Episode 41: A Collection of Music Played on Opening Day by the Scoreboard Operator at Snugglebunny Park, the Shining New Home of the Bourgwick Snugglebunnies Imaginary Baseball Franchise. Sort of.
Listen here.
1. “Threats to Herb, no. 3 – WLOK (from WFMU Radio Archival Oddities)
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “Water Curses” – Animal Collective (from Water Curses EP)
4. “Walderez Walderia” – Flavio Kurt (from Obsession compilation)
5. “He Shoot the Sun” – Kahimi Karie and Jim O’Rourke (from Nunki)
6. “Clouds and Snow” – Ben Kamen (from Dreams EP)
7. “Shoulder Full of You” – Blitzen Trapper (from EP3 EP)
8. “P.O.V. Waltz” – Harry Nilsson (from The Point)
9. “Launderette” – Vivien Goldman (from Disco Not Disco compilation)
10. “Albuquerque” – Neil Young (from Tonight’s The Night)
11. “The Upside of Good-Bye” – Michael Nesmith (from And the Hits Just Keep On Comin’)
12. “Track 2” – Negativland (from Negativland)
13. “Noh-Miso 6” – Kunihara Ayama (from Obscure Tape Music of Japan compilation)
14. “Side A” – Thurston Moore, Jim O’Rourke, Lee Ranaldo, and Steve Shelley (from Melbourne Direct)
15. “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” – Doc Watson (from Black Mountain Rag)
Many wonderful passages in Nabokov’s Bend Sinister, but this one — about the nature of literary translation, in the midst of a complex Rosetta Stone explaining the language of the novel’s dystopia — stuck out this evening.
It was as if someone, having seen a certain oak tree (further called Individual T) growing in a certain land casting its own unique shadow on the green and brown ground, had proceeded to erect in his garden a prodigiously intricate piece of machinery which in itself was as unlike that or any other tree as the translator’s inspiration and language were unlike those of the original author, but which, by means of ingenious combinations of parts, light effects, breeze-engendering engines, would, when completed, cast a show exactly similar to that of Individual T — the same outline, changing in the same manner, with the same double and single spots of sun rippling in the same position, at the same hour of the day.
Essays/articles/features:
Fun, Money, Dolphins, profile of Jake Szufnarowksi (Village Voice)
Glossed in Translation, interview with Michel Gondry (Paste)
Metaphors, memories, and miscellany from South by Southwest (Indy Week)
The Heady /Poetry/ *Of* Paul Siegell (Paste)
Getting A Head On At Umass, on a conference of Deadhead scholars (Relix)
Live:
Akron/Family at Maxwell’s, 5 March 2008 (Village Voice blog)
The Mountain Goats at Webster Hall, 18 March 2008 (Village Voice blog)
Rutlemania at the Gramercy, 27 March 2008 (Village Voice blog)
Albums:
Consolers of the Lonely – The Raconteurs (Paste)
Heretic Pride – The Mountain Goats (Paste)
Exercises in Futility – Marc Ribot (JamBands.com)
Invisible Baby – Marco Benevento (JamBands.com)
Indie Weirdo Round-Up, featuring: Animal Collective, Blitzen Trapper, Yamataka Eye, Sun City Girls, Disco Not Disco (JamBands.com)
Indie Weirdo Round-Up, featuring: Eugene Chadbourne/Jimmy Carl Black/Pat Thomas, Cornelius, Jeffrey Lewis, Megafaun, Pete Seeger (JamBands.com)
Songs:
“Anagram” – Ecstatic Sunshine (PaperThinWalls.com)
“Drops in the River” – Fleet Foxes (PaperThinWalls.com)
“Deception Island Optimists Club” – Laura Barrett (PaperThinWalls.com)
“Hold in the Light” – The Weird Weeds (PaperThinWalls.com)
Movie:
Great World of Sound (Paste)
Columns & misc.:
Georgie in the Sky, fiction (False)
BRAIN TUBA: These Guys Are From England and Who Gives A Shit? (JamBands.com)
BRAIN TUBA: Three Thoughts on Love and Hate (JamBands.com)
BRAIN TUBA: War on War, parts 14-15 (JamBands.com)
Print:
o Paste #40 (Michael Jackson’s Glove cover): charticle on Why?/Lyrics Born; album reviews of the Mountain Goats and Jim White, DVD reviews of Pete Seeger, the Holy Modal Rounders, Great World of Sound; book review of Jumbo
o Paste #41 (Gnarls Barkley cover): features on Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg, Paul Siegell; album reviews of Tapes ‘n’ Tapes, the Black Keys, Lee “Scratch” Perry; Cuts and Paste singles column; movie review of Shine A Light
o April/May Relix (Eric Clapton & Steve Winwood cover): album reviews of Howlin Rain, Man Man, DeVotchKa, Colin Meloy; DVD reviews of The Trips Festival, Super High Me; book reviews of Downbeat’s Miles Davis Reader, Howard Mandel’s Miles, Ornette, and Cecil, and John Darnielle’s Master of Reality.
o January/February Hear/Say (Amy Winehouse cover): album reviews of Vampire Weekend and the Steve Reid Ensemble.
o March Hear/Say (Avril Lavigne cover): album reviews of Why? and Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks
o Signal To Noise #49 (Diamanda Galás cover): album reviews of Phish and Beck
“(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” – The Black Crowes (download) (buy)
“Mixed Emotions” – The Black Crowes (download) (buy)
Yeah, as usual, it’s gauche to repost, but I’m doing it anyway.
These Guys Are From England and Who Gives a Shit?
Recently, Maxim editors caused a kerfuffle when they ran a review — credited to David Peisner — of Warpaint, the 17th and newest album by reunited British rock band the Black Crowes, without actually listening to it. Peisner said he wrote an album preview that was given a star rating, presumably rewritten, and made into a review by editors, which is understandable, given how big magazines sometimes operate. But the problem, of course, wasn’t that Maxim didn’t actually have a copy of the album to review, but that they didn’t do more with the opportunity. After all, it’s a well-known fact that reviewers don’t actually listen to the music they write about. Who can really listen to an album until he’s heard it at least 232 times, anyway?
“Now that they’re legitimately grizzled, they sound pretty much like they always have: boozy, competent, and in slavish debt to the Stones, the Allmans, and the Faces,” Peisner wrote, not saying remotely new or, in fact, justifying its existence on a thin, dyed slab of environmentally disasterous treemeat. That Crowes lead singer Jumpin’ Jack Robinson called for Pesiner’s head on a gilded spittoon should maybe not be surprising, given the zombie-related rumors about the Robinson brothers’ falling out after brother Jimmy ate a groupie’s brain.
But it’s still disappointing that the Crowes bothered to call for an apology at all, especially given their repeated and obvious yearnings for ’70s rock culture, when their beloved Creem magazine was stocked with writers like Richard Meltzer who (in his own words) would “throw chicken bones at some annoying singer at the Bitter End, review (harshly) albums I’d obviously never listen to (or concerts I’d never attended), reverse the word sequence of a text to make it read backwards (or delete, for no particular reason, every fourth word).”
It’s a testament to the age not that Maxim would be shamed into apologizing for their behavior, but that they were so dreadfully goddamn boring in their fabrication. I am sure with fairly unflagging certainty that Peisner or whatever editor signed Peisner’s name to it was completely correct in his assessment of the Crowes’ music. In a way, the band is equally correct in their refusal to send out advance records to review, and not merely because they are trying to foil piracy. The Black Crowes are at the point in their career — some 28 albums, 32 labels, 13 ex-drummers/bassists, etc., in — that they’re not going to change, and will continue to make exactly the same kind of music they always have, regardless of whether or not some rock writer makes up some crap about a band he clearly doesn’t care about.
In other words, anybody likely to have a position on the Black Crowes already has a position on the Black Crowes — save, of course, some 14 year old kid somewhere who is hearing about them for the first time, simply because there comes a time in every dude’s life when he discovers that bands can somehow make hefty livings by mimicking classic rock and that this music may or may not be to his taste. For that reason alone, Maxim should take their job a little more seriously. Clearly, trying to publish for a broad audience hasn’t made their writing any more interesting, so why not occasionally hone in on one as finite as possible? In these Wikified, shark-jumping times, rumors circulate as fast and furious through the cultural ecosystems as they ever did — and, certainly, people should do everything their power to fight misinformation — but we’re talking only about the Black Crowes here.
Really, Maxim screwed up a golden opportunity. Clearly, they felt their reading audience — as potential consumers of the Warpaint product — required information about the album. Instead of using the fact that they couldn’t hear it as a springboard to highlight the absurdity of perpetual hype machines, advertising dollars, demographics, ’70s nostalgia, and semi-pompous rock stars who dress like an Australian’s worst nightmare, they just propagated the absurdity of a system that allows brain eaters like the Robinson brothers to have maintained a nearly five decade long career.
o Fantastic New Yorker profile of former Met/Philly Len Dykstra, who recently founded the Players Club, an investment group for professional athletes.
o Joe Smith is God, sez this MySpace page.
o Shawn Green retired three homers short of Hammerin’ Hank Greenberg’s all-time Jewish home run record of 331. Jewish guilt for juicing?
o On how Latin players pick up English.
o The Apollo 11 moonwalks, as mapped onto a baseball diamond. (Thx, Kottke.)
o Haven’t had a chance to listen yet, but: a tropicalia parody, c. 1974. The New Caetanos, anyone? (Thx, Boomy.)
o There will be papusa!
o Chuck Klosterman on “the difference between a road movie and a movie that just happens to have roads in it.” (Word, SoS.)
o Rem Koolhaas gets loose in Dubai.
o At least Bobby’s enjoying the ride. (Yes he is, Sancho.)
“Side A” – Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Steve Shelley, and Jim O’Rourke (download)
from Melbourne Direct (2004)
(file expires March 31st)
Not quite part of the SYR series, and not quite even Sonic Youth (Kim Gordon is missing), the Melbourne Direct double-LP credited to Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Steve Shelley, and Jim O’Rourke contains some of the most straight-up Dark Starry jams in the Sonics’ catalogue. Four to be exact, each exactly one album side — not coincidental given that the Sonic dudes cut direct to vinyl. Shelley lays out for most of Side A (or is drumming the supreme sublime), and everybody else is deep beneath the Diamond Sea from the first note.
“Osorezan” (excerpt) – Geinoh Yamashirogumi (download)
from Osorezan/Do No Kenbai (1976)
(file expires March 29th)
Searching for Jim O’Rourke’s Osorezan (soon to be “re”-released by Drag City, even though it was only issued in 2006 and only in Japan), I came across Osorezan by Geinoh Yamashirogumi. Labeled “1970s Japanese psych” or something, and translated as “ghost mountain,” I naturally stole it. The band, according to Wikipedia, “[consisted] of hundreds of people from all walks of life: journalists, doctors, engineers, students, businessmen,” which is tantalizing, but completely confusing. Likewise, the page’s description of the band’s “faithful re-creations of folk music from around the world” bears little or no resemblance to the music itself. At least as I hear it.
I downloaded it as two complete album sides, so I’m not sure where the song breaks are supposed to go, but these seven-and-a-half minutes slice out easily: a bassline, a building guitar solo, and chanting. The choir in the first minute portends something, and it’s not the fairly run-of-the-mill soloing that follows. Clearly, there is something lurking. As such, I like the way all the other elements slide back in, including — eventually — that choir. It’s these last two minute of chaos (give or take the cutsey/jambandy bassline) that are the payoff: a musical place unworldly just as much on its own terms as it is for the fact that it’s ’70s Japanese psych.
Thurston Moore interviews Steve Reich (download)
recorded at Austin Convention Center, South by Southwest, 13 March 2008
Amid the extraneous meat market noize of the Austin Convention Center, there was at least occasional discussion of actual music. On Thursday, that included Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore interviewing minimalist composer Steve Reich.
If that sounds remotely up your alley, the whole conversation is worth hearing.
Of note to our headier ranks were Reich’s comments on his pre-minimalism free improv group in San Francisco (listen), and his relationship with future Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh, a fellow student at Mills College under the tutelage of Luciano Berio (listen).
