Appalachian mysticism spiritual folk revival in north carolina or what the poseur An*** 3000’s LA new age spiritual jazz revival wishes they were

 In June 2023 my cousin brought me to a Floating show at a ranch in LA (walking back to the car after the show we found a horse. I shined my phone’s flash to pet her, 10/10). Carlos Niño and Friends played a spiritual jazz set that was 35% misc. percussion, 15% electric organ and 50% bird calls. We were high and spread out on a blanket like everyone else. We were eating a $5 rotisserie chicken, cucumber salad, and butter almond basmati rice like nobody else-- but I think that was ok. Sean Mendez was vibing out behind us (on a "mental health break" from touring, according to the tabloids). My cousin says this happens all the time. He’s a Floating regular. Apparently Andre 3000 is also in with the LA spiritual jazz scene after the release of his non-rap album, New Blue Sun. This release feels exciting for us, but it's just a rehash of the Pharaoh Sanders and Alice Coltrane era. They were really doing something new in the progression of American jazz and broader New Age culture at that time. In 2023 this feels like it could be at best an instance of the eternal return or maybe just nostalgia, or worse— 2003 Ariel Pink.

In the Cat’s Cradle back room, Carrboro, North Carolina— Setting plays a spiritual folk set. Maybe an hour and a half of nonverbal music— some kind of large box accordion drones, and a banjo is played with small wooden sticks processed through several unknowable metal boxes. Joe Westerlund is on drums. Legend of the scene: Joe Westerlund. First heard of him when Emily submitted pottery to a Peel gallery group show. Joe also had visual art in the show. Soon I’d see him at every show. The only drummer in the triangle it seems. I saw him play a strange one off set with Nick Sandborne in the same room I was in tonight. What started as a small-town joke between Emily and I has now become a case of true infatuation. I love to see Joe’s name on a bill. I feel like maybe he is the NC Carlos Niño, as NC is to LA-- quiet and humble and deeply rooted. The Setting show lacks much of the faux eastern mysticism of the Floating show. There are no words and no celebrities and no horses. It’s more Walt Whitman than Alan Watts to me. More John Fahey than Alice Coltrane. If I were less of a poseur I would be able to include more appropriate bluegrass and Appalachian references [here]. Then again that doesn't stop Angel Olsen, Avey Tare, and the newer generation of Appalachian aura-farmers from taking in the fresh Blue Ridge Mountain air.  

 If LA burns down completely next time, I would not be surprised if it re-emerges in NC.  This might in fact be the best scenario we can hope for.  As there is an argument to be made that remaking American society might require engagement with a rich and uniquely American mythology. American political theorist, Murray Bookchin writes, "wherever anarchism took root, it did so because it literally became a voice of freedom for yearning people and spoke in their language -- notably, their most cherished ideals, most fervent hopes, and in the idiom of their specific tongues." 

-MPB

government overreach

Everyone is freaking out this morning.

The squirrels are freaking out. The worms are freaking out. The birds are freaking out especially. It’s 10 AM. These are the late birds. I’ve been taught all my life to have no sympathy for these birds, but truthfully, I have sympathy for all God’s creatures. I’ve seen more cardinals this last month in Texas, than I have in my entire childhood in Ohio. Being the state bird, Ohio cardinals must think of themselves as celebrities, hiding from the common people with their pointing fingers and their flashing camera-- in Texas they're just like any other bird.

I wiped my glasses off on my shirt, as I did every morning. Being that this morning, I was in the bright Texas sun, it was time to reckon with the fact that over the years my glasses had developed a yellowed film through which I was always viewing the world, dimly. Pulling my shirt up close to my naked eyes,  the fibers appear in a stellar high definition. (If only the yellowed film would disintegrate between the fibers, like how a nightmare ends with skin between the fingers.) I have to live with these lenses for a little longer, until my health insurance is renewed upon enrollment at the University of North Carolina. Just a matter of time. For now, I navigate a seemingly featureless ocean (desert?) hoping to see enough of the fine texture of things to keep my head above water.

If you're going to offer a lamb to the slaughter, you have to offer your best. Jesus healed the blind for a reason.

The picture window in my new Carolina house contains all the wonders and horrors of nature. I’ll set my camera up on a tripod, so that I can unobtrusively capture as much of it as possible. The lenses on my camera are cleaner than the ones covering my eyes. This will have to do for now. My camera captures only carolina’s best: blue jays, the carolina wren, tufted titmouse, pileated woodpecker, and that famous red cardinal. However, it is the female cardinal with a bright orange beak that really catches my camera's eye.

I would be lying however, if I let on that I wasn't anxious to get my glasses replaced soon, for it is the Lord that said "Do not offer the blind, the injured or the maimed, or anything with warts or festering or running sores. Do not place any of these on the altar as an offering made to the Lord by fire." (Leviticus 22:22). If you're going to offer a lamb to the slaughter, you have to offer your best. Jesus healed the blind for a reason. A greater purpose. Graduate school probably.

 

sensation seeking

 im scratching this cats ears and he is craning his neck forward turning his head around to gauge the position of my hand and then slamming his head back into my hand to get the ideal sensation. he is doing this repeatedly. repeatedly sensation seeking in this way.

Grandma's house courtesy of LaFaso Real Estate

typing "fluxus" on amazon.com and scrolling

 - MPB

in honor of david c berman

         1-4-23: "civil war" + "nude girls" = 4,610,000 results

 

        BONUS

pictures of eastern north carolina birds

 These are pictures i took of birds in eastern north carolina, specifically the ones that came to the feeder i put outside my window*. The first fall that i lived here, I setup a tripod in my front window and took several hundred photos of birds. This was inspired by the following disconnected excerpts from an unknown (lost) pdf on bird divination.

"What has been said that the demons hear the future is because they receive future events during their flight in the air from the lords of the constellations who are the princes of the quiver. And so also the birds announce these events as proven by divination."

"The efficacy of ornthiomancy in the post-prophetic era... Thirty days before a powerful event occurs to a nation in this world or before misfortune happens to it, the event is announced in that world (i.e. the heavenly world). Sometimes it is transmitted to the mouths of children, sometimes to those who have no understanding (i.e. fools), and sometimes by the mouths of birds."

"His father forbids active augury, but permits occasional recourse to unbidden portents for the sake of repentance."

"Every creature, from the angels to the lowliest insect is potentially a vehicle for the revelation of secrets and decrees that contribute to the self-perfection of man."

"A winged creature may report the word."

 

*I frequently see orioles, blue jays, and goldfinch, but they don't come to my feeder. Any advice on how to attract these, and other birds would be appreciated. I fear that I am missing out on important announcements of future events.

-MPB

letter to Ian Svenonius

 Ian Svenonius, if you are reading this than I would like you to know that it was not very funny to leave several copies of a record with no sleeve in the Scrap Exchange thrift in Durham. The label reading: "Hi! I'm the Lost Record" was unfunny to me. You may think this is funny but it's not. After taking it home for $1 and putting it on the turntable, I immediately recognized your lisp and could feel your sneer through the needle. The ironically daceable drum machine and laconic lyrics did nothing for me. I particularly did not appreciate hearing the lyric "when you find me anyway in a dollar bin, in a basement, in a thrift store, someone threw me away." 

 "I can tell you that the record company, they neglected me." This seems to be true, Ian. Merge Records if you care to comment on why there were several copies of this unfunny post-punk album, sleeveless and brutally stacked vinylagainstvinyl in a mail bin at the Scrap Exchange thrift in Durham, NC-- save it, because it doesn't really matter.

Thanks,

MPB

P.S. do you remember when you told my friends that your dj set with Calvin Johnson was lame, when they were sitting outside of the Owl in Chicago after they'd been kicked out for being underage? that was cool of you.

joke

Today I found the following in my phone notes with the title "joke". I think I wrote it on a plane while either watching Ratatouille or reading Pale Fire.

 "Disclosed was [...] the basic fact that reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates it's own special reality perceived by the communal eye."

- Pale Fire (1962)

 

"You could fill a book-- a lot of books-- with things dad doesn't know. And they have. Which is why I read."

- Ratatouille (2007)

I dont get the joke.

-MPB

A review of Bedroom Databank Vol. 4 by Bradford Cox

opens inbox

The story of where my copy of the collected works of Octavio Paz went.

 In Roberto Bolaño's novel Amulet, Auxilio, the mother of Mexican poets, prophesies that a statue of Octavio Paz would stand in a square in Mexico in the year 2020. 

In 2020, I concluded my 10 year Chicago residence in Pilsen. My girlfriend and I were leaving to live with her family in Texas for a short time. Uhaul is expensive and we didn't even have a couch, so we only took what we could fit in a rented mini-van. Most of our things were laid out on the sidewalk in front of our apartment. I was pleased with the attention it was getting, as a variety of people came by to pick over the pile throughout the week. 

One man, who looked to be around 55 years old, came by. He was interested in the books and took one of the two copies of Be Here Now by Ram Dass, and the collected works of Octavio Paz. He told me he was an artist and through our conversation I learned that he was one of Pilsen's famous/anonymous Mexican mural painters. In my raw emotional state of leaving, I felt especially touched that the books would be in the right hands. I felt I probably never should have had them in the first place. I felt I probably never should have been in that neighborhood in the first place. 

-MPB

dumb beat poem

boy pats lap

dog walks onto it

 

cat drinks tea

for the antioxidants

child opens gift

cheeks incardinate

 

-MPB

"Everything feels like the future but us."

waiting in a Marriot hotel
listening to the bars squeak
as Simone Biles swings from them
she gave it a try

the bars squeak in Tokyo
but I'm alone in the Marriot hotel
the squeak, the silence, the fall

this is the future
subtle, uncaring
only technically amazing

I read it in the Catholic Worker magazine
"Everything feels like the future but us."

What it was like buying a mattress in 2018

I ran into Barbara from American Mattress again. She was at Target buying beer to drink on her new mattress. I wanted to buy her a card from the "friendship and love" section to show her my appreciation for being a kind stranger, and making the awkward task of wrestling with a salesman a more pleasant experience. I'll never forget when she sprawled out on the full-size Beauty Rest with pillow top and said, "I just want to get some rest." She was newly retired at 65 spending her first social security check on a good mattress. 

 

She and I actually ended up buying the same mattress, and the salesman, Tom turned out to be not so awful after all. I sympathized with him. "I know it's a little less than what that gorilla Mattress Firm will give you, but you can be sure that I'm here doing everything I can to get you the mattress you'll love." I didn't like to see Tom squirm like that. Buying the mattress from him felt wholesome and rare.

I think this was also the day I learned that Amazon had not put Toys R' Us out of business, like someone told me, but that they had actually been slowly and deliberately cannibalized by private equity.

-MPB

(Not my) family photos from Lake Kagawong

While doing research for a series of essays (1, 2, 3, 4) about the recursive structure of inland islands for the famous chimps newsletter, I came across a lot of family photos of people enjoying Lake Kagawong, the second largest lake on Manitoulin island, the largest lake island in the world located in Lake Huron.

Here are a few of my favorite of these family photos. I found them inspiring as I tried to imagine what life would be like as the sole human inhabitant of an island nested deep within a series of lake islands in one of the Great Lakes of America.

This fisherman has a lot of great botanical photographs.

Roger's paintings can be found here.

 

-MPB