fulks
I have a guest blogger today, the great Midwest by way of Southeast songwriter, Robbie Fulks. Here he is “blogviating” (he made that up, clever devil) about the secret thrill of watching music on (flat screen) tv.
You can follow the link to his full post — he is not really a guest blogger, more like my electronic captive.
He say:
Last night (December 3) I was flipping channels on my barn-door-size flatscreen TV and saw a middle-aged rock band playing. Sounded good at first, then better, and I kept with it for a good 40 minutes. Turns out it was R.E.M., the Georgia quartet, augmented by two other players. No kidding! If you look in here at my site very often, you must know that rock music, or whatever it’s called — American commercial youth music — is not my thing. In fact I have come to despise it with a wide, open heart. There are broadly speaking three reasons people are attracted to music enough to come to a performance. They like the sound of it, they like the people playing it, or they like the thought of themselves being at the performance. Rock music, almost by definition, because it’s marketed so relentlessly, thrives on the third and silliest appeal. The event-ness of a show in a venue of several thousand seats and upwards, the quasi-religious sensations aroused by being a tiny violin in a massed orchestra of coordinated human emotion, are impossible to discount. Like evangelists, rock musicians need almost superhuman strength to avoid degrading themselves and their craft. The situation is naturally criminogenic.
I will have to look up “criminogenic” — does not sound good. I saw Robbie and Gjersoe at Don Quixote’s in Felton, CA about a year ago and they were perty good.
Above is a portrait I took of him backstage at WUIS radio show in Springfield, IL, summer, 2009. (He was with a pregnant Jenny Scheinman).
http://www.robbiefulks.com/blog/posts/185-some-music-that-sounds-good-and-why-does-it-
Feel free to comment on his post, on his post.
Here is link to ACL page about the appearance:
http://austincitylimits.org/3401rem
P.S. He actually says “bloviate” not “blogviate” which is another new one on me. I have tagged “words” for this post.
Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 
and here is a little blurb about Jenny from about a year ago referencing her pregnancy:
mazel tov to Jenny and her family!! Fond memories of visiting Ohlone and Castilleja Schools in Palo Alto for a set of clinics a few years back, 2004.
http://www.northcoastjournal.com/calendar/events/jenny-scheinman-trio/
The photo is from a set of under-stated tongue-in-check artist portraits I was compiling a whiles back — 50 or so, and then mostly deleted from my cell phone minus a smaller group I sent to my email.
Was pleased to see on my birthday no less that the New York Times Jon Caramanica had plugged the Robbie Fulks tribute to Michael Jackson that is recently released on Yep Roc. I recall knowing that Robbie had started this project some time before MJ’s demise and then let some time pass before putting any energy into actualizing it.
It was fun yelling out “Michael Jackson!” like a confused heckler at the Don Quixote’s show. Or should I say it was a thriller?
Robbie coming to Freight and Salvage in April.
Dao and I talked today about Robbie and I noticed that he is doing a big show tonight in Chicago at Lincoln Hall.
http://robbiefulks.com/blog/posts/216-here-comes-michael-again#add_a_comment
I commented on his site.
this is a bit of a non sequitur but here is a link to clip Tony Gayton’s “Athens Inside/Out” which changed my life in that I drove up to try to meet Howard Finster in Paradise Valley Chatooga County Georgia in 1992, same trip I think in which I re-met Jack McCook and first saw Superchunk (but before I left advertising for what became music):