Brian Eno and Sea Conger

haruki murakami courtesy fantasticfictionimages.co.uk
Originally uploaded by kuchen.

It's been a quiet week in Fargo. Winter coats and snow showers bring May hangovers. Or something like that. I've been reading a few books, Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, V.S. Naipaul's Magic Seeds, and a collection of short stories, Men and Cartoons, by Jonathan Lethem.

Every couple of years or so when a new Murakami translation comes out, I spend a day completely wrapped up in the book. He is really the only author who compels me to finish a novel in one sitting. I'm not saying that's entirely a good thing. I suppose his writing contains just enough sugary postmodern prose to keep me turning the page. Kafka on the Shore features lots of Jungian psychology, a real-life Johnnie Walker who decapitates cats, and a Hegel-quoting prostitute. Doesn't it sound like a good time?

I really recommend browsing the official Haruki Murakami site while listening to Brian Eno's Music for Airports. I happened to be doing just that the other night and was treated to a spooky seamless mix. I wrote the composer, Jefferson Rabb, and told him so. He wrote back,

"Funnily enough I was listening to Music For Airports right before I wrote the Murakami site music. For inspiration, I put together a bunch of music that I felt I could listen to forever without it becoming cloying, and of course, there was lots of Eno on it..."

My Morning Sarcasm

I don't want to get too political on a Friday morning, but apparently a U.S. soldier has been sentenced to execution in part because "Prosecutors said the murders were ideologically driven hate crimes." He murdered his fellow U.S. troops of course. There are apparently no other ideologically driven hate crimes happening in Iraq.

Wolfowitz World

naomi klein courtesy perfectpeople.net
Originally uploaded by kuchen.

Striking a similar theme to her brilliant article in Harper's last year which argued that the Bush administration did have a postwar strategy in Iraq - allowing chaos so that Western capitalism could step in with a blank slate (check?) - Naomi Klein's new piece in The Nation, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, describes an American agenda of "pre-emptive reconstruction".

The Restaurant

I've been working at a restaurant, a perfectly fargone joint, for the past month now. It's a Chinese place that I don't particularly recommend, so there's no need to mention it's Taoist-inspired name. Today I was amused by a guy named Ryan who appears to wash dishes and do deliveries. He showed up at noon or so and just wandered around in back, though, with these red buggy eyes and a mischevious grin. Throughout the afternoon, as I stepped through the door to bus my dishes, he seemed to always be there, doing pretty much nothing. At one point he asked me, with a butcher knife in hand, "Do you wanna play hopscotch?"
...I considered the question carefully before giving my answer...
"Great," he replied, "I'll go find some chalk."

My fellow server, Annie, and our hostess, Amber, also entertained me. Annie is a 20 year-old aspiring biologist who is constantly asking me questions about NYC and drinks cases of Icehouse with her boyfriend in her sparetime, and Amber is excited to leave Fargo and do some cranberry picking in California this summer. After we had closed down the buffet, I found the two of them mixing whiskey cokes and they graciously allowed me to pour my own. It was a good day for an afternoon cocktail hour.

Drive I-29

(Oscar Muñoz, Aliento/courtesy of artfacts.net)

I was in Grand Forks this morning and decided to check out the latest exhibition at the ND Museum of Art: The Disappeared. The works are from South and Central American artists and are responses, both personal and political, to military dictatorship and its often U.S. sponsored violence in the latter half of the 20th century. Some draw on memory to create narrative, others use it for more existential gestures.

I really liked Argentinean Fernando Traverso's photos of graffiti bicycles which he spray painted around the city of Rosario. (This is the kind of stuff which makes teriteri well-chuffed.) These shadows still carry the weight of their former riders, and the fact that they are visible only because of his illegal acts is a kind of tribute to them as well, I think. His silk banners also make Christo's Gates seem really really self-indulgent.

I looked at the Juan Manuel Echavarría for a long time before reading that he used just one beat-up mannequin to create such a haunting and well-designed group of photos. I like his use of a completely unrelated object to evoke the horror of systematic murder and torture.

Oh yeah! The Oscar Muñoz video installation was my favorite in terms of technique. I couldn't quite tell if he was painting with water on paper, or how he got the images to disappear. I'm always attracted to installations that deal with time and randomness.

The Gold in Fort Frances

The trees swayed above him like oars through water.
Green, wood green. Knotted bark and dirt green.
And white cow-limbs.
When she peeled off a piece of the birch paper the crow
laughed and turned over in his sleep, dreaming
a diagram which she carefully copied down using
a Boise-Cascade ballpoint.

Fargo Fool'em

Our nation's most vital cultural critic dives deep into the cerebral sargasso sea in his latest column:

Bird hunters might make good plane gunners

Fly Tongue-Tied and Stride Right

I feel a certain pressure now that this blog has been linked to. And the linker actually updates her blog, which makes me look like such a cyberspace slacker.

I finished watching the full 300+ minute Ingmar Bergman approved version of Fanny och Alexander last night. There are certain deep scenes which make my skin crawl, and the stark cinematography strangers the realism real good. In particular, I like the sequence of shots where Alexander meets the androgynous Ismael who is locked up Hannibal Lecter-style, and they foster an I-Thou relationship while the bishop's aunt reaches for the lamp and runs through the house on fire. For sure.

Momus thinks Devendra Banhart is a "charlatan shaman" in the fine tradition of Donovan. I think he's right.

Even though their latest CD is a waste of your time if you've already heard Vision Creation Newsun or any Psychobaba, it's still hard not to get your hopes up a little bit for the Boredoms (along with Jim O'Rourke) gig coming up in May at the Bowery Ballroom. Yes, I know, this is a Fargo blog, but to give you an idea of what I'm working with here, this is what's happening downtown tonight. Anyway, the Boredoms' EYE has an gallery show going on in NYC right now. For a few years now, his art has been more interesting than his music. Although I remember an amazing DJ set of his at Macao in Osaka.

Waiting for Cyro

Fargo Forum and Eastgate Lounge, why don't you update your websites? Maybe no one around here even cared that Cyro Baptista and Beat the Donkey were booked for tonight, but there was one transplanted New Yorker who saw the listing at the last minute and ran out of the house in the rain, unsure how the hell this gig came about.

Well, it was supposed to happen. I walked into the dive bar out on the east side of Moorhead, near the railroad tracks, and found not a single vinyl seat occupied. Apparently Cyro cancelled last Thursday.

I remember a summer in Devils Lake when Alex, Steve, and I jumped into a blue Dodge Caravan and drove off in a mad fever to catch the Microphones in Grand Forks, after I had read about the show on the K records site. We cruised the streets and pounded the pavement asking all the good citizens where we might find this Microphones fellow. Who knows, maybe Phil Elvrum did play a house party that night, but the three of us didn't find it. We did catch a little Shakespeare in the Park by the river, though.

These things happen in North Dakota. I think it has something to do with the curious smell of sugar beets.

More poo

Now that I've been away from Japan for a year or so, I can find this interesting again. The Japanese are obsessed with a perfect pyramidal poop. It takes up a lot of their free time. When they're not squatting, they're trying to draw it.

Chinatsu Ban's baby elephant poo in Central Park.

All The News That's Fit To Poop On

An interesting way to spend the 4 minutes it usually takes one to read The Fargo Forum is playing the "Is it a lame Onion piece or just..." game. Here's an example from yesterday which is really quite brilliant in its extreme banality.

Alpha and the omega: From first to last, Aaberg, Zwetzig bookend new phone directory

Jennifer Gentle at Ralph's Corner

I walked in tonight in the middle of Marpas Apram, a local trio who blast pot blues in a Deep Purple way. Throw in a little Zeppelin and you get the idea. A few moussed emo hipsters crowded around the bar, and maybe a dozen or so crouched in the half-light of the backroom. It's a Sunday night in Moorhead. As Jennifer Gentle set up on stage, I thought about how damn white the angsty house music sounded.

So I wasn't sure what to expect from the Italian lads of Jennifer Gentle. They did an album a few years ago with Makoto Kawabata, of Acid Mothers Temple, and that was good enough for me to make the trip across the river. The band recently played at SXSW in Austin, and have kind of a buzz going in the American music press, so I was hoping for a good crowd at Ralph's. Nothing doing. It was the kind of night where self-awareness was the dominant vibe. Jennifer Gentle ran through a perfunctory set, with highlights including "Liquid Coffee" and a closing guitar drone freakout, but the silence that followed their last note said it all. You could hear the cockroaches chirping.

I did put a Victor Eremitus sticker on the toilet in the men's room, though, which is my gift to Ralph's before it gets torn down.