music with great visuals II

With the latest portable audio equipment, I believe Cover art will again take on more importance. There was a time with digital music that cover art was depreciated but the new Apple iPod touch makes me want to buy music just for the cover art, just to then see it while browsing my music via Cover Art Flow.

It almost reminds one of flipping through LP albums.

So what are my criteria for good cover art you ask? It should be eye-catching, simple enough so that it works from a thumbnail to larger-than-life scale. Unusual colors, design and humor are a plus. Basically the same things that make art stimulating and enjoyable. There is so much out there that one cannot help but overlook many great covers but it's still fun to try.

	Andrew Bird-Mysterious Production of Eggs
	Oswaldo Golijov

One Man's Slag

Again I have been on my way somewhere and been distracted by the slag on the path (see previous post).

These man-made rocks are beautifully iridescent like oil spilled in water. It is an unusual dark palette of grays and reds but with surprising splashes of cheerful warmth. I saw something on the rail-bed that I thought was a snail, then slag, no it was a snail; then I saw slag, or was it doogie-do, no, it was indeed slag, once a viscous semi-flowing mass. The color scheme reminds me of a bird I recently saw. I think it was a grackle, an outwardly black bird like a crow, not known for it's beauty, but with eye-catching iridescent greens and violets beneath the black surface.

Again, slag has the appearance of having been through hell, with a beauty and flowing bulbous shape that comes of intense pressures and heat. It is scarred with little volcanic eruptions. And again it surprises me that having lived here so long, having walked this path so many times, I had never noticed before. I think when people lived off the land they must have known their environments so much better.

And finally having gone through a lifestyle change (of being laid-off/retired from a demanding all-enveloping job), I wonder if there is an alternative to living productively other than pushing oneself (and being pushed) as hard and long as possible. As a cast-off byproduct, like the slag, scarred by the pressure to produce more and more, perhaps I have even more to offer then before though in a less material way. Our society needs people who have the time and breath to see the slag in a bed of gravel.

Slag under my nose

I call it slag. I don't know where I learned that word and can't remember ever using it before.

Slag is what I call that which I have found on a old railroad bed that I have walked many times over the 21 years I have lived here. It is a visually striking rock; it must have been molten once; it is bulbous and extravagantly pock-marked and tortured looking. It can have convexities in ways that rock rarely has. Perhaps it could be pumice or one of the other igneous rocks of that ilk though I suspect it is man-made. It is full of bubbles and cavities and can have a smooth shiny surface like a liquid frozen in it's tracks. It can have colors unusual for rock: a shiny red-brown with patches of bright powdery yellow.

Now that I have noticed it, I see it everywhere on that old railroad bed, never used by the railroad as long as I've been here. Perhaps slag is particularly subject to the frost heaving that happens this time of year, that force which churns up the usually solid ground; the same force responsible for potholes in our roads. I fill my pockets with it until I must look something like the squirrels fleeing bird-feeders with bulging cheeks.

Probably it was just waste, used as fill, used to build up the bed, from some long-gone industrial site. I am so curious where it came from and how long it's been there. There is so much of it that perhaps at some point I'll get sick of it, ignore it, even kick it out of my way.

And the reason why I finally noticed this noteworthy part of my environment? It is because suddenly I am outside the rat-race, a casualty of the sub-prime mortgage crisis. My pace of life has slowed and I have started to look again, like a child, at my world.

Music with great visuals

The following is an impossible task (which has never stopped me before). Here my first list of music with good cover art (more to come later):

	Frank Zappa-Sleep Dirt
	Robert Wyatt-Rock Bottom (and many others)
	Two Loons for Tea-Nine Lucid Dreams
	Dirty Three-Ocean Songs
	Putamayo Series
	Rough Guide series

Great article about Brooklyn Music scene

Ny Times Mar 8, 2008
Amoung the bands mentioned are:

Yeasayer
MGMT
The Strokes
The Rapture
LCD Soundsystem
Interpol
Dirty Projectors
Grizzly Bear
High Places
Psychic Ills
Gang Gang Dance
Dragons of Zynth
TV on the Radio
Flaming Lips
Vampire Weekend
Battles
Animal Collective

but there's many more exciting original bands out there in intimate venues. Some of which were mentioned here (and I have much more research to do) are:

Slavic Soul Party
Rachelle Garniez
TV on the Radio
JENNY SCHEINMAN
Las Rubias Del Norte

Fax

My desires have becomes faxes
grainy, smeared
beamed to another distant
hole-in-a-wall
the next waystation

while I deliver other's messages
over and over
my ink cartridge
un-refilled

Best Opening line I've read in a long time-

"For numberless years a myna had astounded travelers to the caravansary with its ability to spew indecencies in ten languages, and before the fight broke out everyone assumed the old blue-tongued devil on its perch by the fireplace was the one who had maligned the giant African with such foulness and verve."

This comes from Michael Chabon's novel Gentlemen of the Road. It also contains some great figurative language:

"his eyes womanly as a camel's"

I also enjoyed the titles of the chapters:

On Discords Arising from excessive Love of a Hat

On the Melancholy duty of Soldiers to contend with the messes left by Kings

On the Belated Repayment of the gift of a Pear

In short, this novel is high-quality fun; it has some great illustration as well.

Overcome

it whistled my winter
gurgled my en-garde
purpled my dignity

knocked me down
emptied my pockets
and filled them back up with sand
and a bent spoon

that's what your song did to me