from a gas station on long island en route to grandma & grandpa’s, 10/06
“i’m your puppet” & misc. ylt business
“I’m Your Puppet” – Yo La Tengo (download here)
from Mr. Tough 7-inch (2006)
released by Matador
1. Here’s the newest obscura, a literal B-side from the “Mr. Tough” single: a cover of Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham’s “I’m Your Puppet.” Presumably a Beat Your Ass leftover, it’s got lovely strings (David Mansfield?), and is a welcome addition to the late-night playlist.
2. To reach the resources of the old YoLaTengo.net, one now has to use the Wayback Machine at archive.org to consult a mirror of the old YLT.net via the now-old version of sunsquashed.com. The URLs get pretty hilarious. It is here (no graphics, so just, like, wave your arrow over the links to find what yer looking for).
3. So, apparently, there was a BBC session, recently? I seemed to have missed this. Some curious covers on the setlist. Anybody end up with a copy?
4. YLT played in Jersey City on Friday.
Yo La Tengo at the Landmark Loew’s Jersey Theatre
29 September 2006
Why? opened
Sugarcube
Pass The Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind
Flying Lesson (Hot Chicken #1)
The Weakest Part
Sometimes I Don’t Get You
Winter A Go Go
Mr. Tough
Beanbag Chair
I Feel Like Going Home
Stockholm Syndrome
I Should Have Known Better
Watch Out For Me, Ronnie
Tom Courtenay
The Story of Yo La Tango
I Heard You Looking
*(encore 1)*
Oklahoma USA (The Kinks)
Lewis
Rocks Off (The Rolling Stones)
*(encore 2)*
Cast A Shadow (Beat Happening)
Did I Tell You?
“soul master” – edwin starr
“Soul Master” – Edwin Starr (download here)
released by Motown (1968)
(file expires October 6th)
In a perhaps misguided attempt to derive some truthiness (listening to lotsa shitty hippie bands’ll do that to a fella), I once posited that anybody who sings literally about having a soul (especially one that, uh, “shines”) simply doesn’t have one, at least for the duration of the time he’s singing about it. In the case of Edwin Starr’s “Soul Master,” which I found on the MoistWorks blog over the summer, I am perhaps willing to make an exception — partially because maybe it is as Starr claims, that he’s “the guy they named soul after.” And, well, partially because it’s such a ludicrous rhyme — “I’m the soul master / I’m the guy that they named soul after” — and it somehow works.
“Soul Master” is, no doubt, a silly song, but I love the shit outta the chorus, and love even more singing it to myself in the most honky voice I can muster (which, given my general demeanor, is quite a lot, dankyouvedymuch). It’s fun, especially in public, to take this chorus for my own: I’m the soul master. I’m the guy that they named soul after. Me! It’s a good feeling. Try it some sunny afternoon.
some recent articles
Song reviews:
“Masa Depanmu” – Ariesta Birawa Group (PaperThinWalls.com)
“Three Woman Blues” – The Wowz (PaperThinWalls.com)
“Word Up Forever” – Curse ov Dialect (PaperThinWalls.com)
“fl°” – Trap Door
“NYC’s Like A Graveyard” – The Moldy Peaches
“I Don’t Wanna Leave You On the Farm” – Ween
Album reviews:
Bar 17 – Trey Anastasio
Live reviews:
Os Mutantes at Webster Hall, 21 July 2006
Revenge of the Bookeaters at the Beacon Theater, 23 August 2006
Bustle In Your Hedgerow at the Rocks Off Boat Cruise, 30 August 2006
Columns and misc.:
The Animals I Saw, wunderkammern27.com micro-fiction
BRAIN TUBA: Contrarianism
Only in print:
o August/September Relix (Widespread Panic cover): album reviews of Four Tet, Ollabelle, Medeski Scofield Martin and Wood, Stephen Bernstein’s Millennial Territory Orchestra, Sex Mob, Baby Loves Jazz Band; book review of Les Claypool.
o Paste #24 (Alvis Costello and Allan Toussaint cover): album reviews of Yo La Tengo, Shapes and Sizes, book review of David Shenk
o Paste #25 (Zach Braff cover): album review of Harry Smith Project
o Signal To Noise #43 (Lewis/Abrams/Mitchell cover): album reviews of Brian Joseph Davis, OOIOO, and Sublime Frequencies
wonders, inc.
Without question, one of my favorite books as a kid was Crawford Kilian’s Wonders, Inc., about a boy’s trip to a massive, mysterious factory on the outskirts of town that manufactures (among other products) lines, space, proverbs, music, dreams, and more. John Larrecq’s psychedelic illustrations certainly didn’t hurt. Here, the dopey tour guide, Mr. Whipple, and the bright-eyed Christopher wander through the surrealist mechanics of the Clockworks:
They walked among the machines, Mr. Whipple pointing them out, “This one makes part-time; this one full-time; that one three-quarter time, time-and-a-half, and double-time. We also make Greenwich Mean Time, bedtime, pastime, nick-of-time, and a good variety of specialties.”
“Specialties?” Chris repeated.
“Oh, yes. We turn out a fine brand of split seconds, not to mention fleeting moments and carefully aged days. There’s a great demand for the good old days, you know.”
“Maybe among grownups,” Chris added, “but I prefer nowadays.”
“I thought you would. We make the best nowadays on the market.”
Though it’s super outta print, Amazon has many copies starting at $1.05. Wish there were some illustrations online.
the animals i saw, no. 10
(Short fiction in shorter increments.)
The Animals I Saw: no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10
On the final day, there were dragonflies. They swarmed down each street, above the dock, and across the visible horizon. Their wings beat at a low frequency, like the hum of distant transformers. The weather was perfect, the sky a painted blue. From the basement — a basement added by Abe Lewis — I removed a box of china, my mother’s, to mail her in Sarasota.
The last filings would have to be made, but I knew how to do that; knew whose office down which hallway in what building to address them. I would not return to school that semester, I knew. “In January, I think, I’ll be back,” I wrote my girlfriend, who I did not expect to wait for me, and who didn’t. Abe Lewis would find out what I had: that in times of natural disaster, the duties of a public official override those of a private individual. In pulling the house from the lake, Abe Lewis was acting as deputy mayor, not a contractor. His subsequent possession of the house was unlawful. I would not be the one to tell him.
I thought, briefly, of my shadow cousin, who’d lived there while we’d been away. His memories were present in me now, an adolescence spent carefree on the cool water. Misshapen, they roamed my brain like benevolent spirits; they grew like pungent weeds between weathered planks. It was an exchange, I knew. He would know long before his grandfather. I thought of what I might be taking from him, and what I might be giving to him, delivered on the sagging exoskeletons of dragonflies, terrible and broken. [/END]
the animals i saw, no. 9
(Short fiction in shorter increments.)
The Animals I Saw: no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10
By the second morning, I was no longer an interloper, and I got dead worm all over the kitchen. The rain was over, and — though autumn hung obviously in the air — it was going to be a warm day. I stepped outside barefoot, in my boxers, onto the narrow brick path that led to the lake. I stretched my arms behind me as I walked. The worm squished between my toes.
On the way back from retrieving my bags at the Becketts’, I had the thought that just because I could get dead worm all over my kitchen floor didn’t mean I should. Assuming the Lewises hadn’t done any major renovations in the interceding years, they were tiles my grandfather had laid himself. My memories didn’t extend to the tiles. He’d driven the truck from Portland alone to claim the empty land. There was no one else for miles. There wouldn’t be for a decade.
They were all over the sidewalk, the worms were, as I went to meet Melch. Neither of us had shaved. We hummed as we painted, though I was unsure if we were humming the same song. “It’s plenty peaceful now, sure,” Melch told me. He was doing detail around a window above and to the side of where I was working. I could see the mosquito bites above his ankle. “I like the spring is all,” he said, and started down the ladder, coughing. “You should come back in the spring, man.” I would, and I would build myself there by the lake, as my grandfather had.
the animals i saw, no. 8
(Short fiction in shorter increments.)
The Animals I Saw: no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10
I am not sure if a ghost is an animal, or if that was even what I saw, but I certainly smelled it. Besides the constant patter of the rain, the odor was the first thing I noticed upon awakening on the living room couch. It was a deep must, unclogging reserves of half-remembered dreams. In the daylight, the room was instantly familiar. I found the phone and dialed Melch, pretending to be hungover. Melch sounded worse than I did, and called off work for the day without argument. I felt guilty, but the rain continued unabated.
Though the smell — not unpleasant, like skunk-grass — was omnipresent, it seemed to emanate from a single source. I took a cursory look through the kitchen cabinets, but failed to find anything. I made a packet of dried soup in their microwave, and looked at the photomontages hung by the back door. Abe Lewis, the doting grandparent, was in several. His grandson, likely only a year or two younger than me, grew on the wall, my shadow cousin.
In the mid-afternoon, I brought the comforter upstairs and napped in the room I thought was mine. The bed was bare, as was the dresser. I pulled the blanket tightly around me, and swam. When I went downstairs later, my grandfather sat on the couch, reading. The smell was overpowering. Instinctively, I looked behind me. When I turned back, he was gone. I’d never known him, only the house he built and the enemies he made.
the animals i saw, no. 7
(Short fiction in shorter increments.)
The Animals I Saw: no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10
The large, fuzzy spider in the linen closet did not shake me nearly as much as the top sheets. The creature sat unmoving in the flashlight beam, atop a floral pillowcase that looked like it came from a discount chain. I blew on it lightly and it scampered an inch. By then, the rain had started, and it was much later and I was much drunker than I suspected. It did not sound as if the storm would abet.
I threw the blue down comforter over my shoulder and shined the light to see if there was anything else I needed. On the bottom shelf was the top sheet, white with a plane of red, green, and yellow grids, like a Mondrian. Its match, I was sure, was in my father’s current apartment, if he hadn’t thrown it out. He was in Butte, then, I think, though it was hard to keep up. It was the sheet he stretched over our couch when guests slept over, and what he slept on when my mother sent him downstairs for good and, eventually, out.
On the couch, my feet pressed against the far arm. The house sounded familiar: the rain on the roof (there was no second story over the living room), the wind through the uninsulated walls. When I woke, the house would be mine, really mine. I wished I had the sheaf of xeroxes with me, but that was at the Becketts’. No matter, the sheets were proof enough, if not for the law, then at least for me, that my family had really once occupied the place, a place my father never again acknowledged after we’d been forced from it. I was not hungover the next morning.
the animals i saw, no. 6
(Short fiction in shorter increments.)
The Animals I Saw: no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10
It was the mosquitoes that eventually got me inside the house. They swarmed around Melch and me, up on the ladders, as we reshingled the Inges’ cabin. Back in the woods like that, caught in the sun, the bugs hummed in abstruse shapes. It was hot, the humidity unbearable. Rain was expected. The siding already stripped, we needed to finish before then. By evening, we were both covered in sweat and slowly rising welts.
Through the evening, as Melch and I drank off the itching with his beer stash, the humidity never broke. We were at the house he’d adopted for the season — the Spitz’s, I think. Melch grew drunk and apologetic. I considered telling him why I’d come back, that I’d even been there in the first place. It would mean explaining my father, his relationship with Abe Lewis, and why the house was no longer ours after it had been returned to land.
I opted not to, and set out for the Becketts. The air cooler, it was almost pleasant. The rain would arrive soon, I could tell. My legs felt warm as I walked, as if wrapped in a soft quilt. I felt the bones in my feet flex. Then, the house was in front of me. I needed to piss like a motherfucker, and I went inside.
