a dozen dozen, eggs and/or donuts

Reinbert De Leeuw, Schoenberg Ensemble, and Asko Ensemble With Members Of the Netherlands Chamber Choir performing Louis Andriessen's De Materie (lala)

I should probably spend more time thinking about content, particular about providing interesting content, on this blog but I like playing with structure here and what it means and if it matters. I abandoned the

Author - Title (source link)

structure for the tidier, more card-cataloggy

Author, Title (source link)

paradigm, though I should probably, if I was gonna do it right, be all

Last name, First name. (Date) Title
source link

but that would take up more space than I like. These little ingredients lists at the beginning of almost every post are meant to be succinct and directional, not encyclopedic. You are already on the Internet if you are reading this (which I suspect you aren't actually because who would really read all this?) I also have a loose rule about just putting the composer and a title for a "classical" work even though the interpreter of such a work really is the key thing. But it's such a rabbit hole; where do you stop?

Fortunately, I like being a hypocrite as much as I like making rules so I can put whatever when it serves the narrative I'm after. Like above, all those orchestras and ensembles and special guests lend De Materie the stupefying grandeur I feel in it. It starts with all those people snaking tight melody lines through "144 iterations of the same chord played fortissimo" (wiki)

Part I - Louis Andriessen, 505...

It may just sound like the orchestral version of day laborers framing a house, which I kind think is what Andriessen is all about anyway, but that it is 144, a dozen dozen, eggs and/or donuts squared, gives it a sharpness I like.

The translated title of the piece is "Matter" and yes, it all does in its way. I refuse to believe in chaos; I consider it to be a ignorance in a sexy dress. Just because we don't know the effects of every detail doesn't mean they are unknowable, it just means we don't know them.

And that is what you see, dear readers, when you ponder a picture with your finger on the lens.

Armando Bayolo's conversation with Andriessen up at Squenza21 prompted this whole thing, so blame him.

really tough cowboys

Follow the @LeMGelato truck with me as it makes its way toward the Baton Rouge hipster truck food horizon! I had the quite manly "Rio Star" grapefruit sorbetto. I believe the Rio Star was the dude ranch where really tough cowboys first mixed this flavor as a compliment to beans and freshly killed buffalo.

poets are more game than music students

Media Announcement: In this week's 225 Record Crate blog, I lay out the skinny on Blues Week activities, tell you all about Ruthie Foster, and make a plea for you to go to the Baton Rouge Blues Fest even though it's on the same day My Morning Jacket is at JazzFest. Still weighing that one out myself.

On my lunch library round, I came across a young woman in recital wear pushing a dolly containing a harp wrapped in blue protective fabric up the handicapped ramp of the theatre. I held the door for her, asking if I could take her picture with it because it was such a great image, and she half-smiled "no, you can't" and darted in, so instead you get Anne Sexton skinny-dipping in Newton, 1962, from this wonderful post by Alex Carnivale at This Recording. It is her right to go about the cumbersome business of moving a harp un-picked-over and I am probably a bit of a creep for asking, but it proves, once again: poets are more game than music students.

From that same post; catch that glare she gives the dog at 0:41. Also, she doesn't let anyone be camera shy.

Excerpt of LETTER WRITTEN ON A FERRY WHILE CROSSING LONG ISLAND SOUND from All My Pretty Ones

There go my dark girls,
their dresses puff
in the leeward air.
Oh they are lighter than flying dogs
or the breath of dolphins;
each mouth opens gratefully,
wider than a milk cup.
My dark girls sing for this.
They are going up.

See them rise
on black wings, drinking
the sky, without smiles
or hands
or shoes.
They call back to us
from the gauzy edge of paradise
good news, good news.

production standards

Alex Heard, The Eyes of Willie McGee (Harper Collins)
The Wedding Present, Seamonsters (lala)
Coco Robicheaux, Yeah, U Right
Buckingham Nicks, self-titled (ROOT BLOG)
The National, High Violet (out 5/11)

I just started The Eyes of Willie McGee but it already makes sweet ol' Eleanor Roosevelt look like a bit of an asshole, portending well as a paradigm-shaker. I haven't listened to the Wedding Present since the 90's that birthed them, but novelist Jon McGregor's "Living With Music" bit in the NYT's Paper Cuts brought them slumping right back into my headphones. Four observations:

1. Novelists like to talk about music but how they CANNOT have it on while writing, which is weird to me. It must be awfully quiet in the orchid greenhouse.
   
2. John McGregor gets bonus points for not mentioning Leonard Cohen. Nothing against the good Field Commander, but he appears in almost every one of these things.
   
3. Arch doom practitioners Sunn O))) are becoming the new gettin'-stuff-done muzak, and
   
4. 90s' production standards sound like shit in iPod/Phone/Pad headphones. It's like a guy mumbling something good while someone else blows in your ear.

I just got the new National which excites me so, but not like the sudden springing of Buckingham Nicks out of my favorite well of the the infinite. It's the only thing I ever asked of the Internet and it provided!



I hereby offer the above quickie walk-to-the-bus hangman photo to anyone needing an image for their production of "Death of a Salesman."

Some Thoughts on Treme

Treme (HBO site)

I finally got through the first two episodes of Treme, David Simon's portrait of post-Katrina musicians and the people in their wake. So far I don't really have more than a surface feel for the characters but that's OK because, having spent my life in a low orbit around the city, I've found that actual New Orleans characters give great surface. They really do wear their hats like that and saunter around like they were shook out of a Tom Waits tune. One of my best friends works in tangent to the restaurant industry there, a subculture as singularly nuanced and melodramatic as the music scene, and in comparing the bourgeoisie orientation of Baton Rouge (and the rest of the country) and the self-perpetuated mystique of New Orleans, put it well: "Charm is New Orleans' greatest product. We're not a banking center. Not a particularly great place to raise a family. We're charming! That's all we got!"

I love that WWOZ itself is a main character in the show. It bugs me a little that the two episodes opened with, respectively, a second line parade and a voodoo ritual. Starting a New Orleans story with those details reminds me a little of when a friend of mine said her husband was happy the screenplay he was working on centered on the female character, but when she read it, it opened with a shower scene. Nothing against shower scenes, but again, surface. It's a TV show.

Second lines (and particularly, talking about second lines) and broke-dick musicians late for gigs and a lot of "Yeah, you right" resigned camaraderie make up the New Orleans I know, and in that respect Treme is right on. It is a gorgeous high-budget New Orleans mixtape. And truthfully, I'll watch anything that allows me to bask in the icepick finery of Khandi Alexander. But it's ludicrous to expect Treme to be an exacting portrait.

A different friend of mine and I were talking about David Simon's The Corner, his mediated version of drug life in Baltimore, and how his affections are for the affectations which then get framed in stunning cinematography. One of the big moments I remember from The Corner is when the school teacher has the drug dealers step aside for a moment while she marches school kids through the neighborhood and like a viscous river, they fall back in to pitching prices at cars. A great/corny Moses moment that would probably not happen in real life, but it's still an image that hangs in my head and does something, which is more than I can say for most of TV. Maybe like a lot of of the New Orleans music that builds up Treme, it's not in the lyrics or even the melodies but in the rhythm and arrangements that the profundity lies. It doesn't need to say something different because it is from the bones up different. New Orleans is a city that speaks itself; Treme is just another channel on which part of the message comes through.

speed freaks took my statues

Chocolate Milk, Actions Speak Louder Than Words (lala)
Rodriguez, Cold Fact (lala)
Allen Ginsberg, First Blues (Book: Amazon; Album: lala)
William Basinksi, The Disintegration Loops I (lala)

I dug Brett Milano's Offbeat piece on the other New Orleans funk band, the long forgotten Chocolate Milk. I don't know where I heard about Rodriguez, but as bug-eyed, Moog-friendly folk goes it's a stunner. Everyone knows Allen Ginsberg. William Basinski I know from lots of places, but this Rick Moody story in The Rumpus about his Disintegration Loops, pieces about digitizing tapes so old they disintegrated in the player, started just as the Word Trade Center went down in view of his window got me. I don't know if this degree of provenance of information will ever be valuable or even useful or if it does becomes so, the sites will still be behind the links, but here it is, playing out its own disintegration loop.

Time Machine - Chocolate Milk

This Is Not A Song, It's An Ou...

dlp 1.1 - William Basinski

4 A.M. Blues / New York Blues ...

NEW YORK BLUES

Walking blues (adante)

I live in an apartment, sink leaks thru the walls
Lower Eastside full of bedbugs, Junkies in the halls
House been broken into, Tibetan Tankas stole
Speed freaks took my statues, made my love a fool
     Speed freaks took my statues, made my love a fool

Days I came home tired nights I needed sleep
Cockroaches crawled in bed with me my brain began to creep
My work will never be done, my rest will never begin
I'll be dead and buried and never pleasure win
     I'll be dead and buried and never pleasure win

Lover boy threw meat at me cursed the day we met
Speed freaks and bedbugs New York City's what you get
Someday they'll build subways get rid of all the cars
Cops kill all the bedbugs speed freaks land on mars
     Cops kill all the bedbugs speed freaks land on mars

Dig "Malaria"

Quiet American, Vox Americana: Echolocations Volume 1 (here)
Tetsu Inoue and Carl Stone, pict.soul
Tonstartssbandht, "Oh, Beyoncé, please shut up" (YouTube; above)

Media Announcement: My contributions to the Offbeat Jazzfest Bible are now online here: Robert "1-String" Gibson and Brother Tyrone. as well as on their nifty free iPhone app.

Quiet American is a found-sound-manipulated-into-music project along the lines of Carl Stone but this person stays closer to the sound part and yet coaxes nearly subconscious songs and elegant compositions from those sounds. It sounds like simple thing to do, weird sounds are cool 'n' all, but it's rare that the results are as embraceable as this. Dig "Malaria." Hat tip to Dickie Landry for bubbling this to the surface.

I've never heard this particular Carl Stone album. I came to him when I picked up Mom's sound-unheard at Paradise Records one afternoon eons ago when my friend the manager was frustrated with his job and said "go get anything you want out of the racks" and since then, I have maintained a policy of getting something I've never heard of whatsoever with a free CD ticket or trade credit and it's rarely led me astray. pict.soul is electronica by and for mosquitoes, whereas Mom's is a muthafucka of simple genius loop usage.

I have no idea what Tonstartssbandht is all about besides being a lower rent Animal Collective, except that Randy posted this and Beyoncé's thighs compel me to spread the word.