Coming nowhere near a Netflix queue near you is Los Angeles Plays Itself, Thom Andersen’s three-hour docu-ode to the City of Angels. Made entirely from footage from other movies and narrated with omniscient nonchalance by Encke King, the film is a veritable geography of Los Angeles real, Los Angeles imagined, and — most intriguingly — the Los Angeles created between the two. Given the copyrights on the footage (which probably comes from at least 100 pictures, if not far more), there is no way this film will ever see widespread commercial release. So — both because it’s great & ’cause the Mang doesn’t want you to have it — here is a torrent of it.
Episode 29: A Slightly Used Hope
Listen here.
1. “More Mets Than Yanks” – Roger Angell (from Ken Burns’ Baseball)
2. “Moby Octopad” – Yo La Tengo (from I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “Paper Planes remix” – M.I.A. feat. Bun B & Rich Boy
5. “Fractured Skies” – Parts & Labor (from Mapmaker)
6. “The Lord” – Young People (from War Prayers)
7. “Bad Education” – Blue Orchids (from The Greatest Hit)
8. “Andy’s Chest” – Lou Reed (from Transformer)
9. “It Don’t Come Easy” – Ringo Starr (from Ringo)
10. “Cherubic Hymn” – Bruce Haack (from Electric Lucifer)
11. “Sukiyaki” – Kyu Sakamoto
12. “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)” – Peter Starstedt (from The Darjeeling Limited)
13. “Stella Blue” (live) – Ween (from unknown show)
14. “Can’t Leave Her Behind” – Bob Dylan (from 1966 Hotel Room Tape)
highlights reel
(A list in progress of personal faves, etc..)
Features/Profiles/Interviews, etc.:
Reed and Right, Lou Reed profile (London Times, 7/04)
The Spirit of Radio, WFMU 50th anniversary profile (Signal To Noise, summer 2008)
How Jerry Got Hip Again (part 1 only) (Relix, 8/08) [see also “Hippie” below]
Hunter S. Thompson Keeps Moving, my visit with the late Doctor. (Relix, 4/03)
Happier In Hoboken, Yo La Tengo profile (Paste, 4/05) [see also “Yo La Tengo” below]
The Fugs: American Peace-Creeps, a visit with Ed Sanders (Relix, 11/09)
The Tinkerer, Tristan Perich profile (Village Voice, 6/08)
The Numero Group, a visit with the Chicago archival label (Indy Week, 11/11)
Running Into Stonehenge, essay about my Dad (Paste, 6/08)
Circuit Bending Lets Old Toys Play Tunes (Associated Press, 4/06)
Trey Anastasio’s Empty House (unpublished, 8/06)
Dreams Less Sweet, Circulatory System profile (Indy Week, 8/09)
The Penguin is Mightier Than The Sword, Berkeley Breathed profile (Salon.com, 11/03)
On Long Island, Memories of Harvey Milk Have Expired, a trip to Harvey Milk’s hometown (Paste, 11/08)
American Beauties, Akron/Family profile (Village Voice, 4/09)
Turning the Kleig Lights Around, Mountain Goats profile (Paste, 6/05)
Nobody Expects the Cricket, Glenn Kotche profile (Signal To Noise, summer 2006)
Unleash the Love!, Mike Love profile (Times Herald-Record, 4/06)
Passing the Turing Test With Brian Wilson (unpublished, 12/05)
How To Steal A Smile, on the flawed by wonderful reconstruction of the Beach Boys’ lost classic (Relix, 11/11)
Simple Meals, Talking Cats, an email interview with Haruki Murakami (Paste, 4/07)
NYC music:
Tapes ‘n’ Tapes ‘n’ Tapes, on Abandon Ship and the noise tape scene (Village Voice, 8/09)
The Jazz Loft: A Rare Find, on the convergence of W. Eugene Smith and Thelonious Monk in the Flower District (Indy Week, 3/09)
Fun, Money, Dolphins, Jake Szufnarowski profile (Village Voice, 1/08)
CBGB Closes (Associated Press, 10/06) (audio report, photos by Jack Chester)
Viva Talibam!, Talibam! profile (Village Voice, 3/09)
Monster Island’s Last Hurrah, profile of the arts space (Village Voice, 9/11)
Janka Nabay, A Bubu King, Grows in Brooklyn, profile of the Sierra Leonean transplant (Village Voice, 11/10)
Jimmy McMilllan, Rent Is Too Damn High dude’s musical past life (VillageVoice.com, 10/10)
NYC Taper & the Proud, Obsessive Lineage of Audio Hoarders, on tapers & taping (Village Voice, 1/10)
Albums:
Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? – Of Montreal (Paste, 1/07)
Her Majesty, The Decemberists – The Decemberists (Salon.com, 9/03)
Feels – Animal Collective (Paste, 1/06)
An Open Letter to My Friend Chris Regarding the Mountain Goats’ We Shall All Be Healed (Pop Matters, 2/04)
Americana: Home Recordings – Jim Croce (San Diego Fahrenheit, 12/03)
Tracks:
“Suffer For Fashion” – Of Montreal (Paper Thin Walls, 12/06)
“Boy With A Coin” – Iron and Wine (Paper Thin Walls, 9/07)
Books:
Of Proust & Potter, reading Marcel Proust and J.K. Rowling (Paste, 5/09)
Phil Spector & Brian Wilson bios (London Times, 4/07)
Spook Country by William Gibson (Paste, 8/07)
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (Paste, 5/06)
Don’t Stop Believin’: How Karaoke Conquered the World and Changed My Life by Brian Raftery (San Francisco Chronicle, 12/08)
Live:
The Dead at Red Rocks (JamBands.com, 8/03)
Paul McCartney at Madison Square Garden (JamBands.com, 10/05)
Smokey Hormel at Sunny’s (VillageVoice.com, 1/08)
Cornelius at Webster Hall (VillageVoice.com, 1/08)
Yo La Tengo:
Yo La Tengo, Hanukkah 2007 (VillageVoice.com, 12/07)
Yo La Tengo, Hanukkah 2008 (VillageVoice.com, 12/08)
Yo La Tengo, Hanukkah 2010 (VillageVoice.com, 12/10)
10 Years of YLT Hanukkah (Village Voice, 11/11)
Hippie:
A Recent Rap With Jerry Garcia (Perfect Sound Forever, 2/06)
America On-Line (Dave Matthews Band in Central Park) (unpublished, 9/03)
Phish at Coventry (JamBands.com, 8/04)
Throwing Down With the Upper Crust, Jerry Garcia guitar auction (JamBands.com, 5/02)
Phish: The Biography, a review (Indy Week, 1/10)
Bob:
Gospel Zone, on Bob Dylan’s gospel period (Boogie Woogie Flu, 12/08)
Bob Dylan at Sunfest (JamBands.com, 5/03)
On the Outside Looking In, Dylan’s Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric (The Forward, 1/10)
Misc.:
The Multiplex Dreams of Bollywood (San Diego Fahrenheit, 8/03)
Searching For The Next Little Thing, a trip to the Consumer Electronics Show (unpublished, 1/06)
HST (VegasTripping.com, 3/05)
E-Pro, or Why We Shouldn’t Be Mad at Beck for Being A Scientologist (Pop Matters, 12/05)
Living In Hope, an appreciation of Tuli Kupferberg (Boogie Woogie Flu, 12/09)
“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.
