“Four Freshmen Locked Out as the Sun Goes Down” – No Kids (download) (pre-order)
from Come Into My House (Tomlab) (2008)
(file expires January 24th)
File No Kids’ “Four Freshmen Locked Out as the Sun Goes Down” with Grizzly Bear and Asobi Seksu’s recent Phil Spector tributes, Dr. Dog’s “California,” and any number of other indie odes to pre-Beatles pop. It almost doesn’t matter what the Vancouver trio are singing about. In fact, I’m not even sure if I know myself, other than vague hints of a break-up, framed in the sonic guise of Brian Wilson’s vocal heroes. The title and the arrangement — both novelties on Come Into My House — are all they need to sell me on the song, which powers through on sheer vibe, the type of thing I’m happy to listen to just for the sound of it until it means something more.
“Kim Smoltz” – Ween (download)
from The Mollusk demos (thanks, Ween.com)
(file expires January 24th)
I love this Mollusk outtake before Gener even starts to sing, the endlessly airy keyboard melody that’s warm ‘n’ synthy all at once. When the vocals come in, the genre is implicit immediately: the wizened rock tune filled with maximum meaningless cliché. “Take it easy, walk with a light step, baby,” Gener sings. But without breaking voice, the song turns weird. “Walk amongst the life forms in your day,” is one piece of advice. “Swim around ’til the fish float out of the socket in your skull,” is another. While it might sound like parody, by blowing the song into the psychedelic nether-regions, Ween imbue the clichés with their original power: they’ve been through the weirdness, come out the other side, and now have something to offer. “Marinate a good piece of beef, understand the mind of belief” reminds me of the Americana of “Roses Are Free.”
The steroids hearings today, coupled with the stories about the rise of Adderall and Ritalin prescriptions among players, reminded me off a few passages of Jim Bouton’s Ball Four (1970), where the then-active pitcher makes clear how entwined drugs, quack science, and baseball are. Besides speaking of rubs like “First Atomic Balm” and “Heet!”, Bouton writes:
I’ve tried a lot of other things through the years — like butabolidin, which is what they give to horses. And D.M.S.O. — dimethylsulfoxide. Whitey Ford used that for a while. You rub it on with a plastic glove and as soon as it gets on your arm you can taste it in your mouth. It’s not available anymore, though. Word is it can blind you. I’ve also taken shots — novocaine, cortisone and xylocaine. Baseball players will take anything. If you had a pull that would guarantee a pitcher 20 wins but might take five years off his life, he’d take it.
More present throughout are the omnipresent amphetamines:
We’ve been running short of greenies. We don’t get them from the trainer, because greenies are against club policy. So we get them from players on other teams who have friends who are doctors, or friends who know where to get greenies. One of our lads is going to have a bunch of greenies mailed to him by some of the guys on the Red Sox. And, to think you can spend five years in jail for giving your friend a marijuana cigarette.
And earlier:
There were 30,000 people in the park and it was exactly the kind of day in which you want to look good against your old club and in honor of the occasion Gary put down at least three greenies. They didn’t do him a bit of good.
Finally finished playing catch-up with many of my to-read bookmarks:
o Fantastic LA Weekly piece about Mark Mothersbaugh and Devo’s continued devolution. (“As an antidote, he and fellow Devo member Bob Casale in the beginning used to sneak subliminal messages into their scores. The first few times they were nervous, says Mothersbaugh. ‘I think it was a Keds commercial where we put in “Question authority.” I remember the people from Keds were tapping their pens on the table and the music’s playing, and it gets to the subliminal message, and I remember I flushed bright red. I looked over at this guy and he’s going, “Yeah! Yeah! Go go go!”‘”
o The McLovin12four screenname turned up on my buddy list, too.
o The Times writes a brief history of Webster Hall, which would be a wonderful place to see music if it wasn’t killing rock and roll in New York City.
o David Byrne’s Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists–and Megastars.
o The Avant Garde Project provides an archive of out-of-print experimental LPs in FLAC and mp3.
o The Times profiles WFMU’s $mall ¢hange.
o Sad/sweet dispatch about George Harrison occasionally dressing up in the old Beatles costumes.
o A long thread (c. 2005) about the manufacture and distribution of LSD on Grateful Dead tour.
o “I Got What America Needs Right Here“: a wonderful Onion editorial by and about our man for ’08, Jimmy Carter.
o A map of online communities.
o An open-source freeware version of SimCity will be included with every computer distributed by the One Laptop Per Child project. The idea of impoverished kids learning about mega-conceptual society-building through SimCity blows my mind, but I do worry about the hegemonic implications, that SimCity merely represents the Westernized/American notion of urban development, beginning with power plants and industrial zoning, as opposed to in a poorer economic sphere.
“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.
