Episode 40: Yo La Tengo, Maxwell’s, December 2007
Listen here. (Now with working link.)
1. Roger Angell on “yo la tengo!” (via Ken Burns’ Baseball)
2. Sex (The Urinals) (11/12/88 Cubby Bear, Chicago)
3. Frow Show Theme – MVB
4. Dreidel Party (Black Flag) (12/10)
5. Eight Days A Week (The Beatles) (12/9)
6. Pass The Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind > (12/9)
7. The Last Days of Disco (12/9)
8. Everyday (12/10)
9. The Room Got Heavy (12/5)
10. Season of the Shark (12/8)
11. Autumn Sweater (12/11)
12. Upside Down (12/5)
13. This Diamond Ring (Gary Lewis) (12/5)
14. Paul Is Dead (12/11)
15. I Wanna Be Your Lover (Bob Dylan) (12/6 with the dBs)
16. Mr. Tough (12/6)
17. Watch Out For Me, Ronnie (12/6)
18. Big Day Coming > (12/5)
19. Little Honda (The Beach Boys) (12/5)
20. The Story of Yo La Tango (12/8)
21. Take Care (Alex Chilton) (12/7)
22. I’ve Had It (The Bell-Notes) (12/8 with Alex Chilton)
23. Femme Fatale (The Velvet Underground) (12/7 with Alex Chilton)
24. Sometime in the Morning (Carole King & Gerry Goffin) (12/8 with Stephen Hunking)
25. Seemingly Stranded (David Kilgour) (12/5 with David Kilgour)
26. My Little Corner of the World (Bob Hilliard & Lee Pockriss) (12/9 with Ira’s Mom)
“Austin grackles, 3/13/08” (download)
(file expires March 25th)
The most surprising music I heard during South by Southwest took place within 30 seconds of my first arrival on 6th Street: a tree full of grackles. The field recording I made the next day at dusk, across the street from Whole Foods, doesn’t quite capture the manic density of that first encounter. Composed more of the siren-like yelps (heard at approximately the 12 second mark on this track) that was more of a pitched conversation — as if the birds were in heated council — than the idle chatter heard here. Indeed, as 6th Street filled with meat marketeers and temporary stages, I never once found the grackles occupying that same tree, surrendering downtown to the tourists like the righteously pissed off locals they are.
14 March 2008
French Legation Museum
Austin, TX
Other Music party
acoustic
Et Moi, Et Moi, Et Moi (Jacques Dutronc)
Shaker
I Feel Like Going Home
Autumn Sweater
The Weakest Part
Right Track Now (Roky Erickson)
Sugarcube
The Story of Yo La Tango
See: Other Music’s video of “Story of Yo La Tango”
13 March 2008
Austin Music Hall
Austin, TX
opening for My Morning Jacket
Cherry Chapstick
Little Eyes
Autumn Sweater
Mr. Tough
The Weakest Part
Beanbag Chair
Tom Courtenay
Decora
Watch Out For Me, Ronnie
Sugarcube
The Story of Yo La Tango
I’m blogging a bit this week for Raleigh’s Independent Weekly. (My posts found here.)
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)
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.
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.
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)
