See You At the Mountain!
The '50s was a time of tremendous optimism, and the music had a special way of touching our hearts.
Hello!
It's Elizabeth and here is the bolt-from-the-blue latest edition of my sometimes newsletter Please Take My Advice. I'm imagining many of you standing up in your seat or adjusting your reading glasses. Maybe you're muttering: "Please take my...Really? Now??" Yes. Really. Now. I've told you repeatedly this thing operates on a logic all its own. An ancient logic, if you will. ANYWAY, as always, the legal particulars:
Please Take My Advice is not an accredited training course and cannot issue certification. Please Take My Advice cannot reveal its business partners and associates for any reason. Refer any subpoena to Bar-None Records, Hoboken, New Jersey. And finally – as always – NO WAGERING.*
Issue Areas:
The Paranoid Style Plays Mountain Stage October 9th
I’ve loved and admired the legendary NPR program Mountain Stage for so long that the idea of actually performing on it takes on a dream-like character. ANYWAY! Incredibly – I will be playing Mountain Stage, for the 1000th episode no less. What an honor. Don’t take my word for it – look at this flier. Then consider the widely accepted formulation: if it says so on a flier it has to be true.
We’re gonna have a real good time together. I’ll be joined by my trusted Style-council William Matheny, William Corrin, Jon Langmead and Timothy Bracy. Will there be special guests? Maybe! The rest of the bill is incredible, featuring Cindy Cashdollar & Sonny Landreth, Parker Millsap, Lucy Kaplansky and Caleb Caudle. I can’t wait to see these amazing acts in person. Hoping that fans who can make the trip to West Virginia for this Rare Public Appearance will be able to, and the rest of you will be willing to tune in, which I understand can be done in so many ways now. Terrestrial radio, streaming. Those are two anyway. I’m candidly not up-to-date on the latest lingo. Point is: Build your future life around October 9th – it will be worth it in ways that words can’t describe.
Here’s a link for more information and here’s one to buy tickets.
Barney Bubbles’ Book
This week is likewise headlined by the U.S. release of Paul Gorman’s updated omnibus The Wild World Of Barney Bubbles, the finest exhibit yet of what is to my mind the greatest overlooked visual artist of the past hundred years. It’s difficult to write about Barney Bubbles without becoming emotional, as became evident from this tear-jerking elegy I wrote about him as the first track on the new Paranoid Style album For Executive Meeting. Suffice to say from the first time I saw his artwork – on the cover of Elvis Costello’s Get Happy!! as a record shopping teenager on Long Island in the middle-’90s – something permanently changed in me. I knew almost nothing of Costello but bought the record on the strength of the artwork. It was brazen, sarcastic, precarious, subversive and soulful. It felt like I felt. That night I put on Get Happy!! and stared at the cover, and the inner sleeve and the design details and those two elements in tandem caved my head in sixteen-ways-to-Sunday’s Best. This is my song for him:
Gorman’s new compendium is indispensable – a crucial and beautifully executed deep dive into Bubbles' amazing career and still unsettled legacy. Great liner notes – I guess they're called intros – by Clarita Hinojosa, Billy Bragg and others. I try not to dwell on Bubbles’ sad end, but it’s impossible to ever know what we missed out on without this big-hearted, serrated-minded, visionary graphic poet to help explain the contours of our insane current corporate-tech dystopia that he so clearly envisioned. He would have been 80 this year.
Other Notes:
Whether the Nats end up trading Juan Soto or not, this entire thing is rough on me. Like, you people should be feeling bad for me. Not worried -- but feeling bad. And yes, I am reasonable enough to understand we won the goddamn WORLD SERIES in 2019, and I need to just chill the fuck out and remember Howie Kendrick clanking one off the fair poll in Game 7 in Houston. Flags fly forever. My happy place. But I guess I had psychologically penciled in watching Soto walk two times a game for twenty more years and now I’ll require a different tranquilizer. Mike Rizzo better RANSOM whatever team pulls the trigger.
Do you like cats, political intrigue, ghost ships and murder? Are you getting ready for The Curator?
That’s all for now. Thanks and more news to follow. Hang in and I will too.
Love,
Elizabeth
*Wagers beneath the state-approved limit can be processed. Please do not use actual surname.