“Tropicália” – Caetano Veloso (download here)
from Caetano Veloso (1968)
released by Elektra (1990) (buy)
Yesterday, Os Mutantes announced that, following their May performance in London, they will come to the United States for two gigs, in New York and Los Angeles, respectively. Though it wasn’t on the collective concept album/manifesto that announced the tropicália movement that included the Mutantes, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, and others, Veloso’s “Tropicália” might as well have been. It’s as fine a template for Brazilian psychedelic music as one could ask for: textural, sophisticated, and beautiful. It’s the chorus that got me. It’s, y’know, toe tappin’.
Not that I understand a lick of them, but the verse lyrics (in translation, via Charles A. Perrone’s Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Song) are pretty boss, too, with phrases like “Its heart swings to a samba’s tambourine / It emits dissonant chords / Over five thousand loudspeakers.” The choruses, especially, are filled with references to Brazilian culture, such as Carmen Miranda and bossa nova, and the verses recall various songs, as well as (according to Perrone) “‘The Letter of Pero Vaz Caminha,’ the first literary document in colonial Brazil.” Heady shit.
Album reviews:
Taught To Be Proud – Tea Leaf Green
solo Live Tonic 2002 – Billy Martin
Live at Houston Hall – Billy Martin and Grant Calvin Weston
Columns and misc.:
BRAIN TUBA: Brazil
Only in print:
o Paste #21 (Flaming Lips cover): album reviews of Live, Loose Fur, Gospel Music compilation; DVD review of Joel Gilbert’s Bob Dylan: Rolling Thunder and the Gospel Years; book review of David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green.
o April/May Relix (Frank Zappa cover): Fourteen Instances of Possible Conceptual Continuity (recurring sidebar), Zappaesque or the Story of the Dots (feature on Zappa’s composition, co-written with Matt Van Brink); album reviews of Tom Verlaine and Jack Johnson; film review of The Devil and Daniel Johnston; DVD review of the Velvet Underground.
o Spring Signal To Noise (Elliot Carter cover): album reviews of the Grateful Dead and Dimension Mix compilation.
o March Hear/Say (James Blunt cover): album reviews of Field Notes and Nicolai Dunger.
It’s hard to get more democratic than an interesting ranking of real data.
o Google Zeitgeist – A wholly important list summarizing the most recent week of searches. They are the top ideas currently circulating, which is sort of a heady concept. John Battelle calls it “the Database of Intentions.”
o Billboard’s Hot Ringtones – This week, Koji Kondo’s “Super Mario Brothers Theme” remains in the top five after 74 weeks on the charts. Harry Mancini’s “Pink Panther Theme” isn’t too far behind. Go meme-pop, go!
o Most emailed stories from the New York Times and USA Today – The most emailed stories aren’t the most important. That is, they’re not usually proper news, about politics or the weather or anything. Rather, they’re stories that grow legs because (like the Google Zeitgeist) they speak to some idea circulating subliminally. It seems as if there is no crossover between the Times and USA Today.
o OCLC’s Top 1000 library books – The Online Computer Library Center compiled this list from the catalogues of over 53,000 libraries around the world. For all the talk I heard about the “demise of the canon” during four years of college English classes, it’s funny to see the canon itself spelled out in relatively hard numbers. It’s also funny to note that #15 — nestled between The Night Before Christmas and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer — is Garfield at Large. Bill Watterson’s eponymous Calvin and Hobbes collection hits at #77 (with a bullet!) (BOMP!). Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan sits at #381. The writings of John Calvin do not chart. (Thanks, Kottke)
UPDATE:
Looks like democratic lists are on John Battelle’s mind, too. Here he fantasticates about TVRank.
My old roommate Kristie and I discovered the secret bonus Mexican joint at the back of the bodega by accident one long ago afternoon. It’s in Williamsburg, right on the main hipster drag of Bedford Avenue. The whole place is crammed with bric-a-brac: piñatas hanging from the ceiling, rows and rows of Latin CDs hanging on the wall, a box of sliced cactus in the dairy case, a numbered cubbyhole nook filled with candy, miniature nativity scenes tucked between the plexiglass and the cash register, refrigerators filled with neon Jarritos sodas, and (if you’ll excuse me) damn fine tacos.
There’s a generic red “FOR SALE” sign taped inside the front window. In the space where one is supposed to write a phone number or an asking price, somebody has simply written “store.” I expect to go there for dinner one night and discover that it’s been shut down, boarded up, and soon to be gutted for a boutique or fancy-ass eyeglasses shop. Each taco could be my last.
It’s been almost a year since we’ve presented anything from our vast (and daily expanding) Ordovician Archives. Dr. Tuttledge remains in Taiwan, researching. (His collection continues to lie in storage in Manhattan.) We continue, as we can, without him.
One recent development, at least in the blogosphere, is the proliferation of teams of conversational salesmen posting advertisements in the comments sections of blogs. They are the Ordovician equivalent of traveling hucksters who might sidle up to potential customers at a bar and sell them goods and services. Except these salesmen are retarded. Though their offered products span all nine categories of Dr. Tuttledge’s classification system, they are incapable of hawking more than one item. Most frequently, they will begin conversations about poker, no matter what a blog posting is about.
A recent specimen, not having to do with poker, is most fascinating. It was submitted on March 15th as a comment on a previous posting about the New York Word Exchange.
***
IP Address: 202.134.104.237
Name: Pendostanets
Email Address: pendostanets@gmail.com
Comments:
Pendostanets!
***
Following the URL, one is rewarded with a “server not found” notification. Yet, the post is quite emphatic about this pendostanets thing. It is, after all, the name of the poster, his email address, his URL, and the entirety of his comment. Pendostanet’s primative means of expression recalls Arrested Development‘s Steve Holt (“Steve Holt!”).
A Google search of the word merely turns up other instances of Mr. Pendostanets posting about himself (“Pendostanets!”) on other blogs. One can only conclude that Pendostanets is no product at all, but some sort of code word for the initiated. Which we are not.
If anyone has any information as to the existence or whereabouts of this Mr. Pendostanets, please contact the Center for Anthropological Computing via the comments section of this blog.
“Fille ou Garcon (Sloop John B)” – Stone (download)
from Femmes de Paris, v. 1 (2002) (buy)
released by Wagram
(file expires March 24th.)
I don’t know much about this French version of “Sloop John B” except a.) it’s awesome and b.) it was introduced to me by wunderkammern27 correspondent Michael Slabach. Michael has just launched a blog as a homebase for his photography and his weekly podcast, The Sea of Sound. “Fille ou Garcon” is exactly the kind of eclectic and otherwise ginchy shit he’s great at turning up. A new edition — brimming with a bunch of tantilizing looking tracks, plus some old faves of mine — just went up today. I can’t wait to check it.
As for the song’s awesomeness, I guess I’m just a straight sucker for ’60s sounds. I love the sugar-coated bounce. It reminds me a little bit of Os Mutantes. But the real treat is the horn part, which is another sample waiting to happen. In the grand scheme of French pop, this is probably cookie-cutter stuff, cranked out in a quick session by some bored arrangers and on-staff musicians. Sophisticated it’s not, but man is it sunshiny.
The weekend’s proto-spring brought Polaroid blue skies, the kind that seem to rush down in greeting as you come out of the darkness of a subway station.
The moment after I took the picture, an MTA worker yelled at me. Taking pictures in the subway, after all, is illegal. You know, to prevent terrorism. It’s a stupid law. I hope the illegality of the evidence doesn’t hold back this shmuck from getting prosecuted.
“Harvest Moon” – Cassandra Wilson
from New Moon Daughter (1995)
released by Blue Note (buy)
(File expires on April 6th.)
A friend sent this to me very late at night over the weekend (thanks!), and it’s made me happy continuously since then. It’s not seasonal, forgive me, but Cassandra Wilson’s version of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” is the most luminescent bauble of a recording I’ve heard in recent memory. It’s long been one of my favorite Young songs, mostly because of its perfect melody, though I’ve always had to get by the semi-hokey Harvest Moon-era production.
Craig Street’s setting for Wilson transmogrifies the song from a campfire strum to a transcendent tone poem of chirping crickets (or a fine simulation), spare ambient percussion, a bowed bass, and — I think — a metallic dobro. There is a perfectly dulcet acoustic guitar lurking there, too, and mixed quite presently, at that. Given the Daniel Lanois-like weirdness of the rest of the voices, though, I didn’t notice it until giving the song a close listen. That’s a good thing, I’m pretty sure. All of these effects subliminally trace the changes, liberating the melody to drift dreamily.
What’s funny and unexpected is that, despite Young’s traditional Nashville-style backing, it’s Wilson’s avant-garde rearrangement that makes the song feel timeless and mysterious to me, like it was lifted from a 78 by a lost chanteuse who recorded four sides in an Oklahoma hotel room sometime between the World Wars. And that’s not to diss Neil Young’s version, ’cause it’s real purdy. But, this…
I vaguely remember my friend Paul playing me an Elliot Smith rendition of this tune back in college. Something to look for another day…
Last week, Owen brought over a bootleg DVD of the Talking Heads performing in their original three-piece lineup at CBGBs in December 1975. Needless to say, I was bloody well psyched. What I wasn’t expecting, and what I kind of enjoyed about it, was how bad it was. That’s not meant as an insult.
If anything, it came as a relief. It’s good to know that the Heads didn’t spring from the ground fully formed. During this performance (filmed in black and white), in what appears to be a not-very-packed CBs, the band runs down their early repertoire. David Byrne looks incredibly nervous, far from the charismatic frontman he’d become. Tina Weymouth, though not staring at her feet, doesn’t look much more assured.
The only member of the band who looks (or sounds) remotely comfortable is Chris Frantz, who holds the half-formed songs together with remarkable panache. Even “Psycho Killer,” which pre-dated the Heads’ existence, isn’t quite done. The killer bassline is there, but Byrne doesn’t have the phrasing of the “fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa”s finished yet.
With hindsight, one can see where the music would go, how those weird guitar patterns Byrne plays are his attempt to emulate African rhythms. But for anybody wandering in off the street that night, it must’ve just sounded like noise, maybe even to other punks. Of course, there were probably Heads fans who thought everything after Jerry Harrison joined the band was too polished.
It’s taken for granted that the Heads were art students, but they really look it here, maybe unsure how they ended up playing on the Bowery. It’s all very inspiring, of course, to be able to get that much closer to the germination of the idea, to know that — after the camera stopped rolling — they unplugged their gear and transported it the few blocks back to their loft on nearby Chyristie Street. “The name of this band is Talking Heads,” Byrne says (of course) before they begin. Who?
(If anybody knows where to find this video on the cybernets — it doesn’t appear to be on YouTube yet — please comment or drop me a line.)
“I Live in the Springtime” – The Lemon Drops
anthologized on Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era box set (1998)
released by Rhino (buy)
(file expires on March 21st)
Proto-spring came to Brooklyn in a very real way over the weekend: those first days going out in only a tee-shirt because I can, sleeping with the bedside window open. Of course, it’s supposed get cold again in a few days, but this song — notable, I just realized after a good year or so of listens, for its complete lack of drums — will remain.
