ranking the rankings

As I mentioned in the year-end top 20 albums post, out of curiosity I went back over my prior ten years of published top albums lists. The results are...unsurprising to me, and probably unsurprising to everyone else, too.

Twenty-nine acts have placed more than three albums in my top lists (which in some years went up to fifty). In many years, I didn't rank absolutely; because years in which I listed more albums tended to be years with more good music that I heard, I've ranked such groupings as tied for the highest available position. The raw info (in my sloppily typed form) is available here as an Excel file.

Here's the overall list. Artist first, number of albums placed in parentheses ("+" means an unranked EP was mentioned), then the average rank.

1. The New Pornographers (4) 1.25*
2. The Loud Family (4) 2.25**
3. The Caribbean (4+) 2.5
4. Spoon (4) 3.75
5. Interpol (3) 6
6. Lilys (4***) 6.5
6. Radiohead (4) 6.5****
8. John Vanderslice (5) 8.6
9. Low (3) 9.66
10. Ted Leo & the Pharmacists (3) 10
11. The Rock*a*Teens (3+) 10.33
12. Stereolab (5++) 10.4
13. Mark Eitzel (3) 11
13. Wilco (4) 11
15. Robyn Hitchcock***** (4+) 11.25
16. Guided by Voices (7) 11.25
17. Kristin Hersh (3) 11.33
18. Sam Phillips (3) 11.66
19. Yo La Tengo (3) 12
20. Elvis Costello@ (5) 13.6
21. Tris McCall (3) 14
22. His Name Is Alive (4) 14.25
23. Anton Barbeau (4) 14.75@@
24. Björk (4) 18
25. Robert Pollard (5+) 20
26. Mary Timony (3) 20.66
27. Joe Henry (3) 21.33
28. The Fall (4) 21.75@@@
29. Modest Mouse (3) 24

* Combined New Pornographers/A.C. Newman average: 1.2

** includes collaborative album with Anton Barbeau

*** Precollection was essentially reissued the following year under the title The Lilys; it had a different mix and a couple of different tracks. Although it was among the better releases of that year, I counted it as a reissue and did not rank it.

**** Combined Radiohead/Thom Yorke average: 9.4. (Curious and obsessively counting fans may be wondering: so which Radiohead album didn't make the cut? Due to laziness, busyness, or cluelessness (I can't recall which), the answer is, unbelievably, OK Computer...you know, that album that's probably the consensus for best album of the '90s. I listed only a dozen albums that year; no idea whether that meant I hadn't heard the album, didn't like it yet (I do now), or what. If I were to redo these rankings, OKC would push Radiohead's metaranking upwards.

***** Includes work released under the name Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3.

@ Includes all ranked albums with Costello's name on them, including collaborations.

@@ Does not include collaboration with the Loud Family; 12.8 if it's included.

@@@ The Real New Fall Album, formerly "Country on the Click" was issued in two very different versions in Britain and in the U.S.; the second version came out in the year after the first one. I didn't rank it. Also: if I were to have included the Von Südenfed album as an album by The Fall (under the Granny's Bongos Bylaw), the average would be 20.4.

Unranked albums that may have been released by these acts during these years do not count against the artist, because their absence may simply be due to my not having heard the album until after I did the lists.

From 2006 through 2003, best-of lists are typically the last entry of the respective year. For lists from 2002 back through 1996, go here.

2007 listening diary - the main event

As I've done every year for the past I don't know how many years, at year-end I've put together a mix consisting of tracks from my top 20 albums of the year. (As earlier entries in this listening diary make clear, in recent years I've also put together a large-format mix of songs I listened to during the year - regardless of when they came out. All the tracks on this list are from 2007 releases.) The previous entry (c'mon, just scroll down: you don't need a link all the time, do you?) lists those 20 albums, along with a bunch more and the usual verborrheac commentary.

The sequencing bears no relation to the ranking of the albums the songs are drawn from; I just put them together in an order that sounds good to me.

So: A Pillow Fight in Leather Pants: Makura-Nage.

1. The New Pornographers "All the Things That Go to Make Heaven and Earth" (Challengers)
2. Maximo Park "A Fortnight's Time" (Our Earthly Pleasures)
3. Charlotte Hatherley "Love's Young Dream" (The Deep Blue)
4. Field Music "Working to Work" (Tones of Town)
5. The Caribbean "Bees, Their Vision and Language" (Populations)
6. The National "Squalor Victoria" (Boxer)
7. The Hidden Messages "Over" (Animal Actors 1 and 2)
8. Interpol "The Scale" (Our Love to Admire)
9. Radiohead "Faust Arp" (In Rainbows)
10. St. Vincent "Your Lips Are Red" (Marry Me)
11. Caribou "Sandy" (Andorra)
12. Future Clouds and Radar "Malice of Stars" (Future Clouds and Radar)
13. Spoon "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb" (Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga)
14. Of Montreal "A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger" (Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?)
15. Paul McCartney "Ever Present Past" (Memory Almost Full)
16. The Fiery Furnaces "Navy Nurse" (Widow City)
17. Von Südenfed "Flooded" (Tromatic Reflexxions)
18. Kristin Hersh "Day Glo" (Learn to Sing Like a Star)
19. John Vanderslice "The Tower" (Emerald City)
20. Low "Murderer" (Drums and Guns)

For what it's worth, the albums I had the most difficult time with in selecting a single track to use were the Future Clouds and Radar album (just buy it, okay? there are like 20 excellent songs on it, and even the filler's fun, and short), Hatherley, Field Music, and Of Montreal. A curious coincidence: two tracks here feature somewhat disorienting distortion, which seem to be of a similar type (sounds like overloading a digital signal rather than analog distortion): the Vanderslice (he and co-producer Scott Solter use this sound extensively on Emerald City) and the Fiery Furnaces tracks.

Top albums of 2007 discussed at length.

Previous entry in the 2007 listening diary.

Check the comments for a link to the zip file.

2007's top albums

First, a terminological note.

It's a curious phenomenon that some people use the word "album" to refer to LPs - as in, "I never listen to my albums any more - I only listen to CDs or my iPod." An "album" is, of course, merely a collection of (in this case) songs, not a format for that collection.

I'm reverting to the term album here - because the term I've used since I started doing these tops lists ("CD") no longer makes sense. A good portion of the titles listed below did not enter my collection as CDs...and one or two exist only as digital albums. So "album" it is.

Anyway: it seemed to me, from the very beginning of the year, that this was likely to be a strong year for music. That's primarily an artifact of a lot of bands I like releasing music this year (good music), but there were also pretty decent albums from bands I wouldn't have expected them from (as well as a few disappointments). So this year's list goes pretty deep...and even beyond the list here, there are plenty of fine albums. Maybe I'll feel different in ten years - but as part of this year-end thingy, I also went through the past eleven years of my tops lists and collated them...and it was surprising to see albums crop up on those lists that I don't think are all that great anymore - and, in some cases, that I didn't think were all that great at the time. (More on that in a future post.)

This year is also probably the last year in which CDs as such will dominate. Even there, that fact needs an asterisk: a lot of these top CDs were music I purchased from eMusic and then burned to a physical CD, primarily because it's easier to listen to music on CD in the car and on the home stereo. (In both cases, though, CD-Rs full of mp3s are playable...and a couple-few albums listed here exist only as part of a CD-R.) Next year, though, I plan on buying a large hard drive dedicated primarily to music, including backup of most of my existing music collection. More of my listening will take place on my computer than ever before, and given iTunes' ability to organize collections of songs into playlists (i.e., virtual albums), and given the extensive storage space, most music that I acquire in data format will never make it onto a CD of any sort. We'll see how that changes things. I still think the album as an organizing principle has merit (in the latest issue of Wired, David Byrne interviews Thom Yorke, and that question is one they take up).

Enough preamble - start listing.

TOP TIER

The Caribbean Populations
The Fiery Furnaces Widow City
Future Clouds and Radar s/t
The National Boxer
The New Pornographers Challengers
Spoon Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

Both Spoon and the New Pornographers have put out four excellent albums in a row, and both acts seem to be slightly victims of the sort of backlash that says, wait, we can't keep naming the same bands to these lists year after year. Well, we can if they keep putting out such excellent music. Some folks didn't care as much for Challengers, as rather than sporting six or seven deathless hooks per song, the band's cut back to only two or three - and some songs actually slow down to breathing pace.

No one else seems to recognize the excellence of the Caribbean - probably because what they do is pretty subtle. If you're not listening closely, the songs might sound like pleasant background noise...and occasionally, Michael Kentoff's voice even strikes a somewhat Gibbardian tone. But the details - of composition, of arrangement, of lyrics - are far subtler than background music, and the songs tend to get better the more you listen to them. If I were to do a list of the top albums of previous years, almost everything by the Caribbean would end up more highly placed than it originally did.

And the Fiery Furnaces are beginning to live up to the potential demonstrated by their earlier work. The secret weapon this time is they've let their rhythm section breathe...and one way they've done that is by letting some ass-kicking '70s-style rock into the mix. No shit: one of the most cerebral bands around is now punching out Led Zeppelin-style riffs. Listen to "Navy Nurse" for proof. And Eleanor Friedberger is the band's not-so-secret weapon: she somehow takes brother Matthew's elaborately lengthy lines and recondite vocabulary and makes them sing - more than sing, groove. Not to kick Sasha Frere-Jones around any more - but to my ears, the way the Fiery Furnaces deliver lyrics would be impossible without the influence of hip-hop.

I'm not ranking each album individually, only in groups...but if I were ranking them, I'd be tempted to place the Future Clouds and Radar release at the very top. One measure of that: when putting together the mix of tracks from my top 20 albums this year, this album was damned near impossible for me to narrow down to a single, representative track. And as Paula pointed out, it takes sheer chutzpah to debut with a sprawling, double-disc set. Robert Harrison, formerly head of high-end power-poppers Cotton Mather, transcends genre limitations here. Okay, if you like a real tight, defined album with clear stylistic markers, you won't like this. But you should really just relax.

SECOND TIER:

Caribou Andorra
Charlotte Hatherley The Deep Blue
Kristin Hersh Learn to Sing Like a Star
Low Drums and Guns
Maximo Park Our Earthly Pleasures
Of Montreal Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
St. Vincent Marry Me
John Vanderslice Emerald City

How strong a year was it? We're down to number 14 here...and to my ears, any one of these albums could have been a number one - and in previous years, might well have been number one.

Caribou's Dan Snaith takes a right turn and wins: focusing more strongly on songs and vocals than his previous more instrumental, experimental approach, Andorra delivers an album top-loaded with brilliant psychedelic pop songs. It gets a bit weirder and more abstract as it goes on.

Charlotte Hatherley's second full-length album begins with a swirly, keyboard-led instrumental - a gutsy move for someone whose first album was primarily notable for Hatherley's guitar-playing and winning vocal melodies. Although the rest of the album adds to her previously established songwriting and playing strengths, the diversity and range on display here make me really curious where she's going to go next time. She and Andy Partridge are mutual fans: she might just eventually reach his level as songwriter.

Kristin Hersh's album again combines the intensity and focus of her solo work with the power of her band work, only this time the songs and performance are even better than on her last, fine solo album Sunny Border Blue. Meanwhile, Low continues to evolve from its "slowest band in the world" tag, incorporating more electronics and an increasingly dark emotional range. Maximo Park's second album is a grower: not quite as impressive off the bat as their debut. Of Montreal's album was somewhat overlooked in year-end polls (probably because it came out so early in the year...and had been leaked in fall of 2006), but it's still an emotionally powerful and musically assured and wide-ranging album. John Vanderslice continues his string of excellent albums and character studies, this one being perhaps a bit more personal.

And watch out for St. Vincent: Annie Clark (who basically is the band) wrote and performed nearly everything on this album, and sometimes it's hard to believe it's the same artist so diverse are the approaches and arrangements. Actually, if the whole album had been up to the quality of its best tracks, this would have been in the top tier: she's actually too diverse, and some of her experiments don't quite work. But she's still incredibly young, and this is her debut.

THIRD TIER:

Field Music Tones of Town
The Hidden Messages Animal Actors 1 and 2
Interpol Our Love to Admire
Paul McCartney Memory Almost Full
Radiohead In Rainbows
Von Südenfed Tromatic Reflexxions

Interpol slips a little bit: still a good album, but the arrangements and song structures aren't quite as inventive, and they're going to need to diversify their sound a bit, I think. Radiohead is one band that's definitely done that in the past; here the changes are a bit more subtle, the two most notable being an increasing use of orchestration (by Jonny Greenwood) and acoustic instrumentation. Field Music has a very fresh sound that mixes in almost Gentle Giant-like prog touches (odd meters and harmonies, the occasional jerky rhythm) with classic British-style pop, but with a touch both light and quirkily energetic. The biggest surprise here is Paul McCartney: you can thank the internets for this one's presence here, as I would otherwise have long since given up on McCartney's relevance - but he and his new, highly caffeinated label streamed the track "Ever Present Past," and I was pleasantly surprised by the lack of excessive production polish and the engagement and creativity of the arrangement. The rest of the album is nearly as good, and suggests that it's always dangerous to utterly write off the old guys: it's possible to remain relevant, even to keep your ears to the ground and not come off like a trend-chasing codger. Speaking of the aged, while the actual album released this year by The Fall (Reformation Post T.L.C.) was a bit disappointing, Mark E. Smith's collaboration with the two Mouse on Mars guys under the name Von Südenfed is much better. He seems engaged and challenged by the music, whereas the official Fall seems a bit too professional. Of course, Von Südenfed really is The Fall: MES famously stated in an interview that "if it's me and your granny on bongos, it's The Fall"; therefore Von Südenfed is The Fall. (No one's granny plays bongos, however.)

Finally, pleasant surprise number two: out of nowhere (specifically, somewhere in England and my inbox, respectively), the Hidden Messages blew me over with something that's either two EPs with nearly the same title or a single album in two parts. I'm calling it the latter, just so it qualifies for these lists (no EPs, no compilations, no live albums unless mostly new material). I don't care if this hasn't officially been released yet - it's among the best music I heard this year, so it's making my top 20 list regardless of what format it's in or whether it's generally available.

HONORABLE MENTIONS, TIER ONE:

Anton Barbeau and Su Jordan The Automatic Door; The Besnard Lakes The Besnard Lakes Are the Dark Horse; Division Day Beartrap Island; Mitch Easter Dynamico; His Name Is Alive Xmmer; The Mitchells Slow Gears; Robert Pollard Coast to Coast Carpet of Love.

HONORABLE MENTIONS, TIER TWO:

Githead Art Pop; Brad Laner Neighbor Singing; LCD Soundsystem Sound of Silver; Ted Leo & the Pharmacists Living with the Living; Robert Pollard Standard Gargoyle Decisions; Tegan and Sara The Con; Wilco Sky Blue Sky.

HONORABLE MENTIONS, TIER THREE:

Andrew Bird Armchair Apocrypha; Imperial Teen The Hair The TV The Baby and The Band; Joe Henry Civilians; Knit Delicate Pressed; Liars s/t; Maritime Heresy and the Hotel Choir; Mary Timony Band The Shapes We Make; The Ponys Turn the Lights Out; Saul Williams The Rise and Inevitable Liberation of Niggy Tardust; The Shins Wincing the Night Away; Testa Rosa s/t.

SOME GOOD EPs:

Ghosty No Nothing; Of Montreal Icons, Abstract Thee; Robert Pollard Silverfish Trivia; Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3 Sex, Food, Death...and Tarantulas; Wire Read & Burn 03.

THE LOCAL ZONE:

I confess that between late hours and our state's insistence on permitting idiots to blow foul-smelling, toxic fumes into my lungs and all over my clothing and hair, I rarely get out to hear local bands any more...and I haven't gone out of my way to hear local recordings, either. That said, a number of Milwaukee acts put out good music in 2007: of the ones I've heard, here's a list, ranked approximately:

Maritime Heresy and the Hotel Choir
Knit Delicate Pressed
Testa Rosa s/t
Fever Marlene Civil Wars
Call Me Lightning Soft Skeletons

THE OVERRATED ZONE:

The main entry on this list? Arcade Fire's Neon Bible. It's not a bad album by any means...but to my ears it's just nowhere near as good as almost everything listed above. Its chief flaw is this: its ambition isn't merited by the quality of its songs. Specifically, the grander the instrumentation (pipe organ, orchestra, choir), the harder it is to avoid having that grandeur overwhelm the song. When the imbalance is particularly extreme, the result is sheer comedy (as Frank Zappa knew, playing "Louie Louie" on the monstrous Albert Hall pipe organ...). Neither the melodies, the chords, the structure, nor the lyrics of any song on Neon Bible can stand up to that sort of arrangement...and when the band piles on orchestra and choir and pipe organ, well...it isn't quite "Louie Louie" but it starts to come close. The corollary of this notion, by the way, is that the easier it is to "justify" an arrangement, the harder it is to make a song powerful enough to stand out in that arrangement. That is (as Radiohead said), anyone can play guitar: no one thinks it odd when Joe Shmoe picks up an acoustic guitar at open-mic night at the corner coffeehouse. (They would think it odd if Joe Shmoe walked onstage followed by a fifty-piece choir.) However, Joe Shmoe has to be a very good songwriter and performer for his simple acoustic-guitar music to stand out, to not blend into the background with all the other acoustic-guitar-slinging singer-songwriters.

The other main album on the overrated list, for me, is Modest Mouse's We Were Dead Before He Could Finish Typing the Really Long Title. Again: not a terrible album...but the two things that sink this one (do you see what I just did there?) are: Isaac Brock's increasingly annoying and mannered "singing" (yelping, gesticulating, shouting, grimacing, bellowing, barking, muttering, etc.), and Johnny Marr's ongoing "I Am the Invisible Guitarist" act. That last isn't necessarily a problem as such...but it's rather astonishing that the man whose playing on the first few Smiths albums was so clever, concise, and distinctive has spent the last twenty years disappearing onto other people's albums nearly as anonymously as any studio hack.

Next entry: the tracklisting for my year-end mix drawn from my top 20 albums.

2007 listening diary - part G

The last section of my 2007 listening diary (the mix of tracks from my top 20 releases of the year is yet to follow) consists (almost) entirely of cover songs I listened to a lot this year. (There's a sort of cover embedded in the Michael Ian Black comedy bit - the reason it's in this section...) This one's called "Snake Fist (Shequan)":

121. Michael Ian Black "Satanic Messages"
122. Thurston Moore & Mike Watt "Fourth Day of July" (Tom Rapp)
123. Yeah Yeah Yeahs "The Diamond Sea" (Sonic Youth)
124. Engineers "Song to the Siren" (Tim Buckley)
125. Doveman "Airbag" (Radiohead)
126. Grizzly Bear "He Hit Me" (The Crystals - written by Phil Spector)
127. Joe Jackson "King of the World" (Steely Dan)
128. Manishevitz "King's Lead Hat" (Brian Eno)
129. Matthew's Celebrity Pixies Covers "Wave of Mutilation (Bee Gees Version)" (Pixies)
130. Ted Leo "Dancing in the Dark" (Bruce Springsteen)
131. The Fall "Hungry Freaks Daddy" (Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention)
132. The Vile Bodies "Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)" (David Bowie)
133. The Futureheads "Hounds of Love (acoustic)" (Kate Bush)
134. Of Montreal "Trouble" live on-air (Lindsey Buckingham)
135. Sara Quin ft. Kaki King "Sweetness Follows" (R.E.M.)
136. Robyn Hitchcock & John Paul Jones "Not Dark Yet" (Bob Dylan)
137. Final Fantasy "Paris 1919" (John Cale)
138. Division Day "Enjoy the Silence" (Depeche Mode)

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' cover of the Sonic Youth track reveals something that might not have been obvious in the way Sonic Youth usually arranges its own songs: Thurston Moore's a fine songwriter in the traditional sense, able to write music that works just fine with voice and acoustic guitar. (Lee Ranaldo's pretty good too - one reason Sonic Youth has outlasted many of its peers similarly interested in noise exploration.) Grizzly Bear's cover of "He Hit Me" is simultaneously creepy and compelling: it set me off to try and find the original version, which as it turns out is difficult to find (apparently a lot of folks would rather it be forgotten). The most obvious change is, of course, the gender of the narrator - but when I first heard this version I assumed that the somewhat odd harmonic basis of the song, and perhaps the curious, bolero-like rhythm Grizzly Bear uses, were their own adaptations...but once I heard the original, I realized that no, all that's there in the original. I'm not sure why it hadn't occurred to me that Joe Jackson would be a Steely Dan fan...but hearing this cover, it's obvious and quite evident in his own music. Ted Leo's version is nice in stripping away all the '80s-synth glop that half-ruins Born in the USA for me. The Fall's third or fourth recorded cover of a Zappa song (too lazy to go through all 750,000 other Fall songs to list them) appears on the DVD supplement to their latest, rather uneven recording. The new band seems entirely too deferential and too professional - a spark is missing. Fortunately, Smith had another version of The Fall this year (by the Granny's Bongos Bylaw - to be explained in the top 20 post to come).

(Update) There is no zinc in the comments. Earlier sections of this year's listening diary appear below this entry (too lazy to do a link).

the no-time-for shelf

I'm pathetic at finishing books. Not that I abandon them - I'm fairly compulsive about finishing books once I've started them - more that I don't have time to read them. (Perhaps I type too much...) So I thought I'd make a little list of the books in my to-be-read pile - and for amusement, maybe look back at this a year from now to see how many I've actually managed to read. They're in the order they're sitting there...which is basically order of acquisition.

Robertson Davies Fifth Business (informal workplace book exchange)
P.D. James An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (English dept. free book area)
Anne McCaffrey The Ship Who Sang (English dept. free book area)
Daniel Handler Adverbs (purchased new)
Colson Whitehead Apex Hides the Hurt (purchased new)
China Miéville Iron Council (purchased new)
Susanna Clarke The Ladies of Grace Adieu (purchased new)
Douglas Hofstadter I Am a Strange Loop (purchased new)
A.M. Homes This Book Will Save Your Life (informal workplace book exchange)
Sherry Turkle Evocative Objects (English dept. free book area)
LD Beghtol 69 Love Songs - 33 1/3 (purchased new)
Franklin Bruno Armed Forces - 33 1/3 (purchased new)
Ben Sisario Doolittle - 33 1/3 (purchased new)
Don DeLillo Falling Man (gift)
Philip K. Dick Voices from the Street (gift)

2007 listening diary - part F

The sixth part of this year's megamix, entitled "Black Tiger Pounce":

102. Barry Dworkin "Rock and Roll Dreams'll Come Through"
103. Wondermints "Arnaldo Said"
104. Herman Jolly "1,000,000 Feet Below"
105. Adam Franklin "Syd's Eyes"
106. Diane Cluck "Easy to Be Around"
107. Siobhan Donaghy "Ghosts"
108. Virgin of the Birds "You Haven't Talked to Tara"
109. The Safes "Only in Your Mind"
110. Socalled "(These Are) The Good Old Days"
111. Dirty Projectors "No More"
112. Castanets "You Are the Blood"
113. They Shoot Horses, Don't They? "That's a Good Question"
114. Taxi Taxi "Family Doctor"
115. My Teenage Stride "To Live and Die in the Airport Lounge"
116. Gravenhurst "Black Holes in the Sand"
117. Minus Story "In Line"
118. Bockman "Tied to the Moon"
119. Prefuse 73 "The Class of 73 Bells"
120. Idle Tigers "The Shadow Falls Across the Fridge, Frank"

About that "Barry Dworkin" track: no, this is not the Barry Dworkin who's a physician with a Canadian call-in radio show, nor is this the Barry Dworkin who sells real estate in California - this is the Barry Dworkin who's the greatest living songwriter known to mankind. Sadly, his backing band, the Gas Station Dogs, could not be with him for this performance (he hasn't found the right guys yet), but I think you'll agree that this track is "The Godfather of rock'n'roll songs." Godfather III, probably - or maybe Godfather XIV, the one where Dane Cook and Pauly Shore co-star. Adam Franklin is the former main guy in Swervedriver, a band that's been ridiculously overlooked and whose catalog is really due for reissue. Every music blogger on the planet has had something to say about that Dirty Projectors album (the one that radically reimagines Black Flag's Damaged); as an entire album my impression is it might wear thin, but individual tracks are brilliant. My Teenage Stride seems to quote Brian Eno's "Cindy Tells Me" - not sure if that was intentional (any more than if the band's name is an homage to the Mercury Rev song "Young Man's Stride"). Judging from the Castanets' song, more bands should use heavily reverbed clarinet.

The usual postscript: check the comments for links, and the prior installments are available beginning here.

2007 listening diary - part E

Break out the horns and hooters (no Steely Dan here though - although one of their songs is covered in a later mix), it's the fifth part of my 2007 megamix, A Pillow Fight in Leather Pants, entitled "Cotton Boxing (Mian Quan)":

83. Flight of Conchords "Business Time"
84. Marnie Stern "Put All Your Eggs in One Basket and Then Watch That Basket!!!"
85. Monarch "Warning"
86. The Chemical Brothers "We Are the Night"
87. Savath + Savalas "Era Tu"
88. Deerhunter "Fluorescent Grey"
89. The Sharp Things "An Ocean Part Deux"
90. Magik Markers "Last of the Lemach Line"
91. Tokyo Police Club "Be Good"
92. SNMNMNM "Addy Will Know"
93. A Place to Bury Strangers "I Know I'll See You"
94. Division Day "Reversible" (Ginormous mix)
95. Plushgun "Just Impolite"
96. Head of Femur "Leader and the Falcon"
97. Bottom of the Hudson "Rusty Zippers"
98. Manatella "Apocalyptic Owl"
99. Sleeping States "The Next Step"
100. Great Lake Swimmers "Put There by the Land"
101. Los Campesinos! "You! Me! Dancing!" (ep)

Several Marnie Stern tracks were interesting this year - the woman is an insane guitarist. This was the year of Deerhunter: in addition to a 14-track mix from Jonderneathica, nearly another dozen tracks came my way via various music bloggers (pretty impressive for a band with only about twenty-some songs to its official discography)... The SNMNMNM track is especially for librarians: can anyone tell me which items are referenced via Library of Congress catalog numbers in this song? The band A Place to Bury Strangers seems to have conceived the odd idea that Joy Division and the Jesus and Mary Chain were actually the same band - not a bad idea though. Plushgun is one of three or four bands whose unsolicited demo links impressed me enough to make these mixes (one of them, as I mentioned earlier, made my top 20 CDs of the year...fairly impressive considering, uh, there's no actual CD yet. Technicalities...) Los Campesinos! (their screamer - they seem to like them) rerecorded this track in 2007; the version here (which I first heard in late December 2006) is a bit rawer, but I think all the better for that rawness.

As always, check the dictatorship of the commentariat (where what made Milwaukee famous has made a monkey of me). (The previous entry in this series is here - earlier entries are linked backwards serially. Or - to recycle a joke - surreally, if you prefer.)

2007 listening diary - part D

Welcome to the D-side of our platter, sports fans - I'm compiling just for you, covered in sequins.

This sector is known as "The White Eyebrow (Bak Mei)" and expresses yet another form of the ancient martial art of pillow fighting. Contents may have settled during shipping but should still be viewable using the secret decoder ring as follows:

62. Patton Oswalt "Physics for Poets / The Dukes of Hazzard"
63. Portastatic "You Blanks" acoustic
64. The Mutton Birds "She's Been Talking"
65. The Knife "Neverland"
66. Tarwater "When Love Was the Law in Los Angeles"
67. Psapp "Needle & Thread"
68. Creeping Jenny "Mouse Bite"
69. David Kilgour "Sun of God"
70. David Vandervelde "Nothin' No"
71. Dylan Hears a Who "Too Many Daves"
72. Camera Obscura "Phil and Don"
73. Winterpills "Broken Arm"
74. Cezanne "In Snow"
75. Lost in Hildurness "Floods"
76. A Sunny Day in Glasgow "Our Change into Rain Is No Change at All (Talkin' 'bout Us)"
77. Felix Kubin + Coolhand "There Is a Garden"
78. Momus "Bonsai Tree"
79. MF DOOM "Tick, Tick..."
80. Dntel "Sundial"
81. The High Llamas "Apricots"
82. Ra Ra Riot "Each Year"

This one goes from political to weird...which, you know, makes too much sense. The chorus of the Portastatic track breaks my heart. A couple of otherwise unreleased tracks here: the Creeping Jenny track (which I believe showed up at the estimable Little Hits site), the Momus track (via his own blog Click Opera), and - curses! - the subsequently disappeared Dylan Hears a Who track (one of five or six), which was shoved with great force into the deepest, brownest folds of the nether orifices of the Seuss Estates' legal team. A damned shame: setting Dr. Seuss' words to a dead-on Dylan impersonation (dead-on both musically and vocally) is a brilliant idea that serves both artists. Apparently, some lawyers didn't see it that way. (E-mail me for more info.) Speaking of legal issues: I'd thought that Beatles samples were never able to be cleared. Someone forgot to tell MF DOOM - who finds here that a glass onion makes a wobbly and queasy-making watercraft. And sadly, Ra Ra Riot is one of two bands in this megamix (that I know of) to have suffered tragic losses during 2007: their drummer drowned earlier this year.

Check the comments, check the guy's track comments. (The prior installment is available here - and earlier installments are linked therefrom.)

let's visit the peeve zoo!

Today's entry: "security questions" at websites (such as for credit cards) that ask you personal questions which do not have a unique answer, or whose actual, real, correct answer cannot be used because of a dumbass requirement that the answer have a certain number of characters.

Sorry, but questions like "who is your favorite singer?" and "what's your favorite restaurant?" are terrible "security questions"...because their answers will change over time, and it's very difficult to recall, several years later, what you might have answered years ago. (At least that's true if you know lots of singers or eat out frequently.)

Worse yet, then you choose an option whose answer you're reasonable certain to remember ("what was the first name of your childhood best friend?"; "what was the first name of the boss at your first job?"), and then you can't use them due to the character-number requirement. Sorry - but if someone's name is "Don" or "Li" and no one in the entire universe ever called them "Donald," or there is no longer version of the name, the question is ruled out.

So, in recently filling out one of these in order to pay a card online, it's iffy odds whether I'll remember how I answered whatever their idiot questions were.

Are there people who think the answer to "favorite restaurant" is actually a constant?

pilgrim's prog-ress; or: give the drummer some whatfor

When I was in my early teens, I was a prog-rock fan. Not too unusual, since it was the mid-seventies - and I never got much beyond the obvious names, with the most left-field I got being Gentle Giant on one hand and Hatfield & the North on the other - but then punk rock happened, and although it took me a few years, in the late seventies I saw the light.

And like many newly converted, I proceeded to become obnoxiously intolerant of my former vices. This went on for several years, until I started noticing suspiciously prog-friendly moments in the oeuvres of some of my favorite current bands (let's say it's the late eighties or early nineties: some odd chords, some odd rhythms, the occasional burst of hotshit playing or synth soloing). It was then I realized how to stop worrying and love the prog - or at least, some of it. A lot of my old favorites returned to my playlist (one exception, whose music I still dislike strongly: ELP).

That didn't mean, however, that certain prog habits didn't still irk. Here's one: I think I will blame Chad Wackerman for this, as Zappa's longest-tenured drummer, since it's something that shows up in a lot of his seventies and eighties work: while Zappa isn't wholly prog, he certainly incorporated - or anticipated - many of the genre's key traits. Ladies (if any are still reading: prog is only marginally less female-friendly than metal) and gentlemen, I present to you: the impossibly complex but utterly grooveless drum fill.

My theory as to how these come about runs something like this: drummer's thinking, okay, the song's in 7/8 here. Let's see...I've got a four-bar solo here...four bars of 7/8 is 56 sixteenth notes...let's subdivide that into three groups of 18 and one group of two, then subdivide the 18 into 7, 6, and 5, and then I'll play counter-rhythms to each of those subdivisions, playing 8 notes across the 7-note span, 10 notes across the 6, and 4 across the 5...and then, the second group of 18 I'll play that in reverse, and then the third time I'll play the whole thing twice only twice as fast - oh wait, there are 2 sixteenth-notes at the end - uh, I'll hit all 48 pieces of my kit as fast as I can! The drummer practices and practices and practices until he can play this ridiculous complexity perfectly, even at the 320 eighth-notes-per-minute tempo of the track; the recording comes out, and a bunch of other drummers' jaws fall to the floor; they spend hours and hours trying to figure out what the drummer did, and when they finally figure it out, they practice and practice and practice until they can play it, so they can impress other drummers (and, in an astonishing example of wishful thinking, girls - they hope).

Trouble is, the end result sounds like a 48-piece drum kit falling down a flight of stairs, sped up thirty-two times.

2007 listening diary - part C

Here's the track listing for the third part of my 2007 megamix, this section entitled "Southern Sleeping Dog":

41. Scharpling & Wurster "Jock Squad" (excerpt)
42. Les Savy Fav "What Would Wolves Do?"
43. Sarah Blasko "For You"
44. Kate Tucker & the Sons of Sweden "Everything Went Down"
45. Prints "Too Much Water"
46. The Trolleyvox "I Call on You"
47. The Buddyrevelles "Moods of..."
48. Smart Went Crazy "Funny as in Funny Ha-Ha"
49. Clear Tigers "Boredom"
50. Mike Viola "Girly Worm"
51. Nyack "Savage Smile"
52. Mystery Jets "Diamonds in the Dark"
53. Scott Matelic "Thoughtless"
54. Jeremy Enigk "Oh John"
55. Miracle Fortress "Have You Seen in Your Dreams"
56. Iron & Wine "Boy with a Coin"
57. The Three 4 Tens "R.U.B.A."
58. The Shake "Stop the Show"
59. The 1900s "Cold & Kind"
60. Sam Amidon "Little Johnny Brown"
61. Shocking Pinks "I Want U Back"

Some comments: Scharpling & Wurster (from "The Best Show on WFMU") perfectly capture the sudden mood swings from self-congratulatory to absurdly aggressive that characterize the jock personality. That "Too Much Water" track has a bit of a purple tinge to it, don't you think? Say the band's name out loud... The Smart Went Crazy track contains maybe my favorite lyrics of the year (my year, not theirs - it was recorded in 1997), with the reference to "the time that you said that you were afraid to confront your fear of confrontation"... I will note that Mike Viola blatantly steals the beginning of the theme of the Addams Family TV show for his track...I'm not entirely sure why. Does anyone know who's singing on the Scott Matelic track? I couldn't find any info on the singer.

Once again, check the comments. Earlier installments are here: part A and part B.

Two Holiday Tunes

We're finally home after the annual whirlwind tour of relatives, and so it is that this song by Testa Rosa is most apt: "I Want to Be Alone on Christmas (Here with You)" (Testa Rosa's self-titled CD nearly made my top 20 this year; it's certainly one of the better releases by Milwaukee bands this year).

And in a rather different mood: A.C. Newman's been busy lately, pumping out new tunes - here's one of the most recent, called "Joseph, Who Understood" (it's one of two b-sides for the holiday-esque EP from The New Pornographers - a-side is Dan Bejar's "The Spirit of Giving").

Testa Rosa "I Want to Be Alone on Christmas (Here with You)" (Testa Rosa, 2007)
The New Pornographers "Joseph, Who Understood" (The Spirit of Giving (ep), 2007)

2007 listening diary - part B

Continuing with my mix of tracks I listened to often during 2007, here's part B, "Drunken Clinch":

20. National Lampoon "Magical Misery Tour"
21. Harry Nilsson "You Can't Do That"
22. Wammo "Lowriders on the Storm"
23. The Jennifers "Good Morning, Starshine"
24. The Field "From Here We Go Sublime"
25. The Lichens "Vevor of Agassou"
26. Boy in Static "Violet"
27. Coltrane Motion "Twenty-Seven"
28. Salem 66 "Pony Song"
29. New Young Pony Club "Hiding on the Staircase"
30. Machine Go Boom "All the Way to PA"
31. Bishop Allen "Flight 180"
32. Hazeldine "Tarmac"
33. Jackson 5 "I'll Bet You"
34. Scissors for Lefty "Marsha"
35. Southerly "Soldiers"
36. Don Lennon "John Cale"
37. The Holy Modal Rounders "Give the Fiddler a Dram"
38. Panda Bear "Bros"
39. Pterodactyl "Three Succeed"
40. Ulrich Schnauss "Stars"

Thots: The National Lampoon track is notable in being a Lennon parody whose lyrics are almost entirely written by...John Lennon. That is, they're drawn from the infamous 1970 interview with Jann Wenner, later published in Rolling Stone (and, I believe, as a book). Lennon was at a rather confused and confusing moment in his career and life, and believing at the time in utter honesty and emotional blurt, made a complete ass of himself. Such an eruption of bile, pettiness, envy, and general emotional retardation...so much that Lennon ended up apologizing for and repudiating much of what he said here. So how is it that I end up actually admiring Lennon more after all that? Because I'm guessing that most people, committing themselves to a course of holding back nothing, would still hold back quite a bit, for fear of, well, making a complete ass of oneself. Not John Lennon: in fact, I'd say he made at least an ass and a half here. The music is brilliant: a dead-on impersonation of Lennon's singing and writing style circa 1970-71, complete with "primal scream" ending and imitation Yoko.

The next couple tracks are sort of mashups without being mashups. Nilsson here weaves together quotations both musical and lyrical from several different Beatle songs in his cover of "You Can't Do That." Wammo, rather than sample the tracks he weaves in here, re-plays them instead, for a slightly more organic take on the concept. The Jennifers disprove the adage that you can't polish a turd: taking one of the worst songs ever, stripping it of its mind-bogglingly stupid wordless chorus, and crossbreeding it with Stereolab's "Crest" and the Byrds' "So You Wanna Be a Rock'n'Roll Star" result in a new song that is...shiny and not at all turdesque. The Field deconstruct one of the greatest pop records ever (The Flamingos' version of "I Only Have Eyes for You") into a series of isolated moments, and somehow pull a similar sense of wonder out of what begins as a disorienting buffeting of sound.

A couple sequences of tracks here illustrate something I do fairly often in mixes: juxtapose tracks based on language rather than sound (if they sound like crap next to one another, though, I'll change it). It was, in fact, a total coincidence that the 27th track in this mix was titled "Twenty-Seven."

The rather hilarious Batman reference in the Hazeldine song reminds me of something I should have said last time: many songs in this mix (and particularly the comedy bits) use the sort of language that still makes censors squeamish, so if your house has children whom you'd prefer to remain innocent of such blunt usage of our native tongue, well, you've been warned.

I heard this Jackson 5 tune on a local public radio station late one night...and had a really hard time believing at first that it was a Jackson 5 song. In a sense, it's not: Funkadelic wrote it and recorded and released their version a little bit later.

I like the cute gambit in the Scissors for Lefty track of first naming the chords of the little break section, and then renaming the chords with women's names. Might help young (female-attracted) guitarists learn chords more quickly...

Congratulate Don Lennon: he's used sleighbells in a track without evoking either Christmas or the Beach Boys. (Oops - now I've ruined it.) He does evoke John Cale, his titular subject, rather amusingly (I love the line about the "double-l").

Once again, check the comments for el linko. (For the first batch of tracks, see here.)

Where's the hipster vat?

It defies genetic probability that not just a "look" - clothing, hairstyles - but an entire body type would somehow become more prominent and popular in the wake of a trend...yet walk around any town's hipster ghetto, and I swear there's a secret underground laboratory in which largish heads with larger hairstyles are propped atop stringbean bodies with no ass whatsoever, issued plastic glasses, and set loose to bitch about Kevin Barnes selling out.

2007 listening diary - part A

As I've done for the past few years, I've put together a megamix featuring the songs I listened to a lot this last year, other than those on full-length CDs I've acquired. Most of the songs were released in 2007, but many were not: like most people, I certainly don't listen only to new music.

Anyway, what's new this year is my distribution method: in each entry, check the comments for a link to a zipped file. Each batch is cunningly assembled such that if you want, you can burn them onto a single CD - and everything except for the album-based mix (the last one) will fit onto a single CD-R (as mp3s). There should be no gaps between tracks if you're burning them or playing them on iTunes, etc.

Sometimes, additional info will be available in the comments field for each mp3 (such as where I initially heard the track).

Each posting's mix will be available for about a week - after that, e-mail me. On with the show: presenting my 2007 mix, A Pillow Fight in Leather Pants (in several parts).

I began each batch with a comedy track - not necessarily because I listened to loads of comedy this year, but because it provides a nice break (and a clear marker, if you put the whole damned thing in a single playlist, of where those breaks are). Here's part A, entitled "The Eight Feathers":

1. Paul F. Tompkins "Elegant Balloons/I'm So Rich"
2. Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings "Nobody's Baby" live on radio
3. The Monks "Cuckoo"
4. Ringo Deathstarr "Swirly"
5. Charlemagne "8x10"
6. Black Moth Super Rainbow "When the Sun Grows on Your Tongue"
7. Morning Recordings "Sugar Waltz"
8. Aesop Rock "None Shall Pass"
9. Campag Velocet "Drencrom Velocet Synthemesc"
10. Pinback "From Nothing to Nowhere"
11. Voyager One "Wires"
12. The Sky Drops "Sentimental"
13. Tulsa "Shaker"
14. Speck Mountain "Girl Out West"
15. Destroy Cowboy "1000 Candles"
16. Get Him Eat Him "Exposure" demo
17. Muscles "Lauren from Glebe"
18. Phosphorescent "Wolves"
19. P.J. Harvey "Grow Grow Grow"

Some comments: I'm not sure if "Ringo Deathstarr" is the best or worst band name ever...but I am sure that band members have worn out their copies of Loveless several times over (that lick, even that drum part, is rather familiar). The Morning Recordings track presents the first of two Prince-based puns in this year's mix. Both the Tulsa track and the Destroy Cowboy tracks came to me unsolicited from bands I'd never heard of - nice when that works out! (Even nicer: one such band made my top 20 albums of the year.)

Also: as good a time as any to do the animal inventory, for 2007 continued the trend of having animals in either your band's name, its song titles, or both. Here's a list:

In band names: bears (twice), deer, horses, llamas, pandas, ponies, tigers (twice), doves, birds generally (twice), moths, pterodactyls.

In song titles: hounds, mice, ponies, wolves (twice), cuckoos, falcons, owls, worms.

And there were more in the album-based list...

natal noise

Musicians weigh in on the subject of birthdays:

David Lowery's cynical and a bit drunk; Björk is off in the stratosphere singing about God knows what; and Kurt Heasley, such a downer, is so bitter he's even denying that it is his birthday.

But it is mine.

(It's also Mike Watt's and Billy Bragg's. Apparently, taking my first name into account, it's a day for people with double consonants at the ends of their names.)

Cracker "Happy Birthday to Me" (Cracker, 1992)
The Sugarcubes "Birthday" (Life's Too Good, 1988)
Lilys "Your Guest and Host" (Eccsame the Photon Band, 1995)

the snow turned into treacle

Dan Fogelberg is dead.

My personal theory is that even he finally got so sick of having to hear "Same Old Lang Syne" a zillion times this season that (a la Oscar Wilde vs. the wallpaper) he decided to go instead.

Fogelberg is also responsible for what I believe is the single worst line from any song, ever (and, not coincidentally, the most unintentionally hilarious line ever) - I refer, of course, to "his blood runs through my instrument," from "Leader of the Band."

Really. That's what the line is.

music news today

Jesus Christ has returned to earth and has started an online-only label whose first two releases will be Chinese Democracy and the new album by My Bloody Valentine.

do not read this title

Here is a picture of a billboard on an interstate about a mile north of our house (you clickee make biggee):
Just how much not thinking things through is on display in this sign?

1. The layout and font choices here don't really suggest "public service announcement." They're rather more advertising-y, and the red, black, and white color scheme evokes a sort of vague attempt at "edginess" (a word I despise), as does the perspective treatment of the main phrase "DISTRACTIONS DO."

2. Much of the text isn't legible from a distance (I intentionally took the shot so at small size, it wouldn't be legible). The word "DO" is scrunched up, and rather a blur. The word that stands out most is "DISTRACTIONS."

3. The first two items, combined with the picture of the young blonde woman...well, I confess my first thought seeing this sign was that someone had opened a "gentlemen's club" called "Distractions."

4. That graphic doesn't make a lot of sense. It appears to be framed in the driver's side mirror - but from a perspective that the driver couldn't see. The woman is talking on a cell phone, yes...but what's the reddish blur behind her? An oncoming vehicle (with red lights?)? A sheriff's squad car with its lights flashing? Is she supposed to be the "distracted" driver, about to be in a crash? Where are we in relation to her?

5. The print at the top of the billboard is way too small - given that it mentions Sheriff Clarke's name, I'm surprised it wasn't in type larger than everything else on the billboard...

6. The message - that more crashes are caused by distractions than inclement weather - is obviously bullshit. Crashes go up in inclement weather, no? So even if one is "distracted" by blowing snow or slippery roads, surely those things are contributing causes. And what's the point of the ad anyway? "Don't worry about the slippery, slushy mess - drive as fast as you want so long as you're paying attention"?

7. And of course, what everything above adds up to, the message of the billboard is hilariously at odds with the billboard's very presence. The absurdity of its message is more readily glimpsed if its central idea is rephrased to KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE ROAD! Which message, of course, impossible to do if you're reading the billboard.

stop! thief!

Even musicians who aren't in Led Zeppelin have been known to apply a five-finger discount to musical materials on occasion...although their half-inching is usually a bit more subtle.

Here are some examples.

First up, I noticed this when it came up on shuffle at work the other day: the track "Town & Country II & III" by Ashley Park (I think they should have called themselves the Low Llamas) nicks part of its melody from the Beatles' "You Never Give Me Your Money" (specifically, the part where Paul sings "any jobber got the sack").

And here's Oranger, rather obviously acknowledging the source of its borrowed melody by calling their song "Sorry Paul": its verse melody is taken from the "ooh-ooh" section of "Every Night" by Paul McCartney.

And to prove that it's not only McCartney whose tunes are borrowed, here's Mitch Easter stealing the guitar lick from the Guess Who's "No Time" for his "Sights Set on Heaven."

Antecedent to all this (not posted) is of course Neil Young's "Borrowed Tune" - which (Neil explicitly acknowledges, both in the title and in the lyrics) takes its melody from the Rolling Stones' "Lady Jane."

Ashley Park "Town & Country II & III" (Town and Country, 2000)
Oranger "Sorry Paul" (The Quiet Vibration Land, 2000)
Mitch Easter "Sights Set on Heaven" (Dynamico, 2007)

workin' for the yankee dollar

Paula's doin' it, the Summervillain's doin' it - so even an educated flea like me can do it - let's post a picture of our workspace:
Damned camera's acting up again, with the blurry horizontal lines. I did a totally half-assed job of trying to blur them over...oh well. Unfortunately, even at the largest size (follow the link and click on the alternate sizes link above the Flickr image), the details of the various objects are somewhat illegible...although I just realized that's probably for the best, as some of them are student ID numbers on portfolios I've been grading. Still, a couple-few CDs (not part of my actual job) might be identifiable...anyone care to guess which CDs were sitting on my desk when I took the photo?

a little number we like to call...

I've been a bit Wire-obsessed lately. So it started as a joke on the music mailing list - the notion of a Wire Christmas album. Naturally, I had to make up a track listing:

Two Presents in a Room
Snow in My Joints
Fat Man Blurred
Three Gift Rhumba
1 2 Xmas U
Mr. Red Suit
Dot Dasher
Sleigh Chasers
Jingling Tongues
Pink Tree
Mincemeat Bingos
Our Santa
Bell Bell Bell (Dugga-Dugga-Dugga)
No Reindeer on the Ice
You Hung Your Lights in the Tree/A Christmas Touch

I claimed it was released late in 2001 in an exclusive edition of 100 copies, via posteverything.com (where actual Wire recordings can be purchased), under the title My God You're So Gifted!.

The packaging, supposedly, featured such ridiculous notions as Bruce Gilbert dressed up like Santa, Robert Gotobed/Grey in an Ebenezer Scrooge costume, Graham Lewis as an elf, and Colin Newman as...Mrs. Claus!

Of course, I couldn't leave well enough alone...and so, "1 2 Xmas U" had to come into actual existence, courtesy of Monkey Typing Pool. And so, 'ere it is again.

The lyrics, in their entirety (as adapted from the Gilbert/Newman original at pinkflag.com):

Saw you in a mall (asking for sacks), sat on a lap - sat on the fat man
Caught you with a package (wrapper), caught you with a package
1 2 Xmas U

Monkey Typing Pool "1 2 Xmas U"

PS: As far as Christmas releases by early post-punk bands go, this has it all over the infamous Gang of Four Christmas release, given away to striking workers...which was a piece of cardboard the size of a 7" single with the words "Return the Gift" on one side and on the other, a manifesto on why Christmas was a capitalist ploy to sucker the working class into submission.

Damned humorless Marxists.

someone's sincerely

More noise typage: "Victorian Photographs" Monkey Typing Pool. (Lyrics and music-geekery here; recording here.)

This one grew out of an intriguing paragraph in Geoff Dyer's The Ongoing Moment, in which Dyer noted that nineteenth-century photographic streetscapes often have a haunting, bereft quality partly because the long exposure time required meant that evanescent figures in the camera field - such as people - were simply not there long enough to register: only the buildings and streets remained. (The passage is on page 217 of the Pantheon hardcover edition.) The first verse (which, quite intentionally, is one long sentence) is drawn from ideas in that passage. Then I had to figure out what to do with it.

A few random details: this is, I think, only the second song I've recorded with no outside samples at all. Almost everything you hear is, in its origins at least, an acoustic guitar - in fact, the same, single track of an acoustic guitar, manipulated a zillion different ways. The solo was cut and pasted from a single sawtooth wave generated in my music software, sped up and cut to size and assembled into the solo, then sonically gone over brutally with the digital fuctwithizer. It might have been easier to learn to play it, even if only at half speed. The rhythms are tricky though. I had two models for the solo: architecturally, the long solo in the middle of Television's "Marquee Moon," which is essentially a four-minute elaboration of a D-major scale rising up over a couple of octaves; and in feeling and effect, Robert Fripp's solo in Brian Eno's "St. Elmo's Fire," which alternates between long, becalmed notes and frenzied, firefly-like jottings of chaotic excitement. The bridge background is a mix of voices (eight of 'em, four voices doubled) and keyboard flute (the same four parts, plus a bass mostly an octave lower). The flute was originally recorded off the cuff as a guide for the vocal parts, but I got used to hearing it as a placeholder while I was doing the rest of the track, and liked it (it reminds me of the flutes in Mogwai's "Fear Satan"), so I just mixed it in with the vocal backdrop. The song also features a ShopVac and a table saw, both speed-altered to (approximately) an A. (As I said, even more geekly music talk is here.)

Monkey Typing Pool "Victorian Photographs" (December 2007)

from the Howard Hughes office-supply collection

Okay, I guess I wouldn't want to touch it right after Gareth Keenan did either.

shark gotta swim!

Anyone who parks at the UWM Union parking garage is aware that at many times of the day, the line extends beyond the garage's entryway onto the street - but anyone who parks there also realizes that typically, cars flow fairly quickly into the garage as other cars exit the nominally full garage, thereby letting new cars into the structure.

For some reason, last year or so, the city (I presume, since this is a city street) posted this signage:

The intent is, presumably, to discourage those waiting for parking from queueing on the street.

It is an utterly asinine, pointless, and possibly dangerous policy - so far also, completely unenforced.

Any time you prohibit a behavior, you need to analyze what people are likely to do instead - and if your reason for prohibiting the behavior because it's potentially harmful, you should not prohibit it if the likely alternative behavior is more harmful. (Attention: anti-drug zealots...) In this case, I can't see what possible harm is caused by vehicles queueing on the street: there's no parking there, no bus stop there, and no pedestrian crosswalks in the area (other than, of course, the sidewalk vehicles have to cross to get to the entryway proper). The only offense I can imagine is against the Teutonic rage for order that also motivates Milwaukee's annoying night parking ordinances (certainly, those ordinances are not used to allow the city to remove snow from street parking areas overnight...), but that hardly seems like a very compelling reason.

Okay, so if the "no waiting" rule were strictly enforced, what would people do instead? Well, they still need to find a place to park (the sign suggesting the use of the new Pavilion lot is well-intentioned...but that lot is at the very northeasterly edge of campus and quite a cold, wet, wintry walk all the way to the sciences buildings on the southwestern part of campus: not useful for all people, in other words). Aside from the Union garage (and the Pavilion), there are only a couple small surface lots and one small underground lot that allow non-permit parking for more than a couple of hours. Those are typically full, so often the Union garage is the best, central parking alternative. So, these drivers are going to either circulate around this block of campus, increasing an already serious traffic glut on those streets, or they'll hang around, sharklike, on the other side of the street. In either case they'll essentially be racing one another to get back to the lot entryway sooner than others - and of course, they'll always lose out to folks who happened to have arrived at the entryway when an opening appears. It will lead, in other words, to lots of angry, frustrated drivers circulating on overcrowded campus streets already overflowing with pedestrians. Bad idea.

Of course, one could always finesse the question of what behavior actually is prohibited by the sign. (Note: I blatantly violated it to take this photo. I stopped my car, put on the flashers, and framed and focused the shot through my windshield. No other cars were around - but I definitely plead guilty to that violation.) For example: if indeed you are in a line of cars waiting to get into the garage, at what point does the slowness and occasional stopping characteristic of busy traffic turn into "waiting"? I could argue that in fact, even if I'm sitting in the same place for five minutes, I'm simply driving, stuck in a momentary traffic jam, in this lane designated for those turning into the parking garage. I certainly can't go forward - I'd crash into the car in front of me. And if I'm set to make the turn into the entryway, and there's a crush of pedestrians I have to wait for, surely they have the right of way, and I'm not "waiting" in that instance either?

Presumably, Officer Friendly, after being annoyed at my smartassery, would suggest I simply move on and drive away. Ah, but this lane is clearly marked as being only for right turns, not for through traffic: are you suggesting that I violate a law and use it for temporary driving (since I'm already in it) even though my destination would not be the right turn into the entryway? In real life, at this point I'd almost certainly get written up for whatever possible violations our long-suffering officer could come up with.

Then again, if the sign were actively enforced, that would entail officers stopping vehicles in the "no stopping, standing, waiting zone" - thereby creating exactly the clot of stopped vehicles the sign is intended to prevent. Or would someone just stand on the sidewalk, waving cars on - to meet another officer parked somewhere else who'd issue a ticket?

I seriously doubt anyone will ever be ticketed for waiting in line to get into the parking structure. If anyone gets a ticket here, it will probably be for doing what I did to take the photo: that is, actually stopping and waiting when it's possible to do otherwise. It's the conjunction of the "no waiting" signage with the obvious fact that this area is used by cars queueing to get into the parking garage that creates the problem here.

I half suspect the real intention of the signs is simply to encourage people to use the Pavilion structure...but simply putting up a sign saying that, without the warning- and rule-based signage, would violate the legalistic mindset around parking and traffic ordinances. Simply making a helpful suggestion? We can't do that. We can make up bizarre, unenforced ordinances instead, and hope people will simply interpret them right.

Seems like a waste of effort.

are we not only wanting freedom?

There are only so many notes, and only so many ways in which they can be arranged. (Someone can do the math, I'm sure...and if I recall, some serialist did exactly that. Of course, once you start combining the notes, taking tone, texture, volume, and so forth into account, you're not actually going to exhaust the possibilities at all.) So it is that occasionally, musicians will hit upon rather similar means to express vaguely similar ideas. Sometimes, the influence of the earlier upon the later track is obvious and logical.

Sometimes, it's neither obvious nor logical. Then again...

In 1970, Genesis released Trespass, its first release that sounded somewhat like the Genesis people over the age of 40 remember. (People under the age of 40 think of Genesis as "that band Phil Collins used to be in." This is not a discussion I am prepared to have - note only that Collins is neither the drummer nor the singer on this album.) The prog version of Genesis emerged here, and probably the most lasting song on this album is its nine-minute closing track "The Knife." It's a fine example of early prog, in which the somewhat underdigested traces of electric British folk-rock and psychedelia are clearly discernible, and whose ambition and multi-part structure was still novel and bold in its attempts to get beyond the confines of the three-minute love song. But what's important for my purposes here is the guitar part that goes along with the lyrics "stand up and fight..." - listen to that, and keep it in your head.

And then listen to "Space Junk," from Devo's first album. Doesn't the guitar line underneath the list of cities sound rather familiar?

Now at first, you might think that this is sheer coincidence: a bunch of prim British boys, steeped in fantasy literature and featuring a guy who played a flute and dressed up like a flower, versus the twisted little degenerate creeps from a decaying American industrial city, all proto-punk with their cynical, dark humor...what could they have in common? Other than a coincidental guitar lick, of course.

Then again, what could more typical of mid-seventies nerdy, awkward guys in their early twenties than listening to lots of prog rock? And that sense of humor? Well, vaguely anti-war and anti-authoritarian though Gabriel's "Knife" lyrics could be, they're not terribly amusing (at least not on purpose)...but flash-forward an album or two, and look at the situation conveyed in "Get 'em Out by Friday"...wherein the merged interests of large property owners and genetic engineers lead to restricting human height to four feet, so as to be able to cram more people into smaller space. I can almost imagine General Boy issuing such an order.

Genesis "The Knife" (Trespass, 1970)
Devo "Space Junk" (Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, 1978)

I don't want to know where graphic artist Jack Horner stuck his thumb to pull out this pie

I think the time has come for the formation of a new organization: Citizens Against Pie Charts. I have no idea why the media seem so addicted to them - because quite often they're eminently unsuited to their apparent task, to show the relation among various quantities of related items. And that is because people really are not good at determining relative scale between two "pieces of pie" at odd radial angles within a pie chart. A pie chart does one thing well: it shows that the various components of whatever it's measuring add up to a whole. How often is that really what needs to be known? A lot less often than pie charts are used. Probably nine times out of ten when you see a pie chart, a column graph would convey the desired information far more clearly and cleanly. But America's infographics editors have a smutty passion for the pie chart - and so its pointless reign in newspapers, business reports, and websites continues.

Here, for example, is a pie chart showing the relation among six different items. I chose the quantities somewhat arbitrarily, only making sure that some of them were rather close.

Which is larger: quantity 4, or quantity 5? Is the sum of quantities 2 and 3 larger than quantity 1? Pretty damned hard to tell, isn't it.

Now try answering the same questions, this time looking at a column graph built from the same data:



Much easier, isn't it? And if I'd wanted to, I could have color-coded those columns (I blame Excel) to make the graph a bit more interesting and the distinction among the various items more clear.

If for some reason it was also necessary to see how those items parsed out as a proportion of the whole, why not put small pie charts, each one oriented with its particular quantity's left margin straight up and down, at the bottom of each column, to show the way each item fits into the overall numbers? The graphic would be more complicated, but still much clearer than the pie chart.

I'm famous for 1/15th of a second among people famous for 15 people

So I'm going through my RSS reader, checking up on the various blogs I monitor, and I'm reading the latest entry at Lord Whimsy's site (I heartily recommend his book, by the way: amusing, urbane, thoughtful, and even incisive at times) on the phenomenon of "microcelebrity," a term Whimsy relates to Momus's remix of the famous Warholian aphorism: "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people." In this context, it was highly amusing to find Whimsy quoting...me - from a comment I'd made at (I think) Momus's website.

Bill really needs a comma

Via Josh at The Comics Curmudgeon. (click on the title).

And the indistinct, murky, white shapes are not helping...

the 21st century breathing down his neck

Here's a thoughtful, complex response to Morrissey's latest insertion of his foot into his mouth. While I don't think Morrissey is a thoroughgoing racist, his comments are naive at best, and they reflect a curiously static notion of cultural identity (and, as Momus and several commentors point out, a rather ironic one, given Morrissey's most recent places of residence). England is, in fact, the bastard depository of any number of streams of European and, lately, non-European blood: it's the second-last place on earth anyone should be babbling about any sort of static culture. (Guess where the last is.) Momus's confessions that, essentially, he understands how Morrissey might feel - but from the outside looking in at cultures he admires - is useful also for undercutting the strand of idealism and false identification that lurks underneath the most mainstream notions of "multiculturalism": too often, the "multi" in the phrase is reified into a static notion of cuisines, costumes, and musics, without recognizing that it's just as "authentic" for a South African musician to respond to and incorporate hip-hop into his music as it is to incorporate older, native musical traditions (which, often, are nearly museum pieces at the local level - which makes them, ironically, far more alien-seeming than the hip-hop the musician hears every day).

This whole discussion bears some relation to the Frere-Jones foofaraw about race in music - in that I think one thing he does is focus on certain surface-level signifiers of cultural influence while ignoring deeper structures. For example: it's almost impossible to find any sort of rock or pop recording from the last fifty years whose rhythmic basis does not bear a deep influence from African-derived rhythmic models. Both at the level of the ubiquitous accented offbeat and, far more subtly, the swung or uneven subdivisions of the beat below the pulse level (either the quarter- or eighth-note), African influence is apparent even in places where most listeners would not expect it...such as in the drumming on a Toby Keith record, say.

Of course, if neither the listeners nor the musicians recognize the influence as being African-derived without thinking about it, is it still legible as a cultural influence? Or has it been totally assimilated into another culture? Or, is it more accurate to say that the whole question rests upon static notions of what's in and what's out of a culture: as if there's a "European" tradition forever and ever, upon which an "African" tradition forever and ever can work its influence, leading either to a new hybrid (and presumed dynamic) cultural work-in-progress or to a new, hypostasized static culture?

Ultimately - to return to our large-quiffed friend - any imagination of a one-time, static culture is just that: imagination. The tendency is for whatever prevalent model-just-gone to lose its placement in time and become, in the imagination, what had always been. (For example: the Leave it to Beaver-style nuclear family...which, in its particular formation, was actually relatively new at the time of that show's broadcast, replacing more extended family formations both among urban and rural Americans.)

my new invention

A pair of glasses featuring a series of parallel vertical panes of glass with small handles at the top that allow the panes to be moved horizontally, in order to allow obsessive font geeks to visually correct painfully bad kerning in public places.

puckishly

Since I follow sports primarily via The Onion's sports page (mostly by way of asking more sports-literate friends to explain the jokes to me), I was informed that apparently, there's still at least one professional hockey league (it's called the "NHL," which stands for "National Hockey League." That's kind of a funny name for an organization whose teams are almost evenly distributed between two nations, but I digress...). I was under the impression that there had been a strike, and I'd just assumed all the players had realized that actually, they weren't all that interested in chasing a little rubber thing around the ice with a stick and had gone home to drink beer and watch TV like the rest of us.

In fact, that's a rather parochially American view. Canadians, it seems, so depend on their hockey fix that its absence can affect the caliber of the nation's thought: the void left by the missing season of hockey so messed up the Canadian mindset that they went and elected a Bible-thumping conservative as their prime minister (Stephen Harper) in the first election after the missing hockey season.

I wish I could say there's a lesson here...but I can't. Maybe we should invade the next Republican convention with a phalanx of skating Canadians. (I'm sure many Republicans are offended at a sport which actually allows a guy out there on the ice with a jersey that says SATAN on the back, in front of the Canadian God - who's called "Brian" - and everyone.)

NaBloPoMoNoMo

NEW YORK CITY, Dec. 1 (API) -- The catastrophic blog-loss which downed major portions of the Internet earlier today was likely caused by the simultaneous implosion of thousands of bloggers, exhausted from their participation in November's "National Blog Posting Month." Consultant O.B. Wonk-O'Naughby noticed the difference immediately as the last day of November passed into the new month. "I felt a great disturbance in the blogosphere," Wonk-O'Naughby said, "as if millions of bloggers suddenly cried out in exhaustion and were suddenly silenced."

Fortunately, the collective exertions of bloggers have negligible effect on the economy, politics, or much of anything, so life is expected to carry on as usual. Wonk-O'Naughby says, "I expect we'll be seeing new rants about Bill O'Reilly and Al Franken, new posts of mp3s from bands no one's ever heard of, and new pictures of cute kittens with charmingly ungrammatical captions in a day or so. Me, I'll be YouTubing the latest episode of my sock-monkey-based Darth Vader/Yoda slash videos as soon as I can get around to it."