meme -> iPhone Apocalypse Strategy

From the Facebooks of many:

"List your top 40 albums!!!! Remember, you can't list an artist twice!"

OK! Off the top of my head! Like if I had time to load just 40 albums on my phone before the apocalypse hit and had no time to think about it! Stock-the-bunker-sound-system music-for-the-long-haul music! And for some weird reason iTunes wouldn't let me repeat artists! Whatever! No time to figure out why! Hurry!

1. Can - Tago Mago
2. Funkadelic - Maggot Brain
3. The Fall - Hex Enduction Hour
4. The Rolling Stones - Exile on Main Street
5. Boredoms - Vision Creation Newsun
6. Richard Youngs - Sapphie
7. John Fahey - America
8. P-Funk All Stars - P-Funk Earth Tour Live
9. Nick Drake - Pink Moon
10. Wilco - Being There
11. The Who - Who's Next
12. Guided By Voices - Bee Thousand
13. Yes - Close to the Edge
14. Gillian Welch - Time (The Revelator)
15. XTC - Skylarking
16. Ramsay Midwood - Shootout at the OK Chinese Restaurant
17. Joy Division - Substance
18. The Smiths - The Queen is Dead
19. Sly & the Family Stone - There's a Riot Goin' On
20. Sun Ra - We Travel the Spaceways
21. John Coltrane - A Love Supreme
22. Steve Reich - Music for 18 Musicians
23. Lucinda Williams - Happy Woman Blues
24. Velvet Underground - s/t (3rd album)
25. Big Star - #1 Record/Radio City
26. Miles Davis - Bitches Brew
27. Fugazi - Red Medicine
28. Motörhead - Ace of Spades
29. Black Sabbath - Paranoid
30. Led Zeppelin - Houses of the Holy
31. La Monte Young - The Well Tuned Piano
32. Lee "Scratch" Perry - Chicken Scratch
33. Tom Petty - Greatest Hits
34. Bonny Prince Billy and The Marquis de Tren - Get the Fuck on Jolly Live
35. Charles Mingus - Mingus at the Bohemia
36. Love - Forever Changes
37. Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited
38. Curtis Mayfield - Curtis
39. Guns N Roses - Appetite for Destruction
40. The Cramps - Songs the Lord Taught Us

So, should the cleanup crew find my miraculously still-charged phone among the dust that was me, and somehow it was the only remaining trace of musical history left, it would appear that the sound of our culture was that of a late night college DJ with a pedagogical bent, the Beatles and Elvis would both persist the Next Phase only as unspoken influences, and hip-hop, Prince, most of punk rock and anything past 2001 just never happened.

I predict were you to somehow access my last.fm profile reports from the Event Horizon on, you would find that I never listened to that Bonny Prince Billy I wanted so badly, played any jazz track for at most 3 minutes except for the Mingus record, only ever got through the first two tracks on the Boredoms, talked about Sly & the Family Stone more than I listened to it, and basically played to Guns N Roses, Led Zeppelin, and Tom Petty on shuffle most of the time, because everyone in the bunker, including myself, hated all the other music I put on there after the first week.

I convinced no-one how good that Can album is. Playing La Monte Young and Yes both nearly resulted in my expulsion to the radioactive wasteland. We culled together some form of religion around playing Curtis Mayfield at "sunup" (estimated of course, no windows) every Sunday and tidied up the bunker, or at least felt we should. I likely realized that holding on to the Fall is more about holding onto the dreams of youth than actual musical enjoyment, but it will lift my spirits to know that it's there. Everyone was pleased that I thought to put Guns N Roses on there, since it is an album we can all agree to liking whether we want to admit it or not.

It will also be noted that I attempted to check my email at least once every 30 waking minutes for my tenure in the bunker, even though I full-well knew the whole of civilization had been destroyed.

Review of Pan: From Lieutenant Thomas Glahn's Papers (20th-Century Classics) Pan: From Lieutenant Thomas Glahn's Papers by Knut Hamsun

Pan: From Lieutenant Thomas Glahn's Papers by Knut Hamsun

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Of all the stuff I read in college, nothing lasted longer with me than Knut Hamsun's Hunger, and with stops and starts over the years I've tried his other books without ever finishing them. Then I read somewhere that John Fante got the title or the idea for Ask the Dust, one of my favorite books ever, from Hamsun's Pan, and that was enough for me.

This is a spectacular little book, a hair over 100 pages in the lovely edition I got form the library complete with woodcut illustrations, documenting a season of a narcissist spends hunting in the frozen wastes of upper Norway and how the hearts of the people burn through all that ice. The protagonist is almost categorically unsympathetic, the dialog a little antiquated, the secondary characters a little one-dimensional, yet it all comes together as the way the world does in the mind, pieces cut large and kicked into place so that they fit in our own particular puzzles.

Knut Hamsun seems to have been a terrible person, a Nazi sympathizer so pronounced that in 1943 he sent Goebbels his 1920 Nobel Prize medal as a gift. And yet, in Pan, he reconciles uncomfortable people in a harrowing landscape and reveals the richness of their humanity, the common spark that illuminates us all from within.


View all my reviews.

[The Record Crate] The Edge of the Earth

The coolest musical performance this week was not a show exactly. Field Day, the group comprised of Zenbilly’s Bill Calloway and his two sons performed a stream of undulating space rock as part of Mallory Fetz & Kit French’s smart installation Trip the Light Electric on Saturday night at the Shaw Center. One of the second-floor classrooms was done up in streamers and balloons to recreate a prom setting, and projected on one wall was an extended video of four wallflowers fidgeting uncomfortably on the sidelines as Field Day’s driving continuum bled in from the room next door, capturing perfectly the existential distance that occurs at the prom -- you are there but you are not participating. Calloway and sons would rotate among drums, guitar and keyboards throughout the night, sometimes mid-song it seemed, which I thought was nice incidental touch.

Not only do I want more of this from our eager cadre of art students at our city’s two universities, but I want the local music scene integrated into it. The two feed each other and create something greater than the sum of its parts. There are those that say nothing cool ever happens here; I would say those people are culturally myopic and need to get out more rather than let their grumblings become a reality.

For instance, I am particularly excited about "The Edge of the Earth: An Evening of Video, Music, and Poetry" at the Manship Theatre this Saturday, featuring the performance of selected movements Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, a poem written and read by Jacqueline Dee Parker, and the premier of Bird and Squirrel a film by LSU art professor Kelli Scott Kelley. Programming Messiaen’s beguiling quartet for piano, clarinet, cello and violin, written for the musicians and instruments at hand during his time in a German prison camp during World War II, along with Kelley’s film (soundtrack by Culture Candy founder Bill Kelley) about the last boy and girl on earth, demonstrates the synergy an arts scene, music environment and performance space can create when they work together. And the event is free, starting at 7 p.m. I’ll consider it a present for my 40th birthday if you pack the house for this unique and inspiring event. Go see some art, see some live music and keep up the good work.

Oh and check out the Decemberists’ new album, The Hazards of Love, if you need another example of what high ambition can create in the right hands.

Wednesday, March 25

The Shivers, Like Trains & Taxis, and Wilderness Pangs at Spanish Moon

Thursday, March 26

Patti Austin at the Manship Theatre

The Moaners at Chelsea’s

The Winter Sounds and Dear Future at North Gate Tavern

Pat Green at The Varsity

Friday, March 27

HEALTH, Picture Plane, and Man + Building at Spanish Moon

Steve Riley & the Mamou Playboys at The Varsity

Randy Owen (of Alabama) at the Texas Club

Papa Grows Funk at Chelsea’s

Letters in Red and If I Were a Battleship at Click’s

Tin Horse, Johnny Firmin & American Heart, and Steve Bing & the Bayou Hot Shots at Boudreaux & Thibodeaux’s

Zoso at The Varsity

Kenny Acosta at Phil Brady’s

Randy Pavlock at Teddy’s Juke Joint

Saturday, March 28

“The Edge of the Earth” at the Manship Theatre

As Cities Burn at Spanish Moon

6 Pack Deep and Fatty Lumpkin at Chelsea’s

Sky Chief at North Gate Tavern

Maven and Devil & the Details at Click’s

Chris Himel & Outbound at Boudreaux & Thibodeaux’s

Aretmis at Phil Brady’s

Big Red & the Soul Benders at Teddy’s Juke Joint

Sunday, March 29

Big Red & the Soul benders at Teddy’s Juke Joint

Monday, March 30

Langhorne Slim at Red Star

link to original

This is how you do a music video

Intricate dance number atop a moving train.

Chaiyya Chaiyya

I am not going to pretend to know jack about Bollywood music. This was lifted from Living With Music: A Bollywood Playlist by Daphne Beal. Too bad Michael Jackson spent so much time and energy becoming a disturbing white eccentric - imagine if instead he had decided to become the King of Bollywood. That would have been something to see.

Seriously, watch every video in Beal's post. "Chaiyya Chaiyya" is my favorite, but the one with the kites isn't bad either.

going up

John Coltrane - Ascension (Editions I and II) (listen) The transmigration of the soul into the heavens is likely a harrowing process, like some metaphysical trauma akin to birth in reverse, and instead of sounding like a twinkling harp as you float through clouds in a really nice bathrobe, like the kind I expect Diddy has in his guest bathroom, it instead is the atomic tearing-apart punctuated by fevered bliss that occurs on this record.
John Bell Young - Prisms (listen) Yesterday on a whim I started looking up things about Alexander Scriabin's Mysterium again. Mysterium was a monumental 7-day-long orchestral work Scriabin wanted to stage at the foot of the Himalayas, at the end of which the world would be destroyed and the nobler phase of being would begin. I came across this (HTML version of a doc) about a mountain climber that took a flag depicting this album of Scriabin works up an unclimbed Himalayan peak as a means of partially fulfilling Scriabin's vision. The jury is still out as to whether we are in receipt of cosmic ennobling ensuing from this act or not.

Jannis Kounellis

Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 2006. Iron plates, white fabric, two bed frames, steel hooks, black fabric, two I-beams, two coats, 200 x 360 cm. Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York.

From here

This weekend, I found myself in a rare situation where artists liked and unliked were discussed, offered up and discussed. This was something I did in perpetuity as a student but do not do enough as an adult, so I figured I'd make mention here of one I really like - Greek arte povera artist Jannis Kounellis. He's one of those guys who enjoyed a heyday in the 80's when I first started studying art, often featured in enigmatic gallery ads in Artforum, whose name has slipped a bit from public consciousness. His art, comprised largely of steel and sheets and rope and famously, horses

Jannis Kounellis, exhibition of twelve horses in the Galleria L'Attico, Rome in 1969
From here

no doubt greatly informed that of Damien Hirst as did the whole boho shamble of arte povera speak to the YBA generation involuntarily orbiting Hirst.

What the arte povera guys had that the YBA's were largely missing however, was that touch of class. Kounellis' work is unabashedly industrial in form, culled together from scraps pulled tight by ropes, rivets and gravity, but there is a breathlessness in his work that sharply contrasts from the clinical beauty that can be found in Hirst. His work is grand and heroic, not only in its form and intent, but in its radiance. It is rough and conceptual and possibly political and highly personal, yet it transcends the making of the art, knowing the artist. In this interview in Flash Art, the artist had this to say on the subject:

AB: Among contemporary artists, which seem to you to be the most interesting?
JK: A living artist is not necessarily a contemporary artist. I love the artists drawn to adventure, to renewal, those that do not ever accept evidence or obligatory data. This takes courage. Before, I spoke of Pollock and Kline because in them there is no sign of weakness. In certain cases, this pushes them so far as to risk their lives. If you are weak or fragile as an artist, your weight diminishes and becomes interchangeable and decorative. On an intellectual level, in general, work that is born from a weak area is intrinsically negative, in the sense that you are driven to accept compromises.

Jannis Kounellis, UNTITLED, 2006. Found wooden tables, bowl, knife, red fish
32 x 172 x 179 inches 81.3 x 436.9 x 454.7 centimeters CR# KO.13218
From here

you don't wanna call nobody else

Japancakes - The Sleepy Strange (listen) My dream instrumental combo (taking into consideration the fact that things that make sense in dreams don't necessarily translate to waking logic) would be slide guitar, Hammond B-3, cello and brushed drums. That group could endlessly undulate, building fractal riffs off basic notions. Perhaps some enterprising programmer will write such an application for the iPhone I am getting for my birthday - an art-Americana version of Brian Eno's Bloom (YouTube) - but until they do (IRL, I am a seasoned programmer on the PC side of the world, but the core of Apple knowledge is unknown to me) I will suffice with the sleepwalking opiate that is this the music of this ridiculously-named band Japancakes.
Tortoise - Standards - I read today that a new Tortoise album is in the works, and yeah, you probably hate Tortoise and all they stand for and think post-rock is a joke, prog rock without the reading list, but whatever. I'm excited about it.
Steely Dan - Pretzel Logic (listen) To those that have endured my tirades against Steely Dan in the past, let's just say I've had a change of heart.