“Autumn Sweater” – Yo La Tengo (download)
“This Man He Cries Tonight”- Yo La Tengo (download)
recorded 6 October 2007, Brooklyn Lyceum, Brooklyn, NY
(files expire October 15th)
Yo La Tengo at Brooklyn Lyceum
6 October 2007
New Yorker festival
between song Q&As moderated by Ben Greenman
The Cone of Silence
Stockholm Syndrome
Story of Yo La Tango
Magnet (NRBQ)
Madeleine
Autumn Sweater
I Heard You Looking
Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind
This Man He Cries Tonight (The Kinks) (live debut)
Sugarcube
“Popcorn Superhet Receiver” – Jonny Greenwood (download)
“Smear” – Jonny Greenwood (download) (buy)
from The Jerwood Series, v. 2 (2006)
“Arpeggi” – Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke (download)
recorded 27 March 2005, Ether Festival, London
Skip through Jonny Greenwood’s “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” at random — dropping the cursor here or there — and it could be an orchestra, it could be an electro-acoustic collage. Perhaps it’s the anything-goes approach of Bodysong, perhaps it’s the lonely Ondes Martenots of “Smear,” perhaps it’s the fact that he’s a member of frickin’ Radiohead, but “Popcorn” seems like it could disintegrate to fuzz and bleeps and chiming Rhodes at any moment. Really, though, it’s just an orchestra, even if it blurs into sonic mirages.
The fact that Greenwood sustains it for 10 minutes before the ambient chords swell to Hitchcock thriller trills and explode into another world is impressive enough. Meanwhile, “Smear” — taken from a compilation of new music performed the London Sinfonietta — is a more unpredictable, though lacks the dramatic scope of “Popcorn,” which will receive its US premiere in January as part of the Wordless Music Series.
Are they right and proper formal compositions? Are they just a rock musician dabbling in archaic tropes? Are they boring string excursions? Do they matter except as a research prelude to (say) this version of Radiohead’s forthcoming “Arpeggi”? No answers here, of course. And though I’m excited to hear “Popcorn” performed live, I probably won’t listen to it as much as “Arpeggi” or In Rainbows.
“In the Craters of the Moon” – The Mountain Goats
“Autoclave” – The Mountain Goats
recorded 2 October 2007, Studio B, Brooklyn, NY
[Downloads removed at the polite request of JD.]
Mostly, this was an experiment to see how long it would take to record a show with the aforementioned iTalk, up it to my computer, and extract a few segments, as well as to see how much juice it would take, both in terms of power and memory. The answers: with laughable ease and laughably little.
So, here are two new Mountain Goats songs, performed this evening at Studio B in Brooklyn, a dance club a few blocks from the kielbasa parlors and bright-eyed/enchanting Polish girls of Greenpoint. The frame and drama are pure Mountain Goats, as hard-boiled and stylized as Bukowski or the Coen brothers. Some lines, especially on “In the Craters of the Moon,” feel like stock John Darnielle: “I think I’m gonna crack, I can’t live like this any more.” Others are perfect and inventive: “We swim in the dark until our bodies are numb, clandestine (?) rats in the moonlight, too far from the shore.”
Differentiating good & bad lines seems a tad silly, though, especially at this stage of the game. Darnielle found his voice a long time ago, and he’s sticking to it. They’re new songs. If you like the Mountain Goats, you’ll probably dig ’em. (An autoclave, as Darnielle pointed out, is a device built to sterilize medical instruments and kill all lifeforms, except — as recently discovered — one particular type found at the bottom of the ocean, near volcanic seabeds, which not only survives the process, but multiplies.)
The ninth in an ongoing collection of functional webpages and dork tools (excluding any/all Google programs)
o A guide to free wifi hotposts.
o Send free text messages to any mobile phone via the webz.
o Skip the thumbnails in Google’s image search.
o Trade oodles of used CDs for credit at Spun.com and they’ll even send the goods first, along with an empty box and return postage for whatever’s being traded.
o It ain’t free (cost me $50), and it’s impossible to truly set levels, but the purchase of Griffin’s iTalk gizmo seems well worth it already — even if I haven’t used it yet to tape an interview or bootleg a show. Those will come soon. Excepting an emergency flashlight next to my bed, I no longer have any device that requires a constant diet of double-A batteries. Weird!
Baseball deals in increments of hope: a two-run homer that brings the team within one, a strike closer to a strikeout, an out closer to the end of the game, a victory closer to the end. Each is a small clearing where suddenly a path to the future opens up, and everything is all right.
“There’s more Mets than Yankees in all of us,” Roger Angell once said, or something like it, which is maybe small consolation to a Mets fan this week. But it was a drama to participate in, milked to the very last day of the season: a statistically impossible and literally historic slide with one glorious high before the absolute crash, a redemptive one-hitter/blow-out (with a fight, taboot!), followed by a game in which a future Hall of Famer possibly making his final career start was blown out after giving up five runs in the first, a renowned slugger had his wrist broken by an errant pitch, and a kryptonite-weighted wunderkind ended his honeymoon with the fans. One utility player finished up an all-star career while his wife wept quietly in the stands, and September call-ups packed their bags, hoping for a shot in the spring.
For now, it is time for new routines, new ways to mark the post-agrarian seasonal changes. For some, it’s further escape into different culture industries: the fall movies (Wes Anderson! the Coen brothers!), other sports (a guy next to us at the game was tuned into the Jets today! The Jets!), or even changes that have nothing to do with consumption (taking the train to work instead of riding a bike). They are changes that would have happened with or without baseball, but now we can be aware of the Indian summer rising around us, the last nights to go out on the town and enjoy the air, instead of being lashed to a radio or a ballpark seat. Yeah, that’s the ticket: the nice autumn air.
“I Ain’t Got No Home” (download) (buy)
“Dear Mrs. Roosevelt” (download) (buy)
“The Grand Coulee Dam” (download) (buy)
As Dylan obscurities go, his one-off 1968 Woody Guthrie tribute gig with the Band (billed as the Crackers) at Carnegie Hall is pretty fantastic. There’s no reason for its rarity, given the fact that it is on an official release from a major label. Though it’s the Band behind him, not the amazing Nashville session cats who populated the then-new John Wesley Harding, the sound still recalls a stately and tantalizing outgrowth of that just-released album, coupled with all the grace found during the long, lazy sessions in the Big Pink basement, concluded a few months earlier. “Dear Mrs. Roosevelt,” especially, sounds drawn from the same landscape as the Biblical parables of JWH. The amphetamine urgency of the thin, wild mercury period is mellowed, not yet shot through with the anti-hope reflected through his mirrored sunglasses that marked his next tour, still six years away. (Thanks to Dr. Mooney for posting.)
Episode 28: Bring Me the Head of José Lima
Listen here.
1. “Lazy Days” – Flying Burrito Brothers (from Burrito Deluxe)
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “End of an Era” – Yo La Tengo (from Old Joy OST)
4. “Hallgallo” – Neu (from Neu!)
5. “Komentenmelodie 2” – Kraftwek (from Autobahn)
6. “Arpeggi” – Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke (from 2005/03/27 Ether Festival)
7. “Smear” – Jonny Greenwood (form London Sinfonietta Label: Jerwood Series, v. 2)
8. “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” – Jonny Greenwood (from BBC recording)
9. “So Long, Old Bean” – Devendra Banhart (from Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon)
It has been said often enough that baseball is a game of inches: of a ball that shoulda/coulda/mighta gone foul, of subtle pitch placement, of the exact angle of the bat as it makes contact. But, from the stands, baseball is a dumb show, able only to communicate in the broadest of strokes.
We do anything we can to infer personality from the players. Standing in repose as they do for most of the game — at bat waiting for a pitch (literally in a stance), on the mound waiting for a batter — this is pretty easy. It’s how they approach the plate, or head back to the dugout after grounding out weakly to second. But these are all actions that occur within a formal language, and the result is archetypes: speedy tricksters, crafty veterans, tragic journeymen, graceful future Hall of Famers who move like ghosts through the dugout.
Like the improvised characters in Italian commedia dell’arte, they are recognized instantly and understood for their behaviors. In some ways, at least as far as on-field personalities go, there is rarely anything new under the sun. Sometimes, there is, especially as the racial texture of the game changes, the make-up of pro ball having very much changed from the children of immigrants to immigrants themselves. But these changes are slow.
But, it’s baseball, and they don’t need to be fast. With between 10 and 13 characters on stage at a time with dozens more waiting in the wings (hundreds, if you count the players in the minors), multiplied by 162 games per team/per year (around 2,400 in all of Major League Baseball), the possibilities for sustained drama are functionally infinite.
But we hone in on specific personalities inside the noise, which is why we can so readily read pictures like this in ways that have nothing to do with stolen bases or batting averages or any other kind of detached statistic.
