Everything is Beautiful, and Nothing Hurts: Geraldine Fibbers, "California Tuffy"

Friday, February 26, 2010

Geraldine Fibbers, "California Tuffy"

In this week's spare moments, I've trolled the interwebs for alt-country/goth-country/gothic Americana music. Here's something awesome I reeled in today:

Because sometimes you have to stop acting cute, toss the cat around, and break shit all to pieces.

That's crazy Carla Bozulich playing bass and singing for the Geraldine Fibbers, by the way. I vaguely remember her previous band, Ethyl Meatplow, and their song "Silly Dawg" from the early nineties:

She's gone far since those heady years--all the way to Ravenna, Italy, in fact (among many other places, no doubt). Here she improvises with her latest band, Evangelista:

Reminds me of the demented goofing off Neal and I did when we grew bored in the studio during Gothic Luau recording sessions. I'll have to dig up those tapes some time before the next move. No promises, though.

Anyway, Bozulich carries on as a performance artist, installation artist, and writer, as well. Here's the opening from her terrifying, death-defying story "The Sparkely Jewel":

On the eve of the birth
of my guttersnipe love
I emptied my hands up
inside her
The bloody egg-whites
and the broken tea cup
seemed to mention that her death
was upon her
So I kissed her torn lips
and eyes 'til they closed
and I pulled
like the devil himself

Read the rest here.

2 contributions to the conversation:

AxtonFeb 28, 2010 10:15 PM
Some alt-country/folk-y indie bands that immediately come to mind are The Avett Brothers, Neko Case, Andrew Jackson Jihad, and maybe to a lesser extent, Blitzen Trapper
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Eric BosseMar 1, 2010 11:08 AM
I like Neko Case more in theory than in reality. Which is to say, I have her music, I admire her music, I want to keep up with her music, but I rarely go back to her albums after the second or third listen. To be fair, I'm less and less of a repeat listener to anything these days. Unlike in my teens and twenties, when I would stop everything and dwell on the intricacies of an album for a week or more, I'm a much more restless and omnivorous music gatherer.

"Omnivorous" isn't the right word. I don't like it all. The range of my interests remains more or less as broad and/or narrow and/or eclectic as it was then. Where once I stopped to bond deeply, now I touch base and move on.

Anyway, thanks for the recommendations, Axton. I'll have to look deeper into the Avett Brothers and Andrew Jackson Jihad.
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Everything is Published, and Nothing Is Read

My Short, Happy Life as an Auteur

I am a filmmaker. Or, at any rate, I once was. Between 1999 and 2002, I made several short films, starting with "My Mother Received a Wound"--which showed at a few film festivals and is still featured in the Moondance Festival's annual "best of" restrospective. The zenith (or nadir, perhaps) of my moviemaking was surely MOCK, a 47-minute mockumentary film about a filmmaker who makes mockumentary films. You can watch MOCK and other projects on my Youtube channel if you click here. Enjoy! (By the way, another filmmaker with my name lives in San Antonio. He spells Erik with a k, and his movies are a good deal more accomplished than mine. I'm quite sure he wouldn't want anyone mistaking my work for his.)

What I Have

a. I have indulged in more passions, hobbies, vocations, and interests than anyone I know.

b. I have acted in more than fifty plays, skits, and movies.

c. I have written songs, played guitar, and sung in four rock bands—though I use the term “rock” loosely in one case. Come to think of it, calling what I did “singing” stretches the definition of that word, too.

d. I have worked for years as a music DJ on public radio, hosting freeform, new-release, and international music shows.

e. I have created, designed, edited and published one excellent literary journal.

f. I have edited two other literary journals and a newspaper.

g. I have published hundreds of newspaper articles, columns, and reviews.

h. I have conducted dozens of interviews with artists and public figures I admire. My favorite was a long, dreamy conversation with Lisa Gerrard. She was on tour in Germany at the time, and I was the last person she spoke to that night before she fell asleep.

i. I have blogged about politics, satire, culture, and life.

j. I have co-edited a once-popular political website that is no longer.

k. I have created several journalistic satires of the Bush administration's war in Iraq, and these online satires were viewed by hundreds of thousands of people. (Here is an echo.)

l. I have written, directed, shot, and edited several short movies. Some have shown at minor film festivals in the U.S. and Italy.

m. I have cofounded and codirected a regional film festival (The Pikes Peak Passion Film Festival).

n. I have written about 100 short and short-short stories.

o. I have completed the first draft of a novel that I’m afraid to go back and read. It sits untouched on my hard drive since 2003.

p. I have made significant progress on—but ultimately abandoned—three other novels.

q. I’m developing two or three other novel ideas, and I will hopefully bang out a first draft of one of these eventually.

r. I also have two new short story collections demanding to be written.

s. I have narrated a documentary that showed nationally on PBS.

t. I have traveled to Europe four times (visiting Italy, France, Spain, Poland, and the Czech Republic), Canada several times, and Mexico once.

u. I have taught elementary school students with emotional disabilities.

v. I have taught writing at the university level since 2004.

w. Sometimes, when I’ve looked at my wife and my kids, I have actually felt guilty for being so fortunate.

x. I, like you, have less money than I wish I had. This mitigates the guild I mention above.

y. I have doubts about the wisdom of blogging, and I fear that I may someday regret this. How? I don't know. When? I'm not sure. Why? Because my thoughts here are both publicly exposed and sloppily composed.

z. I have a thing for lists.