Between looking at Texas from outer space and looking at outer space from Texas, I would take the latter, and not out of any great love for Texas. Anyplace you look, I figure, half of what you see is in your head, what you want to see. So, up there, pressed against the glass from my father’s Ford, all I could see were Darla’s cheekbones, the night glow of the gas station, and the cat. Darla’s sister, Morgan, had come in the middle of the afternoon, her white Chrysler extra-bleached as it rounded the corner in slow motion, like the Kennedy motorcade turning onto Dealey Plaza. And so it was afternoon when I took off, no other choice, and it rushed beside me for a minute, a faithful dog, before the blue deepened.
“Sometimes A Pony Gets Depressed” – Silver Jews (download) (buy)
from Tanglewood Numbers (2005)
released by Drag City
(file expires August 21st)
“That guy’s a better songwriter than Bob Dylan,” my friend, an aggressive and renowned contrarian, once said of the Silver Jews’ David Berman. “I bet you didn’t know that, did you?”
“No,” I admitted. “I didn’t.” And, even having been informed, I’m still not sure if I do. Nonetheless, it’s something to consider. The argument is not to take anything away from Dylan, or — for that matter — to even say that Berman is the greatest songwriter of his generation. If it is not about standing on the shoulders of giants and all that (which it might be), then it is at least about how pop audiences have evolved over the years and what they are prepared to accept in a song.
Berman might be a more interesting formal songwriter than Dylan, but an artist is only as exciting as the limits he’s transcending. Again, not to take anything away from Berman, but it’s all about context. “Sometimes A Pony Get Depressed” is in no ways a revolutionary song. But it’s great, and I can see what my friend was getting at: Berman is simply a more modern songwriter, unencumbered by the properties of music grounded in folk and blues.
An argument about David Berman being a better songwriter than Bob Dylan is stupid if one expects to come up with a victor. If one just wants it to use it as a crowbar into a discussion of songwriters’ trickbags then I’ll bite: David Berman is a better songwriter than Bob Dylan.
A fine meditation on the slowness of the dog days, originally published in Harper’s, via Baseball: A Literary Anthology:
Everywhere, from Portland to Pawtucket, baseball’s the same slow, sometimes stately, sometimes tedious game governed by extensive, complexly arbitrary rules, and practiced according to arcane, informal mores and runic vocabularies which compel that almost every act of play be routine. Even the great smashes, the balletic defensive turns, and the unparalleled pitching performances — by being so formally anticipated, so contemplated and longed-for by the fans — become ritual, even foregone. It’s a Platonic game in this way, with all visible excellence (and even unexcellence) ratified by a prior scheme of invisible excellence which is the game itself.
“Piggy in the Middle” – The Rutles (download) (buy)
from The Rutles (1978)
released by Rhino
One should never feel guilty about the music he enjoys, but I’ve been feeling mildly guilty at how much happiness the Rutles have given me of late. I’ve had the desperate urge for songs: stuff that I can sing in the shower, or play quietly on guitar when my roommates are asleep. I sometimes go through minor life crises where I think I’ll never find one of those again. Maybe on account of that, and because the Rutles are a literally formulaic reimagining of the Beatles (who will probably always remains the most irreducible source of aural pleasure for me), I’m just a pushover for the stuff. Who knows? (I also kinda dig that even when Neil Innes is trying to parody Paul, like on “Let’s Be Natural,” he still comes out sounding like John.)
“Piggy in the Middle” doesn’t approach “I am the Walrus” as a technical achievement, but it also doesn’t rely on anything but its songwriting wits for its momentum. It’s got lots of the stuff I love about certain tunes: random resonance with intimate inside jokes (“talk about a month of Sundays”), mysteriously pleasing phrasings (“toffee-nosed wet weekend,” with the emphasis on the “week”), and changes that can be strummed almost as a ballad (which is more than one can say for “I am the Walrus” itself). It’s funny, too. I mean, “do a poo-poo” instead of “goo goo gajoob,” but even that seems somehow Lennonesque.
Once again, the Ropeadope fake office went on vacation without warning me. Anyway, here’s Frow Show #25, which will be up officially on their site next week. Next episode in three weeks. Episode 25: The Dog Days
1. “Meet the Mets (1962 version)” – Ruth Roberts and Bill Katz
2. “Birthday Boy” – Ween (from GodWeenSatan: The Oneness)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “The First Inquisition (part 4)” – The Sadies (from New Seasons)
5. “fri/end” – Thurston Moore (from Trees Outside the Academy)
6. “The Passenger” – Iggy Pop (from Lust For Life)
7. “Piggy in the Middle” – The Rutles (from The Rutles)
8. “Jimmy” – M.I.A. (from Kala)
9. “In the Shadow of the Pines” – Bascom Lamar Lunsford (from Ballads, Banjo Tunes, and Sacred Songs of Western North Carolina)
10. “Green Typewriters, part 1” – The Olivia Tremor Control (from Music from the unrealized film script, DUSK AT CUBIST CASTLE)
11. “The Cave Song/Garden of the Dwarfs” – Spacious Mind (from Garden of a Well-Fed Head)
12. “Wawahkel” – Sack & Blumm (from Sack & Blumm)
13. “Maremaillette” – A Hawk & A Hacksaw (from A Hawk & a Hacksaw)
14. “An Occupation Grooms Me” – The Makers of the Dead Travel Fast (from Early Recordings)
15. “Birthday Boy” – Marco Benevento & Scott Metzger (from Live at Tonic)
16. “The Revolution” – David Byrne (from Look Into the Eyeball)
Whatever Victorian classification philosophy initially divided Sunday newspapers into their compartmentalized hunks of knowledge is long obsolescent in the culture at large. But I’m not sure it’s outlived its usefulness. The Sunday New York Times was never interchangeable with the world it described, though it sometimes seemed like it was. Now, especially, it seems like an obviously incomplete sampling of events presented with a strongly limited perspective.
Lately, though, I’ve come to value its finite qualities way more than its reportage. One could probably find the same stories scattered about the cyberether, but the fact that the Times has chosen to focus on them is what’s important. Data smog is an old problem (to borrow David Shenk’s phrase) and one result of being so overwhelmed is to enter blogospheric niches — be them centered around, say, obscure mp3s or liberal politics — and simply never emerge. Or, worse, only see the world through that community’s eyes.
The Times, especially on Sundays, isn’t just all the news that’s fit to print. It’s not all the news, for starters. But it does fit, neatly and valuably, into a few pounds of tree meat: a microcosm, or at least an organized place to enter the dialogue.
As shaman-in-residence at Boulder, Colorado’s Naropa Institute, folk archivist/alchemist/animator Harry Smith once recorded the entirety of his Fourth of July, from fireworks to crickets. Here are two mono-recorded excerpts of Independence Day 2007. Sounds in the field include the distant bells and marching drums of a parade, siren blasts, low-flying airplanes, a layer of constant bird chatter, and breaking ocean waves. Despite the mono, headphones are recommended, nuances revealing themselves with each upwards nudge of the volume knob. On “Drums, Sun, Birds, Bells,” everything is dense. On “Birds, News,” a more ambient reading of the same gives way to chaos when the birds react to sudden sirens.
The Smithsonian edition of Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music box set included his Fourth of July recording as part of the bonus features on one of the discs… except, so it seems, the “enhanced” multimedia technology, issued in 1997, no longer functions on current Macs. Oh, well. Anybody got an mp3? Permanent link on archive.org.
In two recent movies I’ve seen for review — Jeffrey Blitz’s just-about-to-be-out Rocket Science and John Turturro’s forthcoming Romance and Cigarettes — the telephone plays a typically minor role as a plot device/prop, in much the same way it has for decades. That is, some element of the story is forwarded/revealed by a third party picking up a shared landline. Though plenty of people still have landlines, of course, the sight of them on screen becomes increasingly anachronistic with each usage. To be sure, cell phone use in movies is way up, too, perhaps the single most convenient prop ever invented, but such is the power of the landline, which won’t easily surrender itself to the present.
o Feral cats living in Shea! (Thx, IvyP.)
o Wally Backman bugs out.
o RIP former Mets first base coach Uncle Bill Robinson.
o Lasting Milledge’s MySpace profile.
o With his solo shot tonight, Shawn Green is now just five home runs away from tying Hammerin’ Hank Greenberg at 331 for all-time Jewish home run leader.
