Sunday, January 2, 2011

death from consumption

documenting spending money in 2011.

Silkwom-Firewater double lp
Tim Midgett put what I believe to be the remaining Silkworm records in his possession up for sale on the Silkworm website a few weeks ago. I do not believe there are any left. This was their first record for Matador. It has been one of my favorites for a very long time. I'm glad to own the vinyl release. The artwork by Hiroshi Kimura is creepy. I don't want to gush too much, but this record is wonderful. My mom said a few of these songs remind her of Neil Young. Silkworm built these lyrical worlds for us to dick around in. They quote the Replacements and Bob Dylan in the same song. There are fast songs. There are slow songs. There are songs about weird historical shit. There are songs about touring. There are songs about divorces. There are a bunch of great songs. They made a video for the song Wet Firecracker. The surviving members of Silkworm play in a band called Bottomless Pit. I saw them a few months ago. Their records are just as good as Silkworm records. I listened to the first track on their new record for an hour or so when I first got it in the mail.

James Ellroy-Blood's A Rover paperback novel
This is the final book in Ellroy's Underworld USA trilogy. I meant to buy it a bunch of times last year, but didn't. I was at Borders to buy the new Kid Rock cd for my father for Christmas (my dad fucking loves Kid Rock) and I saw it on a shelf. I ripped through it in three days. Like most of Ellroy's stuff I've read, it's a fast read. He writes in a sort of police blotter, train of thought, "just the facts ma'am" style. The trilogy retells American history from 1958 through 1972. He uses made up characters who deal with the real conspiracies and historical insanity going on during that time period. The fictionalized folks blur with historical figures. The whole scene is a trip. J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, and Howard Hughes are all main characters in this book. They drive the actions of the made up characters. Hoover goes even crazier than he was in the first two novels as he covets and hordes as much seedy information as he can. Hughes grows his delusional recluse beard and talks about getting STD's from America's sweethearts. Nixon calls JFK a cocksucker and plays puppet for the mob. As absurd and outlandishly wicked some of the scenes are, none of it is unbelievable. I wouldn't blink an eye if I was told that everything recorded in these books happened. I prefer the first two books because they deal with a series of events I'm more interested in (Fidel in Cuba, JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King), but this new one is written just as well as them. People always talk about HBO doing a series based on this trilogy. If they do it right, it will be better than The Wire. This is Ellroy talking about his book. I think he might be kind of a dick.