Today marked the first Sunday where the Times had no baseball stories. Caught up on some old bookmarks I’d never read and found a few more.
o A great Violet Blue story about the ownership of sex.com.
o Seth Stevenson’s travel journal from Dubai. I imagine it’s fairly impossible to file a boring story from there.
o A back door in the iTunes store to listen to Japanese pop and other delights.
o Mark Dery’s “Rememberance of tacos post” begins with the immortal lede “I’m having a señor moment,” and presents a brief history of Mexican food in the United States, which seems (to me) just another manifestation of the aesthetic/technological idea/ideal of realism.
o “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace,” a paper by Danah Boyd.
The concept of Raiders of the Lost Ark – The Adaptation got me thinking: Just as George Lucas remade the original Star Wars movies to look as of he’d had all the money he’d wanted to make them, wouldn’t it be cool if he redid the second trilogy as if he’d had none of the money he wanted?
Episode 31: Attack of the Harvest Moonies!
Listen here.
1. “Car Commercial” – Al Kooper (from The Landlord OST)
2. “Terrapin” – Syd Barrett (from Radio One Sessions)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “Now I’m Freeking Out” – Ween
5. “Creator” – Santogold
6. “Nat Pwe” – Bobadin (from Folk and Pop Music of Mynamar (Burma), v. 3 compilation)
7. “Paper Shoes” – Yoko Ono (from Plastic Ono Band)
8. “Marigold” – Nirvana (from Heart-Shaped Box single)
9. “Blue Nile” – Alice Coltrane (from Ptah the El Daoud)
10. “Jade Like Wine” – Six Organs of Admittance (from Shelter From the Ash)
11. “Parchman Farm Blues” – Bukka White (from Anthology of American Folk Music, v. 4A compilation)
12. “Goin’ To California” – Irene Kral (from Gilles Peterson Digs America, v. 2 compilation)
13. “Braver Newer World” – Jimmie Dale Gilmore (from Braver Newer World)
14. “Harvest Moon” – Neil Young (from Harvest Moon)
My first usage of my new health care provider, HIP, went awry when they did not send me a doctor directory for some six weeks after I paid my initial membership dues. Which is to say we got off on the wrong foot.
As such, in order to find a doctor for a long overdue physical, I employed the Find A Provider function on their website, which is where I encountered this screen:
Knowing that I was looking for a Primary Care Physician and not actually angel dust, it seems pretty obvious where I was supposed to click, right?
For reasons that still elude me, it seems, the proper way to find a PCP through the HIP site is to select “non-member” and “specialist,” despite the fact that I am (in fact) a member of HIP and I am in search of a Primary Care Physician. There is no world in which this makes sense.
From this simple mistake sprung a series of confusions about the type of specialist that I was looking for, which will (sadly) have to wait for a future episode of Tragically HIP.
In 89 words, Cormac McCarthy zooms from the broadest setting of a scene down to specific detail, nails a mood, sets up a relationship between two new characters, exercises his own typographical and rhythmic voice with the smallest tweakings of grammar and syntax, and creates a momentum that leads irresistibly into the chapter that follows.
The office was on the seventeenth floor with a view over the skyline of Houston and the open lowlands to the ship channel and the bayou beyond. Colonies of silver tanks. Gas flares, pale in the day. When Wells showed up the man told him to come in and told him to shut the door. He didnt even turn around. He could see Wells in the glass. Wells shut the door and stood with his hands crossed before him at the wrist. The way a funeral director might stand.
Feature:
Dragon the Line: The mystic in Dragons of Zynth walk into the light (PaperThinWalls.com)
Album review:
In Rainbows – Radiohead (JamBands.com)
Track review:
“Never Found” – Johnny Lunchbreak (PaperThinWalls.com)
Live reviews:
Devendra Banhart at Grand Ballroom, 27 September 2007
Akron/Family at the Bowery Ballroom, 30 September 2007
Animal Collective at Webster Hall, 1 October 2007
Column:
BRAIN TUBA: Revolution is a Feeling
Only in print:
Paste #37 (Ryan Adams cover): feature on Marc Forster/The Kite Runner, film review of No Country For Old Men
November Relix (Tool cover): album reviews of Ween, Akron/Family, Iron and Wine, The Fiery Furnaces, and Devendra Banhart; book reviews of Oliver Sacks and Best Music Writing 2007.
October Hear/Say (KT Tunstall cover): album reviews of the Octopus Project and Mum.
“Terrapin” – Syd Barrett (download) (buy)
recorded 24 February 1970, Top Gear, BBC Radio 1
(file expires November 7th)
About 10 years ago in Copenhagen, I saw a dude walking down the street in a leather jacket with the words “Rock & Roll” written on the back in bedazzled studs. And I think he really meant it. That’s pretty much how Tom Stoppard means it in Rock ‘n’ Roll, currently in previews in New York, a play — when it boils down to it — about Czechoslovakian politics and, ahem, Syd Barrett. But, in the context of Czechoslovakia, where rock remained a revolutionary force for several decades longer than the United States (if it ever was here to begin with), the simplicity is totally excusable.
Midway through the first act, intellectual/rock dork Jan (Rufus Sewell) stomps around his room in Prague. His hair has grown out and he wears a long coat. When he turns to face his four shelves of vinyl, for a moment, he resembles nothing less than one of the proto-Commie dreamers of Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia. Rock ‘n’ Roll is in, many ways, an epilogue to that trilogy, catching the last few decades of socialism before the Velvet Revolution and the fall of the Wall, a bridge back to the modern world from the ideas Herzen, Belinsky, Turgenev and others opened up in Utopia.
As a standalone work, Rock ‘n’ Roll is a bit simplistic. Like Ethan Hawke’s clownish Michael Bakunin in the Lincoln Center Utopia, the characters do a lot of shouting about Ideas. In places, the music is predictable — cuing “Welcome to the Machine” after a typically Stoppardian debate about mind-as-spirit vs. mind-as-machine, for example. But Pink Floyd, it turns out, is still a foreign substance to legit thee-ay-terr, and the effect — mixed, Jah bless ’em, at a genuine loud volume — is at least a superficial mimicry of how Czech rockers the Plastic People of the Universe must have fit into political discourse: rudely. Indeed, the songs were always abruptly cut off before resolution, the lights thrown up and the next scene begun instantly. (And, sometimes, the music is totally unpredictable, like a totally WTF?! excerpt of the Rockin’ the Rhein rendition of the Dead’s “Chinatown Shuffle.”)
Stoppard’s got his post-existential/surrealist formula down pat: the life/emotional arcs of characters embroiled in sweeping historical/intellectual concepts, with a few plotlines about incidental contemporary happenings to keep things cosmically circumstantial. In Rock ‘n’ Roll, the latter role is filled by Syd Barrett, who haunts the play, sometimes literally. Formulaic or no, though, it always leaves me excited, the way I felt the first time I saw Arcadia as a freshman in college, like everything was somehow connected.
“Well, that’s the last Stoppard I’m ever going to,” huffed a British chap outside afterwards. Maybe Brian Cox switched accents midway through some scenes, as my friend suggested. Maybe it was just too loud. (Thx, G’ma.)
I love me some Super Taste. Their spicy beef noodle soup makes Republic’s taste like a styrofoam cup of ramen flavored with the pepper packets from an airline meal. The hand-pulled noodles are soft, full, and delicious. Man. And it stings.
I had always assumed that it was the noodles that I loved, and that part of the Super Taste experience is the notion of getting through the spice to the noodles: eating with the fear of slurping a noodle that would lash around like a serpent’s tail and flick spice directly into the eyeball (a sensation surprisingly not unlike what the tongue experiences). Recently, after I’d espoused this idea to Boomy, it was suggested that I simply order the soup without the spice — in fact, an option directly below Spicy on the menu. Nothing to feel guilty about, she said. If you like the noodles, just get the noodles.
So I did. And it just wasn’t as good. On one hand, I feel like this is a revelation my unrefined tongue has been working towards for years. On the other hand, maybe it’s just ’cause Super Taste is so ridiculously ridiculous. Either way, my good blue shirt has some subtle spice staining action this eve.
