Frank & Earthy blog
Jann Wenner is (possibly) opening a Rolling Stone-themed casino in Las Vegas. “Will there be a ‘New Dylan Album’ slot machine,” Gabriel Sherman wonders, “where every pull comes up five stars?”
Hunter Thompson would be rolling over in his grave if he hadn’t been shot out of a fucking cannon.
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?
Features:
Forty Years Upon Our Heads: A Recent Rap with Jerry Garcia on Perfect Sound Forever (an interview from late last year about the Grateful Dead, life after death, the Deadheads, and copyright, among other digressions)
Album reviews:
Feels – Animal Collective, published in Paste #19
Lookaftering – Vashti Bunyan, published in Paste #19
Omnibus – Tarkio, published in January/February Hear/Say
Slow Rewind – Sam Champion, published in Paste #19
Nice Talking to Me – the Spin Doctors, published in Paste #19
Thumbsucker Original Score – Tim DeLaughter and the Polyphonic Spree, published in December Hear/Say
self-titled – No Use For Humans
Live reviews:
Iron and Wine/Calexico at Webster Hall, 5 December 2005
Come On Falcon/Bustle In Your Hedgerow/Danjaboots at the Tribeca Rocking Club, 7 December 2005
Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s, 27 December 2005
Freaks Ball (Metzgerville and Coxygen) at Coda, 21 January 2006
Columns and misc.:
BRAIN TUBA: How I Spent My Christmas Break
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..
(“Magnet TV”)
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.
“Happy Today” – The Wowz
from Long Grain Rights (2004)
released by Recommended If You Like Records (buy)
(file expires on February 6th.)
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.
Here we go.
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.
