Bark Cat Bark The Final Letters. I wrote an entry on a Bark Cat Bark record last year, perhaps it was longer ago, I compared it to Beirut, I probably mentioned the gypsies though I suppose I pretentiously labelled them Roma, I mentioned that it was lovely surely. It was, it is, but who knew there was extant so very much more loveliness. He's been making records, loads of records, for a decade now, possibly more, possibly decades, possibly he is 58 years old. This was meant to be his final record but apparently he has since recanted, thank goodness. The first track now is just many layers of piano, dexterously maneuvered and dazzlingly lovely. Reminder: I do not know anything about music, not anything at all, all of my reactions are emotional cues probably predictable to any social "scientist" but this track is just a swirling maelstrom of prettiness. It could be that really there are tiny sausages glued to his fingertips and he plays like an amateur but I am blissfully unaware. I've been trying to find out more about him. He's handsome, truly, and allegedly he stole a track from some French Canadian duo but really nothing on their "demo" is remotely as beguiling as even the first song on this amazing record. It's a nice demo though, Eli Et Papillion, and allegedly after his thievery they have come to some sort of agreement and decided that he really did not steal their song and post it on Itunes but this hasn't stopped some rogue commenter from being present on every google result for Bark Cat Bark. No matter. If he has stolen all of these songs it only means he's a marvelous curator, something akin to Rudi Arapahoe. Just when I thought I was falling back in line as an indiepop simpleton I have again had a disillusionment with that world. It was very Truly Yours that did it, I was convinced they were lovely once, for a few fey wayward moments, but now, I am not. It is the emptiness, the hollowed out soul, the fact that they lack depth oh and the fact that they are probably upper middle class that makes me resent them so. I know, I am shallow. But there is romance here, second track, a piano and what sounds like a clavichord possibly? Something plucked rather than percussed and it's expansive beyond the confines of a bedroom, beyond the confines of a horizon, romance on a romantic scale. Now to harpsichords, dueling harpsichords, surely some musicologist would proclaim all of this silly and basic and without merit but I am silly and basic and without merit and so I can appreciate the loveliness of all of these things. It's wise that this record has less gypsy overtones than the last Bark Cat Bark record I had written about. In France it has been decided that gypsies are to be reviled, they are the source of evil in this world oh and Lillian Bettencourt. This second track should be the song that plays under the credits of a Mexican telenovela with some beautiful woman from Colombia in the passionate embrace of a moustachioed man with a silly hat, cowboy boots and a shiny suit. Perhaps he has identified a target demographic for each of these tracks. That the majority are instrumentals helps in this capacity. Third track. Jaunty. It could be mistaken for gypsies, gypsies time travelled forward from the court of Joseph II, arriving in the middle of Paris where Sarkozy can sick his fashion model wife on them and ship them back to Romania and Bulgaria. Isn't it funny how Americans present a case to the human rights council at the UN concerning the alleged draconian measures in Arizona and here it is France that is actually carrying out ethnic cleansing. Of course times are tough, it is easy for Politicians to paint unfortunates as scapegoats and it is easy for their constituents to hear them rather clearly. It is an ugly facet of human nature. My own parents are immigrants, they clung to a piece of cardboard as they floated across the river from Trudeaupia. Actually it was the mid 60s, they may have been fleeing from that autocrat Lester Pearson! They would sit quietly, in the corner, with the lights all dimmed and regale their children with tales of oppression from the dominion. it was frightening! Now I imagine that Tom Tancredo wants to hunt them down and send them back. I am an anchor baby. Actually my parents were here legally. But if they were gypsies I would be nervous. Now there are violins and atmosphere, darkening clouds on the horizon. Bark Cat Bark doesn't seem all that political. I've foun the most recent Arnaud Fleurent Didier record online and thankfully it did not include his recording of Dominique De Villepin's speech at the UN security council that he released as a single. I wonder where his recordings of people speaking out against the Afghanistan war are? Next track, again with the dueling pianos, lovely. Less of a Soap Opera soundtrack feel and more a fill for a drama where parents are considering divorce, their children are doing copious amounts of drugs and engaging in promiscuity and wearing snowflake sweaters from Woolworths. Now to Ukuleles and the hum of a refrigerator. What will become of people like Bark Cat Bark when the James Lee's of the world take over and banish refrigerators? What will become of Sonic Boom? Will he have to covertly record refrigerators in third world backwaters and sneak those records back into the west to eleude the green police. I watched Dateline a few Sundays back and they had a profile on the green gestapo in New York city where they pull over trucks randomly and test their particulate emissions to protect the kids in the neighbourhood who apparently have a higher rate of asthma than the national average. No mention of how green laws are an endless windfall for municipalities allowing them to tax all aspects of commerce and then to waste the money on brainwashing their greenshirt soldiers who seemed so very proud to be on the government payroll doing so little. And then I am sure these thugs go into schools and celebrate every day as earth day with their copies of the History Channel's life in 2100 to terrify the kids into submission to their new primitivism. No mention of the fact that zero people died in New Zealand when they had an earthquake, Compare this to Haiti where 230,000 are feared dead. Why? The New Zealand quake was stronger. But New Zealand is richer. Even in chile which is not as rich as Chile there were but 14 deaths with an earthquake even larger. Chile is not as rich as New Zealand but not as poor as Haiti. Look to your future. When you attack commercial enterprise either through endemic government corruption as is true in Haiti or through limitless regulation as is the future here as soon to be imposed by the greenshirts well you end up dying from things like earthquakes, and floods in Pakistan, and Japanese Encephalitis in India. Bark Cat Bark could be writing the requiem from human civilization with his plaintive tones assigned across the width of his keyboard. Now the accordion. Are accordions contraband in Paris these days? Surely only gypsies and people on Jean Pierre Jeunet soundtracks play the accordion. I don't play the accordion. Tom Tancredo would send me to prison for playing an accordion. Now back to the piano. Which track is this? #11. Eichendorff. I think Tom Tancredo might actually win. I will be shipped abroad. Although it was my brother that was the actual anchor child. My parents are American citizens now, they eagerly vote republican. Eichendorff was a romantic. Perhaps Maria Belen Chapur read Eichendorff in Spanish to the South Carolinian Republican governor when she was feeling excessively amorous. It's layers os pianos, or just one piano. I don't play the piano, I suppose with two hands you could play this. I am not certain if the armless Chinese man I watched on youtube could play this piece. Maybe Bark Cat Bark has just stolen all of that guy's material, the same as they stole the French Canadian duos mediocre numbers and put it up on Itunes for no one. It's possible. Why don't apes play the piano? I just read an article that defeated the myth of Koko the Gorilla and it was impressive, they ended by not celebrating Koko's dubious abilities but the sheer inventiveness of Koko's human companion. It was something to be celebrated as uniquely human and comments on the viability of the Mauri wildlife preserve were strangely absent. Song 13, violins. Does he play all of the instruments here? I am under the impression that he is a "solo" artist. This is haunting and ache filled, lovely lovely thing. Koko is part of the celebration of the Primitive. I was reading the issue of Scientific American where they discussed "the end". It's actually pretty good as it contains only a bit of moral preening and heavy handed "science". There is a short bit on Polynesian sailors and how they can tell the geography of the ocean based on how the water laps up against the edges of their boat and how this makes them far superior to modern man, especially modern western man. It's silly. Would this author ask first for a Polynesian boatman if he was making a trip across the ocean or would he rather have a functional GPS unit and a satellite phone with a direct line to the mainland where helicopters and hovercrafts and marines could pick up his distress call and rescue him from certain death because he's a soft consumerist with increasing levels of trans fat lodged in his brain. I would prefer a GPS unit, though I bet the man from Scientific American impresses the young co-eds in his Feminist Studies class with his breathless appreciation of neolithic culture. It's funny he's so impressed with this primitive technology but unimpressed with the idea that man has progressed so far, so quickly that even if the Cassandras were right and all of Greenland will fall quickly into the Atlantic in a few weeks that we might come up with a solution to the disaster. But but, the russian heat wave is the worst in 130 years! Well then what caused the Russian heat wave 130 years ago? Let's ask the Polynesian boatman. The issue of Scientific American does have some fascinating discussion on the role of time in Physics though. But most people will skip that and instead post pictures of the aboriginal in western clothes and body paint on the wall of their 4th grade class and scare their kids by telling them that because they needed that Wii for Christmas this man can no longer paint images of the marsupial tiger on his wall since it is extinct and there is no word for extinct in his language and so he is incredibly sad. Or something like that. They could play this song as soundtrack to the human drama in order to add its morose nature. It hasn't been a particularly warm summer here, some hot days, some cold days, but allegedly this is the second warmest year since 1998. Allegedly this has been a year of the second strongest El Nino since 1998. But how can we be sure these people are telling the truth? Their livelihood demands they receive funding and only crises deserve attention. Ia m reading a Barbara Tuchman book now and she poignantly states that only crises are remembered in history and so it is important to read bills of purchase and shipping manifests that are divorced from emotional investment to tell the real story. She's right. It's best to read data lists dispassionately rather than the synopsis created for politicians with messianic complexes. Next track. Piano. This is a really long album. 36 tracks. I have been at this entry for some time. I've started writing another book. I have been having thoughts of writing a book about Squirrels though. Is that wrong? I go to work on weekends and I am alone and I sit near the window and I watch the squirrels come to the same tree, a Russian Hawthorn, at the same time each day and they assemble in a different part of the tree each day and consume a portion of the fruit from the tre and then leave. If only Koko was a middle management suck-up such as myself to be there on weekends, unseen, to translate the Squirrels thoughts to me. But here I have this romantic notion of the sustainability of Squirrel culture and the romance of life as Squirrel because I am contaminated with this myth of beauty in nature. In the Scientific American from September they also describe the processes of human decay. I found it fascinating. Modern man is all about fluoridated water and freon. I had a thought of sustainable refrigeration with human decomposition on a mass scale. I also just finished Journal of the PLague Year by Defoe and it talked o Churchyards filled with 8000 human remains, imagine the possibility of mass refrigeration on that sale. Eichendorff or Eichmann? I am not well, Ward Churchill has failed me! Next track, birdsong and softly depressed keys on a piano, sigh. I am not a heartless soul. Honestly. Watch me gaze at squirrels in wonder like a little boy. I am assuming the rest of the tracks are just as beguiling. His singing on the last track is particularly striking. Should I end this now? Perhaps not. Perhaps I can Have Koko stand in for me while I take a shower and leave the music playing, of course Koko will be merely signing her impressions and so the screen will not be filled with witticisms the same as when I am typing. Or not. My first book was about a nursing home. I've printed more copies and am again trying to find someone that could possibly even feign interest. It doesn't read like this site at all because I don't edit this site and I don't worry about narrative or coherency. I worried about all of those things for 703 pages. I spent a long time writing. This is just me spilling the contents of my head. I have a really rather large head, not because I am learned but because I am sadistic and tortured my mother on my trip through the birth canal. When I would play baseball I had to borrow a batting helmet from my brother's team. A large cranial circumference means that I am unlikely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's in the future. If you have a small circumference perhaps you have fetal alcohol syndrome or you are destined to break your children's heart when they come to visit you at the Obama Geriatric center and you are covered with your own excrement and pustules and sores and you look at them with searching eyes because your soul has dimmed. I remember when I was a nursing aid in a retirement home and there was this woman Eithel and she was in the throes of dementia her family would arrive every Sunday with hearts chirping and an hour before sunset would leave devastated by the cruelty of nature. Koko is sitting next to me and actually described the scene with much greater heart rendered drama but I am a mere consumer and Koko is a master of nuance and metaphor. Accordions make beautiful now. Rieux-Minervois. It has been a while since I started this entry, have I mentioned that I found the latest Arnaud Fleirent-Didier record online? "Found" is a euphemism. Yes. I love the AFD record. it's less imposing, smaller, more human. French pop music is divine! Bark Cat Bark and AFD and Fugu and Orwell and Alexandre Longo. It's all a wonder and causes one to lament the success of the comparatively uninspiring Phoenix. Are Phoenix actually french? I wonder. Perhaps we could mail Tom Tancredo to France and he could produce an investigation. Tancredo would be preferred to Hickenlooper though. I am still waiting for Hickenlooper to do away with parking meters that run to 10PM as he had promised he would do in his campaign. I thought the whole reason he was elected Mayor of Denver was for his campaign commercials which depicted him merrily galloping through the streets of denver inserting coins into expired meters for all of the helpless citizens. Fraud! Now we have smart meters. He'll only have to bring his bank card. He does make a mean bowl of Gorgonzola Ale soup which goes great with the London Broil. But then I am considering changing my diet to an unalterable procession of dishes made from the fruit of Russian Hawthorne trees in my attempt to get inside the head of a squirrel. Track 17 is a long one with an english title and organ and some sort of stringed instrument. Is it something so parochial as a guitar? Football season begins today. Tim Tebow mania has hit Denver. Perhaps instead of a novel on the squirrels that inhabit the parking lot of my workplace I could write a biography of Tim Tebow and how is football play has changed the planet for the better. Perhaps I could quote the polynesian boatman who could tell if Tim Tebow's next pass will be complete by how the waves of the Denver brown cloud lap up against the dimples of a football in flight. It is a religious thing. Tim Tebow believes in God and so every god fearing football fan here in God's country make up for the sin of voting for Bill Ritter by adopting Tim Tebow as their most favorite player ever even though he is third string quarterback on a mediocre professional football team. I wouldn't imagine Tim Tebow is a big fan of Bark Cat Bark. iw ould imagine he's a big Carrie Underwood fan or Widespread Panic. I wasn't aware of the Widespread Panic love either. Not until Tim Tebow came to town. The events are not related but everyoen I work with loves Widespread Panic. What is Widespread Panic? It used to be that when Dave MAtthews came and played 7 sold out nights at the Univeristy of Colorado's mediocre college football team's stadium the ranks of workers at my workplace would be thinned only by those who live in fear of a random drug test but now when Widespread Panic is here there is joy and laughter and that Christmas feeling wells up in so many of my coworkers. Will they be as excited to see Pavement play Carrot Rope? You know Pavement's records are terrible. I agree. We all agree. But live they are a completely different entity. Maybe I will go. Are tickets over 40 dollars? If they play at Red Rocks will they project passages from Prozac Nation on the Flatirons? Pavement are the American version of Oasis, they have cast a long dark shadow over indie rock as the inability to sing, to play and to care have become modern virtues to be celebrated. Maybe Damien Hirst will encase SM in formaldehyde soon and save us a second reunion tour in ten years. Of course when he's doing reunion tours he's not making solo records. Trade-offs. Big dramatic number now, number 18! it seems orchestrated but has he done all of this himself? Of course it is no Fame Throwa but gorgeous all the same. He should sing more. It would mainly be in French and would consist of lamentations for the Roma but it would be nice. Next track, number 19, some of these are very short. Some are over 8 minutes. This one fels like a song he would play on the stoop with his buddies hanging out with him wearing backwards scally caps and smoking and playing the spoons or dreaming of their youth in Amiens spent on street corners not so dissimilar playing in doo-wop era Billy Joel cover bands. This is an amazingly consistent record considering that there are 36 tracks. It must have taken him ages to steal all of this coherent material. Could I be sued for that bit of sarcasm? I don't actually believe he stole any of this. I jest. Now an interlude, a moment of silence, a test pattern for the ears. Plaintive piano out of the break, a soundtrack to the highlight package of Tim Tebow's greatest incompletions from the 2010 pre-season. The starting quarterback from the Denver Broncos is also mediocre though he is paid handsomely. I'd figure the starting quarterback as a fan of Third Eye Blind with possibly a Libertines record given to him by one of his girlfriends in college hidden in the back of his closet. Quarterbacks get all of the girls, more than people who consider writing books for squirrels. This is a beautiful track, L'homme que voyageo seul. No translation offered. Koko is still teaching me Latin. French, for the moment, is out of the question as she is not sure I could handle the diphthongs. Next track, dancing on the piano, ache, romance, memorex commercials, the same as ever. i could listen to this for a long time without it growing tiresome. it is anonymous and artful, pleasant and ambitious, warm and inviting. he could play with Arnaud Fleurent-Didier and they could open for Andre Rieu at the ruins of lichtenberg castle and have a jam session when Andre breaks out Blue Danube. It would be terrific. Andre would then have to leave early in order to make it on time to Gare Du Nord to close the railway car door on Roma being shipped to Bulgaria to their doom as checkout clerks at Carrefour Sofia. Now a dramatic pensive number, the playing more dogmatic, more morose, more sensitive to the plight of Tim Tebow as he earns 34 million dollars for four years of sitting on the bench thinking about Jesus Christ running the 2-minute drill at altitude. Only five tracks after this, I may make it to the end before lunch. Now to accordions we arrive again, this is more carnivalesque. Is not all accordion music carnivalesque? Perhaps. I could map the way the sound waves lap the shirt collar I have crumpled up against my neck and offer a professional analysis but I am not a polynesian boatman, the apex of human evolution! Now we are dancing, Cossack style, out of breath, it ends so quickly and we fall back again to tender violins played across 6000 miles of telephony. Stirring. Clever. Beautiful. Is this his magnum opus? The defining moment of his career? He doesn't look old. Perhaps he could play with Beirut who seems to have done a fine job aping Bark Cat Bark anyhow. It would be a natural fit. I watched An Education again recently and yes Carey Mulligan is a dreamy english school girl but it isn't that great is it? I mean Peter Saarsgard is certainly no James Mason and it is essentially Lolita right? James Mason is the pinnacle of creepiness in Lolita with Shelly Winters his penultimate foil. Aye it was such a marvelously uneasy movie. His voice, her smoking, aiiee!!! But Peter Saarsgard is really boring. But then the important message of An Education is the idea that good taste is one of the rarest of things. I agree. When I was in search of a home I had time to visit 39 houses and I can assure you that bad taste is endemic. It is catholic. Go to your grocery store and watch the clientele as they enter in sweats, a sports bra and rolls of unsightly humanity hanging over the stretch band waistline. Watch as people flock to see Avatar watch as Widespread Panic play to sold out shows night after night. I would imagine Carey Mulligan is a big fan of Widespread Panic but then I've never seen her in anything else. Wait, she was in Public Enemies which was brilliant but even people with allegedly good taste held only disdain for it. I don't remember Carey Mulligan in Public Enemies. Ah well. Second to last song, the last was stunning. This one is over 12 minutes long. Conventional pop song start, Starbucks coffee girl type of pop. Pretty. It is all so pretty! Why is he not celebrated? Championed as last arbiter of good taste before France is depleted of goodness and left only with B-side compilations from Carla Bruni. Slow build-up, this could be the intro music for Tim Tebow as he comes out of the locker room to take his place on the bench! I met someone who recently expressed an obsession with James Mason. She was marvelous but I used her only for a connection to a book editor. I really don't think that I like my job and I would like to sit at home all day long and read books and shipping manifests and then write boring novels about squirrels for Koko and her best friends. Will it ever happen? Unlikely. This makes me very sad. Apt then for me to be listening to Bark Cat Bark, the king of melancholia. Oy, still 87 minutes left on this track, I am running out of steam. This is the alternate Ending. This was not mentioned in the Scientific American I mentioned earlier. But they did mention Lie groups. Which was also mentioned on that goofy series hosted by Morgan Freeman. I don't understand Lie groups but one of the major proponents surfs which seemed important to Morgan Freeman. But then Lie groups are tied to Murray Gellman who is godlike so who am I to complain about surfing, even if Murray did endorse Barack Obama. Now we hear the sound of Muster Mark's thighs and accordions and swizzled atmosphere and loveliness. Ah, France! This is an epic track, I thought it was over but now the gypsy campfire coda to leave us in a placid state of mind. An ode to Morgan Freeman's earrings! Morgan Freeman the closet gypsy, the silly old man with an earring, starring Martin Lawrence as Morgan Freeman as a silly old man who doesn't listen to gypsy music but should. Really. I love this album. Radio static, octonions, tenderness of the human spirit as his voice emerges from the noise. Amazing! Amazing!