As there were a few requests for this sort of thing, I’m offering up a downloadable mix of Xmas sounds that I’ve been grooving to this year. Some were on one of the two Lost In The Stacks Xmas specials; most are from my personal collection.  Gather round yr Yule Log and sing!

Download Charlie Brown Dance Party: Xmas Mix 2011

Presents For Christmas – Solomon Burke
Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) – Slow Club
Baby It’s Cold Outside (with Dusty Springfield)    - Rod McKuen
A Quick One (Pete Townsend’s Christmas) – Wild Billy Childish
All I Want To Ask Santa Claus – Ricky Segall
Santa Claus Is Sometimes Brown – El Vez
Practically Immaculate – Crystal Stilts
Ring Christmas Bells – Holy Name High School Choir
Don’t Believe In Christmas     – The Sonics
Deck The Bunkhouse Walls – Riders In The Sky Z005
Come On Santa – The Raveonettes
Ole Santa (Single Version) – Dinah Washington
Christmas on Riverside Drive – August Darnielle
Merry Christmas, Baby (Please Don’t Die) – Crocodiles & Dum Dum Girls
Merry Christmas – Bellrays
Let’s Make This Christmas Mean Something – James Brown
Sleigh Ride – Jim Nabors
Merry Christmas Everybody – Slade
Gaudete – Steeleye Span
Twelve Days Of Christmas – John Denver & The Muppets
Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas  – Robert Goulet
Christmas Wrapping (The Waitresses cover) – Summer Camp
To Heck With Ole Santa Claus – Loretta Lynn
Jingle Bells – Jimmy Smith
Father Christmas – The Kinks
‘Zat You Santa Claus? – Dr. Teeth And The Electric Mayhem Band

Please comment if there are any hiccups with the site. First time I’ve attempted a download of this size.

I had a vague thought maybe John Cale was the same guy as J. J. Cale, another artist I had never heard. But I knew from reading Rolling Stone that J.J. Cale had written “Cocaine,” a song made popular by Eric Clapton. The magazine also made it clear that the Velvet Underground wrote a lot of songs about drugs. Clapton’s “Cocaine” bored me, but I thought that on the off chance John and J.J. were the same dude maybe the original would strip out all the tasty licks and mellow vibes and get down to business.

I set to work convincing my mother to take me to the John Cale show. He was a member of the Velvet Underground, I explained, one of the most influential bands of the 1960s. This was a rare opportunity, a chance to glimpse an important piece of rock ‘n’ roll history. Plus, advertisements promised a local new wave band for the opening act, and I liked the playful way my favorite new wave bands portrayed themselves on TV.

Mom agreed. We went after a wedding, so I was wearing a tan, three-piece polyester suit. I had long hair, parted in the middle and feathered. Mom had to pay five bucks, but they let me in for free because I was so young. I remember the Star Garage living up to its name, or the second half of it, anyway – it was a big, open warehouse with a concrete floor.

This is gonna be good.

Surf City
Kudos
Fire Records

New Zealanders Surf City have gotta be living a charmed life at present. Not only are they perfectly poised to capitalize on the current vogue for lo-fi, fuzzed-out Cali vibes and the rub of the Flying Nun scene, but they’ve got this fucking weirdo sensibility that keeps the music unexpected and newish (taking a left instead of a right, etc., etc.). Any time that there is an opportunity to go for the expected riff or melody or Pixies rip, Surf City gleefully take it in the opposite direction, and hence an aesthetic that is being over-strip-mined right now is really rendered fresh again. Surf City combine the more focused sounds of Jesus and Mary Chain’s Darklands with Ride’s spacey pout and the frayed edges of the Velvet Underground and Peter Jeffries. The vocals are that awesome kind of undersinging where it’s so nasal and out of tune that it sounds really great and emotional, like Dean Wareham in Galaxie 500. And the songs are whip-smart and compact. Good show.

Fire Records: www.firerecords.com

Originally ran at Ink 19.

PopNihil #3 Stop Me If You Think That Youve Heard This One Before

by Matthew Moyer and Jason Brown, eds.

$2.00

“Stories fit for a dinner party in Heaven,” although how all these bad asses are going to make it to heaven together is beyond me. Blazin’ writing anthology with shorties from Robby Frerman, Keith Hayes, Jessica Whittington, Keith Marks, Matthew Moyer, Chris Esposito, Alan Justiss, Sheila Scoville, Duncan B Barlow and Scott Adams. -EF

44p, b&w with color cover, 4.25″x5.5″

The perfect mix of Beat Happening and Joy Division, and their new album is sure to be the equivalent of wearing a black sweater over a black turtleneck, smoking cigarettes in a windowless room, blasting Sisters of Mercy and Ronettes records….

Crystal Stilts – Shake the Shackles by Slumberland Records

Noir photos courtesy of Jason Brown:

Bryan Massey

Scott Adams

Keith Marks

Matthew Moyer

Chris Esposito

Duncan Barlow

Cheyla Scantling

Tom Pennington took some photos of the latter half of the evening and posted them here. FOLIO Weekly interviewed Jason and I before the event, and then proceeded to get a number of the facts wrong. And yet, press is press! Read it here.

We graciously request their honor of your presence….

To celebrate the release of popnihil n3, we’re thorwing a zine release party at Underbelly on March 21st. Reading their pieces from the new issue will be Scott Adams, Duncan B Barlow, Keith Marks, Jessica Whittington, Matthew Moyer, and Chris Esposito. Kareem Ghori and Cheyla Scantling will also be reading.

Erzulie will DJ for the evening. Popnihil favorite and Infintesmal Records act Beach Party will perform.

More to come!

popnihil presents…. Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before: Stories Fit For A Dinner Party In Heaven.

Six months in the making and a talented group of writers later, the issue is in the can and ready to go.

Stories from Scott Adams, Duncan B. Barlow, Chris Esposito, Robbie Frerman, Keith Hayes, Alan Justiss, Keith Marks, Matthew Moyer, Sheila Scoville, Jessica Whittington.

Illustrations from Jason Brown.

Will be made available first at Underbelly on March 21st for $2.00, then everywhere fine zines are sold.

(Illustration by Jason Brown)

We at Popnihil are devastated by the sudden loss of Jacksonville’s poet laureate Alan Justiss. He was incredibly supportive of this zine (he wanted two copies of the first issue for his files!) from the very beginning, and we were beyond overjoyed when he agreed to contribute a story to the newest issue. Of course when you’re a writer who was as intensely prolific as Alan, it can never be just one story. The day I came over to talk about story ideas with him, Alan pulled out a box filled to the brim with prose pieces, and gave me my pick of at least seven. And then said, “Ah, but now we have to work together on the editing!” Edit Alan Justiss? Christ, my heart couldn’t take the strain. But he was very receptive to every suggestion and modification. Towards the end of his life, he told me that he was shifting over to prose altogether, showing me a piece he had spontaneously banged out on his typewriter the night before. The imagery was gorgeous, and it had this rhythm to it that reminded me of e.e. cummings. Always creating, always writing.

Unlike many writers who are selfish with both their advice and their time, Alan was a willing mentor to many an aspiring scribbler. You’ll find his DNA buried deep within the sentences of so many Jacksonville writers and artists. But it wasn’t just that, he constantly emphasized the importance of practicing your craft regularly and often. When I last saw him on Friday night, after I’d dropped off some groceries and visited for awhile, he shooed me out, telling me that now it was time for me to go home, turn on the computer, and do what I was meant to do…

I’m not trying to come off as a longtime confidante, I only knew the man for one year, but there is a flood of memories from even one year. (What was it that Lou Reed said? My week is your year?) I remember how every time I came up to his apartment and knocked on the door, he’d bellow, “Come in this house!” I remember how even in the hospital, he demanded constant updates on my job interview with the Hall, at one point leaving me a phone message that said, “Who ever heard of a poet getting into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Guess I’ll have to learn how to sing!” I remember around Christmas talking about how we both liked to put off opening presents until the very end, infuriating everyone. I remember taking him out to breakfast at a Riverside haunt, and the owner treating him like royalty. I remember him gleefully flirting with the ladies; whether it was his eyes lighting up whenever he saw Jessica walk into his living room, chatting up Rose right in front of her boyfriend (sly devil), or calling Bethany “that delightful girl.” I remember him playing me Van Morrison songs on a sweltering Sunday afternoon. I remember us both being astounded at how his strength was seemingly restored coming out of the hospital, and watching him wield his cane like a sword, just like William Burroughs did. I remember him giving me a treasured Bukowski bio to read while on business travel in the summer, and quizzing me about it when I got back. I remember him one day exclaiming, “Y’know, you’d think I was gay, the way I can get all of these guys to do all my errands for me!” I remember him telling me about his first trip across the country as a young man fresh out of the military, seemingly awed still how a square from Jacksonville was suddenly running into famous poets and Manson girls and yippies and y’know. I remember doing weekly beer runs for him when he was churning out nine poems a night last autumn; he’d instruct on the proper way to dispose of the empties so that the staff at his apartment building would be none the wiser. When he asked if I minded lugging a case of beer up seventeen floors, I said that it was the least I could do as a patron of the arts. He always got a chuckle out of that.

His total dedication to his craft is so inspiring in an a time when we’re so distracted by media (social and otherwise) that we can’t even finish a complete thought. We won’t soon see the likes of him again.

Download/Listen: Angel’s Blue Hour
(From the Alan Justiss/Regal Monkey/Elephant See album I Have Only A Few To Read)

The Amish Elf
by Chris Kerr

You could be forgiven for taking a look at the cover and title of Chris Kerr’s minicomic and think it be A one-note joke. C’mon an Amish Elf? There’s gotta be a bad standup routine in there somewhere about oversize buggies? And yet, to his eternal credit, artist Kerr takes this limited concept and weaves a touching and bewitching mythos around it.

The plot is oblique and impossible to sum up in a brief manner to anyone’s satisfaction. Let’s just say that it’s a travelogue the likes of which you’d never read in a Disney story or Piers novel. Surreal phantasmagoria contrasts nicely with the more Spartan reality of an Amish village in a very entertaining manner.

No dialogue, bereft of any text, the weight of the storytelling falls on Kerr’s simple pen-and-ink line drawings. His art style is very familiar (I’m thinking of Magnus Carisson’s Robin and Russian dolls for some reason) and very individual at the same time. Whereas the lead characters–the Elf, the Wizard, and the Amish–are drawn in a very naive, cartoonish style, suddenly he’ll throw you for a curve by drawing, say, an alligator or an opossum in stunning photo-realist detail. Yet it’s the cartoons that pack the emotional punch, a page where a squirrel triumphantly teaches the Amish Elf to throw nuts at targets blindfolded is uplifting, and a shot of stoic Amish parents fighting back tears over the supposed death of their son is wrenching.  And that last page? Man…

Read it, give it to your friends to read, and then argue over the plot more than you did with Twin Peaks!

Also posted to the Zine Library blog.