Answering Kevin Kelly’s questions about The Big Here were way tougher than I imagined. I knew in advance that I didn’t know many of the answers, but even tracking some of them down via Google was a bit tough — quite different from an age where most people would probably know most of this stuff instinctually. I only got through the first 10 (of 30) and it took a good long while. If any of these seem horribly wrong to fellow Brooklynites, please correct.
1.) Point north.
Thatta way: over the basketball court, past the vacant lot, across Bogart Street, and towards Queens.
2.) What time is sunset today?
Probably 8:30ish? (Weather.com says 8:18.)
3.) Trace the water you drink from rainfall to your tap.
Water collects in the Catskill/Delaware and Croton watersheds, in 18 reservoirs and three controlled lakes, before being channeled underground through the Croton Aqueduct, to the boroughs.
4.) When you flush, where do the solids go? What happens to the waste water?
The waste water in my neighborhood eventually makes it way to the Newtown Creek treatment facility in Greenpoint. The sludge is dewatered into biosolids and subsequently used as fertilizer or something else pleasantly beneficial. Yay poop!
5.) How many feet above sea level are you?
Looks to be about 20.
6.) What spring wildflower is consistently among the first to bloom here?
Ferns, from what I can tell. Are they a wildflower? Yeep.
7.) How far do you have to travel before you reach a different watershed? Can you draw the boundaries of yours?
Northern Long Island. The Southern Long Island watershed begins not-so-far to the south, a mile or two tops.
8.) Is the soil under your feet, more clay, sand, rock or silt?
More clay than sand, leftover from the Wisconsin Ice Sheet.
9.) Before your tribe lived here, what did the previous inhabitants eat and how did they sustain themselves?
The Canarsee Indians, Algonquians, were hunters, including ducks, turkeys, geese, deer, and clams. They grew corn, too.
10.) Name five native edible plants in your neighborhood and the season(s) they are available.
No idea, but I bet Wildman Steve Brill can tell me!
Ladies and Gentleman, The Bronx is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City is a map of a Manhattan just out of my reach. Though I wasn’t born until 1978, Jonathan Mahler’s scope encompasses familiar locales, as they were (more or less) when I was a child. There is reference to the Stewart House, a building in lower Manhattan so large that it constitutes its own voting district, crucial to Ed Koch in his bid for mayor. It also happens to be where my grandmother moved later that year after my grandfather died (and where I spent much time during high school). There is Bushwick, too, the neighborhood that properly begins a few blocks from my home, and how its own residents essentially burned it to the ground in the mid-1970s, and gutted it during in a massive riot during the 1977 blackout. And there are the Yankees, in their full mustachioed glory, the all-too-human personalities behind faces I vaguely recall from baseball cards. But mostly there is New York: cars and restaurants and gray buildings and dirt and endless people.
By European standards, New York remains an infant, free of the millennia of history that most European city-dwellers take for granted. While some of the figures in the book, especially in Mahler’s excavation of New York politics, seem ancient, they also seem perfectly contemporary, like the same stories could be happening with only minor variations this very minute. In that, The Bronx is Burning is a trick: one could pull multi-tiered historical narratives — maybe not about baseball and disco, but somethin’ — from any period in New York history. But they probably wouldn’t be as engaging.
“Bat Macumba” – Os Mutantes (download here)
from Os Mutantes (1968) (buy)
(file expires on July 31st.)
Since Os Mutantes rickety, joyous reunion show at Webster Hall on Friday, Gilberto Gil’s “Bat Macumba” — played by the Mutantes to open their encore — has been lodged in my head; the soundtrack to a very nice weekend, indeed. I’m surprised no hippie band has yet attempted to cover this. It’s perfect: an infectious groove, a playful musical structure (a syllable gets dropped from the chanted title phrase each time around, changing the meaning slightly), and equally playful lyrics that (on account of the dropped syllables) reference, among other things: Batman, Afro-Brazilian religion, and — according to a friend who speaks Portuguese — a command to smoke dope. My kinda tune. It’s been stuck in loop in my brain all weekend, despite seeing a bunch of other performances. When I arrived home at 5 in the morning last eve to a roommate-less loft, I put on “Bat Macumba” and danced.
Features:
“Yo La Tengo Is Not Afraid of You and They Will Beat Your Ass,” RollingStone.com (interview with Ira Kaplan)
“Os Mutantes Reunite for U.S. Shows,” RollingStone.com (interview with Sergio Dias Baptista)
“Lesh is More,” Times Herald-Record (interview with Phil Lesh)
“Searching For the Next Little Thing,” wunderkammern27.com (a trip to the Consumer Electronics Show)
Album reviews:
Play Pause Stop – The Benevento Russo Duo
Gypsum Strings – Oakley Hall
Welcome To My World – Daniel Johnston
Of Whales and Woe – Les Claypool
Ganging Up On The Sun – Guster
Requiems der Natur, 2002-2004 – Cloudland Canyon
Live reviews:
Ramble Dove at Irving Plaza, 31 May 2006
Phil Lesh and Friends/The Ambiguously Troy Duo at Jones Beach, 7 July 2006
Columns and misc.:
Dead Bird, wunderkammern27.com micro-fiction
BRAIN TUBA: It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Downloading
BRAIN TUBA: Pleasant Valley Tuesday
Only in print:
o Summer Signal To Noise (Tony Conrad cover): feature on Glenn Kotche, live review of Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid, album review of Sun City Girls
o July Relix (Michael Franti cover): book review of Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, DVD reviews of the Velvet Underground and Captain Beefheart, album reviews of Sonic Youth, Spinjunkies, DJ Deep See, Stuff Dreams Are Made Of compilation.
The slimness of Jonathan Lethem’s This Shape We’re In works to its considerable charm. Its 55 pages read as a quick immersion into Lethem’s almost literally cartoonish other-world. In the first sentence, before he can even establish a plot, Lethem creates a central tension: just what the hell is going on?
It began when Belkan came into our burrow during cocktail hour and told us he had been in the eye. Early and Lorna were sitting around sipping gin and tonics and watching me grill a hunk of proteinous rind which I’d marinated pretty nicely and was basting like a real pro and my immediate response was to tell Belkan to go to hell. Marianne offered him a drink and he took it with both hands like it was hot chocolate and went back to boasting about his extraordinary meaner and the culture of the forelimbs and the things he’d witnessed peering through the eye: the inky depths of interstellar space (his words: inky depths, interstellar space).
Why wouldn’t you keep reading (especially when it’s available for $5 at the McSweeney’s bookstore)?
“UMA” – OOIOO (download here)
from Taiga (2006)
released by Thrill Jockey (buy)
(file expires on July 26th.)
So, basically, I have no idea what’s going on here, but it’s fucking awesome (which pretty much describes what I love about Japanese psychedelia in a nutshell). In this case, it’s a bunch of women screaming/chanting/calling-and-responsing/doing-somethin’ pretty dang gleefully. My attraction to The Boredoms (OOIOO is a side project), Cornelius, and Acid Mothers Temple involves a pungent toke of exotica, fer shizzle, but there really is some core idea that is totally compatible with me as a listener. While it’s a stretch to call that something “universally transferable” (universally transferable to record geeks being tantamount to being world famous in Poland), there is still enough of a continuity to make the foreign language and hints of Asian folk music seem almost understandable, which is actually way cooler than literally understandable. It’s as if the song’s visceral meaning is forever on the tip of my tongue. Plus, it’s called “UMA.”
It’s not really a consolation, but I am glad that I never dislodged the teetering stack of favorite CDs from the top of the stereo. The sudden death of my iPod (as opposed to probable theft by a lesbian stripper) will at least give me a chance to reacquaint myself with the quaint fetish objects, such as the Automatic For the People disc I accidentally got blood on when I didn’t realize my finger was bleeding one late night in high school (still there on the surface, a brown-red smudge atop the timing of “Monty Got A Raw Deal”)…
o BB recently gave props to Tom Stites’ critique of American media. It’s a spot-on, if depressing, assessment. Tom also happens to be my pal Bill‘s dad, and a rad dude. He also drove Bill & me to our first Phish show (and, to his credit, got it completely).
o Okay, okay, there’s nothing new here, but this Elizabeth Drew’s piece in the New York Review of Books, “Power Grab,” is one of the more fundamental indictments of the Bush administration I’ve read, tracing how they methodically redefined the Executive Branch. (Thanks, Rich.)
o Admittedly, I haven’t gone through the full list yet, but — in “The Big Here” — Kevin Kelly offers 30 questions to help you center your ass.
o Paper Thin Walls, another new music site, launched this week with their reader-driven music blog, Bullhorn.
o The alluring, stock footage-assembled coming attraction for the work-in-progress Os Mutantes documentary, Bread and Circuses. (Thanks, Ari.)
This got recently excised from a magazine because the editor (as I interpret it) didn’t want to be responsible for the residual spreading of Manson’s bad juju. Here ’tis.
CHARLES MANSON
Sings
[ESP]
3 stars
Original freak-folker shows ’em how it’s done.
Though the Beach Boys covered one of his songs, and Neil Young lobbied for him to be signed, it was simply not to be for a struggling L.A. singer-songwriter named Charlie Manson. Instead, he earned himself a cult following significantly different than most of his acoustic-slinging brethren. Recorded in September 1967, six months after Manson’s previous release from prison and two years before the killings that brought him to notoriety, Manson set down two-dozen of his original compositions. Considered in the wake of Devendra Banhart and others ragged folk-psych revivalists, Charles Manson’s music — originally issued during his 1970 trial — is quite listenable. “Arkansas” is dotted with weirdly barbed guitars, off-kilter harmonies, and hippie agrarianism, while one can hear what appealed to the Beach Boys about the rising chorus of “Cease to Exist” (effectively repurposed by them into 20/20‘s “Never Learn Not To Love”). Too bad he didn’t get signed. Banhart might’ve rediscovered him.
If Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is an album that has inextricably bound me to a group of friends, then Lawrence Weschler’s Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders is its literary equivalent. The book, as well as David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, which it is about, have been the root of a half-dozen convergences in my life — doubly strange, given the importance of the word “convergence” in Weschler’s vocabulary.
In 2004, Weschler — a former New Yorker correspondent — published Vermeer in Bosnia, an eclectic collection featuring pieces about the director Roman Polanski, artist David Hockney, Shakespeare, war trials, and many other topics. Several of the pieces focus on Los Angeles, including a beautiful, brilliant entry called “The Light of L.A.” In it, he surveys filmmakers, artists, scientists, and poets, synthesizing it all into non-fiction transcendence.
Weschler has just learned of “airlight,” a scientific term describing the interference between one’s eye and the mountains beyond, when there seem to be “a billion tiny suns between you and the thing you’re trying to see.”
The next morning, I happened to be jogging on the beach in Santa Monica, heading north, in the direction of Malibu, as the sun was rising behind me. The sky was already bright, though the sun was still occluded behind a low-clinging fog bank over LAX. The Malibu mountains up ahead were dark and clear and distinct, and seemed as if freshly minted. Presently, the sun must have broken out from behind the fog bank — I realized this because suddenly the sand around me turned pale purplish pink and my own long shadow shot out before me. I looked up at the mountains, and they were gone: lost in the airlight.
