of no consequence

Restaurant servers have their own special lingo, one that involves, it seems, a rather tentative relation to time. No, I don't mean the classic "we can seat you in about 15 minutes," in which "15" designates a number not less than 15 and not greater than 3000*. Here are two examples:

The food has arrived, and the server asks, "how is everything so far?" So far? Am I to assume that I just haven't gotten to the ground-up sweatsock yet?

Earlier on, of course, the same server will have said, "I'm Sandy, and I'll be your server tonight." I've always been curious about that future tense ("will be") and wondering if they ever call customers on that: "Well okay Sandy - let me have -" "Hey, slow down there fella. I said I will be your server. I'll let you know when I actually am your server, got it?"

*Maybe restaurants are just weird around here, but I encountered an odd variation on this the other night at a neighborhood Italian place. I was dining alone; in front of me were two two-tops, both with complete settings, and near the back of the restaurant was at least one more. Hostess says, I can seat you in about five minutes (which was ten, of course). I initially assumed, okay, someone already at the bar's about to be seated, or they take reservations (on a Tuesday? for a party of 2?), or something. No...I sat myself down on an uncomfortable chair (the bar was nearly full, and I didn't feel like a drink anyway) and waited until...well, until about ten minutes later, during which one party of two from the bar had been seated at one of the two-tops near the back of the restaurant, when the hostess told me I could be seated now. She led me directly to one of the two two-tops that had been set when I walked in the door, which hadn't been so much as looked at since I walked in.

I dunno - perhaps they're pacing their servers, so no one succumbs to a coronary what with all the rushing about? All I know is I'd far rather sit and wait at a table, perhaps with luxury-of-luxuries a glass of water, so I can read my magazine and not wonder when the hell I'm gonna get seated anyway. If I'm at my table, and the server says it's really busy and she or he won't get to me for a while, I'd understand. But why was I sitting off in a dumb little corner on a butt-unfriendly wooden chair? Got me...

one billion trees = two double-burgers with cheese

Our friends Bob and Susan are in from California for a couple of weeks, fresh (which is most certainly not the right word) from the Telluride bluegrass festival, so I've been neglecting my babbling and posting in lieu of eating and drinking too much. However, we've been given a brief respite while they visit other friends in town for a couple of days, so I've had time to catch up on all my important nothing-doing.

Anyway: I haven't posted music for a bit, so here's some. Spookey Ruben put out a reasonably well-publicized release on a semi-major label (TVT) in 1996 called Modes of Transportation Vol. 1. I think a track or may have had a video on MTV; a song was placed on a CMJ compilation, etc. Then, he disappeared. At least to American eyes: he's Canadian, and apparently released a second volume of Modes of Transportation - but oddly, this and two further releases (Bed, and Breakfast, released concurrently ha-ha-ha) were as far as I can tell released only in Japan, where apparently this sort of pop/jazz/grunge/prog/avant-garde stuff is popular. Or at least, viable.

That description probably frightens you; if I point out that his stuff is also pretty funny, if sometimes socially insightful, will that help or will that frighten you more? Anyway: fortunately you can simply listen, and judge for yourself. Me, I like it pretty well...but probably not quite well enough to spend $100 to get three Japan-only titles.

Spookey Ruben "Wendy McDonald"
Spookey Ruben "Welcome to the House of Food"

it's the shins

I think there's a pressing need for new slang. I nominate the phrase "get a neck." This came to me as I was driving ahead of a bulked-up moron in a jacked-up truck who kept tailgating me (even though there was, in fact, nowhere else I could go, and I couldn't drive any faster because there were cars in front of me), and I noticed as he exited his vehicle (he'd pulled into a parking space behind me as I was stopped at a traffic light) that he had no neck. Thus the concept is: "you're acting like a belligerent idiot; try using your brain."

Well, okay: it's nowhere near as clever or catchy as "santorum" - but go ahead; try it out today.

so bad it's...

I've always been just a little troubled by the vogue for "bad movies." The quotation marks are important - since the tendency isn't to watch just any bad movie, but only those that try to be more or better than they are. (Anyone can make a truly bad movie, especially if they try to do so.) On one level, of course, it's easy to see the appeal: the sheer incompetence of the work on many of these movies is stunning to behold, as is the frequent "what the fuck?" of why anyone ever thought this plot, these actors, that camerawork could possibly make a passable movie. But that's my problem: at least those folks were trying, and at least they had some sort of ambitions. They may (okay, they definitely do) overshoot the limits of their talents, but that does not mean they're utterly talentless. (And if they were, why would that make the movie more laughable, rather than merely more pathetic - in the original sense of the term?)

In fact, the more popular "bad movies" tend to have, at their core, some kernel of quality that makes the badness that surrounds it ooze forth all the more prominently. But here's the problem: film is, of course, an intensely collaborative medium. "Collaborative," here, is often a synonym for "expensive," where money buys talent, or at least access to decent equipment, actors, and technical people. As far as I'm concerned, the big-budget Hollywood film that, despite its millions of dollars spent, still manages to blow continuity, be rampantly implausible, or just be massively uninteresting is far, far worse a movie than anything Edward Wood ever did. What would Wood have been able to do with Kevin Costner's budgets?

All of this is brought on by having viewed earlier this evening Roy Dennis Steckler's Rat Pfink a Boo Boo. What's wrong with this film is a long list - we can start with an absurdly inconsistent tone, terrible sound that necessitated blatantly uncoordinated dubbing, and a lack of material that caused even an hour-long movie to be full of padding. But still...at least in the first half of the movie, Steckler displays an interesting eye, framing shots rather dramatically, and effectively creating a mood of creepiness around his bizarre trio of amped-up criminals (one of whom seems to have borrowed Willem Dafoe's teeth). Of course (and apparently Steckler and crew simply got bored with the drama), the second half descends into a light-hearted but rather less inspired and more sloppily edited "Batman" parody - even if the absurd appearance of "Kogar" (a man in a carefully groomed ape costume) and his bizarrely large-assed and tight-pantsed trainer up the ridiculousness quotient to hitherto-unexpected levels. (Incidentally, this movie features quite a large number of close-ups of tightly packaged butts, male and female. I'm just sayin', if you wanted to know.)

But give Steckler more money, a better cast and script, and the courage of whatever convictions allowed him to begin filming a semi-avant-garde, creepy crime drama, and he might actually have made a decent b-movie - at least at the level of something like Carnival of Souls, and possibly better than that. Still, even with all its considerable flaws, given that it was made for about $5,000, this movie certainly isn't ten thousand times worse than some piece of $50 million dollar Hollywood crap.

a man's gotta be a man to be a man

Holidays in particular bring out a weird cultural anxiety about various social roles - for example, around Fathers' Day the various culturally approved versions of masculinity get a read working-out - and the disjunction between those roles and my own life are like grit in work gloves. Not because I feel the difference in myself as lack - but because it's so irritating to see the way all the cultural engines rev up in unison to support the notion that fathers (and by extension, all men) must like sports, must be interested in electronic gear and gadgets, etc. For example, at Target's website, the main categories under which gifts "for him" are categorized: Gadgets + Gizmos, Sports + Games, Outdoors, Electronics, Watches, and Unique Gifts. Walk into nearly any bookstore, for example, and see how magazines are categorized by gender.

Ah well - gotta take care of some burgers on the barbecue and grab a couple beers before watching "Spike TV"...

warning!

Short Description: The fake R.E.M. song is done (read about its origins here). The music's okay. The singing isn't. The Long Description of the song and its recording is here.

truth in bumper stickers

You know those bumper stickers that belligerently (and falsely) proclaim THESE COLORS NEVER RUN: NEVER HAVE NEVER WILL? I've noticed, though, that often they're rather cheaply made, and sunlight washes them out. So I suggest a new slogan:

THESE COLORS NEVER RUN: BUT THEY DIMINISH EXPOSED TO THE LIGHT OF DAY

via terra negativa

A few days ago, the fabulous Drink at Work site had a brief entry about Jeffrey Lewis, along with a link to a WFMU recording of his "History of Punk on the Lower East Side," a nine-minute talking-blues-with-song-quotations history of - well, guess. Anyway: brilliant, clever, etc., and it starts with Harry Smith...which I'd never really thought of before, but it makes a lot of sense, at least if the impulse behind punk was for the songs to reflect the lives of the people who live and sing them.

Which, of course, makes punk itself rather a form of folk music. Along the way, Lewis quotes the Fugs' "Nothing," one of the most transcendant moments in popular music of the last fifty years. What do I mean? Well, it starts off as seemingly a mere parody of the old Irish "Potatoes" song - a bit of a joke (although already a bit more, given how grim the Potato Famine was) and then turns into a (still funny) freewheeling negation of just about everything...and somehow, through that thoroughgoing but laughing nihilism, transmutes itself into a wildly, cosmically affirmative embrace. Cuz, you know, caring enough to reject things is also affirming at the least their existence, and your own.

Along the way, the Fugs mention that same Harry Smith, in homage to the song's folk bona fides, and Smith's all-encompassing sense of folk (famously called "the old, weird America") is one that might embrace punk rock - and some of its more musically wayward offspring ("wayward" in not sounding like the soundfile next to "punk rock" in the online dictionary). In that category, I'd include Negativland, whose monkeywrenching in the mediasphere takes the raw materials of that experience and transforms them via their chaotic bricolage of mediated detritus into what might as well be called postmodern folk music (and I'm sure I'm not the first to do so). It's the equivalent of tales handed down by farmers and itinerant musicians, and forms the culture of our lives in the same way agriculture, love songs, religious balladry, and tales of derring-do might have done in the old days. Again, as if to endorse this notion, when Negativland includes music (as conventionally defined) on their recordings, they often fall back on folk-like structures and sounds (like the "Nesbitt's Lime Soda" song, or "The Man with No Fingers" or whatever it's actually called: I am lazy tonight). Here, for example, is "Happy Hero" from their Dispepsi release, whose content seemed designed to say to the cola company, you want brandname market saturation? here's your brandname saturation! Our eponymous hero is dressed in a cowboy hat from the props department for this occasion (just like the ones mandated by law to appear on the head of all Nashville "country" singers), and he sings a song that might be read as a sad tale of a man whose dreams and imaginations come too true. Sorta like the old saying, "battle not monsters lest ye become a monster." Of course, if the actual goal of Negativland's advertising par(anoia)ody isn't necessarily to be indistinguishable from advertising itself, advertisers know that the best lie looks exactly like the truth, at least with that glaringly bright light they're shining, and those deep shadows from over here where everyone's watching the runaway bride toss breadcrumbs into the audience at the circus while naked emperors slip out the back door onto abandoned Downing Street, unmemo'd and shaded by black umbrellas.

The Fugs "Nothing"
Negativland "Happy Hero"

illiteracy on the march

I saw a billboard today for that popular Scots-themed fast-food restaurant. Aside from the inanity of trying to promote its wares as somehow classy and sophisticated, and using the thoroughly cobwebbed "extended pinkie" signifier to do so, the text of the billboard was puzzling. It read swank o' licious. So, are we to interpret this phrase as a contraction for "swank of licious"? What is "licious," exactly - and does anyone in the entire world use the word "swank" without smirking?

Or perhaps "licious" is a trade euphemism for a particularly scary variety of meat, and "swank" is the cheapest cut, as used in the sandwich.

no buttons to push

About a year ago (in my usual out-of-the-loop fashion), it took someone else babbling about a new Jason Falkner EP for me to find out it even existed; anyway, ceej (that person) offered to dub me a copy if I couldn't find it (I did, and bought it). Anyway, ceej remembered my Falkner fandom, and told me that Falkner's cover of "Touch and Go" on the Cars tribute album was worth hearing, if probably one of the only tracks worth hearing thereon. (Just judging from the tracklisting, I'd probably agree.) Worth hearing, yes - but I'm not sure it does all that much for me besides making me go back and listen to the original in the context of the Cars' Panorama album.

The first thing I noticed comparing the two versions is that Falkner's straightened out the odd rhythmic base of the original's verses. In the Cars' version, the bass and drums are in 5/4, while the vocals and keyboards are in 4/4. (They sync up in 4/4 for the choruses, of course). Falkner both simplifies (everything's in the same time signature now) and chooses the more complex time signature: all instruments are in 5/4 in his version.

Panorama might be my favorite Cars album (out of the first three - steady decline thereafter), if only because after the huge commercial success of the first two albums, the band decided to get slightly weirder rather than slicker (that, alas, happened quickly enough). This is apparent from the very beginning of the first, titular track, with electronically treated drums that sound more like someone bouncing a basketball inside an empty semi-trailer than a drum kit. Once the rest of the instruments kick in, it just gets weirder: again, the song's in two time signatures at once, with the drums keeping a steady backbeat in 2, while the rest of the song alternates a 9-beat pattern with an 8-beat pattern. (If you're doing the math, all this comes together after 34 beats, i.e., what sounds like 8 bars of 4/4 with a stray bar of 2/4 afterwards.) Anyway, that's not what makes the song good; that just makes it interesting to a former teen prog-rock geek like me. What makes it good? Lots of nice little touches: the rhythm guitar figure during the first verse, a distant cousin of the "Pleasant Valley Sunday" riff perhaps (it's altered to a chordal pattern later); the swirling background phasing; the sixteenths on distorted hi-hat; the way the chorus is dropped down half a step to add color (rather than the stereotypical step upward); and best of all, Elliott Easton's fabulous flamenco-style palm-muted lick behind the chorus. Easton's all over this track, in fact, with that distorted riff in the lead-in to the chorus, some nice fills throughout, and a couple of fine, understated solos.

Easton's solos in "Touch and Go" are far less understated; in fact, they burn with the kind of rockstar fire that probably contributed not a little to the Cars' acceptance on late-seventies AOR radio. More things to like about this track: the little echoey guitar punctuations, which are just one of the ways the band arranges the track so every verse has its own character. I'm also fond of the spaghetti-western low-register tremolo guitar in the chorus.

The Cars "Panorama"
The Cars "Touch and Go"
Jason Falkner "Touch and Go"

random

1) There seems to be some sort of rule that on any TV show, in any scene set in an urban police station, in the background there must appear a prostitute, being processed in some manner, or just sitting or standing there.

2) I am convinced that the Frangelico bottle is having an affair with Mrs. Butterworth.

what's wrong with the Bush administration, concisely stated

Here, at the end of this story about the people who were arrested for thoughtcrime at a Colorado Bush rally, is Scott McClellan's concise summation of the White House's attitude: "If we think people are coming to the event to disrupt it, obviously, they're going to be asked to leave."

In other words, disagreement = dissent = disruption. And the proper response? Pre-emption.

it's just like sreeping gas - it's oh so ethereal

When I was in my teens, I devoured science fiction. I must have checked out a goodly percentage of the books filed under SF at the Wauwatosa Public Library - so that institution deserves credit for my having discovered the works of R.A. Lafferty. Lafferty's books were filed under science fiction, yes; but that's more a matter of convenience (and publication history) than of description. The closest comparison to Lafferty's writing I might make is Flann O'Brien, at least in The Third Policeman - which is exactly as science-fictional as most of Lafferty's work, and exactly as little.

Lafferty's work has rarely been in print long, however - but fortunately, the Wildside Press has reprinted a number of Lafferty's titles, which is why I've been able to reread one of his novels, Not to Mention Camels. The excerpt below gives a good sense of the flavor of Lafferty's style and ideas, and I think it also stands on its own nearly as a short story. (Lafferty's stories are generally more highly regarded than his novels, in fact.)

_______________________________________________

The Resurrection of Lazarus was the best of the dramas: it was always a joy to watch. The Christus would raise him quickly and then be called away on other matters. Lazarus would rise from the dead putrid and thirsty; and putrid he would remain with rotted and half-rotted streaks of flesh, and the more completely rotted pieces sometimes falling clear off of him. And thirsty he would remain, and this was the delight of the whole animation. The elite audience would order cold drink after cold drink to allay in themselves the thirst of Lazarus. The Resurrection was always an audience-participation drama.

But Pelion Tuscamondo could hold more than eight attentions in his multiplex mind. This Resurrection of Lazarus didn't seem sufficiently researched to his taste. He felt that it needed mountains for its backdrop, and he ordered mountains. He had "Faith Sufficient," and he had station and connections. How could they refuse him mountains?

Albert Fineface, as spokesman for the elites that day, effected the order. And there were mountains, Gothic mountains, Dore mountains, steep menacing mountains, but their spires were twinkling blue instead of midnight black. Lazarus was resurrected in Bethany, perhaps, or in some other small town very near to Jerusalem. And the Anti-Lebanon mountains, or the Hermon or Hauran or some such mountain mass, loomed into the foreground with the breath-catching thrill of very great depth both above and below. And there was very great depth in the resurrected man, depths of thirst and agony.

A cup of water was set before Lazarus. Then, by the power of the group mind of the partakers of the drama, the cup was set out of reach of the suffering man. Once more, small and putrid pieces fell off that good man (where would be the drama in torturing an ungood man?) who did not seem aware of his good fortune in being alive again. With a frantic, animal cry, Lazarus reached mightily for the cup, and the audience-participation group mind moved the cup away from him again.

"It's authentic," Albert Fineface said. "One always experiences intolerable thirst on being raised from the dead. But now, friend Pelion, turn one facet of your jeweled mind to me. You, who have everything, have been wishing for one additional thing; you have not yet formulated this wish well, but you've been wishing it for a long interval. You wish to give testimony of your personal flame and image. As a cult figure, you wish the largest possible publication for your testimony."

"Yes," Pelion declared. "I would like to publish myself in every extent of every ocean that underlies every world. There is a deal to be made somewhere. I've followed some unusual commerces, but I don't know where to make this transaction."

"I can help you," Fineface said. "We've both followed unusual commerces, and we'll let our trading realms intersect here."

The avid crowd with its avid mind power moved the cup just out of the reach of Lazarus again.

This man, Albert Fineface, was a factor in some very dubious transactions, but he did not fail in any of his promises. Should a genie, for his own cloudy reasons, wish to be back in his imprisoning bottle, Albert could arrange it, for a fee. He could fill stranger requests.

"This ocean that underlies every earth," Fineface was saying, "that underlies every creature and manifestation, that infuses every mind and memory, even the memory of that concocted mountain there, the pervading water that is the uterine as well as the ultimate ocean, this ocean may be suffused as well as suffusing. We will suffuse it with your flame and image. You will publish your testament in every gout of its water. And then you will be permanently in the cellar of every mind that is, and has been, and will be. When a cobwebby bottle is brought up from the cellar of the mind of glowworm or giant, drops of your own flame will sparkle out of that bottle. It will cost you, though. You will buy the pervading water as Lazarus does, but you will buy oceans as he buys drops."

By a dramatic device not immediately explained, Lazarus had mortgaged the livings of his descendants for seven generations, and he had turned it all into mortgage-gold. He was allowed to drop gold coins into the cup of water and to lap up what drops of water overflowed the brim of that cup. But the cup itself seemed insatiable, and it drank up many coins for every drop of water that it brimmed over.

"The recording ocean is known on some of the worlds as the 'Group Unconscious' and on others as the 'Folk Ocean,' " Fineface was saying, "and any trace of substance in any part of it is immediately in all parts of it. This ocean, as you may not know, Pelion, is made up of the personal testaments of a group of devils. The testaments of these devils may be known and distinguished by their literary or eidetic styles in this repository, which is the most plastic of all the mass (non-lineal, of oblated bulk or mass) media. And each of these testaments receives very wide publication (infinitely wide, in billions upon billions of minds and nexuses); but most of them are without excellence. There are not many (a few more than one hundred) of these testifying devils who have achieved group-unconscious publication. When they were first raveled out and identified by their styles, they were given letters, as 'a,' 'b,' 'c' scrivener or eidetic devil, to distinguish among them. Soon it was seen that the conventional alphabet would not have enough signs. The Tarshish Syllabary was therefore used.

"Symbols of the elements are also used in the latest literary criticism of these authors and creators. It is believed that there will be the same number of these devils publishing their testaments as there are elements in the universes. It is worth noting that the discovery of the nine most recent elements has coincided with the discovery of the nine most recent of the scrivener or media devils. Should you reach this inner circle, Pelion, your equivalent would have to be an unstable element; that's the only kind left."

"I wouldn't want it any other way, Fineface."

"So it's been asked for some time, 'Cannot others play this game?' And we say, 'No way'; we say that if the asker is short of heel. But must it be restricted? May one not, by fabulous expenditure, buy a membership? May one not buy a pew-stall in this most unchurchly of churches? Yes, I think it may be done. I think it has been done. I believe you or I might be able to do it, Pelion. We are very rich, and we are very flexible in our talents."

"Is it really worth it, Fineface?" Pelion asked. "I don't fund every extravagant idea that comes into my head."

"It will be worth it to you. You will be able to lodge your flame and your image in every mind and every flesh, from the most attenuated flesh to the most gross, from the fire-flame spirit-flesh of the ethereals to the gamy and humpbacked flesh of the camel (your totem animal, is it not, Pelion?). For all of these drink out of that rank-water ocean called the group unconscious, or called other things."

"Other new ones have joined in this?" Pelion asked. "It has been done?"

"Yes, it has been done by several of the Media or Eidetic Lords of various worlds. It has been done by several of the cult figures on and between the worlds."

"With whom might I deal?" Pelion asked. "This is a thing I would like to master."

"Pelion, I can tell you who can tell you who can tell you who. You must pay heavy toll at each station, of course."

"Ah, who can tell me who can tell?" Pelion asked.

"Oh, I can." Albert Fineface made ready for the commerce.

So Pelion paid him very heavy toll and was on the way to contrive entree in and influence on the inmost under-minds of all creatures and uncreatures, living and dead. When one is "in" there, one is in forever.

The cup from which Lazarus sought to drink developed a deep crack from the weight of all the heavy gold coins placed in it, and all the water ran out of it. It was a badly built cup. And Lazarus moaned with his mouth in the sand.

(A nonessential change in worlds and lives and persons happens here.)

_______________________________________________

(from R.A. Lafferty's Not to Mention Camels, pages 140-44, Wildside Press edition.)

The Dance of the Thousand Pedals

There was a curious little trend for a few years in the early to mid-nineties: it seemed like one or two reviews in most indie-oriented venues would refer to "shoegazing" or (less often) "dreampop" in describing what a band might be doing - but invariably, such references were disdainful and implied that the genre had long since reached its sell-by date. The irony, of course, is that if a couple-few CDs every month or two were being reviewed that bore comparison to those stylistic ideas, how could it be said to be an extinct style?

Still isn't...even though I've always hated that name "shoegazer" (although the title here alludes to one critic's quip that those bands were staring down at their shoes more to make sure they chose the right pedal from the many options cluttering the floor around them), and "dreampop" is rather icky too. (Although I've always thought of the first as being from My Bloody Valentine noiseward, whereas the latter moves from its polestar of Cocteau Twins and radiates, ultimately, rather in a gothic vector. Those definitions might be just my own though.) Other names are even worse.

Anyway, despite the lack of a good decent name, the idea of layering a whole mess of guitars and/or other sounds over a song-based core structure (although not always song-based) seems less like a genre to me than a particular, always potentially viable approach. Here are a couple of recent tracks that seem to fit somewhat under the rather vague shoegaze/dreampop rubric.

First up is Rob Montejo, whose site I ran into linked from Bullette's site (see my recent blurb thereon). The track on Bullette's album that he did most the music for intrigued me ("We Are Not from Sugar"), so I was inspired to check out more of his music. "Anodyne" is a reminder that you can achieve a textured, layered sound with acoustic guitars (something MBV did on a couple tracks), particularly if you exploit open, resonant strings and chords with discordant suspensions (you know: that B-major thing where you slide the E-shape up the neck but leave the bottom E-string open...). Odd synth(?) noises add texture, and the track features a floating, disembodied coda.

Next up is a band, Soft, whose website is long on white space, photos, and video but a bit lacking in info...so I can't say much about them except one of their guitarists found my site, e-mailed me, and asked me to check out their stuff. (Aside: I enjoy hearing new music...but because I don't get that much in the way of listen-to-me mail, I'm actually somewhat less inclined to discuss it here - at least at first. So, uh, if you want my ten readers to read about your band, don't let me know you exist. Yeah, I know...) Anyway (despite the parenthetical) I ended up rather liking the two songs from their new single, in particular "Droppin'." That little guitar lick near the beginning seems kind of Modestly Mouse-ish - but the rest of the song isn't. It's got that hi-hat-on-the-offbeats thing that a handful of '80s bands used (and, quite differently, some disco acts too), but I think what I like most (and why I'm shoving it into the subject of this entry) is the combination of multiple guitar textures with the quiet, low-key vocal approach.

That technique can be heard in our vintage selection of the day, "No. 1 Fan" by Majesty Crush (this song's on their 1993 album Love 15: between that title and the song "Seles," it would seem someone's got a bit of a tennis fetish...). This song has only four chords - but they're four interesting chords, and the bassist recognizes that, hey, you don't have to play the root of the chord all the time; that not playing it can give the chord sequence both melodic interest and a sort of slightly off-balance momentum from a weakened sense of harmonic resolution. And I'm not sure why the early '90s was such a bull market for stalker songs: there's this one, of course (and damn I hope the Secret Service isn't listening to my site), and Sonic Youth's "Wish Fulfillment," as well as their brilliant cover of the Carpenters' "Superstar." At any rate, the singer's breathy insinuation is both intriguing and creepy, a presentation that fits the subject very well (as does the insistence of the chord sequence: this guy's not giving up). Note there's also only one or two verses; the band shows confidence in sticking to such limited materials for just short of four minutes, but manipulates texture and suspense to keep the track interesting.

(In ten years is someone going to be posting "neo-emo" tracks? In the words of Ozzy: "oh no no please god help me"...)

Rob Montejo "Anodyne"
Soft "Droppin'"
Majesty Crush "No. 1 Fan"

Phrase of the Day

In a review of Camille Paglia's new book interpreting poetry (shudder), Lee Siegel writes the following:

Resurrecting the patented alarmist language of Allan Bloom and all those culture warriors who marched across our television screens in the late 1980s and '90s - and in doing so created a cultural distraction while the right wing stole American politics - Paglia has exhumed a dead herring.

"Exhumed a dead herring": I love it. I understood what it meant instantly, even though it's a portmanteau of at least two common phrases: "red herring" of course, with its suggestion of a false clue, a distraction; and "beating a dead horse," hyperbolized through the horse having already been buried before being dug up for another go-round.

I think more things should be described as "exhuming a dead herring." Use it daily. Thank you.

scrobble me this, Batman!

I've been sort of obsessed with Audioscrobbler lately (see the link at the upper-right part of this page, about my iTunes? It's actually to Audioscrobbler, since I'm too technically illiterate to figure out any other way to list my iTunes listening...but this provides more info anyway...). I've got it set up on three different computers, so I get a reasonably good picture of my overall listening habits - at least, except for whatever I listen to on the Actual Stereo System at home, in the car, etc. I've always thought it'd be cool if there were a way for a CD player to keep track of what it plays - I'd be curious which CDs I've actually listened to the most over the years. Audioscrobbler isn't quite that all-encompassing - but it could be, if I listened to music only on computers and kept it up for a long time.

One thing about it I'm not so sure will actually work: it purports to want to become a network of sorts among people with common musical tastes. And this is reasonably true with obscure acts - the kind where you play it, go "hmm...I wonder who else has listened to these folks?" and discover that, hey, there are only three of them. It's tempting to contact them - are they the band, for example? - although I haven't yet.

But with acts that people have actually heard of, the links tend merely to confirm a general genre/timeframe/listener profile, even when the acts seem to have little in common. There could, for example, be a long rant here about how Coldplay and the bands that followed them have nothing really in common with Radiohead except a vague similarity in the singers' voices - and how annoying it is that all these bands with tremulous tenor vocalists get called "Radiohead-like" when the music lacks Radiohead's textural and compositional depth, and the lyrics are boneheaded obvious in a poor-woeful-me mode. I mean, Yorke can whine to be sure, but at least he tends to whine abstractly about something other than ex-girlfriends.

The other interesting thing is the way you can chain recommendations together to move to acts wildly disparate from your starting point. For example, if you take "what artists are similar?" for any band, and continue doing that serially, moving down to next-most-recommended if you've already used that act, things get...curious. Here's one such chain:

The Wrens > The Decemberists > The Arcade Fire > The Shins > Modest Mouse > Radiohead > Coldplay (grrr....) > U2 > R.E.M. > Red Hot Chili Peppers (WTF?) > Nirvana > Foo Fighters > Green Day > Blink-182 > Sum 41 > Good Charlotte > Simple Plan > New Found Glory > Jimmy Eat World > Weezer > The Beatles > The Beach Boys > The Velvet Underground (I shit you not) > Bob Dylan > Neil Young > The Rolling Stones > Led Zeppelin > Jimi Hendrix > The Doors > Pink Floyd > The Smashing Pumpkins > Pixies > The White Stripes > The Strokes > The Hives...

Anyway: the lists are compiled not by actual recommendation per se, but merely by which other bands are played by people who play particular bands. This suggests, merely, that a lot of people who listen to the Beach Boys also listen to the Velvet Underground...not that there's any similarity between the two acts (except insofar as a lot of the same people like both).

Me, I just wanna hear what "Sister Ray" would have sounded like on Pet Sounds.

sorry, no Martha Quinn content

A while back, someone online (and I can't remember who: feel free to give yourself credit and let me know it was Dana over at The Mystical Beast) mentioned that This Is the Ice Age by Martha & the Muffins was going to be released. Indeed it has been, on Virgin in Canada - so I trudged through snowdrifts to get to Amazon.ca to order a copy. (Incidentally, although the site didn't say so, the CD arrived with a prominent label proclaiming that "this disc contains Copy Control technology." Luckily, none of the disc's legitimate usages seem impaired - despite the outrageous fact noted on the packaging that the disc may not play in car or computer CD players. A big Canadian fuck-you if such players are your only CD players, apparently.)

Anyway, I'd encountered Martha & the Muffins in college; I think I first heard "Echo Beach." I liked it well enough (I wasn't exactly inclined to listen, due to the name) but they seemed fairly minor at the time. A year or so later, a friend put on This Is the Ice Age's opening (and probably most famous) track, the wonderful "Swimming" (not posted here cuz someone else did: see first paragraph). I especially liked the Frippy lead guitar sound (actually, a lot of the guitars here sound like those on Discipline - must be a 1981 thing). As the record (yes, the large black plastic things with holes in the center: remember, I am old) played on, I liked more and more of what I heard, and - as a poor college student, prevailed upon Ron and Lori to lend me the record so I could tape (smallish blocky plastic things with brownish reels of filmy plastic in them) it.

Of course, cassettes last about as long as the typical Paris Hilton relationship, so I wasn't really able to listen to this album for quite some time. Probably my next tier of favorite tracks are "Boy Without Filters," an Eno-becalmed number that suddenly evolves into several attempts to suck feedback through a straw, and the title track, which begins as a fairly typical early-'80s dancey new-wavey number and then crossbreeds with a minimalist sense of repetition. I also chose these two tracks since one features Mark Gane's vocals and the other Martha Johnson's. Both singers have plain, straightforward, but nevertheless interesting voices that work well with Daniel Lanois's spacious but discrete production.

An amusing liner-note moment: the band's drummer Tim Gane (not the Stereolab Tim Gane) is quoted as saying that he left the band after this release because "it wasn't providing a livelihood [he] could depend on." A couple years and albums later, the band (under the moniker M+M) scored its biggest hit, "Black Stations/White Stations."

Martha & the Muffins "Boy Without Filters"
Martha & the Muffins "This Is the Ice Age"

(oh, alright: if you insist...here's some. Sigh...)