imbidimts

beta bye-bye

2006-05-04T22:19:00.000-07:00

Bye-bye.

What used to be read here (about golf, zombies, jackelopes, hot dogs, the color of paint in Japanese flicks) will now carry on at my new blog, so please update your bookmarks so as to read the cleverly entitled Beta Blog.

(Not to be confused with Andy Beta's blog).

beta ne travaillez humide jamais

2006-05-02T12:02:00.000-07:00

Mais, je mange beacoup de hot dogs.

This is my final post over at Moistworks. Hard times even at the mp3 blog side of the biz, I guess. Appropo, it deals with odds'n'ends, alternate realities, non-selected songs from my previous two months of posts, making soppressata, mystery meat, superstring theory, sausage casings, high school's lost time, and of course, chowing down on hot dogs.

beta plates

2006-04-30T09:59:00.000-07:00

Luc, Sky Walker
Pre-Breath Control and Tantric Toms (about halfway down)
Lost Cat, Found
TV for Vendetta
Monday Morning Drones
A Tribute to Chuck Eddy

beta blue

2006-04-25T18:59:00.000-07:00

Baby blue was the color that he wore...

Another Seijun Suzuki movie, another night of flummoxed eyes. Rewatching recently Branded to Kill and Youth of the Beast, with Tokyo Drifter last night, I finally remembered why I had to own these movies. Audaciousness aside, Suzuki (who despite being considered a B-movie director is by all intents and purposes an auteur of Japanese cinema) makes almost no sense, careening about underneath your confounded gaze like some sort of Yakuza pinball machine. Never being able to keep the characters straight, I always figured that it was just a side-effect of my continued inability to keep Japanese authors distinct (who wrote Thousand Cranes again? And wait, is Chuang-Tzu Chinese?), but even the studio execs were lost and implored that Suzuki play it straight for Tokyo Drifter.

Branded to Kill gets liner notes from John Zorn and Tokyo Drifter has a brandished pullquote about it being a "free-jazz gangster film" (fwiw, I'm not the biggest fan of Japanese free jazz, "Jojo" Takayanagi aside). Yes it is frenzied, fiery, abstract to the point of befuddlement, but there is method to the madness here, an obsession with edits, angles, how characters complement their surroundings, and in a rare dose of the kaledioscope for Drifter, priddddy colors.

Racking my brain trying to think of a musical analogy for Suzuki, someone suggests Naked City, but who sound-clashed, brain-slashed, and jumped with daredevil cuts first? The hues are so vertiginous, jaw-plopping, that music no longer holds as metaphor, so I scramble to blubber about how Tokyo Drifter ranks up there with Dario Argento's Suspiria, or reaching further back, Busby Berkeley, though Susuzki's foreground of violence (not that he doesn't have odd musical interludes, like when his baby-blu gangster strolls and whistles the theme song in a Winter Wonderland) is far more drunken and cool. (QT had a hand in production of the DVD as well). Aside from hiring production designers rainbow-obsessed and high on Gladden paint, the three directors also revel in illogical plots that border on being concussion-fuzzy and irrevent in the resulting confusion that follows in the wake of their delirious visions. At any given point in Drifter (the DVD suggests such poignant chapters as "Tetsu's powder blue coat of honor" or "Saloon Western (Candy-colored set)") you may well ask aloud, "I have no idea what's going on" before settling back into the lavish, hallucinatory color wash once again.

beta plays golf in phoenix

2006-04-19T16:36:00.000-07:00

Circa sixth grade, I was sub-suburbed out in AZ, wedged betwixt the Sun City Gals and Ahwatukee kicking it in those inverted trapezoid parks they have out there in the desert. When I wasn't drawing cartoons about our school mascot, the Scorpion, I supplemented my schoolyard bidness of flipping Blow Pops for a quarter a pop by walking to the canals that cut through the desert landscape. Like some cement circulatory system, these steeply-sloped waterways intersticed roads, groves, parks, and of course, the ever-fertile golf courses that grew everywhere out here. Nourishing a pricey oasis, the canals doubled as watertrap on any Phoenician course.

Such immense troughs made me imagine I was in a scene right out of The Martian Chronicles, the channels feeling ancient through the arid wasteland. I would walk these ducts with my step-father, his knees popping with each step (due to a stint as a college QB) as we crunched down these gravel roads buffeting each slope of the canal. Using a tiny wire scoop affixed to the end of a retractable pole, I trolled the sludgy bottom of these wide Vs, scooping out drowned golf balls that could be ball-washed and re-sold for a dollar a pop, allowing me to spring for TurboGrafx video games and comic books. Turning candy-shelled bubblegum into shiny quarters or rubbing the slime off the dimples of long-submerged golf balls and turning it into cash, it was small change, but a way to eke out a tad more allowance as a 'tween than a lemonade stand.

There isn't too much I recollect about such days in Arizona, save that it probably shaved off any Texan accent I might've otherwise acquired. I'm barely cognizant of myself at that time, haplessly unaware of the world or much of anything. The only music I liked then was the Led Zeppelin boxset (who I had never heard previously) and The Uplift Mofo Party Plan, which soundtracked the downing of Pepsi as my best friend and I played hoops every afternoon after school, huffing and puffing about all the girls in our class that we were "totally boning." Mostly my after-school days were spent bicycling in the desert sun with three squeeze bottles of water as I made my way along the canals and scorching hot sidewalks until I reached the comic book store near the ASU campus.

Somewhere along that route, I came across a newsprint thing called the Phoenix New Times. The comics in this one were weird, far from my tastes at the time (snark all you want about my favorites, Power Pack). Zippy the Pinhead, Bizarro, This Modern World, I laughed at these oddities. I also recall a mean-spirited slam of that impervious teen sensation, New Kids on the Block, only because there was a reference to what surely must be an imaginary band, the Butthole Surfers. Sitting in my physics class, I barely could suppress a chortle at what sort of deviant writer could make up both a band name like that and a "record" called Cream Corn From the Socket of Davis. What body part could that even be?, my pre-teen mind pondered, oblivious in Sex Ed.

When I moved back to Texas, I forgot all about Arizona golf pros, golf courses, golf balls, and finally realized that yes Butthole Surfers did exist, and Cream Corn From the Socket of Davis was tenable indeed, if as inscrutable as Psychic, Powerless,...Another Man's Sac. In Texas, I grew obsessed both with writing and with listening to as much music as possible at this time (meaning lots of Butthole Surfers). Seeing my best friend's father's record collection (he's the culprit mentioned here) wowed me, and I only hoped to learn so much about music as him. Even when I finally graduated and decided to move to New York City, it was with the ambitions of creating music in NYC. I envisioned such projects as "The Suckestra," in which esteemed all-star musicians (I always pictured Thurston Moore, Derek Bailey, Susie Ibarra for some reason) would perform with their floor-cleaning apparatuses, be it broom or shop-vac, in addition to continuing my old band. I would toil in obscurity at some office and ply my trade at night, writing poems and stories never to see daylight while making the improv scene with a prepared guitar jammed full of umbrella tines and struck with massage mallets.

It didn't quite work out that way, and for some reason I found myself working at a computer place with lots of downtime, barely clearing the exorbinant rent. I filled it up writing about music for weird websites, like in Norway and Houston before one day getting in over at the indie salt mines. Realizing I would never support myself writing poetry, I would instead enter that lucrative world of music writing.

Having just been fired for the second time from said salt mines (after arguing for better writer treatment, payment, and not having my words changed in the middle of the fuckin' night without my permission) and having just picked a fight on ILM with Chuck Eddy about whether or not Metallica was indie (knowing fuck-all about either Metallica or indie), I decided I would just hand him something. It never ran, but I had his ear and persisted. Having scratched my head at more than a couple of reviews (like this Don-doodled doozy) I experienced that heady sensation myself of being able to find my jumbled words on any corner of the city.

Always a part of my Tuesday night ritual, ducking out to the street corner to pick up the new Voice and peruse it, reading names like Schaunberg, Ridgeway, Hentoff, Hoberman, etc., I cannot put into words my exhilaration at finding my byline among them (in the teeniest of font sizes, but still). I was part of the tradition. I mean, Bangs wrote there, Meltzer, Tousches, people I had read way back in high school when trying to figure out what fucked-up music I should be blasting out in the school parking lot. Psychotic Reactions and Meltzer's Gulcher were huge, the latter so that I started doing my own ramblings on such quotidian idiotic shit like glow in the dark stickers; growing a moustache (not that I could grow one myself for another five years); Trout Mask Replica as first hip-hop record (in the days of Heavy D and Arrested Development); why "R.E.M. Kicks the Beatles' Ass"; cock-rock sitcoms, as well as a sitcom starring Kim and Thurston. Only in retrospect did I see my own obsessions with music crit all the while, and only as happenstance did I realize I myself had come to fruition. Now I was on the same page as folks I had long read, first in Texas and some eight years on in the city: Chuck Eddy, Robert Christgau, Frank Kogan, Greg Tate, Michaelangelo Matos, Douglas Wolk, Sasha Frere-Jones, Simon Reynolds, Jon Caramanica...

In much the same way as my step-father had a decade previous, Chuck helped me earn a living by giving me a chance to perform that most curious alchemical work: sounds into words, plastic jewel cases into paper checks, dirt into pearls --or to detractors-- bullshit into shineola. So whether I thought about Klaus Schulze's kim chee, erecting neo-psych cathedrals, the sound of Shangri-La-La Land, suffering sunstroke in a surfer community, making bad James Brown jokes or good jokes about the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling and Princess Leia, I suddenly had a platform to elucidate such harebrained connectors between disparate items. Growing emboldened, confident, I branched out even further, writing in places I have never even seen (hello MPLS!). Other gigs felt more like work though, fitting into an alt-weekly style, but nothing was as much of a thrill as opening up the newest issue of the Voice and finding myself there among other luminaries once again. It was not just an honor, it was fun as fuck.

Having not heard from Chuck in a week or so (any writer will tell you that NO ONE is more responsive to emails than Chuck) I had a dream Tuesday morning that involved us talking on the phone about all the pieces he couldn't run at the Voice due to space limitations. When I woke up, I had an email from him and we bandied back and forth a few ideas for the future. Come mid-afternoon, the news hit me. Having watched every single one of my editors step down since January, be it in Miami, Seattle, Minneapolis, Nashville, and watching SPIN get gutted like Bambi with a few quick and nasty strokes, I knew it was only a matter of time before something happened to Chuck, and yet even as I consoled Nibs that it was ultimately for the best when he was shitcanned, I was disarmed that this horrible day had finally come for Chuck. My welling up of tears was tempered only by my subsequent nausea and disgust. Granted, my own emergence at the Voice came well after the halcyon days, a half-century since Mailer, post-Murdoch, even after that drastic cutting of space and Draconian word counts, and with the shadow of the New Times umbrella blocking out the Vitamin D, the luster was dulled, dimmed, but it still absurdly enough shone for me regardless.

Foolish gold is all I feel now, undecided if I will ever get to finish up my assignments at "Village Voice Media" and if I will even try to forge ever onwards into the drought of the music crit landscape that has plenty of skeletons already caught in its sands. It's tough to come to terms with the nagging fact that fifteen years later, some 2500 miles away, I am once again simply polishing some goddamned golf balls for middle-aged businessmen in Phoenix. Maybe I should switch to lemonade.

heep see

2006-04-16T09:20:00.000-07:00

Virgin Insanity : Illusions of the Maintenance Man
Espers : II
Privately pressed Texas stoners should be a no-brainer, yet this thing thuds on the other meaning of the phrase, meaning it gets me over loner-stoner like a bale of Mexi-dirt. Had I been an initial explorer, it's easy to see how falling down such a jackalope hole in a record bin could be so coveted: kooky teens from suburban Dallas in a haze of wacky weed strumming as they attain the Godz within. As something tenable in the twenty-first though, the daylight dispels such doodled illusions.

Espers may dig such a platter. For their own Amon Drool sequeling, arcane vinyl fetishizing, and the sort of librarian listing of all the vintage gear they accrued (along with arsenic old-lace dresses), it might make for knee-jerk dismissal. Especially as we deal with the shriveled pedal fall-out from the year that freak-folk broke (1966 dude). Yet moonbaths in the milky Nightwood extract is redemptive for them and Greg Weeks and his Big Love-like Djunas are even prescient enough to hitch themselves to the year that Black Metal broke. Though they are far more crepuscular and subtle, aligning themselves to the rust that never sleeps but thrives on such a surface.

The Knife : Silent Shout
Fiery Furnaces : Bitter Tea
Weird boy-girl (Hansel und Gretel) dynamic dualities at play, though only one breadcrumb trail to Neverland is stomachable. Biblical bodily-harm band names, and oxymoronic album titles aside, the masking and layers that Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer Andersson project never feel clever and cloying, unlike the Friedbergers. Aside from myself, I can't think of anyone who would benefit more from an editor (or in this case, a producer) than Fiery Furnaces. Their dog-paddling through proper names, cut-ups, and quirkiness (not to mention lame presets) is maddening, nearly causing last night's Movie Night to divide against itself. Maybe it is a psylocybin-steeped brew (which I'd usually never turn down), but much like such trips, shit turns boring the back half, when you stop wanting profundity and just want simple pleasures. Even Fluxblog frets whether or not you're gonna fuck up "Police Sweater Blood Vow" in the studio.

The Knife have some cheesy presets, too, like to dash their pop much like the Fiery Furnaces do. It takes nearly three minutes just to get to the ludicrous drum fill and chorus of "Like A Pen." They claim to be from Sweden, which is more cred-worthy than admitting the truth of their Siberian origins and how they have weird Deliverance-type inbreeding out there. The blurring of identity and gender sounds crucial to the Knife's survival, their duality distorted by digital processing and meat-locker isolation chambers, the horrors of daily life on a spiritual tundra such that it can feel like 500 degrees. Jiff Skippy hears Scott inside 'em, which I hope implies he hears Brecht and the fact that Silent Shout is also Munch-rock.

Belle & Sebastian : The Life Pursuit
Sparks : Hello Young Lovers
If you'd told me that post-April Fool's Day I would have barely spun the new Theo Dini but gotten downright dizzy on the unspeakably irritating Belle & Sebastian, I would've made your breath smell like boot polish. But I'll be damned if a twee-pop record isn't stoving in my head even as I type this. And how to explain my lifelong disregard of Ric Ocasek's hiccup vocal delivery somehow getting co-opted by Stuart Murdoch to my boxer-knotting delight on "The Blues are Still Blue"?

Yes, Viagra has restored their vim and vigor and taken them back to their days of being underwear models. Lascivious, silver-tongued devils though they may be once more, dicking around and whatnot, now it's their hearing that becomes the stumbling block. Punchlines, rather than prattled off with such effortless glee by the Evelyn Waughs of Glam, are now repeating payoff lines for five minutes or more. Not that there are no new twists; "Perfume" sounds downright sincere, until you realize the boys have never been once been so sappy. Then the laundry list of lays and the ladies' corresponding scents scans instead as a sly "settling down" pick-up line. And so they continue to dick around.

heep ep

2006-04-16T08:44:00.000-07:00

Joe Tex : Buying a Book
Bobby Charles : Bobby Charles

Disparaging as it is to flip through used records in New York (not to mention keeping in mind waxy accumulation in the earhole and the hell that is moving boxes of records), it was finally worth my while as two things I had been pining for suddenly appeared in the wood crates. It's no secret that I am taken with Joe Tex (for those who don't know, the phrase "heep see" is from Joe's joint "Heep See Few Know," flipping Scripture in the days before he really got all 5%) but finding his crisp yet wistful classic Buying a Book was just short of impossible this far north of the Mason-Dixon line. His world of sock hops, prom dresses, hand-me-down shoes, dabs of mustard greens, grandma's can of snuff, it sounds impossibly passed, like when a Carl Perkins teen ditty talks about polishing up a horse for Saturday night's picture show. Bus depot hieroglyphics, barber shop-talk, So-n-so's misfortune, everybody'n everybody's bidness...the more things change the more...
Joe Tex - Anything You Wanna Know

Mike McG gave me that slice of Bobby Charles's watermelon first, to slurp and quench to seek out the Band in all its sepia doubt beat, its mudfoot strut, from Jesse Winchester to Jackie Lomax. Now I can hear how it snuggles into crackles like a cardigan in a spring wind. Ever wish Randy Newman just grew up redbone? Sang in swamp shacks instead of at Disneyland? As prime Band-non-Band, this Bearsville record serves as the Chelsea Girl for VU-non-VU. 'Cept Bobby don't have to make explicit that life is a carnival, just squint (maybe it's a wink) about the carnie aspects, you know how people are. Easy Lee as Lee Dorsey, Bobby Charles leans back while dudes like Danko, Dr. John, and Levon Helm loop-de-loop.
Bobby Charles - Small Town Talk

beta flashback

2006-04-14T06:56:00.000-07:00

A conversation about the Beatles that took place at a Jim's Diner a good twelve years ago, up at Moistworks.

Similarly, recalling the first time I ever heard Tom Ze, back in high school.

No, I'm not going to my high school reunion or anything like that (that nostalgic ship already sailed), but I am pondering a book proposal dealing with such a time. It means revisiting a book like Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD so as to again be struck by information about Dr. Hubertus Strughold, a Nazi scientist who performed mescaline studies at Dachau (in addition to injecting inmates with gasoline, crushing them to death with pressure chambers, and other experiments involving poison, gas, and other chemicals). Tucked away in the US military under Project Paperclip, he relocated to the states where he became renowned as "the father of space medicine." Go figure that he lived in San Antonio, too.

It also means a stroll through the scorched parts of the mind, rescuing such artifacts, creating the artifice of teen thought, and wondering what the narrative thread through such a tangle could actually be, learning how to illuminate such burnt filament. In the words of thee mighty Trux, "It's an education every day."

v for venbeta

2006-04-11T11:56:00.000-07:00

If Terry Gilliam threw in the towel at the sheer implausibility of translating Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's visionary The Watchmen graphic novel into celluloid (Aronofsky couldn't handle it either (thank G-d), though now it's in pre-production elsewhere), then what chance did the clunky Wachovia bros really have with V for Vendetta? Since Moore always works in collaboration with his artists, you'd think that having the two-headed brother approach for such daunting projects would help, but the Hughes Brothers fared no better with From Hell. That just leaves the Farrelly Brothers to do Batman: The Killing Joke, or perhaps Swamp Thing ("Swamp gas" is ripe with possibilities).

Watchmen is dense and complex with loads of annotations but V for Vendetta has just as many cultural quotes coursing underneath its story of fascism/terrorism. Translation towards American cineplexes is already an uphill struggle: unpacking a British icon (Guy Fawkes), dealing with fascist states from a historical distance, wrapping it all up in Constructivist Russian street team posters, all done while tapdancing around Al Qaeda landmines that pushed this thing back from its original November release.

You have to give it to them Wachovian boys though; they surfed the black trenchcoat fallout of Columbine for The Matrix as well, so what's a little bit of tube terrorism but street marketing at the end of the day? Yet the movie has to play up its knives (and not its 'daggers of the mind' to quote Willie Shakes at random much like the movie does) while downplaying the more intellectual concepts of V. He at times comes across as an uber-nerd, with stacks of books and rare records. Of course, us rock critics snicker knowingly that Cat Power's "I Found a Reason" was never released as a seven-inch record.

Apparently, Alan Moore went Smithee on the final screenplay, perhaps because nuances get buffed clean with machine guns and CGI knife-whirling. Not that the little additions like crucifix emblems (hello Christian Fascism!), the government-inflicted virus outbreaks, or the pharmaceutical industry getting implicated as population control aren't clever additions to the paranoia pile-on. The terrorism card can get played for shock value (mostly from dismissive critics), but given that they already dosed the blue pill/ red pill bit for The Matrix, why not keep the role that LSD plays in the inspector discovering V's hideout or how mind expansion created V in the first place?

What the original book hints at yet never gets explicit about is the trajectory of making a V itself. It implies both descending line, apex (or nadir, as the case may be) and ascending line. It plays on Hindu deities: V as Shiva, born of fire, Evey as Brahma, birthed in water. It suggests that while V can only cause destruction, Evey's eventual understanding of her role as creator, nurturer, creative urge will resolve the napalm-sticky pro-terror bent of the original.

The movie is content to ignore Evey as both mere street tart (she's cruising for extra cash the first time we meet her in the comic) as well as her evolution into V (guess you can't very well have your Natalie Portman starpower mugging behind a mask) while highlighting a lesbian undercurrent I scarcely picked up in the books. Maybe they don't make her into V to avoid some sorta weird Hillary in '08 subliminal hint, opting instead for the climactic "Everybody is V" demonstration (which my friend snarked was about immigrant rights). Ringing freedom in V masks may help merch sales come Halloween, but in the end such well-intended politics end up as ham-fisted and hammer-subtle as Fahrenheit 9/11. Thankfully this time there's no Matrix: Reloaded rave in a cave.

beta buck and terrell owens

2006-04-09T13:50:00.000-07:00

As if I somehow got through a childhood in Texas without copious doses of Dukes of Hazzard and Hee-Haw, with the 'boys playing right after Sunday services. This Buck trib is (boss) hog-tied to the passing of both Nikki Sudden and Jackie McLean.

Elsewhere, some doot-doot-doot on The Latin Satin, Kim "Olive Juice" Gordon's groop, and a hastily-writ grab at the ungraspable Golden Afrique and Lagos sets.

beta shout at the devil

2006-04-05T11:32:00.000-07:00

When dealing with the figure of Daniel Johnston (by which I mean in that form somewhere between fat man and indie-mythic cut-out), it strikes me so close to home that vision tends to slide into platitudes that the man himself trades in, between good and bad or Captain America and Satan, simple blacks and whites, absolutes of craziness and sanity. And my mind quickly obfuscates the man, to where I watched much of The Devil and Daniel Johnston questioning my own familiarity with the subject, almost shocked by pictures of his youthfulness, his unmedicated early vigor.

While I'd like to color myself as more an original seeker circa senior year, I'm fairly certain that my first knowledge with the man stems solely from Kurdt Kobain's "Hi, How Are You?" tee shirt, but even such photo ops merely cemented and made approachable the odd white tapes with xeroxed covers that were always on display in Austin, something at the periphery of my young teen consciousness, never quite in focus. (When talking to people from Houston, they experienced a similar sensation with all those Jandek records that used to just sit in the record bins for years, their blurry kodachrome mystery beckoning right under their nose.) If it's not the tapes of Daniel Johnston then it's a four-story spray-painted frog asking about your condition as you walked along a wall right off of the Drag on the way to class; his remains a presence in the city, but that of a god departed from the world.

Just cracking open the plastic case of Songs of Pain was like that of a cosmic egg (or a suddenly brainless boxer), the curtains of hiss parting for a grotesque display of elephant-man madness. We snickered and then were silenced by the tears of rage as Daniel wailed about sticking his head in a fire hydrant or else badgered the potheads who rolled up the sacred pages, subsequently burnt their lips, and also forgot to brush their teeth.

And Laurie, always Laurie, his Beatrice, dude would just not shut up about her. It was a listen as beguiling and gruesome as an emotional car wreck. With that audition and others (we each bought separate tapes, though it's doubtful we ever got all the way through one in a single sitting), Daniel rose into the upper echelons of our minds, raw and bared and (perhaps most key) as Texas as anybody. Maybe if Buddy Holly had written 1500 songs about prettyprettypretty Peggy Sue after spelunking through the lysergic muck of Roky's "Kingdom of Heaven" (Y'gnow, within?). If Paul had lost his shit in an East Texas sandbox. If Henry Darger had really been into Jack Kirby.

Going to the Clementine Gallery to check out his exhibit of drawings, there's a discernible peaking that occurs, as he is less "Dan Johnston" and more "Daniel Johnston," obsessing over Captain America and Casper, though I reckon it's really a recognizing and transposing (conscious or not) of comic books into mythology. Darger is a good touchstone for understanding Dan, with his eternal struggles of good versus evil fought by the eternally young and innocent. Not to mention the sexual tension tenting up in nearly every drawing. Daniel’s birds look like boners while his portraiture of women is by turns statuesque, powerful, yet naïve. Their breasts nippleless, they’re often headless, and the intersections of legs remain as mysterious and prepubescent as ever. He’s as unlaid and creepy as Darger with his girls’ small peckers.

And so it becomes less and less about Daniel's initial delirious outpouring of songs and more of the psychic fall-out resulting from it, that's what makes Daniel in this day and age. Blame the meds and their forgetfulness for not making him re-hash "Speeding Motorcycle" at every show, but he has scarcely advanced since that day he sped away from the circus. It's a fawning freak show, and God knows I bought my own ticket for it way back when at Liberty Lunch in the later part of the decade. Child wonderment of the man inspires such reverence in his fans (not to mention folks who made careers out of such “child” moves, from the Flaming Lips to Danielson). While his song craft remains stuck on 'Beatles,' there’s a definite maturing of his artwork though, as his art school leanings suddenly drop away, the magic marker box re-opens, and the childhood comics take over his mind, implanting figures like Jeremiah the Frog, Joe the Boxer, and Satan front and center in his destabilized lobes. There's a reason that such scribbled drawings pay the bills these days.

As with any good psychosis story, good ol' boy blotter plays a role in Daniel's demise (as much as say, Metallica). And like any fragile psyche in the Central Texas area circa the 80s, it occurs during a Butthole Surfers concert. In a movie rife with horrific, painful scenes of madness, disintegration, MTV worship (and Mountain Dew as demon-exorcising potion) is there any more physically painful scene in the film than of Gibby Haynes recounting the night's incidents and denying guilt while getting excruciating dental work done on his heinous snaggleteeth? Remember, Gibby was one of the last people Kurdt Kobain saw before his shotgun popsicle. And yet Daniel not only survives, but grows in influence, not to mention girth.

Rather than accept my dare to listen through to an entire cassette, how about this, peak-era Buttholes (between Locust Abortion Technician and Hairway to Steven) with the man-child chiming in (on Gibby-tronix, no less!), riffing on a Throbbing Gristle tune?

Butthole Surfers (with Daniel Johnston) - All Day

betawker

2006-04-03T20:34:00.000-07:00

And then the Nothing went to take a tinkle.

Oldham Addendum: so going to the Old Joy afterparty got the elbows rubbed but good. Not only was Kim Gordon's armrest right next to mine in the mingling, but we hit the olive bowl pretty hard. Me, I only talked to her about the eggrolls that were served at the party, afraid to thank her for ruining my friggin' life (it's easier to tell her than Thurston (who I also neglected to inform of such a factoid back when I ate BBQ with him) or Kurdt Kobain (who really lost touch with his fanbase...)). I blame it on all the free bottles of Negra Modelo, as I wound up rather ripped.

Nothing to say to Todd Solondz but I do however corner Ira Kaplan in the bathroom queue, completely inhabiting my role as the guy that tells you about the one time he saw you guys play and how much you freakin' rawked. The only reason I would say such a thing to the guy though is I saw Yo La Tengo when they played at Tacoland in an insanely packed, reverent, and intimate gathering some ten years ago.

During the show itself, they just gushed over and over about how amazed they were to be playing there (Gwar musta told them about it or maybe it was the Dead Milkmen) and how amazing Big Drag (our hometown heroes/zeros) were. They went on to make explicit how genius they thought Big Drug was by completely ripping off their Beach Boy cover of "Little Honda" for I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, replete with fuzzy one-note bend git solo.

Of course he remembered the show (all requests past the Dead C cover they opened with), although he remembers power outages, while I don't. Ira tells me that when he met Doug Sahm and Augie Meyer, he got to boast about playing there. Augie Meyers just laughed and laughed. And in a sweet party pee-line moment, he offers me his condolensces with the shooting death of Ram last year. It was swell that he knew about it and thought to say something sweet like that to some guy waiting to use the pisser.

b-e-v-o

2006-04-02T10:33:00.000-07:00

Yet another xian name permutation? Some sorta de-con disgruntlement at the Baby Shaq dismantling of my alma mater? Cheap beav joke?

Growing up Devo, as told over at Moistworks is just the icey-tip, but until the truth can be told about de-evolution (as well as the Cunt Whistles Behind the Music) a Devo disco track deftly mixing midgets and incest with a booji beat to hold you over:

Devo- Midget

beta feels old, ham, joy

2006-03-30T15:26:00.000-08:00

Every moment that Will Oldham is on the screen in Kelly Reichhardt's second feature film, Old Joy, it's impossible to look away from the man's mesmerizing, almost-freakish visage. Playing the perpetually-stoned and non-commital Kurt, that expansive pate, protruding forehead, and thick jut of amber beard threatens to overtake the film's surroundings, and yet the film's main focus, Mark (played by Daniel London) more than holds his own with his own intent stare.

His eyes are closed when the film opens, as he practices his meditation despite the blender of his pregnant wife and the phone call of his old friend. Mark is trying to do good in the world, trying to set it to rights as he drives his Volvo, listening to ranting left-wing talk shows, trying to remain centered. Or has he divulges at one point: "Find another rhythm, do what other people do."

The film, based on a short story by Jonathan Raymond and expanded to a full-length with Reichardt, is simple enough in premise: two friends decide to reconnect for a quick camping trip before paternal duties tear them asunder for good. They smoke a jay, get bummed about a record store they once knew and frequented closing down, feel the highs of the past come much lower now, and guards remain raised. And yet no interaction between two people, be they lovers, friends, or strangers, is ever that simple. Every word echoes an unseen past.

As the last post's faceless dialogue attests, Will Oldham himself, his creak of mystery, his crackled voicing of the unknowable ancients, resonates deep within my roots. Hearing him, seeing him, moves me to a heady time of my life, to malleable, infinite-possibilities of young years, to invincibility, to you know, the "quiet joys of brotherhood." So to see him portraying an old acquaintance makes me re-think my other strained and fissured-with-time relationships to friends in the past.

Throughout the quiet --at times unspoken-- dialogue between the two old friends, I project myself and my estranged friendships instead, toggling between which man perhaps represents us best. Am I more the ever-adrift and dispersive Kurt or the self-immolated tethering of Mark? Am I lost amid devilish details or else on the road to hell paved smooth with good intentions? As the men make u-turns, get lost, seek drunken shelter from the encroaching darkness of both Oregon rainstorms and inpenetrable forest dark (cinematographer Peter Sillen captures the overcast skies, the umbrage and chill of trees come evening exquisitely) or else wander slowly along faint trails towards their destination, there is the small realization of no straight trajectories, no cut and easy path to travel. "It is to be on one thing only, on the road to God knows where," Kurt croaked in another life.

The film's center, soaking in the buck in cloistered hot springs with a can of Hamm's to cool them, is silent, just the gurgle of water and steam rising between pale feet. His hands move to Mark and yet there is no resolution. As the discussion afterwards goes, Reichardt wonders about idealism when it is unforgiving or unable to come across and reconnect, to forgive with grace. Grace...that's an unwieldy word. I still find myself in such a limbo, wondering (with a line that echoes one once written to me in a long-buried letter) if the wires can ever be burned clean, if there is ever true connection between people. Is communion only in the past?

"Grace…That's a weird word."

2006-03-28T06:35:00.001-08:00

"I was having a bad time of it back then. Running ecstasy in the deserts of New Mexico, across the border and back. But shuttling between Texas and California began to take its toll on me, and after one big payoff, me and my girl headed to Juarez and just burned ourselves out. Pills, 'shrooms, coke, anything we could get our hands on. We blew apart like dust down there at the border. An awful ending to it, man. So bitter."

"That sucks."

"So I just blew back into town for a few weeks, no money, no nothing, just the clothes stuck to my back, and telling myself that I’m just crashing here for a few days, to make up some time with a lost friend. Trying to recollect my scattered self.

"So I’m sitting in my friend’s living room one morning, listening to Bob Dylan leer out ‘No man alive will come to you with another tale to tell...’ when a scrap of paper on the hardwood floor catches my eye. It’s wedged between these books; one's called Way of the Animal Powers and there's a purple book saying Be Here Now. It's under these small clouds of cat hair and weed twigs. There, on this tiny piece of paper were these slanted, scrawled words my friend had hurriedly written out in his shaky hand:

I send my love to you.
I send my hands to you.
I send my clothes to you.
I send my nose to you.
I send my trees to you.
I send my blues to you.
Won’t you send some back to me?

"Just then I heard him stir in the other room, slowly shuffling into the bathroom. Even with the vent on, I could hear him murmur a small chant before the cracked mirror and stained porcelain sink. When he emerged, I couldn’t contain myself.

"'Man, did you write these lyrics? This is really fucking good!'

"Mumbling and clacking his new prayer beads together, he moved for the stereo, yawning out: 'No. I got it from him.' He handed me this broken jewel case. A crack sliced the black, backlit head of someone in front of a curtained window. Impossible to make out the face of this individual, but he almost seemed familiar, even in the shadows."

"Had you ever seen these Jandek records back in Houston? Weird shadowy faces and drum kits gleaming in the evening light? That's what the cover always reminded me of."

"Nunh-uh. But when he put it on, it was the strangest thing. There was just this hiss of room air, a sigh of breath, a rustle, and then the hesitant plucking of a guitar, attuned to itself but much looser, at a lower pitch. Then this flicker of a flat voice warned and warbled in a whisper: 'When you have no one, no one can hurt you.'

"The songs mumbled along to themselves. And just that morning I had this dream about stumbling into a room, and seeing myself separately in the creaky pink chair, leaning forward a little to sing in a wretched voice. Neither able to play or sing, I was somehow doing both, a set of fingers and thumbs, a pair of heaving lungs. Awkward chords, squeaking strings, wavering words in the vacuous room. And I watched as this shadowy self billowed about like wind-stirred curtains. It was fucked-up. That's what this thing sounded like. The more it became me, the more alien it was, too. And when we got to the song from that scrap of paper, it was like some crazy prayer sung on the verge of tears.

"I became obsessed, had to hear it all the time. All of our friends, too. We listened to it at his place every day, over and over again, trying to crack its code like we had cracked the plastic case that reflected it darkly. We grew beards, picked at guitars. Was it a Palace Brother, even if the only name on the case was plural? Was he an Oldham? Pushkin? Little Willy Bulgakov? My friend showed me the other things, these dusty seven inches of sketched covers, obscured with the shifting of names and people. It seemed like it could all be the same person, emanating from the backwoods like a nimbus on nimble little goat legs. I mean, it was him and his brethren that were bellering out like loosed wolves on "Come A Little Dog," wasn't it?

"At the same time, it seemed like it could be us as well, as we too took to the streets at night, our heads empty with acid and dope. Devout, we were. Read Timothy Leary, Diary of a Drug Fiend, Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly, Valis trilogy. Crazy on the Holy Spirit, we thought, like wheels about to explode.

"We would see these curs out too, their nails clacking down 3AM's unlit streets in ragged packs, digging for nourishment among the garbage and table scraps. Every encounter with the wild dogs would raise the questioning voice in my head: 'Where'd the little dog come from?' And my voice would answer back like a skull echoing with webs: 'The little dog came from you.'

"This quavering voice told us of the fantastical tucked into the bleak, even in near-rural isolation with sheep and cow mewls. In daylight, it would be insurmountable, but with night's descent, all seemed possible. Taking the shit out of your pockets at night could turn you into a cosmonaut. Or did he say astronaut? Not only had this little man been a big ol' bear once, but also a duck out on the pond, saying 'fuck the land.' There was that one song with the storm on it, with the birds still chirping..."

"Number six?"

"Oh yeah yeah, that's the one where Stable Will morphs into a racing horse. Or that little sliver of a song where he told how Pretty Polly, or whatever her name was, could change her form: "Down the hill I'd like to take you, where I shot a little deer. My little dear, I'd like to take you down there."

"That one is called 'All is Grace.'"

"Grace…That's a weird word. Anyway, I kept expecting these prophecies to reveal themselves though, the lyrics to make sense, veils lifted, a lasting transcendence to come, but it always fell away. If we partook and got high, so would we come down.

It is to be on one thing only
On the road to God knows where.

"I was giving up. Does God even know where? Does God lie within? Was it all a lie? Or was it just this emptied earth, only animals and people, one form changing into the other? I didn't know shit. Who came by the way that he walked? Enigmas became tiring and useless. By the end of it, I would listen to the end of the record and laugh that he was actually singing that he was 'a kiddie pornographer.' And when that next Palace record came out with those Neil Young rockers on it, I mean, I still liked it, but that religious shit was just over for me."

"So what do you listen to these days?"

"Eh, mostly just Fiddy."

(Originally published in Sound Collector Audio Review #5.)

beta ketchup

2006-03-26T15:24:00.000-08:00

Even though I had the most horrifying near-disaster of having my kneecap pop out of place last week, crumpling me to the floor of my house with fears of ACL surgery sans health insurance (or else falling down subway steps every time I venture out now), it's somewhat appropriate for the distinct sensation I've had the past few weeks of being busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.

Not that you'd notice it from a dearth of posts, or my only recent links being from two-month old reviews in Miami that sat in editorial-switcheroo limbo before finally running this week, but I have been swamped with work, non-work, and a spring cold. Swear shit'll pop back into place (body shivered at just the thought) but until then:

Achso
Prog is not a four-letter word
"Too Much Love" (Rub'n Tug Remix)
"Just Like We (Breakdown)" (DFA Remix)

zo so beta

2006-03-21T10:40:00.000-08:00

My piss-take coda to James's otherwise choice Led Zeppelin overview at Moistworks.

Slightly more serious is last week's selection of African tunes I'm digging mightily. Worth a look just for the bad-ass photo Ali Farka Toure. Once again, I'll big up Keith Harris's look at the Golden Afrique sets.

heep see

2006-03-19T10:16:00.000-08:00

Cluster : '71

While staying in Chinatown recently to elude yet more transit shutdowns, I came across this odd wooden fish with a few black knobs on it that my friend had tucked away in her room. Hitting a red switch on it, a sawtoothed sinewave began to squelch aloud. Every nudge of a knob created new barbs, increased envelopes and attack or else screwed higher already ferocious frequencies. Her roommates were nonplussed that I had found it, as I immediately set about tempering and getting the noise under control. Were I to have mastered that fish, I'd only be creating Cluster '71 some thirty-five years after the fact though, so I just buried it under some of her laundry and went about my business instead.

Loose Fur : Born Again in the USA

Previous Jim O'Rourke excursions were somewhat rote exercises in various facial hair styles, despite the man being clean-shaven throughout. Early on, he worshipped those intellectual beards that AMM grows, then got downright grizzly with "the Fahey" by the time of Bad Timing. Eureka had him trimmed down to Van Dyke Parks's van dyke, but now he seems to be obsessed with both Steely Dan's wu-stache and "the Hitler" that Sparks's Ron Mael rocked, and so is Loose Fur oh so seventies. Not that the Fur is nearing the heights of either band (or sonically mimicking them, as O'Rourke projects are wont to do), as despite chops and parts aplenty, they're simply not razor-sharp enough with their wit to pull off a quasi-concept record about Jesus returning to Midwest Mall American culture and golf-playing carsalesmen for Christ.

Much like facial hair, this really grew on me. "Licks, licks, licks" the Mael bros. might've crooned, with Kotche cowbell just for the clop of it, the coda jazz chords and proggy changes getting pressed into some dinky diamonds. And holy shit, check out the 'power' video for "Hey Chicken") Which makes it fairly easy to forgive some of the shitty lyrics ("Thou Shalt Wilt" is a real shame, just because when Jim whispers like a high school drug dealer "Check this shit out" it always makes me snigger right before hitting the FF button to avoid the Ten Commandments redux). As the crunchy wanking gives way to the oozed wooze of "Wreckroom," it makes for an early quarter highlight.
Loose Fur - Pretty Sparks

Fred Neil : Fred Neil
Vince Martin : If the Jasmine Don't Get You the Bay Breeze Will

Standing on the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal in the middle of a blizzard, I now know what these two New York folkers were doing when they got the fuck out of the Village scene and lounged down at the sparse Coconut Grove in FLA instead, putting the lime in the coconuts. The exhaust smoke out of their clothes, its instead infused with...well jasmine and bay breezes. Both of these were recently reissued and they sound like the sea itself, mighty and deep, simply unplumbable and breathtaking at either sunrise or sunset, flashing you their majesty while also revealing the smallness of humanity. The playing is top-notch throughout (Village all-stars on the former, Nashvillain session men on the latter), and there's really no need to spend time gleaning the strands of folk, jazz, raga, country, and blues that course through the sounds, as its all of a piece. A friend at Other Music deemed it "marina rock" (not to be confused with yacht rock) and you can feel the salty spray coming off the prow of the boat, the dolphins unseen as they course alongside you.
Vince Martin - Snow Shadow

Scott Walker : Climate of the Hunter

No doubt to 'cash in' on the Scott Walker wave that will accompany The Drift when it comes out in May, Climate of the Hunter, Walker's much-maligned 80's album, comes back around. While I am of course kicking myself for not purchasing this on record when I came across a clutch of Scott records (2&3), I could see why I would pass it up on first audition. It opens with the unfunkiest clop of a cowbell I've ever heard. It clamors like, you know, a lolling cow in a field. It has Sting-sleek bass, proggy compressed drum sounds, and Scott's dark theater could easily get mistook for a Phantom of the Opera audition. And Billy Ocean, for fuck's sake! To have giants among men like Tennessee Williams, Evan Parker, and guitarists Ray Russell and Mark Knopfler simply absorbed into the black hole of the man is telling though.
Scott Walker - Sleepwalkers Woman

Santana : III

Before the collab-heavy star-hitching (to have Lauryn Hill be your mule is plain wrong, but I must cop that the Rob Thomas smooth-cringe was a guilty pleasure) Santana owned San Antonio and would stop through every four months or so to play Sunken Gardens. The place remains a refuge for metal: Moxy records are on the walls, Bloodrock goes for money, and senior citizens like Budgie and King Diamond make a stop before touring Brazil or wherever it is they're still treated like gods. When I was in Costa Rica, jamming the official station for middle-aged American ex-pats, Radio Dos, every half-hour or so, the crybaby wails of "Black Magic Woman" would emerge, a decidedly American comfort sound in Latin America. I ignored those hallucinatory Santana gatefolds outright most of my formidable years, but this reissue shreds, making me re-think the man. Playing it at work, the acidic solos always elicit audience reaction of some sort.
Santana : Toussaint L'Overture

Kay Hoffman : Floret Silva

If you're into aural weirdness down in San Antonio, at some point you come across Mister Spacer, who intermittently looses crucial documents on Robot Records. A true heavyweight, the man played this pup some real shit (Pierre Henry's lobe-microwaving Cortical Art III for one, but he was one of the first people I knew in the early 90s to appreciate late-era Talk Talk, too) and he put out singular seven inches from the likes of Merzbow, John Duncan, Organum, and Lithops. But even this release is an oddity for him.

A clutch of poems from unknown monks in the 13th century, their kind eradicated by the encroaching and assimilating Roman Catholic Church, save for these documents unearthed in the 19th century in Germany, subsequently set to music by a lovely young Italian lady named Kay Hoffman. Hoffman and her co-horts have ties to the Italian prog scene, and this album was originally slated to come out in RCA/Italy in the 1970s. Of course, that didn't happen, but it did make its way out in the mid-80s in Japan. So maybe getting reissued in Texas come the 21st century isn't so strange after all. For something 800-odd years old, this sounds timely, anachornistic while simultaneously being medieval, folky, proggy. Themes these minstrels once wrote on include this terrestrial life, spiritual quandaries, love, the dark forces to always contest...meaning it is everpresent.
Kay Hoffman - Tempus Instat

Oh yeah, this marks my 100th post.

bet ajar

2006-03-18T10:00:00.000-08:00

It's not every day that I recommend the poetry of a Rolling Stone writer, but Peter Relic's stuff in The Nightjar Review is delightful. (Jury is still out on Fricke-ian Sestinas though). Utilizing the Malaysian stanza form known as the pantoum (Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, and John Ashberry all used it), Relic toggles between being trenchant and ludicrous, all rendered with a definite sense of craft. Gay quarterbacks, special hacksaws ordered off TV, and Jesus's love of hot pants are just a few poetic images visited. Hep also to the "No mini-Stereolab; aloe, retsin, I'm on" threats of Jeff-cepter as well as the murmured words of Diane Cluck.

beta daze in heaven

2006-03-08T14:46:00.000-08:00

As the PB Wolf or Burns' side Project could tell you, Movie Night is a-rolling. Imagine the Sopranos episode where Carmella and the molls/gals watch Citizen Kane with the help of Leonard Maltin ("Oh! The cinematography!") and you're almost there. Granted, it's been some austere titles so far, Tarkovsky's Mirror and Terence Malick's Days of Heaven. Throw in some Timmy Treadwell and you would have a good overview of the most eloquent wind shots in the history of cinema, as the three capture gusts across grass and brush verily, showing the chill of nature's invisible breath.

Malick, like the finest wool, does not bode well when shrunk. Days is severely cramped on the small screen, as is Badlands or The Thin Red Line, but it is a reminder to maybe race towards The Lost World (though it is its own phenomenon now).

Forgot about the Ennio Morricone soundtrack, which finds the maestro at his harmonicky hootenanniest, all pickin' and Accadian hollerin', with fits of tap-danced hoedowns, too. Gere anticipates Cheney at one point, about to buckshot Sam Shepherd while hunting quail. Did I mention this all takes place in the Texas panhandle? Though I can't rightly say I recollect Amarillo ever looking so danged fertile, flowing, and well...heavenly.

The Malick Poetic Voiceover is everpresent, with his ancient-sounding young girl talking to the wheat patches; in return they visit her at night to sway and whisper in her dreams. The cinematography gets downright National Geographic (perhaps my favorite aspect of a his films (Red Line's lens is entranced with razor grass as much as its all-stars), to the point you think there'll be discussion about the grasshoppers mating cycles or their diet. (I myself get a craving for whole wheat bread untoasted mid-film). That is, until the childish euphemism for grasshopper becomes the more adult "locust."

The giant cycles of man and his tractor machinations are already wheeling and gnashing at the film's start, outing hares and pheasants to scamper from the blades. Such manmade creations are soon overtaken by the larger wheels of seasons and blight, and ultimately that great destroyer, fire. The whir of the thresher becomes the hum of pestilence, the tiny chitter of locusts grows as deafening as flame's crackle; where man and animal once walked in abundance of the land, they are now cursed to scurry over the face of scorched earth. Gere himself is hunted like an animal by movie's end. When were those heavenly days though? Out in the fields during back-breaking labor? Daydreaming among the hay and fresh-crushed wheat berries?

There are cartoon birdies a-chirp on the cover of the newest Arthur Russell set, First Thought, Best Thought. Inside are extreme close-ups of flowers in bud (taken by Russell's Zen master) and a wide shot of a wheat field. One can only wonder how many times the native Iowan wandered lost through the fields, presaging his meandering the villages of New York, spacing out on the ferries and bodies of water that echoed the flatness of home.

Space and spaciness go hand in hand for Arthur, the space in the sound of these orchestral works, the latter in how Instrumentals Vol.1 never existed, yet Vol. 2 did, only wait, it was mastered at the wrong speed. Pieces break off mid-thought, or else pick up in different mindstates. This selection is from Vol. 2, and it just picks up at random and leaves that way as well. This work evokes the recent Moondog set, in that the two men take the limitless expanse of the Midwest and tuck it inside Gotham's claustrophobia, clearing out the headspace via ears. Moondog's recordings have wolf howls and taxi horns, the din of traffic made to respond to Harding's concise orchestrations. One piece on the Russell set has a foghorn bellow caught in its amber.

A discussion the other night with Steve Knutson (who took on this Sisyphean task of releasing the vast archival work of Russell's) and minimalist composer Arnold Dreyblatt touches on Arthur's sense of humor. It's light and full of whimsy these works, never ponderous but twinkling, shimmering, almost catchy and dare I say it, twee. Dreyblatt suggests further the generous nature of Arthur and how such abundance shows up in his music. Hear how the wheat sways:

Arthur Russell - Instrumentals Vol.2 (Track 11)

beta got it for cheap

2006-03-08T13:57:00.000-08:00

Clipse:

Ennio Morricone : Crime and Dissonance
Tony Conrad, Rhys Chatham, and Jonathan Kane
Orthrelm : OV (disclaimer: auditioned and writ during my food poisoning episode (not recommended))

rocket beta

2006-03-08T12:00:00.000-08:00

Of course, Simon can precisely link to the PiL Top of the Pops performance that altered his trajectory, but the only good thing I can find (my laziness extends beyond mere blog non-update) on YouTube is of the Transformed Man mutating into the Three-Headed God that he secretly is during this smoker-friendly rendition of "Rocket Man" from a '78 Sci-Fi Awards show.

Feeling guilty for not discussing Sylvestergate, SPINsanity, Dick Wolf, or "the Harold," here's the song that inspired the song that inspired such transformation:

Pearls Before Swine - Rocket Man

beta why you been gone so long

2006-03-03T10:25:00.000-08:00

Dealing with the French Revolution of crit-dom over here (and feeling like a chicken-head despite the toga), I only got this to show for it.

beta grande

2006-02-24T16:13:00.000-08:00

In the same way that the Wu-Tang Clan watched tons of chop suey Shaolin monk flicks and made such Tiger claw styles into the hip-hop vernacular, I'm hoping someone will do the same for Rio Grande. I have a ways to go to check in with all of John Ford westerns, but this is a good start. The Calvary outfit in the movie answers everything with a boisterous "YO!!!" and there's plenty of dialogue comprised solely of "YO!"s bandied about through the canyons. You can also harvest any number of lines about men as "sol-juhs" and have a new sub-species of dialogue ripe for that next wave of over-sampled movie snippets. Expect Scarface-esque John Wayne embroidery on leather jackets blowing up in the Fader soon.

There's plenty of Sons of Pioneers tunes here as well, marching in and harmonizing at odd intervals. They even sing a song that makes me think of the Animal Collective, called "She was my Purple Gal." How appropo, since that was the obsessive color of Feels, even though they themselves sound way more like the bellering Apaches on the warpath in the movie. (Aside, yet another dispatch from that one-man PR firm that is myself for the Animal Collective runs here.)

Watching this classic John Ford/ John Wayne western, it rekindles an old ritual I once shared with my father. One of my fondest memories was spending his lunch break watching westerns together. Every afternoon, they used to play these old Gene Autry movies and we partook of each and every matinee offering. As I grew more appreciative and adult, we switched to Clint Eastwood flicks (I forgot how diabolical and severe High Plains Drifter was until I re-watched it recently).

For a certain generation, John Wayne was the male archetype supreme, the epitome of masculinity. Christ, what's more American, more manly than John Wayne? Familiar mostly with his drunken swaggering and slurred speeches of later Western boilerplate, he's so young and statuesque here, as if chiseled from granite. As Rio Grande's plot hinges on a father-son relationship, I wonder what my father imagined his father-son relationship would be like in the future when he first took in the film. That I'd one day follow in his footsteps? Prove myself on some imaginary battlefield much like John Wayne's son does here? Make things right in the eyes of the father? We all know about the flame that killed John Wayne though, right?

beta hopscouch

2006-02-20T19:21:00.000-08:00

Been battling food-poisoning over the weekend, watching the tube through barely cracked lids. Grateful now that we have cable, as I cannot move from the couch without the greatest of deliberation. Though all two hundred-plus channels melt under an aching body fever that grows worse with the radiators on at full-blast, not to mention that any water poured onto my stomach evacuates.

Trying to catchup on my Curb and Sopranos viewing, I keep mixing up Larry David and Tony Soprano, remembering them hitting each other's marks. As if Richard Lewis wouldn't ever be at Ba Da Bings or Jeff wouldn't be down with Sylvio, too. Seeing the Public Enemy and Anthrax collab makes me tear up for no reason; watching Metal Mania on Classic VH, I cannot begin fathom as to why Salughter's "Up All Night" features this flanged choir singing "America the Beautiful" at the very end. Something to do with that patriotic image of women with wet hair, I presume. The only thing I can recall about L.A. Confidential now is that it has a hooker with a heart of gold. And retroactive from watching Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol, I keep seeing Kevin Spacey in the roles of Baynes. Surely there must be a remake in the works.

Growing slightly more lucid, I watch Walter Matthau in Hopscotch. While one has to wonder how such hatred of Ned Beatty's face can fuel Matthau's revenge (which entails writing a tell-all about the spy trade, setting off both CIA and KGB manhunts), who knew that punchlines about "the Hilton" could still resonate in the 21st century, or that strains within the FBI and CIA would be glimpsed even in an 80's comedy (Beatty's acronym for the FBI is "Fucking ball-busting imbeciles." So Tenet-like, n'est-pas?) I am envious of Matthau's writing habits, to say the least. Waking up to some Puccini and Rossini in a silk robe as he cranks out chapter after chapter would make any writer envious (maybe a portrait of Ned Beatty by the typewriter would help). And let's not forget the tossed-off line about national security: "Yeah, that's a phrase that lost a good deal of meaning lately."

beath from above

2006-02-19T11:50:00.000-08:00

While I believe the final cover of the upcoming DFA remix comp will be like one of those old school marquee joints, this promo sleeve is hilarious, with both Tim Goldsworthy and James Murphy looking downright psychotic and drug-addled.

While at the offices, I get a frustrating taste of the upcoming Delia & Gavin remixes, done by Carl Craig, Baby Ford, and the DFA. I say frustrating in the fact that Delia and Gavin are purportedly trying to shoot a video to accompany the single, which may take awhile. They are making it with a friend of theirs whose name is, no shit, "Assume Vivid Astro Focus."

Having discussed with the couple their love of movies from directors like Alejandro Jodorowsky, Dario Argento, and Vera Chytilová (not to mention their own videos done as the Fancypants and Black Leotard Front dance troupes), the video should be perplexing to say the least, but to hold off the mixes is a shame. The Carl Craig one is epic, ludicrous, taking its sweet-ass time to build up only to toyingly deflate and slowly balloon upwards once more. And that's before getting into the kick and these random piano figures that are askant, unexpected, fragrant, perhaps kin to Villalobos when he would drop harpsichord records at random into his mixes. Fine, call it "ketamine house," but this will be huge in Ibiza.

As will the DFA mix. Not to give it away, but they have a "new secret weapon" (no, it's not another set of those damned go-go bells) that they purportedly found at the Yoga Health Food Store next door to the studio. Yes, all the percussion is made with a cannister of hemp granola. Packed with all the Omega-3 goodness and soluble fiber that you'll need for those imminent foam parties where you'll no doubt be hearing the remixes.

And while Woe rightfully has Allison Goldfrapp in the compactor, I'm not sure how he can deny the ridiculously opulent guilty pleasures piled on the remix of "Slide." Frilly uvulala, a Bronx-bound 5 Express train full of clang and dink, followed by these heavenly guitar harmonics that accumulate into a...well:
"Slide In"

When I asked the office if they were holding out on me with the Tiga remix, they said they didn't even have them yet. The fiends apparently edited this out of a Tim Sweeney podcast, and so:
"Home"

beta inch space

2006-02-15T13:46:00.000-08:00

I am simultaneously grumbling about the sudden dearth of space in which to write (editors seem to be dropping like flies, or else they're booked out till Chinese Democracy drops) and posting links to two recent pieces:

The Deep City label and Willie Clarke in Miami New Times
Beth Orton and AGF in Village Voice

heep see

2006-02-11T13:38:00.000-08:00

Islets in the polypropylene stream, that is what we are.

Mickey Newbury : Looks Like Rain, 'Frisco Mabel Joy

Kris Kristofferson considers him an artist in the Blakeian sense while the Man in Black simply huffs: "Mickey Newbury is a poet." I corrected a new editor when he said Kenny Rogers Roasters wrote "Just Dropped In (to see what condition my condition was in)," perhaps the first psychedelic country tune. Mick wrote it, and his version has some sick sitar on it. He also made Looks Like Rain, which may be the most perfect rainy afternoon record ever, and it's also doing the trick for an afternoon blizzard. It's one bizarre Nashville country record: melancholic with haunting chorale arrangements, backed with windchimes, orchestral sighs, and subtle electronics, with the sound of rain and thunderstorms filling out the hushed spaces of his quavering sound.

Moondog : The Viking of Sixth Avenue

This is my favorite record of the year so far. Ten years back or so, Moondog was a gateway to modern classical music for us young ears, when his Moondog 1/2 was readily available on disc, and I could come across a cache of his Columbia record at a shop (which I did, handing them out as gifts one year), making folks like Glass and Reich somewhat more sensical when seen through the man's mighty prism. Alot of the ten-inch records I'd never auditioned before, and collected here by Honest Jon's, it's a heavenly delight to hear how his square drums and sung tong rounds mingle with taxi horns and biznessman traffic in Midtown. Hearing him anew now, he places folks like No-Neck and Animal Collective firmly into the tradition of Gotham's tribal sound (not to be confused with the sound of 'urban hippies').

Number 1 de Dakar

Yahya Fall is my new favorite guitar hero. The Sonny Sharrock of Senegal? The Keith Levine of Dakar Afropop? My friend warned me that there's a track on this recent No.1 retrospective where it sounds like the guitar amp is melting, and sure enough, Fall pulls some Ray Russell/Sharrock/Dead C brain-melt four minutes into a long, spritely jam that takes it deep into some dark places only to somehow pop back out into the sunny din.

Mountains : Sewn

Subtle is the word, but it isn't. Humble though, hiding the use of computers on the list of instruments here, and showing that they can both pick nimbly here as well. It's a continuation of the last Mountains album, and sounds born out of their recent tour, meaning there's more straight playing here than segueing, very much the sound of them strumming guitars first and then coloring in the forest clearings later. Hence the computer at the end. Parts remind me of that Brotzmann/ Bennink record from the Black Forest, where they play astride rivulets and little streams. There's plenty of gurgling springs, sticks snapping, and at the moment, the static din of a waterfall that merges with their campfire-warm drones. Ever so subtley, they lift it all so that it buoys on some new stream of sound.

Anthony Manning : Islets in Pink Polypropylene

Apparently Manning now makes his name as a visual artist, but he's a key figure in early 90's abstract electronic music, too. I cannot quite get a handle on what he is up to here. Islets is oft-considered his greatest work, but I can't really measure it against anything else from the man. On it's own terms, it's an exquisite esoteric listen. I wonder what would've happened had he made himself into a brand name rather than say, Aphex Twin. The software is not quite there for him in '93 or '94 it seems, but he gets great effect from how he runs his tapes backwards, simultaneously letting lines bubble up and get sucked back down to the river bed.

Terry Riley : Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band "All Night Flight"

Speaking of someone who plays against himself in a suspended state of time, Riley is the originator. Due to a recent watching of a bootleg copy of Robert Ashley's Music with Roots in the Aether series, I am seriously obsessed with the master right now. Going back to stone classics like Persian Surgery Dervishes, I always wonder why he is considered a minimalist, seeing as how his music draws on the entire keyboard tradition (Bach to Monk to LaMonte) and he gurgles forth like some untapped spring, eternally letting flow a pure crystalline stream of nectar. Or should I say goat's milk? The first half of the doc has him milking a goat and talking about how the subtleties of the environment are reflected in the taste of the fresh goat's milk that he offers to Bob Ashley. The second half then shows the man in his barn, putting on a jaw-dropping recital of "Shri Camel." Pure milky bliss.

beta luvs l.a.

2006-02-08T14:36:00.000-08:00

I haven't inhaled smog since I was a 'tween, and I can't recall if I scaled Magic Mountain or Space Mountain, but two recent pieces touch on or emanate from la-la land. (sidenote: I tried to find an online link to the recent New Yorker article by Tad Friend about LA car chases, which is hilarious/disturbing, but to no avail). One is about a recent (and much-needed) spate of post-punk releases, and I talk about This Heat, Delta 5, and Maximum Joy over at the LA Weekly this past week.

The other is about Beverly Hills troubadour Ariel Pink, up now at City Pages. While perhaps not nearly as obsessed as either Simon, Mike, or Woe, it was something else to be immersed back in that scuzzy jacuzzi of Pink's, and the resin stains of House Arrest stayed with me much longer, lingering like stale bong smoke. My line comparing Pink to a screwed and chopped CD got edited into just a line about music as the drug.

Since I made some sort of beat connection between Ariel and Brian, here are two selections to compare:

Brian Wilson "Hey Little Tomboy"
Ariel Pink "West Coast Calamities"

beta luv streams

2006-02-07T11:45:00.000-08:00

"Let me ask you something: Do you believe love is a continuous stream?"

The Anthology snuck in a quick triumvirate of John Cassavetes's less-vetted late-period flicks over the weekend since the Elaine May movie Mikey & Nicky got nixed. As the beer-guzzling, seven-layer dip devouring and bleu cheese'n wings dipping ceremonies kicked off, I missed both Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Opening Night, but since I had seen the latter recently, I settled for the last movie John Cassavetes made, Love Streams.

It's not on DVD stateside (neither is Husbands, my favorite) and I hadn't seen it in a good eight years or so. Trying to recapitulate the plot for my friend as we walked through the drizzling gusts of afternoon rain, all I could remember is that John looks ancient: hair dyed, eyes carrying heavy baggage, rapidly aged, his swollen distended belly hidden under dirty tuxes. That and that there are a bunch of animals in it. Everything else about the movie flows so subtly yet constantly that it's hard to hold such water in your hands.

I'm surprised at the copious amounts of blood that get shed in the movie. Who doesn't have blood from their forehead, their hands, the corner of their mouth, their ears at some point here? Also, I forget how fall-down hilarious it is at points. It's both his bloodiest and funniest movie I can recollect. Cassavetes and Rowlands are kooky siblings, deluded on their notions of love. For her, it's 'the ultimate,' the biggest chip on the table, the greatest bet there is in the universe; for him, love is just about a woman giving up her 'secret' to a man; 'secret' meaning 'lady-yum,' 'man' meaning him. The beginning scenes of him at some weird tranny wine bar with Bob Marley lip-synching and with a mansion full of honeys (peep the one in the swooshing white jumpsuit that just screams Falcon Crest) are brilliant, with John smirking through all the insanity, even as he protests to be sane himself.

Conflicts are like clockwork, all a-grind, continuous, and unresolved even by movie's end. Lovers cannot communicate and neither can generations. Parents and children squabble, the former unable to reign in their crazy tendencies, the latter young but quickly learning to be in such an unstable state, making life miserable for all. The product of divorce, I feel for both the eternally-single man and his abandoned child. As the movie continues to float well past the 2 1/2 hour mark, I can hear the rain still brushing against the Anthology's walls.

In a similar on-screen deluge, decisions are quietly --almost imperceptibly-- made by both Robert and Sarah, and whether there is hope of true change, or just irrational deluded hope, the change is decisive, if slight, and the last image of the movie is of our man, soaked from the downpour, behind windows blurry from the everflowing water. It's his last role, and knowing that death is imminent, he waves goodbye to his sister and to us.

Back outside, waiting for a bus, soaked myself in my raincoat, I watch from a leaky kiosk as the wind blows the droplets into rippling patterns all along the broad blackness of First Avenue.

beta remembers blind joe death (ep)

2006-02-04T07:03:00.000-08:00

extended play:

an unreleased Fahey performance from 1972.

beta remembers blind joe death

2006-01-31T11:40:00.000-08:00

So here is my long essay about my brief week with John Fahey back in the summer of 1999 . This encounter is something that has lingered with me for many years, as it's not everyday you meet an idol and legend close-up, and seeing the hairline fissures on the face of God is a daunting though reassuring experience indeed. My time spent with Fahey was nowhere near the level of say...Glenn Jones's epiphany of working with the man, but it was still quite eye-opening for this fresh collegiate.

In my mind, little stray details have accrued, many of them enumerated in the article, and yet when I went to my journal entries for this period of time, there is a solid week with no entries. I pried one of his fingerpaintings from my journal pages but was horrified to find that I had written next to nothing about my experience. Nothing about my canvassing with Fahey, nothing about having a vegetarian BBQ with No-Neck Blues Band, nothing about the four concerts Fahey put on, nothing about the man playing my guitar at an in-store, nothing about the Captain Beefheart release party, nothing. There was however, some venting about the fuckfaces that I used to make noise with, as they showed their two-faces that manic weekend.

Another story that I didn't mention was how much Revenant hated No-Neck. One Saturday morning, the morning after their set opening for Fahey, I got a phone call from them, saying that they were utterly embarrassed by the band and their shitty pretentiousness and ramshackle wonkiness and really wanted nothing to do with them. There was talk of scrapping the entire Sticks and Stones project out of hand.

Driving around with Fahey that morning, we got to talking about the whole debacle, about how the band had been evasive about the tapes they made with Jerry Yester. So while we're at some South Austin shopping center, flipping through used records, Fahey asks me for a quarter. "I'm gonna put a stop to this whole nonsense right now," he says, marching out to a payphone. "I used to deal with bands like this back during the Takoma days, and you just have to play hardball with them." He then proceeds to dial up the house where NNCK has been staying, and while I know that the band is currently unloading gear elsewhere, he gets a befuddled person on the horn and delivers an ultimatum: "They either get the tapes to me in a half-hour or the whole deal is off." Nevermind that he has no idea where he is or who he's even talking to.

Cooler heads somehow prevail, and the Beefheart release party goes off without a hitch, NNCK getting reeeeal lost with a swordfish and stand-up bass overhead dual, and SASMBMBBWWNHM ultimately sees daylight some six months after Fahey's passing from this world.

The Man handling my old guitar.

For your listening pleasure, some tunes from the upcoming John Fahey tribute:

Fruit Bats - Death of the Clayton Peacock
Calexico - Dance of Death
Cul de Sac - Portland Cement Factory

beta weekend

2006-01-29T14:31:00.000-08:00

Before I knew it, I was out two nights in a row at rock shows, which has become anathema to me as of late. Winter has not nearly been the hibernation inducer that I was hoping for, meaning books and movies aplenty pile up in the cave, unread and un-watched as instead the 50 degree nights implore me out and about. Walking around in the park yesterday was fucking with my head; I mean, it's still January, and even the barren trees are confused by such sun. Sunbathers seemed to be stunned rather than basking in it. Even with all this seasonal synaesthesia, I had been staying away from rock shows, and yet here I was in the basement of Cake Shop for a friend's band, Coyote on Friday night with Man Man, and then down to the sold-out Black Dice/ Gang Gang Dance/ Bill Cosby & his White Pudding Pops show at the Syrup Room. Can you say clusterfuck?

Friday night I made a crucial layering mistake, knowing that it would be cold out but forgetting the oven-like tendencies of the cramped basement confines of Cake Shop. That brilliant idea of long johns backfired, as did wearing a coat and sweater. After watching Coyote's set, my friend and I decided that the chance to instead catch the last L train back to Brooklyn was far more enticing than watching Man Man and paying the cabfare.

Come Saturday at the sardine factory inside the Syrup Room, I was smarter, with only a thin jacket on me. Of course, in the industrial depths of East Williamsburg, where liquor licenses and smoking bans are as distant as the Jersey shore, it meant smelling like an ashtray upon arrival, kicking at crushed cans of PBR and Sparks. What was worse than that cig stench though was in venturing outside brought an even more malefic and unidentifiable industrial aroma to the nose.

Bill Cosby is cut from the Tra La La mold, if said band was only into "I Want Candy," all Neanderthal thud and Godz-like lobule non-think. The band must all be under 5'6" or something, as I couldn't tell who was doing what, nor could I hear most of the Neil Hamburger-esque jokes being cracked.

The prevailing thought of the night with Gang Gang Dance, who had been hibernating as of late too (incubating more than being simply dormant though) was how amazing their show at the Bowery last spring had been. That was a long time ago, and no one really knew what they were up to. Apparently, creating a whole new set, which they debuted on Saturday. It's definitely a continuation of previous themes, digital and roto-tom spikes that inspire snaking guitar and vox about them, twisting like helixes and fanning out like wasp swarms.

At times, I wonder what they would be like as a live grime band (see the Myspace page linking to Lethal Bizzle), yet they remain intent on doing Houdini-esque escapes from cheesy presets. "Andean pan pipe," "Steel Drum #3," "Zen Bamboo," "Orinoco Flow," might be some of the presets they spring from, rising above the beginning sounds with deft though ridiculously intricate rope tricks and levitation moves. Unfortunately, the band is simply doing more complicated versions of God's Money peaks right now, meaning longer songs, more polyrhythms, more prog parts, more vocal gymnastics, more busy-ness. Hopes of them locking into deeper dance grooves or becoming catchy don't appear to be part of their agenda.

Black Dice are as quiet as I've ever encountered them, meaning no chairs rattling beneath my ass or migraine-levels of bass, no irritable bowel tones. They still remain one of the more difficult bands I've ever encountered, mind-wiping me the moment I stop being able to keep up with the sonic overload of miniscule movements. Apparently, there's a new 3-track release on the way from DFA, and while they distend Broken Ear Record to gnarly extremes tonight, there's new noises creeping up as well. Danny Perez's ever-fracturing fractals and hilarious fuzzed-out hair metal loops make any rational thought irrelevant though; the senses simply overheat.

beta gets rabid

2006-01-28T07:02:00.000-08:00

Demurely covering the dog dick in her armpit anus.

The Peanut Butter Wolf got me to go for Videodrome a few months back, but it's taken forever to track down other Cronenberg movies (and of course, since I'm a good decade behind pop culture, I still haven't seen History of Violence either, which I thought for the longest time was an adaptation of this), and it was not until this week that I finally tracked down Rabid. It's Cronenberg's 1976 horror flick starring Marilyn Chambers as Rose, the motorcycle mama with an emergency experimental skin graft surgery that gives her a fresh flesh wound in her armpit, a moist red puncture that opens and puckers up (remind you of anything?) replete with an odd needle-tipped dripping wet red protuberance that slides out of it like a dog dick, sucking at the new blood of her victims. Of course, it meditates on a constant Cronenberg theme of technology meeting the ancient human flesh and what happens when the two mutually mutate together.

Coming out from behind the green door to again try her hand beyond one-handed flicks, it wasn't too long before Chambers went back to where she was already a legend. Her gig as an Ivory Soap 'pure' poster girl are notorious now, and apparently all of her movies feature a brief instance where she happens upon a box of the stuff, though I can't be certain if there's such product placement is on set here. There is however an allusion to the actress originally up for the role of Rose, Sissy Spacek.

One wonders how such a casting would have completely altered the movie's trajectory. Rabid would simply be a movie with green foam capsules jizzing out of the mouths of the infected were it not for Chambers' porn star fuckability that sizzles every frame of the flick. Alternately a seductress and an innocent who feigns she doesn't understand her newfound vampirism, she struts through Montreal in her fur and zip-up boots, cruising the malls, park benches, apartment halls, and the darkened porno theatres for that most odd coupling she performs on her johns. We wait and watch, mesmerized, for the next appearance of that needle-dick to pop out of her armpit anus.

Such a mutation reflects that other groundbreaking porno, Deep Throat, where Linda Lovelace has a similar sexual mutation (the clit deep down her throat) that can only be satiated by subversive means. Note there is never physical penetration in either of these movies, suggesting a new way of stimulating sexual pleasure and release. Body consciousness, questioning the sensual stimulants, things that happen inside your body, both mentally, chemically, and physically, that's what Cronenberg cooks up. His horror is never a monster movie, per se, save that your own physical body is the monster. In an interview extra on Videodrome, he says that the psychological possibility of the body to become monstrous, that is the new horror.

Cronenberg has a way of extinguishing my sexual desires though, or at least reveling in the hideousness of the human body, even if it is also simulatneously worshipping the new flesh. Which I guess brings me to the events of a past night, one wasted Tuesday night in Brooklyn, slumped over somewhere feeling the effects of the 'combo platter,' so to speak, sipping at a whisky and going through my smokes so as to dull the quivering edge just a bit.

In walks three girls, dolled up and in denim hip-huggers, tight baby tees. My drinking buddy starts up a conversation with them, nevermind that his girlfriend is waiting for him uptown, and we come to find out that the girls all work at the Coyote Ugly. Guess the leather bras have be unlatched for more acceptable tops, but they are busting out at the seams still. The girl closest to me has razor slits all along the outer seam of her skin-tight jeans, thigh flesh like shut eyes every inch or so up her leg.

By this point, I cannot recollect how I wind up in a cab with all three girls while my friend stays behind at the bar, since doing shots and more drugs with three party girls is way more his idea of a fun weeknight than mine, but I am well on my way to their apartment, for God only knows what. My heart races, and I go to the bathroom for that last lick of a freeze, to reinstill some semblance of chemical order to my head. When I come out, the girls are all gathered around the TV, and we're soon watching The Brood. Any sort of nervous sexual tension is immediately replaced with straight nervous system tension as the movie goes on, and the thought of even touching one of the girls appals me by movie's end.

About the only thing I can recollect about the end of the night comes at the movie's climax, when the husband pulls back his ex-wife's long skirt to reveal the horrific, palpitating alien queen formation that makes up her vagina and lower half. "Every man is afraid that this is what happens to their ex-girlfriends," I say.

beta catches a tiger by the tail

2006-01-22T09:14:00.000-08:00

some recent ephemera:

Prima Materia - The Tail of the Tiger
Dominik Eulberg - Kreucht & Fleucht
Post-Tropicalia at Moistworks

beta burnt on bootlegs

2006-01-20T07:18:00.000-08:00

Sure, I miss any and all current music videos, and yet I seem to be catching up on my bootleg DVD watching this week, revisiting the evergreens and mistletoes of mythic music-making, musicians I have heard forever but never really seen much footage of their craft. Even while glimpsed now, some dance tantalizingly just out of sight.

The first is a French documentary about Tropicalia, probably from the early eighties. My high school Francophonics challenged yet recollected just enough (brushed up with recent Bunuel and Godard viewing) to follow the translated Portuguese dialogue as the music is set against the political upheavals and tank-fueled (and CIA-funded) coups and the slow calcification of Joao Gilberto's revolutionary ideas in bossa nova.

It's getting nigh on a decade since I first heard the beguiling/ befuddling "La la la la"s of that opening Mutantes song, yet I remain giddy and agog all over again when Os Mutantes rip off astounding versions of "Panis et Circencis" and "Fuga No.II" in front of a studio audience, their prowess evident as they ply at the taffy strands of each song, tweaking it and taking it out further (there's also a surreal music video for "Don Quixote" involving diesel fill'er ups and windmills). The footage of Caetano, young and vibrant on the soundstage as he and orchestra recast "Tropicalia" is swell, but it's Tom Ze's ensemble, in Devo-esque hard hats and boiler suits, that is truly revelatory. Finally, I can glimpse that music laid out with musical saws, poinging hammers, and witness Ze's mythical blender engine doo-hickey device instrument, triggered with a primitive switch box.

The disc is a tease though, as it still doesn't have the Tropicalia television specials that you always see stills from in any documentation of the music. Instead, tacked onto the end is a good half-hour of nth generation VHS dubs of live musical performances from Mutantes, Roberto Carlos, Chico Buarque (playing the ugliest guitar I've ever seen), and Os Novos Baianos, but all seen through a mirror darkly, all warped and distorted tape. Fuzzed out, the whites blinding, the blacks crumbling, all this catchy pop never to be recollected by public consciousness and moth-eaten by time, it transmits from an unimaginable past. But I'll save my Ariel Pink observations for another day.

***

Taj Mahal Travellers
Travel to the Taj Mahal

I missed this most-hallowed celluloid documentation of the mighty Taj Mahal Travellers when it played at the Anthology last year (due to a certain barbecutie), but finally get to watch the waves coming in now. Otherworldly ensemble spacetime-suspension music that today's longhaired groups (be it Jackie-O, NNCK, WWVV, whatevs) have no hope of even fucking with, I guess this is also an argument for Japanese tourists taking pictures of everything, as the group is basically travelling from the Netherlands through Tehran and Afghanistan to Taj Mahal. The footage of them playing inside some sort of geodesic dome to an audience where everyone looks like Delia, Gavin, or Will Oldham is lobe-blowing. And when it pans to reveal that they are actually performing with Don Cherry, it's pure vents of cosmic dust. Of course, they don't actullay play at at the Taj Mahal, so it's anticlimactic in that regard.

***

Funkadelic on Say Brother!

I can still recall hearing those echoing words of sucking souls and licking funky emotions for the first time on a road trip to the Dodgeball Fest in College Station, Texas, site of innumerable musical epiphanies, all of the punk rock sort. And even though I picked up the reissues of those first four Funkadelic records last year, coming across this unreleased track (as originally posted here) burned my 'fro something fierce. For those that missed it:
"The Rat Kissed the Cat"

And recently some early live footage of that Parliament/ Funkadelic thang has popped up as well, linked here. Takes forever to load, but it's a sweaty, fonky, flop-hatted affair of the highest caliber. Their hyper-medleys would make for an intense kinetic DJ set these days (think Cherrystones, Andy Votel). It's a mix that burns but never ages or becomes ash.

heep see

2006-01-18T08:14:00.000-08:00

Robert Altman
Secret Honor
Tanner '88

Used to the ensemble sprawl and clamor of Nashville, M*A*S*H, The Player, and Short Cuts, the smallness of these is almost shocking. Downsizing in the 80s? There's these little details: the quick, overheard asides like "What television can't cover is change"; how a joke unfolds in the mirrored shades of a Secret Service detail as they clean their guns. Altman's work with Garry Trudeau dovetails nicely, the mental comic strip boxes still intact inside what Trudeau notes is Altman's "cubist sensibility."

Nicholas Roeg
Performance
Bad Timing
Eureka

Re-watching Performance reveals scads more info each go, but still remains truly wtf? in its haltingly early attempts to portray schizophrenia and LSD-induced loss of identity. I'm a sucker for such films (Bergman's Persona and Altman's desert-delirious 3 Women spring to mind at present). It's clumsy at times as the language isn't necessarily there just yet, but by Bad Timing, Roeg melds his characters together deftly to where fleshy boundaries disentegrate as they really do appear to be a three-sided identity (or, as you cannot quite tell each character's impetus, it kaleidoscopes into something six-sided), rather than just being Art Garfunkel, Theresa Russell, and Harvey Keitel. The jumpcuts are those of a master, awash in vibrant colors (in Vienna, no less) the movement of bodies and hues as rhythmic and as graceful as any modern ballet.

Eureka is more troublesome, more lugubrious and weighty. While allusions to Klimt and Billie Holiday in Timing are subtle, the Qabbalic underpinnings in Eureka are heavy-handed. Right, Rutger Hauer happens to have on a shirt with the Tree of Life stitched into it, and then there's the Tarot card that Gene Hackman draws of the Hanged Man, its prophecy echoed when his burned corpse photo is hung up at the trial, the angle nearly upside-down. But Roeg is usually more nuanced than this.

Jafar Panahi
The Mirror
Abbas Kiarostami
Ten

Condi's head talking about the nuclear negotations with Iran; an NY Post political cartoon staking its claim that they know where the WMDs are, past the dotted Iraq line towards a mushroom cloud labeled 'Iran'; the game already afoot. But what do they see in Iran? Kiarostami is perhaps most well-known, but both men are working within stringent parameters here. And the viewer is taken along for the ride, literally. Amid the maze of streets in Tehran in these two films, the camerawork is really claustrophobic, trapped in a car in traffic, stuck on either the woman driver or any number of her passengers and the agitated conversations they have, touching often upon the plight of women in the country. Simple, and yet I can't help but feeling that there is far more brimming under the surface of each film, allegories so immersed under layers so as to escape the notice of censors and all but the most-attuned.

The Mirror is similarly focused (not surprisingly, since both gents work together) with Panahi's camera handheld, almost Cassavetes-like in its clandestine coverage of street scenes, the beginning of the movie scanning the little schoolgirl, moving along at her eye level. Viewers are as perplexed and lost amid the urban din as she is; almost all of the adults are out of our viewline right around their shoulders, similarly calloused and faceless to her plight and struggle to go home. Tracking shots continually lose her behind the broadsides of passing trucks and buses. Some 38 minutes in, it all breaks apart, as the movie bursts outside of its own framing, just as life always does.

beta luv jack

2006-01-14T15:53:00.000-08:00

Realizing now that the newest issue is on the shelves (this one all about Chicago), perhaps I'm a tad late in mentioning that I wrote a piece for the Auteur issue of Stop Smiling Magazine about producer/ arranger/ soundtracker/ session man/ Rumpelstilskin/ pill-popper/ alchemist/ Angel of Death/ Oscar-winner all around genius Jack Nitzsche. A purt-sweet issue, that one, featuring pieces on Robert Altman, Terry Gilliam, and Nic Roeg, so if you still see copies, grab it.

While it's not my first piece, or my second, but my third piece on Jack, in its original form, it was perhaps my most ambitious piece to date. Unfortunately, the film script portions of it were excised for space, and so I figured I would post the original edition now, along with some soundtrack selections.

THE WORLD ON A STRING
Jack Nitzsche and his soundtracks

EXT. LANDSCAPE -- DUSK
Scene opens in wide shot of landscape, an expanse of America. Wheat ripples like gold. A lake is luminous in the background, reflecting the setting sun.
CUE WINEGLASSES RUBBED BY MOIST FINGER.
CUE INDIAN WHISTLE.
Strange, ephemeral, spectral sounds stir, ripple like the fields, the water, as if arising from the earth herself.
CUE NYLON STRING GUITAR AND INDIAN TOM- TOM.
A glint of light appears on the horizon: a will o’wisp? No, just the sun off a windshield.
CUE SINGING SAW.
A Studebaker crosses through the landscape shot, heading west. It traverses through what was once Indian land, the pale-faced pioneer trails cut and paved into black highway. The car rolls cross-country towards the promised land, its human cargo speeding toward destiny.

INT. OF STUDEBAKER -- DUSK
Cut to a man hunched over the steering wheel of the Studebaker. BERNARD ALFRED “JACK” NITZSCHE, age 19. JACK is scrawny, with thick black-plastic glasses and sheepdog bangs over his brow and ears. Pan over a backseat with all of his worldy possessions, including saxophone case from his nights honking R&B in smoky Muskegon, Michigan steel worker joints. A stack of sheet music reflects Jack’s correspondence homework for the Westlake College of Music out in Los Angeles, which is his final destination. As we watch, the wind flaps the stack free.

EXT. HIGHWAY -- CONTINUOUS
JACK’s sheet music flutters out over the highway, slowly settling on the landscape as the Studebaker plunges into the darkness ahead. Fade out.

Well, it could be a scene out of a movie, Jack Nitzsche’s life. How the first generation American, born to German immigrants (who dropped the “e” from their surnames to avoid comparison to their Zarathustrian-obsessed kin) was reared on his father’s opera and classical record collection, igniting a powerful addiction to music in the boy while he also excelled at piano, saxophone, and clarinet. Classical studies went out the window though when he heard the Penguins’s “Earth Angel” on the radio. Young Jack could hear what was hidden below: “It had death in it. Death is always a part of the music I make. Death means a lot.”

As did being a rebel. Stealing James Dean’s insouciant and sullen pose from Rebel Without a Cause, Jack headed to LA and quickly fell in with a foppish A&R man and songwriter Salvatore “Sonny” Bono, as well as madmen like Kim Fowley and Lee Hazlewood, before landing a role as arranger for the most rebellious and megalomaniacal of them all, Phil Spector.

INT. of GOLD STAR STUDIOS.
Recording session in full swing, twenty-one musicians jostling as the song is recorded.
CUE THE CRYSTALS “HE HIT ME (IT FELT LIKE A KISS).”

Jack ascended to become the main freemason of Spector’s Wall of Sound, erecting the mono-lith for him. He was the alchemist that could turn Phil’s every whim into notes on paper, scurrying to every lead sheet during sessions at Gold Star. That was the crucial element, gold, and Jack was Spector’s Rumpelstilskin, arranging “four guitars (to) play 8th notes; four pianos hit it when he says roll; the drum is on 2 and 4 on tom-toms, no snare, two sticks -heavy sticks- at least five percussionists” and spinning it so that the resulting single shimmered like that rarefied substance. It was not just din, but the sound of money flowing out of the speakers. When “Specs” (Phil’s nickname for him) was not being hired to dopplegang and replicate the sound of Spector for Doris Day, Bobby Darin, Jackie DeShannon, he ran with the nefarious Wrecking Crew and the Rolling Stones, England’s newest set of long-haired, blues-reared miscreants. The Queen of Beatniks, Judy Henske, recalls the chemical concoctions that fueled her recording sessions with Nitzsche: “We were both drinking (wine) heavily and were taking pills that were half Nembutal and half Desoxin…Desbutol. So, if drinking hadn’t made you crazy enough, the Desbutol would keep you awake so you could continue drinking.”

For the Stones (who he turned onto grass), Jack played piano. It was his ‘gypsy style’ on keys that helped them paint it black and he had the Stones ask of the shadows: “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby?” (which Jagger considered “the ultimate freakout”). The energy expended on their weeks-long recording sessions was revelatory to Nitzsche, as he realized that such force could be focused in the recording so as to alter consciousness through pop music. Arranging and commingling the teen music of Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, the Supremes, the Stones into a commercial behemoth for The T.A.M.I. Show; turning Monkees’ chirps into porpoise songs; making Marianne Faithfull into Sister Morphine fulltime; Jack’s unseen hand is there, alchemically transforming sound, in (Marianne’s words) “an attempt to make high art out of a pop song.”

He did the same for the only member of Buffalo Springfield that he gave a flying fuck about, Neil Young. Jack believed in the songs, that the shaky singer could stand solo, and so he made that epileptic Canuck hold steady at the edge of an eagle feather.

CUE BUFFALO SPRINGFIELD’s “EXPECTING TO FLY.”

He swaddled Neil with the aurally-hallucinated soar of flight, aiming him towards an effervescent choir of brown-eyed nymphettes, the listener ultimately far from heaven. He would later overdose Neil on the London Symphony Orchestra’s strings on Harvest, much like he did to the Stones on choirs and French horns on “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Such opulence opened portals though, and as pop and rock’n roll divulged all of its mysteries over the course of the decade, Nitzsche dabbled deeper in musical magic, entering his next career phase: soundtracks.

INT. OF CRAMPED ROOM. -- MIDNIGHT
Very dark, cluttered, only vague shapes of bizarre frightening statuettes and masques can be made out. Smoke enshrouds everything. Close-up as JACK inhales cocaine off of knife-tip. He laughs wickedly, leans back over his lead sheets. From his neck dangles a locket taken off a voodoo woman’s tomb.
CUE BLIND WILLIE JOHNSON’S “DARK WAS THE NIGHT.”

Contracted to score Donald Cammell (Aleister Crowley’s godson) and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance, Nitzsche concocted the soundtrack while ensconced in a witch’s cottage down in Laurel Canyon. Fueled by Cammell’s coke, possessed by malevolent spirits and in possession of a prototype device called a synthesizer, Jack rooted deep, invoking crossroad blues, sitar-trance states, sinister sinewaves, voodoo drums, and wails of ritualistic sacrifice for the soundtrack. Nitzsche’s cauldron bubbled as he brewed it all together; call it goat’s head soup. “I was trying to capture the effect of taking one breath in and letting two breaths out.” Such hyperventilating exacerbated the synesthesia of the film and the dark world portrayed on celluloid carried beyond the frame: Jagger embodied the vile role of Turner full-time, fucking Keith’s girl and co-star, Anita Pallenberg. She swore off of movies forever afterwards. Star James Fox turned to Christ to save his soul. Nitzsche’s powers were crescent.

The schizophrenia of LSO strings on his disorienting St. Giles’ Cripplegate (from 1972), became Jack’s calling card. Even Bernard Hermann dug it, and it secured him the gig scoring One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Again, strings convey a psychologically precarious state, where the mentally unstable are dosed with staggering amounts of pharmaceuticals (a condition Jack knew recreationally). Loopy, spongy waltzes maintain the placid status quo of Nurse Ratched. Woozy, staggering slippery motifs are arranged for wineglass, singing saw, dobro, fiddle, Indian drums. Brilliantly dazed, regal in its madness, Nitzsche’s score missed out on Cuckoo’s Academy swoop, losing out to John Williams’s cello undertow from Jaws.

Jack’s next big project was William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Though it had demonic possession as its theme, the split pea spew and crucifix humping held significantly less darkness for Jack than Performance. Mad with demons during the latter movie, for The Exorcist, it was just a job. With a wave of the wand, a counterclockwise motion on crystal chalice, he delivered what original composer Lalo Schifrin failed to give, the aural effect “like a cold hand on the back of the neck,” as Friedkin put it.

Jack was up to his neck beard in darkness, though. Living out at Neil Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch, he would drink to the brink of madness, grind his hands into smashed glass for kicks, tell his son Jack Jr. that he himself was “the Angel of Death.” Every substance at hand was mixed together in his bloodstream. He was the last living soul to speak to Crazy Horse bandmate Danny Whitten before his valium overdose, and in a limousine with Gram Parsons on the Time Fades Away tour, Jack presaged his fate: “You look like Danny…and Danny’s dead.”

He also wound up shacking with a woman he despised, Young’s ex-wife, Carrie Snodgrass. Coming to her house with both pistol and head full of gunpowder one night in late June, 1979, he found her in bed with another man. Foggy though the subsequent details were, Jack soon found himself facing five criminal charges, the most lurid being “rape by instrumentality.”

The Hollywood Babylon-esque debacle and debt eventually cleared, and Jack finally lifted an Oscar for Best Song, Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes’s “Up Where We Belong” from 1982’s An Officer and a Gentleman. Boilerplate though it may sound (producer Don Simpson hated the tune), it was the culmination of Jack’s singer-songwriter side; sentimental, sappy, yet soaring, hailing the great spirit of the eagle in song. It marked a return to the top of the charts, to a peak not glimpsed since his days with Spector.

That gold statuette was but a false idol. Getting into an entanglement with some young punks who swiped his hat, Jack flashed that pistol once more, and his last public appearance was in an old episode of COPS. Hogtied in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard, Jack impotently summons his new, feeble god.

EXT-HOLLYWOOD BLVD.
ARRESTING OFFICER pushes at a handcuffed JACK.
OFFICER: “Keep moving, Academy Award winner.”
CUE CLOSING THEME.
FADE TO BLACK.

Extended Play:
Captain Beefheat - "Hard Working Man" from Blue Collar
Jack Nitzsche "Miryea" "Whorehouse & Healing" from Revenge
Jack Nitzsche "The Razor's Edge Suite" from The Razor's Edge

beta polishes off that bottle of ketchup

2006-01-11T11:58:00.000-08:00

Wait, are Boards of Canada from MN, MI, or MD?

Boards of Canada bores like That 70's Show
NNCK wrapped in tree bark
Caetano Veloso singing like un perro
Dandy Jack playing jai alai
Robag Wruhme in wuv
Panda Bear compared to Brian Wilson shocka
Jerry Yester & Judy Henske dreaming me

beta (gong bangs)

2006-01-06T18:06:00.000-08:00

Right before the Christmas holidays, I had the rare opportunity to check out a Balinese gamelan recital at the Indonesian consulate, thus reliving my own time spent playing with a gamelan (though my experience is with the more subtle seductive everflow of the Javanese strain). Now, I could waste my time talking about how the orchestral gamelan music of Indonesia (a bit redundant, as the word gamelan merely denotes ensemble; my program also notes that the four Indonesian words to enter into English usage are amok, orangutan, gong, and uh...ketchup) broke open whole new vistas for European composers and musicians as diverse as Debussy, Harry Partch, Steve Reich, Lou Harrison, Aphex Twin, and Four Tet, but why not just hijack John Fahey’s explanation from How Bluegrass Destroyed My Life instead?

“Gamelans are large ensembles of idiophones and metalophones. Instruments which you hit…as far as I’m concerned, there is no music more beautiful than Gamelan music…I could tell you lots of things about gamelans. But I don’t want to waste time. One thing, though. Gamelans are not tuned the way Western instruments are tuned…they are not built so that they are exactly in tune…and so when you hear a gamelan, all the ‘phones give off a shimmering effect…the tonality is strange but quite beautiful and very soon you find yourself seduced by the tones.”

First coming across Golden Rain in the mid-90s connected my high school love of Sonic Youth’s dissonant looming blooms to the mathematical patter of Steve Reich and breakbeats. Finding out that my alma mater was soon acquisitioning the largest, most complete orchestra of five-tone and seven-tone scaled instruments for a Javanese gamelan in the United States had me lined up to play in the ensemble the first day of the semester, nevermind that I was neither a folklorist nor musicologist and had to fight to get into the class (for the record, the ensemble also included future members of Charalambides and Black Lipstick). I just wanted to learn for myself how such music can be created, to see the mechanics behind the magical spell, to be in the room with those immense four-foot cast iron gongs and to feel the vibrations of the struck metal as it permeated the entire room and buzzed my body. To constantly remember that music is first and foremost a vibration.

Gamelan was described in our concert program as comparable to only two things: “Moonlight and flowing water; it is pure and mysterious like moonlight and always changing like flowing water.” As beginners, we learned that the music is a division of labor and is segmented into quarters like most Western music, the instrumentation in different ratios: sixteenths, eighths, while the bulk of the metalophones play quarters and gongs bong on the one.

Simple mathematics and deceptively easy to hammer at (how could this not have arisen out of the industrial revolution, I wondered) but as Fahey notes about the tuning, the bowls, pots, and gongs ring out with slightly-off frequencies, a roiling effect created as tones merge and shimmer. As we worked, my master (Rasito Rasito, we called him, unable to pronounce his three other last names) would slowly draw one section to flow faster, while another would slow their pace ever so slightly, giving a tidal motion to the proceedings as we slid to and fro. Even only playing one note per measure on the kemong (which nestles at the midway point between gong hits), I found it excruciatingly easy to get swept downstream by the undertow and constant flow of the gamelan, quickly caught up and disoriented in the coruscating sound.

As an untrained musician, or at least enough of one to quickly unlearn whatever I picked up on piano and guitar in just a few years, what struck me (ha!) about playing gamelan and instruments like the saron demung is that it's not just about striking a note but erasing it before you strike the next in succession. As the mallet comes down on the next note, your other hand snuffs out the previous one. It’s very tidy, the gamelan is, one hand creating, the other destroying. Think “Erased De Kooning.”

Stuck to the recordings, and the academic rote-practicing of gamelan, the role of the music in Indonesian society was lost on me, and seeing the Gamelan Dharma Swara perform with dancers showed what other nuances were previously lost on my ears, or what is lost without the eyes and body. Female dancers perform intricate though minute variations with their fingers and foot placement, and eyes denote turns in the rhythmic patterns. That boom-bap that you always hear in the Balinese variant on the gamelan, with sudden explosions of percussion are sparked off by the widening of eyes.

While the consulate does offer workshops for outsiders (re: offays) that are hypnotized by the sounds of the gamelan and want to participate, I demured from taking up the mallets again. Not that the concert experience wasn’t a pleasant one (it was, though the complimentary dumplings served tasted like mothballs and the gooey orange sweet tasted salty instead), but I get lost in the noise just crossing the street these days.

beta luv beards

2006-01-05T11:48:00.000-08:00

My love for Ol' Willie never dies.

2006-01-01T15:04:00.000-08:00

Dear Andy Beta:

Thank you for your submission - your votes have been recorded.

Your Pazz & Jop albums ballot was submitted as follows:

1. Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane-at Carnegie Hall-Blue Note (24)
2. Cam'Ron - Purple Haze - Def Jam (12)
3. Mannie Fresh - The Mind of Mannie Fresh - Cash Money (11)
4. Animal Collective - Feels - Fat Cat (10)
5. The Mars Volta - Frances the Mute - GSL/Strummer (9)
6. Isolee - Wearemonster - Playhouse (8)
7. Tod Dockstader - Ariel - Sub Rosa (8)
8. Ennio Morricone - Crime & Disonance - Ipecac (8)
9. Clipse - We Got it for Cheap, Vol. 2 - Mixunit.com (5)
10. M.I.A. - Arular - Interscope (5)

Your Pazz & Jop singles ballot was submitted as follows:

1. The Game feat. 50 Cent - Hate It or Love It - Aftermath
2. Amerie - 1 Thing - Columbia
3. Three 6 Mafia ft. Young Buck, Eightball & MJG - Stay Fly - Columbia
4. Mike Jones ft. Slim Thug and Paul Wall - Still Tippin' - Swishahouse
5. Trick Daddy ft. Ludacris - Sugar - Atlantic
6. Tori Alamaze - Don't Cha - Universal
7. Fannypack - 718 - Tommy Boy
8. Gwen Stefani - Hollaback Girl - Interscope
9. T.I. - Bring 'Em Out - Atlantic
10. Ying Yang Twins - Wait (The Whisper Song) - TVT

beta's eleven (thru twenty)

2005-12-24T11:06:00.000-08:00

Turning down any and all offers of year-end thoughts and empirical numerical rankings, and just barely being able to rank and file ten things for the imminent Pazz & Jop clusterfuck, here's more scrapple from the apple, some not in the Top Ten just because P&J is a numbers game and I tend to shade populist rather than wave lone banners over there.

Gathering my year-end thoughts, I oft-times realize that maybe I'm not a pop music critic at all, as I'll be damned if I heard the year's finest as posited in inumerable glossy mags and whatnot. While house-sitting over the holidays, I finally saw me some Fuse, getting my first exposure to Bloc Party, Le Tigre, Annie, and Missy videos, not to mention finally seeing the "Galang" video (okay, there's an island of women that don't know how to dance? and why had I never noticed that a chorus of blazing purple haze is a drug reference to be bleeped out?). That said, this is what registered:

11. Link Wray : Wray's Three Track Shack
This just made his passing all the more bittersweet. Playing this for people never fails to blow minds.

12. Goldmund : Corduroy Road
This spare, sparse, solo piano work from one Keith Kenniff, gossamer as it was, was crucial to making this Seattle Weekly CDR-Go! mix hang together like it did, like smoke near the ceiling, or a Civil War-era Satie, playing in a greenhouse comprised of the fading plates of Matthew Brady photos. The other Type titles I came across, like Sanso-Xtro's Sentimentalist, were uniformly delightful.

13. Gang Gang Dance : God's Money
Discussing GGD way back when, I noted its scraps and cheapness. Who knew they would turn this crisp, so expertly ornate, and razor-etched so quickly, either when just clacking and hovering in place or suddenly shooting through the stratosphere at the crack of a snare? It would be impossible to mistake them as ragged and improv; now they're an odd, immaculate pop band.

14. Satwa : Satwa / Lula Cortes y Ze Ramalho : Paebiru
Another crucial component of my SW mix, these two discs tipped off open ears to what other pleasurable treasures grew in Northeast Brazil, far from Tropicalia's plastic leaves and synthetic creeper vines, as well as Nascimento's urban corner club. The drawing of two long-haired angels sitting cross-legged in a forest clearing on the Satwa disc encapsulated the spirit of this fourth-stream music perfectly. While in Costa Rica, winding through the verdure slowly getting hacked to make more grasslands for chewing cows, the receding spirit of the rainforest grew crescent once again through the airing of this music.

15. Judee Sill : Dreams Come True - hi, i love you right heartily here - new songs
A package that was simultaneously extravagent, colorful, lovingly-rendered, biographically-illuminating, and completely user-unfriendly, this unfinished third album from Judee Sill fulfilled her statement about her influences being "Bach, Pythagoras, and Ray Charles" by embracing the spirit of the latter on this life-affirming set.

16. Antony & the Johnsons : I Am A Bird Now
The ideal for a late winter's evening listen (meaning 4pm), I ever so slightly cooled on the disc, mostly due to the parade of lesser voices sent to spar yet ultimately grovel before that maddening ever-warble of Antony. He also put on one of the most self-effacing and disarmingly funny live shows I saw all year.

17. Stephan Mathieu : The Sad Mac / Mountains : Mountains
Exquisite multi-textured electronic minimalism from one of its finest practitioners, utilizing ancient wire recordings, Jacques Tati soundtracks, Handel, Monteverdi, and a crashing Macintosh Classic II.

The once-Brooklyn duo of Brendon Anderegg and Koen Holtkamp, already building up an exquisite catalog with their Apestaartje imprint, reach an apex here. Oddly enough, their designer would come into my work to fine-tune the cover shot of laundry drying on an enormous boulder, a temporal red house erected on top.

18. Dominik Eulberg : Kreucht & Fleucht
Unable to keep up with the prodigal gushing forth of German house music, it takes an expertly navigated path across such raging waters by biologist extraordinaire Eulberg to get a worthwhile glimpse of all the current currents. It doesn't hurt to have four bangers by wunderkind Robag Wruhme, though even I can't stomach the vocals on "This World." That said, my friend at EMI in Europe just laced me up with the Wighnomy Bros./ Robag Wruhme Remikks Potpourri set, and it's killer. I'm sure to be discussing it later on.

19. The Juan Maclean : Less Than Human (and remixes)/
Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom : The Days of Mars
It took the peeling of layers by remixers like Cajmere, Prins Thomas and Lindstrom, and Booka Shade to reveal the melancholy and paranoia teeming under the veneers of even the most hedonistic of dance idioms.

The Days of Mars is easily the most misunderstood record of the year, with all the focus being on its evocation of the past (meaing Klaus Schulze or whatever 70's reference you wish to insert here), but not understanding why. Almost no-one is engaging their ref. to Bryher (save for this excellent post and interview at Kid Shirt) and how this music recollects a time of war, be it WWII or the secret war that the American art conscious barely even registers, much less the feminine presence and intuitive influence that separates it from its previous Mars-slanted practitioners. It mesmerizes, and to recapitulate an earlier musing, it focuses the mind so that you too can create.

20. Luny Tunes and Baby Ranks : Mas Flow 2
Or as Lil Jon said when confronted with reggaeton: "Whaaaa???" "Yeah!"

beta wishes u happy x

2005-12-24T08:31:00.000-08:00

beta boots made for walking

2005-12-22T10:32:00.000-08:00

Perhaps the passing of the transit strike deadline last week made me be prepared for once when the NYC strike finally happened this week. For once, I had a contingency plan and followed through with it, packing up a roller bag with a week's worth of clothes and making arrangements to stay in the city. As I made my rounds around the city that last Monday night with bags in tow, I felt awkward, pinata-full of possessions, like a tourist in my own city.

Staying down in Chinatown now, I embrace this strange newness, my locus shifted, the geography tilted and rearranged. Locations and destinations once so distant and difficult to access are now just down the block, but when I suddenly flash on a book to reference, a name to look up in my library, a song to spin, they are distant, as tactile as a dream. Until the lines run again, I can't even fathom getting back out to Brooklyn.

Now, I walk thirty blocks up to Union Square and back, each day taking a new route, re-learning how the streets work down here, their orders, the differences of each corner as it unfurls before me at new angles. My surroundings are in flux, too. Yesterday morning, I kept hearing the sounds of old Papa-sans hacking up phlegm as they shuffled through Sara D. Roosevelt Park, but this morning, it's the beeps and whistles of men unloading palettes from trucks along Bowery, intersections with NYPD flapping their hands at traffic, and Bassist Punk Wanted fliers fluttering across the street from CBGB's.

I forgot how deeply lodged I was in my routines, my ruts, my pathways. Knowing the way home, I never deviated from the treaded gray line. I've lived in Brooklyn the entirety of my time in New York, and most crucial, I've never moved. By the time the lease comes back around, this will be the longest I've ever lived in any one place my entire life! And I've developed a blindspot to such sediment.

Comforts are now replaced with an uncertainty that is not at all disdainful. Staying in a crowded apartment in the city, I am thrilled by the odd new sounds. One morning, I awaken to a ricocheting sound, like ping-pong balls in a popcorn hopper, bouncing loudly outside my window. No longer ensconced in my own lethean green room, with my stereo blasting, my routine settled, with water ready for that first cup, breakfast already decided, and new packages dropping through the mail daily, I sit silently in a new pad, uncertain of what will occur next, where everyday items are in this foreign household.

I listen for these new curious sounds: how the old radiators in each bedroom gargle and hiss into a warm though discordant chorus, while the heating pipes in my room and in the bathroom ping in polyrhythms. Outside the door, I swear the neighbors have a fucking aviary: innumerable squawks and chirps and bickering beaks can be heard nattering and singing at all hours of the day. For once, the sounds of birds do not emanate from inside my own room.

beta back in tx

2005-12-18T09:14:00.000-08:00

That's a "Tasty Animal Collective" tee-shirt, thank you very much.

Of all the airports to be purgatorial in, being grounded at Memphis International Airport for a good six hours may be the most tolerable. Watching the FedEx planes lift against the newspaper-gray skies, or else staring into the beige cubicle barriers surrounding the secretive security table, I continually remove my headphones so as to better hear the stacks of Stax hits continually being piped into the terminals. You can buy Elvis tees or the Sun emblem emblazoned on all sorts of gee-gaws, or peruse those weird German tins that house the greatest hits of James Brown and Bob Marley, all the while listening to Aretha Franklin, Sam & Dave, Clarence Carter, Booker T. and the MGs. Best of all is that some mighty fine BBQ from Interstate is served, and so I help myself to the pulled pork platter with slaw and brown-sugar beans while I wait for the next flight to Texas. Bummed that they are out of sweet potato pie, I console myself instead with "Sock it to Me" cake, an unholy marriage of poundcake with a swirl of maple syrup inside, all of it smothered in thick white icing.

This is by far the most scattered trip I have ever undertaken. I'm back not even a month later for yet another wedding, this time in Pleasanton, Texas, and having made all sorts of plans to see family and friends last time, I make zero plans now. Shoot, I don't even know how to get to the chapel in Pleasanton, much less the town itself. I rent a car, but for the life of me, can't figure which company I used. It starts with an A, so maybe Alamo? Nope. Advantage? No reservation under that name. Having spent a total of twelve hours in airports and planes, my mind is deranged enough that I just skip the car debacle so as to be out of the terminal. Stepping outside, I realize I didn't even check the weather forecast before I left, and South Texas is as chilly as New York, hovering about in the low 30s. Of course, I neglected to pack a coat or warm jacket, so I'm freezing right away.

The wedding is a hoot though, the only kind of wedding that I know and truly enjoy. It stirs my earliest memories of such community affairs. Everyone from all the small towns that my family comes from: Gillett, Falls City, Kennedy, Poth, all converge on the festivities, which are held in a giant showbarn. A parade of the seldom-seen members of my extended elderly family are brought up to me by my mother, who re-introduces me to kin who last saw me when I was "this high." I'm almost in tears when I see my godparents again. "Gawddang, you came all the way down from New York City?" they all ask, shocked.

This is how I want my own wedding to be catered: barbecue brisket and sausage with all the fixin's, served with sweet tea and plates of pickles, jalapenos, and white onions, not to mention slices of Mrs. Baird's. Shots of Hot Damn and Pucker Up are peddled about, while my other cousins whip out fresh bottles of Crown they bootlegged in to the festivities. Once properly loaded on BBQ and cheap liquor, the dancing starts, and I get to partake in the Grand March, and follow it up with the Cotton-Eyed Joe and the notorious Chicken Dance. My littlest cousin, not yet five, keeps pulling out ridiculous breakdance moves all night, popping his arms and dropping to the floor to do the Worm with little spurring on and despite the shuffling boots and high heels teetering in dance above him.

beta back and backed up

2005-12-15T07:31:00.000-08:00

Back from yet another sojourn to Tejas (a report forthcoming), but as I rip through all the stacks of bubble-packed tracks, here's what has also come to pixel light:

Moistworks musing about my apartment vacancy

Dusted musing about the magick of Ms. Judee Sill

Trudging through the Tzadik catalog

beta runs miami

2005-12-07T11:41:00.000-08:00

Brief bits about the Fonotone box set and the American Primitive II set. The latter underwent a bit of that ol' Pudd'nhead Wilson/ Those Extraordinary Twins sort of separation from a piece about No-Neck Blues Band (which will run at a later date).

Speaking of being late, I almost never link these articles that run down in the MIA, unlike Ricky Williams: Dirty Three, Impulsive!, Lightning Bolt, The Orb, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Ennio Morricone, Tod Dockstader, and Edu K. In part because the New Times edit process seems to always put words in my mouth, as the latter example apparently has me referencing early-80's favela comps. What am I, Diplo?

beta and the black queen

2005-12-05T11:54:00.000-08:00

Goddesses abound!

***

Still spending my nights plowing through The White Goddess; it makes evident my slippage from fast-reader to snail-slow. Good thing my reference in the AC article is within the first few pages. That author Robert Graves casually references 12th century esoteria and name-drops thirteen different names of tree spirits in Welsh myth doesn't help, and in fact embodies his own claims about the obfuscating nature of the Lapwing , whose role, he notes is to "disguise the secret."

***

The villainess of the Chronicles of Narnia?

***

Finally get to watch Suspiria last night, at the suggestion of Mike P. And while it has all the earmarks of Italian horror (specifically Dario Argento), meaning strange jumps in knowledge; characters that disappear for no reason; new characters never previously mentioned yet integral to the story; memory lapse; a secret clouded by temporary amnesia yet recollected at the last instant; but it's still a stunner. Even the wallpaper looks delirious, the reds always opulent and blood-tint, but the blues and greens revelatory and lavish as well. But what occult figure hides behind the evil and murder? The Black Queen.

***

Overheard on the subway, a lady discuses at great length her travails while sleeping on subways, talking to these hip-hop guys at First Ave., and a woman who has stolen her songs, to where she can no longer play the guitar, because she can't afford the amp or the socket to plug it in. She also insists that John Lennon is the next Jesus Christ, though I realize in retorspect she just said "John," which could mean anyone.

Lastly, she wants to set the record straight:

"I am not a psychotic devil, so I wish people would stop calling me that."

beta finally feels feels for real

2005-11-28T12:11:00.000-08:00

Animal Collective
@ Webster Hall
Sunday, November 20

Finally able to get a few words in edge-wise regarding Feels, under the clever title I done conjured up, "Through the Grass Darkly." Few pieces mentioned the female presence on the album, which I may have been a bit too explicit in naming. Ran out of room to tie the epigraph from the Graves book back into the record itself, so perhaps that is just implicit. It's cheating somewhat, as Avey Tare and I had discussed the book some months prior to the album's release. It was by mere happenstance that I stumbled upon a copy of The White Goddess myself some few weeks back, and have been dipping into it ever so slowly, like some sort of chilly moonbath, the kind described by Anais Nin in Spy in the House of Love. Was this what they were up to, conjuring the beloved through the slow ripples of sound and their poesy?

Live, I am always astounded by three things: how the crowds grow at each return to a New York stage, how much more gear they have each time, and how strange the band is. They are always ahead of the album released, and tonight was no different. Many new songs were between the familiar tones and jangles of songs from Feels and Sung Tongs (and at least three songs that mention getting nekkid), and whoever might have been there for the hits had to wiggle and squirm through large swaths of the show that featured no guitar whatsoever, just layers of embryonic voices and ebbing tides of noise. Word is that the group is moving away from using the guitar at all, and watching how both Avey Tare and Deakin approach that thing, you can sense that technique is secondary to the generating of energy on the open strings. The next album may be more like the back half of Feels, meaning voice and piano, drifting further from the entrapping isles of both 'rock' and 'free-folk.'

Not from the show, but from the live disc accompanying the first 1000 copies of it:

"Loch Raven (Live)"

Konono No. 1
@ S.O.B.'s
Thursday, November 17

While Animal Collective always overwhelms the senses with the unexpected, the trance-inducing, this stateside show by Congo collective Konono No.1 was underwhelming, to say the least. Anyone who has become enamored with Konono's backstory (a good review here) of amplification via car batteries and percussion made from jeep parts, their voices broadcast by loudspeaker would've surely expected something far more hypnotic, distorted, and LOUD for the live experience. Expecting a pineal-pummeling of likembe trepanning into my skull, I instead got something far more pedestrian and politely-mixed. There was a slight trance element to the three half-hour songs that comprised the main set, but it was at such a low volume that it never once threatened to overwhelm the senses or make me forget the uptight bald guy who insisted on putting his forearm into my low back when I got within a foot of his 'space.' You know it's a bad sign when the NPR sector turns out (not to mention dudes from Pavement, Boredoms, Oneida, and Christian Marclay's djTrio in the crowd), but much as it is in their native country, their own people care little for the music they conjure.

My initial flush at seeing the show not abated, here is a link to a Moistworks post I did about mbira/likembe. Ears may connect the sounds of the Ituri pygmies and Francis Bebey back to the Animal Collective, something I wouldn't discourage. An early working title for Feels was African Speaker, a reference back to the raw, mesmerising sound of that Congotronics record.

heep see

2005-11-22T14:52:00.000-08:00

Long-unlistened-to records I dragged back from Texas...

Throbbing Gristle - DoA
This pressing has that infuriating banding, so that the little noises segue without warning into Genesis's violin dirges or the sound of crumpled found cassettes. Meaning that as much as I'd want to spin it between Ilitch or Tolerance records, I can never figure out where that lump of Hambuger Lady quivers. The Cosey pic reminds me back when my old roommate had a few early-eighties skin mags with Cosey sprawled out; he made a mint from them horny goths on eBay.

Rockers Almighty Dub
Dreads shoota magenta lightning from fingers, turning the title to magma and the island to the more-to-the-point name of "JAM." I haven't listened to this set in a good five years and am pleasantly blown to realize the first side features excellent outbound dubs on Horace Andy tracks like "Money." Vagaries abound, with names like Bullwackies and Joe Gibbs tossed around, as well as piano by Agustis (sic) Pablo.

The Saints - (I'm) Stranded
My copy still skips on "Kissin' Cousins," but the opening notes of the furious "Nights in Venice" slays me.

Public Enemy - You're Gonna Get Yours
b/w Miuzi Weighs a Ton, Rebel Without a Pause 12"
Made more classic with the 98 Posse chillin' in a Strong Island parking garage on a freezing night sleeve.

Red Krayola - Coconut Hotel
This remains one of my favorite free music documents, just for the fact that this odd stuff was being cooked up in Texas. A huge influence on my concepts of what can be played, be it abrupt organ snores, poured water, or just what sort of possible sound you can attempt on a one second song. The Les Blank portraiture that captures Mayo Thompson's beatific smile on the back is just exquisite.

Paul McCartney - II
This record keeps blowing minds. James Murphy plays out a sick edit of "Temporary Secretary" that actualizes its electrocoeur, but I have to constantly warn everyone that it's not as hot as the proto-drill'n bass of "Drakroom" would lead you to believe. There's that patented lack of quality control prevailant in the man's catalog.

P16.D4 - Kuhe in 1/2 Trauer
The record clerk scribbled in Sharpie about "Classic 1984 Experimental Noise! Awesome!" and spinning it again, my only wish is that I had about three more of these Selektion titles, so as to trace the progress of Ralf Wehowsky in the early days. What strikes me the most is how personal and intimate this still sounds, sensical to the self first and foremost, meshing dadaism and industrialism via home-taping, damn the outside and its imposed organizing operations.

J.J. Cale - Naturally...
naturally.

beta missing link

2005-11-21T10:43:00.000-08:00

It took forever for this news to come back to the Carolina hills from Copenhagen. Better tribute has already been paid by odd fellows that spent their formative days looking for that true fire of existence in a world of horrific absurdity and prosaicness, guys named Pete Townshend, Neil Young, Bob Dylan. Some fine words going at ILM too (including all sorts of live trax getting posted).

I have spent a good three months with a two-disc set of the man's self-revival in the early 70's, when the music of Dylan, the Band, and the Rolling Stones made the man go, "Shit, these Canucks and Brits keep taking on the guise of the American hills, whereas I came up in the back country and can beller it ferreal." Link then proceeded to do so in a little wood shack, excavating a music that draws from the underground currents that such deep wells as gospel, folk, country, and hillbilly stomp all take as their source. Dig some of this coal, black and ever-burning, much like Link will be up in the skies beyond:

Link Wray "Fire and Brimstone"
Link Wray "Right or Wrong (You Lose)"
Link Wray "Take Me Home Jesus"

beta in tx pt. 3

2005-11-19T09:24:00.000-08:00

Granny is crestfallen that I don't regularly attend church. I gingerly avoid such discussion and divulging of my life details when I go to visit her on these occasions, as my life as critic of secular music in "that awful New York City" that she recalls from her visit here in the fifties certainly doesn't help her sleep any better at night. One reason I avoid talking to her about music has to do with my uncle, who has recently returned to live in her attic once again, after a scant six months away from the nest in Austin.

It's 1997, my last year in San Antonio, and every Tuesday morning, at that most unholy hour of 1 a.m. to 3 a.m., I have a DJ slot at KSYM. I spin records into the void, with nary a call light or other DJ in sight. Imagining no audience (sort of like now), I loose peculiar, amorphous mixes to drift into the ether. Yes, I am into long pieces and dronescapes anyhow, but I also play such twenty-minute pieces so as to have ample time to plow through and plunder the unused stacks hidden throughout the station, looking for hip-hop twelves and other unmentionables. Scores include everything from Eric B. and Rakim's Follow the Leader to an effervescent Sonia Pottinger rocksteady comp to the Robert Johnson LP box set.

Hoping to reach back into a remote corner of my brain that still retains my piano lessons (and perhaps my recital of "Blue Danube Waltz") from so long ago, I have asked my Granny to start giving me piano lessons once again, perhaps getting a free dinner in the process. It's a weekly affair, and somewhat grueling as my fingers haplessly try to evoke the past patterns and melodic structures that have since crumbled away. Try as I might, they are never to be retrieved, and that guilt of failing both her and my self weighs heavier with each passing week, as practice at home falls away for other, more miscreant activities, which unfortunately take precedence.

So as I sit at her kitchen table one day, awaiting that inevitable piano session, my uncle walks in, and says that he wants to "play me something." He punches in a cassette and a woozy drone fills the air. "Do you know what this is?" he inquires. Of course I do, it's Charlemagne Palestine and his weightless electronic dreampiece, "Three-Fifths," a piece I played on my show earlier that week. Realizing that he taped my show, a sense of dread crawls over me, as I know what's coming next.

"Listen, you're a good kid, but there are forces out there that you may not know about. Have you ever heard of the New Age?"
"You mean that thing that Face from the A-Team now preaches?" I reply, hoping to diffuse the situation.
"Listen, they preach such things as dream control and crystals and whatnot, and it's all a guise for Lucifer. You know his name means light, right?"
I nod with dread.
"Now this music may not affect you, but do you realize that by playing this hypnotic, droning music over the airwaves, you may be imperiling peoples' lives? If someone were on LSD and they heard this, they might go into a trance state, during which a demon could take possession of their body and damn their soul."
"Okaaaaaay..."

And so now I keep my mouth shut about such things, so as to not stir up conversations I'd rather not fall into. My uncle is back around, and I'm curious as to why he didn't make it in Austin. This leads to a lecture about the traffic patterns of Austin, how fast everyone drives and how everyone is a snob in their fancy cars. It's almost the exact same complaint I always hear from my father, despite the fact that they are in two different countries. It's then I realize that my family make for terrible conversationalists, bogging down in the pettiest of gripes and details. His story quickly digresses into talk about a certain hill at 2222 and how fast he had to drive up or down it. Now I don't care what his point is.

What I'm here for is my Granny, to spend some precious time with her. How many more moments we will have together, I am never certain. Since I never go to church, much less the church that she plays organ at every Sunday, I ask her if she will give me a personal recital this Saturday afternoon. The striking news she told me upon my arrival is that she has partial paralysis in her hands, making her unable to perform on the piano any longer, as her pinky can't reach for the higher octaves. Meaning she can only play the more plodding organ. It's strange to think that I haven't heard her play in ages, and yet it's what I recall of her best.

She demurs, but I finally convince her, and so I spend an afternoon in her front parlor, listening to how her swollen, stockinged feet depress the foot pedals to loose the shuddering bass tones, to how her fingers tremble as she carefully traces out the patterns of Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring," the resulting music so fragile, hesitant, fissuring, and most incredible.

beta in tx pt.2

2005-11-16T09:06:00.000-08:00

My granny just had all of her teeth yanked and replaced with new dentures not too long ago. Such a thought lodges deep inside my subconscious, as a few nights back, I dream that I am washing her silver teeth, the mercury polished like little pebbles in the stream of a faucet.

I fear that my teeth may be rotting out of my head, that unseen cavities are gathering force and slowly drilling deeper. When worrisome, my tongue worms for the holes. No dental plan aside from floss and toothpaste in my bag, and having paid for an emergency root canal two summers back, that Marathon Man pain still burns bright in my nerve memory. But when I pay my irregular visit to a Dallas dentist, I am told that there are no problems. Except the mantra of every dentist I have ever opened wide for: "Floss more."

Teeth and suit dry-cleaned, I pack everything to head down to what would be considered my hometown, San Antonio. I keep forgetting that I left the place nearly a decade ago, first for school and then for whatever it is I do now as an adult. Stuck in the labyrinth maze of Gotham, I admit to a small amount of mal du pays, of estrangement and endearment for the River City and its occult currents. My oldest friendships were all formed along its banks, and I return now for a wedding of someone I've known since he was a freshman in high school. Shoot, I still root for the Spurs, trying to block out that the city's dominance extends beyond the hardwood with such lovely entities as Clear Channel and the biggest business of them all, the US military.

While the city is one of the top ten in terms of US population (and a huge target during the Cold War), culturally it barely registers. Despite its swelling college campuses, there's barely a pulse to the city come nightfall, and the city struggles for a decent live music venue (my married friend is trying his own hand at such an endeavor, which should be interesting). But the majority of the city always seems to be tucked into the outskirts, due to the outlying Air Force bases and military hospitals, which make up a huge portion of its population.

Meaning that there many different realities of my home that I have distanced myself from. It's still hard to wrap my head around its loyalty to the meat-grinder of the military. As the rest of the country fails to meet its new recruitment goals, SA exceeds its quotas. Reading that Times article, I'm not sure why these statistics so surprise me, since my best friend from high school, unable to pull himself out of the gutter of drink, signed up for six fucking years, nearly getting himself stationed in Iraq. He's out now, but only after they found a tumor on his pineal gland and dug it out.

As much as I want to forget about the military complex that powers the city, I am reminded of it. Just trying to get to my grandmother's house, a police officer stops our car and we are made to idle under the hot November sun. Fanfare can be heard in the distance, and the next thing you know, there's a military parade marching past on a Saturday afternoon through downtown San Antonio. I get out to start documenting the surreal nature of this thing.

And while tears of laughter are veritably streaming down my face, I see that this one has everything: Women in blue wigs with star-spangled red dresses! An organ grinder gilded in gold perched atop a flatbed! Marching bands making an undisciplined clamor! Beauty pageant losers waving from a funny car with bows on its wheels! ROTC troops that march in place right in the middle of the intersection! Shriners in their fezzes riding around in humvees! And the cherry on top is the Navy Band Octet (pictured) jamming out some Blink-182 and the theme from Dawson's Creek for the derelict crowd that's supporting and hooting at the troops.

beta in tx pt. 1

2005-11-15T13:20:00.000-08:00

The first thing I notice when I arrive in the airport is the amount of critters. Flies, gnats, crickets, either in flight or invisible in mid-chirp, they are prevalent in the air here. Their song rings out, as audible as that of Dallas traffic from the bedroom window.

Dallas has never really been home, despite the outpost that my mother and cat keep, but as my roots shrivel up in the Lone Star State, this remains my most stable place whenever I return. A real bed, a car to gobble petro in as I cruise to the under-plucked used bookstores (hauling in DVDs like Suspiria and Two-Lane Blacktop, but also finding Caetano Veloso's tropicalismo book), a fridge full of Shiner Bock, 500 channels of DirecTV gobbledygook, it's all those comforts of "home."

Gone almost nine months, I'm shocked when I arrive. My cat has lost a good half of her weight, and is as tiny as I've ever seen her. She looks fragile, as if picking her up might crumble her into fur and dust. Running my hand along her back, I can feel every ridge of her bones, can see how her fur has slightly more grease on it, having not been so throughly tongue-bathed as it would've been in the past. She looks old, something I forget with such distance, and who can say what the situation will be like when next I return?

My mom breaks the news that my step-father is being run out of his job after twenty-plus years of service. Meaning their house is going on the market and everything is uncertain, in turmoil. I can only guess what he's going through, as I long ago gave up hope of dedicating myself to some corporate entity, much less having steady employment, not to mention the fact that he's in an inconsolable mood, to where almost nothing can be said to him without setting him off. So I shy away from any mention of the situation. He's fallen victim to the politicking that goes on in any sort of social human interaction, and despite his company's very well-broadcast happy employee image, he's getting run out on a rail, to where he's toxic among his allies still in the company. Everyone has to distance themselves so as to not go out on his leaving train.

The house must be shown to agents, so it's scrubbed clean. If I set a drink glass or a magazine down, take off my shoes, or just turn my back, it's quickly whisked away out of sight. I feel like I'm forgetting everything, misplacing every bit of my paraphernalia, as it moves out from under me. In terms of location, I'm not even sure where I'll be flying into next. What will be "home" when I come back home?

beta cooks, thanks, and ketchups

2005-11-09T16:36:00.000-08:00

Apologies to the three of you out there checking back to see me doing no updates to my blog the last few weeks. Been busy with lots of deadlines and upcoming assignments, not to mention going back for a wedding last week (hopefully my comments on Texas will be forthcoming). Much thanks to those offering condolences on Tupac, too.

Recently:

Fiery Furnaces live at Town Hall in the Village Voice

LCD Soundsystem and the Juan Maclean in the Nashville Scene

And on the racks, my first appearance in SPIN, writing about, of all people, Pugh Rogefeldt, Svensk psych guitar god. It was somewhat thrilling to be national, and to stand at the airport kiosks and read myself, rather than thumb the newest issue of Leg Show.

Since the disc seems to be hard to come by (try Aquarius), I'm posting two choice cuts from Ja, Da a Da!. See if the first ten seconds of "Love, Love, Love" doesn't sound familiar:

Pugh Rogefeldt "Love, Love, Love"

Pugh Rogefeldt "Har Kommer Natten"

(much obliged to DB for the trax and Stephen, my resident Swedish interpreter (who helped me translate titles on Ta Det Lungt earlier this year))

Tupac R.I.P.

2005-11-09T07:59:00.000-08:00

beta opening night

2005-11-08T19:01:00.000-08:00

Through a combination of two assignments discussing outre jazz labels, I have been brought to re-think, re-consider my ideas about improvisation. Or more to the point, why I have abandoned it, in terms of my own music as well as in just listening pleasure.

Maybe that's why I wound up re-watching John Cassavetes's Opening Night. This is the film that Alan Licht once told me should be requisite watching for improvising musicians (he mused if Derek Bailey had ever seen it). And not for that mistaken assumption that Cassavetes's movies are improvised, which they most certainly are not, but crafted to feel as if they are in the actual and as spontaneous as life. The crisis for Gena Rowlands character, as she puts it, is that "I somehow lost the reality of the reality." It's an existential crisis kin to that of the actress in Bergman's Persona, but of course John doesn't package it as such. Instead, it nestles its crises amongst the double-scotch tumbler upending and its resulting slurred "I love you"s that get uttered that the film concerns itself with, of breaking down in public, of no fourth wall as Rowlands continually crumbles on-stage and eschews her scripted lines to instead remind the audience of their role, and the actor fact of this stage (the film is famous for its theatre scenes being shot in front of a real audience). "It's so simple, you just don't see it," she implores, which could correlate to her own aging self, with heavier and heavier doses of drink, she refuses to come to terms with this fact. She imperils the entire play and teeters on the edge of disaster. But who wouldn't toy with the strings, tear the curtains down, as the dialogue of the actual play is fucking atrocious?

The key tenet of improvised music is that it is more real, more actual, more like life is, interacting with people, engaging in dialogue and the moment at hand (maintenant, the French word meaning now, breaks down as "holding in hand"), not in the lock of script or notation or the past. That it is alive somehow, a proper reflection of life. When Tonalamotl played this music, it was the only way that felt natural to us. It was the only way for players of every level, be they strangers or friends, it was the only way for everyone to communicate equally. Trying to script it, to conscribe it in anyway, rang false, and worse than that, it sounded like a disaster when contrasted with anything of the past. It had to keep moving, keep changing. Which is a fine lifestyle, but one at conflict with routine, patterns, and stabilization via simple, rote moves and concision. What good is the ever-present when your show comes on at 7:30pm or when you have to work at 8am?

While improvisation is about social openness, about forum and equality, listening to it becomes its own cult. Most improv is in fact exclusionary, not for the laypeople or the uninitiated. The amount of concentration needed to focus on such music is too demanding for most people (this one included). Not able to give ones senses over to it fully, when it demands all your attention, or to spend the time necessary absorbing it when there's all sorts of new tracks to hear on shuffle. Rather than reflect the random noise bursts and chaos of the world surrounding, I've instead taken to the overlay of shape, meaning, divisible rhythm, the illusion of order and sense in a world that shares little oof these traits by and large. If I can hear the outside improvised, how it devours the orderly stream of reggaeton radio, then why listen for it inside?

beta dresses up for halloween

2005-10-27T14:11:00.000-07:00

Fools learn the hard way not to get in my way. (Sorry if I pre-empt the next few weeks of Beta jokes).

beta dirties three or four

2005-10-26T21:58:00.000-07:00

Rock week didn't quite pan out, as I decline on shows by Take off My Pants and Morning Jacket and Devendra Beanfart, preferring to ensconce myself in baseball playoffs. Of course, I missed this on Monday night, as I ventured out to see the Dirty Three instead with some deliciously drunk Aussies, as well as one drunk Irish girl who is training for the New York Marathon. We arrive in time to see these four guys on stage, with one wooly guy looking like this NBA commentator (whose visage is emblazoned in my mind, if not his damned name), long hook nose, grizzly beard, balding long hair whipping wildly about as he furiously plucks a mandolin with his back to us. What the hell is this band?

Oh, so it is the Dirty Three or rather Four, as they have some tiny dude who may be playing an unplugged violin as far as my ears can tell. Warren Ellis decided that between crack and growing a beard, the latter was the best way to get a divorce. A few years back, after being unable to distinguish between any D3 songs, much less any albums, I had all but given them up. It took a good flask warmth on a night out under a new moon to fully appreciate what it is that the Dirty Three do so well: make music for crying jags. All heaving bosoms, teeth-gnashing, shuddering comedowns, such is the music of sawed fiddle, tears not in beers but in bourbon glasses. Mick Turner, all eight feet of him, blushes in the background, waiting for that moment in the eye of each song's sea storm where he can strum each string as slowly as possible without bringing it all to a stop; Jim White swinging his sticks so that they become as fans, catching and reflecting back the red light districts. The only way to move with them is as if drunk on a pirate ship, staggering, swaying, careening with a slight lack of control.

It's this sorta body movement that leads to me continually bump into this school marm lassy wearing lace gloves and a high-necked collar with granny glasses. Figure she must've just crawled out of the Jersey outback or an attic in the Hamptons, and I can't figure out if she's 22 or 52. Blame it on the red lights, but I realize much later that I have been jostling Neil N. Bobb herself. Time for some mouthwash.

Friday night, it's Oneida, who I have written about plenty o'times, as solid and repetitive as ever. Their first song is about as close to Terry Riley circa Persian Surgery Dervishes as I've ever heard a bar band be, and they take a deliciously long time to even get to the first words of "Each One, Teach One."

By the time DC and I get down to Tonic on Saturday night, we're soaked, socks all squishy from the outburst. If my toes are uncomfortable, how can I possibly stand for a band that to their credit, really does sound as annoying as a pterodactyl? But what am I expecting seeing squawky no-wave at Tonic anyhow? Downstairs, in the amontillado casks, I get enrapt in the film flickering against one wall. There's excellent softcore sex every two minutes or so, and it's really no surprise that it's an Emmanuelle movie, but with a long-haired black Emmanuelle as well as a short white-haired one that looks like Penelope Houston.

It sets the mind for the Magik Markers, whose wild mood swings from god awful to God in Awe Full are tough to take. Perpetually on tour, they veer all over the highway, though a year on, I notice they actually play more than just flail about. There's no head-butting guitars, or spazzing out. No blood drawn, very little hair-whipping. Pete plays trumpet into his skins, Leah every once in awhile tip-toes over to the piano and creates new chords with her nails, while Elisa stumps for God times, or at least better posture, making a holy chant about shoulders back, chin up, face light.

beta turns the heater on

2005-10-25T15:47:00.000-07:00

While I wait for the landlady to realize that it actually is cold and crank up the soda machine-sized furnace in my apartment (which will make us schvitz and get dry bloody noses instead), a friend wrote me today to say how much he's obsessing over Keith Hudson.
Yeah, me too.

From the still out of print Torch of Freedom here's some warmth:

Keith Hudson - "Turn the Heater On"
Keith Hudson - "So Cold Without Your Love"

beta bids you come on

2005-10-22T13:12:00.000-07:00

Come On!

heep see

2005-10-20T19:02:00.000-07:00

AFX
Hangable Auto Bulb
"Laughing Butane Bob"

Has it really been ten years? Not exactly, as I don't think I was enthralled enough with the Warp label and the enigmatic Aphex to seek out any and all Dick James records I could until late college, so perhaps I mail-ordered both of these twelves back in 1998. I also wound up with weird twelves by Woodenspoon and Rubber Johnny, who I'm told are not actually the man himself, but I'll be damned if it's really JP Buckle twisting and tightening up that taut snare flurry.

Simon Reynold's recent Aphex Twin piece puts his prime output only up to "Alberto Balsam," but these are my favorites sides, falling as they do between my two favorite Aphex albums. At the time, this was impossible music, delirious to spin and imagine the future possibilities. Friends of mine, excellent musicians in their own right, would marvel at similar tracks, like Squarepusher's "Port Rhombus," its melancholic melody entwined with knotty rolls and rubbery basslines, trying to figure out a way to make all those changes in real-time and finally giving up. A shame that most proponents of this music went up their own arses soon after and that if I really want to hear drum and bass, that now means the new Lightning Bolt.

I also discussed these "Hangable Auto Bulbs" (along with topics ranging from Revenant to reggae) for one of them Stylus Magazine podcasts, y'know, Stycast.

Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom
The Days of Mars
"Rise (DFA Remix)"

Matos's disavowal (near the bottom) of this record only confirms my suspicions that this is the aural equivalent of Ritalin. While to his ears, it just sounds like they set up some presets on their gear and left the room (which is sorta what they do for some of their pristine installations), there's a ridiculous amount of arpeggial weaving at work here. Of course, I am into what they do, and I find myself getting stuff done while spinning it, such as hitting deadlines, oiling floorboards, alpha-beta-izing white labels, or checking my thread count. Tom Breihan's comment about this being the perfect album to look at NYC skyscrapers is spot-on, whether he realizes it or not. This drawing on their homepage is from some Nazi architecture sketches.

Dominik Eulberg
Flora & Fauna
"Die Invasion der Taschenkrebse"

It's tough to mention Eulberg without referencing Phillip Sherburne's worthy piece. I still have yet to scope the bio, much less translate the deliciouly elongated titles for his tracks (maybe I should make my German friends translate for me? Or else find the nicest way of putting the above title as "Invasion of the Cancerous Sacs"), and when I did a Stycast recently, I played one of these Eulberg tracks just to make Todd Burns tell me what he knows. A biologist or horticulturalist that makes such the case for intelligent design in nature's patterns? Ja.

Isolee
Wearemonster
"Face B"

I don't know if I've ever worked harder to keep an album on my radar this year and in my sightline than I have for Isolee (yeah, more Sherburne links, I know). Sent to me in one of those little slipcases, I generally lose such wafers the moment they're out of the mailers, and have dozens stacked up that will never ever see the laser-light. And after months of forgetting about it on my iPod or forgetting to dig it back out from under that pile, it's finally paid off for me. It's hard to pick just one track out of it, as each one tucks so many pleasures in so many pockets (sorta like that thing I do every year at the end of winter, where I tuck a few bucks in a coat, so that next time around, I'm nouveau riche), and what may not sound like my favorite the first minute in, unzips and stacks up to reveal its treasures (mega bucks). Juxtapose the way that he uses guitar textures here versus how Boards of Canada listlessly do and it's easy to see who among them is really moving things forward and which one will place in my Top Ten at the end of the year.

beta hate beards, luv Oneida

2005-10-19T12:23:00.000-07:00

It actually happened last summer, when my levels of Devendra Banhart reached toxic levels at his Bowery Ballroom show. That reaction then is described in some detail in my first paragraph about Cripple Crow, and goes along with my disappointment with that album as a whole. Granted, it's not as killer as Nick Catucci's piece, but that axe he's grinding shaves more than beards.

Just the same, my fondness for Oneida perhaps dims in the light of my editor Chuck Eddy's love for them, which may be what led to this gi-normous spread I got to lavish on them for this week's main Music section.

This song below was one of the few highlights on that Rough Trade new artists cover old artists comp from a few years back. Of course, Oneida's "eternally well-read and repetition-happy" (Chuck's words) traits work exceptionally well with this James "Blood" Ulmer joint. And you know how much I luv Ulmer.

Oneida- "Jazz is the Teacher, Funk is the Preacher"

heep see

2005-10-14T16:00:00.000-07:00

Fiery Furnaces
@ Town Hall

Lord how I used to love that first one, despite the huge falling out I had with my old friend, who drums on it, his style intimately familiar to my ears. Digging it out today, I'm almost shocked at how well it's held up, since after waxing about Blueberry Boat, Blue Very Bloat has not been much fun to return to.

And so they finally return to rocking and of course it's when everyone is seated in Town Hall. The rhythm section is BoC Godzilla stompy, smashing flat most of the studio nuances. I am shocked that the painful listening that Rehearsing my Choir is at home (it sounds as inaudible as the title suggests) actually shakes loose live with some listenable song-ish qualitites. Of course, my guest, who is not familiar with how the songs are changed around or whatever it is that the devout cling to with the band, finds them bland and boring, with every change the same, the organ flourishes wanky, and Eleanor too stiff and uptight, her singing flat and not right. At least they're not doing that "We're bored of our songs too in a deconstructed sense, so let's do it all as a Vegas medley" that they did last time.

My live review of this show will run at the Voice next week.

The Juan Maclean
@ Delancey Lounge

As I grind out a longish piece on both Juan and James Murphy, the sleek, impervious chrome gives way to something darker, more brittle. Live, the robotic facade is shattered and the album's glossy, synthetic coruscations grow barbed and sawtoothed, the aerodynamic beats harried and frayed. The remixes (Lindstrom and Prins Thomas's "Tito's Way" is ludicrous in its analog elongations while the Cajmere remix of "Give Me" sashays between ecstasy and acid) shake something different loose with each producer, all of which hinges on the alternately vampiric/bloodless vocals of Nancy Whang and what they do to them.

Metric
@ Bowery Ballroom

I haven't heard this group at all, but since I run into the PR folks who routinely send me stuff, maybe I just subconsciously buried it in the stacks. They come out to "O Superman" and Emily Haines, classy in her little black dress, gets even more classy by taking off her heels to do this running in place dance barefoot. Sasha's New Yorker blurb mentioned they would've been big in the early nineties, but with the ear towards Laurie Anderson and Blondie, I think it'd have to be the early eighties. That's how catchy it is, if anachronistic. My bourbon thankfully helped me forget the most political lines of the evening.

Excepter/ Yura Yura Teikoku
@ North Six

Coming across some Strawberry Fields Forever in that dank, permanently new paint odious-smelling dungeon of the N.6 backstage area, what better balloon mindstate could there be for Excepter? A hissing kingsnake throb, some smoke machine hooliganism, fauxhawked analords, and just as it seems to stick together like resin, it's just some sticky shit. Call it Village People capped woodblock abuse, or Karl Malden karaoke, but my hatless Beatles haircut is seriously bummed by the proceedings. My friend says it's excellent torture for his studio engineer.

Yura Yura Teikoku (whose name I don't even figure out until Nick's entry the next day) are locked in from the start. It's fine group interlocking, extended without dropping off the edge, but not as jammy as Nick's take suggested. Both the bassist (rocking that slimming black cypher like Keijo Haino) and the guitarist have trousers that match their amps. More than anything, it sounds like dudes that are into Groundhogs and ZZ Top but with the blues root of their boogie snipped. It's Heat, but not Hooker. If they weren't Japanese (yes, I made the Wisconsin jab), it's doubtful so many folk would have shook loose to see them, but it's not like I keep track of every hard rock band from Japan, so maybe they're huge in Brooklyn.

beta eyes without a face

2005-10-11T08:05:00.000-07:00

Not quite realizing it, I picked out a double feature in the form of Vincent Price's centennial feature film, The Abominable Dr. Phibes and Georges Franju's Les Yeux Sans Visage ("Eyes Without a Face" for the Billy Idol-obsessed). Both are classics (prob'ly why the NYPL carries 'em), either of the cheese or realistic chill variety. Won't spend much time lamenting how CGI has scrubbed clean horror backdrops even as they made them more 'scary' and dungeon-drippy, so that once-campy but kaleidoscopic vision of set design and costuming has fallen haplessly deep into muted earth-tones and realistically drab monochromes, to where either in the deranged and ornate dwellings of the revenge-bent Dr. Phibes or else the ensconced black and white laboratory of Dr. Génessier, the films still shudder with wide-eyed horror in the present.

Both movies deal with that peculiar horror of being faceless, to where interacting with society is all but impossible and life of any import is dead even while they still 'live'. Too hideous are the visages of Dr. Phibes and the disfigured daughter of Dr. Génessier, Louise, each burned to the point of losing that most-individualistic of human traits, their face. Now obviously, horror excels when it can best magnify the dread of the everyday into something truly monstrous, be it the cave-day dread of untrackable squeaks, of being lost in the woods, of not being able to run fast enough, of the dark, but being marred beyond recognizability is a frightening prospect that even in a casual viewer causes tremors to the core. The infamous scene wherein Génessier slowly fillets and peels the face off of a young girl is still stomach-turning some forty years on.

Beyond mere parallel plot points, the engine of both men's vengeance is of a rationalized sort of madness, gripping both doctors as they try to atone for accidents beyond their professional grasps. Being doctors (Phibes was also a masterful organist, making him prone to brooding meditations on his glowing ruby pipe organ in-between murders and the winding up of his inflatable jazz band, Dr. Phibes and his Clockwork Wizards) both men are used to controlling both life and death, of being all-powerful, able to save lives, especially their beloved, to exert their wills against all odds. So whether its Phibes' inability to save his wife from a car accident death or Génessier's helplessness in the disfigurement of his own daughter from such a car fire, both men are fueled by a desire to eradicate their mistakes, their own feebleness, by muuuuuuurder.

Phibes is the classic madman, hiding in a castle of some sort, taking the lives of the nine surgeons who were unable to save his young wife on the operating table in twisted variations of the plagues of the Pharoahs. There's a contraption to replicate hail inside a car, a birdcage full of bats, a brussel sprout syrup that makes locusts eat the face off a nurse, a fat Hebrew neckpiece to correspond to each death, for no other reason than to copycat such poetic pestilence nine times. Believe me, it's far easier to create wax busts for each victim, get the special necklaces made, and then melt each face after death than to be prostrate in the face of unyielding fate and admit that your wife is dead and there's little you can do about it.

What makes Dr. Génessier, as Georges Franju tells in an interview, so frightening is that he is someone quite rational behaving irrationally. He's delivering a paper on skin grafts, he's running a clinic successfully, he's taking in stray dogs, he's dealing with the traumatic 'loss' of his daughter by immersing himself in his life-saving work. Such realism made me wonder through most of the film if this might have been a real case after all. Rather than accept his error (the car accident is mentioned as being his fault), his mistakes, his wrongheadness, admit that he's destroyed his daughter even while she still lives, he'd sooner take to kidnapping and performing horrific operations on both young girls and lost dogs, heedless of the consequences or his own daughter's feelings or his own certain yet spiraling madness, and spend forever just trying to mask his own mistakes.

beta in ozla

2005-10-10T14:52:00.000-07:00

I need to get out of the labyrinth or something, outrace the rats. Buying a ticket for November is just not soon enough. Gray turn the skies and press down like wet newsprint. Feeling just as soggy and uninspired. Not that it affects my mental wandering, which includes this jaunt to outer LA and Oz.

Since both albums are one forty-minute long noise guitar track, here's a wobbly remix of Triste as done by LAFMS member, Tom Recchion that sounds like a one-man band version of In a Silent Way or something equally brilliant and batty:

Oren Ambarchi - "Triste (Remake by Tom Recchion)"

beta luv betty and/or bettye

2005-10-06T14:01:00.000-07:00

Betty Lavette - "Let Me Down Easy"

This is one of the first soul songs I ever got into, as my old drinking buddy Jones turned me onto the Best of Calla Records and Dave Godin's Deep Soul Treasures one Lone Star'd night. That twinkle of vibraphone, that stinging twang, that sweet voice growing more desperate and frayed with each verse, that pop sheen that just hints at the fissures of heartache beneath, it all came together here, and led me into much deeper, darker fields of human soul.
So it was a thrill to have Bettye return to the scene, even if she has to go through Joe Henry's embalming machine to get to the present. Musing on her down yonder in Nashville...

beta shops at d'ags

2005-10-04T11:10:00.000-07:00

overheard conversation in the checkout line at D'Agostino's grocery store between two guys in their mid-thirties:

First Guy: "So there's this video coming out of old footage from CBGB's and punk clubs in the eighties."
Second Guy: "It's hard to believe that you used to be a punk-rocker. I just can't see you like that at all. All angry at the world and shit."
First Guy: "Yeah, back then it was all about the music. Punk before it was fashion. Guys like Joe Strummer and the Ramones were my fucking idols. Joe, he was a spokesman for a generation. Music was all I cared about when I was eighteeen, twenty. Now all I think about are my kids. "
Second Guy: "I'd like to be the spokesman for my generation."
First Guy: "You can't be now. You're too old."
Second Guy: "I'm too old to get up on stage?"
First Guy: "Nah, you can still get up, but you're too old to be the spokesman for a generation. It's already past your time."
Second Guy: "I'm too old?"
First Guy: "Yeah, you're too old to be spokesman. You can't be over twenty-five. The kids will never trust you."
Second Guy: "What do you mean? What about Kanye West?"
First Guy: "Who's she?"

heep see

2005-10-02T08:22:00.000-07:00

Recent movies:

The Saragossa Manuscript (dir. Wojciech Has)- Having caught this once before when Captain Trip and Scorsese brought it round to the revival circuit, I could barely recall the title all these years until just recently, though it appeared to be a different edit than either Jerry Garcia or myself remember. The notes mention his appreciation not only of its surreal, circular, interlocking (story within a story within a story within a story...) dream nature of the movie (which is about as trip-structured as any movie I've ever born witness to) and a particular scene wherein a guy keeps moving his bed so as to not have Death stand at the foot of the bed. That scene's not here, and I swear at the movie's end (when I saw it in the theater), it returns all the way to the beginning, to the first soldiers who come across the manuscript, thus completely the journey back to its outermost rings.

Double Trouble (dir. John Paragon)- Turning away from the boring Yankees game on a Saturday afternoon, I stumble upon this early nineties gem. It must've been a knock-off of Jean-Claude Van Damme's Double Impact (full disclosure: I saw this 'twin' movie in the theater and at least three other times) with the Barbarian Brothers playing mullet-topped, neckless, unable-to-put-their-arms-down ripped, Raiders mid-riff tee wearing, svelte-waisted good/bad brothers. It really makes Van Damme's twin movie play like Dead Ringers or something arty in comparison. An obliviously absurd action movie masterstroke (in the brain-crippling sense).

The Black Sabbath Story- Okay, I skipped the whole story just to watch the early live footage. Ozzy, in his somewhat awkward, babyfat, just kinda weird Birmingham lad days, is hypnotizing. By the time of his acid and coke-crazy success period, where he claps along far off the beat and does embarrassing air guitar moves in Elvis-white jumpsuits, he's dreadful. And "Snowblind" kinda loses its edge when he yells "COCAINE!" at the end of every verse.

La Dolce Vita (dir. Federico Fellini)- Maybe I will give it all up to be a publicist.

Short Cuts (dir. Robert Altman)- Captain Planet and his Planeteers? Jeez, the early Clintonian-nineties never felt more antiquated and distant.

Mother and Son (dir. Alexander Sokurov)- Realize I had already seen this gorgeous, austere movie a few years back (must be getting old). What kind of lenses were they shooting with? The opening scene seems to be a tableau, angled oddly as if a plane. The colors are painterly, exquisitely textured, with landscapes that have infinite depth, and yet there is a distorted flatness and fuzziness as well, almost dizzying in its toggle between the two dimensions. The shot of chilly Russian winds moving through the golden fields of wheat is but one of many perfect shots.

Grizzly Man (dir. Werner Herzog)- Okay, Treadwell was batshit (feeling the heat of fresh bear shit in amazement but one small indicator) but Herzog was right in his appraisal of the man's nearly-unrealized cinema talents. The unintentional capture of nature (meaning, without him fixinng his hair in the shot or pretending he is some sort of action hero) on the shots of humanless trails, with the wind at play, bending boughs and grassblades is evocative, poetic, the accidental amateur equal of Malick, Tarkovsky, Sokurov.

beta luv shirley and june

2005-10-01T10:57:00.000-07:00

Dusting off the Moistworks to talk about autumn, and that quality of voice from the lovely ladies of the British Isle, Shirley Collins and June Tabor, and how they sound in the chilly wind.

beta luv kim

2005-09-28T14:08:00.000-07:00

Unknown - "Oh Girl, Stand Up"
Unknown - "Pride of the Nation"

I've pondered the Sublime Frequencies label before, be it in Burma, India, or Sumatra, their dreamworlds aswirl in my cloudy head. In discussing the music of Iraq and N. Korea down in Miami though, it was hard to remain swaddled in such sonic reverie. Stuck inside the fences and boxes provided (be it on TV or in the delivery service), it's tough to be roused awake. For once, SF eschews dream collage for ever-waking reality. Call it Mission Accomplished.

Where do these discs fit in though? Is the label trying to be relevant? As Alan Bishop put it in a recent issue of Arthur magazine: "Don't be fooled by the fear patrol out there who say that terror is only a minute away. It's all an illusion…The fear of terror being spread is a tactic employed as a mirage to keep the herd from experiencing phenomena beyond the pasture." Rather than trade in sensationalism, it reveals these highly-pressurized, brutally repressed cultures and how music comes forth under such duress. Both the Iraq and Pyongyang discs resound in the present rather than in dream. Which is a somewhat chilly way to have to wake up these days.

beta luv bob and amandy

2005-09-27T14:55:00.000-07:00

So, yes, the wedding was lurvely, but my memory card seems to be leaning towards the memory hole, hence no pics of the blushing bride and groom, Amanda and Brent. Ah well, it was right along the Hudson, offering a delightful view of that not-so filthy river (though I'm more of an East River man myself). Being back in nature (aka, a small lil town with American flags flapping on Main Street) was mind-clearing, unlike the Irish carbombs that went oh so well with the little handmade Nazi-Buddha chocolates for every guest. Breathing among trees and getting hypnotized by coruscating little ripples of water...guess I'm still a country boy after all.

And their vows even referenced Bob! They had to get married before the PBS thingy on Bob Dylan came on, although during would've been perfect (no vows would've been exchanged with both of their eyes glued to the tube). I mean, who else in their right mind would get married to the strains of Blood on the Tracks as done by string quartet? That's just sick!

I tried to call Amanda when No Direction Home was on, but the phone was unplugged. I was enrapt as well, even though by Tuesday night it ultimately came out as further mythologizing, scrubbed clean of such things like collector-scum thievery (in the name of "Musical Expeditionary" sez Bob as he helped himself to tons of old folk records, some of which can be heard here), punch-pulling by Dylan's manager on his own interviews, cold Joan Baez-diss (she is visibly still stung, singing "Love is a four-letter word"), and gigantic amounts of **** to keep the sunglasses affixed (though not sucked on) as camera clicks increasingly gnashed like teeth in the center gearhouses of the beast. My jaw began to clinch and grind on Tuesday's beginning, as Dylan sped through every permutation of pet and business signage in England in frantic goofy word spiel.

Monday's portion felt more vital, less linear, superimposing times past-past and past-present and eternal, featuring film of Hank, Gene Vincent, and Odetta (and the extreme wtf?ness of John Jacob Niles) that was so crisp that I almost wished it would just veer off that highway and show all that footage instead. The most surprising thing may be how great some of those folks looked (okay, I just feel young and snotty), especially Maria Muldaur, Suze Rotolo, and Dude Supreme, Bruce Langhorne. Of all the talking heads on parade, Allen Ginsburg's insights were most illumed. Who else even came close as Dylan's peer, except maybe Lennon? Who else would recognize that quality of breath and oneness, perceiving how Dylan became "a column of air" in front of everyone? I'm hoping to turn into a puddle upstate soonish.

beta and kilink in istanbul

2005-09-26T18:40:00.000-07:00

Mort's obsession with all things Diabolik/Sadistik/Satanik/Kriminal/Killing/Kilink-related has spilled over to me (I'm a sucker for just about any movie that I can borrow). But what's not to like about D/S/S/K/K/K? That rigid, skeletal rictus; that miscreant belly-laugh that bursts forth at the hapless roadblocks that goodness erects in his path; that assured, jackbooted stride as he marches against decency and kills at will.

It's tough going to love something like Kilink in Istanbul though, and not just because it's PAL so that you have to view on the CPU. Okay, the sudden appearance of Shazam is the funniest bit of deus ex machina (or whatever they call it in Turkish) since Magnolia, at least. Even better is how the vengeful son whispers "Sajem!" to become Superhero, replete with striped-boxer shorts, puffy muscle shirt, and askant Batman mask. And his exquisite corpse outfit echoes the soundtrack, which seems to be fifth-generation dubs of Bond movie cues all chopped and screwed back together (sometimes even run backwards) like some sort of Frankensteinian aural collage. But the ending is the most anti-climactic thing I've ever seen, where Kilink's secret weapon is never displayed and Superhero never even shows up for the final battle. Instead Kilink kisses his girlfriend (chicks dig evil skeletons) and just admits that he likes doing what he loves. Guess the Turks are into frustration (and sequels).

One thing is that they like their heroes to be cruel. As extras are a few trailers for other Turkish films. Their Superman is malnourished, yet the thousand-yard stare, stillborn emotional core, and imminent kill-punch make for a ridiculously stony shell. It's nothing compared to the other feature that somehow pulls together an unholy triumverate of Spider-Man, Captain America, and Mexican wrestling icon, El Santo(!). No idea about the plot, but it seems to center on the sadistic kicks of the St. Patty's day green outfit of Spider-Man and his BBW girlfriend. Some exploits include: burying a woman neck-deep in sand and driving an outboard motor into her face; stomping on a bar of soap with Spidey jackboots and strangling a woman mid-shower; shoving a flesh-hungry hamster into a cardboard tube to gnaw off a man's face. All of which are accompanied by Spidey's malevolent gut-busting. Ghost Rider was never this sick.

beta gets diabolikal

2005-09-23T10:03:00.000-07:00

Never an expert on such things as Italian cinema, much less fumetti, or the trend in Europe post-WWII to root for miscreant anti-heros and supercriminals (I'll leave all that to my esteemed colleague and lending-library, Mort Todd), I have been an avid fan of Mario Bava's Danger: Diabolik for many years. No idea how it got lodged in my head so, but my gateway must've been the snaky, wacked-out, and swinging Morricone score, which would endear the movie on the revival circuit regardless (or for its notoriety as the last movie watched by the damned on MST3000), but it stands as much more than time-period curio.

As I mentioned above, the appraisal and popularity of the miscreant anti-hero intent on destroying the government, or exacting vengeance on society at large, or thieving for decidedly non-Robin Hood ideals, or just killing people in a sadistic manner (see Fantomas, Satanik, etc.) never made it to American shores, dealing instead with good vengeance and rightful punishment, and of course, support of the government's law and order. Only with the emergence of Alan Moore and Frank Miller in the eighties did darkness begin to encroach on squeaky-clean icons like Batman and Spider Man. Two Italian sisters drafted the comic book version of Diabolik.

So that strange, striking, black-clad figure of Diabolik (played by the excellent eyebrows and chilly stare of John Phillip Law) whizzed over the heads of American audiences (critics hated it) who mostly dug its "camp" aspects, drawing misguided parallels to Batman and Barbarella, as if that was the only thing funny-books were capable of translating to on celluloid. Okay, the escapades of Diabolik are absurd, as he steals "the largest single shipping of dollars ever" just so he can shag his girl, Eva, on a pile of dough, and then tops it by heisting the biggest lump of gold just to bankrupt his country. There's also the tossed-off one-man terrorist campaign, wherein Diabolik blasts the Ministry of Finance and Tax offices, or rather, the fancy engraved marble signs in front of their respective buildings. (This is mostly an excuse to just post the absurdly great Morricone theme for Diabolik when darting around in his sports car, all surf twang, maniacal laughter, and Green Hornet trumpet spittle, the guitar feedback threatening to capsize the whole thing into delerium.)

What pushes Diabolik to something beyond period-piece is the eye of Bava. Already a master of Italian horror and gialli (a forebearer to Dario Argento), this comic book adaptation was just one of many genres Bava dabbled in, like spaghetti westerns, softcore, and uh, viking films. Not content to just recreate panelling of his source material, he plays with it, revealing depth and balancing both the foreground with the back. The documentary comments on his lens in motion versus the staid, flat shots that riddle Barbarella. Other times, he sets up almost natural shots of borders, where characters are framed by shelves, bedposts, propeller blades, giving the illusion of the page. Aside from the craft, there's a fantastical backdrop of painted glass and subtle effects, crystal spires and glistening stalagtites that comprise Diabolik's lair, created with most of the actors just moving on soundstages. This was Bava's biggest budget, and the story went that he returned most of the extra money he didn't use (catering, dude) as he returned to low-budget horror for the bulk of his remaining career.

If Diabolik needs another selling point, the Beastie Boys ripped this movie off for their video "Body Movin'". So did one of Coppolla's kids, lazily, blatantly. Of course, the terroristic aspects of Diabolik are muted, as the natural American kneejerk is to play up its campy aspect.

Ennio Morricone - "Main Theme"
Ennio Morricone - "Driving Decoys"

beta grows his own

2005-09-20T17:06:00.000-07:00

The Skatalites - "Beardman Ska"

It started out as a joke between myself and an unapologetic beard-lover, on the occasion of her upcoming vows. Somehow it sprouted into this verdant thicket.

beta hears more ethiopiques than reggaeton

2005-09-19T11:04:00.000-07:00

Mulatu Astatke "Tezeta"
Mahmoud Ahmed "Kulun Mankwalesh"
Alemu Aga "Yeemebetatchen Selamta"

It's strange to try and explain that thonka-thunk sound of reggaeton to all my Texan visitors. I find it incredibly difficult to fathom that down south, they haven't heard that beat, that telltale clave and snare that pounds through The City at all hours. Especially in SA, where you can escape neither tejano nor conjunto nor salsa nor rancheros nor whatever strand of Latin rhythm is overtaking the state, much like fire ants and killer bees and cucarachas. It seems less likely that border country hasn't been hit by reggaeton and just more likely that my friends don't listen to the radio, much less the Latino stations. Guess they're too busy with the Walkmen and Brian Jonestown Massacre. Sigh.

But how could they avoid it up here? Who knows, but I do know that nearly everywhere we went, they seemed to be piping in various volumes of the Ethiopiques. Eating dinner at Mama's, it was from Volume Four, featuring the big band sounds of Mulatu Astatke. And while waiting for the Arcade Fire to come on, out blared Mahmoud Ahmed through the park, one of my favorites of the series. Sounded phenomenal over the PA, too.

No one seems to have much love for Alemu Aga though and his King David harp. Even the eMusic Dozen has no mention of it. Quite honestly, his music is about the closest thing I have found to late period Arthur Russell, all murmur and holy buzz. How great would this sound coming out of a tricked-out Navigator with chrome rims?

beta imagines bowie in his funk

2005-09-16T10:55:00.000-07:00

My only planned night of CMJ is inside the VIP pen on the side of the SummerStage. I am trying to figure out a way to cover Bell Orchestre in the near-future, but their live set does little to help, as there's nothing to endear or earmark it to me. Yes, it strikes me as a few more of the Arcade Fire playing even more instruments. And when's the last time you've seen two bands in a night both use a French horn player? Alright, I got that you guys are from New France; I don't need it shoved down my daggummed Texan good ol' boy throat all night long.
Speaking of TX, my boys SOUNDteam (a/k/a the other Screwed-Up Click) must have the H-town connex, opening up for the Arcade Fire in a humidity that feels like home. The 'team are crisp, even on such an open stage, getting a crowd that has never heard a peep of them nor been told to like them to nod and clap.
Everyone is waiting for the Arcade Fire, and while I have only come across one song that strikes me, the devout are in full-force, selling out the show months beforehand. Perhaps I've avoided really big, corwd-pleasing concerts in the recent past, but I always get chills when I hear a crowd chant back all the words of songs (I never remember the words). What amazes me the most is how the Arcade Fire is sold on their own concept, whether it's just spazz-goth or something more (or less) profound. They've sewn their own flag, pounded their own marching drum, conceptualized their story and art from the start. They shout along and writhe, stomp and shiver, loose howls towards the light riggings of heaven, just as their fans do. As if mere recitation could save lives.

I saw David Bowie backstage, just drunk enough to convince the girls that I would get a Polaroid of them with Bowie, but then he moves towards the sidestage and I'm not that drunk to test my slobbery silver tongue then. Even knowing what's next (or what happened before), to feel the roar that washes over me when Bowie takes center in crisp Panamanian white to offset their sweaty black digs mewling about that queen bitch is a fitting peak to the long night to follow...

Lee Dorsey - Yes We Can

2005-09-15T07:49:00.000-07:00

Lee Dorsey
Yes We Can
1970

Lee Dorsey
"Riverboat"
"O Me O Mi O"
"Games People Play"
"Occapella"

Can you imagine one of your favorite artists making you a mix tape? While maybe not exactly my all-time all-time, a handmade package from Van Dyke Parks would be sweet, me thinks. His knowledge of worldly musics is encompassing and exact (see The Wire #163 Invisible Jukebox for an example). Add in his production work with the likes of The Mojo Men, Rufus Wainwright, Little Feat, or Cher and it gets more wondrously varied! This is to mention nothing of his co-writing many of the legendarily fractured Beach Boys’ Smile tracks like “Heroes and Villains,” “Cabin Essence,” and “Surf’s Up.”
But why imagine a tape when his actual albums work as mixes of whatever music and themes he happened to be pondering at that point in time? His first, Song Cycle, spun bluegrass, Stephen Foster, McCarthyism, “Canto a Vera Cruz,” and Ives into a kaleidoscopic, post-colonial Americana head trip. And his second, Discover America, goes it one better by picking up the shuffling rhythms of Trinidad, Jamaica, and Barbados and dashing them into his pot (literally). It is still distinctly American though, with homage paid to icons like Bing Crosby, the Mills Brothers, J. Edgar Hoover, and New Orleans songwriter Allen Toussaint, with the inclusion of his “Riverboat” and “Occapella.” These two songs always perplexed me over the years, as Parks never seemed to be one to light on the same subject twice. So what was it about these songs that required two nearly-consecutive trips to the bayou?

As wont to do with cover versions on mix tapes, I went looking for the originals. While Toussaint began to step out from behind the console in the early 70’s to sing his own songs, these two selections were still the domain of singer Lee Dorsey. A World War II sailor and featherweight prizefighter by the name of “Kid Chocolate,” Dorsey hooked up with Toussaint (after his own draft duties) after stints for Rex, Fury, and Minit to cut the instant strip-joint anthem, “Ride Your Pony,” for the Amy label in 1966. From that moment forth, Dorsey would be the main vocal conduit for the prolific pen, production, and piano playing of Allen Toussaint. Add to the mix the ultimate practitioners of second-line funk, the Meters, and you have a potent triumvirate of Naw’leans power. While Sundazed has so far reissued both The New Lee Dorsey and Ride Your Pony, the pinnacle of this tandem remains the obscure Yes We Can LP of 1970. Woefully distributed by the overseas Polydor back then, even the CD reissue on Polygram Chronicles is now nearly ten years gone. And it is a shame.

Kicking off with the title track, “Yes We Can” shows Toussaint writing an anthem of sorts, although it stays just shy of being an overtly political song. While not surprising, considering the timeframe, New Orleans music always enjoyed a bit of distance from the rest of the world, focusing more on the good times that comprised life in the Big Easy. That laid-back feeling permeated every aspect of their sound. There is a look out onto the world at large here, but the resulting view is non-judgmental, unaligned neither with revolution nor with the powers that be. There is no rage or riling in sight. Proffered instead is a call for kindness and consideration for the people around you. Even in the midst of the decade end’s upheaval, Lee Dorsey’s voice soothes with his sage-like flow:

Help each man be a better man with the kindness that you give
I know we can make it, I know darn well we can work it out
Yes we can.

The bouncing beat, organ swells, “bop ba doo bop” scats, and triumphant horns all reinforce the positive message without a hint of false hope or disbelief in a good outcome. Already the qualities of voice noted by Burke Johnson are evident: “(Dorsey can) project both joy and sorrow and literally take you out on a limb of fantasy, still keeping the intended mood of the composition intact.”

But once the drum kicks in for “Riverboat,” you realize that there is a whole ‘nuther level at work in the music. We are already far down the Mississippi by the time Dorsey bursts in after two measures:

Big wheel justa keep on turnin’
And the fire justa keep on burnin’
Opportunity knockin’, Big Boat justa keep on rockin’

It is at once overwhelming and reassuring. The earthy banks and levees are nowhere to be heard, just the Big River itself, and every instrument in Cosimo Matassa’s studio (the ONLY studio in New Orleans at the time) becomes a component of this sound vessel as it cruises the mighty waters. The horns bleat out steam and smoke, the wah guitar warbles like eddies alongside the boat. Drums cycle and churn like pistons, hi-hats hiss, and Dorsey floats on it all, comfortable against such enormous surroundings. Amongst the Big Wheels, Big Boats, and Big Opportunities surrounding and nearly swallowing the passengers on this voyage, it is the miniscule grain of love in his eye that is most important. That cinder renders all these other enormous, uncontrollable elements harmless. Tumultuous as it might be out there, Lee just wants to let you know that there’s a party going on y’all, and as long as we keep cool and stay together, we’ll all flow through this mess without capsizing:

We just keep right on huggin’ ‘n kissin’ ooooh, cuz we got love, yes we have

Other songs comment on the balance between the individual and society. “Who’s Gonna Help Brother Get Further?” addresses the troubles of being poor and predisposed to trouble, and wonders how a person faced with such odds can make it out there. The answer that comes at the chorus is succinctly put: “One Another.” “When the Bill’s Paid” is a similar meditation on economic situations, as Dorsey imagines how easy things will be (for him and his woman) once he is free and clear. The almost-bitter invective of “Games People Play” is the most world-weary of the lot, wondering about the less-pleasant tendencies of human nature and how to deal with them. But even in the face of such negativity, Dorsey and the arrangements that Toussaint surrounds him with never get bogged down by the impending negativity. The buoyancy that laces all these bayou tracks is nothing short of inspiring.

“Tears, Tears, and More Tears” reminisces over the heartbreaking little things of a lost love. From thinking about her first thing in the morning, to the phone call that will never come, the thought of “It’s really over” rises up in his throat as he swallows to hold it back. No more holding hands or drinking wine or speaking sweet nothings, and that absence becomes more concrete as he calls upon the only thing he has, memories, which rends his heart even more. Yet somehow the song is upbeat, as if the continual outpouring of tears will be cathartic, alleviating the heartbreak, and the saddened Dorsey will rise again, cleansed, wiser.

While the heartbreaks have their upside, so do the good times have their troubles as well. With the drunken thuds of bass under him, Dorsey warbles about “hanging out all night long, hanging out till my money’s gone/ O Me O Mi O, what am I gonna do oh?” Despite the ever-present loneliness and dead-ends of night’s pleasurable oblivion of drink, Dorsey somehow sees through to the other side of the tunnel. It’s no blinding revelation or morning-after empty promise, just a simple parry to life’s painful cycles of brief joy and persistent despair: “Another failure, another try. Just keep on trying.” While the world surrounding hits him, floating like a butterfly, and then pounding down again, Kid Chocolate, even with blood on his teeth, just keeps smiling, swinging only as he must. He was undefeated after all.

While dabbling a tad in social issues and breakups, the moments of sheer happiness on the album come to the forefront often and with a rollicking sense of play. From the good-timing indiscretions of “Sneakin’ Sally Thru the Alley” to the raw-funk swamp-pheromone physicality of doin’ the “Gator Tail,” the album also exudes a positivism that is infectious. While the former are bawdy and boisterous, the movement of the other song Parks’ covers, “Occapella” is gentle, though no less delightful with its bubbling spirits:

Pardon me, but you could use it, we’re gonna make a little music
You got soul, why don’t you use it, we’re gonna make a little music
Everything gonna be mellow, we’re just gonna sing it a capella
mmmmm

The percolations of the steel drum in the Discover America remake are instead the deep waters of the backing voices merging into the song’s very essence: how music (specifically the voice, both solo and merged into chorus) can uplift, empowering the song with that very sound of which it sings. The hmms and ahhs abstract beatifically here, levitating the song to a higher ground that is reverent and festive at the same time. It is that Sound of Joy so often looked for yet lost in secular music!

And what better person to embody that feeling of joy than Lee Dorsey? “If a smile had a sound, it would be the sound of Lee Dorsey’s voice,” Allen Toussaint recalled, “No wonder he inspired so many of my favorite songs.” Van Dyke Parks attempted to harness that same easy feeling so prevalent in New Orleans, showing how even the normally stiff American music can be as laid-back as the multitudinous rhythms of the Caribbean. Not a surprising connection between the two regions then, considering writer Gene Santoro’s remark that: “New Orleans is really a Caribbean city…where music is a more natural part of the cultural fabric than in any other US place.” It is a pleasure worth seeking out the originals (Soul Jazz’s excellent New Orleans Funk series holds two of the songs found here), so as to experience the sound of Lee Dorsey’s voice and feel the joy and wisdom that it instills on each listen.

[originally published in Sound Collector Audio Review Issue #3 Summer 2003]

beta feels oates with the hired hand and the shooting hand

2005-09-11T15:37:00.000-07:00

While a truly awful film transfer, bordering on a taped TV show quality, (and who is really going to go back and properly archive every two-bit TV western that strolled into a plywood town like some mean, squinting, dusty stranger, especially a Roger Corman one?) it was worth tracking down the hokey DVD titled "Big Screen" Cowboys just to see the early Monte Hellman western that was tacked onto it, entitled The Shooting. (Hellman would go on to cult classics like Two Lane Blacktop and The Cockfighter, as well as executive produce this little film called Reservoir Dogs.) It's the earliest Jack Nicholson appearance I've ever seen, playing a murderous gunman named Billy Spears. Of course, Jack's entrance midway through is all but lost in the evening shots that the transfer destroys any and all subtlety of, the shadows but indistinguishable mottled blobs. Now Jack is the quickest draw, but the real star is Warren Oates, who apparently is the quickest bare-handed grave-digger in the West. Just like in The Cockfighter, Oates chews up the most scenery when he's silent, his face just a flicker to suggest those freight trains of emotion that tunnel below the surface. So accompanies a Feldman-esque soundtrack of cycling motifs, full of anxiety and heightened edginess.

Banged out in 1967, you wouldn't be able to guess its place in American history unless you could tap into the edginess of the times, and then the fear and loathing is not just palpable, but seething and bile-forming. It's a ride of attrition, cruelty to both man and the horse (even a bluebird is shot for spiteful sport), as Oates and a ranchhand help a woman bent on revenge track the offending party that may or may not be his brother, while psychopath Spears trails the party. Weary bodies, already sick of the killing (the cruelest threat is getting your face shot off) are trapped to struggle along with and depend on for survival with truly awful sorts. A simple man like Oates (who is just searching for his brother) is forced to associate with sociopaths and vengeful people, where revenge is the only principle, the taste of blood paramount to slaking of hunger, thirst, sanity. He becomes one of them, not killing Spears when he has the chance (and exact revenge on him for killing his buddy in cold blood) but instead smashing his right hand so that he can never shoot again. The slo-mo ending feels like one of those dreaded dreams where your body won't respond to stop the madness, much less salvage itself. All feel helpless and staggering afterwards.

The next weirdest Western then (aside from High Plains Drifter, I reckon) must be this one that Peter Fonda made after Easy Rider, The Hired Hand. Maybe Jack wore off on him, as I still haven't seen a genre flick that readily incorporates a Bruce Conner-like transparency of film images, an invocation to the four elements, and a reading from the ancient Gnostic text, the Gospel According to Thomas into its fibers quite like this. And of course, there's Warren Oates again. And looking back to my original discourse, I realize I've basically looped myself, so I'll just post some of this Americana cosmisch musick from the reeaaaal Mister Tamborine Man, Bruce Langhorne:

"Opening"
"Three Teeth"
"Arch Leaves"
"Ending"

beta do not want what he has not got

2005-09-09T05:21:00.000-07:00

I'm on the press list at Joe's Pub, which means they put you behind some velvet rope in the giant crow's nest booth at the back of the club. Loli and I laugh at Bettye LaVette's backing band and the total Frank Zappa studio dude on guitar, and she says they remind her of lounge bar bands in Japan, totally cheesy dudes playing blues and soul and jazz standards as slick as velvet jackets. The cover of Bettye's new album would make you think she was on her deathbed, but live she's fiesty and packing her black jumpsuit with some seriously stairmastered gams. She looks great some forty-four years into the biz, belting randy deflowering tales in her backyard and off-mic holding these eerie cry faces, using the shadows under the lights to accentuate her mask. Her voice is still powerful, getting into the little crevices and hidden pockets of words from Fionna and Lucinda the way she learned from listening to Frank Sinatra records, and her breath conveys it exactly, in either a breathless plea or cathartic, though still heatbreakingly human howl. There is a chill to hear Bettye send the words of Sinead O'Connor towards the void, defiantly stating "I do not want what I haven't got" all by herself, into a bar dropped into reverent, breathless silence, save for that exhalation of vents, the event suspended in time for that second in-between her gasps.

At some point in the night, whether in the rasps of her Dolly Parton or Sharon Robinson cover, or else covering Joe Simon, she draws forth tears from the crowd (no comment). She jokes about having all women songwriters on her newest album, even though she has no girlfriends otherwise. She jokes about Allen Toussaint, which I think strange, until she reveals that both he and Elvis Costello are in attendance.

I have not really talked about New Orleans, thought much about New Orleans, never been to New Orleans, and so I would rather not meditate, much less discuss, such an unknown and unquantifiable place that has become a spiralling media image of floodwaters and helicopters and fixed images of graves multiplied into infinite numbness. Such is the cycle of media madness, and having to devour A Current Affair and the Post and media news special catchphrases like "Disaster on the Delta," "Floodwatch 2005," "American Tsunami," and "Sold Down River: Ferreal" is enough to induce nausea. When I first heard that Allen Toussaint was among the numerous musicians missing and un-accounted for, I did become dizzy and severely nauseaous. I have few musical heroes and Mr. Toussaint is a beacon, a craftsman, a conveyer of benevolence, the beatific, and le bon temps roulet in song, and to think that he might not have made it out of the city before the flood made me reel at the depths of a true cultural loss. (aside: The work he did with Lee Dorsey is still profound for me, and one album in particular was my first print-published piece. Perhaps I'll dig it up one of these days and post it here.)

When lights come up, I lean over from our booth into the one with Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint and reach out my hand to gush with thanks and praise that he is alright. I can't believe how soft and assured his hand is when I shake it, and he thanks me. I am but one of many people that appraoch him and give thanks and praise for his music and his well-being. Don't see anyone approach Elvis.

It's one of those nights where the mind almost reels from the possibilities and impossibilities of going out (totally miss Luciano at APT), as I then head back to Brooklyn to see Grachan Moncur III play for free. I had already been warned that Moncur seemed to have some mouth problems, or an inability to pucker up and play like he did on his still-stunning Blue Note sessions he cut in the early sixties. Okay, so there is reduced lung power, no more of those syrupy, plunging bass peals, languorous and bayou-deep, that he used to dive into back then, with Jackie McLean and Bobby Hutcherson, or Lee Morgan and Herbie Hancock, playing those intricately crafted and curious compositions of his. Not quite hard-bop, not quite the fiery models that would be taken up soon after in jazz, but hanging in-between like some stunningly modular, gently turning, almost Alexander Calder-like mobile. Which is very much the way that Moncur can suspend time.

Now, Moncur moves in more shallow registers, closer to shimmering surface. His backing band is sometimes too propulsive, makign for less pronounced curvature, less obtuse angles and tighter space. Partially that's due to Moncur's shorter breaths. Even his introductions are hard to parse, nearly inaudible in the bar's din, but he works for his music, sops the sweat off his face as often as the aerobic LaVette did. A girl comes up to me at the bar to blurt out how amazing he sounds, talking over his breathless, sometimes lost in the air, solo on the Fender Rhodes-powered version of Miles' "So What." I tell her that for some people (like myself), Grachan is a legend, but I don't really discuss what I suddenly realize about the trombone itself.

While folks like Moncur and Roswell Rudd brought the sliding, slurry timbre of the trombone into the vernacular of modern jazz, the instrument has rarely left its Dixieland roots, and no matter what its present surroundings (or even in Don Drummond's cheeks down at Studio One), it evokes New Orleans for me, echoes it in every breath. The tentacles never spread too far from its home (though how crucial were the radio broadcasts of Naw'leans R&B on the future island sound of Jamaica?), where it remains the perfect voice of the funeral dirge, the muggy air, the original screwed sound. No matter the condition of these folks, I'm glad they are still among us.

beta smiles off (again)

2005-09-07T14:17:00.000-07:00

Black Dice - Smiling Off (Luomo remix)

I yabbered about this a month back, so I'll let Nibs blab instead:
"This is the best psych-house track ever made, and my favorite DFA release of 2005. Yeah, you can dance to it all right; you can put your head in a lion's mouth too."

beta grows finns again

2005-09-06T20:48:00.000-07:00

Not that I've really parsed exactly what goes on in Tampere, Finland, much less Nashville, Tennessee, but finally such twains meet for my piece about the former playing down south in the latter.

beta love egg scepter cream

2005-09-06T14:47:00.000-07:00

I swear I do more than just push the vast Brooklyn noise conspiracy by writing about Excepter:

for the Initiate
or
for the Elder

beta has an appetite for Luv

2005-09-06T10:59:00.000-07:00

At a neighbors' barbecue, the lovely young couple in sweet airbrushed tees confess to me that they "totally met over this" cassingle. She queues it up and blasts "Me So Horny," in the clean version. Since 2 Live Crew was my favorite shit as a freshman (along with this dude), I instantly had all the words come back, only to realize I didn't know the non-randy words. (side note: my local punk rock store in HS was the one that had the obscenity charges brought against them that brought the album to court and national attention).

Funny how the crude juvenile lines, whether it's "Sitting at home with my dick on hard" or "Put you lips on my dick and suck my ASSS-hoooole too," actually struck me as something more uh...everlasting and relevant than either "watching Arsenio Hall" or the oddly wording that urge of "having an appetite for love." The neighbors then did a bump'n grind move to it, meaning I may just have to head over here and download some of that choad.

beta feels single, sees the double

2005-09-05T14:52:00.000-07:00

Saturday was a day of doubles. I'm at the Twisted Ones vacant lot party with Nabisco and Pinky. It's not enough that Nabs is talking about Goldfrapp being an evil double, he has to go and bump into a girl that he appears to have met in another life. Or maybe it's her twin, as she admits to having one.
Soon after, Pinks tells me that her Freudian double is present, the dark-haired version of herself, as if it's going to turn all Mulholland Dr. on a Saturday afternoon. Of course, it has to happen during silencio of The Double's set, right? And when Black Dice and I talk about the next wave of rock, we decide that it'll all be about squawkboxes that make neat-o noises in addition to the guitars and drums. No one can think of any bands that fit this description though, other than Comets on Fire and The Double.

beta hate milk

2005-09-04T11:57:00.000-07:00

In the past two days, with two different sets of friends, I have gotten into lengthy discussion-cum-arguments about this album. If I were to bring it up again tonight, in either polite or mixed company, I'm sure I could pick even more fights about Neutral Milk Hotel and In An Aeroplane Over the Sea.

And it's nothing specific against NMH (save for the fact that I get those initials mixed up with Neil Michael Hagerty and think the discussion is about the Trux), except that I find the album almost-unlistenable and far too precious, precocious. Given its status in most folks' (either friend or foe) minds as perfect, classic, amazing in concept, mind-blowing, etc., as opposed to that other one they did, just some little record that you could just ignore and soon forget, as even the Aeroplane-devout are wont to do, I feel a slight dislocation, unable to find any sort of toe-hold in it. My friends can't fathom my utter disavowal of the thing either, almost shocked at my bale for the thing.

Perhaps my reaction stems from a bigger problem I have with the sea change that came over indie-rock in the mid-90s. When I was coming up, it was still in the early days post-Nevermind, when all was grunge-metal, as opposed to hair-metal. Even among the HS elite, the coolest bands were the Pixies, the Pumpkins, the Chilis, the Beatles, and other sixties' rock, from Hendrix to Zeppelin to Janis to the Doors. My best friend in HS and I bonded not just over Nirvana, but far more clandestinely, the Beach Boys, and in particular, Pet Sounds. While it would be no deal to put on The Doors when you were smoking joints and drinking everclear, no one in their right mind would drive around, much less drop to the strains of that barbershop, fake-surf, "Kokomo" wash-up un-cool bullshit.

Even then, we knew between us that what the Beach Boys were up to, with their harmonies, their arrangements, their cellos and kettle drums, their really sloooooow ballads ("Don't Talk, Put Your Head on My Shoulder"), their naming of God, their weird bright sunniness, what they were up to was some serious and irreducible scripture. They were cool to us, even if we couldn't convince anyone that when the Beach Boys wanted to do some harmonizing, they could be as avant as Sonic Youth. They recorded a Manson song! The hippies hated them! And we hated the hippies! Since he had a hand in that Humpty-Dumptied, fractured and scattered to the four winds of that most Holy of Grails, Smile, we even dug Van Dyke Parks and his two early records of Ives-tinged Americana and Hollywood imperialism as Caribbean carnival kookiness. This was our punk, since the sound of them infuriated everyone else.

As you erect such critical fortresses though, waters rise and the great unwashed breach the walls. As people swamp the Beach Boys and also recognize their greatness (and it seems impossible that Mojo would ever rank Sgt. Peppers over Pet Sounds again, though maybe both albums now lose out to Forever Changes), incorporate such overwraught productions and layering of vocal harmonies and goody-gumdrop golly-gee outlooks on life, you move onto outposts further away. Say...Nick Drake, or Vashti Bunyan, or Chad & Jeremy or the Everly Brothers, or whomever these days. As much as we loved the Beach Boys (and would now say "oh wait, Pet Sounds isn't their greatest album, but Sunflower is, or else Love You," or "They totally went downhill after Today."), we could not get with their revitalization. We won, and it was the emptiest feeling.

Whether it was in the form of Sean O'Hagan's High Llamas, Apples in Stereo, or anything out of Athens' Elephant Six, be it Olivia Tremor Control or Neutral Milk Hotel, the emulation just smacked of exactly that, and our distaste was great. Who cares if you add a French horn or mellotron or have banjo and accordion? Do the complex backing harmonies on four-track? Did it matter to me that what the Beach Boys embraced uncooly suddenly became the template itself for the dorky and disenfranchised of how to make perfect-pop? If I was still into indie-rock by that release date, would I have found the album life-affirming and mystery-of-existence-embracing (as say, the Palace Brothers were to me)? I didn't care then if it was a teenage symphony to God and I still don't care if it is a tweenie ode to Anne Frank. The most recent time I heard IAAOTS, it still struck me as pretentious, over-thought and cluttered, too aware of itself and how important it was dressing itself up as, and aside from their grating idea of 'song', just the sound of his voice made me curdle.

beta walks the streets

2005-09-04T09:19:00.000-07:00

Overheard phone conversation by a guy in camouflage pants:
"You take care of the lady.
Or I will come there and spank you nasty."

Found clipping near the Twisted Ones outdoors show:
"Want the Biggest Dick She Ever"

heep see

2005-08-31T09:59:00.000-07:00

Haswell & Hecker
"Revision: Orange-Time-Shock-Format-Wave-Re-Composition (Remix for Voice Crack)" 12"
The accompanying text says that mastering maestro Rashad Becker "managed to restore the intended effect of between +6dB and +8dB, depending on the cartridge and tone-arm et cetera used by the listener." FYI, my steak knife-needled stylus changes its rpms dependent not just where I am standing in my room but also how many electrical devices are plugged in, so such subtlety is no doubt lost on me. It's like my room is the Dream House or something when I play a 12". This goes at either speed, and having compared Hecker in the past to dentist drills and alien abductions and gibbons, let's just say this is the sound of a Klingon ballgown zipper going down at either 33 or 45. And she uglier than that Windowlicker bee-yatch, natch.

Luny Tunes & Baby Ranks
Mas Flow 2
Call it what you want, but I wash laundry to this (even my dusty curtains). I also try to ask for 'Trace Dolores' from the lady at Lavenderia when I turn a pocket full of dimes and quarters into folding money)and say 'grassy ass'. At best, I feel like Lil Jon on the "Gasolina" remix, only able to go "Wha???" and "Yeah!" and of course "Skeet-Skeet!" in reaction to this, as I really know fuck-all about what's happening here. Whenever I try to select the "Espagnol" directions for my laundry card, it switches into English the moment it senses my card. But of course.

Haruomi Hosono
Cochin Moon
This made my Pitchfork Top 70s list a while back (#89 here), and even though I only ever hung with an artless cdr of it for years, it's ear-whiggled deep into my butterscotch pudding. Not that I would suggest reading PFK's take of it (much less link to it), though I'm not going to waste either my time or yours describing a late-70s Japanese post-Happy End lotus-eating swastika-curtained hotel outpost monsoon season matinee soundtrack of prog-exotica bitten by electric mosquitos, drum pads of death, and a synth with 'tribe' presets.

Taikuri Tali
some untitled little EP
Fine Finnish frivolity. My first piece for a new outlet, should be out in early Sept.

Pugh Rogefeldt
Ja, Da a Da
Not to say that writing about this will be my big breakthrough, but it too is an initiate piece for a new spot, nationwide no less.

Oneida
Anthem of the Moon, The Wedding, Nice./ Splittin' Peaches EP, the new single with Plastic Crimewave Sound
Prep work for their imminent Labor Day parking lot end of bummer jam.

Bettye Lavette
"Let Me Down Easy"
I realize that I am just a sucker for vibraphone-pop in any capacity, not to mention any Blue Note date with Bobby Hutcherson manning mallets.

Oren Ambarchi
Triste
I'll just let Mark, my recent boarder, do the talking on this, at least until my piece on it appears.

Ricardo Villalobos
Chromosul/ Fadutron
Whether or not 'illa is eating his Wheaties or his Special K and is thus missing flights to Mutek or getting pushed back indefinitely on a fabriclive mix is not for me to judge. Shee-it, I've never even been skiing at Kay Hole, WY. But I do know the sensation of boarding a transatlantic flight with two flights cases full of bog water and peat moss. Not to mention the difficulty of stowing them in the overhead bins, especially when the entire cabin is filled with aloe gel. To where that Swamp Thing stewardess has to come over and hassle you about tray tables and upright, lock positions. Which of course, gets heard as "Wquiahth rrreeeeoorr ihooogpuhgluuug" through the viscous jelly. Dude just can't hang with that scene, and I understand.

The Melvins
Stoner Witch
I can only wonder at what my face looked like in the Hole Foods express line as I tried to scream along with the King B.

beta bin bizzy

2005-08-31T08:21:00.000-07:00

UGH. When is there enough time to work a dayjob, edit a chapbook, pick out nice paper for it, write about Finnish folk AND Swedish moustachioed psych (dude, I only been to Ikea like, once), host houseguests (the lovely Richardson family), look for a new roommate, and drunkenly discuss the reflective surfaces in Jacques Tati's Playtime, the cankles of Scarlett Johansson (and Hillary Clinton), as well as name a bunch of LA-based ensemble movies (Short Cuts, Magnolia, and...I forget every other one we blurted out last night)?

beta pays homage to an old dirty bastard

2005-08-28T15:39:00.000-07:00

RIP, Msr. Luc Ferrari

beta crawls, grows finns

2005-08-26T14:48:00.000-07:00

While Wednesday night found me in the company of my friends (you know who you are), my first morning of a new decade found me talking to Ralph on the white telephone, not the way to kick off the roaring thirties. When I felt slightly less queasy, I venture out to Greenpoint to see the first show from a good deal of the Finnish folk contingency. All the big names are here in the states: Lau Nau, Kuupuu, Pekko Kappi, you know, them. A good reference is this article by Brandon Stosuy, who was also in attendance. All the noise dudes are there (natch), the beard exchange between the Finns and No-Neck and Double Leopards involves lots of mutually-admired product swapping hands.

I catch just the end of Lau Nau's performance. She is five months pregnant, and already loosing sublime lullabies for her belly on her little keyboard as Pekko Kappi, himself a student of Finnish folk forms, accompanies on his hand-built jouhikko. Pekko's set feels the most traditional, as it is just him and jouhikko unadorned by effects pedals and random objects, playing songs that he says are sometimes spells. One is to make a house catch on fire, which isn't too hard to do in Tommy's packed, stuffy backroom.

Afterwards, Laura informs me that the piece she performed at the end is not her own, but a song from Don Cherry's soundtrack to Alejandro Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain. Cherry is an important forbearer to consider, in that he combined isolated folk music idioms with (not necessarily jazz) improvisation to create a handmade music that could be playful, spiritual, all-encompassing, ascendant, drony, childlike, melodic, percussive, folk-based, non-denominational, open-ended. His was a template that could draw from Africa, India, Nepal, Turkey, as well as in Scandinavia, and render such musical distinctions moot in the personal space. Even his artwork resonates with this music, as the cover of Organic Music Society gets evoked on the little handmade CD I buy of Taikuri Tali (which is Laura and someone else whose name I forget and probably can't spell anyway).

Kuupuu is another solo female performer, and she is quite deliberate in how she accrues her sounds, time-lagging tiny patterns from flute, prayer bowl, melodica, tamborine, thumb piano, bird whistles, and sampling keyboard until the dizzying loops swirl around the room.

Tomutonttu is the solo project of Jan Anderzen, who is the main guy of the big Finnish noise collective, Kemialliset Ystavat (consider them the Sun City Girls, NNCK, Sunburned Hand of the Man of the country, I guess). He has people in the front row grab two cassettes at random, which he then meshes together on the fly, shooting them through a chain of pedals, creating hypnotic whorls out of tapes that could be culled from Finnish talk shows or something. They sound voice-based at the very least, and he shoves a microphone close to his lips as he hunches over the pedals, looping and distending gurgles and chatter. Michael from Double Leopards joins in at the end, the two hissing and humming, covering their mouths with cupped mics as they utter in fear of catching germs. The best part though is when a drunken Greenpoint denizen stumbles into the befuddling vortex, and starts yelling for her drinking buddy: "EVELYN!" she shouts into the din, again and again: "EVELYN!" It compliments what Anderzen does, a randomness that even he could never contrive.

beta b-day

2005-08-24T08:10:00.000-07:00

elisa ambroglio of the magik markers reveals my youth-keeping secret.

beta wins rabbits, smokes grass

2005-08-23T19:43:00.000-07:00

with the very dark disturbing darger art (of children crying purple and vomiting up a boysenberry bile) of the animal collective feels before me now, i have returned to spin it again. and within its slippery slopes, again and again and…

it’s mostly to do with “GRASS” (the rightful single), the second track (much like “who could win a rabbit?” was from sung tongs) and also has its single-killing noise tucked into the core as chorus (of sorts). it was never quite disguised before (and was beaten to death on tongs's reviews, even under this byline), but the Beach Boys are made overt here.

yes, it’s in their sense of shading in the harmonies (which no longer obfuscate the boy avey tare as much as buoy him). yes, it’s even in the “wouldn’t it be nice” sorgham-y sentiment seeping through opener “did you see the words,” which trades letters between two distant lovers and shivers with giddy anticipation, wonders aloud about the old folks on the swing still holding hands. (those in the audience of the last tour will recall a dose of wtf? is that stevie? sweet syrup, an interpolation excised from "the purple bottle" quite late into the mastering process). but there is also the sense of beach in the boys. to where sound is waves, played with and made to ripple, roar, a sensation of waves sustaining, crashing, pulling you deeper with their hypnotizing tug of tides. and they know that, hone that.

gurgles of glistering rivulets, and a clanging cyclic tone (maybe kristin mum’s piano?) that is not unlike caribbean steel drums, and not unlike a cowboy song, all wagon-wheel loping-along when its not yelping incessantly. not to mention the kahuna toms, the “little pad” harmony hidden in the middle, the riptide rolls, the luminous gravity undulating. la mer et la luna.

beta clocks rabbits

2005-08-23T14:04:00.000-07:00

within a five-minute window at my "day job," i ran into my bartender from Diddy's, an upcoming R&B honey who is like a genetic-cross between Foxy Brown and Jessica Rabbit, one of the bros from the Faux-Ohioan Famille and chantreuse Laura Cantrell, whose purdy music my buddy Edd turned me onto via a recent mix of new country.

beta love fonz

2005-08-21T19:53:00.000-07:00

i turn on King of the Hill just in time to hear Henry Winkler needle-drop Monk and tell Hank Hill: "Now Thelonious Monk, he must've fished."
and then later on, Family Guy's talking dog gushes about his love of junkie-era Coltrane.

beta love jah

2005-08-20T12:07:00.000-07:00

what i have really been listening to all summer:
I
I&I
III

EDIT: I probably fudged it up, but here are two other tracks I was s'pose to have posted to Moistworks (hence the talk of Gregory and Christina), so consider this extended-extended play:

ROCK ON/ SATURDAY
Gregory Isaacs/ Christina

YES YES YES DUB
Ranking Dread

beta spells B-A-N-A-N-A-S

2005-08-18T16:24:00.000-07:00

indulging in Mama's banana cream pie, its alternating fluffiness and dense gooey banana-ness caps today's double feature at the Film Forum. first up was a Maria Montez montage of her upcoming films: Arabian Nights, White Savages, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and Gypsy Wildcat. more than one is set in exotic Baghdad, she with tan-pancaked co-star Jon Hall and an alternating third 'savage' played by either Sabu or Turhan Bey, the extras almost always in pencil-thin goatees, and all movies described as "Fiery!" every reference to Montez's attribute of being "Bewitching!" weirdest is that each movie advertises torture devices as amusement. Blood dances, the rack, the wheel.

today it's Cobra Woman, with Montez playing twins, the high priestess evil one doing a sparkling snake dance with a cobra that alternates between being a tiny black tongue-flicking live one and a sickly-green, thick-necked puppet. she then pulls some hypnotic, glittering, venomous dance like Mariah Carey at the VMAs, manically pointing and pulling out 200 female virgins for volcanic sacrifice. the entire audience chuckles with unease at the cheesily prophetic line about the inhabitants of Cobra Island and their foolish worship of the evil priestess: "Fear has made them religious fanatics."

the second half of the double-feature is a Busby Berkeley stunna with Carmen Miranda. what can i say about The Gang's All Here, except that it is literally bananas? boundaries exist only in the audience's mind, with Berkeley flooding the rational with bewildering and vivid sensations. dosed on Technicolor (this is a rare IB Technicolor print with all original negatives destroyed in the 1970s) my presumed sense of space is constantly blown out, re-evaluation just another rickety shack before the next vibrant gale blows through to expand the scene's parameters once again, time and space rendered meaningless, the idea of a linear plot just to hold the hook. perhaps that's why one tag called it an "apotheosis in vulgarity"? Uncle Samba dances and slinging of war bonds barely hide the mischievous psychedelic glee that shimmies seductively on every number. yes, there is Benny Goodman (also singing about the war effort), but there's also banana-colored oxen that tow Miranda into the hallucinatory bananas and "shwaw-bewwies" sequence of "The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat." insane plantains.

and i'll just leave the children's polka-dot polka turning into a giant manicured hand meditation that reveals a futuristic hula dance (bathed in magenta light that Marian Zazeela must've based her life's work on) with a pink and lime dot dance that defies gravity and time until it crashes into a mélange of petticoats exponentially fracturing into kaleidoscopic shards scene to your imaginations. the Brady Bunch floating head finale just puts a cherry on top of the banana cream pie.

heep see

2005-08-17T18:23:00.000-07:00

records i been hearing:

Rogerio Duprat - A Banda Tropicalista do Duprat
VA - Sufferation: The Deep Roots Reggae of Niney the Observer
Grant Green - Idle Moments
Jimmy Giuffre - Western Suite
Double Leopards - Savage Summer Sun
Ilitch - 10 Suicides
Excepter - Self-Destruction
Big Youth - Dread Locks Dread
Link Wray - Wray's Three Track Shack
Ananda Shankar - and his Music

heep see

2005-08-16T21:16:00.000-07:00

movies i been watching:

*Daisies (turned onto this movie by Delia and Gavin. it almost seems like something out of Nickelodeon's old European cartoon show, Pinwheel. not to mention that the rhythms of Vera Chytilova's edits, jump-cuts, and montages are stunning)

*Pygmalion

*Performance (which makes explicit the weird homo-gangster Stones' tune, "Memo from Turner.")

*Re-Visiting "Father" and the Source Family (this documentary of Father Yod is almost as hard to slog through as one of his records)

*Napoleon Dynamite (i fell asleep halfway, but not before copping to the Mets not just being clever with their VOTE FOR PEDRO tees for sale at Shea)

*Quella villa accanto al cimitero (another Delia and Gavin recommendation, and i being to understand the appeal of Italian horror, and horror movies in general. more on this later, probably after i watch Argento's L'Uccello dalle piume di cristallo)