Stench of burnt sulfur

THE EMBARRASSMENT "Careen"
When the weather gets too hot to do much of anything, I turn to the Embarrassment. Not sure why -- I guess "Don Juan," "Art Party," "Drive Me To The Park," and "Sex Drive" are just perfect little songs that remind me of suburban air conditioned living? This song is from a collection called Heyday that I know you already have but I'm lazy today.

Thanks to everyone who replied the other month about my health stuff, and I am going to explore homeo/ etc. type approaches to things ASAP. Right now, I need two surgeries sooooon: a hernia operation ASAP, and this thing to combat the effects of the Barrett's -- am still trying to get some kind of health coverage but no luck yet.

I am caught between making too much $$ to get on the ever-weakening Oregon Health Plan and being denied by regular independent carriers for my prior conditions. I'm really fucking dismayed and flummoxed. And if I do get fancy individual insurance it will likely never cover me for anything aside form the hernia which is not in any doctor's logs yet but it's really hurting like a bitch today and yesterday and I'm tired of holding my intestines in my stomach with my fucking hands whenever I cough or use the facilities (sorry I know that's gross).

Today I spent a long time deciding whether or not to do this plan -- somehow it looks like a scam to me, though. I mean, how can you save that much $$ and pay so little? I already gave them my SS# via their interface (OK I'm a dumbass) but there's nothing anyone can really do with my SS# aside from get turned down for any loan (or whatever you try to do with it) I hate to say! I guess I really need to start just playing the lottery. Yeah, that's it. Back to work!

You're gonna watch me

PRESSLER-MORGAN "You're Gonna Watch Me"
SANDRA BELL "Waitawhile"

What better song to celebrate the official loss of the last vestiges of civil liberties we Americans might still have pretended we had left --with the signing into law of the Patriot Act on Friday-- than the fine little avant-pop dittie "You're Gonna Watch Me" by Pressler-Morgan, off their one fabulous 7" from 1978 for David Thomas' Hearthan/ Hearpen label. The Sandra Bell song is from her first tape made for XPressway around 1993. It is sort of sad, like me, today.

Dragging me down

POP ART TOASTERS "Circles"
FOUR INTERNES "I'm Troubled"
THE SOUTHERN SONS "This Heart of Mine, Pt. 1"

I am obsessed with songs about dizziness and disorientation, and the ways in which the structure of those tunes so often mirrors the subject matter. I'm thinking about this a lot as I work on the MBV book, as every MBV song pretty much hints at a loss of equilibrium, you dig? Anyway. "Instant Party (Circles)" is one of my favorite ever Who songs, and I know of three diffferent covers of it. The best is of course by the British '60s band Fleurs des Lys, but props must be gaved to Pop Art Toasters, a band that a New Zealand music website calls "a short-lived super-group of sorts featuring martin phillips, david kilgour, noel ward, alan starrett and mike dooley." OK.

I don't know too much about the Internes or the Southern Sons. Both crossed from jubilee style singing to "hard" gospel in the late '40s. These are among the respective groups' best known tunes -- and it's easy to see why. When I hear these songs I just want to write scenes for a movie that they can play in the foreground to, uninterrupted.