The Magnetic Fields - Realism (streaming at their MySpace) The Magnetic Fields - 69 Love Songs, Disc One (listen)
I have love at first sight for the Magnetic Fields' new antsy-pantsy, artsy-fartsy folk record. Zithers are employed. They borrowed Devendra Banhart's tablas. The word "hootenanny" comes into play. A friend sent me a link to a blog illustrating all 69 of 69 Love Songs drolly called howfuckingromantic. And how! Realism doesn't quite have the immediate intimacy you find in Love Songs, but when does it ever? This one made me go back and listen to disc one of 69 Love Songs, but, not to discredit Huw “Lem” Davies' lovely use of the comic form, it doesn't take much.
This song makes me wish I could play piano and had a forceful rich baritone and a semi-ironic wine bar gig so I could put it on my setlist.
A friend called me up for lunch at Roul's Deli, a sketchy burger place right by my office that has "Juicy Juicy" as its catchphrase. The spectre of the dietitian visit is still on my mind, with her perverse little cautions: watch your intake of fresh fruit, lots of carbs in those. So I saw on the menu Steve's Burger: Grilled chicken and shrimp. That doesn't sound too heavy.
Except, of course, as you can see above, it is grilled chicken and shrimp ON a juicy juicy burger. A total Man Vs. Food abomination of which I consumed about 1/2. I'm tempted to send the dietitian this picture and ask "Is this what you had in mind?"
Talking Heads - More Songs About Buildings and Food(listen) Wadada Leo Smith - Saturn, Conjunct The Grand Canyon In A Sweet Embrace
The camelias have arrived! Their whorl is a detonation against the brief but oppressive gray of the Southern winter.
I woke up with the opening of "Thank You For Sending Me an Angel" in my head, which is not a bad way to burst into a Thursday. I tried to match my strides to the bus stop with those of David Byrne's clipped observations. The vinyl sign on the gospel radio station. The hand painted banner above the tattoo place that says "Tattoo's and Piercing's." Some might be driven mad by such a thing but I find it charming, though I might think twice before getting a tattoo there.
I saw the bus reel past my stop as I was a block away but I figured fuck it, it's the first day in weeks I didn't need a sweater. A perfectly insouciant looking hard rock chick was at the stop with me with headphones on as well. On this bus we are all simultaneously united and girded by out little white headphones. David Byrne was going on about how the girls only want to talk to the girls and the boys only talk to the boys when I had an urge to ask her what she was listening to. Tune in and commune. I was imagining it was some bloodcurdling metal record that brought her succor in her morning trek.
Then she walked over to me and messed it up by complaining about how there were only two buses running on this route and how it made her late and one time I had to wait 45 minutes for- and I was tempted to interrupt with a little practice your can walk, you can talk just like me...
Jack Pendarvis has been on a Wadada Leo Smith kick at his "blog." Wadada is conversant music. There are gaps in the music you are forced to fill with the loose pieces from your own head. I completely concur with his assessment that "Twmukl-D" sounds like Webern.
Webern is so good. He is like the guy you know from the coffee shop that rants in mysterious tones about his inventions, their intricacy, how they line up with his sense of doing things right. Finally, you go to his little workshop behind his house to see it and it is a flimsy little contraption made out of a couple toothpicks, a small box and a lantern battery. It does not work or really do anything of discernible merit except express the longing of the inventor, which is invaluable.
Stravinsky said of Webern: Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge.
After the bus stop chick killed my high-on-life buzz, I switched over to the mutterings of Wadada's Saturn, Conjunct The Grand Canyon In A Sweet Embrace, less cerebral than Mr. Smith's Kabell Years, more interpersonal. The conversation Mr. Smith is having with Anthony Braxton is that among crazy coffee shop inventors, each applauding the other's impenetrable diagrams, trying to get my toothpicks to work with your lantern battery, grumbling in existential frustration, and bellowing "Yes!" when the damn thing starts working.
If you are still reading this, you are either a kind soul that listens patiently while a lunatic raves or are a big jazz nrrd and perhaps have a copy of the Thelonious Sphere Monk: Dreaming Of The Masters Vol.2 by Art Ensemble of Chicago with Cecil Taylor to which I could be pointed or made privy. That, my friend, is a record.
Led Zeppelin - Live at LSU, Baton Rouge 1975, soundboard recording (still, this link) Spoon - Transference (listen)
Seriously, dig my awesome lamp. I rescued it from the closet of my old office to address the marked and oft-commented-upon gloominess of my current one. It is huge. Carrying it down the hall wrapped over my shoulder made me think of the post-coital caress a male praying mantis experiences right before his head gets bitten off.
I made it all the way through the above linked tremendous recording of LZ at LSU up to the 8-minute mark of "Moby Dick." I think this is where they reach the palace of Wisdom down at the end of the road of excess and decide to repave that road in one more layer of gold, just to be sure. I'm recovering with the new Spoon, where formerly one of the more the anti-Zeppelin bands around gets their nerd-reduction Plant/Page on, or is that just actual transference at play? And glance adoringly at my new lamp.
The Membranes - Kiss Ass, Godhead! (lala) Led Zeppelin - Live at LSU, Baton Rouge 1975, soundboard recording (this link, thanks Dave!)
Hey, lookit me, I'm a music critic! Vampire Weekend and Dengue Fever get put through my rusty culture analyst paces. I also weigh in on cover bands and tribute shows at the 225 blog. I tackle all the important issues.
A dip into emails I usually ignore from an old list serv reaped the rewards of the Membranes, 80's post punk when punk was freshly post, formed out of snottier recesses of Blackpool Sixth Form College in Lancashire. Kiss Ass, Godhead appeared in '88 and sounds it: the drums are a rubber mallet on a cardboard box and chopsticks on a pie pan and the guitar is run to the amps via wires salvaged from rat cages. They could title a song back then.
The above photo is of a haphazard display of NASCAR RC vehicles stacked in front of the nightie section of the Family Dollar I pass on the way to the bus. Caged up and formalized like that, they and the chest-beating from both sides over the liberals failing to hold onto Ted Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts made me think of the Joseph Beuys 1974 performance "I Like America and America Likes Me"
where he holed up in a caged gallery with a bolt of felt, a cane, copies of the Wall Street Journal and a coyote. The coyote symbolically tore the paper to shreds and pissed on it but rational man and feared beast soon found some common ground. Partisan posturing seems so facile that I lose sight of who is wrapping themselves in felt and who is befouling the newspaper. What do you win when you win?
I am going to ponder this as I take a walk by the building where the mightiest of our culture thieves let the hammer of the gods ring some 35 years ago.
I am basking in the afterglow of Koi's beef noodle soup, writer talk, a cappuccino and soon-to-be-released CD's of shimmering, unassuming beauty. My life at this moment is a precious Facebook status update, which is probably not unlike things feeling as good as "Dancing Queen" in Muriel's Wedding, or were I manlier man, something involving a particular play in a particular game.
"Iran: An Unlikely Treasure Chest Of Funk" (from NPR's Funk Archeology blog) Darius Jones Trio - Man'ish Boy (A Raw & Beautiful Thing) The Heavy (MySpace) Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - Jukebox Explosion (listen)
What a great little series! I think NPR may be the only ones to get radio-on-the-internet as opposed to podcasts and downloads, I'd like the experience to be a little more fluid from a user standpoint, but I find myself listening to more and more NPR sets and album previews lately than anyone else. Plus, I've been dying to hear some of Iran superdiva Googoush after reading about her in the Believer's 2008 music issue. The song NPR chose didn't really floor me, but at least I am no longer dying. Trip on this:
The Darius Jones disc is the one I bought yesterday. I was expecting something perhaps avant-bluesier given its title, and the presence of a diddley-bow but it is instead Coltrane/Ayler/Sanders forlorn stretched on the drying rack until the threads start to separate, a few cracks appear. Room-slowly-filling-with-water music.
Here is some surveillance footage of their blues underbelly
I did not see the Heavy play Letterman the other night, but a guy I'm chatting with right now did and put me on them. Check out that song "No Time" on their page. It'll scratch that chigger bite itch. Kinda back a million years ago when you first heard Jon Spencer bark and bellow, it made you wanna dig a million years back more.
