10.29.16

Up 8:30. Weight 214.3

Went w/ Bree to a nearby church rummage sale, took a flyer on a Benny Moré CD (40s-50s Cuban bandleader). Went to coffee, went ahead and finished the Everett; daybook. Read a section-and-change on Aaron McCullough (lyric to which fragmentation doesn't always add much, some Howe-like archaic passages; I like a short sequence on domesticity). Exercised 10 min. Cleared email and worked on misc. tasks 2-5; added the recent 4-track comp to the website, contacted singers I'm accompanying for David Hadju, sent demos to Peter Hughes [unfortunately the "Boring Postcards" I played into my phone yesterday didn't work out], made some phone calls. Another indolent patch. Went to coffee about 7:30, read Stones/British blues chapter of Jack Hamilton + the introductory chapter of Larry Starr, George Gerswhin, who seems defensive about race. Put together a playlist of models/inspirations/aspirations (listed below) for the upcoming recordings - nothing I mean to copy directly, just some performances to get in our heads as to feel and some arrangement ideas. Read a few p. from Hartman, Verse,, tidied up office, got set for tomorrow. No prose. Lights out just past midnight.

Booker T & the MG's, Time Is Tight
Elvis Costello & The Attractions, Temptation
Talking Heads, Pulled Up.mp3
Tom Waits, 16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought-Six.
Tom Waits, Singapore.mp3
Elvis Costello, Pads, Paws And Claws
Elvis Costello, Chewing Gum
Railroad Jerk, Ballad of Railroad Jerk
Mable John, Same Time, Same Place
Barbara Stephens, The Life I Live
Bobby "Blue" Bland, I'll Take Care Of You
Ike Turner, Takin' Back My Name
Rolling Stones, Rocks Off
Gang of Four, At Home He's a Tourist
James Brown, I Got Ants In My Pants (And I Want to Dance)
James Brown, Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved
Minutemen, Toadies
Minutemen, Maybe Partying Will Help
Big Flame, Why Popstars Can't Dance
Toulouse, Commuter Maquette
Go-Betweens, Slow Slow Music
James Brown, Cold Sweat Pt. 2
Wire, Mr. Suit
Wire, Former Airline
Wolfhouds, Cut the Cake
Game Theory, She'll Be a Verb
Verlaines, Way Out Where
Verlaines, The Ballad of Harry Noryb

Unrelated - Muhal Richard Abrams, "Temporarily Out of Order," from his first, straight-ahead recording, 1957.

10.28.16

Up 8. Weight 214.4.

Exercised 10 min. Left 10:15, read 50 p. Everett on train and at coffee/breakfast. Oracle 11:45-3 pm: worked on "Stairway to Paradise," but didn't get very far. Met Pete at Ultrasound, midtown, for gtr rehearsal, 4-6; worked on "Still in Error," "Cover Your Tracks," and "Guesthouse." Went from there to the Strand for The Gerswhin Reader, also picked up, cheaply, another Gershwin book; Robert Duncan, The Noise (not the poet, a book on '60s culture I've always meant to look at); and a Drawing Center catalog of Walser and Dickinson artifacts. AACM show at Community Church - almost blew it off and came home, but it was the best of the 3 I've seen this month. Muhal Richard Abrams + 2 modern-classical string players, alternating and then together, and Hamiet Blueiett, quintet w/ Reggie Nicholson and D.D. Jackson, a formidable pianist - went everywhere from gospel to energy blowing, with little pretension. Wrote in daybook, longer than usual, during intermission - also had an idea, based on flipping through the hymnbook, about writing poems w/ the syllabic count of various traditional tunes. Got in about 11.

Read, mainly on trains, a small chapbook interview w/ Clark Coolidge, Cooke/Dylan chapter of Just About Midnight (uneven), and about 10 p. of Aaron McCullough, Double Venus.

10.27.16

Up 8. Weight 214.4

Out at 10. Finished Gates [at a near-skim, some later parts of the book aren't too directly relevant to what I'm doing] on the train and at coffee. Oracle 12-4, mostly cleaned up the graf on "Swanee." Answered some emails; offered to play piano for a few other singers at David H's book party in Dec. Listened to the rest of Fallen Angels on the train home - with another delay, just suddenly going express past my stop so I had to double back from Junction Blvd. Rested, read intro to Jack Hamilton, Just About Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination (which I'm worried scoops me on some points about, e.g. the relationship between "Blowin' in the Wind" and "A Change Is Gonna Come"), and started Percival Everett, Wounded (in his less taxing contemporary Western mode). Made a stack of my intended reading for Nov., went to the gym (for the first time in months!) around 7:30, as much to exert some willpower as anything. 25 min. elliptical, finished the last section of Gilbert, also had on some Wire. Stopped at e77 on the way back, daybook, more of the Everett. Left before some music started - curious, but didn't want to get up in the middle. Read this group of Ashbery poem from upcoming collection.

10.26.16

Up 8. Weight 214.4

Not an effective day. Some email exchanges 10-noon, noon-5 almost entirely wasted. Cleaned  up my desktop, listened to most of side 1 of Game Theory, Two Steps in the Middle Ages (starting to think about liner notes), left 5:45. Read about 1/2 of the remainder of Gates, on Hurston and Ishmael Reed. Triple Canopy event/performance at their new space on Canal. Dan Fox talked back to Gilbert and George (briefly mentioning Linton Kwesi Johnson), Okkyung Lee played horrific cello to clips from Eyes Without a Face (dir. Georges Franju, 1962), The Face of Another (dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara, from a novel by Kobo Abe, 1967), and El Espejo de la Bruja (dir. Chano Urueta, 1962). Hung out for a while afterwards w/ Dan, Andrew Hultkrans, and C. Spencer Yeh, who organized - oddly, he had been a Shrimper fan in Cincinnati. Left too late to go to Strand as I'd planned. Left around 10, ridiculous train delays, esp. once in Queens. Wrote in daybook, read liner notes to Spike, an Ike Turner collection, and that Jazz Arrangers comp., about 10 p. of Gilbert, and an article my godfather sent me on Sicilians in New Orleans jazz. Listened more closely to some tracks from the arranger's comp. (liner notes actually useful in picking out some things, notable that there are tons of augmented chords in Chappie Willett's "Uptown Rhapsody" and Fletcher Henderson's "Queer Notions"), about 1/2 of Dylan's Fallen Angels (it may be better sung than Shadows of the Night), that Sneaks record, and Stravinksy's wind octet. Walked into apt. after 12:30.

10.25.16

Up 6:30. Weight 214.2

Dl'ed absentee voting form, Bernadette Mayer,'s Utopia. Looked at some card stock I have around for Work From Home cover; possible, but involves a fairly complicated printing/scoring job. Out by 9, read 25 p. Gates [I am in the middle of too many books, will limit to 1 prose/1 poetry as much as possible for a while]. A stranger decided to adjust my shirt collar. Daybook. Oracle from 11, had to work on a range of non-book tasks - long email to John Shaw, gathered album demos for Peter (still should do quick phone recordings of 2-3), located some charts to send to Pete. Left at 1:45, met Bree at Film Forum for Vitaphone shorts, entertaining as always, and Show Girl (Alfred Santell 1928), a long-lost Alice White late silent, not shown in the U.S. since its release. 2 decent, if generic, songs. Got my voting form printed in between. Ran into Will Friedwald, Russell Scholl, and Imogene the mysterious Buster Keaton scholar, waiting for the next showing, on the way out. Walked to Gaia, some ways down Houston, to Jean & David's birthday dinner: Brandon + Devon, Jenny, a fair number of people I didn't know. Bree left early b/c she has something tomorrow; I read he middle half or so of the Gilbert book. Listened (on various train rides) to disc 5 of the Lester Young set and v/a The Jazz Arranger vol. 1, until my phone died during Jimmie Lunceford's "Taint What You Do." Lights out 12:30.