Author: James Brush

James Brush is a teacher and writer who lives in Austin, TX. He tries to get outside as much as possible.

(Always) Rediscovering Daydream Nation

Ever since I first read about Sonic Youth’s album Sister back in 1987, I’ve loved this band despite never having heard them. Granted, I never could find Sister at any of the record stores (either of them) in Newport, RI, but I knew they were my favorite band.

I finally heard them a year later when their follow-up, Daydream Nation, arrived. I had moved to Austin by then and was able to locate what would become my favorite album ever. Period.

I’ve tried to explain to many people for many years why I love this noisy, spacey album so much, why it’s my desert island disc. But then love of a particular work of art is a lot like loving a person: you just can’t always explain it.

I suppose when I heard it, it was so at odds with everything else that was floating around out there, so unexpected, and so stimulating that I couldn’t stop listening to it. Literally. I think I listened to “Teenage Riot” five times before letting the tape (yes, a tape) advance to “Silver Rocket,” which was the track that sealed the deal. I still love the way the song descends into that insane pit of boiling feedback and white noise to finally be rescued by a drum roll that rises out of nowhere, growing louder and louder, organizing the chaos back into music and then, suddenly, the band is back, tight as ever, from wherever they had gone. Amazing.

I never tire of listening to the intro and outro to “‘Cross the Breeze” and Kim Gordon’s lyric:

I took a look into the hate,
It made me feel very up to date

Or Lee in “Hey Joni”:

She’s a beautiful metal jukebox,
A sailboat explosion,
The snap of electric whipcrack

So cool. So hip. So unlike anything I’d ever heard before. This is one of the few, if not the only, bands from my high school years that I still follow, and Daydream Nation is why. In 1989, it seemed like everything that was worth knowing about popular music had been distilled, destroyed, and rebuilt in this album that still sounds like a punk rock Dark Side of the Moon.

Sparking this post, I ran across two exciting treats in store (or should I say in stores soon):

Continuum will be publishing a 33 1/3 Series book about Daydream Nation
Billboard has this (discovered by way of Kofi’s hat) which mentions that the band is looking into doing an expanded release of Daydream Nation as they did with Goo and Dirty. It also mentions several other releases to look forward to in the meantime.

I finally found Sister in 1994 when it was re-released on CD by Geffen. It was as good as I knew it would be and inspired an interest (obsession and grad school project) in Philip K. Dick’s writing, but alas, that is a post for another day.

Call Me a Dork, but…

November 18, 2005 • James Brush • 2 Comments

The following are links to some interesting Harry Potter related commentary and analysis:

This is a pretty thorough and convincing analysis of Snape’s background and why he is, despite murdering Dumbledore, still working for Dumbledore’s cause.
“Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy” is the abstract (I can’t seem to access the whole article, but the abstract is still worth a read) to a law review article about the Ministry of Magic.
ASL Library contains a series of links (including the one listed above) to more law-oriented articles about the world of Harry Potter.

Anyways, I still have Potter on the brain and will until I see Goblet of Fire.

As an antidote, I think I’ll be reading a nice short work of nonfiction next: River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins.

A New View

November 17, 2005 • James Brush • 2 Comments

There’s nothing like seeing familiar sights anew to make a person appreciate what he takes for granted. Just one tiny shift in point-of-view makes the familiar seem so unexpectedly exciting. I love those moments when, as David Byrne once put it, you suddenly notice the color of white paper, and I was treated to one yesterday.

Being a North Austinite, I rarely find myself needing to go from East-bound 71/Ben White/290/Whatever-the-hell-they-call-it-now to I-35 North, so I’d never driven the new (to me anyway) overpass that connects the two highways. Nevertheless, yesterday, I was ascending the overpass thinking, Man, I am up here!, and as the roadway bent northward, a stunning view of the city that I’d never before seen rolled into view. The overpass is high enough that you can look down on St. Edward’s University, which is usually hidden, and clearly see the main building dominating the foreground, and in the background, the downtown skyline rises up from the trees in a way that the buildings all seem to huddle together making them seem somehow taller and the city denser than it appears from some of its other views.

The crisp wintry air that (finally!) arrived the other day just made it appear all the more inviting.

White paper never looked so white.

Ok, JK, How Long for Number Seven?

November 16, 2005 • James Brush • 2 Comments

Be advised, not pissed: If you haven’t read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, but wish to do so, you might not want to read this as it contains spoilers.

I finally finished reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince last week. I’ve been on a Potter streak lately, and now I am finally caught up. This book wasn’t the kind of page-turner that Order of the Phoenix was with all its intensity and downward-spiraling chaos, but it easily kept my attention for the pieces of the past that Harry discovers with the aid of the great wizard Dumbledore. Their trips into the pensieve to witness the past and learn the story of how Tom Riddle became Voldemort paved the way for Book Seven in which Harry will have to face Lord Voldemort and either destroy him or be destroyed.

Half-Blood Prince jogs along at a relatively slow pace as most of the big action in the book takes place in the past. The present Hogwarts story concerns the love lives of Harry, Ron, and Hermione and their awkward efforts to find romance and do a little snogging. Much of the book is quieter than the previous books, but it is by no means boring. Rowling does a fantastic job of keeping tension seething just beneath the surface through news of the world outside the school and Harry’s growing paranoia, which contrasts sharply with the relatively peaceful year at Hogwarts following two incredibly tumultuous ones. The peace, of course, is all on the surface. All of the characters are terribly afraid and unable to articulate their fears, which set everyone on edge, ready to jump down each other’s throats at only slight provocations. Throw teenage hormones into the mix, and Rowling has created a pretty tense atmosphere.

Throughout the novel, Rowling does an excellent job humanizing the insufferable bully Draco Malfoy. One even begins to pity him the dark and mysterious task about which he is obviously conflicted and yet trapped into. At the novel’s beginning, the unpleasant Professor Snape (still apparently working as a double agent spying on Voldemort’s Death Eaters for Dumbledore) is forced to make the Unbreakable Vow to finish whatever task Malfoy has been set if he is unable to accomplish it. I assumed it would be to kill Harry. How Snape would get around the Vow was one of the things that kept the book exciting. Of course we learn the plot was to murder Dumbledore and when Malfoy can’t do it, Snape does thus proving that all along Harry was right about Snape’s lack of commitment to Dumbledore’s cause. Or does it?

I had a suspicion that Dumbledore wouldn’t make it through the book considering that someone had died in each of the previous two books with the importance of the death escalating each time. With Harry’s godfather, Sirius Black, killed off in the last book, who could be more important to Harry than Dumbledore? I also knew that ultimately Harry would have to face Voldemort utterly alone, but I still couldn’t believe Dumbldore died, nor that Snape was the one to kill him. Like Dumbledore I had always believed Snape, bastard that he is, was not working for Voldemort, and I still wonder about that.

Dumbledore knows Malfoy won’t kill him. Can’t kill him. Doesn’t have it in him. Dumbledore has also demonstrated time and again that he will do whatever he needs to do, offer any sacrifice to destroy Voldemort as was seen when he made Harry force him to drink the poison that would reveal Voldemort’s Horcrux. I can’t help but wonder if Dumbledore knew that Snape had to make the Unbreakable Vow to keep his cover. Knew that Snape would have to kill him if Malfoy couldn’t. Then at the scene of Dumbledore’s death, as Malfoy has the opportunity to kill a weakened and trapped Dumbledore, Dumbledore works on him, stalls him, because Dumbledore believes that there is good yet in Malfoy, that Malfoy, though a bully, isn’t a murderer. It is as if Dumbledore has, as Harry did, seen Malfoy in the bathroom crying, agonizing over his terrible mission. When Snape arrives, he kills Dumbledore as Dumbledore knows he must, thereby preserving Malfoy’s innocence (barely) and Snape’s cover, which of course could prove invaluable to Harry, though Harry doesn’t know it.

It would be just like Albus Dumbledore to sacrifice his life to save one student (Malfoy) from evil and set in motion a chain of events that will help Harry destroy Voldemort. It would also be just like Dumbledore (and Rowling) for none of this to be revealed until the end of Book Seven.

As I mentioned in my previous Potter post, I am still constantly amazed by the way in which Rowling grows her characters through adolescence and into young adulthood. By the end of this book, though he is more passive than in previous books, Harry has seen too much, fought too hard, lost too much to really be thought of as a boy-wizard anymore.

When in the last chapter Harry defiantly proclaims to the Minister of Magic that he is still “Dumbledore’s man, through and through,” the operative word has suddenly become ‘man.’ Book Seven will be the story of Harry finally confronting his destiny.

These books are great fun and much more engaging than I ever imagined they would be, and now I’m left pacing around the room thinking, “How long do we have to wait, Ms. Rowling?”

My Own Psychedelic Picnic

November 15, 2005 • James Brush • 2 Comments

I’ve just finished listening to the audiobook version of Kinky Friedman’s The Great Psychedelic Armadillo Picnic: A “Walk” in Austin, enjoyable especially because of Kinky’s profound love of this city that he clearly relishes sharing with the reader (ok, listener), making one happy to be an Austinite.

At one point, Kinky names his twelve favorite Austin restaurants and that, of course got me hungry. So for what it’s worth, in no particular order and in honor of the Kinkster, my top twelve:

Kim Phung – tofu lemongrass vermicelli…mmmm
Castle Hill Cafe – the menu always changes, what’s not to like?
Chuy’s – rellenos made with Hatch green chiles (nature’s most perfect food) rather than the more typical poblano
Vivo’s – micheladas
Guero’s – the South Congress vibe, the enchiladas
Las Manitas – mas enchiladas
Thai Passion – the hottest tofu noodle dish I’ve ever had
The Clay Pit – ok so the service was bad last time, but what a curry
Hut’s – whether a veggie burger, buffalo burger, or somewhere in between it’s always the Wolfman Jack
Katz’s – never closes, there’s always parking, and has the best bloody mary, what else is needed?
Thundercloud – of course
The Salt Lick – for the sides and suasage and the guy playing old outlaw country tunes on the porch

So there it is. Right now, but likely to change tomorrow, my top twelve Austin comfort food establishments, and I’m already wondering how I forgot Mongolian BBQ, Dirty’s, Kerbey Lane, The Magnolia Cafe, Thai Noodle Bowl, Etc., The Texas Chili Parlor… oh my cup runneth over! What an embarrassment of riches we have here.

Hound of Adventure

November 15, 2005 • James Brush • Leave a comment

Everytime I go to the front door, Phoebe follows. When I go out to get the paper or to the mailbox, she peers out the front window. It’s obvious she wants to walk, so I’ve started taking her. She does well, but usually about a quarter of a mile from the house in any direction, she just stops. I suppose her fear takes over at that point and then she becomes Frozen Dog, forcing me to coax her along one step at a time until we get back to the house, usually in twice the amount of time (if we’re lucky) it took to get to the turnaround point.

Then the next time I go to the front door, she wants to go for another walk.

I’ve gotten in the habit of walking her to the mailbox or to the end of the driveway to get the paper, but since it’s only fifty feet or so, it seems mean, though I don’t think she minds. It’s clear this dog has a sense of adventure, but for now, I think she only wants short adentures where she can’t get in over her head as she does when we get a quarter mile from the house.

Car rides are also proving to be great fun, and when we get out of the car she’s fine until we’ve reached just about the point where it’s time to go back. It reminds me of Tigger taking Roo to the top of the tree and then not knowing how to get back down. Tiggers don’t climb down. Phoebes don’t walk back to where they started.

Still, we’ve progressed a long way from the first walk when I had to carry her (all sixty pounds) nearly a quarter mile back to our driveway after a dry leaf skittering across the sidewalk had induced temporary paralysis of the legs.

Maybe Daphne is the smart one; she runs and hides when I get the leashes out.

“He Ain’t Kinky. He’s My Governor.”

November 15, 2005 • James Brush • Leave a comment

At least that’s what the bumper sticker on a truck cruising I-10 outside Beaumont said.

I was surprised to see that Kinky’s campaign to be the first independent governor of Texas since Sam Houston had reached outside the Austin area. I know he’s been all over the state campaigning, but I assumed it was only in Austin and perhaps the Hill Country that anyone would have heard much about him.

Kinky has been asking, “How hard can it be?” for nearly a year now, and based on Governor Perry’s half-assed performance, I can only assume that it’s not that hard. Come and Take it! has a nice piece on why he has an uphill battle (assuming he can get on the ballot, which is a chore in and of itself), but provides hope that someone will have the backbone, honesty, and wit to serve up the public humiliation that Rick Perry so richly deserves.

This post is provoked by finally listening to an audiobook that my dad loaned me over the summer. The book is Kinky’s The Great Psychedelic Armadillo Picnic: A “Walk” in Austin and so far (about half a CD in) it’s an amusing, irreverent, and fairly accurate picture of the Austin that was (from the days of founder President Mirabeau B. Lamar through Willie, Stevie, and on towards Dell), is, and will be as told by someone who loves this town deeply (and unfortunately read by someone who does not pronounce words like ‘Guadalupe,’ ‘San Jacinto,’ ‘Burnet,’ or ‘Waylon’ – as in Jennings – like he’s spent much time here).

So to make a rambling post shorter, I was driving on Mopac yesterday, crossing the river and listening to the Kinkster spin the tale of Austin’s founding and the tensions between Lamar and Sam Houston over whether or not this beautiful settlement on the river in the heart of Comanche country should be the capital of the republic, and I decided that Kinky is far more deserving of life in the governor’s mansion than Perry or whatever poor sacrificial lamb the feckless Texas Democrats throw out there. Kinky understands the Texan love of big stories, big myths and big talk that gets Texas politicians elected, but he also seems to get the fact that we live in the modern world and we have very real, very big problems that the Republicans have shown they have no interest in or ability to solve.

I don’t know if Kinky can solve them, but at least he seems honest about trying when he talks about them. And he’s funny. And listening to his book, he reminds me all over again why I love Austin.

As his campaign materials ask, “Why the Hell not?”

Visiting Orange a Month After Rita

November 14, 2005 • James Brush • 1 Comment

We had to drop everything last week and head off to Orange, TX for a funeral. My wife’s aunt passed away peacefully after many years of suffering and that brought us back to her hometown on the Texas-Louisiana border. This was my first post-Rita trip to Orange.

It’s been a little over a month, and the place still looks like a war zone: trees uprooted or still standing but snapped in two, twisted piles of metal torn from who knows where, buildings ripped apart, FEMA tarps on nearly every roof, crooked signs and street lights, many businesses still closed. And all this after a month and a half. Everyday, there were trucks lumbering along the roads randomly picking up the sawed remains of the forests and trees people once had in their yards that are now piled high in front of their houses.

One of the most striking things about the hurricane’s aftermath was how bright everything appeared. My wife had noticed this a week prior when she’d come to visit her aunt in the hospital, and it was, I think, both the most startling and most subtle aspect of the damage. The dense, dark forests of the Piney Woods were so thinnned throughout the town that there seemed an over-abundance of sunlight. Orange is supposed to be dark and a little mysterious, but it seemed so bright, the forests so thin, that some of its swampy bayou mystery was lost.

Driving around town was odd as we were constantly rubber-necking to view the damage while my wife pointed out buildings and homes that despite growing up there, she’d never seen because of the thick trees that had always hidden them from the road.

The sound of chainsaws is constant, and there’s plenty of work to do, but people seem to be taking it in stride. At the visitation, I watched one old guy walk over to a friend, shake hands and say with a straight face, “Need some fire wood?” It was obviously a well-worn joke down there, but they both laughed anyway.

Near Meteor Crater

November 13, 2005 • James Brush • 1 Comment

I took this photo near Meteor Crater, Arizona in March of 1992:

These old cars are about a quarter of a mile from the service road that connects I-40 to Metoer Crater. I’ve been there several times, and I find that the cars are as engaging as the crater itself so I always try to photograph them. This is my favorite one.

A few days after one trip out there in 1995, while browsing the CDs at Waterloo Records, I found that the cars had also served as cover art for Lee Ranaldo’s excellent East Jesus album.

“I’m Against It!”

November 8, 2005 • James Brush • Leave a comment

Today is election day in Texas. We have no bastards to throw out… well actually we have many, but not the opportunity to do so for still another year. Today it’s just a series of propositions to amend the constitution, the most controversial of which is prop two, which will re-ban gay marriage.

So off to the polls we went this morning with Groucho Marx’s voice singing in my head:

“I don’t know what they have to say,
It makes no difference anyway,
Whatever it is, I’m against it!
No matter what it is or who commenced it,
I’m against it!”

Surprisingly, my precinct was not using those cool little electronic voting machines that turn all votes cast into votes for the incumbent so I had to actually use a chisel to carve my vote into the stone tablet, but considering the backwards nature of the thinking that went into prop two, it seemed somehow appropriate.

I then affixed my little ‘I Voted’ sticker to my shirt and went outside whistling along with Groucho, thinking, “Well, I voted against it, but next time I think I’ll vote against the other pronouns,” as I ashed an imaginary cigar on the sidewalk.