The Entroporium

This Saturday will be the last time I ever get to see my all-time favorite live band, Guided By Voices, who plan to break up after their current tour. This is GBV Week!

It’s 1997 and I’ve settled into my return to San Francisco life. GBV have settled in, too. They are on a one-new-album, two-tours annually groove. They clearly love coming to San Francisco and play some great gigs here.

Weird stories are coming out of the GBV camp, principally that Bob has fired the entire band and grafted another band, Pittsburgh’s Cobra Verde, into its place.

Saturday will be the last time I ever get to see my all-time favorite live band, Guided By Voices, who plan to break up after their current tour. This week will be devoted to GBV!

I was living in Seattle when I was first put on to GBV. Mark of course — with his stacks & stacks of CDs — many wonderful, many head-scratchers — was the start of it all. We had both moved up there in various states of loneliness and weird life inflection points to find Seattle dark, depressing but really open to finding new bits of alt.culture. This was at the tail end of grunge, but the city’s hipoisie had already moved on.

[Soundtrack] Willie Brown & Woodie – Ventriloquist Rap.mp3 I’m tired of thinking about this … thing. And you are too. So here is the silliest, most cheerful record I could find on the spur of the momen — a rap by a ventriloquist and his dummy, surely the only rap record of its kind. (If [...]

[Soundtrack] Mel & Tim – Starting All Over Again.mp3 Looking back it seems so obvious now. That sense of foreboding, of torpor and motionlessness was all the build-up to the election. Basically nothing seemed to happen in October — and the molasses-slow playoffs did nothing to dispel that impression. In retrospect, it feels like a [...]

I noticed that a whole lot of folks like yesterday’s propaganda image. There’s tons more at the Propaganda Remix Project. Go get ‘em. Plaster the town.

[Soundtrack] American Music Club – Patriot’s Heart.mp3 Swing states are part of the story, but consider: For the second time in a row, the Democratic ticket has failed to carry its own states. John Edwards’ North Carolina has 15 electoral votes; add on either Iowa or New Mexico and that’s enough to swing it — [...]

[Download] Stevie Wonder – He’s Misstra Know It All.mp3 For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no marvel: for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end [...]