Sorry for the lack of updates lately. Y’know: life/summer, etc..
Articles/profiles: James Brown? James Brown!, on the James Brown auction at Christie’s (Village Voice blog) Emergent: Todd Rohal, interview with Guatemalan Handshake director (Paste) Repeater, James Blackshaw profile (PaperThinWalls.com)
Books: Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex edited by Ellen Sussman (San Francisco Chronicle) Sonic Youth books: Goodbye 20th Century by David Browne, Psychic Confusion by Stevie Chick, and The Empty Page edited by Peter Wild (London Times)
Songs:
“Black Rice” – Women (PaperThinWalls.com)
“Veins to the Sky” – Alexander Tucker (PaperThinWalls.com)
Albums: Indie-Weirdo Round-Up, featuring: African Scream Contest, Animal Collective mixomixes, Colin Meloy, Yeti v. 5, John Zorn (JamBands.com) Indie-Weirdo Round-Up, featuring: James Blackshaw, Eric Chenaux, Andy Votel Presents Brazilika, Do You Smell What Barack is Cooking? (JamBands.com)
Print:
o August Relix (Jerry Garcia cover): cover feature “How Jerry Got Hip Again” (feat. Akron/Family, Megafaun, Greg Davis, Animal Collective, Sonic Youth, Will Oldham, Black Flag, Earth), album reviews of Beck, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Mike Gordon, Inara George with Van Dyke Parks, The Music Tapes, Brian Wilson, Patti Smith and Kevin Shields, Karen Dalton.
o Paste #45: profiles of CSS and Roel Wouters, album review of Brazil Classics at 20.
“Smile, part 1 (Tim Smolen mix)” – The Beach Boys (download)
Lewis Shiner’s Glimpses — which I discovered via a review in the back pages of (I think) Guitar for the Practicing Musician — was how I first heard of the Beach Boys’ Smile, which I wouldn’t hear for another eight years after the book’s publication. Written at the tale-end of the ‘zine/cassette era, Glimpses‘ sci-fi reconstructions of lost albums comes from an age when lost albums were more rumors than downloadable fact. Shiner’s narrator, an audio repairman named Ray Shackleford, hangs out with Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, but it’s his time with Brian Wilson that resonated with me most. Here, Ray arrives at Brian’s Laurel Way home in early December 1966.
The decor was schizophrenic: plaid drapes and pole lamps and heavy Spanish furniture, mixed with Lava Lites and orange-and-blue wallpaper and campy religious icons. It was all I could do not to rub the curtains between my thumb and forefinger, or pocket an ashtray for a souvenir.
Downstairs there were glass doors that led to the pool. A slide curved down to it from the roof of the house. In the steam from the pool, I smelled chlorine, perfume, cut grass. Of the four people who splashed around in the shallow end my attention went to Brian right away. First off because he was so big, six four and really starting to put on weight. There in his baggy trunks, as he straddled a child’s inflatable horse and almost sank it, he seemed larger than life.
Running at the Sunshine is a 2002-2003 collaboration between composer Matthew Van Brink, choreographer Judith Chaffee, and myself. It’s based on the Sunshine Motel, the last remaining flophouse on the Bowery. I’d often walk by en route from the Bowery Ballroom to San Loco and imagine life within. (Recently a cube of white light was built on the formerly vacant lot next door.)
Matt posted a video of Sunshine‘s debut performance at the Huntington Theater at Boston University on February 20, 2003:
Dr. Tuttledge expresses his thanks to MVB for this glorious example of outrageous political racketeering. And though we here at the Ordovician archives cannot endorse 419 scams or their perpetrators, we greatly appreciate Senator Obama’s willingness to engage in contemporary mediums. His understanding of the form is absolutely elegant.
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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]
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.
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 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.
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.
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
