best, Lana reinterprets others’ work with intention, percolating their meaning through a personal filter. The way that she now applies this same approach to her own past material—beyond the “Venice Bitch” remake, there’s a sliver of “Cinnamon Girl” in the Jon Batiste feature “Candy Necklace,” and chopped-up strings from “Norman Fucking Rockwell” on “A&W”—suggests an artist who is tracing her own evolution and also submitting her work, ripe for reimagining, for entry in the greater American songbook from which she so readily draws.

One of Ocean Blvd’s key takeaways is that perfection is not a requirement for inclusion in this canon. Part of the title track is spent extolling a sublime flaw—a specific beat in the 1974 Harry Nilsson song “Don’t Forget Me.” Lana cites, by timestamp (2:05), the moment when the singer-songwriter’s voice breaks, cracking open the track with raw emotion. As an indicator of Lana’s mindset, this embrace of imperfection may help explain some of Ocean Blvd’s excesses and experiments, which nobly pursue profundity and succeed only sometimes. Still, there are 2:05s to be found within the sprawl.

 I do not know if this will get anyone new to listen to her, but I can hope.

As for Ely, I came to him through The Clash and have tried to keep up with him through 4 decades of records. This is a guy who should have been heard by more. Out of West Texas, with Buddy Holly looming in the background, this guy could write and sing and perform.

This barren country gave birth to early rock pioneers like Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison, whose electrified guitars were signal conductors connecting remote listeners to the big city, like telephone wires across an empty highway. As a teenager in Lubbock in the early 1960s, singer-songwriter Joe Ely proved particularly receptive to the transmissions of rock’n’roll. Though his music might be branded Americana, Ely has always had a rockabilly soul, emphasizing the shared rhythm-and-blues roots that country and rock sprang from. In a career that stretches back more than 50 years, Ely found success as both a regional superstar and international cult favorite, even if mainstream American recognition often seemed to elude him—a songwriter’s songwriter, as they say.

New remasters of Ely’s first three solo albums—Joe Ely (1977), Honky Tonk Masquerade (1978), and Down on the Drag (1979)—by engineer Dave Donnelly blow the dust off a rich body of work. It was these records in particular that made Ely—alongside artists like Jerry Jeff Walker, Guy Clark, and former classmate Terry Allen—a pillar of the progressive country scene that revolved around public television’s Austin City Limits. Their audience may have been the same, but the West Texas sound had a few crucial differences from the “gonzo” music brewed up at the Armadillo World Headquarters. Where Jerry Jeff and friends brought the folk and jazz of the West Village down south to Austin, Ely went south of the border, borrowing from the sounds of Tejano music and Mexican norteño. The result is pure Tex-Mex fusion, with a penchant for waltz time and as much accordion as steel guitar. It’s the soundtrack of a region that’s always been a cultural crossroads of blended influences—by way of norteño, Ely’s songwriting especially highlights the polka and waltz traditions that German and Eastern European immigrants brought to Central Texas, a region where the Czech kolache remains a long-standing breakfast staple.

And being a fan, I give you one remaster of a song I knew from Live Shots, and always felt a connection. This is the first time I have heard the studio version. It's a great one, all the same. It might give you something to think about. Furthermore, it could be an anthem.

A spiritual hideout in the wind....

Oh, since it is Saturday night:

sch 9:58 PM