the trippy-ass light box at the tank, 6/06

“woman” – devendra banhart

“Woman” – Devendra Banhart (download here)
from Cripple Crow (2005)
released by XL (buy)

(file expires on June 23rd)

Drunk dial from an old flame today. Those things happen in this type of weather, this glorious post-spring warmth before the reality of summer arrives like a smothering veil. The nights have been particularly generous, cool cross-breezes rolling into my room and over my bed. It lures me into staying up later and later to enjoy it. Sleep comes perfectly on nights like this, and I want to prolong the pleasure of that as long as possible, and try to forget the direct sunlight, magnified by the windows, that will burn me like a bug come morning. I won’t think of the cruel half-sleep I am forced into long before alarm rings. I won’t think of that at all.

the nearest faraway place

The newsman sez that the Beach Boys “reunited” the other day, which apparently means that Mike Love and Brian Wilson met on the roof of Capitol Records for a promotional event and managed to have a public conversation without slapping the other with a lawsuit. The Beach Boys’ story is one act in a long family saga that didn’t get too particularly weird until the Boys themselves came around.

Late Billboard editor Timothy White’s The Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the Southern California Experience is one of my favorite rock bios. White is less interested in placing the Boys in pop history as he is in an exacting contextualization of them as the product of a Southern California family in the mid-20th century. It’s really beautiful stuff.

From all [Brian Wilson] had been taught, from every risk taken in his own family tree, from what he could see and guess about the pain in his milieu and its sources, he believed he had no choice but to trust in the power of improvisation.

Southern California was itself an improvisation. As a Los Angeles newspaper columnists of decades past once quipped, in these parts “tomorrow isn’t another day, it’s another town.” Like his sunshine-bound forebears, Brian Wilson believed in the idea of California more than the fact of himself, feeling that the energy focused on the romantic concept could carry over into the substance of his existence.

The impossible hope that runs through this story live a river, bending, swerving, and nearly reversing itself over the course of five generations, is that California could eventually expand to become more than a mere destination, that the land of sun would finally fulfill its unreal promise as Improvisation Rewarded — the shortcuts of heart songs alchemized into the intricate accomplishment of a sonata.

have read/will read dept.

o An update on Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child project
o A Los Angeles Times profile of musician/teacher/DJ Barry Smolin. Shmo is a way righteous dude.
o A history of the Viele Map, which surveys the waterways of old Manhattan.
o An essay by virtual reality inventor Jaron Lanier about the dangers of online collectivism (and subsequent weigh-ins from other digerati).
o A conversation between MPAA president Dan Glickman and EFF rabble-rouser John Perry Barlow.
o The mysterious fiction excerpts William Gibson has been posting to his blog of late.

modern times, huh?

So, the name of the new Bob Dylan album, due out August 29th on Columbia, is Modern Times. In name, anyway, it is good and resonant and oh-so-Boblike, both perfectly vague and utterly precise. It’s also a bit ambitious, a tad pretentious, and surely not a little tongue-in-cheek, but — hey — that’s why he’s Dylan. The first point of reference that pops to my mind is the classic Charlie Chaplin picture. I’m also reminded, to a lesser extent, of the two “Hard Times” — Charles Dickens’ novel and Stephen Foster’s song (which Dylan covered on 1992’s Good As I Been To You — both of which use the title phrase as synonymous for “modern times.”

It’s wonderfully multi-purpose, too. The first page of Google results (without quotes) returns listings for the Chaplin flick, a San Francisco book store, and an outfit that operates Scandinavian television stations. Searching with quotes, one also discovers a Chicago furniture outlet. And the Google Book results? Rural France, contemporary Japan, mathematical thought, Jews of the Middle East and North Africa, Don Quixote, 20th century storytelling, and those are just in the first ten hits. It is a phrase that is as well-circulated as it is slippery. Go ahead, try to define it.

In the liner notes to 1993’s World Gone Wrong, Dylan described the music of the Mississippi Sheiks as “raw to the bone and… faultlessly made for these modern times (the New Dark Ages).”

Meanwhile, while yer pondering and waiting for August, catch up on the latest Theme Time Bobcasts.

UPDATE: RollingStone.com’s new blog has some more details, including a few song titles: “Ain’t Talkin’,” “Thunder on the Mountain,” “Spirit on the Water,” “Workingman’s Blues,” “When the Deal Goes Down,” and “Neddy More.”

“saints” – the breeders

“Saints” – The Breeders (download here)
from Last Splash (1994)
released by 4AD (buy)

(file expires on June 19th.)

It being summer and all, I’ve been cranking the summer jamz. This weekend, I dug on The Breeders, whose indie-surf-punk masterpiece Last Splash is top-to-bottom great. It’s heretical, I suppose, but I actually like The Breeders a good bit more than The Pixies (at least if one measures “like” by how often he actually listens to the music).

At the same time that I love Last Splash and find choruses like “summer is ready when you are!” to be absolutely irresistible, I also acknowledge that it falls oddly in the pantheon. There are certain albums that I hold very dear that could hardly be called groundbreaking; they’ve just burned themselves into my consciousness, somehow, and become special, despite being generic in some way or another.

It is safe to say that there are few albums like Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. It creates a unique space. By contrast, I suspect that there are probably a half-dozen albums that’ve been made this year that could’ve grabbed me in much the same way as Last Splash (or The Raconteurs’ Broken Boy Soldiers). But they didn’t, or haven’t yet, likely because I didn’t cross paths with them when I was looking for an album like that. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea I think I would have found no matter what.

But Last Splash‘s atmospheric distorto-slide guitars, and “Saints” (with the awesome aforementioned chorus), have traveled with me for some time now. “Saints” goes particularly well on a mix before or after “Snail Shell” by They Might Be Giants.

“yellow sun” – the raconteurs

“Yellow Sun” – The Raconteurs (download here)
from Broken Boy Soliders (2006)
released by V2 (buy)

(file expires June 16th.)

There’s so much very-good music out there that finding something really remarkable becomes a surprisingly difficult task. Sometimes, I fret that my inner harddrive has filled up, and that I’ll never fall in love with a new album again, and have it — most every song — be part of me. I’m honestly not sure how long The Raconteurs’ Broken Boy Soldiers will stick with me. But, if one function of an album is to be a collection of little moments that I remember (and hopefully smile at) when I’m not listening to it, then — this season, anyway — Broken Boy Soldiers is pure sugar. There are parts that are pure fluff, but catchy-ass, immensely likeable fluff.

“Yellow Sun” isn’t my favorite song on the album (that’d probably be “Intimate Secretary”), but two separate hooks have sunk their teeth into me of late. The first is the way Brendan Benson sings “the phase of the moon,” with a little melodic swoop on the “of the.” I went around for days trying to figure out what song it was from. The second is the way the Rhodes sounds against the strummed acoustic guitar. It’s just a really pleasing, appropriate combination.

Oddly, the parts of the song I really love and remember all take place in the first minute-and-a-half. After that, Benson and Jack White dismantle the innocence of the first two verses (“and if the sun should follow us into your room, the courage would be robbed from me, to tell you the truth”), which is a totally clever way to introduce a narrative, just neat songwriting, but not what releases the happy stuff into my brain. And that’s okay, because when I think about the song, I — by definition — rarely remember any of the things that aren’t hooks, and when I actually listen to it, it’s clever enough to sustain.

Much of Broken Boy Soldiers is imperfect, but much of it isn’t, especially when the sun is out.

impro

Keith Johnstone’s Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre was unofficially required reading for a group of friends near the end of college. Though nominally about, well, improvisation and theater, Johnstone’s very British writing about human interaction is lucid and fantastic. His work on status, especially, is a useful way to think about any relationship, be it between people, objects, or some combination thereof.
1. from ‘A psychotic girl’

We were in a beautiful garden (where the teenager had just seen God) and the teacher picked a flower and said: ‘Look at the pretty flower, Betty.’

Betty, filled with spiritual radiance, said, ‘All the flowers are beautiful.’

Betty rolled on the ground screaming, and it took a while to calm her. Nobody seemed to notice that she was screaming ‘Can’t you see? Can’t you see!’

In the gentlest possible way, this teacher had been very violent. She was insisting on categorising, and on selecting. Actually it is crazy to insist that one flower is especially beautiful in a whole garden of flowers, but the teacher is allowed to do this, and is not perceived by sane people as violent. Grown-ups are expected to distort the perceptions of a child in this way.

2. from ‘Status’

‘Try to get your status just a little above or below your partner’s,’ I said, and I insisted that the gap should be minimal. The actors seemed to know exactly what I meant and the work was transformed. The scenes became ‘authentic,’ and actors seemed marvelously observant. Suddenly we understood that every inflection and movement implies a status, and that no action is due to chance, or really ‘motiveless.’ It was hysterically funny, but at the same time very alarming. All our secret manoeuvrings were exposed. If someone asked a question we didn’t both to answer it, we concentrated on why it had been asked. No one could make an ‘innocuous’ remark without everyone instantly grasping what lay behind it. Normally, we are ‘forbidden’ to see status transactions except when there’s a conflict. In reality, status transactions continue all the time. In the park we’ll notice the ducks squabbling, but not how carefully they keep their distances when they are not.

night sounds, 6/06

– A rush of water through pipes.
– Bells, followed by train. Repeat.
– Wind, trees rustling.
– The occasional distant squeal of breaks.
– House guests in sleep loft; loft creaking slightly.
– Truck reversing, bleeping.
– Truck discharging air brakes.
– Desk chair.
– Humming electronics: Christmas lights, stereo, computer.
– Another reversing truck, still further away. .
– Car accelerating.
– Another car, with a squeaky frame, going by.
– A faint industrial stamping.
– Fingers on keyboard.
– Car being started, wheezing past.
– A chorus of idling motors (possibly imaginary).
– Something metallic, dragged for a moment on the asphalt.
– Something plastic, blown briefly down the sidewalk.
– Car horn, honked once, far away.
– Two other cars bellowing responses like foghorns.
Also, the cinnamon smell of the cake factory.

“halifax” – hampton grease band

“Halifax” – Hampton Grease Band (download here)
released on Music To Eat (1971)
reissued by Columbia/Shotput (1996) (buy)

(file expires on June 13th.)

Since quitting the Aquarium Rescue Unit in 1994, Col. Bruce Hampton (ret.) has sort of lost himself in translation. While successfully elucidating his doctrine via Mike Gordon’s 2001 film, Outside Out, it’s been a while since Hampton’s music has been as weird as it’s often made out to be — which, in turn, makes a lotta people wonder what the big deal is. Smaller chunks of the Big Deal involve Hampton’s waaaaay-underground ’80s cassettes under band names like “The Late Bronze Age” ( reissued by Terminus in 2001).

But the main chunk of the Big Deal was, and remains, the Hampton Grease Band, whose 1971 Music To Eat was purportedly the second-worst selling double-LP in Columbia Records’ history. The two brilliant discs are a treasure trove of Southern avant-hippie wankery of the first order, somewhere between Frank Zappa and the Allman Brothers’ jazzier moments.

The occasion of this post was, initially, the 40th anniversary of the events described in the Grease Band’s “Six.” Frankly, though, the album opener, “Halifax,” is just much better: a “focused” 19-minute tour through Hampton’s inner Halifax (“six thousand six hundred and thirty eight miles of grated road! And a lot of gravel, too!”) while the band epically freaks out in multi-sectioned bliss. It is a blueprint for jam-prog strangeness that not even Phish ever matched.

In some ways, Hampton is only icing on his bandmates’ performances. He doesn’t play an instrument, he only sings (if one can call it that). And that’s basically what he’s done for his whole career. There is a temptation to call him a charlatan — which, of course, he is — but he is a charlatan who, for a very long period of time, seemed to consistently catalyze extraordinarily talented individuals to create something distinct and, well, Bruce-like. Hampton’s been brandishing the “retired” suffix for well over a decade. Appearing on only one cut on the forthcoming Codetalkers album, though, it looks like he actually might be. Maybe.