Thanks to Craig’ers & Dave, the Frank & Earthy Blog is back. I’ve got a whole backload of entries from around the time the site shit the bed, so I’ll be putting those up in the next few days.
I’ve also stocked the new blog with all the entries from my initial It’s Got A Good Beat blog (circa 2003-2004), which are mostly (maybe uninteresting) exercises in listening carefully to and writing very specifically about Billboard hits, as well as the past 10 months worth of entries from wunderkammern27.com. They’re all properly dated, 1984-style, so as to give the illusion that they were always there. Just as Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, this has always been exactly what my blog has looked like.
I’m using new software, so it’ll prolly take a few days to work out the kinks. Anyway, glad to be back and shinier than ever.
1. In which the sun explodes over Bourgwick…
2. …and later sets behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sucking the foreground into pure, black silhouette.
3. And, of course: the (accidental, digital) agony of Paul McCartney.
I’m a big fan of Polaroids, I have a few cameras, some of them even working, and my shelves are littered with boxes of pictures. With the ubiquity of digital cameras, all consumer-level photography is pretty much instant these days. Everything is a Polaroid. I’ve long thought, though, that lo-fi cell phone cams probably come closest to embodying what was special about the obsolete technology.
On one hand, cell pictures are silly and “cheap” (more on that in a moment), but — on the other hand — they present a series of technical limitations that can result in some great pictures. Polaroids are/were very good at capturing certain subjects and colors — rich blue skies, for example. I imagine that cell cams will prove to have their own specialties.
Like Polaroids, cell pictures are meant to be ephemeral. Where Polaroids generally cost $1 a shot and took a long moment to develop, one likewise doesn’t really know what cell phone shots look like until he sends them back to his computer (and, just as he had to be judgmental at a dollar a pop, barring the purchase of a USB cable, he usually has a limit of pictures he can upload each month).
All of which is to say: I got a new phone this week and have started to take some pictures. So far, I’m most enjoying the varying ways the low resolution distorts different light sources (a TV, a digital radio tuner, a candle). Check it.
More to come, hopefully! I think I need a USB cable…
“Funky Lil’ Song” – Beck
(buy)
(This file will expire August 30th.)
Been on a minor Beck kick lately (more on that soon, hopefully), wishing Guero made me happier than it does. But “Funky Lil’ Song,” Beck’s contribution to Dimension Mix (Eenie Menie, Aug. 22nd) — a tribute to Bruce Haack, Esther Nelson, and their utterly psychedelic children’s imprint, Dimension 5 Records — makes me quite happy, indeed. It’s a cover, but it shouldn’t be, reviving as it does a fine strain of Beck’s older music that he didn’t bring back for Guero: the novelty number. With spoken asides (“the bad vibrations are all around / when your house is upside down”), falsetto overdrive, and some kind of exaggerated soul singer voice I’ve never heard him use before, Beck definitely plays it for somelaughs. It’s a children’s song, after all.
But, while playful, it also retains that somber (ahem) “maturity” that crept into his music beginning with Sea Change that’s frequently toosomber. Beck sounds plenty world-weary on “Funky Lil’ Song,” but when you’re swaying and singing “ding dong, funky little song, everything is up and nothing is down” it’s tough to sound like a miserable sod. More than the comedy factor, though, what makes this feel like the Beck of yore is the sheer surprise of its discovery: a freshly minted obscurity. It’s nice to have that back, if only for five minutes and 15 seconds.
The Mountain Goats: Turning the Kleig Lights Around; feature inteview with John Darnielle, published in Paste#16
Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman, published in Paste #17
Illinois – Sufjan Stevens, published in Paste#17
One Step Closer – String Cheese Incident
David Byrne at Central Park, 29 June 2005
Yo La Tengo and Stephen Malkmus at Battery Park, 4 July 2005
The Olivia Tremor Control at the Bowery Ballroom, 2 August 2005
BRAIN TUBA: Sea Change?
In the current Relix (Jerry Garcia cover), only in print: Mike Doughty and the Unsingable Name feature, album reviews of Lake Trout, Erin McKeown, and the Grateful Dead; DVD review of Brian Wilson presents SMiLE; book review of Anthony DeCurtis’s In Other Words
Thanks to the good utopians at Archive.org, I’ve recently uploaded a bunch of Stopwatch Recordings. Now available for free download:
sw02: Postcards: Atlantic City EP (Funny Cry Happy)
Casinos are tuned to the key of C. Slot machine bleeps, video poker blurps, the pings that come before public announcements — all in C. The sum total is a surprisingly warm hum, designed to keep gamblers hypnotized. Like the lack of natural light, the absence of clocks, and the recycled air, it is one of the many surreal environmental features of our nation’s gambling halls.
Postcards: Atlantic City melds field recordings made in the seedy New Jersey resort town with slight modifications made at home — new drones, toy pianos run through delay pedals, chirping birds recorded in Chelsea — that interact, occasionally accidentally, with the source.
sw03: On A Clear Night, You Can Smell For Miles (Funny Cry Happy)
The second Funny Cry Happy full-length. Songs ‘n’ shit.
sw04: Running at the Sunshine (Matthew Van Brink/Jesse Jarnow)
Running at the Sunshine was conceived as an imagined community behind the doors (and up the stairs) of the incongruously named Sunshine Hotel, one of the last remaining men’s flophouses on Manhattan’s Bowery — a point on a late-night ramble from Chinatown to a greasy taco stand in the Village. These fantasies were later bolstered by an NPR documentary, and a wonderful book of photographs (“Flophouse” by David Isay, Stacy Abramson, and Harvey Wang), which uncovered links to a New York of a bygone era.
With the story and text in place, choreographer-director Judith Chaffee and composer (and my old friend) Matthew Van Brink worked closely together to realize the story in space and sound. Employing a deep percussion arsenal, Van Brink evokes a still clattering, post-industrial New York filled with squealing breaks, rusty dumpsters, and the undergridding rhythmic bustle of a city filled with permanent transients.
NOTE: Handmade meatspace versions of these recordings are also available. Drop me a line, if interested.
Studio 77 loves you!
Got a lotta catching up to do.
Picaresque – The Decemberists
Face the Truth – Stephen Malkmus
Bonnaroo 2004 – various artists
Sun Ra Arkestra and the Dub Trio at the Knitting Factory, 24 April 2005
Bob Dylan at the Beacon Theater, 25 April 2005
Caribou and Four Tet at the Bowery Ballroom, 4 May 2005
Yo La Tengo at Rose Theater, 18 May 2005
Derek Trucks Band at Rocks Off Boat Cruise, 22 June 2005
BRAIN TUBA: The Catalogue
BRAIN TUBA: Black and White Hiss
In the current Paste (Billy Corgan cover), only in print: The Mountain Goats: Turning the Klieg Lights Around, album review of The Stanley Brothers.
In the previous Relix (Trey Anastasio/Robert Randolph/John Butler cover), only in print: album reviews of Mike Doughty and A Hawk and a Hacksaw/Four Tet/Caribou; book reviews of Dave Van Ronk and All Yesterday’s Party: the Velvet Underground in Print, 1966-1970
In the current Relix (Jack Johnson cover), only in print: album reviews of Skeletons and the Girl-Faced Boys, The White Stripes, and Spirit; DVD review of Classic Album Series: The Band; book review of Greil Marcus. (I am also interviewed in Shain Shapiro’s article about message boards.)
In the current Signal To Noise(Four Tet cover), only in print: live review of Sonic Youth; album review of A Hawk and a Hacksaw.
In the current Hear/Say(Vans Warped Tour cover), only in print: album reviews of The Bad Plus and Head of Femur.
July 1st marks my fourth anniversary as a Brooklyn resident, where I moved after college (and following a month on Mom’s couch). Since then, I have occupied the same corner of the same loft above the Morgan Avenue L-train stop, on Seigel Street. I have watched the walls grow around me and hem me in, the open 900 square foot room first divided by a half-assed frame/bedsheet construction, then scrapped to create three doorless/roofless cubicles. This year, a ceiling grew, stairs were built, and an attic was created. There was painting.
When we moved in, the remains of the A.M. Knitwear Corporation were intact below us, a ghost factory filled with unused envelopes in abandoned desks where plates of fried chicken sat uneaten, milk left to curdle in the office refrigerator. We salvaged what we could: a few clothing racks, some furniture, and what is now my absurdly huge wooden desk. Within the year, the remains of the factory were wiped free, and more rooms installed.
The building has changed. Graffiti-etched paint was scraped from the walls to reveal a rich brick. Clean marble was laid on the cement hallway floors. There are new doorways in the stairwells, and security cameras. Most of the rooms now have hardwood floors. Our crap was already in by the time that was added to the deal and you can still see the yellow paint from the factory floor in our living room.
There were people on the block before us. They were across the street when we got here. I suspect some of them were responsible for the founding of the health food store and the bar. I am not entirely sure. And so, outside our front door, a neighborhood began. The New York Times said so last weekend. My ex-roommate, who recently vacated the premises for more civilized digs elsewhere in Brooklyn, weighed in with a pretty fair critique of the Timesstory.
As an unrepentant hippie, however, I take some umbrage with use of the term “hippie music” to describe what comes out of this neighborhood. At its worst, it’s usually sub-indie shitpiles or Radiohead-knockoffs. The latter can be particularly dangerous, what with their love of bass and all. But, as an unrepentant hippie, I will also defend to death their right to make it in their natural habitat. Which, I guess, doesmake them hippies (and relegates jamband kids to the suburban youth demographic it probably always was).
The picture at the head of the Times pieces is of the public area in front of Brooklyn’s Natural and The Archive — the main drag of what I’ve been trying to get people to call Bourgwick Village. Next to the entrance to Brooklyn’s Natural, there are several surfaces ripe for graffiti. Recently, some new stickers have cropped up: KEEP YOUR ART TO YOURSELF NEXT TIME. I laughed when I saw it, but every time I think about it, it gets more and more repellant. Self-righteousness is certainly the tone of most of the neighborhood graffiti — the standard issue liberal arts cultural critiques on the subway ads, to spray-painted slogans like “devious semantics.” If graffiti’s anonymous safety is a forum for a neighborhood’s true self, then we petty Bourgwickians are a pretty navel-gazing lot. But we also live here. Don’t like street art? Get outta Brooklyn, asshole.
“I guess I’ll say that I think that everybody should play music,” Laura Carter of Elf Power once told me. “The more the better. I guess I like the Sun Ra perspective on it that you’re giving and making things, by choosing to play music, versus a lot of other things you could choose to do.” Probably 1% — if that — of all the art ever created will ever mean anything substantial to anybody besides its creator. But I don’t think that’s sad or pathetic. It’s just how it goes. And that’s cool! Make that album! But it doesn’t mean I want, or even need, to hear it, either. Maybe I’m being a bad neighbor by not going out and seeing my local bands whenever they make the trek to gig on the Lower East Side or wherever. but — shit yeah — go play.
As for people practicing music “all night,” I can honestly say that it doesn’t happen. At least not in ear shot of my open windows (and I can hear the pinched hi-hats of at least three drummers practicing most afternoons). I think that’s mostly hyperbole. (As for people listeningto music at all hours, that’s another story.) But the musicians aren’t the only loud part. There’s also a city park out our back window. And, as anybody who has ever tried to record music in the building will tell you, it’s not the other bands that leak onto your virtual tape, it’s the fucking ice cream trucks.
That said, calling it the new Haight-Ashbury is a tad absurd, and I don’t really believe that the dude meant it. Though maybe he did. The Haight, after all, was overrun with herpes-carrying pilgrims come to find the San Francisco dream (“how I love ya, how I love ya, how I love ya, ‘frisssssscooooooo — oh, my hair’s getting good in the back…”) George Harrison called them “spotty.” Even the Grateful Dead bounced for Marin County pretty early on. It’s not quite the Summer of Love out here, thankfully.
Nobody’s trying to save the world (except my friend Jeff, and he moved out a while ago) though that might change when the pilgrims start to arrive — which, with the promised Williamsburg waterfront project, could be soon. Or it might not be. Or maybe they’re already here. How can one tell? Is there a secret handshake? Maybe the Timesarticle was a blip that won’t turn out to mean anything, but it’s a blip that at least warrants some attention from those being blipped.
There is also the matter of the new building going up one block over, between the Wonton factory and the Boar’s Head plant. It is next to another pair of loft buildings owned by my landlords, and it is being built to look exactly like them. Except that it will not serve any time as a factory, despite what its architecture might suggest. It kind of creeps me out, like one of the memory-impregnated replicants from Blade Runner. Do the residents of android buildings even dream, let alone of sheep (electric, organic or otherwise)?
I moved here because there was space and because I could afford it. Split three ways, places still seem affordable. Perhaps it is an existence of prolonged adolescence, though I suppose I prefer it to one of premature adulthood. Yes, welcome to Bourgwick my hippies. Go forth and try not to suck..
(And I mean that in the nicest possible way.)
Thanks to the lovely and effervescent Andy Blackman Hurwitz of Ropeadope Records, today marks the first new episode of the FROW SHOW since the shutdown of my friend Jeff’s pirate radio station in the spring of 2001.
For the next four Tuesdays, the Ropeadope Podcast Network will distribute installments of my favorite music (plus slick DJ chatter). This week’s show includes tracks by Captain Beefheart, Cornelius, the Olivia Tremor Control, some of my favorite unsigned NYC/Brooklyn acts (The Song Coproration, The Wowz, John Biz), outtakes and B-sides by Yo La Tengo, Bob Dylan, Wilco, Brian Eno, and Beck, the all-important Frow Show theme (of course), and much mo’.
Thanks again to Andy and everybody at the fake office!
You can listen here.
“You Belong to Me” – Bob Dylan
(This file will expire on February 9th.)
Dylan did a really lovely version of Pee Wee King, Chilton Price, and Redd Stewart’s “You Belong to Me” on the Natural Born Killers soundtrack, from 1994. It’s just Dylan and guitar. Because of that — and the warmth of the recording, and those chord changes, and that tempo, and Dylan’s level of engagement — it feels to me very much like something that could come near the end of Blood on the Tracks, in the vicinity of “Shelter From the Storm” and “Buckets of Rain.” It’s real pretty-like.
The only problem with the recording was that, right after the last verse, came a sample of Woody Harrelson from the film. To put it mildly, it killed the vibe. Dunno why it didn’t occur to me earlier, but — tonight — I finally dumped it into ProTools, removed Woody, and fixed the ending. I was feeling nerdy. Enjoy.
