UFO [15 years]

 

Lesley, M.: Glitter Mini 9

Disgraceful [14 years]

M., C., Lesley: Glitter Mini 9 

Breakup at the Rock Show [13 years]

 

Lesley on cover of Breakup at the Rock Show (2000)

Kiss the Liberator [12 years]

Lesley in SF

Glitter Mini 9 "Kiss the Liberator"

Automate [11 years]

Lesley @ Warped Tour, San Francisco

Glitter Mini 9 “Automate”

I hear you

I see you

You need to

Automate

It won’t kill you

They’ll rebuild you

You’re better off this way

Hey, hey, hey

Automate

You are breaking

Misbehaving

And you’re hating every day

Now it’s time you

Come around to

Your new life in solid state

Hey, hey, hey

Automate

Love you, Transistor

Cuckoo [10 years]

Glitter Mini 9 “Cuckoo”

Ronnie's Racing School [9 years]

(l-r): Lesley, C., M. @ Warped Tour, SF

Glitter Mini 9 “Ronnie’s Racing School”

Who’s that cool cat

racing down the track?

Is it Cary Grant?

No he’s too laid back

Larger than life

Ronnie’s making out 

icon of his time

he’s what motor sports are all about

Ronnie’s Racing School

making men of fools

Ronnie’s Racing School

it’s cool, it rules, it rules

Pack of Lucky Strikes

smoking down the speedway

you just can’t deny

he’s hotwired for the 21st century

Ronnie’s Racing School

you know you can’t lose

Ronnie’s Racing School

it’s cool, it rules, it rules

Ronnie, hey

and the boys and the girls

they cry, he’s so shy

Ronnie hey

Ronnie’s Racing School

making men of fools

Ronnie’s Racing School

it’s cool, it rules, it rules, it rules (x2)

Gimme a Teenager [8 years]

(l-r): M., Lesley, C.on Lesley's roof, SF

Glitter Mini 9  “Gimme a Teenager”

I’m not your girlfriend

I’m not your safety pin

today is not your lucky day

The broken locks

the burning sheets

the bad ideas

coming back to me

Every day the sun is shining

the sun is shining, uh-huh

The Devil he says

step back around

two hundred ways for you

to go down, down, down

Come on, come on

we’ll say no way

what we can’t help we

give away

Every day the sun is shining

the sun is shining, uh-huh

Every day the sun is shining

the sun is shining, uh-huh

Gimme a teenager

gimme a teenager

gimme a teenager

gimme one now (x2)

Leisure West [7 years]

M., C., Lesley
Glitter Mini 9  “Leisure West”  

You should know where

home is

close your eyes and

think on this

life—why cry now?

Why cry now?

If you don’t get

sick of it

come on down it’s

time to get

your prize, and get it right

now lie down

Top of the sun

that sets down behind Leisure West

dissolving the girl of my dream

till she is nothing

till she is nothing

[spoken: “If I die, I’d like to be in a place where people can come and have a picnic or a barbecue. I wouldn’t be offended if you’re barbecuing around my grave or my headstone; I just want people to know that.” ]

You should know where

home is

come around to

Leisure West

find out

one down 

why cry now?

The Last Perfect Day [6 years]

Lesley in Bernal Heights, SF

Glitter Mini 9 “U.F.O.” 

U.F.O.

is coming down to make

the last perfect day

and what you put

in your breakfast

it sway the earth’s gravity

The U.F.O.

is coming down to change 

your frequency

and what you hum in your head low

satellite emergency

the holiday

could last all week

I look up to the sky

I’d love to wave goodbye

goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye

I wish that it was

I really want my holiday

U.F.O.

U.F.O.

is coming down to make

the last perfect day

turn off your

television and turn it on

your data aid

The U.F.O.

she’s coming down to blow

your chemistry

and what it was

don’t worry you’ll adjust

to everything

a holiday

is what you need

I look up to the sky

I want to make it right

alright, right, right, right

I know that it could

this starlight

this star bright

U.F.O.

I see the sun, I see the sign

I see the sun, I see the sun ...

Tonight [5 years]

Bozho, Lesley

Come On, Come On, "Tonight"

Into the Ground [4 years]

M., Lesley, C.
Glitter Mini 9, "Into the Ground"

Dreamstalker [3 years]

M., Lesley, C.

Glitter Mini 9 “Dreamstalker”

Olè [2 years]

Lesley @ El Rio, SF

Glitter Mini 9 “Olè”

Smarter Than You Think [1 year]

(l-r): Lesley, KALX DJ Rick Sylvain, Mauri, Chavaugh

Glitter Mini 9 “Smarter Than You Think”

Sympathy for the Garfunkel

Somehow I missed the magic week at the SFMOMA blog that opened with Dana Ward on Corey Arcangel’s editing down of Simon and Garfunkel’s 1984 Central Park concert to only the footage where Art’s got his hands in his pockets, and closed with Brandon Brown’s answering piece on the satanics of Kanye West. Brown pulls a thread through two centuries of “poetry which portends towards devotion to the Satanic,” his own days “entrenched in wizardry” in the 1980s, and the “audacious impiety” of Kanye’s Twitter pronouncements about his upcoming My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, while Ward reads angelic Art’s “increasingly enigmatic gesture”—boredom? regret? interpersonal friction?—as “a prosody to that which one never knew one desired to know.” Art’s remarkable “junction of poise and unease” through the concert, as Ward sees it, “speaks to the fragile happiness engendered by every false armistice.” I liked this, too:

“[Arcangel’s work] reminds me that reverie is the scholarship of unproductive time, and that inquiry undertaken there is hard won and precious and just what the world of work seeks to undo.” 

See what can happen when you let poets out of their usual malbolge?

Current Mood for the Oracle at Delphi

“The session’s gorilla on vox humana.”

A Hard Day's Night at the Opera

I asked operaman; now I’ll ask you. You know that scene in A Hard Day’s Night where Wilfrid Brambell, the “clean old man” from Steptoe and Son, accidentally throws the switch on a stage elevator that thrusts him up into the middle of a televised opera? Which opera is it? It’s in German, the tenor’s dressed as a hussar, and its sounds like it might be an operetta. Google’s failed me on this one. Help!

King of the Beach

What Bruno says. Wavves’ King of the Beach and Ariel Pink’s Before Today have been two of my summer’s bigger disappointments, in almost exact proportion to the excitement of their earlier efforts. Both scrubbed and buffed all the cool burrs away, or enough of them to reduce their songs to just a crafty catalog of their influences. But I’ve learned you look square and bitter when you criticize pop music, as if you expected something from it in the first place, so let’s end on the sonically positive: Drew Gardner doing “Pop Rocks” in a cattle auction amphitheater. “Nothing in my life is the way it’s supposed to be” is about as sharp a summation of the pop ethos as I’ve heard this side of Eddie Cochran.

Fourth of July

“But his creative contributions to the insurance business could hardly have been made so successfully later if he had not had this early familiarity with the basis of insurance theory. He was at home with it from the first because his devotion to Emersonian doctrine led him to see, in the truths revealed by statistical averages, the expression of the Universal Mind, operating in the experience of many individuals.”

—Henry Cowell, Charles Ives and His Music