leap!

Here's some leap-themed music for your leap day. (Yes, there's only about an hour left in the day...but if I can't be late on leap day, when can I be late?)

Count Basie's Kansas City Seven "Lester Leaps In" (1939)
Tirez Tirez "Leap in the Dark" (Against All Flags, 1988)
Creeper Lagoon "Lover's Leap" (Take Back the Universe and Give Me Yesterday, 2001)
The Sammies "Panther Leap" (The Sammies, 2006)

Frederick avers

In case you were wondering:
(Via Stereogum; via not-quite-credited boyshapebox's "Song Chart Meme" Flickr photoset.)

geeknits being picked

It's always sorta bothered me on science fiction movies and TV shows, where some sort of matter transporter device always manages to readily distinguish between which matter belongs to the person and which just happens to be nearby. Oh - and miraculously, recognizes clothing and things the person's holding as transport-marked, also.

Seems to me that even if you imagine that you could somehow code for biological entities such that a transporter would recognize the physical entity as a unit and not, you know, the floor beneath the transporter pad, etc., there'd be no particular way to recognize clothing, or the communication device the person's holding, etc.

In fact, it strikes me as weirdly analogous to the problem of spam-recognition: while various algorithms do a reasonable job of recognizing much spam as spam, it's still not as accurate as human eyeballs in spotting out obvious spam (though it's much, much quicker and less prone to succumbing to sheer tedium).

I think it'd be much more believable if a transporter device were less physics-based and more a matter of extreme mental discipline, the sort of thing that takes years of intensive training for the transportee to focus on exactly and only what needs to be transported - sort of a yogic discipline scenario.

Of course, I read very little SF these days...so far all I know, a million stories have taken up exactly this concept.

whip it on me gym

The big music news this week is...new old never-before-heard Velvet Underground song. And yep - it's true. The legendary Gymnasium tape - from a sparsely attended April 1967 show, also including the first live performance of "Sister Ray" - has made its way at last to bootleggers. (Thanks to Dana, former proprietor of The Mystical Beast, for alerting me to this one before Stereogum and Pitchfork got hold of it...) There's an interesting discussion of the tape's provenance and legitimacy - beginning before anyone had actually heard it - at this site.

For a lost, thirty-year-old tape, the sound is pretty damned fine. It's a soundboard recording, so Reed's vocals are very high in the mix, and you can barely hear Moe Tucker's drums - but the guitar playing is scorching, particularly on "Run Run Run."

Oh, and that "new" song? It's called "I'm Not a Young Man Anymore" (not true then, true now), and while it doesn't cause any major reevaluation of the VU catalog, it's an interesting song in that it has a far stronger blues flavor than nearly anything else they recorded.

(The whole thing is available here - and I think there's another few links buried in that discussion somewhere, if that one isn't working.)

The Velvet Underground "Run Run Run" (live, April 1967, at The Gymnasium)
The Velvet Underground "I'm Not a Young Man Anymore" (live, April 1967, at The Gymnasium)

gaah!

I still refuse to accept the annoying set of words formed along the lines of "thirtysomething" (i.e., "twentysomething" etc.), after the now-decades-old TV show and for some reason utterly beloved of hack journalists everywhere. The world got along just fine for centuries without a word ending in "-something" to describe the general age of people: "in their twenties," "in their late thirties," and so on. (Side question: is age always even relevant? We're addicted to generation-mania...see the related and annoying trend of vague generational names...)

And now the producers of the old Thirtysomething TV show (I'm just a puddle of peeves today: yep, I'm refusing to lower-case the name of the show...) are back with a new series, to be called Quarterlife (no points if you guessed that it, too, is supposed to be lower-cased) and dealing with the oh-so-traumatic maunderings of a bunch of folks in their early to mid-twenties.

Oh joy - now pop-sociology -loving journalists will have a new term, and a new phenomenon, to bluntly hit us over the head with: not enough for there to be a "midlife crisis," no; now we need a "quarterlife" crisis as well.

Grr.

I am going to go search YouTube for videos of cute kitties to calm myself down for a while.

string quartet

Violins "The Launderer" (Pink Water, 2006)
John Fiddler "Another 21st Century Day" (Miniatures 2 compilation, 2000)
Mike Viola "That Part of Me Is Dead" (Lurch, 2007)
The Cellos "Rang Tang Ding Dong (I Am the Japanese Sandman)" (1957)

That Violins CD was thrown into a batch of moving-sale CDs by Michael over at No Karma, and when I realized I'd also just acquired some music by Mike Viola, well, the subject was obvious. And then I realized that I'd come up with the idea just in time, too...because today is my friend Tonia's Jack Benny birthday...and she's a professional violist.

because what holds the world together is contests without prizes (sorry, Mark and the wind that blows through Gena Rowlands' hair)

For no good reason, I spontaneously started writing Beck lyrics earlier today. I do hope this doesn't mean that teams of 10,000,000-year-old alien lawyers will descend in silver spaceships to reallocate my pengram chips or whatever.

Anyway: the contest is, finish the song! Points off for making any sense at all.

Drip-dry modem in a wet dream parking lot
Gettin' strangled in the tangle of a carburetor hum
Flash flood humping in a mousehole packet
With a Krispy Kreme coffee and a paper bag bum

Go the Semicolons!

They're not just a good idea; they're grammatically correct!

PS: the title of this post is a bit of an in-joke...hello to those of you who get it.

iTunes, memeTunes

An iTunes meme, copied from flasshe and hotrox: I think I did this one a few months back in the comments area of yellojkt's blog...but I can't seem to find it. For added value, I'll list the subsequent items as well where appropriate

Anyway, iTunes libraries tend to be in flux - so it'd be interesting (if I ever find that comment) to compare. This is my laptop's iTunes - I have different (although partially overlapping, no doubt) collections on the computer in my school office and at my other job.

On wit' da show:

Total length:

3970 songs, 10:15:25:48 total time, 19.75 GB. (This will increase massively once I buy my external drive: waiting on a big rebate from another purchase to buy that...)

First and last songs (by title):

"A'int No Funki Tangerine" [sic] Campag Velocet (I remember this is the same; next one up is "A19" by Maximo Park); "#9 Dream" John Lennon (next: "8x10" Charlemagne)

Shortest and longest songs:

"Underpants Gnome Jingle" from South Park (0:16); "Outro" by The Fall (0:36)
"Summerisle Horspiel" Momus and Anne Laplantine (24:42); "In Held 'twas in I" Procol Harum (17:32)

Sort by album title - first and last

Okay, this doesn't really work: for various complicated reasons due to the way my mp3 database sorts mp3s, I tend to remove info from the album field. So most of the stuff in iTunes lists no album. But of those that preserve album title, it looks like this (none of which are albums I actually own as a whole):

A Place to Bury Strangers (self-titled), The Above Ground Sound of Jake Holmes
The Yellow Princess (John Fahey), The Yellow Box (David Cunningham and Peter Gordon)

Sort by artist - first and last:

A-Frames, A Place to Bury Strangers
!!!, 9853

Top 5 played songs: (another category that doesn't really work: iTunes increments these whenever a song reaches its endpoint, no matter where it started; when I do mixes, I'll go from the last few seconds of one track into the first few of the next to check transitions...so any song used in a mix will show far more plays than songs not part of a mix.)

Portastatic "You Blanks" (acoustic)
The Holy Modal Rounders "Give the Fiddler a Dram"
The Jennifers "Good Morning Starshine"
Les Savy Fav "What Would Wolves Do?"
New Young Pony Club "Hiding on the Staircase"
(mix)

Broken Social Scene "Ibi Dreams of Pavement"
Joy Zipper "Out of the Sun"
Bullette & Hangnail Phillips "The Finest Gifts"
The Faint "Dust"
A-Frames "Flies"
(non-mix...and this is entirely iTunes' own preference in shuffling...in fact, despite these tracks' "most frequently played" status, I cannot recall any one of them goes. I should also point out that the numbers aren't high: from 10 at the top to 8 at the bottom. One measure of the diversity of a playlist - or rather, of the diversity of play-style - is the ratio between the highest number of plays and the total number of tracks: the higher it is, the more that listener literally plays favorites. Or iTunes does...)

Word Count:

Sex: 14
Death: 19 (obviously, I'm not a metal fan...)
Love: 142 (obviously, I'm not a metal fan...)
You: 361 (it's a drag you can't specify entire words only; I wonder how that would compare to "I"?)
Home: 43
Boy: 54
Girl: 76

First 5 songs on Party Shuffle: (to be clear: I refreshed the list first)

"The Air We Breathe" Figurines
"Seratonin" Simple Kid
"Blow Up (Tomorrow)" The Yardbirds
"Commemorative Transfiguration and Communion at Magruder Park" John Fahey
"Bombs" The Impossible Shapes

A curious note: I have exactly one track performed by John Fahey in iTunes...yet here it is, representing in two different categories.

Finally: a new category...

Oldest track added: "The Swish" (demo) The Hold Steady (12/21/04)
Newest track added: "Bee of the Bird of the Moth" They Might Be Giants (2/14/08)

Addendum: I thought I'd check one of the other two iTunes, so here's the results for my work computer:

Total: 668 songs (1.7 days, 3.56 GB) - just got a new 'puter in January, so not much yet.

first/last title "About the Ocean" The High Water Marks / "7 Deadly Sins" Traveling Wilburys

Short/long "Museum of Hopelessness" Game Theory (0.11) / "Ommadawn Part 1" Mike Oldfield (19.19)

Album title Andorra (Caribou) / 6 Peace EP (Schneider TM)

Artist Add/The 1900s

Most Played "Lunch Hour Pops" Broadcast; "Call Off the War" James Angell (2 plays ea.); a bunch tied with 1 play: first 3 alpha "Let It All Burn" Add; "Under Your Spell" Amber Benson (Buffy sdtk); "Cosmo Retro Intro Outro" Amon Tobin

Party Shuffle first 5: "Sapphire Eyes High" Serena-Maneesh; "Reality Check" Schneider TM; "Fit and Working Again" The Fall; "Please Say Please" Dwight Twilley Band; "Wholy Holy" Marvin Gaye

sex 1, death 0, love 35, you 61, home 2, boy 7, girl 5

early "The New Stone Age" Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark; late "I Hope You Never Die" Black Fiction

Mahatma Gandhi and Doris Day

It's been too long since I've posted actual new musical material. Here are a couple of songs that have come my way recently.

First up is DeVotchKa's "Transliterator" (yes, they spell the band name that way, for no good reason - and speaking of transliteration, the band's name is an oddly transliterated version of the Russian for "young girl" - also used with the same meaning in Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange). The melody and arrangement are somewhat reminiscent of Andrew Bird's recent work, but the arrangement's a bit fuller. Also something a bit unusual in these click-tracked days: I'm pretty sure the song speeds up slightly as it intensifies in the second verse. Of course, music used to do that all the time, but so many recordings now are slave to the rhythm (sorry Grace) that it actually sounds unusual by now. I also like the way both the piano/violin intro and the overlapping melody lines sort of tumble across themselves.

Speaking of retro sound, the arrangement and recording of the Billie Burke Estate's "Everybody's Gonna Die" is a bit of a throwback: the drums primarily in one channel, balanced by a very compressed-sounding piano in the opposite channel, and the vocal very prominent in the mix. It reminds me a bit of Badfinger, in fact, in their less power-poppy and more soulful moments.

DeVotchKa "Transliterator" (A Mad and Faithful Telling, 2008)
The Billie Burke Estate "Everybody's Gonna Die" (Let Your Heart Break, 2007)

let's get metaphysical

What is it about vice-squad -type folks and obscure, vaguely philosophical language? I've always found the phrase "substance abuse" rather amusing...the notion that something as vague as a "substance" might be abusable - and now (via this week's "Savage Love" column - which annoyingly uses an URL system that will change after its next edition but which is not predictable: it's the 2/14/08 column) we find that, at least for the upright citizens of Jackson, Mississippi, the legal jargon for sex toys (which are prohibited in Jackson - from heaven, Lee Hazlewood shakes his head mournfully) is "three-dimensional devices." I certainly hope none of my readers has ever used a three-dimensional device, and instead that such readers have relied entirely upon devices that are infinitely flat and limited to two dimensions, or which provide otherworldly stimulation by means of a fourth-dimensional vibrating appendage (the use of such device would be, presumably, allowable in Jackson, Mississippi - in case you're traveling, and feel lonely - since it is not, thereby, strictly a "three-dimensional device").

Either that, or aliens from an alternate dimensionality have taken over the reins of power in Jackson: first they take the sex toys, and then...the rest! "From beneath they devour!"

dubious science

Here's an article from an Australian source claiming that, essentially, rock stars die young due to drug abuse and the pressures of fame (article via Click Opera). It seems rather suspect (and not only because the author doesn't know how to spell Jimi Hendrix's name).

First, rock'n'roll simply hasn't been around long enough for its earliest exponents to live long enough to die at a fine old age. Someone who was 25 in 1955 would be celebrating only his 78th birthday this year, only a few years older than the average life expectancy in the West. Any average calculated now will inevitably skew young: no rocker has lived to be 100, because no one in their middle forties was making rock'n'roll in the mid-1950s.

Another factor that would skew the age young: the survey includes rock stars who'd died up until 2000...but obviously, it could not include those who were still alive in 2000. Those folks might live to be 50, or 60, or 100: we just don't know yet. If I say, what's the average age of death for folks under the age of 30, you'd be right to question what the answer proves...obviously, people who die under age 30 tend to die of misadventure, since very few people under 30 die of natural causes. And equally obviously, that age is going to be...under 30. Effectively, this is what the study's methodology does. (Similarly but unrelatedly, scare articles that point out that suicide is the most common or second-most common cause of death among teens shouldn't surprise: few teens are going to drop dead of a heart attack or lung cancer. If a teen's going to die, it's probably going to be from an external cause: murder, car crash, suicide.)

Sorry: it's simply too soon to make any statement about whether rock stars, on average, live shorter or longer lives than average.

cat's eyes

Introducing Fritz, the photo-taking cat.

Fritz wears a small, waterproof camera around his neck which is set to shoot automatically every fifteen seconds. The battery lasts about an hour and a half, which is about as long as one of Fritz's typical rambles.

Apparently, Fritz doesn't mind the camera (or, in the not-entirely-idiomatic English translation of the site, it doesn't "argue" Fritz) - which surprises me, since if it were mounted on either of our cats, they'd spend quite a lot of time chewing on it or playing with it. I wonder how long it took Fritz to recognize that this toy didn't taste very good and was rather boring to play with.

(Via Steve S.)

still streets

I've reconvened the Monkey Typing Pool to remix its most recent song, "Victorian Photographs," into a sort of ambient remix I've subtitled "Still Streets." I'd actually always conceived of this song in two versions: one more or less songlike, the other almost purely textural. I just wasn't sure how I'd end up doing the second one. The answer turned out to be: simultaneity and repetition. More details in the "Monkey Typing Pool" link to your right.

Monkey Typing Pool "Victorian Photographs (Still Streets Remix)"

I give up - where's the AARP signup sheet?

Remember the early '90s? "The Year Punk Broke"? Of course you remember Kur(d)t and Courtney...and their little baby daughter Frances Bean?

She's fifteen now, and was just interviewed in Harper's Bazaar. Here's Stereogum's report, complete with photo.

I am glad they did not use the "Bimbo" font instead

I'm pretty sure most font geeks and alphamanes have already found this...but if not... ('tis a Flash animation, if that's the sort of thing you want to know in advance).

metal valentines

The tribute album has subdivided into several genres, including the remaking of entire albums, whether by groups of artists or by a single artist. Two rather intriguing examples of the latter showed up in the last year or so.

First, Japancakes ("groan" on the name - I'm not sure, is that better or worse than "Japanther," another band?) has remade My Bloody Valentine's 1992 classic Loveless...and, aptly given their status almost as more texture than text, has eliminated the vocals, giving their melodies over to various instruments, primarily pedal steel guitar or strings. The result seems to shift the geography of the music's evocative landscape - from a hallucinatory, sleep-deprived dreamscape to a dustier, more western (as in movie) locale. I'm not sure why, but the resulting rearrangements frequently remind me of soundtracks to '60s movies...although really, I can't think of any actual '60s soundtracks scored for pedal steel, strings, piano, and flutes (which is what the synths typically sound like). Some of the tracks work very well, demonstrating that while texture is what got Kevin Shields so much acclaim, he's quite an engaging melodist as well. Others are maybe a bit too pretty, moving that soundtrack's location from some twilit desert to a too-plushly appointed elevator...but for the most part it's a successful reinvention. For comparison purposes, here's MBV's original version of "Loomer," followed by Japancakes' rearrangement of the same.

A few days back in the comments section, yellojkt argued that John Cage's 4'33'' is an "enormous emperor with no clothes joke on the music and art world." My response is the following:

I disagree. Okay: it's rather meta...in that it's more a piece about listening to music than music per se...but that's typical enough in 20c art. The point is to listen, firstly - but also, it plays with preconceptions of performance (to me that aspect is quite secondary: the musician sitting down, fiddling with the score, etc.). A key tenet of 20c art is that art is not necessarily inherent in the object but a mode of perception: if you see artistically, what you see is art. That is: if you look at something with an aesthetic eye, you'll be looking for many of the things you might look for in a more traditional work of art: order, symmetry, pattern, texture, interplay of color and of form, etc. I think this might be most obvious in photography: a great photograph is rarely defined by the aesthetic beauty of its subject but by the vision and framing of the photographer.

Similarly: what Cage does is ask the listener to hear sound, as music. What sounds can you hear when you really listen for them? What sort of interactions, rhythmic, pitch, etc., can you perceive among the thrum of the building's air conditioning, the echo of traffic on the street, and the occasional coughing audience member or whispered comment?

But also: yes, a joke. I think excessive self-seriousness is one of the main reasons art is seen as elitist. Duchamp's urinal was all of the above (also, cleverly mounted upside down so you'd reconsider its form) - but also an enormous joke.

Everything truly serious is also screamingly funny. Certainly, life, love, and the like.

In many ways the complete opposite of the Cage piece - but also often regarded as a complete joke - Lou Reed's infamous Metal Machine Music has received an overhaul...arranged for a small orchestra consisting of violin, viola, cello, contrabass, soprano and tenor saxes, trumpet, piano, and loads of percussion. Oh - and tuba, and accordion. Reed himself has alternated between claims that MMM is a serious piece of music...and that it's a huge joke. He's stated that the specs listed on the original album cover are all bogus...and he's said that "anyone who's still listening by side 4 [of the original 2-LP set] is even stupider than I am." At any rate, German ensemble Zeitkratzer has painstaking transcribed MMM for the above instruments (one of the transcribers is the accordionist, perhaps accounting for that instrument's place in the score)...and if nothing else, it's a rather miraculous demonstration that the range of traditional acoustic instruments is by no means exhausted by the conventional orchestral repertoire...or even various twentieth-century expanded techniques. I don't believe I know of any other piece that includes a part for bowed and amplified styrofoam.

Speaking of which, while listening to the music is intriguing enough, what really makes this set is the included DVD, which films the same live performance you hear on the recording. Reed has said that for him, guitar feedback is a visceral, physical thing (and it is, if you turn it up loud enough: if you see old videos of bell-bottomed hippies standing in front of bass cabinets, you'll see that those cabinets move enough air to flop those trousers around pretty seriously). And watching this performance, you get a sense of the sheer athleticism required of these musicians. The string players in particular seem to be bowing furiously throughout the performance, and the percussionist takes up his station with innumerable unusual implements (including that styrofoam). If I weren't technologically inept, I'd youtube an excerpt. Instead, here's the first four minutes, first of Reed's original, then of the Zeitkratzer orchestration.

Here's the intriguing thing: once you get past the onslaught of noise - which is easy enough to do, particularly listening to all of it - that noise transfigures into drone, backdrop...and what's left is curiously peaceful, almost calming. Long chords breathe in and out slowly, and I think Reed was serious when he said that he's found MMM to be "meditative."

(As a bonus: let's say you want to listen to Metal Machine Music, but you just don't have an hour to set aside. Why not listen to it all in about five minutes...through the miracle of modern engineering and stacking techniques, we've taken sixteen four-minute excerpts (approximately) and layered them on top of one another! Efficiency and progress are ours once more!)

My Bloody Valentine "Loomer" (Loveless, 1992)
Japancakes "Loomer" (Loveless, 2007)
Lou Reed Metal Machine Music, Part I (excerpt) (1975)
Zeitkratzer Metal Machine Music, Part I (excerpt) (2007, rec'd 2002)
Metal Machine Music (Efficiency Mixdown)

Come on!

Courtesy the divine Lauren Elizabeth:

'Arrested Development' Film Planned?
"Actor Jason Bateman has confirmed plans are underway for a movie version of cancelled TV sitcom Arrested Development. A rumored meeting between the star and series creator Mitch Hurwitz late last year fuelled speculation a big-screen adaptation of the cult show was in the pipeline. And now the Juno star has confirmed the cast has received calls from executives asking if they would be interested in reviving their roles once the ongoing Hollywood writers strike is over. He tells E! News, 'I can confirm that a round of sniffing has started. Any talk is targeting a post-strike situation, of course. I think, as always, that it's a question of whether the people with the money are willing to give our leader, Mitch Hurwitz, what he deserves for his participation. And I can speak for the cast when I say our fingers are crossed.'"

—via IMDB

beetles, specters, owls, giants

1. Apparently, NASA plans on beaming the Beatles' "Across the Universe" into space. No word on which version they're going to use - I kinda hope they use the horrible Spectorized one, because that way, space aliens can also realize, wow - he killed someone, and he ruined a perfectly good John Lennon song! (Okay, unfair: Phil Spector did the opposite of ruin many more songs than he ruined...)

Less discussed is the follow-up headline: RIAA to Preemptively Sue All Lifeforms for Copyright Infringement.

2. Regular readers of this space know that I'm occasionally rather out of touch with the average goings-on of the typical American - so it may surprise such readers (all four of them) that I am actually aware that a major sporting event took place yesterday. It involved the game of "Foot-Ball," and is known under the sobriquet "The Superb Owl," for mysterious reasons. One team, known as the Providers of Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Tapes (New England), had gone the entire season without losing a match (which wouldn't have been a problem, since the team was well-equipped with lighters), while its opponent, The Football-Playing New York Football Giants of New York That Play Football Gigantically, had not. Despite this, the larger team won! Yay Largeness! Volume Volume Yoo-Rah-Rah!

curious dream fragment

For some reason, I rarely remember entire dreams - instead I remember isolated scenes, like snapshots or little skits. Here's one from last night:

I'm at some public function or another, and I realize that the man sort of behind me and to my right is Morrissey. However, I'm quite surprised to find that in person, Morrissey is rather tall and has a rather imposing physique, much like that of a linebacker. However, his head is comically small, the overall effect making him look a bit like one of those Playskool characters with the blocky bodies and round, plastic head. Even more unfortunately, his speaking voice is peculiarly high-pitched - I'm surprised by that, since his singing voice isn't particularly high-pitched at all.