…”There are books for when you’re bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you’re calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you’re sad. And there are books for when you’re happy. There are books for when you’re thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you’re desperate. The latter are the kind of books Ulises Lima and Belano wanted to write. A serious mistake, as we’ll soon see. Let’s take, for example, an average reader, a cool-headed, mature, educated man leading a more or less healthy life. A man who buys books and literary magazines. So there you have him. This man can read things that are written for when you’re calm, but he can also read any other kind of book with a critical eye, dispassionately, without absurd or regrettable complicity. That’s how I see it. I hope I’m not offending anyone. Now let’s take the desperate reader, who is presumably the audience for the literature of desperation. What do we see? First: the reader is an adolescent or an immature adult, insecure, all nerves. He’s the kind of fucking idiot (pardon my language) who committed suicide after reading Werther. Second, he’s a limited reader. Why limited? That’s easy: because he can only read the literature of desperation, or books for the desperate, which amounts to the same thing, the kind of person or freak who’s unable to read all the way through In Search of Lost Time, for example, or The Magic Mountain (a paradigm of calm, serene, complete literature, in my humble opinion), or for that matter, Les Miserables or War and Peace. Am I making myself clear? Good. So I talked to them, told them, warned them, alerted them to the dangers they were facing. It was like talking to a wall. Furthermore: desperate readers are like the California gold mines. Sooner or later they’re exhausted! Why? It’s obvious! One can’t live one’s whole life in desperation. In the end the body rebels, the pain becomes unbearable, lucidity gushes out in great cold spurts. The desperate reader (and especially the desperate poetry reader, who is insufferable, believe me) ends up by turning away from books. Inevitably he ends up becoming just plain desperate. Or he’s cured! And then, as part of the regenerative process, he returns slowly – as if wrapped in swaddling cloths, as if under a rain of dissolved sedatives – he returns, as I was saying, to a literature written for cool, serene readers, with their heads set firmly on their shoulders. That’s what’s called (by me, if nobody else) the passage from adolescence to adulthood. And by that I don’t mean that once someone has become a cool-headed reader he no longer reads books written for desperate readers. Of course he reads them! Especially if they’re good or decent or recommended by a friend. But ultimately they bore him! Ultimately, that literature of resentment, full of sharp instruments and lynched messiahs, doesn’t pierce his heart the way a calm page does. I told them so. I warned them. I showed them the technically perfect page…..”

2 years on, and yet to reach the summit of The Magic Mountain.

One rainy day.

NEWSFLASH: We play HOUSE OF BLUES (Main Room) next Thursday night for the 1st time. It’s part of the DALLAS ROCKS! Series and the show is FREE.99.
I have a thousand tickets to pass out.
E-mail me: HOYOTOHO@GMAIL.com and we’ll make sure to get you some.
If anyone wants to help us pass these babies out that’d be stellar!

I’ll explain.
So, yesterday morn the AC @ the HOYOTOHO Ranch went kaputz and we were left to rehearse in a heat so enveloping that by the end everyone’s jeans were drenched in sweat and coated in a thick layer of salt. I thought nothing strange of it until last night when, while talking about medieval tales w/ HOYOTOHO Musicologist #1, Mr. Thiago Nascimento, my thoughts wandered even further back…to Sodom & Gomorrah and Lot’s wife. THEN! THE EPIPHANY! THE FIRE! THE BRIMSTONE! THE HEAT! THE PILLAR OF SALT! Brothers & Sisters, Could it be that Lot’s wife sweat to death?

Moral of the story: Keep cool and make sure to have a wineskin on your person at all times.

Don’t leave home without it!

See you there mon frere!

Unknown Mortal Orchestra: “Ffunny Ffrends”
Josh T. Pearson “Country Dumb”
Marcella Emille “falling apart”
Trombone Shorty “Hurricane Season”
TV On The Radio “DLZ”
Allen Ginsberg reads “HOWL”
Burial “Fostercare”
Simon & Garfunkel “Keep The Customer Satisfied”
David Lynch Feat. Julee Cruse “Mysteries of Love”
Jean Sibelius “Symphony #5 in E-Flat”
HOYOTOHO “Dreamin”