How did several of the new “anti-establishment” Tea Party-supported Congressmen start their new positions this week? By hiring lobbyists and taking succor from corporate fundraisers.

Even with this latest disaster, I’m rooting for that Spider-Man musical.

My favorite musical artist, David Thomas of Pere Ubu, is now taking bookings for solo concerts — in people’s living rooms. I’m preferring to think this is cool, a la Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory doing one-time plays staged for audiences totaling all of 40.

Here’s the info… and a friend and I are already figuring out how we can round up 30 people to join us.

Along the lines of my previous post:

“Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions.  Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.”  ~Mark Twain

“And to you. We sure need a good one.”

That’s what a friend just texted me when I texted him to say “Happy New Year.” I’m surprised and not surprised by how many of my friends feel the same way (the sentiment seems to be the status du jour on Facebook).

I haven’t written about it here until now, but on October 20th I was in a pretty big car accident. I don’t want to go into it now, but let’s just say that I was forced to participate in someone else’s accident as he plowed into me at what was probably more than 80 miles per hour as he was desperately trying to get somewhere else far too quickly. I’ve been dealing with that in the nine weeks since, and I’m almost ready to write some more about it here — maybe — but here’s the big takeaway:

I’m glad to be here. Really.

And while I know there’s a lot of struggle going on out there, around the country and certainly around the world, most of us have it better than we know.

From the perspective of someone who gets as many meals a day as he likes, who has a place to live and a life to share with family and friends, who has the pleasure of books and music and the arts, who is engaged in his community and who has, for the most part, his health, 2010 was a pretty good year. Will 2011 be better for many of us? I think so. Will it be worse for others? Absolutely. But whatever the future, that artificially carved into 12 months future, holds for us, we should make the most of it and most of us should recognize our general good fortune.

That Rolling Rock retains the tagline “Same As It Ever Was” even though they changed the formula. It’s four years later and I’m still outraged. The people behind Rolling Rock are frauds and mountebanks and they brew a crummy beer. I contemn them with all my vigor.

(And yes, it’s 8 p.m. and I’m still at my office writing and I’m wishing I had a real Rolling Rock.)

Stan Lee turned 88 yesterday and he’s still going strong. Further proof:  Earlier this month, the Los Angeles Business Journal recognized him as one of their “Eight Over 80”:  business people in Los Angeles in their 80’s still leading professional lives. Here’s the piece.

Yesterday on KPCC, one of the local national public radio stations, I caught a nifty little profile of Van Dyke Parks, another of my preferred musicians. Parks hangs out in the best of company — Brian Wilson in his prime (and since), and David Thomas of Pere Ubu, to name just two — and I enormously appreciate his influence wherever he spreads it.

Here’s the transcript of the profile, which ends with the writer putting out the little paper sailboat that perhaps Van Dyke Parks might tour with his (only now) acclaimed album, “Song Cycle.” Yes, here’s hoping.

This quote from the Parks suggests why I’ve always been interested in him:

“We’re still learning not to laugh at funerals,” said Parks. “Especially those of people who are leaving us something. We are supposed to cry. But the arts demands something else, often. Sometimes they suggest uncertainty.” It’s that uncertainty in music — discord, contrapuntalism,”mistakes,” and other elements that allow the music to break free of rigid formal demands — that’s interesting. Witness the  lyrics Parks supplies for the Beach Boys’ “Surf’s Up”:

A diamond necklace played the pawn
Hand in hand some drummed along, oh
To a handsome man and baton
A blind class aristocracy
Back through the op’ra glass you see
The pit and the pendulum drawn
Columnated ruins domino

Canvass the town and brush the backdrop
Are you sleeping?

Hung velvet overtaken me
Dim chandelier awaken me
To a song dissolved in the dawn
The music hall a costly bow
The music all is lost for now
To a muted trumperter swan
Columnated ruins domino

I don’t care that they don’t make “sense” or that Mike Love remains outraged. The sonic shape of the words demands the elegaic reading given them in the Beach Boys’ recording.  The surf’s up, and something (youthful innocence?) is washing away:

Surf’s Up
Aboard a tidal wave
Come about hard and join
The young and often spring you gave
I heard the word
Wonderful thing
A children’s song

I hope I get the chance to see Van Dyke Parks play live.

More coverage of the recently departed Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart.

Here’s a nice remembrance in the New York Times.

Finally, if you’re going to read just one piece to understand the appeal of Captain Beefheart to those relatively few of us who care, this is the one to read. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Randall Roberts notes: “on first listen the best of Van Vliet and band, even 40 years later, sounds wrong – but only in the way that, say, Marcel Duchamp’s cubist painting ‘Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2’ looks wrong.” That’s exactly right. As Van Vliet noted in a radio interview 30 years ago, the 4/4 mandate of rock music sounded so boring, and so he wanted to break that up. And that’s something he did to great distinction with every album.

Courtesy of the Huffington Post, herewith a Venn diagram for the three people who get paid to touch your junk.