Features:
“CBGB Closes” (audio slideshow for Associated Press, photos by Jack Chester)
Song reviews:
“Tio Minuter (Ten Minutes)” – Pärson Sound (PaperThinWalls.com)
“Good Things Are Coming” – New Sound of Numbers (PaperThinWalls.com)
“God Bless the Ottoman Empire” – A Hawk and a Hacksaw (PaperThinWalls.com)
“Untitled (Track 4)” – Talibam! (PaperThinWalls.com)
“Trial By Lasers” – Icy Demons (PaperThinWalls.com)
“Time Passing” – Max Richter feat. Robert Wyatt (PaperThinWalls.com)
“Soul Master” – Edwin Starr
“I’m Your Puppet” – Yo La Tengo
“I’d Love Just Once To See You” – The Beach Boys
“California” – Dr. Dog
““In a Different Light – The Bangles
Album reviews:
The Information – Beck
Live at the Warfield – Phil Lesh and Friends
Live reviews:
Of Montreal and Jamie Lidell at Irving Plaza, 26 September 2006
Yo La Tengo at Loews Jersey City, 29 September 2006
The Mountain Goats at the Bowery Ballroom, 1 October 2006
Columns and misc.:
BRAIN TUBA: Five Little Thoughts (It’s a Scientific Lifestyle
Two new Funny Cry Happy demos
Only in print:
o November Relix (Tenacious D cover): album reviews of Bob Dylan, Tortoise, Joanna Newsom, Four Tet; book review of 33 1/3 Greatest Hits
o Paste #26 (Beck cover): movie review of Fast Food Nation, DVD review of Jeff Tweedy
“In a Different Light” – The Bangles (download here)
from Different Light (1986)
released by Columbia Records (download here)
(file expires November 2nd)
My first exposure to the Bangles came through the radio show Kids America that my mother and I listened to, and where — being a kid-friendly novelty — “Walk Like An Egyptian” was a ceaseless hit. Not long after that, we bought a tape of the album. The songs disappeared into my memory until this summer, when my friend Paul convinced me to grab them from his iPod. The title track, whose chorus was one of the few bits of the album I remembered (along with Prince’s “Manic Monday” and “Walk Like An Egyptian”), remains awesome. Give or take a little bit of the production sheen, it doesn’t even sound too dated.
I can imagine walking into a bar on the Lower East Side and hearing some sub-Strokes band covering this. It’s garage-pop of the first order: pounding wah guitar intro, a chorus/hook that drops immediately, and — eventually — lyrics that run just deep enough to be meaningful as lyrics, but don’t strive to be anything deeper. The first verse, to me, is just plain effective: “I wanna make a movie / I wanna put you on the silver screen / Sit in a darkened room / and study you from a distance.” There’s no attempt at a backstory, it’s just an observation — an unrhyming one, too, which makes it even kinda elegant. (Funny that the other two verses do rhyme, but it’s really the first one that sets the tone.)
All the lyrics are about making some kind of art to explain the subject — a movie, a novel, a painting — but, in the end, it’s just a song, and not even one that really explains anything. It only gets at the feeling of wanting to explain — which is not only a more modest goal, but a more evocative one, and certainly more mysterious. Not everybody needs to be John Darnielle, y’know?, and “Bob” bless ’em for all that.
“California” – Dr. Dog (download here)
from Takers and Leavers EP (2006)
released by PTV Records (buy)
(file expires November 1st)
Been taking a leisurely slog through Writing Los Angeles, an anthology of great writing about the place. Here, in an essay titled “Paradise, ” Double Indemnity writer James M. Cain writes about what he thinks of as the shallowness of L.A.:
But what electric importance can be felt in a peddler of orange peelers? Or of a dozen ripe avocados, just plucked that morning? Or a confector of Bar-B-Q? Or the proprietor of a goldfish farm? Or a breeder of rabbit fryers? They give me no kick at all. They give themselves no kick. The whole place is overrun with nutty religions which are merely the effort of these people to inject some sort of point into their lives; if not on earth, then in the stars, in numbers, in vibrations, or whatever their fancy hits on.
Thing is, all those things do have kick: what a weird, mystical place southern California must have been in 1933, between the wars. Dr. Dog evokes it perfectly on this Western Swing-on-a-soundstage number from their Takers and Leavers EP.
o A mondo-heady Judith Supine punk-rawk collage/animation video by the dude who may or may not be my roommate. (Thanks, Judith Supine!)
o Former Mets’ manager Bobby Valentine sells meat in Japan: for a relaxing time, make it Bobby-Burger time. (Alright, MetsBlog, and thanks for the great year.)
o A DJ set Simpsons‘ creator Matt Groening spun on the BBC last year (or, the badass setlist, anyway).
o A really creepy bootleg mix I acquired over the weekend, called Endless Bummer: The Very Worst of the Beach Boys, features in-studio arguments, terrible ads, drunken live cuts, Brian rapping, and the Spanish version of “Kokomo.” Perhaps I will post a track sometime. (Big ups, Pete.)
o A recent article about what’s become of the Shibuya-kei scene that produced Cornelius and Kahimi Karie.
The Mets will change in the off-season, as teams do. Some are now free agents, others — perhaps — trade bait. The lineup will morph, and they’ll start again in Florida, in the agreeable weather and miles of green.
On the way home from Shea, I pulled my comfort ripcord and listened to In Utero quite loudly while reading the new 33 1/3 book about the same. Escaping back into the music that I loved in ninth grade when I turned away from sports to begin with, the phrase that kept rolling around in my mind was “aqua seafoam shame,” which is what I thought Kurt Cobain was singing somewhere in “All Apologies” (and still kinda do; the actual lyric is rather mundane).
I’m not sure why it’s appropriate, really, or even if it’s how I’m actually feeling right now, but it’ll do. Next season in Jerusalem, as I believe the saying goes.
Of all the major professional sports, baseball is easily the one with the most physical inactivity. That is, with the exception of the pitcher and catcher, most of the players are still far more than they are in motion. In that, it is also the professional sport best suited for lingering close-ups on players’ eyes. Resultantly, though perhaps I am saying this as one who never developed a taste for any other sport, it also seems the game with the greatest potential for articulated drama. It is not a coincidence, I don’t think, that the majors are known as The Show.
In terms of creating a genuine, truthful response from as large an audience as possible, mannered dialogue brimming with double-entendres and clever plot devices is always going to be working at a handicap compared to the evenly distributed nine innings of a playoff game. Storylines are ending, developing, and beginning, though not even the characters know which ones. Only the unwritten ending can contextualize the true meaning of the two-out rallies that begin on botched catches (as the Mets pulled in the 7th tonight), or advances that are temporarily halted (like a massive Carlos Beltran throw to the plate that prevented Juan Encarnacion from tagging) (though So Taguchi drove him in, quite futilely, on the next at-bat, anyway). Nobody knows the meaning, especially not going into game 7, but we’ve all got our suspicions.
For fans, October is an exciting time of year, for the majority of ballplayers — which is to say, all those who didn’t make the playoffs — it must be disconcerting. The sportswire is filled with the dispensing of managers, the scouting of coaches to fill their positions. For players — nomads, mostly, during the summer months — it is about moving. No matter what the Mets’ fate might be over the next few days, and no matter how he pitches tomorrow night, John Maine will soon be vacating the room in the Ramada Inn off the Grand Central Parkway where he’s been living, headed for that black hole known as the off-season.
Watching these games, sometimes, all the fancy fonts and and modern uniforms and tailored facial hair fall from view, and the face in the batter’s box could be peering from a daguerreotype in a Ken Burns documentary or a sun-bleached ’70s Topps card, all gauzy technicolor. The face becomes, for a moment, somehow classic. Tonight, that face belonged to the Cardinals’ runt of a leadoff hitter, David Eckstein, who nabbed a few near-hits during the Mets’ first at bat, and later took a pitch hard on his fingertips. He seemed like a ghost already, someone I’ll forget after the post-season. In my memory, his features will join my blurry gallery of ballplayers, an index like a massive WPA mural.
“I’d Love Just Once To See You” – The Beach Boys (download here)
from Wild Honey (1968)
released by Capitol Records (buy)
(file expires October 24th)
Post-Smile Beach Boys tends to get a bad rap, and maybe rightly so, but some of it is quite excellent — Wild Honey, especially. It doesn’t really fit the popular Smile narrative that Brian should still be making great, current music after the collapse of his concept album, but Wild Honey is a completely Beach Boys take on the back-to-the-roots thing that Dylan, the Beatles, the Stones, and everybody else was doing after a few years of psychedelic blow-outs (see: John Wesley Harding, the White Album, Beggars’ Banquet, etc.).
The lyrics are the stuff of everyday (“I washed the dishes, and I rinsed up the sink, like a busy bee”), but are positively liberated by BB standards. “I wouldn’t mind if I could get with you right away,” Brian sings. (That’s not say they’re entirely liberated. “When’s the last time you baked me a pie?” Brian also asks.) The composition is laced with the same tricks to be found all about Pet Sounds and Smile, here applied to something modest and adult, instead of high school melodrama or teenage symphonies to God. The arpeggiated 12-string figure behind the bridge melody wouldn’t be out of place on “Cabinessence,” and — of course — there’s some lovely harmonized bah-bah-bahing.
But really, the song is all about the punchline at the end: “I’d love just once to see you, I’d love just once to see you, I’d love just once to see you…” — pause– “…in the nude.” Hot. (Kinda is, right?)
Not long after that season ended, I got a copy of the Mets’ highlight video, 1986: A Year to Remember, at a literal fire sale over on Jericho Turnpike: the place had burned, and the tape smelled like badly crisped bacon for a few years. As a nine year old, I watched it religiously, learning consciously for the first time about drama. There was an ominous narrator, atmospheric music, non-linear editing techniques, excited radio announcers, and some killer montages (one featuring “Karn Evil 9” by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, though I wouldn’t learn that for another decade). I saw how music could build tension and how authoritative foreshadowing could build it even further. I learned about fate, or at least its implications.
For me, it is right impossible to watch this post-season unfold and not hear A Year to Remember‘s narrator framing it. I want him to. I want him to say things like “in game 5, they put the ball in the capable hands of Tom Glavine,” as he described a winning Bob Ojeda appearance against the Red Sox. I want to see surprisingly tasteful bits of nostalgia — say, Reyes sliding in slow motion into second, coming up grinning — like the condensed version of the Series set to Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Remember You” (which, like the ELP cut, I didn’t realize was Dylan until much later).
Of course, the video’s weight comes entirely because the Mets made it, and won the World Series. Watching the Mets go down two games over the weekend, Saturday night in a singularly spectacular meltdown by seemingly everybody, the fate of the team was thrown into question for the first time since the post-season began. If the Mets lose now, and they might, does that invalidate everything that has happened already? Does the entire theoretical highlights video crumble? As the games progress, I hear him crunching them into soundbytes. I just wish I could feed him lines.
