RT @jpsowin: This picture is more full of win the longer you look at it. http://i.imgur.com/zDJ7W.jpg
One Dalton Ghetti, of Connecticut, carves lead pencil points into tiny sculptures. There’s a full gallery of these on the Telegraph website. This Ghetti fellow uses his time well.
Through the cab window of a decrepit old Boston & Maine RS-3. From Shaun O'Boyle’s mesmerizing series of photo essays, Modern Ruins.
The Olivetti Lettera 22. I have one of these coming to me for my 32nd birthday, which is still 40-something days away. I know this because my wife isn’t as good at hiding and sneaking and lying as I am. She is virtuous, I am not. I look forward to typing on something without monitor glare, that cannot connect to the internet, and that doesn’t heat up when I use it. I’ll even be able to hold what I’ve written.
“Born in the U.S.A.” as it appears on Tracks and as it could’ve appeared on Nebraska. Music- and performance-wise, this version is more “in character”… but the version that the Gipper co-opted for his 1984 Presidential campaign is, I think, a lot more complex and subversive. This version here is the sound you expect for desperate words like these, and, as such, makes the song a bit one-dimensional and indignant. But the shouted, mainstream, swing-for-the-fences stadium rock of the more famous version from Born in the U.S.A. tells another part of the story more eloquently than the lyrics do: by 1984, the country had moved on and done its best to forget the man in the song. All that aside, this version still rips—it’s great writing and performance from a man who believed what he was singing.
Having a 10-month-old son means something. It means that I can confidently say that the snot smeared across my sleeve is probably not mine.
Lots more railroad tattoos at the Black Butte Center for Railroad Culture website. The BBCRC was started by some hoboes I was once acquainted with, including a terrifically-entertaining wino named North Bank Fred. NBF, of former Southern Pacific crew-change town Dunsmuir, CA, photographs hobo tags and puts them up here.
Justin Townes Earle: Harlem River Blues →
Justin Townes Earle is almost the best thing about music nowadays. Good ol’ NPR First Listen has his forthcoming Harlem River Blues streaming up until the record actually drops on September 14. A few weeks ago, I wrote something about the title track here.
Gillian Welch goes outside to do the day’s work, when a rider with a blood-black gunshot wound crashes through the willows. The rider is her wayward son. After two verses, she repeats the whole song in two lines: “One morning, one morning/the boy of my breast/came to my arms, unable to rest/leaving me in the arms of death.” The banjo is the very sound of violence and terror and worry and sorrow. One of those perfect songs.
Sweetgrass is a really mesmerizing and—as the official description says—unsentimental documentary of Montana shepherds driving their flock into the wild, remote Absaroka-Beartooth wilderness for summer pasture. The last glimpse of something that is now gone.
“Reader, just in case you don’t want to knock it back straight and would rather monkey around with perfectly good Bourbon, here’s my favorite recipe, “Cud’n Walker’s Uncle Will’s Favorite Mint Julep Receipt.”
You need excellent Bourbon whiskey; rye or Scotch will not do. Put half an inch of sugar in the bottom of the glass and merely dampen it with water. Next, very quickly—and here is the trick in the procedure—crush your ice, actually powder it, preferably with a wooden mallet, so quickly that it remains dry, and, slipping two sprigs of fresh mint against the inside of the glass, cram the ice in right to the brim, packing it with your hand. Finally, fill the glass, which apparently has no room left for anything else, with Bourbon, the older the better, and grate a bit of nutmeg on the top. The glass will frost immediately. Then settle back in your chair for half an hour of cumulative bliss.“
”
Stervenson →
My friend, the ruddy-livered Joshua Stevenson, co-inventor with me of the very delicious “progressive mint julep”. He podcasts his stuff, too.
This tight, brisk, 3-minutes-and-change song gets blown up into an 8-minute, widescreen epic for the people of Belgium. There’s a 5-minute version on this free recording from a show in Nuremburg.
“Calling it “neo-feudalism” is unfair, to feudalism.”
The Love Language: Libraries. →
Really, really, really excellent record. Comes in under 32 minutes total running time. First rule of rhetoric: leave ‘em wanting more.
Only problem with this site: it is a Flash-based monstrosity. Fortunately, you can also stream it on the Merge Records site… where you can also buy it.
I don’t really go in for the lovelorn, teen angst thing… but damn, these guys do it perfectly. A hormonally-gigantic sound, sharp songwriting, and flawless sequencing. I love albums.
This fellow, also. God bless the Library of Congress.
Bo Weevil, from Frank Fairfield’s Daytrotter Session. To paraphrase myself, it was recorded in 2010, but sounds like something from 1930.