Frank & Earthy blog
“Toc” – Tom Ze (download here)
from Estundando o Samba (1975)
reissued by Luaka Bop (buy)
(file expires February 22nd)
Here, just in time for Presidents’ Day, is the second installment of Dad’s animation, Face Film, which is all about resolution. Literally. I’ve posted Tom Ze’s “Toc” before, but it makes such a swell alternate accompaniment to this that I’m posting it again. Go on, try it!
see also: Cosmic Clock, Yak!
Episode 13: V-Day, you depressed biznitches!
Bizarre celebrations & tender ministrations.
Listen %20no.%2013.mp3″>here.
1. “Glückugel” – Bruno Spoerri (from Glückugel)
2. “I Get a Little Taste of You” – Z-Rock Hawaii (from Z-Rock Hawaii)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “Dashboard” – Modest Mouse (from We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank)
5. “+81” – Deerhoof (from Friend Opportunity)
6. “What Light” – Wilco (from 7/16/2006 Pines Theater)
7. “Green Valentine Blues” – Allen Ginsberg (from Holy Soul, Jelly Roll)
8. “If Not For You” – George Harrison (from All Things Must Pass)
9. “Something” – Booker T & the MGs (from Stax singles collection)
10. “Center of Gravity” – Yo La Tengo (from I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One)
11. “Wraith Pinned to the Mist & Other Games” – Of Montreal (from the Sunlandic Twins)
12. “Not At All” – Claudia Lennear (from Some Bad-Ass Bitches 1968-1978)
13. “Go Where I Send Thee” – Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet (from Gopsel Music)
14. “Green Typewriters (Outer Themes and Explorations)” – The Olivia Tremor Control (from Jumping Fences EP)
15. “The Diamond Sea” – The Yeah Yeah Yeahs (from iTunes Sessions EP)
16. “The Way I Feel Inside” – The Zombies (from Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou ST)
“Tropical-Iceland” – The Fiery Furnaces (download here)
from EP (2005)
released by Rough Trade (buy)
Jonathan Lethem’s Harper’s essay on “The Ecstasy of Influence” has been on my to-read list, but this quote, pulled by Return of the Reluctant, caught me eye:
For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction’s seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.
In the fall, I read Bruce Wagner’s Memorial, which is full of passages like this:
After the make-out session in Griffith Park, Chess shared some memories of his dad. Laxmi enthusiastically echoed how The Jungle Book was a favorite of hers too, from girlhood. (She meant the version with John Cleese.) A few days later, she brought over a Netflix of the original Disney.
Memorial was a thicket of references, both high and low. Dutch theorist Rem Koolhaas, art-rockers the Fiery Furnaces, and David Wilson’s Center for Land Use Interpretation all got name-checked, but so did plenty of McDonald’s slogans, Oprah episodes, and Viagra side-effects. Reading it, I picked up on some, and missed a ton of others.
One’s experience of a book comes in two main parts: the actual real-time reading, and the long-tail memory of it. That is, although I remember Wagner’s methods, what really sticks with me when I think about the book are the peculiar emotional climaxes and plotlines that had nothing to do with the dressings. Though I was involuntarily disgusted by the abundant pop culture references, and didn’t really dig much about the book in general, my brain still filtered it down to the Platonic Always.
I think, maybe, we automatically look for this when we read. In fact, the idea that a given story has a broader meaning to people besides its characters is basically the unspoken contract we have when we begin to read a story. Regardless of pop culture references, then, we fit it into some world that makes sense for ourselves. You know, the imagination. It would take a critical density of allusions to derail that. But it still feels wrong to me.
“Basically Frightened” – Col. Bruce Hampton (download here)
from Arkansas (1987)
reissued by Terminus (buy)
(file expires February 19th)
For all his ballyhooed weirdness, Col. Bruce Hampton’s two albums with the Aquarium Rescue Unit sound remarkably straight in retrospect. His four ’80s records on Landslide, reissued a few years ago by Terminus, are anything but. Like a lo-fi Captain Beefheart, a good deal of it is virtually unlistenable to most, however fun to others, but 1987’s Arkansas is a masterpiece. Many of the bizarro orchestrations are lashed to the decade by excessive synth use, but the studio rendering of Hampton’s perennial staple, “Basically Frightened,” is gloriously unadorned. Though it would later be a jazz boogie for the ARU, here it’s just existential blues: acoustic guitar, bass, and cosmic lamentations. Some make no sense. Hampton, for example, is basically frightened of “Young men in helmets who are occupied for women in–” and Hampton coughs. But, his surreal index occasionally strikes notes that are, well, real: “I’m afraid of losing bookmarks and, of course, politicians with no hobbies,” Hampton moans. Aren’t we all?
It is cold, and there is still no snow. But, a week from today, pitchers and catchers report to spring training. From there, it is easy to imagine new beginnings: some bit of life, however feint, in the bitter air.
“Metal Machine Music, part 1” – Lou Reed (download)
from Metal Machine Music (1975)
released by RCA (buy)
(file expires February 15th)
Being time for the annual, brain-cleansing airing of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, I got to thinking about a passage from Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach:
Achilles: …If any record player — say Record Player X — is sufficiently high-fidelity, then when it attempts to play the song “I Cannot Be Played on Record Player X”, it will create just those vibrations which will cause it to break… So it fails to be Perfect. And yet, the only way to get around that trickery, namely for Record Player X to be of lower fidelity, even more directly ensures that it is not Perfect. It seems that every record player is vulnerable to one or the other of these frailties, and hence all record players are defective.
If there was any piece of music in the universe that might be subtitled “I Cannot Be Played on Record Player X,” it’s Metal Machine Music. In that regard, maybe MMM is less effective now that the easily-disruptable turntable has been supplanted by the quietly humming mp3 box. Certainly, it sounds less scary now, its standing as a piece of music with overtones and melodies and movement a little more obvious.
But its actual musical effect, delirious overload, is no different, and that is because the “Record Player X” in question isn’t a record player at all, but the listener’s brain. MMM still can’t really be played, at least if the listener is trying to do anything else while listening to it — like, say, writing a blog entry. Or probably reading a blog entry, too. This means, of course, that it’s time to turn it up.
Further forays into the alien world of actual pop…
week of February 10, 2007
#2 this week, #2 last week, 2 weeks on chart (download) (buy)
(file expires February 13th)
The Wikipedia entry for Fall Out Boy’s “This Ain’t A Scene, It’s an Arms Race” notes that the song’s #2 placing is “the highest Hot 100 debut for a single by a rock band since Aerosmith’s ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’ debuted at #1 on the Hot 100 in 1998.” While Fall Out Boy might be a rock band, I’m not so sure “Arms Race” is a rock song. That is, like Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable,” the instrumentation feels arbitrary. It’s got a big kick drum, sure, and — eventually — a chorus with power chords, falsetto ooh-ooh-oohing, self-effacing lyrics like “all the boys who the dance floor didn’t love” and such, but the beat could be constructed of anything and the drama is single-minded. The overwrought verses could be sung by a diva over a synth pattern. Fall Out Boy’s recent flirtations with Timbaland and Jay-Z only underscore this: pop is welcoming back the idea of rock, at least as a signifier. (FOB play with this notion in the video, too, apparently.) What’s really happening, though, probably isn’t so simple. Pop divas pretending to be singer-songwriters? Drama queen emo acts pretending to be hip-hop stars? Really, nobody’s pretending to be anything, though, because all’s equal in the top 10. Anything goes, be it Timbaland’s Egyptian samples or FOB’s earnest/”earnest” guitar riffage.
“Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)” – Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (download here)
from Lay & Love EP (2007)
released by Drag City (buy)
(file expires February 13th)
Maybe Gardner is right. Maybe B-sides aren’t as interesting when they’re not actually on the other side, and don’t have to tracked through shops and mail order catalogues. In some ways, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Duder’s exceedingly lovely cover of Bob Dylan’s “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)” is the same as any of the songs on The Letting Go, the album for which it’s nominally an addendum. That is, they’re all just files on my computer.
At the same time, though, the songs become way more modular: both “Señor” and the album’s title track have made it onto some of my playlists, where the album’s other songs haven’t. There, the ever-ephemeral digitizations have become more personalized than fetishized, more than they ever could be merely as industrially produced physical objects, no matter how rare.
But de-fetishizing something isn’t always bad. No matter how obscure or obvious a recording, as a listener, there will always be the moment before you heard a song, the moment you actually heard it, and the moment after, and — in those moments — the experience of newness. That’s what counts, right?
“Señor” adds to Bonnie ‘Prince’ Mofo’s catalogue of boomer covers, including Dylan’s “Going to Acapulco” (also on the Lay & Love EP), the Dead’s “Brokedown Palace,” and — as Gardner randomly informed me tonight — the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” And that’s really what makes them special: a sub-narrative available only to those who want to read it.
“Social Studies” – David Byrne (download here)
from Music for the Knee Plays (1985)
released by ECM (never released on CD)
(file expires February 12th)
I saw David Byrne revive his music from The Knee Plays at Zankel Hall on Thursday evening. As usually happens when a rock dude performs at a traditionally classical venue, a screamer or two came with. “Make some noise,” came the voice from the balcony, early in the show. Or maybe it was “bring the noise.” Either way, being a night of brass band charts derived from New Orleans music, gospel, and Bulgarian folk (mixed, of course, with Byrne’s wry spoken word), it wasn’t happening. How obnoxious, I thought/sighed/judged.
Later, though, after Byrne asked for the audience to “cut us some slack,” the voice returned: “we cut you some slack!” It was a nice little moment, and Byrne cracked a smile. It occurred me that, so long as the screamers weren’t screaming during the music, why should it matter? Not only that, but it seemed to add to the performance, zapping a tiny tinge of electricity into what felt like an otherwise staid routine: a concert hall, ushers, a program listing the songs to be performed, etc..
Byrne’s series at Carnegie Hall was subtitled “No Boundaries,” but — given the mechanism of Carnegie Hall itself — that obviously wasn’t literally true. There might be surprising music, yes, but it would all occur at a certain place, in a certain time, in a certain manner, and the audience was expected to behave as such. I liked the shout. As for the music, The Knee Plays is far from my favorite extracurricular DB project, though there are a few great True Stories-like observations, including the above-uploaded “Social Studies.”
I’m kind of sick, so instead of a real post, here’s an indistinct picture of the Moon I took while lying in bed the other night.
