Dancing about Architecture

An article I wrote last week: The Surrealist Photos of Bob Dylan by Daniel Kramer and Daniel Schatzberg.

Greil Marcus will appear at a screening of “I’m Not There” at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis on Nov. 1st.

Somebody has been listening to The Genuine Basement Tapes.

My girlfriend and I went to this last night.

I’m not up to writing a full review, but:

“I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face”, as performed by Paul was great. (And touching as hell under the circumstances—Laurie was wiping tears from her eyes and clearly she didn’t know ahead of time that Paul would be playing it.)

(Musicals were a recurrent theme of the evening. Besides “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” from My Fair Lady, “Till There Was You” from The Music Man was performed (by John Eller).)

Also great was some song with the lyrics “she’s a goddamn angel” and something about her “husband in Hell”. Is this a new Westerberg song? (A Gram Parsons song??)  The lyrics are kind of like an inverted version of the lyrics of the Tim version of “Can’t Hardly Wait”: “I’ll be sad in Heaven/You won’t follow me there”.

Paul and a bunch of others played an awesome (extremely awesome) version of the Stones’ “Loving Cup”. (Paul’s left hand seems to have recovered from the screwdriver-candle-cleaning incident—he played some decent guitar solos on “Loving Cup”.) Paul was totally getting into this song and John Eller played really good keyboards on it.

The Zuzu’s Petals songs were excellent. Laurie was completely happy performing, Linda is an awesome drummer (she played drums for almost everyone that night), and it was fun watching Coleen bop around.

Other than P.W. and Zuzu’s Petals, the main musical highlight was an amazing vocal performance by Lori Barbero (of Babes in Toyland) on some song that I don’t know the name of. Whatever song it was that she played, it was an amazing minimalist arrangement: just distorted, feedbacking guitar, Lori’s vocals, and Lori’s foot slamming down on the bass drum pedal.

Also great was the closing performance of “Daydream Believer” by everybody.

I had my copy of Petal Pusher signed by Laurie after the show. I didn’t want to reveal myself to her as some kind of “Paul worshipper”, so I didn’t say much to her, which I now regret. I could have at least told her that I loved the book.

Riding your bike and reading books from the public library.

This morning I finished reading Laurie Lindeen‘s beautiful and moving (in parts) and laughing-so-hard-milk-snorts-out-your-nostrils funny (in other parts) new book, Petal Pusher. I wanted to quote some of the funny parts, but I gave my copy to my girlfriend, as a gift, immediately after finishing it and it’s over at her apartment right now (and I’m not), etc. But, anyway…

You’ll probably get your own ‘message’ from the book, because it’s about a lot of things (and the author’s writing is too intelligent for it to be the type of book that would overtly have a single ‘high-concept’ message, anyway). But, to me, it was about the fact that maybe you can go home again. Maybe home is just things like reading books and riding your bike around with a friend, and not doing the things that make you feel bad in the long run. Maybe home is the things you did when you were a kid when you were happy (more or less, relatively speaking (relative to the complicated, messy, decidedly non-happy corner you might have painted yourself into now as a so-called adult)).

But, that’s not exactly what the book is about. It’s about a lot of things and it’s not something some moron blogger (my name is Paul) can summarize in 500 words. So, just read the book for yourself, because it’s super good.

Here are my top five songs that are missing from Rolling Stone’s list.

• “No Fun”/”Push It” by Iggy & The Stooges/Salt-N-Pepa and 2 Many DJs
  The best of the mash-up world.
• 4’33” by John Cage
  Sometimes silence is golden.
• The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky
  How come riots never happen at any of the concerts I go to?
• “Police and Thieves”, “White Man in the Hammersmith Palais”, or “White Riot” by the Clash
  How come everybody’s afraid to throw a brick in this country?
• Any song by the Replacements
  Actually no song by the Replacements ever changed the world, but many of them changed individuals.

My choice of the top 10 albums that weren’t included on the HOF/NARM list:

• McCartney, Paul McCartney
• The Forgotten Arm, Aimee Mann
• Tim, the Replacements
• East Side Story, Squeeze
• Get Happy!!, Elvis Costello and the Attractions
• Sandinista!, the Clash
• Hard Rain, Bob Dylan
• Darkness on the Edge of Town, Bruce Springsteen
• Jesus of Cool, Nick Lowe
• A Ghost is Born, Wilco

“If not, then why are we here?”. Click here to listen.

Listen to an excellent interview with Lisa Germano on PRI’s Studio 360 (uses RealPlayer).

Please, Lisa, come and do a concert in the Twin Cities.

Paul Westerberg just came out with his first children’s record, the soundtrack to Open Season. Who could disagree about everyone’s constitutional right to arm bears?