Speaking of ladies!
How come nothing I seem to read about the new Neko Case album is by one of them? Like that Times Mag piece, “Wild Thing.” Although maybe the achievement of that piece is that the dude who wrote it was really old, and you could tell, and so it seemed just sort of, well maybe “distinctive” is how you’d put it, how little time he’d seemed to have spent trying to fathom what it was to be born not a dude — I mean I know he is in publishing but — and somehow still he managed to emerge unchafed from the process of being shuttled to the Arizona Whole Foods and introduced to this woman and being exposed to all her poetic “haunting” songs and finally furnished by some intern the transcripts for pull quote material, and oh well now that I think about it I suppose I’d better use that morbid line about how she “should have been an abortion,” as melodramatic as that sort of logic is when the subject is some poor worthless lived trailer park woman, especially one who has stumbled so auspiciously upon all this talent (and in ways so completely ad hoc and accidental!)
The cacti outside the store reminded me of the often-thorny music Case admires and composes. They appeared to grow out of nothing, beauty and strangeness from dust, and then new parts of them seemed to spring as if from nowhere out of other parts, the flowers looking completely ad hoc and accidental.
