8.24.25 - LOOSE RAKES
Sunday August 24, 2025
KCMO
Dear pancake flippers, zipper rippers, and real big dippers,
My sunday motivation is feeling low, and my task list long. Yesterday I mowed and took bags to the city brush and yard debris drop off. I weeded our community garden bed and picked peppers and tomatoes. We also went to Trader Joe’s and got TJ type stuff. I guess it was a fairly productive day, ending with pizza, salad, and an episode of Peaky Blinders. Actually now that I write it down, I am grateful for a most excellent day.
Earlier this summer, at the The Record Collector in Iowa City, I found an Attia Taylor record called Space Ghost and it has become one of my favorites of the year, on pink vinyl no less! She’s a black and brown women’s health advocate and publisher--very cool artist that Cleo’s colleagues need to hear about if they haven’t already. I love taking a chance on a record. Hard to do when some of them are $35 out of the gate!
I also listened to Ed Cole’s new album Born To Rot, and the Tex Perkins and the Fat Rubber Band album. It has an earthy, americana vibe but with a kind of remote, warped feel, and some crazy guitar tones. Not much americana threads the needle for me anymore. Rural musical vernacular does not feel automatically homey to me, more of a palette that has become easy to pull together, so it’s gotta have that thing. And the barely detectable but still-there rural-ish vernacular of pop country is…well, pass the Kaopectate and bring me a bucket, many listeners are hurting from both ends. At the same time, joking aside, I’m open, things change, to each their own. This dialogue with superficial pre-fab Nashville country has been going on for thirty years now, kind of stock in its own right. Every once in a while a Dierks Bentley comes along. Or a Taylor Swift! And you can pry my Shania Twain Come On Over cd out of my cold, dead hands.
I listened to a Bandcamp Daily show yesterday while I was mowing, I really enjoyed it. Steve Wynn should host a Bandcamp show, it would be fantastic. Later Cleo and I stopped by Sister Ann’s records for coffee. They had the second Saints record, kinda spendy but I’ll get it at some point. And a used Milton Nasciemento that I almost got. And the Scratch Acid double-EP 12” reissue, dang!
The frog I don’t want to eat today is a sheet metal shed that has been in a box for about three months. I didn’t want to do it in the heat, handling super-heated sheet metal screws and red hot razer sharp thin-gauge sheet metal (boo hoo). I could use it to cauterize bug bites, I guess. But it is 78 degrees today, and I have no excuse not to start the project, and capture loose rakes that are driving me crazy in the garage. Cleo has a thing about cords and cables, I get really twitchy around piles of rakes and other tools.
