Blip.fm is yet another thing. I'm shaking up my social networking situation mostly because FaceBook is turning into the kind of encroaching octopus that MySpace became.
Social networking of this stripe reminds me of the old days of underground cassette culture where you had a network of like-minded musicological misfits that all had one piece of the puzzle and you slowly disseminated the pieces among each other. Twenty years ago, I had to fly to California and stay a week with a lunatic to get to hear La Monte Young's The Well Tuned Piano, and now I can auto-broadcast it to everyone I know, 99% of whom will be decidedly uninterested in it. I'm not sure which is better, sending it to everyone with hopes that 1% will like it, or the old fashioned way when it was sent to one person who would treasure it. It's not unlike debating the merits of carpet-bombing vs. a sniper.
Semi-related, when I was a kid, my friend Robbie down the street, who got everything before the rest of our poor asses got anything, had Blip when it first came out, and our mutual friend Dale and I had to impatiently take turns in Robbie's treehouse playing him in proto-pong, so maybe I was born to network through electronic gadgetry.
rating: 2 of 5 stars I could not get into this, Bolaño's only collection of poems in English, at all. I saved it for last after spending the last couple of months reading literally thousands of pages of Bolaño's mesmerizing tributes to the power of poetry and exaltation of suffering poets, only to find the poetry falling pretty flat. There are moments when he gets his engine running, like the numerous "Detective" poems where he offers every conceivable facet of a subject, but they fall short of the impact of any of his novels. Again, maybe it's the translation, or maybe Bolaño is just much better at talking about a thing than doing it, and in that, I can imagine the powerhouse of a critic he might have become (or was and I don't know about it) had he lived a little longer.
rating: 4 of 5 stars I am relieved to be finished with this book and with Roberto Bolaño, not because I didn't enjoy it, in fact, I think this is the longest novel that I have ever finished, but I'm ready to leave the cloud in which his extended prose places me. Like The Savage Detectives, which I think is a better book though 2666 is better written (or is easier to read, and I am willing to chalk that discrepancy up to different translators), the stories that unfold here are lived in rather told. By the onset of part 5, I had a sinking fear that none of this was going to tie up, and I'm not sure if it all did. I think the experience was like living in a town so long that you no longer seek to connect the threads, you become a thread in it.
I think Bolaño's novels are totally deserving of the hype they have received and find sweetness in the fact that the late writer himself is wandering the ether of lost enigmatic writers which embodies much of his work, chuckling as a bunch of peckerwoods like myself chase his ghost.
Fela Kuti & The Africa '70 - Open/Closeand Afrodisiac(lala) You can clean a room to some Fela. I set mini-goals like I will keep picking up trash until this song is over because otherwise you can pick up trash forever, a room generates trash at a rate pproportional to your efforts, Not that we have a messy house by most standards, it just bears the patina of people living their lives in it. With Fela going, though, that song lasts a good 15-20 minutes, a bracket in which you can get some shit done. The Necks - MosquitoThese Australian jazz/rock/minimalists/purveyors of very long trance instrumental tracks usually fall into the same thinking space as Fela, but this record just sent me running back to the source. Kraftwerk - Electric Cafe (lala) This played just long enough for me to come up with the post title.
George Benson - The George Benson Cookbook (lala) - George Benson operates in the choicest position I can think of for an artist: straddling the fence between he mundane, either far to out-there or way to in-there. I knew him for the beyond-massive pop hits "Turn Your Love Around" and "Gimme the Night" and when I first got one of his guitar albums, I thought it was a different George Benson. Dig if you will the multilateral sonic onslaught of "Ready and Able"
Harlem Underground Band - s/t - Harlem Underground Band is possibly one of the lesser known facets of the George Benson universe. Harlem Underground Band was a psychedelic soul band Benson formed in 1976, featuring the chanted soul of Ann Winley on four extended dope-blues-soul workouts. The released one eponymous with a number of the key tracks appearing on Erotic Moods under Benson's name in 1978. Best known among the blissed-out talkin' streetdealer blues jive throughout this records is "Smokin Cheeba-Cheeba" a rolling thunderhead of stoner funk kitsch, most recently featured in the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
Curtis Mayfield - Roots (lala) I knew the hits but I never really understood how badass Curtis Mayfield is until I started digging into the albums. James Brown - There it Is (lala) The WNYC SoundCheck blog is calling for greed songs for their ongoing deadly sins series, and nothing spells that out better than "I'm a Greedy Man"
possessing one of his finest grooves, sounding like the conveyor belt that keeps the rotting mess of the world churned up to that life continue to flourish. The magic of James Brown lies in its implausibility; if it didn't already exist, and you tried to sell someone on the idea - OK, the song is just one riff over and over for like 8 minutes and the singer is going to scream and bark orders to a band that keeps doing the same thing and occasionally says something semi-sensible - who would think that was a reasonable way to do things, much less a highly successful one? Also, if you've never heard his cautionary tale "King Heroin," get on it, be you Italian, Jewish, Black or Mex.
The Bar-Kays - Gotta Groove and Black Rock (lala) Gotta Groove is the spot-on soulsonic boom one would expect from a well-oiled one-time Stax Records session machine - OK, maybe not the "It's a Small World"-esque trip through "Hey Jude," but otherwise, generally tight. Their follow-up record Black Rock, on the other hand, is a glorious mess. "Baby I Love you" is stretched until its ragged threads are exposed. Instead of the tight weave Aretha Franklin made of the song, it is a roughshod net trolling the waters of 1971, letting big horns and jazz flute and acid guitar all commingle and flop around like a bunch of surprised fish when the bounty is hauled to the surface. Then, when the net finally tears, the fisherman is left howling in the empty echo of infinitude. Massive stuff for a song with such an innocuous title.
As the record proceeds, it's more MC5 than MG's, doctoring the otherwise pure sentiments of "Dance to the Music" needlessly with protest and "bad acid" kitsch, but then psychedelia is never about the path of least resistance. That doesn't explain WTF happened with "Montego Bay" at the end. Is this what happens when you drink a daiquiri that has been left out for too long? J. Blackfoot - City Slickers (lala) lala kept insisting on this so here it is. A signiciantly lower-dose of lysergic soul, it opens with the Twilight Zone vamp
Do not adjust the sounds of your stereo There is nothing wrong with your set For the next 34 minutes, I will control what you hear and feel You're about to be taken on a musical safari To the most ferocious jungle known to man The jungle where the hunter's often captured by the game This is a city, and you are there
This is the kind of stuff that sounds brilliant at a place like Teddy's but feels ridiculous listening to it in headphones at my desk.
A friend posted a picture of the forsythia arrangements in her well-appointed abode on her equally well-appointed blog and it reminded me of a collection of concrete poetry (not An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, ed by Emmett Williams, published by Something Else Press, as I thought after perusing it at the library. It was a smaller book with a lot of of the same material.) This poem was on the cover of that book that I found on my father's bookshelf when I was 8 or so, and I buried myself in that book. Now I need to know what that book was.
According to the Anthology, Solt utilized the Morse code definitions of each letter as the stems of the forsythia branches.
