“Paperback Writer” – The Beatles (download, regular) (buy, karaoke)
Over the weekend, I asked Spupes how to create a user account on my computer with all temptation-abetting internet capabilities blocked. Instead, he told me about WriteRoom, a text editor that takes over the computer’s full screen, literally blacking out all other apps in an emulation of a no-fuss ’80s-style word processor. By necessity, a screenshot could never convey exactly what is so wonderful about this program, so I’m not gonna try. Conceptually, it raises some interesting points about the usefulness of the complex, multitask-enabling GUIs that’ve become the norm versus the efficiency of one-track productivity. Practically, it’s just awesome. Or maybe it’s just a nice change of virtually scenery after 10+ years of Microsoft word processing products. Either way, I’m looking forward to getting up tomorrow and using this.
“Texas” – Jeffrey Lewis with Jack Lewis and Anders Griffin (download) (buy)
from It’s the One’s Who’ve Cracked That the Light Shines Through (2003)
“The Murder Mystery” (Velvet Underground) – Jeffrey and Jack Lewis (download)
recorded 2002 July 31 Peel Session
“Don’t Be Upset” – Jeffrey and Jack Lewis (download) (buy)
from City and Eastern Songs (2005)
(files expire January 18th)
Besides the press release for the forthcoming Mountain Goats album, which he illustrated, I have never seen any of Jeffrey Lewis’s comics. Nonetheless, they seem such a vivid way to understand his music. On “Texas,” speech balloon call-and-response (“How’s the pizza?” “Fucking awful!”) spirals methodically into imagistic madness, ala the Velvet Underground’s “Murder Mystery” (covered by Lewis on a Peel session in 2002), or a one-sheet comic in an alt-weekly. Elsewhere, it comes through in alternatingly hilarious and narcissistic autobiography — at it’s best, both simultaneously, as on “Don’t Be Upset” — where Lewis appears, like a self-illustrated post-hippie narrator, ala Kim Deitch’s Alias the Cat. Or maybe it’s just the power of suggestion. Just knowing that Lewis is a visual artist almost makes one forget the anti-folk cuteness that marbles his urban chronicles. Whatever it is, it’s a voice, and one that’s been absurdly prolific over the past few years, with a lot to discover. (And don’t neglect his legit cartoon classic, “Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror.”)
It occurred to me the other day that this is the first primary season of my life without HST around to bring a continuum of sanity/humanity (stylized, as it were) to Presidential campaign coverage. Drag.
There is something seriously bent, when you think on it, in the notion that a man with good sense would race out of his peaceful mountain home in Colorado and fly off in a frenzy like some kind of electrified turkey buzzard to spend three or four days being carried around the foulest sections of New England like a piece of meat, to watch another man, who says he wants to be President, embarrassing a lot of people by making them shake his hand outside factory gates at sunrise.
Episode 35: Weather-Induced Serotonin Fluctuations
Listen here.
1. “New Year’s Eve” – Stephan Mathieu and Ekkehard Ehlers (from Heroin)
2. “New Year” – The Breeders (from Last Splash)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “He’s A Bad Boy” – Carole King
5. “Pochahantas” – Neil Young (from Chrome Dreams)
6. “Static #1” – Beck (from Radio 1 session)
7. “Blue Moon of Kentucky” – Ray Charles (from Complete Country & Western)
8. “Going to San Diego” – Allen Ginsberg (recorded 11/1971 Record Plant, NYC)
9. “Heshey’s Miniatures” – Corn Mo (from I Hope You Win!)
10. “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels” – Kitty Wells
11. “From A Window To A Screen” – the dB’s (from Repercussion)
12. “Tengazako 2” – Esau Mwamwaya
13. “Amok!” – Evan Ziporyn and Gamelan Galak Tika (from Evan Ziporyn/Gamelan Galak Tika)
14. “Mixed Bizness (Cornelius remix)” – Beck (from Mixed Bizness EP)
15. “Shooter” – Lil’ Wayne feat. Robin Clarke
16. “Side A (cLOUDDEAD #4; Jimmy Breeze 10”) – cLOUDDEAD (from 2002/07/17 Peel Session)
17. “We Bid You Goodnight” – Animal Collective (from unknown date, Old Market Hove, East Sussex, UK)
18. “As We Go Along” – The Monkees (from Head OST)
o Nicholas Meriwether on the Grateful Dead moniker: “steeped in scholarship, near universal in human culture and history, and still capable — as one Deadhead put it — of alienating parents.” (via his introduction to All Graceful Instruments, an anthology of Deadhead academia) (PDF)
o Chuck Klosterman on why not reading Harry Potter will make him culturally irrelevant at some point in the future.
o Why dudes like sappy movies, as long as they’re made up (and vice-versa).
o J. Hoberman on Bob Dylan’s films.
o David Cross on selling out. This is something of a genre: the confessional post about why doing X isn’t selling out, or — if it is — why it doesn’t matter a damn. (See also: Kevin Barnes.) Somebody could edit an anthology of this stuff.
o Steve Jobs at home, circa 1982.
“Box of Rain” – The Grateful Dead (download) (buy)
from American Beauty (1970)
The Lorimer/Metropolitan station connects the L train to the G train, or Williamsburg to Park Slope. It is, needless to say, a Brooklynite hub. After discovering Grateful Dead graffiti there last year, I had another late night Dead encounter, this time with a drunk hipster.
At around 2 in the morning, over Thanksgiving weekend, he wandered onto the Brooklyn-bound side, carrying a mostly empty bottle of wine, and singing at the top of his lungs. His bellows slapped off the tile, making the lyrics that much more indistinguishable as he sang along with his iPod. I slipped off my headphones, curious to hear what he was singing: “Box of Rain.” Needless to say, I started singing along.
Dude had owned American Beauty in high school but was recently inspired to dust it off thanks to the concluding episode of Paul Feig and Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks, in which Lindsay Weir discovers the Dead and skips out on a summertime academic summit to head off on Dead tour.
The reclamation continues.
Following my debacle with the HIP website, I soon ran afoul of their legions of contradictory phone-bank loons, two of which approved a simple physical with a Manhattan doctor, and one of which added a few hundred dollars of additional charges to my account even though I’d already shelled out the agreed co-pay.
Thankfully, I have a secret force on my side, who revealed his identity in a manner most clever amid a thick tangle of bureaucracy that (I think) means I won:
v. The decision to overturn for the processing of the claim was rendered by Senior Clams Examiner, who is experienced in claims related issues.
The Senior Clams Examiner! Calloo! Callay! I’d like to think he is working away at his desk right now, high in some post-modern box overlooking a deserted midtown avenue, his office gloriously clean and new and tasteful. He empties a bucket of clams on the clean glass before him, the residue of previous loads miraculously wiped away by the futuristic self-cleaning furniture.
The Senior Clams Examiner praises Jah for the dumbass HIP executive who didn’t know the difference between oysters and clams and hired him to look for pearls anyway. He will be home in time to put his son to bed. He smiles, and grants his benevolence on a hapless sucker who didn’t realize that just because a hospital is affiliated with HIP doesn’t mean that all of its doctors are, too.
Putting the appeal in a pneumatic tube, the Senior Clams Examiner returns his attention to the batch of mollusks before him. When he finishes, he slides a few into his briefcase for a midnight treat with his wife, and leaves the rest for the robots to clean up.
Friends! Landlubbers! Brooklynites!
I sincerely hope you are all weathering the season with minimum
weather-induced mope and maximum nog.
Here are 111 songs — old faves, new friends, Dylan covers, shuffle-zen,
etc.. — I have thought ginchy since the last time I did one of these (and
in a more compatible file format, too):
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=F0AXAKIF
Sorry about all the ads & clutter on MegaUpload, here’s how to navigate it:
1. Click above link.
2. Ignore flashing lights, find code next to MegaUpload logo, enter code into special box, click “download.”
3. Wait 45 seconds (sing rousing chorus of “Contact” while watching onscreen
counter, waving arms), click “Free download.”
4. Save! Go!
…when on harddrive, click on file happyholidaysxojj.zip
Helper monkeybots are on call in the comments section to answer any technical
questions!
Other’n that, see y’all next year.
xo,
jj.
The Yo La Tengo Hanukkah mixes: part 1 and part 2.
Part 1: Georgia, Ira, James, Todd-O-Phonic Todd Abramson
Part 2: Yoshitomi Nara, Matmos, Eye, David Cross
If you enjoy the mixes, please consider donating to the charities for which they were intended. (See original setlists for more info.)
Happy holidays y’all. Check back in soon for my own holiday megamix.
