Appalachian American Ennui: April 2021

"I stared through the Russian girl in her double-breasted gray suit, rattling off idiom after idiom in her unknowable tongue . . . and I wished with all my heart I could crawl into her and spend the rest of my life barking out one idiom after another. It mightn't make me any happier, but it would be one more little pebble of efficiency among all the other pebbles." The Bell Jar. This reminds me of those artficilly colored, rock-like gravel one lays as a foundational, bottom of the sea-like bottom of a fish tank, tropical fish acquarium. Interspersed with foundational fish shit, they just sit. But each one has utility. Minimal utility but utility nonetheless. These pebbles unionize so that all the fecal deposits from the neon tetras, angel fish, and the like can find the place to hide. Gravity and the interspacial voids between and among the pebbles create an open invitation for the disgusting necessaries to hide below the waterworld.

I've enjoyed his music for 32 years. And when I say "talented" this does not mean his body of work just emgerged. Frank Black has worked hard perfecting that talent. He has been a prolific independent and alterntaive musician. He's not done, either. He can make a guitar emit sounds that are novel. Frank Black will take his seat one day next to the likes of Thom Yorke, John Lennon, Morrissey, David Bowie, and Billy Corgan. He's already at the top of the list for me. I've listened to him since 1989. He's the real deal. The honor is in how hard he works to perfect his talent, which is out of this world. He changed music forever when he formed Pixies. There had never been anything like it before.