afrojet

Tactics for Tax Evasion
I can think of a thousand things I’d rather be doing than figuring out my taxes. Putting out lit cigarettes on my tongue? Hell it’s better than filling out an M1 form in triplicate. This year is an especially tough one. The tax quagmire is so large that I’m going to have to call in more troops and hand everything over to the professionals.

Every year at about this time I get the strange urge to reorganize and re-alphabetize my entire vinyl collection. Go figure. This year is no exception. I am now in the throws of an extensive ‘ground-up’ 12-inch restructuring program that could take me well into the month of May. My office looks like a cityscape filled with poorly constructed skyscrapers. Every towering stack (except for maybe the German Disco section) looks like it could topple at any moment. I move carefully. But the stacks bring calm in this tax season. Trying to figure out where to file “Music to Break a Lease By” (Is is ‘Sixties Pop’ or do I start a whole new category of ‘Music to *Blank* By’) is a far more soothing and focused task than figuring out my deductibles. If only I owned a record called “Music to Do Your Taxes By”, could I then move on to more responsible endeavors. The hunt continues.

The Headlights Shine on Deers that Drop Doo-doo
Well how about that President of ours? Man, he really killed last night. I’ve completely lost the ability to speak and think about or otherwise analyze critically the message and tone of this national leader of ours. Even he looks bored with having to deliver the same rehearsed and coached talking points over and over again. He’s so obviously uncomfortable up there speaking as the high ruler of the free world, that I almost feel bad for him. It’s like rooting for your kid at their first piano recital. My money was on him to totally crack up last night and shit his diaper. I had visions of him fumbling a question so bad that he would take a step back from the podium collect himself for a brief second and then come back with, “OK. Fuck it – I’m outta here. Done. As of this moment – I resign!” One can hope…

The Good Doctor had this to say about Bush and the Iraqi quagmire:

“I hereby proclaim that “Fallujah” is the new
replacement for the F word. As in “Dude! I got a big
Fallujah on that test!” or “Fallujah this! I’m
leaving!”

Training Days
I’ll be heading to New Orleans for JazzFest in a couple of weeks. It will be my first time traveling in the Dirty South and from all the accounts I’ve heard of the festival, my time there will be an around-the-clock, non-stop musical exploration. It will be an endurance test of epic proportions. A musical marathon. And like any marathon, one needs to train. So this weekend I laced up my sneakers extra tight and went off to see as much music as I could fit into 48 hours, with an end goal of still having enough energy for Sunday Easter activities and Twins baseball/Masters Championship television viewing. I’ve still got a lot of work to do. After this weekend I’d give myself a strong B- for my performance. Of all the good music taken in, the surprise hit was this amazing beat box gentleman named Kenny Muhammad who opened up for Squarepusher. Check out this video of him playing with the New York Philharmonic.

For Easter there was trip to the Minnesota Zoo. Some new arrivals were on display for persons of all ages to ogle and manhandle. My favorite part of the zoo is the decent into the nocturnal animal cave. The decent into the cave has that classic Zoo/Science Museum vibe. You know the one, where it gets all kinda dark and the ambient museum music (mixed with nature sounds) comes out of little speakers and a gentle narrator walks you through the mysteries of time, space and beast? Man, that never gets old. Pure nostalgia. Speaking of nostalgia, I miss the old Minnesota Zoo identity with the old moose logo. I wonder why they got rid of that.

Thurston Moore on Kurt Cobain

A reasoned piece in the NYT by guitar wiz Moore on the death of Cobain and the continuing life of the music he loved.

You wouldn’t know it now by looking at MTV, with its scorn-metal buffoons and Disney-damaged pop idols, but the underground scene Kurt came from is more creative and exciting than it’s ever been. From radical pop to sensorial noise-action to the subterranean forays in drone-folk-psyche-improv, all the music Kurt adored is very much alive and being played by amazing artists he didn’t live to see, artists who recognize Kurt as a significant and honorable muse.

Twins Baseball
My sleeping patterns get all twisted around when the baseball season starts. Already, the first two Twins games have spilled over into extra innings. Thankfully both have ended with victories for the home team but I’m not sure how long I can keep up this pace. Twenty-six innings of baseball in as many hours starts to wreak havoc with your ability to speak cogently with the general population. It’s especially bad when you’ve listened intently to John Gordon’s play-by-play on ‘CCO. It’s really addictive. I wonder if he talks like that at home or out in public. WCCO should shoot television advertisements with John Gordon engaged in mundane human interaction speaking as he does when Shannon Stewart hits one out of the park in the bottom of the 11th.

The weather in the Twin Cities has been warming up considerably. This weekend I moved the 150 pound tube technology Solid State stereo onto the screened-in porch. It’s heaven. Last night I was out on the porch listening to the game stretched out on the couch. I had a freshly poured Sidecar in my hand and a bag of carmel corn from Candyland at arms reach. The cats were lazily bathing themselves in the pale orange glow of the setting sun. All was good. All was as it should be – peaceful.

The Comma Will Save Us All
This weekend while rummaging around antique stores in Saint Paul, I picked up a 1962 copy of The New York Times Style Book for Writers and Editors. I hope to use the edition along with Strunk and White to bring my grammar and spelling on these pages up from the deep depths of awful to the shallow waters of just bad. The process could be a slow one.

There’s a lot of good information packed in these pages. For instance, I had forgotten that words like Linotype, Tabasco, Technicolor and Teleprompter are all trademarked brand names and not simply generic nouns used to describe things (see also: Kleenex and FedEx). But my favorite part of the book is this little grammar nugget explaining the proper use of the comma:

“The absence of commas in His brother George was best man means that the bridegroom has more than one brother. If there is only one brother, George should be set off by commas. Thus a monogamous society must be well supplied with commas: His wife, Nancy, was not there.

That’s right folks. Really the only thing that’s holding the moral fabric of our country together, preventing a collapse into which thousands experiment loosely with polygamist policies, is our often overlooked friend, the comma. I think armed with that knowledge, we can all agree that the comma shall be sacrosanct and used with gleeful abandon. It is our moral duty.

And while you are contemplating the comma, you should also meditate on this other nugget that I gleaned from a different book find:

“Only those who can appreciate the least palatable of vegetable roots know the meaning of life”
Discourses on Vegetable Roots – Hung Tzu-ch’eng

Somebody Hire This Guy

Chicago boy seeks new job. The whole thing makes for a great Wednesday morning read. (via BoingBoing)

Also a brilliant visualizer (is that a word?) of google news and it’s prioritization of articles.

Axis of Aevil has a nice collecion of links to humdrum technicolor postcards.

The Don Quixote Plunge
This weekend I picked up the newly designed Penguin Classics edition of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. It’s going to be a commitment but hopefully within a few months I will have crushed this tomb and come out a better man for it. I love the newly retooled Penguin Classics editions. I wish I could have them all neatly lined up on a book shelf. Not that I can really critically discern the subtle differences, but the edition I bought is the John Rutherford translation and not the popular Edith Grossman translation.

So far I’ve spent more time thinking about the old arcade game Super Don Quix-ote (that I used to play at Chuck E. Cheese), than I have reading the book. I’ve also been tracing some of the design history of the early Penguin Classic book covers.

Moreover, I’ve been busy compiling a list of ‘music to read quixote by’, which begins with: Kevin Shileds, Bonobo, and The Merken Dream. Now I need to get to the task at hand and actually read the damn thing.

(Note: above image contains a beautiful photo of grass taken by my step-father Peter.)