without chemicals he types

We're working our way through the Season 2 Twin Peaks DVD set. I've long maintained that Season 2 is by no means the disaster some people claim it is - if only because what a lot of people forget is that the first third of the season is the conclusion of the Laura Palmer arc.

Admittedly, after that the show hits a bit of a slog...but once the Windom Earle plot gets going in earnest, I think it regains much of its special qualities. Apparently, that slog was due in part to Kyle MacLachlan vetoing a Cooper-Audrey affair subplot, on the (correct) grounds that it would have been massively out of character for Cooper to have an affair with a high school girl. True, nearly every character in the series has a dark secret...but I think what they eventually settled on for Cooper - his past affair with a married (adult) woman, and the consequences that followed from that - was far richer plot territory.

That said, if anyone wants to edit Season 2 to get rid of the more inane subplots, here's my list of things to cut:

SuperNadine
Ben Horne Refights the Civil War
Dick and Nicky (including the whole Lucy/Andy terminally unfunny contretemps)
The Irresistible Widow Milford
Horrifying Teen Triangle (special demerit points for that gawdawful song James, Donna, and Maddy record...)

Even though it leads pretty much nowhere, at least the James/Evelyn/Malcolm business isn't so utterly silly as those things above.

It certainly didn't help that, if you're an old fart like me who saw the shows in their original broadcast, the network's decision to delay and move the show around meant that some of those tedious plots (the Ben Horne one in particular) seemed to drag on for months. On DVD, thankfully, they go by pretty quickly.

Some trivia: much has been noted about the doubling/pairing that shows in so many elements of the series. One way that idea plays out is in familial or quasi-familial pairs, often involving substitutions or doublings for absent or dead family members (Big Ed in lieu of James's father; Norma in lieu of Shelley's mother; etc.). What's been less commented upon (according to some cursory googling) is the way that idea shows up outside the narrative, in casting. There are two father/son pairs among the cast and crew, and one set of brothers. Dan O'Herlihy plays Andrew Packard; his son Gavan O'Herlihy plays the crooked Canadian Mountie (the blond guy with the mustache). Warren Frost (Doc Hayward) is producer and writer Mark Frost's father. And the first of Windom Earle's victims we see - the drifter posed above the chessboard - is played by Craig MacLachlan, Kyle MacLachlan's brother (a particularly pointed substitution...since, of course, Cooper is Earle's ultimate target).

caption in need of cartoon (but I can't draw)

Arriving at the picnic, Ray realizes too late that the phrases "al fresco" and "au naturel" do not mean the same thing.

Most Pointless Action Ever

I just joined twitter (the site that asks you to answer the question "what are you doing now?") solely to post the following message under a clearly false name:

I just finished typing the following characters: IJUSTFINISHEDTYPINGTHEFOLLOWINGCHARACTERS:

Then I blogged about it.

The concatenating pointlessness of it all may well produce a quasi-religious epiphany.

geography lesson

Since I seem to have been stuck in an '80s rut lately, I thought I'd highlight two tracks from releases that have actually come out this year.

Naturally, the first thing I can think to do is compare one of them to an act that some people think peaked in the '80s. Je Suis France is many things (and many people: nine, in fact), but one thing they are is a band enamored of noisy, obnoxious repetition for its own sake (not unlike a certain rotating band of Mancunians, perhaps including your granny on bongos, led by one Mark E. Smith). They mix that with a bunch of other things: an indie-ish insouciance, a love of swirling electronics and piston-like beats derived from krautrock, and a willingness to improvise live that perhaps wins them converts amongst fans of j** b***s (warding off the baleful influence there). "Whalebone" is eight and a half minutes of all that. I like it - especially loud. You may not. (Je Suis France clearly comes from the gauntlet-throwing-down school of album sequencing: Afrikan Majik begins with a sixteen-minute song built on a single chord. Paging Sister Ray...)

A bit harder to pin down - moody, quiet sometimes, ever-so-slightly experimentally textural at others - Elk City will probably get a fair amount of press because one of its members is Sean Eden (formerly of Luna), but he isn't the main songwriter, and if you didn't read credits you probably wouldn't know that he's in the band. More notable is singer and songwriter Renee LoBue, whose smoothly frosty but expressive voice is the band's most distinctive component. I think "Cherries in the Snow" is the most immediately appealing song here, but several others are beginning to work their way into my consciousness as well. (Bonus Milwaukee content: ex-Lovely Barb Endes plays bass and sings backing vocals.)

Je Suis France "Whalebone" (Afrikan Majik, 2007)
Elk City "Cherries in the Snow" (New Believers, 2007)

it was my own invention...

The first version of this post appears as a comment at the wonderful More Words About Music and Songs, which is a song-by-song blog on the Talking Heads catalog. Phil talks about "What a Day That Was" (which is sort of half a Talking Heads song, in that the studio version is a Byrne solo track from his score to The Catherine Wheel, but Talking Heads covered it on Stop Making Sense).

The two key points of Phil's post (in case you didn't follow the link) are that he first heard the song in the Stop Making Sense version, compared to which he found the studio version rather listless; and that he'd always heard the lyrics in the chorus as referring to a "date" (rather than "day," which is what the lyric sheet in The Catherine Wheel CD shows).

What I found most interesting about Phil's post is that it demonstrates, twice over, the influence of first impressions, even when those impressions might be "wrong" in a trivial sense (as in the lyric mis-hearing). For me, the studio recording of "What a Day That Was" has always been one of my favorites in the Byrne/Heads catalog. Conversely, the Stop Making Sense version seems almost wildly extroverted, lacking the key quality of the original, which to me is crackling with a near-electrical sense of tension, a feeling of emotions held barely in reserve. (It's also true that in the generally quieter, calmer context of The Catherine Wheel score, that version of "What a Day That Was" sounds far livelier than it does listened to immediately after the admittedly crackling live version. I suggest you listen to the studio version first...but then, see below.)

But then, I heard the studio version first. And I always heard the lyrics as "day" - and at first, I'll admit, the notion that they might be "date" seemed laughable, a reduction of the song's subject (which is, typically, vague but fraught with some sort of meaning) to a mundane, even trivial, experience. But then, I thought, maybe I'm wrong: maybe it really is "date" - and I'm imagining generality ("day") where Byrne really is singing about a "date."

In a sense, it doesn’t matter: "day" doesn’t rule out "date," after all: everything Phil says could still be true. And - more importantly - probably is for him. And that might explain why the more direct, extroverted live version works better for him. If the song is about (for Phil) a date with a woman who "wasn't all she was cracked up to be," the song is heading in the direction of something like Dylan's "Positively 4th Street," perhaps, or Lennon's "I Found Out": the moment when the narrator realizes he's misjudged the other party (and, however submerged in the song's overt narrative, realizes he's been a fool). So the song isn't about "tension"; it's about a sort of flailing, a trying to figure out what went wrong or why.

The great thing is that in a sense it doesn't matter whether the lyric really is "day" or "date": if you think the song's about this sort of interpersonal (and intrapersonal) discovery, whether the particular "day" was also a "date" is almost irrelevant. But if instead, you read it as a sort of judgment day (note that, minus the apocalypticism of that phrase, the "date" interpretation still works in this light), with vague portents of power and reckoning being tallied and brought to bear, that sense of tension and foreboding - far more present in the studio recording - becomes more important than the near-celebratory sense of realization, of "I found out."

And this is why I sometimes wish there were no lyric sheets anywhere, and everyone would be compelled to figure out lyrics on their own. People make their own meaning anyway, after all - ranging from the obviously and knowingly private ("this is our song"...) to carefully constructed overreadings posited as the one true meaning ("once you realize the whole song's really about this guy he saw at his concert that he knew killed a guy"...) - so why not encourage that? Sometimes, the results are more entertaining, at least, and more poetic and evocative, at best.

In fact, I almost wish I had time to do a new (?) kind of specialized blog: dedicated entirely to wrong or misheard lyrics that, for the mis-hearer, are way better than the actual lyrics. My favorite in this category? Suede's "Sleeping Pills": I heard "you're a water sign / I'm an asshole." The actual lyric is "air sign" rather than "asshole" - but I think what I heard is a far better lyric, in that it simultaneously deflates the banal pretension that personality can be read through astrological sign, and it reinforces the narrator's assholity - because telling someone you're talking to that they're an idiot (however indirectly) is a good demonstration of being an asshole.

David Byrne "What a Day That Was" (The Catherine Wheel, original score, 1981)
Talking Heads "What a Day That Was" (Stop Making Sense, 1984)

Jesus struck by lightning...

...Social Services called to investigate parental abuse.

(Thanks to Flasshe.)

that crooked, crooked beat

A bit of a paradox: the song is the central unit of rock music, but careers are made by albums, not single songs. While the derogatory sense of the term "one-hit wonder" is perhaps unfortunate (there are plenty of bands who've never written one decent song - and even the most blatant hackwork of a hit single has at least something to recommend it...catchiness, usually), it's true that if a band can't consistently write good songs, and (squaring the circle) consistently assemble them into albums better in their particular sequence than a random sequence of their component tracks, they'll be relegated to the lower tiers of rock history.

Maybe the clearest illustration of that "greater than the sum of its parts" theory is the way songs that seem like filler - or even tracks that don't rise to the level of song as such - end up contributing an essential flavor to albums, such that when they're removed, the album as a whole doesn't work as well. Those minor tracks and experiments function rather in the way spices do: you wouldn't want to eat a spoonful of paprika, but that doesn't mean you should just leave it out of the recipe.

All of which leads to me to a confounding new release: a tribute album, a track-by-track remake of The Clash's Sandinista! (That exclamation mark is part of the title, not an expression of my incredulity...although on second thought, it probably would have been if I'd written this when I first heard of the project). Generally regarded as The Clash's worst album (project compiler Jimmy Guterman correctly notes that Cut the Crap doesn't count - any more than that Yule Brothers -led "Velvet Underground" album belongs in that band's canon), Sandinista! seemed to some to be the moment the original punk rock dream died...of suffocation, in the same overweaning bloat and ego that it had been born against. Well, that's all rather melodramatic - and the fact is, I've always liked Sandinista!, precisely because of its weirdness (but then, I was never a punk true believer, at least not at the point "punk" described a list of do-nots). Still, even though there've been several Clash tributes already, you'd think this might be the last album to get the song-by-song remake treatment.

In fact, there are several good reasons to choose Sandinista! for this project. One is, even if it's the Clash's worst album, the Clash's worst album is still a hell of a lot better than a lot of lesser bands' best albums. More to the point: as I've written elsewhere, sometimes it's necessary for a band to do a "bad" album in order to get to some other kind of good album. (The Clash followed this one with Combat Rock - which focused and concentrated the weirdness as color and texture: a lot of people don't like that album either, but that's another discussion...) The best reason, though, is that the often surpassingly odd arrangement choices (sometimes you can nearly see a choking cloud of purplish gray smoke emanating from the studio, somehow coming through your very own speakers...) are not the sorts of things most bands are going to mechanically reproduce in photo-accurate remakes; instead, they're rightly seen as versions of the song, a song whose skeletal structure is legible (sometimes only barely) underneath those odd arrangements. So the bands are generally compelled to do the best thing you can do in remaking a song: re-make re-model (hello Bryan).

And the effect is paradoxical: on the one hand, the song underneath the song is often brought out, to the extent that in some of the tracks on The Sandinista! Project, it took a few bars for me to remember..."oh yeah, this track!" Which leads to the other duck: the remakes actually inspired me to return to the original. That impulse, from covers, is often misunderstood, I think. The idea isn't "oh god this version sucks so horribly, I must hear the original to get that awful noise out of my ears" (to cut the crap, in other words...although sometimes, that can happen...) but to relisten to the original and hear it anew, to notice aspects of it, emphasized in the cover, that you'd perhaps failed to notice the first time.

A good number of remakes on The Sandinista! Project, for example, are done in a rootsy, country-western style...and you realize that, hey, Joe Strummer could have been Jon Langford and become a credible country songwriter. (By "country," of course I do not mean Hat Pop...) And even the most gestural tracks on the original CD - the ones that sound like riffs ladled over with production sauce - get made into actual songs (because the song was there in the first place, just more hinted at than played), at least in most cases. Not everything on the album is golden (how could it be? that would in some senses betray the nature of the original, whose experimentation - the free-for-all notion that "punk" could be any damned thing you wanted to be, that it could, in fact, toss the rather boring requirement that everything even succeed out the window), but rather more of it than you might expect is pretty damned fine.

Four tracks that illustrate some of those ideas:

Jason Ringenberg and Kristi Rose "Ivan Meets G.I. Joe"
Ethan Lipton "Corner Soul"
The Lothars "The Call Up"
Dollar Store "The Street Parade"

Buy The Sandinista! Project (amazon.com link: neither of the indie online stores in my links appears to be stocking this at the moment)

all sucking choccy bars

A few weeks back, Joe from The White Noise Revisited described his history with the music of Adam & the Ants, particularly the band's first CD Dirk Wears White Sox, which features none of the "Burundi beat" or pirate shtick they later became known for. That stuff is fun and includes some fine pop tunes, but Dirk is another beast entirely, partly because the band is nearly entirely different. I hadn't listened to it for quite some time, but TWNR inspired me to pull it out again (along with its contemporary set of Peel Sessions recordings).

I don't know what was going on with guitars in England in the late seventies, but my suspicion is that someone surreptitiously altered a bunch of chord guides, because there was quite an epidemic of bizarre, almost Beefheart-like chording going on then. Early XTC, Gang of Four, and the Ants' guitarists all suddenly were playing half-diminished skronkmented chords in Q minor, splattering great globs of wild guitar color all over their recordings. This was also the first flowering of the post-punk movement, wherein musicians realized that the idea wasn't just to keep slamming the same four chords but to do whatever their ears and hands could find. So we get a grab-bag of influences or similarities, ranging from the aforementioned Beefheart, to funk bass, to reggae (already present in punk itself, of course), even psychedelia and the lightest most gossamer hint of the dreaded prog (or were those moments when the rhythm popped out of 4/4 just accidents, right?).

Here are two tracks from the band's Peel Sessions of 26 March 1979, "Ligotage" (look it up if you have to), a track that I don't think was ever recorded in studio, and a frantic version of the band's tribute to Italian Futurists, "Animals and Men." From Dirk proper, "Digital Tenderness" is one of the catchiest tracks, with the interplay among the guitars, bass, and percussion striking a nearly Latin feel at times. More on the weird side, two of Adam Ant's bizarre, science-fictional narratives, "Nine Plan Failed" and "The Idea." Basses may have been flanged for your protection.

Adam & the Ants "Ligotage" (Peel Sessions, 1979)
Adam & the Ants "Animals and Men" (Peel Sessions, 1979)
Adam & the Ants "Digital Tenderness" (Dirk Wears White Sox, 1980)
Adam & the Ants "Nine Plan Failed" (Dirk Wears White Sox, 1980)
Adam & the Ants "The Idea" (Dirk Wears White Sox, 1980)

like an accidental movie

Yet another thing that will prevent you from getting any work done at all because it's way cooler than your work.

zombie clichés walk!

If someone creating a work of fiction had given British characters names like "Imogen Poots" and "Mackintosh Muggleton," most editors would say enough already with the cutesy "British" naming...but it just so happens those are (apparently) the actual names of two young actors in 28 Weeks Later...

you can't know what's going on if you're asleep

Local radio here in Milwaukee recently saw a major change, as long-time public radio WYMS, which had featured jazz almost exclusively for years, is being transformed to a new entity calling itself Radio Milwaukee. The format is free-form leaning a bit heavily toward World Cafe territory...but even though I miss the ability to turn on jazz whenever I want to hear it (and of course I mean jazz, not the laxative crap traded under the name "smooth jazz," which is jazz only if anything with a saxophone is jazz), any station that can play the Macromantics, Robyn Hitchcock, some hip-hop I couldn't identify, and a deep-cut Jackson 5 track in a row is alright by me. It's not going to supplant the mighty WMSE in my listening, but it is a nice alternative.

About that Jackson 5 track: turned out to be "I'll Bet You," from their second album, in 1970, which was written by George Clinton (and Pat Lindsey and Sidney Barnes). Funkadelic recorded its own version on its second album, also from 1970, so of course I had to dig up a copy of it. (Turns out it's on eMusic, too - which I didn't know, but I'd exhausted my monthly downloads anyway...). One source I ran into (and now can't find dammit) says that the Jacksons' version was released before Funkadelic's version (can't find info on the albums' respective release dates).

Comparing the two versions is useful. The Jackson 5 version is more concise (as you might expect), and while the arrangement sticks pretty close to the Funkadelic version, it's highlighted by a very nice, whining lead guitar sound, and a funky flute solo near the end, neither of which feature in the Funkadelic version.

Someone in the Jacksons' camp was wielding a red editors' pencil, because Funkadelic's version is actually titled "I Bet You." While the Jackson 5 version is dark and undeniably funky (I detect some Whitfield/Strong influence, too), the Funkadelic version is freakier and psychedelic in a way the then-teenaged Jacksons probably couldn't comprehend. That's not a slam on the Jacksons: their version is a fine track, and surprisingly funkier than I would have expected. But they didn't have Eddie Hazel to pull off a snarling, wild guitar solo, or the odd electronic touches like that high-pitched, filtered organ whine near the beginning or the low-pitched rumbling later in the track (probably not even audible if you're listening on cheapo computer speakers). Also: after that Hazel solo, about halfway through the track...do you think that's where Talking Heads got the "Psycho Killer" riff from?

The Jackson 5 "I'll Bet You" (ABC, 1970)
Funkadelic "I Bet You" (Funkadelic, 1970)

spring arrives...slowly

I took a picture nearly every day from the same position, edited the photos, and assembled them into this slideshow, to show the changes as spring arrives. Fasten your seatbelt: because the camera wasn't fixed in place (and due to one serious editing error) it's a bit wobbly...

perhaps we can also interest you in this knight's credenza?

Once again, those sneaky Doleful Lions go and release a CD without my knowing it. This time, it's the second volume of the Song Cyclops series, in this case mostly recorded back in 1999 with a few tracks done and futzed with later, primarily by Jonathan Scott solo (and apparently with limited fidelity). Sez here it came out in October of last year, and was actually reviewed in many places you think I might have run into it at - but no, it slipped right by me.

Although there are more songs that try to attract flies with honey than on the first volume, it's still primarily Scott and primarily acoustic. One of those honey-based tracks (but not acoustic-based) is the oddly-titled "The Warriors End Table" (apparently, Scott is allergic to apostrophes). (Incidentally, it's a curious phenomenon: now that the All-Music Guide has established itself as the go-to for info on music, every other website will quote it. So reviewer Tim Sendra's line on this track - "the best song GBV never wrote" - is all over the place...including here, now.) Scott's lyrics, typically drawn from horror movies, myth, and various nodes of weirdness, are oblique as ever, but they sound great. Song Cyclops Volume 2 also contains a slower reprise of the song, with acoustic instruments more prominent in the mix (it essentially bookends the CD, the first version coming after a 30-second intro track, and the latter version being the second-last track), called for mysterious reasons "Eskimo Wizards."

Years ago, a friend sent me a recording of a live Doleful Lions show from April of 2000, which featured many songs that haven't shown up in studio versions until now. "The Warriors End Table" is one of them, so you can hear how it might have sounded with a band. Not the highest-fi recording, and the backing vocals occasionally are a bit iffy in intonation, but it's a little less insular-sounding, which I like.

Doleful Lions "The Warriors End Table" (Song Cyclops Volume 2, 2006)
Doleful Lions "Eskimo Wizards" (Song Cyclops Volume 2, 2006)
Doleful Lions "The Warriors End Table" (live April 13, 2000)

Zubin Meta

Once again, I've switched hosts for my file storage: eSnips had become increasingly irritating, in that even as a signed-in member, often it would claim that my (and probably your) downloading limit had been reached...even if only one track had been downloaded, even if it had finished downloading five minutes ago.

Amusingly, when I switched over to eSnips after discovering it via Steve's site, Jonderneathica thanked me for finding it, and he switched over to eSnips. A week or so ago, Jon switched over to DivShare...so now I get to thank him for leading me to that site. We'll see how this works...a few test downloads and everything seems to be working okay.

(Addendum: this also means that people who've been unable to download stuff should be able to do so now...)

In other meta news, I clumb up on the roof and hooked up Google Analytics to the site, so now I can pick up all kinds of wild data-crunching...which mostly confirms what I suspected: I know most of you (readers, that is) by name. (And here I was hoping I'd be surprised by my multimillions of readers...) There are apparently, or supposedly, a few readers from far-flung locales such as Kuala Lumpur and Bangalore...but I'm not entirely certain they're human readers. If I'm wrong, and actual human beings who aren't interested in spewing a certain potted-meat food product are reading this, well hello to you in your wild other-end-of-the-world time zone.

entirely predictable headline

"Clown had child porn"

history blurs

More digging in the hometown crates here...

Here's a somewhat rare cover: the Violent Femmes doing "Positively 4th Street." The original, you'll note, really doesn't have a chorus or a bridge, just Bob endlessly exulting over the comedown his rival's encountered. The Femmes rearrange the song slightly to create a chorus for it out of thin air (okay: actually, out of the song's first line).

Another Violent Femmes track has pretty much completely gone down the memory hole. "World Without Mercy" originally appeared on the cassette version of The Blind Leading the Naked (and, I think, as the b-side of the initial single accompanying that album: "Children of the Revolution" maybe?). I can't find any evidence of its ever having been released on CD...except that this copy of it came my way courtesy of a friend who says it was on his version of the CD. I don't doubt him - but that version of the CD seems to have eluded every effort to catalog the Femmes' releases that I've been able to find.

Anyway, I think I can guess why the song disappeared. First, it's not a Gordon Gano song - and even though there are a handful of non-Gano tracks scattered throughout the Femmes catalog, this album already has a cover (the T. Rex song released as a single) and "Candlelight Song" (like "World Without Mercy," a DeLorenzo/Ritchie co-write - although I suspect that one's more Ritchie, just like this one sounds more DeLorenzo). And even though the band would occasionally mix up the sound with genre experiments and stylistic sidesteps, "World Without Mercy" is quite different from anything else in their catalog. Probably the most apt descriptor is neo-psychedelic (I'll note here that Brian Ritchie served a stint as Plasticland's lead guitarist prior to forming the Femmes): from the shakuhachi intro, to the filtered string chart, to the Arab percussion and DeLorenzo's becalmed vocal, it's pretty distant from everything else on the CD/LP version of this album...except for "Candlelight Song," another oddly arranged track. Still, I think it's a lovely song, its prettiness just barely saved from saccharinity through the oddness of the arrangement (that is to say, the arrangement is pretty at a 90-degree angle to the melody and sentiment).

Still, I'm surprised it hasn't shown up somewhere, on a compilation, say. (Perhaps it has, and I missed it.)

Violent Femmes "Positively 4th Street" (Something's Wrong 2001 digital-only)
Violent Femmes "World Without Mercy" (The Blind Leading the Naked 1986 cassette only)

as he and his campaign staff emerged all from a single Volkswagen...

The location from which former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson should have announced his presidential campaign...

the liquor store supreme

One secret to The Fall is that even though on the surface, all the songs sound the same (to borrow a phrase from Mac McCaughan...), closer examination reveals that the selection of detail, and variety within that selection, is often what elevates their superior material above their less-compelling work. In some ways, it's harder to do good work within a restrictive paradigm (say, riff-based rock), because the restrictions limit what you can do. While I'm prone to be impressed by musicians that are expansively creative in the sounds they use (two examples: the new Björk CD, and Beck's most recent one which, as it happens, I'm listening to right now), sometimes the sheer variety of colors overwhelms, to the extent that I'm not sure what I'm looking at. That might be intended - but it might sometimes be a distraction along the lines of a flashy magician's cape.

Anyway, back to The Fall: one reason I'm not warming to the songs on their most recent CD Reformation Post T.L.C. is that they seem, for the most part, to lock into a riff and just run with it - as opposed to subtly varying (or maybe they're varying it so subtly I just haven't heard it yet). Two illustrations...not exactly of this point, but sort of outlining the area around it, both sound files extracted from the live video performance contained on that CD. First, this band's version of "Theme from Sparta FC," from the most recent undisputably classic Fall album, The Real New Fall Album/Country on the Click (whatever it's called, in whatever version: in some ways I actually prefer the unreleased, early mix to either the British or American mixes: it tends to place murky synths and sharp guitars in equal billing). One reason this version doesn't quite work as well for me is that a lot of subtleties from the original(s) are missing: it's just sort of banged out - energetically enough, yes; and if this were the only version I knew, I'd still think it's a great song. But...it's not quite there yet. (Incidentally, my fingers want to make puns my brain won't cash: first version read "falls a bit short" until I realized it sorta punned on the name of the band...and my first substitution was "misses the mark" until I remembered who's doing the vocals. Even I have my standards...)

The other is a cover of Frank Zappa's "Hungry Freaks Daddy" (I think this is the third or fourth Zappa cover the band have done), originally from Zappa's first album. In that recording, in addition to the main riff (whose monsterositousness The Fall has amped up considerably), there are a couple of other sections, to vary the overall feel of the song. At least one of them is (intentionally) rather cheesy, to go with the satirical intent of Zappa's lyrics, and at first I missed the variety, if not the satirical cheese, of Zappa's version. Instead, The Fall basically interrupt that riff only once, for the big, tall, bearded bassist guy to do his funny voice bit (not sure which one he is, given that the band had two bassists at this time - I keep thinking it must be Rob Barbato, but that's mostly because "Rob Barbato" sounds more like the name of a big bearded bass player). The more I listen to it, though, the more I like the relentlessness of this version - and I do like the thickness achieved by two fuzz basses. (Talk about mud flaps...)

The Fall "Theme from Sparta FC" (Reformation Post T.L.C. from video track, recorded 2006)
The Fall "Hungry Freaks Daddy" (Reformation Post T.L.C. from video track, recorded 2006)

Uglatto!

I recently downloaded a copy of the way-out-of-print Hardcore Devo Vol. 2 1974-1977 which, as the title suggests, consists of very early Devo recordings. Compared to the first volume, this one has a higher proportion of underdeveloped, warped blues-like tunes: it was the mid-seventies after all. Still, the best songs (or at least the most interesting ones to me) are almost shockingly stark, raw, and crude (in both senses: "I Need a Chick" is the subtlest line in the song of that title). The clearest precedents seem to be the most caveman-like moments of the Stooges, along with some of the wilder, distorted electronics of the early German scene. The near-atonality and occasionally bizarre time signatures seem to be pretty much Devo's own.

"Mechanical Man" (from the first volume) is an early theme song of sorts: after a moody, ambiently creepy opening, detuned synths splurt in descending rhythms (5 beats, then 4, 3, 2): this theme was used in the band's early video The Truth About De-Evolution as the band's name was spelled out, letter by letter (or so I remember it: it's been a while since I saw the video...). The song itself is a curiously static and (aptly) robotic 3/4, with mechanically distorted vocals. The synthesizer solo is an exercise in uglification, with leering pitchbends, electronically harmonized distortion that renders the background nearly bell-like. As the title suggests, the lyrics explore one of the key ideas in early Devo: mechanization of the human (in the context of work or "fitting in").

The other notion Devo returned to in its early songs was the grotesquerie of the human body, particularly the sexual body. It would be pretty easy to conclude that raging geeks like the guys in Devo were frightened and appalled by sex because, uh, they never got any...but there's also the mid-seventies context to be taken into account. By contrast with the easy, sun-kissed sexuality in, say, contemporary songs by the Eagles, Devo wants to insist that sex is full of bad smells, sticky, murky liquids, and stickier, murkier feelings: if they could have released these songs with accompanying scents, I'm sure they would have. "Ono" (also from the first volume: no apparent relation to Yoko...) presents its sexual scenario in terms of domestic squalor, disease, mundane events, and the physical plainness of blunt, crude objects. The highlight of the song, though, is that creepy, squalling synth in the background (an effect they would recycle in "Shrivel Up")...and that chilling, half-cry, half-laugh in its last minute.

"Can You Take It?" (from the second volume) contrasts cartoon violence (Popeye, Yosemite Sam) with reality ("you and me wind up dead"; "Mama's in a basket, crossed a double yellow line"), along with trademark Devo surrealism ("dreamed I laid a toaster/Daddy caught me in the act"). I can almost imagine the music - straightened out and wrested into more conventional tonality - turned into a ZZ Top song. Curiously - although I doubt either band would have heard of the other this early in their respective careers - the Residents were doing something similar in uglifying rock songs (and, of course, both bands covered the Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"). Devo later used this uglification technique in the guitar solo in "Too Much Paranoias" - which is suspiciously reminiscent of the guitar solo in Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" run through a blender and played by an ill-trained robot on an electric guitar loosely strung with rubber bands.

There was a scene in the original version of The Fly showing a fly's-eyes point-of-view, refracted through hundreds of hexagonal eyes: every sound on "U Got Me Bugged" (and I think Devo deserves credit/blame for that annoying "U" thing, rather than Prince), including the vocals, is a sonic analogue of that effect. Nearly impossible to understand, the lyrics present the narrator as his lover's victim, pinned and otherwise entrapped in the manner of various insects. (Surprisingly, both Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale eventually entered into long-term marriages...)

Amazing, the unlistenably bland quasi-dance dreck the band ended up doing near the end of its career... My personal theory is that their movement from abrasively confrontational music, into less-confrontational songcraft, into synth-based pop, into blandola, was entirely intentional, an example of "de-evolution" in action. At least, I can hope that's true.

Devo "Mechanical Man"
Devo "Ono"
Devo "Can You Take It?"
Devo "U Got Me Bugged"

neither snow (x 9) nor rain (+ 17) nor gloom of night ( up to 3.5 ounces)...

Honestly, I have no problem with the postal service raising its rates (with the exception of the periodicals rate, which is a scandal, as this article illustrates) - but why oh why must they do so in the most complicated way possible?

With the exception of postcards and odd-shaped envelopes, in the past rates for various types of packages started more or less at the same place - which meant you could go to the post office, weigh a package, and readily determine the appropriate first-class postage (with those automated machines, you could even purchase that postage without having to wait in line). Now, you need to measure the package in all three dimensions, it seems...and each category of mail (letter, large envelope, package) starts at a different base rate. And letters - whose base rate will be 41 cents - are even weirder. Stuff a few more pieces of paper in there, and each ounce will cost you another 17 cents...up to three ounces. Stuff in another piece of paper or so, bring the weight up past 3.5 ounces...and now, you suddenly jump another 39 cents. So, a letter weighing between 2 to 3 ounces will require 75 cents of postage; a letter weighing between 3.5 and 4 ounces will cost you $1.31. What's with the enormous jump of 56 cents?

Then again, if your "letter" is too big to comfortably fold in a standard #10 envelope, you'll put it in a flat envelope...which has a different rate structure entirely: the base rate will be 80 cents, with 17 cent increases with each additional ounce. (If you're keeping score, once you get up to 4 ounces, you're at the same $1.31 rate letters are at. More accurately, letters more than 4 ounces are on the same schedule as "large envelopes." I guess this makes a degree of sense, as you can no longer fold them...but again, it makes for complicated math to start with.

Oh, as if that's not enough, if your "large envelope" is thicker than 3/4" (and that's not very thick), the base rate is $1.13. Again, the increment per ounce is 17 cents (they're at least consistent with that)...but what's with the incommensurable numbers? If that base rate had been $1.14, it would be the same as a 3-ounce "large envelope: wouldn't that be simpler for all concerned? As it is, I have no idea what sort of denominations stamps will be sold in: presumably, there'll be a basic 41-cent first-class stamp, and (one imagines) a 17-cent incremental stamp (since that's the basic ounce increment for all these types of mail)...but will there also be an 80-cent stamp (for the first ounce of large envelopes), or a $1.13 stamp (first ounce of packages)? Will they keep 39-cent stamps around for that fourth-ounce jump?

I doubt it. Instead, the post office is probably assuming that most people will just throw on stamps to the nearest available amount above the required amount. And of course (even though they'll ask you to pay shortage on incoming mail), they don't give change. So the effective rates are actually higher than they seem, at least for many items of mail.

paper and iron

One of the articles I've had my students read this past semester concerns itself with the effect of grading on education and concludes that, ultimately, grading itself degrades the quality of education. Grading does so (to oversimplify) by substituting desire for the grade for desire for learning, in other words, by substituting an extrinsic motivation for an intrinsic one. Rather than learning because one values learning, knowledge, or skills, all of those things are seen as secondary to something else, something external: in the case of the classroom, grades. Of course, those grades are not really their own goal either: they are seen as keys to another extrinsic motivator, which is, of course, success (i.e., money, and the things you can do with it).

One argument typically raised by students against the premise of this article is that without the motivation of grades, students will realize they can slack off and not be penalized. Of course, that's true only if you define "penalized" in terms of receiving a short-term negative: if you actually do value the learning and knowledge and skills, slacking off quite clearly penalizes you, in that you will not learn. But this criticism does have an element of truth, since our whole conception of effort tends to be keyed to the notion of reward. So it's most likely true that, at first, eliminating grades (in favor of, say, comments intending to help the student improve the quality of work) might lead to some students putting in less effort, simply because they do not see any immediate penalty.

But the tension here between avoidance of short-term penalty and awareness of longer-term reward is not just a part of education; it's a huge part - and problem - of capitalism generally. So long as you get paid, so long as you get the job, so long as you maintain the prestige necessary to ensure your continued income, the quality of the work itself simply does not matter. The usual argument is that people will recognize lower-quality work, favor higher-quality work, and penalize slackers and just-enoughers accordingly. But in fact, most people don't care, don't know, or can't afford to exercise such discernment, and so the good-enough will always outshine the quality.

What's worse, though, is the way extrinsic motivation is concomitant with an excessive emphasis on competition compared to cooperation (some readers will recognize that I'm continuing to follow the ideas of Alfie Kohn, the writer linked above). Competition is valorized as the necessary fuel for the motor of economic achievement, the essential ingredient, the lack of which (in the form of absent "incentive") is supposed to doom attempts to interfere with the natural workings of the market (such as by a government), since people without the bracing slap in the face of competition will simply accept what they get and not work any harder. But as I suggest, competition also breeds its own species of disincentive, since the need to appeal to a mass audience (even if a demographically pinpointed mass) tends to work against a desire for improvement in quality, since that quality is irrelevant to larger numbers of that audience.

Furthermore, I think an excessive emphasis on competition is corrosive and generates cynicism, since it poisons the idea that anyone could really be out for anything but his or her own self-interest and casts a dubious eye upon claims to the contrary (see my post above on global warming and scientists). This cynicism is real, though, and has real effects, in that most people resent being misperceived, and after a while give up attempts to beat their heads against that wall of cynicism, and simply give in: yeah sure I'm only in it for the money - and those folks who say they aren't are just liars. Furthermore, if such people actually do have money, they probably didn't earn it: a corrosive resentment follows, both from personal frustration and as a consequence of the inability to theorize non-economic motivations within that economic system.

Status and prestige are concomitant with money and success; lacking those two elements, people are forced back upon other devices to assert their status and position. The wealthy do not generally involve themselves in drive-by shootings, because they don't need to. Deprive a person of all the means of achieving respect and status, except for brute force, and don't be surprised if brute force is what the person uses.

(One irony on the whole emphasis on competition: it downplays the fact that cooperation is equally essential, even within a capitalist system. The chief economic actor these days is, in fact, the corporation: that is, a cooperative endeavor that exists because people realize it's more effective and more efficient to cooperate to earn money than for every individual to do so. Corporations themselves go on and on about "teamwork" (even when that's just a code word for "do as I say"), and even the elite tend to educate their children in classrooms, not solely with individual tutors.)

hoping to evade the Port Authority's new tax on incantations

...by making sure they're too drunk to enforce it. Some months back, the blogger Zoilus compiled the Destroyer Drinking Game, collating typical modes of language and reference in the lyrics of Dan Bejar. For some reason, it occurred to me that the resulting list also constituted a challenge of sorts: could I write a Bejarian lyric that incorporated every last item on the list (excepting the ones purely musical in nature, of course...)? Needless to say, having it make any sort of coherent sense would be irrelevant and untrue to the spirit of the thing.

Here I go, to express my bloated self - crack open a bottle of something:

Post-Minimalist Blues (in G)

They slunk out of a West Coast demimonde
hand in tattered glove with the Bible of the Scene
pocketed close, next to men's room prophylactics
and the kind of whiskey-scented glamour
born of innocence left for dead and hurled deep
into the fetid, rank waters of a disaffected harbor.
They vowed this night, they’d burn the swollen autumn
and rant like drunken fathers, pissing on the redwoods of Bohemian Grove.

But not you: oh no, you were like sugar left untasted,
a frame left on the floor, a novel more lionized than read.
You wore a Dali brooch, bought some drugs, and watched a band;
your coal heart was carved and inlaid with stones naively gathered
— As if it mattered.
You invoked executive privilege, and left an unpaid bill of rights,
so don't cancel delivery of your hogshead full of mead
until you destroy the garden gone to seed.

Alyssa, I told you
all men are just as faithful as a snowfall in April.
So when they said, "fuck off, princess" –
it was a debt you'd never settle, an athlete in poor fettle...
Oh Alyssa, if I could hold you
like a clapper rings a bell, like a prison holds a cell...
That's why they said, your mind no longer can hurt you —
it's forgotten how to rhyme, and it's running...

Stuck watching Gainsbourg tapes from 1969,
you jealous Pitchfork-reading kids all wish you'd been there.
She sang, "he’ll set the sheets on fire"
and fantasized about the burning lover
whose very breath made the air shimmy like Venezuelan hips.
And the dust from the rubble in the dingy Paris streets,
as your eminent Alsatian countenance well knows,
will cause the poet to cough and clear his throat before he sings this chorus:

"Alyssa, I told you
all men are just as honest as a bee caught in a bonnet.
So when they said, 'fuck off, princess' –
it was a check you'd never cash, someone's treasure in the trash...
Oh Alyssa, I could have told you,
but you'd send me straight to hell, no indulgences to sell...
That's why they said, your mind no longer can hurt you—
Broken clocks can't wait for time, and I'm running out of..."

welcome!

Born: to glenn mcdonald and Bethany Ericson, their first child, a daughter, Lyra, on May 1, 2007.

spring!

XTC "Green Man" (Apple Venus volume 1 1999)
Jethro Tull "Jack-in-the-Green" (Songs from the Wood 1977)
T. Rex "Beltane Walk" (T. Rex 1970)
The Acid Gallery "Dance Around the Maypole" (single 1969)