“Walcott” – Vampire Weekend (download)
from Blue CD-R
(file expires December 10th)
Gak, there are so many reasons why I wanna hate Vampire Weekend. Despite my love for Graceland and Remain in Light, the idea of nostalgia for ’80s world-pop sung seems kinda repellant, let alone revived by a buncha Ivy Leaguers singing about being Ivy Leaguers. Plus, they seem a perfect embodiment of the indie archipelago’s shift towards what once would’ve been considered totally goddamn bland/lite. There are times when Vampire Weekend might as well be the Gin Blossoms. Geeze, fuck me in the beard.
At first, “Walcott” was a perfect summary of all that. I mean, how entitled do you have to be to sing about being bored at Cape Cod?
But it’s such a winning hook — “outta Cape Cod, outta Cape Cod tonight” — that it becomes the sonic equivalent of a recklessly charming preppy, all windswept hair and big smile and kinda creepily Aryan. Really, though, bling is in, and there’s a certain cross-cultural egalitarianism in the concept. For that, Vampire Weekend communicate it in a different way than their hip-hop equivalents. For them, instead of strife and drugs and violence and struggle, it’s about safety and warmth. Fuzzy, even. Certainly, the channeling of the ’80s — childhood for the band’s presumed 20something listeners — doesn’t hurt. All that comes part and parcel with the songs, though, which linger, linger, linger.
The 2007 La Superette DIY arts/holiday fair commences this weekend. I will be selling a small collection titled In the Autumn of the Island and other stories, each with a Polaroid. You should go.
!!!!!La Superette celebrates 10 years of making, shopping, and wrapping!!!!!!
Please join us for this year’s festive events all held at chashama’s
Times Square location:
112 West 44th Street
New York, NY 10036
http://www.chashama.org
*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$**$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*
Shopping days are scheduled for:
Saturday, December 1st 12-7
Sunday, December 2nd 12-7
Saturday, December 8th 12-7
Sunday, December 9th 12-7
This year’s installations artist is: Patrick Meagher
Theme song by: DJ neckbreaka
With works by:
Newyorkclocks, Aaron Krach, Amanda Boulton, Anna Harsanyi, alexis
scherl, Amy Sanford/Merry Monk Design, Aughra Moon, Ben Fino-Radin,
Becky Hutcheson, caroline byrne, carrie dashow, Twice Sewn, Collin
Cunningham, Corinne Enni, Colleen Rochette, Craig Comstock, Charm
School Design,
DIR + ACB, David Carter, Miggipyn, Donna Jo Brady, AcHT(eN), Eliz,
erica weiner, free103point9 Dispatch Series, Hannah Gibson, Heather
Phelps-Lipton, Ginger D’anus, Gremalkin, Kitty Jones, ( ), Josh
Goldstein, Jesse Jarnow, Jill Killjoy, deChow, ^^^, Jennifer
Nedbalsky, Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg, Climate Change Preparedness
Center, Kimm Alfonso, Karen’s Monsters, kim couchot, Kim Scafuro,
egnekn, better than jam, Sheepishlion, no-time, Kristin Zottoli, Pink
Elephant, Levi Haske, Lori Bode, Lais Williams, Marie Evelyn /
Analogous, Marisha Simons, Molly Dilworth, Muffy Brandt, Mary Gagne,
Mira Artz, Miss Chief, Michael Krasoiwtz, Monika Webb, Radio Shock,
Mark Williams, Nathaniel Kassel, Nina Young, ipodtherapy.org, Patricia
Buraschi, Pillows for the People, rebecca alvarez, hawkwind, 35mm
Designs, Sue Havens, sallykismet, Flower Face Killah, Loud Objects,
Teresa von Fuchs
Performances dates are:
Dec. 13 – Benton Bainbridge + Matty Ostrowski, Loud Objects
Dec. 14 – MV Carbon + Tony Conrad, Nautical Almanac
Dec. 15 – Luke Dubois, James Rouvelle + John Roach
Dec. 16 – Dan Iglesia, Gerald Marks
*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$**$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*$*
La Superette 2007 is brought to you by Ignivomous Inc, (www.ignivomous.org)
La Superette 2007 crew
Director: Tali Hinkis
Producer: Kyle Lapidus
Webmaster: Ron Rosenman
Graphics: Netta Rabin and Karen Lawler
Special Projects: Douglas Irving Repetto
PR: Evelyne Buhler
Superator: Amy Benson
Stage Manager: Ryan Welsh
Video Curator: Susan Agliata
Chashama Liason: Jenny Rogers
Features:
Planet Waves: The Sublime Frequencies label hunts down the world’s elusive soundtracks (PaperThinWalls.com)
The Kite Runner: Marc Forster Flies Kites (Paste)
Film reviews:
No Country For Old Men (Paste)
Romance & Cigarettes (Paste)
Track review:
“Yo Yo Bye Bye” – Dump (PaperThinWalls.com)
Album reviews:
Indie Weirdo Round-Up, featuring: Akron/Family, Black Dice, Robert Wyatt, Sublime Frequencies, Darjeeling Limited ST (JamBands.com)
Live review:
Sun Ra Arkestra at the Iridium, 1 November 2007
Column:
BRAIN TUBA: An Academic Explanation of the Jamband Moment (Minus Footnotes and, y’know, Proof)
Only in print:
Paste #38 (The National cover): Todd Haynes/I’m Not There feature, Marjane Satrapi/Persepolis feature, Cuts and Paste singles column, film reviews of Redacted and Starting Out in the Evening, year-end blurblets on The Darjeeling Limited, Persepolis, Margot at the Wedding, Ghosts of Cité Soleil, preview blurblet on Be Kind Rewind.
December/January Relix (Beastie Boys cover): album reviews of I’m Not There OST, Os Mutantes, The Dragons; DVD reviews of Help! and Bob Dylan: The Other Side of the Mirror
Not quite print/not quite web:
several reviews — possibly/probably including CD reviews of Woody Guthrie and the Akron/Family and a book review of Noise/Music: A History — are in Relix‘s digital-only October issue. Registration and proprietary format load-time patience required. (I don’t have the latter.) No direct URLs, blech.
Gone in search of the Boognish.
Back in action here Thursday. Probably.
Episode 32: You can get anything you want…
Listen here.
1. answering machine message – MVB
2. “Preparando el Marck5” – Meteoro (from Latinamericarpet: Exploring the Vinyl Warp of Latin American Psychedelia, v. 1 compilation)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “This Time Tomorrow” – The Kinks (from Lola vs. Powerman and the Money-Go-Round, part 1)
5. “Ra 2” – Sun Ra Arkestra (from 2007/11/01 Iridium, NYC)
6. “Happy Coffee Song” – Trey Anastasio (from One Man’s Trash)
7. “Vajdaszentivány” – A Hawk and a Hacksaw (from A Hawk and a Hacksaw & the Hun Hangár Ensemble EP)
8. “Mr. Tambourine Man” – Bob Dylan (from 1999/07/30 Jones Beach, NY)
9. “Worry ’til Spring” – Sprengjuhöllin (from Verum í sambandi/Worry ’til Spring)
10. “For Some Time” – RANA (from Here in the USA)
11. “Alice’s Restaurant” – Arlo Guthrie (from Alice’s Restaurant)
12. “Harvest Moon” – Of Montreal (from Sony Connect EP)
On books:
It’s the oldest and the first mass medium. And it’s the one that requires the most training to access. Novels, particularly, require serious cultural training. But it’s still the same thing — I make black marks on a white surface and someone else in another location looks at them and interprets them and sees a spaceship or whatever. It’s magic. It’s a magical thing. It’s very old magic, but it’s very thorough. The book is very well worked out, somewhat in the way that the wheel is very well worked out.
via the Washington Post
I swallowed Google’s utopian kool-aid at CES a few years ago, and — on a primal level — have a real hard time understanding any argument suggesting that Google’s mass digitization of books is anything but a profoundly good thing. But Jean-Noël Jeanneney’s Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge genuinely opens up the discussion.
Where publishers’ frustrations seemed profit driven, Jeanneney’s analysis of how Google’s economic approach manifests itself in search results is totally essential.
There is a danger that cultural populism will organize channels of access in favor of the most elementary, the least disturbing, and most commonplace products.
Elsewhere:
Despite the false appearance of gratuitousness, the private sector reaps the profits by indirectly selling the use of these books through the advertising exposure that occurs with each hit, and also by global exposure. The company expects this increasingly lucrative business, thanks to Google Book Search, to have an impact on its entire commercial offering. Naturally, what remains of such profits, after distribution to shareholders, will further accentuate the imbalance in favor of the private sector and reduce the influence of those institutions serving the common interest.
In other words, down with libraries! Having run the Bibliotheèque nationale de France for five years, I can see why Jeanneney might fret. His arguments get curmudgeonly on occasion, such as his criticism of Google’s massive book intake, saying that it is the job of a library to carefully pick what they preserve — and totally ignoring the fact that Google is digitizing collections already vetted by librarians. (Though his fear of an American dominance seems totally warranted.)
Jeanneney yearns for some sort of governmental involvement in these projects. And, really, if what he proposes ever occurs, it would be an amazing and useful advance for humanity. While it is true that the internet is a free market (which left it vulnerable to domination by a utopian company like Google), it also has the power to be something else entirely, the same unformed ether it always was. (Maybe this is a particularly American way of approaching the basic metaphor of the ‘net: the old, unsettled west.) People can preserve information with profit behind them, like Google, or because they want to, like Brewster Kahle’s archive.org.
In the case of the latter, it is little different than any national library, at least in the sense that it is an institution that earns its power in recognition. After Jeanneney’s book, I might not trust Google the way I once did, but I do trust the internet. When given the choice of freedom, the result isn’t always a market. Sometime it’s just being free.
Download torrent. (File expires November 20th.)
– There is a suspension of disbelief in watching Eric Zala, Chris Strompolos, and Jayson Lamb’s shot-for-shot adaptation of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which (beginning when they were 12) took them seven years to complete. Obviously, the cast isn’t digging in the desert near Cairo. There are just too many trees. There is little believability to the firefight in the Nepal bar. But, so what? There’s a suspension of disbelief in watching the original Raiders, too. It’s just something one deals with when watching movies.
– In Raiders, though, the disbelief is smoothed over by big budget special effects and Harrison Ford’s charisma. In the Adaptation, it is the opposite, coming via the sheer low fidelity of the project: the analog video blur that coats the actors’ mid-scene age changes, or the distortion that occasionally permeates the soundtrack, a tape warble transforming a melodramatic string swell into something like a theremin moan. It intensifies the disbelief until the movie becomes about something else entirely.
– With a plane replaced by a boat, a monkey by a puppy, dramatically speaking, the big tension isn’t what’s going to happen, but how it’s going to be executed. How are they going to shoot lightning ghosts from the Ark? Or make that dude’s face melt?
– What is the “correct” order in which to screen the films in a double feature? Does one show the Adaptation first, to let the audience members’ memories guide their viewing, and then show the original, to see how it matches up? On one hand, that’s probably more satisfying from a traditionally dramatic point of view, but why should Spielberg have primacy over the marquee?
