“Stick Your Tail in the Wind” – Summer Hymns (download here)
from Voice Brother and Sister (2000)
released by Absolutely Kosher (buy)
Y’know, I don’t even know if I like this song. That’s not to say anything bad about it, either. We just met. But we definitely had a moment, there, in the subway. It was damp there, and cold, while I was waiting for the train in Greenpoint. Then, this song came on, and brought me somewhere, briefly, completely. Florida, maybe, or someplace like it. It didn’t keep me there, though. It was a flash, followed by three perfectly lovely minutes, that — as I was saying — I may or may not like. To be honest, I don’t even know its name yet. Ah, yes. Nice to know you.
“1999” – Dump (download here)
from That Skinny Motherfucker With the High Voice? (1998)
released by Shrimper
(file expires March 29th)
Yo La Tengo’s James McNew reimagines “1999” as an oddly grooved drum machine chill-out. It works, too, mostly thanks to McNew’s boyishly sweet voice. His album of Prince covers, That Skinny Motherfucker With the High Voice? (note the question mark) was sued out of existence by the Purple One himself. I wonder if he ever listened to it. I hope so, if only because I dig the idea of Prince feeling threatened by James McNew. Apparently, Amazon Japan has copies.
(Oh, yeah: and YLT will be on WFMU tomorrow night doing their annual request-a-thon/benefit, though it probably won’t be as good as this.)
Episode 15: Oh, It Was Not Lima-Time For Keith
…& winter clothes, half-off!
Listen here.
1. “I Love How You Love Me” – The Paris Sisters (from Back to Mono box set)
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “River Deep-Mountain High” – Ike & Tina Turner (from Back to Mono box set)
4. “The Crystal Cat” – Dan Deacon (from Spiderman of the Rings)
5. “Portofino” – Raymond Scott (from Manhattan Research, Inc.)
6. “Tropical-Iceland” – The Fiery Furnaces (from EP)
7. “Going to Acapulco” – Bonnie “Prince” Billy (from Lay & Love EP)
8. “Sky Blue Sky” – Wilco (from Sky Blue Sky)
9. “Niburu” – Sun City Girls (from Carnival Folklore Resurrection, v. 11)
10. “1…” – Lorkakar (from Bell Notations)
11. “See No Evil (alternate version)” – Television (from Marquee Moon)
12. “Just Another Day” – Brian Eno (from Another Day on Earth)
13. “Flying” – The Beatles (from Magical Mystery Tour)
(via Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant…)
Turn to page 123 in your work-in-progress. (If you haven’t gotten to page 123 yet, then turn to page 23. If you haven’t gotten there yet, then get busy and write page 23.) Count down four sentences and then instead of just the fifth sentence, give us the whole paragraph.
“I will gather the rain and the moon and I’m gone,” I heard myself sing, my voice practically one with the background music. I broke for the surface of the pool, took a quick gulp, and plunged down again. “I will gather the rain and the moon and you’re gone.” Another breath. “I will gather the moon and the stars and we’re gone.” The song was buoyant, harder to stay underwater while it was playing. I was filled with joy, which I had not expected.
“Cleo’s Back” – Jr. Walker and the All-Stars (download here)
from Shotgun (1965)
released by TML (buy)
(file expires March 26th)
Jerry Garcia on Jr. Walker’s “Cleo’s Back,” via Dennis McNally’s A Long Strange Trip:
There was something about the way the instruments entered into it in a kind of free-for-all way, and there were little holes and these neat details in it — we studied that motherfucker. We might have even played it for a while, but that wasn’t the point — it was the conversational approach, the way the band worked, that really influenced us.
o Wired’s cover feature on so-called Snack Culture (“movies, TV, songs, games… packaged like cookies or chips, in bite-size bits for high-speed munching”) is a clever trend piece, even if it seems sorta token. Stephen Johnson’s contrarian rebuttal, on the other hand, is more incisive, arguing that, based on our collective love of insanely long television serials like 24 and The Sopranos, our attention spans are actually getting longer.
o In regards to the latter, I quite enjoyed David Denby’s overview of the recent spate of avant-narrative play in movies. “In the past, mainstream audiences notoriously resisted being jolted,” he writes. “Are moviegoers bringing some new sensibility to these riddling movies?” Definitely, I think, though I’m sad that Denby didn’t chase his idea even deeper into the mainstream, where movies like Stranger Than Fiction are channeling Charlie Kaufman’s meta-narratives into ultimately cutesy and traditional romantic comedies.
o In regards to the former, I also recently landed back on the perennial Ronald & Nancy Reagan pro-drug mash-up, which circulated extensively via bootleg video back in the day. I vaguely remember my Dad having a copy. It’s sometimes easy to forget that videos like this not only existed before YouTube but that there was a fairly established underground network that existed to distribute them. This is how the original South Park episode, “The Spirit of Christmas,” circulated, too.
o In regards to all of it, if only the molecular sense, I’m fascinated by Lowe’s recent campaign to “try to inject a new ’emoticon’ into teens’ text messaging vernacular in an effort to keep teens drinking milk.” Or, if you will: :-{). I’m sure the international moustache lobby & various facial hair advocacy groups are pleased that the milk people are saving their first-quarter propaganda budgets.
o In regards to none of the above, Richard Gehr is blogging. It’s one thing to expose the kidz to good music. It’s another to do the same for the adultz.
At first, the lack of coverage of spring training pissed me off: even with cable (not that I have it) only a few games on television, even fewer on radio, and no Gameday play-by-play on mets.com. I think I like it, though. The lack of constant information feels like a connection to the old ballgame, and that’s always welcome: getting information in spots from informed beatmen like Adam Rubin and Mike Delcos (in their modern guise as bloggers, of course), and occasionally updated linescores.
Much of spring training feels like that. With all the teams in the Grapefruit League a busride away, it is nothing but a regional baseballing association. (That is, it feels like the way all non-major league baseball still operates.) Plus, the very ritual of Florida to begin with: going some place where there’s warmer weather in the spring, instead of holing up climate-controlled bunker/complexes in their respective hometown.
Baseball respects the seasons, and not in some meatheaded “we’re gonna prove ourselves by playing the m’fucking snow” way, so much as the “I’m gonna figure out how to position ourselves by gently tossing this here clump of dirt into the air and seeing how the breeze is, but if it rains I’m going inside like a sensible human” kinda way.
As my life began to de-blah itself from the winter, I noticed it was the same day exhibition games began. I was reminded of this quote Russ comforted me with in the days after the Mets lost the NLCS, from the late, sage commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti:
It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, you rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then, just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.
In the spring — or, rather in these weeks before spring — hearts are whole and pure.
“This Is Why I’m Hot” – Mims (download here)
from M.I.M.S. (Music is My Savior) (2007)
released by Capitol (buy)
week of March 10, 2007
#1 this week, #32 last week, 6 weeks on chart
(file expires March 21st)
I appreciate the Zen/pop logic of the line “this is why I’m hot/I’m hot ’cause I’m fly/you ain’t ’cause you not,” I really do. And I certainly appreciate any song that employs a theremin, as “This is Why I’m Hot” does occasionally.
But Mim’s #1-with-a-bullet feels completely rudimentary, all but ignoring the symphonic beats that occasionally crest and distort behind it, instead using them to frame a bland, linear melody. There’s a simplicity to it that I like in theory, no particular tongue-twisters, or even trickery, just a beat and a vocal. The regional shout-outs are kinda curious and, likewise, there’s probably something to be said about the fact that (per Wikipedia) it samples Kanye West, Mobb Deep, and Dr. Dre, possibly about the boring recursiveness of hip-hop sampling itself, but I didn’t pick up the samples. Mostly, reduced to its hook, the song still feels like a placeholder. Nothing about it makes me want to put it on, and it feels too sluggish to dance to.
More Zen: if a bullet misses its target, and there’s no force to stop it, is it still a bullet?
“I Love How You Love Me” – The Paris Sisters (download here)
from Back To Mono, 1958-1969 (1991)
released by Abkco (buy)
(file expires March 20th)
The murder trial repackaging/revision of Mark Ribowsky’s Phil Spector bio, He’s a Rebel, has been a good subway companion this week. On Spector’s arrival at Manhattan’s Brill Building:
Implying that he couldn’t afford to go elsewhere, Phil was allowed to crash that night on the couch at the rear of the office, and would do the same in following days. The truth was, Spector had money in his pocket, but part of his New York music assimilation was to assume the guise of bohemian deprivation.
…Hanging around at the restaurants and other haunts where the music crowd congregated, he ran into many of the working and aspiring songwriters who covered the canyons of Broadway like locusts…
Getting to town just months before Dylan, Spector worked the same game, albeit uptown and across a cultural divide. The differences are legion, mainly in their methods of distribution, but the Village folk scene where Dylan came up and the Tin Pan Alley songwriters of the Brill Building had a lot in common, despite the latter becoming a strawman enemy of the former. Besides, they were both kinda corny. Likewise, they both matured: Dylan made Blood on the Tracks, Spector produced All Things Must Pass.
Spector’s 1961 production of the Paris Sisters’ “I Love How You Love Me” sure remains pretty, though. With no disrespect to Phil Ochs, I’ll take that most days.
The seventh in an ongoing collection of functional webpages and dork tools (excluding any/all Google programs)
o Should you be using Entourage ’01 for your email, and should you reach the 2 GB storage limit they take no measures to warn you about, and should your whole email database proceed to meltthefuckdown and corrupt your archives and cause you three days of freakation and frustardedness, I would then whole-heartedly endorse paying $18 for EntourAid.
o Handbrake allows you to easily rip mpegs from DVDs. Sadly, my laptop is way too slow to run it effectively. Someday I’ll get the whole ’86 series on my iPod and watch the innings in shuffle.
o iConcertCal searches your iTunes library and tells you what bands are coming to town.
o Haven’t f’ed with it yet, but Peel seems like a good utility to organize blog listening.
o The iTunes linkmaker allows you to generate URLs that pop right into the iTunes store.
