(See part 1 for explanation.)
When I was a kid, I had a poster of Earth on my wall — a fold-out from National Geographic, I think. Clouds and storms and systems obscured parts of the planet. When it rains, I like picturing myself beneath some twisting gray-black cover that can be seen from space, no different from the atmospheric turbulence (give or take) on any other planet. We’re preparing for a heatwave now. I’m not sure what those look like from space, if anything.
21.) What was the total rainfall here last year?
56.01 inches.
22.) Where does the pollution in your air come from?
Cars and trucks, mostly, but also the endless factories (chemical and otherwise), incinerators, and other structures of industry all around the tri-state area.
23.) If you live near the ocean, when is high tide today?
12:38 am & 1:24 pm.
24.) What primary geological processes or events shaped the land here?
The water left behind by the melting of the glaciers, which pooled in lakes and carved rivers, valleys, and islands.
25.) Name three wild species that were not found here 500 years ago. Name one exotic species that has appeared in the last 5 years.
Mile-a-minute vine, giant hogweed (ooh, giant hogs!), pale swallow-wort are all recent arrivals. Japanese knotwood sounds pretty exotic, too.
After three months of waiting, Brotha Andy has finally posted the eighth installment of the Frow Show! Booya!
Listen here.
1. “True History of the Rolling Stones” – The Rolling Stones (via my friend Tim)
2. “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” – Devo (from Q. Are We Not Men? A. We Are Devo!)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “You Just May Be The One” – The Monkees (from Headquarters)
5. “SA-5” – Beck (from Deadweight EP)
6. “1000 Cities Falling (part I) – The Sadies (from Favourite Colours)
7. “Holding” – John Hartford (from Aereo-Plain)
8. “The Tain” – The Decemberists (from The Tain EP)
9. “Wheel of Light” – The Guppies (from Hydrologic)
10. “Sit Down, Stand Up” – Radiohead (from Hail to the Thief)
11. “Stand” – R.E.M. (from Green)
12. “Superdeformed” – Matthew Sweet (from No Alternative compilation)
13. “Cold Irons Bound” – Bob Dylan (from Masked and Anonymous soundtrack)
14. “Nobody Knows De Trouble I’ve Seen” – Marian Anderson (from Sacred Roots of the Blues compilation)
15. “Down Home (rehearsal version)” – Jerry Garcia (from All Good Things box set)
“Wait For You” – The Mountain Goats (download here)
from Babylon Springs EP (2006)
released by 4AD (buy)
(file expires on August 4th)
The closer from the Australia/iTunes-only Babylon Springs EP, “Wait For You” is a quiet John Darnielle gem. Instead of the lighter-and-liter full-band arrangements Darnielle has favored lately (including the other tracks of the EP), “Wait For You” opts for the straight-up acoustic guitar/bass of the Mountain Goats’ live gigs. Done right, the guitar/bass combo is one of my favorite sounds in the world, warm and rich, and part of what makes a lot of Blood on the Tracks such a joy for me.
Here, Darnielle whispers his narrative with all authority. “When it came time to wait for you, I took the bus to Malibu,” he begins, simultaneously precise (bus, Malibu) and vague (you? wait?). The chorus hook is gorgeous, its combination of image (“and a rainbow in the west wrapped its coils around the earth like a serpent”) and delivery (quieter and quieter and quieter) making for a little moment of transcendence.
(See part 1 for explanation.)
Just to play devil’s advocate here, what’s more important: knowing the information here instinctually or knowing how to find it on the world wide cyberinterwebnet? Clearly, all of this information is good to know. I feel more responsible as a a citizen for having some idea, now, where my garbage is going. Is it useful? Maybe in the broader sense that I’m now thinking about these questions. Strokes chin.
11.) From what direction do storms generally come?
West.
12.) Where does your garbage go?
Since the Fishkill landfill on Staten Island closed in 2001, New York area garbage has been shipped to various out-of-state landfills. Last week, a plan was approved to ship it out by barge.
13.) How many people live in your watershed?
I’m a-gonna guess about 3.7 million, given that the Northern Long Island watershed is about half of Long Island, which has about 7.4 million residents.
14.) Who uses the paper/plastic you recycle from your neighborhood?
Anybody who purchases products from A&R Lobosco, Inc., Potential Industries, Inc. (awesome name for a company!), Paper Fibres Corp., Rapid Recycling, and Triboro Fibers.
15.) Point to where the sun sets on the equinox. How about sunrise on the summer solstice?
Hmmm, over there and over there (points towards clusters of buildings).
16.) Where is the nearest earthquake fault? When did it last move?
In the Atlantic, south of Far Rockaway beach.
17.) Right here, how deep do you have to drill before you reach water?
I’m not entirely sure, but I’m sure the Federal Pump Corp., who drill wells, would be able to tell me if I really needed to know.
18.) Which (if any) geological features in your watershed are, or were, especially respected by your community, or considered sacred, now or in the past?
I live in Brooklyn, but I like Jason Kottke’s answer too much: the bedrock beneath Manhattan was truly a sacred consideration in the construction of those most holy skyscrapers.
19.) How many days is the growing season here (from frost to frost)?
Early April-Mid May through October.
20.) Name five birds that live here. Which are migratory and which stay put?
Common loon (migratory), red-throated loon (migratory), horned grebe (migratory), red-necked grebe (migratory), Cory’s Shearwater (migratory). (Lots more.)
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.”
