Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Steamroller action crushing all, Victim is your name and you shall fall

Monday nights at the bookstore are Jazz Night. Every Monday some jazz or improv folk come in and lay some noise smoke for a few 'hood toe-tappers and ring-a-ding-dings with bad dreads and some facial scuzz. Usually we can deal. We are doing fiction overstock in the stacks with Edward Francis Esq. (otherwise known as the proprietor of Crazyman Records on Division near the Cut-Throat and Wendy's) and as he constantly falls asleep on his ladder we are yelling at him to wake up damnit and tell us which Dickens paperbacks we need every five minutes and are too busy to notice what is happening with their rooty-tooty little art forms. But tonight was a night for asshole jazzbos to get all up in our grills.

First of all, one of the nerdy boobs came downstairs and asked us to turn off the music we were playing, which was a very unobtrusive and pretty darn quiet Boards of Canada album, because they were "recording" up in the main room. Now, if it was Sonny Rollins laying down the cheddar cheese with Art Blakey, Moonshorts Mulligan, Harry "Sweets" Edison, Rance Mulliniks and Eric Dolphy on the skin flute, that might be one bag of trail mix. But these dudes were eating some fresh gorilla balls and farting out something much less than the Well-Tempered Clavier, know what we're saying? Nothing too goddamn earthshatteringly special, even to our novice and easily impressed ears.

We went up for a smoke at about 8:30 PM and Fred Longberg-Holm, usually one of the organizers of jazz night (not tonight natch, nor was he playing), was in the house, and we made pained smiles at each other through the vivid aural squalor of their poo-bop cliches. Later, he came down to apologize to us that dudes were being so pretentiouzoid. F.L.H. is a freaking serious musical muscleman. That he has to come apologize for some douches from Western Illinois University (!?) put us right into the red zone. Our only small victory was that because Myopic is right behind the EL platform, trains were rumbling by and the conductors kept making announcements about trains running late, track problems between Damen and Grand, their Grannys' gall stones, erectile dysfunction, etc. in very loud sqwauky and unceaseless prattles, which we really hope ruined their, um, album or whatever. We were also seriously wishing we had brought some of our stack of epic black metal (DarkThrone? Krisiun?) that we could have blasted from the stereo near the register every ten seconds or so at premium volume just to fuck things up for the wretched dogs. But, we withheld our rage for the remainder of their "set".

Then, after they were finished, we went up to put some books away and caught snippets of their "post-sesh" conversation about how Myopic isn't as good as Powells, one of them called our 1.00$ reshelving fee for books carelessly left on tables "fascist", and they all were basically being dickweeds because they knew we were in the room and we were working. To top it off, they took off when we were in the back room, leaving all the tables and chairs out of place, an empty bag of Bugler tobacco (of course), several empty coffee cups and just general trashed mayhem every which place. And there was barely an audience so they did all of it! The poetry folks always pick up a bit, at least, and are swell about things. The jazzbos do too. We PAY them out of the drawer to grace us with their musical flimmerflam or poetical noodling for chrissakes! This is not a nightclub, bitches. This is not 1954 at the motherfucking Plugged Nickel.

One of the great bookstore powers, passed down from generation from Joe to Emmy to Adrienne to Fat Bald Jeff to Nate to Cat to Jon and on to us is the power to ban. Banned for life! Like Peter at the gates we mete out our will without pause, mercy or rejoinder! Well, you know what happens if these creepy crawlies try to frost us in our house again. First we whip out Customer Service (a late 50's model Sears and Roebuck Ted Williams model baseball bat made of beautifully honed ash) for extra emphasis, wave it around menacingly, and we tell them to get the fuck out and never come back, with our bony fingers pointing out the door toward hard, cold Milwaukee Ave. Then we put them in the big book, and eternity alone shall know their names. Selah.

In other news, like, day 25 or 26?

Coast to Coast AM has a lady who is a specialist in Angel Visitation on, and George is kind of flirting with her, which is rather gross. We have an angel visitation story we could tell, and have tried to, but couldn't get through on the lines. Maybe we'll tell all of you sometime, but maybe not. It's kind of personal. Now the lady's phone is acting crazy and auto-dialing and making strange noises, and George and the lady are attributing it to....you guessed it. Angels. Cheesy, yes it is. But we love Coast to Coast AM. Bye.




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6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Please update yr blog more. It is so great.

love,
yr neighbor JH

Anonymous said...

i would have kicked the fuckwads out at from the get go. you have much more patience than i. also my loud chortling here at alliance bakery and cafe has caused a mild disturbance.
-vanessa

Anonymous said...

I second that emotion about more updates, although you can't rush gold (or cats, I've found).

I think wrathful invective is a mode that you wear well 'n lightly, not unlike Bill Murray smoking cigs on the fire escape in a tattered old day glo bathrobe, it's both comical and a warning sign to local fauna to approach with some caution.

I'm not sure if it's "sober behavior" to encourage a newcomer's creative anger mismanagement, but I'd greatly enjoy it if you focused your glowering death-ray peepers on some the new (false) prophet beards sweeping our fair land ... I recentl.y went to a Pink Mountaintops show and while I had a great time & danced like an idiot, I had to fend off a strong urge the entire time to rush to the store for shaving cream & straight blades. I mean, I know it's not news or anything, but if your rage has dipilatory properties, maybe that would be like a publically useful outlet for it.

Woundup Corp. said...

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, we'd like to remind you that we don't applaud here at the Showplace, or where we're working. So restrain your applause and, if you must applaud, wait till the end of the set - and it won't even matter then...In fact, don't even take any drinks, I want no cash register ringing. Et cetera!"
-- Charles Mingus

Anonymous said...

uh, jds, have you seen JR's mug? It's swathed in full wooly beardedness. Also, JR, could you please post more often, if only for my entertainment? Perhaps I will hold a fundraiser for the purchase of a computer for you so that it will be easier for you to publish your musings.

vanessa

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