“The Warmth of the Sun” – The Beach Boys
from Shut Down, vol. 2 (1964)
also on Endless Summer (1974)
released by Capitol Records (buy)
(file expires on February 20th)
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.)
“Barnaby, Hardly Working” – Yo La Tengo
27 December 2005 :: Maxwell’s – Hoboken, NJ
(file expires on February 16th)
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.
“Think Small” – Tall Dwarfs
from Fork Songs (1992)
reissued by Cloud Recordings as twofer with Dogma EP (buy)
(file expires on February 15th)
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.”
Oh word? Word.
Dylan rehearses new album in Poughkeepsie.
We take our good news where we can get it.
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.
Brother Andy just posted the newest installment of the Frow Show. Thanks, Andy!
Listen here.
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.
