except the one guy who says "I'm not!"

Every five years, Milwaukee milks several hogs' teats worth of dollars from bikers returning upstream whence their iron ponies spawned, and...okay, gotta cut back on the metaphors here.

So day and night, the air is filled with Harleys lustily farting potatoes, so Rose has to put on headphones at work and we have to turn on the A/C rather than open the windows at night. And far be it from me to criticize all those bucks flowing into the city's coffers courtesy America's motorcycle-loving gentlemen and ladies, but...sometimes I think the city just went straight to central casting and asked for several thousand biker-looking types.

Because about three-quarters of the bikers look exactly like you'd expect Harley guys to look, and most of that remaining quarter takes its visual cues from slightly less popular variations (i.e., the younger, thinner Harley guy rather than the older, fatter, graybearded Harley guy). And if seeing the same thing over and over again eventually renders it invisible, I think black and orange will be imperceptible to my vision by the end of this weekend.

The funniest thing to me is the cliche about bikers has it that they're the last remaining bastion of freedom, individuality, and all that, wind blowing on the open road and brushing the dead bugs from their beards...and yet a more conformist, brand-oriented bunch of consumers I've never seen. And they roam in gaggles, like a bunch of freshman all Abercrombied and Hollistered, but branded with Harley-Davidson and lifestyle-appropriate hangers-on. (Mr. Daniel, I'm looking at you.) I can hardly blame every business in town for festooning itself in black and orange and cordoning off parking spaces with hastily lettered "BIKERS ONLY!!" signs, since obviously once this crowd dedicates itself to consuming something, it grips it like a pit bull and returns to it like Robert Downey Jr. to rehab.

Thus I've taken the liberty of redesigning the H-D logo and rendering it as a flag, to be flown until tattered from the proud sissy bars of Harleys everywhere:

Lisa Frank does NIN graphics

Over at Click Opera, a discussion about which font to use on Momus's forthcoming release evolved quickly to address issues of appropriation, influence, postmodernism, and property (of course...), but not before two commentors weighed in with their visual arguments concerning the importance of appropriate design.

These arguments took the simple but brilliant form of "remixing" a couple of classic Joy Division covers. Here's the remixed cover of Closer...with one telling change from the original:



(via "viceanglais" at livejournal.com)

And here's what Unknown Pleasures' cover might have looked like had it been designed instead as a graphic for a preteen girls' school folder:



(via "microworlds" at livejournal.com)

(The original covers may be viewed here and here.)

you say tomato, I say too meta, let's call the whole thing off

We went down to Ikea in Bolingbrook, Illinois today to buy furniture for the bedroom in our remodeled second floor, and across the road from the store was a big-box store with the puzzling name "Outdoor World."

Consider the rather dizzying series of regresses implicit in that name. It's indoors, and it's not a world, but it's called "Outdoor World." The actual "outdoor world" is, well, outdoors from this store. Odder yet - the world we use to refer to nature, the wild, and so on - "outdoors" - carries its differentiation from the built, the artificial, the human-made, in the notion of "doors" (which side of them you're on) - that is, in claiming to name the natural, the unmediated, its very name requires its opposite to be thought of first, as preceding the "natural" in some way.

I wonder if Jacques Derrida ever did any bass fishing?

"umbrella man" not shown because like these clowns can draw an umbrella

Those on the lookout for thrilling, edgy cartoons (and what the hell does "edgy" mean anyway? All cartoon panels have edges) are unlikely to look at the not-at-all beloved "Gil Thorp"...yet had they done a little digging, they would have found the new plotline the strip was going to begin a few days ago quite disturbingly edge-a-licious indeed. Sadly, the strip, as published, reverted to its unusual incomprehensibility and poorly drawn quasi-human figures (as always, click to illargenate):



The original strip, however, was far darker - a trip back into American history to show just how desperate a failed athlete could get:

things I didn't realize I didn't know, and things I know but keep forgetting

I keep confusing Brian Dennehy with Brian Cox.

Anyone else have that problem?

Also: as Flasshe notes, it's important for bloggers in particular to keep cameras with them at all times - you never know what you might see. For example, today I saw this vehicle on the road - and even though the website I've linked to was printed on the vehicle, so that I could find and share that image, it would have been much more fun to actually photograph it: "I was there!" All I know is, this is what I'd want to be driving in a rollover accident. Also, given the name of the organization, I keep thinking the vehicle should have a sound system playing the Who's "Now I'm a Farmer" (and I'm diggin diggin diggin diggin diggin!).

Gourds.

probably never heard of the Rolling Stones, R.E.M., or Elvis Costello titles either

The annual "Mindset List," released each year by Beloit College and intended to help professors avoid references their students would fail to understand, seems increasingly to be a guide to how out of touch its creators are with the students whose mindsets they purport to be describing.

This year's list, for example, refers to All I Ever Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (a book which had its cultural blip in the sun and then justly disappeared back in the Pleistocene Era, although its corn-likker faux-folksy proud dumbness annoyingly lives on), to Wayne Newton (and his mustache, the presence or absence of which is approximately as interesting to students as that of Kaiser Wilhelm's), and to Roseanne singing the national anthem. These are sort of meta-clueless references, in that not only would today's students not get them, most of today's adults would wonder what's next, a figure of speech relating to horses and buggies?

And for a document originating from a college, there's some awfully sloppy copy-editing going on - either that, or (per the second item on the list) it's a trend in Beloit for karaoke machines to sport diapers.

(Unrelatedly: I tend to collect phrases whose sound I like, but sometimes the meaning or image evoked by the phrase sits awkwardly next to the phrase itself. For example, this one: "Scottish erotica." "Sloppy copy-editing" - used above - works quite well, however.)

most...boring...cover...evar

A few weeks back, I picked up a free paperback copy of a P.D. James mystery via the UWM English Department's informal book exchange. I didn't really pay much attention to the cover of the book (despite my belief that "don't judge a book by its cover" is a ridiculous aphorism, at least taken literally), but it's a good thing I wasn't relying upon the designers' marketing skills to sell me a copy, because this has to be the lamest, most generic cover design I've ever seen:



The typography for the author and title are generic but serviceable...but there's something about the placement of the promotional quote and "also-by" tag that irritates...maybe because all the text is centered? And I don't like the "Queen of Crime" tag in the red band - I don't like the spread-out letter spacing, nor the needless quotation marks, nor the fact that the asterisk indicating the source of the quote is crammed up against the closing quotation mark, defying the spacing of the rest of the text in that red band.

The perspective of the space is just bizarre - either that, or someone hired a German Expressionist carpenter to do the fenestration for the room. We have a generic-looking woman in a minimally-defined room, with what look to be some papers or envelopes and a glass on the edge of the frame. Outside the open window, a man in dark clothing is walking. This only barely even suggests the notion of "mystery" - it would perhaps be more effective if the man were looking toward the woman, but no - he's apparently caught in the midst of merely passing by her window, and given that the trimming of the foliage in the background implies that there's a path of sorts he's walking on, he can't even be accused of sneaking or lurking. The woman can't be placed in any clear relation to the papers: are they on a desk? Is she seated, looking off to the side of them? Or is she standing, in the foreground, looking just to our right? And that perspective plays havoc with scale, as well: the room appears to be sunken in relation to the path outside the window, unless the woman is seated and we're intended to be a dwarf standing nearby.

The quality of the drawing is pretty weak as well: I think they were going for a sort of stylized, clean-lined pulp-fiction look, but instead everyone looks carved from wood, particularly our black-clad, hatted gentleman - who, now that I look more closely, might be just a cardboard cutout, like those promotional statues of Jar-Jar Binks used to sell Star Wars novelizations that were usefully non- flame-retardant (not that I'd actually know that and the statute of limitations has expired anyway).

how did I not know this?

Wandering semi-randomly around the web, I found out that none other than Grace Slick sang the "jazzy spies" counting things on the original Sesame Street! (If you're not sure what I'm referring to, here are a bunch of them on YouTube.)

It just seems like the sort of info I would have stumbled across, since I've long been a fan of Jefferson Airplane, and I've always thought Grace Slick is one of the best rock vocalists ever - plus, just generally a kick-ass woman of the first order. (Let us not speak of any music she or they did after 1976 or so, however...) Following on my "jazzy spies" discovery, I went to the Wikipedia entry on Slick - and found this wonderful photo of her earlier this year, age 68 or so:



Especially considering all the health problems she's endured, she looks fantastic - and despite that look of grandmotherly kindness, there's a mischief there that suggests she's still capable of the sort of biting, acidic wit that characterizes her best lyrics.

Of course, her hits with Jefferson Airplane are well-known, but here are three slightly more obscure Slick vocal performances. First up is a very odd little song from the Airplane's classic third album, After Bathing at Baxter's, called "Two Heads," in which Slick's cut-glass voice navigates spooky Eastern-sounding speedy little notes. (Narrowly averted a deadly musical pun there...)

While later Jefferson Airplane and Airplane-related material was stunningly inconsistent, there are still highlights, even up to the late '70s or so. Here's one, from the 1970 album Sunfighter which Slick and Kantner made in celebration of the birth of their daughter, China.* Fed up with Marin County hippies endlessly bugging her about what she should and shouldn't eat while pregnant, Slick countered by writing a song about cannibalism, "Silver Spoon." (If you want to make a cannibal hat-trick playlist, add "Timothy" by the Buoys and "Friends" by the Police...) Play this one on a decent sound system and turn it up to hear Jack Casady's awesomely majestic, growling bass sound.

Perhaps the lusty appetite described in "Silver Spoon" took its toll...on the Baron Von Tollbooth & the Chrome Nun album (credited to Slick, Kantner, and David Freiberg), Slick sings "Fat" - whose hilarious opening verse seems slightly prescient of today's supersized society... We haven't quite gotten to the point of barreling through the walls, but seats and entryways have been enlarged, and elevator capacities (by number) reduced...

Jefferson Airplane "Two Heads" (After Bathing at Baxter's, 1967)
Paul Kantner & Grace Slick "Silver Spoon" (Sunfighter, 1970)
Kantner/Slick/Freiberg "Fat" (Baron Von Tollbooth & the Chrome Nun, 1972)

*The story has it that China's original name was "god" - with a lower-case "g" - but in fact, this is one of Slick's jokes: she was irritated at a nurse she perceived as being sanctimonious, and sarcastically told her that the child would be named "god, with a lower-case g - because we're humble." The nurse, it seems, promptly alerted the media. In fact, "China Wing Kantner" is the name on her birth certificate, "Wing" being Slick's birth surname.

what ever happened to baby Nadia?

More on the ugliness of Olympic female gymnastics - this from Dave Zirin's online column on the issue, a quote from Joan Ryan's book Little Girls in Pretty Boxes:

In 1956 the top two Olympic female gymnasts were 35 and 29 years old. In 1968 gold medalist Vera Caslavska of Czechoslovakia was 26 years old, stood 5 feet 3 inches and weighed 121 pounds. Back then, gymnastics was truly a woman's sport....[In 1976] 14-year-old Nadia Comaneci clutched a baby doll after scoring the first perfect 10.0 in Olympic history. She was 5 feet tall and weighed 85 pounds. The decline in age among American gymnasts since Comaneci's victory is startling. In 1976 the six US Olympic gymnasts were, on average, 17 and a half years old, stood 5 feet three and a half inches and weighed 106 pounds. By the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, the average US Olympic gymnast was 16 years old, stood 4 feet 9 inches and weighed 83 pounds, a year younger, 6 inches shorter and 23 pounds lighter than her counterparts of 16 years before.

So what's driven this trend toward ever-younger athletes? (They would be ever-younger had not a ruling finally been delivered limiting competition to girls and women 16 and over.) Not the sport itself, evidently.

It was the failed Glenn Miller follow-up

In a misguided attempt to give its mapping function a bit more precision, Flickr has dragged out placenames last heard when operators plugging patch cords into a bank of bays used full names for exchanges ("Morgandale 7-8220? One moment, ma'am..."). I mean, yes: people do refer to "Bay View"...but Fernwood? Morgandale? Town of Lake? (Also: if it's anything, it's "Yankee Hill" not "Vankee Hill"...damned scanners!)

Also amusing to find out that about a mile offshore (a photo I shot on the Lake Express ferry) is "St. Francis." Always thought that burb was all wet...

onomastic crossdressing

Funny how band names seem to fall into trends. Over the years we've had the "Jesus" trend, the "Super" trend, a smattering of "Orange" bands, and of course the ever-expanding zoo of animal bands. And in the last year or so, it seems male musicians want to explore their feminine sides - or at least, name themselves as if they are. Of course there's Greg Gillis and Girl Talk - but since every other music blog has posted his stuff, I'm not. So instead here are tracks from Girls, The Girls (not the same band), and Women. (And Parenthetical Girls.) No one in any of these bands is biologically female.

Girls are from San Francisco. Their song is called "Lust for Life," and it's not an Iggy Pop cover. And Googling this is challenging.

The Girls are not the same band as Girls (and online websites that drop articles can kiss it). Instead of being from San Francisco, they're from Seattle, and given that their forthcoming album is called Yes No Yes No Yes No, they also are guilty of making web searches difficult. Their song is "Transfer Station," and it's probably my favorite of this bunch.

Women are all grown up, and they're Canadian. Dan at Said the Gramophone called "Black Rice" one of the more straightforward songs on their self-titled album, and he's right.

(Finally, here's a cover by Parenthetical Girls of Orchestral Manœuvres in the Dark's "Joan of Arc (Maid of Orleans)" - which is not the same song as "Joan of Arc." (I bother to write out the band's name in full rather than use the convenient abbreviation "OMD" because the band's first four or five albums are quite different from the rather fluffy synthpop of their later work: well worth checking out for some dark, moody, often experimental textures.) This version was originally released on obscure label Aagoo's limited-edition picture single, but it's more readily available from Pitchfork's site - which is where I got it.)

And if anyone knows of any all-female bands named "Men," or "The Boys," or "Boys," please let me know...

Girls "Lust for Life" (download, 2008)
The Girls "Transfer Station" (Yes No Yes No Yes No, 2008)
Women "Black Rice" (Women, 2008)
Parenthetical Girls "Joan of Arc (Maid of Orleans)" (limited-edition picture disc, 2008)

from tragedy to farce

Following up on my post earlier today, early in the article referred to therein, Buzz Bissinger refers to watching women's beach volleyball in the Olympics. In what appears to be the journalistic equivalent of opening a presentation with a joke, Bissinger confesses that he watches "not because it's a sport" but because he enjoys watching "skimpily-clad, leggy women rolling in sand." As a lead-in to an article primarily about the abuse of female gymnasts, this is a bit odd and opens him to various criticisms, and sure enough, one reader comments huffily that volleyball players are too athletes (which Bissinger doesn't deny, of course).

But this article, with our president apparently thinking his predecessor's way with women helped his ratings, illustrates (literally) the hypocrisy of anyone who doesn't see the hypocrisy in the way women's volleyball is marketed and presented:



Show me a sport for men whose uniforms reveal this much asscheek, and I'll stop believing women's volleyball isn't a featured Olympic event primarily to drive ratings. There's no doubt these women are fine athletes...but that's not how they're being presented.

"women"'s gymnastics: child abuse

Read this New York Times article by Buzz Bissinger. Plain and simple: in order for the girls (not women: the average age of this year's US team, for instance, is only 17 and a half) to develop skills necessary to compete at the Olympic level, they can have no childhood, only grueling and rigorous years of training. And of course, the decision to undertake this training is, by definition, not a decision made by the athlete as an independent adult, it is a decision made for them by her parents. The effects of such nightmarish training on these girls' bodies, their development both emotional and physical, would be bad enough by itself, but the odor of worse abuse attaches itself to the intense relationships coaches develop with these girls. Bissinger points out several examples of sexual abuse pre-teen gymnasts have suffered at the hands of their coaches, and while such cases are surely a small minority, the demanding/dependant relationship between coaches and the young girls is psychologically damaging in any event.

The Romans enjoyed gladiatorial combat to the death, and while the abuse suffered by female gymnasts isn't quite so extreme, at least the Romans didn't kid themselves as to the source of their enjoyment or the suffering of its victims.

exbeeriment

Last week I saw a new beer at Groppi's Market (perhaps it fell off the back of a truck...) called Oscura. It's brewed under the auspices of the Furthermore brewery, and it features a strong coffee flavor.

Probably too strong - at least for someone like me, who doesn't drink coffee. (So why'd I buy the beer? Because I do sometimes like a bit of coffee flavoring, and anyway, it's beer.) My first bottle of the stuff, I'm thinking, I don't know...that coffee flavor's maybe a bit too intense. I thought I'd get used to it though.

Next bottle, I decided no, it really is a bit much. But then it occurred to me: coffee drinkers who aren't Henry Rollins sometimes wimp out and mix stuff into their coffee, so...why can't I do the same? As it happened, I had a bottle of Breckenridge Brewery's Vanilla Porter on hand (its vanilla flavoring is just the right side of too much, by the way - which is to say it drinks wonderfully and goes down very smooth indeed), and I thought its sweet profile might moderate the bitter edge of Oscura's coffee flavor.

So the next night, I mixed the two. At first I thought I'd favor the Oscura, to not utterly overwhelm its flavor, but as it turned out, that flavor was quite strong, and I ended up adding the entire bottle of Vanilla Porter to it. Since I added it gradually, and drank some of the beer along the way, in fact the final mix in my glass would have been slightly more Vanilla Porter than Oscura. Still, Oscura's coffee notes were loud and clear.

How'd it work? Reasonably well...the coffee flavor was dialed down a bit, and the resulting blended beer drank pretty well. However, not a total success: unlike classic beer mixes like the Black & Tan, the flavors here don't quite blend alchemically to create a new and fresh third flavor. So, not something I'd do regularly, and although I'm guessing coffee lovers will enjoy the Oscura, I probably won't buy another six-pack.

these houses, they don't build themselves

A couple of newly recorded songs by a very promising Bay Area band (full disclosure: I've known one of the writers and singers for years and correspond regularly with him), the Bye Bye Blackbirds. Their debut album Houses & Homes, following a couple of EPs, is due out in September on American Dust (a fledgling label that's also releasing the new recording from Department of Eagles, featuring Daniel Rossen of Grizzly Bear, and the much-blogged-about Port O'Brien). Its leadoff track is called "The Ghosts Are Alright," and it's aptly titled, since it evokes any number of sonic ghosts both musically and sonically. (And of course that title evokes the Who...) Structurally, it's a bit unusual, with multiple sections following each other rather than the usual arrangement of verse, chorus, and bridge (it reminds me, in that way although not in terms of sound, of certain Kinks songs from the late sixties to the early seventies). The band has a very nice vocal blend, which you can hear in an especially wondrous fruition on the ends of the phrase "smoke all night" in this song. Its production is looser than is typical these days; songwriter Bradley Skaught has stated that he was inspired particularly by the in-camera sound of late sixties recordings, and the way that live approach led to sonic artifacts (leakage, roomtone, and of course the character of the performance) that lent each song a character that the more surgical, track-isolating approach typical today tends to suppress. In this song, for instance, the drums sound like they're recorded in a particular room: they might not sound like the sort of thing Steely Dan spends five days getting just so, but they're characteristic of this song in a way that's ultimately unreproducible.

For a limited time, Bye Bye Blackbirds is making available a 4-song EP for free download. The highlight is a sparkling cover of the Go-Betweens' classic "Apology Accepted," while the EP is rounded out by a new song adapting lyrics from Jonathan Lethem's novel You Don't Love Me Yet and acoustic versions of two older tracks, including this lovely take on "In Every Season."

The Blackbirds' previous EP Honeymoon (featuring the original version of "In Every Season") is available from CD Baby and iTunes.

The Bye Bye Blackbirds "The Ghosts Are Alright" (Houses & Homes, 2008)
The Bye Bye Blackbirds "In Every Season" (acoustic) (Apology Accepted (ep), 2008)

winning by winning, drilling by drilling, and voting by...not voting

The thing about Bush is that you can actually believe he's stupid enough to believe the garbage he spews. John McCain, though no Einstein, simply isn't in Bush's league when it comes to being dumb.

So it's all the more infuriating when McCain tries to play the Stupid Game. The "inflate your tires, haw haw" thing was bad enough...but now here's Honest John, talking to bikers in Sturgis about "win[ning the war] the right way, by winning it!" (as opposed to winning it the wrong way, which would be by, say, counting on it to cover the spread in next year's Super Bowl) and blathering about how "we're going to drill, and we're going to drill now" (probably not what the bikers would have thought had McCain persuaded his wife to enter the topless beauty contest as he suggested) and, ridiculously, suggesting that part of the problem was that Congress was taking a "vacation" instead of voting on drilling. Let's see...first, Congress has always recessed; second, I thought McCain was trying to be one of those "best government is that which governs least" conservatives - now he wants legislators to work overtime? - and finally, this from a guy who's missed nearly two-thirds of votes during his time as a Senator due to his campaigning.

I don't think McCain's that stupid - apparently, he thinks Americans are.

I really hope he's wrong.

my friends cover political hoohaw so I don't have to

1) Via ¡The Jestaplero!: Glenn Greenwald, in Salon, compellingly argues the significance of the 2001 anthrax attacks in amping up an environment of fear in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, as well as pointing out some very dubious reporting (and lack of reporting) on the same. (You may have to click through an ad to read the article.)

2) Steve at Hot Rox points out the idiocy of the laughing boys of the Republican Party, whooping it up at the expense of Barack Obama's remarks that properly inflating our tires would save as much gas as drilling in the ANWR...given that in fact, underinflated tires cause Americans to use more fuel than the ANWR is likely to generate. And that fuel won't hit pipelines for at least another decade. Not that being reality-based has been all that important to the right (or, alas, to those who vote for it)...

hits where they ain't

One advantage to having your whole music collection in iTunes (I'm about one-third done) is the way shuffle-mode can bring up songs you'd forgotten, even if at one time they'd rather charmed you. So it was I stumbled again upon Cake Like's "My Guy" (not the old Mary Wells hit), a song I remember liking in 1999 or so when the band's album Goodbye, So What came out (such a '90s title!). In my review of the album for the late, lamented Milk magazine, I noted that the song's lyrics were able to "convey both the kitsch and pathos of [its] subject" - an assessment I'll stand by. I'm less certain about that review's lede: "Too often, bands try to get by on wit, attitude, and simplicity - but sometimes, it works." The rest of the tracks on the album are rather more lacklustre...never actively bad, but not very memorable either. But "My Guy" should've been a hit. I'm particular fond of the lines "I've been to New York City twice / I've been to Oklahoma, too."(Those interested in tracking celebrity's trails should note that the band's vocalist and guitarist was Kerri Kinney, better known for her acting and writing for The State, and that the band was an early signee to Neil Young's Vapor Records.)

While scarcer in hitmaking elements (yet curiously also listing a prominent Great Plains geographic location), another track from the same era which I'd also forgotten, even though I kind of liked it at the time, is "Kansas City" by Hal Lovejoy Circus. (This band's oh-so-'90s thing was that, of course, no one in the band was named "Hal Lovejoy.") It's nothing special, really - a bit offhand - but something about the bass in particular, and the half-spoken, half-sung vocals, along with the song's lyrical hook ("gotta get a job, gotta get a job..."), place the song not a million miles from Girls Against Boys or Harvey Danger...which in turn means a sort of Americanized take on certain moments of The Fall as filtered through Pavement and Guided by Voices. But, admittedly, nowhere near as good as any of those bands.

Cake Like "My Guy" (Goodbye, So What, 1999)
Hal Lovejoy Circus "Kansas City" (American Made, 1997)

you think your parking tickets are bad?

Here's the sort of thing that gives government a bad name (and provides ammunition to right-wing nuts who think all government is out to rule the planet with an iron fist). The most ridiculous thing about this situation is: the city doesn't want to own the guy's property, yet too many of the bureaucrats interviewed in this situation seem to imagine that laws are rules for robots - rather than realizing that the reason we have actual humans charged with interpreting regulations is precisely to work with exceptional situations, such as this man's.

Of course, it's absurd on its face that any sort of parking regulation could lead to forfeiture of a house valued at a quarter-million dollars - parking simply isn't that important. At the very, very most, you'd think forfeiting the vehicle would be the most extreme remedy. But in this situation, nearly everyone involved seems to have failed to apply any sort of common sense or problem-solving skills (and I do include the owner who, despite his apparent disabilities and limitations, still seems to be acting rather pig-headedly here).