I’ve tried a lot of other things through the years — like butabolidin, which is what they give to horses. And D.M.S.O. — dimethylsulfoxide. Whitey Ford used that for a while. You rub it on with a plastic glove and as soon as it gets on your arm you can taste it in your mouth. It’s not available anymore, though. Word is it can blind you. I’ve also taken shots — novocaine, cortisone and xylocaine. Baseball players will take anything. If you had a pull that would guarantee a pitcher 20 wins but might take five years off his life, he’d take it.
More present throughout are the omnipresent amphetamines:
We’ve been running short of greenies. We don’t get them from the trainer, because greenies are against club policy. So we get them from players on other teams who have friends who are doctors, or friends who know where to get greenies. One of our lads is going to have a bunch of greenies mailed to him by some of the guys on the Red Sox. And, to think you can spend five years in jail for giving your friend a marijuana cigarette.
And earlier:
There were 30,000 people in the park and it was exactly the kind of day in which you want to look good against your old club and in honor of the occasion Gary put down at least three greenies. They didn’t do him a bit of good.
Finally finished playing catch-up with many of my to-read bookmarks:
o Fantastic LA Weekly piece about Mark Mothersbaugh and Devo’s continued devolution. (“As an antidote, he and fellow Devo member Bob Casale in the beginning used to sneak subliminal messages into their scores. The first few times they were nervous, says Mothersbaugh. ‘I think it was a Keds commercial where we put in “Question authority.” I remember the people from Keds were tapping their pens on the table and the music’s playing, and it gets to the subliminal message, and I remember I flushed bright red. I looked over at this guy and he’s going, “Yeah! Yeah! Go go go!”‘”
o The McLovin12four screenname turned up on my buddy list, too.
o The Times writes a brief history of Webster Hall, which would be a wonderful place to see music if it wasn’t killing rock and roll in New York City.
o David Byrne’s Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists–and Megastars.
o The Avant Garde Project provides an archive of out-of-print experimental LPs in FLAC and mp3.
o The Times profiles WFMU’s $mall ¢hange.
o Sad/sweet dispatch about George Harrison occasionally dressing up in the old Beatles costumes.
o A long thread (c. 2005) about the manufacture and distribution of LSD on Grateful Dead tour.
o “I Got What America Needs Right Here“: a wonderful Onion editorial by and about our man for ’08, Jimmy Carter.
o A map of online communities.
o An open-source freeware version of SimCity will be included with every computer distributed by the One Laptop Per Child project. The idea of impoverished kids learning about mega-conceptual society-building through SimCity blows my mind, but I do worry about the hegemonic implications, that SimCity merely represents the Westernized/American notion of urban development, beginning with power plants and industrial zoning, as opposed to in a poorer economic sphere.
“Paperback Writer” – The Beatles (download, regular) (buy, karaoke)
Over the weekend, I asked Spupes how to create a user account on my computer with all temptation-abetting internet capabilities blocked. Instead, he told me about WriteRoom, a text editor that takes over the computer’s full screen, literally blacking out all other apps in an emulation of a no-fuss ’80s-style word processor. By necessity, a screenshot could never convey exactly what is so wonderful about this program, so I’m not gonna try. Conceptually, it raises some interesting points about the usefulness of the complex, multitask-enabling GUIs that’ve become the norm versus the efficiency of one-track productivity. Practically, it’s just awesome. Or maybe it’s just a nice change of virtually scenery after 10+ years of Microsoft word processing products. Either way, I’m looking forward to getting up tomorrow and using this.
“Texas” – Jeffrey Lewis with Jack Lewis and Anders Griffin (download) (buy)
from It’s the One’s Who’ve Cracked That the Light Shines Through (2003)
“The Murder Mystery” (Velvet Underground) – Jeffrey and Jack Lewis (download)
recorded 2002 July 31 Peel Session
“Don’t Be Upset” – Jeffrey and Jack Lewis (download) (buy)
from City and Eastern Songs (2005)
(files expire January 18th)
Besides the press release for the forthcoming Mountain Goats album, which he illustrated, I have never seen any of Jeffrey Lewis’s comics. Nonetheless, they seem such a vivid way to understand his music. On “Texas,” speech balloon call-and-response (“How’s the pizza?” “Fucking awful!”) spirals methodically into imagistic madness, ala the Velvet Underground’s “Murder Mystery” (covered by Lewis on a Peel session in 2002), or a one-sheet comic in an alt-weekly. Elsewhere, it comes through in alternatingly hilarious and narcissistic autobiography — at it’s best, both simultaneously, as on “Don’t Be Upset” — where Lewis appears, like a self-illustrated post-hippie narrator, ala Kim Deitch’s Alias the Cat. Or maybe it’s just the power of suggestion. Just knowing that Lewis is a visual artist almost makes one forget the anti-folk cuteness that marbles his urban chronicles. Whatever it is, it’s a voice, and one that’s been absurdly prolific over the past few years, with a lot to discover. (And don’t neglect his legit cartoon classic, “Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror.”)
It occurred to me the other day that this is the first primary season of my life without HST around to bring a continuum of sanity/humanity (stylized, as it were) to Presidential campaign coverage. Drag.
There is something seriously bent, when you think on it, in the notion that a man with good sense would race out of his peaceful mountain home in Colorado and fly off in a frenzy like some kind of electrified turkey buzzard to spend three or four days being carried around the foulest sections of New England like a piece of meat, to watch another man, who says he wants to be President, embarrassing a lot of people by making them shake his hand outside factory gates at sunrise.
1. “New Year’s Eve” – Stephan Mathieu and Ekkehard Ehlers (from Heroin)
2. “New Year” – The Breeders (from Last Splash)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “He’s A Bad Boy” – Carole King
5. “Pochahantas” – Neil Young (from Chrome Dreams)
6. “Static #1” – Beck (from Radio 1 session)
7. “Blue Moon of Kentucky” – Ray Charles (from Complete Country & Western)
8. “Going to San Diego” – Allen Ginsberg (recorded 11/1971 Record Plant, NYC)
9. “Heshey’s Miniatures” – Corn Mo (from I Hope You Win!)
10. “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels” – Kitty Wells
11. “From A Window To A Screen” – the dB’s (from Repercussion)
12. “Tengazako 2” – Esau Mwamwaya
13. “Amok!” – Evan Ziporyn and Gamelan Galak Tika (from Evan Ziporyn/Gamelan Galak Tika)
14. “Mixed Bizness (Cornelius remix)” – Beck (from Mixed Bizness EP)
15. “Shooter” – Lil’ Wayne feat. Robin Clarke
16. “Side A (cLOUDDEAD #4; Jimmy Breeze 10”) – cLOUDDEAD (from 2002/07/17 Peel Session)
17. “We Bid You Goodnight” – Animal Collective (from unknown date, Old Market Hove, East Sussex, UK)
18. “As We Go Along” – The Monkees (from Head OST)
o Nicholas Meriwether on the Grateful Dead moniker: “steeped in scholarship, near universal in human culture and history, and still capable — as one Deadhead put it — of alienating parents.” (via his introduction to All Graceful Instruments, an anthology of Deadhead academia) (PDF)
o Chuck Klosterman on why not reading Harry Potter will make him culturally irrelevant at some point in the future.
o Why dudes like sappy movies, as long as they’re made up (and vice-versa).
o J. Hoberman on Bob Dylan’s films.
o David Cross on selling out. This is something of a genre: the confessional post about why doing X isn’t selling out, or — if it is — why it doesn’t matter a damn. (See also: Kevin Barnes.) Somebody could edit an anthology of this stuff.
o Steve Jobs at home, circa 1982.
“Box of Rain” – The Grateful Dead (download) (buy)
from American Beauty (1970)
The Lorimer/Metropolitan station connects the L train to the G train, or Williamsburg to Park Slope. It is, needless to say, a Brooklynite hub. After discovering Grateful Dead graffiti there last year, I had another late night Dead encounter, this time with a drunk hipster.
At around 2 in the morning, over Thanksgiving weekend, he wandered onto the Brooklyn-bound side, carrying a mostly empty bottle of wine, and singing at the top of his lungs. His bellows slapped off the tile, making the lyrics that much more indistinguishable as he sang along with his iPod. I slipped off my headphones, curious to hear what he was singing: “Box of Rain.” Needless to say, I started singing along.
Dude had owned American Beauty in high school but was recently inspired to dust it off thanks to the concluding episode of Paul Feig and Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks, in which Lindsay Weir discovers the Dead and skips out on a summertime academic summit to head off on Dead tour.
Following my debacle with the HIP website, I soon ran afoul of their legions of contradictory phone-bank loons, two of which approved a simple physical with a Manhattan doctor, and one of which added a few hundred dollars of additional charges to my account even though I’d already shelled out the agreed co-pay.
Thankfully, I have a secret force on my side, who revealed his identity in a manner most clever amid a thick tangle of bureaucracy that (I think) means I won:
v. The decision to overturn for the processing of the claim was rendered by Senior Clams Examiner, who is experienced in claims related issues.
The Senior Clams Examiner! Calloo! Callay! I’d like to think he is working away at his desk right now, high in some post-modern box overlooking a deserted midtown avenue, his office gloriously clean and new and tasteful. He empties a bucket of clams on the clean glass before him, the residue of previous loads miraculously wiped away by the futuristic self-cleaning furniture.
The Senior Clams Examiner praises Jah for the dumbass HIP executive who didn’t know the difference between oysters and clams and hired him to look for pearls anyway. He will be home in time to put his son to bed. He smiles, and grants his benevolence on a hapless sucker who didn’t realize that just because a hospital is affiliated with HIP doesn’t mean that all of its doctors are, too.
Putting the appeal in a pneumatic tube, the Senior Clams Examiner returns his attention to the batch of mollusks before him. When he finishes, he slides a few into his briefcase for a midnight treat with his wife, and leaves the rest for the robots to clean up.
I sincerely hope you are all weathering the season with minimum
weather-induced mope and maximum nog.
Here are 111 songs — old faves, new friends, Dylan covers, shuffle-zen,
etc.. — I have thought ginchy since the last time I did one of these (and
in a more compatible file format, too): http://www.megaupload.com/?d=F0AXAKIF
Sorry about all the ads & clutter on MegaUpload, here’s how to navigate it:
1. Click above link.
2. Ignore flashing lights, find code next to MegaUpload logo, enter code into special box, click “download.”
3. Wait 45 seconds (sing rousing chorus of “Contact” while watching onscreen
counter, waving arms), click “Free download.”
4. Save! Go!
…when on harddrive, click on file happyholidaysxojj.zip
Helper monkeybots are on call in the comments section to answer any technical
questions!
(Thanks to Boomy for many Holiday Sounds from the Way Out.)
1. “Silent Night” – Ween (from Merry Little Christmas compilation)
2. “A Very Special Christmas, part 2” – Wayne Butane
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “Christmas at Ground Zero” – Weird Al Yankovic (from Polka Party)
5. “In the Hot Sun of A Christmas Day” – Caetano Veloso (from Caetano Veloso (1971))
6. “Santa Claus Is Ska-Ing To Town” – Granville Williams Orchestra (from Trojan Christmas box set)
7. “Sugar Rum Cherry” – Duke Ellington (from Three Suites)
8. “It’s Christmas Time” – The Qualities (from Sun Ra: The Singles compilation)
9. “Reindeer Boogie” – Hank Snow
10. “Run Rudolph Run” – Keith Richards (from Run Rudolph Run single)
11. “Rock n Roll Santa” – Yo La Tengo (from Merry Christmas from… EP)
12. “12 Days of Christmas” – Twin Peaks cast (from KROQ Acoustic Christmas compilation)
13. “Christmas With William S.” – The Olivia Tremor Control (from Singles and Beyond compilation)
14. “The Priest, They Called Him” – William S. Burroughs and Kurt Cobain (from The Priest, They Called Him EP)
15. “Turkey Song” – Stephan Mathieu and Ekkehard Ehlers (from Heroin)
16. “Blue Christmas” – Ernest Tubb
The Frow Show will return tomorrow with a special Christmas in Bourgwick episode. For now, Steve Martin’s “The Bohemians,” from Cruel Shoes (1979). Kinda makes ya nostalgic for a simpler age, eh?
Were they rebels? Were they artists? Were they outcasts from society? They were all of these. They were The Bohemians.
These bohemians, Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Williams, and their seven children, Biff, Tina, Sparky, Louise, Tuffy, Mickey, and Biff Number Two, lived in a notorious artists’ colony and planned community.
Naturally, the bohemians’ existence thrived on creativity. Early in the morning, Mrs. Williams would rise and create breakfast. Then, Mr. Williams, inspired by his wife’s limitless energy, would rush off to a special room and create tiny hairs in a sink. The children would create things, too. But being temperamental artists, they would often flush them away without a second thought.
But the bohemians’ creativity didn’t stop there. Mr. Williams would then rush downtown and create reams and reams of papers with numbers on them and send them out to other bohemians who would create special checks to him with figures like $7.27 written on them.
At home, the children would be creating unusual music, using only their voices to combine in avant-garde, atonal melodies.
Yes, these were the bohemians. A seething hot-bed of rebellion — the artists, the creators of all things that lie between good and bad.
When you ask a question or make a statement it’s either that you know the subject that you’re talking about or you’re trying to express something without the persons you’re talking to changing their views of it. You try to make their view of it more clear to them so they can stay more natural, rather than to think that you’re just trying to get them to repeat something to make you feel more secure or something.
Coleman gets at the artificial casualness of the typical interview, where the interviewer has to figure out how to best ask a question without leading the witness, so to speak. Often, this involves some sort of carefully managed reduction of the questioner’s knowledge of his subject. Despite wanting an interview to flow like a natural conversation, the very relationship between interviewer and subject makes it virtually impossible.
“Mr. Tambourine Man” – Bob Dylan (download)
recorded 30 July 1999, Jones Beach Amphitheater, Wantagh, NY (download whole show)
(file expires December 24th)
(And… reentry complete.) A friend of mine once negatively characterized Bob Dylan’s live vocals as “UPdownUPdownUPdown.” And not inaccurately. But, Dylan’s too ornery to alternate so blandly (except when he is). It’s like Mike Gordon said — speaking of criticisms that the Grateful Dead just ran up and down scales together — you have to know when to go down and when to go up. Given Dylan’s gnarled voice — part affected, part acquired — even the up/downs sometimes get blurred, which is why I’m so frabjously psyched about this summer ’99 soundboard, in which Dylan cuts through completely.
In Chronicles, Dylan spins a probably bullshit yarn to describe his improvised vocal melodies, taught to him by Lonnie Johnson, involving “an odd- instead of an even-numbered system” and “a highly controlled system of playing [that] relates to the notes of a scale, how they combine numerically, how they form melodies out of triplets and are axiomatic to the rhythm and the chord changes.” Which is where the UPdownUPdown comes from. And the fastSLOWfastSLOW, and all the layered combinations.
At its best, though, it all congeals into melody, as it did during shows I saw in 1999 and 2000, when Dylan’s Larry Campbell-dominated band blew both Paul Simon and Phil Lesh’s genial revues off the summer shed stages. This “Mr. Tambourine Man” resists singalongs and stumbles, almost surprised at itself, around a new melody, with all the revelation that entails. Dylan never quite sings it directly — which is sort of the point, like an improvisation unresolved — but still delivers appropriate drama. This is what I love about live Dylan. It can be elusive, and I’m glad I finally have a solid example I can point to. If you don’t like it, well, there it is.
So, who’s got the awesome Never Ending Tour soundboards? Sendspace that shit up. (Thx to Ace Cowboy for digging this one up.)
“I Wanna Be Your Partner” – Bob Dylan (download)
from Dimestore Medicine bootleg, c. 1966
“Fourth Time Around” – Yo La Tengo (download) (buy)
from I’m Not There OST
(files expire December 21st)
(Re-entry continues…) Yo La Tengo’s two Bob Dylan covers on the soundtrack to Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There — “I Wanna Be Your Lover” and “Fourth Time Around” — constitute a tiny sub-category in Dylan’s work: response songs to the Beatles. The former lifts its chorus from Lennon/McCartney so-cast-off-they-let-Ringo-sing “I Wanna Be Your Man” (supplanting Dylan’s earlier draft, the proto-PC “I Wanna Be Your Partner”). “Fourth Time Around,” meanwhile, is Dylan’s rewrite of “Norwegian Wood,” with a similar plot (cheekily oblique conversation about an affair) set to a similar melody in a similar mood. Dylan’s version is way more sly, of course, with its wry put-downs (“your words are not clear, you better spit out your gum”) and the snotty/Britty crutch/crotch double entendre at its end (“I didn’t ask for your crutch, now don’t ask for mine”). Intentional choice on YLT’s part to mirror Haynes’ meta-textual orgy? Only the nose knows for sure. The nose being Ringo.
“I’ll Keep It With Mine” – Yo La Tengo (download)
recorded 30 December 2005, Maxwell’s, Hoboken, NJ
(file expires December 20th)
Sleep. Soon. In the meantime, to aid in the ever-so-gradual reentry, the Georgia-sung “I’ll Keep It With Mine” from the stunning sleeper show the night before New Year’s, 2005. Purdy Nico arrangement (superior to Dylan’s clunkier demo, oddly), aided by Rolling Thunder/sessionman stringdude David Mansfield. Sleep. Now. But first, maybe headphones. (Thx to Neil & Brandon for the tunes.)
(My now-complete Maxwell’s reports: part 1, part 2.)
Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s
11 December 2007
*(Hanukah, night 8)*
Times New Viking and David Cross opened.
Mix disc by Ira.
Night Falls on Hoboken
Eight Day Weekend (Gary “U.S.” Bonds)
Double Dare
Cone of Silence
Shadows
The Weakest Part
Mr. Tough
Paul Is Dead
Stockholm Syndrome
I Should Have Known Better
Autumn Sweater (organless version)
Watch Out For Me, Ronnie
Blue Line Swinger
Love Power (Herb Hartic/Norman Blaoman) (with Hanukah shout-outs)
*(encore)* with Howard Kaylan of the Turtles/Flo & Eddie
Hungry Heart (Bruce Springsteen) (with Beth Murphy of Times New Viking on keyboards)
You Baby (P.F. Sloan/Steve Barri)
One Potato, Two Potato (The Crossfires)
Love Songs in the Night (Michael Brown)
Metal Guru (T-Rex)
She’d Rather Be With Me (The Turtles)
Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s
10 December 2007
*(Hanukah, night 7)*
The New Pornographers and Andy Blitz opened.
Mix disc by Yoshitomo Nara.
TV Party (Black Flag) (sung as “Dreidel Party”)
Everyday
From A Motel 6
The Room Got Heavy
False Alarm
Beanbag Chair
Mr. Tough
Magnet (NRBQ) (with Jon Wurster of Superchunk on drums)
Saturday (with JW)
Sugarcube
The Story of Jazz
We’re An American Band
Mushroom Cloud of Hiss
You Can Have It All (George McCrea) (all on drums)
*(encore)* with Roy Loney of the Flamin’ Groovies on vocals and Bruce Bennett on guitar
Have You Seen My Baby (Randy Newman)
High Flyin’ Baby (Flamin’ Groovies)
Teenage Head (Flamin’ Groovies)
Slow Death (Flamin’ Groovies)
(also: my reviews so far.)
Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s
9 December 2007
*(Hanukah, night 6)*
Redd Kross and Heather Lawless opened.
Mix disc by Eye.
Eight Days A Week (The Beatles)
I Should Have Known Better
Autumn Sweater
Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind >
Last Days of Disco
Today is the Day (fast)
Sometimes I Don’t Get You
The Weakest Part
Demons
Out the Window
Drug Test
Tom Courtenay
I Heard You Looking (with Joe Puleo on organ)
Our Way To Fall
*(encore)*
September Gurls (Alex Chilton) (with Redd Kross)
Bus Stop (The Hollies) (with Redd Kross)
Who Loves the Sun (Velvet Underground) (with Redd Kross)
Calling Dr. Love (KISS) (with Redd Kross)
My Little Corner of the World (Bob Hilliard/Lee Pockriss) (with Ira’s mom)
Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s
8 December 2007
*(Hanukah, night 5)*
Dew-Claw, Sarah Vowell, and Amy Poehler opened.
Mix disc by Georgia.
Barnaby, Hardly Working
Shaker
Stockholm Syndrome
Tears Are In Your Eyes
Season of the Shark
Don’t Say A Word (Hot Chicken #2)
Song For Mahlia
The River of Water (with Dave Rick of Dew-Claw/ex-YLT on guitar)
Sometime In The Morning (Carole King/Gerry Goffin) (with DR and Stephen Hunking on vocals/guitar)
E.T.I. (Blue Oyster Cult) (with DR and SH)
Mr. Tough
Big Day Coming
Watch Out For Me, Ronnie
The Story of Yo La Tango
*(encore)* with Alex Chilton on guitar and vocals
I’ve Had It (The Bell-Notes)
The Oogum Boogum Song (Brenton Wood)
Let Me Get Close To You (Carole King/Gerry Goffin)
Femme Fatale (Velvet Underground)
Baby Strange (T-Rex)
Hey Little Child (Alex Chilton)
Government Center (Modern Lovers)
Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s
7 December 2007
*(Hanukah, night 4)*
Endless Boogie and Todd Barry opened.
Mix disc by James.
Cherry Chapstick
Evanescent Psychic Pez Drop
Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind
Little Eyes
The Crying of Lot G
The Summer
The Weakest Part
Beanbag Chair
Detouring America With Horns
I Should Have Known Better
Sugarcube
Tom Courtenay
Heroin (Velvet Underground, Roky Erickson arrangement) (with Jesper Eklow of Endless Boogie on guitar)
Take Care (Alex Chilton)
*(encore)* with Alex Chilton on guitar and vocals
Let Me Get Close To You (Carole King/Gerry Goffin)
‘Til The End of the Day (The Kinks)
Time Is On My Side (Jerry Ragovoy) (with Tammy Lynn Michaels on vocals)
Femme Fatale (Velvet Underground)
Hey Little Child (Alex Chilton)
Jeepster (T-Rex) (with Todd Barry on drums)
Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s
6 December 2007
*(Hanukah, night 3)*
The dB’s and Eugene Mirman opened.
Mix disc by Todd Abramson.
Nuclear War (Sun Ra)
Five Cornered Drone (Crispy Duck)
The Race Is On Again
Autumn Sweater
The Weakest Part
Mr. Tough
No Water (with Chris Stamey of the dB’s on guitar)
I Wanna Be Your Lover (Bob Dylan) (with CS on organ, Gene Holder on guitar, Will Rigby on 2nd drums)
Cast A Shadow (Beat Happening) (with GH and WR on drums)
Don’t Have To Be So Sad (with WR)
Tom Courtenay
Styles of the Times
Watch Out For Me, Ronnie
I Heard You Looking (with Joe Puleo on organ)
*(encore)*
Heart Full of Soul (The Yardbirds) (with CS)
The Question (Will Rigby) (with WR)
Solitary Man (Neil Diamond) (with Jim James of My Morning Jacket on vocals and guitar)
Secret Agent Man (P.F. Sloan/Steve Barri) (with JJ)
Hard Luck Woman (KISS) (with JJ)
Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s
5 December 2007
*(Hanukah, night 2)*
The Clean and John Oliver opened.
Mix disc by David Cross.
Green Arrow
Eight Day Weekend (Gary “U.S.” Bonds)
Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind
Stockholm Syndrome
The Room Got Heavy
Beanbag Chair
Winter A Go Go
Nowhere Near
This Diamond Ring (Gary Lewis)
Decora
Upside Down
Deeper Into Movies (with Hamish Kilgour of the Clean on 2nd drums)
Big Day Coming (fast) > (with HK)
Little Honda (The Beach Boys) (with HK)
*(encore)*
Blitzkrieg Bop (instrumental) (The Ramones)
Easy Action (T-Rex) (with David Kilgour and Bob Scott of the Clean on vocals)
Seemingly Stranded (David Kilgour) (with DK, BS and Mac McCaughan of Superchunk on organ)
What Am I Gonna Do? (The Dovers) (with DK, BS, and MM)
Blitzkrieg Bop (The Ramones) (with BS)
Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s
4 December 2007
*(Hanukah, night 1)*
Versus and Jon Benjamin and Jon Glaser opened.
Mix disc by Matmos.
Carnival Time (Al Johnson) (sung as “Hanukah Time,” with Mike, Jeff, and Steve on horns)
Mr. Tough (with Mike, Jeff, and Steve on horns)
We’re An American Band
Damage (with James Baluyut of Versus on guitar)
Madeleine
She’s My Best Friend (Velvet Underground)
Flying Lesson (Hot Chicken #1)
Alyda (Georgia on keys)
I Feel Like Going Home (Georgia on keys)
From A Motel 6
Sugarcube
Sudden Organ
Watch Out For Me, Ronnie
The Story of Yo La Tango
*(encore)*
Autumn Sweater (with Jon Glaser as “Kim” on vocals)
What’s My Name (The Clash) (with Mark Arm of Mudhoney on vocals)
Operation (Circle Jerks) (with Mark Arm)
Too Animalistic (Angry Samoans) (with Mark Arm)
Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love (Van Halen) (with Mark Arm)
Cabaret (Fred Ebb/John Kander) (with Mark Arm)
1. “It Takes A Lot to Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” – Yo La Tengo (from Wingding BBC session)
2. “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” – Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (from I’m Not There OST)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “Faust Arp” – Radiohead (from thumbs_down webcast)
5. “Bodies” – Tunng (from Comments of the Inner Chorus)
6. “I’ve Seen It All” – Bonnie “Prince” Billy (from Ask Forgiveness)
7. “Kim Smoltz” – Ween (from The Mollusk demos)
8. “Walcott” – Vampire Weekend (from Blue CD-R)
9. “Night Comes Creeping” – The Screaming Trees (from Anthology)
10. “Playing In the Band” – The Grateful Dead (from 1979/12/28 Oakland Coliseum)
11. “Nuclear War (version 1)” – Yo La Tengo (from Nuclear War EP)
“Walcott” – Vampire Weekend (download)
from Blue CD-R
(file expires December 10th)
Gak, there are so many reasons why I wanna hate Vampire Weekend. Despite my love for Graceland and Remain in Light, the idea of nostalgia for ’80s world-pop sung seems kinda repellant, let alone revived by a buncha Ivy Leaguers singing about being Ivy Leaguers. Plus, they seem a perfect embodiment of the indie archipelago’s shift towards what once would’ve been considered totally goddamn bland/lite. There are times when Vampire Weekend might as well be the Gin Blossoms. Geeze, fuck me in the beard.
At first, “Walcott” was a perfect summary of all that. I mean, how entitled do you have to be to sing about being bored at Cape Cod?
But it’s such a winning hook — “outta Cape Cod, outta Cape Cod tonight” — that it becomes the sonic equivalent of a recklessly charming preppy, all windswept hair and big smile and kinda creepily Aryan. Really, though, bling is in, and there’s a certain cross-cultural egalitarianism in the concept. For that, Vampire Weekend communicate it in a different way than their hip-hop equivalents. For them, instead of strife and drugs and violence and struggle, it’s about safety and warmth. Fuzzy, even. Certainly, the channeling of the ’80s — childhood for the band’s presumed 20something listeners — doesn’t hurt. All that comes part and parcel with the songs, though, which linger, linger, linger.
The 2007 La Superette DIY arts/holiday fair commences this weekend. I will be selling a small collection titled In the Autumn of the Island and other stories, each with a Polaroid. You should go.
!!!!!La Superette celebrates 10 years of making, shopping, and wrapping!!!!!!
Please join us for this year’s festive events all held at chashama’s
Times Square location:
112 West 44th Street
New York, NY 10036
http://www.chashama.org
La Superette 2007 is brought to you by Ignivomous Inc, (www.ignivomous.org)
La Superette 2007 crew
Director: Tali Hinkis
Producer: Kyle Lapidus
Webmaster: Ron Rosenman
Graphics: Netta Rabin and Karen Lawler
Special Projects: Douglas Irving Repetto
PR: Evelyne Buhler
Superator: Amy Benson
Stage Manager: Ryan Welsh
Video Curator: Susan Agliata
Chashama Liason: Jenny Rogers
Only in print: Paste #38 (The National cover): Todd Haynes/I’m Not There feature, Marjane Satrapi/Persepolis feature, Cuts and Paste singles column, film reviews of Redacted and Starting Out in the Evening, year-end blurblets on The Darjeeling Limited, Persepolis, Margot at the Wedding, Ghosts of Cité Soleil, preview blurblet on Be Kind Rewind.
December/January Relix (Beastie Boys cover): album reviews of I’m Not There OST, Os Mutantes, The Dragons; DVD reviews of Help! and Bob Dylan: The Other Side of the Mirror
Not quite print/not quite web:
several reviews — possibly/probably including CD reviews of Woody Guthrie and the Akron/Family and a book review of Noise/Music: A History — are in Relix‘s digital-only October issue. Registration and proprietary format load-time patience required. (I don’t have the latter.) No direct URLs, blech.
1. answering machine message – MVB
2. “Preparando el Marck5” – Meteoro (from Latinamericarpet: Exploring the Vinyl Warp of Latin American Psychedelia, v. 1 compilation)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “This Time Tomorrow” – The Kinks (from Lola vs. Powerman and the Money-Go-Round, part 1)
5. “Ra 2” – Sun Ra Arkestra (from 2007/11/01 Iridium, NYC)
6. “Happy Coffee Song” – Trey Anastasio (from One Man’s Trash)
7. “Vajdaszentivány” – A Hawk and a Hacksaw (from A Hawk and a Hacksaw & the Hun Hangár Ensemble EP)
8. “Mr. Tambourine Man” – Bob Dylan (from 1999/07/30 Jones Beach, NY)
9. “Worry ’til Spring” – Sprengjuhöllin (from Verum í sambandi/Worry ’til Spring)
10. “For Some Time” – RANA (from Here in the USA)
11. “Alice’s Restaurant” – Arlo Guthrie (from Alice’s Restaurant)
12. “Harvest Moon” – Of Montreal (from Sony Connect EP)
It’s the oldest and the first mass medium. And it’s the one that requires the most training to access. Novels, particularly, require serious cultural training. But it’s still the same thing — I make black marks on a white surface and someone else in another location looks at them and interprets them and sees a spaceship or whatever. It’s magic. It’s a magical thing. It’s very old magic, but it’s very thorough. The book is very well worked out, somewhat in the way that the wheel is very well worked out.
Just down the block from the late CBGB (itself an ex-flophouse bar) is the Sunshine Hotel, the last remaining men’s flophouse on the Bowery. Gorgeously documented in Flophouse, the site next to the desultory residential hotel was, until recently, a vacant lot. As the velvet-roped clubs creep up the block, the anonymous cube of white light next to the Sunshine has a horrible logic, a constant reminder of the sheer inaccuracy of the flophouse’s cheery name.
I swallowed Google’s utopian kool-aid at CES a few years ago, and — on a primal level — have a real hard time understanding any argument suggesting that Google’s mass digitization of books is anything but a profoundly good thing. But Jean-Noël Jeanneney’s Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge genuinely opens up the discussion.
Where publishers’ frustrations seemed profit driven, Jeanneney’s analysis of how Google’s economic approach manifests itself in search results is totally essential.
There is a danger that cultural populism will organize channels of access in favor of the most elementary, the least disturbing, and most commonplace products.
Elsewhere:
Despite the false appearance of gratuitousness, the private sector reaps the profits by indirectly selling the use of these books through the advertising exposure that occurs with each hit, and also by global exposure. The company expects this increasingly lucrative business, thanks to Google Book Search, to have an impact on its entire commercial offering. Naturally, what remains of such profits, after distribution to shareholders, will further accentuate the imbalance in favor of the private sector and reduce the influence of those institutions serving the common interest.
In other words, down with libraries! Having run the Bibliotheèque nationale de France for five years, I can see why Jeanneney might fret. His arguments get curmudgeonly on occasion, such as his criticism of Google’s massive book intake, saying that it is the job of a library to carefully pick what they preserve — and totally ignoring the fact that Google is digitizing collections already vetted by librarians. (Though his fear of an American dominance seems totally warranted.)
Jeanneney yearns for some sort of governmental involvement in these projects. And, really, if what he proposes ever occurs, it would be an amazing and useful advance for humanity. While it is true that the internet is a free market (which left it vulnerable to domination by a utopian company like Google), it also has the power to be something else entirely, the same unformed ether it always was. (Maybe this is a particularly American way of approaching the basic metaphor of the ‘net: the old, unsettled west.) People can preserve information with profit behind them, like Google, or because they want to, like Brewster Kahle’s archive.org.
In the case of the latter, it is little different than any national library, at least in the sense that it is an institution that earns its power in recognition. After Jeanneney’s book, I might not trust Google the way I once did, but I do trust the internet. When given the choice of freedom, the result isn’t always a market. Sometime it’s just being free.
– There is a suspension of disbelief in watching Eric Zala, Chris Strompolos, and Jayson Lamb’s shot-for-shot adaptation of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which (beginning when they were 12) took them seven years to complete. Obviously, the cast isn’t digging in the desert near Cairo. There are just too many trees. There is little believability to the firefight in the Nepal bar. But, so what? There’s a suspension of disbelief in watching the original Raiders, too. It’s just something one deals with when watching movies.
– In Raiders, though, the disbelief is smoothed over by big budget special effects and Harrison Ford’s charisma. In the Adaptation, it is the opposite, coming via the sheer low fidelity of the project: the analog video blur that coats the actors’ mid-scene age changes, or the distortion that occasionally permeates the soundtrack, a tape warble transforming a melodramatic string swell into something like a theremin moan. It intensifies the disbelief until the movie becomes about something else entirely.
– With a plane replaced by a boat, a monkey by a puppy, dramatically speaking, the big tension isn’t what’s going to happen, but how it’s going to be executed. How are they going to shoot lightning ghosts from the Ark? Or make that dude’s face melt?
– What is the “correct” order in which to screen the films in a double feature? Does one show the Adaptation first, to let the audience members’ memories guide their viewing, and then show the original, to see how it matches up? On one hand, that’s probably more satisfying from a traditionally dramatic point of view, but why should Spielberg have primacy over the marquee?
Today marked the first Sunday where the Times had no baseball stories. Caught up on some old bookmarks I’d never read and found a few more.
o A great Violet Blue story about the ownership of sex.com.
o Seth Stevenson’s travel journal from Dubai. I imagine it’s fairly impossible to file a boring story from there.
o A back door in the iTunes store to listen to Japanese pop and other delights.
o Mark Dery’s “Rememberance of tacos post” begins with the immortal lede “I’m having a señor moment,” and presents a brief history of Mexican food in the United States, which seems (to me) just another manifestation of the aesthetic/technological idea/ideal of realism.
o “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace,” a paper by Danah Boyd.
The concept of Raiders of the Lost Ark – The Adaptation got me thinking: Just as George Lucas remade the original Star Wars movies to look as of he’d had all the money he’d wanted to make them, wouldn’t it be cool if he redid the second trilogy as if he’d had none of the money he wanted?
1. “Car Commercial” – Al Kooper (from The Landlord OST)
2. “Terrapin” – Syd Barrett (from Radio One Sessions)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “Now I’m Freeking Out” – Ween
5. “Creator” – Santogold
6. “Nat Pwe” – Bobadin (from Folk and Pop Music of Mynamar (Burma), v. 3 compilation)
7. “Paper Shoes” – Yoko Ono (from Plastic Ono Band)
8. “Marigold” – Nirvana (from Heart-Shaped Box single)
9. “Blue Nile” – Alice Coltrane (from Ptah the El Daoud)
10. “Jade Like Wine” – Six Organs of Admittance (from Shelter From the Ash)
11. “Parchman Farm Blues” – Bukka White (from Anthology of American Folk Music, v. 4A compilation)
12. “Goin’ To California” – Irene Kral (from Gilles Peterson Digs America, v. 2 compilation)
13. “Braver Newer World” – Jimmie Dale Gilmore (from Braver Newer World)
14. “Harvest Moon” – Neil Young (from Harvest Moon)
My first usage of my new health care provider, HIP, went awry when they did not send me a doctor directory for some six weeks after I paid my initial membership dues. Which is to say we got off on the wrong foot.
As such, in order to find a doctor for a long overdue physical, I employed the Find A Provider function on their website, which is where I encountered this screen:
Knowing that I was looking for a Primary Care Physician and not actually angel dust, it seems pretty obvious where I was supposed to click, right?
For reasons that still elude me, it seems, the proper way to find a PCP through the HIP site is to select “non-member” and “specialist,” despite the fact that I am (in fact) a member of HIP and I am in search of a Primary Care Physician. There is no world in which this makes sense.
From this simple mistake sprung a series of confusions about the type of specialist that I was looking for, which will (sadly) have to wait for a future episode of Tragically HIP.
In 89 words, Cormac McCarthy zooms from the broadest setting of a scene down to specific detail, nails a mood, sets up a relationship between two new characters, exercises his own typographical and rhythmic voice with the smallest tweakings of grammar and syntax, and creates a momentum that leads irresistibly into the chapter that follows.
The office was on the seventeenth floor with a view over the skyline of Houston and the open lowlands to the ship channel and the bayou beyond. Colonies of silver tanks. Gas flares, pale in the day. When Wells showed up the man told him to come in and told him to shut the door. He didnt even turn around. He could see Wells in the glass. Wells shut the door and stood with his hands crossed before him at the wrist. The way a funeral director might stand.
Only in print: Paste #37 (Ryan Adams cover): feature on Marc Forster/The Kite Runner, film review of No Country For Old Men
November Relix (Tool cover): album reviews of Ween, Akron/Family, Iron and Wine, The Fiery Furnaces, and Devendra Banhart; book reviews of Oliver Sacks and Best Music Writing 2007.
October Hear/Say (KT Tunstall cover): album reviews of the Octopus Project and Mum.
“Terrapin” – Syd Barrett (download) (buy)
recorded 24 February 1970, Top Gear, BBC Radio 1
(file expires November 7th)
About 10 years ago in Copenhagen, I saw a dude walking down the street in a leather jacket with the words “Rock & Roll” written on the back in bedazzled studs. And I think he really meant it. That’s pretty much how Tom Stoppard means it in Rock ‘n’ Roll, currently in previews in New York, a play — when it boils down to it — about Czechoslovakian politics and, ahem, Syd Barrett. But, in the context of Czechoslovakia, where rock remained a revolutionary force for several decades longer than the United States (if it ever was here to begin with), the simplicity is totally excusable.
Midway through the first act, intellectual/rock dork Jan (Rufus Sewell) stomps around his room in Prague. His hair has grown out and he wears a long coat. When he turns to face his four shelves of vinyl, for a moment, he resembles nothing less than one of the proto-Commie dreamers of Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia. Rock ‘n’ Roll is in, many ways, an epilogue to that trilogy, catching the last few decades of socialism before the Velvet Revolution and the fall of the Wall, a bridge back to the modern world from the ideas Herzen, Belinsky, Turgenev and others opened up in Utopia.
As a standalone work, Rock ‘n’ Roll is a bit simplistic. Like Ethan Hawke’s clownish Michael Bakunin in the Lincoln Center Utopia, the characters do a lot of shouting about Ideas. In places, the music is predictable — cuing “Welcome to the Machine” after a typically Stoppardian debate about mind-as-spirit vs. mind-as-machine, for example. But Pink Floyd, it turns out, is still a foreign substance to legit thee-ay-terr, and the effect — mixed, Jah bless ’em, at a genuine loud volume — is at least a superficial mimicry of how Czech rockers the Plastic People of the Universe must have fit into political discourse: rudely. Indeed, the songs were always abruptly cut off before resolution, the lights thrown up and the next scene begun instantly. (And, sometimes, the music is totally unpredictable, like a totally WTF?! excerpt of the Rockin’ the Rhein rendition of the Dead’s “Chinatown Shuffle.”)
Stoppard’s got his post-existential/surrealist formula down pat: the life/emotional arcs of characters embroiled in sweeping historical/intellectual concepts, with a few plotlines about incidental contemporary happenings to keep things cosmically circumstantial. In Rock ‘n’ Roll, the latter role is filled by Syd Barrett, who haunts the play, sometimes literally. Formulaic or no, though, it always leaves me excited, the way I felt the first time I saw Arcadia as a freshman in college, like everything was somehow connected.
“Well, that’s the last Stoppard I’m ever going to,” huffed a British chap outside afterwards. Maybe Brian Cox switched accents midway through some scenes, as my friend suggested. Maybe it was just too loud. (Thx, G’ma.)
I love me some Super Taste. Their spicy beef noodle soup makes Republic’s taste like a styrofoam cup of ramen flavored with the pepper packets from an airline meal. The hand-pulled noodles are soft, full, and delicious. Man. And it stings.
I had always assumed that it was the noodles that I loved, and that part of the Super Taste experience is the notion of getting through the spice to the noodles: eating with the fear of slurping a noodle that would lash around like a serpent’s tail and flick spice directly into the eyeball (a sensation surprisingly not unlike what the tongue experiences). Recently, after I’d espoused this idea to Boomy, it was suggested that I simply order the soup without the spice — in fact, an option directly below Spicy on the menu. Nothing to feel guilty about, she said. If you like the noodles, just get the noodles.
So I did. And it just wasn’t as good. On one hand, I feel like this is a revelation my unrefined tongue has been working towards for years. On the other hand, maybe it’s just ’cause Super Taste is so ridiculously ridiculous. Either way, my good blue shirt has some subtle spice staining action this eve.
Sadly, probably not. What a lame Series. At least it’s time to end the self-imposed moratorium on reading baseball books.
o The New Yorker‘s Ben McGrath gets loose on Scott Boras, agent to A-Rod, Carlos Beltran, and many others.
o A pair of scholarly studies about the effects of the Designated Hitter, including a PDF of “the Etiology of Public Support for the Designated Hitter Rule” (apparently, um, Democrats favor the DH more than Republicans) (Thx, MVB)
o FireJoeMorgan.com will keep me entertained during the long, cold months. Of this, I am sure. (Word, OAK.)
o Richard Ford has a nice piece in today’s Times about the game-as-played versus the game-as-discussed. Anything that “refines the idea of spectatorship” is good. Anything “trying to sharpen the focus on a bunch of focusless stuff that not only doesn’t matter a toot, and could never be proven true or false and therefore isn’t really journalism, but that also doesn’t have anything to do with the game as it’s played”… well, that’s bad.
o It is time for the annual reading of A. Bartlett Giamatti’s “The Green Fields of the Mind.”
No, seriously, is it time for spring training yet?
“Crank That (Soulja Boy)” – Soulja Boy Tell’em (download) (buy)
from Souljaboytellem.com (2007)
released by Collipark Music/Interscope/Stacks on Deck Ent.
week of October 27, 2007
#1 this week, #1 last week, 14 weeks on chart
(file expires November 1st)
The question that “Crank That” poses is thus: can a single chord, played ad nauseam, count as a hook? Perhaps, when played at an enormous volume, the overloaded piano hit here sounds dope. Streaming through Hype Machine, though, there’s not much to it. At first, the ear moves towards it. What is it made from? Is that just piano? Is there some orchestral oomph behind it? Kettle drums, maybe? It’s almost like the way illusory melodies suddenly surface in the elongated shimmers of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music (or any other feedback session), except mega-compressed, so it goes by too quickly to distinguish. Ultimately, though, who cares? Yeah, a single chord can probably carry a song (any suggestions?), but not this one. Not nearly weird enough. It’s kind of lame, as big chords go. I do like the layered vocals, though only as a potential source for cascading/refracted remixes.
I also like that his album is called Souljaboytellem.com, that the album is indistinguishable from the project as a whole — which now includes 179,295 streamable answering machine messages from, er, Soulja Girls — one medium pointing at another. More, I like that the Soulja Boy concept is embedded at every level — the song title, the album title, the artist name, in the lyrics, etc..
1. “Baked Potatoe” – Gene Ween (from Synthetic Socks CS)
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “Get You Down” – Super Monster (from Super Monster EP)
4. “Just As You Are” – Robert Wyatt (from Comicopera)
5. “Diamond Heart” – Marissa Nadler (from Songs III: Bird on the Water)
6. “Julia (sped up/slowed down)” – The Beatles (via WFMU’s Beware of the Blog)
7. “? ?????? ??? ??????” – Yori Morozov (via End(-)of(-)World Music blog)
8. “Love Can Tame the Wild” – The Monks (from Black Monk Time)
9. “In the Future” – David Byrne (from Music from the Knee Plays)
10. “The Grid” – Philip Glass (from Koyaanisqatsi)
11. “I’ll Be Your Mirror” – Lou Reed, John Cale, and Nico (from Le Bataclan ’72)
A particularly lovely fantasia from Stephen Millhauser’s Martin Dressler:
While taking note of the unusual living arrangements, and ignoring conventional features such as lobbies, cafeterias, and a very efficient laundry service, many observers preferred to comment on the large amount of space devoted to services and entertainments not generally associated with hotels: the many parks and ponds and gardens, including the Pleasure Park with its artificial moonlight checkering the paths, its mechanical nightingales singing in the branches, its melancholy lagoon and ruined summerhouse; the Haunted Grotto, in which ghosts floated out from behind shadowy stalactites and fluttered toward visitors in a darkness illuminated by lanternlight; the Moorish Bazaar, composed of winding dusty lanes, sales clerks dressed as Arabs and trained in the art of bargaining, and a maze of stalls that sold everything from copper basins to live chickens…
“Ripple” – Yo La Tengo (download)
recorded 19 October 2007, Landmark on Main Street, Port Washington, NY
(file expires October 29th)
Yo La Tengo at Landmark on Main Street
Port Washington, NY
19 October 2007
Chris Brokaw opened.
The Landmark being (as we discovered) across the street from Finn MacCool’s, the watering hole of choice for the 1986 Mets, many of who resided in Port Washington, we naturally had to toast Danny Heep en route to the show. Via Jeff Pearlman’s The Bad Guys Won:
Strawberry did much of his damage at Finn MacCool’s, a tavern in Port Washington where many of the Mets hung out. One night Henry Downing, the bar’s manager, concocted a drink for the Mets that he named The Nervous Breakdown. It was a potent combination of vodka, cranberry juice, tequila, and schanpps, and the twelve Mets sitting around the table eagerly devoured pitcher after pitchers. Among the participants were Ojeda, Mitchell, Dykstra, and Backman — guys who could hold their own. Yet the one who drank the most was Strawberry. ‘I remember he really took to that,’ says Connie O’Reilly, MacCool’s owner. ‘I guess he liked the taste.’ … ‘The next afternoon we were watching the game from the bar, and the broadcaster said Darryl wasn’t playing,’ O’Reilly says. ‘They showed him sitting on tbe bench… something about a twenty-four-hour virus.’
Tom Courtenay
Beanbag Chair
Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House
Fog Over Frisco
Mr. Tough
Ripple (Grateful Dead)
Surfin’ With the Shah (The Urinals)
Cone of Silence
Sloop John B (trad/Beach Boys)
Black Flowers
Luci Baines (Arthur Lee)
Decora
I Found A Reason (Velvet Underground)
Oklahoma USA (The Kinks)
Story of Yo La Tango
Detouring America With Horns
Speeding Motocycle (Daniel Johnston)
You Can Have It All (George McCrea)
*(encore, with Chris Brokaw on guitar)*
A House Is Not A Motel (Arthur Lee)
Tell Me When It’s Over (Dream Syndicate)
I Feel Like Going Home
“Julia” – The Beatles (sped up & slowed back down by Editor B) (download)
“Tomorrow Never Knows” – The Beatles (sped up & slowed back down by Lee R.) (download)
(files expire October 26th)
So, Steve McLaughlin compressed the entire Beatles’ catalogue into a single, one-hour mp3. Cute. But then some other dudes, Editor B and one “Lee R” (hmm), took out chunks and reconstituted them back to normal speed. The result is one of the most literally psychedelic remixes ever, a technological approximation of the tricks the acid-enhanced ear plays when listening to even the most familiar music. It’s gorgeous, like watching an image gradually decompose on a xerox machine. Or, more accurately, a xerox of a xerox of a xerox, or even the granular decay of Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting In A Room” or David Wilson’s “Stasis.” Thing is, though, while it’s a pretty academic experiment, there are Beatles melodies’ in the middle, rising out of the noise, already complete in most listeners’ minds.
The breaks in the middle of “Tomorrow Never Knows” are fantastic, the famous backwards guitar almost indistinguishable from John Lennon himself. On “Julia,” Lennon’s voice practically pixilates, but it is no less evocative of the subject’s seashell eyes and windy smile, though the beach might now be the silvery landscape glimpsed in William Gibson’s Neuromancer:
The city, if it was a city, was low and gray. At times it was obscured by banks of mist that came rolling in over the lapping surf. At one point he decided that it wasn’t a city at all, but some single building, perhaps a ruin; he had no way of judging its distance. The sand was the shade of tarnished silver that hadn’t gone entirely black. The beach was made of sand, the beach was very long, the sand was damp, the bottoms of his jeans were wet from the sand… He held himself and rocked, singing a song without words or tune.
“Get You Down” – Super Monster (download) (buy)
from Super Monster EP (2007)
(file expires October 24th)
Said it before, but I was reminded tonight during the Industrial Park Records CMJ showcase at the Tank: steal global, buy local.
That is: download/appropriate/pilfer whatever music you need by any means necessary, so long as you support local musicians when you can by going to their gigs, buying their tour CDs, a tee-shirt, or whatever. The locality, a slippery term in this age, is whatever neighborhood/karass/clique/scene you choose to define.
Coming nowhere near a Netflix queue near you is Los Angeles Plays Itself, Thom Andersen’s three-hour docu-ode to the City of Angels. Made entirely from footage from other movies and narrated with omniscient nonchalance by Encke King, the film is a veritable geography of Los Angeles real, Los Angeles imagined, and — most intriguingly — the Los Angeles created between the two. Given the copyrights on the footage (which probably comes from at least 100 pictures, if not far more), there is no way this film will ever see widespread commercial release. So — both because it’s great & ’cause the Mang doesn’t want you to have it — here is a torrent of it.
1. “More Mets Than Yanks” – Roger Angell (from Ken Burns’ Baseball)
2. “Moby Octopad” – Yo La Tengo (from I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “Paper Planes remix” – M.I.A. feat. Bun B & Rich Boy
5. “Fractured Skies” – Parts & Labor (from Mapmaker)
6. “The Lord” – Young People (from War Prayers)
7. “Bad Education” – Blue Orchids (from The Greatest Hit)
8. “Andy’s Chest” – Lou Reed (from Transformer)
9. “It Don’t Come Easy” – Ringo Starr (from Ringo)
10. “Cherubic Hymn” – Bruce Haack (from Electric Lucifer)
11. “Sukiyaki” – Kyu Sakamoto
12. “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)” – Peter Starstedt (from The Darjeeling Limited)
13. “Stella Blue” (live) – Ween (from unknown show)
14. “Can’t Leave Her Behind” – Bob Dylan (from 1966 Hotel Room Tape)
“Autumn Sweater” – Yo La Tengo (download)
“This Man He Cries Tonight”- Yo La Tengo (download)
recorded 6 October 2007, Brooklyn Lyceum, Brooklyn, NY
(files expire October 15th)
Yo La Tengo at Brooklyn Lyceum
6 October 2007
New Yorker festival
between song Q&As moderated by Ben Greenman
The Cone of Silence
Stockholm Syndrome
Story of Yo La Tango
Magnet (NRBQ)
Madeleine
Autumn Sweater
I Heard You Looking
Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind
This Man He Cries Tonight (The Kinks) (live debut)
Sugarcube
“Smear” – Jonny Greenwood (download) (buy)
from The Jerwood Series, v. 2 (2006)
“Arpeggi” – Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke (download)
recorded 27 March 2005, Ether Festival, London
Skip through Jonny Greenwood’s “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” at random — dropping the cursor here or there — and it could be an orchestra, it could be an electro-acoustic collage. Perhaps it’s the anything-goes approach of Bodysong, perhaps it’s the lonely Ondes Martenots of “Smear,” perhaps it’s the fact that he’s a member of frickin’ Radiohead, but “Popcorn” seems like it could disintegrate to fuzz and bleeps and chiming Rhodes at any moment. Really, though, it’s just an orchestra, even if it blurs into sonic mirages.
The fact that Greenwood sustains it for 10 minutes before the ambient chords swell to Hitchcock thriller trills and explode into another world is impressive enough. Meanwhile, “Smear” — taken from a compilation of new music performed the London Sinfonietta — is a more unpredictable, though lacks the dramatic scope of “Popcorn,” which will receive its US premiere in January as part of the Wordless Music Series.
Are they right and proper formal compositions? Are they just a rock musician dabbling in archaic tropes? Are they boring string excursions? Do they matter except as a research prelude to (say) this version of Radiohead’s forthcoming “Arpeggi”? No answers here, of course. And though I’m excited to hear “Popcorn” performed live, I probably won’t listen to it as much as “Arpeggi” or In Rainbows.
“In the Craters of the Moon” – The Mountain Goats
“Autoclave” – The Mountain Goats
recorded 2 October 2007, Studio B, Brooklyn, NY
[Downloads removed at the polite request of JD.]
Mostly, this was an experiment to see how long it would take to record a show with the aforementioned iTalk, up it to my computer, and extract a few segments, as well as to see how much juice it would take, both in terms of power and memory. The answers: with laughable ease and laughably little.
So, here are two new Mountain Goats songs, performed this evening at Studio B in Brooklyn, a dance club a few blocks from the kielbasa parlors and bright-eyed/enchanting Polish girls of Greenpoint. The frame and drama are pure Mountain Goats, as hard-boiled and stylized as Bukowski or the Coen brothers. Some lines, especially on “In the Craters of the Moon,” feel like stock John Darnielle: “I think I’m gonna crack, I can’t live like this any more.” Others are perfect and inventive: “We swim in the dark until our bodies are numb, clandestine (?) rats in the moonlight, too far from the shore.”
Differentiating good & bad lines seems a tad silly, though, especially at this stage of the game. Darnielle found his voice a long time ago, and he’s sticking to it. They’re new songs. If you like the Mountain Goats, you’ll probably dig ’em. (An autoclave, as Darnielle pointed out, is a device built to sterilize medical instruments and kill all lifeforms, except — as recently discovered — one particular type found at the bottom of the ocean, near volcanic seabeds, which not only survives the process, but multiplies.)
o A guide to free wifi hotposts.
o Send free text messages to any mobile phone via the webz.
o Skip the thumbnails in Google’s image search.
o Trade oodles of used CDs for credit at Spun.com and they’ll even send the goods first, along with an empty box and return postage for whatever’s being traded.
o It ain’t free (cost me $50), and it’s impossible to truly set levels, but the purchase of Griffin’s iTalk gizmo seems well worth it already — even if I haven’t used it yet to tape an interview or bootleg a show. Those will come soon. Excepting an emergency flashlight next to my bed, I no longer have any device that requires a constant diet of double-A batteries. Weird!
Baseball deals in increments of hope: a two-run homer that brings the team within one, a strike closer to a strikeout, an out closer to the end of the game, a victory closer to the end. Each is a small clearing where suddenly a path to the future opens up, and everything is all right.
“There’s more Mets than Yankees in all of us,” Roger Angell once said, or something like it, which is maybe small consolation to a Mets fan this week. But it was a drama to participate in, milked to the very last day of the season: a statistically impossible and literally historic slide with one glorious high before the absolute crash, a redemptive one-hitter/blow-out (with a fight, taboot!), followed by a game in which a future Hall of Famer possibly making his final career start was blown out after giving up five runs in the first, a renowned slugger had his wrist broken by an errant pitch, and a kryptonite-weighted wunderkind ended his honeymoon with the fans. One utility player finished up an all-star career while his wife wept quietly in the stands, and September call-ups packed their bags, hoping for a shot in the spring.
For now, it is time for new routines, new ways to mark the post-agrarian seasonal changes. For some, it’s further escape into different culture industries: the fall movies (Wes Anderson! the Coen brothers!), other sports (a guy next to us at the game was tuned into the Jets today! The Jets!), or even changes that have nothing to do with consumption (taking the train to work instead of riding a bike). They are changes that would have happened with or without baseball, but now we can be aware of the Indian summer rising around us, the last nights to go out on the town and enjoy the air, instead of being lashed to a radio or a ballpark seat. Yeah, that’s the ticket: the nice autumn air.
As Dylan obscurities go, his one-off 1968 Woody Guthrie tribute gig with the Band (billed as the Crackers) at Carnegie Hall is pretty fantastic. There’s no reason for its rarity, given the fact that it is on an official release from a major label. Though it’s the Band behind him, not the amazing Nashville session cats who populated the then-new John Wesley Harding, the sound still recalls a stately and tantalizing outgrowth of that just-released album, coupled with all the grace found during the long, lazy sessions in the Big Pink basement, concluded a few months earlier. “Dear Mrs. Roosevelt,” especially, sounds drawn from the same landscape as the Biblical parables of JWH. The amphetamine urgency of the thin, wild mercury period is mellowed, not yet shot through with the anti-hope reflected through his mirrored sunglasses that marked his next tour, still six years away. (Thanks to Dr. Mooney for posting.)
It has been said often enough that baseball is a game of inches: of a ball that shoulda/coulda/mighta gone foul, of subtle pitch placement, of the exact angle of the bat as it makes contact. But, from the stands, baseball is a dumb show, able only to communicate in the broadest of strokes.
We do anything we can to infer personality from the players. Standing in repose as they do for most of the game — at bat waiting for a pitch (literally in a stance), on the mound waiting for a batter — this is pretty easy. It’s how they approach the plate, or head back to the dugout after grounding out weakly to second. But these are all actions that occur within a formal language, and the result is archetypes: speedy tricksters, crafty veterans, tragic journeymen, graceful future Hall of Famers who move like ghosts through the dugout.
Like the improvised characters in Italian commedia dell’arte, they are recognized instantly and understood for their behaviors. In some ways, at least as far as on-field personalities go, there is rarely anything new under the sun. Sometimes, there is, especially as the racial texture of the game changes, the make-up of pro ball having very much changed from the children of immigrants to immigrants themselves. But these changes are slow.
But, it’s baseball, and they don’t need to be fast. With between 10 and 13 characters on stage at a time with dozens more waiting in the wings (hundreds, if you count the players in the minors), multiplied by 162 games per team/per year (around 2,400 in all of Major League Baseball), the possibilities for sustained drama are functionally infinite.
But we hone in on specific personalities inside the noise, which is why we can so readily read pictures like this in ways that have nothing to do with stolen bases or batting averages or any other kind of detached statistic.
Album reviews: I’ll Follow You – Oakley Hall (Paste) Indie Weirdo Round-Up, featuring: Caribou, Nels Cline Singers, Dr. Delay, Marissa Nadler, Odd Nosdam (JamBands.com) Indie Weirdo Round-Up, featuring: Bishop Allen, Sir Richard Bishop, Diplo, Kamikaze Ground Crew, Patton Oswalt, Brazil 70 comp. (JamBands.com)
Track reviews:
“Boy With A Coin” – Iron and Wine (PaperThinWalls.com)
“Phenomena” – Akron/Family (PaperThinWalls.com)
“No Dreams” – Oakley Hall (PaperThinWalls.com)
“I Used To Try” – Nancy Elizabeth (PaperThinWalls.com)
Only in print: Paste #36 (Iron and Wine cover): album review of Oakley Hall; film review of Romance & Cigarettes; DVD review of Yo La Tengo/Jean Painlevé
September/October Relix (Ben Harper cover): album reviews of Thurston Moore, Sir Richard Bishop, The Sadies.
“The postseason is all about extending the summer, ” my friend Russ said last night, waxing philosophical sometime not long after I demanded the head of José Lima. For being the best, the World Series teams are allowed the pleasure of going to the ballpark day after day, reveling in the mechanics of routines they perfected in earlier, golden light, even as the leaves die and the sun changes.
“Summer Turns To High” – R.E.M. (download) (buy)
from Reveal (2001)
released by Warner Brothers
“Summer Turns To High” has lingered on a few summer playlists, and I’ve been meaning to post about it for a while. The season being what it is, though, I figure I better hop to it.
In his most excellent contribution regarding Stereolab’s Transient Random Noise Bursts With Announcements to the recent Marooned anthology, Douglas Wolk made a sadly unattributed reference to an academic study that somehow proved that one hears the most meaningful music of his life at the age of 22-and-a-half. While that makes perfect sense for a discovery of Neutral Milk Hotel (as occurred roughly that month for me), it probably also goes a long way in explaining my undying attraction to R.E.M.’s generally reviled Reveal (which I’ve posted about before).
So many of the song’s sins are circumstantial, like the sterile folktronica washes, which seems a totally understandable type of cutting edge to adopt for guys of R.E.M.’s age and could just as easily be reimagined with a Glenn Kotche-like narrative drumbeat (hinted at, for example, beneath the line “hopes and dragonflies”). Beyond that, it’s R.E.M.: Michael Stipe’s obtuse transformations, and — especially — that twangy Peter Buck guitar fill at the end of the chorus. What makes it compelling is that there is a song in there, like a shape in the shifting heat. What makes it divisive is how arbitrary the production is. It could be set in front any of those backdrops. It’s beautiful, but — for that — feels spineless, musically speaking, only able to be appreciated properly by a 22-and-a-half year old wanting an R.E.M. album of his own.
“Summer Turns To High” hung around in morningtime with me for a good chunk of late summer, and was quite useful, nestled between the Beach Boys and John Fahey. I love the way the drums come in, the baroque arrangement under the verses, the subliminal high percussion part that comes in. And, in the fall, it will linger, too, as if it’d absorbed extra warmth to last as the fall arrives.
Reviewing is a guessing game, no matter how informed one is: a guess about what the contents will do with time. Will the melodies lodge and reemerge later as lyric fragments? Will the textures — of the music, of the medium — bond with the changes in the season and permanently lash to an ultimately arbitrary time and place? Listening is ephemeral, of course, but what’s really there? Is there something there? What’s left when the newness of context falls away? In that sense, it’s terribly unfair to review an album after even after a few months of listening.
To use an indie-safe example: when I wrote about the Shins’ Chutes Too Narrow upon its release, I listened a bunch, took it for absolutely decent standard-grade rawk, tucked it away, and forgot about it. That is, until months later, when I heard it played under the din of bar chatter between bands at Webster Hall, at which point I realized I knew nearly every melodic turn. Go figure. Once I got past the relative blandness of the more guitar pop, it was mondo groovy.
I reviewed two albums today by two other indieish standard bearers: Devendra Banhart and Iron and Wine. One grabbed me. The other didn’t. One seemed like a real step forward for an artist I didn’t quite get previously. The other seemed like a goofy step straight into the middle of the road for a musician I’d grokked instantly on his previous discs. Is that how they’re going to hold up, though? I really don’t know, but one can look for familiar signs: a certain way the guitars are recorded, a certain vagueness in the lyrics that suggests their abstraction will be useful, a preponderance of a certain mood. That’s all they are, really: guesses about how people might want to spend their time in the future.
I sometimes think about Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape artist who designed Central Park, who intended for his work come into full bloom only with a century of time. Not that most musicians are as good or functional or meaningful at their work as Olmsted was with his, or that their work will make any sense whatsoever a century from now, but — by their very nature of captured time reproduced — albums are somehow like that. All they’ve got is the promise of future meaning.
“End of an Era” – Yo La Tengo (download)
from Old Joy OST (2006)
unreleased
(file expires September 23rd)
I’m not sure what the proper name of this tune is, but it’s one of a few extended Yo La Tengo instrumentals in Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy. The voice at the top is Bonnie Prince Palace himself, Will Oldham, playing the role of Kurt with perfectly burnt detachment. With little overt drama, just submerged tensions rippling the surface, the picture plays like a short story — no surprise, given that it was based on one by Jonathan Raymond. Like this YLT’s contributions to the score, Old Joy is an extended mood piece, the whole reflected patiently in each of its parts. Absolutely worth seeing.
o Virgil Griffith’s WikiScanner lets you see which organizations’ employees are editing Wikipedia entries.
o TV Links: full movies, TV shows, etc.., organized fairly immaculately. Like YouTube, if the Man never noticed it.
o Nobelcom.com provides international calling card codes at cut rates waaay better than the bodega.
o TubeTV allows the user save videos from YouTube and other embedded sources.
o Like Robert DeNiro’s renegade plumber in BrazilNYC iPod Doctor does out-of-service/unauthorized iPod repairs on street corners — and now, apparently, via the mails. We’re all in this together.
The soundtrack to “Architecture” — composed by Tom Vuozzo (aka Tom Perry) — is wiggy, electronic, and great… but I also couldn’t resist posting some math-rock to accompany it. Start at any point in “Atlas” & it should do just fine. Thanks to YouTube user sawing14s for putting it up.
1. “Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror” – Jeffrey and Jack Lewis (from City and Eastern Songs)
2. “Windfall” – Son Volt (from Trace)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “Christopher Columbus” – Kamikaze Ground Crew (from Postcards From the Highwire)
5. “Black River Song” – Angels Of Light (from We Are Him)
6. “It Seems Like Nothing’s Gonna Come My Way Today” – The Outsiders (from CQ)
7. “Happy Together” – The Turtles (from Solid Zinc)
8. “Peacebone” – Animal Collective (from Strawberry Jam)
9. “Mexican Radio” – Wall of Voodoo
10. “Are You Hung Up?” – Frank Zappa
11. “Who Need the Peace Corps?” – Frank Zappa
12. “Concentration Moon” – Frank Zappa
13. “Mom and Dad” – Frank Zappa
14. “Telephone Conversation” – Frank Zappa
15. “Bow Tie Daddy” – Frank Zappa
16. “Harry, You’re A Beast” – Frank Zappa
17. “What’s the Ugliest Part of Your Body?” – Frank Zappa (from We’re Only In It For the Money)
18. “Porpoise Song” – The Monkees (from Head OST)
19. “Cirque de Soleil” – Patton Oswalt (from Werewolves and Lollipops)
The only reference I have ever seen to the village of Jarnow, Austria comes via an account in the New York Times‘ “condensed cablegrams” section published on 7 February 1892 wherein it was reported that an unnamed doctor was killed by two unnamed comrades of an argumentative (and unnamed) Captain.
Since then, events in Jarnow, Austria ceased to be documented by the New York Times — if it could ever be said that they were documented at all. Indeed, for the remainder of its years, the village of Jarnow managed to elude nearly every piece of written documentation since digitized, as well as the memories of at least three generations taking its name for their own.
“I don’t know what it is,” Darla told me, after we had sex in the living room during the afternoon. “It’s like he stole my blind spot,” she said. The mauve cross-stitching pressed into my back as I cradled her. “You know how your brain makes up that little bit between your eyes? Just there can be something there? But I can’t explain it to him, not like that.” I couldn’t explain it to Morgan, either. We’d almost stopped talking ourselves. And when I saw her car come around the corner in slow motion like that, my own blind spot filled with unaccountable rage, the space of not knowing, of the space of knowing something that you have no need to tell anyone else, and ran for the spaceship. [END]
I slipped from the bottom hatch and kicked off as the pod filled with water and sank. Swimming towards the light, I wondered if Darla had heard yet. I rose, as if lifted by color and taste and sound. Were there really boats above me? My wallet was still in my pocket, so I could go to a hotel, if I could get ashore. The surface got closer and closer and I burst through, finally, laughing: probably the first man in the history of the planet to launch himself into outer space for not wanting to have sex. I had phrased our departure as a hypothetical to Morgan. I knew she wouldn’t tell her husband. We were in the corner of the shed then, the warm skin above her breasts pressing into my arm as she kissed my neck. “Then I’d just have to give you a special goodbye,” she said, drawling.
It was never part of the plan for me to get in the spaceship. It was only to gather a bag and go. Darla didn’t want a postmark that would hint at our destination or direction, so I would mail it before I left. Thinking I had at least a day, the letter made it across town that afternoon. Probably 20 minutes or so ago, I thought, as my ears popped and I sank through the Gulf. The color in the windows turned a peaceful blue. I saw no fish. Darla had hopefully made it to El Paso, listening to her Jerry Lee Lewis tape over and over. The sealing held, thankfully, and I thought of Darla, with her window open, smoking Winstons. I could tell the pod was reaching the nadir of its descent and, if I didn’t disengage the plug, would shoot upwards at any moment, back into the naked daylight, Coast Guard boats circling.
There was the morning Darla couldn’t talk, just woke up with a look on her face like she was receding into the distance. She kissed me and got out of bed. We ate cereal across the table like most mornings, and I talked to her, joked about the weather, traffic at the Astrodome. She smiled, unaware anything was amiss. I went back to my corn flakes. When I looked up, there was a look of horror on her face, one I understood entirely when it was time to abandon the pod under the water. That night, after the silent day, by the moonlight, I showed her the ship. She exhaled and cried quietly into me, her body coming against mine as we stood in the shed. For a second, there, every part of her was right again. “I don’t want to go to sleep,” she whispered. “Tomorrow’s going to be like today.”
The spaceship neared completion in the golden late summer, its dirty silver podform taking shape in the midst of backyards aglow with barbecues. We had Morgan and Strommler — Erik, his name was — over for one, in fact. He drank a pop and leaned on the oak, the oak I would see incinerated below me as I launched a few weeks later. “Hell’s bells!” he said, describing an approaching ice cream truck and I laughed. He did, too. His hair always seemed to shoot in different directions, as if it was growing towards the sun. He wasn’t a bad guy, not at all, though his laugh reminded me of my aunt in Shreveport. We had little to talk about, but got along well, even then, when I knew he was destroying Darla, and I was fooling around with his wife. But by Labor Day, I felt dizzy with grace, because Darla and I had it all worked out, what we were going to do.
The first alien wildlife I saw was a sunflower. Perhaps five years old, maybe six, at a county fair. The stem was thick as my wrist. There was a small, one-track maze of them. My mother was ahead, with my younger brother, around a turn. Without her in view, I felt transported elsewhere, someplace far. I grabbed one in front of me and peeled at its skin. When I was finally able to pierce it, I found its Martian insides wet and furry. I recoiled at the coolness. As Morgan increased her affections with me in the days after she helped me with the parachute, her hands running from my hips and up my chest, it was a severed sunflower she wore behind her ear. And then the spaceship slammed into the water, sunflowers and imagined interplanetary terrains and Morgan’s mouth collapsed by the sudden pressure.
For every test that Dr. Strommler conducted on Darla, I developed another system for the spaceship. He had her imagine shapes, colors, outlines. I devised a series of coils to create power for the launch. He played her a series of drones, had her focus on flickering patterns, and peeled them away from one another. I built an electricity distribution grid. When Darla described the exercises, in bed, it was with difficulty. “I feel so proud,” she said, as we started towards sleep. “No, not proud,” she amended after a moment. “Adjusted,” though she did not sound satisfied with that word either. I could tell she was still thinking, her breath against my shoulder like distant waves. I smelled salt, sand, and suntan lotion. Darla’s face was blank as she slept.
1. “Take the Cash (K.A.S.H.)” – Wreckless Eric (from The Wonderful World of …)
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “Timebomb” – Beck
4. “How Does the Brain Wave?” – Baby Elephant feat. David Byrne (from Nadia)
5. “Ed Is A Portal” – Akron/Family (from Love is Simple)
6. “Chaos 24” – DJ Chaos X (from Live Mixxx)
7. “Canned Goods & Firearms” – Sir Richard Bishop (from Polytheistic Fragments)
8. “I Miss the Girl” – Soul Coughing (from El Oso)
9. “Poison Flowers” – Mono Puff (from It’s Fun To Steal)
10. “Why Don’t You Smile Now?” – The Downliners Sect (from Nuggets II compilation)
11. “Maria Bethånia” – Caetano Veloso (from Caetano Veloso (1971))
12. “Squirrel of God” – Nels Cline Singers (from Draw Breath)
13. “Jesus, etc.” – David Sandstrom & co. (via YouTube)
The falling was more vivid than the lift-off, a memory turned to stardust by the adrenaline. The speed increased, and my ears popped on and off, like a loose connection. The clouds came towards me. I wished I could escape my bonds and grasp at the cumulus topographies with my hands. Outside the portal, the land and the blue mixed. I tried blindly to calculate my trajectory, hoping it would end in the Gulf, Army surplus parachute or no. It was really a pair sewn together. Folded into two olive green duffels, I’d heaved them from the car to the shed. Morgan, that day and the next, helped me affix them to each other. When we finished, we kissed in a way that felt natural, which is not what I wanted or needed. Behind the silver and crimson and impossible white, there was a new taste, which began to corrode the old.
Morgan called it a “condition” and, when she did, her voice took on a sharp quality, like food left too long in the refrigerator. It made me not want to kiss her. I thought of it simply as the state of being Darla. It was some years into our marriage before I saw that particular look on her face, standing by the garden, though I am certain that I noticed its residue the first time we met, at a garage sale. When she smiled, she looked as though she not only meant it, but earned it. “You don’t see it,” Morgan said, “because you are at work all day, but she is not happy.” Darla’s smile had escaped, flown dissolving into the gaseous atmosphere, where I’d gone in search of it. It was all too fast for me to be queasy. I don’t remember holding the straps, but I know my hands never left them as I plunged towards the planet below me.
Our routine: she comes into the shed, sits on the beach chair, and reads a spy novel. I work on the spaceship. It runs in a loop, over and over, even as I am in space itself, watching the stars manifest from pure daylight. That was what I wanted back. The plans are leftover from the space race, a design unpicked, rescued from an attic. Morgan sips her beer. Eventually, she stands, meets me by the workbench. We kiss, hands as neutral as possible on each other’s hips. We say nothing of consequence, and return to our respective stations. Later, Darla slips into bed beside me, and we have sex, passionately, tenderly, the missing colors slipped to me earlier from her sister’s lips. This happened, more or less, for five months.
The colors were always there for her. At first, when she was a girl, they were just spots. “Almost like pets,” she said. “Like, milk was neon green. A cartoon frog that followed me around until the taste was gone.” As she got older, it was whole rooms. When we lived together, I would sometimes discover her standing in some corner, as if in rapture. “Hey,” she would say when I took her hand, breathy and sexy. It is funny now, almost, that I cannot recall when I found out Dr. Strommler, Morgan’s husband, was studying Darla, whether it was before or after Morgan and I first kissed. It was not an important reason why I allowed it to happen. From every other girl I’d been with — Karen and Seiko and Darla, all — I wanted everything, lives together, love in constant renewal. From Morgan, I only wanted a small, specific something.
We honeymooned in the Caribbean, Darla and I, at a pink, three-story hotel by the ocean. All night, we listened to the murmur of the tide: softer as it went out, harsher as it came in, spitting up over the curve of the sand, long and low. The blinds were open, the stars visible. In our half-sleep after sex, she told me about the colors. A light outside shined on the pool patio, muted by palm trees, and occasionally illuminated the room when the wind blew the fronds aside. Her face, when she said this in the dark, looked like Karen, my high school girlfriend and Seiko, a girl I slept with once in college: all cheekbones. She also looked like herself. “It’s blue and gold,” she said. “That’s what I feel, when I come. Blue and gold.” Which is what I saw when I touched her cheeks the next time we had sex, and what I saw when the capsule peaked and tipped towards the Gulf.
So long as I fixed a toaster once in a while, nobody much bothered me in the shed. Still, I could not figure out a way to test the launchpad without making somebody, maybe Darla, ask what I was doing. There was no shame: I knew how to build a spaceship. But it was also an uncomfortable knowledge to possess, like I’d broken something but couldn’t tell my mother. I kept the parts tucked across the room. When Morgan came over that first afternoon, to see if I couldn’t unjam E.T. from the VCR, her eyes paused on the exposed circuitry on the workbench. Her husband, Jacob, a doctor, had been working late, so she was alone most evenings, too. “Like a menagerie in here,” she smiled, looking at the shelf of bulbs and plugs, and from then on co-existed with it. I looked past her, next to the Astros calendar, at the first sketch of the booster. Even going up, I knew the capsule would hit the apex too soon.
Darla and Morgan, brown-haired and blue-eyed both, were variations on the same family code, though Darla came out prettier. Where Darla’s lips were slim, Morgan’s were puffy. Darla’s clear eyes were perpetually wide with awe, Morgan’s were dopey. And Darla’s voice was bell-like when she yawped in ecstasy, Morgan’s flat and nasal and tired. I saw her, Morgan, a flash of her freckled shoulder, as the capsule launched from the backyard. I was aware of the Chrysler door slamming, but didn’t look up. It was like jumping a car, really, to get it hot enough to launch. She had found Darla’s note with an awful quickness, perhaps with not even enough time for Darla herself to gain any distance.
Back then, everybody tinkered. It is not as if it was a lifelong ambition to build a spaceship, or even be an astronaut. Believe me, that’s not my personality. Installing a new car radio, putting together a kitchen table, those are closer to my areas of expertise. Sure, I watched the moon landing. I didn’t give much thought to it, though. Not like that, anyway. The decision was gradual, something to do during the cool evenings when Darla worked late. I thought of this as I grasped the oxygen tube between my lips, my hands desperately clenched in the side straps. As I rose, a half-dozen balls of sweat emerged from my cheeks, fell, and froze instantly into silver airborne droplets.
Between looking at Texas from outer space and looking at outer space from Texas, I would take the latter, and not out of any great love for Texas. Anyplace you look, I figure, half of what you see is in your head, what you want to see. So, up there, pressed against the glass from my father’s Ford, all I could see were Darla’s cheekbones, the night glow of the gas station, and the cat. Darla’s sister, Morgan, had come in the middle of the afternoon, her white Chrysler extra-bleached as it rounded the corner in slow motion, like the Kennedy motorcade turning onto Dealey Plaza. And so it was afternoon when I took off, no other choice, and it rushed beside me for a minute, a faithful dog, before the blue deepened.
“Sometimes A Pony Gets Depressed” – Silver Jews (download) (buy)
from Tanglewood Numbers (2005)
released by Drag City
(file expires August 21st)
“That guy’s a better songwriter than Bob Dylan,” my friend, an aggressive and renowned contrarian, once said of the Silver Jews’ David Berman. “I bet you didn’t know that, did you?”
“No,” I admitted. “I didn’t.” And, even having been informed, I’m still not sure if I do. Nonetheless, it’s something to consider. The argument is not to take anything away from Dylan, or — for that matter — to even say that Berman is the greatest songwriter of his generation. If it is not about standing on the shoulders of giants and all that (which it might be), then it is at least about how pop audiences have evolved over the years and what they are prepared to accept in a song.
Berman might be a more interesting formal songwriter than Dylan, but an artist is only as exciting as the limits he’s transcending. Again, not to take anything away from Berman, but it’s all about context. “Sometimes A Pony Get Depressed” is in no ways a revolutionary song. But it’s great, and I can see what my friend was getting at: Berman is simply a more modern songwriter, unencumbered by the properties of music grounded in folk and blues.
An argument about David Berman being a better songwriter than Bob Dylan is stupid if one expects to come up with a victor. If one just wants it to use it as a crowbar into a discussion of songwriters’ trickbags then I’ll bite: David Berman is a better songwriter than Bob Dylan.
A fine meditation on the slowness of the dog days, originally published in Harper’s, via Baseball: A Literary Anthology:
Everywhere, from Portland to Pawtucket, baseball’s the same slow, sometimes stately, sometimes tedious game governed by extensive, complexly arbitrary rules, and practiced according to arcane, informal mores and runic vocabularies which compel that almost every act of play be routine. Even the great smashes, the balletic defensive turns, and the unparalleled pitching performances — by being so formally anticipated, so contemplated and longed-for by the fans — become ritual, even foregone. It’s a Platonic game in this way, with all visible excellence (and even unexcellence) ratified by a prior scheme of invisible excellence which is the game itself.
“Piggy in the Middle” – The Rutles (download) (buy)
from The Rutles (1978)
released by Rhino
One should never feel guilty about the music he enjoys, but I’ve been feeling mildly guilty at how much happiness the Rutles have given me of late. I’ve had the desperate urge for songs: stuff that I can sing in the shower, or play quietly on guitar when my roommates are asleep. I sometimes go through minor life crises where I think I’ll never find one of those again. Maybe on account of that, and because the Rutles are a literally formulaic reimagining of the Beatles (who will probably always remains the most irreducible source of aural pleasure for me), I’m just a pushover for the stuff. Who knows? (I also kinda dig that even when Neil Innes is trying to parody Paul, like on “Let’s Be Natural,” he still comes out sounding like John.)
“Piggy in the Middle” doesn’t approach “I am the Walrus” as a technical achievement, but it also doesn’t rely on anything but its songwriting wits for its momentum. It’s got lots of the stuff I love about certain tunes: random resonance with intimate inside jokes (“talk about a month of Sundays”), mysteriously pleasing phrasings (“toffee-nosed wet weekend,” with the emphasis on the “week”), and changes that can be strummed almost as a ballad (which is more than one can say for “I am the Walrus” itself). It’s funny, too. I mean, “do a poo-poo” instead of “goo goo gajoob,” but even that seems somehow Lennonesque.
Once again, the Ropeadope fake office went on vacation without warning me. Anyway, here’s Frow Show #25, which will be up officially on their site next week. Next episode in three weeks. Episode 25: The Dog Days
1. “Meet the Mets (1962 version)” – Ruth Roberts and Bill Katz
2. “Birthday Boy” – Ween (from GodWeenSatan: The Oneness)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “The First Inquisition (part 4)” – The Sadies (from New Seasons)
5. “fri/end” – Thurston Moore (from Trees Outside the Academy)
6. “The Passenger” – Iggy Pop (from Lust For Life)
7. “Piggy in the Middle” – The Rutles (from The Rutles)
8. “Jimmy” – M.I.A. (from Kala)
9. “In the Shadow of the Pines” – Bascom Lamar Lunsford (from Ballads, Banjo Tunes, and Sacred Songs of Western North Carolina)
10. “Green Typewriters, part 1” – The Olivia Tremor Control (from Music from the unrealized film script, DUSK AT CUBIST CASTLE)
11. “The Cave Song/Garden of the Dwarfs” – Spacious Mind (from Garden of a Well-Fed Head)
12. “Wawahkel” – Sack & Blumm (from Sack & Blumm)
13. “Maremaillette” – A Hawk & A Hacksaw (from A Hawk & a Hacksaw)
14. “An Occupation Grooms Me” – The Makers of the Dead Travel Fast (from Early Recordings)
15. “Birthday Boy” – Marco Benevento & Scott Metzger (from Live at Tonic)
16. “The Revolution” – David Byrne (from Look Into the Eyeball)
Whatever Victorian classification philosophy initially divided Sunday newspapers into their compartmentalized hunks of knowledge is long obsolescent in the culture at large. But I’m not sure it’s outlived its usefulness. The Sunday New York Times was never interchangeable with the world it described, though it sometimes seemed like it was. Now, especially, it seems like an obviously incomplete sampling of events presented with a strongly limited perspective.
Lately, though, I’ve come to value its finite qualities way more than its reportage. One could probably find the same stories scattered about the cyberether, but the fact that the Times has chosen to focus on them is what’s important. Data smog is an old problem (to borrow David Shenk’s phrase) and one result of being so overwhelmed is to enter blogospheric niches — be them centered around, say, obscure mp3s or liberal politics — and simply never emerge. Or, worse, only see the world through that community’s eyes.
The Times, especially on Sundays, isn’t just all the news that’s fit to print. It’s not all the news, for starters. But it does fit, neatly and valuably, into a few pounds of tree meat: a microcosm, or at least an organized place to enter the dialogue.
As shaman-in-residence at Boulder, Colorado’s Naropa Institute, folk archivist/alchemist/animator Harry Smith once recorded the entirety of his Fourth of July, from fireworks to crickets. Here are two mono-recorded excerpts of Independence Day 2007. Sounds in the field include the distant bells and marching drums of a parade, siren blasts, low-flying airplanes, a layer of constant bird chatter, and breaking ocean waves. Despite the mono, headphones are recommended, nuances revealing themselves with each upwards nudge of the volume knob. On “Drums, Sun, Birds, Bells,” everything is dense. On “Birds, News,” a more ambient reading of the same gives way to chaos when the birds react to sudden sirens.
The Smithsonian edition of Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music box set included his Fourth of July recording as part of the bonus features on one of the discs… except, so it seems, the “enhanced” multimedia technology, issued in 1997, no longer functions on current Macs. Oh, well. Anybody got an mp3? Permanent link on archive.org.
In two recent movies I’ve seen for review — Jeffrey Blitz’s just-about-to-be-out Rocket Science and John Turturro’s forthcoming Romance and Cigarettes — the telephone plays a typically minor role as a plot device/prop, in much the same way it has for decades. That is, some element of the story is forwarded/revealed by a third party picking up a shared landline. Though plenty of people still have landlines, of course, the sight of them on screen becomes increasingly anachronistic with each usage. To be sure, cell phone use in movies is way up, too, perhaps the single most convenient prop ever invented, but such is the power of the landline, which won’t easily surrender itself to the present.
o Feral cats living in Shea! (Thx, IvyP.)
o Wally Backman bugs out.
o RIP former Mets first base coach Uncle Bill Robinson.
o Lasting Milledge’s MySpace profile.
o With his solo shot tonight, Shawn Green is now just five home runs away from tying Hammerin’ Hank Greenberg at 331 for all-time Jewish home run leader.
It is worth noting, perhaps, that Microsoft Word’s spellcheck assesses the following beautiful passage of Italo Calvino as being written 60% in the passive voice:
As we reentered the hotel and headed for the large lobby (the former chapel of the convent), which we had to cross to reach the wing where our room was, we were struck by a sound like a cascade of water flowing and splashing and gurgling in a thousand rivulets and eddies and jets. The closer we got, the more this homogeneous noise was broken down into a complex of chirps, trills, caws, clucks, as of a flock of birds flapping their wings in an aviary. From the doorway (the room was a few steps lower than the corridor) we saw an expanse of little spring hats on the heads of ladies seated around tea tables. Throughout the country a campaign was in progress for the election of a new president of the republic, and the wife of the favored candidate was giving a tea party of impressive proportions for the wives of the prominent men of Oaxaca. Under the broad, empty vaulted ceiling, three hundred Mexican ladies were conversing all at once; the spectacular acoustical event that had immediately subdued us was produced by their voices mingled with the tinkling of cups and spoons and of knives cutting slices of cake.
o Been perusing the Lost in Tyme crate-digging blog at Sea of Sound‘s recommendo. Compared to Mutant Sounds, it’s positively mainstream, but still yielding some nice scores.
o The Acid Archives of Underground Sounds is a ridiculously large document of the obscurest of the obscure. They certainly don’t get everybody — a quick scan through recent Mutant Sounds posts from the genre/era reveals that — but the sheer amount of “lost” psych records is nearly unfathomable. If only they had recommended playlists.
Only in print: Paste #34 (White Stripes cover): book review of William Gibson; album reviews of Young Galaxy, Xavier Rudd, Great Northern, the Grateful Dead; film review of Rocket Science
August Relix (String Cheese Incident cover): album reviews of Architecture in Helsinki, Mushroom, Love is the Song We Sing box set, Sonic Youth; book review of 33 1/3: Daydream Nation; DVD review of the Flaming Lips.
June/July Hear/Say (festivals cover): reviews of Hallelujah the Hills and the Thieves of Kailua
1. “Ouch!” – The Rutles (from The Rutles)
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “Office Boy” – Bonde Do Role (from Office Boy EP)
4. “Atlas” – Battles (from Mirrored)
5. “I Saw The Bright Shinies” – Octopus Project (from forthcoming album TBD)
6. “Oben Beg mk3” – Baikonour (from For the Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos)
7. “Flux = Rad” – Pavement (from Wowee Zowee)
8. “Sweet Talking” – The Heptones (from Sweet Talking)
9. “A Goddamn Thing” – Mr. Smolin (from The Crumbling Empire of White People)
10. “(I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea” – Elvis Costello (from This Year’s Model)
11. “Baby” – Caetano Veloso with Os Mutantes (from Live EP)
12. “Lå de Longe” – Tribalistas (from Tribalistas)
13. “Birth Of A Nation/Rain Of Terror/Tempus Fugit/Opus 71/Twenty-First Century Express” – The Mesmerizing Eye (from Psychedelia: A Musical Light Show)
14. “Angel Band” – Old & in the Way (from That High Lonesome Sound)
As you may’ve noticed, the site’s been a bit a spotty lately. I’ve been getting everything migrated to a new server, a process far more oi-inducing than I could’ve predicted. Anyway, I’m gonna take a break until everything is all squared. Could be tomorrow, could be next week, I dunno. When we come back: field recordings of distant marching bands, more animation, new micro-fiction, and all kindsa mp3s.
Americana: Home Recordings – Jim Croce (Shout! Factory)
A roommate of mine once told me of an opulent summer week he spent sailing around a vast lake on a private yacht. Every day, he said, they would drink white wine on the deck, dive off the sides, and float in tubes on the cool water. At night, they would go ashore via a tricked-out speedboat for parties on sprawling waterfront estates, returning to the ship to stare dizzily at the milky stars and enjoy the warmth of their drunkenness. The soundtrack for their unassuming debauchery – and the only thing preventing it from entering F. Scott Fitzgerald’s world of idle rich – was a collection of lite-folkie Jim Croce’s Greatest Hits. “It was,” my friend frequently insisted, “perfect,” as if that circumstance alone is what made his vacation transcend to the sublime.
The belly-filling warmth my roommate felt is present in spades on Americana: Home Recordings, a collection of kitchen table folk and country covers recorded before Croce’s career took off. They are songs of hard-luck hoboes and fallen working class heroes — the same stuff of Willie Nelson’s compatible (and heartbreaking) Crazy Sessions. But, where Nelson’s voice is pure ache, there is a lingering optimism in Croce’s, even in jailhouse laments like “The Wall.” That difference is what makes Nelson’s music appropriate for lonely barroom nights and Croce’s appropriate for giddy boating excursions.
In a way, it is the purest realization of depressing folk music as entertainment. Croce is an easy-going pop singer born in an age of acoustic troubadours, his vocals retaining a deftly mechanical sense of momentum while remaining impossibly laid back. It’s the kind of voice that makes one feel like a man of action despite lazing idly on a yacht, projecting movement upon silent canvases of stillness, vapidness turning to golden magnificence.
o Technobrega is a new Brazilian genre whose creation and distribution is entirely based on bootlegging/free distribution/live gigs. Haven’t listened to the clips yet, but its context is rad. (Thanks, RG.)
o ZoomQuilt II is extraordinarily detailed eye candy, an infinitely looped acceleration into fantastic recursive worlds. (Word, Dad.)
o Haruki Murakami on jazz.
o A nice, meaty interview with William Gibson on his forthcoming Spook Country and other topics.
o A detailed chronology of 120 years of electronic musical instruments.
from San Diego Fahrenheit, circa summer 2003: The Multiplex Dreams of Bollywood
by Jesse Jarnow
“These seats are real comfy,” my friend whispered as exotic birds fluttered floridly across the movie screen and landed.
“Yeah,” I giggled. “It’s almost like they want you to stay.”
We were somewhere in the middle of Winged Migration, a low-grade Disney-style nature flick, in the fourth theater on the third floor of the local multiplex which featured – give or take – 20 or so inexorable looking pieces of shit. But, despite the theater’s dubious quality, they also possessed a refreshing lack of security, coupled with labyrinthine system of escalators and a pair of unwatched smoking decks. It was an unbeatable deal: for $10 one could construct his own Indian-style multi-hour epic replete with sweeping drama, garish dance sequences, and – hell – even a mutant slasher or two. So we did.
From the anthropomorphic goodness of Winged Migration, we dropped into some previews. If Winged Migration was an abstract tune-up, then the previews were an overture. They acted as a series of condensed plot arcs, keynotes for the dramatic themes to be explored later. Under The Tuscan Sun (chick flick), Cat In The Hat (future cult-favorite dark horse), and Brother Bear (a Disney cartoon with a puzzling appearance by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas reprising the McKenzie Brothers in the form of a pair of talking moose), attuned us as viewers to the range of emotions we would likely be expected to feel later.
Then, a dash into the thick of it, to the movie we had actually bought tickets for, the 9:20 show of Spy Kids 3D. As I turned to survey the theater, I realized the other viewers had actual 3D glasses. “Yeah, it’s in 3D,” my friend confirmed, noting my puzzlement.
“Well, why don’t we get some?”
We zipped down the escalator to the Guest Services Counter and demanded what was rightfully ours: two pairs of gloriously old-fashioned cardboard glasses with blue and red cellophane lenses. Back in our seats, the screen instructed us to put our glasses on. We had worn ours up the escalator and into the theater. Suddenly, the landscape morphed into a grid, Tron-like and perfect. For the next 40 minutes, minus a quick nip to the smoking balcony, we were immersed in a genuinely vintage 3D world. It worked as well as could be possibly hoped. Objects shot out of the frame, characters progressed with no other motivation than that it might look cool.
And it did. A senseless feast for the eyes unfurled in a picaresque series of spectacles. The plot was occasionally stirred by a suitably bizarro b-movie villain played with Jerry Lewis aplomb by the impossible-to-take-seriously-ever-again Sylvester Stallone. In 10 years (or even 10 months), this could be a serious midnight classic, assuming theater owners have enough ingenuity to track down (or make) a crate or two 3D glasses. So, the little kid and Grandpa saved the universe or something and it went back to plain ol’ two dimensions, and we split.
Falling plum into the middle of a movie can be disconcerting. At first, one clutches desperately to the dialogue, trying to figure out who is who, what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it. After doing it two or three times in a row, plots became irrelevant. Other details took on new importance. Dialogue and acting could be taken objectively on their own immediate merits as performances. Messages could be found, y’understand? Any film could be turned into a Rocky Horror-style gimmick-fest with cues and whistles.
I looked for triggers for us to leave: a parrot escaping in a cage in Winged Migration, the end of a montage sequence in Freaky Friday, which we checked out after Spy Kids. Montages kick ass, instantly understandable dumb shows that rarely fail to express cinematic momentum, regardless of the quality of the movies they’re nestled in.
Gigli was the final stop for the evening. A guard hovered by the door of the theater, though made no attempt to stop us, despite the fact that we still wore our 3D glasses. Though it was supposedly legendary in its terribleness, Gigli didn’t seem all too bad — or, at least, no more horrible than a random 10 minutes out of Freaky Friday. There was Ben Affleck, and Jennifer Lopez, and a retarded kid, and Ben Affleck sticking a syringe in his character’s mother’s thong-dipped ass. What’s so bad about that, eh?
It still looked way cooler with 3D glasses on, though, red and blue hues swirling the film to Stan Brakhage-like abstraction. The guard stood by the door. “What if he doesn’t let us leave?” my friend hissed as J-Lo launched into a display of histrionics.
“You got a problem with the retarded kid?” I asked her. “Are you insensitive?”
Apparently, the guard was, because he soon left. And so did we.
“Ouch!” – The Rutles (download) (buy)
from The Rutles (1978)
released by Rhino
(file expires July 16th)
Ostensibly parody, Bonzo Dog Band leader Neil Innes’ songs for the Rutles are more like what the Beatles themselves might’ve written under slightly different circumstances. Sure, repurposing “Help!” into “Ouch!” is silly, especially with those extra-long verse phrasings, but the sentiment is just as sincere. Why should “Ouch, don’t desert me, ouch, please don’t hurt me!” be any less emotional or effective than “Help, I need somebody, help, not just anybody”? It’s just that John Lennon chose the latter. Innes’s version, really, is just as naked and direct. That’s not to say that Innes is a better songwriter than Lennon, but the whole original soundtrack is great stuff. Like top grade Nuggets faux-fabs, Innes nails the Lennonesque wistfulness repeatedly. In fact, I might even prefer Innes’ “I know you know what you know/But you should know by now that you’re not me” to Lennon’s “I am he as you are me as you are she and we are all together.”
1. “You Broke My Heart” – Lavender Diamond (from Cavalry of Light EP)
2. “It’s Summertime” – The Flaming Lips (from Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “Rain” – Bishop Allen (from The Broken String)
5. “When Love Was the Law in Los Angeles” – Tarwater (from Spider Smile)
6. “Selling Oakland By the Pound” – Mushroom with Eddie Gale (from Joint Happening)
7. “Fall Breaks and Back to Winter (Spring Breaks and Back to Winter) – Jim O’Rourke (from Smiling Pets compilation)
8. “Plin” – Hermeto Pascoal (from A musica livre de Hermeto Pascoal)
9. “Witchi Tai To” – Harpers Bizarre (from Harpers Bizarre 4)
10. “Ruby” – Silver Apples (from Contact)
11. “Black Swan” – Thom Yorke (from The Eraser)
12. “Spotted Pinto Bean” – The Residents (from Meet the Residents)
13. “Red River Valley” – The Mountain Goats (from Daytrotter Session)
14. “Brazil” – Frank Sinatra (from Come Fly With Me)
15. “Tropicalia” – Caetano Veloso (from Caetano Veloso)
16. “Summer Turns to High” – R.E.M. (from Reveal)
Well, there was a new Frow Show to post & some other odds & ends, but Ropeadope is off ’til Monday, and I’m gonna do the same. We’re just gonna get back to detonating marshmallows for freedom now.
I am not quite sure what to call the below episodes of Robot Chicken and Powerpuff Girls, in which fairly fuckin’ hilarious Star Wars and Beatles references, respectively, are framed in the shows’ usual styles. They are not mash-ups, except conceptually. They are too scattershot to be parodies, and too oblique to be tributes, though that perhaps comes closest. Anyway, it’s probably making too much of them, but both make comedy from the secret vocabulary of intimate fandom.
It’s not like other shows haven’t done the thematic-inside-joke-as-leitmotif before, but these two happen to do it with worlds that have been with me (and probably a lot of people) since early childhood. So, it’s absurd, but it somehow runs deeper than that — as when the Robot Chicken dudes tell the story of Ponda Baba, one of the many creatures from the Mos Eisley cantina that resonated with my adolescent self as grotesquely creepy, or when the whole Powerpuff episode builds towards a joke based almost exactly on More Videos
“Arrival in Mas” – recorded by David Baker (download) (buy)
from Pitamaha: Music From Bali (2000)
released by Amulet
(file expires July 4th)
There’s lots of gamelan music to be had besides Amulet’s Pitamaha: Music from Bali, and I’ve had some of it, but David Baker’s compilation of field recordings was my first exposure. “A thousand toy pianos twinkling madly,” is how I described it before I knew anything about the genre, about how each “instrument” is actually an individually tuned set of sub-instruments. And, to be honest, I still don’t know much about it, give or take a few shadow puppet traditions. It is not that the rhythms sound foreign to me. They sound as instantly natural as ever, as does the tone. They sound like another dimension, like the alternating consciousnesses of Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland & the End of the World, a place I’ve been all along.
Album reviews: The Mix-Up – The Beastie Boys (Relix) The Complete Rich-R-Tone 78s – The Stanley Brothers (from Paste #16) Indie-Weirdo Round-Up, featuring: Dandelion Gum by Black Moth Super Rainbow, While My Guitar Violently Bleeds by Sir Richard Bishop, Mirrors by Battles, Corona: Tokyo Realization by Jim O’Rourke, and Spider Smile by Tarwater (JamBands.com)
In print: Paste #33 (Can Rock Save the World? cover): feature on Ghosts of Cité Soleil director Asger Leth, film review of Death at a Funeral
July Relix (Page McConnell cover): album reviews of the Beastie Boys, Praxis, Buffalo Tom; book review of Dub: Soundscapes & Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae)
“Sad and Lonesome” – RANA (download) (buy) [live versions only on iTunes]
from Here in the USA (2002)
released by Bonesaw
(file expires July 2nd)
Man, after five years (!), RANA’s “Sad and Lonesome” is still so perfectly languid. Though they sometimes played at being an indie band, the New Jersey quartet never quite mastered the hipster, er, edge. But when they played to their strengths — chemistry, mainly, and berserker lead guitar — they sounded fantastic. Though “Sad and Lonesome” references both blues (a pair of harmonica solos) and country (the title, and a twangy solo from guitarist Scott Metzger), the song is decidedly neither of those. But it’s definitely sad, and it’s definitely lonesome. A lot of the mood comes from songwriter Matt Durant’s Rhodes, a naturally sleepy instrument that simulates warm, nocturnal air. On paper, the lyrics are an ambiguous jumble — Durant claims, “It’s such a nice night to be married” before he declares that he’s gonna “find [him]self a bride” — but it’s no matter and (in practice) makes exactly enough sense as it needs to.
“Meet the Mets” – Funny Cry Happy (download)
(Ruth Roberts and Bill Katz cover)
(file expires July 1st)
If anybody was wondering what a Funny Cry Happy arrangement of “Meet the Mets” would sound like, well, wait no longer. Conceived during the atrocious 4-14 stretch and recorded with a mite less mope following their three-game sweep of the A’s this weekend, it’s… um, I guess it’s something I made on a Sunday evening for the hell of it. Forgive the extra/dropped beats.
There are many ways to read Lolita: as dark & sexual pulp, as hilarious meta-narrative, as a disturbingly sincere love story. But Nabokov is also a peerless observer of the cultural landscape as it transforms from the old, weird America of folksong and rural roads to the new, weird America of endless asphalt and roadside lodging.
Nous connumes (this is royal fun) the would-be enticements of their repetitious names — all those Sunset Motels, U-Beam Cottages, Hillcrest Courts, Pine View Courts, Mountain View Courts, Skyline Courts, Park Plaza Courts, Green Acres, Mae’s Courts. There was sometimes a special line in the write-up, such as “Children welcome, pets allowed” (You are welcome, you are allowed). The baths were mostly tiled showers, with an endless variety of spouting mechanisms, but with one definitely non-Laodicean characteristic in common, a propensity, while in use, to turn insanely beastly hot or blindingly cold upon you, depending on whether your neighbor turned on his cold or his hot to deprive you of a necessary component in the shower you had so carefully blended. Some motels had instructions posted above the toilet (on whose tank the towels were unhygienically heaped) asking guests not to throw into its bowl garbage, beer cans, cartons, stillborn babies, others had special notices under glass, such as Things to Do…
“Goodnight Irene” – Little Richard (download) (buy) (1951ish)
(file expires June 28th)
There is nothing ethereal about Little Richard’s Ray Charles-like take of “Goodnight Irene” — at least, not like the Leadbelly origination, or even the white bread version Pete Seeger & the Weavers rode to #1 in the summer of 1950. But it is remarkable nonetheless, mostly because of a drummer I can’t identify. In his hands, it doesn’t matter that the song is a murder ballad. The melody is there alright, but it is almost as if it only exists to give an arc to the utterly liquid groove. It sounds like there’s a conga player, too, but the meat of it is in the snare shuffle beneath Richard’s vocal, which dives in and out of the rhythm guitar. Like Glenn Kotche’s parts in Wilco’s “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart,” the drummer remains in freefall, as if he is always about to start the song’s real drum part. It never arrives, and the singer never quite says goodnight proper.
1. “The True Wheel” – Brian Eno (from Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy))
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “Good Guys & Bad Guys” – Camper Van Beethoven (from Camper Van Beethoven)
4. “Melody Day” – Caribou (from Andorra)
5. “When the Sun Grows On Your Tongue” – Black Moth Super Rainbow (from Dandelion Gum)
6. “Pink Batman” – Dan Deacon (from Spiderman of the Rings)
7. “I Hear A New World” – Joe Meek (from I Hear A New World)
8. “Within You Without You” – Sonic Youth (from Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father compilation)
9. “I’m A Boinger” – Billy & the Boingers (from Billy & the Boingers Bootleg flexidisc)
10. “The Night Before” – The Beatles (from Help! OST)
11. “You Didn’t Try To Call Me” – Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention (form Freak Out)
12. “She’s A Rejector” – Of Montreal (frrm Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?)
13. “Stupid Girl” – The Rolling Stones (from Aftermath)
14. “Never Talking To You Again” – Husker Du (from Zen Arcade)
15. “Wait For You” – The Mountain Goats (from Babylon Springs EP)
16. “Goodnight Irene” – Little Richard (from Forever Gold)
I’d heard about Tideland, but my first notice of its release was when I looked down at the Daily News (I think) while eating a taco at two in the morning and seeing (I think) a half-star review of a new movie. Wondering what could possibly be so awful, I was informed of the existence of a new Terry Gilliam movie. I missed it during its New York run, and sat on the DVD for a month or so after it arrived. My suspicions were met head on when Gilliam himself arrived, in unflattering black and white, to introduce the film himself.
“Many of you are not going to like this film,” Gilliam says. “Fortunately, many of you are going to love it, and a great many of you are not going to know what to think, but hopefully you’ll be thinking.” The math is a little dubious. It is not optimistic, and — after Gilliam tells what, exactly, we should be thinking — it certainly contributes like a self-fulfilling prophesy to the ruin of the movie, which plays out like the most hideous recesses of the adrenochrome nightmare Gilliam hinted at in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (with Jeff Bridges as the anti-Dude doing his best impersonation of Bernie of Weekend at Bernie’s fame). Tideland‘s fundamental language is no different than the fantasy-infused grotesques of Brazil or The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, but — as Gilliam’s totally unnecessary and film-mauling introduction seems to emphasize — it plays the grotesques for almost pure shock as opposed to building blocks towards larger truths.
It’s nice to see Gilliam getting arty and strange again after a decade run at the mainstream. It’s a logical step for him, artistically. All the darkness, of course, lurked near the surface of his Flying Circus animations for Monty Python — which is exactly what gave them their power. I hope he keeps chasing this particular muse. Maybe he’ll get it next time. (Don Quixote, sadly, seems the perfect manifestation for it.) I am not going to repeat Gilliam’s instructions for viewing Tideland, because they give concrete shape to what could be an oblique and implacable experience. (Though you can watch the intro on YouTube.) (No, you can Google it yourself.)
“Don’t forget to laugh,” Gilliam reminds us, sounding like a total sourpuss. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he gravely intones at the end of his message. The image switches to color (?!) for a frame or three. Only then does Gilliam smile. The joke is definitely on somebody.
o Peter Tork kvetches about how the Monkees have been kept from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I must respectfully disgaree with the otherwise heady folks at Hidden Track. In fact, not only would I argue that the Monkees deserve to be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for their roles as pioneering cultural archetypes, but that a canned institution like the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame was veritably invented for canned bands like the Monkees. I also think it’s a bit of a double-standard for them to honor those doing the canning (like, say, Phil Spector) but denying the messengers’ existence.
Watching the Mets melt over the weekend, there were numerous tasteless jokes I wanted to make about unsuspended steroid-free reliever Guillermo Mota. But there was nobody around. I thought about logging on to one of the entertaining comment threads on MetsBlog.com. Entry into the Mets’ online fan community is something I’ve been hesitant about, though.
When fans of bands or authors or comic books or even politicians gather online, it is usually for the purpose of creating a virtual community, a collectively imagined place to give body to an idea. But baseball fans already have a physical home: the ballpark. That’s not to take anything away from Mets fans that post online, just to note that the meaning and tenor of their conversations is different. They are an old-fashioned mini-diaspora that doesn’t need the net to survive, just AM radio and somebody in a similarly colored hat. I was happy to save my rude comments until those conditions were met. Didn’t take long.
“I Wish It Would Rain” – The Cougars (download) (buy)
from Jamaica to Toronto, 1966-1974 compilation
released by Light in the Attic
(file expires June 20th)
Apparently, this is a Temptations cover, though I only know the Cougars’ version from the Jamaica to Toronto, 1966-1974 soul/reggae compilation. The vibe amazes me every time, which simultaneously nails the heartache of the lyrics (“raindrops will hide my teardrops, and no one will ever know”) and the feeling of swampy, unbearable humidity. Part of that is in the particular crackle of the recording, but a good deal of it is the arrangement: the alternating notes between the guitar and the heartbeat kickdrum, the atmospheric organ. Of course, it has a hook, which reminds me of Hendrix’s “Burning of the Midnight Lamp” (a song I haven’t heard in probably 13 years, when I learned a mongrelized version for a summer camp band, so maybe I’m totally misguided). But it is the conflation of weather and emotion that does it. Not that it’s gotten too humid yet this summer, but I’ve been feeling “I Wish It Would Rain” lately, wanting to watch sheets of flamboyant storms come crashing across the basketball court outside.
Wrote this song in October but had occasion(s) to record it this evening. I think there are some partying Puerto Ricans in the background on one of the tracks. It’s a very rough mix right now, though C.P. Farnsworth will soon tweak it up proper. It’s short & could probably use a bridge. Also uploaded to the Funny Cry Happy MySpace page…
Examples of my handwriting, 15 years apart. The right two columns are from 2007, the lefthand columns are from 1992. The 3s and 8s are loopier, and I was more inclined to write in cursive, but not many differences besides those. That said, the 2007 version doesn’t really look (to me) like my normal handwriting anyway. Ah, the durress of Yahtzee.
1. “Let’s Go Crazy” – Prince & the Revolution (from Live in Syracuse)
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “Erotic City” – Dump (from That Skinny Motherfucker With the High Voice?)
4. “Hallelujah the Hills” – Hallelujah the Hills (from Collective Psychosis Begone)
5. “I Think That Echo Finally Fadeed Away” – A Big Yes & A Small No (via myspace.com/abigyesandasmallno)
6. “Return of the Tourist” – Jason Holstrom (from The Thieves of Kailua)
7. “2300 Hawaii” – Yoshinori Sunahara (from Sushi 4004 compilation)
8. “Sad & Lonesome” – RANA (from Here in the USA)
9. “A Life of Possibilities” – Dismemberment Plan (from Emergency & I)
10. “The Thanks I Get” – Wilco (from Sky Blue Sky b-sides)
11. “These Are the Eyes” – Bodies of Water (from Ears Will Pop & Eyes Will Blink)
12. “Should A Cloud Replace A Compass?” – The Circulatory System (from The Circulatory System)
13. “The Dress Looks Nice On You” – Sufjan Stevens (from Seven Swans)
14. “Lazybones” – Soul Coughing (from Irresistable Bliss)
15. “I’ll Fly Away” – Johnny Cash (from My Mother’s Hymn Book)
Yo La Tengo at Winter Garden, World Financial Center
2 June 2007
Bang on a Can Marathon
Ira: keyboards/piano, James: electronics/drums, Georgia: keyboard/crutches (?!), with: Pat Gubler (PG Six, harp), Matt Heyner (No Neck Blues Band, upright bass), Elson Nascimento (Sun Ra Arkestra, percussion), and Britt Walford (Slint, drums)
Set was 20-30 minute improvisation, possibly including bits from one of The Sounds of the Sounds of Science songs (“The Sea Horse,” maybe?). Mostly free and abstract, save for a pulse in the middle when James switched to drums, at which point it became rhythmic and abstract. But also pretty free.
What a specific, weird window of time: when the internet and pinball machines co-existed, and fantasies of one could be channeled into the other. Specifically, 1996, with the release of Johnny Mnemonic movie.
o The Wave dissipates around the seats, following a zagging single-file line before dying completely, more like a secret whispered from one fan to another than any kind of groupmind declaration.
o The ball is a pinprick in a massive field of controlled visual noise. It is like the key to a magic eye. Locating it against the crowd can sometimes be like looking at an Escher, the foreground and the background toppling over one another as one tries to pick up if it is fair or foul, high or low, or even which side of the diamond it’s heading towards. For a dizzying fraction of a second (at least far away) it is all of these places simultaneously. Then it is in the first baseman’s glove, and Damion Easley is heading back to the dugout.
o In extra innings, the PA runs into the deep cuts: The Doors’ “Break on Through,” with Ray Manzarek’s long organ solo to keep fans entertained in lieu of DiamondVision gimcracks. Also because, like, the Mets need to break on through & such. Later, the DJ (what would his title be?) whips out “We Will Rock You” — not just the introductory beat to get the crowd stomping, but the actual song, Freddie Mercury verse and all. As a dramatic cue, it really works.
o The booing of Barry Bonds is an amazing, overwhelming sound. Especially on Tuesday, when he doesn’t come in until a late inning pitch hit appearance, and the crowd finally releases their hatred (is that what it is?), it sounds like a jet going over Shea. Wednesday, a plane passed overhead while Bonds was up, and the sounds were indistinguishable.
o The debate over “performance enhancing drugs” rings a bit false, though, if only because science — especially as it relates to baseball — is almost always destined to prove itself mere folk knowledge. From (the recently late) David Halberstam’s Summer of ’49:
The strain of the heat on the pitchers was even more obvious. They kept a jug of orange juice mixed with honey to drink as a pick-me-up and also a bucket filled with ice and ammonia. Gus Mauch would dip a towel in the bucket and drape it over the pitcher’s neck between innings. “Florida water,” they called it. It was believed that water, any amount of it, would bloat you up, make you heavy, and slow you down. So none of the pitchers took even the smallest drink of water during the game. Allie Reynolds, as a special reward to himself if he made it to the seventh inning in the hot weather, would go over to the cooler, take a mouthful, wash it around in his mouth for a moment or two, then spit it out.
Sometimes, the players ate candybars (no water to wash it down) midgame. Other times, they just stuffed ice into their jocks to fight off fatigue.
“Mountains of the Moon” – the Grateful Dead (download) (buy)
recorded 1 March 1969, Fillmore West, San Francisco
(file expires June 6th)
As I’ve been saying all along, the Dead are hip and getting hipper. With the publication of The Fader‘s Jerry Garcia issue (download it fer free!), the circle is complete. It’s official: Jerry’s cool again. And it’s about fucking time.
It is interesting to see Garcia liberated from the thin, crammed pages of Relix and splashed gorgeously across the thick glossy sheets and high modern layouts of The Fader. The editors present a very specific version of Garcia that is far from the genial, bearded fat dude he was for his last 15 years, and who is often still celebrated by the jamband scene. Titled “Jerry Garcia: American Beauty,” only two of the nine photos of Garcia (including full-sized front & back cover shots) feature the iconic beard. Instead, we get the doe-eyed beatific boy from San Francisco.
Arranged as an oral history/appreciation, the spread features quotes from the usual suspects (Bob Weir, Mountain Girl, David Grisman), but also pontificatin’ from various hipster musicians, including Devendra Banhart, Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse, Craig Finn of the Hold Steady, duder from Animal Collective, and others. Though they missed a few good quotables (no Lee Ranaldo?), they all present alternative readings on how to listen to the Dead. Alternative to the Deadhead mainstream, that is.
What happens now that the Dead are seemingly back in the dialogue, I have no idea.
“Blue Bayou” – Roy Orbison (download) (buy)
from Mean Woman Blues 7-inch (1963)
released by Monument Records
(files expires June 5th)
Along with Depression-era standard “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” Roy Orbison’s “Blue Bayou” is a semi-secular utopia fantasia. It is a most pleasant subgenre, which also includes Bob Dylan’s “Beyond the Horizon” and countless others. Just as the opening shot of “Big Rock” is lit by “the jungle fires… burning” in a hobo shantytown, “Blue Bayou” begins under the spotlight of any ol’ C&W bar. “I’m so lonesome all the time,” Orbison croons over a plain kickdrum heartbeat before the cooing back-up singers, lazy harmonica, and an airy clavichord (?) transport the listener to a more pastoral scene, a place “where you sleep all day and the catfish play.” Who doesn’t like a good utopia now & again? It really works. Hope everyone got good and lost in their own blue bayous over the long weekend.
“Tuileries,” the Coen brothers’ contribution to Paris, Je T’aime, might as well be a silent short titled “Donnie Goes to Paris.” To my ugly American ears, the French dialogue is just part of the soundtrack — and, either way, is totally unnecessary to understand the story, which is conveyed via pantomime. Not a significant work by any stretch, it’s still an entertaining exercise in how to retain one’s own voice while working inside a genre. For the Coens, that means abusing the shit out of Steve Buscemi in some new way. (Thanks, MVB.)
Only in print:
June Relix (Jeff Tweedy cover): feature on Europe ’72, album reviews of Wilco, Billy Martin and John Medeski, Soul Sides, and Michael Barry; book review of John Peel. Paste #32 (Parker Posey cover): feature interview with Haruki Murakami; film review of Crazy Love.
1. “Bob Dylan’s 49th Beard” – Jeff Tweedy (from 3/5/2005 Vic Theater
2. “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” – Bob Dylan (from 10/16/1992 Madison Square Garden)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “On A Rainy Afternoon” – Bob Dylan & the Band (from Complete Basement Tapes)
5. “See You Later, Allen Ginsberg” – Bob Dylan & the Band (from Complete Basement Tapes)
6. “I’m Not Here 1956” – Bob Dylan & the Band (from Complete Basement Tapes
7. “Santa Fe” – Bob Dylan & the Band (from Complete Basement Tapes)
8. “Winterlude” – Bob Dylan (from New Morning)
9. “You’re A Big Girl Now” – Bob Dylan (from Blood on the Tracks acetate)
10. “Up To Me” – Bob Dylan (from Blood on the Tracks acetate)
11. “Every Grain of Sand” – Bob Dylan (from Shot of Love)
12. “A Couple More Years” – Bob Dylan (from Hearts of Fire film)
13. “John Hardy” – Bob Dylan & the Grateful Dead (from Dylan & the Dead rehearsals)
14. “One Too Many Mornings” – Bob Dylan (from 11/1993 Supper Club)
15. “Tomorrow Night” – Bob Dylan (from Good As I Been To You)
16. “Moonlight” – Bob Dylan (from “Love & Theft”)
Wow, the Man came crashing down swiftly on occasional Mets prospect Lastings Milledge for his participation in Soul-Ja Boi Records & Manny D’s “Bend Ya Knees” single, huh? There’s a nice multi-faceted discussion over at MetsBlog. Mostly, I’m just curious to hear the damn song — it seems to have been deleted from the Soul-Ja Boi website, their MySpace page has apparently been disappeared, and when I emailed their info@ addy, I got a big, fat “delivery to the following recipient failed permanently” bounceback. WTF? Anybody got an mp3?
“Wave Backwards to Massachusetts” – Hallelujah the Hills (download) (buy)
from Collective Psychosis Begone (2007)
released by Misra
(file expires May 24th)
It was the song titles — “It’s All Been Downhill Since the Talkies Started To Sing,” “To All My Scientist Colleagues I Bid You Farewell” — that got me to listen to Hallelujah the Hills. Historical accuracies aside (the first talkie, Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer, sure sung) I’m glad I did, because the music is every bit as original. I love the first 30 seconds of “Wave Backwards to Massachusetts,” and like the rest a great deal. In some ways, it sounds like smart, vintage ’90s power pop as arranged by Neutral Milk Hotel, or some other ragged-but-right indie outfit. That is, pretty much every instrumental part here could be played by some combination of clean & dirty electric guitars, carefully layered. Instead, we get acoustic, trumpet, cello, and distorted vocal. It’s all oversaturated emotion, that particular trait of turn-of-the-century indie rock, and it’s really enjoyable. Besides having a trumpet player and a cellist (and who doesn’t these days?), Hallelujah the Hills don’t seem to have a particular gimmick. And that’s awesome. They’re just a really good band. I’m not sure if that really flies anymore, but maybe the existence of their Collective Psychosis Begone debut, out next month on Misra, is gimmick enough.
o It feels kind of, er, un-American to sing “God Bless America” during the 7th Inning Stretch. It feels hypocritical that it is only done on Sundays. I’ll stand for “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” though.
o Mama’s of Corona is easily the best food I’ve found at Shea. It is buried on the field level, accessible to Upper Deck groundlings, via a back hallway at gate B3 (though this article says there’s one in the mezzanine, too.) (Thx, Gary.)
o Much more on Michael Lewis’s Moneyball as it sinks in. An odd side effect of the Bill James/Billy Beane school of general managership: though it rewards deep, impersonal stats, on the playing field itself, it often emphasizes classically idiosyncratic baseball characters, such as Chad Bradford, the sidewinding Alabama Baptist, or Scott Hatteberg, the pitch-count-racking catcher-turned-first-basemen. (I’m only four years late to the party on this one.)
o During the last homestand, Shea’s grass was cut in criss-crossed diamond patterns. This time out, it radiates outwards from homeplate like sunbeams, growing wider and bolder as they reach the outfield, each a miniature replication of a baseball field’s implied infiniteness.
What with Trey Anastasio beginning his court-ordered dry-out, it seems a fine time to post a profile I wrote for RS.com last summer that got killed when RS instead ran an Austin Scaggs Q&A where Trey admitted to freebasing and, er, listening to Neutral Milk Hotel.
Also, “Empty House,” while not a terribly original sentiment, is one of the few cuts from last year’s Bar 17 that (I think) is unequivocally rather good, a solid Paul Simon-like ballad in a sea of acoustic tripe.
Empty House
by Jesse Jarnow
Trey Anastasio could be having a nervous breakdown. Either that, or everything is just really funny. Anastasio laughs a lot.
The 42-year old ex-Phish guitarist laughs about the label he has just started, Rubber Jungle, which released his own Bar 17 in early October, and how he found the term on a website for hot air balloon enthusiasts. He laughs about touring with yet another version of his solo band, as he will for most of this autumn. He laughs about how the album’s two year creation was one of great catharsis, so much so that he’s not even sure if the songs are good or not.
And he laughs when asked about the decidedly dark tenor of the recording, which features titles like “Let Me Lie,” “What’s Done,” and — during one particularly uplifting stretch — “Empty House,” “Gloomy Sky,” and “Shadow.”
“Did you ever see Mighty Wind?” Anastasio asks. “When Mitch and Mickey break up, [Eugene Levy’s Mitch] puts out those three albums?” While Bar 17 isn’t exactly Songs From A Dark Place or Cry For Help, the comparison isn’t unwarranted.
Begun during the disintegration of Phish in 2004, and temporarily shelved for the buoyant summer-pop of 2005’s Shine, Bar 17 is part expansive modern rock and part mid-life crisis. Elaborate big band breakdowns (“Cincinnati”), playful orchestral epics (“Goodbye Head”), and earnest horn-driven head-bobbers (“Mud City”) are liberally distributed, but so are a half-dozen acoustic numbers with exquisitely representative titles.
As the veteran Vermont jamband closed up shop, Anastasio fled Burlington, first for Atlanta, where he recorded Shine (working title nixed by then-label Columbia: A Circular Dive), and then Brooklyn, where he decamped at collaborator Bryce Goggin’s Trout Studios.
“Everything is good now,” says Anastasio, who is again spending time in Vermont, and recently toured with ex-Phishmate Mike Gordon. “But for a year there, it was hard to see clearly, not to mention the fact that I was such a wreck, to top it all off. Probably virtually everybody else I knew was waking up from six years of raging, or ten, all at the same time.”
“It was some shit to go through. It becomes cathartic to write this stuff, and there’s no value judgment about whether you’re writing good music or bad music. You’re writing just to clear your head.”
Following the souring of Anastasio’s relationship with Columbia — which included both Sony’s digital rights management debacle and Shine‘s poor reception by Phishheads — Anastasio spent his time on Bar 17. Anastasio clearly enjoys company with his catharsis. Either that, or he just hates being alone. “I really like collaborating,” he says. “It doesn’t make any difference if they’re a musician or not.”
In fact, one common trait of the scattered sessions that produced Bar 17 was their spontaneity. Even when jamming with world-class instrumentalists, the work was sudden, such as when Anastasio and Goggin roused Phish bassist Mike Gordon and indie-jam upstarts the Benevento Russo Duo late one Brooklyn night. For the man who piloted the country’s foremost jamband for two decades, this should come as no surprise.
Non-musicians included Anastasio’s 10-year old daughter Eliza (lyricist on “Goodbye Head”), and a sailboat captain named Kevin Hoffman (who was unaware Anastasio was demoing “A Case of Ice and Snow” into his cell phone at two in the morning in a St. Martin hotel room).
Anastasio says he is fond of the “fly-by-night” approach. And though Phish were known for their improvisation, Anastasio often describes how hard it was to maneuver them as their popularity grew. It is likely not coincidental that he describes the quick writing and recording of 2005’s Shine as “reactionary.”
“In 1996, we were already talking about how huge the scene had become, and the sense of entitlement around Phish. It’s virtually impossible not to get sucked up into it yourself. I’m completely guilty of that. It never stopped. It just kept going and going and going. Same old story.
Anastasio grows philosophical. “You’re surrounded by people who have an interest, everybody has an interest, and you lose yourself. Any kind of art is an attempt to point at something bigger than human beings. That’s what art is. It’s always a failure, it’s destined to fail, all art. But sometimes people can point a little bit, and sometimes people can get a glimpse of something beyond humans. But if you start celebrating the human who’s doing it, you have a problem, ’cause it’s not supposed to be about the person.”
He sighs again. “It just got so big, so many people, so much money, so many expectations, that we just lost our bearings.”
Part of Anastasio’s attempt to regain his footing has been a return to one of his first loves: composition. Though Phish started partially as an outlet for Anastasio’s fugues and mini-musicals, they rapidly evolved into their own beast. After releasing Seis de Mayo in 2004, a collection of string quartets, Dixieland fantasias, and bursting prog-rock, Anastasio met Don Hart while preparing for a Bonnaroo performance with the Nashville Chamber Orchestra.
“Before I started [Bar 17],” Anastasio remembers, “we started having lunch in New York City, and talking about ways we could integrate the string thing, into the rock music I do, improvised music. He did the arrangements on this album, and he did a great job.
“Sometimes, it sounds like the strings are riffing off the guitar solo, and sometimes it sounds like the guitar solo is riffing off the strings,” Anastasio says, describing the construction of “Shadow.” “We spent a lot of time talking about how to accomplish that. I like the sound and I like the emotion it can bring, but it can get real cheesy, if you’re not careful. Whoa, here comes the orchestra!” Anastasio laughs again.
“Dangerous Match #1” – Scientist (download here)
from Scientist Wins the World Cup (1982)
released by Greensleeves (buy)
(file expires May 21st)
It never ceases to amaze me how many genres were invented almost entirely by accident:
Given the heavy demand for dub mixes from sound systems preparing for weekend dances, it is important to realize that these mixes were improvised on the spot, with a mimimum of pre-planning. Most dub mixing was done on Friday evenings, when producers deposited their master tapes with engineers, and sound system operators gathered at the studio so that each could be given a unique mix of a currently popular tune. (via Michael Veal’s Dub: Soundscapes & Shattered Songs in Jamaican Culture)
That and the dub tracks that we hippies mellow-out to were intended to be blasted at massive volume, with DJs toasting on top of them — still tripped-out and all, but in a very different way. Accidents will happen.
(I recommend this Scientist cut — and the whole album, for that matter — with a tall glass of chocolate milk. Speaking of which…)
“One True Vine” – Wilco (download here) Sky Blue Sky b-side (2007)
(Not sure what this is the b-side to, exactly. Just a free-floater, mayhaps.)
(file expires May 18th)
What lite! If “One True Vine” sounds Jesus-y, it’s because it is. “I am the true vine,” sez John 15:1. This stands to reason, of course, because the Walrus was Paul and Jeff Tweedy, ergo, must write more mid-tempo ballads. Goo goo gajoob. What’s funny — though maybe not ha-ha funny — is that the lyrics are fairly consistent with a born again confession. “You set me free from this mighty, mighty fire,” Tweedy sings. That doesn’t mean it’s not a love song, too, though it lacks the songwriter’s usual self-deprecating sadness. If it’s a sturdy image — and a good chunk of those Biblical ones are, nice poets them prophets — I’m not as sure about the song itself. It seems like straight testifyin’, but there’s nothing majestic about its delivery. No gospel organ solo/whatever. Perhaps it was slotted before “What Light” on the Sky Blue Sky and scratched because it was redemption overload.
(A foray into longer-form baseball writing in the form of a review of Shout! Factory’s 2006 Mets highlights reel, The Team. The Time. The 2006 Mets..)
“You’re gonna have to learn your clichés,” Kevin Costner’s Crash Davis advises Tim Robbins’ Nuke LaRouche in 1988’s Bull Durham. “You’re gonna have to study them, you’re gonna have to know them. They’re your friends. Write this down: ‘we gotta play it one day at a time.'”
“It’s pretty boring,” LaRouche says.
“‘Course it’s boring,” Davis responds. “That’s the point.”
Nineteen seasons later — LaRouche, perhaps, having just wrapped up a respectable alternate-universe career as a dependable mid-rotation starter — Robbins has certainly learned his. Narrating The Team. The Time. The 2006 Mets, the now-veteran actor spits them out fast and furious, along with nearly every commentator, Met, vet, and front office rep to offer commentary.
And, like Davis says, that’s the point. Despite baseball’s infinite facets, cliché remains the dominant public language of the game, and there’s no reason to suspect that will change anytime soon.
“This town is about winning,” General Manager Omar Minaya notes at one point, completely clearing that up. “It starts with our passion for playing the game,” observes manager Willie Randolph in a totally winning white turtleneck. “The 2006 Mets personified heart and courage,” Robbins intones as Carlos Beltran slams into (I think) the Astrodome wall. Things, in short, that might be said about any (the) team at any (the) time.
In a way, all of that seems perfectly obvious. Of course David Wright is going to regurgitate platitudes like “I think winning’s contagious.” Clichés let the game speak for itself, mindless chatter between highlights clips. And what highlights clips: Carlos Delgado rocketing a shot into the rightfield bullpen in the 16th inning against Philadelphia on May 23rd, Jose Reyes completing his June 21st cycle with a single, Jose Valentin acknowledging the transcendent power of his moustache.
Stache’s ‘stache, as it turns out, is a reminder that highlights reels don’t have to be clichés. Really, a DVD about the 2006 Mets could just as easily plug the gaps between walk-off wins by talking about mechanics, like what knowledge leather-faced Rickey Henderson imparted on bright-eyed/bushy-tailed Reyes in the art of stealing bases, or the practically spiritual strength Tom Glavine draws from his routines. Or a feature reflecting the culturally rich clubhouse. Or even just the lovely and human story of the seemingly over-the-hill Valentin earning the hell out of a starting spot at second base.
Instead, we get acoustic guitar shorthanding for the sadness of Pedro Martinez’s mid-campaign meltdown, though no actual footage of the events. Even by highlights films standards, some of it’s pretty bad. By contrast, the plum delightful 1986 reel, A Year To Remember, created its narrative authority by including (for example) footage of an errant throw by Gary Carter smashing into Mookie Wilson’s face and shattering his sunglasses. Plus, they had montages. Crazy, bad-ass ’80s montages set to Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Glenn Frey. You know, from the Eagles. (The Eagles of Los Angeles, that is, not Philadelphia.)
Few of the clichés are inaccurate, either. After all, the Mets did finish 2006 tied for the best record in baseball, and a host of other accomplishments. But, with chapter names like “Chemistry,” “Resiliency,” and “Optimism,” it’s also kind of patronizing. Cute marketing brand, the whole definite-article/parallel construction the-team-the-time thing, but maybe not very accurate as far as titles go, given that the Mets didn’t even make it to the World Series. In the end, the true tenor of a baseball season — for player and fan alike — is multitudes more complex than “Chemistry” and “Optimism.”
Instead of the World Series, though, what we got — and what we get here, augmented by dramatic orchestral hits — is Endy Chavez creating a real, honest-to-Keith capital-M baseball Moment. And, while that’s maybe not as good as brute force world champ bragging rites, it’s also much richer: that concentrated flash of pure joy deeply colored by the fated ending just an inning later. It’s not victory, but it’s something to hold onto — and, in the form of The Team. The Time. The DVD, it takes physical form.
We bought the ticket, we took the ride, and the Mets lost. The latter fact feels (and is) entirely secondary on The Team. The Time. The 2006 Mets.. And, really, it is, owing primarily to another life-affirming cliché: we’ll get ’em next year. And we will. Both the bragging rights and the bitchin’ montages.
“Huck’s Theme” – Bob Dylan (download here)
from Lucky You OST (2007)
released by Columbia Records (buy)
(file expires May 10th)
Here’s the newest Dylan tune, “Huck’s Theme,” from the soundtrack to Lucky You, a movie I don’t know anything about and — given Dylan’s previous soundtrack contributions — probably don’t need to. I’m not sure how I feel about the song. I like how it begins, with an arrangement that at least aims for the transcendent in the drone of steel guitar and organ even if the synthiness of the organ prevents it from getting there.
But then the drums kick in, and — my God — do I hate what they do here: the big, plodding beat doesn’t add anything, just sort of serves as a default tempo. But I do like the melody, and the lyrics seem like a perfectly serviceable catch-all of Dylan couplets, even if they don’t cohere into any one mood. Still, there’s some good stuff: “When I kiss your lips, the honey drips, I’m gonna have to put you down for a while,” is a pleasant, tender thought. And “all the merry little elves can go hang themselves, my faith is as cold as can be” plays like a scroogey Christmas version of Dylan’s late-period Southern gentleman on the skids.
I do wonder if Dylan’s gonna ever try reinventing himself again. Of course, that’s what makes the reinventions compelling: they all seem like the “real” Dylan at the time. Unfortunately, “Huck’s Theme” doesn’t seem quite weird enough to be worth considering all too seriously.
There are many urban economies, preying on tourists being only one. The afternoon I was first approached, I participated in several. I had just gotten back to the city, and had errands to run. I bought from the gray market, purchasing new headphones at a dubious electronics chop shop on 14th Street, and spent local, eating pizza from a dingy slice stand. I was returning from my black market acquisition — some Ritalin from a friend of a former co-worker — when it happened.
The afternoon was bright, and the snow made even the dingiest car hoods blindingly luminescent. I squinted into the avenue ahead, searching for the subway entrance, and brushed past the man without looking. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his sunglasses drop. “Sorry,” I called, spotting the stairs. He followed me. “These are scratched,” he said. “I’m sorry,” I said again. In a minute, the encounter was over.
In bed that night, I fretted: what if I had scratched the man’s pair of $70 sunglasses. I buried my head in the pillow the smelless girl had slept on 24 hours previous. It was worse than a void, but like lucid daylight cast onto my thoughts when I craved the free-associative release of sleep. The next morning, I woke repeatedly before my alarm.
Only in print:
o April/May Relix (album art cover): mini-essay on the future of album art; album reviews of Phish, Tin Hat, and Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid; book reviews of Billy Martin’s Riddim and Mitch Myers’ Boy Who Cried Freebird. All typos added by Relix staffers, for your convenience.
o Paste #30 (Modest Mouse cover): film review of First Snow, DVD review of the Decemberists.
o Paste #31 (Hold Steady cover): album review of Patti Smith, book review of Roni Sarig’s Third Coast, film review of Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie For Theaters.
Yo La Tengo at Webster Hall
29 April 2007
Oneida opened
I Feel Like Going Home
From A Motel 6
Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind
Last Days of Disco
The Room Got Heavy
The Weakest Part
Beanbag Chair
Mr. Tough
Song for Mahlia
Don’t Say A Word (Hot Chicken #2)
Sugarcube
Styles of the times
Big Day Coming > (fast version)
Watch Out For Me, Ronnie
The Story of Yo La Tango
*(encore 1)*
The Race Is On Again
Dreaming (Sun Ra)
Tom Courtenay (acoustic version)
*(encore 2)*
Gates of Steel (Devo)
My Little Corner of the World (Bob Hilliard & Lee Pockriss)
I love Paul Williams’ writing on Bob Dylan. Like the baseball columns of Roger Angell, it’s clear that Williams is a fan and can completely communicate that experience. Frequently, of course, he gets carried away. Nonetheless, it is always valuable. In the best stretches of his multiple books about Dylan, it really seems as if Williams holds the key to understanding what Dylan does.
Here, Williams unpacks what is amazing about live performances. He is speaking generally, though what says is more easily applicable to Dylan’s linear/one-man style than most other types of musicians:
The performance is a unit of time. If you think of a movie camera recording the painter’s every brush stroke from the moment and place where s/he starts on the canvas to the place and moment where s/he finishes, you will understand that every painting is a kind of straight line, a movement, a performance, compressed upon itself… as the painting compresses time into something that can be felt all at once, so the performance takes human experience and stretches it out so that instead of just feeling it altogether (as we do in life) we feel it a morsel at a time, in a sequence. (from Performing Artist, 1974-1986)
He resorts often to hyperbole, though it is of the most beautiful, infectious sort. On the July 1st, 1984 rendition of “Tangled Up in Blue” that I can’t really imagine being objectively very good (though am certainly willing to check it out):
The version on Real Live (from London, July 7) is so similar I’m not sure I can articulate what makes the two performances different; yet the difference is as unmistakable as that between an ordinary starry night and the same instant after a lightning bolt has shattered the sky. (from Performing Artist, 1974-1986)
Williams is passionate in his adversity, too, publishing a book-length defense of Dylan’s 1978 conversion to Christianity titled Dylan — What Happened?). Purportedly, Dylan purchased copies to distribute to his friends, letting Williams act as his surrogate. When most fans were abandoning Dylan, Williams committed to Dylan’s new music as hard as he could without becoming a disciple of Christ himself, and in the process teased out some great stuff about what it really means to be a listener. “Some people see this is a threateningly anti-intellectual move from someone they’ve always related to on an intense intellectual level,” he wrote.
The old thing of all of us being in the same psychic space at the same time listening to the same new record albums just doesn’t work anymore. Not that I think Dylan expects it to — but I think that’s what a lot of us still expect of Dylan, that he’ll bring us the news. And that’s why we’re so confused and upset about the news he brought us this time. We keep thinking his news is our news, you see. (from Watching the River Flow, 1966-1995)
Billed as ‘Around the Campfire with Yo La Tengo.’ Ira on acoustic guitar, Georgia on snare/hi-hat, James on bass. Q&A between each song.
Tom Courtenay
Our Way To Fall
You Can Have It All (Harry Wayne Casey)
Tiny Birds
Rocks Off (Rolling Stones)
Better Things (The Kinks)
Now 2000
Nowhere Near
Stockholm Syndrome
Autumn Sweater
Speeding Motorcycle (Daniel Johnston)
1. “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” – Bob Dylan (from Theme Time Radio Hour #4: Baseball)
2. “Thou Shalt Always Kill” – Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip (from Thou Shalt Always Kill EP)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “Bird Flu” – M.I.A.
5. “Earth Intruders” – Bjork (from Volta)
6. “Boy Looka Here” – Rich Boy
7. “Je Veux Te Voir (Original Mix)” – Yelle (from Mashed III compilation)
8. “????” – Ike Reiko (from Kokotsu no Seka)
9. “Nega (Photograph Blues)” – Gilberto Gil (from Gilberto Gil)
10. “This Could Be The Night” – Modern Folk Quartet (from Back to Mono box set)
11. “Backwater” – The Meat Puppets (from Too High To Die)
12. “Stick Your Tail In the Wind” – Summer Hymns (from Voice Brother and Sister)
13. “Portrait in the Clouds” – Wooden Wand (from Second Attention)
14. “Painted Eyelids” – Beck (from One Foot In the Grave)
“Thou Shalt Always Kill” – Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip (download here)
from Thou Shalt Always Kill EP (2007)
released by Lex (buy)
Yeah, “Thou Shalt Always Kill” is novelty hip-hop, British, and dorky, but it also feels like an achievement, or at least something I’ve been listening to over and over and over. Sure, there are all kinds of clever pop references (“thou shalt not wish your girlfriend was a freak like me”), but there are just as many moments that just feel real (“thou shalt not fall in love so easily”). It’s one popped balloon after another, keeping it real as real, in the highly relatable dialect of music geekdom. I likes.
Incidentally, I found this tune via Critical Metrics, a site I’ve been doing some editing work for, which I whole-heartedly endorse as a dope way to discover new music. A track review aggregator, CM launched officially on Friday, via a BoingBoing interview with our grand poobah (and my ex-neighbor) Joey Anuff. Blender weighed in as well. (Here is CM’s page for “Thou Shalt Always Kill.”)
o CitiField is emerging a few dozen yards from the outfield fence, a superstructure that looks not unlike the half-completed Death Star in Return of the Jedi. It’s certainly ominous. With nobody working on it during the weekend games, it looked like it could either be a construction or demolition project. Like a first trimester fetus in a sonogram, bits of what I imagine will be the first base bleachers are the only part currently recognizable as a ballpark.
o I’m deeply suspicious of the asymmetric layout of the new field. I dig Shea Stadium because it is Platonic: what a baseball field should look like in the best of all possible worlds. Allegedly, CitiField is to mimic old-time ballparks, with its facade imitating Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field. But old fields’ dimensions were idiosyncratic because they were often forced into the confined footprint of a city block. It just seems false.
o Aha, another reason baseball is unique: its complete system of elegantly nested units. (Huh-huh, “nested units.”) It can be broken down into formal segments, growing larger and more complex: single pitches (their motion over the plate), at-bats (the full drama of how to work a batter), plays (individual sets of action), innings (slightly larger sets, with dramatic unity), games (the most basic currency of baseball), series (how two teams stack up during a given few days), and seasons (ultimately, determining who is best, and starting over). Matt commented about the micro-macro qualities of the game at this point last year, and he’s totally right. The relationships between the levels are unbelievably dynamic. As above, so below. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
o Likewise, there are all kinds of different levels one can pop back and forth between when talking during a game. Besides the formal elements, listed above, there’s also the matter of lore: individual player narratives, team rivalries, and the like, as well as the even grander arc of baseball history.
o One can employ any one of the elements to figure out why the fuck the Mets melted in the 7th this afternoon. For example, one can blame Shawn Green’s misplay of Scott Thorman’s drive into the right field corner, which should’ve been the third out. Or one can blame the evolution of relief pitching into righty/lefty specialists used for one or two batters, even if they’re clearly in the groove — Willie Randolph having pulled Ambiorix Burgos so Scott Schoeneweis could face Kelly Johnson (walked) and Edgar Renturia (three-run home run into the Mets’ bullpen). Or one can blame Schoeneweis for bad pitching, or anybody or anything else. Really, the Mets lost, another unit completed.
A reasonable/utopian proposal to rebalance the cultural ecosystem.
If it can be proved that:
1.) In a neighborhood…
a.) …there has been a recent boom in high-value residential real estate…
b.) …the average rent for a commercial property has increased.
2.) An institution in that neighborhood…
a.) …is of cultural value…
b.) …has been open for five years or longer…
c.) …was able to operate at the original rent…
d.) …cannot viably function under the new rent.
Then:
The neighborhood’s new residents should be made to pay a Gentrification Tax to cover the difference between the institution’s original rent and the current market value of the property, as well as any attendant costs for the legal enforcement of the law.
Perhaps it is true of all sports, but magical realism/fabulism seems to go particularly well with baseball, from Philip Roth’s malfunctioning Ruppert Mundys of the Great American Novel to the entire career of W.P. Kinsella (who I’ll probably post more about as the season moves along). A good answer is suggested by George Plimpton in his own contribution to the genre, The Curious Case of Sidd Finch, about an aspiring Buddhist monk who can pitch 168 miles per hour (and does so over several games with the 1985 Mets):
Baseball is the perfect game for the mystic mind. Cricket is unsatisfactory because it has time strictures. The clock is involved. Play is called. The players stop for tea. No! No! No!… On the other hand, baseball is so open to infinity. No clocks. No one pressing the buttons on stopwatches. The foul lines stretch to infinity. In theory, the game of baseball can go on indefinitely.
On Finish’s first big league performance:
Sometimes in a stadium, if it is tense, and the place has a good crowd, enough people identify with the actual flight of the pitch ball — an exhalation of breath — so that the pitch is accompanied by a slight whoomph. With the first ball that Finch threw there was no time for any kind of reaction: we heard the slam of the ball driving the air out of the catcher’s mitt with a high pop! — audible, I suspect, in the parking lot beyond the center-field fence. This was followed by a high exclamation from Reynolds, a kind of squeak, as he stood up from his stance, reached into his glove, and began pulling the ball free.
Several more thoughts about Tom Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia, which I finished seeing last week, and finished reading yesterday…
o I could really go for another three parts. With the recent appetite for serial entertainment like Lost and Harry Potter, it’d be wonderful for a writer of Stoppard’s caliber to tackle a project as epic. Perhaps that’s exactly what Coast of Utopia already is.
o Three women next to us left after act I of part III. What the fuck? Did they make it all the way and give up? Were they tourists who just wanted to see a show at Lincoln Center?
o For numerous reasons — rhythm, dialogue, conceits — it could never translate to film. Does the fact that it can’t be mass entertainment make it pretentious? (It is, of course, but for other reasons, often indistinguishable from why it’s so grand.)
o Perhaps the most beautiful set in the whole show: perfectly vertical Christmas lights lowered from the rafters, creating the illusion (especially in the balcony) of being suspended in the midst of a hyperreal starry night.
o Throughout, Stoppard juggles characters, plotlines, philosophical arguments, and — in part III, Salvage — it was amazing to watch him bring them all to conclusions. In doing so, Stoppard sometimes stepped out of his usual voice. On paper, while supremely eloquent, some of the Big Speeches lack Stoppard’s usual multi-layered verve. But, on stage, calling on the audience’s collective experience with the characters, they were among the most dramatic parts of the trilogy. Alexander Herzen, reflecting:
I sat in this char the first morning I woke up in this house. I’d just arrived in England, and for the first time… for the first time since Natalie died… no, from before that, that I don’t know since when… but for the first time in a long time, there was silence. I didn’t have to talk or think or move, nothing was expected of me, I knew nobody and nobody knew where I was, everything was behind me, all the moving from lace to place, the quarrels and celebrations, the desperate concerns of health and happiness, love, death, printer’s errors, picnics ruined by rain, the endless tumult of ordinary life… and I just sat quiet and alone all that day, looking at the tops of the trees on Primrose Hill through the mist.
“Backwater” – Meat Puppets (download here)
from Too High To Die (1994)
released by London (buy)
(file expires April 23rd)
It’s amazing how genres disappear with time. A few weeks ago, I caught a bit of the Kids In the Hall movie, Brain Candy, at a friend’s house, which I hadn’t seen since college. I couldn’t tell if Death Lurks, the faux-band fronted by Bruce McCullough’s Grivo, was supposed to be parodying grunge or metal. Likewise, a bunch of months ago, I put the Meat Puppets’ Too High To Die on my iPod. Nearly every time a track came up on shuffle, I thought “what vintage jamband is this?”
“Backwater” — their only charting single, not coincidentally, #47 on the Hot 100 — is still the best. It’s filled with sweet double-tracked vocals and rubbery/crunchy guitars that might launch into a Jersey Shore cover band version of “St. Stephen” at any moment. Plus, the album is called Too High To Die. Of course, the Meat Puppets were always hippies, and Meat Puppets II is at least as psych-country as it is punk. But they worked on the proto-indie circuit, and got a huge boost when Kurt Cobain featured them on MTV Unplugged, so they got lumped in with the alt-rockers, and people heard them differently. Whatever you wanna call it, “Backwater” still makes me happy.
o Got called out by Wooden Wand over a review of his song, “The Pushers.” (My response is below his.)
o Accidentally got my eyelids stuck behind my eyeball, then made up a punk song about it with my buildingmates. I play bass and shout “1, 2, 3, 4.” (Via my lovely neighbor’s 365songbird project.)
“Nega (Photograph Blues)” – Gilberto Gil (download here)
from Gilberto Gil (1971)
reissued by Water (buy)
(file expires April 20th)
For all the complexities offered to American listeners by tropicalia — musical, conceptual, cultural, and political — the pleasure of Gilberto Gil’s “Nega (Photograph Blues)” is its near-bubblegum bliss. It is simple, catchy, and doesn’t leave much to talk about. It’s just a song. Recorded during his early ’70s London exile, Gil’s second self-titled album was his first in English. Really, “Nega” is a silly love song, but Gil’s likeability is boundless, his voice open and joyous. Reissued by Water this spring, with a handful of live cuts, the album radiates good vibrations.
It was the winter of being a rube and, on the subway home, the smelless girl slept on my shoulder, my nose buried in her hair. Across from us, a drunk student fighting sleep was an automaton, her head lolling to the side before a mechanical reset in her arm jerked it back upwards. In the girl’s hair, I could not even detect the cigarettes from the party we’d been at it. Their staleness, I knew, clung to my clothing. I smelled nothing. I saw her most weekends just before and after the holidays. We got along well, though the comfort she provided was minimal. The night before, I’d been made a mark again. We’d gone out for the night, the smelless girl and I, though she hadn’t come home with me. I’d kissed her goodnight at her door, and made for the train. On the platform, I stepped on a man’s watch, or so he claimed.
I’ve known James Dunseth, the rad geographer, for almost 10 years. As he has at various times over that period, he recently sent me a package of new music. This time, it included a fantastic mix of songs by his favorite bands local to Portland, Oregon, where he lives. Instead of just pilfering them for various Frow Shows, I figured I’d just turn the reigns over to him for an episode…
1. “Peein’ In An Empty” – Tom Heinl (from With Or Without Me)
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “Space Hole” – March Fourth Marching Band (from March Fourth Marching Band)
4. “Hands In Pockets” – Laura Gibson (from If You Come To Greet Me)
5. “Color Coded” – Heroes & Villians (from Heroes & Villians EP)
6. “Plagiarhythm” – Copy (from Mobius Beard)
7. “The Sleepless” – The Shaky Hands (from The Shaky Hands)
8. “Bottom of the Lake” – The Builders and the Butchers (from The Builders and the Butchers)
9. “The Pirate’s Gospel” – Alela Diane (from The Pirate’s Gospel)
10. “Very Much Alone Pt. 4: O, Fuck, I’m Fucked. Fuck.” – Drakkar Sauna (from Rover)
11. “Lux and Royal Shopper” – Blitzen Trapper (from Field Rexx)
12. “The Nights on the Absillian Sea” – Aidan Coughlan (from Mystery’s Mist)
13. “Aftershocks Anfter Afterthoughts” – Small Sails (from Hunter Gatherer)
14. “Hitman Blues” – Pentecost Hotel (unreleased)
15. “This Abdomen Has Flown” – Bark, Hide and Horn (from Bark, Hide and Horn EP)
16. “Storyteller is the Story” – Modernstate (from Highwater Moonboot)
17. “Seven” – Point Juncture, WA (from Mama Auto Boss)
18. “Seems To Calm The Baby” – Nick Jaina (from The 7 Stations)
& here are the notes James sentme with the original mix:
01_ Tom Heinl – Peein’ In An Empty
The king of ‘stereoke’… he plays his live shows karaoke style with his own living room furniture and stereo on stage. Plus he reads hilarious excerpts from his childhood journals.
02_ March Fourth Marching Band – Space Hole
Portland’s very own 35 piece renegade marching band.
03_ Laura Gibson – Hands In Pockets
Nice wintery music… I like her breathy vocals.
04_ Heroes And Villains – Color Coded
My friend Ali (originally from Long Island) plays piano and accordion.
06_ The Shaky Hands – The Sleepless
Potentially the next big name to come out of Portland. Their live shows are really high energy. Their debut album comes out April 10th.
07_ The Builders And The Butchers – Bottom Of The Lake
My favorite band in Portland. Their CD just came out on Friday. Blues/Gospel revival rock. Their live shows are amazing!
08_ Alela Diane – The Pirate’s Gospel
Another nice folky type lady.
09_ Drakkar Sauna – Very Much Alone Pt. 4: O, Fuck, I’m Fucked. Fuck.
The only non-Portland band on this mix. They’re from Kansas but their records are put out by Marriage Records here in Portland. Delightfully weird.
10_ Blitzen Trapper – Lux & Royal Shopper
Fun indie pop rock.
11_ Aidan Coughlan – The Nights On The Absillian Sea
Lo-Fi E6 type stuff. Very mysterious.
12_ Small Sails – Aftershocks And Afterthoughts
Electro pop.
13_ Pentecost Hotel – Hitman Blues
This track comes from an album that probably won’t ever get released. Their other album is pretty cool.
14_ Bark, Hide And Horn – This Abdomen Has Flown
They write most of their songs based on National Geographic articles that they read. This song is about Honey Ants.
15_ Modernstate – Storyteller Is The Story
One man weird band.
16_ Point Juncture, WA – Seven
Indie Rock… Influenced by Radiohead & Yo La Tengo.
17_ Nick Jaina – Seems To Calm The Baby
Just a good singer songwriter type. My friend Ali plays in his live band and on most of his album as well.
In the Great American Novel, Philip Roth compares legendary Negro League pitcher Satchel Paige to Mark Twain’s slave Jim, from Huckleberry Finn. “Students of Literatoor, professors, and small boys who recall Jim’s comical lingo will not be fooled just because Satch has dispensed with the thick dialect he used for speaking in Mr. Twain’s book.”
Paige’s six-point list for “How To Stay Young” (first published in Collier’s in 1953 and reproduced by Roth) sounds like it’s straight out of Twain, though (I think) could be any one of Twain’s folk weirdoes, white or black. Or maybe I’m just a white liberal.
1. Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood.
2. If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.
3. Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move.
4. Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society. The social ramble ain’t restful.
5. Avoid running at all times.
6. Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.
“Wild Night” – Van Morrison (download here)
from Tupelo Honey (1971)
released by Polydor (buy)
(file expires April 15th)
Here’s Dad’s video for Martha & the Vandellas’ version of Van Morrison’s “Wild Night.” Originally animated for the pre-MTV NBC show Friday Night Videos. (The date at the beginning is incorrect, FWIW, the final credit of the previous clip on the reel.)
Two-thirds through Tom Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia trilogy at Lincoln Center (thanks, G’ma!!). Some things I have loved, so far:
o The frayed scrim that drops almost to the stage, reflecting off the shiny floor to create a fairly literal illusion of coastline (which promptly disappears during the rising dystopian tides of part II: Shipwreck).
o Stoppardian zingers like “the whole Army’s obsessed with playing at soldiers” — spoken by deserting military student/future anarchist Michael Bakunin. I thought of it frequently as I passed through TSA checkpoints en route home from Minneapolis earlier this week.
o The woman across the aisle from us in the loge who brought her shaggy, craggy old black dog to the theater, who dozed peaceably under her seat throughout the performance and was quieter than many audience members (myself included) sniffling with mild late-winter colds.
o The ridiculously clever conceit Stoppard uses to establish that, while the play is English, the characters are speaking Russian. The first line, spoken at a dinner table scene on an idyllic estate north of Moscow: “Speaking of which — Liubov, say something in English for the Baron.” Later, the “English” dialogue is spoken with a thick Russian accent.
o The manner in which (as always) Stoppard is able to wrench fabulous emotion from potentially (and, probably, actually) pretentious plotlines — in this case, the entwined lives of privileged Russian radicals in the post-Decembrist/pre-Marxist period. The literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, played by Billy Crudup:
I’m sick of utopias. I’m tired of hearing about them. I’d trade the lot for one practical difference that owes nothing to anybody’s ideal society, one commonsensical action that puts right an injury to one person. Do you know what I like to do best when I’m at home? — watch them build the railway station in St. Petersburg. My heart lifts to see the tracks going down. In a year or two, friends and families, lovers, letters, will be speeding to Moscow and back. Life will be altered. The poetry of practical gesture. Something unknown to literary criticism!
“Take Me Out to the Ballgame” (a capella) – Bob Dylan (download here)
from Theme Time Radio Hour, ep. 04: Baseball
(file expires April 12th)
I think baseball’s slowness, exactly what most people seem to hate about the game, is exactly what I love about it: being able to watch characters develop slowly, over (if we’re lucky) eight months, both in action and in repose, in micro (at bat by at bat) and macro (the story arc of an entire career), and having plenty of time between pitches to boggle about it all.
Of course, whenever I try to boil down why I love baseball and not other sports, it’s all sort of arbitrary — which isn’t to say unimportant, just more akin to a religion one is born into, and accepted as meaningful many moons ago. Except for the fact that baseball begins with the spring, and ends as the leaves die. Anyway, it’s April, and the Mets are 3-and-0, so here’s Bob Dylan singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” from the fourth episode of his Theme Time Radio Hour.
Here’s some music by the Grateful Dead. Perhaps, if you have not liked the Grateful Dead before, you will like this. It begins with some noisy avant-garde electronics by Phil Lesh and guest keyboardist Ned Lagin. They are joined by the band, who eventually play florid hippie-jazz & a beautiful song about a doomed alcoholic.
1. “Introduction” – some French dude (from 4/17/1972 Tivoli Gardens)
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “Seastones” >
4. “Eyes of the World” >
5. “Wharf Rat” (from 9/11/1974 Alexandra Palace)
Yo, happy spring everybody. I’m getting hell out of Dodge until early April. Posting will sporadic ’til I get back… xoxo, jj.
o Update on The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson’s latest, which recently wrapped two months of shooting in India. Sounds potentially epic. (via Kottke.)
o The blogobattalions have been all over this, but still worth passing along: a short Chris Ware animation from the forthcoming This American Life television show. I love the way his style translates to this medium. Hope he does more. (Thx, Sea of Sound.)
o Mutant Sounds blog, dedicated to uploading insanely obscure weirdo albums. (Werd, Boomy.)
o This whole episode is nutty, but fast-forward to 4:10 for the ridiculous Star Wars dorkiness:
Lester Bangs called “Flying” “McCartney’s first venture into FM musak.” While there’s a ring of truth to that, even bad genres occasionally start off with good intentions (see: the appropriation of Brian Eno’s ambient explorations into New Age). Me? I dig the vibe. A few years back, my dear comrade Spacefuzz dubbed “Flying” into “Destination Imagination” with his theramin and a solid collection of bleeps, and floated outwards. I like the way it holds out on the initial beat ’til — just after my ear has convinced itself it’s not the Beatles — it finally resolves to the main melody halfway through. It’s like when I used to repeat a word so many times it became nonsense. Here, meaning returns.
On Friday, listening to the Mets/Marlins broadcast on WFAN. I heard (for me) one of the first positive uses the word “gentrification.” Though I imagine that’s most likely because I’m a sheltered Brooklyn liberal. One of the announcers was commenting on the positives of adding a retractable roof to Dolphin Stadium, where the Marlins play, and suggested that it would gentrify the surrounding area, thus revitalizing it. The neighborhood — a slum, maybe, I’m admittedly not sure — happens to be Little Havana, heavily populated by Cuban exiles, with all their attendant culture.
It’s nothing new for baseball. A few years back, Ry Cooder recorded Chavez Ravine, paying tribute to the Los Angeles neighborhood cleared in 1950s to make way for Dodger Stadium. And in another year or two, the horribly named CitiField will probably wipe away Willets Point, the primeval shantytown of chop shops and tire repair joints that abuts Shea Stadium. Strange that baseball should be so linked to the displacement of indigenous urban cultures. I suppose anything the magnitude of a ballpark is necessarily a municipal project, and therefore big business. It seems natural, in a horrible way.
But was it always like that? Fenway Park and other old stadiums were built to fit inside their respective city grids, and a lot of the stories I heard about Ebbets Field seem to indicate that it was integrated into Flatbush. In this day and age, is there any way for something as mammoth as a stadium to be assimilated organically into the surrounding area? Certainly, shitstorms brew in Brooklyn whenever new stadiums are mentioned. But was there ever a time when they didn’t?
“Mississippi Half-Step” – the Grateful Dead (download here)
recorded 20 October 1974
Winterland Arena – San Francisco, CA
from The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack (2005)
released by Grateful Dead Records (buy)
Even in deepest Williamsburg, Deadheads survive, here leaving their mark on the Brooklyn-bound platform of the Lorimer Street L-train station. Definitely a WTF?, but I’m glad the Deadheads are taking back the streetz. Or, as Boomy reminds: Dead Freaks Unite!
“Stick Your Tail in the Wind” – Summer Hymns (download here)
from Voice Brother and Sister (2000)
released by Absolutely Kosher (buy)
Y’know, I don’t even know if I like this song. That’s not to say anything bad about it, either. We just met. But we definitely had a moment, there, in the subway. It was damp there, and cold, while I was waiting for the train in Greenpoint. Then, this song came on, and brought me somewhere, briefly, completely. Florida, maybe, or someplace like it. It didn’t keep me there, though. It was a flash, followed by three perfectly lovely minutes, that — as I was saying — I may or may not like. To be honest, I don’t even know its name yet. Ah, yes. Nice to know you.
“1999” – Dump (download here)
from That Skinny Motherfucker With the High Voice? (1998)
released by Shrimper
(file expires March 29th)
Yo La Tengo’s James McNew reimagines “1999” as an oddly grooved drum machine chill-out. It works, too, mostly thanks to McNew’s boyishly sweet voice. His album of Prince covers, That Skinny Motherfucker With the High Voice? (note the question mark) was sued out of existence by the Purple One himself. I wonder if he ever listened to it. I hope so, if only because I dig the idea of Prince feeling threatened by James McNew. Apparently, Amazon Japan has copies.
(Oh, yeah: and YLT will be on WFMU tomorrow night doing their annual request-a-thon/benefit, though it probably won’t be as good as this.)
1. “I Love How You Love Me” – The Paris Sisters (from Back to Mono box set)
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “River Deep-Mountain High” – Ike & Tina Turner (from Back to Mono box set)
4. “The Crystal Cat” – Dan Deacon (from Spiderman of the Rings)
5. “Portofino” – Raymond Scott (from Manhattan Research, Inc.)
6. “Tropical-Iceland” – The Fiery Furnaces (from EP)
7. “Going to Acapulco” – Bonnie “Prince” Billy (from Lay & Love EP)
8. “Sky Blue Sky” – Wilco (from Sky Blue Sky)
9. “Niburu” – Sun City Girls (from Carnival Folklore Resurrection, v. 11)
10. “1…” – Lorkakar (from Bell Notations)
11. “See No Evil (alternate version)” – Television (from Marquee Moon)
12. “Just Another Day” – Brian Eno (from Another Day on Earth)
13. “Flying” – The Beatles (from Magical Mystery Tour)
Turn to page 123 in your work-in-progress. (If you haven’t gotten to page 123 yet, then turn to page 23. If you haven’t gotten there yet, then get busy and write page 23.) Count down four sentences and then instead of just the fifth sentence, give us the whole paragraph.
“I will gather the rain and the moon and I’m gone,” I heard myself sing, my voice practically one with the background music. I broke for the surface of the pool, took a quick gulp, and plunged down again. “I will gather the rain and the moon and you’re gone.” Another breath. “I will gather the moon and the stars and we’re gone.” The song was buoyant, harder to stay underwater while it was playing. I was filled with joy, which I had not expected.
“Cleo’s Back” – Jr. Walker and the All-Stars (download here)
from Shotgun (1965)
released by TML (buy)
(file expires March 26th)
Jerry Garcia on Jr. Walker’s “Cleo’s Back,” via Dennis McNally’s A Long Strange Trip:
There was something about the way the instruments entered into it in a kind of free-for-all way, and there were little holes and these neat details in it — we studied that motherfucker. We might have even played it for a while, but that wasn’t the point — it was the conversational approach, the way the band worked, that really influenced us.
o Wired’s cover feature on so-called Snack Culture (“movies, TV, songs, games… packaged like cookies or chips, in bite-size bits for high-speed munching”) is a clever trend piece, even if it seems sorta token. Stephen Johnson’s contrarian rebuttal, on the other hand, is more incisive, arguing that, based on our collective love of insanely long television serials like 24 and The Sopranos, our attention spans are actually getting longer.
o In regards to the latter, I quite enjoyed David Denby’s overview of the recent spate of avant-narrative play in movies. “In the past, mainstream audiences notoriously resisted being jolted,” he writes. “Are moviegoers bringing some new sensibility to these riddling movies?” Definitely, I think, though I’m sad that Denby didn’t chase his idea even deeper into the mainstream, where movies like Stranger Than Fiction are channeling Charlie Kaufman’s meta-narratives into ultimately cutesy and traditional romantic comedies.
o In regards to the former, I also recently landed back on the perennial Ronald & Nancy Reagan pro-drug mash-up, which circulated extensively via bootleg video back in the day. I vaguely remember my Dad having a copy. It’s sometimes easy to forget that videos like this not only existed before YouTube but that there was a fairly established underground network that existed to distribute them. This is how the original South Park episode, “The Spirit of Christmas,” circulated, too.
o In regards to all of it, if only the molecular sense, I’m fascinated by Lowe’s recent campaign to “try to inject a new ’emoticon’ into teens’ text messaging vernacular in an effort to keep teens drinking milk.” Or, if you will: :-{). I’m sure the international moustache lobby & various facial hair advocacy groups are pleased that the milk people are saving their first-quarter propaganda budgets.
o In regards to none of the above, Richard Gehr is blogging. It’s one thing to expose the kidz to good music. It’s another to do the same for the adultz.
At first, the lack of coverage of spring training pissed me off: even with cable (not that I have it) only a few games on television, even fewer on radio, and no Gameday play-by-play on mets.com. I think I like it, though. The lack of constant information feels like a connection to the old ballgame, and that’s always welcome: getting information in spots from informed beatmen like Adam Rubin and Mike Delcos (in their modern guise as bloggers, of course), and occasionally updated linescores.
Much of spring training feels like that. With all the teams in the Grapefruit League a busride away, it is nothing but a regional baseballing association. (That is, it feels like the way all non-major league baseball still operates.) Plus, the very ritual of Florida to begin with: going some place where there’s warmer weather in the spring, instead of holing up climate-controlled bunker/complexes in their respective hometown.
Baseball respects the seasons, and not in some meatheaded “we’re gonna prove ourselves by playing the m’fucking snow” way, so much as the “I’m gonna figure out how to position ourselves by gently tossing this here clump of dirt into the air and seeing how the breeze is, but if it rains I’m going inside like a sensible human” kinda way.
As my life began to de-blah itself from the winter, I noticed it was the same day exhibition games began. I was reminded of this quote Russ comforted me with in the days after the Mets lost the NLCS, from the late, sage commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti:
It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, you rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then, just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.
In the spring — or, rather in these weeks before spring — hearts are whole and pure.
“This Is Why I’m Hot” – Mims (download here)
from M.I.M.S. (Music is My Savior) (2007)
released by Capitol (buy)
week of March 10, 2007
#1 this week, #32 last week, 6 weeks on chart
(file expires March 21st)
I appreciate the Zen/pop logic of the line “this is why I’m hot/I’m hot ’cause I’m fly/you ain’t ’cause you not,” I really do. And I certainly appreciate any song that employs a theremin, as “This is Why I’m Hot” does occasionally.
But Mim’s #1-with-a-bullet feels completely rudimentary, all but ignoring the symphonic beats that occasionally crest and distort behind it, instead using them to frame a bland, linear melody. There’s a simplicity to it that I like in theory, no particular tongue-twisters, or even trickery, just a beat and a vocal. The regional shout-outs are kinda curious and, likewise, there’s probably something to be said about the fact that (per Wikipedia) it samples Kanye West, Mobb Deep, and Dr. Dre, possibly about the boring recursiveness of hip-hop sampling itself, but I didn’t pick up the samples. Mostly, reduced to its hook, the song still feels like a placeholder. Nothing about it makes me want to put it on, and it feels too sluggish to dance to.
More Zen: if a bullet misses its target, and there’s no force to stop it, is it still a bullet?
“I Love How You Love Me” – The Paris Sisters (download here)
from Back To Mono, 1958-1969 (1991)
released by Abkco (buy)
(file expires March 20th)
The murder trial repackaging/revision of Mark Ribowsky’s Phil Spector bio, He’s a Rebel, has been a good subway companion this week. On Spector’s arrival at Manhattan’s Brill Building:
Implying that he couldn’t afford to go elsewhere, Phil was allowed to crash that night on the couch at the rear of the office, and would do the same in following days. The truth was, Spector had money in his pocket, but part of his New York music assimilation was to assume the guise of bohemian deprivation.
…Hanging around at the restaurants and other haunts where the music crowd congregated, he ran into many of the working and aspiring songwriters who covered the canyons of Broadway like locusts…
Getting to town just months before Dylan, Spector worked the same game, albeit uptown and across a cultural divide. The differences are legion, mainly in their methods of distribution, but the Village folk scene where Dylan came up and the Tin Pan Alley songwriters of the Brill Building had a lot in common, despite the latter becoming a strawman enemy of the former. Besides, they were both kinda corny. Likewise, they both matured: Dylan made Blood on the Tracks, Spector produced All Things Must Pass.
Spector’s 1961 production of the Paris Sisters’ “I Love How You Love Me” sure remains pretty, though. With no disrespect to Phil Ochs, I’ll take that most days.
o Should you be using Entourage ’01 for your email, and should you reach the 2 GB storage limit they take no measures to warn you about, and should your whole email database proceed to meltthefuckdown and corrupt your archives and cause you three days of freakation and frustardedness, I would then whole-heartedly endorse paying $18 for EntourAid.
o Handbrake allows you to easily rip mpegs from DVDs. Sadly, my laptop is way too slow to run it effectively. Someday I’ll get the whole ’86 series on my iPod and watch the innings in shuffle.
o iConcertCal searches your iTunes library and tells you what bands are coming to town.
o Haven’t f’ed with it yet, but Peel seems like a good utility to organize blog listening.
o The iTunes linkmaker allows you to generate URLs that pop right into the iTunes store.
“Rats” – Sonic Youth (download here)
from Rather Ripped (2006)
released by Interscope (buy)
(file expires March 14th)
Yeah, it’s gauche to cross-post, but it’s pretty gauche to be reviewing for JamBands.com to begin with, so wtf. Mostly, I just wanted to enter this one into the blogologue…
NYC ROLL-TOP: Sonic Curfew
It’s too bad Webster Hall is killing rock music in Manhattan, ’cause (in theory) it’s kind of a cool place to see shows. “It’s good to be back at the Ritz,” Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore cracked not long after his 26-year old band hit the stage on Friday, February 16th. Known by that name during the glitzy glitzy ’80s (when Sonic Youth were making their name in dingier quarters a bit down Broadway in SoHo), the club is currently where Bowery Presents, the city’s largest indie promoter, puts on their big rock shows. It’s got beautiful marble floors and cool reliefs on the walls, and — on good nights — almost feels grand.
For Sonic Youth, it was a homecoming. Besides a night at the soon-to-be-defunct CBGB last summer, it was their first major gig in Manhattan proper in two years, and they were their usual art-punk selves: the 6’6″ Moore careening around his side of the stage, bassist Kim Gordon in the middle like a displaced gallery goddess, and grey-haired Lee Ranaldo gracefully attacking his guitars like an avant-statesman. Moore addressed the entire crowd as “man.” As in, “thanks for coming, man.” Laconically jovial, he sounded like he was happy to be home. But what home were Sonic Youth coming back to?
It was city officials who banned smoking in bars a few years back. In one fell swoop they removed the proverbial (and fairly literal) vaseline on the lens of the rock experience, as well as a convenient mask for pot smoking, eliminating both social and ritualistic elements of live music’s allure. But it was Bowery Presents who started booking major weekend shows that had to be over by 10 pm so the place could be cleared out for a dance club, even more tightly regulating the idea of a rock show. What hopes of transcendent chaos could one possibly have at that time of night?
Sonic Youth were great. They did their best. Focusing mainly on 2006’s Rather Ripped, in places, they were even majestic. On Moore’s “Do You Believe in Rapture,” the band moved at a silken, relaxed clip. “Do you believe in sweet sensation? Do you believe in second chance?” Moore sang, almost tenderly, over the noise. “City streets so freezing cold,” Ranaldo exclaimed (quite accurately) on “Rats,” working from his usual fantastic formula: half-spoken poetry erupting into full-blown melody. Moore played “Or,” his ode to DIY-era fanzine life, for comedy. It worked, though missed the sublimity of its closing slot on Rather Ripped.
With former Pavement bassist and touring SYer Mark Ibold playing along with Gordon, and holding it down when she took off her instrument to front the band, the quintet sounded lean, if never exactly gnarly. Beginning and ending with older numbers (1988’s “Candle” and 1986’s “Expressway To Yr Skull”) and sprinkling a few others throughout, everything ran like a polished road show. Perhaps too tight at times, the occasionally jam-happy Sonics’ improvisation was limited to one song, and only at the tail end of the final encore.
When Sonic Youth closed a show at Brooklyn’s Northsix with “Expressway To Yr Skull” in 2005, it stretched for a half-hour, Gordon leaving the stage while Moore, Ranaldo, drummer Steve Shelley, and Jim O’Rourke, urged out quieter and quieter spirals of noise. That the same segment at Webster Hall was a quarter of the length, the band dutifully filing offstage at 10:07, would seem to be a result of the environment.
As I do after most Sonic Youth shows, I do believe in rapture, but almost definitely not at Webster Hall, where the dance beats start pounding up from the lower floors as the shows run to their end. Music isn’t dying in New York City. After all, at least at Webster Hall, the indie crowds are just being replaced by different kinds of music fans. But, for heaven’s sake, there’s gotta be a better place to do it. I also believe in rapture and unpredictability being closely related. Subsequently forced to go find alternative means of chaos for my Friday night, and having plenty of time to do it, the Sonic Youth show lingers like something less than the real deal. Which is too bad. Because it probably was.
1. “We Got An Arts Council Grant” – Robert Wyatt (from Solar Flares Burn For You)
2. “Basically Frightened” – Col. Bruce Hampton (from Arkansas)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “Way in the Middle of the Air” – Sister Gertrude Morgan (from Let’s Make A Record)
5. “Be Thankful For What You Got” – William DeVaughn (single)
6. “Omstart” – Cornelius (from Sensuous)
7. “I” – Petey Pablo/Timbaland (from Timbaland Instrumentals, v. 2)
8. “Sittin’ On Top of the World” – Mississippi Sheiks (from Honey Babe Let the Deal Go Down)
9. “Pra Lembrar” – Kassin+2 (from Futurismo)
10. “Robot Ponies” – Laura Barrett (from Earth Sciences EP)
11. “Planaria” – John Fahey (from Womblife)
12. “Rats” – Sonic Youth (from Rather Ripped)
13. “Moment” – Akron/Family (from Akron/Family & Angels of Light)
14. “If You Rescue Me (Chanson Des Chats)” – Gael Garcia Bernal & the cast of Science of Sleep (from Science of Sleep OST)
“excerpt from Dogbirthed Brother in Eggsack Delicious” – Korena Pang (download here)
from AUX (2005)
released by Ideas for Creative Exploration (buy)
(file expires March 13th)
Jeff Mangum’s only released post-Aeroplane composition was nestled on last year’s AUX, a literally handmade collection of Athens’ musical adventurers (also including fellow Elephant 6 conspirators Will Hart, Heather McIntosh, and Hannah Jones). Extreme concrété, it might be more original than Neutral Milk Hotel, if accessible to exponentially fewer people. Beginning with a rolling barrelhouse piano, “Eggsack Delicious” tumbles rhythmically into belches, grunts, robotics, cackles, yodels, yowls (Mangum himself/), accordion, church bells, train whistles, surreal recollections, and bleeps. The utterly musical splicing has the effect of creating a narrative, though it plays more like a lucid dream than a story.
Grapefruit League games begin on Wednesday. (Do you like grapefruit?)
o For the first time in a decade, Major League Baseball has tweaked the rules. Some stuff, such as a new way of resolving tied games, might come into play. In most cases throughout the 14-page PDF — the umpire placing the rosin bag on the pitcher’s mound instead of carrying it with him, for example — the changes are almost literally insignificant. Often, they exist simply to make a rule “consistent with current practice at the professional level.” One uses the word “expectorate.” In places, the changes excise outmoded historical statutes. They also acknowledge that any place the official rules refer to “he,” it could also mean “she.” If it is accepted that nobody, especially not Abner Doubleday, was singularly responsible for codifying the rules of a folk game, then — owners and commerce aside — it remains, like most professional sports, morphed and unconsciously micromanaged by the collective will of the participants. Official changes are, most of the time, secondary.
o The New York Times runs a nice profile Mets’ bench coach Jerry Manuel. “I feel very strongly that the game has a certain flow to it,” Ben Shpigel quotes Manuel as saying. “You make adjustments as it goes on.” It also notes that Manuel reads Gandhi and Tolstoy, which makes him a nice match with anti-war socialist/Gabriel Garcia Marquez-reading first baseman Carlos Delgado. I like the description of Manuel finding a “secluded spot on the field” to listen to the players around him.
o From the opposite school as Manuel is J.C. Bradbury, whose Baseball Economist: The Real Game Exposed was recently published (and reviewed by the Wall Street Journal). While the book sounds mindblowingly analytical, no doubt, I guess I’m a little skeptical of the claim that statistics comprise an objective, “real” game of ball. Baseball seems much larger to me, statistics being one part of a collision that also involves the drama, tedium, life, and lives that unfold from an eight-month season that begins in late February and ends in late October. Yes, you can read a baseball game as entries into a grand database (as my friend Russ recently pointed out) and maybe there’s something pure about that, but I’m not sure if it’s any more real or important than, say, a random summer rain delay.
Only in print:
o Paste #29 (Norah Jones cover): album review of Son Volt, film review of The Situation, DVD review of Bob Dylan
o January/February Hear/Say (Gnarls Barkley cover): album review of Charlie Louvin
Some people swear by Moleskine notebooks. Me, I’m all about the 6 1/8″ x 3 3/4″ 72-page Oxford Memo Book, stock number 6096 1/2. They look old school, age well after months in my back pocket, and never fall apart.
Unfortunately, the dude at the stationary store told me that they are being discontinued in that size. I, for one, am having a cow.
Emails with the Esselte Corporation, trying to order even just a single case, have proved fruitless. Googling and eBay searching have been similarly frustrating. As I embark on occasional missions to various lower Manhattan stationary stores, I figured I’d post a cyberplea, as well, and make an offer…
If anybody comes across any 6096 1/2s (or the ledger-lined 6094), I will gladly cover the costs of purchase and shipping, and will send a care package including a mix CD and other goodies. Drop me a line, y0!
“I Get A Little Taste of You” – Z-Rock Hawaii (download here)
from Z-Rock Hawaii (1997)
released by Nipp Guitar (buy)
(file expires March 7th)
Even now, some 10 years after they recorded, Z-Rock Hawaii — a one-time collaboration between Ween and The Boredoms — seems like an impossible supergroup, both in theory and practice. But I guess weirdness crosses international boundaries. Hey, those post-Nirvana alt-rock years were heady times, nyet? Z-Rock Hawaii fares better in the accessibility department than TV Shit, the yowl-happy 1993 crossing of The Boredoms and Sonic Youth. But so would most free jazz.
That said, the good parts of “I Get A Little Taste of You” seem to be all classic Ween — which is to say, except for Yamantaka Eye’s bug-outs during the middle eight, it’s just a great semi-lost brown nugget. “Sometimes I feel so good, sometimes I feel so bad,” Gener rhymes in a infectious sing-song. “Often I get mad, even when I’m glad,” he croons, in a 20th century love ode that’s so right that it (almost) doesn’t matter when some dude starts tweaking for no apparent reason. (Eye makes much better contributions elsewhere, like the orchestral noise of “The Meadow” and the gas fumes electronics of “Hexagon.”) For the bottom of your iTunes library, Z-Rock Hawaii.
o Jonathan Lethem’s awesome Harper’s essay, “The Ecstasy of Influence.” Oddly — or not, given the theme of the piece — the section that I quoted the other day was actually lifted/appropriated/borrowed from David Foster Wallace.
o My ex-roomie’s aweosme clap clap blog has relaunched as clapclap.org, including an incisive deconstruction of freak-folk’s relationship to pop.
o Samantha M. Shapiro’s fascinating overview in the Sunday NYT magazine about the gray market that has sprung up to accomodate bootleg mixes. It centers on the Aphilliates’ recent bust, though never really gets into the meat of why there was a sudden crackdown.
Not reading, but:
o Lullabyes.net posted a lovely solo acoustic soundboard of Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes playing, uh, the other day at Good Records in Dallas. A few nice covers are included, notably Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” the Beatles’ “I Will,” and a bit of the Olivia Tremor Control’s “Green Typewriters.” Thanks!
Forays into alien terrain…
“Say It Right” – Nelly Furtado (download here)
from Loose (2006)
released by Mosley (buy)
(file expires February 26th)
week of February 24, 2007
#1 this week, #2 last week, 14 weeks on chart
“Say It Right” is such a cohesive construction that its principle charm seems to be its atmosphere rather than its melody, at least until the chorus drops, and the vibe suddenly becomes epic and distinct. Specifically, for me, it conjures the set of a video. Which is odd. Songs usually trigger something, y’know, real, even if it’s just the proverbial dance floor. But the only place in which Timbaland and Danja’s production sounds organic, where the echoing of Timbo’s voice between murky digi-trees and the subliminal gurgle of water makes sense, is an artificial world. It would sound diluted if even the best live band arranged it. Yet it employs naturalistic cues throughout: bells playing a stereo-panned ambient counterpoint to the chorus, a woman’s voice (Furtado’s?) counting off an overdub, and (a few seconds later) the shimmering of an electric guitar during the outro that almost becomes a solo. So, even if the music exists firmly an imaginary world, it also sounds impossibly comfortable there. Totally mature, but I wish I liked the chorus more than I do, though I usually don’t at first listen.
“Moment” – Akron/Family (download here)
recorded 15 November 2005
Brick House, London, UK
(file expires 23 February)
Saw a great show in Greenpoint last night: Akron/Family, who I’ve been keen to catch for at least a year. Acting on my new resolution to steal global and buy local, I walked away with the A/F’s latest $10 tour CD, a live set recorded in London in November 2005. It pretty well captures the spirit of last night, too.
The third main thing I love about “Moment” is that its structure is reversed: it begins with chaos, resolves into a verse, and — eventually — gets to the simplest, most stripped down statement of the song. The second thing I love is that the arrangement — both on the CD and live, last night — is still at the stage where everything is tight enough to be blistering but still new enough to implode. Of course, that’s the main effect of Akron/Family, controlled chaos, underscored by their all-hands-on-deck vocals. If they keep going (and it seems like they’ve got all the proper momentum), I’ll be curious to see if they can keep up this particular energy.
And, really, what I love about “Moment” is all the different sections. They fit together in a most pleasing way, especially the drop from the wall-of-noise intro to the first verse. Then, more chaos, a noisy jam-jam (and, man, there’s nothing post- about this jam) and that lovely coda. It’s just dramatic. I’m not sure if I can really get behind the hippie-dippy lyrics (about, y’know, the Moment), but they recover quickly with a line about old friends and new clothes, and glide out on the indie-brand Beach Boys harmonies. It’s all the fun of Animal Collective, without (most of) the foreboding inaccessibility. Dig it.
“Toc” – Tom Ze (download here)
from Estundando o Samba (1975)
reissued by Luaka Bop (buy)
(file expires February 22nd)
Here, just in time for Presidents’ Day, is the second installment of Dad’s animation, Face Film, which is all about resolution. Literally. I’ve posted Tom Ze’s “Toc” before, but it makes such a swell alternate accompaniment to this that I’m posting it again. Go on, try it!
1. “Glückugel” – Bruno Spoerri (from Glückugel)
2. “I Get a Little Taste of You” – Z-Rock Hawaii (from Z-Rock Hawaii)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “Dashboard” – Modest Mouse (from We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank)
5. “+81” – Deerhoof (from Friend Opportunity)
6. “What Light” – Wilco (from 7/16/2006 Pines Theater)
7. “Green Valentine Blues” – Allen Ginsberg (from Holy Soul, Jelly Roll)
8. “If Not For You” – George Harrison (from All Things Must Pass)
9. “Something” – Booker T & the MGs (from Stax singles collection)
10. “Center of Gravity” – Yo La Tengo (from I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One)
11. “Wraith Pinned to the Mist & Other Games” – Of Montreal (from the Sunlandic Twins)
12. “Not At All” – Claudia Lennear (from Some Bad-Ass Bitches 1968-1978)
13. “Go Where I Send Thee” – Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet (from Gopsel Music)
14. “Green Typewriters (Outer Themes and Explorations)” – The Olivia Tremor Control (from Jumping Fences EP)
15. “The Diamond Sea” – The Yeah Yeah Yeahs (from iTunes Sessions EP)
16. “The Way I Feel Inside” – The Zombies (from Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou ST)
For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction’s seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.
In the fall, I read Bruce Wagner’s Memorial, which is full of passages like this:
After the make-out session in Griffith Park, Chess shared some memories of his dad. Laxmi enthusiastically echoed how The Jungle Book was a favorite of hers too, from girlhood. (She meant the version with John Cleese.) A few days later, she brought over a Netflix of the original Disney.
Memorial was a thicket of references, both high and low. Dutch theorist Rem Koolhaas, art-rockers the Fiery Furnaces, and David Wilson’s Center for Land Use Interpretation all got name-checked, but so did plenty of McDonald’s slogans, Oprah episodes, and Viagra side-effects. Reading it, I picked up on some, and missed a ton of others.
One’s experience of a book comes in two main parts: the actual real-time reading, and the long-tail memory of it. That is, although I remember Wagner’s methods, what really sticks with me when I think about the book are the peculiar emotional climaxes and plotlines that had nothing to do with the dressings. Though I was involuntarily disgusted by the abundant pop culture references, and didn’t really dig much about the book in general, my brain still filtered it down to the Platonic Always.
I think, maybe, we automatically look for this when we read. In fact, the idea that a given story has a broader meaning to people besides its characters is basically the unspoken contract we have when we begin to read a story. Regardless of pop culture references, then, we fit it into some world that makes sense for ourselves. You know, the imagination. It would take a critical density of allusions to derail that. But it still feels wrong to me.
“Basically Frightened” – Col. Bruce Hampton (download here)
from Arkansas (1987)
reissued by Terminus (buy)
(file expires February 19th)
For all his ballyhooed weirdness, Col. Bruce Hampton’s two albums with the Aquarium Rescue Unit sound remarkably straight in retrospect. His four ’80s records on Landslide, reissued a few years ago by Terminus, are anything but. Like a lo-fi Captain Beefheart, a good deal of it is virtually unlistenable to most, however fun to others, but 1987’s Arkansas is a masterpiece. Many of the bizarro orchestrations are lashed to the decade by excessive synth use, but the studio rendering of Hampton’s perennial staple, “Basically Frightened,” is gloriously unadorned. Though it would later be a jazz boogie for the ARU, here it’s just existential blues: acoustic guitar, bass, and cosmic lamentations. Some make no sense. Hampton, for example, is basically frightened of “Young men in helmets who are occupied for women in–” and Hampton coughs. But, his surreal index occasionally strikes notes that are, well, real: “I’m afraid of losing bookmarks and, of course, politicians with no hobbies,” Hampton moans. Aren’t we all?
It is cold, and there is still no snow. But, a week from today, pitchers and catchers report to spring training. From there, it is easy to imagine new beginnings: some bit of life, however feint, in the bitter air.
“Metal Machine Music, part 1” – Lou Reed (download)
from Metal Machine Music (1975)
released by RCA (buy)
(file expires February 15th)
Being time for the annual, brain-cleansing airing of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, I got to thinking about a passage from Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach:
Achilles: …If any record player — say Record Player X — is sufficiently high-fidelity, then when it attempts to play the song “I Cannot Be Played on Record Player X”, it will create just those vibrations which will cause it to break… So it fails to be Perfect. And yet, the only way to get around that trickery, namely for Record Player X to be of lower fidelity, even more directly ensures that it is not Perfect. It seems that every record player is vulnerable to one or the other of these frailties, and hence all record players are defective.
If there was any piece of music in the universe that might be subtitled “I Cannot Be Played on Record Player X,” it’s Metal Machine Music. In that regard, maybe MMM is less effective now that the easily-disruptable turntable has been supplanted by the quietly humming mp3 box. Certainly, it sounds less scary now, its standing as a piece of music with overtones and melodies and movement a little more obvious.
But its actual musical effect, delirious overload, is no different, and that is because the “Record Player X” in question isn’t a record player at all, but the listener’s brain. MMM still can’t really be played, at least if the listener is trying to do anything else while listening to it — like, say, writing a blog entry. Or probably reading a blog entry, too. This means, of course, that it’s time to turn it up.
#2 this week, #2 last week, 2 weeks on chart (download) (buy)
(file expires February 13th)
The Wikipedia entry for Fall Out Boy’s “This Ain’t A Scene, It’s an Arms Race” notes that the song’s #2 placing is “the highest Hot 100 debut for a single by a rock band since Aerosmith’s ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’ debuted at #1 on the Hot 100 in 1998.” While Fall Out Boy might be a rock band, I’m not so sure “Arms Race” is a rock song. That is, like Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable,” the instrumentation feels arbitrary. It’s got a big kick drum, sure, and — eventually — a chorus with power chords, falsetto ooh-ooh-oohing, self-effacing lyrics like “all the boys who the dance floor didn’t love” and such, but the beat could be constructed of anything and the drama is single-minded. The overwrought verses could be sung by a diva over a synth pattern. Fall Out Boy’s recent flirtations with Timbaland and Jay-Z only underscore this: pop is welcoming back the idea of rock, at least as a signifier. (FOB play with this notion in the video, too, apparently.) What’s really happening, though, probably isn’t so simple. Pop divas pretending to be singer-songwriters? Drama queen emo acts pretending to be hip-hop stars? Really, nobody’s pretending to be anything, though, because all’s equal in the top 10. Anything goes, be it Timbaland’s Egyptian samples or FOB’s earnest/”earnest” guitar riffage.
“Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)” – Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (download here)
from Lay & Love EP (2007)
released by Drag City (buy)
(file expires February 13th)
Maybe Gardner is right. Maybe B-sides aren’t as interesting when they’re not actually on the other side, and don’t have to tracked through shops and mail order catalogues. In some ways, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Duder’s exceedingly lovely cover of Bob Dylan’s “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)” is the same as any of the songs on The Letting Go, the album for which it’s nominally an addendum. That is, they’re all just files on my computer.
At the same time, though, the songs become way more modular: both “Señor” and the album’s title track have made it onto some of my playlists, where the album’s other songs haven’t. There, the ever-ephemeral digitizations have become more personalized than fetishized, more than they ever could be merely as industrially produced physical objects, no matter how rare.
But de-fetishizing something isn’t always bad. No matter how obscure or obvious a recording, as a listener, there will always be the moment before you heard a song, the moment you actually heard it, and the moment after, and — in those moments — the experience of newness. That’s what counts, right?
“Señor” adds to Bonnie ‘Prince’ Mofo’s catalogue of boomer covers, including Dylan’s “Going to Acapulco” (also on the Lay & Love EP), the Dead’s “Brokedown Palace,” and — as Gardner randomly informed me tonight — the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” And that’s really what makes them special: a sub-narrative available only to those who want to read it.
“Social Studies” – David Byrne (download here)
from Music for the Knee Plays (1985)
released by ECM (never released on CD)
(file expires February 12th)
I saw David Byrne revive his music from The Knee Plays at Zankel Hall on Thursday evening. As usually happens when a rock dude performs at a traditionally classical venue, a screamer or two came with. “Make some noise,” came the voice from the balcony, early in the show. Or maybe it was “bring the noise.” Either way, being a night of brass band charts derived from New Orleans music, gospel, and Bulgarian folk (mixed, of course, with Byrne’s wry spoken word), it wasn’t happening. How obnoxious, I thought/sighed/judged.
Later, though, after Byrne asked for the audience to “cut us some slack,” the voice returned: “we cut you some slack!” It was a nice little moment, and Byrne cracked a smile. It occurred me that, so long as the screamers weren’t screaming during the music, why should it matter? Not only that, but it seemed to add to the performance, zapping a tiny tinge of electricity into what felt like an otherwise staid routine: a concert hall, ushers, a program listing the songs to be performed, etc..
Byrne’s series at Carnegie Hall was subtitled “No Boundaries,” but — given the mechanism of Carnegie Hall itself — that obviously wasn’t literally true. There might be surprising music, yes, but it would all occur at a certain place, in a certain time, in a certain manner, and the audience was expected to behave as such. I liked the shout. As for the music, The Knee Plays is far from my favorite extracurricular DB project, though there are a few great True Stories-like observations, including the above-uploaded “Social Studies.”
1. “Waitin’ For A Train” – Beck (from Stereopathetic Soul Manure)
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “Freckle Wars” – Ecstatic Sunshine (from Freckle Wars)
4. “Masa Depanmu” – Ariesta Birawa Group (from Ariesta Birawa Group)
5. “Princess Knows” – Elf Power (from Treasures From The Trash Heap)
6. “Temptation” – The Sunshine Fix (from The Spiraling World of Pop EP)
7. “Trombone Dixie” – Marbles (from OpticalAtlas.com)
8. “Now She Sleeps in a Box in the Good Soil of Denmark” – David and the Citizens (from David and the Citizens EP)
9. “Wizard’s Sleeve” – Yo La Tengo (from Shortbus OST)
10. “I’m Your Puppet” – Yo La Tengo (from Mr. Tough 7-inch)
11. “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” – The Beach Boys (from The Beach Boys’ Party)
12. “Verse Chorus Verse” – Nirvana (from No Alternative compilation)
13. “St. Judy’s Comet” – Paul Simon (from There Goes Rhymin’ Simon)
14. “I’ll Keep It With Mine” – Nico (from Chelsea Girls)
15. “Gone Beyond” – Akron/Family (from Meek Warrior)
16. “I’m Of No More Use To Me” – Sam and Simon (from Brudders)
17. “Time Passing” – Max Richter feat. Robert Wyatt (from Songs From Before)
“Hey Bulldog” – The Beatles (download here)
from Yellow Submarine OST (1968)
released by Capitol Records (buy)
For whatever reason (soundtrack cut, etc.), the Beatles’ “Hey Bulldog” totally eluded me, and that’s rather awesome. There’s no reason to validate my love for the Beatles, or even to analyze what I love about “Hey Bulldog.” But it was pretty rad to discover, for me, what was essentially a new Beatles tune. If you’ll forgive me the rockist gushing, it reminds me of a Nick Hornby quote from Songbook, the warm ‘n’ fuzzy type of rock criticism that makes somebody like Hornby just as necessary as somebody like the Beatles.
In Victorian London they used to burn phosphorous at séances in an attempt to see ghosts, and I suspect that the pop music equivalent is our obsessions with B-sides and alternate versions and unreleased material. If you can hear Dylan and the Beatles being unmistakably themselves at their peak — but unmistakably themselves in a way we haven’t heard a thousand, a million times before — then suddenly you get a small but thrilling flash of their sprit, and it’s as close as we’ll ever get, those of us born in the wrong time, to knowing what it must have been like to have those great records burst out of the radio at you when you weren’t expecting them, or anything like them.
Hyperbole, I guess, but Cosby sweater/feel good hyperbole, and not entirely wrong. Beneath that, though, there is something a bit sad. The quest for b-sides, I think, can often be an attempt not to find out what something sounded like new, but to find something that might approximate an experience that one has worn out. It grows from the most atavistic of pop impulses: to want to hear more of what one liked before except, y’know, different. It’s not often that anything about the Beatles sounds new to me. Eventually, though, “Hey Bulldog” will dull, too. It will still be wonderful, of course, but that internalized, well-understood wonderful instead of that cue-and-recue-that-opening-groove wonderful. That’s maybe a little sad, because then I’ll (maybe) have no more Beatles songs to discover. For now, though: rawk.
“The Language of Stationary Travelers” – The Olivia Tremor Control (download here)
from Jumping Fences EP (1998)
released by Blue Rose (buy)
(file expires February 5th.)
Finally, some more of Dad’s animation on YouTube! Here, in the first of what will hopefully become a regular series, is “Cosmic Clock,” one my personal faves. Originally aired on PBS’s 3-2-1 Contact, “Cosmic Clock” is to linear time what the Powers of Ten was to physical space. For an alternate soundtrack, try the above “Language of Stationary Travelers” by the Olivia Tremor Control. (When the animation ends just, y’know, start the Olivias again.)
“Okie From Muskogee” – the Grateful Dead with the Beach Boys (download here)
recorded 27 April 1971
Fillmore East, NYC
(file expires February 2nd)
“We’ve got another famous California group here,” Jerry Garcia announced without much drama midway through the middle night of the Grateful Dead’s five-night run to close out the Fillmore East in April 1971. “It’s the Beach Boys.”
And out they came, or the post Brian Wilson incarnation anyway, to join the Dead for five songs, and to play two of their own in the middle. Like many sloppy superjams before and many since, it didn’t quite add up, but remains rather amusing. There are some great moments, from Carl Wilson’s fucking baked-ass “hello” as he arrives onstage to the Deadheads’ cries of “bring back the Dead” between Deadless renditions of “Good Vibrations” and “I Get Around” (the former introduced by Bruce Johnston as “a song that reflects these really fucked-up times”) (wha?).
The most musical artifact of the set, though, is a rendition of Merle Haggard’s still-newish redneck classic “Okie From Muskogee” which finally gets down to business: hearing Garcia’s guitar dart between the Boys’ harmonies. The Dead had been grooving on Haggard all month (indeed, a lovely Garcia reading of “Sing Me Back Home” would be the encore that night), and the ease with which they play matches the laid back Californicana of the BBs’ severely underrated albums from that period. There, ever so briefly, the great straights from the south and the great freaks from the north clicked, and over what? Some tongue-in-cheek twang. Go figure.
o This dude melted my mind, man, with his theory of “A New Sith,” in which he reconsiders the backstory of the original Star Wars movies in light of the prequels. If George Lucas intended even a quarter of the stuff detailed here, he’s way cooler than I ever gave him credit for.
o Charlie Kaufman’s next picture, Synecdoche, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, sounds ridiculously amazing.
Time to revive the occasional Good Beat entry. What better way than to get back into it but with the newest single by Beyoncé, whose “Crazy In Love” revived my faith in pop.
week of January 27, 2007
#1 this week, #1 last week, 13 weeks on chart (download) (buy)
(file expires January 31st)
The use of the acoustic guitar on Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” interests me. Specifically, it’s that in pop there’s nothing given about using one. The normal palette is so much wider than that. The song’s bed could just as easily be a reconstituted horn section and nobody would bat an eye. But here, the Norwegian production team Stargate has chosen to go into strum overdrive. The vibe, then (at least, as a white male accustomed to acoustic guitars), becomes more girl next door than melodramatic pop diva. Of course, it’s one shiny m’fuckin’ acoustic guitar. On first listen, the beat seems nothing more than an amped-up version of the bland drum machines many singer-songwriters normally employ. Considered as that, it’s way more complex, filled with lots of subliminal fills and cross-patterns. And, considered as that, Beyoncé’s vocal performance suddenly becomes more intricate, as well, vocals cooing and layering and harmonizing in a way no coffeehouse crooner could conjure. In creating a little box for itself (Beyoncé as singer-songwriter) and then using pop spit-polish to make it sound so much bigger than that genre, there’s a visceral excitement in “Irreplaceable.” It also reminds me a lot of Mike Doughty’s version of Mary J. Blige’s “Real Love,” especially the “you must not know about me” refrain, which really is rather wistful. Or maybe it’s just Norwegian.
Song reviews:
“Suffer For Fashion” – Of Montreal (PaperThinWalls.com)
“Freckle Wars” – Ecstatic Sunshine (PaperThinWalls.com)
“Caledonia” – Ghost (PaperThinWalls.com)
“Welcome To My Room” – Vietnam (PaperThinWalls.com)
“Tas Var Kopek Yok – Bunalim (PaperThinWalls.com)
“The End” – David and the Citizens (PaperThinWalls.com)
Album reviews: Stages 2 – v/a (JamBands.com) Love – The Beatles (JamBands.com) We All Belong – Dr. Dog (Relix)
Only in print:
o February/March Relix (Lucinda Williams cover): album reviews of Dr. Dog, What’s Happening in Pernambuco compilation, and Ghost; book reviews of Best Music Writing 2006 and Show I’ll Never Forget anthologies; DVD review of Nirvana.
o Paste #28 (The Shins cover): album review of Of Montreal; film reviews of An Unreasonable Man and Venus.
o Signal To Noise #44 (Comets on Fire cover): album reviews of The Diminisher, Icy Demons, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, and Jean-Claude Vannier.
“Come to Butt-head” – Beavis and Butt-head (download here)
from The Beavis and Butt-head Experience (1993)
released by Geffen (buy)
(file expires January 22nd)
The arguments that Mike Judge’s absolutely fucking hilarious Idiocracy is classist are probably correct. But, as a reason for not distributing the film (it never opened in New York) it seems far more cynical a statement than Idiocracy itself. In the film, Luke Wilson, utterly average dude, wakes up 500 years in the future to discover he’s the smartest man on the planet, the population having devolved owing to the fact that dumb people have more babies than smart people. Hilarity, of course, ensues.
Idiocracy‘s main problem, then, seems to be its form: a cheap-looking CGI comedy. Imagined on the printed page, the story is nothing more than dystopian political parable, connected to vicious satire like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and H.G. Wells’ own classist sci-fi devolution tale, The Time Machine. (Imagined as pop music it’s, uh, Devo.) That is, it puts the issue on the table. But were Fox really that afraid that the movie wouldn’t play in middle America? Isn’t that itself an insulting assessment of middle America? Or maybe the whole classism argument is a strawman, and the assholes in charge still just don’t get how brilliant it is (even after they did the same effing thing to Office Space)?
’cause, man, it’s brilliant: a whole nation of Beavis and Butt-heads, with Wilson and Maya Rudolph as the only sensible folks around. Indeed, much of the humor is drawn from the same wellspring as MTV’s preeminent cartoon meta-critics, from fantastic perversions of language (“we seem to be experimenting some techmerlogical differences”) to nearly Zen arguments (no spoilers, but watch for a joke about electrolytes). Like any dystopian fantasy, maybe it’s right. I don’t know which possible world is scariest: Judge’s vision, or the fact that it slipped through the cracks as it did.
Likely, it’s not a tragedy at all, and Idiocracy is simply a film built the age of the Long Tail, and it’ll just become a huge NetFlix hit. Speaking of which: it’s out now and, yeah, you should probably go put it in your queue.
“Puzzlin’ Evidence” – Talking Heads (download here)
from True Stories (1986)
released by Sire (buy)
(file expires January 20th)
Watching 20-year old baseball games is way more fun that I’d suspected. In the case of Game 6 of the 1986 National League Championship Series, a 16-inning epic between the Mets and the Houston Astros, the overarching drama yielded dozens of miniature entertainments. Framed by the hyperreal green of the Astrodome’s Astroturf and its roof’s impressionist light slats, there was the simple pleasure of watching the 1986 Mets operate. There were small moments: Keith Hernandez making a routinely amazing grab deep in the hole, and flipping effortlessly to Roger McDowell, covering first. And there were the crowd shots, flickering portraits of the same characters that populated David Byrne’s True Stories, shot and set in Texas that same year.
The first picture, perhaps, is titled: the Starting Pitcher’s Wife in the Top of the 9th. In this case, the starting pitcher was Bob Knepper, working on a two-hit shut-out against the Mets who — moments after this shot — pinch-hit with Len Dykstra, who would triple to deep center, thus beginning a three-run rally that would result (seven innings later) in the Mets’ clinching of the pennant. But she didn’t know that.
Episode 11: illegal shit
Highlights of bootleg plunderings from Turntable Lab and elsewhere. Also some things that can be legally acquired. But only some.
1. “Carl’s Anti-Drug Radio Spot” – The Beach Boys (from Endless Bummer: The Very Worst of the Beach Boys)
2. “Television is Crack” – Certified Bananas (from CertifiedBananas.com)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “TV on the Radio vs. Afrika Bambaata” – Diplo (from Hollertronix, v. 2)
5. “Music to Watch Girls Cry, part 13” – Andy Votel (from Music to Watch Girls Cry)
6. “Ensemble Melodica Intro” – Dr. Delay (from Psycrunk)
7. “°‹” – Trap Door II (from Trap Door II Mystery Mix)
8. “Naomi” – Neutral Milk Hotel (from the Joe Beats Experiment Presents Indie Rock Blues)
9. “Love Is How You Make It” – Gong (from Four Tet: DJ Kicks)
10. “Where I End and You Begin” – Radiohead/”Stay Fly” – Triple 6 Mafia (from Psycrunk)
11. “Dirt Off Your Shoulders” – Spinjunkies (from Jay-Z’s Dead)
12. “[Untitled]” – Andy Votel (from Songs In the Key of Death)
13. “Chove Chuva” – Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66 (from Jorge Ben: Tudo Ben, v. 1 [Rock & Soul])
14. “Soul Master” – Edwin Starr
15. “I Wish it Would Rain” – The Cougars (from Jamaica To Toronto compilation)
16. “Kokomo (Spanish version)” – The Beach Boys (from Endless Bummer: The Very Worst of the Beach Boys)
“Brokedown Palace” – the Grateful Dead (download here)
recorded 11 April 1972
Newcastle City Hall, Newcastle, UK
from Steppin’ Out with the Grateful Dead (2002)
released by Grateful Dead Records (buy)
(file expires January 24th)
It’s hard to find an excuse to publish a two-and-a-half year-old review of a show by a band I don’t like very much. But I’m going to, anyway, because it involved a pleasantly bizarre excursion to Central Park, and this thing has stewed on my harddrive for way too long. At one point, it was supposed to have run in the Interboro Rock Tribune, though — if it did — I sure never saw a copy.
And “Brokedown Palace”? Well, why not? Consider it a spoonful of honey for all the theorizing about Dave Matthews. Or maybe it’s just honey because honey is fucking delicious. Anyway, I came across this version tonight, recorded in Newcastle on April 11th, 1972, and I love it. For some reason, I can’t remember ever hearing a version from ’72 (or ’73 or ’74, my fave Dead period), though DeadBase swears there are plenty. Except for the high harmonies near the end, it’s all so perfectly assured, maybe even more than the American Beauty rendition, especially Garcia’s monstrously concise solo.
***
America On Line
by Jesse Jarnow
When guitarist Warren Haynes took the stage with the Dave Matthews Band during their massive free concert at Central Park on September 24th, few cheered. That was to be expected. Though Haynes is revered in some quarters as the ever-active guitarist for the Allman Brothers Band, Gov’t Mule, and Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh’s eponymous quintet, he’s mostly unknown in the mainstream.
After dueting with Matthews on a rendition of Neil Young’s “Cortez The Killer,” Haynes ripped into a soaring solo. It was typical Big Rock fare, Haynes’s fingers flying impassioned up the fretboard in a show of bluesy virtuosity, face scrunched in anguish and splayed across the nine jumbo screens to underscore the point. The solo blew to a volcanic climax, the tension released from Haynes’s body, and he stepped back.
And, again, few cheered.
This raises some questions. Likely, it wasn’t a show of displeasure. Nobody was booing, nor were people offering up any particular show of criticism. And it wasn’t abject boredom. Around me, on the fringe of the crowd, people seemed to be having a grand evening under the stars, laughing and smiling in all directions. So, what was it? Why hadn’t that old reliable, the Big Solo, ignited them?
On the surface, the Dave Matthews Band appear to have inherited the stadium rock mantle once held by bands like Led Zeppelin and, more recently, U2: an old-fashioned rock outfit (give or take) capable of creating best-selling records and filling impossibly large halls wherever they choose to roam. But, as the crowd’s reaction to Haynes indicated, perhaps not all is what it seems.
Beneath the same ol’, same ol’ exterior of the rock concert as suburban coming of age ritual, the practices of young concertgoers have subtly mutated. To say that they are having shallower experiences at the shows they attend because, say, their experiences are apparently non-musical is to miss the point. They’re still having a good time and they’re still, like it or not, coming of age. So, what is it that they latch onto?
***
Given the truly epic surreality of the event, from its conception to is execution – light years removed from the uncomplicated cause-and-effect of liking a band, hearing about their show, buying a ticket, and going (and even further from the vaunted free concerts of yore) – it’s right boggling to conceive of the AOL Concert For Schools as a teenager’s first rock show. Rock concerts have always been theaters of the absurd, but the dramatis personae seem to be changing of late. In Manhattan, anyway, ads had plastered subways and buses for several weeks. Typical copy depicted a picture of a row of school desks, the AOL running man logo branded onto the corner of each (a frightening thought), and the caption “Life needs a music lesson.”
Waiting on line, the acquisition of tickets seemed to be the most popular topic of discussion. Officially, they had been distributed for free via white AOL vans that parked at various Manhattan street corners throughout the week. But, being free and pretty much indiscriminately passed out – in a relatively mysterious way, at that, some seemingly arbitrarily, some after participating in contests – they quickly fell into other hands. We heard tales of a temporary black market that had sprung up to accommodate the distribution of tickets, funneling them out to the suburbs via EBay and co-workers and friends of friends with favors to call, sometimes free, but mostly not.
The line coiled through the park, a human Great Wall of China drudging in slow motion through Frederick Law Olmstead’s Arcadian landscaping, disappearing into the greenery at one end, stretching out onto Central Park’s bordering avenues on the other. On the east side, we had followed it south from the park’s entrance at 72nd Street with no end in sight, as Jon looked for somebody to bestow his spare ticket on.
A kid overheard us. “Do you have an extra?” he asked, with a slight accent.
“Maybe,” Jon replied
“Ya, I came from Germany,” he said.
“Oh yeah?” I replied, glancing at his Ithaca College hoodie.
“Ya,” he confirmed. “I’m from Munich.”
“Okay, you got it,” Jon said.
“Oh, danke!” Munich Boy grinned, and scurried off, ducking under a barricade and cutting into the line.
“Do you ever get the impression that the way these kids act on line might be a good metaphor for the way they’ll turn out later in life?” I asked Jon.
He paused. “Nah, that’s stupid.”
We pressed onward. Near 70th Street, past a row of port-o-lets, the line suddenly changed directions, as if we had passed the equator.
“The line doubles back somewhere down there,” a girl groused.
“This sucks, I wanna go home,” a nearby cop grumbled. “I could be in class right now.”
“Down there” was 65th Street, just north of the Central Park Zoo. “Screw this,” Jon announced, and turned into the park, following the sidewalk along the thru-road. A hundred yards into the park, we hopped the small stone wall, climbed a grassy embankment, and looked down on the line, which we could see in the distance. We could see dozens of other dissidents, looking for alternate paths into the concert. I wondered how many of them were first-time concertgoers.
We cursed Munich Boy as we clamored through the underbrush after the hillside we were following suddenly dropped away. We roamed the Ramble, occasionally catching sight of the line. It was a lovely evening for a stroll, and we wandered up paths and down stairs and past the pond and the gondolas and rowboats peacefully adrift. At the Boathouse, men in white linen suits dined, seemingly unaware of the horde of teenagers milling on the other side of the treeline.
We slipped into line. “Hey, good idea, man!” a guy said, unbothered by the fact that we were blatantly cutting in.
“How long have you been here?” I asked a girl next to us.
“Five hours,” she replied.
“Man, I got here three hours ago,” said a kid standing next to her.
“Really?” said somebody else. “We walked up, like 45 minutes ago. Didn’t even cut.”
The line had broken down their sense of time, it seemed. Mine, too. I have no recollection of how long we were there. People talked. Besides how they got their tickets, they rarely spoke about the band they were there to see (unheard of at show by Phish or the Grateful Dead, two bands the DMB is frequently lumped with). They didn’t even speak with particular frequency about other bands, but mostly about movies or television shows.
While this might not seem worth remarking on at first, it seems some indication of the way the Dave Matthews Band (and, thus, the rock concert as an entity) might now be viewed by young fans: music as something undifferentiated from other pop culture mediums, as opposed to an autonomous experience that exists outside of the mainstream of American life. In other words: rock not as rebellion at all, but as a completely sanctioned experience. Though this has probably been the norm for some time, the concert form has seemingly transformed around this ideal.
We passed a row of ticket takers, a pile of confiscated lawn chairs and blankets (for a day in the park, at that), a thoroughly crouch-mauling patdown (hands placed and suddenly jerked UP), and a bag search (though, officially, they weren’t allowing bags in at all; terror, etc.). Though our tickets had been ripped, and word had come that the show had started, we still couldn’t hear any music. Abruptly, two girls in front of us shrieked, charged up a small hill in the vague direction of the concert field, and disappeared into the woods. There was a rustling, then silence.
***
The lush green of the Great Lawn sprawled before us, the stately regency of Belvedere Castle and the midtown skyline at our back. The music ricocheted between speaker towers in an echoed maze, bearing strange sonic resemblance to an avant-garde multi-channel sound installation. Six giant screens stood in V-formation, pointing towards the distant stage, which was adorned by its own screen. Though the field was half-empty (presumably, most were still on line), clumps of people gathered around each of the screens.
Each was mounted on an elaborate scaffolding which also included several banks of lights, and a smoke machine. The former flashed constantly, moreless indiscriminately (which didn’t matter, since the images were hardly synched with the music coming from the speakers). The latter, positioned below the screen, jetted smoke straight upward, thanks to industrial fans just beneath the chute. The lights and the smoke both came between one’s sightline and the broadcast images, which simultaneously drew the eye in and created the impression that one was, indeed, watching something real at the center. Crowds sat cross-legged at the bases of the scaffolding, goggling upwards.
A camera mounted on a crane swept over the crowd. Another camera stood on a smaller scaffolding that rose from the midst of the throng. With the exception of a few songs in the middle of the band’s set, the operator trained the camera away from the stage for the entire night, presumably for the DVD of the concert, already set to be released on November 4th. There was no shortage of striking images. A girl holding a bouquet of heart-shaped balloons of silver mylar wandered by, the balloons momentarily framed by smoke billowing from the screen.
Instead of the usual between song pandemonium, the air vacuumed to near silence after a brief smattering of applause. Despite this, the music was not an unimportant part of the event. There was dancing, though it was frequently directed at each other in clusters, like a school dance, as opposed to at the stage. There were singalongs, though only at preset moments, as opposed to when the mood struck. There were giddy screams when favorite songs were played, though they were usually followed by cell phone calls, as opposed to intent listening.
So, why is the Dave Matthews Band the premier party band of the early 21st century? Surely, part of their appeal is in their Joe Rockband quality. Matthews is, as Rolling Stone’s David Fricke called him, “the ultimate Everyman.” Their music maps to that description, too. Despite several long instrumental excursions, there was little extreme about the band’s performance. They played at comfortable tempos with no distortion. All of this accounts for the band’s accessibility, for the college following that was Matthews’ bread and butter in earlier years, but doesn’t explain why listeners seem to be applying different standards to Matthews’ music than previous generations.
Or does it?
Despite its size, despite the screens, the show in Central Park was as close to a non-spectacle as one could get at that magnitude. When soloing, bandmembers would make a point of stepping close to each other and making eye contact. Again, it was an old rock trick (e.g. Robert Plant drawing the crowd’s attention to Jimmy Page by moving near and watching him solo), but effective. But, when Plant looked at Page, he frequently did so with awe, putting the guitarist on a pedestal for the audience by temporarily playing low status.
By contrast, the Dave Matthews Band’s gestures were far more humble. By design or happenstance, each revealed the band as six men playing music in real time. In an age where jump cuts are the norm and linear performances are practically unknown in popular culture, that can be powerful good. It is well possible that the Dave Matthews Band appeals for the same reason that country music suddenly found itself in vogue in the late ’60s. There is not so much an authenticity to the Dave Matthews Band as there is an undiluted simplicity — which is a helluva thing to say about a rock and roll band playing music in front of an estimated 100,000 people at a concert sponsored by one of the biggest corporations in the world.
In this case, it’s not what the guitars are doing, but that there are even guitars at all. Through all, Matthews inspires a certain comfort level. And, hey, as an audience member, that feels great. It is precisely because the rock concert has become such an ingrained ritual that the Dave Matthews Band thrives: simply, at a Dave Matthews Band show, one doesn’t have to behave like he’s at a rock concert.
There are no pretensions of revelation, no high art or inflatable pigs, not even any obvious attempts to get the crowd riled up. Nobody was beat over the head being told that they were having the time of his or her life. Is that rebellion? Maybe so, maybe not. It’s definitely a “to each his own trip” philosophy, minus the drugs and writ large. Like every Everyman, Dave Matthews is a blank slate. Life needs blank slates.
Around us, boys approached girls awkwardly, smoking the second or third cigarettes of their lives, as the new template for a rock show burned itself into their heads. They had meaningful experiences.
“This is the place to be!” a guy in a turquoise Alligator shirt bellowed as he stumbled by. “These guys are the bomb, right?”
A moment later, he held his head and staggered towards the scaffolding, where he vomited. He removed his shirt, revealing a lacrosse uniform, wiped his mouth, and lurched back into the crowd.
“Less Then You Think” (droneless edit) – Wilco (download here)
from A Ghost Is Born (2004)
released by Nonesuch (buy)
(expires January 23rd)
I’ll be the first to defend the migraine-mimicking ambient construction tacked to the end of Wilco’s “Less Than You Think.” In its own way, it can be quite a cleansing listen (and when they opened their New Year’s show at Madison Square Garden with it, the noise became a wonderfully patient jam that resolved into “Spiders”). But, I also love “Less Than You Think” a lot — especially the Morse code-like piano tap-tap-tapping behind Jeff Tweedy — such that I might wanna put it on playlists and the like. This becomes a bit more of pain in the arse when there’s 12 minutes of drone affixed. For my (and your) convenience, here it is without.
It occurred to me over the weekend that, before it is all over, James Brown could still be arrested for something. As my friend Bill is fond of saying: even in death, he’s James Brown. So far, he’s died on Christmas, been pulled through Harlem in a horse-drawn carriage, caused lines down the block when he lay in state at the Apollo (check Amy’s photo-essay), had the locks changed on his wife, been at the center of a paternity test, and isn’t buried, but literally chilling in a temperature-controlled room in his own house until the lawyers figure it all out. I can’t say how it’ll happen, but there really is a chance that James Brown will once again end up in police custody. It also sincerely and deeply warms my heart to note that, during the last week of the year, Brown topped Saddam Hussein and Gerald Ford on the Google Zeitgeist.
Dude’s still the hardest working man in show business.
Oddly enough, just before the holiday break, I read the best book about music I’ve read in ages, and it happened to be about James Brown: Douglas Wolk’s 33 1/3 entry on Live at the Apollo. Check his mesmerizing science drop on hypeman Fats Gonder’s introduction:
Fats Gonder ramps up his delivery from a salesmanlike incantation to rabid enthusiasm. He’s got a singer to sell. What’s the man he’s introducing done with all that hard work? “Man that sang, ‘I Go CRAZY’!” The snare smacks as the horn section blares a G-chord. It’s really “I’ll Go Crazy,” but Gonder’s determined to out-country JB’s enunciation. “Try ME!” G-sharp. “YOU’ve Got the Power!” A. “THINK!” A-sharp….
Gonder’s speech has been setting up a couple of subliminal effects. Starting with “You’ve Got the Power” and running through “Bewildered,” there’s a steady 6/8 rhythm to the words he accents and the band’s stabs — a tick-tock swing that’s at pretty much the same tempo as Brown’s ballads. There’s also a hidden message in those emphases — Crazy-me-you-Think-Want-Mind-Be-WILL-Lost-Night-Shimmy! This is a night for total abandon, the suggestion goes; for thoughts to become desires and then to simply be, through sheer will; a night to be lost to shimmying.
All that, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Chitlin Circuit. Well worth the read — but, then, what about James Brown isn’t? One couldn’t ask for a better subject. Philip Gourevitch’s “Mr. Brown” profile from the New Yorker is a must-read, too, and contains perhaps my favorite section lede ever:
There are no computers in the offices of James Brown Enterprises. “He’s got this strange notion that they can see back at you,” Maria Moon, one of his staffers, explained. “I guess he watched too many Russian-spy movies when he was young or something, but he thinks that they can see you and that they can track everything that you do.” Mr. Brown put it slightly differently: “I don’t want computers coming feeding direct off of me, ’cause I know what I got to tell a computer that it ain’t got in there, and I don’t want to. If the government would want me to be heading up the computer people, I would give ’em a basic idea what we should put in a computer—not just basic things, you know, but things that will be helpful in the future. We don’t have that, but I could tell ’em a lot of things.”
Jonathan Lethem’s Rolling Stone piece from last year ain’t nothing to sneeze at either. As Wolk points out repeatedly, the idea behind Live at the Apollo was for James Brown to sell himself as an attraction. Or, as the Tom Tom Club put it, in their “Genius of Love”: “James Brown? James Brown!” Even still, James Brown remains the answer to his own question.
“You Enjoy Myself” – Phish (download here)
recorded 26 October 1989
Wetlands Preserve, NYC (soundboard)
Man, y’know, I hate to be negative & shit, but sometimes life requires it and this story is too good to pass up. Carole De Saram is the President of the Tribeca Community Association. As I found out when I saw the final cut of Wetlands Preserved, a documentary I worked on a few years ago, she was one of the prime movers in forcing the Wetlands Preserve out of Tribeca in September 2001. Call it gentrification or something else, but she displaced a very real community in the name of making her own newer, richer community a little blander. That it happened during a month when communities in Manhattan were needed more than ever only made it shittier.
But then there’s karma. Or, more accurately, there’s Borat.
Carole De Saram, as it turns out, is also a member of the Veteran Feminists of America, a group Sacha Baron Cohen interviews in Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. When I saw the film, it was one of the few times where I groaned and thought, “gee, does he really have to fuck with these people?” And the answer, as the universe has pointed out to me, is: hell yes. My new theory is that anybody in Borat who appears innocent is actually atoning for some bad juju he or she previously unleashed on the world.
Anyway, there’s something positive to go along with it: a nicely mixed soundboard of Phish playing “You Enjoy Myself” at the Wetlands in October 1989. For non-Phishies open-eared enough to try, this is as good a place to start as any. If you don’t enjoy “You Enjoy Myself,” you probably won’t enjoy Phish. They’re not the story here, anyway, Wetlands is: a club that allowed this bizarre music to happen in New York.
Here’s a 12-story feature I edited, and partially wrote, about Wetlands on the occasion of its closing.
o Wayne Marshall is a pop ethnomusicologist who runs the great Wayne and Wax Blog. His “we use so many snares” piece about reggaeton, featured in Da Capo’s newest Best Music Writing anthology, delves into the genre’s genetics with highly readable academic aplomb.
o Cory Doctorow described neo-cyberpunk Charles Stross’s Accelerando as making “hallucinogens obsolete,” which is a bit of an overstatement. But, if you wanna trip nuts in 15 minute increments on the subway, bus, or wherever, Accelerando (once it gets going) will probably do the trick. It’s kinda like DMT without the exploding mothball smell. Stross, being one of them futurey robot-talkin’ types put the whole dang novel online. Buy it here, if’n y’want. (Thanks to RG for the recommendo.)
o Ypulse is a blog dedicated to teen culture; teens being way cooler than anything covered on Idolator.
o On Sunday, the Times ran a story about an amazing internet-age love triangle that is by turns both hilarious and horrible. Reads like a novel, or a Coen brothers’ script, or something way beyond reality.
“The Weakest Part” (slow version) – Yo La Tengo (download here)
from iTunes Session EP (2007)
released by iTunes (buy
(expires January 17th)
Though you wouldn’t know it by checking YLT.com (at least, as of tonight), there’s a new four-song Yo La Tengo EP this week, available for $4 via the iTunes store. Along with a vaguely surfy instrumental, “El Es Gay” (like “El Es Dee”?), a by-the-books rerecording of “Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind,” and a delighted cover of Love’s tribute to LBJ’s daughter (and “Twist and Shout” rewrite) “Luci Baines,” there’s also a rearrangement of Beat Your Ass‘s “The Weakest Part.”
Sufficently damn understated in its original incarnation, “The Weakest Part” is now practically invisible. As a solo piano ballad (with dab of feedbacky guitar), the slow motion melody stretches to a near flatline. It’s just atmosphere, Georgia Hubley’s voice disappearing into the sound of itself. It’s not much to sing (or even hum) along with, but it is lovely nonetheless.
Well worth the $4 (if only to burn to CD & re-rip to mp3), the iTunes Session EP is a nice addition to the twob-sides Yo La Tengo put out last fall.
The sixth inanongoingcollectionof functional webpages and dork tools (excluding any/all Google programs).
o Since the cat seems to be out of the bag, the coolest thing ever: Critical Metrics, a rated singles aggregator. It begins.
o OttoBib — An automated bibliography generator. Just enter ISBNs and click “Get Citations.” Man, I wish I had this when I was in school.
o BookMooch — Trade used books with peeps. (Thx, VB.)
o eSnips.com — Semi-permanent freebie web storage, up to 1 GB. (Word, Dean.)
o Writer’s Dreamtools — Their URL is no joke.
Missing baseball, I recently spent some time with Roger Angell’s Season Ticket, which contains some of the best writing I’ve ever read about the pleasures of being a fan. That Angell’s fandom happens to be of baseball often feels incidental. Here is a rain-delayed in game in Toronto:
Then it rained — downward and side-blown sheets and skeins of water that streamed down the glass fronting of the press box, puddled and then pounded on the lumpy, too green AstroTurf playing field before us, and emptied the roofless grandstand around the diamond. Glum descendant clouds swept in, accompanied by a panoply of Lake Ontario ring-billed gulls (a celebrated and accursed local phenomenon), who took up late-comer places upon the long rows of backless aluminum benches in center right field and then settled themselves thickly across the outfield swamplands as well, where they all stood facing to windward, ready for a fly ball, or perhaps for a visiting impressionist French film director (“Quai des Jays,” “Toronto Mon Amour”) to start shooting.
(It also happens to be available for $1.00 from AbeBooks.com, or one cent from Amazon.)
“Go Where I Send Thee” – Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet (download here)
from Gospel Music (2006)
released by Hyena Records (buy)
(file expires January 12th)
We can talk all we want about popcraft, but the most genuine hooks are those in folk music — real folk music, that is, the type that existed before recordings. In fact, after a song has been passed from generation to generation and continent to continent, all that’s left is what people can remember: hooks.
Like the Beverly Hills Teens theme song, “Go Where I Send Thee” — performed here by the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet — has been lodged in my head for most of my life without me ever owning a proper recording. I suspect I learned it from a lily-white Pete Seeger rendition, but I’m not really sure. (The 1937 GGJQ version is from Joel Dorn and Lee Friedlander’s awesome Gospel Music mix.)
In Folk Songs of North America, where it is labeled “The Holy Baby,” Alan Lomax traces it as such:
Versions of this ancient mystic song have been recorded everywhere in Europe. Archer Taylor (Journal of American Folklore, LXII, p. 382) suggests that its origin may be found in Sanskrit, but that all European versions are probably derived from a Hebrew chant for Passover (Echod mi Yodea, first printed in Prague in 1526). The earliest known English translation of the Jewish religious folk song appeared in the seventeenth century, but a number of distinct forms soon developed.
To my ears, “Go Where I Send Thee” — the melody at its core, anyway, the specific part that never left me — doesn’t sound particularly like any of these cultures, the American South included. The refrain, the little drop between “send” and “thee,” just sounds like something I remember, everything whittled away except for its exact emotional effect. To paraphrase Frank Zappa: Folk isn’t dead. It doesn’t even smell funny.
And… we’re back. This year, the Frow Show will run every other Wednesday on the Ropeadope Podcast Network. Hooray for regularity. Insert joke about eating lots of bran here. (Thanks to Ace Cowboy for calling me out.)
Episode 10: the autumn rollover An autumn mix burned for friends.
1. “Beverly Hills Teens Theme” – ??? (from the interweb)
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “Suffer For Fashion” – Of Montreal (from Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?)
4. “Mikes Jones vs. Britney” – Diplo (from Hollertronix, v. 2 EP)
5. “If I Were Only A Child Again” – Curtis Mayfield (from Four Tet: DJ Kicks)
6. “In A Different Light” – The Bangles (from Different Light)
7. “Divine Hammer” – The Breeders (from Last Splash)
8. “Autumn Sweater” – Yo La Tengo (from I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One)
9. “The Mountain Low” – Palace Music (from Viva Last Blues)
10. “All Downhill From Here” – Jim O’Rourke (from Insignificance)
11. “Sanddollars” – Why? (from Elephant Eyelash)
12. “I’d Love Just Once To See You” – The Beach Boys (from Wild Honey)
13. “She Smiled Sweetly” – The Rolling Stones (from Between the Buttons)
14. “Absolute Lithops Effect” – The Mountain Goats (from All Hail West Texas)
15. “Harvest Moon” – Cassandra Wilson (from New Moon Daughter)
16. “Thank You For Sending Me An Angel” – Talking Heads (from CBS demos)
17. “I Wanna Be Your Lover” – Bob Dylan (from Biograph)
18. “Brokedown Palace” – Bonnie “Prince” Billy (from Pebbles and Marbles, 2004 summer tour)
Happy 2007. Still recovering from various reveleries, but here is another Greatest Miss: a brief item circa November 2002 for a now-defunct (I suspect) NYC freebie paper whose name I don’t recall about the sound art gallery, Engine 27. I picked up copies for a few months after I submitted it, but never saw it in print and never heard back from the editor. I was a little premature in calling Engine 27 firmly established, it seems, but so it goes. Diapason is still kicking.
Engine 27’s Rational Amusements
by Jesse Jarnow
Lower Manhattan has long been rife with the so-called rational amusements: scientific dream factories like PT Barnum’s American Museum where exotic worlds might be conjured. And where Barnum displayed the curios of destinations fantastic, Jack Weisberg’s Engine 27 multi-channel sound gallery allows visitors to walk through jungle darkness, strange symphonies erupting from every corner. Housed in a decommissioned TriBeCa firehouse, the space open to the public is little more than a long, dark room adorned by 16 custom-built speakers. Below the floor, though, mind-bending technology hums and directs sound, creating what managing director Eric Rosenzveig calls a “physical three-dimensional landscape.”
Multi-channel sound-as-art has existed at least since Iannis Xenakis and Le Corbousier’s 1958 Brussels World’s Fair collaboration with Edgar Varése, but the form seems to have blossomed in the past two years, with the firm establishment of not only Engine 27 and Michael Schumacher’s midtown Diapason Gallery, but a nod from the Whitney, who included a sound room in their most recent biennial. “I think [one of] the primary directions in music in the past 10 years has involved breaking open the stereo field,” says Rosenzveig, who thinks “all music can work well in a multi-channel environment, if the artist is interested in addressing [one].”
Electronic musician Tetsu Inoue, who had never created for multi-channel before, sculpted the rich Active Dot (for 16 lines). Though he admitted having trouble adjusting to the new spatial palette, he claims that after his residency, “CD format is kind of boring, very timeline based.” Engine 27’s first batch of artists-in-residence, a “Noah’s Ark” of 30 composers combining invited guests and open-call applicants, tried to sample a multitude of aesthetics. As highfalutin as the specifics of Engine 27 are, the results played like rotating weekly features at one of William Gibson’s futuristic stim-parlors: magical, and all for a fair buck.
“New Year’s Eve” – Stephan Mathieu and Ekkehard Ehlers (download here)
from Heroin (2001)
released by Orthlorng Musork (buy)
“New Year” – The Breeders (download here)
released by 4AD
from Last Splash (1993) (buy)
I like the contrast of these two takes on New Year’s. Stephan Mathieu and Ekkehard Ehlers’ field-recorded fireworks are literally kinetic energy. Though they are violent chemical reactions, they are also soft, as if muffled by a snowfall. Certainly, the swelling organ helps — a fantastic exercise of bare melody finding form in chaos.
“New Year,” meanwhile, is the sun-blinded morning after and all (conceptual) potential energy. The lead track from Last Splash, it is two minutes of indie-surf glee whose main purpose is to set up what follows. Like slowly remembering the impossible resolutions made in the ecstasy of revelry, its ending is profoundly unsatisfying without a dramatic statement to follow. Below the lyrics, in the liner notes, there is a literal parenthetical clarification: “(stage direction: suspenseful point).” The Breeders came up with the classic bass-drop intro to “Cannonball.” If only every year could start so well.
(Thanks to the too-oft-neglected-but-still-bloody-awesome ‘buked & scorned for introducing me to “New Year’s Eve” last December. I should probably check out the rest of Heroin now, huh?)
By morning, I will happily off-grid for a week, back in action on 12/28 or so. In the meantime…
Rescued from the cabinet of VHSs at my father’s house on Long Island (and digitized by my buddy, LB), it’s Think Big, the 1987 inspirational video starring the New York Mets’ Gary Carter, Mookie Wilson, and Roger McDowell!
See them mime (on the field at Shea!) to hilariously synthed out rock tunes written just for them! Hear Gary Carter attempt a Pee-Wee Herman imitation! Dig the late ’80s conception of proto-internet video baseball! Get inspired!
I remember asking my parents to get Think Big for me. I don’t think I ever bought into to it, though. Even when I was nine, it was unbearably corny. But it was neat to see Mets players clowning around like they were the Beatles or something. Really, the coolest part was the video baseball. 100% awesome!
“You fucked my girlfriend with a cellphone!” said GWAR’s Number One fan, upon encountering the band in Hell, shortly before they chopped into him and he squirted the sixth or seventh round of fake blood on the audience. Before that, though, the band clarified: “We didn’t fuck your girlfriend” (pause) “…we raped her. And it wasn’t a cellphone. It was a phone booth.” (Cheers.) Then blood. Like every between-song skit — which also included Adolf Hitler, Arnold Schwarzenegger, George W. Bush, and Jewcifer — it was scripted with the obvious punchline: cover the audience in some kind of fluid. There was also a fake cock and a lot of fake cum.
“There used to be a lot more blood,” said my friend, who’d seen GWAR “10 or 20 times.” “It used to start gushing as soon as they hit the stage. It was a lot better.” He’d never seen GWAR — who celebrated their 20th birthday last year — in any place larger than Irving Plaza, the small ballroom where we saw them tonight. It makes sense. After all, any bigger and the blood cannon (placed at crotch level and operated by a dude in a leather thong) wouldn’t be able to reach the back of the room.
Besides the wall of tee-shirts and branded underwear at the merch table, there was also a veritable metal record store. Besides discs from GWAR and their two openers, there were also long cardboard cases filled with their brethren like Cannibal Corpse, Cattle Decapitation, Born Into Pain, and Destroy Destroy Destroy. It was a one-stop subcultural shop.
GWAR have been doing this for twenty years. With their anonymity-granting costumes — which resembled, well, bad guys from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — they could tagteam members for generations (if they haven’t already). GWAR could still be playing in decades, when metal feels quaint, like bluegrass does to us. One can never underestimate the power of being covered in fake blood, though. If being covered in sweat is the sign of an authentic ecstasy, then GWAR do all the work, virtually guaranteeing that anybody who wants to can have a literally physical, visceral experience. And that is a pretty good concept for a band.
I have a playlist of all the quiet songs I can listen to late at night or right when I wake up. Usually, it’s a matter of finding one or two tracks on a given album. As such, sometimes I wonder if I automatically devalue (say) Iron & Wine’s music because I can drop nearly any song from Sam Beam’s catalogue arbitrarily into the shuffle. Likewise, the ultra-prolific Akron/Family’s forays into the big purdy — like the ambiguous and beautiful “Gone Beyond” from Meek Warrior — sometimes seem too easy. The untitled last track from their self-circulated radio session demos for their next album (produced by Ween collaborator Andrew Weiss, out in spring, can’t wait to hear it, etc), falls into this category.
Besides the lovely rising turn on “moonlight” and “in the daytime,” it doesn’t make much of a case for being something besides a generic psych-folk ballad. The images are even a little hackneyed (“all we see is moonlight drifting from dream to dream”), but somehow it all adds up and makes me want to listen to it repeatedly. Especially in the context of A/F — whose typically ambitious demos also include their usual ecstatic chants (“Ed Is A Portal”), ragged Americana (“Sophia”), and oddball/handclap grooves (untitled no. 1) — it is an inevitable coda. As a single track, almost anybody, in almost any genre, in any decade of the 20th century could have written it. That’s all well and good. Mostly, I like it — especially the woozy faux-Hawaiian slide interlude — because it sounds fucking fantastic when I’m almost asleep.
o Dad recently posted the most recent batches of his Andy Goldsworthy/Joseph Cornell-like beach constructions, as well as filling out an archive of some his paintings.
o I quite enjoyed Cory Doctorow’s post about how the internet is far better at enabling deviance than promoting normalcy. It’s nice to see the freak flag fly.
o Astroland, the last big amusement park on Coney Island, was sold a few weeks ago. After this coming summer, it will be torn down. While the Cyclone and the Wonder Wheel and Nathan’s (and the Parachute Drop) will allegedly remain, Coney Island as a place of cheap thrills is pretty much over. But, hey, maybe they’ll pull off their plan. Wouldn’t a glimmering new theme park by the sea be more respectful to the idea of Coney Island than the semi-occupied ruins currently there? (My Coney Island photos.)
In contrast to the cellular phone of the United States (defined by technical infrastructure), and the mobile of the United Kingdom (defined by the untethering from fixed location) (Kotamraju and Wakeford 2002), the Japanese term keitai (roughly translated, “something you carry with you”) references a somewhat different set of dimensions. A keitai is not so much about a new technical capability or freedom of motion but about a snug and intimate technosocial tethering, a personal device supporting communications that are a constant, lightweight, and mundane presence in everyday life.
Maybe, the relentless clicking of cell cams at shows constitutes part of what might be described as Western keitai. That is, along with mp3s both financially and corporeally devaluing recorded music, it is possible that concerts are slipping into the realm of the day-to-day. Taking pictures, then, isn’t an attempt to capture anything momentous, but to simply mark the occasion, like a diary entry. And, sure, maybe that’s a defiling of live music as sacred ritual/spectacle, yadda yadda yadda, but it’s probably time for a change, anyway. Wouldn’t wanna be late for the future, after all.
My first reaction to Tom Cox’s “Don’t film it, feel it” editorial in the London Times was annoyance. And, after thinking about, it still is.
I get Cox’s point: if people are spending the whole shows taking pictures on their phones, they’re not listening. Admittedly, it’s frustrating. A few months ago, I saw my friend’s band, the Rolling Stallones, play at CBGB. During the opening act, a gaggle of girls up front spent literally 20 minutes taking pictures of each other in front of the stage. I don’t think it was even for the purposes of documenting themselves at the soon-to-closed venue. It was just obscenely narcissistic.
But were the girls taking pictures of each other really going to be “listening” to the show, anyway? Going to see live music is about far more than just the music coming out of the speakers, otherwise you wouldn’t fork your money over and you could just stay at home and listen to the stolen mp3s. It’s a social act, with all the attendant relationships.
Though I’m a big proponent of cell cameras, I almost never take pictures at gigs. But that’s just me. Even though there are tons of differences, I associate their use at shows with the act of smuggling a cheap cassette deck in to make a bootleg. The content is different, even the action is different — cell cams being condoned, bootlegs being, well bootlegs — but I think it’s the same impulse. The resultant tangle of Flickr pages, MySpace and Facebook pictures is obviously ephemeral. But so is live music. That’s sort of the point, right?
It all seems like a way of engaging with the music. And by “the music,” of course, I mean everything besides the music itself: one’s friends, the rest of the crowd, the band, the club. In an age where one’s relationship with music is more complex than just listening to albums and going to shows, it’s sometimes good to be able to locate herself in the noise.
Of course I was annoyed by the girls at the show. It wasn’t because they were taking pictures, though. It was because they just wouldn’t shut up. But that’s a much older problem.
“Omstart” – Cornelius (download here)
from Sensuous (2006)
released by Warner Japan (buy)
(file expires December 14th)
I used to have this theory that Beck and Cornelius sounded like the zeitgeist. Odelay‘s junkyard pastiches sounded like 1996, Fantasma‘s fantasias like 1997, Midnite Vultures‘ neon disco like ’99, and Point‘s electro-acoustics like 2002. I’m not sure if that theory extends to Sensuous, Cornelius’s new album, currently only out in his native Japan. It certainly doesn’t sound like any 2006 I’ve experienced, anyway.
For an album titled Sensuous, “Omstart” is one of the few tone poems. With Point‘s alien organics (somewhat disappointingly) mostly supplanted by terrestrial synthetics elsewhere, “Omstart” is a stereo-panned palette cleanser. Keigo Oyamada’s voice rises, transforming into texture as if, owing to some mythological justice, it must become a bird. Besides that movement, the drama is spare, all branches empty. Maybe it sounds like 2007.
UPDATE, Thanks to the benevolent Dean, who has graciously offered server space, all things should be go again. Sorry again to any trouble I caused on other peeps’ servers.
Wilco has been playing an album’s worth of new material over the past year or so. Here they are, in no particular order.
My early favorites are “What Light” (mostly for the crystalline, Band-like sound of it) and “Rafters and Beams” (because I’m a sucker for ballads). Also, some people seem to be labeling it “Rafters and Dreams,” but I like “Beams” better so I’m gonna stick with that, until someone learns me good.
Thanks to netZoo and rbally and probably some other blogs. (Now that this has been picked up by Pitchfork & all, I s’ppose I should thank the original tapers/posters once again, apologize for the sexytime bandwidth explosion, give big ups to Wilco for their taping policy, and remind everybody that the complete shows are available by following the previous links.)
Episode 09: Summer Salt! A late summer mix burned for friends (with some modifications).
1. “Carl and Passions Radio Promo” – The Beach Boys (from Endless Bummer: The Very Worst of the Beach Boys)
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “Toc” – Tom Ze (from Estudando o Samba)
4. “Fille ou Garcon (Sloop John B)” – Stone (from Femmes de Paris, v. 1)
5. “Bat Macumba” – Gilberto Gil (from Panis et Circences)
6. “Dreaming” – Sun Ra (from The Singles)
7. “Think Small” – Tall Dwarfs (from Fork Songs)
8. “All Things Must Pass” – George Harrison (from All Things Must Pass)
9. “Singing to the Sunshine” – Cardinal (from Cardinal)
10. “It’s Up To You” – The Shop Assistants (from Shopping Parade EP)
11. “In Another Land” – The Rolling Stones (from Her Satanic Majesties Request)
12. “Some Clouds Don’t” – Fred Frith (from Cheap at Half the Price)
13. “Mr. Tough” – Yo La Tengo (from I am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass)
14. “Magnolia” – Apollo Sunshine (from Apollo Sunshine)
15. “Panis et Circences (reprise)” – Os Mutantes (from Technicolor)
16. “Those To Come” – The Shins (from Chutes Too Narrow)
I spent part of my Saturday afternoon reading on my couch and part of my Saturday afternoon playing video games with the neighbors. The latter felt healthier. Part of this had to do with the fact that they just acquired a Nintendo Wii. We strapped on the little controller boxes and played. It was social and, if not exactly exercise, then not exactly anything else, either. And I certainly wasn’t alone in my own head anymore.
The baseball game was primitive. There is only batting and pitching. No fielding, no baserunning. In the bottom of the third, the last inning in this stripped-down rendition of the rules, with the score tied at zero, my friend hit a long fly out to left field with a man on third and one out. There was no option to tag, so no run scored. The game stayed tied, and there were no extra innings.
But the experience was pretty remarkable, especially bowling — which, when done in a group of four, strangely mimicked the group act of actually bowling. Even the gestures, mostly involving lining up shots and putting spin on the ball, felt real. I thought often of my college bowling coach.
Naturally, when playing these games, we all assumed the natural postures of what we would do when playing meatspace sports. In baseball, we held the controller like a bat. In golf, like a club. But we don’t have to. One can trick the game into thinking he’s made a full swing with just the slightest twitch of the wrist. But it is a precise twitch, subtler than the intricate hand-eye coordination required for traditional video games.
Until Nintendo releases boxes that attach to the ankle, to mimic the motion of running (or Dance Dance Revolution), the Wii probably won’t slim down the post-cherubic youth of America. But it could do something else. The first generation of home video games refined the use of the thumb: those of the rotary era still dial phones with the pointer fingers while members of the Nintendo generation are more likely to use their thumbs. Who knows what the Wii will really do?
o Should you have a mouse problem, I highly recommend Havahart’s mouse trap. My roommate set it up today. By the time I got home, Sparky (at least, I think it was Sparky) was waiting for me. I tried to release him into the vacant lot, but he skittered off in the direction of the cake factory. Hopefully, he’s in heaven right now, consuming mountain-sized puffs of cinnamon-flavored goo. Safe travels, Sparky!
o Two years old, but news to me: Gabriel Garcia Marquez is writing the script for the film adaptation of Love in the Time of Cholera. Actually, I guess, he wrote the script, since the film is allegedly in production.
o Striking a bit too close to home is The Burg, a YouTube-era sitcom. (Thx, RG.)
o Lists of essential movies and whatnot are somewhat silly, though I appreciate the authoritative, core curriculum-like functionality of Jim Emerson’s 102 Films You Must See Before…. At any rate, it’s been kind of a fun project to check stuff off lately.
The summer before eighth grade, in 1992, I read John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley as an assignment for fall English. If I’m remembering correctly, that same English teacher — fresh out of college and new to the school that year — passed out an untitled/uncredited novel chapter on the first day of class. After a few days, maybe, he explained it was from a book called On the Road. Later, he assigned us Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. It is probably not a coincidence that, the same autumn, I discovered hippie music.
But when I read Travels With Charley, I was bored by all Steinbeck’s sightseeing (at least, that’s what I remember the novel being about). What completely enchanted me was the preparation for the journey.
Equipping Rocinante was a long and pleasant process. I took far too many things, but I didn’t know what I would find. Tools for emergency, tow lines, a small block and tackle, a trenching tool and crowbar, tools for making and fixing and improvising. Then there were emergency foods. I would be late in the northwest and caught by snow. I prepared for at least a week of emergency. Water was easy; Rocinante carried a thirty-gallon tank.
I thought I might do some writing along the way, perhaps essays, surely notes, certainly letters. I took paper, carbon, typewriter, pencils, notebooks, and not only those but dictionaries, a compact encyclopedia, and a dozen other reference books, heavy ones. I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless.
I suppose I was in preparation myself, which is perhaps what appealed to me about it. It was a good summer, though, reading-wise. I also acquired my first Bloom County collection, Penguin Dreams and Stranger Tales, and, on a trip to visit family friends in Maine, a copy of Hunter S. Thompson‘s Great Shark Hunt.
POSTSCRIPT: After posting last night, I got into bed & finished off Jonathan Ames’ What’s Not To Love?. In the epilogue, Ames spends a paragraph talking about what he’s bringing with him to Europe, concluding, “well, enough of that, but packing isn’t talked about sufficiently in travel writing.” Pleasant convergence.
Only in print:
o December/January Relix (Les Claypool cover): album reviews of the Apples in Stereo, Norfolk & Western, and Phish.
o Paste #27 (Christopher Guest cover): profile of Nicholas Hytner
“If You Rescue Me” – the cast of Science of Sleep (download here)
from Science of Sleep OST (2006)
released by Astralwerks (buy)
(file expires January 22nd)
Hearing “If You Rescue Me” in the middle of Michel Gondry’s Science of Sleep threw me for a loop. Like trying desperately to recall a dream, appropriately enough, I knew the melody that Gael Garcia Bernal and the cast were singing, but couldn’t place it until the performance was almost over: the Velvet Underground’s “After Hours” (one of the loveliest of the all-time lovelies).
I have no idea where the new lyrics came from, but I love the mood they create, of being lost in a grotesque adult world: “all the cars drive so fast, and the people are mean, and sometimes it’s hard to find food.” Like Cat Power’s approach on her Covers Record, the rewrite is something like a literal interpretation: a verbal articulation of the song’s emotional content that somehow happens to also fit the constraints of the original melody. Pleasant coincidence, eh?
“Minute By Minute” – Girl Talk (download here)
from NIght Ripper (2006)
released by Illegal Art (buy)
“Naomi” – Neutral Milk Hoel (remix by Joe Beats) (download here)
from the Joe Beats Experiment Presents Indie Rock Blues (2005)
released by Arbeid
(files expire December 4th)
I’m certainly fascinated by the increasingly frequent crossings of hip-hop and indie rock, and what each brings out in each other. Neutral Milk Hotel even turns up in a few places, including Joe Beats’ complete remix of On Avery Island‘s “Naomi,” and a sampled “2-1-2-3-4” count-off from “Holland, 1945,” dropped in the middle of Girl Talk’s “Minute By Minute” (from the super-fun super-mash-up Night Ripper).
It’s nice that indie rock has been effectively pulled into the conversation, but it does make me wonder about the value of all these mash-ups. Girl Talk is a blast, an endless parade of pleasing hooks, but I’m still not sure how far it extends past novelty. Can a mash-up ever get to the point where I need to hear it, like I need to hear, say, “Two-Headed Boy”?
Though I react more instinctively to Girl Talk, I think I like Joe Beats’ approach a little better. His version of “Naomi” sounds like a complete song, the new beat somehow natural. It is something I could get into, beyond the initial shock of the new context. I’m not sure where the conversation is headed, but it’s most entertaining.
(Don’t even know if this is possible. If you or someone you know can possibly code this, do drop a comment below.)
Idea for art: an mp3 that changes itself with each copy. That is: a computer-generated piece of music that contains a mechanism/algorithm to alter its contents whenever somebody drags it somewhere. No two listeners would end up with the same song..
“Wizard’s Sleeve” – Yo La Tengo (download here)
from Shortbus OST (2006)
released by Team Love (buy)
(file expires November 28th)
The second post-Beat Your Ass b-side is from the soundtrack to John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, and is really quite groovy: two minutes of sweetly wordless space age exotica that sound like they could’ve been crate-dug on some Numero release, possibly French. There are faint strings, but mostly just atmosphere and a nearby ocean (and likely a view from a stucco balcony).
Haven’t seen the movie yet, so maybe there’s some context there, but the title seems a conceptual sequel to the ironic anti-shock of Beat Your Ass and its contents. Or perhaps they’re just incidentally meme surfing: I think Borat uses the phrase to describe his wife.
“Alice’s Restaurant” – Arlo Guthrie (download here)
from Alice’s Restaurant (1967)
released by Warner Reprise Records (buy)
(file expires November 27th)
On one hand, the film adaptation of Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant,” directed by Arthur Penn, can be written off as a period piece. Starring a ridiculously young-looking 22-year old Arlo, there are confrontations between rednecks and longhairs, a dude playing Woody Guthrie in his deepest sickness, and a gaggle of super-stereotyped hippies.
On the other hand, though, it also shows remarkable foresight. Released in 1969, the same week as Woodstock, it is also brutal. There are overdoses, spotty runaway groupies, and domestic abusers. There is, in short, a complete collapse of the ’60s idealism that wouldn’t crumble on itself — at least in the fashionable terms of mainstream perception — for quite some time.
The story of the Alice’s Restaurant Thanksgiving Day Masacree — presumably what earned Guthrie the right to make a movie of it — takes up only a small chunk near the end. It’s great, for sure — it’s even got the real officer Obie as himself! — but it’s also quite striking how the song and the film hit totally different tones.
Anyway, it’s Thanksgiving week, and I figured people’d be searching for Alice. Here, once again, is the shitty-ass mp3 I downloaded in college. Enjoy.
The fifth inanongoingcollection of functional webpages and dork tools (excluding any/all Google programs).
o Lulu.com — Print books, hardcover or softcover, color or otherwise, with no minimum order. Quick turnaround, too. (Thx, MVB.)
o Zaba.com — People search. Remember when there was just, like, a phonebook? (Kaw!)
o DownThemAll — Download all the links on a page with this Firefox extension.
o ZipCar — The other night, I watched a friend arrange a ZipCar so he could pick up his cousin at the airport. Bloody amazing.
o Hype Machine — Besides aggregating the latest leaks, the search function is also an easy way to keep up with b-sides, radio sessions, and the like. If only it didn’t buffer so often.
The broken machine’s canister was deployed, Looper noticed. He followed the source of the sound. Kneeling, he saw a canvas belt that had stopped. A loose spring had sprung, and caught in its motion. A heavy rubber stopped caused the spring to vibrate against the cogs with a precise, metallic rattle. Looper glanced at an adjacent machine. There, the canvas belt moved slowly.
Looper pushed the rubber stopper back into place, freeing the gears. The belt began to turn again. Within seconds, the whole room evened into silent harmony. Stepping back, Looper noticed a pattern on the floor that reminded him of the tile fountain in the plaza near the factory. He left the flashlight in the secretary’s window and walked home. The snow fell through the buildings’ massive spotlights, which shot upwards and illuminated the top floors.
At home, he sat still. Soon, he found himself drifting in the perfect quiet he had long known. There, the apartment was all at once. It could bend in the dark, yes, but only in ways Looper knew: his wife drinking tea in the corner, the warmth he knew would await him when he returned from his cousins’. It could be any of these, at any time, and Looper listened. Around the city, the offness had lifted, Looper knew. It was gone. [END]
Looper lost count of the floors. They bore no correlation to the windows. He reached the top of the stairs. There, he found a space that opened across the span of the entire building. The streetlamp outside cast a familiar, buttery glow on the rows of machines. Looper turned off the flashlight.
Strolling cautiously down the aisle, he felt their humming. Their arrangement was methodical, if irregular. Looper felt as if he were in a garden. Each machine, he saw, had a glass tube emerging from it. The tubes shot straight out, before turning 90 degrees, and disappearing into the floor. Each tube had a copper canister at its bottom.
Near the room’s center, there was a plain metal desk. Next to the desk, there was a large open area. And, next to the open area, there was a machine that did not hum as the others did. Looper approached it. The machine cried quietly, wounded. Looper could hear a whirr coming from its back.
The factory was again unlocked. The lights were off, but the entry was no less inviting. Looper could not see the olive green walls in the dark, but he could feel them. A large black flashlight sat in the secretary’s window, like fresh linens for a houseguest.
The upper floors were like catacombs, Looper found. They did not conform to the blueprints Mr. Brown had shown him. On the fourth, Looper branched off from the main hallway. He passed through a series of telescoping rooms, one after another. The beam was strong. In some, there were cabinets. In others, there were shelves. Jars of screws and electrical parts filled them.
On another floor, Looper saw the machines Mr. Brown had described. They were under canvas, mostly. He imagined stuffed animals, dead fur matted, concealed beneath them. He let the light linger on one machine, tracing its shape. He could not get a sense of its whole. Looper sniffed at the air for dust.
Christmas fell on a Tuesday that year, so the city closed its offices the Friday previous. As usual, Looper would go to his cousins’ home east of the city for dinner. He did not see them often. This year, he looked forward to the three-hour train ride more than he had since his wife died.
The final straw came on Saturday night, however. Looper had called the cousins to remind him he was coming. He opened the window to admit cold air into the room to mingle with the radiator’s pleasant humidity. Instead, the offness filled his apartment, and he felt as if at the bottom of the ocean.
Looper had the sense to bundle up before he walked onto the street. He did not rush. It was late. The city was silent. He needed to surface. Looper again walked west on 79th Avenue. Soon, he would reach the plaza. And, on the other side of the plaza, he would emerge into the normal. It was only when he got there that he remembered how close he was to the factory.
It got worse. Looper remembered reading a story in the newspaper about how sunspots caused interference on people’s telephones and televisions. He wondered if the sun had caused this, too. He sat for hours in the warm living room. The furniture moved silently, like tectonic plates, and shifted back. Looper wondered if he was running a fever.
As the holidays approached, Looper thought again about the factory he had visited some weeks earlier. It was the milk that did it. The milk that now always tasted wrong. He had smelled it, at the factory, he knew. It was in the air, trace elements were.
It was not hard to get the secretary to print out the file for the building. Bowman Manufacturing, it was. The documents were unclear about the factory’s purpose. In fact, the file contained little more than Looper’s notes. He tucked the folder in his briefcase. It was the last day before the vacation, and he was glad. Even in the offness, it was still his room.
(Short fiction, shorter increments.) Looper in the Dark: no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11, no. 12
It was in the next week that other people began to recognize the offness, too. Walking to work in the snow, Looper saw a boy, perhaps about 9. The boy was blonde, and he studied the row of Christmas trees on the sidewalk as the snow fell around him. Looper could see why instantly.
The trees were not in a straight line, absolutely, but the wind blew through them wrong, as well. In some places, the branches sagged, as if in a breeze. In others, they threatened to snap. Looper could not tell if it was the fault of the wind or the trees. He and the boy acknowledged each other, and Looper continued on to work.
The man at the newsstand complained of too much ink on his fingers. At the bank, Looper overheard tellers speaking in hushed voices about the ledgers being several dozen cents incorrect. In the dark, Looper drank his off-flavored milk and wondered when society began to expect it to taste the same every time.
Mr. Brown led Looper off the floor. They entered another hallway. Looper felt a change in the air. He smelled something, too. He could practically taste it on his tongue. The sound of the machines quieted as they walked deeper into the building. The odor increased, though. Looper could feel a layer of saliva on his tongue.
“The vents from upstairs,” Mr. Brown noted. “Some people seem to like it. I do not mind it myself.”
“What is it?” Looper asked. He had tasted it before, somewhere. Perhaps inside a chocolate, once.
“Byproducts, mostly,” Mr. Brown replied, fixing his tie. “Byproducts,” he said again. Looper inspected the remainder of the building.
Twice, he got lost in passages of endless doors. Both times, he was unhappy to recover his bearings.
In the warehouse’s halls, Looper felt as if he were on an exotic vacation. “We’re mostly a factory now,” Mr. Brown, the manager, explained to him as they walked. They passed door after door. The snowy street seemed miles away. The collar of Mr. Brown’s red shirt jutted at an unusual angle, Looper thought. It was most pleasing.
“The upper floors are for specialty machines,” Mr. Brown pointed out, showing Looper the building map. “None gets used more than once or twice a month. There are rarely more than a half-dozen men up there at a time.” Looper nodded. The tone of Mr. Brown’s desk was one he could not name, like a shade from an early color photograph.
On the factory floor, high windows transformed the thin winter sun into something magnificent. Earphones muffled Looper’s ears. Mr. Brown pointed out the fire exits, professionally silent in the din. It occurred to Looper that he did not know the factory’s purpose. One machine was at least two stories tall. Two men tended to dials and counters at its base.
In fact, the warehouse looked especially normal. It was a perfect cube. The walls were a soft, white cinderblock. They met the sidewalk evenly, giving the entire block symmetry. The windows began on the third of the five stories. Looper could not find a doorbell. For a moment, he stood confused. He tried the knob. It was a silver sphere. Clean, very clean, and quite unlocked. There was no lock on the door at all, in fact.
Looper stepped into entry. It was empty. The ceiling was low, Looper observed. Lower than he would expect. The room was an olive green, the light warm. He felt welcome, which is not what he usually felt when it came to inspecting warehouses. A sliding window opened into an office, also empty.
The chair Looper sat in while he waited was of bright white leather, also welcoming. The arms were wooden, cut at sharp 90-degree angles. Looper relaxed into the room’s plainness. It washed over him like a sea breeze. When the secretary called at him from the window, he was not upset. He stood, still in reverie.
It was perhaps on account of the offness that Looper was even there, in the other neighborhood. That is what he called it: the offness. Looper considered this as he walked west on 79th Avenue. To be fair, he had not yet called it that to anyone. He merely thought it. Nobody else seemed to do even that.
Like the new secretary. She reminded him of wool, dense wool. She was the one who sent him to the neighborhood. The printed dispatcher sheet was in his coat pocket. Its folds were uneven, of course, despite his best efforts. The destination was far afield, a distance from his office’s assigned territory. “That’s what the computer says,” the secretary shrugged, chewing her gum.
The wind was biting. Looper counted Salvation Army Santas. He looked for a pattern in their distribution. At least his scarf still worked as it should. He crossed a plaza. He remembered a farmer’s market he’d once been to there. On its far side, everything was normal again.
In the morning, everything remained flawed. The alarm rang at 6, as usual. It seemed too dark, however. Looper’s coffee was too strong. His toast was too burnt. Even his bootlaces were too short. Walking to the dispatcher’s office, all the world seemed askew. The newspaper headlines were off-center. The traffic signals hesitated before changing.
The time clock punched Looper’s card with an abnormally resounding thud. It echoed through the office. Looper looked around, though neither of the secretaries looked up from her desk. All day, Looper trudged about the neighborhood in the dirtying snow. None of the buildings failed his inspection, though each was wrong, as if it might remove a mask as soon as he was out of sight.
In the dark, later, he held the milk in his mouth. He could taste something else in it, as well. Besides milk. He swallowed it slowly. In his chair, he tried to feel the room around him. He did not want to feel the room. He just wanted to sit. Why should that be difficult?
Looper was in the dark. He was sitting, that was all. Outside, it snowed. The apartment sang in response. Steam rushed through the pipes, crying and hissing. Looper listened, though not that closely. He was happy to sit. From his green easy chair, he could see the heavy flakes falling. They were gray and muted through the glass.
The streetlamp was dim. Looper rose to see if the snow was accumulating on the cars and the fire escape. That was when he bumped into the corner of the table. He felt his thigh bruise. That should not be, he thought crossly. The table had not moved for decades. The snow was blanketing the street, unbroken by tire tracks or footprints. It was late. Nobody should be out anyway.
Before he went to bed, Looper drank a glass of milk. It was not cold enough. He’d been drinking milk from this refrigerator for some 33 years, since he first moved to the city. The dials indicated that there was nothing wrong, yet that was incorrect. Oddly temperatured milk and furniture not where it should be. Looper did not like it. The snow kept falling.
It’s always fun to go through old issues of Wired from early in the first cyberboom. On the hyper-colorful mess of an index for the May 1995 issue, they refer to cover subject Brian Eno as “a prototypical Renaissance 2.0 artist” — funny to see the 2.0 meme/self-image already in play, even then.
I was in high school at the time, so I didn’t really grasp most of the hilarious hippie optimism of the whole affair (nor all the details). Still, I quite uncynically read interviews with a lot of heady hitters. I didn’t consciously hear Eno’s music for another few years, but this quote stuck with me right away.
Try it with a British accent. It sounds more thoughtful.
So, what happened with recording is that suddenly you could hear exactly the same piece of music a thousand times, anywhere you chose to listen to it. And this of course gave rise to a while lot of new possibilities within music. I think the growth of jazz, especially improvised jazz, was entirely due to recordings, because you can make sense of something on several hearings — even things that sounds extremely weird and random on first hearing. I did an experiment myself last year in which I recorded a short piece of traffic noise on a street. It’s about three and a half minutes long, and I just kept listening to it to see if I could come to hear it as a piece of music. So, after listening to this recording many times, I’d say, Oh yes, there’s that car to the right, and there’s that door slamming to the left, and I would hear that person whistling, and there’s that baby coming by in the pram. After several weeks, I found I loved it like a piece of music.
Only in print:
o November Relix (Tenacious D cover): album reviews of Bob Dylan, Tortoise, Joanna Newsom, Four Tet; book review of 33 1/3 Greatest Hits
o Paste #26 (Beck cover): movie review of Fast Food Nation, DVD review of Jeff Tweedy
“In a Different Light” – The Bangles (download here)
from Different Light (1986)
released by Columbia Records (download here)
(file expires November 2nd)
My first exposure to the Bangles came through the radio show Kids America that my mother and I listened to, and where — being a kid-friendly novelty — “Walk Like An Egyptian” was a ceaseless hit. Not long after that, we bought a tape of the album. The songs disappeared into my memory until this summer, when my friend Paul convinced me to grab them from his iPod. The title track, whose chorus was one of the few bits of the album I remembered (along with Prince’s “Manic Monday” and “Walk Like An Egyptian”), remains awesome. Give or take a little bit of the production sheen, it doesn’t even sound too dated.
I can imagine walking into a bar on the Lower East Side and hearing some sub-Strokes band covering this. It’s garage-pop of the first order: pounding wah guitar intro, a chorus/hook that drops immediately, and — eventually — lyrics that run just deep enough to be meaningful as lyrics, but don’t strive to be anything deeper. The first verse, to me, is just plain effective: “I wanna make a movie / I wanna put you on the silver screen / Sit in a darkened room / and study you from a distance.” There’s no attempt at a backstory, it’s just an observation — an unrhyming one, too, which makes it even kinda elegant. (Funny that the other two verses do rhyme, but it’s really the first one that sets the tone.)
All the lyrics are about making some kind of art to explain the subject — a movie, a novel, a painting — but, in the end, it’s just a song, and not even one that really explains anything. It only gets at the feeling of wanting to explain — which is not only a more modest goal, but a more evocative one, and certainly more mysterious. Not everybody needs to be John Darnielle, y’know?, and “Bob” bless ’em for all that.
“California” – Dr. Dog (download here)
from Takers and Leavers EP (2006)
released by PTV Records (buy)
(file expires November 1st)
Been taking a leisurely slog through Writing Los Angeles, an anthology of great writing about the place. Here, in an essay titled “Paradise, ” Double Indemnity writer James M. Cain writes about what he thinks of as the shallowness of L.A.:
But what electric importance can be felt in a peddler of orange peelers? Or of a dozen ripe avocados, just plucked that morning? Or a confector of Bar-B-Q? Or the proprietor of a goldfish farm? Or a breeder of rabbit fryers? They give me no kick at all. They give themselves no kick. The whole place is overrun with nutty religions which are merely the effort of these people to inject some sort of point into their lives; if not on earth, then in the stars, in numbers, in vibrations, or whatever their fancy hits on.
Thing is, all those things do have kick: what a weird, mystical place southern California must have been in 1933, between the wars. Dr. Dog evokes it perfectly on this Western Swing-on-a-soundstage number from their Takers and Leavers EP.
o Former Mets’ manager Bobby Valentine sells meat in Japan: for a relaxing time, make it Bobby-Burger time. (Alright, MetsBlog, and thanks for the great year.)
o A really creepy bootleg mix I acquired over the weekend, called Endless Bummer: The Very Worst of the Beach Boys, features in-studio arguments, terrible ads, drunken live cuts, Brian rapping, and the Spanish version of “Kokomo.” Perhaps I will post a track sometime. (Big ups, Pete.)
These are some books I have written. For reasons of price and/or age level, I can’t necessarily recommend the purchase of any of them (unless you happen to be between sixth and 12th grades, in which case the Princeton Review book will likely prove quite handy, or a percussion ensemble with a lot of disposable academic money, in which case Running at the Sunshine might serve you well).
The Mets will change in the off-season, as teams do. Some are now free agents, others — perhaps — trade bait. The lineup will morph, and they’ll start again in Florida, in the agreeable weather and miles of green.
On the way home from Shea, I pulled my comfort ripcord and listened to In Utero quite loudly while reading the new 33 1/3 book about the same. Escaping back into the music that I loved in ninth grade when I turned away from sports to begin with, the phrase that kept rolling around in my mind was “aqua seafoam shame,” which is what I thought Kurt Cobain was singing somewhere in “All Apologies” (and still kinda do; the actual lyric is rather mundane).
I’m not sure why it’s appropriate, really, or even if it’s how I’m actually feeling right now, but it’ll do. Next season in Jerusalem, as I believe the saying goes.
Of all the major professional sports, baseball is easily the one with the most physical inactivity. That is, with the exception of the pitcher and catcher, most of the players are still far more than they are in motion. In that, it is also the professional sport best suited for lingering close-ups on players’ eyes. Resultantly, though perhaps I am saying this as one who never developed a taste for any other sport, it also seems the game with the greatest potential for articulated drama. It is not a coincidence, I don’t think, that the majors are known as The Show.
In terms of creating a genuine, truthful response from as large an audience as possible, mannered dialogue brimming with double-entendres and clever plot devices is always going to be working at a handicap compared to the evenly distributed nine innings of a playoff game. Storylines are ending, developing, and beginning, though not even the characters know which ones. Only the unwritten ending can contextualize the true meaning of the two-out rallies that begin on botched catches (as the Mets pulled in the 7th tonight), or advances that are temporarily halted (like a massive Carlos Beltran throw to the plate that prevented Juan Encarnacion from tagging) (though So Taguchi drove him in, quite futilely, on the next at-bat, anyway). Nobody knows the meaning, especially not going into game 7, but we’ve all got our suspicions.
For fans, October is an exciting time of year, for the majority of ballplayers — which is to say, all those who didn’t make the playoffs — it must be disconcerting. The sportswire is filled with the dispensing of managers, the scouting of coaches to fill their positions. For players — nomads, mostly, during the summer months — it is about moving. No matter what the Mets’ fate might be over the next few days, and no matter how he pitches tomorrow night, John Maine will soon be vacating the room in the Ramada Inn off the Grand Central Parkway where he’s been living, headed for that black hole known as the off-season.
Watching these games, sometimes, all the fancy fonts and and modern uniforms and tailored facial hair fall from view, and the face in the batter’s box could be peering from a daguerreotype in a Ken Burns documentary or a sun-bleached ’70s Topps card, all gauzy technicolor. The face becomes, for a moment, somehow classic. Tonight, that face belonged to the Cardinals’ runt of a leadoff hitter, David Eckstein, who nabbed a few near-hits during the Mets’ first at bat, and later took a pitch hard on his fingertips. He seemed like a ghost already, someone I’ll forget after the post-season. In my memory, his features will join my blurry gallery of ballplayers, an index like a massive WPA mural.
“I’d Love Just Once To See You” – The Beach Boys (download here)
from Wild Honey (1968)
released by Capitol Records (buy)
(file expires October 24th)
Post-Smile Beach Boys tends to get a bad rap, and maybe rightly so, but some of it is quite excellent — Wild Honey, especially. It doesn’t really fit the popular Smile narrative that Brian should still be making great, current music after the collapse of his concept album, but Wild Honey is a completely Beach Boys take on the back-to-the-roots thing that Dylan, the Beatles, the Stones, and everybody else was doing after a few years of psychedelic blow-outs (see: John Wesley Harding, the White Album, Beggars’ Banquet, etc.).
The lyrics are the stuff of everyday (“I washed the dishes, and I rinsed up the sink, like a busy bee”), but are positively liberated by BB standards. “I wouldn’t mind if I could get with you right away,” Brian sings. (That’s not say they’re entirely liberated. “When’s the last time you baked me a pie?” Brian also asks.) The composition is laced with the same tricks to be found all about Pet Sounds and Smile, here applied to something modest and adult, instead of high school melodrama or teenage symphonies to God. The arpeggiated 12-string figure behind the bridge melody wouldn’t be out of place on “Cabinessence,” and — of course — there’s some lovely harmonized bah-bah-bahing.
But really, the song is all about the punchline at the end: “I’d love just once to see you, I’d love just once to see you, I’d love just once to see you…” — pause– “…in the nude.” Hot. (Kinda is, right?)
Not long after that season ended, I got a copy of the Mets’ highlight video, 1986: A Year to Remember, at a literal fire sale over on Jericho Turnpike: the place had burned, and the tape smelled like badly crisped bacon for a few years. As a nine year old, I watched it religiously, learning consciously for the first time about drama. There was an ominous narrator, atmospheric music, non-linear editing techniques, excited radio announcers, and some killer montages (one featuring “Karn Evil 9” by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, though I wouldn’t learn that for another decade). I saw how music could build tension and how authoritative foreshadowing could build it even further. I learned about fate, or at least its implications.
For me, it is right impossible to watch this post-season unfold and not hear A Year to Remember‘s narrator framing it. I want him to. I want him to say things like “in game 5, they put the ball in the capable hands of Tom Glavine,” as he described a winning Bob Ojeda appearance against the Red Sox. I want to see surprisingly tasteful bits of nostalgia — say, Reyes sliding in slow motion into second, coming up grinning — like the condensed version of the Series set to Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Remember You” (which, like the ELP cut, I didn’t realize was Dylan until much later).
Of course, the video’s weight comes entirely because the Mets made it, and won the World Series. Watching the Mets go down two games over the weekend, Saturday night in a singularly spectacular meltdown by seemingly everybody, the fate of the team was thrown into question for the first time since the post-season began. If the Mets lose now, and they might, does that invalidate everything that has happened already? Does the entire theoretical highlights video crumble? As the games progress, I hear him crunching them into soundbytes. I just wish I could feed him lines.
Keeping score is a Braille record of the game, feeling the innings and statistics stretch, one by one. It is something to hold onto, something deeper than the drunken mayhem of the far reaches of the upper deck. Out there — even deeper than last time, now behind the stadium’s speakers — Ivan Neville’s rendition of the national anthem is almost literally avant-garde. Whole notes form ill-fitting harmonies with those on either of side of them in the melody.
Even the echo of the bat is gone, as is the announcer. The scoreboard is an unreadable sliver. In the eighth, we figure out that Manny Mota is pitching because the name on the back of the jersey is short and the number is somewhere in the 50s. On my lap, the scorecard is a languid other-world, far from the chants (“En-dy C,” “En-dy Cha-vez” and just “En-dy” all compete after a Ron Swaboda-like miracle catch) and the chill (which will surely be worse at future games).
The innings occasionally widen, only once filled with the black wedges that represent runs (Carlos Beltran’s two-run shot in the sixth), and sometimes aberrations (Beltran’s 8-3 double-play from centerfield to first base) (booya!), but mostly they roll by like a river and keep pulse: the heartbeat of a season extended nine more innings.
o The PhantasyTour message boards, where the Phish parking lot lives on, are many things. Rarely, however, are they as brilliant as the thread that began several weeks ago with the subject “moe. = missionary position sex…” and went from there. (Random sampling: “Brothers Past = boning an emo chick just to see what it’s like. Turns out, not that bad.”)
o An unusually well-written baseball profile by John Koblin in the New York Observer, about Mets’ starter John Maine. (Thanks, MetsBlog.)
o These lists make the rounds every few years, but here is an updated page of how much it costs to book bands at colleges via the Man. (James Brown: $100,000; Huey Lewis, $150,000. Hmm. (Go Josh!)
o Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan listed his faves for both Pitchfork and eMusic recently.
o A great piece from the New York Review of Books reviewing a bunch of books about Google, the Long Tail, and such. (Word, Joey.)
Since the last update from wunderkammern27.com’s Ordovician Archives, Dr. Tuttledge has traveled to Nigeria. Though he has remained in constant contact regarding his collection of oral histories related to the narratives transmitted by what he deemed “Urgent Message” artifacts (classified as “419 scams” by other scholars), Dr. Tuttledge has been unable to maintain his own observational work. The Center for Anthropological Computing — whose ever-expanding collections continue to be stored in Manhattan — has received applications for our still-open intern position, though none have yet met Dr. Tuttledge’s exacting standards.
In the meantime, we would like to present one new discovery that has earned a spot in the Archives. It is a classic type 1 goods-for-sale message, but it mimics the form of a MySpace notification. It is a strategy that employs the message type’s perfect ubiquity to cloak it against both humans and electronic filters. All of us here at the CAC are duly impressed and doff our hats. (The accompanying gibberish is pretty interesting, as well.)
Subject: New message from Ruth on MySpace sent on Oct 07 02:20:00 -4 2006
You’ve got a new song from Ruth on MySpace!
Click here to hear your MySpace music:
http://myspace.mp3piat.com/?reloc.cfm=6&id=78730
Click here to get 5-free songs downloaded to Your Space:
http://myspace.mp3piat.com/?reloc.cfm=6&id=7873096909_5free
————————-
At MySpace we care about your privacy. We have sent you this notification to facilitate your use as a member of the MySpace service. If you don’t want to receive emails like this to your external email account in the future, change your Account Settings to “Do not send me notification emails”
Click here to change your Account Settings:
http://myspace.mp3piat.com/?account.settings=update=6&id=78730
MySpace Inc. – 1900 Wilshire Blvd. 2109, Los Angeles, CA 90403-5400 USA
5. EXPORT RESTRICTIONS. Licensee agrees not to export or re-export the Licensed Materials to any country, person, entity or end user subject to U.S.A. export restrictions. Licensee warrants and represents that neither the U.S.A. Bureau of Export Administration nor any other federal agency has suspended, revoked or denied Licensee’s export privileges. By installing the Software, Licensee agrees to the foregoing and Licensee is representing and warranting that they are not located in, under the control of, or a national or resident of any such country.
1. Game overview
RESPONSIBILITIES FOR SELECTION OF
– What makes it different from other systems?
the wrapper-script named ‘curl’ that is a front-end to curl in this case.
– Debian bug report 338681 by Jan Kunder: make curl better detect and report
Added support for a second FTP server in the test suite. Named… ftp2.
Assess CMP compliance
compliance with the terms hereof, permits you to Use
– Nodak Sodak reported a crash when using a SOCKS4 proxy.
Daniel (14 March 2005)
Nationals or the U.S. Commerce Department‚s Table of Deny
___________________
with any of your obligation or conditions of this Agreement.
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To create a “No Networking” hardware profile,
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END-USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
10. If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into other free
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Over the weekend, I spent some time recording, and finally started a MySpace page for Funny Cry Happy. Included are the two demos I just made, “No Wonder” and “Textual Healing,” and a few songs from On A Clear Night, You Can Smell For Miles. I’ll post more as they’re ready.
Watching the Mets celebrate after their three-game sweep of the Dodgers on Saturday night, I again had the thought that I probably wouldn’t enjoy actually hanging out with any of them at a bar. They’re jocks after all, probably the same breed that did their best to make my life miserable in high school. What could we possibly have to talk about? But I still like them. It makes me happy to see Jose Reyes in the dugout, smiling and bobbing his head around. All of my assumptions about Reyes, though, come from trying to read into his minute variations on a very strict set of behaviors as a fielder, batter, and runner. Everything I think is probably grossly inaccurate, but that’s kind of the fun of it.
In watching baseball, I pay attention to people that I often cannot relate to in any way: physically, emotionally, financially, culturally. That’s kind of weird to me, I think. In theory, what we have in common is an interest in the sport, but I’m not sure how far that would go conversationally. Seeing the Taiwanese starter Hong-Chih Kuo — only one big league victory to his record — pitch against the Mets in game two, the dudes calling the game mentioned that if Kuo doesn’t succeed in the majors, he’ll be sent back to Taiwan, where he’ll be forced to enlist in the army. Clearly, baseball means something entirely different to Kuo than it does to me. In that sense, it’s a pretty abstract tongue, and one impossible to literally verbalize. It is irreducible, the language itself. It is spoken elegantly this time of year.
The drama of the upper deck is all misinformation. High above the foul poles, the sounds ricochet, like Branford Marsalis’s instrumental “Star Spangled Banner.” It echoes from the PA towers, all neutered soprano sax. “You suck!” someone shouts, but most people just stand, shifting their feet. Elsewhere, noises delay and cross, owing to the sheer size of the arena, like the polyphonic “Let’s go Mets!” chants that thunder at different tempos and from different starting points and collide like a Charles Ives orchestration. The chants, especially, are amazing: spur of the moment decisions by the collective, crunching names into a small library of flexible syllable patterns (“Car-los Bel-tran!” “M.V.P.!”). Sometimes, no consensus is reached, and the chants whither away like smoke (but not before more chaos).
Mostly, the game is far away and it is hard to see the ball. The mezzanine swallows the deep corner of right field itself. The crack of the bat is unreal, one sound in many. When the ball is hit in the air, it is like being thrust into an optical illusion, nearly impossible to tell if its movement is hard or soft, high up or just over the infielders’ heads, or even fair or foul. Adjusted to the dimensions, the ball still lands in totally unpredictable places, like David Wright’s bloop double into right in the seventh. A run scores, and the chanting starts all over again.
Pretty much the standard complaint against the World Series runs something like this: “It’s not really the World Series, is it? They’re just American teams, man.” Well, maybe, but the players are far from all American. Though I’m reasonably sure most major league franchises are as equally diverse, there still seems something particularly New Yawk about the Mets’ international patchwork.
They’ve got corn-fed submariners named Chad from Jackson, Mississippi and power-hitting scumbags named Paul, from Brooklyn. But they’ve also got players from the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Venezuela. And until the General Manager (also Dominican) traded him for sucking, even a dude from Japan named Kaz who bugged his eyes out at unpredictable moments. (And though he doesn’t technically count as part of the international contingent, I was also quite pleased when they acquired a good Jewish boy named Shawn in the post-All Star Break force-marshalling.)
Baseball is a game of statistics. They exist so one might reasonably compare one player to any other, to find out which one is the Best. The Major League happens to be the league of record. Should the proper business interests establish a franchise in, say, the Dominican Republic, it would likely just become the same melting pot as any other organization. If one’s got an interest in baseball, the United States is where he goes. It’s not globalization, y’understand, it’s baseball. What the hell do you expect? So, the World Series it is.
All of which is to say: LET’S GO METS.
“I’m Your Puppet” – Yo La Tengo (download here)
from Mr. Tough 7-inch (2006)
released by Matador
1. Here’s the newest obscura, a literal B-side from the “Mr. Tough” single: a cover of Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham’s “I’m Your Puppet.” Presumably a Beat Your Ass leftover, it’s got lovely strings (David Mansfield?), and is a welcome addition to the late-night playlist.
2. To reach the resources of the old YoLaTengo.net, one now has to use the Wayback Machine at archive.org to consult a mirror of the old YLT.net via the now-old version of sunsquashed.com. The URLs get pretty hilarious. It is here (no graphics, so just, like, wave your arrow over the links to find what yer looking for).
3. So, apparently, there was a BBC session, recently? I seemed to have missed this. Some curious covers on the setlist. Anybody end up with a copy?
4. YLT played in Jersey City on Friday.
Yo La Tengo at the Landmark Loew’s Jersey Theatre
29 September 2006
Why? opened
Sugarcube
Pass The Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind
Flying Lesson (Hot Chicken #1)
The Weakest Part
Sometimes I Don’t Get You
Winter A Go Go
Mr. Tough
Beanbag Chair
I Feel Like Going Home
Stockholm Syndrome
I Should Have Known Better
Watch Out For Me, Ronnie
Tom Courtenay
The Story of Yo La Tango
I Heard You Looking
*(encore 1)*
Oklahoma USA (The Kinks)
Lewis
Rocks Off (The Rolling Stones)
*(encore 2)*
Cast A Shadow (Beat Happening)
Did I Tell You?
“Soul Master” – Edwin Starr (download here)
released by Motown (1968)
(file expires October 6th)
In a perhaps misguided attempt to derive some truthiness (listening to lotsa shitty hippie bands’ll do that to a fella), I once posited that anybody who sings literally about having a soul (especially one that, uh, “shines”) simply doesn’t have one, at least for the duration of the time he’s singing about it. In the case of Edwin Starr’s “Soul Master,” which I found on the MoistWorks blog over the summer, I am perhaps willing to make an exception — partially because maybe it is as Starr claims, that he’s “the guy they named soul after.” And, well, partially because it’s such a ludicrous rhyme — “I’m the soul master / I’m the guy that they named soul after” — and it somehow works.
“Soul Master” is, no doubt, a silly song, but I love the shit outta the chorus, and love even more singing it to myself in the most honky voice I can muster (which, given my general demeanor, is quite a lot, dankyouvedymuch). It’s fun, especially in public, to take this chorus for my own: I’m the soul master. I’m the guy that they named soul after. Me! It’s a good feeling. Try it some sunny afternoon.
Without question, one of my favorite books as a kid was Crawford Kilian’s Wonders, Inc., about a boy’s trip to a massive, mysterious factory on the outskirts of town that manufactures (among other products) lines, space, proverbs, music, dreams, and more. John Larrecq’s psychedelic illustrations certainly didn’t hurt. Here, the dopey tour guide, Mr. Whipple, and the bright-eyed Christopher wander through the surrealist mechanics of the Clockworks:
They walked among the machines, Mr. Whipple pointing them out, “This one makes part-time; this one full-time; that one three-quarter time, time-and-a-half, and double-time. We also make Greenwich Mean Time, bedtime, pastime, nick-of-time, and a good variety of specialties.”
“Specialties?” Chris repeated.
“Oh, yes. We turn out a fine brand of split seconds, not to mention fleeting moments and carefully aged days. There’s a great demand for the good old days, you know.”
“Maybe among grownups,” Chris added, “but I prefer nowadays.”
“I thought you would. We make the best nowadays on the market.”
Though it’s super outta print, Amazon has many copies starting at $1.05. Wish there were some illustrations online.
On the final day, there were dragonflies. They swarmed down each street, above the dock, and across the visible horizon. Their wings beat at a low frequency, like the hum of distant transformers. The weather was perfect, the sky a painted blue. From the basement — a basement added by Abe Lewis — I removed a box of china, my mother’s, to mail her in Sarasota.
The last filings would have to be made, but I knew how to do that; knew whose office down which hallway in what building to address them. I would not return to school that semester, I knew. “In January, I think, I’ll be back,” I wrote my girlfriend, who I did not expect to wait for me, and who didn’t. Abe Lewis would find out what I had: that in times of natural disaster, the duties of a public official override those of a private individual. In pulling the house from the lake, Abe Lewis was acting as deputy mayor, not a contractor. His subsequent possession of the house was unlawful. I would not be the one to tell him.
I thought, briefly, of my shadow cousin, who’d lived there while we’d been away. His memories were present in me now, an adolescence spent carefree on the cool water. Misshapen, they roamed my brain like benevolent spirits; they grew like pungent weeds between weathered planks. It was an exchange, I knew. He would know long before his grandfather. I thought of what I might be taking from him, and what I might be giving to him, delivered on the sagging exoskeletons of dragonflies, terrible and broken. [/END]
By the second morning, I was no longer an interloper, and I got dead worm all over the kitchen. The rain was over, and — though autumn hung obviously in the air — it was going to be a warm day. I stepped outside barefoot, in my boxers, onto the narrow brick path that led to the lake. I stretched my arms behind me as I walked. The worm squished between my toes.
On the way back from retrieving my bags at the Becketts’, I had the thought that just because I could get dead worm all over my kitchen floor didn’t mean I should. Assuming the Lewises hadn’t done any major renovations in the interceding years, they were tiles my grandfather had laid himself. My memories didn’t extend to the tiles. He’d driven the truck from Portland alone to claim the empty land. There was no one else for miles. There wouldn’t be for a decade.
They were all over the sidewalk, the worms were, as I went to meet Melch. Neither of us had shaved. We hummed as we painted, though I was unsure if we were humming the same song. “It’s plenty peaceful now, sure,” Melch told me. He was doing detail around a window above and to the side of where I was working. I could see the mosquito bites above his ankle. “I like the spring is all,” he said, and started down the ladder, coughing. “You should come back in the spring, man.” I would, and I would build myself there by the lake, as my grandfather had.
I am not sure if a ghost is an animal, or if that was even what I saw, but I certainly smelled it. Besides the constant patter of the rain, the odor was the first thing I noticed upon awakening on the living room couch. It was a deep must, unclogging reserves of half-remembered dreams. In the daylight, the room was instantly familiar. I found the phone and dialed Melch, pretending to be hungover. Melch sounded worse than I did, and called off work for the day without argument. I felt guilty, but the rain continued unabated.
Though the smell — not unpleasant, like skunk-grass — was omnipresent, it seemed to emanate from a single source. I took a cursory look through the kitchen cabinets, but failed to find anything. I made a packet of dried soup in their microwave, and looked at the photomontages hung by the back door. Abe Lewis, the doting grandparent, was in several. His grandson, likely only a year or two younger than me, grew on the wall, my shadow cousin.
In the mid-afternoon, I brought the comforter upstairs and napped in the room I thought was mine. The bed was bare, as was the dresser. I pulled the blanket tightly around me, and swam. When I went downstairs later, my grandfather sat on the couch, reading. The smell was overpowering. Instinctively, I looked behind me. When I turned back, he was gone. I’d never known him, only the house he built and the enemies he made.
The large, fuzzy spider in the linen closet did not shake me nearly as much as the top sheets. The creature sat unmoving in the flashlight beam, atop a floral pillowcase that looked like it came from a discount chain. I blew on it lightly and it scampered an inch. By then, the rain had started, and it was much later and I was much drunker than I suspected. It did not sound as if the storm would abet.
I threw the blue down comforter over my shoulder and shined the light to see if there was anything else I needed. On the bottom shelf was the top sheet, white with a plane of red, green, and yellow grids, like a Mondrian. Its match, I was sure, was in my father’s current apartment, if he hadn’t thrown it out. He was in Butte, then, I think, though it was hard to keep up. It was the sheet he stretched over our couch when guests slept over, and what he slept on when my mother sent him downstairs for good and, eventually, out.
On the couch, my feet pressed against the far arm. The house sounded familiar: the rain on the roof (there was no second story over the living room), the wind through the uninsulated walls. When I woke, the house would be mine, really mine. I wished I had the sheaf of xeroxes with me, but that was at the Becketts’. No matter, the sheets were proof enough, if not for the law, then at least for me, that my family had really once occupied the place, a place my father never again acknowledged after we’d been forced from it. I was not hungover the next morning.
The Animals I Saw: no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10
It was the mosquitoes that eventually got me inside the house. They swarmed around Melch and me, up on the ladders, as we reshingled the Inges’ cabin. Back in the woods like that, caught in the sun, the bugs hummed in abstruse shapes. It was hot, the humidity unbearable. Rain was expected. The siding already stripped, we needed to finish before then. By evening, we were both covered in sweat and slowly rising welts.
Through the evening, as Melch and I drank off the itching with his beer stash, the humidity never broke. We were at the house he’d adopted for the season — the Spitz’s, I think. Melch grew drunk and apologetic. I considered telling him why I’d come back, that I’d even been there in the first place. It would mean explaining my father, his relationship with Abe Lewis, and why the house was no longer ours after it had been returned to land.
I opted not to, and set out for the Becketts. The air cooler, it was almost pleasant. The rain would arrive soon, I could tell. My legs felt warm as I walked, as if wrapped in a soft quilt. I felt the bones in my feet flex. Then, the house was in front of me. I needed to piss like a motherfucker, and I went inside.
The house drifted in the mud for a day, serenaded only by the crickets. It had no foundation, built as a summer cottage early in the town’s history. It was some 30 feet into the lake when people returned three days after the hurricane to survey the disfigured shoreline. The house, for reasons nobody was able to adequately explain, floated. There’d been massive water damage, but that was due to the blown-in storm windows.
I still possess several of the photographs my father rescued the day the house was dragged back to land. One, of the family, taken when I was probably three, was badly curled. The rain had disintegrated my grandmother’s face into flecks of white negative space.
In bed at the Becketts’, listening to the insect symphony, I wondered how many generations of crickets had passed since those who’d chirped at the floating house. Did they live for a season and then die? Was it as simple as that? On the bed wet with lake water, I thought of how their impossibly layered rhythmic constructions were transmitted to the next generation. My drying skin felt cool on the Becketts’ patterned sheets.
If the deer saw our house come unmoored, they may not have understood what was happening. The deer were dumb, Melch said. At least once every spring, when he resumed his contracting work, he’d have to remove a dead one from a swimming pool. “Why these assholes need pools by a lake,” he shrugged with contempt, not bothering to finish the thought.
My father had brought my older brother and me out into the lake on an inflatable raft several times that last summer, the only season I can recall. We rowed what seemed some ways from the shore. It was probably August. I would skim my palm over the water as we moved, as weightless as the sunlight itself. Once, my father held my legs and let me plunge into the lake. To my surprise, the sun-warmed surface gave way instantly to impenetrable cold, and I came up sputtering.
In my two weeks back, I’d not yet swum. I’d seen plenty of deer, however. They did not seem as dumb as Melch suggested. During the days after the summer residents left, I saw the deer meticulously picking through spilled trash, the stray cats hovering in a scattered perimeter for leftover leftovers. The cats, however, might’ve known better what was happening. Hopefully, none of them were hiding in the house when the hurricane hit.
There was a Pink Floyd song that once scared the shit out of me, which I remembered exactly as I saw the raccoons. There were three of them, I think. Even without the deck light, I could see their eyes reflecting. I didn’t know anything about raccoons at the time. My mind turned to static, expecting chaos.
I’d heard the song on the radio — in junior high school, when Dad had taken the job in Omaha — very late at night. “Then something happened,” a robotic voice, a representative of the animals, claimed. “We learned to talk.” I lay there, terrified of the violent nonsense that would ensue. As I faced the raccoons, I imagined their robot voices: high, electronic squeals pitching torrents of dada.
I started to slowly ease the kitchen door closed behind me, and the raccoons scattered. There was a tree hanging over the deck. I imagine they went up it, though my eyes had not yet adjusted. The door creaked as I opened it again. The Becketts’ house could use some work, I thought. The addition behind the kitchen was being destroyed by humidity, threatening to pull apart like a rogue continent eroding. If they were not careful, it might even sail into the lake, like our house did.
The ants came next, a few nights later. I’d gone to find the house. When I returned, they’d formed a crescent around a drop of orange juice I’d left on the counter. A line trailed to the cabinet below the sink. I wiped them off with a paper towel.
The dark air was cool, autumn wafting in like a top note looking to establish its dominance in the melody. The lake was a sturdy mass behind me as I stood on the front lawn, sipping a screwdriver. I tried to pick out the room I’d slept in during those five summers. Perhaps it was just below the west gable, though I had no reason to believe that was correct.
Melch said he went into the houses all the time. If he was painting and had to piss, he’d just let himself in, no big deal. “These people, they leave their doors unlocked mostly,” he noted, crumbling a dead leaf between his calloused fingers. “Small town, you know.” He smiled at me.
I considered this, walking inland back to the Becketts’, and smelled autumn again. School was starting without me. That was alright. I’m sure my roommate appreciated the extra space. Outside the Becketts’, I paused, studying its shape. The screwdriver was done. I put the glass down and urinated into an empty patch of the garden.
It was the time of year when the animals took over, though they were no trouble until later. I noticed the stray cats first. Carrying a tarp from Melch’s truck down the path by the lake, I saw a tabby sunning on the steps of the Petersons’ front porch. It was not theirs. When I stopped to look at it, I noticed another — fat and black, with a white belly — in the shadow of the juniper shrubs. Climbing the ladder in the back of the Johnsons’, I saw still a third — a mangy calico — sleeping under a chair on the deck next door.
The lake caught the afternoon sunlight, reflecting it with less intensity than just weeks previous, as if to finally collect some for itself. Save a dinghy bobbing at a distant dock, the water was devoid of boats. The quiet of the town in the off-season had shocked me at first.
During my first night in the Beckett house — Melch had given me the keys — I pulled the sheet from the upright piano. Depressing the sustain pedal, I tentatively played a chord. It spread through the house like an intruder. In bed, I could still hear it decaying, a vague hum now imprinted in the floorboards. I would have to leave a note apologizing, I thought. Unable to sleep, I sat at their kitchen table and ate stale saltines they’d left in the cupboard, trying to work up the nerve to enter the house that was rightfully mine.
“fl° – Trap Door (download here)
from International Psychedelic Mystery Mix
released by Dis-Joint (2006)
available via Turntable Lab
(file expires September 19th)
Like many of the mixes my friend Joey has turned me onto, Trap Door’s International Psychedelic Mystery Mix has no track list — just beautifully lettered album art and, in iTunes, cryptic ASCII symbols. Much of the material feels like it could be drawn from the distant corners of Alan and Richard Bishop’s Sublime Frequencies project and carries much the same message: that people plug in, freak out, and fall down across whole small world after all.
The lack of performance information triggers all kinds of alarms in my brain’s obsessive quadrants: how can I understand something if I don’t even know what to call it? Regardless of how I feel about a crossing it, I think there’s an unquestionable line between liberating the content of a piece of music via mp3s (“I’m gonna copy this great, obscure song for all my friends”) and liberating the intellectual ownership of the work entirely (“I’m gonna deliberately not give credit to the person who wrote it, even though I know who he is”). These are not just samples, mind you, but entire songs.
Obviously, the tracklisting is absent for legal reasons. Still, it’s a big line to cross — obscuring intellectual property, I mean, not bootlegging, which is quite well-trodden — and crossing it can be oodles of fun. It is incredibly freeing as a listener. “fl°” is the first real song on the disc, and I’ve no idea where it’s from. It grooves like Jamaican dub, but the melody sounds positively West African (but, then, that guitar sounds a bit Middle Eastern).
Here, crossing that line is potentially terrifying. The exploration of music is a dialogue, the discovery of albums, bands, and songwriters naturally leading one to the discovery of related albums, bands, and songwriters. In that way, the Trap Door mix is seemingly a dead end in a hedge maze. Maybe that’s the trick: that they found an end at all. Of course, Google can help with the vocal cuts, but the instrumentals remain elusive. It’s either an end, or the music becomes the property of the curator, the only one with the key. None of this is to complain — I’ve been thoroughly digging the bejeezus out of this mix — just to wonder aloud about what it all means, maaaan.
Listening to the Mets on the radio is a crystalline connection to the old, weird New York, and not simply because it was something I did when I was a kid. It is filled with advertisements for steak houses (“just over the left field fence in Astoria!”) and camera stores (B & H, closed for Shabbos, though the voiceover dude is obviously goyim, and just says “Friday evenings and Saturdays”), of annoying pitchmen and annoying pitches. The Mets’ announcers still shill for sponsors, and often interrupt themselves mid-commentary to do so. It is a world where hipsters don’t exist, and Dwight Eisenhower might as well still be President, or even Calvin Coolidge. Ballgames — and, I assume, other sporting events — are one of the few things that traditional radio still does extraordinarily well. Web 2.0? Whatever. I’ll take pure AM gold from Shea.
o David Yaffe’s “Tangled Up in Keys” is a few weeks old, but is interesting attempt at unpacking the whole Dylan/Alicia Keys thing. (Thanks, BoomSalon.)
o ‘zine-era information punks RE/Search are putting out a second volume to their awesome 1987 Pranks sourcebook, certainly one of the cooler college textbooks I ever had to purchase. (Thanx, BB.)
It just gave me a greater admiration for the incredible baroque possibilities of mentation. The mind is so incredibly weird. The whole process of going into coma was very interesting, too. It was a slow onset — it took about a week — and during this time I started feeling like the vegetable kingdom was speaking to me.
It was communicating in comic dialect in iambic pentameter. So there were these Italian accents and German accents, and it got to be this vast garbling. Potatoes and radishes and trees were all speaking to me. It was really strange. It finally just reached hysteria, and that’s when I passed out and woke up in the hospital.
The odds that a lighter or a pen might survive to its natural end — the diminishment of ink or fluid — are pretty slim. They get pilfered, left at bars, lost in couches. It’s no matter, they’re cheap. Empty, they are often scarred.
“NYC’s Like A Graveyard” – the Moldy Peaches (download here)
from The Moldy Peaches (2001)
released by Rough Trade (buy)
(file expires September 5th)
Like “I Don’t Wanna Leave You on the Farm,” the Moldy Peaches’ “NYC’s Like A Graveyard” might first be construed as a novelty anthem. And it kind of is. Certainly, the anti-folk Peaches — who wore bunny suits, among other costumes, during their performances — eventually broke up rather than trying to shrug off the stigma of humor.
I remember hearing this song everywhere during the summer of 2001. I think it got played between nearly every set at Wetlands, and RANA covered it once or twice. It made me buy the album, just before a solo road trip I took to New England during the first week of September. Driving through rolling green hills, none of the other songs on the album — all novelties (or at least mutants) — took, but “NYC’s Like A Graveyard” was every bit as good as I thought it was. The recording hisses, almost literally, between the abrasive guitar and crummy-sounding hi-hat. Listened to as a single, between songs by other artists, my ears cringe whenever “NYC’s Like A Graveyard” begins.
Then 9/11 happened, and the song twisted into vapor. It’s not that the Moldy Peaches were prophetic, like Dylan’s “High Water (For Charley Patton),” their song was just true. “NYC’s Like A Graveyard” is a utopian summer anthem (“all the rock stars double datin'”), and one of those random thoughts one has sometimes when looking at the skyline (“all the tombstones skyscrapin'”), but mostly it’s about being young in New York (“we’ve got it! we’ve got it!”). In that period of post-attack murmur, though, it went away, not censored so much as willed out of people’s minds. RANA certainly never covered it again. Five years later, the song now a playlist footnote, New York City has changed considerably, though it is still — among many other things — a graveyard.
“I Don’t Wanna Leave You on the Farm” – Ween (download here)
from 12 Golden Country Greats (1996)
released by Elektra (buy)
(file expires September 4th)
My friend Bubba Love once pointed out that — slowed and stripped down — Ween’s “I Don’t Wanna Leave You on the Farm” could be an Elliot Smith song. He’s totally right. Specifically, it’s the chorus: that mournful, mournful change and the lyrics themselves (“days go by and I’m still high,” “leaves fall to the ground, it’s a sound that reminds me of you”). Since then, I’ve wanted to hear it played that way. It’s completely typical Ween, able to set real emotion (there are days I can’t get enough of the chorus) inside this wholly absurd frame (Ween doing a country album to begin with) with self-consciously juvenile brushstrokes (“I’m alone… on the throne”). That’s pretty much Ween at their best.
The idea of playing with copyright — through mash-ups (musical, visual, or otherwise), pirating, mixes — occasionally seems the modern equivalent of psychedelics. Like LSD, which had been in circulation for two decades previous to the 1960s, the notion of reappropriation took some time to achieve critical cultural mass (and has been present, in some form, for all human history). There are people who exploit it on a strictly recreational level (such as downloading music), and those who have used it as a great springboard of creativity (such as turning that music into something new and redistributing it). Committing one of the latter acts, especially, one automatically enters into the dialogue, rearranging the symbols around himself. It is an instant ticket to the group mind. Mostly, playing with copyright makes one see the world differently, as something more malleable than it was moments earlier. Though maybe not as dangerous an idea as acid, it still makes for a dandy of a bogeyman.
I was not raised bi-platform. I’ve been an Apple user since the day my Aunt left her family’s IIe with us while they went on vacation. I was five or six. The next holiday season, one of our very own materialized in Dad’s studio. The hulking gray console now sits in the corner of my room on top of a closet. In the intervening decades, my family shared a IIc and two desktops. In high school, I got a desktop of my own, and am now on my fourth laptop. Just as I can only effectively communicate in English, I can only really function on Macs. I’m an ugly American and a brutish Apple rube.
With the death of my third iPod in three weeks by unprovoked harddrive failure, I think my faith in Apple’s hardware has been irrevocably scarred. There’s nowhere I can go, and — from now on — there will be a half-second of near-panic every time I turn anything on: Will it work? Am I about to get all stressed and shit or am I going to get that demonically sad icon again? Is my computer about to die on me? (Holy shit: did my back-up jump drive actually just die on me? What the fuck?)
Fuck you, technology. I’m going to bed.
Song reviews:
“Two Sheep Asleep” – Dirty Projecters (I’m reviewing songs for PaperThinWalls.com, with a bunch more already in the can)
“Freckle Wars” – Ecstatic Sunshine
“Wait For You” – The Mountain Goats
“Bat Macumba” – Os Mutantes
“UMA” – OOIOO
Only in print:
o August Relix (Pearl Jam cover): “Plugging the A-Hole,” feature on Digital Rights Management; album reviews of Phish, The Sadies, and Thom Yorke; book review of Ben Fong-Torres.
o Paste #23 (Thom Yorke cover): album reviews of Sufjan Stevens, The Mountain Goats, Danielson, Elf Power, Yo La Tengo, Guillemots, The Ditty Bops, and Robert Fripp.
“Freckle Wars” – Ecstatic Sunshine (download here)
from Freckle Wars (2006)
released by Car Park (buy)
(file expires August 28th)
Maybe my favorite moment on Sonic Youth’s Murray Street is at the very end of “Rain On Tin,” when the drums and the bass drop out, leaving only Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, and Jim O’Rourke’s guitars. For about 30 seconds, transcendent electric guitar arpeggios wrap around one another. The Baltimore duo Ecstatic Sunshine — just two dudes with axes, man — take that moment and derive an entire sound. Their MySpace page declares them to be “Black Metal / Trance / Jam Band,” which isn’t too far from the truth, either. .
The delirious two minute title track from their joyously slim debut, Freckle Wars is probably all one need know about Ecstatic Sunshine. From the first beat, it’s busy and chiming, like the Allman Brothers without all the extraneous drummers, bassists, organists, and predilections towards sounding soulful. Notes scamper and dive, chase one another through the air, and drop into rhythm parts when necessary, all while forging a sense of movement. Mixing the psychedelic punk jams of Television and Sonic Youth with post-White Stripes minimalism and hippie goodness, Freckle Wars is one of the most refreshing debuts of the year.
Sometimes, when I think of the vastness of the internets — that faith that nearly any piece of information I could ever want can be found behind some URL, some combination of letters, numbers, slashes, and tildes — I think of Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel” (available in Collected Fictions):
When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first reaction was unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal problem, no world problem, whose eloquent solution did not exist — somewhere in some hexagon. The universe was justified; the universe suddenly became congruent with the unlimited width and breadth of humankind’s hope. At that period there was much talk of The Vindications — books of apologiœ and prophecies that would vindicate for all time the actions of every person in the universe and that held wondrous arcana for men’s futures. Thousands of greedy individuals abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed downstairs, upstairs, spurred by the vain desire to find their Vindication. These pilgrims squabbled in the narrow corridors, muttered dark imprecations, strangled one another on the divine staircases, threw deceiving volumes down ventilation shafts, were themselves hurled to their deaths by men of distant regions. Others went insane… The Vindications do exist (I have seen two of them, which refer to persons in the future, persons perhaps not imaginary), but those who went in quest of them failed to recall that the chance of a man’s finding his own Vindication, or some perfidious version of his own, can be calculated to zero.
I do not know where the island went after it left our harbor. The next time I knew of its presence was many years later. I was sitting in my father’s old desk chair. It was a momentary vision — Caribbean waters, crescent moon, stars — and then the house’s radiators were singing again.
“That island?” Elizabeth asked. We were in bed. My parents’ old bed, in my parents’ old room, on the third floor. The hot water rushed through the pipes below us. “You’re just daydreaming about a nice island,” she told me, stroking my chest. “I think about nice islands all the time.”
It took some months for David Mallis’s wound to fall away to its resultant scar. I watched the process with silent fascination. That is what I thought of when Elizabeth told me to think of nice islands. David Mallis’s scar was crescent shaped, the same moon I saw over the island.
He lives in Florida now, David Mallis does. Our town is no place for him. Even the hotel, once a proud center of commerce, now sits almost decrepit. The wallpaper peels, and still Jimmy Cavins, the day manager, demands payment a week in advance. It is likely Florida, where David Mallis lives, though it might be Atlanta. Even though he never felt the island, I will find him. Enough time has passed. I have some time yet, and I will have a boat. [/END]
The words David Mallis used to describe the sky over the island during the time it disappeared from the mainland’s view were twisted into numerous variations. “Blood red!” was one account. “Chalk black and starless,” another. I was not present for any of the interrogations that day. Elizabeth and I spent the afternoon pulling her trunks up Oak Street to the house on a red wagon. Between trips, we drank cold beers on the front porch, enjoying the chill.
That day’s utterances remained David Mallis’s final public thoughts on the matter until the day he moved from town, several years later, after the lobsters disappeared. “I knew what was coming,” he said on that occasion, as we watched the fire destroy the bulkhead. The water shimmered and distorted behind the heat. “After all, the whole sky looked like that,” he noted.
Elizabeth and I were on our final trip to the house when my father erupted. We were on the lawn. The floor lamp in his room flickered, as objects fluttered and fell in front of it. It was his worst tantrum yet. It would be three days before I could reorganize the maps for him. “It’s not you,” I promised Elizabeth, though I couldn’t be sure.
The death of Andy Byers came as a result of his exposure to Carlos Dias. The two never spoke, Andy Byers’ sister Mimi told me, just sat facing one another under the pennants in Carlos Dias’s room. “He did not tell anybody what happened,” she said, “but Andy Byers knew.” It was said that they were lovers, but a lot is said.
David Mallis, for his part, knew the swiftness of rumor, and distributed his images like currency: jungle, storms, drums. In the end, though, it was clear that David Mallis did not know what he saw, either, or could not describe it. “Make it sound like air,” he told me in high school, as I crafted a letter to Suzanne Camer for him. “Like–” and he made the sound of an exhalation.
Harold Brown at the Ledger compiled David Mallis’s bits into a narrative. He printed it, two columns wide, on the front page. I read it aloud to my father. “This man is steeped in bullshit,” my father said, when the account reached the part about the attack. “Any man can see he does not know what he is talking about.”
“The island, though,” I protested. “It was there.”
“No,” my father replied, perhaps mishearing. “I was not there.”
It wasn’t until the rain died down, Tuesday morning, that anybody realized David Mallis and Carlos Dias had returned. Arnold Laning had looked through binoculars from his upstairs window at the island, and noticed smoke rising from the beach. Arriving at the dock, he discovered David Mallis’s lobster boat tied in its usual spot.
Carlos Dias never told anybody what he saw. It was said that the transition from a tropical climate back to our own was too great. Three days later, he was dead. David Mallis’s wounds were more obvious: the deep cut on his forehead, burns on both elbows, and an even series of puncture marks across his upper back. Whenever he spoke of his time on the island, he never once mentioned the injuries.
Several years after my father died, Elizabeth and I had David Mallis and Suzanne Camer — briefly reconciled — over for dinner. “We woke up in the sun,” he said suddenly, admiring my father’s sketch of a strange bird that then hung in the kitchen (and which I took with me). “The woods — the animals, I mean — were just crying,” he said, sipping his Scotch.
I had found the sketch in a portfolio in my father’s bag, which he refused to unpack for a week after the island disappeared. “Took me a whole goddamn day to get everything in there, and fuck if you’re going to empty it now,” he declared. My father was rarely an angry man.
Pastor Johnson mentioned nothing of the island’s continued absence on Sunday morning. Over the next decade, as the town went into a decline, many blamed it on the breakdown of the church, which was — in turn — attributed to the Pastor’s failure to explain the island.
“It was a crack in the egg,” Elizabeth confided to me a few weeks before Lauren was born. “I didn’t want to see what was going to hatch.” I was not in church that day.
For much of the morning, I sat outside my father’s door. Behind it, the radio played mournful music at unforgiving volumes: old standards about moons, lovers, trees. Occasionally, I could hear him moving around. “Soon,” is all he would say when I knocked, if that.
Only Elizabeth was there when he emerged. “Nails,” he said as he walked by her on the way to the bathroom. “Tell that son-of-a-bitch to get nails. It’s time to board the windows.” The storm that rolled in that night beat the eastern wall with such force that shingles I’d painted in the spring aged decades by morning.
Monday, the island was dimly visible among the clouds and whitecaps. Late Sunday night, an hour before the rain began, David Mallis and Carlos Dias rowed into the dock. No one was there to greet them.
He was ready at dawn, my father. Getting him to town was a chore, but he was as eager to do that as anything. The walking was slow, down the long hill that fed into Oak Street. Both Elizabeth and my brother were convinced it was dementia. That day, he spoke little, scratching at the stubble on his face. It was getting harder for him to shave.
“No,” he said again, when the island was not there. Even Arnold Laning’s entreaties were not enough to convince him. “You know who this man is making a fool of?” my father asked me, when his former poker companion was out of earshot.
“No,” I admitted.
“He is making a fool of you and me,” my father said. It was another clear day, and the sea looked as it always had, an unbroken gray-green extended on a flat plane to the horizon. David Mallis’s lobster boat was nowhere.
When Suzanne Camer drove us home, after breakfast, my father kept touching his chin and cheek, as if constantly rediscovering his need to shave. Elizabeth and my brother may have been right. But they might not have. To claim my father expected the island would be inaccurate, though it is possible he anticipated it in some way.
I have a totally absurd friend named Orf who once played an evil hippie named “Wyoming” on As the World Turns. He makes totally absurd movies. His latest — as I found out this morning, in a (predictably) totally absurd email — is titled “Koalas on a Police Car,” and features soundtrack excerpts from the most recent Funny Cry Happy album, On A Clear Night, You Can Smell For Miles. The film can be watched here as part of a “[blanks] on a [blank]” contest. Search for “koala” and listen for bits of “Xanadu Roadtrip” and “The Speed of Sunset.” Don’t forget to vote for it! Not safe for work, yo.
They left at dawn on Friday, David Mallis and Carlos Dias in the red lobster boat, with three guns and four knives between them. One of the knives — given to me by Carlos Dias’s sister, Mimi, after Carlos’s death and long a paperweight on my desk — returned with its blade entirely dulled.
We all had excuses to be near the dock when they departed. The island was as clear as it had ever been. Its trees were turning, orange dabs speckled across the green, like a detailed jigsaw puzzle. I was next to Suzanne Camer again. “I needed eggs,” she explained, showing me the carton. We sat on the grass overlook by the park with a half-dozen others. The cold dew seeped through my jeans.
They were out of meaningful sight within five minutes. Arnold Laning — who had donated his old war rifle to the cause — stayed with binoculars for three hours, only leaving when it was time to open the sporting goods store. When the island disappeared the next day, his store remained closed, and Arnold Laning sat vigil on the dock in his fatigues.
Following the departure of David Mallis and Carlos Dias, I returned home. Putting the beer in the refrigerator, I made coffee and breakfast for my father. I did not immediately notice that he had ceased speaking of the boats.
Thursday, the island returned, and David Mallis proposed an expedition. I was right there. He was a little drunk, though not so gone that we did not take him seriously. Under the bar light, the pores and pockmarks on his cheeks were an ageless stone. Three days later, under any light at all, once he’d washed the blood off, his skin was golden.
The lobster boat was inherited from his father. Once, before dawn, Andy Byers’ brother — who owned a rival operation — blew a hole in the hull with a small explosive. That was the height of the battle. “Doesn’t anybody want to know? Really know?” David asked, standing near the dartboard, his fingernails crusted with plaster. Only Carlos Dias would join him.
I could not go. My father would not hear of it. There were deliveries to receive, linens to air, a house to run. He was stubborn those days, hobbling bow-legged. The ballgames over for the season, there was little for him to do. Weeks earlier, just after the Series, he’d taken to looking through his atlases. When the island came, he’d been drafting navigational charts for some days.
When we got to really drinking that Wednesday, we talked about the island. I was sure it had been there. Andy Byers got so drunk that he began the night believing it imaginary (“sailors have a name for that illusion,” he’d said, pulling foam from his moustache), was argued into thinking it real, and — by closing — again denied its existence.
“Yes,” Elizabeth told me many years later, the summer we decided I was moving out. “I remember that feeling, too. I could never explain it. It was like a light that was on and off at the same time.”
“Frost’s coming soon,” Andy said on the way home, when we stopped on the empty lot across from the gas station on Baker Street. The water was visible through the mostly bare trees, small dashes of light dancing. There was no moon. The horizon was blank.
Andy lived three houses down. I smoked another cigarette between his place and mine. He’d been a fool at the bar, Andy had. He had always been one and the same with the town — even when he died, not long after the island disappeared for the last time. I stamped the cigarette out, went through the kitchen door, and slipped into bed with Elizabeth. We tried not to wake my father.
The island appeared Tuesday, solid and clear on the horizon, was gone Wednesday, and came back Thursday. “Ask me what the secret of comedy is,” I instructed Suzanne Camer, as we stood on the old dock. It was autumn.
“Haha,” she laughed, though never asked. Then she coughed. Later, her ex-husband, David, would attempt the first trip to the island in his lobster boat, returning with a deep gash in his forehead. “I think it must be the power plant,” she said. “The smoke. A trick.”
“Yes,” I nodded, “a trick. Somebody is tricking us.” Though the air was crisp enough, my beer was getting warm. I gulped the last third of it down.
There had never been an island there before. “This is the end of the world,” my father told me on the day I fell in the campfire and emerged miraculously unscathed. “Look,” he said, “there is nothing out there. Nothing. The next thing is Greenland, maybe.” He pointed and then went back to tending the fire.
“No,” was all he said when I told him about the appearance of the island, which he never saw.
When I was a kid, I had a poster of Earth on my wall — a fold-out from National Geographic, I think. Clouds and storms and systems obscured parts of the planet. When it rains, I like picturing myself beneath some twisting gray-black cover that can be seen from space, no different from the atmospheric turbulence (give or take) on any other planet. We’re preparing for a heatwave now. I’m not sure what those look like from space, if anything.
21.) What was the total rainfall here last year? 56.01 inches.
22.) Where does the pollution in your air come from?
Cars and trucks, mostly, but also the endless factories (chemical and otherwise), incinerators, and other structures of industry all around the tri-state area.
23.) If you live near the ocean, when is high tide today? 12:38 am & 1:24 pm.
24.) What primary geological processes or events shaped the land here?
The water left behind by the melting of the glaciers, which pooled in lakes and carved rivers, valleys, and islands.
25.) Name three wild species that were not found here 500 years ago. Name one exotic species that has appeared in the last 5 years.
Mile-a-minute vine, giant hogweed (ooh, giant hogs!), pale swallow-wort are all recent arrivals. Japanese knotwood sounds pretty exotic, too.
1. “True History of the Rolling Stones” – The Rolling Stones (via my friend Tim)
2. “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” – Devo (from Q. Are We Not Men? A. We Are Devo!)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “You Just May Be The One” – The Monkees (from Headquarters)
5. “SA-5” – Beck (from Deadweight EP)
6. “1000 Cities Falling (part I) – The Sadies (from Favourite Colours)
7. “Holding” – John Hartford (from Aereo-Plain)
8. “The Tain” – The Decemberists (from The Tain EP)
9. “Wheel of Light” – The Guppies (from Hydrologic)
10. “Sit Down, Stand Up” – Radiohead (from Hail to the Thief)
11. “Stand” – R.E.M. (from Green)
12. “Superdeformed” – Matthew Sweet (from No Alternative compilation)
13. “Cold Irons Bound” – Bob Dylan (from Masked and Anonymous soundtrack)
14. “Nobody Knows De Trouble I’ve Seen” – Marian Anderson (from Sacred Roots of the Blues compilation)
15. “Down Home (rehearsal version)” – Jerry Garcia (from All Good Things box set)
“Wait For You” – The Mountain Goats (download here)
from Babylon Springs EP (2006)
released by 4AD (buy)
(file expires on August 4th)
The closer from the Australia/iTunes-only Babylon Springs EP, “Wait For You” is a quiet John Darnielle gem. Instead of the lighter-and-liter full-band arrangements Darnielle has favored lately (including the other tracks of the EP), “Wait For You” opts for the straight-up acoustic guitar/bass of the Mountain Goats’ live gigs. Done right, the guitar/bass combo is one of my favorite sounds in the world, warm and rich, and part of what makes a lot of Blood on the Tracks such a joy for me.
Here, Darnielle whispers his narrative with all authority. “When it came time to wait for you, I took the bus to Malibu,” he begins, simultaneously precise (bus, Malibu) and vague (you? wait?). The chorus hook is gorgeous, its combination of image (“and a rainbow in the west wrapped its coils around the earth like a serpent”) and delivery (quieter and quieter and quieter) making for a little moment of transcendence.
Just to play devil’s advocate here, what’s more important: knowing the information here instinctually or knowing how to find it on the world wide cyberinterwebnet? Clearly, all of this information is good to know. I feel more responsible as a a citizen for having some idea, now, where my garbage is going. Is it useful? Maybe in the broader sense that I’m now thinking about these questions. Strokes chin.
11.) From what direction do storms generally come? West.
12.) Where does your garbage go?
Since the Fishkill landfill on Staten Island closed in 2001, New York area garbage has been shipped to various out-of-state landfills. Last week, a plan was approved to ship it out by barge.
13.) How many people live in your watershed?
I’m a-gonna guess about 3.7 million, given that the Northern Long Island watershed is about half of Long Island, which has about 7.4 million residents.
14.) Who uses the paper/plastic you recycle from your neighborhood?
Anybody who purchases products from A&R Lobosco, Inc., Potential Industries, Inc. (awesome name for a company!), Paper Fibres Corp., Rapid Recycling, and Triboro Fibers.
15.) Point to where the sun sets on the equinox. How about sunrise on the summer solstice?
Hmmm, over there and over there (points towards clusters of buildings).
16.) Where is the nearest earthquake fault? When did it last move?
In the Atlantic, south of Far Rockaway beach.
17.) Right here, how deep do you have to drill before you reach water?
I’m not entirely sure, but I’m sure the Federal Pump Corp., who drill wells, would be able to tell me if I really needed to know.
18.) Which (if any) geological features in your watershed are, or were, especially respected by your community, or considered sacred, now or in the past?
I live in Brooklyn, but I like Jason Kottke’s answer too much: the bedrock beneath Manhattan was truly a sacred consideration in the construction of those most holy skyscrapers.
20.) Name five birds that live here. Which are migratory and which stay put?
Common loon (migratory), red-throated loon (migratory), horned grebe (migratory), red-necked grebe (migratory), Cory’s Shearwater (migratory). (Lots more.)
Answering Kevin Kelly’s questions about The Big Here were way tougher than I imagined. I knew in advance that I didn’t know many of the answers, but even tracking some of them down via Google was a bit tough — quite different from an age where most people would probably know most of this stuff instinctually. I only got through the first 10 (of 30) and it took a good long while. If any of these seem horribly wrong to fellow Brooklynites, please correct.
1.) Point north.
Thatta way: over the basketball court, past the vacant lot, across Bogart Street, and towards Queens.
2.) What time is sunset today?
Probably 8:30ish? (Weather.com says 8:18.)
3.) Trace the water you drink from rainfall to your tap. Water collects in the Catskill/Delaware and Croton watersheds, in 18 reservoirs and three controlled lakes, before being channeled underground through the Croton Aqueduct, to the boroughs.
4.) When you flush, where do the solids go? What happens to the waste water?
The waste water in my neighborhood eventually makes it way to the Newtown Creek treatment facility in Greenpoint. The sludge is dewatered into biosolids and subsequently used as fertilizer or something else pleasantly beneficial. Yay poop!
5.) How many feet above sea level are you?
Looks to be about 20.
6.) What spring wildflower is consistently among the first to bloom here?
Ferns, from what I can tell. Are they a wildflower? Yeep.
7.) How far do you have to travel before you reach a different watershed? Can you draw the boundaries of yours? Northern Long Island. The Southern Long Island watershed begins not-so-far to the south, a mile or two tops.
8.) Is the soil under your feet, more clay, sand, rock or silt? More clay than sand, leftover from the Wisconsin Ice Sheet.
9.) Before your tribe lived here, what did the previous inhabitants eat and how did they sustain themselves?
The Canarsee Indians, Algonquians, were hunters, including ducks, turkeys, geese, deer, and clams. They grew corn, too.
10.) Name five native edible plants in your neighborhood and the season(s) they are available.
No idea, but I bet Wildman Steve Brill can tell me!
Ladies and Gentleman, The Bronx is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City is a map of a Manhattan just out of my reach. Though I wasn’t born until 1978, Jonathan Mahler’s scope encompasses familiar locales, as they were (more or less) when I was a child. There is reference to the Stewart House, a building in lower Manhattan so large that it constitutes its own voting district, crucial to Ed Koch in his bid for mayor. It also happens to be where my grandmother moved later that year after my grandfather died (and where I spent much time during high school). There is Bushwick, too, the neighborhood that properly begins a few blocks from my home, and how its own residents essentially burned it to the ground in the mid-1970s, and gutted it during in a massive riot during the 1977 blackout. And there are the Yankees, in their full mustachioed glory, the all-too-human personalities behind faces I vaguely recall from baseball cards. But mostly there is New York: cars and restaurants and gray buildings and dirt and endless people.
By European standards, New York remains an infant, free of the millennia of history that most European city-dwellers take for granted. While some of the figures in the book, especially in Mahler’s excavation of New York politics, seem ancient, they also seem perfectly contemporary, like the same stories could be happening with only minor variations this very minute. In that, The Bronx is Burning is a trick: one could pull multi-tiered historical narratives — maybe not about baseball and disco, but somethin’ — from any period in New York history. But they probably wouldn’t be as engaging.
“Bat Macumba” – Os Mutantes (download here)
from Os Mutantes (1968) (buy)
(file expires on July 31st.)
Since Os Mutantes rickety, joyous reunion show at Webster Hall on Friday, Gilberto Gil’s “Bat Macumba” — played by the Mutantes to open their encore — has been lodged in my head; the soundtrack to a very nice weekend, indeed. I’m surprised no hippie band has yet attempted to cover this. It’s perfect: an infectious groove, a playful musical structure (a syllable gets dropped from the chanted title phrase each time around, changing the meaning slightly), and equally playful lyrics that (on account of the dropped syllables) reference, among other things: Batman, Afro-Brazilian religion, and — according to a friend who speaks Portuguese — a command to smoke dope. My kinda tune. It’s been stuck in loop in my brain all weekend, despite seeing a bunch of other performances. When I arrived home at 5 in the morning last eve to a roommate-less loft, I put on “Bat Macumba” and danced.
Only in print:
o Summer Signal To Noise (Tony Conrad cover): feature on Glenn Kotche, live review of Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid, album review of Sun City Girls
o July Relix (Michael Franti cover): book review of Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, DVD reviews of the Velvet Underground and Captain Beefheart, album reviews of Sonic Youth, Spinjunkies, DJ Deep See, Stuff Dreams Are Made Of compilation.
The slimness of Jonathan Lethem’s This Shape We’re In works to its considerable charm. Its 55 pages read as a quick immersion into Lethem’s almost literally cartoonish other-world. In the first sentence, before he can even establish a plot, Lethem creates a central tension: just what the hell is going on?
It began when Belkan came into our burrow during cocktail hour and told us he had been in the eye. Early and Lorna were sitting around sipping gin and tonics and watching me grill a hunk of proteinous rind which I’d marinated pretty nicely and was basting like a real pro and my immediate response was to tell Belkan to go to hell. Marianne offered him a drink and he took it with both hands like it was hot chocolate and went back to boasting about his extraordinary meaner and the culture of the forelimbs and the things he’d witnessed peering through the eye: the inky depths of interstellar space (his words: inky depths, interstellar space).
Why wouldn’t you keep reading (especially when it’s available for $5 at the McSweeney’s bookstore)?
So, basically, I have no idea what’s going on here, but it’s fucking awesome (which pretty much describes what I love about Japanese psychedelia in a nutshell). In this case, it’s a bunch of women screaming/chanting/calling-and-responsing/doing-somethin’ pretty dang gleefully. My attraction to The Boredoms (OOIOO is a side project), Cornelius, and Acid Mothers Temple involves a pungent toke of exotica, fer shizzle, but there really is some core idea that is totally compatible with me as a listener. While it’s a stretch to call that something “universally transferable” (universally transferable to record geeks being tantamount to being world famous in Poland), there is still enough of a continuity to make the foreign language and hints of Asian folk music seem almost understandable, which is actually way cooler than literally understandable. It’s as if the song’s visceral meaning is forever on the tip of my tongue. Plus, it’s called “UMA.”
It’s not really a consolation, but I am glad that I never dislodged the teetering stack of favorite CDs from the top of the stereo. The sudden death of my iPod (as opposed to probable theft by a lesbian stripper) will at least give me a chance to reacquaint myself with the quaint fetish objects, such as the Automatic For the People disc I accidentally got blood on when I didn’t realize my finger was bleeding one late night in high school (still there on the surface, a brown-red smudge atop the timing of “Monty Got A Raw Deal”)…
o BB recently gave props to Tom Stites’ critique of American media. It’s a spot-on, if depressing, assessment. Tom also happens to be my pal Bill‘s dad, and a rad dude. He also drove Bill & me to our first Phish show (and, to his credit, got it completely).
o Okay, okay, there’s nothing new here, but this Elizabeth Drew’s piece in the New York Review of Books, “Power Grab,” is one of the more fundamental indictments of the Bush administration I’ve read, tracing how they methodically redefined the Executive Branch. (Thanks, Rich.)
o Admittedly, I haven’t gone through the full list yet, but — in “The Big Here” — Kevin Kelly offers 30 questions to help you center your ass.
o Paper Thin Walls, another new music site, launched this week with their reader-driven music blog, Bullhorn.
o The alluring, stock footage-assembled coming attraction for the work-in-progress Os Mutantes documentary, Bread and Circuses. (Thanks, Ari.)
This got recently excised from a magazine because the editor (as I interpret it) didn’t want to be responsible for the residual spreading of Manson’s bad juju. Here ’tis.
CHARLES MANSON Sings
[ESP]
3 stars
Original freak-folker shows ’em how it’s done.
Though the Beach Boys covered one of his songs, and Neil Young lobbied for him to be signed, it was simply not to be for a struggling L.A. singer-songwriter named Charlie Manson. Instead, he earned himself a cult following significantly different than most of his acoustic-slinging brethren. Recorded in September 1967, six months after Manson’s previous release from prison and two years before the killings that brought him to notoriety, Manson set down two-dozen of his original compositions. Considered in the wake of Devendra Banhart and others ragged folk-psych revivalists, Charles Manson’s music — originally issued during his 1970 trial — is quite listenable. “Arkansas” is dotted with weirdly barbed guitars, off-kilter harmonies, and hippie agrarianism, while one can hear what appealed to the Beach Boys about the rising chorus of “Cease to Exist” (effectively repurposed by them into 20/20‘s “Never Learn Not To Love”). Too bad he didn’t get signed. Banhart might’ve rediscovered him.
If Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is an album that has inextricably bound me to a group of friends, then Lawrence Weschler’s Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders is its literary equivalent. The book, as well as David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, which it is about, have been the root of a half-dozen convergences in my life — doubly strange, given the importance of the word “convergence” in Weschler’s vocabulary.
In 2004, Weschler — a former New Yorker correspondent — published Vermeer in Bosnia, an eclectic collection featuring pieces about the director Roman Polanski, artist David Hockney, Shakespeare, war trials, and many other topics. Several of the pieces focus on Los Angeles, including a beautiful, brilliant entry called “The Light of L.A.” In it, he surveys filmmakers, artists, scientists, and poets, synthesizing it all into non-fiction transcendence.
Weschler has just learned of “airlight,” a scientific term describing the interference between one’s eye and the mountains beyond, when there seem to be “a billion tiny suns between you and the thing you’re trying to see.”
The next morning, I happened to be jogging on the beach in Santa Monica, heading north, in the direction of Malibu, as the sun was rising behind me. The sky was already bright, though the sun was still occluded behind a low-clinging fog bank over LAX. The Malibu mountains up ahead were dark and clear and distinct, and seemed as if freshly minted. Presently, the sun must have broken out from behind the fog bank — I realized this because suddenly the sand around me turned pale purplish pink and my own long shadow shot out before me. I looked up at the mountains, and they were gone: lost in the airlight.
This is what the dead bird told me: it told me that Monica started the fire. There was no mistaking this. We’d seen dead birds all around the house, both of us, the summer the plant closed. It was not possible to go ten feet in the woods that August without seeing them. We’d read them, Monica and I, and saw rich narratives unfold across the gruesome mess. As it happened, Monica moved three blocks from where I’d first come across the bird.
Before that, we’d ridden the train out of the city, to the town in which our mother grew up. The weather was nothing: no rain or particular sun, a muted blue sky. Neither Monica nor I knew the town well. We walked from the train station, through the town center, towards a park I’d seen on the map. Monica bought a beer, which she drank from a paper bag.
On top of the hill, when we were sure we were out of view of the parking lot, we opened the box. Some of our mother’s ashes whipped from us, but there was little wind, and most fell at our feet in a dismal, chalky pile. I thought of the fine black powder our living room had become, the dust Monica had wished to join, unaware that our mother was looking through boxes of knick-knacks in the attic.
Walking back to the station, Monica dropped the bag and empty bottle on the ground. I looked at her. “What?” she said, “We can dump Mom here but not a fucking beer bottle?” But it wasn’t that. I wanted to burn the beer bottle, melt it down. I wanted to keep burning the house, making sure every last part was disintegrated. I wanted to burn the ashes more, making them smaller and finer and smaller still. I wanted to burn all the dead birds in the world. [/END]
“Don’t ever think about that,” Monica told me, still drunk, as I made my way towards the bedroom. I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, if it was an instruction to me, or a statement about her own powers of thought.
I craved a return to the life I’d made: working at the coffee shop, jogging every afternoon, getting eight hours of sleep a night. I realized I still did most of these, though no longer had the boundless interior tundra I might wander without Monica watching.
“Ever?” I asked, as I closed the door.
“Ever,” she confirmed.
And so, of course, I thought about it. I thought about the dead bird like Monica told me not to, and what it meant that — a full three weeks into its dismemberment — its wings were now perfectly opposed to one another, as if in flight, albeit with two feet of sidewalk between them. I dreamt of the beach by the lighthouse, its beam chasing me as I swam.
Monica was still sitting at the table in the morning, awake. I could not tell if she’d slept.
The doorbell woke me. I’d fallen asleep on the couch, listening to the old R & B station and half-reading about the Mbuti pygmies in National Geographic. Then there was knocking. I found a police officer in the hallway. He had puffy, pocked cheeks and hard eyes. Monica stood next to him. She’d been crying. She was holding a box of brownie mix.
“We thought she was soliciting,” he said. Monica squeezed silently past me into the apartment.
I was taken aback. “Carrying a box of brownie mix?”
The officer looked embarrassed. “That’s what she said. She was quite drunk, though, and very lewd. She kicked me.” I glanced at the clock on the mantle, next to our mother’s ashes. Monica had been gone for over two hours. “We were forced to ticket her,” he explained.
After the officer left, I took my contacts out. I had to work in the morning. Monica sat at the kitchen table, reading the brownie box. I thought again about what the dead bird had told me, and felt tiredness course through my body like ink dispersing in water.
As soon as Monica left, I washed the blood from my knuckle. Then I turned on the radio and rolled a joint. Whenever we separated, I felt a change in consciousness, a portion of my thoughts returning to a private domain. Ray Charles was on. I nodded gently with the music as I smoked.
I’d started getting high a year before I left home. It was summertime. My mother decided that I was the one to attend college in the city the following autumn; Monica would remain at home and run the store. I spent most of my time at Billy Tiernan’s, listening to his stepfather’s record collection, playing backgammon, and getting stoned.
One night, we all went to the lake. Monica and her friends, too. Billy and I had smoked a joint in his truck. Monica didn’t like pot. As we plunged towards the water, through the woods and between sheets of fireflies, I instinctively looked for her in the dark ahead of me. She was gone, then. From me, I mean.
The mail was still in the mailbox, all junk. There was an American Express offer for me, and I had not lived there for over a decade. I’d gotten lost on the way over, and it was almost dark. The house outlined in the mild, pink light, I squinted at the familiar facade. When my eyes focused, I realized the whole left side, from the kitchen up, was caved in; missing, like a dark chunk from a waning moon.
The fire had started in the living room, they said. I stood at the edge of the yard and looked at the first floor’s dim skeleton. As a child, I’d imagined fires in the living room many times; not fires that I’d started, but fires I envisioned at their peaks, flames lapping cruelly at the drab, off-yellow drapes. I wondered how this matched up.
I sat on the warm hood of the car for a few minutes before I headed back to the city. The coroner had given me the option of picking up the ashes in the morning or having them shipped. I gave him my address.
“You told the coroner about the brownies?” Monica asked, cross-legged on my couch, drinking her third screwdriver of the night. She cradled the paper cup gently in one palm. Her head rested on the other.
“No,” I explained, “he brought up the brownies.”
“Do you want to make brownies?” she asked. It was after midnight. I was on my first drink. “Come on,” she nudged, “The corner store’s open all night, right?”
Three days after she’d arrived we had our first fight, a silent feud that lasted a week, about whether we could afford a funeral. We couldn’t. I had little desire to communicate with my mother’s sister. Monica wouldn’t do it, either, so I won, as it were.
After that, without discussion, we slid into a natural co-habitation. I’d readjusted to Monica’s whims, all of them impulses that existed close to my own surface. Thinking about it right then, I wanted brownies, too. I didn’t offer to go with her, though. That was my fault.
The wallpaper over the urinal repeated infinitely: a house, a river, a moose contemplating the dwelling from the opposite bank, some woods, another house. Somewhere between the woods and the house, the image began again, like an MC Escher illusion. This was the wallpaper in the bathroom at the coroner’s office.
My mother looked more or less like herself, except dead, her blonde-grey hair still in a ponytail. It had been a terrible fire, to be sure, but it was smoke inhalation that had gotten her, in the attic, while firemen below tried to put out the blaze.
“Yes,” I told the coroner, “that’s her.”
He nodded, and said he’d bought brownies from Mom at a few school bake sales.
“Yeah,” I said, “Brownies,” thinking about chocolate and looking at my dead mother’s still face out of the corner of my eye. I was still imagining the sugar on my tongue when I drove by the burnt house at dusk.
“Well, what did they tell you?” she asked. She meant the bird’s parts. There was a time I could have answered the question, when Monica wouldn’t have even needed to articulate it. The idea of telling her of the abstractions I’d read in the mangled pigeon seemed shameful to me, like reverting to the provincial dialect I’d trained my tongue to avoid. She would understand it, though, whatever I said.
“I don’t know,” I muttered. “I really don’t.” I said that second part with more conviction, even though the blood was starting to cake on my fingers and I desperately wanted to wash my hand.
“Oh,” she said, sounding hurt. Feeling hurt, I’m sure. I knew exactly what they meant, and dead birds don’t lie. Then she asked again about what it was like to identify the body.
I’d already been in the city many years. She’d not visited. When she arrived, still smelling of smoke, she walked around my cramped living room. We’d hugged, of course, and probably made one or two inconsequential remarks, but she got right to it. All with her eyes, she examined the magazines on the table (National Geographic, Newsweek), the plants hanging by the window (unwatered and dying), the contents of the trashcan by the television (a few receipts, maybe; I never remembered it was there).
In the next weeks, the room changed shape, meeting her will. The couch, now opened to a bed, was pushed permanently to the wall. Aside from her duffle bag, she brought no objects into the space. At the end of it, it felt right and natural, my arrangement only a temporary diversion from whatever the truth was, whatever I was escaping by moving to the city to begin with. It felt like the room we’d shared as children.
My hand happened to be covered in fresh blood when the conversation began. I’d been chewing on my knuckle for some reason, and I’d broken skin. It was odd, I thought, but didn’t seem like a big deal.
We were talking about sundials, Monica and I, because we both agreed that calculations (especially of this nature) took time, and that we were better off just waiting for all the business arrangements to work themselves out. I explained to her that I’d marked time since the fire with the passing of the bird’s limbs across the cement.
“Oh,” she asked. “Like augury?”
“Yes, I suppose,” I told her. I’d almost grown used to her again, which was strange enough, but she would soon be leaving.
The dead bird moved a little bit every day. Or, rather, parts of it did. It was separated — a wing over here, something unrecognizable over there — on the weed-cracked sidewalk outside the wonton factory I passed while jogging each afternoon. It was a mostly deserted street.
Late in the bird’s disintegration, I passed someone a little further down the block, walking in the shadow of a warehouse. “Hey!” I wanted to ask him — a prematurely balding Puerto Rican kid who worked in the tire yard –“did you see the bird? It’s been there since March!” It was the end of May then, and I was wondering what the summer sun would do to it. But I kept jogging.
That was the same week I told Monica about the bird.
I’ve already posted my photos and field recordings of my adventures at the 2006 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show, but my reason for being there — the piece I was supposedly writing — kinda fell through the cracks. I pitched this story and went to Las Vegas thinking I was writing a tech-oriented travelogue, only to discover upon my return that my editor had wanted a simple review of the Show’s hottest new gadgets. After another publication promised to run it, it got bumped for adspace, with the intention of running it on the website, at which point it officially fell through the cracks. Half a year later, here it is.
Searching for the Next Little Thing (or A Consumer in a Strange Land)
by Jesse Jarnow
The only reassuring thing about the chaos across the 1.6 million square feet of carpeted exhibit-space at the Consumer Electronics Show, held January 5th through 8th in Las Vegas, is that nobody among its 150,000 participants seemed to know what was going on — which is exactly how I found myself offering fanboy suggestions to one of the dudes from San Jose who invented the iPod’s trademark clickwheel.
We’d both come upon the same CES woman in a yellow information shirt, who’d told us (with stunning inaccuracy) that it was “about a mile” to the other side of the building. She explained why we should wait for the next shuttle bus rather than walk — as we did — down the service driveway and past loading docks stacked high with wooden crates that resembled stage props.
“Tell me,” I asked Clickwheel Dude promptly, “the next generation of iPods is gonna be a cell phone with a faux-modernist rotary dial clickwheel, right?”
“Where’d you hear that?” he asked, mildly taken aback. “No, no,” he said, hinting that a virtual clickwheel could potentially be “extremely tactile.”
“We really need this kind of feedback,” he added.
Once he finally made it through registration and onto the floor of the Las Vegas Convention Center and into the teeming ecosystem of buyers, exhibitors, press, and other non-consumers (mostly dragging roller-suitcases), he would get plenty more.
***
To tramp from the Convention Center’s monorail stop to its furthest rim, attendees crossed more than a mile, from the two-level South Hall (starring Google and their giant Legos), across the massive Central Hall (featuring a Sony floor installation that required its own sub-map), through the bass-booming North Hall (where bikinied booth babes demonstrated the hottest backseat subwoofers), and into the Hilton next door (whose modest stalls sported clever Asian miniaturizations). And that’s not to mention the additional floor at the Sands (conventioneers mingling with silicone-enhanced attendees of the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, held next door).
Feedback for Clickwheel Dude came on like locusts in a plague. One could barely step without crunching down on the sleek plastic exoskeletons of imitation iPods (like SanDisk’s sporty Samsa, pimped by toned pep-dancers) and artifacts from its attendant cottage industry, including mini-speakers (mostly mimicking Altec Lansing’s popular inMotion), crazy protective shells (H2O Audio’s waterproof pod-cases and earbuds), and teddy bears (Sakar’s SoundPal). If iPods are the present of music, then its future is undoubtedly a world of variations, and — eventually — commonality, cheapness, and Salvation Army bins.
While pundits pontificated about an “iPod killer,” the most innovative products recognized music tech’s new paradigm of flexibility. With ATO’s iSee, users can store videos on regular iPods, dock them in the iSee, and watch them. Many forward-thinking products served as reminders of the entertainment industry’s ongoing copyright wars. Timetrax’s TraxCatcher allows users (with perhaps questionable legality), to snatch individual mp3s from satellite radio systems like Sirius (now starring Howard Stern) and XM (whose roster includes DJ Bob Dylan).
As always (as demonstrated by the latter), the future includes cars with TVs in them (possibly in their trunks), screens that are bigger, and speakers that are louder. The main halls were characterized by a nearly comical largesse that suggested a World’s Fair without the nobility. Utopian living room sets (such as CyberHome’s wireless video network) were interspersed with displays of fantastical architecture (such as DirectTV’s cube-dangling high modernist dreamscape), as well as temporarily constructed meeting rooms that recalled conjugal visit trailers.
Google’s presence was a breath of fresh air, stocking their booth with real live engineers to showcase the Mountain View wunderkinds’ fabbest inventions. Likewise, following a canned Friday morning keynote-cum-product-roll-out from Yahoo CEO Terry Semel (abetted by token celebrities Tom Cruise and Ellen DeGeneres), Google co-wizard Larry Page took the afternoon by storm.
The deliciously geeky opposite of Semel and his fake living room set, Page (in a white lab coat) spun a science fiction vision, pleading for industry-wide standardization in hardware and power supply and inter-gadget communication.
“One wire should do everything possible,” he said. “If you plug a wire into something, you should be able to do anything you could possibly do with that device -– run software on it, charge it, power other devices from its battery, or whatever, just with that single wire. We could basically do that with the hardware we have. And it should work the same whether you plug that wire into your house, your neighbor’s house, or all the way around the world.”
Following the help of his (gloriously freestyling) celebrity, Robin Williams, Page soon introduced Google Video — the search company’s first foray into retail, and their response to Apple’s iTunes store.
Featuring CBS shows, day-old NBA games, and Charlie Rose interviews, Google Video will also sell content by anybody who cares to create it. Much of the major programming will only work on Google’s proprietary viewer, however, preventing users from watching their purchases on their iPods (bummer, Clickwheel Dude).
But the most mindblowing product described by Page wasn’t the integration of Google Earth into mobile phones (though that’s pretty rad), nor was it even made by Google (though they donated $2 million dollars to its development). It was a mock-up of MIT scientist Nicholas Negroponte’s hand-cranked, wifi-enabled, open source $100 laptop. At a convention dedicated to making the world move faster, Google seemed committed to moving the world quantifiably forward.
After Page, the hum of the Consumer Electronics Show — a din of voices, bleeps, and New Age music blasting from demonstration speakers — seemed literally meaningless. Page had veritably declared it: nobody knew what was going on.
***
Somewhere in the acres upon acres of the Las Vegas Convention Center, there must have been the perfect gadget, that front-of-the-curve device that won’t be really profitable for another few years, and will soon be on the road to ubiquity, but — well — a consumer can get dizzy.
In the immaculately ordered Asian displays at the Hilton, surreal devices like clothing-hangers-with-inboard-dryers, CD shredders, and folding keyboards sat between infinitesimal variations of keychain USB drives, wireless toys, and microscopic neon-colored mp3 players, spiraling smaller and smaller and smaller.
When I found myself gazing woozily into a TV that was playing Revenge of the Sith (stretched, for some reason), my eyes glazing into the CGI, it was time to go. I reached for my iPod, put on George Harrison, and headed for the monorail.
Today, something — I no longer remember what — triggered a memory of a Virginia Woolf quote, from To The Lighthouse. It was a vague, flickering memory, and I could hardly remember the meat of the passage. So I went looking through my copy of To The Lighthouse, probably not opened since sophomore year, and thumbed through the 20-year-old me’s underlines and bent-back page corners. I don’t think I quite understood the book, though I think I thought I did at the time. I found the quote without too much trouble…
…like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. …Still, if he could reach R it would be something.
…but felt little connection to the vast meaning I once thought it had. We tend to think of books strictly as unchanging vessels of information. That is, a book on my shelf exists precisely so I can find the page with the words that contain the knowledge I desire. But books are very much temporal experiences, and reading one is an action that one takes, same as going to the market or climbing a mountain. My memories of To The Lighthouse are dreamy and indistinct, possessing autonomy equal to memories of things I actually physically did during the same period of time as I read it.
When I thought of the above quote, I was remembering it as an experience: a eureka! moment that occurred only after I’d read the previous 33 pages. It was information I am now unable to access, the words — the same, exact words — lingering on the page, teasing.
“Frosted Ambassador Suite” – The Olivia Tremor Control (download here)
from Those Sessions EP, recorded 18 March 1997 with John Peel
“Through My Tears > Oh Comely > Now There Is Nothing” – Neutral Milk Hotel (download here)
recorded 14 September 1997, Broad River Outpost, Danielsville, GA
“Trombone Dixie” – The Beach Boys/Marbles (aka Robert Schneider) (download here)
via Optical Atlas
recorded 1992
(non-Marbles files expire on June 29th)
Ah, Jah bless Brewster Kahle and archive.org. Via their most rocking Wayback Machine, I recovered the Signal To Noise article I wrote, er, way back about a trip to Athens, Georgia to “find” Elephant 6. In a lot of ways, I was pretty naive and a few years too late. In other ways, I wasn’t. Maybe they’re not putting out records as furiously as they once did, but that’s life, and the facts of that make this group of people no less extraordinary. If anything, it makes them more so.
Here’s an E6 sunshine fix for while you read, a pair of live suites from Neutral Milk Hotel and the Olivia Tremor Control, and an obscurity from Apples in Stereo leader Robert Schneider. “Through My Tears > Oh Comely > Now There Is Nothing” is pure psych-punk joy, hot from the soundboard, shortly after the band returned to Georgia after recording In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. The Olivas’ “Frosted Ambassador” suite — this version is from a John Peel session — is considerably more considered, and (to me) perfectly captures the feeling of watching the sun rise after a long, strange night. “Trombone Dixie,” meanwhile, is a young Schneider’s bedroom attempt to finish one of Brian Wilson’s incomplete instrumental beds from the Pet Sounds sessions.
The fourth in anongoingcollection of functional webpages and dork tools (excluding any/all Google programs).
o Newsroom Navigator — A veritable almanac of useful links to stuff like telephone directories, government records, reference sources, and tons of other pages, designed for the staff of the New York Times.
o VideoDownloader — A Firefox plug-in to save streaming videos.
o Audio Hijack — An application save streaming audio.
o UsersManualGuide.com — A mind-boggling list of PDFs of users’ manuals for just about any piece of equipment you can think of.
o WikiHow.com –“The world’s largest how-to manual,” they boast, and they might be right. Definitely an interesting use of the wiki. I haven’t played with this site too much yet, but it’s good to know about. (Thanks, Holly!)
“Clementine” – The Decemberists (download here)
from Castaways and Cutouts (2002)
released by Hush (buy)
(file expires on June 27th.)
At first, I thought I liked The Decemberists because they sounded like Neutral Milk Hotel. As Colin Meloy’s surreality transformed into theatricality, though, I realized that it wasn’t Meloy’s Magnumtude that did it for me (though it was a fine entry point), but — on Castaways and Cutouts, anyway — the understated loveliness with which he delivered. “Clementine” is weary and beautiful. It’s folky and plain and uncheeky in a way that seems increasingly foreign to The Decemberists’ recordings. But forget what they’ve become, ’cause this is just great. Meloy sounds tired, and the song comes out a lullaby, as much as for the singer as for the audience. The pedal steel is well used, avoiding staid country tropes, and blending warmly with the accordion to create something unique. I think it is time for bed.
“Woman” – Devendra Banhart (download here)
from Cripple Crow (2005)
released by XL (buy)
(file expires on June 23rd)
Drunk dial from an old flame today. Those things happen in this type of weather, this glorious post-spring warmth before the reality of summer arrives like a smothering veil. The nights have been particularly generous, cool cross-breezes rolling into my room and over my bed. It lures me into staying up later and later to enjoy it. Sleep comes perfectly on nights like this, and I want to prolong the pleasure of that as long as possible, and try to forget the direct sunlight, magnified by the windows, that will burn me like a bug come morning. I won’t think of the cruel half-sleep I am forced into long before alarm rings. I won’t think of that at all.
The newsman sez that the Beach Boys “reunited” the other day, which apparently means that Mike Love and Brian Wilson met on the roof of Capitol Records for a promotional event and managed to have a public conversation without slapping the other with a lawsuit. The Beach Boys’ story is one act in a long family saga that didn’t get too particularly weird until the Boys themselves came around.
From all [Brian Wilson] had been taught, from every risk taken in his own family tree, from what he could see and guess about the pain in his milieu and its sources, he believed he had no choice but to trust in the power of improvisation.
Southern California was itself an improvisation. As a Los Angeles newspaper columnists of decades past once quipped, in these parts “tomorrow isn’t another day, it’s another town.” Like his sunshine-bound forebears, Brian Wilson believed in the idea of California more than the fact of himself, feeling that the energy focused on the romantic concept could carry over into the substance of his existence.
The impossible hope that runs through this story live a river, bending, swerving, and nearly reversing itself over the course of five generations, is that California could eventually expand to become more than a mere destination, that the land of sun would finally fulfill its unreal promise as Improvisation Rewarded — the shortcuts of heart songs alchemized into the intricate accomplishment of a sonata.
So, the name of the new Bob Dylan album, due out August 29th on Columbia, is Modern Times. In name, anyway, it is good and resonant and oh-so-Boblike, both perfectly vague and utterly precise. It’s also a bit ambitious, a tad pretentious, and surely not a little tongue-in-cheek, but — hey — that’s why he’s Dylan. The first point of reference that pops to my mind is the classic Charlie Chaplin picture. I’m also reminded, to a lesser extent, of the two “Hard Times” — Charles Dickens’ novel and Stephen Foster’s song (which Dylan covered on 1992’s Good As I Been To You — both of which use the title phrase as synonymous for “modern times.”
It’s wonderfully multi-purpose, too. The first page of Google results (without quotes) returns listings for the Chaplin flick, a San Francisco book store, and an outfit that operates Scandinavian television stations. Searching with quotes, one also discovers a Chicago furniture outlet. And the Google Book results? Rural France, contemporary Japan, mathematical thought, Jews of the Middle East and North Africa, Don Quixote, 20th century storytelling, and those are just in the first ten hits. It is a phrase that is as well-circulated as it is slippery. Go ahead, try to define it.
In the liner notes to 1993’s World Gone Wrong, Dylan described the music of the Mississippi Sheiks as “raw to the bone and… faultlessly made for these modern times (the New Dark Ages).”
UPDATE: RollingStone.com’s new blog has some more details, including a few song titles: “Ain’t Talkin’,” “Thunder on the Mountain,” “Spirit on the Water,” “Workingman’s Blues,” “When the Deal Goes Down,” and “Neddy More.”
“Saints” – The Breeders (download here)
from Last Splash (1994)
released by 4AD (buy)
(file expires on June 19th.)
It being summer and all, I’ve been cranking the summer jamz. This weekend, I dug on The Breeders, whose indie-surf-punk masterpiece Last Splash is top-to-bottom great. It’s heretical, I suppose, but I actually like The Breeders a good bit more than The Pixies (at least if one measures “like” by how often he actually listens to the music).
At the same time that I love Last Splash and find choruses like “summer is ready when you are!” to be absolutely irresistible, I also acknowledge that it falls oddly in the pantheon. There are certain albums that I hold very dear that could hardly be called groundbreaking; they’ve just burned themselves into my consciousness, somehow, and become special, despite being generic in some way or another.
It is safe to say that there are few albums like Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. It creates a unique space. By contrast, I suspect that there are probably a half-dozen albums that’ve been made this year that could’ve grabbed me in much the same way as Last Splash (or The Raconteurs’ Broken Boy Soldiers). But they didn’t, or haven’t yet, likely because I didn’t cross paths with them when I was looking for an album like that. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea I think I would have found no matter what.
But Last Splash‘s atmospheric distorto-slide guitars, and “Saints” (with the awesome aforementioned chorus), have traveled with me for some time now. “Saints” goes particularly well on a mix before or after “Snail Shell” by They Might Be Giants.
“Yellow Sun” – The Raconteurs (download here)
from Broken Boy Soliders (2006)
released by V2 (buy)
(file expires June 16th.)
There’s so much very-good music out there that finding something really remarkable becomes a surprisingly difficult task. Sometimes, I fret that my inner harddrive has filled up, and that I’ll never fall in love with a new album again, and have it — most every song — be part of me. I’m honestly not sure how long The Raconteurs’ Broken Boy Soldiers will stick with me. But, if one function of an album is to be a collection of little moments that I remember (and hopefully smile at) when I’m not listening to it, then — this season, anyway — Broken Boy Soldiers is pure sugar. There are parts that are pure fluff, but catchy-ass, immensely likeable fluff.
“Yellow Sun” isn’t my favorite song on the album (that’d probably be “Intimate Secretary”), but two separate hooks have sunk their teeth into me of late. The first is the way Brendan Benson sings “the phase of the moon,” with a little melodic swoop on the “of the.” I went around for days trying to figure out what song it was from. The second is the way the Rhodes sounds against the strummed acoustic guitar. It’s just a really pleasing, appropriate combination.
Oddly, the parts of the song I really love and remember all take place in the first minute-and-a-half. After that, Benson and Jack White dismantle the innocence of the first two verses (“and if the sun should follow us into your room, the courage would be robbed from me, to tell you the truth”), which is a totally clever way to introduce a narrative, just neat songwriting, but not what releases the happy stuff into my brain. And that’s okay, because when I think about the song, I — by definition — rarely remember any of the things that aren’t hooks, and when I actually listen to it, it’s clever enough to sustain.
Much of Broken Boy Soldiers is imperfect, but much of it isn’t, especially when the sun is out.
Keith Johnstone’s Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre was unofficially required reading for a group of friends near the end of college. Though nominally about, well, improvisation and theater, Johnstone’s very British writing about human interaction is lucid and fantastic. His work on status, especially, is a useful way to think about any relationship, be it between people, objects, or some combination thereof.
1. from ‘A psychotic girl’
We were in a beautiful garden (where the teenager had just seen God) and the teacher picked a flower and said: ‘Look at the pretty flower, Betty.’
Betty, filled with spiritual radiance, said, ‘All the flowers are beautiful.’
Betty rolled on the ground screaming, and it took a while to calm her. Nobody seemed to notice that she was screaming ‘Can’t you see? Can’t you see!’
In the gentlest possible way, this teacher had been very violent. She was insisting on categorising, and on selecting. Actually it is crazy to insist that one flower is especially beautiful in a whole garden of flowers, but the teacher is allowed to do this, and is not perceived by sane people as violent. Grown-ups are expected to distort the perceptions of a child in this way.
2. from ‘Status’
‘Try to get your status just a little above or below your partner’s,’ I said, and I insisted that the gap should be minimal. The actors seemed to know exactly what I meant and the work was transformed. The scenes became ‘authentic,’ and actors seemed marvelously observant. Suddenly we understood that every inflection and movement implies a status, and that no action is due to chance, or really ‘motiveless.’ It was hysterically funny, but at the same time very alarming. All our secret manoeuvrings were exposed. If someone asked a question we didn’t both to answer it, we concentrated on why it had been asked. No one could make an ‘innocuous’ remark without everyone instantly grasping what lay behind it. Normally, we are ‘forbidden’ to see status transactions except when there’s a conflict. In reality, status transactions continue all the time. In the park we’ll notice the ducks squabbling, but not how carefully they keep their distances when they are not.
– A rush of water through pipes.
– Bells, followed by train. Repeat.
– Wind, trees rustling.
– The occasional distant squeal of breaks.
– House guests in sleep loft; loft creaking slightly.
– Truck reversing, bleeping.
– Truck discharging air brakes.
– Desk chair.
– Humming electronics: Christmas lights, stereo, computer.
– Another reversing truck, still further away. .
– Car accelerating.
– Another car, with a squeaky frame, going by.
– A faint industrial stamping.
– Fingers on keyboard.
– Car being started, wheezing past.
– A chorus of idling motors (possibly imaginary).
– Something metallic, dragged for a moment on the asphalt.
– Something plastic, blown briefly down the sidewalk.
– Car horn, honked once, far away.
– Two other cars bellowing responses like foghorns.
Also, the cinnamon smell of the cake factory.
“Halifax” – Hampton Grease Band (download here)
released on Music To Eat (1971)
reissued by Columbia/Shotput (1996) (buy)
(file expires on June 13th.)
Since quitting the Aquarium Rescue Unit in 1994, Col. Bruce Hampton (ret.) has sort of lost himself in translation. While successfully elucidating his doctrine via Mike Gordon’s 2001 film, Outside Out, it’s been a while since Hampton’s music has been as weird as it’s often made out to be — which, in turn, makes a lotta people wonder what the big deal is. Smaller chunks of the Big Deal involve Hampton’s waaaaay-underground ’80s cassettes under band names like “The Late Bronze Age” ( reissued by Terminus in 2001).
But the main chunk of the Big Deal was, and remains, the Hampton Grease Band, whose 1971 Music To Eat was purportedly the second-worst selling double-LP in Columbia Records’ history. The two brilliant discs are a treasure trove of Southern avant-hippie wankery of the first order, somewhere between Frank Zappa and the Allman Brothers’ jazzier moments.
The occasion of this post was, initially, the 40th anniversary of the events described in the Grease Band’s “Six.” Frankly, though, the album opener, “Halifax,” is just much better: a “focused” 19-minute tour through Hampton’s inner Halifax (“six thousand six hundred and thirty eight miles of grated road! And a lot of gravel, too!”) while the band epically freaks out in multi-sectioned bliss. It is a blueprint for jam-prog strangeness that not even Phish ever matched.
In some ways, Hampton is only icing on his bandmates’ performances. He doesn’t play an instrument, he only sings (if one can call it that). And that’s basically what he’s done for his whole career. There is a temptation to call him a charlatan — which, of course, he is — but he is a charlatan who, for a very long period of time, seemed to consistently catalyze extraordinarily talented individuals to create something distinct and, well, Bruce-like. Hampton’s been brandishing the “retired” suffix for well over a decade. Appearing on only one cut on the forthcoming Codetalkers album, though, it looks like he actually might be. Maybe.
The suicide of former Grateful Dead keyboardist Vince Welnick on Friday saddened me in a way I couldn’t have predicted. As a latter-day Deadhead, I never had much use for him. In large part, that is because his tenure fell during Jerry Garcia’s final half-decade, a period of terminal musical decline. In the proverbial history book, Welnick is a footnote.
But he was also a real dude, who — until last week — was busting his ass trying to make a living playing keyboards (most recently with various Dead cover bands). His story, as posted by his friend Mike Lawson, is heartbreaking. Welnick was depressed, Lawson writes, because his ex-bandmates never invited to any of the periodic Dead regroupings. This, in part, seems to have happened because — while on tour with Bob Weir and Ratdog — Welnick overdosed in the back of the bus, and was subsequently shoved unceremoniously into a cab and sent to the emergency room as a John Doe.
There’s more, of course, throughout both Lawson’s post and the subsequent thread. In a way, with its neat and logical narrative, it makes perfect sense of what happened — something extraordinarily rare. But just because the story makes sense and has an ending doesn’t mean that anything is resolved, or better. Sometimes, the music just doesn’t work, and that might be the scariest ending of all.
“Screenwriter’s Blues” – Soul Coughing (download here)
from Ruby Vroom (1994)
released by Epic (buy)
“Screenwriter’s Blues” – Soul Coughing (download here)
recorded 3 February 1997, Tokyo, Japan
released by Kufala (buy)
“Screenwriter’s Blues” – Soul Coughing (download here)
recorded 15 June 1992, Knitting Factory, New York City, NY
(files expire on June 9th.)
I busted out Soul Coughing’s Ruby Vroom while doing the dishes tonight, and re-fell in love with an old favorite, “Screenwriter’s Blues.” The album version, of course, is the proverbial Platonic motherfucker. That is, it’s good and definitive. I love Doughty’s mythical descriptor, “and men built a Los Angeles,” as if there could be more than one. Mark de Gli Antoni’s cyclical horn sample is the sonic equivalent of “the imperial violet” cast when “the sun has charred the other side and come back to us.” The whole song boils down to that, and the way Doughty sounds the word “luminous,” disappearing into a wispy, baubled L.A., like a city encased in a raindrop.
The jammy-jam 10-minute live version, recorded in Tokyo in 1997 (and released as part of Kufala’s great Soul Coughing archival series), expands on this vibe. Doughty launches into the spoken word over an ambient noir-groove. Imperceptibly and impeccably, the band snaps from their sparse weirdness into a complete reimagining of the song that occasionally calls on elements of the original recording, but is mostly just its own unique entity.
A mostly unformed rendition from an early Knitting Factory gig, in June 1992, reveals exactly how much work went into the song. The idea is there, clearly. “You see the grid of light below the plane descending on the airport,” Doughty recites during one of the song’s better excised lines, but it clearly needed some editorial attention — which it thankfully got — not to mention some music beyond a drum groove. Nearly all of the song’s final lines are present in some variation. The creative process in action, though only really relevant as a footnote to the other two versions.
Over the weekend, I lent my friend Mike a copy of Gates of Eden, a book of short stories by Ethan Coen of the Coen brothers. Each piece is like a miniature, unmade Coens’ picture. “Have You Ever Been To Electric Ladyland” (a statement, not a question, in the hands of Coen) is one of my favorites.
The opening two graphs of the story still blow my mind. In 93 words, Coen establishes a legit voice with its own phrasing, a rough sense of who is speaking, who he is interacting with, and (most importantly) a momentum, propelled by the fact that something has happened. And it all sounds, uh, Coenesque taboot, filled with awkwardly incomplete thoughts, nervous side-chatter, and an often subliminal throughline. The whole story is just masterfully timed and well worth reading.
I don’t know. I do not know. A sick fuck. A sick, twisted motherfuck, that much is obvious.
An individual name does not come to mind. I’m not saying it was a stranger. Though it could be. Senseless, random. Or not random. A stranger, but not random. Because, officer, if you have, like me, a certain renown, name in the papers, well — I don’t have to tell you that there are nuts out there. You know that better than anyone. A lot of nuts. And this, clearly — this is nut’s work.
Only in print:
o June Relix (Pete Townshend cover): album reviews of Billy Martin, Billy Martin and Grant Calvin Weston, Steve Reid and Kieran Hebden, Glenn Kotche, Marley’s Ghost, Johnny Cash; live review of the Rhythm Devils; DVD review of Leo Kottke.
o Paste #22 (Bob Dylan cover): Jeff Tweedy entry in “100 Best Living Songwriters feature, album review of The Raconteurs.
o May Hear/Say (Taking Back Sunday cover): album reviews of Danielson and Elf Power.
There’s an old SubGenius maxim that runs that if Satan can use the Scriptures to his own ends, then SubGenius slackmaster J.R. “Bob” Dobbs can quote anything to prove anything. Reading pop psychology can sometimes feel like that. Harvard prof Daniel Gilbert and his thoroughly enjoyable Stumbling on Happiness are cut from the same contrarian cloth as New Yorker staffer Malcolm Gladwell (who gives good blurb on the book’s Amazon page).
Gilbert hangs his arguments about what makes humans happy from a narrative of anecdotes. In short, he says, “when we think of events in the distant past or distant future we tend to think abstractly about why they happened or will happen, but when we think of events in the near past or near future we tend to think concretely about how they happened or will happen.” This is what we must consider, he argues, when we think about how to be happy (which, presumably, is what we want).
The endless stream of footnoted studies is powerfully dizzying. In one test, subjects “imagined the poster on their wall, noted how they felt when they did so, and assumed that if imagining the poster on the wall made them feel good, then actually seeing it on their wall would probably do the same. And they were right.” Score one for intuition. But 25 or so pages earlier, Gilbert writes that “when humankind imagines the future, it rarely notices what imagination has missed — and the missing pieces are much more important than we realize.” So… we shouldn’t trust intuition?
At one point, Gilbert uses graphs to show that eating at the same restaurant over and over can be clinically more satisfying than eating at a variety of restaurants over the same period of time — which goes a long way towards justifying my San Loco obsession, but could just be rhetorical fancy-pantsing (or, in other words: anything to prove anything).
Surprisingly, the end result of Stumbling on Happiness is a cohesive composite of a deeply elusive emotion. Gilbert never puts his finger on exactly what happiness is, but who could? Instead, he provides a vocabulary (see: “presentism,” “pre-feeling,” etc.), to chart its idiosyncratic dartings. If that all sounds a l’il fuzzy and self-helpy, then I suppose it is, but Gilbert offers no cure-alls, just methods of observing one’s own thoughts mid-flight. Sure, Dobbs or Gilbert can use anything to prove anything, but Gilbert has chosen to prove the existence of happiness, and that’s not such a bad goal to have.
I, meanwhile, had to prepare for a World Series not against Baltimore and Mr. Brooks Robinson, but against Charlie Finley’s Oakland A’s: mustaches, mules, and all.
We were the bad guys. It was 1972, the streets belonged to the people, flower children were alive and well, and the Cincinnati Reds were the Establishment being shoved up against the wall by the A’s from Berkeley.
We wore white suits at home, gray on the road, with low-cut socks and black polished spikes. They wore gold, green, and white uniforms in every combination, shiny high-cut silks, and white spikes.
We were clean-shaven with trimmed, short hair (Pete still wore a flat top) and no sideburns. They were longhairs, with sideburns and mustaches — thanks to Charlie Finley’s contest to see who could grow the most stylish upper lip — and the results were muttonchops, handlebars, and Fu Manchus.
…Before the series began in Cincinnati, I got together with Reggie Jackson and went out for something to eat. … Later I drove him back to the hotel, Reggie was on crutches, and when we went up past a few players’ rooms, I smelled the sweet, unmistakable odor of marijuana. A couple of the Oakland A’s, the American League representatives in the World Series, were smoking dope. That really shook me. I thought, “How in the world can they be doing this?” (pp. 109-111)
2.
1973 National League Championship Series, versus the Mets
“Grab a bat!” I yell. “Everybody grab a bat! Make sure Pete gets off the field.”
Sparky takes it up, mobilizing the whole team into a civil defense corps. We’ll go out there swinging to get him if we have to. Our hitter slaps a grounder, Pete runs a few steps toward second, then dashes for our dugout.
“Here they come!” someone shouts, and the fans are pouring over the walls and onto the field. Pete bulls his way, knocks a few kids on their cans, and makes it into the dugout. By now the people are on the dugout roof and coming over the top. I stand there with the fat part of a bat in my hand. I swing at a kid who comes at me and rap him in the shins. I can hear the thwock against the bone. He yelps and drops back and others back off. (p. 144)
“Meet the Mets” – Yo La Tengo (download here)
from Yo La Tengo Is Murdering the Classics (2006)
released by Egon
(file expires on May 31st.)
Every one of the 30 tossed-off covers on the terrible-by-any-objective-standard Yo La Tengo Is Murdering the Classics will be endearing to somebody; the only question is which one. It’s kind of a neat effect, and it makes the band seem that much more personal. For me, it’s “Meet the Mets,” the closest the team (from whose lore YLT drew their name) ever came to a theme jingle. Though it was recently replaced — officially, anyway — by the metallic shit-pop production “Our Team, Our Time,” “Meet the Mets” still gets an early inning airing and sing-along. Young Manhattanite recently posted a delightful mp3 history of the Mets’ various songs over the years.
(Visible under the 7-train tracks is the Casey Stengel bus depot.)
(“Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” 7th inning stretch.)
Walking from home plate at Shea Stadium, across second base, through the outfield, over the fence and to the other side of the parking lot, one arrives in Willets Point, a sprawling near-shantytown of car repair places. Before tonight’s five-hour, 16-inning blowout victory against the Phillies, Tony and I wandered through Willets Point at Magic Hour. The roads were unpaved and riddled with puddles. There were chop shops, pre-fab warehouses, body specialists, and lots filled with tires. Tony said it felt like being suddenly transported to a third world nation. He wasn’t wrong. It was pure urban anarchy.
When the Mets’ new stadium goes up in a few years, it’s a sure bet that somebody will have some whizbang revitalization plans that will involve the removal of the unsightly car repair places (the cheapest in the boroughs, supposedly) currently clogging up valuable waterfront real estate. For now, though, the scrap metal glows in the Queens County sunset.
“Feels Blind” – Bikini Kill (download here)
from Bikini Kill EP (1991)
compiled on The C.D. Version of the First Two Records (1994)
released by Kill Rock Stars (buy)
(file expires on May 30th.)
Sometime during junior high school, at summer camp, my friend (a girl, it should be noted) played me Bikini Kill’s “Feels Blind.” I was just learning to play guitar, and the three-note riff was irresistible. I loved how it started off clean with the nice neat martial beat, and then the band just went apeshit. The intro verse was lovely, I thought: a clever melody and cool lyrics, and then it just disappeared into the full-throttle punk-rawkness of it all — and that was awesome, too! And then Kathleen Hanna was screaming something about how “as a woman, I was taught to be hungry.” Then, the climactic chant: “I eat your hate like love.” Needless to say, we played it in our summer camp band (we were called “Umlaut” that year). She played bass. I was part of the unnecessary army of guitarists. It was fun.
And sometime after that, while visiting the aforementioned girl in DC, I bought myself Bikini Kill’s The C.D. Version of the First Two Records on a label called “Kill Rock Stars” (which seemed plenty provocative to the 15-year old me). When I showed off my purchase, I was told, basically, that I wasn’t allowed to listen to Bikini Kill. They were a riot grrl band, and — as a guy — it wasn’t for me. That bummed me out a lot. At the same time that Bikini Kill intended to create an inclusionary safe-space for girls, I was genuinely hurt by being excluded from this music that my friend herself had introduced me to. It was the first and last riot grrl CD I bought. Our friendship didn’t last much beyond that.
A few things happen when a favorite artist doesn’t put out an album for a few years. The first is that the already-existing catalogue ossifies into what seems like a closed canon. The second, and basically inverse, reaction is the lingering fear that the next project is going to be the shitty one, the one where the star ratings in the AllMusic.com discography suddenly jag downwards. Hearing new songs in advance of a new record can be exciting, if scary. What may’ve seemed like a perfectly balanced body of work suddenly needs to admit something new; and one must make room in whatever his conception of the band is.
This week, both Yo La Tengo’s “Beanbag Chair” and Wilco’s “Is That The Thanks I Get?” made the cyber-rounds. I am still assimilating, though I have happily listened to “Beanbag Chair” many times, but have been semi-afraid to take a second glance at “Is That The Thanks…,” for fear it might confirm my initial impression. Likewise, a friend directed me towards a page of live recordings from the current Radiohead tour, including much of their new material. I have not yet had a chance to listen (see above).
Because I like the moon, a bit of Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino:
How well I know!–old Qfwfq cried,–the rest of you can’t remember, but I can. We had her on top of us all the time, that enormous Moon: when she was full–nights as bright as day, but with a butter-colored light–it looked as if she were going to crush us; when she was new, she rolled around the sky like a black umbrella blown by the wind; and when she was waxing, she came forward with her horns so low she seemed about to stick into the peak of a promontory and get caught there…
There were nights when the Moon was full and very, very low, and the tide was so high that the Moon missed a ducking in the sea by a hair’s-breadth; well, let’s say a few yards anyway. Climb up on the Moon? Of course we did. All you had to do was row out to it in a boat and, when you were underneath, prop a ladder against her and scramble up.
“John Wesley Harding” – Wilco (download here)
“I Shall Be Released” – Wilco (download here)
recorded 5 March 2005, Vic Theater, Chicago, IL
(files expire on May 24th.)
I love when I listen to a good live recording so often that I know it as well as an album, accidentally have the banter memorized, can identify its sound instantly when it comes on shuffle, and the likes. One of my favorites is a Jeff Tweedy solo gig from last March, which concluded with Wilco joining him onstage for the final encore. It is paced perfectly with a vibe all its own, perfect for long Sunday mornings. It doesn’t hurt that the recording is a rich and beautiful soundboard. During the encore, Tweedy & co. played a pair of reverent Bob Dylan covers, “John Wesley Harding” and “I Shall Be Released” that I am extraordinarily glad to have in my collection. Especially in the case of the former — the title track from Dylan’s stark, well-aged masterpiece — Tweedy picked well.
With lyrics that scan like terse prose, The Mountain Goats’ Tallahassee paints a disintegrating marriage of an “alpha couple” in suburban Florida with sympathetic, literate strokes. Achieving a rare mopeless melancholy, John Darnielle’s songs are rendered with a subtly glorious production: a tapped cymbal here, a wash of static there. If concept albums tend to reach for the bombastic arcs of opera for their inspiration, then Tallahassee finds its forebears in the understated drama of Raymond Carver and John Cheever’s short fiction. Darnielle’s couple could be anybody anywhere, but they’re in Florida, in the lush air, and there’s no mistaking anything about them.
“Comin’ Correct” (live) – RANA (download here)
from Subject To Change (2003)
released by Rockslide
“Buy, Sell or Break” – RANA (download here)
from What It Is (2004)
released by RANA/Bone Saw Records
(files expire on May 22nd)
RANA played long and late and raucous at the Knitting Factory on Saturday. Three-quarters of the way through the set, back to back, they jammed their great lost/unrecorded double-A-side 7-inch: Comin’ Correct (Metzger) b/w Buy, Sell or Break (Durant). I’m not sure how the world would be different had it ever been released, let alone recorded, but these two songs live together in my mind. Here are the two songs, in marginally less than Platonic form.
Okay, so the name wunderkammern-twenty-seven-dot-com doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, I admit it. Neither does Jesse-Jarnow-dot-com, but at least it’s (sorta) easier to remember. In an act of rare common sense, I finally bought the domain over the weekend and set it to forward over here. Y’know, in case that makes life easier for you or anything…
o YouTube has the original, 1994 short film of Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket. I’m looking forward to watching this one. (Yepyep, Kottke.)
o A list of various “open content” projects currently occurring in Brazil, including details about Gilberto Gil and John Perry Barlow’s Canto Livre program, which aims to digitize Brazilian culture, assign Creative Commons licenses, and distribute via peer-to-peer networks. See also the Estudio Livre program, a series of public, government-funded recording studios run on open source software.
o The second episode of Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour is available for free via the same route as the first. (username: press1, password: xmr0ck5!) It is a great pleasure to come back from a night out and be able to fire up the freshy Bobmix. (Big ups, Expecting Rain.)
Apropos of absolutely nothing, a quote from Struggles and Triumphs, the 1869 autobiography of P.T. Barnum. Here, Barnum describes the burning of his second American Museum, where mermaid bones were displayed side by side with genuine artifacts:
The cold was so intense that the water froze almost as soon as it left the house of the fire engines; and when at last everything was destroyed, except the front granite wall of the Museum building, that and the ladder, signs, and lamp-posts in front, were covered in a gorgeous framework of transparent ice, which made it altogether one of the most picturesque scenes imaginable. Thousands of persons congregated daily in that locality in order to get a view of the magnificent ruins. By moonlight, the ice-coated ruins were still more sublime, and for many days and nights the old Museum was ‘the observed of all observers,’ and photographs were taken by several artists.
“Ragtime Nightingale” – David Boeddinghaus (download here)
from Crumb soundtrack (1995)
released by Rykodisc (buy)
(file expires on May 17th)
Even without an inch of vinyl crackle, ragtime pioneer Joseph Lamb’s “Ragtime Nightingale” sounds mysterious and old. One gets the sense, though, that the song has exactly the same emotional impact as it did when it was first composed; that it is not simply the nostalgia of listening to ragtime in the early 21st century, but an objective emotional effect of the music. It’s just beautiful. The genre’s signature rhythmic force gives shape to the melody, which is so closely entwined that it is almost elusive, a shadow turning within a shadow.
“Down in the Valley” – Pete Seeger (download here)
from American Favorite Ballads, v. 1 (1957)
released by Smithsonian Folkways (buy)
(file expires on May 12th)
Pete Seeger was my first hero, plain and simple. My parents played me a lot of his records when I was very young, most especially his American Favorite Ballads series. I have distinct memories of their tinted, block-printed covers on the big, mysterious record sleeves. He was probably the first professional musician I saw perform. I got to interview Pete two months back, and it was one of the most deeply satisfying experiences I’ve ever had. It’s been nice to see him get some attention lately, with Bruce Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions disc, and the subsequent New Yorker profile of Pete. Seeger’s music is lily white. When, on the elegiac “Down in the Valley,” he sings, “write me a letter, send it by mail, send it in care of Birmingham jail,” one wonders what the hell somebody so mild-mannered could possibly be jailed for. Seeger was jailed, though, for refusing to name names before Joseph McCarthy’s House un-American Activities Committee.
I didn’t know any of that when I was a kid, though, nor did I even question Pete’s authority about being jail. It seemed so obviously a song, a play of some kind. There is no authenticity to Pete Seeger’s performances of American folk ballads, at least in the sense that — owing to his ridiculously button-down voice, his earnest presentation — Seeger is so obviously presenting songs. That, Seeger implicitly says, is what one should be listening to anyway. There is a backwards transcendence to Pete’s version of “Down in the Valley.” It’s as corny as it comes, but there’s no mistaking the beautiful, lingering melody at the center. Seeger is not interpreting the song, he is simply singing it. And, while he may have political reasons for doing so, he’s still doing so, and that’s something still rare and wonderful.
Before the game, the announcer announced that it was Asian Night. As such, there would be a performance of “traditional Korean music and dance.” Nothing more specific, just “traditional.” From the visiting dugout paraded a troupe of dancers and hand percussionists. A man played long, piercing drones on a horn. Processed through the tinny scoreboard P.A., the horn cut through the stadium din with stunning clarity.
When the dancers were done, men began banging on a massive drum set up by the Mets’ dugout. Again, no explanation, just booms. At first, they didn’t come through the speakers, and we could only hear the drums, muffled and indistinct, like distant fireworks. When they were piped through the P.A., there was an unbelievable echo, almost literally the dimensions that Jamaica’s early dub astronauts were trying to create. And again, the crowd — or those paying attention, anyway — were totally boggled. The speakers were cut off quickly.
If I was a kid there, I think I’d have to be totally intrigued, especially by the mysterious, ricocheting horn. It would’ve been like discovering music through the crackle of library-loaned vinyl, or from the erratic signal of the college radio station a few towns over. There was no scholarship to the presentation, and it was awesome (if maybe accidentally so, at least for that). “Let’s have a big Shea Stadium hand,” the announcer announced. Some people clapped politely, and the buoyant pre-recorded organ played again. .
“Three Woman Blues” – The Wowz (download here)
from Go Figure EP (2006) self-(un)released
(file expires on May 10th.)
On “Three Woman Blues,” The Wowz set their hootenannic anti-folk over a beat that recalls Brazilian baile-funk (especially the recurring two-note electro-whistle melody). The verses are pure amphetamine-era Dylan (“Jet Pilot,” specifically), but the dropped chorus is all Wowz: “I wouldn’t be a misogynist, if my heart didn’t hurt as bad as this.” The ragged harmonies are ace, as are their musical equivalent in the sloppy/ecstatic lightning-shot guitar break that leads to the middle-eight. My favorite line, sung good ‘n’ dry, is there: “She moves in a stupid way / and she’s, like, obsessed with putting things away.” Not ready to be manic yourself? Well, dig the upswings vicariously through the Wowz.
“The Mountain Low” – Palace Music (download here)
from Viva Last Blues (1995)
released by Drag City (buy)
(file expires on May 9th.)
I’m a sucker for a good first line anywhere, be it a novel or a newspaper or a song, and — holy “Bob” — does Will Oldham’s “The Mountain Low” have one. “If I could fuck a mountain,” Oldham sings, “Lord, I would fuck a mountain.”
“There are so many ways you can go at something in a song,” Bob Dylan told Robert Hillburn last year. “One thing is to give life to inanimate objects. Johnny Cash is good at that. He’s got the line goes, ‘A freighter said, “She’s been here, but she’s gone, boy, she’s gone.”‘ That’s great. ‘A freighter says, “She’s been here.”‘ That’s high art. If you do that once in a song, you usually turn it on its head right then and there.”
Oldham twists it from the start. After that, the song settles down into lyrics and a fantastic melody that are basically folk music (or anti-folk or whatever you wanna call a boho duder with an acoustic guitar these days). But that first line just hangs over the song, and informs what’s essentially just a lovely strum with a general sense of dirty, surreal unease.
I love the democracy of YouTube. Search for “Wilco,” and the first results (for now, anyway), include unofficial music videos, what appears to be a Dutch school play (whose keywords include “robot,” “funny,” “hardcore,” and “zelfgemaakt”), and some kids partying in the basement of a dude named Wilco. Then comes footage of the band, but first shaky audience-shot bootlegs, before finally getting to the TV appearances and music videos, and Wilco covers by random people who thought it’d be a swell idea to cover Wilco and put it on YouTube.
I made my Associated Press debut today, with a story about last week’s circuit bending festival. It’s been picked up by the websites of (at least) 42 news organizations, including the Washington Post, Canada.com, the Chicago Tribune, and the Local News Leader in Olberlin, Kansas. Whee. I’m not sure if that means it’ll be the treeware editions, too, but maybe? For some reason, the San Jose Mercury News has filed it as “gossip.” If you haven’t looked at ’em yet, I posted somepictures, too.
MLB.com’s Gameday interface is a pretty ginchy way to follow a ballgame without the TV or radio interrupting work. The window automatically updates with a striking amount of information about the game as it happens (albeit with a 10-or-so second delay), all of which can be perceived in quick glances. Once one picks up the rhythm of the page reloads and toggling between other projects, the pace creates its own drama, and unfolds as such. Key transmissions, such as when runs score, come in bold. Today, I resisted the urge to turn on the radio as the Mets blew a lead in the bottom of the ninth, and beat the Giants in extra innings. It felt even more old-fashioned than radio, like reconstructing a game via telegraph.
Not sure if it’s still available, but XM Radio posted the first episode of the Theme Time Radio Hour With Your Host Bob Dylan (username: press1, password: xmr0ck5!). About a million miles from contemporary radio, it is exactly the type of show I would’ve loved to discover late at night in high school when I was supposed to be asleep. Where Dylan to come on, and were he just a random announcer and not actually Bob Dylan, I would’ve likely thought “who talks like this?” His phrases are occasionally awkward, his spoken recitations of songs’ lyrics kind of hilarious, and his attempt at introducing Stevie Wonder in Italian is endearing.
But I’m equally sure that I would’ve kept listening, because the DJ sounds like he’s from another planet. In a good way, too. “If you think the sun is too hot, at least you don’t have to shovel it,” he says near the end of the weather-themed episode. (“Spoken like a true Minnesotan,” a friend commented.)
The music is great, mostly drawn from that ancient period before, well, Dylan was Dylan. There’s Muddy Waters and the Carter Family, of course. But there’s also Frank Sinatra and Martin, Joe Jones’ proto-surf-rock (“California Sun”) and cinematic Judy Garland (Come Rain or Shine”). There’s calypso (Lord Beginner’s “Jamaica Hurricane”) and tremolo-kissed gospel (The Staples Singers’ “Uncloudy Day”). I can’t say I’m going to subscribe to XM just to get Dylan’s show, but I’ll certainly make an effort to track it down (and would probably even purchase it on a per-episode basis, were that option to be reasonably offered).
I interviewed Mike Love recently for the Middletown Times Herald-Record. They called it “Beach Boy Mike Love at West Point.” I like my headline better: “Unleash the Love.”
And a “hullo” to Times Herald-Record readers.
Please to be enjoying some other Beach Boys-related writing I’ve done.
The following Brian Wilson interview (the most frustrating I’ve ever done) was supposed to have been published in December 2005, around the time of the release of Brian’s What I Really Want For Christmas holiday LP. It didn’t, and — as soon as the New Year rolled around and the album’s press cycle ended — it became instantly unsellable. Here ’tis.
I Know There’s An Answer: Passing the Turing Test With Brian Wilson
by Jesse Jarnow
Brian Wilson has a mindblowing deadpan. At least, that’s the most reassuring explanation.
Having unexpectedly returned to the critical and popular limelight last year with his resurrected 1966 masterwork Smile, the 63 year-old Wilson and his associates seemingly achieved the impossible. As if to affirm that assessment, Wilson has followed the final realization of his greatest accomplishment with its polar opposite: an infinitely unassuming, shinily packaged holiday CD titled What I Really Want For Christmas.
While it’s hyperbole to say (as Wilson’s website does) “that it’s not hyperbole to say that [Wilson’s new songs] are destined to become instant Christmas standards,” What I Really Want For Christmas — which includes a title collaboration with Elton John lyricist Bernie Taupin — is a must-have for anyone who thinks that both Christmas albums and the Beach Boys are pretty nifty ideas. (Others might need more convincing.)
When Wilson led the Beach Boys through the 1964 recording of the #6 charting Beach Boys’ Christmas, it was totally natural. For starters, they were family. Wilson co-founded the band with brothers Dennis and Carl, first cousin Mike Love, and neighbor Al Jardine. What’s more, they were an American family.
“We used to Christmas carol to our neighbors,” Wilson says simply.
What songs did they sing?
“I just remember singing Christmas carols.”
And who was there?
“My family.”
Any particular memories?
“No, we just had a lot of fun doing it.”
“The relationship between the Wilsons and the Loves was very similar to the Hatfields and McCoys,” Love reflected in 2000’s Endless Summer documentary, recalling the legendary Southern families who’d feuded so long that they’d forgotten the origins.
“But there was one time of year [our] families would get together and there was sort of a truce,” Love continued, “and that was Christmastime, when we would do all our Christmas carols and get together musically. After the carols were done, we’d segregate into age groups and do music that was of our time.”
Nowadays, remembering the causes of the Wilson/Love feud isn’t so tough. The Beach Boys’ decades of hits gave way to — like Wes Anderson’s Royal Tenenbaums — “decades of betrayal, failure, and disaster.”
The tension has never been far from the surface. During the ’60s, the two went face-to-face over the contents of the original Smile, and by the mid-’70s Wilson abandoned his band amid drug abuse and depression.
There was late brother Dennis’s marraige to (and child by) alleged Love daughter Shawn Marie Love, and the remaining Beach Boys’ 1991 battle to remove Brian from the care of svenghali psychiatrist Eugene Landy. And there was Love’s late ’90s squabble with Wilson over “Good Vibrations” royalties. Just in time for the holidays is Love’s latest lawsuit, this one over Smile (with some nasty words about Brian’s management on the side).
It’s no wonder that Wilson doesn’t want to speak of Christmases past. Is he going to revive the tradition for Christmases future with his family, which — in addition to grown daughters Carnie and Wendy — now includes three adopted daughters with wife, Melinda?
“No.”
Any reason?
“No, no reason, we’re just not going to.”
At its best, What I Really Want For Christmas evokes Christmas in southern California, plastic reindeer strung afront low-slung bungalows, tinsel wrapped about the drive-through at the burger shack. As he has the since ’60s, Wilson faces down pain with elaborately layered harmonies and bouncy organs.
Christmas — his third album in under two years — is the latest in Wilson’s most productive period since his prime. Besides constant touring, Wilson recently offered to personally telephone any fan that donated $100 or more to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina.
Did he have funny conversations?
“No.”
How many people did he talk to, anyway?
“About 10,” Wilson replies earnestly, with what one strongly hopes is extremely dry wit. (According to Wilson’s office, the pledge drive raised $210,000 in donations via over 500 phone calls by Wilson.)
Those tempted to apply British mathematician Alan Turing’s famed test to determine the difference between human and artificial intelligence would be frustrated. Publicly, anyway, Wilson has long championed harmony over intellect. But who needs to answer questions over the holidays when he can just sing, anyway? Surf’s up, mmmhmmhmm.
“Every Grain of Sand” (demo) – Bob Dylan (download here)
recorded in 1980
from Bootleg Series box set (1991)
released by Columbia Records (buy)
(file expires April 26th)
Given the quality of the work, it might not say a lot that “Every Grain of Sand” is easily my favorite Bob Dylan tune from the ’80s. Shot of Love, from 1981, is called Dylan’s first post-Christian album. But “Every Grain of Sand,” is still very much a religious song, albeit in a more nuanced, less evangelical way than his previous three records. “I hear the ancient footsteps, like the motion of the sea,” Dylan sings, “sometimes I turn, there’s someone there; other times, it’s only me.”
With its reverb-heavy guitars, the official Shot of Love version sounds a bit like a prom ballad, or maybe one of David Lynch’s attempts at noir pop. The demo, released on the inaugural Bootleg Series box set, is more palatable (and a bit faster). The sparse arrangement of Dylan’s piano and Fred Tackett’s guitar is just right. For reasons both topical and musical, I can easily imagine Sufjan Stevens covering this rendition of “Every Grain of Sand,” whispering the lyrics over Kermit-style banjo.
“The Lifting” – R.E.M. (download here)
from Reveal (2001)
released by Warner Bros. (buy)
(file expires on April 24th.)
Being warm out and all, I got some quality roof/sunset time in this weekend. It made me want to listen to Reveal, by R.E.M.. Post-Automatic For the People R.E.M. tends to get a raw deal, I think. Admittedly, the last album wasn’t great (though I owe it another listen), but I think Up and Reveal are legitimate — if modest — records. There are no anthems, but that’s not their place. “The Lifting” is Reveal‘s opener. As soon as Michael Stipe comes in and the chord changes become obvious, it is unmistakably R.E.M.. The whole album is like that: virtual orchestras and noise washes, but there’s never any confusing the band. It’s a unified, unique sound, I think, often hard to place individual instruments.
Like most of my favorite R.E.M. songs (as well as Astral Weeks by Van Morrison), I’ve rarely stopped to think about the lyrics. I can sing along to “The Lifting,” I think (ditto for most of Automatic), but with few exceptions the songs have never cohered into complete thoughts or stories. Key words and phrases get lodged in my head: “seminar,” “sunken cities,” “the air was singing.” I have always associated this song with transcendence in the Sprawl. I think of gorgeous, late afternoon light hitting strip malls, chain restaurants, and parking lots. There is absolutely nothing in the lyrics to support this idea, but that’s what I love about Michael Stipe’s words: they tend to provoke nonsensical interpretations in me. They’re good carriers.
One way the Museum blurs facts into emotional half-truths is through atmosphere. Ostensibly, the Museum is devoted to the scientific, but the theatrical presentation is extraordinarily important. My favorite example is the squid vs. whale battle in the Hall of Ocean Life, where a fake whale battles a fake squid in a dark display case with no glass between the viewer and the subject. But that’s unphotographable, at least with my cell-a-roid.
A close second, and another childhood favorite, is the Gem Room (which I think is actually called the Gem Room). It is dark and circular, with all kinds of ramps and nooks and miniature amphitheaters and artifacts you can actually touch. As a kid, the room felt like a respite, with numerous places to hide and sit (a welcome break for a young biped). Despite the obstacle course Rachel and I had to cross to get there, it still felt that way. I love the vibe of the room.
A few years ago, I made an ambient sound collage out of very quiet FM static and drone-organ designed to be listened to in the Gem Room (as well as with the collection of meteorites next door). Oddly, I still haven’t actually listened to it there. It was called “A Clear Night.”
“Strange Invitation” – Beck (download here)
from Jack-ass single (1997)
released by DGC (buy)
(file expires on April 20th.)
Like “Brazil,” “Jack-ass” is also a durable song. Besides the Odelay version, based on Van Morrison’s cover of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” there’s “Burro,” the mariachi arrangement, and this, “Strange Invitation.” Given that Beck has since made it one of his trademarks, it’s also worth noting that this is probably first string-heavy space-pop ballad. (David Campbell, Beck’s father, arranged the strings in question.)
Like both other versions, “Strange Invitation” is gorgeous. For me, the center of the song is the phrase “we will rise in the cool of the evening.” It conjures up something out of One Hundred Years of Solitude, of seeking respite from an oppressive, exotic heat and finding it in the transcendent nighttime shade.
Museums, and especially the Museum of Natural History, are intended to be places of learning. We look at exhibits, read the labels, and are educated. But we are bombarded with facts, and they tend to blur into glorious half-truths. On the mezzanine of the Hall of Ocean Life (what my inner seven-year old still calls “the underwater room”), there are a bunch of dioramas of what the bottom of the ocean maybe/mighta/kinda looked like in a few different prehistoric ages (one of them being the Ordovician) in various places (one of them being an ocean over present-day Ohio). Dang if I can remember the actual facts, but I sure remember the wild colors. Have I been educated? Absolutely.
This week marks the release of AUX, a compilation organized by Ideas for Creative Exploration at the University of Georgia. It features a host of Elephant 6 conspirators — including Heather McIntosh (The Instruments), Will Hart (The Olivia Tremor Control/The Circulatory System), Hannah Jones (Lorkakar/Tuning the Air), and the long-awaited official debut of Korena Pang (do some Google searching)– as well as a host of other fine Athens-based musicians. I really like “Waiting For the Dawn to Break” by The Leapyear, an act I need check out more from.
With gorgeous, handmade artwork, AUX is truly a labor of love. I’m proud to have contributed an essay to their equally handmade website. To read it, enter the site, click through the AUX logo, wave the cursor until a map of Athens appears like Brigadoon, click, find the shadowed outline of the falling aeroplane, click again, and check out “Another Set of Flowers in the Museum.”
Last week, en route across town, a friend and I got stuck in rush hour traffic near Central Park. We hopped out of the cab, and walked across the park. Despite the warm weather, it was nearly deserted. The only people about were New York caricatures in garish jogging suits or walking hilarious dogs, all of us extras in a Woody Allen movie. Near the Sheep Meadow, the midtown skyline placid in the blue dusk, I felt transported to the timeless city that runs unchanging beneath the ever-shifting storefronts, advertisements, and neon. I might as well have been 12, visiting from Long Island. Today, the Museum of Natural History felt the same way.
(As Owen and I once discovered, while the other stuffed animals in the dioramas are posed vaguely naturally, the gemsbok simply stare disarmingly back. They almost break the fourth wall.)
“April Showers” – Marcos Fernandes (download here)
from phonography.org, vol. 1 (2001)
released by phonography.org
(file expires on April 14th.)
Good field recordings are deceptively hard to make, especially of things that are simple, like rainstorms or waves crashing. At least when I’ve tried, unexpected noises have always sullied the result: people talking in the next room, sudden gusts of wind at odd angles to the microphone, etc..
Marcos Fernandes’ “April Showers” is the Platonic rainstorm. Water pounds in sheets on the porch roof, its tempo and intensity changing subtly, and — midway through — dramatically. A sparser sub-network of percussive drips plays in oblique counter-rhythm to the main drone. Airplanes (I think) cut through the atmosphere far above, issuing parallel rumbles like enormous pieces of construction paper ripping in extreme slow motion.
Sometimes, even if it is April and supposed to rain, it’s good to listen in advance to the music you are about to hear.
Tonight at dorkbot, I saw NYU’s Jeff Han present on the multi-touch systems he has helped invent. These are touchscreens that expand their input from one finger to, in theory, an infinite amount. In his presentation, Han argued that the one-cursor/one-mouse model that computers have run on for decades is limiting. If he hadn’t insisted that the screens depicted in his videos were real, I would’ve sworn the clips were mock-ups.
Hands roamed a celestial desktop filled with photographs, effortlessly resizing them and sorting them at will; they soared over a GoogleEarth-like mapscape zooming in and tilting with mild finger twitches; they sculpted a virtual face as if it were clay; they danced across a MaxMSP-type environment, attaching sound widgets to oscillators, keyboards, drum machines; they played strange futuristic games; they navigated pure abstractions. I guess it’s kinda that whole virtual reality thing, huh? Whether or not it will ever catch on, it’s straight-up next level.
“Some Clouds Don’t” – Fred Frith (download here)
from Cheap at Half the Price (1983)
released by East Side Digital
reissued by ReR Megacorp/Fred Records (2004) (buy)
(file will expire on April 12th.)
Matt turned me onto avant-guitarist Fred Frith’s frickin’ fantastic Cheap at Half the Price several years back. I finally got my own unscratched copy in today’s post. It’d be cheap (at less than half the price) to compare the disc-opening “Some Clouds Don’t” to Brian Eno’s ’70s pop excursions (to which Frith himself contributed)… but I think I just did anyway. Like those albums, Cheap is a rare trip into vocal-based music. Frith’s ragged voice, lo-fi complexity, and tweeting keyboards are all cheekily charming. The harmonies are nice, and there’s something willfully naïve about the lead guitar playing that I like (especially coming from somebody as nimble as Frith). The whole album — recorded on a four-track with Frith playing most of the instruments and assembling all of the sound collages — is extraordinarily personable.
Once Upon A Time – Kahimi Karie with the Olivia Tremor Control
released by Polydor Japan (2000)
download here
(file expires on April 9th.)
I’m a pretty big Olivia Tremor Control fan, but somehow — until this past weekend — I totally missed the existence of Once Upon a Time. Yet, there it is, nestled in the discography over at elephant6.com. Recorded in 2000 backing Japanese singer Kahimi Karie and released on Polydor in her native country, the Olivias serve up five tracks of spaced-out psychedelia replete with concrété chaos, horns, violins, cosmic blurps, and everything else one might expect (save for the giant Beatles choruses).
In an odd convergence, a few months ago, I asked my now ex-neighbor to give me the strangest music on her iPod. She gave me some tracks by Kahimi Karie that she’d lifted from a Japanese teen’s mp3 collection. And, lo, they were strange. Funny to find out now that she’s both a protégé of Cornelius (another fave), and has worked with the Olivia Tremor Control. Bizarro headphone candy, for sure. Once again, a peculiar noise called the Olivia Tremor Control…
(I’m pretty sure this EP/mini-album was never released in the States. It sure doesn’t turn up on Amazon. If anybody’s got any beef with me circulating it, let me know.)
“Walking With the Beggar Boys” – Elf Power (download here)
from Walking With the Beggar Boys (2004)
released by Orange Twin (buy)
(file expires on April 6th.)
“Walking With the Beggar Boys” uses the simple tools of rock — a circular guitar lick, a chorus that compares love to a dream, call and response — to create something ecstatic. There is nothing remotely progressive going on, but Andrew Rieger and the Elves go for it anyway. The refrain is perfect pop logic — “love was just a dream, you know I never got no sleep” — that comes at an oblique angle to the verses, which are about pretty much about what the title suggests. A brief Eno-circa-Warm Jets guitar solo gives way to the song’s moment of being: a breathless call and response between Rieger and Vic Chesnutt that recalls “I am the Walrus”: “I was you ” (“You were me.”) “He was she.” (“She was he.”) “They were us.” (“We were they.”) Crank it.
The Elves will be putting out a fine new album in April, Back to the Web, on RykoDisc. (If Warner buys Ryko, as promised, does that make this their major label debut?) They’ll also be touring a lot with The Instruments.
o Alexandre Matias’s “The Dark Side of Tropicália, part 1,” published by Perfect Sound Forever in 2003, argues (essentially) that the tropicalistas have assumed an omnipresent cultural dominance in Brazil not unlike their baby boomer equivalents in the United States. Matias’s argument is as uncommon as it is well reasoned. Definitely an interesting read. (But where’s part 2?)
o Back in December, Nature published an article that claimed Wikipedia was only marginally more error-ridden than the mighty Encyclopedia Britannica. Britannica has fired back. Like many, I’m rather enamored with Wikipedia, and this is heartily disheartening on all counts. Naturerefuses to retract the piece. (Thanks, Russ.)
1. “In and Out of Grace” – Mudhoney (from Superfuzz Bigmuff plus Early Singles)
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “5:30” – DNA (from New York Noise: Dance Music From The New York Underground, 1978-1982)
4. “Corrinna” – Ralph White (from Trash Fish)
5. “When the Stars Shine” – The Instruments (from Billions of Phonographs)
6. “You Can’t See The Stars In This Town” – Sam Champion (from Slow Rewind)
7. “Rocket #9” – Sun Ra (from The Singles)
8. “Second Movement” – Glenn Branca (from Symphony No. 6 (Devil Choirs at the Gates of Heaven))
9. “Sunken Treasure” – Wilco (from June 28, 2005, Metropolis, Montreal, Quebec)
10. “I Shall Not Be Moved” – Mississippi John Hurt (from Live)
11. “Accidentally Like A Martyr” – Jerry Garcia (from All Good Things box set)
12. “I’m Not Here 1956” – Bob Dylan (from Complete Basement Tapes bootleg)
“Just Another Day” – Brian Eno (download here)
from Another Day on Earth (2005)
released by RykoDisc/Hannibal (buy)
(file expires on April 3rd)
Last year’s Another Day on Earth, Brian Eno’s first solo collection of songs since 1977, is far from perfect. There’s almost no way to get around the fact that it’s synth-heavy New Age pop. Still, that core melodic gift that made his ’70s music special is present somewhere in nearly all of the tracks. After getting the album, I listened to it a bunch and tucked it away. Whenever one has come on lately, I’ve realized that I remember it and most of the words. He had to have been doing something right.
What “Just Another Day” has going for it is the fact that — on headphones, with one’s eyes closed — its first minute sounds and feels remarkably literally like the first rush of a psychedelic experience. The texture Eno chooses to express this breathtaking stereo-trickery recalls, for better or worse, a sonic approximation of a planetarium laser light show. After that, the song settles down into semi-trite (but, as I said, perfectly memorable) Eno-pop. Still, take a minute, put on your headphones, close your eyes, and zone. When was the last time you were at a laser light show, anyway? Do it ironically, if you need to, but do it.
“Tropicália” – Caetano Veloso (download here)
from Caetano Veloso (1968)
released by Elektra (1990) (buy)
Yesterday, Os Mutantes announced that, following their May performance in London, they will come to the United States for two gigs, in New York and Los Angeles, respectively. Though it wasn’t on the collective concept album/manifesto that announced the tropicália movement that included the Mutantes, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, and others, Veloso’s “Tropicália” might as well have been. It’s as fine a template for Brazilian psychedelic music as one could ask for: textural, sophisticated, and beautiful. It’s the chorus that got me. It’s, y’know, toe tappin’.
Not that I understand a lick of them, but the verse lyrics (in translation, via Charles A. Perrone’s Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Song) are pretty boss, too, with phrases like “Its heart swings to a samba’s tambourine / It emits dissonant chords / Over five thousand loudspeakers.” The choruses, especially, are filled with references to Brazilian culture, such as Carmen Miranda and bossa nova, and the verses recall various songs, as well as (according to Perrone) “‘The Letter of Pero Vaz Caminha,’ the first literary document in colonial Brazil.” Heady shit.
Only in print:
o Paste #21 (Flaming Lips cover): album reviews of Live, Loose Fur, Gospel Music compilation; DVD review of Joel Gilbert’s Bob Dylan: Rolling Thunder and the Gospel Years; book review of David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green.
o April/May Relix (Frank Zappa cover): Fourteen Instances of Possible Conceptual Continuity (recurring sidebar), Zappaesque or the Story of the Dots (feature on Zappa’s composition, co-written with Matt Van Brink); album reviews of Tom Verlaine and Jack Johnson; film review of The Devil and Daniel Johnston; DVD review of the Velvet Underground.
o Spring Signal To Noise (Elliot Carter cover): album reviews of the Grateful Dead and Dimension Mix compilation.
o March Hear/Say (James Blunt cover): album reviews of Field Notes and Nicolai Dunger.
It’s hard to get more democratic than an interesting ranking of real data.
o Google Zeitgeist – A wholly important list summarizing the most recent week of searches. They are the top ideas currently circulating, which is sort of a heady concept. John Battelle calls it “the Database of Intentions.”
o Billboard’s Hot Ringtones – This week, Koji Kondo’s “Super Mario Brothers Theme” remains in the top five after 74 weeks on the charts. Harry Mancini’s “Pink Panther Theme” isn’t too far behind. Go meme-pop, go!
o Most emailed stories from the New York Times and USA Today – The most emailed stories aren’t the most important. That is, they’re not usually proper news, about politics or the weather or anything. Rather, they’re stories that grow legs because (like the Google Zeitgeist) they speak to some idea circulating subliminally. It seems as if there is no crossover between the Times and USA Today.
o OCLC’s Top 1000 library books – The Online Computer Library Center compiled this list from the catalogues of over 53,000 libraries around the world. For all the talk I heard about the “demise of the canon” during four years of college English classes, it’s funny to see the canon itself spelled out in relatively hard numbers. It’s also funny to note that #15 — nestled between The Night Before Christmas and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer — is Garfield at Large. Bill Watterson’s eponymous Calvin and Hobbes collection hits at #77 (with a bullet!) (BOMP!). Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan sits at #381. The writings of John Calvin do not chart. (Thanks, Kottke)
My old roommate Kristie and I discovered the secret bonus Mexican joint at the back of the bodega by accident one long ago afternoon. It’s in Williamsburg, right on the main hipster drag of Bedford Avenue. The whole place is crammed with bric-a-brac: piñatas hanging from the ceiling, rows and rows of Latin CDs hanging on the wall, a box of sliced cactus in the dairy case, a numbered cubbyhole nook filled with candy, miniature nativity scenes tucked between the plexiglass and the cash register, refrigerators filled with neon Jarritos sodas, and (if you’ll excuse me) damn fine tacos.
There’s a generic red “FOR SALE” sign taped inside the front window. In the space where one is supposed to write a phone number or an asking price, somebody has simply written “store.” I expect to go there for dinner one night and discover that it’s been shut down, boarded up, and soon to be gutted for a boutique or fancy-ass eyeglasses shop. Each taco could be my last.
It’s been almost a year since we’ve presented anything from our vast (and daily expanding) Ordovician Archives. Dr. Tuttledge remains in Taiwan, researching. (His collection continues to lie in storage in Manhattan.) We continue, as we can, without him.
One recent development, at least in the blogosphere, is the proliferation of teams of conversational salesmen posting advertisements in the comments sections of blogs. They are the Ordovician equivalent of traveling hucksters who might sidle up to potential customers at a bar and sell them goods and services. Except these salesmen are retarded. Though their offered products span all nine categories of Dr. Tuttledge’s classification system, they are incapable of hawking more than one item. Most frequently, they will begin conversations about poker, no matter what a blog posting is about.
A recent specimen, not having to do with poker, is most fascinating. It was submitted on March 15th as a comment on a previous posting about the New York Word Exchange.
Following the URL, one is rewarded with a “server not found” notification. Yet, the post is quite emphatic about this pendostanets thing. It is, after all, the name of the poster, his email address, his URL, and the entirety of his comment. Pendostanet’s primative means of expression recalls Arrested Development‘s Steve Holt (“Steve Holt!”).
A Google search of the word merely turns up other instances of Mr. Pendostanets posting about himself (“Pendostanets!”) on other blogs. One can only conclude that Pendostanets is no product at all, but some sort of code word for the initiated. Which we are not.
If anyone has any information as to the existence or whereabouts of this Mr. Pendostanets, please contact the Center for Anthropological Computing via the comments section of this blog.
“Fille ou Garcon (Sloop John B)” – Stone (download)
from Femmes de Paris, v. 1 (2002) (buy)
released by Wagram
(file expires March 24th.)
I don’t know much about this French version of “Sloop John B” except a.) it’s awesome and b.) it was introduced to me by wunderkammern27 correspondent Michael Slabach. Michael has just launched a blog as a homebase for his photography and his weekly podcast, The Sea of Sound. “Fille ou Garcon” is exactly the kind of eclectic and otherwise ginchy shit he’s great at turning up. A new edition — brimming with a bunch of tantilizing looking tracks, plus some old faves of mine — just went up today. I can’t wait to check it.
As for the song’s awesomeness, I guess I’m just a straight sucker for ’60s sounds. I love the sugar-coated bounce. It reminds me a little bit of Os Mutantes. But the real treat is the horn part, which is another sample waiting to happen. In the grand scheme of French pop, this is probably cookie-cutter stuff, cranked out in a quick session by some bored arrangers and on-staff musicians. Sophisticated it’s not, but man is it sunshiny.
The weekend’s proto-spring brought Polaroid blue skies, the kind that seem to rush down in greeting as you come out of the darkness of a subway station.
The moment after I took the picture, an MTA worker yelled at me. Taking pictures in the subway, after all, is illegal. You know, to prevent terrorism. It’s a stupid law. I hope the illegality of the evidence doesn’t hold back this shmuck from getting prosecuted.
A friend sent this to me very late at night over the weekend (thanks!), and it’s made me happy continuously since then. It’s not seasonal, forgive me, but Cassandra Wilson’s version of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” is the most luminescent bauble of a recording I’ve heard in recent memory. It’s long been one of my favorite Young songs, mostly because of its perfect melody, though I’ve always had to get by the semi-hokey Harvest Moon-era production.
Craig Street’s setting for Wilson transmogrifies the song from a campfire strum to a transcendent tone poem of chirping crickets (or a fine simulation), spare ambient percussion, a bowed bass, and — I think — a metallic dobro. There is a perfectly dulcet acoustic guitar lurking there, too, and mixed quite presently, at that. Given the Daniel Lanois-like weirdness of the rest of the voices, though, I didn’t notice it until giving the song a close listen. That’s a good thing, I’m pretty sure. All of these effects subliminally trace the changes, liberating the melody to drift dreamily.
What’s funny and unexpected is that, despite Young’s traditional Nashville-style backing, it’s Wilson’s avant-garde rearrangement that makes the song feel timeless and mysterious to me, like it was lifted from a 78 by a lost chanteuse who recorded four sides in an Oklahoma hotel room sometime between the World Wars. And that’s not to diss Neil Young’s version, ’cause it’s real purdy. But, this…
I vaguely remember my friend Paul playing me an Elliot Smith rendition of this tune back in college. Something to look for another day…
Last week, Owen brought over a bootleg DVD of the Talking Heads performing in their original three-piece lineup at CBGBs in December 1975. Needless to say, I was bloody well psyched. What I wasn’t expecting, and what I kind of enjoyed about it, was how bad it was. That’s not meant as an insult.
If anything, it came as a relief. It’s good to know that the Heads didn’t spring from the ground fully formed. During this performance (filmed in black and white), in what appears to be a not-very-packed CBs, the band runs down their early repertoire. David Byrne looks incredibly nervous, far from the charismatic frontman he’d become. Tina Weymouth, though not staring at her feet, doesn’t look much more assured.
The only member of the band who looks (or sounds) remotely comfortable is Chris Frantz, who holds the half-formed songs together with remarkable panache. Even “Psycho Killer,” which pre-dated the Heads’ existence, isn’t quite done. The killer bassline is there, but Byrne doesn’t have the phrasing of the “fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa”s finished yet.
With hindsight, one can see where the music would go, how those weird guitar patterns Byrne plays are his attempt to emulate African rhythms. But for anybody wandering in off the street that night, it must’ve just sounded like noise, maybe even to other punks. Of course, there were probably Heads fans who thought everything after Jerry Harrison joined the band was too polished.
It’s taken for granted that the Heads were art students, but they really look it here, maybe unsure how they ended up playing on the Bowery. It’s all very inspiring, of course, to be able to get that much closer to the germination of the idea, to know that — after the camera stopped rolling — they unplugged their gear and transported it the few blocks back to their loft on nearby Chyristie Street. “The name of this band is Talking Heads,” Byrne says (of course) before they begin. Who?
(If anybody knows where to find this video on the cybernets — it doesn’t appear to be on YouTube yet — please comment or drop me a line.)
Proto-spring came to Brooklyn in a very real way over the weekend: those first days going out in only a tee-shirt because I can, sleeping with the bedside window open. Of course, it’s supposed get cold again in a few days, but this song — notable, I just realized after a good year or so of listens, for its complete lack of drums — will remain.
The third in an ongoingcollection of functional webpages and dork tools (excluding any/all Google programs).
o BitPim — Get into your phone’s file structure and remove or add any data you need. (Having trouble? Poke around the cellphoneforums.net and you might find an answer.)
o TextPayMe — In one of our periodic life-as-sci-fi freakouts, my friends and I got to fantasticatin’ about the day one will be able to transfer money via text message. Unbeknownst to us (but apparently knownst to Rachel) the day is already here. Can’t wait to try this out.
o Encyclopedia — A mini-Wikipedia for the iPod! Hot diggity, this is like a real-life Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (Thanks, BB.)
o AbeBooks — Sure, Amazon can find you anything you’d want, but AbeBooks’ network of independent used booksellers probably can, too, and with way more character, taboot.
Ary Barroso’s “Brazil” is really one of the loveliest melodies ever written, I think. Though Barroso was Brazilian, his song hardly conjures up images of that sophisticated, chaotic Latin American country for me (probably because it was composed before the advent of bossa nova). Rather, it brings me to some cosmopolitan ’20s getaway that can only be reached by flying in a small plane represented as an advancing dotted line in a travel montage made of maps and stock footage. You know, like in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Excluding Django Reinhardt for no particular reason, the Deadly Nightshade Family Singers and Cornelius have recorded my two favorite versions that I’ve yet heard (please post suggestions if you’ve got others). They’re wildly different. The Nightshades — a macabre chamber string outfit who put out the great Plain Brown Suit in 2000 and then fell off the face of the interwebs — turn in what I (perhaps erroneously) think of as the platonic version. It is thoughtful and romantic. Cornelius completely twists the song on his mindbending Point in 2002, doing away with the signature chromatic riff and filling the song out with electro-acoustic samples, chirping birds, howling dogs, pastoral bleeps, and sputteringly chopped vocals. Somehow, though, it retains everything that I find romantic about the Nightshades’ rendition. This is the definition of a durable song.
Yo La Tengo played their annual all-covers pledge drive for WFMU tonight.
Please comment with corrections. Thanks to Google for the help.
7 March 2006
WFMU Studios
Jersey City, NJ
Batman theme
Bertha (Grateful Dead)
City Hobgoblins (The Fall)
The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man (The Rolling Stones)
Instant Karma (John Lennon)
Zig-Zag Wanderer (Captain Beefheart)
Something In The Air (Thunderclap Newman)
Laugh at Me (Sonny and Cher)
Egyptian Reggae (Jonathan Richman)
Rock and Roll Love Letter (Bay City Rollers)
Starry Eyes (The Records)
You Don’t Miss Your Water (Craig David)
Girl of the North Country (Bob Dylan)
Dead Flowers (The Rolling Stones)
Blister in the Sun (Violent Femmes)
Lay Lady Lay (Bob Dylan)
Suspect Device (Stiff Little Fingers)
I Can’t Make It On Time (The Ramones)
Gut Feeling (Devo)
Holiday (The Bee Gees)
Suzanne (Leonard Cohen)
Don’t Cry No Tears (Neil Young)
I Fought the Law (Bobby Fuller Four)
(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace Love and Understanding? (Nick Lowe)
Happy Birthday to Bruce Bennett
Pay to Cum (Bad Brains)
Do It Again (Steely Dan)
You Make Me Feel So Good (The Zombies)
Heart of Darkness (Pere Ubu)
Alex Chilton (The Replacements)
Jack and Diane (John Mellencamp)
California Girls (The Beach Boys)
Hello Lucille, Are You A Lesbian? (T. Valentine)
Re-Make/Re-Model (Roxy Music)
Should I Stay or Should I Go? (The Clash)
Slack Motherfucker (Superchunk)
Werewolves of London (Warren Zevon), as medley, with bits of Take Me To The River (Al Green), Life on Mars? (David Bowie), Like A Virgin (Madonna), Dr. Robert (The Beatles), Uptown Girl (Billy Joel) and others.
After visiting the Watts Towers, we hit an awesome local restaurant, Jordan’s, which has been in business since 1942. The red beans and rice and spicy-ass sausage was mindblowing. Upstairs, where we ate, there was a great (unplugged) jukebox that hadn’t been restocked since sometime in the ’80s. I wasn’t expecting to see a Beatles record.
o Aquarium Drunkard posts what I’m guessing is the August 1967 rehearsal preceding the Beach Boys’ gigs in Hawaii — their last shows (I’m pretty sure) as the original quartet of Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, and Al Jardine. Smile had already combusted, but Brian was still pretty far from a vegetable (though Mike Love’s brutal dickheadedness comes to fore atop what sounds like a great sounding rehearsal of “Heroes and Villains”). Still, the harmonies are brotherly and beautiful. (Thanks, Justin.)
o Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan posts the following:
We want to let you know that once again Yo La Tengo will take to the airwaves of the mighty WFMU and do our best to help them make some well-deserved money. Listen live over wfmu.org (details available on the Schedule page at yolatengo.com) on Tuesday March 7 from 8 pm – 11 pm, eastern time. Anyone who pledges to the station during that time gets to make a request, and Georgia, James and I — helped out as always by Mr. Bruce Bennett– will do our best to play it. Don’t miss it.
o The New York Times Magazine’s real estate issue proclaims Bourgwick to be the Next Neighborhood (bypass registration) in an article subtitled “How An Undesirable Neighborhood Becomes the Next Hot Spot.” The Times has covered Bourgwick before, but not at this level, with at least a half-dozen color newsprint photos (with circles and arrows!) of places within a two-block spitting range. Unlike the last story, which was about the social development of the place, Robert Sullivan’s piece gets into the mechanics of the neighborhood’s economics. Our neighborhood is very much a satellite of Manhattan, and sometimes seemed pleasantly untouched by the bustle of the big island to the west. (Today, for example, dozens of bike messengers gathered on the basketball court out back and veritably jousted.) Of course it’s ignorant to play naive about the real estate development happening underfoot, but it’s also not something that’s easy to find out about. I need to give the article a better read.
o When I was young, the closest thing we had to a town drunk lived down the block from us, and he’d occasionally wander by, talking to himself, having just staggered up the steep hill from Gunther’s Tap Room in the village. Dad would sometimes give him lifts home, and the guy would speak of a fellow drunk he’d known some years ago, named Jack. Jack’s last name happened to be “Kerouac,” then living out some of his final, indescribably depressive years (during which he became an embittered, conservative alcoholic) in Northport. The Daily News has a story about his time there, taking care of his mother. (Shortly, they moved to Florida, where Kerouac died in 1969.)
o In Los Angeles, my friend scored us passes to go see a test screening of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life-style adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. I was more than psyched. After Daniel ran our cell phones back to the car (no pictures!), and after we lied on the little questionnaires and said we were 26 (only 18-26 year olds, please), junior-level studio dudes from Central Casting marched up and down the line cherry-picking 20 year olds to meet their demographic needs. We ended up past the cut-off point, got a pre-recorded spiel from Central Casting Junior-Level Studio Exec. #2 (who offered us freebies to see a forthcoming John Cusack/Morgan Freeman picture whose major recommendation is that Freeman plays the bad guy), and were sent off into the night. Anyway, here’s a preview for the movie, which — despite my threats to Exec #2 that I’d post bad things about the movie on my blog — looks pretty f’in nifty. (Thanks, Michael.)
Only in print:
o March Spin (My Chemical Romance cover): Noise item on Mothers Against Noise.
o Paste #20 (Philip Seymour Hoffman cover): reviews of John Fahey tribute, Bush Chemists, Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, Clogs, Sonic Youth, Robinella, and Taylor Hollingsworth. (These will likely appear eventually on Paste’s website.)
o February 10 Times Herald-Record: preview for (later cancelled) Lou Reed show (n.b.: the TH-R is the newspaper Hunter S. Thompson was fired from for kicking a soda machine).
Building in his Los Angeles backyard while belting opera, a 4’10” Italian tile layer named Simon Rodia constructed one of the foremost wonders of the modern world between 1921 and 1955: the Watts Towers. Using only a window washer’s harness to convey himself upwards, the towers — the tallest is 90 feet — have survived race riots, earthquakes, and bureaucracy to become a life-affirming marvel of the power of beautiful weirdness. Their complexity — all broken bottles and scrap tiles and shells and rigidly overlaying grids creating a surreal three-masted ship — is overwhelming, and literally awe-inspiring.
(Conceptual continuity fun fact #17: As a neighborhood kid growing up in Watts, a young Charles Mingus occasionally helped Rodia with his work.)
While backing up files recently, I discovered a cache of mp3s I’d totally forgotten about — bits and bobs snagged mostly from the OG Napster, including lots of B-sides and random live cuts. “In Another Land” by the Rolling Stones is neither of these, though it is an obscurity. In fact, perusing the tracklist, nearly all of Their Satanic Majesties Request could be considered as such. The Stones’ sloppy-ass answer to Sgt. Pepper, it yielded virtually no songs that have entered the classic rock canon — pretty bizarre for an album by one of rock’s most legendary bands released at the peak of the psychedelic ’60s.
The only song in the Stones’ catalogue to be penned and sung by bassist Bill Wyman, “In Another Land” sounds a bit like the Pink Floyd then being piloted across town (and the cosmos) by Syd Barrett. In other words, it’s charming and cute and utterly blokey. The melody is simple and awesome. I love the childlike jump on “I stood and held your hand,” both the notes sung and the way Wyman sings ’em. Run through (what I suspect is) a Leslie rotating cabinet, Wyman’s voice shimmers, and the whole cut feels as if it were conceived and recorded underwater. This is no grand statement. From what I remember, it’s mostly just Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts fucking around on a day when none of the other Stones bothered to show up. Perhaps this isn’t what Mick and Keef’s great demonic overlord wanted to groove on, but maybe they should’ve let Wyman take calls from the listeners every now and again.
The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, California is a most peculiar institution, dedicated to the preservation of knowledge equally wondrous and arcane, simultaneously authentic and dubious. As is pointed out in their opening presentation, a museum is a “spot dedicated to the muses,” and the MJT’s darkened halls — which seem to get more convoluted with each visit — are an improbable sanctuary in deepest Los Angeles.
Exhibits chronicle convergences, such as between opera singer Madelena Delani (below) and neurophysiologist Geoffrey Sonnabend.
One room (“The World is Bound With Secret Knots“) celebrates 17th century polymath Athanasius Kircher, who — among other things — believed that Nimrod’s construction of the Tower of Babel, whose size brushed the heavens, could have altered the Earth’s axis and caused a literal, geophysical catastrophe that, in turn, may have been the cause of the lingual chaos of the Bible story.
Elsewhere, there are three-dimensional X-rays of flowers (glasses required).
We missed our connecting flight to Los Angeles, and would’ve had to wait it out a while for the next one, so we rented a car and headed out across the desert, stopping in Baker — a strip of abandoned and less-abandoned restaurants and gas stations — for improbably delicious gyros. The world’s tallest thermometer (bottom pic) — or so they claim — didn’t seem to be working, though sure was weird lookin’.
Thanks to the good folks at BitPim, I’m now able to merrily wire myself pictures via USB cable, despite Verizon’s desire for me to pay them for the privilege. It’s a bit evil that they sell a USB cable and software and all, though still don’t let you officially upload your own pictures directly to your own computer. Fuck ’em.
With that, some pictures that have lived on my phone for some moons…
1. Macca on the monitors, 9/05.
2. A floating two, Las Vegas, 1/06.
3. The back of some dude’s camera, random member of Broken Social Scene on the right, NYC, 1/06.
1. “Royal Crown Hairdressing Ad” – Little Richard (from Night Train to Nashville: Music City Rhythm and Blues, 1945-1970)
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “Zero Point” – Rogers Sisters (from Yes New York)
4. “Big Day Coming” (fast version) – Yo La Tengo (from Painful)
5. “Crushed Bones” – Why? (from Elephant Eyelash)
6. “Johnny Too Bad” – The Slickers (from The Harder They Come OST)
7. “Are You My Woman (Tell Me So)” – The Chi-Lites (from I Like Your Lovin’ (Do You Like Mine?))
8. “Coquelicot, Claude and Lechithin Dance Aboard the Ocean Liner” – Of Montreal (from Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies: A Variety of Whimsical Verse))
9. “I Live in the Springtime” – The Lemon Drops (from Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era)
10. “Space Suit” – They Might Be Giants (from Apollo 18)
11. “Great Day (Four Tet remix)” – Madvillain (from Madvillain Remixes: Four Tet EP)
12. “Pull Up the People” – M.I.A. (from Arular)
13. “Twilight Time” – John Fahey (from Return of the Repressed: the John Fahey Anthology)
14. “My Grandfather’s Clock” – Howe Gelb (from I am the Resurrection: A Tribute to John Fahey)
15. “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” – Hank Williams (single)
16. “Mutineer” – Bob Dylan (from Enjoy Every Sandwich)
17. “Going, Going, Gone” – Jerry Garcia (from April 10, 1982, late show, Capitol Theater, Passaic, NJ)
18. “Find the River” – R.E.M. (from Automatic For the People)
Postcards: Consumer Electronics Show is comprised of unaltered, binaural field recordings made at the 2006 edition of the country’s largest trade show. Over 150,000 non-consumers — vendors, buyers, celebrities, quasi-celebrities, execs — filled 1.6 million miles of floor space of the Las Vegas Convention Center, fussing over the latest and greatest in all things beepy.
1. Microcosmicomics
So large it required its own sub-map, but still only requiring three-and-a-half minutes to traverse, the Sony pavilion was a microcosm for all of CES. Ambient music blares from demonstration speakers, hawkers hawk absurdly overblown home entertainment systems and digital books, conventioneers schmooze, and Sony product provides a titillating soundtrack.
2. Authorized Mash-Up
The rear end of Sony’s space was filled with a circular 150 (?)-person capacity movie theater, screening an eight-minute corporate mash-up hype film. Between hyperspeed CGI-enhanced edits, celebrities ho themselves for new gizmos, hot movies get previewed, and an authoritative Hollywood voice booms a World of Tomorrow fantasia narrative. No mention of Sony’s innovative Digital Rights Management program, though.
3. The Full Tramp
The full tramp — well over a mile — from the two-level South Hall, across the massive Central Hall (where the Sony pavilion was), through the bass-booming North Hall (where bikinied booth babes demonstrated the hottest backseat subwoofers), into the Hilton next door (where modest stalls sported clever Asian miniaturizations), and through their casino (where Google’s Larry Page was about to give a keynote address at the theater normally occupied by Barry Manilow). Hear attendees chatter in a variety of tongues, whizzing golf carts, and even Robin Williams, who walks by at the 17:41 mark (you can hear one of has handlers say “you are a quick study today” and Williams responding indistinctly) as he exits the Hilton just before his appearance at the Google keynote.
4. Flamingo Soundwalk
Later, back at the Flamingo, the elevator counts down and opens on the casino floor, where a lush world of bleeping slot machines (all tuned to the key of C), drunken bachelorettes, clinking poker chips, and distant pop songs fans open like a lotus flower. After a walk around the floor, we return to the elevator, an endless Borgesian hallway, and the hotel room. Another Friday night in Vegas, just after midnight, circa January 2006.
We now return you to your irregularly scheduled weirdness…
With the innovations of digital feeds, and televisions, VCRs, and DVD players that magically go blue at the first sign of interference, static is gradually disappearing. It’s beautiful stuff, both visually and metaphorically.
“Electricity comes from other planets.” – Lou Reed
How bad could the outtakes be from a Phish album that was basically comprised of demos to begin with? The answer, if you have any wookie blood in you at all, is relative. (And, if you don’t, you’ll come away hating Phish even more than you already do.)
Yes, yes, relative. That is: the three “new” songs circulating from Phish’s 2002 Round Room sessions are very much like their officially released brethren in that they’re half-conceived and far less than they should be. Being outtakes, this less-than-whole-assedness is also perfectly excusable. That doesn’t make them good (or of interest to anybody not already curious about Phish’s creative process).
“Birthday Boys” had already been recorded by Oysterhead, one of the bands Trey Anastasio played with during the two years previous to this session, while Phish was figuring out if they wanted to be a band or not (they didn’t, as they determined later). It’s nifty, heavy on the same impressionistic twang that defined “Pebbles and Marbles,” which led off Round Room. Playful and intricate, it would’ve made an ace Phish tune — especially the cleverly modulating ending. The version here borders on trainwreck, especially as it goes, but — hey — it’s a rehearsal. It coulda been a contenda.
The all-improv (and largely abstract) “Bubble Wrap” is — I assume — one of the band’s first jams after getting back together. They feel disconnected, their parts moving against each other and trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to lock in. It’s kind of uncomfortable to hear Phish, who were rarely less than psychic communicators with big ears, playing like this. A historical curiosity, perhaps. The last song, “Running Scared,” most likely isn’t Phish at all, but Anastasio demoing with songwriting/drinking chum Tom Marshall. Finding the song in the midst of the sloppiness is like trying to find the marble in the proverbial oatmeal (or maybe just figuring out a magic eye). Either way, it’s hard to imagine a way that Phish could’ve made it all too interesting. So it went.
I know shitall about Clifford Curry. This tune is on the Night Train to Nashville anthology. It turned up on my shuffle many months after I ripped the album. I’m a big believer in the power of an opening statement, be it the first line of a story or the top of a song, and “She Shot a Hole in My Soul” is one of my favorites. The horn intro establishes an instant momentum, and all the verses and arrangements unfold perfectly from there. It’s so good that the first time I really heard the song, I distinctly remember wanting the horn part to come back, and soon. It only did so twice.
Unless somebody’s done it and I haven’t heard it, it’s also waiting to be sampled and made the basis of a huge hit. That is, I know I personally would greatly enjoy a new version of this song where that horn part is repeated endlessly for two or three minutes, like “Crazy In Love” did with the horn part from the Chi-Lites’ “Are You Woman (Tell Me So)” (which only repeated once in the original version). Awesome morning music.
Here’s some post-Valentine’s Day contrast to Monday’s Beach Boys. It’s hard to call anything having to do with Frank Zappa “innocent,” but the teen-lust cynicism of Freak Out is just so durned precious. “Go Cry on Somebody Else’s Shoulder” sums it up well. “I’m somewhat wiser now and one whole year older,” sings Ray Collins from a time in life where one whole year was actually a perceptible and meaningful unit of time in one’s own emotional development. That’s the key to the whole album, I think.
Freak Out in general and “Any Way the Wind Blows” specifically have been hitting the spot lately, making increased sense with the years. This early demo (from the yummy Joe’s Corsage compilation) lacks the rhythmic sophistication of the officially released version, but that’s part of the charm. It sounds like music made by the characters singing. “Now that I am free from the troubles of the past,” Mother Ray croons. What past? Freak Out is music sung by people who’ve got nothing but future, and — being an album most appropriate for disaffected high school-age males — listened to by the same. Can it be nostalgia if you’re not remembering the good parts? And what if the good parts entailed the discovery of music like Freak Out that effectively shielded the bad parts? Can it be nostalgia then?
Found at the corner of Broadway and Bleecker Street. I actually found one-and-a-half photos. I have an extra copy of the right side, ripped in the same exact place, as if both pictures were torn at once.
2. A dinosaur.
Found at a filling station in the northeastern Colorado desert en route to Boulder to make shadow puppets.
Found on the kitchen table the morning after a party, during which a drunken roommate discovered Aloha Moods and other fine vinyl selections in the stairwell of our building.
Here at the Bourgwick cabana it was a snow day, and — while savoring the falling whiteness — my mind naturally wandered to warmer climes. And I got to considering Endless Summer — the 1974 greatest hits collection that put the Beach Boys back on top of the charts — as a concept album. Why not? Why shouldn’t it be thought of as a continuous series of abstract scenes and innocent (and not-so-innocent) encounters shot on sunbleached stock, like French New Wavers on the lam in Los Angeles?
Why shouldn’t the mysterious Rhonda help the main character rid his memory of another woman, named Wendy (who he went together with for so long)? Can we take him seriously as he proclaims his love to a series of nameless women? After several of these, it begins to seem like slapstick: a joke repeated over and over and over.
Why shouldn’t he be offered riddle-like information from a stranger? “The girls on the beach are all within reach, if you know what to do,” he is told. No, he replies, as a matter of fact, he doesn’t know what to do. But no matter, the girls are still on the beach. He interacts with grotesque boardwalk caricatures that offer their own geographies, evaluating the quality of the land by the quality of women (“the east coast girls are hip,” he is assured) and the oceanic conditions.
(And, if it’s not, it’s at least a great docudramatic proto-Google map of the white southern Californian teenage gestalt circa 1963. In the real world, “The Warmth of the Sun” was the immediate reaction of two early-20something cousins to the Kennedy assassination.)
It’s a good week (for me, anyway) when there are announcements of new projects from Bob Dylan, David Byrne, and — now — Yo La Tengo. Over on ylt.com, Ira reports that the band is working on a new album in Nashville (presumably once again with producer Roger Moutenot). Beauty, eh? Ira also mentions a bunch of movie soundtracks. It’d sure be nice to see some EPs come outta those. And, while we’re on the topic, Brooklyn Vegan posted a few weeks back that YLT will be returning to the Prospect Park Bandshell on July 13th.
Above is “Barnaby, Hardly Working” from the third night of the 2005 Hanukah run. I’ve dorked about it elsewhere, and it’s worth a listen, totally different from the versions on Fakebook and the President Yo La Tengo EP. The band really milks the transitions, stretching out via a long Ira solo in the middle and turning the ending into two separate sections — a reprise of the verse, and finally a dreamy glide through the “face down beside the water” coda. There are all kinds of nifty arrangement touches throughout, too: Tortoise drummer John Herndon’s just-right shaker entrance (around the three minute mark), his drum-off with Georgia coming out of Ira’s solo, James’ sudden organ (pun only slightly intended) during the ending. For all I know, this is how they’ve been playing the song for years, but I’d sure never heard it. For BitTorrenters, the whole show is (hopefully) still available here. Thanks to yltfan for taping.
It took me a while to get the Tall Dwarfs, New Zealand’s lo-fi giants. I can’t remember if “Think Small” — the closing number from 1992’s Fork Songs — was a late night discovery, but that’s definitely where I listen to it most often. Along with George Harrison’s “Behind That Locked Door,” this has been in high rotation this week. It’s a nice bit of comfort, a simple and direct evocation of pulling the covers over your head, and — for a very real moment — giving up totally and completely on everything.
The best of all possible worlds includes a free, perfectly indexed database containing the complete text of every book ever published. There is no way to argue that this would be anything but good.
On one hand, from a legal point of view, we are a long way from figuring out how to make that work. On the other hand, from a technical perspective, it’s already been done, though — owing to, y’know, reality — one can only use a few pages at a time.
Why not allow users to get a few sample pages, and then modify the Google database to give them the option to buy further pages at five cents a pop? The standardized pricing seems to be working just fine over at the iTunes Store, and a nickel a sheet seems quite reasonable. Users would end up with basically the same hard copy as if they’d gone to the library, found books, and xeroxed them.
Sure, that would open up oodles of new issues (and royally screw-up any opt-out plan), but it seems like it could solve more problems than it’d cause. Who knows? If Google can figure out how to make the database to begin with, they should be able to lick this one, too.
Today, David Byrne formally announced Here Lies Love, his musical about Imelda Marcos. It will debut in Australia next month. As the page says, this production is a “first sketch” of a “performance [that] will be set in clubs, with non-stop music by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim.”
I’m in the minority of my friends in that I think that Times Square is actually quite nifty. It’s nicer empty, of course, late at night. When I started taking cell photos, Times Square was at the back of my mind. After discovering how cool bright light looks crammed into 1.3 megapixels, I figured Times Square would be a cinch.
I made my first stab last week, and I was utterly, entirely wrong. Making light distort requires that the lens be reallllly close to the source. Shots of buildings tend to look massively insubstantial on a cell cam. The scale of Times Square is gigantic, and its beauty is as much about its residual glow than the specifics of any one display. The light is in waves, visible only when they crash into each other or lap at the sides of buildings or windows. Photographing Times Square, I think, is like painting pictures of the ocean.
The first batch I took was uniformly bad, save one shot (the last below). The second batch was slightly better (I think) though still doesn’t capture it entirely. More next time I have an excuse to go to Times Square…
“Toc” – Tom Zé
from Estudando O Samba (1976)
released by WEA International as twofer with Correio da Estação do Brás (1978) as Serie Dois Momentos, vol. 15 (2000) (buy)
(file expires on February 13th)
Welcome to the working week. Here’s a Monday morning freak-out to clear your head before you get back to sticking it to your local incarnation of the Man. Though Tom Zé is the Brazilian equivalent of David Byrne or Beck, “Toc” — from 1976’s Estudando O Samba — finds him on the more experimental end of his spectrum. Practically a proto-minimalist exercise (the whole song rests on one looping guitar part), nearly every single second is tailor-made for sampling. That is, one could grab just about any chunk and build a song around it, from the lovely rhythmic grid that makes up the first minute to the James Barry-like horn fills that glide in to the torrent of chattering voices and the clangs of typewriters to the whirs of electric drills (samples in 1976?)
I’m still learning my way around the Zé catalogue, but (at the moment) “Toc” seems like a good key to understanding it, containing a representative palette of Zé’s tricks from which to make sense of everything else. The whole track is utterly groovy, too, and — well — Brazilian. He’ll supposedly be touring later this year, behind his new album Estudando O Pagode (which is pretty rad). Hope he does.
1. “Pot Ads” – Eugene Mirman (from The Absurd Nightclub Comedy of Eugene Mirman)
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “Going to Tennessee” – The Mountain Goats (from Protein Source of the Future… Now!)
4. “Blue Bayou” – Roy Orbison (single)
5. “Private Idaho” – The B-52s (from Wild Planet)
6. “Bubble Gum Independence” – various (from Sublime Frequencies’ Radio Phnom Penh)
7. “Have A Banana!” – The Beatles (from Live at the BBC)
8. “A Hard Day’s Night” – The Beatles (from A Hard Day’s Night)
9. “Happy Colored Marbles” – Ween (from Quebec)
10. “ABC” – Jackson 5 (single)
11. “I’m a Believer” – Robert Wyatt (from Solar Flares Burn For You)
12. “Let’s Spend the Night Together” – Jerry Garcia (from Compliments of…)
13. “How Much I’ve Lied” – Yo La Tengo (from Little Honda EP)
14. “Snail Shell” – They Might Be Giants (from John Henry)
15. “Walking With the Beggar Boys” – Elf Power (from Walking With the Beggar Boys)
16. “Sometimes A Pony Gets Depressed” – Silver Jews (from Tanglewood Numbers)
17. “Hard Times” – Bob Dylan (from Good As I Been To You)
18. “Trampin'” – Patti Smith (from Trampin’)
I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a sports guy. But I love me some Chuck Klosterman. He’s blogging from the Super Bowl all week for ESPN.com, and it’s glorious stuff. He began on Sunday night. Here is his most recent posting.
The Village Voice posted the results of their annual Pazz and Jop poll. My ballot is here. I made the comments section this year, however blandly, under the “Earphone Heads” category.
Here are the full comments I submitted with my ballot, which I am going to indent because I think it looks nifty:
Since one can only take small planes off the island, I opted to take the ferry back. It was choppy as fuck, and I tried to listen to my iPod and watch the horizon. The boat was a jungle of sounds, all leaking queasily through my headphones: deep rumbling engines, calypso-tinged Christmas muzak piped through the cabin’s tinny speakers, chattering families, and emerald Caribbean waters slapping against the window.
Halfway across, I noticed that one noise — beats — had grown more distinct than the others. I turned, and studied the skinny island kid on the bench seat next to me. He scrolled through ringtones and detonated them one after another, a hit parade of instantly gratifying hooks. He noticed me watching and I took my headphones off.
“You like hip-hop?” he asked, studying me back. “Probably not, huh?”
“Sure,” I said. “I like all kinds of stuff. Who do you like?”
“Mike Jones,” he replied.
“Who?” I asked.
“Mike Jones,” he repeated, unimpressed.
“Who?”
“Mike Joooooones,” he sang and laughed. “You like that shit?”
“Meh,” I shrugged. “I like the screwed and chopped stuff more than his regular stuff.”
“That shit’s weird,” the kid declared.
“Yep,” I nodded happily, and somehow found myself in another conversation about Houston hip-hop, some quarter way across the hemisphere from Brooklyn’s indie-dork enclaves (let alone Houston itself).
He went back to his ringtones, 50 Cent thugging out in the background picture on his cell, as the ferry pulled into the harbor.
***
Despite making for retarded hard copy, Mike Jones’ shtick made for a hell of a meme: news vessel as pop hit, doesn’t even matter what the song is (hell, sing it in every song), and doesn’t even matter if that news is merely the arrival of Jones himself.
R. Kelly did it, too, in his boggling serialization “Trapped in the Closet.” Then there are the mash-ups, like the Notorious K.O.’s “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People.” Give or take the Texas robo-trippers — who are truly psychedelic and have added a cool new tool to the pop kit — it’s all just the latest iteration of novelty, except these novelties have concepts that somehow play with the technology of the moment, and that’s sorta nifty. Sorta.
“It disappeared up its own fundamental aperture,” Tom Wolfe snarked in The Painted Word, his 1975 treatise on contemporary art, “and came out the other side Art Theory! … a vision ineffable as the Angels and the Universal Souls.”
Lord knows, Mike Jones (who?) ain’t, um, a Universal Soul, but his meme-pop is the very definition of ineffable, the place where music — that self-contained world of melodies and performances — takes steps towards a broader universe of breathing things.
And, of course, if Jones’ endlessly circulating mp3s are steps, then the ringtones are crowbarred intrusions — sudden infections that come unannounced from somebody’s pocket, and disappear just as suddenly. And if you don’t have ’em on your phone, you can’t play ’em again.
Which is exactly why ringtones are music and not just sound: if done right, you want to hear them again. I’ve seen it on the subway, too: kids clicking through ringtones because it makes them happy.
When The Residents recorded their Commercial Album in 1980, cramming 40 60-second “pop” songs into 40 minutes (with instructions to play each thrice), they were operating on the assumption that the entirety of a pop song could be condensed into a minute. As Mike Jones has proved, they were off by about 50 seconds.
While ineffable, it’s hard to think of Jones’ hook as particularly transcendent in and of itself. But it points towards the new — or, more accurately, the old. Like every new medium, it will be used to reassess and repackage the past.
As of this writing, a half-dozen old tracks — call them proto-meme-pop — are scattered across Billboard’s top 50 Hot Ringtones chart: “Jingle Bells,” “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies,” “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” the “Super Mario Brothers” theme, the “Pink Panther” theme, and — blessed art thou, oh Lord, our “Bob” — “Sweet Home Alabama.” Like all truly classic folk works, each can be boiled down to one central idea that pretty much anybody reading this can almost surely remember.
If the advent of mp3s returned us to the New Golden Age of the Single, then ringtones may well introduce an even more primitive age, one that never really existed outside the head of people who thought ’70s rock was a good idea: the Age of the Riff, where the popcraft of Skynyrd will meet the genius Japanese techno-artisans who code the sound of chirping crickets.
And what a challenge! Who can create something magnificently short? Who will be the first to cram meaning into a 10 second statement? It’ll be like building ships in bottles, or carving micro-sculptures in the heads of needles. When will the ringtone mash-ups start to drop? Will “Smells Like Teen Spirit” come ricocheting rudely up the ringtone charts during 2006’s inevitable grunge revival? Will it still rock? Can it?
Only in print:
o February/March Relix (Bob Weir cover): album reviews of Derek Trucks Band, Robert Fripp, Wilco, and Robert Wyatt; book reviews of Grievous Angel: An Intimate Biography of Gram Parsons and The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu
o December Hear/Say: albums reviews of Lightning Bolt and the Grateful Dead
A helpful way to observe the State of the Union was to pretend that I was just watching the tail end of a shitty (and vaguely hilarious) prequel to the really dope trilogy where the good guys save the galaxy. I fully expect that the loose ends will be tied up shortly: hands and heads lopped off, faces melted, children born and exiled to desert planets, etc..
I can’t claim to be an expert on the work of the Korean artist Nam June Paik, who died on Sunday. I only really saw one show by him, a career retrospective called “The Worlds of Nam June Paik” at the Guggenheim in March of 2000, when I was home for spring break. It blew my mind quite thoroughly, though. A laser-shot waterfall cascaded through the Guggenheim’s central space (the floor of which was covered with a garden of glowing televisions), while ambient sound and light created a continuous environment. (See!) While I could take or leave his Fluxist absurdities like “One For Violin Solo” (though I’m sure it was fun to stage), his technology-oriented sculptures floored me with their combination of beauty and koan-like logic (and humor).
One piece I saw was called “Moon is the Oldest TV,” and was created by a series of televisions holding images of the different phases of the moon. Elsewhere, in “Candle-TV,” Paik had hollowed out television casings and inserted gently burning candles (or maybe there were just pictures of a time he’d done it previously…) The gallery on his site has some nice pictures. Beautiful, inspiring stuff.
Here’s a slab of bipolar Beatlesy joy from The Wowz, a New York band I really oughta see more often. “Happy Today” — and a lot of their debut, Long Grain Rights — just hits that spot sometimes: an uplifting and homemade accounting of happiness and its fracture lines, mope and the inevitable glimmers of its end. I suppose this is just a different reckoning of the same mathematics behind “All Things Must Pass.”
So, Google has gone into China, and seem to be complying with the government’s censorship orders. A lot of people are calling Google out on this, saying it directly goes against their “don’t be evil” motto. But it really depends on one’s definition of evil, not to mention the value one places on Google’s import. Either way, Google has crossed a line into some murky currents.
At the Consumer Electronics Show, Google co-founder Larry Page showed a world map that highlighted where search queries were coming from. “If you look at a picture of earth from space at night,” he said, “you’ll see that anywhere there’s electric light, there’s internet, and anywhere there’s internet, people are using Google.” That’s pretty staggering. Simply, Chinese citizens will have better access to this grid. There’s no way to argue that this is bad, nor is the mass self-consciousness created by what John Battelle calls Google’s database of intentions. (This is more or less what co-founder Sergey Brin argued this week.)
If Google is pure, then the fact that they are now operating in China is not what matters. What matters is the way they function within the boundaries laid out for them. Will there be a Chinese equivalent of the famed Google Zeitgeist? If so, and teched-out dissidents ram “Tibet” — one of the censored terms — up the charts with a bullet, what happens? Does it get blocked out from the list like the Sex Pistols were? What happens if the Chinese government requests search information, like the Department of Justice is currently? (If the DoJ gets away with it, wouldn’t that set a bad standard for China? Not that the United States government has ever taken a hypocritical stance before…)
Google is a business, but — in many ways — they operate like a mysterious institution, like the State or the Church or money or anything else that people collectively agree to believe in because it is necessary. If one accepts that the internet exists, Google naturally follows (and, if it doesn’t, you’re deluding yourself). They were going to go into China eventually. This is the beginning of the next phase, and substantially more important in a (literally) real world way than Google Video and the fact that people can download day-old NBA games and old Star Trek episodes.
The second in an ongoing collection of functional webpages (excluding any/all Google programs).
Two search tools:
o OneLook Reverse Dictionary — If getting stuck on a word is like having something stuck between your teeth, the reverse dictionary is pretty decent floss. (Thanks, Mayur.)
o Retrievr — A prototype, but a pretty cool concept: draw the image you’re looking for and see what comes back. I tried drawing distinct frop-pipe smoking Dobbsheads, but it didn’t pull anything back. Hopefully, it’ll improve. (Thanks, SearchBlog.)
One utility of dubious legality:
o BugMeNot Firefox plug-in — Last time, I mentioned BugMeNot, a handy site to bypass website registrations. If you use Firefox, this plug-in will apparently automate it for you. (I do use Firefox, but haven’t had a chance to try this yet.) (via BoingBoing, of course.)
And a pair of NYC-centric pages:
o Interactive Transit Map — Okay, so it’s enabled by Google (but what isn’t these days?). This is an ace way to map your way to unfamiliar corners of the boroughs. (Courtesy o’ Kottke)
o NYC Transit Email Notification — Have the MTA’s central robot email you every week to let you know what the deal is with your trains. Especially useful for us shuttle-bus plagued Bourgwickians. (Found this my damn self!)
In high school, we hung out at Dunkin Donuts and played Uno and guzzled what we called “Crust” — the hideously mind-boggling flavor from Snapple known as Snapple Pie. It tasted like cinnamon-spiced apple cider going down but then, immediately, one’s mouth was filled with the aftertaste of pie crust. Donuts stopped carrying it, so we patronized the horribly nicknamed Iraq Shack on the corner until they, too, ran out of their supply. (There was a brief “re-release” in 2003, and I only found a bottle in the back of a Chinatown grocery in San Francisco in spring 2004.)
It’s truly amazing technology, and only wished Snapple responded to my repeated entreaties to let me interview Smita Patel, the creator of such wonders. Even though she is oft quoted as saying completely absurd things in hilariously fake publicist-talk, I have no doubt she is the one who knows the secret of The Crust.
And, anyway, what’s important right now is that The Crust is back! Sort of, anyway.
In a non-descript pizzeria on Third Avenue tonight, I discovered the existence of Snapple Pie, mark II: Berry Mix and Mingle (“Cranberry Juice Drink from Concentrate with Other Natural Flavors”). Though the ingredients list mentions neither raspberry nor cinnamon, both are depicted on the package and, I suppose, in the drink. (This stuff has apparently been out since at least last fall, but whaddya want front from me? Besides, even BevNet, the leading site for all things sugary and liquidy seems to have missed it.)
Alas, this Berry Mix hardly delivers on the miraculous connotations (who can turn water to pie?) of the original Crust. Oh, the magical aftertaste is still there, alrighty, but it’s also present in the initial cran-ras gulp, which sorta defeats the punchline. Likewise, the aftertaste seems itself to have acquired an aftertaste. Reactions in the blogosphere (all two of them) have been mixed. Staticpain says it “definatly sucks so much dick,” while Ugly Floral Blouse writes that “the berry flavor is pretty dang good.”
Still, as Thomas Jefferson once said, “inferior Crust is always superior to no Crust.” I believe he was speaking metaphorically, but I’m not sure.
I’m a straight-up sucker for any kind of melodic percussion, from vibraphone (mmmm, Ruth Underwood-era Zappa) to mbira, the African thumb piano. Ralph White, the co-founder of the late Texan hillbilly weirdoes Bad Livers, had the brilliant idea to combine the latter with mountain music. Throughout Trash Fish, it creates a warm bed that fills the rhythmic holes left by the rolling banjo and the swelling fiddle. It’s so unusual and gorgeous that it pushes the genre from its usual Appalachian evocations towards a place even more pastoral and dreamy. A great morning album for those who can deal with a little twang before noon. My, that sounds dirty. Happy Monday.
Recently, I remembered a Saturday Night Live ad parody from the ’80s for the New York Word Exchange. It starred the late (and sorely missed) Phil Hartman as spokesperson Don Bingham. He offered financial advice for those interested in the burgeoning word market. It was fantastical, and kinda reminded me of one of my favorite books when I was a kid, Crawford Killian’s Wonders, Inc, which is I think why it’s stuck with me.
Strange thing is, it fairly predicted the value of domain names when the cyberboom hit.
I wish I could quote the sketch itself, but I don’t have a copy and — besides an entry on an SNL fan site, which reveals that the bit aired on November 22, 1986 — there doesn’t seem to be any public, digital evidence of its existence: no clip, no transcript, no nothin’. That surprised me. Part of the reason I didn’t post about this sooner is because I figured the geeks woulda been all up on it a long time ago. At any rate, I’m happy to release the meme back into the blogospherical wild.
My good chum Spacefuzz plays in the blissfully weird Los Angeles band Kiss the Frog. They just finished their first album, called The Trojan Horse, which — they promise — is “a crystalline dub jazz concept album of cohesive disconnection” (among other things). So dig it, my hippie love children, ’cause it jamz a lot. I’m also proud to say I co-wrote lyrics to a few of the tunes, including the title track, which you can (and should) download here.
1. Waiting for the L-train, listening to “Madame George” by Van Morrison. “Get on the train,” Morrison croons, exactly as the subway’s headlight appears down the tunnel. “This is the train.” Sure is.
2. Pulling into Union Square, the delay pedal faux-ambience of “Birth Ritual,” Soundgarden’s contribution to Cameron Crowe’s Singles soundtrack, starts swirling. The doors open, and a bagpipe player on the platform contributes to the cacophony, building dissonantly until the exact moment the doors close and the band headbangs their way into the song.
3. On the F-train, somewhere near the Gowanus Canal, Brian Eno’s “Baby’s on Fire” comes on. “And after I felt this was going on too long,” says an interview subject in an essay about cell phone usage I’m reading, “I suddenly changed the topic.” “Rescuers row row,” Eno sings cheekily, “do your best to change the subject.”
Given enough inputs — the stimulus of urban life, a book to read, an iPod to listen to — coincidences are bound to occur. “Any sufficiently advanced technology,” Arthur C. Clarke declared, “is indistinguishable from magic,” and the shuffle mode’s particular magic seems to be its catalytic abilities: its way of seemingly organizing chaos into something neatly packaged. In a way, it is both artificial and disarming, but it is also a sleight-of-hand that rarely fails to dazzle.
I cannot recall the last time I saw a bagpipe player in the subway.
Mike Doughty went to Africa (start there and proceed), and is dispatching oodles of beautiful photographs in categories such as “kids,” “dudes!” “cars,” and “signs!” as well as some more descriptive postings.
John Perry Barlow, meanwhile, headed deep into his belly button, and came back with a fairly staggering bit of self-reckoning in this foul year of our Lord, 2006. Whether or not you’re interested in Barlow, he’s definitely in it for the long haul — whatever “it” is — and is one of the more elegantly articulate travelers I’ve come across.
I’ve long loved the White Album-era demo for this tune, included on Anthology (and even put it on my Hanukah mix), but — for some reason — had never really given much credence to the official version. Randomly, the same week, Ira from Yo La Tengo chose to put the album rendition on his Hanukah mix (right after the Tall Dwarfs’ “Meet the Beatle,” a hilarious account of an encounter with George Harrison himself, who denied that he was George Harrison). And, man, has it ever sunk in.
Beyond George’s beautiful and uplifting melody — and the fact that it’s a song exactly as slow as it should be — I love the Phil Spectorness of it all: the impossibly bright horns, the sunbeaming steel guitar, the angelic strings. For some reason, the music has just hit me absolutely over the past week. I’m not even particularly down right now. I’m doing quite well (dank you vedy much), so it’s not a particular comfort thing. It’s just pure pleasure. In Vegas and since, at the end of the day, I’ve wanted to do nothing more but listen to this song two or three times consecutively (as I’m doing right now). Happiness abounds.
Here is Larry Page’s keynote from the Consumer Electronics Show in mp3 form — part one and part two — courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle’s podcasts. Page starts dropping science about interface standardization at around the 8:20 mark of part one. It’s a geniune and brilliant performance. (Robin Williams shows up around 27:50.)
HST: “…the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody — or at least some force — is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.”
Marshall McLuhan: “Light is pure information,”
What does it mean, then, when Google says they want to “organize the world’s information”?
After spending two eight-hour days at CES looking at every kind of gadget imaginable, most of which seemed totally useless, and seeing Yahoo roll out their Go! project to make the world fasterfasterfaster, I’m fully convinced that Google is truly and actually committed to moving the world forward (give or take the DRM-burdened Google Video).
Are they tending the light? You think I believe in that hippie bullshit? Well, why shouldn’t I? You got something better to believe in these days?
Back in Eastern Standard Time after a completely mindbending few days at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. There is, of course, much to report — and, when I get back to a high-speed connection — lots of shtuff to upload: cell phone pix (holy “Bob,” did my lo-fi camera love the Vegas lights!), maybe some field recordings (mmm, twinkling casino drones), and random notes.
The highlight of my weekend was easily Google co-founder Larry Page’s keynote address on Friday afternoon, which was positively inspiring. In addressing the consumer electronics industry and encouraging them to standardize their interfaces, Page spun a utopian sci-fi vision of the future. Then he rolled out a bunch of new Google products, and showed off a prototype of Nicholas Negroponte’s $100 laptop. And then Robin Williams came out and freestyled.
Except for Google Video, which seems like it’s gonna need some philosophical ironing-out before it jibes with the rest of the G-mission, pretty much everything was spot-on and made nearly every other product showcased at CES seem, well, pointless. I walked out of the keynote with the same dizzy sensation I have after amazing live gigs. Supposedly, the official CES website will have a transcript at some point. I’ll most definitely link to it.
Vegas was all kinds of fun and dazzling and bizarre. In the morning, I could look out the window and see flamingos and penguins cavorting in the garden below (though, sadly, not together), not to mention the beautiful view of the mountains and desert.
Yeeeeeaaaaaaaaah.
Parker lies in the darkness, recalling the thousand fragments of the hologram rose. A hologram has this quality: Recovered and illuminated, each fragment will reveal the whole image of the rose. Falling toward delta, he sees himself the rose, each of his scattered fragments revealing a whole he’ll never know — stolen credit cards — a burned-out suburb — planetary conjunctions of a stranger — a tank burning on a highway — a flat packet of drugs — a switchblade honed on concrete, thin as pain.
— from “Fragments of a Hologram Rose” (1977), collected in Burning Chrome (1986)
I love how, in the course of a paragraph, Gibson simultaneously invents a completely fictional technology and then employs it poetically to convey real, subtly creeping emotion. Blew me away when I first read it in high school, and blows me away now.
I can’t seem to find it on the web to link to it, but my friend Josh points me towards a bit of Radiohead news via tipster newssheet TripWire:
On a more surprising note, O’Brien revealed that uber-producer and longtime Radiohead collaborator Nigel Godrich will not be involved with the new record. Rather, they have decided to go with Mark “Spike” Stent, who has worked in the past with U2, Madonna and Bjork. Oh yeah, and the Spice Girls.
O’Brien added: “It’s not an end of an era, (but) part of what your realise as a band is that all those records you made with Nigel, apart from Hail To The Thief we were a little bit in the comfort zone. That’s why you make records like Kid A after OK Computer, that’s why you make OK Computer after The Bends, you’ve got to do stuff that you’re scared of doing. With Nigel, we’ve been working together for 10 years, and we all love one another too much.”
At any rate, I’m sure Pitchfork’ll be all up in that shit soon, especially ’cause it also mentions that they’ll be playing some shows and offering some new tunes for download come spring.
The Godrich news is certainly surprising, and could be really cool.
After thrilling out repeatedly to their self-titled 2004 debut, I finally caught Icy Demons last month at the Bowery Ballroom, opening for Prefuse 73. Their music was as weird and otherworldly as it is on Icy Demons, at once atmospheric and way outside, while still being performed by a fluid, churning band. It is the type of music, filled with Martian grace, that I can’t really fathom being performed by humans, yet there they were. A rare contemporary album worth spending 44 consecutive minutes with.
My mind is on the blink. One more night in Hoboken kept 2005 in suspended animation, so the New Year doesn’t really begin ’til I wake up tomorrow. So it goes. One more night, a few more bust-outs (finally got “Tiny Birds”), one more version of Serge Gainsbourg’s “Je T’Aime.” Happy Hanukah. Thanks, YLT.
Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s
1 January 2006
*(Hanukah, night 8)*
Lois and FruitBoots opened.
Mix disc by Cornelius.
Holiday (Madonna)
Eight Day Weekend (Gary Lewis)
Cherry Chapstick
Decora
Season of the Shark
The Summer
Autumn Sweater
Satellite
Tiny Birds
Nowhere Near
Sudden Organ
Styles of the Times
Tom Courtenay
Blue Line Swinger
Eight Days A Week (The Beatles)
*(encore)*
Matter of Trust (Billy Joel, with, ahem, Matter of Trust, featuring Jons Benjamin & Glaser, Todd Barry, etc.)
Rocks Off (The Rolling Stones)
Don’t Make My Baby Blue (Cynthia Weill/Barry Mann, with Lois on vocals and Bruce Bennett on guitar)
Je T’Aime (Serge Gainsbourg, with Lois and Gaylord Fields)
Dream A Little Dream of Me (W. Schwant/F. Andre/ G. Kahn, with Lois on vocals)
Never thought I’d be so glad to spend New Year’s in Jersey. Probably some holes below, but so it goes. Lotta strands in ol’ Duder’s head. Fun stuff — falsetto overdrive after midnight (“1999”); costumes; thin, wild mercury music (“I Wanna Be Your Lover”); Georgia balladry (“Gee, the Moon is Shining Bright”); New Year’s resolutions (“Sugarcube”), and the infinitely charming Wreckless Eric eating an apple while crooning Serge Gainsbourg (“Je T’Aime,” untranslatable to tape). Happy New Year’s.
Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s
31 December 2005
*(Hanukah, night 7)*
The Scene is Now and Fred Armisen opened.
Mix discs by James and RJD2.
(much of set with various members of The Scene is Now and/or Fred Armisen on drums.)
1999 (Prince, Fred Armisen as Prince.)
When U Were Mine (Prince, with Armisen)
Stockholm Syndrome
Upside Down
Tears Are In Your Eyes
I Wanna Be Your Lover (Bob Dylan)
As the Hour Grows Late
Center of Gravity
Xmas Trip (Run-On)
Gee, The Moon is Shining Bright (The Dixie Cups)
Little Eyes
Sugarcube
The Story of Jazz
Big Day Coming (fast version)
Deeper Into Movies
Mushroom Cloud of Hiss
instrumental (Georgia on guitar)
Our Way to Fall
*(encore)*
False Alarm tease >
Let’s Compromise (Information, with everybody)
Red Rubber Ball (Paul Simon, with Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby)
Je T’Aime (Serge Gainsbourg, with Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby)
Yellow Sarong
An utterly surprising set, featuring former Rolling Thunder Revue multi-instrumentalist David Mansfield on violin (“the boy with the Botticelli face” — Allen Ginsberg) and all the quiet folkiness and obscure covers that’ve been conspicously scarce for much of the run. Nearly every selection felt like a forgotten (or newly remembered) treat, from the Camp Yo La Tengo “Tom Courtenay” to a random-ass T-Bone Burrnett cover to Georgia’s beautiful, beautiful, beautiful take on the Blonde on Blonde outtake “I’ll Keep It With Mine.”
Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s
30 December 2005
*(Hanukah, night 6)*
The Volcano Suns and Raisin opened.
Mix disc by Ira.
(entire set with David Mansfield on violin)
Night Falls on Hoboken
Tom Courtenay (quiet version)
Did I Tell You?
Griselda (Peter Stampfel)
Pablo and Andrea
Black Hole (The Urinals)
Something To Do
We’re An American Band
I’m Coming Home (T-Bone Burnett)
Alyda
From Black to Blue
How Much I’ve Lied (Gram Parsons)
Little Eyes
For Shame of Doing Wrong (Richard Thompson)
Sugarcube
I Heard You Looking
I’ll Keep It With Mine (Bob Dylan)
*(encore)*
Autumn Sweater
Can’t Make It On Time (The Ramones, with Volcano Suns guitarist)
Definitely Clean (Steve Wynn, with Volcano Suns guitarist and Peter Prescott on vocals)
I wasn’t there, but thanks to the help of Christopher, Neil, OneLouderNYC, and Ira’s diary, I think I’ve reconstructed the setlist for last night’s show. Looks like fun, with a nice seasonal clump in the middle. (No “I Live in the Springtime,” though.) All corrections welcome, of course.
Beautiful World (Devo)
From A Motel 6
Today Is The Day
Detouring America With Horns
Season of the Shark
Winter A Go Go
Autumn Sweater
The Summer
Car Gears Stick in Reverse, Daring Driver Crosses Town Backwards (with Jad Fair)
Principal Punishes Students with Bad Impressions and Tired Jokes (with Jad Fair)
Little Eyes
Five-Cornered Drone (Crispy Duck)
Tom Courtenay
Heroin (Velvet Underground, Roky Erickson arrangement)
*(encore)* with David Johansen on vocals
After the Fox (Burt Bacharach)
Out in the Streets (Jeff Berry and Ellie Greenwich)
Doin’ All Right (The Fugs, with Bruce Bennett on guitar)
Chinese Rocks (Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers)
Who Are the Mystery Girls? (New York Dolls).
(No Yo La Tengo for me last night. I stayed home and cleaned my room. True story. Scroll down for reports from the first four nights, or click on the new YLT link over thar on the right, and watch this space for reports on the Friday and Saturday shows. And email me if you have a Thursday setlist.)
I imagine twilight landings are sublime pretty much anywhere, but I especially enjoy coming down over sprawl. I love how literally one can see civilization’s grid wired across the landscape.
The following photos weren’t taken with my cell camera, though there’s a similar limitation. Since I was shooting through the plane window, I couldn’t use a flash. Given the speed of the plane, and the bending of the lights, the results are nothing like the magisterial order of semi-urban suburbia (what I was hoping to get), but are nifty nonetheless.
It’s just a wonder to me that I can see Tortoise and the Sun Ra Arkestra on consecutive nights, on a tiny-ass stage, playing both by themselves and with Yo La Tengo. The Arkestra was in fine form, digging deep and weird, and coming up with “I am Gonna Unmask The Batman,” a cut from the cosmos-spanning Singles anthology that YLT has drawn from repeatedly.
Like the Arkestra, YLT’s set was, by turns, sloppy, inspired, and joyous. Highlights included a gorgeous “Beach Party Tonight” opener, a half-dozen impromptu Stax-on-Saturn horn arrangements, an overdriven “Big Day Coming” (with trombone blowing a mutated Dixieland counterpoint to the two-note riff), and a full-charge segue into an even-more-overdriven “Little Honda.”
I’m, er, skipping tomorrow. So, if anybody goes and wants to pass a aetlist along, I’d be happy to post it.
Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s
28 December 2005
*(Hanukah, night 4)*
The Sun Ra Arkestra and Jon Glaser and Jon Benjamin opened.
(“Beach Party” through “Double Dare,” and “Clumsy Grandmother” through “Nuclear War” with members of the Arkestra.)
Beach Party Tonight
Georgia vs. Yo La Tengo
Don’t Have To Be So Sad
Out the Window
Double Dare
Tears Are In Your Eyes
Stockholm Syndrome
Walking Away From You
Can’t Forget
Clumsy Grandmother Serves Delicious Dessert by Mistake
Deeper Into Movies
Big Day Coming (fast) >
Little Honda (Beach Boys)
Nuclear War (Sun Ra)
*(encore)*
I Dream of Jeannie (Hypnolovewheel, with Stephen Hunking on guitar and vocals)
(I Live For) Cars and Girls (The Dictators, with Todd Abramson of Maxwell’s on vocals)
Dreaming (Sun Ra)
It’s a 600 MB stuffed file of about 170 mp3s that I think are the bee’s knees — old favorites, new favorites, outtakes, hot jamz, shuffle-play weirdness, Brazilian fun, sound collages, and some field recordings of frogs and Chicago radio preachers thrown in for good measure. I’m sure some stuff will be quite familiar, but hopefully you’ll find abundant new goodies. Enjoy!
(And don’t forget to click “save-as” if you download so it doesn’t come up as a jarbled text file…)
Splendid night in Hoboken, and kinda the reason I keep going back to Maxwell’s. Seeing Tortoise on a tiny stage was a treat, and their additions to Yo La Tengo’s set were exactly what guest appearances should be. Switching off on various basses, guitars, and drums, Messrs. Hendon, McCombs, and Parker strengthened the songs in all kinds of subliminal, unpredictable ways, from McCombs and Parker’s spine-like guitar/bass groove underneath “Autumn Sweater,” to McCombs’ one-chord drone below “Last Days of Disco,” to McCombs putting down his guitar altogether after seemingly deciding that “Barnaby, Hardly Working” was working just fine with the core YLT trio (and it was), to Herndon returning to help guide the song through a magnificent coda.
The appearance of Patti Smith Group mastermind and legendary rock scribe Lenny Kaye (on his 59th birthday, no less) was also glorious. The curator of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era — the punk-era equivalent of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music — led by example, running the Tengos through a handful of, er, nuggets with passion and graceful humor. Happy birthday, dude.
Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s
27 December 2005
*(Hanukah, night 3)*
Tortoise and Demitri Martin opened.
Mix disc by El-P.
(First three-quarters of the set with various members of Tortoise.)
Bad Politics
Green Arrow
Everyday
False Alarm
Autumn Sweater
The Last Days of Disco
Barnaby, Hardly Working
How To Make A Baby Elephant Float
Madeline (false start)
Sugarcube
Artificial Heart
Decora
Tom Courtenay
I Heard You Looking
*(encore)* with Lenny Kaye on guitar and vocals
Night Time (Strangeloves)
No Time Like The Right Time (Blues Project)
Shock Me (Lenny Kaye)
Pushin’ Too Hard (The Seeds)
Moulty (The Barbarians)
Literally nobody I’ve ever mentioned it to has copped to remembering Beverly Hills Teens. It aired (sometimes?) weekday mornings during the half-hour before I boarded the bus to school when I was a kid, when — if I’d finished breakfast and gotten my coat on — my mother would occasionally let me watch cartoons. It was an inane piece of shit, a kiddie forerunner to 90210, and — besides the neon/turquoise color scheme — I remember literally nothing of it. I can’t recall a single character nor recount a single plot (though, I’m sure I could guess and probably be right).
But, for some reason, the melody of the show’s theme lodged itself firmly in my brain, and has stayed there for twenty years (albeit with mostly erroneous words). Hearing it now — because, as we know, everything is available on the internets — returns me somewhat bizarrely to my childhood skin. The melody, I’m happy to report, is exactly as I’ve been humming it for the past two decades, and it still evokes exactly the same exotic images of California that I had as a kid: a land foreign and mysteriously bright.
Word-up to the faceless Hollywood songwriter who penned this.
An effervescent Boxing Day at Maxwell’s. First half of the set was particularly graceful. Precise “Pez Drop” opener (the “bah bah bah bah”s were still in my head waiting for the PATH), purdy-like “Our Way To Fall,” neatly swinging “Tony Orlando,” and delicious Acetone action/two-note riffage on “Big Day Coming.”
Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s
26 December 2005
*(Hanukah, night 2)*
PG Six and Todd Barry opened.
Mix disc by Georgia.
Evanescent Psychic Pez Drop
Our Way To Fall
We’re An American Band
Today is the Day (fast version)
Flying Lesson (Hot Chicken #1)
Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House
Season of the Shark
Little Eyes
The Empty Pool
She’s My Best Friend (Velvet Underground)
Big Day Coming (fast version)
Drug Test
Tom Courtenay
Blue Line Swinger
Flowers of the Forest (Fairport Convention, no drums, with Patrick Gubler and Bob Banister (sp?) of PG Six)
*(encore)*
Jeepster (T-Rex, with PG & BB, Todd Barry on drums)
Time (Richard Hell) (with PG & BB)
Burning For You (Blue Oyster Cult)
(thanks to Sam for plugging the holes in night 1, all help appreciated…)
Back from vacation just in time for Yo La Tengo’s annual Hanukah run at Maxwell’s. I’ll be hitting a bunch of these in the coming week. Setlists to follow when I feel like it. Tonight’s show was a lot of fun, with a little bit of opening night glitchery, and definitely a bitchin’ way to spend Christmas.
Personal highlights included a quiet/shimmering “Crying of Lot G,” a blistering false ending on “Styles of the Times,” and the lovely acoustic campfire “Big Day Coming” (the third different arrangement of the song).
Also, the band is going to be selling limited run CD-R mixes each night of the run, $10 at the merch table. Tonight’s was made by brilliant Motherless Brooklyn/Fortress of Solitude novelist Jonathan Lethem. I bought it, and will post a tracklist when I can decipher the liner card.
Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s
25 December 2005
*(Hanukah, night 1)*
The Mad Scene (with Georgia on guitar) & Eugene Mirman opened.
Band in costume for show:
Ira – Santa
Georgia – Robin (as in “Batman and…”)
James – Hasidic Jew (James McJew?)
Holiday (Madonna)
Eight Day Weekend (“Seven Day Weekend” by Doc Pomus, covered by Gary “U.S.” Bonds)
Little Eyes
The Crying of Lot G
Double Dare
Shaker
Stockholm Syndrome
Lewis
Don’t Have To Be So Sad (James couldn’t get the synth beat going right, so the guitar tech dude played drums)
Sudden Organ
Autumn Sweater
Styles of the Times
Decora
Deeper Into Movies (Hamish Kilgour from Mad Scene on snare)
I Heard You Looking (Kilgour on Acetone)
*(encore)*
Big Day Coming (acoustic, Georgia lead)
Je T’Aime (Serge Gainsbourg, with Kilgour and Lisa Siegel on vocals)
My Little Corner of the World (Ira’s mother on vocals)
I’m going on vacation. I’ll be back 12/23. See you then.
If you’re bored, might I recommend obsessively clicking the Comrades & Daily Repeck links o’er there on the right column (like I do when I should be working)?
The milk is on the second shelf on the door, and the chocolate syrup is just below that. Clean up when you’re done, or Mayur’ll be pissed.
While it’s not quite as delicious as last year’s rumor that El Zimmy was gonna guest judge on American Idol, the prospect of the following has me hugely intrigued (to say the least):
Bob Dylan shocked his fans 40 years ago by embracing the electric guitar. Now he’s stunning a few more by embracing another technological innovation: satellite radio. The singer has signed on to serve as host of a weekly one-hour program on XM Satellite Radio, spinning records and offering commentary on new music and other topics, starting in March. The famously reclusive 64-year-old performer said in a statement yesterday that “a lot of my own songs have been played on the radio, but this is the first time I’ve ever been on the other side of the mike.”
“Other topics,” hmm? After doing a Victoria’s Secret ad, I don’t think anybody can possibly spin a Dylan radio show as “shocking.” It kinda makes too much sense. Unless, that is, he starts hawking underwear on the air (and even that would be in the fine tradition of King Biscuit Flour and the like…)
If heads can’t figure out how to get this on BitTorrent, I might have to actually subscribe to XM!
The website for David Byrne’s always-hep Luaka Bop Records reports that Brazilian psychedelic legends Os Mutantes are considering a reunion:
We are working on an expanded Os Mutantes record. The band members have been discussing possibly getting back together for a few shows in 2006, hence we are also talking to people who might be excited as all hell to put on an Os Mutantes show. Are you one of those people? Would you mind if we use your basement/rec room for a show or two? When’s the last time you entertained 1,500 people down there? Yeah. You’re gonna have to move the coffee table.
Hot diggity! This is one of the few reunion shows I’d flip over. I’ll post an mp3 sometime.
(both files expire on December 15th)
In honor of my friend Joey and coming across Bulworth on my chum’s television-box (I’d never seen it) and having already planned to post a Why? track and getting thrown “In A Cold-Ass Fashion” on the ol’ shuffle shuffle this evening… well, what reasons could I have for not celebrating a decade of dorky white boyz rapping?
I’d forgotten about “In A Cold-Ass Fashion,” a Mellow Gold-era b-side from some random compilation called Jabberjaw: Good to the Last Drop. In some ways, this is quintessential mid-’90s Beck: total absurdity (“smoke a pack of whiskey with Jesus Christ / I’ve got options / I’ve got cop shows / I get nauseous and the sweat is day-glo”), but the beats and the bassline that comes in at around the 2:10 mark and the robot voice at the end and the way the banjo breakdown drops in all kind of feel like a throw-forward to me — a prototype for the dancefloor sexx music from Midnite Vultures and Guero. And, besides, it’s where Beck declares himself the original gluesniffa. Take that, ya Houston robotrippers!
Elephant Eyelash by Why? — a rapper from the Anticon collective (2) — is easily one of my top 10 faves from this year. When I first heard Why?’s work with cLOUDDEAD, for some reason, little bits of his melodies reminded of some Beck’s acoustic tunes, not his rap stuff at all. There’s a real playfulness in the way the song is organized, which I love. As it progresses and builds from section to section, these modular scenes surface (“the rain comes down in late July” is particularly vivid), each defined by its own combination of rhyme, melodic turn, and arrangement. On one hand, “Crused Bones” not a song you can sit down and play with an acoustic guitar, but it’s definitely a song you could play with a band (3), though — as near as I can tell — the type of song that almost nobody would actually think to play with a band. Nearly all of Elephant Eyelash blows my domepiece as such.
(1) Holy shit, the redesign of beck.com is annoying. They used to have a great, functional, searchable discography. Now, the site’s all purdy & shit, with exclusive web tunes (cool, I guess), but — dammit — all I want is information.
(2) Man, there’s a lotta exploring to be done with these guys.
(3) Still kicking myself for skipping out when Why? & his comrades descended on Brooklyn a few months back.
.
