Volitionless, from Different Heights, and in the One Direction

I busted my head open Monday night. Tuesday is trash day, so I went to drag the trash cans from the backyard to the curb, and after the first trip, walking back, I slipped on an ice patch at the fence gate, my head taking full brunt of the fall, slammed flush into our cast iron fence.

Sitting on the sofa afterwards, telling a frantic Planet I didn't need to go the hospital while wincing as Earthgirl cleaned and dressed the wound, while pressing a bag of frozen corn against my head to try and stop the swelling, I was flipping the channels of the TV and saw Cowbell Girl and wondered, maybe I do have a concussion, then in the morning vividly remembered her but imagined I'd dreamed her in the weird sleep of the night.

I'm fine. I literally have a hard head. Gonna suck for a few days - the rest of my body is insisting it's hurt too; I'm looking at rainbow bruises - but I'm fine.

People are mocking Cowbell Girl, people who've never been in a marching band, who'd never snuck off from JT's band of Trojans to get as stoned and drunk as possible before a halftime performance at a Washington Dip's game at one of the Woodson High Schools in NOVA, you don't know what it's like to want to get into the pants of that Cowbell Girl after she made that face.

Of course you do. Everything is high school. Coercion is ticket and passport, sex appeal freighted on frequencies of defiant irony and compliant damn.

• Who knew blegfriend Montag was Mike Shanahan's agent?  ESPN's Adam Schefter is reporting now that the two sides have begun to discuss contract details. Schefter has as close a relationship with Mike Shanahan as anyone in the media, dating back to Schefter's time covering Shanahan's teams in Denver. Schefter, in fact, wrote Shanahan's 2000 book, "Think Like A Champion." Schefter tweeted this afternoon: "Talks went well enough last night that Mike Shanahan summoned his agent, Sandy Montag, to Washington to negotiate his contract." And though I understand why he never mentioned it, who knew Montag's first name was Sandy?
• BTW, your Washington Redskins? Now coached by a man whose agent is a business partner of Ari Fleischer and whose new general manager is brother of George Macaca Allen.
• Blowback, 2020.
• Cheney, Politico, yadda.
• Pastor Sanctimonious, who appears weekly courtesy of Your Fucking Washington Post, is a fucking pussy.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Your Fucking Washington Post zeroes in on Obama's problems.
• pRonstachery!
• Cocksucker of the Year! More evidence.
• The pictures of war you're not supposed to see.
• On sillyass libertarians.

• On sillyass Star Trek allusions:

• Things you might have missed.
• Shop at Whole Foods?
• The Church of the Consumer.
• Work.
• Gnome Chomsky.
• He named his bong Lurch! Bleggalgazingest congrats!

• Restoring Catoctin Aqueduct.
• My Future Hell.
• My Future Hell.
• My Future Hell.
• Maryland's Great Country Club Tax Break.
• Peebles? No, not one of those two, though the younger one did try to friend me on Facebook about three months ago.
• Dead deer in your yard, Mocomofo? Compost!
• Bromark sent word new United kits debut January 14.
• Here's Onalfo at his official unveiling today with a United scarf:

• Checkerboard? Sign of things to come, kit-wise?
• United news from Goff! The first noteworthy item: The heat wasn't working in the VW Lounge. Gotta love RFK. New stadium soon? Don't hold your breath. "Things are pretty much the same," club president Kevin Payne said. "We remain interested in D.C., but we are having conversations with Maryland and a jurisdiction in Virginia."
• This is good news, though.
• UPDATE! STOKES! (And Cruz Azul wants Nicolas Addlery?)
• O! BTW? Strike.
• Strike. Or lockout.
• UPDATE! Courtesy of Bromark, this link re: MLS labor crisis.
• Man Utd in terminal decline?

• Most Anticipated Books of 2010. Books I won't be reading include new novels from McEwan, Carey, Doyle, Amis, Ellis, Smiley, Roth, and Franzen. I don't want to read the new DeLillo but probably will out of some sillyass sense of obligation to know what everyone else is yammering about. 
• This, however, will be read as soon as I get my hands on it: An excerpt of this new novel by “pioneering postmodernist” Coover was published a while back in Vice. It is introduced thusly: “Noir is a short novel starring you as Philip M. Noir, Private Investigator. It began as a story about a dockside detective in pursuit of something—like truth or beauty, the ineffable—and became over the course of its writing a kind of companion piece to Ghost Town, which played with the western genre and mythology the way this one plays with the hard-boiled/noir genre and urban myth.
• Of the 14 books on this list of neglected books of the past decade, I can honestly say I hadn't heard of 13 of them, and the one I knew about is by a guy in my above list of people whose new book I'm not going to read next year.
• New Campbell McGrath poem!
• Embarrassments need not apply.
• Fuck poetry.
• More on Ashbery's Planisphere.
  
• KEXP Albums of Decade Listener Poll. I accept I just don't get Arcade Fire, and it's no surprise two Radiohead's in top five, and I've no aargh to argue about Wilco, but fucking Death Cab for Cutie at #6? Fucking Band of Horses at #9? Fucking Fleet Foxes at #10?
  
• Birthday Party.
• When was the last time this jangled in your head?
• How about this?
• Or this?
• Or this?
• Or this?
• UPDATE! Have I mentioned I like Archers of Loaf before?
• I'm ambivalent about Vampire Weekend, who's at the top of this post which I post because it has a link to a Charlotte Gainsbourg video and MP3s to other good stuff including Kurt Vile and especially Fucked Up.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Another posting of one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever, just put in my head seconds ago.
• UPDATE! Jim's comment about black ice made me think of this, another one of dozens of my favorite five songs ever. XTC has about two dozen of them.
• UPDATE! Maybe I did take a harder knock than I'm allowing, because this is the song I meant to post.

PORCELAIN

Carl Phillips

As when a long forgetfulness lifts suddenly, and what
we'd forgotten—as we look at it squarely, then again
refuse to look—is our own
                                                 inconsequence, yes, it was
mostly like that, sex as both an act of defacement and—
as if the two were the same thing—votive offering,
insofar as the leaves
                                     also were a kind of offering, or could
at least be said to be, as they kept falling the way leaves
do: volitionless, from different heights, and in the one direction.

 

I bet a pint the new Beach House will be one of my favorites of 2010, and this is already another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever: