An oncoming cold, a new millionaire pitcher to wonder idly about, and some Roger Angell to peruse. I’m going to bed, ideally to dream of “raising my mid-game gaze from the diamond to observe the gauzy look of departing rain clouds lifting from the jagged rim of some distant desert peak, and then entering that in my notebook (with the pen slipping a little in my fingers, because of the dab of Sea & Ski I have just rubbed on my nose, now that the sun is out again and cookin gus gently in the steepl little grandstand behind third base).” We all dream of dreams.
o New Murakami on the way! In July! About jogging! (Bill Hicks: “What do you jot down about jogging? ‘Left foot, right foot, blood spurts out nose.'”) Either way: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.
o Like grapes becoming raisins, bureaucracy often transforms into absurdity, which — in turn — is a fine basis for proverb-soaked folklore. John Beamer on 14 “Rules and quirks” of professional baseball.
o New Yorker classical critic Alex Ross on Radio’eads’s Jonny Greenwood.
o This year’s Oscar-nominated animated shorts. Looking forward to watching these.
o Wired explores “The Life Cycle of a Blog Post.” Great concept, nice execution, but not nearly as complicated as the chart seems to represent on first glance.
o Jennifer Egan’s “The General” — first published in Five Chapters, collected in Best American Non-Required Reading — is the raddest piece of short fiction I’ve read in a long while. Effortlessly modern and viciously hilarious, but also sweet and heartbreaking.
o A luxurious, Joseph Mitchell-style 2002 NYT piece on Sunny’s, where I recently caught Smokey Hormel’s Roundup. (see also: bassist Tim Luntzel’s page, for upcoming Roundup dates.)
o Via the Huffington Post: “According to Us Weekly, the Terry Gillian production of ‘The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus’, which Ledger was partially though filming, has been scrapped and everyone let go.” Dude can’t catch a break; peeps can’t even spell his name right. (Of course, Brothers Grimm and Tideland kinda sucked.)
o Tom Stoppard’s book valise. Hawt.
o Not reading, but not embeddable either, Eugene Mirman’s report from the New Hampshire primary is a useful distillation of his absurdism.
o Ron Darling has been training. (And of course you’ve seen Ira Kaplan’s Kiner’s Korner-parodying interview with Eddie Kranepool.)
o Why can’t American politics be this much like Joseph Campbell lectures about folklore? (Via NYT.)
Omens of his downfall are said to have included the breaking of a gavel in Parliament and Mr. Suharto’s loss of the chignon, or hairpiece, of his wife, Siti Hartinah, who died in 1996.
Many Indonesians maintain that her death was the beginning of the end for Mr. Suharto. She was a minor member of the royal family here, the Sultanate of Solo, and is said to have been the source of Mr. Suharto’s legitimacy as a ruler. In Javanese tradition, power has an essence of its own, known as wahyu, and is conferred like a mantle on certain chosen people in a way similar to the “mandate of heaven” that empowered Chinese emperors.
After the death of Mr. Suharto’s wife, spiritualists as well as political scientists saw Mr. Suharto becoming less deft as a ruler. In his desperation near the end, according to accounts at the time, he called in a West African spiritualist to help him.
“There is a tradition of Javanese kings becoming kings because of their wives,” Onghokham, a prominent social historian, said in an interview. He died last year. “When Suharto rose to power, people believed that the wife had the wahyu, the flaming womb, and whoever united with her would get the wahyu. After her death, people began to sense the wahyu was gone.”
Or maybe it is and we’re just too close to it.
Essays/articles/features:
Field of Schemes, on the Mitchell Report (Village Voice)
Interview with Walk Hard director Jake Kasdan (Paste)
Anthology Recordings Brings Forgotten Music To The Web (PaperThinWalls.com)
Pazz and Jop 2007: ballot, comments
Idolator 2007: Ballot & Comments (Idolator.com)
Live reviews:
Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s, 4-11 December 2007 (Village Voice blog)
Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s, 8 December 2007 (Relix)
Phil Kline’s Unsilent Night, 15 December 2007 (Village Voice blog)
Smokey Hormel’s Roundup at Sunny’s, 23 January 2008 (Village Voice blog)
Album reviews:
Jukebox – Cat Power & Ask Forgiveness EP – Bonnie “Prince” Billy (Paste)
I’m Not There OST – various (Relix)
Give Thanks to Chank – Col. Bruce Hampton & the Quark Alliance (JamBands.com)
White Moth – Xavier Rudd (Paste)
Track review:
“Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse” – Of Montreal (PaperThinWalls.com)
Movie reviews:
Redacted (Paste)
Starting Out in the Evening (Paste)
Columns:
BRAIN TUBA: The Bohemians (JamBands.com)
BRAIN TUBA: War on War, parts 14-15 (JamBands.com)
In print:
o Paste #39 (Art House Powerhouse cover): feature on Michel Gondry, blurblet on Todd Haynes’ Superstar, album reviews of Cat Power, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, La Belle Epoque compilation, movie review of City of Men
o February/March Relix (Black Crowes cover): features on Ween and Unbroken Chain symposium, live review of Yo La Tengo, album reviews of North Mississippi AllStars, Zox, Grateful Dead, book review of Will Hodgkinson.
o Signal To Noise #48 (Devendra Banhart cover): album review of A Hawk and a Hacksaw & the Hun Hangar Ensemble, Os Mutantes
o December Hear/Say (Angels & Airwaves cover): album review of Michael Showalter
Plus, “Ghost Stories” (from Paste #33) made Short End Magazine’s “40 Film-Journalism Must-Reads & Sees of 2007.”
Ballots for the Village Voice‘s annual Pazz & Jop poll were posted today. Mine is here. My full comments are below:
The other night Sancho and I were toasting the arrival of the Huns. His belief about the record industry’s collapse, which I support, is that it is wonderful that nobody can make a living playing music anymore, because then only people who really give a shit will try. I like it because it reaffirms the fact that everybody, it seems, does it anyway.
Granted, I write about music, and do so in Brooklyn, taboot, but I am optimistic that the glut is not local. I will have Sancho confirm this upon his annual return to Santo Domingo next week, but really, it seems that music is ephemeral again. The corporate bloodlettings — which greatly please Sancho’s North American Zoroastrian urges — are the final sign that the technologies for production and consumption are virtually interchangeable, a decidedly pre-modern balance.
Coupled with the pervasive and overwhelming data smog, one might even read the omnipresent desire to write/record/edit/curate music as culturally bred defense mechanism. Territorial pissing, more or less. Bodily fluids being what they are, this — needless to say — only exacerbates the issue. What is uncanny, though, are all the specific ways that music can make itself cut through, well, the crap. Sometimes it’s at least pretend-innovative, other times plain as day.
Released on a circular disc and judged strictly on its sonic youth, Radiohead’s In Rainbows would likely have been greeted as a songy disc by blokes reaching middle age. By selling it through ice cream trucks as they have, though, Radiohead has added a layer of (at least) temporary meaning to their work — ideally enough to get a listener listening long enough to really give the music a fair shake. (Which it’s worth. Really.)
Wilco (to use another example from the dwindling set of shared references) took a tried and true route: make it as plum pleasing as possible. Sancho thinks Jeff Tweedy is a stone shark-jumper (but that’s okay: more blood, potentially), though the shimmering guitars and dulcet tones of Sky Blue Sky wooed me endlessly.
There was just something I liked about the way it sounded, and couldn’t get enough of it for a while. Does that make it good? Dunno. I couldn’t really tell you what the songs are about, or even how I necessarily relate to anything beyond one or two lines, or — when it comes down to it — why I still consider it great even though I actually deleted the second half of the album from my iPod, cut out a plodding jam, substituted a live version of “What Light” and added some B-sides. Even with all of that, it holds up as a vessel, floating.
My enjoyment of the album is totally abetted by technology and its resultant lesson: the notion that music isn’t sacred. And it’s not even necessarily made by people with cool haircuts, righteous attitudes, or business sense. In the case of the latter, it sometimes just takes 40 years to reach who it needs to reach. Discovered anew, everything sounds current. Sometimes, everything current sounds old — like Vampire Weekend, who (on first listen) already sound like a band sucked into the hype grinder and spat out. I kind of hate myself for liking them. Sancho probably just hates them, though he’s got some theories about that, too.
“Start a blog,” I said.
“Bite me,” he said. “Then I’d have to write.”
Episode 36: Won’t Somebody Think of Terry Gilliam?
Link here.
1. “Can’t Buy Me Love” – The Better Beatles (from Mercy Beat)
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “Only Heaven Knows” – Kevin Ayers (from The Unfairground
4. “Your Party Was Yesterday” – Sam Champion (from SM CHMPN EP)
5. “Spider Home” – O’Death (from Gigantic Series 7-inch)
6. “Amnesia” – Fire on Fire (from Fire on Fire EP)
7. “Cycles” – Frank Sinatra (from Cycles)
8. “Kandore Mandore” – Andore Mandore
9. “Ego Blossoms” – Samara Lubelski (from Living Bridge compilation)
10. “Music (Japanese version)” – Petra Haden (from Gum EP)
11. “Coloris” – Cornelius (from Coloris OST)
12. “Systems Thinking Business Modeling Consultant” – Magnetophone and John Darnielle (from Esopus #6: Help Wanted Alternative)
13. “The Deepest of Reds” – The S-Haters (from Stories As Cold as the Irish Sea 7-inch)
14. “Hyperstation” (live) – Sonic Youth (from Daydream Nation deluxe edition)
15. “California” – Dr. Dog (from Takers and Leavers EP)
16. “Four Freshmen Locked Out As the Sun Goes Down” – No Kids (from Come Into My House)
o Jason Gross returns with his annual Best Music Scribing round-up.
o Nabokov’s son, Dmitri, has to decide whether or not to destroy his father’s last work, a work-in-progress titled Laura in accordance with Nabokov’s last wishes.
o Adderall/Ritalin prescriptions are up in the Major Leagues — 35 players during the 2006 season to 111 in 2007.
o My mind was totally blown by this Times article on Sunday about the genre of Japanese cell-phone novels. Hope they make it to translation!
o A Wired editorial by Clive Thompson titled “Why Sci-Fi is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing,” which (I think) is also what it’s about.
“Coloris” – Cornelius (download)
from Coloris OST (unreleased) (2006)
“Mixed Bizness (Cornelius remix)” – Beck (download)
from Mixed Bizness EP (2000)
“Music (Japanese version)” – Petra Haden (download) (buy)
from Gum EP (2008)
(files expire January 28th)
Super-dooper-like-whoa psyched for the Cornelius gig at Webster Hall next Saturday. And you should be, too. As such, here’s some arcana from the shibuya-kei bitmaster.
First up is part of his contribution to the soundtrack to the Gameboy Advance game Coloris (thanks to Dessgeega for the YouTube vid). I’d love to hear more of this stuff! I like the idea of writing loops and algorithms and standalone pieces of music for video games as a formal challenge to create music that is economical, simple, and satisfying.
Cornelius’s take on Beck’s “Mixed Bizness” is probably my single favorite remix of all time, let alone in the deep catalogues of both Hansen and Oyamada. If there were ever any doubts about one being the Oriental/Occidental counterpart to the other, the mind-blowing singularity of this cut should blow them like so many oblique paper creatures.
My major problem was last year’s Sensuous was its seeming abandonment of the acoustic side of the electro-acoustic equation. On the new Gum EP, vocal acrobat Petra Haden’s take on “Music,” Sensuous‘s penultimate cut, re-humanizes the hyper-organized bleeps. (Also included is Haden’s English language version of the same.)
