Yo, happy spring everybody. I’m getting hell out of Dodge until early April. Posting will sporadic ’til I get back… xoxo, jj.
o Update on The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson’s latest, which recently wrapped two months of shooting in India. Sounds potentially epic. (via Kottke.)
o The blogobattalions have been all over this, but still worth passing along: a short Chris Ware animation from the forthcoming This American Life television show. I love the way his style translates to this medium. Hope he does more. (Thx, Sea of Sound.)
o Mutant Sounds blog, dedicated to uploading insanely obscure weirdo albums. (Werd, Boomy.)
o This whole episode is nutty, but fast-forward to 4:10 for the ridiculous Star Wars dorkiness:
Lester Bangs called “Flying” “McCartney’s first venture into FM musak.” While there’s a ring of truth to that, even bad genres occasionally start off with good intentions (see: the appropriation of Brian Eno’s ambient explorations into New Age). Me? I dig the vibe. A few years back, my dear comrade Spacefuzz dubbed “Flying” into “Destination Imagination” with his theramin and a solid collection of bleeps, and floated outwards. I like the way it holds out on the initial beat ’til — just after my ear has convinced itself it’s not the Beatles — it finally resolves to the main melody halfway through. It’s like when I used to repeat a word so many times it became nonsense. Here, meaning returns.
On Friday, listening to the Mets/Marlins broadcast on WFAN. I heard (for me) one of the first positive uses the word “gentrification.” Though I imagine that’s most likely because I’m a sheltered Brooklyn liberal. One of the announcers was commenting on the positives of adding a retractable roof to Dolphin Stadium, where the Marlins play, and suggested that it would gentrify the surrounding area, thus revitalizing it. The neighborhood — a slum, maybe, I’m admittedly not sure — happens to be Little Havana, heavily populated by Cuban exiles, with all their attendant culture.
It’s nothing new for baseball. A few years back, Ry Cooder recorded Chavez Ravine, paying tribute to the Los Angeles neighborhood cleared in 1950s to make way for Dodger Stadium. And in another year or two, the horribly named CitiField will probably wipe away Willets Point, the primeval shantytown of chop shops and tire repair joints that abuts Shea Stadium. Strange that baseball should be so linked to the displacement of indigenous urban cultures. I suppose anything the magnitude of a ballpark is necessarily a municipal project, and therefore big business. It seems natural, in a horrible way.
But was it always like that? Fenway Park and other old stadiums were built to fit inside their respective city grids, and a lot of the stories I heard about Ebbets Field seem to indicate that it was integrated into Flatbush. In this day and age, is there any way for something as mammoth as a stadium to be assimilated organically into the surrounding area? Certainly, shitstorms brew in Brooklyn whenever new stadiums are mentioned. But was there ever a time when they didn’t?
“Mississippi Half-Step” – the Grateful Dead (download here)
recorded 20 October 1974
Winterland Arena – San Francisco, CA
from The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack (2005)
released by Grateful Dead Records (buy)
Even in deepest Williamsburg, Deadheads survive, here leaving their mark on the Brooklyn-bound platform of the Lorimer Street L-train station. Definitely a WTF?, but I’m glad the Deadheads are taking back the streetz. Or, as Boomy reminds: Dead Freaks Unite!
“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.)
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)
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.
