The Architectural Dance Society

THE ARCHITECTURAL DANCE SOCIETY HAS MOVED

2009-02-08T19:58:00.002-06:00

New site: http://spanghew.wordpress.com (it's also in the title line...) Please update your links - thanks!

movin' on up...

2009-02-08T19:53:00.002-06:00

No, it's not exactly a deelux apartment in the sky (or even the Upper East Side) - but this is the (second)-last post at Blogger. I'm moving to WordPress. Primarily because of this.

I'd rather not find out a bunch of my entries have disappeared (so far, it looks like they haven't). It'll take me awhile to update all references...and unless Blogger deletes them, all entries will remain here (because hell of cross-referencing) - but no new posts here.

Everything (except this and the last, place-holding entry) is now at my new digs. If you've bookmarked or linked to this site, please change its URL to http://spanghew.wordpress.com. Thanks.

a deep and troubling mystery!

2009-02-03T22:02:00.002-06:00

What is the deal with institutional clocks? In the classroom I'm working in this semester, the wall clock has been wrong, differently, every day so far this semester...but always by approximately exact-hour intervals (in other words, it might say 5:11 when it's actually 10:11). The two nearest clocks in the hallway are also incorrect - and different both from one another and from the clock in my room, but also wrong by exact hours.

This is something I've noticed about institutional clocks, in schools, universities, and the like, for years...and it baffles me. In the rest of the world, setting a clock is no big deal: it runs accurately for a good long time, and sure, once in a while someone might forget which way to move it when Daylight Saving Times comes or goes, and so for a while it might be two hours out of whack - but that's easily corrected. What doesn't happen is random, arbitrary shifting of the time such clocks tell.

There seems to be some centralized (or at least distant) control for institutional clocks...since, as I'm sure you've all observed, when they're wrong, sometimes they suddenly start progressing rapidly forward or backward. Presumably someone somewhere is causing this to happen. But that still doesn't explain why such clocks are so prone to going wrong...or why when they do so, they're so often wrong by exact-hour intervals.

One more thing: these are the same kind of clocks whose minute hands creep backwards for a second before advancing...a phenomenon well-known to clock-watching test-takers, causing momentary heart attacks as if they will never get out of that room.

idiot politicians not just homegrown!

2009-02-03T06:58:00.003-06:00

It's good to know that people other than Americans can elect or appoint absolute morons to political office. Here, for example, is Martin Mullaney, councilor in Birmingham (UK) and head of that city's "transport scrutiny committee," on why Birmingham is eliminating apostrophes from its signage: "they confuse people. If I want to go to a restaurant, I don't want to have an A-level in English to find it." For those who don't speak British, an "A-level" is roughly equivalent to high school (except in Britain, it usually means you can actually read).

This is mind-boggling. One does not need a high-school degree to comprehend the use of apostrophes. I do not understand why people find them so confusing. (At the bottom of this post, isolated so as not to bore those of you who do know how to use them, is a brief guide to correct apostrophe usage.) The other reasons Mullaney adduces for coshing grammar on the head in Birmingham are equally ludicrous: apostrophes confuse GPS systems and cause people and emergency services to get lost (no, they don't, as the article points out...Mullaney clearly is not a member of the reality-based community), and they are "old-fashioned."

All hail the modern illiteracy!

While it's true that names like "St. Paul's Square" have a slightly fusty (and, to Americans, very British) air, so what? Shall we rename them all as "InterCorporate Way" to be all modern and entrepreneurial?

Sadly, apostrophes' defenders are presented as if they're little old blue-haired ladies fussing over seventeen cats and condemning "strong language" such as "gosh-darned." I suppose there are more important things in the world - but why encourage further ignorance and illiteracy?

(How to use apostrophes: 1. In contractions, to denote missing letters, as in "don't" for "do not," "let's" for "let us," "it's" (only!) for "it is," etc. 2. To denote possession: the object that "possesses" receives an apostrophe followed by an "s" in most cases: the ball of the dog = the dog's ball. If the possessor is plural and ends in an -s, simply append an apostrophe: of a group of politicians, the politicians' idiocy. Some hold that if a singular noun or name ends in -s, only an apostrophe is sufficient, while others argue that -'s is still required. The second option is certainly not wrong, so err on the safe side. 3. Other uses: here's where confusion arises, I think. The main vector of confusion re apostrophes is "it's/its": possessive pronouns do not use apostrophes, even though some of them end in -s and otherwise look like the sort of word formed by adding an apostrophe and an "s." But this confusion is easily clarified: "it's" is always "it is" - remember that, and you're good. Also: some use apostrophes to pluralize letters or numerals or capitalized abbreviations (i.e., "he has 1,000 CD's"). The second, at least, is pointless.)

taxing the light fantastic

2009-02-01T22:49:00.003-06:00

Apparently, there was some sort of "foot-ball" game played today?

To continue imposing my grossly un-American lifestyle on the rest of you, I will be posting about some pretentious postmodern art consisting primarily of stuff you can buy at hardware stores.

In a curious case, a British court has ruled that, while some Bill Viola video installations and a Dan Flavin light piece could be regarded as "art" when it came to assessing their value, they were to be regarded merely as "electrical devices" when it came to deciding tax rates and whether customs duty needed to be paid (artworks are exempt from the latter and pay lower rates on the former). This seems both contradictory and rather nakedly self-serving, as obviously a collection of fluorescent light tubes, plugs, switches, and the like are worth relatively little in themselves but become much more valuable once they are assembled into a Dan Flavin piece. I'm at a loss as to exactly when that collection of objects - "electrical devices" at the moment they were subject to the higher tax rate and customs, "works of art" when it came time to assessing their value to determine those tax rates and customs duties - magically was transfigured.

Perhaps it's sort of like Heisenberg's cat: the objects both were and weren't art simultaneously, until the proper authority ruled.

The real problem pointed out by the article is that, as in many other areas (intellectual property being an obvious one), the categories defined by the law lag behind actual practice. By now, many artworks cannot readily be defined as either "painting," "print," or "sculpture" - and it is this fish/fowl issue that flummoxes the British courts and led them to their rather metaphysical flourish.

Or maybe it was some sort of curious scientific/legal pun: light, after all, is both particle and wave, and both artists' work involves light.

Adam Sandler's gonna make a movie about all this, I'm sure.

whoa, whoa - slow down you guys, I can't keep up

2009-01-30T23:39:00.003-06:00

I guess I should have expected this, after the Wrens made and ate a soup that contained samples of Robert Pollard's hair and fingernails: they've just made available for download two entire new songs in the last week or so!

Of course, once again (as with "In Turkish Waters" and "Pulled Fences"), the new, untitled song posted at Magnet Magazine's site a week or so ago is the same as "Marked Up," posted at Stereogum. It's even the same recording this time.

So no, the Wrens haven't premiered four new songs online in the last few months...only two. Cheating bastards. It's that kind of sneaky repackaging that ensures that in twenty years, the chief economic output of the state of New Jersey will be endless permutations of the Wrens' scanty catalog.

décartournement

2009-01-30T11:04:00.001-06:00

opportunity missed

2009-01-30T11:00:00.001-06:00

A few days ago, I noticed that the Oriental Theater was playing four movies. The order may not be correct as billed on their marquee, but the four movies were The Wrestler, The Reader, Doubt, and Milk.

It is my firm belief that whenever an array of movie titles can be formed into a comprehensible sentence, they should be so arranged; thus it is that this slate of films presents a tragically missed opportunity:

DOUBT
THE WRESTLER
MILK
THE READER

Slang King!

2009-01-29T23:07:00.000-06:00

Fans of The Fall know that Mark E. Smith has a peculiar way with language and in particular has a cracked way with song and album titles. So it's no surprise that a long-running thread on Ye Olde Fallnet assembles fake Fall song titles, albums, and even artwork.

Some of my favorites (all peculiar spelling and punctuation is intentional):

"Of Their Phalanx! Episode 7#"
"The Flaxen"
1919 Disco Man
Addendum: Rot
Adherents of Debris Field
Aerobics Instructor vs. Zeitgeist
Ailerons Deployed
Are/Am Chaotic
Bar Code Formulate
Batwalk Nacht
Benefiction
Blank Fizog
Burstwich Arse Fiend
Castle Vernacular
Cat Gut Violator
Chamber of Errors
Chipping Machine Ranger (Cut Up)
Claimant IV's Insights
Cogent Discourse Tits Up in Ditch
Cornwall Dross Horse
Cough It Up, Functionary
Crust-Choke!
D. Crypto-Knight
Daft Song
Drag Man in Gdansk
Dream-Coitus w/Cooking Show Presenter
Factotum* If Applic.
Fall Title Authentification Protocol
FD.brimmedfork
Final Represented Qty.
Flaccid Plumber in Accrington Pub
Gallic Trophy-Haulage Inc.
Gaza/Conflate 78
Hairline Plenitude Assessment Board
Ham-Fist
I Cudgel Sky Saxon
I'm an Inter-Mingler
Inasmuch
Krieg Walker-Stassen!!
Larcenist's Last Redoubt
Lost Guitarist in Pudding Shoppe
Manxchester Extent(acle)
MES Channels Dead Poetaster
Met Hasselhoff
My Malt Shuffle
Oblong Vector
Paltry Return on Service Rendered
Peg and Awl Fornicants
Physicks Defied at Last
Pilf en Rectifier
Pist M'Self
Pith of Chasm
PRCLJJ.3 (Oort Cloud)
Ring-Tone Slattern Not Without Appeal
Schlock Cartel (& Its Pitfalls)
Shatner!
Shift-Key Curses
Sloven After Kid Pouch.
Stept-Up! Trail-Forth!
The Hatred of Ombudsman Fowler
Tit Fuck Hash Key 7
Vix. Waned Sheik
Whelk Legion
7'23" Whatever Was Near Mic

I believe these tracks would be assembled onto the following albums:

And Within
Conjoined Twin Emulsifier
Crooked Gap in Eiger
Defeat the Retina - AKA The Exposure of Infinity
Marrow Transplant Rejection Queue
Partisan Slump Chronickle
The Frictionary E.P.

And here are a few of my own:

Shite Natterer (Sans Prefix)
Petomane Horse
The Winch/Whinge Retrograde
I'm Not Fookin Morrissey Am I
Flak Jacket
Drink-Reich Blighter
The Arse Whisperer
Cabin Essence*

* Not a cover...just another song that happens to have this title, which is rather MES-like if you think about it.

because you needed to know

2009-01-27T07:03:00.001-06:00

You know the movie referenced in the first season of 30 Rock...the one whose title no one could pronounce? It turned out to be The Rural Juror...but until now, the name of the actual titular character has never been revealed.

It is "Earl Wuhrer."

utterly, thoroughly, obliteratingly gobsmacked

2009-01-25T19:20:00.004-06:00

I've heard unlikely or obscure tunes muzak'd before...but unless the original song borrows a melody, I believe that today, I've topped everything along such lines I'd heard before: today, in a relatively upscale suburban mall, I heard a muzak version of The Bonzo Dog Band's "Canyons of Your Mind." The original is (as you can hear if you listen) obviously goofin' on Elvis, particularly his big, dramatic ballads - but, as usual with the Bonzos, is built on a solid song underlying the broad, comedic antics (including The Worst Guitar Solo In The World).

Seems as good a time as any to celebrate the Bonzos, a band that lays a fair claim to have been the main influence on Monty Python, and thereby an indirect influence on much of the comedy that follows. (In fact, Bonzos co-leader Neil Innes wrote many songs and much incidental music for the Pythons - and later went on to write most of the music for the immortal Rutles.) "Rhinocratic Oaths" is the most Python-esque song in the Bonzos' catalogue, and it demonstrates as well the peculiar warping of a particularly British strain of jazz.

The voice you hear is Viv Stanshall's (later rather well-known for the narration at the end of the first part of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells ("plus...tubular bells!"), itself a wry joke on the Bonzos' own "The Intro and the Outro," which features a rather odd series of, uh, guest musicians.

But let's not limit the Bonzos to inventing Monty Python: hell no, they invented heavy metal, too. Don't believe me? Listen to "Mr. Apollo" (this mix is gorilla-enhanced).

But not all is fun and games in the Bonzos' world. Neil Innes occasionally veered disturbingly toward writing genuinely affecting, moving songs - such as "Ready Mades" (covered years later by The Condo Fucks - at least I think that's the band's name...), which, among other things, tells the sad tale of a man who arrested for something he put on display. (I'm pretty sure this song takes place directly around the block from Penny Lane.)

Back to that muzak'd version: Devo sort of did this, but I always thought it'd be a brilliant idea for The Residents to hire a genuine Muzak arranger (cap'd this time because I'm referring to the actual corporation - even though I believe they've long since changed their name) to arrange several of their tracks...but making sure to preserve as many odd chords and rhythmic structures as possible. I'm pretty "Santa Dog" would sound fantastic arranged for a hundred strings and more french horns than could be drowned in the biggest Vegas fountain.

The Bonzo Dog Band:
"Canyons of Your Mind" (Tadpoles, 1969)
"Rhinocratic Oaths" (The Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse, 1968)
"The Intro and the Outro" (Gorilla, 1967)
"Mr. Apollo" (Tadpoles, 1969)
"Ready Mades" (Tadpoles, 1969)

of course, of course

2009-01-23T10:50:00.004-06:00

Our current slate of Netflix DVDs includes episodes of the Cadfael series originally broadcast on British TV, and since that series is set in the 12th century, it's no surprise there are many horses. And we recently bought the DVD of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog - and all decent people know and fear the name of Bad Horse, the Thoroughbred of Sin.

We're also re-watching The X-Files...and the last episode we watched was the second part of "Terma," part of which is set in Russia...and features guards riding horses.

I began to detect a trend here - so I said to Rose that it was a bit curious, and I'd know something was up if there were a horse in the next DVD we watched...which seemed unlikely, since it was from the first season of 30 Rock.

Fans of that show know what's coming, of course: in "Corporate Crush," Liz Lemon opens the door to her office to find...Tracy Jordan, and a horse.

I'm not sure what this is all about. (Although, come to think of it, at a department meeting yesterday, my voice was, in fact, a little hoarse.)

Addendum: And, I just realized that two of the four items above also refer to...Thomas Jefferson! More mystery...

unless you're insured by Mutual of Omaha

2009-01-22T15:46:00.004-06:00

About a month ago, someone on the Robyn Hitchcock mailing list mentioned that he'd had a dream in which Hitchcock was on David Letterman's show and announced that he was about to premiere his new song, called "(Here's One I Bet You Wouldn't Want to Meet) In the Wild." Unfortunately, our dreamer couldn't recall how the song went - so I decided to write the song instead.

The first problem was that rather unwieldy title: how to make it scan? I played with it for a while, and came up with what I hope is a viable solution. The wordiness and staccato rhythm dictated some of the rest of the song's texture, with a lot of rapid-fire words. The lyrics came pretty quickly - I think the idea is quintessentially Robyn, in some ways similar to "Lions and Tigers" - although figuring out how to sing them presented more difficulty!

It seemed as if the music should be relatively simple, so I stuck largely to conventional chord sequences and rhythms (with a few tricks thrown in to make things interesting). The most fun was coming up with actual guitar parts as opposed to just strum-strum-strumming away. Some day I might even practice often enough to be able to play them reliably and consistently. Editing magic!

Lyrics:

Here's one I bet you wouldn't want to meet in the wild
The scent of raw meat between the politician's teeth
Slavering over a shivering child

At home we find it best to try to keep them in line
Some jingling coins and some velvety loins
Makes them forget they're already dying

Oh Mr. Perkins, you've such a glaring white smile
But don't mind Jim, so secretive and grim
You'll have alligator shoes in a while

Here's one I bet you wouldn't want to meet in the wild
With a sleight of wrist and the invisible fist
He's anointed the bank vaults in his castles in the sky

Clipped wings and a nice little perch will be fine
And yesterday's news is covered up with rotting food
You won't smell it if you just keep on buying

Here's one I bet you wouldn't want to meet in the wild...

(The bridge, incidentally, refers to this program, and urban legends like this one.)

Monkey Typing Pool "(Here's One I Bet You Wouldn't Want to Meet) In the Wild" (2009)

Obamaesque

2009-01-20T00:40:00.003-06:00

The weirdest thing about the news coverage of Barack Obama's impending inauguration - or maybe, the weirdest thing about my view of Obama - is that every time the media refers to Obama as "the first black president," I'm somewhat taken aback. I mean, of course I'm aware that it's tremendously significant that Obama, as an African-American, was elected president...but for me, it's so much more present in my mind that he is, say, a thoughtful man, an intelligent man, a reasonable man, that the fact that he's black recedes into the background. (Of course - as nearly everyone reading this probably already knows - I'm not black, and I suspect that if I were, Obama's blackness - and the significance of his being elected to the highest office in the nation as an African-American - would be far more present in my mind.)

It's not that I "forgot" he was black...or that I'm "colorblind"... But for myself, at least, once the primaries began to shake out and it was clear I'd end up choosing between Obama and Hillary Clinton, the qualities that stood out for me in making Obama the superior choice loomed independent of his race...and in fact, the qualities that turned me against Clinton (I was never exactly in her camp...although I surely would have voted for her had she been the Democratic nominee) were related to Obama's race: the way her campaign used similar subtly racist demarcators to position herself for white, working class Americans as "normal" and "known" versus Obama's purported status as political outlier, cultural elitist, and untested unknown. The way those attributions tied cleanly to certain unpleasant racial notions, and the way Clinton attempted to exploit certain voters' discomfort with Obama, repulsed me from her campaign...and even though I was aware of the extent to which her campaign (and, of course, far less subtly, McCain's) worked racial metaphors and assumptions, I still found myself weighing Obama's qualities on a scale that somehow all but erased race as having any input.

I should say too that the views of certain conservatives about Obama...the ranting about "socialism," say - seem to me to be not much about race, and more about a generational or cultural shift, of which Bill Clinton was the first signifier, in which an older, hierarchical order gives way to a more egalitarian, inclusive order. Race is certainly among those qualities leveled by this new order...but more important is the way it assumes such issues as being negotiable. Contrast that to Cheney et al....who clearly believe, it seems to be, in a natural order of things wherein some people (almost invariably, "some men") are simply better suited to rule than other peoples...and certain surface traits, seemingly unrelated to leadership potential, function to predict leadership capabilities (or, maybe more accurately, such peoples' ability to get along and go along with the old, entrenched orders).

The simplest, shortest way to sum all this up is that I've always viewed Obama politically - as a politician, as someone whose politics were far more amenable, far more practical, than Bush's...and, even though I knew those politics were far to the right of mine (and who knows how much of his rightward positioning is genuine and how much is politicking?), the fact that he seems the sort of man to weigh evidence rather than rely on faith or prefab labels, that in itself is enormously hopeful. I have no doubt he'll disappoint me sometimes, perhaps frequently...but I also have little doubt that when he does so, he'll have reasons for it, reasons which will either be spelled out or be essentially transparent. He is not doctrinaire by any means...but neither is he unprincipled. And it's that latter quality that most recommends him to be: though he recognizes politics as the art of compromise, he realizes also that artless and thoroughgoing compromise is not politics, but surrender...something else entirely.

oh dear...

2009-01-19T19:39:00.003-06:00

If you are very, very bad, and you're a singer, when you die, you will go to Karaoke Hell...where you are compelled to sing your hits with horrifyingly cheesy rearrangements, courtesy of a demon specializing in such torture. His name is Bill Gates.

Pitchfork has linked to several extraordinary renditions of well-known songs, as "performed" by Microsoft Songsmith, which analyzes a vocal part, then comes up with what it thinks is a suitable instrumental background. The Van Halen track is particularly evil, while the Police...well, as the Pitchfork writer pretty much says, it's all that Sting deserves.

for the little ones

2009-01-16T00:18:00.000-06:00

For real.

won't get fooled again?

2009-01-15T18:13:00.002-06:00

Those looking for a relatively concise, impassioned summary of just how much George W. Bush has fucked up this nation should read yellojkt's four-part "Epic Fail" series (the link is to a convenient Google search that lists all four entries). I'm not sure who the remaining true believers are - oh, except probably for asshole jerks like our county executive Scott Walker, who's parading "ideological principles" as to why he wants to flush the county (and mostly, the city) down the toilet, since he's thinking that will help him in his upcoming gubernatorial run with the rest of the state ("I Killed Milwaukee" will be his slogan, should he get his wish) - but if there's a silver lining in this cloud of disaster, it might be that maybe, just maybe, folks will wise up to politicians hypocritically claiming to run for elected office "against government." Not that they're lying, exactly - they want to make sure the government stays well out of the way of their own power and wealth. The rest of us? Useful (in the voting booth) idiots, disposable otherwise. Can't find a job? Hey, the military's still hiring...but don't expect that, if you get injured, you'll actually get coverage, or even an honorable discharge, since they've got folks working to redefine your situation as pre-existing or not combat-related...

you animal!

2009-01-14T22:54:00.004-06:00

Normally, I listen to songs before I post them. But it's 11 at night, Rose is sleeping, and my headphones are in the next room (I'm lazy), so I haven't heard this song I'm posting. Why am I posting it?

Because (1) Neko Case and Anti- Records will make a cash donation to Best Friends Animal Society for every blog that posts this song. So even if the song sucks (and I seriously doubt it will, given my experience with Case's last two albums), it's still worth posting.

Oh, and (2) I will donate money to the same organization if Neko herself comes by my house...say, next Thursday at about 2pm.

Neko Case "People Got a Lotta Nerve" (Middle Cyclone, 2009)

(via Anti-'s label blog - which also has info on posting the track yourself)

Resolved:

2009-01-14T15:40:00.003-06:00

Ugliest female name: Gretchen.

Ugliest male name: Jared.

Both sound like characters in epic Vogon poetry. Hearing them aloud is an experience akin to feeling an unidentified something the consistency of hard rubber in your mouth as you're desperately and drunkenly consuming an anonymous burrito in a flickering neon-lit place cockroaches are scared to inhabit.

In other words, ick factorial.

another in a series of insane musical comparisons

2009-01-13T21:15:00.004-06:00

For the first time in way, way too long, I was listening today to Paul McCartney's Band on the Run. First thing I thought: why did I ever think this wasn't a fantastic album? Second, and odder thought: as I was listening to "Jet" (which is a brilliant pop song) I suddenly found myself thinking of Stephen Malkmus. Now, vocally there's almost no similarity; musically, while Malkmus sometimes draws from classic '70s rock and '60s psych (both of which, of course, McCartney had a hand in originating), the emphasis is very different...but what struck me is that the critical darts hurled McCartney's way in the seventies had much to do with the way he failed to fit with then-emerging rock-critical orthodoxy: his lyrics were rarely either deeply meaningful (or attempting same), knottily allusive, or at all self-important, and he seemed pretty unconcerned with being profound. Plus - I mean, Linda McCartney playing keyboards? She wasn't even a musician! (Of course, within a couple of years, had Paul been a young punk, Linda's non-musician status would have been a plus...Paul was ahead of the curve there.) But the reason I found myself thinking of Malkmus during "Jet" in particular was a certain insouciance, an off-kilter tendency toward little private jokes, and the way the lyrics seem to point toward some sort of heavier subject matter but then turn that very pointing into a sort of joking parody. That seems Malkmus-like to me: a couple of lines in "Jet" gesture at the British class system...but they're so vague and joking that any kind of idea refuses to gain traction. Coupled with that are goofy lines like "I thought the major...wass a lady...sufferagette!" - I spelled the last word wrong intentionally to get the extra syllable McCartney adds: you can almost hear him cracking up at the goofy pronunciation...kind of like Malkmus riffing on "career! career! Korea!" in "Cut Your Hair" - or that "the only lonely place was on the moon." Malkmus's word salad tends a bit more toward the recherché (a word that's much more likely to appear in one of his songs than in McCartney's) but he too seems content to riff on associations and sound (compare "jet"/"suffragette") rather than worry meaning to a shred.

So in the seventies, the peak of Rolling Stone high critical seriousness, McCartney's work was dismissed as fluffy, meaningless, pop pap...whereas in the nineties and uh-ohs, Malkmus gets branded with "irony" - which, although not necessarily as critical as "fluffy" was, is still off-base - in that it implies an emotional standpoint either critical or above-it-all, and most often there's little evidence in Malkmus's work to suggest either perspective. I mean, when you write a set of lines like "You are a gardenia pressed in the campaign journal in the rucksack of an Afrikaaner candidate for mild reform" (from "Gardenia"), the "point," if there is one, seems more to be a joke at extending a metaphoric comparison far past its breaking point in terms of specificity - not some sort of withering critique of, I dunno, Afrikaaner candidates for mild reform, or mild reform, or the pressing of gardenias.

Next up: why Tori Amos is just like The Kingsmen. Or maybe Leonard Cohen. I'm not sure.

please - still no heart attacks

2009-01-12T22:18:00.004-06:00

Long-time readers will know that I consider it my duty to mention any and every scrap of musical activity undertaken by Jersey's heroes, the Wrens (example, from my entry posted February 4, 2005: "Kevin Whelan, on his way to work this morning, tripped on a loose bit of carpeting and banged his left elbow on the piano. The chord that resulted consisted of E, F, F#, G, A, and C two octaves below middle C (the expected B is broken) and reportedly will form a leitmotivic chord for the operatic song cycle based on the tunnel builders of Newark, due to be released sometime in 2057. It is projected to be a full 47 seconds long, and recording will commence in 2012, with overdubs scheduled for the following thirty years, while the band's heirs negotiate direct-to-cortex release for the remaining fifteen years").

But really truly actually the Wrens have released a new song. Okay, it's "new" only if you don't notice it's really the same song as "In Turkish Waters," which was released last month (and was on one of my 2008 mixes)...but this is a different recording. What's more, it is the first time all four Wrenseses have performed together in a studio in ten years. And that studio, my friends, is none other than (Zappa looks over at the majestic Albert Hall pipe organ) Abbey Road studios.

Take that, Beatles! Ha - those guys haven't recorded together in the last ten years either! And you're thinking that's because two of them are dead...yeah, well, two of the Wrens were dead (for tax purposes) for a year in the early 2000s, so there.

Anycow, the new song (here titled "Pulled Fences") is available for an entire penny less than a dollar via this little chromium link here. Long-suffering Wrens obsessives may also note that ZOMG it's an entirely new website. (Note: "new" in this sense includes some text not updated since 2002 - but really, there's lotsa new stuff, including a much-more detailed discography, with notes in trademarked Wrens "we suck worse than all you guys think we do" style, and a new layout, and the rest of Charles Bissell's hair is being auctioned off. Hurry, before it's all gone!)

my shortest blog entry ever, re Google's new favicon

2009-01-11T14:24:00.000-06:00

Ick.

stand in the place where you live...

2009-01-11T00:07:00.000-06:00

Strictly local content here...but it's curious how marketers assume certain things based on geography. In today's mail was one of those packets of coupons that arrive periodically - usually, I open them to see if one of them might be for somewhere I go to regularly or might be interested in, then toss it in the recycle bin.

But I've noticed that that marketers assume folks in our neighborhood (about two miles north of the airport, near the Walgreen's where Howell and Chase meet) are more interested in businesses to the south: nearer the airport, in St. Francis, Cudahy, or South Milwaukee. Of the 11 coupons for local businesses with one or two locations, 9 of them were south of us, and of the 2 whose location is to our north, one was three blocks north. Only one featured anything north of I-94...and that was one with two locations, one of which is in the Third Ward. (Those coupons were for an exercise center and a fried chicken place. The other coupons were for a bar that serves your typical bar food, two different Chinese restaurants, an Italian restaurant, a pizza place, a donut shop, a discount haircut joint, a hotel, and a carpet and tile outlet.)

But we ourselves are far more oriented toward businesses to the north of us. We're far likelier to head north when we go out or shop - to the Bay View business district, to the Third or Fifth Wards, downtown, or the East Side or Riverwest. That might be because we're former East Siders and Riverwest residents...but more likely, it's because of the kind of restaurants, bars, and other businesses we're interested in. My guess is that if we lived in a hipper part of Bay View, more of those businesses would show up in such mailers.

Or not: I'm kind of thinking the older, lower-middle-class crowd these places imply are probably more into coupons than yr hipster joints might be. (O noes did I just out myself as being vaguely hipsteresque? Vaguely...I mean, Blogger is like the AOL of free blog sites, isn't it?)

my new favorite joke

2009-01-10T22:11:00.001-06:00

Philip Glass walks into a bar Philip Glass walks into a bar walks into a bar walks into a bar walks into a bar Philip Glass Philip Philip Phil Philip Glass walks Glass walks Glass walks into Philip Glass Philip Glass Philip Glass Glass Glass Glass Glass Philip bar bar bar bar bar bar bar.

Hey! You got Onion in my CNN!

2009-01-08T14:18:00.004-06:00

So I'm having lunch at Comet and reading The Onion, when I happen to look up at the TV, which was playing CNN. There's a crawl at the bottom saying something like PORN INDUSTRY WANTS ITS OWN BAILOUT.

You know that Philip K. Dick novel Time Out of Joint, where the main character Ragle Gumm finds objects disintegrating in front of him, replaced only by scraps of paper saying things like DESK and the like? (You know that Orson Scott Card - author of Ender's Game - and the folks who put together The Truman Show should be paying Dick's estate royalties...) This was a more high-tech version, where somehow the world of The Onion had escaped its textual confines and had virally infected the actual news.

That must be the answer. Because with more people unemployed with nothing else to do, how could the porn industry possibly be suffering?

(Next post will not mention The Onion - promise. Unless they pay me.)

best (if tasteless) t-shirt of the year

2009-01-06T00:08:00.002-06:00

Via Decider Milwaukee (a/k/a The Onion's local-edition calendar thingy). I love the way whoever snapped the photo managed to get his or her thumb in the image...

there's more to life than books, you know - but not much more

2009-01-04T00:18:00.001-06:00

Several worthy tracks fell between the cracks of my 2008 mixes - mostly because while there's a place for random tracks, and a place for songs from my favorite albums, there's not a place for songs from albums I own that don't make my top 20. (I don't make the rules, I just - wait: I do make the rules. Guess I could change that.)

One album that might well end up among my twenty favorite albums of 2008, if I were to redo the list after some months, is Simon Bookish's Everything/Everything. I'd just downloaded the album from eMusic a few days before putting together my lists. I downloaded it on the strength of the two tracks linked below, which had been sent around the flackosphere for months.

First, you gotta love a guy who calls himself "Simon Bookish"...and then puts out an album with this cover:

I suppose the simplest way to describe Simon Bookish's music is that it sounds almost exactly what you'd expect music by "Simon Bookish" to sound like. It might also help to imagine a collaboration among David Bowie, David Byrne, and Philip Glass (even though Bookish has a song called "Terry Riley Disco," the horn and keyboard arrangements are closer to Glass's work than Riley's). Both "Synchrotron" and "Dumb Terminal" feature extended, multipart structures, which isn't necessarily typical - but I think Bookish does much to recuperate the diminished stature of the saxophone, abused over these years by everyone from annoying blues honkers to Sanborn-esque cheese merchants. There's also much to be said for the sort of insouciant abstraction of the lyrics, along with Bookish's alternately melodramatic and distant vocals.

Everything/Everything is on Tomlab (another good indicator, if you know that label's work), and Bookish apparently has released two earlier titles, Unfair/Funfair and Trainwreck/Raincheck (noticing a trend?), which apparently do not necessarily sound anything like this.

Simon Bookish "Synchrotron" (Everything/Everything, 2008)
Simon Bookish "Dumb Terminal" (Everything/Everything, 2008)

a house is not a motel, or...

2009-01-03T21:59:00.003-06:00

Last night was our first night sleeping in the new bedroom - complete with new bed, sheets, pillows, and blankets. It's always a little odd, sleeping in a new place...perhaps odder when it's your own. You realize that all kinds of little details and rituals need to be worked out and reimagined: where stuff goes, habitual motions, gestures, etc., and of course the obvious getting used to a new bed. We discovered, for example, that the eyebrow dormer lets in a lot of south light later in the mornings: this won't be a problem on weekdays when we get up and go to work, but if we want to sleep later on weekends (and we do), we'll need to find a way to dim that down, without just slapping up something that blocks the light all the time. And of course, we discover minor things that either need to be changed (already, we moved one of the shelves in the closet, partly for cat-related reasons but mostly for functionality) or that we would have done differently had we been able to live in the space before building it. (Dammit - I knew I should have done that Sims thing...)

But for the most part, we're incredibly pleased: Rose's design mostly works exactly as we'd hoped it would, and we're so happy finally to have been able to do this.

2008 top 20

2008-12-31T20:11:00.003-06:00

Here's a selection of songs from my 20 favorite albums of 2008. I sequenced them to play in order, so the order doesn't reflect any ranking of the songs' host albums.

Ringtone Tycoon: The Automated Pushover

1. The Bye Bye Blackbirds "The Ghosts Are Alright" (Houses & Homes)
2. Ghosty "A Good Customer" (Answers)
3. These New Puritans "Elvis" (Beat Pyramid)
4. School of Language "This Is No Fun" (Sea from Shore)
5. Department of Eagles "Waves of Rye" (In Ear Park)
6. TV on the Radio "Family Tree" (Dear Science)
7. Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks "Out of Reaches" (Real Emotional Trash)
8. Shannon McArdle "I Was Warned" (Summer of the Whore)
9. The Black Watch "Peppermint" (Icing the Snow Queen)
10. Mike Viola "That Part of Me Is Dead" (Lurch)
11. Albert Hammond Jr. "In My Room" (¿Cómo Te Llama?)
12. Wire "All Fours" (Object 47)
13. School of Seven Bells "Connjur" (Alpinisms)
14. Momus "Fade to White" (Joemus)
15. The Week That Was "The Story Waits for No One" (The Week That Was)
16. The Chap "Wuss Wuss" (Mega Breakfast)
17. Sam Phillips "My Career in Chemistry" (Don't Do Anything)
18. Portishead "We Carry On" (Third)
19. Beck "Chemtrails" (Modern Guilt)
20. Clinic "Shopping Bag" (Do It!)

Playlist: enjoy! Everyone have a happy new year, and here's to 2009!

2008 top albums

2008-12-31T14:41:00.006-06:00

Typically this entry will feature a mini-essay on some music-related phenomena I observed during the preceding year...but you know, I can't think of anything that isn't dead boring and analyzed to death: declining sales blah-blah, downloads yadda-yadda-yadda, market share zzzzzz... Oh well - at least the RIAA appears to have stopped suing its customer base. (Or the media have also grown bored with covering same.)

Anyway, I care about that stuff only to the extent it affects the music - and while some of those business-type trends indeed are dire (I'm still in shock that Atomic Records will be no more), as it happens there were indeed lots of good albums released in 2008. I don't know what else to call them: music is still most often released in packets of songs from 35 to 75 minutes long, whether such packets ever end up occupying a particular piece of plastic or not, so "album" it is (as in "collection of associated items"). I suspect this is so, and will continue to be so, both from marketing perspectives and from musicians' perspective: the popularity of online playlists speaks to the way people enjoy experiencing songs in the context of other songs, and so songwriters are still attentive to the way a sequence of songs establishes a particular context for each of those songs. And of course, the atomization into single digital downloads is exaggerated anyway; bands still write more than one song, listeners still download more than one, and the moment they start listening, they either put them in a sequence or experience them in one.

Anyway: here's the top tier of my favorite albums of 2008. Within each tier, the albums are simply alphabetical by title. I didn't even attempt to rank them any more finely. "DL" most likely refers to (legal) downloads via eMusic, although occasionally I may have acquired the tracks from a publicist or because the band's giving it away at their website.

Top Tier:

Alpinisms School of Seven Bells: This one blindsided me: I heard one track and liked it, heard another track and liked it, heard a third...then downloaded the album from eMusic and here it is among my ten favorites of the year. It's sort of like one of those old candy bars that has eight different flavors - although in this case, they're blended rather than separated. (DL)

Answers Ghosty: Clever, intelligent, sophisticated pop, well-played and nicely arranged: why ask more? (CD)

Don't Do Anything Sam Phillips: Phillips continues her stealth campaign to put out weird little records that casual listeners think are folk music...the production and arranging on this are spare, subtle, but often rather odd, but her voice is in the forefront, and there's usually an acoustic guitar, so people will overlook that the title track, for example, sounds rather like a My Bloody Valentine outtake. (CD)

Houses & Homes The Bye Bye Blackbirds: I used to agonize slightly over whether it was fair to put albums largely written by people I know on these lists - I don't have to do that when the albums are as good as this one. Songwriter Bradley Skaught says he was listening to a lot of mid-sixties Everly Brothers while the band was making this record, and that shows in the country/folk roots of the songwriting, the sophistication and airiness of the arrangements and recording, and of course in the vocal harmonies (which, being three- and four-part, are more Byrds than Everlys...but had there been a third singing Everly Brother, they would have sounded like the Byrds anyway). (CD)

Icing the Snow Queen The Black Watch: John Andrew Fredrick may not be exactly a one-man band, but clearly it's his sensibilities, and layers of guitars, that dominate proceedings here. The band has eight to ten excellent albums, but bad record-label deals and negligent publicity means they tend to be far more obscure than they should be. (Fredrick has, I believe, a full-time academic position as well, which prohibits much touring, which might contribute as well.) (DL)

In Ear Park Department of Eagles: Because Daniel Rossen's other band Grizzly Bear received reams of (deserved) publicity, people tend to think of Department of Eagles as a spinoff act...but in fact, DoE predates Grizzly Bear, being formed nearly a decade ago by Rossen and his then-college-roommate Fred Nicolaus. There's a curious combination of delicacy and power, even brutality, in the arrangements; the delicacy is easy to hear, but sometimes the band heaps up guitars and basses and pushes them into the red, and the effect is rather like an enormous tree, struck by lightning and falling directly toward you. (DL)

Lurch Mike Viola: This was released in late 2007 online, but since there was a physical release this year (and since I didn't hear the whole thing until this year), I'm counting it. Pure pop for now people (to be unoriginal): as I wrote the other day, I'm well past the peak of my power-pop fanaticism, but when someone gets that combination of melody, harmonies, and clever songwriting and arranging just right, it still sounds damned good. (DL)

Modern Guilt Beck: I keep underestimating Beck - every time he releases an album, I sort of delay picking it up (although having to hold my nose at his Scientology might have much to do with that), and then when I finally get around to it, the album almost invariably is better than I'd hoped, and tends to just get better on repeat listen. Modern Guilt is an exception only in that I actually bought the thing relatively early in its release - and this is the record where Beck seems to integrate much of the disparate strands of his songwriting rather than isolate them into particular albums. He's grown into a versatile, confident, and still exceedingly clever writer and arranger, and he's also become a fine singer - and he has a knack for hiring the right people to realize his sounds as well. (CD)

Real Emotional Trash Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks: Malkmus is another guy who seems to have settled into what he's doing: his first few post-Pavement releases seemed a bit uncertain, snatching from a stylistic grab-bag and sometimes coming up a bit sketchy in the songwriting department. I think it helps that, even though he's wanted all his "solo" albums to have been co-billed with the Jicks, this is the first album on which they actually sound like a band as opposed to hired hands playing Malkmus songs: even on the rather jammy Pig Lib, the songs sounded as if they'd been entirely written beforehand, and then the band stretched them out. Here the long songs sound as if they've been developed by the band, as part of the writing and recording process (this also means Malkmus and the Jicks are a fantastic live act these days, especially drummer Janet Weiss). It's also interesting to compare this with the most recent Pavement reissue (Brighten the Corners); listening to that Pavement album, the roots of Malkmus's current music are clear. (CD)

Third Portishead: If Portishead had wanted to give this album a real title, Lowered Expectations probably would have been it...at least before it was released. The band hadn't released a studio recording since 1997's Dummy, and as the band epitomized the frozen-in-mid-nineties-amber style known as "trip hop" (a style which had not experienced massive calls for revival), one could be forgiven for imagining that anything new would be either a lame retread or some horrendous attempt to be "contemporary." Nope: the band instead produced the most uncompromising record of its career. Yes, the sound is still cinematic, but from the dark yet romantic aura of its first releases, the sort of film evoked on this album is far darker, more unsettling: a sort of gothic, psychological horror film, whose violence is primarily emotional and almost exclusively offscreen. Beth Gibbons sings like ice on fire - if that fire were carefully banked and focused - and the arrangements are ruthlessly discordant, electronic, harsh...but sometimes also beautiful, a beauty which in such context is as disquieting as menace might normally be. "We Carry On" (the track on my playlist) is practically a Silver Apples tribute in its textures, but if the electronics sound soldered together by Dr. Frankenstein, the microtonal timbres wrench the whole thing out from its roots: there's a synth part whose pitch is halfway between the bass note and a lurching harmony a minor second above, which also plays a role in the song's texture. (CD)

Next Tier:

¿Cómo Te Llama? Albert Hammond Jr.: With his second solo album, Hammond seems nearly poised to relegate his main band, the Strokes, to the trivia-question file - this album feels more alive and lived-in than all but the first Strokes album. Hammond also contributes to what seems a mini-power-pop resurgence this year - in addition to the usual virtues of that genre, I really like the playing and recording on this record: there's a crackling presence to many of the tracks (one guitar in particular, I swear you think the guy's amp is in your living room). (CD)

Beat Pyramid These New Puritans: With Wire moving toward one of its more pop-oriented phases (successfully: see below), and the Fall in one its periodic drifts toward sketchiness, here's a band mining such obvious influences (they're even named after a Fall song) but without seeming like someone's tribute act. Partly that's due to sheer youth and enthusiasm (the band members are in their early 20s), but I think it's also just because they do it so well...and incorporate a lot of more contemporary, electronic influences as well. Oh - and they sound great played really loud. That always helps. (CD)

Dear Science TV on the Radio: While many past TVOTR songs sounded as if the band threw every idea (and every vocal track) they could think of into the mix, here the band cuts back - sometimes even becoming (gasp!) pretty in the process ("Family Tree" is an example, on the playlist). Maybe not as powerful or overwhelming as their first few releases, but when a band is still growing after several years filled with critical acclaim (rather than repeating itself or disintegrating), that's a good sign. (CD)

Do It! Clinic: Clinic roars back, with a little less subtlety than 2007's Visitations and a lot more noise, while still retaining the surrealistic crossword puzzle intrigue of their lyrics. (CD)

Joemus Momus: Aside from having a terrible title (Momus collaborates with Glasgow's Joe Howe, of Germlin and Gay Against You), this album finds Momus incorporating Howe's video-game squiggles into a set of songs often surprisingly indebted to Scottish folk...then again, given that one of Momus's in-the-works projects is something called The Book of Scotlands, maybe that's less surprising. I'm sure many will be alienated and ask why he ruins this perfectly good melody with all that noise (while others will lean the opposite way, wondering why he's gumming up such cool noises with sappy little melodies), I find the combination, and the tension it creates, intriguing and refreshing. And although it didn't fit the playlist, the album's closing track is one of the most affecting things Momus has ever done: a dying vaudevillian wheezes out his last breath, wondering what ever's happened to his world. (CD)

Mega Breakfast The Chap: Speaking of Momus, I sometimes think The Chap is what might have resulted had Momus and Wire formed a band largely influenced by Robyn Hitchcock's "Uncorrected Personality Traits" and the four-part vocal harmonies to go with. Sometimes The Chap's music is almost straightforward, streamlined 21st century rock-pop; other times it's sheer avant-gardist noise; but most often it's both at the same time, with those vocal harmonies piled atop cracking beats, guitar riffs, scratching violin, and glitchy electronic belches and hiccups. (CD)

Object 47 Wire: As I noted above, Wire's moving gradually toward the more pop end of its stylistic pendulations, but Object 47 is curious in that, with a couple exceptions, it works better as a whole than as isolated tracks. The lead track, released for download ahead of the album's issue, was "One of Us," and it's a fine number with a classic Colin Newman vocal melody, but it (along with the album's closer "All Fours") is one of the few tracks that works as well outside its context. Consequently, the album places a bit lower for me than it might have...although it may well be another example of a Wire album gradually rising in my estimation over the years. (CD)

The Week That Was The Week That Was; Sea from Shore School of Language: In a somewhat odd move, Field Music (one of the most intriguing acts of the past few years) split in two this year...even though the Brewis brothers still work together and some personnel are in common between each of the brothers' releases. So, instead of one new Field Music album, we get a short album (just barely 30 minutes long in each case) from two new bands. Fortunately, they're both excellent...and the other curious thing is that they're rather similar, stylistically (suggesting that the break-up was not due primarily to the usual "musical differences"). School of Language's album came out first, led by the simultaneously catchy and annoying glossolalic riff of the four-part "Rockist" (vowel-speak a la "O Superman"), and TWTW's self-titled album came along later in the year. School of Language seems more dominated by keyboards, while TWTW adds some light orchestral coloring to the mix. Both continue to sort of pointillist post-punk/prog mix of Field Music, sounding rather like Gentle Giant at times, although scaled down in terms of ambition and complexity. (CD for both)

Summer of the Whore Shannon McArdle: This is probably the most ruthless post-break-up album I've heard - ruthless both toward the singer's ex and toward herself (the "whore" of the title track isn't her ex's new lover, it's herself). Musically, it's first-rate Chicago-school avant-pop: some country, some folk, some post-rock touches, careful arrangements and production, all done with a great degree of skill, craft, and intensity. (DL)

Honorable Mentions:

One interesting thing about this section: a number of artists whose albums have frequently made the top reaches of my listings ended up here, in the second half of the top fifty. I'm not sure yet if that means they're subpar releases for those acts, or if they're just suffering from the "oh, another decent album from this band again" syndrome.

Doleful Lions 7, Aimee Mann @#%&*! Smilers, R.E.M. Accelerate, Jenny Lewis Acid Tongue, Stereolab Chemical Chords, Future of the Left Curses, The Magnetic Fields Distortion, Tokyo Police Club Elephant Shell, David Byrne & Brian Eno Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, Sparks Exotic Creatures of the Deep, The Fall Imperial Wax Solvent, The Helio Sequence Keep Your Eyes Ahead, Atlas Sound Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, The Raveonettes Lust Lust Lust, Deerhunter Microcastle, Elvis Costello & the Imposters Momofuku, No Age Nouns, Deerhoof Offend Maggie, Of Montreal Skeletal Lamping, The Hold Steady Stay Positive, Robert Forster The Evangelist, American Music Club The Golden Age, Destroyer Trouble in Dreams, The Baseball Project Volume 1: Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails, Fever Marlene White China, The Walkmen You & Me

(If anyone cares, this link brings you to a chart listing the above as well as all the other 2008 albums I acquired, including those I haven't had a chance to listen to - a couple of which have potential to dislodge some of the above.)

The next entry will contain the playlist of tracks from my top 20 albums of 2008.

2008 mixes - covers!

2008-12-30T22:57:00.006-06:00

I've always rather liked cover songs - or at least, I've never been one of those folks who can't imagine a cover that does anything but make one want to listen to the original (which is not to say that some covers don't do exactly and only that). So this is the second or third year in which I've compiled a playlist consisting solely of covers I'd run into during that year. Here's the 2008 version:

Ringtone Tycoon: "it's okay, they're speaking Chinese..."

1. Marnie Stern "Don't Stop Believin'" (Journey): Among the more interesting varieties of covers are those that begin in your mind as clearly ironic...but then turn out to represent aspects of the original song that were more interesting than you'd remembered it. Okay - fooled ya. I don't know if this is ironic...but Stern's usual spastic yet fluid guitar playing covers every square millimeter of this track, such that the mundane little song underneath is almost not there. (Also: "South Detroit"? I believe that would be properly known as "Windsor, Ontario"... There is, however, a "South Detroit" in South Dakota, according to Google...so maybe we've been wrong all along, and the narrator is from South Dakota.)

2. Chica and the Folder "I'll Come Running" (Brian Eno): Despite being entirely synthetic, this one sounds almost like an arrangement Eno might have used for the original...perhaps if an Oblique Strategies card had read "Blackout" or something.

3. Darker My Love "The Fool" (Sanford Clark): A somewhat obscure fifties track, if I'm remembering correctly, covered here as part of some shoe-based marketing program. Does that sound promising? No - but I like the song much better than I would have guessed.

4. French Kicks "Trouble" (Lindsey Buckingham): I didn't plan on including covers of this Lindsey Buckingham song two years in a row...but that's just how it came out. Of Montreal did it last year...I wonder who'll do it 2009?

5. The Monks of Doom "The 15th" (Wire): This might be the Wire song you want to play for someone to evidence the band's genius as both songwriters and arrangers...the Monks of Doom, however, make the arrangement less luminously brilliant and add an ending (and a fake ending) that suggests they're taking the song into their own, more improv-friendly territory...but instead punt in favor of giving the 'puter some.

6. Parenthetical Girls "Joan of Arc (Maid of Orleans)" (Orchestral Manœuvres in the Dark): Architecture & Morality is one of my favorite albums (the source of this track's original), and one reason is its blend of electronic, acoustic, and old-school musique concrète sampling...and what's astonishing to me is how well Parenthetical Girls (of course you've guessed by now: no women in that band either...) have reproduced the effect of the textures and tones of the original version's opening section - even though the orchestration is quite different. Beyond that, the arrangement is slightly more intimate than the original, largely due to the substitution of what might be a harmonium for mellotron, and the fade's accompaniment of the martial drumming with reams of acoustic percussion (rather than the sort of clattering electronic soundscape that backs the original's acoustic drums).

7. Eliza Lumley "How to Disappear Completely" (Radiohead): Covering Radiohead is the new black, or the new loud, or maybe just the new "new x"...but there's a reason for that, which is that brouhaha about distribution models, stylistic changes, and bad hair only obscures that Radiohead also writes very good, durable songs. Lumley's version barely exists, and in so nearly not doing gets quite pointedly at the panicked desolation at the heart of the song.

8. Morrissey "Redondo Beach" (Patti Smith): When the Smiths' first singles came out, and Johnny Marr's fabulously inventive and textured guitar-playing surrounded Morrissey's series of two-note melodies, everyone figured Marr would go on to become a big star, while Morrissey would probably become a writer or a journalist or simply a celebrity. Instead, Marr's taken the title of our last track to heart (even when he appears, who can tell? hear his appearance on last year's Modest Mouse album for evidence), while Morrissey's had a career full of solid albums...and has developed into a fine, supple singer without losing his distinctiveness. Here he wraps himself around Patti Smith's tragic little number to nice effect.

9. Brazilian Girls "Crosseyed and Painless" (Talking Heads): First, I believe this is the sole act in this year's mixes with "girls" or "women" in its name that actually has women in it. Take a bow. Yeesh. Anyway: a nice, intense cover of Talking Heads' already intense song.

10. No Age "It's Oh So Quiet" (Björk): Another species of cover is the kind in which the band does nearly a complete rewrite. There are some similarities in melodic countour here...but essentially, this is a No Age setting of the lyrics to Björk's song (which isn't actually hers, but let us not quibble).

11. Radiohead "The Headmaster Ritual" (The Smiths): Whereas this is nearly a carbon copy...but it's interesting to see how well Thom Yorke's voice fits the lyric and melody, and the way Marr's idiosyncratic guitar part with its odd passing chords is flawlessly reproduced. This is from a live online performance, if I recall correctly, via Stereogum (I linked them the last two posts, and they still haven't paid me, so you get to find the URL yourself this time).

12. Scott Miller "Cara Lee" (Chris Stamey): Miller, late of Game Theory and the Loud Family, is a semi-retired father of two these days ("semi-retired" from music anyway), but he made this recording and offered it for free if enough people donated to a particular charitable cause. They did, he did, and here it is again...but you might give to Donors Choose anyway.

13. The New Frontiers "Look at Miss Ohio" (Gillian Welch): I think this is the only track here whose original is unknown to me (I found a free stream of that Sanford Clark number above, which I hadn't known beforehand), but since I can nearly hear Welch's voice singing this one, I'm guessing it's pretty close.

14. My Morning Jacket "Wear Your Love Like Heaven" (Donovan): Okay, am I imagining this, or was the Donovan original one of the earlier instances of a song used in a commercial for an utterly unrelated product...like some time in the '70s? Anyway, I like the original regardless, and My Morning Jacket tweak it just enough to make it interesting...

15. Spoon "Peace Like a River" (Paul Simon): I would not have expected Spoon to cover Paul Simon...but here they do, from a Daytrotter session, and it somehow fits the band better than I would have guessed.

16. Calexico "Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)" (Bob Dylan): From a series of online downloads of live tracks covering Dylan songs. If anyone knows who the guy is that sings the Spanish verse, let me know: he gives it this incredibly grave dignity, and while the series is called "Nobody Sings Dylan Like Dylan," as effective as Bob can be singing his best, he couldn't do this.

17. The Last Town Chorus "Modern Love" (David Bowie): Yet another common species of cover: the radical tempo change gambit. Do a fast song slow, do a slow song fast - you get the picture. Done well, though, it brings out whole new realms of meaning, since all the connotations of "slow" (and, often, "quiet") get applied to lyrics lacking such registers in the original. (Speaking of which: I've always thought Roger Daltrey's bellowing on "Who Are You" often utterly missed what seemed to be the point of the lyrics...and that if Pete Townshend had sung the verse about "how can I measure up to anyone now, after such a love as this?" in his own, much more vulnerable voice, particularly holding back the volume quite a bit, the song would have been much more effective. So, uh, I guess I'm saying I'd like to hear a cover of the song by its actual writer...)

18. Seksu Roba "Moon Song" (My Bloody Valentine): It's Theremin Night at the Luna Lounge, and here's a glittering trove of swank dressed up just for your very sophisticated palate...

19. Laura Cantrell "Love Vigilantes" (New Order): Cantrell found the country song hidden within the New Order track and pulled it out intact. Sad that so many lyrics that began as fiction end up being all too plausible, though. (Uh, not the visitation part - the rest.)

20. Xiu Xiu "All We Ever Wanted Was Everything" (Bauhaus): Xiu Xiu is, of course, not for everybody - I fully understand the folks who would rather claw their own eyeballs out than listen to either the band's sometimes horrendous cacophony or Jamie Stewart's vocal exhibitionism - but at their best, they're not only compelling but (often overlooked) write great melodies besides. This, of course, is not their song...but anyone expecting Stewart to suddenly start howling or yelping will be... I guess you'll just have to find out.

Play it, Sam - play it.

Next: My favorite 20 albums of 2008 (and accompanying playlist).

2008 listening diary - part 2

2008-12-30T17:01:00.007-06:00

The second of two "listening diary" mixes for this year (see my previous entry for general bloviation thereon).

Ringtone Tycoon: Mormon Jigsaw?

1. Ezra Furman & the Harpoons "We Should Fight": Begin with the rock, son. Begin with the rock.

2. The Eat "Communist Radio": It's short. It's fast. It's 1979.

3. Service Group "All I Wanted to Say": I discovered this because the band's main songwriter is my brother-in-law's cousin (I think I have that right). He used to work on crew for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I include that info only so Buffy fanatics will check it out. Pure power-pop - no longer as favored a genre as it once was for me; still, done right it hits the spot, kind of like junk food is good once in a very rare while. Good junk food, anyway.

4. The Misbelieves "Come On Now Kids Yeah It's Bonnington Truce!": This is written by the same guy who wrote the instant classic "Touch You Natalie Jane" (billed to Popsicle Thieves) a few years ago, and which was on my best-of mixes for that year. I think he's got the touch. Random songs educate the youth: here are a few words.

5. Neil Gaiman ft. Claudia Gonson "Bloody Sunrise": Uh, let me see...this is song written in the style of Magnetic Fields, sung by Claudia Gonson, who actually does sing for Magnetic Fields, and which was written by noted fantasy author Neil Gaiman, after a bookshelf full of fake titles (along with a bunch of other songs written by other folks on those titles), and...wait, I'm lost. Here - follow Gaiman's links instead. This would all be terribly postmodern (emphasis on "terribly"), except that this really does sound like a Magnetic Fields song, and a fairly good one at that, and Stephin Merritt's often written about vampires anyway. (I think it's a fairly accurate claim that Merritt has written and recorded the only concept country-western electronic album about vampires. Therefore he's also written the best concept country-western electronic album about vampires - no slouch that Merritt fella.)

6. Gil Ray "X-Ray Beach": Gil used to be the drummer, then a guitarist, for Game Theory, then was that band's successor the Loud Family's drummer in its last years. He put together this surf instrumental because surf instrumentals are fun. And in fact, one of the bands that put out one of my twenty favorite albums this year (see forthcoming post) regularly opens its sets with a cover of this track.

7. The Wrens "In Turkish Waters": No, no, don't have a heart attack: there's no new Wrens studio album. This is one of Stereogum's 'Gum Drop specials...and (I just found out now - though Stereogum probably mentioned it but I forgot) is another contribution to the same series as the Gaiman track. At least we know the band hasn't all dropped dead, or run for New Jersey elective office, or murdered annoying music journalists.

8. Tris McCall "Girl with a Bicycle": We continue with the New Jersey section of the mix: for the last few months Tris has been posting demoes at one of his websites. This, so far, is my favorite, a percolating little piece of semi-psychedelic whimsy about a classic subject (hint: it's in the title). Rumors that the synth at the end was played by directly wiring Tris's cortex to the inputs are, alas, unconfirmed at press time.

9. Son Lux "Weapons": Blame Tris McCall - those squalling synths put me in a sort of electronic/prog mood, so here's this track: moody, layered, all too contemporary in lyric subject.

10. Rudely Interrupted "Don't Break My Heart": Once I remember that this isn't, in fact, Wire's "One of Us," its own charms become considerable. If you see me wandering around going "malfunction...malfunction..." you can blame this song.

11. The Hidden Messages "As If": A British band that e-mailed me out of the blue late in 2006 ended up placing songs in that year's list, its debut in last year's list, and released a couple more songs this year...and here's my favorite of that bunch. Anti-ironic, orchestrated, joyous pop with more hooks than, uh...a terrifying cloning disaster involving New Order's bass player.

12. Sinkane "Autobahn": Not the Kraftwerk marathon. The drums keep threatening to fall down the stairs, and somehow it's the repetition of the song's few vocal phrases that keeps them put. And someone's remembering a flute they heard once, quite long ago, rather far away.

13. Rox "My Baby Left Me": Only the sadly 21st century massive compression gives this one away as a contemporary recording. Shoulda been a massive hit in 1971.

14. The Joy Formidable "Austere": After that high-pitched vocal opening, you don't really expect that bass sound - and the band also has a good line in switching the rhythm around to make things interesting...alternating with straightened-out phrases both to avoid predictability and preciousness.

15. The Girls "Transfer Station": Of course there's no one female in this band. Duh. Otherwise, why would they call the band "The Girls"? (Ditto "Women" below, and just plain "Girls" - no article - one of whose songs almost made these mixes too...) What there is is a nice driving rhythm and more wailing synth (especially at the end).

16. The Mojomatics "Wait a While": This is for those of you who think rock'n'roll should not have synths but should have buckets of reverb. And should be short.

17. The Homophones "Everyone's Dead": Such a cheery little number, with a jolly glockenspiel, homoerotic imagery, and dead cops in your head. No, really - it's cheery.

18. Women "Black Rice": One route: make things simple, but don't make everything obvious. Make them into a little jigsaw puzzle, but make sure the resulting picture doesn't just depict a jumble of disorganized jigsaw puzzle pieces.

19. Setting Sun "Not Waste": This is one of those songs that works for me almost entirely due to one or two unexpected chords. Without those chords, it'd be a reasonably good, moody little song...but the presence of that particular chord sequence somehow elevates and transfigures the entire emotive world of the song, and enables the song to haunt my damned brain. Funny, that.

20. Planar "No Numbers": There has to be a sort of floaty, goodnight track every year...

21. Tom Bolton "Little Star": I would not have thought it was possible to wring anything decent from such a well-established, simple little melody...but Bolton manages it.

22. The Speakers "You'll Remember": What works for me here? Well, this song kept threatening to get booted off the list...it was all just kinda okay...and then I kept listening to the end, and something about its last few minutes kept insisting on its presence in these mixes. It was destined as a last song from the beginning, also.

Ici la playliste actuelle. Je ne parle pas français.

Later this evening: covers mix!

2008 listening diary - part 1

2008-12-29T23:59:00.002-06:00

This is the first in my series of year-end music recaps with accompanying playlists. The first two (including this one) assemble free-range music that came my way unencumbered by that twentieth-century phenomenon known as "the album" (as I pointed out last year, "album" simply means "a collection of songs" and has nothing to do with the physical format that collection takes). As someone who occasionally blogs about music, I receive lots of links to mp3s: I am apparently a valuable corrosive in the plumbing system of the music industry, presumed to have a certain power to burn through the various assembled nasties that prevent music from flowing freely through the sewage system of the music industry, only to be discharged in a fetid rush, in the middle of the night, via some unauthorized conduit, on property of mysteriously tangled ownership, whence its fertile effluvia might cause the flowers of commerce to bloom in profusion. I'm guessing the industry would rather the plumbing metaphor be run in reverse, with profits flowing fresh as water through its carefully maintained faucets...but (as the philosopher Ice-T once said) "shit ain't like that."

Anyway: here's the first playlist, carefully assembled to provide all essential nutrients and a carefully calibrated bouquet of aural efflorescence...

Ringtone Tycoon: German Mixup?

1. Statues "The Last Stand": Begin with the rock, son. Begin with the rock.

2. 18th Dye "Backdoor": I think the lines about the mom and the dog are really about the cartoon "Marmaduke"...

3. Duchess Says "Ccut Up": Hey! You got guitar in my synthesizer! But you got synthesizer in my guitar!

4. An Horse "Warm Hands/Scared as Fuck": Via Said the Gramophone...whose writer (too lazy to check which one) noted a titular ambiguity - I preserve the perhaps mythical "Scared as Fuck" part simply because it's a beautiful contrast with the chorus affirmation "I'm not really scared" (whose "really" already brings us halfway there, of course).

5. Crystal Stilts "Crystal Stilts": I like bands that write songs named after themselves (or bands that name themselves after songs they've written). 'Scuse me while I wash off this reverb.

6. Eugene Francis Jnr & the Juniors "Poor Me": I like the circling keyboard part, and the way the guitars get a little woozy, and the general air of this one...although I find it's one of those songs I somehow fail to be able to get very specific in writing about. Oh wait - is that mandolin in the background? Nice!

7. Bob Hund "Reinkarnerad exakt som förut": This track was linked at The Sugarplastic's website...and at first I thought it was a joke: really Ben Eshbach recording under a different name...except I found independent mention of this album and artist elsewhere. Anyway, it's unsurprising that Eshbach liked this one.

8. Camphor "The Sweetest Tooth": There's still room for nicely arranged, tuneful, even "adult-orientated" (a la Stereolab) pop music. Isn't there?

9. Devotchka "Transliterator": I believe this track was one of Stereogum's "'Gum Drop" tracks of the week - anyway, I'd earlier dismissed these guys as one of those annoying "gypsy rock" bands that cater to former frat boys grasping after sophisticated occasions to overdrink...but there's way more going on here than that. In fact, that is not going on here at all.

10. Monkey "Heavenly Peach Banquet": You know, I can't really imagine monkeys cooperating overmuch at a "peach banquet." I'm guessing they'd just start throwing them around, overturning tables, scampering around, and generally behaving obnoxiously. Sorta like Oasis. But then, this is actually Damon Albarn from Blur, with collaborators...he'd probably be perfectly capable of appropriate peach banquet behavior.

11. The Grizzly Owls "What's a Girl to Do?": Apparently, my new hobby is collecting songs called "What's a Girl to Do?" - first, in 1994 or whatever, there was the Wrens; then last year or so, Bat for Lashes had their/her song of that title...and here's the Grizzly Owls, with yet another song of that title, which both wins the earworm award for this playlist and confirms that indie rockish folk still haven't finished with the damned "name your band after animals" trend (to rather absurd ends, here).

12. 13ghosts "Riverside": Another haunting track...isn't there a reference to feeding swans on the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle?

13. Phonograph "Paper Bag": Country and lunar. From a Daytrotter session.

14. HIJK "Paper Boat": This is one of those songs for which neither band nor title sticks (not that they're inappropriate) but then, once I hear the song again, I go, oh yeah: that one! (Pretend this track's entry has content.)

15. Diet Cola "Wicked Witch of the Northeast": The nice thing about these listening diaries (and indeed, about the ongoing mp3-ization of music listening) is that it returns us, to an extent, to pre- album-era rock, when a band could get a nice buzz just on the basis of one song, and that one song might be primarily a matter of one very cool guitar sound or something. Is that a career? Who cares? It's a great noise this song's got.

16. Josh Ritter "Wildfires": Okay, yes: I followed up the noisy track with the sensitive, acoustic-guitar -based track. So sue me. Anyway, Ritter subtly varies his guitar playing here...the change in tone and texture from the opening to the song's ending is a case in point. (When I make these mixes, I'll listen only to the ends and beginnings of songs to decide on transitions...so such differences become striking).

17. The Harpeth Trace "Who Knows Where You Are": Sometimes, you wake up and you're sure you had this dream...but all you remember is one curious detail, like bits of a feather stuck underneath a carpet. Yeah, it's one in the morning, so?

18. Figurines "Hey, Girl": You gotta give this band credit just for calling a song "Hey, Girl" - doing so speaks to a real confidence in the song itself, since no one's going to remember the title as anything distinctive. And indeed, this is (along with the Grizzly Owls' track above) the second-most persistent earworm in this mix. Something about the way that melody hooks and reaches around reminds me of Rollerskate Skinny (and I know: that probably strikes most people as saying something like, you know, this building reminds me of Yetzske Office Supply headquarters in Deadoak, Idaho - but in fact, if you've been to Deadoak, Idaho, you'll know what I mean).

19. The Sadies "Translucent Sparrow": Remember that song in which Camper Van Beethoven talks about giving some cowboys some acid? The cowboys went and gave that acid to the Byrds and a passing mariachi band.

20. Passion Pit "Sleepyhead": I wouldn't want to break the mood. And I don't mean the mariachi mood.

21. DM Stith "Just Once": Let's say you took some colored ink, and you mixed some ground-up iron filings in with it. Then you filled a metal tank with water, put a few lights overhead, then slowly poured in some of that ink. Oh, and then you turn on a bank of very powerful magnets you've installed in a band around the outside of that tank, and crank the lights up to absurd candlepower. This song has a middle section that's kind of like that.

The playlist itself.

More tomorrow (or later today, if you prefer).

stupid career moves, pt. 372

2008-12-29T00:29:00.002-06:00

I read a review (probably in The A.V. Club) of a film called The Reader, which features an actor named David Kross. Now, apparently that's his real name - he's German, and sometimes spells it with the funny capital-B-looking thing Germans use for double S's - but it's positively silly for any actor beginning his career now to use the name "David Kross" even if it's the name he was born with. Because he'll spend his entire career going, no, not David Cross, the stand-up, actor, and co-star of Mr. Show, but David Kross - with a K, the obscure German guy whose agent and manager are clearly woefully uninformed. Almost anything would have been better than "David Kross": "David Krauss," even "David K. Ross," hell even "The Great Grimpen Mire"... But "David Kross" - that's just silly. That's like someone calling himself "Phillip Seymore Hoffmann" or something...

year-end books-to-be-read list

2008-12-26T23:20:00.002-06:00

I did this last year - and, astonishingly, have actually read all the books sitting in my queue from that date (I would have guessed...maybe not).

Here's what's upcoming for me on the bookshelf (in the random order they're shelved):

John Hodgman More Information Than You Require (gift)
Sean Wilentz & Greil Marcus The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad (gift)
Steven Pinker The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
Naomi Klein The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Robertson Davies World of Wonders
Jasper Fforde Thursday Next: First Among Sequels

I'm sure I'll find a few more as the new year rolls on...

at this time of year...

2008-12-25T21:08:00.002-06:00

Here's an old favorite. Although the song doesn't mention Christmas specifically, it's always felt like a Christmas song to me. So here it is, "Bells" by Wobble Test, my all-time favorite Milwaukee band.

This is from their debut cassette, from 1990, called trixienickybambibo (also known jokingly as "Four Dead Dogs"...since that's where the names in the title come from, each band member's childhood dog). That's my memory at least...someone can correct me if I'm wrong.

Wobble Test "Bells" (trixienickybambibo, 1990 cassette)

the ball is gone...in a flash

2008-12-22T20:32:00.002-06:00

A little late...but my previous entry may clue you in to the fact that my plan to post this earlier got a bit derailed...(Oranj is recovering quite well, by the way).

Anyway, I'm probably now the last music blogger to post SF Seals' "Dock Ellis" in memory of the pitcher who died a couple days ago...and who is best known for his claim to have thrown a no-hitter on acid. Barbara Manning is a major baseball fan (SF Seals was her band...named after a minor-league baseball team) who wrote an entire album around baseball, but here she imagines, with brilliant sonic acuity, what it must have been like to have been Dock Ellis that evening.

Manning isn't the only musician to have written a song called "Dock Ellis": here's Lotion (best known for having been blurbed by none other than Thomas Pynchon) with their "Dock Ellis" song.

SF Seals "Dock Ellis" (The Baseball Trilogy, 1993)
Lotion "Dock Ellis" (Full Isaac, 1993)

in which Oranj makes sure I will never forget my 47th birthday

2008-12-21T21:25:00.002-06:00

Yesterday afternoon, we heard a crash in the basement, followed shortly thereafter by two darting cats. We figured they'd been startled - nothing unusual - and that was that...although Rose noted Oranj was carrying his tail unusually, but figured that was simply part of his being temporarily freaked out by the big loud banging sound.

A little later, though, we noticed little red droplets scattered about the house. At first we didn't know what they were - they didn't really look like blood, being lighter-colored - but once we determined they were, we examined our cats, and found that Oranj had bits of blood matting part of his tail. He's very furry, and his tail therefore is very hard to examine, but after gingerly looking at it, at one point he started yowling painfully and fearfully. We'd thought it was just a small cut - but that clued us in to the likelihood that it was something worse.

So we went off to the vet (of course, this was the weekend, so we had to go to the emergency vet...and of course, it decided to start snowing again, so traffic was slow and the roads were slippery...). After some examination, a sedative, and some tail-shaving and bandage-applying, the vet told us that the damage was deep enough that the end of the tail would have to go.

The worst part about it was knowing he was in great pain and that we couldn't do anything about it. Anyway, the surgery was scheduled for the middle of the night, and the vet said she'd call us when things got underway and when they were finished. We slept fitfully, of course - with the phone right next to the bed - but the calls when they came were all good news so far: no negative reactions to anaesthetic, good results from the surgery, etc.

The vet called this morning to tell us we could pick him up early this afternoon. He was, of course, groggy and weak from the surgery and anaesthetic, but seemed otherwise fine and very glad to see us and to get home. He's in a period of quiet recovery right now: we've isolated him in the library with a mattress, a litterbox full of shredded paper, and some food and water (and, most of the time, Rose), so he can recover w/o being bothered by his lively brother, Lumen. (The vet said it was best to keep them apart for a while so Lumen wouldn't "groom" the bandages off or sutures out.)

He's got a time-release anti-pain patch, and a floppy collar to prevent him from getting at his wounds or the bandages. The bandages come off in a while, and the sutures come out in about 10 days. He's still got about 4" of tail, but he'll still need to adjust his balance for running and leaping a bit...but fortunately, he was never much of a leaper, and we think he'll be pretty resilient.

Lumen's slightly confused - he knows his brother's home, but he's not sure why he can't see Oranj or why Oranj smells funny (antiseptic, etc.). But I'm sure they'll deal with it.

So all things considered, this isn't as bad as it could have been. It's still kind of a freaky accident - and I'm still sorta processing the progression from "small cut" to "oh, a couple of stitches" to losing half of his tail. But we think he'll be fine, and we feel much better now that he's home and doing well so far.

Probably not the best birthday present ever...but seeing Oranj home the next day and doing well, that pretty much qualifies.

snow story

2008-12-19T23:14:00.005-06:00

As anyone paying attention to the weather knows (and anyone living here knows unless they spent the day in a coma), the midwest got socked with more than a foot of snow today. Strong winds meant huge drifts, in places hip-high. So we spent the morning digging out, with touch-up work being required in the afternoon.

We had an event we needed to get to this evening, and it occurred to us that even though most the folks whose houses abut the same alley as we do had cleared the snow from their portions of the alley, too often what happens is the city plows come through on the streets and leave huge mounds of snow along the curbs in their wake, including at the entryways to alleys. (The city doesn't plow the alleys - this sometimes surprises residents of other cities...) So I thought I'd check to be sure we could actually get out.

Well, there was indeed a huge pile blocking the exit to the alleyway, so I once more fired up the snowblower and walked down to the corner. Along the way, the sidewalks of the folks on the corner had had snowdrifts cover what they'd shoveled, so I cleared a path there since it was right on my way. Once I got to the end of the alley, which is normally cleared by the people whose houses are nearest it, I'd gotten as far as clearing two paths each the width of the snowblower when a pickup truck with a plow came by on the street, stopped, backed up into the alley, and cleared out the entryway within a matter of seconds. I waved in acknowledgement of the driver's kindness, he nodded back, and moved on. I saw him a block away clearing out the corner sidewalk curb break.

One nice thing about nasty weather like this: it often brings out the best in people, in this case, neighborliness. I don't know who the pickup guy was (I didn't recognize him or the truck), but it's just a nice thing to do: simple for him, a great courtesy to others.

Similarly, our neighbor noted that his hot-water heater wouldn't work and gave him an error code indicating that the vent was blocked (which it was...with snow) and suggested we check ours. I did, and shoveled it out...and since our neighbor on the other side was clearing snow at the same time, Rose mentioned this possibility to him as well.

So with all the crappy, depressing news that's made me avoid newspapers recently, it's good to get this sort of news instead.

(On an unrelated note: my spell-check flagged "acknowledgement," which seemed odd. I checked...and apparently "acknowledgment" is acceptable as well. I did not know until now that there was another word along the pattern of "judgment"...)

most bizarre house-style typographical preference evar...

2008-12-15T22:37:00.003-06:00

So I'm reading an article from The New Yorker on Elvis Costello's talk show (having neither cable nor terrestrial TV, this was a surprise to me), and I discover the following rather peculiar typographical sequence, in reference to '60s singer Billy Stewart, "R. & B. singer."

What? Those periods and spaces are just weird, especially in conjunction with the otherwise abbreviation-friendly ampersand ("R. and B." would be exceedingly odd, but somehow more internally consistent).

And I thought The New York Times' infamous "Mr." or "Mrs." fetish was odd (deployed most infamously in a late-seventies article on Meat Loaf, referring to him, absurdly and comically, as "Mr. Loaf").

salted with winks?

2008-12-12T22:08:00.002-06:00

Earlier this week I happened to read a preview of an upcoming concert in the local alternative weekly (I can't remember which band, and I'm unable to find the preview online), and I was struck by the use of an odd mixed metaphor in the writer's description of a particular band's music: he or she described it as being "peppered with nods" to such-and-such a style. I was left pondering how a "nod" could be the sort of thing that "peppers" anything...yet when I searched the phrase to see if I could find the review, I discovered that many writers imagine that nods pepper things regularly.

Peculiar...

ghosts blow wilder

2008-12-11T23:11:00.002-06:00

I've been on a bit of a David Sylvian kick lately (also found this very interesting and lengthy interview, in which Sylvian is, unsurprisingly, revealed as intensely thoughtful and self-insightful). Some moments in Sylvian's career find him moving as far away from conventional tonality as anyone still working primarily (though not exclusively) in a song-based musical framework - and so I also find myself wondering again at the way listeners who aren't musically trained experience such harmonies. Though I can't claim to be able to instantly decipher some of the denser chords I might hear, my ears have developed sufficiently that a lot of that comes pretty much without thinking...or when I'm wrong, I'm wrong by being half-right. (Example involving a rather interesting chord, whose source I now can't recall, except that it was on guitar: I thought I was hearing an augmented chord, but what it turned out to be - I was curious enough after hearing the song it's from in the car to listen again once I got home, and figured it out on the guitar - was a sort of stacked chord that might be called a D11+ or something: D-F#-A-C-E-G# (the F# was implicit). What's interesting is that all four basic chord types are present, three notes at a time, within this chord: major (D-F#-A), diminished (F#-A-C), minor (A-C-E), and augmented (C-E-G#). Or: it's an augmented chord with the bass raised a whole step...why I was hearing an augmented in the first place.)

Anyway, the point is that I'm aware that most people who aren't musicians (and many who are) can listen to lots and lots of music, and be pretty expert as fans or even critics, without necessarily looking at it in theoretical terms. My working theory is that complex harmonies "translate" to tone color, that you can play a simple chord on a piano, say, then play the complex chord, and people will hear the sounds as texturally more complex. (Which, in terms of the physics of sound, they actually are.)

These two David Sylvian songs are a good test of that in some ways. First is a song Sylvian himself regards as the pinnacle of his first band Japan's career, "Ghosts," from that band's final album Tin Drum. While there's a fairly simple song underlying what we hear, seemingly every other musical phrase has a new synth sound attached, many of which are artfully detuned or feature altered overtone series - that is to say, they're warped tonally, timbrally, even if the actual notes sounded are relatively straightforward. (And they're not always that.)

The second song I'm posting is Sylvian's 1989 single (a bit of a jab at Virgin Records' demand that he release a single to go with the Weatherbox compilation), rather cheekily titled "Pop Song." Cheekily, because on first listen, it's anything but. As George Harrison said (in a song that followed its own rather winding harmonic pathway), "If you're listening to this song, you may think the chords are going wrong." But also cheekily because, listen to it a few more times, and you realize there is too a pop song buried underneath the crabbed, intertwined harmonies. From those dense harmonics melodic counterpoints can be extracted...and even the song's slightly off-center chord structure reveals itself as a variation on your basic fifties I-vi-VI-V progression (often abbreviated to I-vi). And those squiggly, near-Zappa-like, jagged instrumental interjections? I imagine you could play many of them at half speed, or offset by a sixteenth- or eighth-note, and they might sound almost normal. "Pop Song" is essentially a détourned pop song.

Japan "Ghosts" (Tin Drum, 1981)
David Sylvian "Pop Song" (single, 1989)

we'll leave a light on for ya...

2008-12-11T17:43:00.000-06:00

every day I write the book

2008-12-08T22:27:00.003-06:00

I'm racking my brains, almost certain there's at least one other song that fits this category, but...I can't come up with a third song whose title is the same as a book (fictitious or obscure) named within that song's lyrics.

Here are the two that occurred to me:

R.E.M. "Life and How to Live It" - this fiery live version was recorded in Madison, Wisconsin, May 10, 1985 - a show at which I was actually present. A cow-orker of Rose's dubbed this from a friend of hers who recorded it - the curious thing is, not too long ago I ran into an online bootleg of the same show...whose break (from turning over the cassette tape, nostalgists) was in the exact same place: in other words, which almost certainly came from the same source. Anyway, this was always a great live R.E.M. song - a year or two, Matthew from Fluxblog posted a more recent live version.

Belle and Sebastian "The State I Am In" (BBC version) - from the recently released collection of BBC recordings on Matador, this version begins almost off-handedly, Stuart Murdoch half-whispering the song's opening lines, reinforcing the song's seemingly conversational structure. This version builds to a nice yet still quite controlled peak (those who dislike the band would say "timid" or "repressed" but miss the point), demonstrating the young band's slightly off-kilter grace.

Total Lyrics/La Distribution

2008-12-05T19:31:00.003-06:00

More Destroyer-oriented awesomeness (graphic arts department), via the new music site MBV (no, not a My Bloody Valentine tribute site). (I'm guessing that the link to "The Modern Listener's Guide" will become outdated as soon as a second object is produced, but the site is new, so I have no reference.)

depressing news

2008-12-05T14:53:00.003-06:00

Atomic Records is closing its doors in February.

This sucks: I've bought music at Atomic since it opened (I remember that the building used to house a record store called "Ludwig Van Ear" back in the '70s...), and I'd assumed, or hoped, that it was doing fine specializing in independent label stuff while the majors crashed and burned.

The worst part, though, isn't one less place to buy CDs (and yes, I do still buy CDs); it's realizing how central Atomic was to Milwaukee's music community. Members of I don't know how many bands have worked there, probably met there; the store sponsored concerts and in-store appearances, and (my personal connection) was more or less headquarters for Milk magazine in the '90s when I wrote for them. The folks who worked there were always willing to order anything you wanted, or help you find some item that had fallen between the cracks (sometimes literally: once I dropped a used CD jewelbox between two shelves accidentally...).

I suppose in the grand scheme of the economy flying headlong into the ground, one record store, as most people still all-too-quaintly refer to them, isn't that important. And the particular set of economic factors that have led to Atomic's demise probably were well in motion regardless of the current crisis. But, as I said: it sucks.

Good prices on remaining merchandise for the next two months, though.

The Tragedy of Julian Cope

2008-12-02T22:00:00.005-06:00

Julian Cope's career has been a long, curious one - and if nothing else, the man earns considerable credit for integrity: he seemingly has never done anything but what he wants to do. And considering that all observers of his early career saw him headed straight for superstardom, it was more than an empty room he turned his back on.

That said, musically at least his career seems a headlong retreat away from his greatest compositional strengths. Cope's first band, The Teardrop Explodes, was among the early '80s British acts regarded as "neo-psychedelic" - and indeed, the music of the late sixties has exerted an ongoing power over Cope's muse. The problem is, what we generically refer to as "psychedelia" is really at least two, rather distinct musical approaches: the British approach, and the American (primarily West Coast) approach. The British approach is exemplified by Syd Barrett's work with early Pink Floyd, while probably the best representative of the West Coast style is the Grateful Dead...or at least, a stereotype of the Grateful Dead, including its jam-band descendants. What was valued most was freedom, spontaneity, living in the musical moment...and so bands tended to jam, to stretch songs out to the breaking point, sometimes dispensing with "songs" altogether: their formal constraints were non-conducive to freedom. This aesthetic preference even extends to (stereotypical) wardrobe: loose-fitting, flowing, in a seemingly uncoordinated riot of colors and fabrics - and hairstyle: just let it grow. Another reductive but useful way of looking at this is that the music is essentially outward-looking - even the emphasis on feeding one's head, freeing one's mind, were essentially about tearing down the walls of consciousness, breaking down the doors of perception, letting the sunshine in: making the indoors outdoors.

By contrast, Barrett's music retreated inward, to a candy-colored, pseudo-Victorian children's world, often nostalgic, emotionally muted yet intense. Sonically, this played out in tightly constructed songs whose psychedelic elaboration worked essentially inward, in ever-more detailed arrangements and tone coloration. Similarly, British psychedelic bands of this era tended to favor colorful but carefully tailored clothing, and hairstyles also were a bit more controlled, even nostalgic, with Victorian and Edwardian fashion pieces making momentary comebacks. (Consider the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper: a small-town, military band of an earlier era, exuberant mustaches exploding into technicolor satin uniforms.) And if latterday jam bands represented West Coast psychedelia's descent into sheer, flatulent slackness, latterday British psych turned ever inward, traceable actually in Pink Floyd's own post-Barrett evolution into a vehicle for the exploration of Roger Waters' neuroses, whose musical nadir was maybe that band's The Final Cut - an album which, in my memory (haven't listened to it for years), is entirely at the tempo of a dying man's last few heartbeats, and is seemingly recorded by attaching a contact mic to Waters' tonsils.

So what's this got to do with Julian H. Cope? He's a real dead loss, that's what: his early stuff (both with The Teardrop Explodes and solo) is a brilliant flowering of British neo-psychedelia, cunningly composed songs jammed full of lively arranging detail. The Teardrop Explodes "Colours Fly Away" is a fine example: after a Pepperish burst of horns, Cope constructs a melody that constantly balances on precarious harmonic peaks, a strategy echoed in the chorus chords, which move tentatively, stepwise, while the bass repeats the same figure beneath them. Cope's own "Quizmaster" (from his first solo album) is another example, beginning with a classic descending chord sequence (what Cope would later call a "glam descend") that gradually effloresces into less expected sequence, before resolving into a simple two-chord turnaround that leads back to the opening descending sequence.

But some time in the last two decades, Cope moved away from songwriting and toward a sort of performance-oriented, real-time rock'n'roll. At its best, with a good band (and live, I'd imagine), it can be powerful and bracing...but too often it's merely slack, predictable chord sequences carrying dull pentatonic melodies artlessly sung and recorded. "Feed My Rock'n'Roll" is a fairly dire example (it's from Cope's most recent release, Black Sheep), although Cope's last few releases (available solely through his Head Heritage site) have shown glimmers of his craftsmanship. For the most part, though, Cope's gone for the jam-oriented spontaneity that's a direct descendant of West Coast psychedelic rock...and in recordings, at least, it seems noisy and attenuated, because neither his players nor the quality of his recording techniques represent the most important element of that musical approach: its power and capacity for surprise.

And I want to like this stuff. As I said, I admire Cope's bullheaded integrity, and although he tends to follow the implications of his political and spiritual beliefs far further than I'd ever be comfortable with, those beliefs are consistent and ultimately far more humane than the beliefs he's most strongly opposed to. (Probably why everyone thinks he's just crazy...) But even though I'll probably continue to buy whatever he releases, the pattern for nearly everything he's released since the '90s has been a couple-few good songs surrounded by a lot of forgettable ones.

The Teardrop Explodes "Colours Fly Away" (Wilder, 1982)
Julian Cope "Quizmaster" (World Shut Your Mouth, 1983)
Julian Cope "Feed My Rock'n'Roll" (Black Sheep, 2008)

update: the broken link to the Teardrop Explodes track has been fixed.

in defense of Terry Gilliam's Tideland

2008-11-29T23:33:00.006-06:00

As I often do after I watch a movie, I read a selection of online reviews after watching Tideland earlier this evening.

And it seems to me that a whole lot of professional critics are quite adept at point-missing. (There will be a minor bit of spoilerage in this entry, so if you haven't seen the movie, stop reading, if that matters to you.)

First: critics generally responded in an entirely wrongheaded way to what they were pleased to call hints of "pedophilia" in the movie. Although I wish it weren't necessary (and I don't know if it was in the theatrical release), the movie does begin with a Terry Gilliam talking head telling us audience members to please remember that this movie is to be viewed through the eyes of its main character, ten-year-old Jeliza-Rose, and that our adult view of things is not her view. So it is: when the brain-damaged adult character Dickens and Jeliza-Rose indulge in their "romance," it is almost exactly as innocent as Jeliza-Rose thinks it is, in her fairy-tale ideal of romance. Almost: because Dickens is still a man, and a man who, despite his diminished mental capacity, still has a man's urges...but also, inklings of a man's conscience. If he's smitten by the sweetness Jeliza-Rose shows him (and she, in turn, seems to regard him as an overgrown boy), it's fairly clear that at some level he knows he should back away from any affection stronger than the "silly kisses" the characters indulge in. Gilliam does not relent in the face of the squeamish, but he is smart enough to know his characters, and know that even if both Dickens and Jeliza-Rose, in their own, very different states of innocence, went any further, we as audience could not follow.

Not that Gilliam doesn't challenge us: most reviews seemed willing to close their eyes rather than confront Jeliza-Rose's damaged world head on. As the film begins, her parents (Jeff Bridges - playing the dark side of "The Dude" - and Jennifer Tilly - channeling one's worst nightmares of Courtney Love) are hopelessly washed-out junkies...and yet, calling them "abusive" (as several critics did) misses the point: Tilly alternates between contempt and spasmodic love, but Bridges seems genuinely fond of Jeliza-Rose...even if he has no idea what to do with her. That he has taught her (it seems) to assist him in his heroin fixes surely is abusive in a technical sense...but Jeliza-Rose seems to accept that this is simply Daddy's way of taking "vacations" (as he calls them). Despite his pathetic and desperate incompetence at life, he seems to love her and be affectionate toward her. He's simply incapable of being any kind of father to her.

And while the grotesqueries the film heaps upon us seem to bear little resemblance to anything we'd call "realistic," such a complaint misses the point: Gilliam is a fabulist, and his story here (and many elsewhere) update the classic world of what we, rather obliviously, simplify and infantilize as "fairy stories"...stories whose content, robbed of the buffering of cliché and history, are often shockingly grotesque and cruel in content. Place those characters in a contemporary setting, and "realism" is beside the point...but resonance is not.

The clearest aspect of Tideland is the utter incomprehensibility of the adult world to the child...and the dangers to a child of that world, which we see in this film with queasy-making clarity, but which a child might be all but oblivious to (to her peril). As a counter to that, we also see the ways in which "innocence" can be extraordinarily harmful...when it essentially equates to a decoupling of cause from effect, of emotional understanding, here played out in the character of Dickens, whose fantasies culminate in dreadful, real-world form...yet it's unlikely that any of that real-world terror ever entered his mind, except (again) as a sort of storybook fantasy: the brave submarine captain killing the monster shark.

It's that counterpoint (and the extraordinary performance of Jodelle Ferland as Jeliza-Rose...and her four talking doll heads) that gives the movie its emotional force...and which makes the critical accusations that Gilliam's worldview is capriciously sadistic so absurd - because I think what finally emerges from this movie is how fragile even the most resilient child might be, ultimately, and how much we as adults need to make sure children can negotiate the desperate and immense gap between their world and our own. We see Jeliza-Rose as extraordinarily resourceful, capable of transmuting (or ignoring) the most horrific situations imaginable...yet the most villainous character in the movie (the "witch" Dell) is clearly presented as an adult warped and undone by her own childhood trauma...and Dickens, too, suffered abuse at the hands of an adult, abuse which scarred him beyond the physical and mental scars of his apparent lobotomy. The fact that nearly all the adults in the film are tremendously damaged suggests something about Jeliza-Rose - and that something isn't pretty: that the trauma she's now able to transmute into storybook fantasies may eventually well up and overwhelm her psychic defenses. (The movie might be said to literalize the way the past brutally insists upon its physical presence beyond its supposed passing...)

The other striking aspect of this movie is the sheer isolation of its world. Bridges and Tilly begin the film in what appears to be some sort of derelict hotel (Bridges is apparently a rock musician...though whether the scenes of him playing to an enthusiastic crowd are current, past, or sheer fantasy remains unclear), in which their noisy playing-out of their pathetic yet perversely domestic routines goes on without the slightest interest from anyone else. The southern gothic set of decayed houses in which most the movie is set, too, exists in utter, desolate isolation from the rest of the world. Only two scenes in the movie are set in any sort of social world: one, in the bus on which Bridges and Jeliza-Rose flee the scene of their girlfriend and mother's death (during which the passengers' annoyance at Bridges' drunkenly oblivious carryings-on is kept, for the most part, to an uncomfortable distance); two, the aftermath of the movie's closing scene (which critics were all too cheerfully apt to label self-referential: it's a train wreck). This isolation only emphasizes the idiosyncratic view of its ten-year-old protagonist: only one character in the entire film acts at all like a responsible adult, and even her regard is tainted a bit by the desperation of the scene.

Tideland is unquestionably a difficult movie to watch (this despite cinematography that is frequently achingly beautiful). I'm just glad someone's bullheaded enough to refuse the imperative to make movies "watchable" - while also resisting the equally stupid urge to glory in unpleasantness for its own sake under cover of its "reality."

a meme before memes

2008-11-28T15:10:00.002-06:00

A few years back, amused or annoyed by all the dumb "which X are you?" internet quizzes (not yet called, annoyingly, "memes"), which were inevitably constructed such that after only a couple of questions, it was obvious which results would arise from which answers, I made up one of my own.

It's maybe a little bit less linear than most. (After you take it, click on the "view all results" button to see the rest of the possibilities...)

grammar among thieves

2008-11-28T00:14:00.004-06:00

One of the CDs I pulled out earlier this evening featured a tiny little small-print notice about copyright law. After thanking the listener for having bought the CD, it moves to an increasingly preposterous list of illicit acts: "using internet services to distribute copyrighted music, giving away illegal copies of discs or lending discs to others for them to copy is illegal and does not support those involved in making this piece of music - especially the artist." Well, okay...maybe I can see that with the first point, but the second one? Which copies of discs are "illegal"? And the third...how do I know what my friend is going to do with my CD if I lend it? The philosophy utterly overlooks the fact that fandom is spread by sharing and enthusiasm...you've got to hear this! this is really cool! etc. In record company world, once you buy a CD, you can only let anyone else hear it under carefully controlled situations (hmmm...I'm not entirely sure record companies would even approve of that: shouldn't those other folks buy their own copy?), and certainly CDs cannot be lent freely, nor can copies of tracks be made. Back in the day, of course, people would make cassette tapes for their friends of their favorite songs. How much of my collection of legally-purchased music was bought because I came to know and love the artist's music because a friend made me a tape or CD? I'd guess one-quarter to one-half, at least.

But never mind all that foolish and dubious babble about what's legal and what supports the musician (musicians hate it when people who haven't paid for their music hear it and like it - they just haven't earned it yet, baby). The really offensive part of this little bit of pleading is the next sentence, which reads:

By carrying out any of these actions it has the same effect as stealing music.

With all those attorneys on the RIAA payroll, there's simply no funding left for proofreaders, it seems...

And you know what? To paraphrase Emma Goldman (sort of): If you won't proofread, I won't be part of your counterrevolution.

Mr. Jones takes Monday and Wednesday off

2008-11-25T22:43:00.003-06:00

I was amusing myself by creating Winamp playlists featuring songs or artists featuring days of the week, and I noticed that David Bowie's name kept popping up. How many days of the week have been included in Bowie song titles, I wondered...

And so, here's David Bowie's week: as it turns out, he has so far taken off Monday and Wednesday.

"Sunday" (Heathen, 2002)
"Love You Till Tuesday" [single version] (1966 - reissued on The Deram Anthology)
"Thursday's Child" (Hours, 1999)
"Friday on My Mind" (Easybeats cover - Pin-Ups, 1973)
"Drive-In Saturday" (Aladdin Sane, 1973)

bonus:
"After Today" (use on Sunday or Tuesday as the following day's missing track - Sound + Vision exclusive, 1975)
"I Know It's Gonna Happen One Day" (Morrissey cover - Black Tie, White Noise 1993)

if this billboard were e-mail, it'd end up in my spam folder

2008-11-24T06:56:00.001-06:00

the advantage of a cold start heart

2008-11-22T21:50:00.002-06:00

The new millennium version of Wire has been intense and inspiring, but one puzzlement and disappointment has been the relative absence of Graham Lewis's singing. I've always liked bands with more than one lead singer, particularly if the singers' approaches were sufficiently different that (as with Wire's "Ambitious") if each singer did the same song in different versions, the song itself takes on a wholly different air.

In Wire's newest material, Lewis's voice has been rare, and when it has appeared, it's either been electronically distorted or sounded rather shot, and I feared it was just gone. But here's the Daytrotter Session version of "Mekon Headman" (which I'd like to think is about Jon Langford, but probably not...), whose original version is on Wire's most recent Object 47, and Lewis's voice is strong, supple, and powerful: not quite as complete an instrument as it was at its peak, but stronger than I've heard it for years. The performance is nice, too - but the version from these sessions of "Boiling Boy" is even better, with Lewis's bass brought to the forefront. You need to listen to this loud, with either a good set of headphones or a nice pair of speakers; tinny little computer speakers cannot hold that bass.

(The other two songs from the session, "Mr Marx's Table" and "Silk Skin Paws," are well worth hearing and downloadable from the Daytrotter site.)

Wire "Mekon Headman" (Daytrotter Session, 2008)
Wire "Boiling Boy" (Daytrotter Session, 2008)

auto-portraiture

2008-11-22T00:14:00.000-06:00

Via How We Drive, Vladimir Nikolic's "car-face" portraits... Brilliant, hilarious stuff.

this is your brain on my blog...

2008-11-21T22:48:00.004-06:00

Okay, actually it purports to be my brain on my blog, as interpreted by the fine ~~folks~~ machines at Type-alizer, who also claim I'm a "mechanic" (which is pretty damned funny, because I can barely operate a screwdriver. Of course that may be because I drink them first...)

via Hot Rox Avec Lying Sweet Talk

where ecos meets eros

2008-11-19T23:38:00.004-06:00

So, let's say you're all green and energy-efficient and the like, and you push your fat-ass Hummer off a cliff (or better yet, someone else's fat-ass Hummer) and get yourself a nice, small, high-mileage car.

Feeling virtuous?

Could be...but what happens when you and your lovely partner are driving along one lovely spring day (perhaps to pick up some locally-grown organic veggies at a nearby farmers' market) and, you know, your fancies turn to the things fancies turn to in spring? And I mean now...

About the only advantage of a Hummer (the vehicle) is that if you were so inclined, a full-fledged orgy involving the entire Swedish beach volleyball team could be held inside - but how, pray tell, are you going to find room even for the lower-cased, non-vehicular hummer in a SmartCar?

Fortunately, the folks over at Treehugger have it all figured out for you horny crotch-monkeys. (With photos...kinda NSFW, but mostly only if you work for Mattel and you have lawyers with itchy motion-filing fingers. And at least one of those positions brings back some high-school memories...mighta been a Honda Accord, or a VW Rabbit...)

he is the Japanese sandman?

2008-11-18T19:34:00.003-06:00

I'm a bit of a collector of phrases - sometimes for their content, often for their sound. An excellent example of the latter (which I could easily imagine Zippy the Pinhead repeating three times...) came up in class today.

One of my students was showing off the various ringtones on her phone, one of which was an obscure (particularly to my students) '80s song. I couldn't ID that song, but I mentioned the bit of trivia that the guy who did the contemporaneous "Science!" song (only a few heads nodded as I imitated Magnus Pyke...) was also a pioneer in ringtones: Thomas Dolby, according to his Wikipedia entry, "found[ed] Retro Ringtones LLC ... which produces the RetroFolio ringtone asset management software suite for companies involved in the mobile phone ringtone business."

In other words, I said, he was a ringtone tycoon.

Ringtone tycoon! Ringtone tycoon! Ringtone tycoon!

oh hell now all the bottle-rocket freaks will come here...

2008-11-16T00:19:00.005-06:00

It's November...and so the insane folk who dedicate themselves to posting an entry every day (just don't look at how many entries I had last November...) desperately dig into the bloggers' bag of tricks. And who am I to question?

Without further ado, a list of amusing phrases Googled to get readers here (however briefly):

beastliness in government
beaufort scale joke drunk
"dance based on child abuse"
deleting every other letter
donkey puns
grammar self centered (hey!)
how delete every site you have looked at or done
how to draw an umbrella
message bird
9 years old not this not this mountain quiz very
porky pig--"th-th-th-that's all folks!" --followed by the loony tunes theme music
pornstar ben harper
"rino christ" (the horn player on several releases from Les Disques du Crepuscule)
song never whistle urinal
spelling of word architecual
13 hours war house font
tinnitus photon machine
tootle the train communism
unfunny jokes (hey!)
vampire milk
warning narcs can dance too
woman shoots bottle rockets out her vagina
words only containing the letters m,i,s,p

ADS financial corner

2008-11-14T13:59:00.003-06:00

Direct from Phil Proctor (Firesign Theatre):

If you had purchased $1,000 of Delta Air Lines stock one year ago, you would
have $49 left. With Fannie Mae, you would have $2.50 left of the original $1,000. With
AIG, you would have less than $15 left. But, if you had purchased $1,000 worth of beer
one year ago, drunk all of the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling
refund, you would have $214 cash.

Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink heavily.

can't believe it's been a week!

2008-11-11T00:01:00.001-06:00

it is teh awesome...

2008-11-10T21:59:00.002-06:00

Found this floating around the Facebook, where all those young whippersnappers hang their virtual...

from the ADS "Last Year's Films" files

2008-11-10T11:32:00.002-06:00

I was amused to discover that Atonement won an Oscar for Best Original Score...because in viewing the film the other night, I thought the score was the main element that kept the film from being truly outstanding. (A few scenes somehow came across as more familiar on film than they had in the novel, and I really could have done without the enormous MESSAGE COMING IN! of Cecilia's posture in her watery death.) First of all, while scores are meant to underline a scene's emotions, this one often did so by a forceful triple set of slashes that no doubt broke the pencil's lead. A couple scenes in particular had me wishing there was a selective mute button (dialogue and diegetic sound only). And the composer's device of using the sound of a typewriter as percussion was only cute at first (if marred by being way too high in the mix) but quite clickly became cloying. We get it: writers and writing are a key part of the movie!

I guess Oscar voters must have thought that last bit very clever, and apparently approve of emotional hammering over the head. Too bad: the rest of the movie nicely compressed a novel to the smaller scope of a movie without losing its essence.

here's wishing...

2008-11-06T23:54:00.003-06:00

Amazon's got a new feature, a "universal wish list," whereby you can attach a doohickey to your web browser that allows you to click on it and add any item from any web page to your Amazon wish list.

Any item?

Okay...I can do that (click it bigger):

keeper of the crypt behind the gates of delirium?

2008-11-06T00:40:00.003-06:00

Some people age better than others. Rock musicians...are probably "others."

Here's one:

That's Steve Howe, guitarist with Yes.

And here he is without makeup, working the nightshift:

YES!!

2008-11-04T22:17:00.002-06:00

This song always makes me feel good.

And I feel good.

Talking Heads "Pulled Up" (Talking Heads: 77, 1977)

I wish I'd known about this when I was a kid...

2008-11-02T17:35:00.003-06:00

A couple of days late...

The site doesn't address this situation, however. I believe that this would be the appropriate symbol (apologies to Kurt Vonnegut):

the other side

2008-10-31T21:14:00.005-05:00

An essay by John Jeremiah Sullivan in the latest issue of Harper's describes a recently reissued, extremely rare country blues recording called "Last Kind Words Blues" by Geeshie Wiley. At one point Sullivan cites some lines from the song, which he hears as "The Mississippi River, you know it's deep and wide, / I can stand right here, / See my baby from the other side." In the context of the song, whose narrator seems to be speaking with her dead father, the peculiarity of the syntax takes on a spooky literality: the narrator seems half embodied, this side of the river, and half ghost, viewing her "baby" from the other side.

While Sullivan acknowledges the possibility that such a reading pays overly literal attention to the lyrics (Sullivan quotes John Fahey, who - after asserting that the lyrics of these old songs didn't mean much - spends several hours trying to determine what the words are), and while he analyzes obsessive rare-record collecting to some degree, he only hints at one possible reason such collectors might be so compellingly haunted to track down these records. And that is the way that, much like the narrator of the Geeshie Wiley song, sound recordings can open a sort of virtual portal to another time and place.

The art of audio recording, conventionally conceived, tends to stress "fidelity" or "presence," the illusion that the performance you're hearing sounds as if it's taking place right there in your room - but even the highest-fi recordings generally sacrifice sonic literalism for musical purposes. On rock recordings, for example, no one bats an eye when an acoustic rhythm guitar is the same volume as, or louder than, a hugely distorted electric lead guitar, even though that's possible only with differential amplification. (This amplification already departs from the "realism" of the actual loudness of an acoustic guitar, and therefore calls into question whether there's any such thing as the "actual" loudness of an electric guitar. Of course one might argue that rock is the first fully postmodern music, conceived entirely in the era of mechanical reproduction of sound, which therefore never depended upon a hypothetical "real" performance based in real time and space.) I remember reading a fascinating article called "A Bedroom Community" by Franklin Bruno (from the 1997 issue of Badaboom Gramophone: it does not appear to be available online), in which he analyzed the effect of the creation of sonic spaces in recorded music: far too little attention is paid to the way such essentially spatial effects like reverb or echo affect listeners' perception of the imaginary space of the hypothetical performance, or the way even clearly patchwork recordings, dubbed part upon part, sometimes strive to create an aura of performed authenticity through the inclusion of count-ins, stray amp noise, or even mistakes in playing or singing (despite the obvious fact that if the song's made up of multiple overdubs, such "errors" could easily have been removed or eliminated in a subsequent take).

An interesting thing happens when the "fidelity" of a recording is less than ideal. First, there's the question of how that infidelity (secret noises offstage) came to be: through the unavailability of quality recording equipment or technique, through intentionally eschewing such equipment or technique ("low-fi"), or through aging and degradation of the recorded artifact itself (such as an old, scratchy 45). Clearly these things signify differently: the recording that's poor of necessity might convey the artist's persistence, rawness, amateur intensity, etc.; the "low-fi" recording might seek to convey those same things or, more smartly, undercut the assumptions that low fidelity just does mean persistence, rawness, or intensity; and the degradation of the artifact is often thought of as irrelevant to the "real" recording.

This last assumption isn't correct, though. First, although we might try to hear "through" noise and poor signals (and the more experienced we are as listeners, the likelier we'll be capable of pulling off this listening performance), I don't think we can fully escape the crackle of the vinyl or the attenuation of dynamic and frequency range. This is particularly the case with older recordings (whether by "older" we mean scratchy LPs we've owned since our teens, or recordings that are mastered from ancient 78s): I'd argue that the older the recording, the more we tend to hear those sonic accretions as part of the musical experience. It would seem strange indeed if, somehow, a Robert Johnson song were suddenly available in wide-screen, massively compressed, state-of-the-not-necessarily-high-fidelity-art 2008 sound.

One of the peculiarities of recorded sound is the way it can substitute itself for real-time performance even when such a real-time performance was a necessity. (Bruno quotes Stephin Merritt, who refers to the "false realism" of recordings that seek to convey the illusion of a unified sonic space, even though there was never any such space of performance.) My Robert Johnson example is unfair in that way: rather than imagine a Robert Johnson recording that sounds like a modern recording, imagine what being in the room with Robert Johnson playing "Dead Shrimp Blues" might have sounded like. Even though it was 1936, presumably our ears, and the air in the room, would have been every bit as capable of conducting sound waves without the imposition of crackling static as they are now when our friend or roommate belabors an acoustic guitar in the same room with us. Would that 1936 performance sound "right," the unmediated Robert Johnson, with no microphone, no recording equipment's stamp of sonic character, only his voice and guitar in the naked air? I think most people would like to say it would...yet since we know such a thing is impossible outside of science fiction, I wonder if we'd respond the same way to such a recording (if it were possible). I suspect that, just as some people respond to what they perceive as the "warmth" of vinyl, and most respond more positively to the exact same recording if it's louder than another, our history of contact with old, degraded sonic artifacts would mean that ultimately, we'd prefer those over the hypothetical, ultra-cleaned-up recording. No doubt such arguments would be mounted in terms of "authenticity," with claims that our hypothetical sonic clean-up device somehow distorts or cheapens the original sound (as if we'd know what the original sound was). Even though sound behaved in 1936 the same way it does in 2008, the context of a performance's larger sonic world is not the same now as it would be in the world of 1936. (A clichéd citation...but this idea is converging on one reason Borges' verbatim new Quixote differed from the original: though the object is identical, its context is not - and since no object is apprehensible without context, essentially the object is not identical in any real experience.) The removal of the patina of age, which might seem superfluous to the object itself, results in a significant loss.

Specifically, what would be lost is such a recording's ability to open a psychic time-portal in the listener: the sense that while I'm here in 2008, and the Mississippi of time is deep and wide, I can see myself listening there, on the 1936 side. I think this effect is one reason some people are so strongly attached to old recordings: the sound of the time is right there, magnetically arrayed, etched into shellac or vinyl grooves, encoded in cryptic digits of shiny, aluminum-coated plastic that can reflect another world.

The paradox is, that patina wasn't there from the start (except insofar as 1936 recording equipment was less capable of "fidelity" than contemporary equipment). It itself is an artifact of the fact that many such old recordings exist solely on a mere handful of timeworn old 78 RPM records, and it's the patina of such records that we hear. Which is to say, if a record collector or serious fan fetishizes such sound, it's because they hear themselves in the sonic reflection: the years of their and others' collecting, the inevitable wearing down of such records no matter how carefully preserved and packaged, their own obsessions emerging into the air, curatorial and remembered.

paging Dr. Lynne...

2008-10-29T22:47:00.002-05:00

Can someone explain to me the popularity among dentists of the Traveling Wilburys?

I went to the dentist this morning and I swear, the last three times I went there, at some point while having my teeth cleaned, a Traveling Wilburys song played. My guess is that the mysterious Volume 2 is full of songs entirely about dental hygiene...

M...M...M...!

2008-10-26T00:15:00.002-05:00

We begin with Negativland's "By Truck" - a reconfiguration of the usual perspective, wherein the importance of trucks to the consumption of our breakfast cereals received its due.

We follow that with Was (Not Was)'s absurdist logic problem "Tell Me That I'm Dreaming" - which, as an aside, features a line that might perhaps take early '80s entrepreneur-worship to its ridiculous extreme.

And finally, Aphex Twin mutters like a masturbating dwarf in a basement window-well, making some sideways associations, in "Milkman."

Our common thread? Well, my first published online writing was for the late, lamented Milk magazine - and so, although I'd thought of this trio of tracks before this realization, their consideration seems fitting for this my 1,000th post.

Negativland "By Truck" (Thigmotactic, 2008)
Was (Not Was) "Tell Me That I'm Dreaming" (Was (Not Was), 1981)
Aphex Twin "Milkman" (Richard D. James Album, 1997)

(That link above is to a fascinating article by Peter Blegvad, illustrator, musician, and curious thinker, whose work - particularly his The Book of Leviathan and his collaborative album with John Greaves and Lisa Herman Kew: Rhone - is worth seeking out...although frankly, the rest of his musical output is less compelling than that album.)

things I care about so little that writing a blog entry about them is head-spinningly contradictory

2008-10-25T21:39:00.003-05:00

The world awaits at long last the actual physical release of Guns 'n' Roses*' new CD Chinese Democracy, whose first "single" actually exists, at least in digital form.

Can I hire the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to sing "so what?" for about five hours?

GNR sucked back when CDs were new, shiny, wonderful objects that would transform the music industry, and they suck even more irrelevantly now that CDs are bizarre artifacts purchased only by the elderly (why yes I did buy a handful of CDs just last week, thank you very much). Axl and his gang of idiot poseurs were always just a bunch of dunderheaded clowns laughably enacting the lamest possible rock-star clichés on and off stage, and it's been utterly mystifying to me why anyone ever gave them the slightest scintilla of cred.

And to take longer to produce a single album than it took Beethoven to write a handful of symphonies, well, it's just ridiculous. Me, I'm more hotly anticipating the release of a new left-handed flange-grip attachment to the 1947 Grimsby slide rule than I am any new GNR product.

* No, I don't know which of the apostrophes on the already-annoying "'n'" thing GNR decided, for no good reason, to omit. Multiply my not-caring about this album by god factorial, and you'll be within a few light years of my not-caring about that issue.

and they're off...

2008-10-24T23:52:00.002-05:00

My mind is sponsoring a race right now. It's between "how fucking outrageous and stupid will they get?" and "how idiotic will enough people be to buy it?"

As P.T. Barnum never said, you'll never go broke betting on the obnoxiousness of right-wing race-baiters...

flimsy

2008-10-18T21:33:00.003-05:00

I picked up the new Jenny Lewis CD a few days ago, and while it's a fine CD (in many ways it does what Elvis Costello's last album set out to do, but more effectively...), the packaging is annoying. It comes in a cardboard slipcase, so narrow that there's no spine, and with no inner sleeve to protect or hold the disc. There are four small snapshot-like photos included, which are just tossed inside the slipcase. The musician credits are printed on the back cover, along with the usual bureaucratic info...and the admonition DO NOT DROP THIS RECORD.

Yeah? Because the crap packaging means it might shatter?

Apparently major labels have just given up on trying to sell CDs, and are cutting their packaging costs...even though good packaging is one of the few aspects of physical recorded media that cannot be digitally reproduced. You'd think they'd be going the opposite direction, making more packages with aesthetic value in themselves. If this were the only example of shoddy packaging on recent CDs (and I suppose a number of my readers are like, you still buy CDs? Christ but you're old!), I might not be complaining...but PJ Harvey's last release was similarly packaged (although it, at least, had an inner sleeve, if I recall correctly, so there was some friction preventing the disc from just falling out onto the ground).

I suppose you could argue that such minimal packaging leaves a smaller environmental footprint, and if you did, I'd laugh in your face. There's a difference between packaging that's pointless because it's discarded as soon as the product is brought home (such as the nasty, hard to open, finger-slicing molded-plastic cases common on lots of household products) and packaging that's integral to the product and which therefore will not be thrown away, at least not until the product itself is tossed. But cheap packaging like this almost encourages further waste. I'm tempted to scan the cover and back cover and print it out on some decent paper, and put the whole thing in a conventional jewelbox, just so the CD can sit amongst my other CDs and not disappear and become unidentifiable (no spine, remember?). Which would mean I'd be using more paper, and probably more paper overall than a decent package would have used in the actual product.

Perhaps another irony here is that I bought this CD as essentially an impulse purchase: I was buying something else at the Large Box with Red and White Concentric Circles, and it was on sale, so I picked it up. If I'd known in advance the packaging was so flimsy, I might have decided merely to download it.

A musician named Zimmerman, from the same state as the store, had a new compilation of unreleased material out, too, also on sale, which I also picked up. Funny how that one was almost exactly twice the price of the Lewis release...yet it contained not only twice the music, roughly - two discs - but extensive info and documentation, including a 60-page booklet. Of course this suggests another reason for the lame packaging of Lewis's CD: lower production and material costs mean more profits for the label. I suppose Columbia, which put out that Minnesota guy's set, figures the only people interested in a 2-CD set of obscurities by him are old people who'd buy a CD because they can't handle all this newfangled digital rigmarole, whereas Warner Bros. figures Ms. Lewis's fans are just gonna download the thing anyway. It's also just my personal opinion, but I've gotta say Lewis is a hell of a lot more photogenic than that elderly folksinger dude anyway. I guess good on WB for not caving to the capitalistic pressure to exploit a singer's sex appeal. Columbia, on the other hand, saw fit to fill that 60-page booklet with shot after shot of the nearly seventy-year-old Dylan gazingly faunishly at the camera while recumbent in nothing but a snug yet well-filled pair of bikini briefs.

Thank god I'm kidding, please.

The Mystical Beast (slight return)

2008-10-17T22:41:00.006-05:00

A first here at the Architectural Dance Society: a guest columnist. Dana was the proprietor of the wonderful Mystical Beast site for several years, which was one of the first blogs to post mp3s regularly (the site's still up, although the song links are dead), and we met on the old Loud Family mailing list back when that band was extant. He recently e-mailed me with the following observation:

Have you ever listened to "Reflected" (early Alice Cooper), "Elected" (mid Alice Cooper), and "Bell Boy" (mid Who) all in a row?

My reading: "Reflected" is a Who rip-off with some acid guitar and weird chord changes added. "Elected" is a revisitation of "Reflected" but sounds an awful lot like "Bell Boy" in terms of production, riffs, and overall feel. "Elected" came out in '72 as a single and '73 as an album track, "Bell Boy" in '73.

I wonder who influenced who (since release date doesn't necessarily indicate when the song/production was conceived). Weird. I don't usually think of Townshend looking to Alice Cooper for inspiration.

I hadn't been familiar with "Reflected" before this, but "Elected" obviously borrows its main verse melody. But that thing where the chords change over a static bass (as in the verses of "Bell Boy") is a Who trademark - and so "Reflected" is indeed borrowing from the Who (in fact, given its slightly iffy production and raw feel, you could almost pass it off as a newly discovered Guided by Voices track - hell, even the weird chords would fit Pollard's usual MO). And in "Elected" you have an arrangement that's very similar in syncopation and feel, even in instrumentation (real horns vs. synth horns...oddly enough, since John Entwistle often overdubbed his own horn-playing on Who records), but rather than place those chords over a bass pedal tone, the bass first plays its own rather melodic line, and then goes to a rather grandly dramatic walking descent.

So my take is that Townshend didn't really need to rip off Alice Cooper (or Bob Ezrin, who contributed largely to the arranging on Alice Cooper's records of this era), since ol' Vince Furnier had already been dipping heavily into the Townshend Songwriting Book of Tricks with these tracks.

It's still unexpected to find Alice Cooper and the Who put together like that, though!

Alice Cooper "Reflected" (Pretties for You, 1968)
Alice Cooper "Elected" (Billion Dollar Babies, 1972)
The Who "Bell Boy" (Quadrophenia, 1973)

Welcome to the Palindrome

2008-10-16T14:33:00.004-05:00

Have you heard the one about how Obama chose his running mate so that their names, together, would sound the first line of a hymn to a weapon deified? "O Bomb abidin'..."

Okay, that hasn't happened yet...but I wouldn't be surprised. What's also amusing is that such lame punning on candidates' last names has been indulged in by Republicans...in the likely subconscious form of Sarah Palin choosing the odd verb, one which almost sounds like her last name, "palling" (as in "palling around with terrorists"). Somehow, working together a decade ago with a man who, when Obama was 8 years old, advocated violence in the anti-war effort, constitutes "palling around with terrorists." I love the plural, by the way...I mean clearly Obama spends most of his off-hours hanging out with every terrorist on the block, shooting hoops and passing arugula-haters.

I wonder if Palin, in her "pro-life" stance, has ever met with any of the folks who winked at or even applauded the murder and terrorization of abortion providers. And I wonder why, even though every homegrown terror group of note over the last two decades has been right-wing (Oklahoma City, anti-abortion, arguably Waco), this flimsy accusation of "terrorist" against a man who once worked with a man who's worked with both Democrats and Republicans on various educational issues has any media traction at all.

from the slightly confused art dept.

2008-10-14T12:04:00.003-05:00

Uh, Jared? That's not how a shark works.

(From a new CD for which a publicist sent me a couple mp3s. I haven't had a chance to listen to them...but I'm just amused at the cover...)

making a mountain out of an ACORN

2008-10-11T23:31:00.002-05:00

One political party is accusing the other of trying to steal the election. (Also, a pot called a biracial kettle "black" in an attempt to scare certain voters.)

This time, though, it's the Republicans claiming the Democrats are trying to steal the election, by the rather dubious means of registering enough bogus voters to win. Uh, how would that work again? If I register 25 voters in the name of (as this article notes) the Dallas Cowboys, that doesn't mean the Dallas Cowboys are going to show up to vote - and certainly not to vote for a particular candidate. It's pretty obvious (as finally made clear in the last paragraphs) that fraudulent registration in the names of fictitious or ineligible "voters" occurred primarily in order for the registration worker to earn more money...since at one time, such workers were paid by how many voters they registered.

That's clearly a bad idea - but the few cases of fraud it led to were not voter fraud, but fraud against ACORN, in that they fooled or attempted to fool ACORN into paying workers for voters that they had not actually registered. This method of pay has been changed...but the record demonstrates, again and again, that voter fraud is a vanishingly small problem.

No wonder: who would risk a large fine or jail time just to cast one vote for a candidate, as if that's going to turn an election? Almost nobody...and again, the very few instances of purported fraud turned out to arise from bad registration info (outdated addresses, incorrect initials, and so on), or from confusion (ineligible voters unaware of their ineligibility) and not from an 88-year-old guy trying to vote a third time as "Brett Favre."

If the Democrats wanted to steal an election, they have far better examples of how to do it, drawn from recent history.

everything you always wanted to know about John McCain*

2008-10-09T17:38:00.004-05:00

An excerpt from Tim Dickinson's "Make-Believe Maverick":

In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.

In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.

* but were afraid to ask for fear McCain would haul off and punch you in the nose.

whittled on the griddle of Japan

2008-10-07T22:20:00.004-05:00

One of my favorite semi-obscure little bands is The Sugarplastic. They had a moment's glory back in the '90s with a single release on Geffen, which instantaneously garnered them 7,396 XTC comparisons. On that: the short version is that the band quite openly acknowledges their love of and influence by XTC - but that's not the whole story: for example, Rose pointed out bits that sounded rather Pixies-like...and indeed, the Sugarplastic's penchant for steady 8th-note rhythms, sometimes broken up with irregular meters, is one of two quirks I've noticed in nearly every one of their songs (the other is a love of little chromatic lines).

Anyway: they're one of those bands whose members would seem to have day jobs that prevent them from focusing career energies on the band (to judge from his website, Ben Eshbach, the main songwriter, is quite the smart cookie), and so their release schedule has been quite irregular. Their last recording was released in 2005, and their website is infrequently updated.

Eshbach's site also contains mp3s of early Sugarplastic songs that are somewhat difficult to find, as well as some of his own MIDI experiments (not terribly interesting to my ears). One of the better Sugarplastic tracks at that site (follow the link above to explore further) is "Motorola Rocketship," which was released on the Japanese version of their third full-length release Resin in 2000. The arrangement, as is typical for the band, is fairly transparent, allowing the various parts to interweave without obscuring one another. The sort of early-sixties rock feel in the rhythm guitar and the occasional Beach Boys-like touch in the vocals is relatively unusual in their stuff: even though it's still fairly subdued, this is pretty much as rocking as the band gets.

A much earlier song, "Ottawa Bonesaw," is another story. Doing web searches on the band, I discovered that (unsurprisingly) Dana formerly from The Mystical Beast had already written about the Sugarplastic. While he finds much to like about their music, he notes that sometimes they can sound "a little cutesy-poo" and "white-bread." My guess is, this isn't one of his favorite tracks. For me, though, it's maddeningly catchy - and I find myself thinking of it as a slightly off-kilter children's song, so the cutesy stuff has a reason to exist: the rhymes based on people's names, the funny voices, etc., make much better sense if you imagine this is music for kids. (My theory is that the song is loosely based on a French-Canadian children's book whose title, in English, is "To You a Good Evening!" - the song title is a mangling of the French title "À Toi Bonsoir!"... Okay, probably not.) Regardless, I think more people should howl the title at the moon in the manner of the song's closing.

The Sugarplastic "Motorola Rocketship" (Resin, Japanese edition, 2000)
The Sugarplastic "Ottawa Bonesaw" (Ottawa Bonesaw, 1993)

Postscript: Curiously, if you Google the titles of these two tracks, one link will lead you to an academic study on pattern recognition in music, whose authors used these two Sugarplastic songs to determine whether a particular band could be recognized by their software. Fans do funny things.

however, absolutely no making love in a canoe

2008-10-06T22:15:00.003-05:00

With the opening of Café Centraal on the corner of East Lincoln and KK, along with (blessedly smoke-free) Sugar Maple half a block east, this half-block of Lincoln has officially become beer-lovers' heaven. Sugar Maple has 60 premium American microbrews on tap, and a goodly number more in bottles, while Centraal has countless beers (I tried to count them and got lost) both on tap and in bottles, focusing (as its name might suggest) on European brews. Between the two, there are at least 200 different beers available for the drinking.

I would suggest not trying to sample them all in a single evening.

might be a bit difficult to obtain...

2008-10-05T16:36:00.002-05:00

I'm (still) in the midst of digitizing my CD collection, and I ran into Polvo's first EP. The name of the "label" (I think it's really just self-released) is "Jesus Christ," and I think it was chosen solely to allow the following copyright notice that appears at the bottom of the back cover:

Unauthorized reproduction without the express written consent of Jesus Christ is prohibited.

departures

2008-10-03T21:44:00.004-05:00

A feature article in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel the other day described the journey of comedy director David Zucker (a native of a Milwaukee suburb, Shorewood, and best known for his involvement with brother Jerry and Jim Abrahams in the production of the Police Squad and Naked Gun movies) from his liberal background to his current conservatism. At first, my reaction was, okay, some guy becomes more conservative as he ages - nothing very unusual there - but at a specific point in the article, I realized Mr. Zucker had departed the plane of reality. He's quoted describing Barack Obama as "an extreme left-wing candidate who doesn't represent the country."

Uh-huh. Exactly which positions of Obama - who's reliably liberal on social issues (as are most Americans) and moderate on economic issues (as are most Americans) - are "extreme left-wing"? Funny how the folks who make such accusations never back them up (nor are asked to: bad enough in a biographical puff piece like this one, but plain irresponsible in political reporting). And that "doesn't represent the country"? Apparently all those folks who voted for Obama in the primaries, and who gave Obama lead in most polls, must not be from this country. And Zucker has swallowed the lie that McCain represents "lower taxes." Here's a chart (whose presentation, from wealthiest to poorest taxpayers, gives casual readers a false impression), demonstrating that for most Americans, except the very wealthiest, Obama's tax plan will lower taxes considerably more than McCain's will.

And, sadly, dirt and grime have at last vanquished their mortal enemy: I refer, of course, to Mr. Clean: the actor who portrayed the eponymous cleaning products spokesperson, House Peters Jr., has died at the age of 92. That New York Times article describes the career of Peters - one of many bit actors who are all but forgotten now - but fails to explain where the rather exotic (for its time) image of Mr. Clean came from. I mean, nowadays bald-headed, muscular guys sporting white t-shirts and an earring are everywhere (although few have the illustrated Mr. Clean's bushy white eyebrows), but back then, that look must have seemed quite bizarre.

petty annoyances, oversensitive ears division

2008-10-02T21:00:00.002-05:00

We're watching Season 4 of The Office (US version, obviously: the Brit version didn't have four seasons), and the thing that's bugging me? The production company's little trumpet tag at the end ("Deedle-Dee Productions") is ever so slightly out of tune with the musical tag that goes with the NBC thingy that follows, and it's like being forcefed very sour lemonade every time I hear it.

Dammit, folks: tune to the same pitch!

not at all the same as "bartime pairs"

2008-10-01T22:33:00.004-05:00

A few months back, one of the music-related e-mails in my inbox was from a songwriter I hadn't heard of named Bennett Samuel Lin. Lin is the main songwriter for a band called Bobtail Yearlings (whom I also had not heard of), but rather than promoting his band directly, in this case he was interested in feedback on a book he'd just published, called The Bobtail Method for Composing Unique Pop Melodies. (The Method is available both in book form and online as a free PDF file, at the band's website - painfully cute front page and all.) While Lin does have some formal musical training, his method doesn't seem to follow typical songwriting advice or approaches. His main idea is that chord sequences and melodies ought to be composed together, rather than either a melody being written separately (often come up with from the blue sky) and chords built around it, or a chord sequence being written, over which an impoverished, stereotypical melody is improvised.

To this end, Lin walks his readers through the way chords and melodies work and work together. His basic device he calls "the barline pair": "exactly what its name implies: two barlines, signifying a harmonic progression of three bars, with one chord per bar." And what he does with this simple, simplifying device is provide for the musician a sort of puzzle: he leaves the third bar unspecified. So we begin with a question: given these two chords and/or these two melodic lines (he walks us through the construction of both), what chord and melodic line makes musical sense in that third bar? There are, of course, numerous possibilities - but Lin begins by exploring the nature of melodies: their distribution of steps (half- or whole steps), skips (a third or fourth, sometimes), and leaps (generally a diminished fifth or greater), their "points of emphasis" deriving from their intervals, changes in register (any leap defines a change in register), and rhythmic characteristics.

In practice (and probably because to construct a book, you have to begin somewhere), Lin begins with chords, in that he constructs "barline pairs" for every possible sequence of two chords, which chords he's categorized in terms of their harmonic relation, from closest to furthest. Progressing through the book, the reader finds the chords, melodies, and rhythms increasing in complexity and moving away from the harmonically, melodically, and rhythmically obvious.

So how useful is all this? First, I'm probably not his ideal audience: I do have some musical training, enough that it's reasonable when I write songs to proceed more intuitively, confident that I can spot out both the over-obvious and the unduly recherché chordal or melodic sequence. Well, I'd like to think I can, anyway: point is, at first I found myself thinking that Lin's approach was maybe too formalistic, too intellectualized, and that sometimes one just needs to trust one's ears. But (and I think Lin would argue thus), where do one's ears learn what works? Much of the music we hear is, for better or worse, rather clichéd harmonically and, these days, impoverished melodically - so one's ears may well be a poor guide, prone to lead one down only the most worn, well-traveled, and predictable paths. The advantage of Lin's method for beginning musicians is that without being as arbitrary as, say, the twelve-tone school, he doesn't privilege particular chord sequences but shows readers how each one might be made to work reasonably well, in certain contexts. And I suspect that such methodological order might help such musicians get a handle on the unruly array of possibilities a keyboard or guitar presents to them.

I'm not sure about some of Lin's quirks: nearly all his examples (at least in the early part of the book) are in 6/8 time because, he says, this "is an optimal [meter] for creating an interesting melodic contour that feels neither too sparse nor too crowded [and which] ... provides greater flexibility for consolidating a fluid melodic pace when different barline pairs are assembled into a single musical work, which can then be converted to common time (four quarter notes per bar) all at once." Maybe...I'm not entirely persuaded. I was also concerned (as I said above) that the musical exercises that would result from "The Bobtail Method" would be logical but uncompelling musically (that is to say, emotionally). Some of them probably are...but then, they're intended as exercises and examples in some cases, while others are drawn from his own compositions. Fortunately, nearly twenty Bobtail Yearlings tracks are downloadable from the band's website, and they go some ways toward answering the question of how well Lin's ideas work in practice. My first impression is fairly positive: they generally begin from a folk-like texture, but their variety is broader than "folk-like" suggests, and while they are more diverse harmonically and melodically than most pop music, they're not egregiously or clumsily so. In practice, at least, Lin wears his theoretical approach lightly and gracefully. That cutesy splash page does characterize the music to an extent: if you're one of those people who requires a heavy dose of obvious angst and heaviness in your music, you'll probably be disappointed. (Me, I think being boringly dark all the time is easier than the opposite, yet somehow critically more accepted.) Also, banjo.

My only real criticisms of the book are both trivial: I wish the print version had been made available bound such that it could lie flat, to make it easier to rest on a music stand and play the examples. (Perhaps future editions, if they come to be, can be bound this way. You can always download and print the PDF version however you want, of course.) I also think it might have been helpful, when Lin demonstrates the effects of particular chord sequences, to have provided examples from well-known songs rather than just his own music. While copyright no doubt prevented him from reproducing the notes and chords of such songs, he could certainly mention them (as in the well-known mnemonic - a bit outdated but still effective - that to remember a melodic interval of a rising augmented fourth, think of the first two notes of Bernstein's "Maria" from West Side Story, say). This would allow readers to "hear" in their heads the effect of such chordal sequences even if they're away from an instrument, and it would also illustrate (in conjunction with the examples from Lin's own songs) that the same chord sequence can result in sometimes dramatically different effects, depending upon other musical components (which melody and rhythm are chosen with those chords, texture, etc.).

Reese's Musical Politics Cup

2008-09-30T06:54:00.000-05:00

To encourage people to vote, Wilco has made available a free download of a live version of Bob Dylan's classic "I Shall Be Released," recorded with vocal contributions from Fleet Foxes in concert last month. And all you have to do to get the download is pledge to vote and fill in the blanks in the following sentence:

"Two of John McCain's pet names for his wife Cindy are 't-----p' and 'c--t'."

(Okay I made up that last part.)

campaign sign

2008-09-29T00:01:00.001-05:00

(saw this in a photo taken at an Alaskan anti-Palin rally - so I made my own...)

aughts for naughts

2008-09-28T21:00:00.002-05:00

Over at his spankin' new blog Reading Pronunciation, my pal Miles wonders why it is that no one's come up with a clever nickname for this decade yet. (It could be worse: it could be retroactively named like MTV named "The Big Eighties"...)

I have this vague idea that around the turn of the millennium (the odometer-turning-over, big-round-number millennium, not the pedants' millennium marking a numeric event that's just as illegitimate since there was no "Year 1" either - oh wait, looks like I'm earning the right to celebrate that millennium after all...) I came up with some clever name for the then-upcoming decade - but I can't remember it. Probably vanished along with the Y2K problem.

That locution, though, reminds me of one of the two irritating year-related things I've noticed since the beginning of the 2000s. One: the use of "2K" as part of a slangy way to write the year designation, as in "2K8." Folks, "2K" is two characters, so you're only saving a single character by typing it that way...and since you have to hit the shift key to do so, slowing down the flow of characters, you're saving no time at all. (See also: "@" for "at" outside of e-mail addresses.)

The other is people who, in using the date format m/d/year or d/m/year, leave off the initial "0" in the year field, creating date like "9/7/8" (that would be either September 7, 2008 in the US system or July 9, 2008 in the British). That simply doesn't look like a year - more like some bizarre hybrid shoe size - and with two digits in the month or date field - say, 10/15/8 - looks even weirder. I can understand dropping the "0" in month or date fields - for the month, there are only three that go into two digits, and for date, there are enough of them that the usual numeric designations (which do not generally include leading zeros) seem sufficient. But it's conventional to refer to years by dropping the century designators (i.e., the first two digits) and leaving the last two years of the number (thus the more traditional "'08" as an example). A naked "8" there simply doesn't mark out the concept of year, and makes one confused as to whether you're using yet another date system (such as year/month/date). But mostly, it just looks stupid, in my entirely subjective opinion.

looking him in the eye

2008-09-27T15:29:00.002-05:00

We didn't watch last night's debate (no TV), but here's an interesting post at The Angry Black Woman on McCain's body language. Be sure to read the comments as well.

parodists unemployed

2008-09-26T21:57:00.004-05:00

Sarah Palin - Sarah Palin! - has called Henry Kissinger - Henry Kissinger! - "naive," for understanding that diplomacy sometimes involves talking with people with whom you disagree. Kissinger - naive?

I mean, Kissinger is many things - world-class war criminal, say - but on the list of adjectives that aptly describe him, "naive" is approximately 49,537th. And for Sarah Palin to be the name-caller...

I keep waiting for Andy Kaufman to take off the McCain mask he's been wearing the last few years, and say "surprise! it's me! I'm not dead - but the real John McCain was the only one who knew I was alive, and as he was dying we came up with this great idea..."

I'm pretty sure Caligula's horse was more qualified to be a Roman consul than Palin is for VP.

the pigment that you promised

2008-09-25T21:37:00.002-05:00

One thing our remodeling project has done (some might be thankful for this) is interrupt my usual summer efforts to desecrate the art of recorded sound. Typically, I'd try to record a song or two during the summer when I have more free time; this summer, my keyboard and equipment have been unplugged in the basement...and when I have time off, either there's been a bangin' and a hammerin' from on high, or it's later at night and Rose is trying to sleep. I suppose if I were into it enough I could do an all-laptop number - but before I could do that, I'd need to familiarize myself with some new MIDI software and the like (also got a new outboard USB doohickey to connect to the keyboard and such - all I've used it for so far is to digitize a 45).

Anyway, all this is by intro to the fact that the last recording project I did was last spring, when I covered an obscure Robyn Hitchcock song for the third in a series of fan-based Hitchcock tribute collections. The deadline for submissions was several months ago...but I've heard nothing about the project since then (not about my own work, nor about the project generally), so I think I'll sneak out my cover of "Creatures of Light" in my own little blog.

The original version was released on a 7" single for Ptolemaic Terrascope magazine in 1995 and so far as I know had no other release. It sounds to me nearly improvised: Robyn's lyrics (insofar as I can make them out: I guessed in several places) are less polished than usual, and the song's structure is a bit freeflowing as well.

For my cover, I decided to run with those aspects of the song. My initial conception involved two overlapping guitar improvisations, along with two keyboard improvs on top of those, and some percussion. I used a tuning I hadn't used before (and I'm not Mr. Alternate Tuning Guy either), which I call Heather Has Two Daddies (it's D-A-D-D-A-D: the D's in the middle are the same pitch). Of course I exploited the drone possibilities of this tuning (also useful when you're a crap guitar player), and the two D's that are nominally the same pitch drifted slightly out of tune as I thrashed madly at the guitar, so you get a bit of resonance from that fact as well. I ended up using only one guitar track, which was highly edited down from a longer version (much of which was me fucking up the simplest parts...).

I'd mentioned that I had a sort of first-take ethos originally. That involved my letting my mad rhythmic impulses somewhat free reign (you'll notice the original doesn't stick strictly to 4/4 either), but in order to play over that initially recorded guitar part without totally screwing up, I had to map out what I had done. Thus it is that I'm aware of the odd bar of 11/8, 5/4, and the like that sprung mysteriously from my fingers...

Anyway, the percussion didn't work: I'd envisioned a sort of tabla-sounding thing - didn't have a tabla, didn't have a tabla setting on my keyboard (that's an oversight, Yamaha...), so I looked around for something that might deliver a similar sound. I tried tapping out some rhythm on, of all things, Rose's giant inflatable exercise ball...but not exactly being Steve Albini, I couldn't record it right, so instead of a rich, ringing tone I imagined, it sounded more like drops of water randomly hitting a metal sink basin. Percussion scrapped.

Onto the keyboard: I recorded the first go-round, then went back and did another one (muting the first track while listening to the guitar part). When playing them back, I'd accidentally left on both keyboard tracks (which had been improvised independently), and decided I rather liked the way they accidentally worked together. In some places, obviously, I'd worked out a part; in others, I just played, and in those later parts we have passing odd discords and fortuitous ghostly harmonies, depending - so I decided to keep them both on.

I mentioned that Hitchcock's lyric is even more cryptic than usual: I decided, for some reason, that "Captain Morrison" was essential to the story, and so that bit received some emphasis. I also added the vocal harmonies at the end (loosely inspired by "I Can See for Miles") and a few filigrees of backwards guitar and the like to add some flavor.

Robyn Hitchcock "Creatures of Light" (7" with Ptolemaic Terrascope magazine, 1995)
Monkey Typing Pool "Creatures of Light"

(Note: all rights in this composition remain with Mr. Hitchcock)

legerdemain

2008-09-23T22:27:00.004-05:00

I'm trying to work out the logic here.

Representatives of various industries that employ large numbers of immigrant workers (food service and hotels, retail, agriculture and food processing) have formed a group to lobby for regulations that would allow guest workers into the country on a limited basis tied to their employment. These workers are "essential," the group says, because they're needed for jobs American citizens won't take. But these groups don't want regulations mandating a higher minimum wage - even though you'd think a higher wage might entice citizen workers to take those jobs - because, you see, "the market determines wages" (this is from a director of the American Meat Institute).

So: government action that mandates a minimum wage, that's "interference." Government action that creates a whole new class of worker - workers who, from desperation and powerlessness imposed by their guest-worker status (nearly similar to that of indentured servants), drive down everyone's wages...well, that's not interference at all.

It follows that "the market" includes industrial groups lobbying government on behalf of their interests, but it does not include labor groups lobbying government on behalf of their interests. Apparently the famed invisible hand is "invisible" only from the wrong side of a sort of two-way economic mirror: from that side, nothing can be seen but the reflection of one's fruitless efforts to have one's interests recognized; from the other side, the hand is visible indeed, and in full control of industry, who use it to steer profits and benefits exclusively their way.

(On the larger issue: the path to citizenship should be much simpler, and if NAFTA and the like allow capital to flow freely across borders, then workers should be able to move just as freely in search of better wages.)

Prague rock?

2008-09-20T23:12:00.005-05:00

One of those curiosities: two British bands, both prone to the experimental, both operating in the early '80s, each choosing to record a short sound collage with the title "Radio Prague": I think they even use some of the same samples (guess the source).

First, the earlier, more abstract one, from This Heat's brilliantly odd yet perversely catchy 1981 album Deceit - then, Orchestral Manœuvres in the Dark*'s more direct track, recorded two years later as the opening track to their last truly exceptional release Dazzle Ships.

* It's useful to distinguish between the band thus designated and the band typically referred to by the abbreviation "OMD." The latter is the band remembered as one of the early '80s synth-pop bands, with a couple-few relatively minor hits to its name. Not bad stuff, but not very interesting either. The band they were beforehand, though, was much more interesting, its work culminating in two brilliant albums that mixed a stark soundspace, pop melodicism often derived from '50s-inspired chord structures, and experimental cold electronics which, beginning on Architecture & Morality and continuing on Dazzle Ships, occasionally manifested as full-blown avant-garde sound experimentation. The two albums preceding those, their self-titled debut and its follow-up, Organisation, have an engagingly raw sound blending electronics with acoustic drums, but the band's more avant-garde tendencies are largely submerged.

This Heat "Radio Prague" (Deceit, 1981)
Orchestral Manœuvres in the Dark "Radio Prague" (Dazzle Ships, 1983)

Next - both Grizzly Bear's and The Grateful Dead's songs called "Alligator"! Nah...probably not...

swallowed alive

2008-09-19T23:12:00.004-05:00

Two tracks featuring David Sylvian guest vocals.

The first one, "Linoleum," is by Tweaker a/k/a Chris Vrenna formerly from Nine Inch Nails. This is some remix or other, about which I have very little info because the track came my way on a disc I received in trade for something else... Anyway, even though this is from 2001 it somehow sounds rather dated to my ears, as if it's ten years older than that. I still like it fairly well.

But the better Sylvian-guesting-on-electronic-artist's-work track is Fennesz's "Transit." While there is a chord structure to this track, it would be far more obscured by Fennesz's fuzzy sonics if not for Sylvian's vocal, which outlines the chordal structure more clearly than the backing track's somewhat ambiguous approach.

David Sylvian's voice is one of those that inescapably associates itself for me with a particular color...the oddity is, I can't name the color, really. As a comparison: Michael McDonald's voice is, clearly, a rich shade of medium-dark brown.

Tweaker ft. David Sylvian "Linoleum (Wamdue 2step Vocal Experience)" (original recording on The Attraction to All Things Uncertain, 2001)
Fennesz ft. David Sylvian "Transit" (Venice, 2004)

still sitting in a tree and spelling out the fun words

2008-09-16T23:19:00.005-05:00

I don't usually write about my personal life here, but today Rose and I celebrate the 25th anniversary of our first date. Those of you who know us know that I continue to be flabbergasted at my good fortune. My life is immeasurably richer with Rose in it, and the few bumps we've experienced along the way only make it more precious.

In addition to being the date we first got together, it's also the date, on that 9th anniversary, we got married - making today our 16th wedding anniversary. And because I'm geeky like that, it occurred to me that that combination of numbers is unusual if not unique, in that 9+16=25...but the square root of each of those numbers ~~not only adds in the same sequence (3+4=5) but~~ is itself a numerical sequence. (As Steve points out, I'm not a math teacher. I'm also not much of a copy editor, apparently.)

The other benefit of doubling up the anniversary celebrations is that we get to have another 25th anniversary nine years from now. I hope each of my readers finds as much happiness with their partner as I have.

pink fluffy cotton-candy snowstorm in Hell

2008-09-14T23:54:00.002-05:00

Karl Rove has condemned the McCain campaign for being dishonest.

I'll pause a few moments while the paramedics restart your heart.

No, really: it's even on video:

I'm pretty sure this proves that Swiss experiment to duplicate conditions just after the Big Bang did, in fact, swallow the universe in an enormous black hole...and now we're in Bizarro World.

If Dick Cheney appears on TV tomorrow, cuddling a kitten and funding soup kitchens, we'll know for sure.

linkfest!

2008-09-13T12:21:00.002-05:00

I'm on vacation this weekend, so just a few links. All political, I'm afraid...but entertaining for all that:

1. Paul Krugman on the Republicans' "blizzard of lies"

2. Scott Bateman animates and comments on an excerpt from Charlie Gibson's Sarah Palin interview (via The Jestaplero).

3. Momus proposes political memes for the Obama campaign.

particularly amusing for our British friends

2008-09-12T00:01:00.002-05:00

time alone

2008-09-09T22:25:00.003-05:00

Matthew Perpetua has finished his Pop Songs 07-08 song blog: his examination of nearly every song R.E.M. has ever recorded (and a few they hadn't but had played live). Fittingly, the blog concludes on 9-9 - which is of course the title of an R.E.M. song - and with what is perhaps R.E.M.'s most famous song: "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)."

One of the best things to be said about these entries was a comment on today's entry, which noted that the entries never seemed tossed off, overly brief, or done out of a sense of obligation, no matter whether Matthew liked the song or not, and even though he's maintained quite a busy writing schedule (with his main Fluxblog gig and several other projects going). Taken as a whole, this constitutes one of the most inclusive and well-written guides to the music of any band out there. It's quite an accomplishment.

"Since the beginning of time, mankind has yearned to blot out the sun."

2008-09-09T20:53:00.004-05:00

Thus spake Montgomery Burns (if not in exactly those words), and if the humor of that remark comes from the absurdity of Burns's assumptions...well, the assumption itself may be absurd, but that he assumes it's shared does reflect a certain reality: one of the major levers grasped by anyone seeking to manipulate the public (advertisers, politicians, etc.) is the potent resistance many people have to believing that others actually and genuinely have opinions different from their own.

You can see this in the culture wars underway on behalf of the Great American Middle Class (everyone's middle-class in America! but only some of them are white, which remains unspoken), kindly engineered by the sort of folks who lose count of how many houses they own, in which a sinister significance is attributed to one's preference in vegetables, heated beverages, or ostentatious display of nationalistic bric-a-brac. Not only are such odd preferences different, which is just weird, but those who profess to enjoy the latte that dare not speak its name are suspected of doing so merely to mark out their difference and their superiority from the riff-raff, and to toady to some imaginary overclass ("the elitists") whose mission seems to be to denigrate the tastes and preferences of "real Americans" in lieu of the trivial, the ephemeral, the fashionable, and - worst of all - the French. (Don't try to tell me "latte" is from the Italian - it sounds French, so it is French. And what's the difference anyway? They all wear fancy-ass shoes, and they lose wars like the Phillies lose baseball games.)

This is why it's such a seemingly short leap from trivial questions of taste to the more serious matter of insincerity, fifth-columnism, and hidden agendas: if you're willing to pretend to like bizarre vegetables and elaborate coffees, there's no telling what else in your life is a pretense, a sucking-up to expectations...so all the flag pins, nice suits, and patriotic speeches mean nothing, because you'll say anything to curry favor.

And god help you if you prefer to deliberate, analyze, plan, or do anything other than kick ass and react from the gut. Real Americans - which is to say, real men - don't waste time cogitating and hawing and hemming, they get out there and play some rapid-fire chin music. You don't see John Wayne heading the debate club, do you? My favorite story in this regard involves a former co-worker of Rose's who, after Rose argued such-and-such, citing various facts, statistics, etc., replied that Rose's opinions weren't as valuable - because Rose had relied upon what she knew, and on ideas, whereas the co-worker felt what she did from the heart. Or, in the other common phrase, she operated from a gut feeling.

You know, you can't really figure out what your guts are up to from an upright position. I think the optimal view probably comes from bending over backwards and sticking one's head straight up the poop chute.

Another advantage to that position: you won't be bothered by that demon sun.

twice nice

2008-09-08T22:15:00.004-05:00

Two songs that have in common their performance by an act that's a spin-off of sort from an earlier act...first up is "Scratch the Surface" by The Week That Was (a/k/a The Name That I Can't Remember - honestly, I've had to google that name I don't know how many times...), which is the name ex-Field Music Peter Brewis is trading under. Like his brother and bandmate David's School of Language project from last year, Brewis's songs often seem to pack a carefully trimmed prog-rock aesthetic into a cunningly constructed sharp, spare, new-wavey pop song. The arranging here is diamond hard, the piano resonating with the pinging drum echoing the guitar, and all the rhythms mesh gears winningly.

Slightly less famous, All City Affairs is a side project of Peter Andreadis, who also drums for Baby Teeth. "One Shot" has a melody that keeps reminding me of classic Squeeze (is it similar to a particular song), along with a funky late '70s rhythm guitar, quasi-backwards synth bass, and (similar to the track by The Week That Was) punch-press drums.

The Week That Was "Scratch the Surface" (The Week That Was, 2008 forthcoming)
All City Affairs "One Shot" (Identity Theft, 2008 forthcoming)

hunters and collectors

2008-09-06T16:04:00.004-05:00

Momus has an interesting article on record-store taxonomy (and yes, I'm sure he's aware of the oddly archaic air the whole notion of record stores might have). The essential problem is something I run into frequently, which is what to do in attempting to classify an item which is both A and B. One of my geekly traits is being fairly insistent on the classification system of my CD collection: CDs are stored alphabetically by artist (with some exceptions, below), within artist chronologically (what to do with collections is always iffy: do they go before the earliest represented selection, after the latest represented selection, or simply at the end of the artist's section?). That's the bulk of the collection - but after that is a separate section for various-artist items, which also includes tribute albums (which some folks might want to file with the artist so honored), soundtracks, etc. And after that is classical music - which I've organized in alphabetical order by recording label and within label by catalog number. That last one seems hopelessly arcane, I'll admit...and it certainly isn't obvious - but it does solve a problem. Some classical recordings might consist entirely of recordings by a single composer (whose name is, therefore, featured strongly on the cover). Others might consist of pieces by multiple composers and might be highlighting a particular musician or ensemble. Still others might be thematically organized. But here's the problem: here's a piano concerto by Composer X, featuring Musician Y and Orchestra Z, conducted by Conductor A. If I were a huge fan of any one of those, I suppose it would make sense to file the CD under that artist...but what if I'm a huge fan of several of them...or all of them? The label/catalog number solution simplifies: it uniquely identifies a CD, and it cuts through that selection process by saying "none of the above." Yes, it means I need to remember what label a recording is on in order to find it - but that wasn't all that challenging even before I assembled my music database, and now it's even less of an issue.

This system, logical as it might seem to me, still presents problems. Let's say there's a split CD, an EP each from two bands on one disc. Let's say I'm a huge fan of one band, while I've never heard of the other one. The nearest example I can think of is the Lilys/Aspera ad Astra split CD: I'm a huge Lilys fan, and although I'd heard of Aspera (they later shortened their name), I'm only lukewarm about their music. In that case, I just ignore the Aspera tracks where filing is concerned and put it in the "Lilys" section. But what about a split CD for two bands I like equally (or hadn't heard of: arrived for review, good enough to keep, not good enough to investigate further...)? Similarly: if all the other Kronos Quartet recordings are in the "classical" section, what do I do with their CD full of Thelonious Monk tunes, in which Monk is essentially treated as a composer? It's not a "tribute CD" (although I suppose it kind of is, just when Japancakes covers My Bloody Valentine's Loveless in its entirety), and it isn't played like jazz anymore...so I suppose it becomes "classical" by default. And what about Frank Zappa? Most of his work, of course, just gets filed under "Z" for "Zappa"...but what about the two-CD London Symphony Orchestra set playing his original compositions? And what about the various other small ensembles that have played Zappa's orchestral or small-ensemble compositions...or arranged his rock-band pieces for same? Do those recordings go in the "classical" section, or in the "tribute" section, or in the main alphabetical section under the name of the ensemble (just as that Japancakes CD would be under "J"...if it were a CD and not merely a collection of mp3s I purchased from eMusic).

Momus's article notes that the record store he visited had created such intensely imbricating classifications that it became nearly impossible to determine where a particular recording might be found. And woe to the artist whose style varies dramatically over a career (like Momus's own): they get stuck in whatever genre they began, even if their later recordings bear no relation to that genre whatsoever. This is true also of online database genre labeling: Wilco is "country" forever and ever, it seems...even though there's not a single second that sounds like country music on their most acclaimed release, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I know I find it maddening trying to shop at a store that's excessively enamored of classification...is this in the main "rock" section, the "indie" section, the "bizarro-pop" section, the "what the hell were they thinking when they recorded this?" section, or the "please - we'll pay you to take this off our hands!" section?

The ironic aspect of this situation is that I imagine stores categorize items by genre in order to help shoppers: presumably, it's easier to find "No Age" in a section helpfully labeled "indie" than if their CDs were in amongst recordings of all the other genres in the store. But is that true? Is it necessarily the case that someone looking for the No Age CD is likelier to be swayed into buying another CD by its mere adjacency in the "indie" section? My guess is that many, many factors enter into whether someone decides to buy a title they weren't planning on buying: whether they know of the artist, have heard some of the music, like the cover, etc. It seems to me that anyone likely to buy a CD without having heard most or all of it (that is to say, something they randomly run into on the shelves) is the same sort of person whose interests probably transcend particular musical genre designations...particularly those set up not by fans of the music but by the store, which necessarily has to choose how to categorize items without hearing the music on them. (I'm sure record labels help out here.)

So I'm with Momus: my ideal record store would (big surprise) file its selections pretty much the same way my own music collection is filed: mostly a big alphabetical selection, with various artists at the end (or beginning). As for the classical stuff: the advantage of a record store is that it presumably has multiple copies of the same CD...so if it's Emanuel Ax playing a Beethoven piano concerto, some copies can go under "B" for "Beethoven" for the Beethoven fans, while others can go under "A" for "Ax" for fans of Mr. Ax. Same with split CDs, ad hoc collaborations (Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs' "Sid and Susie" CD), and so on.

Incidentally, one advantage of the music database I use (Music Collector, from Collectorz.com) is that it allows multiple entries in the artist field, both for "album artist" and "track artist." So consider the second Billy Bragg/Wilco album of Woody Guthrie lyrics: I can have that show up under Bragg, under Wilco, under Guthrie (and I could create a separate entry for "Billy Bragg and Wilco" if I were so inclined) - and on the song that features Natalie Merchant on lead vocals, her name under "track artist" along with all the others (they transfer down from the album level). Unfortunately, Collectorz' MP3 Collector database program does not (yet) include a similar feature...rather annoyingly since, if it ever does in a future upgrade, a whole lot of relabeling will become necessary. (Note that "geek" is one of the labels for this post...)