Well hello there! Welcome to the Report. These posts are a personal monthly review of cultural & creative experiences that I’ve had. It’s about the junk I’ve been consuming. (So you don’t have to?) It’s like a really poorly organized personal bibliography. (Way to sell it, Rendina!) Are you thinking that this kind of stuff might be blog filler? Perhaps you’ve noticed a couple of weeks gone by without new posts? If that is your feeling, well, all I can say is that maybe you’re on the right track. Yeah, yeah, that’s when you reach for your revolver. I get it. I suspect that these entries may have more value to me as a train-of-thought tracking tool. But, I’m going to take a chance that my wrestling matches with creative junk may have some value to you. A continued dialog or some other nonsense. Okay, let’s get into it.

I finally got into the band The Soft Boys right here, right now, at this moment in 2018. I picked up a copy of A Can of Bees after hearing a track at the tail end of the WMNF Saturday ‘70s show. (Oh yeah, the album has the worst cover art ever. But that connects with my theory that bands who can’t come up with a decent band name or general presentation might be awesome. Exhibit A: Nirvana.) As for WMNF, I haven’t listened to that station in ages and am happy to report that good stuff was happening. There were about three tracks at the end of that set that I wanted to know more about. (Probably because they were getting ready for Scott to come in and do his Gen X thing.) What’s this Soft Boys music about? It’s like an appropriated Syd Barrett/neo-psychedelic/post punk kind of dealy. There’s a Richard Hell kind of swing to it. It’s pretty great. To be straight with you about the whole issue though, I really can’t stand Robyn Hitchcock and his aesthetic/sartorial choices. He’s like the first guy at the dawn of the ‘80s who’s like, “I’m gonna bring back the super-wide flat brim fedora hat.” The Prometheus of the color brown to the goths when they wanna go granola. And then there’s the paper trail of Boomer rock writers anointing him to some Great Writer status. It’s all very tiresome and I caught all of that in real time working at the record store in the early ‘90s. Blaargh. So it took me a long time to even consider what he’s all about. Nevertheless, this record sounds really good. Twangy guitars and ropey bass. Nice and loose. It’s right in my wheelhouse. Sandras [sic] Having Her Brain Out is a swell piece of neo-psychedelic surrealistic rudeness. It’s brilliant. Even if I’m not sure if it’s spirit is simply rude or #metoo verboten these days. This perceived hypothetical conflict is kind of fun to think about, so I’ll probably stick with this album for awhile. I’m working on a blog post about Rod Stewart that explores this kind of rudeness in more depth.

I’ve had some jolly morning commutes to work this month thanks to the music of (The Naked Cult of) Hickey. Just like Mastodon or Sepultura, you cannot play Hickey too loud in your car. It’s great! I got to see them in Gainesville at the Hardback once. The opening band was called Fuckface. Right on! I saw them in Tampa about a year later at the short-lived coop venue 403 Chaos. Good times. Much like Steely Dan (Let that settle for a minute.) the songs of Hickey are recorded exactly as they should sound, regardless of econo budget realities.

Chris (Jones) sent me an enthusiastic text message saying that he was listening to lots of Billy Childish. Right on. That’s a great idea. Though my main impression of Childish doesn’t come from listening to his music. It comes from an interview: the Re/Search (SRL) published Real Conversations series, V.1. But that dude Childish has got some cool ideas. He was trying to start a new visual art movement called Re-Modernist. This movement aimed to ignore Postmodernism entirely. Rad! And he has this quote, “In Japanese the word for ‘copy’ is the same as the word for ‘learn’-- I really like that.” Cool. I like that too. I like that so much that I’ve been spouting mangled, paraphrased versions of this quote for years-- versions that certainly range into malaprop territory.

Also, in terms of listening to music, I put another mystery Lego piece into place. It turns out that if it sounds like Jeff Pezzati is singing, “Persecuted the Weavers,” well, that would be correct. Naked Raygun, bless their hearts. Such romantic spirit in that band.

In the world of podcasts, I did my usual intake of WTF, Going off Track, and Last Podcast on the Left. I’m happy that Marc Maron seems to be out of his Phlegmatic Demented Geezer cycle (Nick Nolte did some weird damage to my listening skills, not to mention Sean Penn’s, uh, thing that he does.) LPotL had some gnarly shit going on (as usual) with their current run of murder stories: Mark David Chapman & Dennis Nilsen. In the case of Chapman (& of course his victim John Lennon) it’s fun listening to Millenials reckon with the Boomers. Marcus nailed it on the generational analysis. (As always, Gen X remains passive on the Boomers. Aren’t we in charge now?) Switching gears: What’s the deal with Going Off Track, is it monthly or something? I can’t get my fix often enough. Nevertheless, if you’re into Punk, P-Punk, and H/C music, their episode catalog is amazing. The Roger Miret, Craig Wedren, and Harley Flanagan episodes are illuminating and superb.    

In May, I had the opportunity to continue my ill-advised return to the reading material of my childhood: The Elric Saga. On a recent vacation to New York, we stopped at the Strand bookstore and I picked up a hardcover copy of The Elric Saga: Volume II. I already had copies of the Berkley paperback editions that I found at the Madeira Beach used book store. To be clear, these are shitty fantasy novels. And Michael Moorcock’s books are shitty. And marvelous. I only got to revisit The Vanishing Tower for one lunch break this month, as I did not have my current library book with me that day. In any event, Elric took a ride on a magic metal bird and learned about the limitations of his evil soul-sucking sword (& semi-sentient companion) Stormbringer. That’s pretty cool.

My current, daily reading from the library is the book Chaos Monkeys, by Antonio Garcia Martinez. This book is taking me some time to hack through, because I only read it on lunch breaks but it’s a super-good nonfiction read from a Wall Street quant, internet startup co founder, and former Facebook Ads PM. Dude’s got a PHD in math. Lotsa sequences of two and three letter acronyms shootin’ around in this narrative. If you follow the HBO show Silicon Valley or movies like The Big Short, this is totally your jam. Oh yeah, there’s also that current hullabaloo about Internet privacy going on. This book gets into that, too. Did I mention that the chapter headings are selections from historical texts and dialog from indie movies? No? Well, that’s the appetizer that serves up each brain-fuck of a chapter. Get on it! The world is doomed and everything is changing!

In real life I got to attend a few cultural events. I need to do more of this for several reasons. Not the least of which is to have social experiences (as a disciplined practice) in order to avoid hermitlike inclinations. I need to get out once in awhile! It’s healthy, right? I went to two excellent exhibitions at the Tempus Projects space: Sunistra and You Can’t Get There From Here. The latter being an installation by my brother, Devon Brady. On Sunday, May 20, Diana and I went to a rock concert! We haven’t done that in awhile. We saw Hot Water Music at the Orpheum. The performance was solid and the guys still have got that feeling. The new guy (The Canadian, also named Chris I think) is alright, man! He brings something new and good to the lineup. He looks like a more-handsome Jim Parsons. His presence seemed to temper the super-hetero chest thumping vibe, mostly coming from the audience. Chuck was doing his warm and awesome earthy thing and (let’s be honest) my primary motivation was to be around that heartfelt magic for a night. Everybody delivered. It’s been too long since I’ve seen them live-- and man, do they have a deep catalog now. I only recognized three songs. Some of the newer cuts skewed into stylistic directions I had not heard from the band before. There was one that had a cool heavy progish early ‘70s thing going on. HWM fans (with the exception of myself and DL) still know all the words and sing along. The fans were what I expected: mostly thick bros with flat-billed ball caps. There was shirtless passionate flexing and flailing. But that Hot Water vibe kept everybody reasonably in check.

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Oh! I almost forgot, Ben invited me to join his band up in Chicago around October for a one-off performance. For the performance the band will be an AC/DC cover band and in the line-up, I will be in the Bon Scott role. I’m into it, let’s see what happens.

So that’s it for the Report! I’ve got three new songs that I’m working on, a daily practice schedule, and other than that-- I’m just living the life. Take care.