TVD | Powder n' Paint

I had a couple of emails yesterday inquiring about my Mom who some of you might recall has Alzheimer’s and moved to a nursing home last July.

If there’s an upside to the disease, it’s that it eventually steals your memory along with your desire to maintain connections with things or people with whom you’d normally miss when taken from your home and placed in a senior’s facility, for example.

So for my mother, there's no longing for her home, her belongings, her dog, her brother, ... or me. To know this woman all of my life as one who is just so particular and choosy with aesthetics entirely of her own making which had to be maintained with some expense—it’s the oddest thing to witness and get your head around.

I’m told however that when she’s asked by the nurses or aides at the nursing home if she needs anything, her response is often, “A good looking man,” so I know some synapses are still firing like they used to.


Along with her not missing much of anything, she’s not missing the piano above which I wrote about here last summer.

Her house has been sold and she and my late father’s possessions will all be boxed to move to storage for when I have a house of my own, but for the life of me I cannot figure out what to do with this 105 year old piano. I thought that to move it to the nursing home would be a grand karmic gesture as she can still play quite well, but they’re wary of housing it for a number of obvious reasons.

To know my mother is to understand just how important this instrument is to her and I’m unable to fathom selling it while she walks the earth – however slowly at this point.

I often wonder about this endeavor here online and think about all of this work and coordination just to go on and on daily about ...music. I mean, how frivolous. But like the cotton commercial jingle—it’s the fabric of our lives.

So, if anyone has any ideas about the piano, I’m all ears.



Aztec Camera - Still On Fire (Mp3)
Friends Again - State Of Art (Mp3)
The Call - Everywhere I Go [Extended] (Mp3)
The Wake - Plastic Flowers (Mp3)
The Buggles - Johnny Riding On The Monorail (Mp3)

TVD's Musique Non Pop | Teepee 'Morals'

Our friend Brandon, one half of the dynamic DJ duo behind We Fought The Big One returns with our first Musique Non Pop of the new decade. —Ed.


Teepee - Morals (Sensei, 2009 LP only)

So much of modern criticism is skewed toward the comparative. It’s a lazy and sometimes thuggish situation geared more towards the display of the critic’s own hierophant-like knowledge of the modern record. But, besides being somewhat petty, this approach fails on at least two major levels.

First, the writerly one—which is that the product is unreadable (the English major in me gets more upset by this than most, probably.) But the other, more important failure is that it fails completely to capture the process, the craft and the spirit of the work it was intent on translating into the written word.

Thus the comparative review can only ever truly minimize by association that what it might want to lionize and really fucking miss the boat on what it’s like to struggle with something just to get it right. This, the best of the bands do, laboring long hours on a record, only to get Velvet Underground dropped in their laps by someone still living at Hotel Mom.


I have to admit to having come up short when trying to review the new album by Teepee, the alias of Miami’s own, Eric Lopez-Delgado. I haven’t been able to do it justice in any way. I toyed with a scissor kick off a Marshall stack while fist-pumping “it’s fucking awesome” approach—including rampaging through the thesaurus, picking out every juicy synonym for moody, rocking, opaque, blastular etc. I even thought of being the lazy shit and name-dropping a certain mid-eighties art-rock band from Illinois, but killed that immediately (See paragraph 1.)

I settled ultimately on the narrative. In this case, in the depth of the night, there came the realization. How can one write about sensibility? How can you properly capture, in words the thing that allows an artist to simply know how long the cues between songs should be and just what order those songs should be in? And how those songs should be so haunting way beyond the coolness you feel about owning a labor of love record by someone obviously without an ounce of rock star cynicism?

I should shut up now and let you listen to the song. But allow me to end this review in an ellipsis and question mark…..?

Teepee - I Told You So (Mp3)