winter olympics closing ceremonies, 2/06

useful things, no. 3

The third in an ongoing collection of functional webpages and dork tools (excluding any/all Google programs).

o BitPim — Get into your phone’s file structure and remove or add any data you need. (Having trouble? Poke around the cellphoneforums.net and you might find an answer.)

o TextPayMe — In one of our periodic life-as-sci-fi freakouts, my friends and I got to fantasticatin’ about the day one will be able to transfer money via text message. Unbeknownst to us (but apparently knownst to Rachel) the day is already here. Can’t wait to try this out.

o Encyclopedia — A mini-Wikipedia for the iPod! Hot diggity, this is like a real-life Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (Thanks, BB.)

o AbeBooks — Sure, Amazon can find you anything you’d want, but AbeBooks’ network of independent used booksellers probably can, too, and with way more character, taboot.

“brazil” – the deady nightshade family singers & cornelius

“Brazil” – Deadly Nightshade Family Singers
from Plain Brown Suit (2000)
self-released (no current website) (buy)

“Brazil” – Cornelius
from Point (2002)
released by Matador (buy)

(files expire on March 15th)

Ary Barroso’s “Brazil” is really one of the loveliest melodies ever written, I think. Though Barroso was Brazilian, his song hardly conjures up images of that sophisticated, chaotic Latin American country for me (probably because it was composed before the advent of bossa nova). Rather, it brings me to some cosmopolitan ’20s getaway that can only be reached by flying in a small plane represented as an advancing dotted line in a travel montage made of maps and stock footage. You know, like in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Excluding Django Reinhardt for no particular reason, the Deadly Nightshade Family Singers and Cornelius have recorded my two favorite versions that I’ve yet heard (please post suggestions if you’ve got others). They’re wildly different. The Nightshades — a macabre chamber string outfit who put out the great Plain Brown Suit in 2000 and then fell off the face of the interwebs — turn in what I (perhaps erroneously) think of as the platonic version. It is thoughtful and romantic. Cornelius completely twists the song on his mindbending Point in 2002, doing away with the signature chromatic riff and filling the song out with electro-acoustic samples, chirping birds, howling dogs, pastoral bleeps, and sputteringly chopped vocals. Somehow, though, it retains everything that I find romantic about the Nightshades’ rendition. This is the definition of a durable song.

yo la tengo WFMU 2006 setlist

Yo La Tengo played their annual all-covers pledge drive for WFMU tonight.

Please comment with corrections. Thanks to Google for the help.

7 March 2006
WFMU Studios
Jersey City, NJ

Batman theme
Bertha (Grateful Dead)
City Hobgoblins (The Fall)
The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man (The Rolling Stones)

Instant Karma (John Lennon)
Zig-Zag Wanderer (Captain Beefheart)
Something In The Air (Thunderclap Newman)
Laugh at Me (Sonny and Cher)

Egyptian Reggae (Jonathan Richman)
Rock and Roll Love Letter (Bay City Rollers)
Starry Eyes (The Records)
You Don’t Miss Your Water (Craig David)
Girl of the North Country (Bob Dylan)

Dead Flowers (The Rolling Stones)
Blister in the Sun (Violent Femmes)
Lay Lady Lay (Bob Dylan)
Suspect Device (Stiff Little Fingers)
I Can’t Make It On Time (The Ramones)

Gut Feeling (Devo)
Holiday (The Bee Gees)
Suzanne (Leonard Cohen)
Don’t Cry No Tears (Neil Young)
I Fought the Law (Bobby Fuller Four)
(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace Love and Understanding? (Nick Lowe)

Happy Birthday to Bruce Bennett
Pay to Cum (Bad Brains)
Do It Again (Steely Dan)
You Make Me Feel So Good (The Zombies)
Heart of Darkness (Pere Ubu)

Alex Chilton (The Replacements)
Jack and Diane (John Mellencamp)
California Girls (The Beach Boys)
Hello Lucille, Are You A Lesbian? (T. Valentine)
Re-Make/Re-Model (Roxy Music)

Should I Stay or Should I Go? (The Clash)
Slack Motherfucker (Superchunk)
Werewolves of London (Warren Zevon), as medley, with bits of Take Me To The River (Al Green), Life on Mars? (David Bowie), Like A Virgin (Madonna), Dr. Robert (The Beatles), Uptown Girl (Billy Joel) and others.

jordan’s, 2/06

After visiting the Watts Towers, we hit an awesome local restaurant, Jordan’s, which has been in business since 1942. The red beans and rice and spicy-ass sausage was mindblowing. Upstairs, where we ate, there was a great (unplugged) jukebox that hadn’t been restocked since sometime in the ’80s. I wasn’t expecting to see a Beatles record.

links of dubious usefulness, no. 3

o Aquarium Drunkard posts what I’m guessing is the August 1967 rehearsal preceding the Beach Boys’ gigs in Hawaii — their last shows (I’m pretty sure) as the original quartet of Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, and Al Jardine. Smile had already combusted, but Brian was still pretty far from a vegetable (though Mike Love’s brutal dickheadedness comes to fore atop what sounds like a great sounding rehearsal of “Heroes and Villains”). Still, the harmonies are brotherly and beautiful. (Thanks, Justin.)

o Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan posts the following:

We want to let you know that once again Yo La Tengo will take to the airwaves of the mighty WFMU and do our best to help them make some well-deserved money. Listen live over wfmu.org (details available on the Schedule page at yolatengo.com) on Tuesday March 7 from 8 pm – 11 pm, eastern time. Anyone who pledges to the station during that time gets to make a request, and Georgia, James and I — helped out as always by Mr. Bruce Bennett– will do our best to play it. Don’t miss it.

o The New York Times Magazine’s real estate issue proclaims Bourgwick to be the Next Neighborhood (bypass registration) in an article subtitled “How An Undesirable Neighborhood Becomes the Next Hot Spot.” The Times has covered Bourgwick before, but not at this level, with at least a half-dozen color newsprint photos (with circles and arrows!) of places within a two-block spitting range. Unlike the last story, which was about the social development of the place, Robert Sullivan’s piece gets into the mechanics of the neighborhood’s economics. Our neighborhood is very much a satellite of Manhattan, and sometimes seemed pleasantly untouched by the bustle of the big island to the west. (Today, for example, dozens of bike messengers gathered on the basketball court out back and veritably jousted.) Of course it’s ignorant to play naive about the real estate development happening underfoot, but it’s also not something that’s easy to find out about. I need to give the article a better read.

o Two blogs I’ve been quite enjoying of late are the Proceedings of the Athansius Kircher Society and Tinselman — both esoteric cabinets o’ digital wonder, featuring bizarre architecture, optical illusions, and other delights.

links of dubious usefulness, no. 2

o What’s-a-pederast-Walter? dept: the real life Jesus “The Jesus” Quintana. Creepy. (Thanks, Rach.)

o When I was young, the closest thing we had to a town drunk lived down the block from us, and he’d occasionally wander by, talking to himself, having just staggered up the steep hill from Gunther’s Tap Room in the village. Dad would sometimes give him lifts home, and the guy would speak of a fellow drunk he’d known some years ago, named Jack. Jack’s last name happened to be “Kerouac,” then living out some of his final, indescribably depressive years (during which he became an embittered, conservative alcoholic) in Northport. The Daily News has a story about his time there, taking care of his mother. (Shortly, they moved to Florida, where Kerouac died in 1969.)

o In Los Angeles, my friend scored us passes to go see a test screening of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life-style adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. I was more than psyched. After Daniel ran our cell phones back to the car (no pictures!), and after we lied on the little questionnaires and said we were 26 (only 18-26 year olds, please), junior-level studio dudes from Central Casting marched up and down the line cherry-picking 20 year olds to meet their demographic needs. We ended up past the cut-off point, got a pre-recorded spiel from Central Casting Junior-Level Studio Exec. #2 (who offered us freebies to see a forthcoming John Cusack/Morgan Freeman picture whose major recommendation is that Freeman plays the bad guy), and were sent off into the night. Anyway, here’s a preview for the movie, which — despite my threats to Exec #2 that I’d post bad things about the movie on my blog — looks pretty f’in nifty. (Thanks, Michael.)

o A righteously hilarious short film for music dorks and Other Music patrons (picking up where Jack White’s recent rant ended).

o Speaking of which, Jack White is blogging? I’ll have to check that out in the morning.

recent articles

Album reviews:
Colin Meloy Sings Trad. Arr. Shirley Collins EP – Colin Meloy
Rubber Traits EP – Why?
Dead Drunk EP – Terrestrial Tones
The Hidden Land – Bela Fleck and the Flecktones

Live reviews:
Colin Meloy at Town Hall, 26 January 2006
Phil Lesh and Friends at the Beacon Theater, 15 February 2006

Columns and misc.:
BRAIN TUBA: Theme From the Bottom

Only in print:
o March Spin (My Chemical Romance cover): Noise item on Mothers Against Noise.
o Paste #20 (Philip Seymour Hoffman cover): reviews of John Fahey tribute, Bush Chemists, Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, Clogs, Sonic Youth, Robinella, and Taylor Hollingsworth. (These will likely appear eventually on Paste’s website.)
o February 10 Times Herald-Record: preview for (later cancelled) Lou Reed show (n.b.: the TH-R is the newspaper Hunter S. Thompson was fired from for kicking a soda machine).

watts towers, 2/06

Building in his Los Angeles backyard while belting opera, a 4’10” Italian tile layer named Simon Rodia constructed one of the foremost wonders of the modern world between 1921 and 1955: the Watts Towers. Using only a window washer’s harness to convey himself upwards, the towers — the tallest is 90 feet — have survived race riots, earthquakes, and bureaucracy to become a life-affirming marvel of the power of beautiful weirdness. Their complexity — all broken bottles and scrap tiles and shells and rigidly overlaying grids creating a surreal three-masted ship — is overwhelming, and literally awe-inspiring.

(Conceptual continuity fun fact #17: As a neighborhood kid growing up in Watts, a young Charles Mingus occasionally helped Rodia with his work.)

“in another land” – the rolling stones

“In Another Land” – The Rolling Stones
from Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967)
released by ABKCO (buy)

(file expires March 6th)

While backing up files recently, I discovered a cache of mp3s I’d totally forgotten about — bits and bobs snagged mostly from the OG Napster, including lots of B-sides and random live cuts. “In Another Land” by the Rolling Stones is neither of these, though it is an obscurity. In fact, perusing the tracklist, nearly all of Their Satanic Majesties Request could be considered as such. The Stones’ sloppy-ass answer to Sgt. Pepper, it yielded virtually no songs that have entered the classic rock canon — pretty bizarre for an album by one of rock’s most legendary bands released at the peak of the psychedelic ’60s.

The only song in the Stones’ catalogue to be penned and sung by bassist Bill Wyman, “In Another Land” sounds a bit like the Pink Floyd then being piloted across town (and the cosmos) by Syd Barrett. In other words, it’s charming and cute and utterly blokey. The melody is simple and awesome. I love the childlike jump on “I stood and held your hand,” both the notes sung and the way Wyman sings ’em. Run through (what I suspect is) a Leslie rotating cabinet, Wyman’s voice shimmers, and the whole cut feels as if it were conceived and recorded underwater. This is no grand statement. From what I remember, it’s mostly just Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts fucking around on a day when none of the other Stones bothered to show up. Perhaps this isn’t what Mick and Keef’s great demonic overlord wanted to groove on, but maybe they should’ve let Wyman take calls from the listeners every now and again.