“U.S. Millie” – Theoretical Girls (download) (buy)
The Motel Party: no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11, no. 12
The flowers wilted overnight, shriveling from a Technicolor fanfare to something more in line with the muted browns of the rest of the room. Heidi was gone, and an early fall storm battered the ocean-side door. I burrowed under the blankets and thought of Dani, of the company that sent her to Tokyo to investigate “possibilities,” to look pretty with prospectuses, and how she might move among the steam and neon and ringtones and salarymen. Later, if I didn’t check out, she would fill the room again, absorb me in her drama via her company-issued calling cards. The wifi was back. I ignored my email and drifted in and out of sleep. Eventually, I got out of bed and pulled on my pants. I wondered how I could express the notion of time travel to my professor, that I’d been there, and knew what he was feeling, by the water, his dying father, and young beautiful friend, George Peabody. I put on my shoes and left the flowers for the maid. [END]
“666: The Coming of the New World Government” – Apollo Sunshine (download)
The Motel Party: no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11, no. 12
Her name was Heidi and I could still see her bikini under her grey tee-shirt. She was from a few towns inland. “Me and Gene walked there once,” Peabody said. Heidi giggled. “How long did that take?” she asked. “Oh, a day maybe,” Peabody replied, accepting another beer from the chief Angel and nodding at him. “Why did you do it?” she asked. “The territory,” Peabody replied. “Had to know it.” One of the baymen reported the sick Angel in the bathroom, which broke up the card game as the bikers helped their drunken brother to his feet. She put her weight on one foot, leaning towards me. Up close, she seemed older, in her early 30s maybe. “I heard the music down the hall,” she said. “And then this little man came walking by when I opened the door.” “What little man?” I asked. “Not, like, a midget. In suspenders. White tee-shirt.” “Never saw him,” I said. She looked around. “Talked just like Peabody. Yeah, he’s gone now.” So was almost everybody, the party disassembled around us. Peabody tapped me. As I turned around, I could see his shoulders sink. “Mmm,” he said. “It’s there,” he said, spirit escaping. “Just… don’t worry about it.” He was gone and Heidi and I lay down on the bed.
“Your Cheating Heart” – James Brown (download) (buy)
The Motel Party: 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 a hipster’s musicality: a dry, bright singsong punctuated by occasional ironic drawls to slow the tempo. I’d heard it for hours, on every extant tape of Harrison. “What’s it there?” Peabody asked once more, arm around me again, in the voice he’d preserved. “Um, pretty alright,” I answered. His fingers gripped my shoulder once and let go. He looked disappointed. “S’okay,” he said in his dead friend’s voice and his face softened. When he stood upright, I realized he hadn’t been previously. He was only 18 when he met Harrison, who was then nearing 50. “Listen, don’t mind any of this,” he said, suddenly lucid and grinning. “It’s just a party, that’s all. You know what I mean. Who has time for all that?” He closed his smile, like a ghost in a corn field, and took of up three lines of conversation at once: one with the card players, one with a distant cousin, and one with the girl I’d seen earlier in the bikini. She took a step towards us as a Fire Angel staggered towards the bathroom.
“I Bid You Goodnight” – The Dixie Hummingbirds (download) (buy)
The Motel Party: no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11, no. 12
I wondered briefly what the night manager might think, and only then could I envision it as a series of comic events, of characters trooping by, past his ice machine, to room 302, around the back and upstairs, my room. Could there possibly be anything more exciting going on in the seaside town? The question wasn’t so much conceited as it was a way of marveling at Peabody’s ability to make this coastal outpost feel like a happening place. I pushed myself off the wall and tried to find Peabody, who was talking to a florist, just arrived with a psychedelic bouquet he positioned next to the mirror. Peabody put his arm around me. “What’s it there?” he asked, happily, a definite question. When I didn’t answer, he smiled and nodded slowly, as if prompting me. “C’mon, what’s it there?” he asked again. As he repeated the phrase, the intonation the same, it reminded me of a recording of Harrison reading at NYU just before returning to his father. Peabody suddenly looked much younger as he leaned back and laughed against the lamp, which had somehow acquired a gypsy shawl and was shining silver moonlight over the stucco ceiling.
“Green Rocky Road” – Karen Dalton (download)
The Motel Party: no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11, no. 12
Peabody’s drunken sway made sense when the party hit critical mass, symmetrically lilting to the rhythm of the bebop. He was a ripple at the center of two dozen other ripples, people who’d found their way into the motel room. There were at least five baymen, their eyes becoming more resilient as the evening grew. One, named Ricky Schmidt, lectured on the history of tailpipe design in American cars. Another pair, Corey Lagasse and Rodney Santini, led a card game at the small, lacquered table with four members of the Fire Angels, a local motorcycle club (of which Santini was also a member). They’d been in the town for nearly 40 years — a father and a son were present, the Smiths, their hairlines the same, the curvature of the younger’s back noticeably straighter. I was mildly drunk, but found myself unable to sway as gracefully as Peabody. Instead, I confined myself to one wall, and let the salon of local color circulate around me. I occasionally spotted Peabody ricocheting between conversations, though I was unable to hear any myself. I tried to move towards him.
Episode 47: Dedicated to Jesse Orosco
Lifetime 3.16 ERA, brah.
Listen here.
1. “Hershey’s Miniatures” – Corn Mo (from I Hope You Win)
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “666: The Coming of the New World Government” – Apollo Sunshine (from Noise Shall Upon)
4. “Black Rice” – Women (from Women)
5. “I Wanna Be A Girl” – King Khan and His Shrines (from What Is?!)
6. “Girl With the Vagina Made of Glass” – The Billy Nayer Show (from American Astronaut OST)
7. “Bexxlaws (Chipsploitation remix)” – Bud Melvin (from Rock the Plastic Like A Man compilation)
8. “Djanfa Magni” – Tidian Kone and Orchestre Poly-Rythmo (from African Scream Contest: Raw and Psychedelic Afro Sounds from Benin and Togo ’70s)
9. “Happy” – The Rolling Stones (from Nasty Music)
10. “Guitar Trio (1977)” – Rhys Chatham (from A Rhys Chatham Compendium)
11. “Beloved Binge” – Megafaun (from Impala Eardrums compilation)
12. “Green Rocky Road” – Karen Dalton (from Green Rocky Road)
13. “Temple Bells” – various (from Buddhist Drums, Bells, Chants compilation)
14. “Waiting For the Dawn To Break” – The Leapyear (from AUX compilation)
15. “Sun Spots” – Best of Seth (from Sun)
16. “The Warmth of the Sun” – The Beach Boys with Willie Nelson – (from Stars and Stripes, v. 1)
17. “Mean Old World” – Sam Cooke
“The Warmth of the Sun” – The Beach Boys with Willie Nelson (download) (buy)
The Motel Party: no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11, no. 12
The first to arrive was Walter Manteau, a local artist who gave Peabody rides home, up the soft incline to his house near town, when Peabody was too drunk. Manteau had a wife and a child. We chatted pleasantly, though he didn’t stay very long. He was closer to my age than Peabody’s. “He has these moments of profound lucidity,” Manteau said. “Once, I had a painting with me, and he looked at it. This was on a day when he wasn’t making much sense. He told me, ‘if you put that on TV, it would be like… reality.'” I looked at Peabody, who was fiddling with the record player he’d carried in earlier, finally getting it playing. He put on Charlie Parker. He was on his fourth or fifth beer, and was starting to tilt mildly when he walked. I wondered if I would see that side of him. “You think he really knew Harrison?” Manteau asked me. I was somewhat taken aback. Manteau backpedaled. “I’ve heard some crazy stuff come out of his mouth, that’s all,” he said. Manteau excused himself. He had to get home. It was nearing midnight when I stopped wondering when the party would start.
Running Into Stonehenge
by Jesse Jarnow
Paste, June 2008
I had a totally normal childhood. There was the time I ran into Stonehenge. Knocked myself out. I have no memory of this, of course, but it became something of a family joke, in as much as my father sometimes reminds me that this is something I once did.
The other family joke to come out of our trip to England in 1982, when I was three, is the line (spoken in a Monty Pythonesque chirp) “I’m sorry, sir, but can’t you film Stone’enge someplace else?” to be repeated whenever an event is threatened by inclement weather.
Its originator was a British weather services operator whom my father had asked for the conditions at the mythological site, where he was to shoot an experimental film titled Celestial Navigation. The result, as John Luther Schofill of the Experimental Film Coalition would proclaim, “captures, first person, the experience of being, in the words of Buckminster Fuller, ‘a passenger on Spaceship Earth.'”
To me, the filmmaking only meant chaos in the weeks leading up to our departure, which included setting up Dad’s high school buddy from Brooklyn, Paul, as a housesitter in our Long Island home. His duties included feeding the cats and operating the time lapse cameras tracking shadows across Dad’s attic studio, while Dad marked similar solar-seasonal changes across the ocean. “These are the means by which space describes its meanings,” Dad’s reverb-laden voice explains in the narration. “Touch, sight, and the echoes of distant walls.”
More exciting to me was the animation he did for Sesame Street and other PBS programs. On occasion, I even got to be in them, making my hip-hop debut in a series of number raps. (Yeah, they’re on YouTube.) Stuff from around the house turned up regularly — a toy train chugging with tumbleweeds across the frame, or even our cat, Banana, appearing in Real Cat Drinks Milk.
I wish I could say that being an animator’s son made me think all animation came from mysterious attic studios filled with zoetropes and homemade orrerys, or that any old toy could lurch into magical movement like a Michel Gondry movie, but this is not the case. I knew the harsh realities of children’s television.
Once, Dad brought me to the Sesame Street set (a place he rarely ventured), then located in Manhattan. Where I once imagined winding catacombs in the depths of Oscar’s garbage can, I saw a tangle of wires. Later, I saw Snuffalapagous hanging on the wall. True story. There are pictures of me sitting on the set’s central stoop, looking quietly mortified.
A parade of undergrad assistants became family friends. College students, perhaps, they were also filmmakers in their own right, members of a very real community, whom Dad was, in a sense, welcoming in. We attended their weddings, went on family trips with them.
In Santa Cruz, we stayed with another of Dad’s friends at a synagogue-turned-studio purchased with money made animating Luke Skywalker’s targeting computer in Star Wars. Below a mantel displaying chunks of the original Death Star, we watched a video of folk collector Harry Smith’s painted-on-film abstractions. In Boston, we visited Manhattan Project physicist (turned humanist peacenik) Philip Morrison and his equally brillaint wife Phyllis, who Dad worked with on their 1987 PBS series, Ring of Truth.
Had I been more conscious, I might’ve observed that culture — be it abstract animation or atom bombs or 4,000-year old stone calenders — isn’t a thing so much as it is people. But sometimes that can be hard to notice when art is life and life is art (and science and literature and history) and all are rushing towards you in the shape of monoliths in the British countryside near Salisbury.
Indeed, our trip abroad — partly underwritten by an American Film Institute grant — was worked into a family vacation with my parents, grandmother, aunt, uncle, and two cousins. After several days, crappy weather or no, Dad befriended the guards at Stonehenge. When Mom and I arrived, he asked if I could touch the plinths. The guard let me through.
At which point — perhaps drawn by the ancient power of the rocks — I apparently charged, knocked myself out, and made a family memory just as worthwhile as any experimental film, not to mention concisely answering the question of why one can’t shoot Stonehenge someplace else. If only I remembered it.
For more information about Al Jarnow, see http://protozone.net/AJ/Jarnow.html. Much of his animation has been collected on the Numero Group DVD Celestial Navigations: The Short Films of Al Jarnow.
Articles/profiles:
the-tinkerer, 464952,22.html”>Tristan Perich: The Tinkerer (Village Voice)
The Spirit of Radio, long-ass WFMU 50th anniversary profile (Signal To Noise)
The Record Store: A Good Thing, blurblets on Other Music and Turntable Lab. (Paste)
Albums:
Mimidokodesuka – Osorezan (Village Voice)
Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea – The Silver Jews (Paste)
Electronic Projects for Musicians – Apples in Stereo (Paste)
Jesus That Looks Terrible On You – A Big Yes and a small no (JamBands.com)
Live:
Spiritual Unity (Marc Ribot & Henry Grimes) with the Joshua Light Show at Issue Project Room, 30 May 2008 (Village Voice blog)
Songs:
“Majesty” – The Music Tapes (PaperThinWalls.com)
“The Frozen Lake” – Arms (PaperThinWalls.com)
“Depart (I Never Knew You)” – Bellafea (PaperThinWalls.com)
Movie:
My Winnipeg (Paste)
Columns, etc.:
BRAIN TUBA: Morgan the Lion, no. 1
BRAIN TUBA: Morgan the Lion, no. 2
Print:
o Paste #44 (My Morning Jacket cover): record store blurblets (Other Music, Turntable Lab), album reviews of Dr. Dog, Coldplay, Mudhoney, book review of Haruki Murakami, film review of My Winnipeg, DVD reviews of The Guatemalan Handshake, Persepolis (see: Paste digital edition)
o July Relix (Dr. Dog cover): album reviews of Sound Tribe Sector 9, The Fiery Furnaces, Tony Allen remixes, Dennis Wilson, Daptone anthology
o Signal to Noise #50 (Our Favorite Things cover): WFMU feature
“Le Fils De Jacques Dutronc” – King Khan and His Shrines (download) (buy)
The Motel Party: no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11, no. 12
The last email I got before the motel’s wifi network mysteriously blinked out was from my thesis advisor, asking why I hadn’t responded to his previous message. “Need more proof that Harrison was happy in later years,” he’d written. “Presently insubstantial, unacceptable.” I stared at the blank reply screen and gave up. I thought about calling Dani and decided against it. She could call me. I looked around the room and wondered what else I should do. I put my bags in the closet, on a shelf, and waited for Peabody. It was almost 10 when he arrived. He stood at the foot of the band with his hands on his hips and cocked his head slightly. Turning only his face, he glanced around the room, taking in its contents. He reminded me of a hitman. Though he seemed ancient to me, I realized–watching him–that when Peabody had spent time with Harrison, he was 20 to the former novelist’s 40. He put his fingers to his chin, and I tried to imagine him genuinely boyish, instead of Peabody’s alcohol-hardened perversion. “Alright,” he said quietly. “This can do. Help me unload the car.”
