south by southyourmom blogging
I’m blogging a bit this week for Raleigh’s Independent Weekly. (My posts found here.)
ylt sxsw, IFC crossroads party, 3/11
11 March 2008
The Parish
Austin, TX
opening for My Morning Jacket
IFC Crossroads Party
Mr. Tough
Beanbag Chair
Demons
Drug Test
Big Day Coming (fast) >
Watch Out For Me, Ronnie
I Heard You Looking (with Joe Puleo on organ)
You Can Have It All (George McCrea) (all on drums/percussion)
albuquerque sunrise, 2/08
One last photo set of my last trip, before I head to Austin in the morning. Posting coming sporadically. possibly some blogging elsewhere. Maybe a few YLT setlists here. Who knows?
chop shop
Every Mets fan should see Chop Shop, which is at the Film Forum until Tuesday, and hopefully other art houses in other cities at other times. Though leads Alejandro Polanco and Isamar Gonzales are a bit melodramatic in places as adolescent brother and 16-year old sister Ale and Isamar, it’s still a valuable evocation of life in Willets Point, the scrapyard neighborhood bordering Shea Stadium. New Yorkers are long used to seeing movies set in the boroughs, but Willets Point — whose streets aren’t paved — might as well be another planet, even compared to projects and tenements and other slums.
Chop Shop has most often been compared to City of God, and that’s probably fair, both plots grown wholly from geographic/economic circumstances — in this case, Ale’s dream to open a food cart. There is little interaction between the neighborhood and the ballpark, but the economic chasm is constantly on display, the stadium lights sometimes seeming like alien backdrops. There is also, of course, quiet transcendence and something like authentic human life. With the construction of CitiField comes a looming threat of gentrification and Mayor Bloomberg’s efforts to have the area leveled/redeveloped. Chop Shop is a world that might soon be destroyed.
easy riders, black panthers
Via Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls:
It was the Golden Age of postwar European and Japanese cinema, the era of the French New Wave, of Ingmar Bergman, of Akira Kurosawa, of Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini. Although these films were “foreign,” they seemed more immediate, more “American” than anything Hollywood was turning out. They hit home with a shock of recognition. Sean Daniel, who grew up to become an executive at Universal and shepherded National Lampoon’s Animal House to the screen, was an antiwar activist in high school in Manhattan in the ’60s. He recalls, “You saw The Battle of Algiers ten times so you could memorize how to build the proper cell structure. I’ll never forget seeing a platoon of Black Panthers, in matching black leather jackets and berets, sitting in front of me, taking notes during the show.”
Reminds of the recent BB post about the 1886 book Danger! A True History of a Great City’s Wiles and Temptations. The Veil Lifted, and Light Thrown on Crime and its causes and Criminals and Their Haunts. Facts and Disclosures that became a handbook for petty criminals.
frow show, episode 39
Episode 39: A Beard Beyond
Listen here.
1. “White Winter Hymnal” – The Fleet Foxes (from Some of Mount Fairweather)
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “Strange Light” – Deerhunter (from Cryptograms)
4. “Owl Cut (White Flowers In the Sky)” – Elf Power (from In A Cave)
5. “Screenwriter’s Blues” – Soul Coughing (recorded 2 or 4 February 1997 Tokyo)
6. “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” – Wilco (recorded 19 February 2008 Chicago)
7. “All the Way Around and Back” – Charles Ives (from Leonard Bernstein: Ives Symphony No. 2)
8. “Telescope” – Tristan Perich (via TristanPerich.com)
9. “Threnody To the Victims of Louisiana” – Col. Bruce Hampton (from Give Thanks to Chank)
10. “Get Happy” – Ella Fitzgerald (from Sings Harold Arlen, v. 2)
11. “Mississippi Moon (alternate take)” – Jerry Garcia (from All Good Things box set)
yo la tengo WFMU 2008 setlist
Please comment with all corrections/additions. (Thx, Neil.)
2 March 2008
WFMU Studios
Jersey City, NJ
no Georgia (home sick), Peter Walsh (ex-Hypnolovewheel) on drums, Bruce Bennett on guitar
Starry Eyes (Roky Erickson)
Badlands (Bruce Springsteen)
She’s My Best Friend (Velvet Underground)
Run Run Run (Velvet Underground)
Can’t Explain (The Who)
Baby’s On Fire (Brian Eno)
Slow Down (The Feelies)
I’m In Love With A Girl (Big Star)
Critical List (The Fleshtones)
Sweet Leaf (Black Sabbath)
Tales of Brave Ulysses (Cream)
Green-Eyed Lady (Sugarloaf)
Shot Down (The Sonics)
These Boots Are Made For Walking (Lee Hazlewood)
Cowboy Song (Thin Lizzy)
Aba Dabba Do Dance (The Tradewinds)
Our World (Individuals)
What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love, and Understanding (Nick Lowe)
Bridget Because (Hypnolovewheel)
Mannequin (Wire)
Viva Las Vegas (Doc Pomus/Mort Shuman)
Teenage Kicks (The Undertones)
It’s Only Life (The Feelies)
The Passenger (Iggy Pop)
With A Girl Like You (The Troggs)
Mystery Called Love (Ron Davis/Rodd Keith)
See My Friends (The Kinks)
Jesse’s Girl (Rick Springfield)
If I Were A Carpenter (Tim Hardin)
California Sun (The Rivieras)
Love Will Tear Us Apart (Joy Division)
Different Drum (Mike Nesmith)
Search and Destroy (Iggy and the Stooges)
Paint It Black (The Rolling Stones)
White Rabbit (Jefferson Airplane)
Chantilly Lace (Big Bopper) medley, also featuring: Waterloo Sunset (The Kinks), Yo Yo Bye Bye (Why?), Afternoon Delight (Starland Vocal Band), At Last I Am Free (Chic), Now You Know You’re Black (The Frogs), Girl Don’t Tell Me (The Beach Boys), I’ll Never Fall In Love Again (The Carpenters), I’ll Keep It With Mine (Bob Dylan), Ode to Billie Joe (Bobby Gentry), MacArthur Park (Jimmy Webb), The Tra La La Song (Cal Tjader), Boogie Wonderland (Earth, Wind and Fire), Star Spangled Banner (Francis Scott Key)
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elephant parts parts
Five segments from Michael Nesmith’s Elephant Parts that particularly hold up. (Sadly, neither “Name That Drug” nor “Tragically Hip” seem to be on YouTube.)
(It’s funny ’cause they never actually do “R.”)
useful things, no. 11
The eleventh in an ongoing collection of functional webpages and dork–like tools (excluding any/all Google programs)
o The Belkin Podcast Studio looks totally dope, though I lovelovelove the DL elegance of the iTalk and can’t imagine it’d possibly improve on that.
o C86 is a mixtape app. (Word, xian.)
o A time calculator. Super useful. Crappy interface.
o Ask Sunday. Still wrestling with morality of outsourcing interview transcription tasks, but that’s topic for another post. That aside, this is a sort of an amazing idea, and I might have to try it on general principle.
grapefruit league links
The Mets lost 4-2 to the Tigers in a split squad game today. Welcome back.
o Dunno how I missed this when the Voice ran the story in September, but ex-Mets pitcher/current Mets announcer Ron Darling is apparently a huge jazzhead.
o Digaman hipped me tonight to the existence of the fantasy baseball league that existed only in Jack Kerouac’s head. Really.
o Despite the utter failure of the Mitchell Report to create any kind of closure with the steroids era, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are speaking in gestures as weirdly elegant as their records are grotesque. That is, one can imagine John Chancellor’s narrator in Ken Burns’ Baseball reading off their narratives. The latest installment, far less reported than Clemens’ escapades on Capitol Hill, involves Bonds personally driving from spring training camp to spring training camp looking for work, while threatening to go play in Japan. (Thx, Russ.)
o SNY’s feature on the best Mets brawls would be a whole lot cooler with video clips. But it’s still pretty cool.
o The Times Bats blog reports on Mets’ pitching coach’s Rick Peterson’s observational skills. According to Sports Illustrated, Peterson spent the off-season “read[ing] Eastern philosophy and [drawing] sketches of his players.”
o A classic meditation by the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould.
