gone fishin’
Well, there was a new Frow Show to post & some other odds & ends, but Ropeadope is off ’til Monday, and I’m gonna do the same. We’re just gonna get back to detonating marshmallows for freedom now.
some entertainments.
I am not quite sure what to call the below episodes of Robot Chicken and Powerpuff Girls, in which fairly fuckin’ hilarious Star Wars and Beatles references, respectively, are framed in the shows’ usual styles. They are not mash-ups, except conceptually. They are too scattershot to be parodies, and too oblique to be tributes, though that perhaps comes closest. Anyway, it’s probably making too much of them, but both make comedy from the secret vocabulary of intimate fandom.
It’s not like other shows haven’t done the thematic-inside-joke-as-leitmotif before, but these two happen to do it with worlds that have been with me (and probably a lot of people) since early childhood. So, it’s absurd, but it somehow runs deeper than that — as when the Robot Chicken dudes tell the story of Ponda Baba, one of the many creatures from the Mos Eisley cantina that resonated with my adolescent self as grotesquely creepy, or when the whole Powerpuff episode builds towards a joke based almost exactly on More Videos
“arrival in mas” – recorded by david baker
“Arrival in Mas” – recorded by David Baker (download) (buy)
from Pitamaha: Music From Bali (2000)
released by Amulet
(file expires July 4th)
There’s lots of gamelan music to be had besides Amulet’s Pitamaha: Music from Bali, and I’ve had some of it, but David Baker’s compilation of field recordings was my first exposure. “A thousand toy pianos twinkling madly,” is how I described it before I knew anything about the genre, about how each “instrument” is actually an individually tuned set of sub-instruments. And, to be honest, I still don’t know much about it, give or take a few shadow puppet traditions. It is not that the rhythms sound foreign to me. They sound as instantly natural as ever, as does the tone. They sound like another dimension, like the alternating consciousnesses of Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland & the End of the World, a place I’ve been all along.
some recent articles
Album reviews:
The Mix-Up – The Beastie Boys (Relix)
The Complete Rich-R-Tone 78s – The Stanley Brothers (from Paste #16)
Indie-Weirdo Round-Up, featuring: Dandelion Gum by Black Moth Super Rainbow, While My Guitar Violently Bleeds by Sir Richard Bishop, Mirrors by Battles, Corona: Tokyo Realization by Jim O’Rourke, and Spider Smile by Tarwater (JamBands.com)
Track reviews:
“Melody Day” – Caribou (with interview) (PaperThinWalls.com)
“Wave Backwards to Massachusetts” – Hallelujah the Hills
Columns and misc.:
BRAIN TUBA: Friends & Other Hippie Pap (JamBands.com)
“Summer Salt” demo
“Meet the Mets” cover
In print:
Paste #33 (Can Rock Save the World? cover): feature on Ghosts of Cité Soleil director Asger Leth, film review of Death at a Funeral
July Relix (Page McConnell cover): album reviews of the Beastie Boys, Praxis, Buffalo Tom; book review of Dub: Soundscapes & Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae)
‘sad and lonesome” – RANA
“Sad and Lonesome” – RANA (download) (buy) [live versions only on iTunes]
from Here in the USA (2002)
released by Bonesaw
(file expires July 2nd)
Man, after five years (!), RANA’s “Sad and Lonesome” is still so perfectly languid. Though they sometimes played at being an indie band, the New Jersey quartet never quite mastered the hipster, er, edge. But when they played to their strengths — chemistry, mainly, and berserker lead guitar — they sounded fantastic. Though “Sad and Lonesome” references both blues (a pair of harmonica solos) and country (the title, and a twangy solo from guitarist Scott Metzger), the song is decidedly neither of those. But it’s definitely sad, and it’s definitely lonesome. A lot of the mood comes from songwriter Matt Durant’s Rhodes, a naturally sleepy instrument that simulates warm, nocturnal air. On paper, the lyrics are an ambiguous jumble — Durant claims, “It’s such a nice night to be married” before he declares that he’s gonna “find [him]self a bride” — but it’s no matter and (in practice) makes exactly enough sense as it needs to.
“meet the mets” – funny cry happy
“Meet the Mets” – Funny Cry Happy (download)
(Ruth Roberts and Bill Katz cover)
(file expires July 1st)
If anybody was wondering what a Funny Cry Happy arrangement of “Meet the Mets” would sound like, well, wait no longer. Conceived during the atrocious 4-14 stretch and recorded with a mite less mope following their three-game sweep of the A’s this weekend, it’s… um, I guess it’s something I made on a Sunday evening for the hell of it. Forgive the extra/dropped beats.
lolita
There are many ways to read Lolita: as dark & sexual pulp, as hilarious meta-narrative, as a disturbingly sincere love story. But Nabokov is also a peerless observer of the cultural landscape as it transforms from the old, weird America of folksong and rural roads to the new, weird America of endless asphalt and roadside lodging.
Nous connumes (this is royal fun) the would-be enticements of their repetitious names — all those Sunset Motels, U-Beam Cottages, Hillcrest Courts, Pine View Courts, Mountain View Courts, Skyline Courts, Park Plaza Courts, Green Acres, Mae’s Courts. There was sometimes a special line in the write-up, such as “Children welcome, pets allowed” (You are welcome, you are allowed). The baths were mostly tiled showers, with an endless variety of spouting mechanisms, but with one definitely non-Laodicean characteristic in common, a propensity, while in use, to turn insanely beastly hot or blindingly cold upon you, depending on whether your neighbor turned on his cold or his hot to deprive you of a necessary component in the shower you had so carefully blended. Some motels had instructions posted above the toilet (on whose tank the towels were unhygienically heaped) asking guests not to throw into its bowl garbage, beer cans, cartons, stillborn babies, others had special notices under glass, such as Things to Do…
“goodnight irene” – little richard
“Goodnight Irene” – Little Richard (download) (buy) (1951ish)
(file expires June 28th)
There is nothing ethereal about Little Richard’s Ray Charles-like take of “Goodnight Irene” — at least, not like the Leadbelly origination, or even the white bread version Pete Seeger & the Weavers rode to #1 in the summer of 1950. But it is remarkable nonetheless, mostly because of a drummer I can’t identify. In his hands, it doesn’t matter that the song is a murder ballad. The melody is there alright, but it is almost as if it only exists to give an arc to the utterly liquid groove. It sounds like there’s a conga player, too, but the meat of it is in the snare shuffle beneath Richard’s vocal, which dives in and out of the rhythm guitar. Like Glenn Kotche’s parts in Wilco’s “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart,” the drummer remains in freefall, as if he is always about to start the song’s real drum part. It never arrives, and the singer never quite says goodnight proper.
frow show, episode 22
Episode 22: Standard Bitter Love Songs…
…at the end of a bliss bender…
Listen here.
1. “The True Wheel” – Brian Eno (from Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy))
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “Good Guys & Bad Guys” – Camper Van Beethoven (from Camper Van Beethoven)
4. “Melody Day” – Caribou (from Andorra)
5. “When the Sun Grows On Your Tongue” – Black Moth Super Rainbow (from Dandelion Gum)
6. “Pink Batman” – Dan Deacon (from Spiderman of the Rings)
7. “I Hear A New World” – Joe Meek (from I Hear A New World)
8. “Within You Without You” – Sonic Youth (from Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father compilation)
9. “I’m A Boinger” – Billy & the Boingers (from Billy & the Boingers Bootleg flexidisc)
10. “The Night Before” – The Beatles (from Help! OST)
11. “You Didn’t Try To Call Me” – Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention (form Freak Out)
12. “She’s A Rejector” – Of Montreal (frrm Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?)
13. “Stupid Girl” – The Rolling Stones (from Aftermath)
14. “Never Talking To You Again” – Husker Du (from Zen Arcade)
15. “Wait For You” – The Mountain Goats (from Babylon Springs EP)
16. “Goodnight Irene” – Little Richard (from Forever Gold)
