In the Fallen Off Zone
The Passion of Carl, Remembering David Lynch, and a James Tate Reading
James Tate's "Uneasy About the Sounds of Some Night-Wandering Animal"
It feels increasingly like whatever "the fallen off zone" is, we’ve all found ourselves in it lately. That's just one of the many metaphysical descriptions from James Tate's "Uneasy About the Sounds of Some Night-Wandering Animal” that I adore. It’s from the essential collection Hell, I Love Everybody. I recently recommended another favorite from that one, “The Cowboy,” in an interview for
. I'm presenting a new tribute reading here, soundtracked by an unreleased recording of my combo JPW, featuring pianist Rob Kroehler, bassist Andrew Bates, drummer Zach Toporek and myself on guitar. It’s sweet sounding but not without considerable peril. Welcome to the “fallen off zone,” glad to have you here with me.
Jokermen: Carl and the Passions-So Tough
And speaking of Carl, I recently got to go on Jokermen, one of my favorite podcasts. Thanks to Evan Laffer and Ian Grant for having me on to riff to riff about a favorite, the Beach Boys’ bafflingly-tiled 1972 LP Carl and the Passions-So Tough. Its wooly and potentially choogle adjacent. We get into it all: Jesus, Transcendental Meditation, Cool Mike, and Brian Wilson’s massage parlor misadventures. Listen through Jokermen’s Patreon channel.
Remembering David Lynch
And speaking of meditators, I had the pleasure of speaking with
on KJZZ 91.5 FM’s morning show, The Show, about the mystery, horror, and sweetness of David Lynch. I don’t know how but I got them to play the “horse is the white of the eyes” clip. Really hoping I didn’t accidentally release any curses.Listen in wherever you get podcasts or through the station’s good old fashioned, and reliable, website. And though it goes without saying: long live public radio.
Additionally, I was pleased to join the Aquarium Drunkard braintrust in this
-spearheaded tribute, “Lynch People,” featuring Jessica Hundley, Jokermen, Matt Marble of the American Museum of Paramusicology, Mitch Horowitz, and members of Wilco, The Charlatans, My Morning Jacket, and many, many more. From my contribution:Lynch imbued everything he made, from chairs to paintings to avant-blues soundscapes, with his singular sensibility, creating what biographer Kristine McKenna called in Room To Dream a “complicated zone where the beautiful and the damned collide.” That quality allowed him vast creative latitude, the ability to transport his viewers from the smog-choked industrialism of Eraserhead to the pastorale, amber-waved swoon of The Straight Story, from the teenaged hopes and haunts of Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart to the time and space bent interdimensional narratives of Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, and Twin Peaks: The Return.
JPW & Dad Weed, “It’s Happening”
My bud Zach Toporek and I have a new tune out. It’s called “It’s Happening.” It’s about what’s happening, but also, about who it’s happening to. Or put in broader strokes: to truly understand what’s happening to one person, you must also understand what’s happening to everybody. For the official lyric video, we recontextualized some public domain animation from The Information Machine, Or: Creative Man and the Data Processor. It was produced for the Eames Office for IBM to screen at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. As we ponder an age where the info machine is distorting and bending reality more than reflecting it, we wonder, what makes us human and what makes us just “data processors”? We hope the other footage sampled serves as a reminder that when we can only imagine destruction in the other, we bring destruction upon ourselves too. The party is over; it’s happening. Listen via whatever streaming service you use.
Loved the reading w/ tunes!