Diagnosis: No Radio

The New 52: Part Two (or why you should care)

2011-08-30T18:38:00.000-07:00

I am a big advocate for superheroes. Superheroes and the reading of them are like vitamins. They strengthen parts of the spirit and morale.

Reading is great for you. Reading fiction, even better for you. But contemporary fiction doesn't do much in the way of giving one things to aspire to. Literary fiction (and this is more or less true of a lot of genre fiction as well) relies on the conflicts produced by characters who have deep-seeded flaws.

Might it not be a good idea to now and then read about people whose defining characteristic is that they are inherently good? I mean, isn't that what the whole New Testament is supposed to be about? Here's this guy, he's just...really nice to everybody. Like as in nicer than nice. All the time. Look, he's handing out some fish to some strangers! Look, he's helping out some blind people! What a nice guy!

Reading superheroes lets you get all that positive Jesus-y energy without all the unpleasant Christianity. Comic books are chock-full of positive role models. Of people we could aspire to be.

But they're difficult to crack into. Comic books are arcane, they're drenched in nostalgia and stale narrative. They lock out all but the most devoted fans, pandering to those of us who are willing to retain encyclopaedic knowledge about character histories.

Now it's possible that the DC relaunch will quickly devolve into more of the same. But it's also possible that the door into the DC universe might be unlocked to the uninitiated for the first time in decades. And there could be treasures within. What follows are some suggestions for books that should provide the easiest access to people who've never read a comic book in their lives.

1. Action Comics by Grant Morrison & Rags Morales. Rookie socialist Superman. If that three-word pitch doesn't sell you, you should probably stop reading now. Morrison has already done visionary work on Superman at the end of his career and is going back to the character's Seigel & Schuster roots for this story of Supe's first arrival in Metropolis. One of the best writers in comics on the medium's most iconic character.

2. Batman by Scott Snyder & Greg Capullo. Snyder's recent work on Detective Comics has been nothing short of amazing. His American Vampire, which started out as a collaboration with Stephen King, was so good that King got dropped off the title (okay, that's not exactly how it happened, but if writing American Vampire was an arm-wrestling match, Snyder would be Stallone in Over the Top and King would be...everyone else in Over the Top). He's the closest writer in ages to write a Batman that feels as basic and real as Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. Greg Capullo's chunky artwork was practically made to draw Batman.

3. Justice League by Geoff Johns & Jim Lee. One of the biggest writers in comics paired with one of the most influential (for better or worse) comics artists of the past twenty years. If they can keep this book on track and out on time, it should be pretty remarkable. Plus, this is the A-list Justice League: Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern. The big guns. I'd imagine the notoriously dilatory Lee has six issues drawn already, since a lot of DC's hopes are riding on this book.

4. Batwoman by JH Williams & W. Haden Blackman. Now we get into risky territory. Williams is one of the best artists working in superheroes. He pushes the limits of what a page can look like. And Kathy Kane is DC's high profile lesbian superheroine. Under the pen of Greg Rucka, she was a wonderfully fleshed out and balanced character. Williams' writing is the x-factor here; he's one of several DC artists who are getting the bump up to writer. But unlike some of the others, Williams might have the chops to carry this book.

5. Wonder Woman by Brian Azzarello & Cliff Chiang. Here's a character that's been struggling for an identity for ages. For whatever reason, WW has never caught on at the level of Superman or Batman. I might have preferred a return of Gail Simone to this book, I'm interested to see what Azzarello brings to it. Mostly known as a crime writer, Azz is promising that Wonder Woman will have a strong horror vibe to it. Could be a disastrous return to the bondage fetishism of WW's roots, or a chance to set the Amazonian mythology aside and let Diana step up into DC's big three where she belongs.

6. Batgirl by Gail Simone & Ardian Syaf. This one threatens to remain bogged down in continuity. Barbara Gordon reclaims the mantle of Batgirl after decades in a wheelchair. A whole lot of fans are, somewhat rightfully, offended at this mysterious, miraculous recovery and to keep those folks from rioting, there's going to be some 'splaining to do. But some of us think that Simone, one of the best writers on DC's stable and the only female writer involved in stage one of the relaunch, could be able to pull this off. Simone excels at writing strong, deeply realized female characters, which is exactly the treatment Barbara Gordon deserves, in or out of the chair.

7. Aquaman by Geoff Johns & Ivan Reis. Okay, this probably shouldn't be on the list. After all, Aquaman's power is that he talks to fish. But I've always had a soft spot for the guy and desperately want him to be cool. Geoff Johns has made Hal Jordan cool and almost had me convinced Barry Allen wasn't a narrative dead end. I'm hopeful he can do the same for Arthur Curry. But that doesn't mean y'all need to read it.

8. Animal Man by Jeff Lemire & Travel Foreman. Marvel has been very good at getting folks from indie comics to come write superheroes, with high levels of success. Huge paychecks probably don't hurt. DC's mostly plucked their talent from the mid-nineties and seems to have managed to piss off the very talented Brian Wood enough for him to abandon everything he's writing for DC. But Jeff Lemire is the real deal. His Essex County is stunning and Sweet Tooth continues to be on my reading list by virtue of being just wonderfullly weird. I wasn't huge on his Superboy work, although a lot of people were. But Animal Man, a superhero with strange animal-based powers and the ultra-rare ability to maintain a wife and two kids, could be the perfect fit for Lemire. And could be one of those books that creeps up and changes the game entirely, the way the big bad Brits did in the late eighties. Too much pressure for one book? Probably, but I'm betting Lemire is impressive right out of the gate.

Some of these might not be for you. And there might be some I'm leaving out that are totally for you. But if on some Wednesday this month, you happen to find yourself with three dollars to spare? Might not be a bad idea to go pick up a comic for once. Just saying.

Oh, and I swear pretty soon I'll start writing about books without pictures.

The New 52: Unsolicited Thoughts on the DC Comics Relaunch

2011-08-29T09:45:00.000-07:00

It's apparent I haven't written for this blog in...oh, seventy years. Two and a half years, to be exact. I was thinking last week that, being between books at the moment (I'm in edits on one and pre-writing on another), maybe I would start up a new blog. Then I remembered I've had a whole bunch of blogs before and maybe I should just go back to this one.

Rather than doing anything remotely ambitious, I figured I'd talk about comic books.

For the record, the novel I'm starting to put notes together on has a lot to do with comics, comic book conventions and how fantasy narrative works. So I have an excuse.

In case you haven't heard, DC Comics, a company whose output makes up probably 40% of the floppies produced every year ("floppies" here refers to single issue comics, usually between twenty four and thirty six pages long with half that again in advertising, much of which is for other comics or comics-related merch), is about to do a company-wide relaunch of its superhero universe, releasing fifty-two number one issues in the month of September. If you're a comic book fan, this is huge news. In fact, it's hard to think of a cognate to this in any other form of entertainment.

Of course, it's a marketing move. Maybe not 100% a calculated marketing move, but largely a marketing move. DC has perennially lagged behind its competitor, Marvel Comics, in market share and this is what they're doing about it. Many of the characters are getting redesigned. Most if not all of them are going to be younger than they were before. And they're shedding the years of convoluted "continuity" that's come before, a sort of narrative baggage that the characters have been carting around for decades.

Continuity is another tricky thing to explain to an outsider, so let's try an analogy. If you were going to start reading the Harry Potter books (or watching the movies), you wouldn't start with the fourth one. Built into the fourth book is the expectation that you've read the previous three; there's a degree to which the narrative won't function if you don't bring that other knowledge in with you.

Now imagine that Harry Potter books have been coming out for fifty years. And that Harry lives in the same narrative universe as characters from the Narnia books, the Dark is Rising books and Madeline L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time books, each with fifty years of constant narrative trailing behind them. That's what comics continuity is like: dozens of characters who have amassed fifty years worth of intertwining, often contradictory stories (hard-core fans will do amazing mental acrobatics to reconcile discrepancies in continuity, as will comic book writers, many of whom started out as hard-core fans). And any of these stories can be called up into relevance at any time.

You can see where this might be daunting for a new fan. Someone who walks out of the Green Lantern movie, goes to their local store and picks up the latest issue will be left to stare blankly at a story that includes not just Green Lanterns, but Yellow, Orange, Violet, etc. This Lucky Charms of Lanterns situation is easily understood by someone (like me) who's been following the book for years. But it's illegible to a noob.

So in an attempt to bring in new readers, DC is ditching most (although not all; back to that later) of its continuity. And they're offering same-day digital availability of all of their titles, a move which might be more significant for the industry than everything else.

All of this has caused calamity within the comic book community and has gotten some amount of press in the world outside. A lot of fans are pissed off about the erasure of continuity. Which makes sense, especially for DC fans, because the DC universe is, in a way, about its continuity. Not only does DC trump Marvel in having superhero legacies (many DC icons have been, at one time or another, replaced by their sidekicks or someone new picking up the torch. See Batman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, Starman. Of course, most of these torch-passings have been reversed eventually), the DC universe itself has been in a sort of existential crisis (that was an inside joke) about the contradictions in its shared narrative for decades. In an effort to "make it all fit", they've tried multiple dimensions, hypertime and the occasional rewriting of the timeline from scratch. Even this relaunch doesn't come out of nowhere: it supposedly flows out of the "Flashpoint" miniseries that wraps up tomorrow. We'll see about that.

But leaving aside the debates within the comics community (pants? no pants?), the question of whether or not this will bring in new readers remains. And while I'm rooting for this to be a huge success, here are a couple hurdles I can see.

1. Floppies are bite-sized. Most of us have watched enough television that we can handle serialized narrative. You hit the "Oh snap!" moment at the end of an episode of Lost, the screen goes black and you understand you'll have to wait a week for another fix. Most of us probably prefer binging our way through a full DVD worth one Saturday on the couch, but the waiting is part of a novelty cost: we get to see it right away. Then it's hurry up and wait.

But imagine if each episode of Lost was a half hour long. And they came out once a month. That's about the rate narrative gets doled out in comics.

For those of us who have been comics readers for a while, this is fine. We have several titles we follow and there's a ritual to going down the comic book store on a Wednesday and seeing which of the titles you dig has come out, then rushing home and moving incrementally ahead in the adventures of your favorite characters. And because the stories are going on in a shared universe, it becomes a little easier to keep incredibly long-form narratives in your head. Something that happens to Spider-Man may be referenced in a Captain America or Iron Man comic.

But these are very ingrained habits, and are foreign to most non-comic book readers. I'm not saying someone who doesn't read comics can't do this, I'm saying it may be difficult to get them to start. I started my wife (who is much smarter than me) reading The Unwritten and she really liked it. Until she had to wait every month for a new issue. By the time the next issue came out, the last one was more or less forgotten.

Among comics fans, there's a somewhat recent phenomenon referred to as "waiting for trade". What this means is that you stop following a comic on a monthly basis and wait for a whole storyline to be collected in a trade paperback. This is a much more natural form of reading and what most people probably prefer. The switch to reading in fits and starts, even with DC's commitment to getting books out on time, is going to be a tough sell to most readers.

2. The insularity of "top creative talent". It should first be noted that there have been numerous attempts to bring non-comics writers into the industry. Writers from Lost, Battlestar Gallactica and other series, as well as bigwigs like Stephen King and Kevin Smith have been given the keys to the shiniest narrative toys and told to let loose.

The results? Mixed at best. But the sales have generally been strong.

I will be the first to admit that many non-comics writers have failed to take advantage of some of the particular opportunities presented by the comics medium. I will also admit that most established, high end comics writers excel at exactly what they're doing. But outside of the industry, they're not marquee names.

This is particularly problematic within the DC relaunch, where many of the would-be marquee names are remnants of the nineties comic boom, their names largely forgotten (or never known) to the outside world and often snickered at within the industry. DC may have a hard enough time getting the fans excited about a book by Fabian Nicieza or Scott Lobdell (both keepers of the sprawling X-Men franchise through most of my teen years), much less getting anyone else's attention.

Yes, what this means is I want the writing staff of The Wire to take over the Batman books. Nothing against Treme, but seriously: right now.

3. The ladies were not excited about pants. When the relaunch was announced, one of the points DC editorial stressed was that all of its female characters would now wear pants. Not hot pants, regular pants.

In the minds of DC editorial, this seemed to be a major victory for feminism and a guaranteed increase in female readership. Of course, as game time approached, they reversed this decision and re-de-pantsed Wonder Woman. But pants (or tights, or whatever) are mostly colored in skin in a comic book, and the objections to Wonder Woman go deeper than the fact that she wears short shorts. It might not be a bad idea to enforce an editorial mandate against up-skirt shots and down-shirt shots by DC artists. If DC wants to really bring female readers on board, there are two major ways to do it.

Female writers and female artists.

I'm excited about Brian Azzarello writing Wonder Woman, because I'm excited about Brian Azzarello writing pretty much anything. But this should have been an opportunity for DC to frontline its current roster of female creators (which I think is pretty much Gail Simone, Nicola Scott and Amanda Conner) and bring new female creators into the fray. They should have been recruiting from all over the industry and beyond. What about Carla Speed McNeill writing the Legion of Superheroes? Or Karen Russell writing Element Girl? Hell, why not Sophia Coppola writing Catwoman? DC had a chance to bring in the ladies and all they had to offer was pants.

4. We're scrapping continuity. Well, not all the continuity. Marvel put out three huge superhero movies this year. DC put out one. Now not everyone was super-keen on Green Lantern, but it wasn't horrible and while it wasn't wildly successful, it wasn't an utter failure.

Folks coming to the continuity-free New 52 after digging on the Green Lantern movie might be surprised when they pick up Issue #1 of Green Lantern and find the man slinging the ring isn't Hal Jordan but Sinestro. Who is technically a Korugarian and not a man, but let's not split hairs.

Point here is, not all previous continuity is being jettisoned. It looks like all the continuity that DC Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns likes (or wrote) is still in play. So rather than a clean slate, we get a slightly muddied slate.

This brings up a numbers issue I'd like to address, one that illustrates just how dire the straits of comic books are right now. The lynchpin of the relaunch, Justice League #1, written by Johns and drawn by Jim "I only draw a comic every five years and it sells like crack" Lee, was pre-ordered at 200,000 copies. Biggest pre-order in a long long time. The comics industry is tumescent over numbers like that. The Green Lantern movie was pretty much considered a failure within the movie industry. It grossed $18 million in its first weekend. That means, figuring for a modest $10 ticket price, 1.8 million people saw the movie in its first weekend, almost ten times the number that will read what looks to be the best selling comic in three years.

I've gone on long enough. I'm hoping to post again on all the reasons you should get your ass down to the comic book store this month and start reading DC comics, but for now, while I'm pulling for them, I wish they'd gone a little bigger and a little smarter.

I'm also glad the Green Lantern books aren't getting the big continuity wipe. Because I'm a huge GL nerd.

Coming very soon: reasons you, yes you, should go buy some DC Comics starting tomorrow.

Reviews, mine.

2009-02-10T12:38:00.000-08:00

Hey kids. In case you're interested, here's two book review pieces I've done recently, along with a review/meditation on some newly released Hank Williams stuff. Enjoy.

Omega: The Unknown by Jonathan Lethem
The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
Hank Williams

Debut of the new gig!

2008-10-25T12:46:00.000-07:00

So it seems I am now the monthly country music columnist for PopMatters.com. Which I'm pretty excited about. I even did a little dance.

You can check out the first column here. Naturally I've decided to launch my journalistic career by misquoting Toby Keith. I'm pretty sure that's how HL Mencken got started.

In other news, I am about to dive face first into the second and hopefully final set of page proofs for the book. Do not envy me my headache. Small type's a bastard.

Oh yeah, and I'm back from Berlin. It was neat. I ate a blood sausage.

And so but.

2008-09-15T13:00:00.000-07:00

So this is what brings me out of blog semi-retirement. Not the bike accident that tore up my face and left me with a shattered sense of what I looked like for weeks, so much so that when I look in the mirror, my eyes still go immediately to the new scars on my forehead, upper lip and chin, all of them faded now from their angry red to an apologetic pink. Not the cancer diagnosis that even now, as it enters its last week of real medical importance with the last of the offending tissue coming out of my neck in a chunk this Thursday, haunts my brain in a big black robe, checking its watch impatiently, or the accompanying paranoia regarding the upcoming surgery and its (statistically unlikely) threat to my facial-motor skills. Not any of the awfulness and growing despair surrounding the current election. No, not those. It's DFW.

One opens oneself up to derision (or at least would've last week) by claiming to be a David Foster Wallace fan. He was, after all, one of the smartest of the smart kids, and while he may have lacked some of the smarminess of Dave Eggers, his style had a type of intellectual intensity that reminded one, first and foremost, of the kid in the front row of the class, practically jumping up and down to get the teacher's attention, to answer yet another question posed to the entire class or worse, volunteer a bit of extra information on the subject at hand.

Extra information is certainly one of the first things that stood out in DFW's work, and as a style it's one I openly cribbed when working on my Flying Burrito Brothers book. Sure, it indicates certain...mental health issues when a writer cannot physically bear the thought of a stray related fact left on the cutting room floor. But it also indicates a deep investment in things, things in the William Carlos Williams sense: objects seething with meanings. In short (although nothing about DFW was ever in short), a sort of feeling that this fact might save your life. And if not that one, maybe this one. At the very least, maybe it'll be something you can turn over in your head for a little bit, while your laundry dries or in the seconds/minutes/hours before falling off to sleep.

This speaks, I think, to two things about DFW. The first is the difference between his mode of intellect (and expression of said intellect) and that of many of his contemporaneous young turks. When I finally got around to attempting "A Heartbreaking Stagger of Et Cetera", I was immediately (as in "before the first page"), I was immediately thrown out of the text by the feeling I was about to start a long conversation with someone who wanted me to know exactly how smart he was. The feeling was cold, condescending and alienating. DFW's work, no less showy and fact-packed (moreso on both counts) gives the opposite feeling. DFW was excited to tell us all the things he knew not so he could look at us smugly afterward, but because he knew we were smart. And he knew he was smart. And he wanted us to remember how fun that could be, how knowledge, even little trivial bits of it can light up the quotidian with the soothing warmth that a string of Christmas lights can give a kitchen, a sweet and needed opposite to the glaring overhead fluorescent of everything about the world that constantly threatens to overwhelm us with the almost blinding unknowledge of ideas ungrounded in things, of ideology uber alles. Or, in the case of many of DFW's characters (and possibly the author himself), the deafening roar of the solipsistic self. One of DFW's most resonant sentences (up there for me with Pynchon's devastating one-two, "They were in love. Fuck the war.") is Hal Incandenza's desperate lament at the beginning/end of Infinite Jest, when, unable to communicate from inside this all-encompassing sense of isolating self (whether because of a mystery drug as the novel suggests or because he's trapped in a pervasively ironic discourse where nothing can be said and meant, as the novel insists), he pleads to the "I am in here." As if the reader, speaker and author all need convincing.

The second, corollary to a love of knowledge because it's fun to be smart, is DFW's deep compassion. I can't find the quote now but I think it was Turgenev who suggested all art should prepare us for compassion. This sentiment might have seemed a little too moralistic for a lot of contemporary writers (and any statement that begins "the purpose of art is..." pretty much begs for a fight), but DFW seems to hold it close to his heart throughout his work. DFW was adept at drawing compassion out of a reader (often along with its ugly stepsisters, pity and revulsion) through his gift at a sort of narrative brutality, most notably in the threateningly honest "hitting bottom" narratives of "Infinite Jest"'s addicts, which serve not to advance the story but to offer an almost violent counterpoint to the ironic discourse employed by other characters in the novel (a discourse which, as previously mention, is one centrally concerned with non-meaning, anti-compassion and the protection of the solipsistic self and leads to one of the novel's central frustrations/thrills: a series of unsolvable ambiguities, sets of signs that mean neither one thing nor the other) and in the throat-grabbing two page piece, "Incarnations of Burned Children". But more often, DFW offered a training course in compassion through his intellectual investment in things. If he could teach readers to apply his sort of sprawling deconstructive techniques (not to be confused with Deconstructive techniques. Lower case, it means something like taking a watch apart to see how it works, learn how to put it together and possibly build a better watch. Upper case, it means something like taking a cat apart to see what a cat looks like when it's been taken apart) to objects around them, to invest those objects with attention and caring, DFW seemed to believe transference of those skills to the people around them would necessarily follow. This is of course not always the case: there are plenty of people who have a rabid curiosity for objects and no interest in other people. But in DFW's work, the two seem intrinsically linked. His obsessive inclusion is born of a sense of caring or attempting to care fiercely about the world outside of himself.

I first read "Infinite Jest" during my second summer in Boston. I could tell you I was living with a prostitute, dating a nineteen year old albino, drinking heavily and teaching sixty hours a week, but those are just a scattering of facts I've told so many times they have the snark of irony about them, for me at least. I could also tell you I'd just been kicked out of graduate school, which amounted, at the time, to the total destruction of every life-plan I'd had, and left me with the feeling of being completely adrift in myself, unconnected with the world ("life-plans" being, after all, just maps for how we want our selves to interact with/fit into the world). I could also tell you, in the spirit of inclusion, that when I went to Brookline Booksellers to buy "Infinite Jest" I nearly knocked over a small Asian woman who turned out to be Amy Tan. For those weeks of reading, mostly on the medievally slow B train of Boston's Green Line, the moments I passed locations mentioned in the book seemed like the first connection I'd had to the outside world, the fact of Mike's Liquor's, the actuality of the Cambridge subway station. Slowly, my feet extended out of myself and touched the ground again, legs shaky as a frequent subway rider's can become. In the months that followed, I returned to DFW's description of depression like a promise that mine would eventually retreat, that my depression and I were not identical (a difficult conclusion to reach from the inside of such a condition).

Of course, like Salinger, I could never read DFW if I had any plans to do writing of my own: the precision of his sentences, so different from Salinger's (closer, I've always thought, to a sort of hipster Henry James) but just as pristine, ringing, gorgeous, would invade and overtake my own cadence til I was thinking in DFWspeak. I would often point to one of the exchanges between Hal and his older brother in "Infinite Jest" as exemplifying all the modes of conversation Ford Maddox Ford and Joseph Conrad outlined and have recommended to numerous professor-friends the use of one or the other of his essays in their classes (I know I've focused largely on his fiction here, but the rest of the journalistic world is giving ample attention to his non-fiction). And I borrowed/stole his footnoting riff for my own nefarious uses. But his way of thinking, of taking things apart, putting them back together and taking them apart again, his ability not to distract the reader with facts but to ground and center the reader with them, to draw the reader out (rather than draw things out of the reader) into a space where they were vulnerable to ideas, to feelings, to other things became locked in my mind as a kind of underlying architecture, a palimpsest that changed the shape of everything written over it. I never scoured publishing schedules for news of DFW's next work or trawled through magazines hoping he'd contributed. New work would show up like the occasional and unexpected letter from an old friend, and like the best of old friends, the conversation would seem to pick up in the middle of a frantic sentence, bursting with a pent up enthusiasm that broke through every dull thing around it.

As goodbyes go, this one is overly long and rambles into places it need not. But I imagine DFW would have wanted it that way, and I'm a little less for knowing his next missive will never be delivered.

Rediscovered: The Thermals' "The Body, The Blood, The Machine"

2008-07-26T13:49:00.000-07:00

Six hours into what looks like it's going to be a fifteen hour work day and coming off listening to three straight hours of Yo La Tengo, I'm watching the rain roll in and out and enjoying the jesus reference out of the Thermals' "The Body, The Blood, The Machine". Like a punky John Darnielle grappling with issues of Christianity. Darn fine stuff.

Sorry, needed to put something new up here and not feeling entirely lucid. Deep coats of work glaze as a long week concludes. Put together a new muxtape though, as if that's some sort of achievement. Enjoy.

http://noradio.muxtape.com

To Boldly Go Where No One Should Have Gone to Begin With...

2008-06-30T14:36:00.000-07:00

I would have taken pictures, but there was really no point. Some time I’ll take you all to the Saturday Super Flea back home, you can imagine everyone there is wearing crimson with little triangular buttons and you’ll get the idea.

So as I’m writing this, I’m DJing the closing dance for the regional Starfleet Conference. Which is apparently like a Star Trek convention only not as freewheelin’. I think if we had done show of hands, at least sixty percent of these folks would either be card-carrying NRA members or at least highly sympathetic. Median age: 43 (to be fair, Helen throws off the curve a bit, this statistical outlier is certainly joining us from not just before the United Federation of Planets but a good decade before the United Nations). Median weight: deuce and a quarter and I’m being generous. Median facial hair: goatee. Lots of them and a fair count of mustaches.

When I arrived at the Ramada (seriously , how the fuck do I allow myself to be talked into these things?), I was greeted by the fairly ancient manager, who kindly waited til I had loaded in everything but a handful of XLR cables before asking if he could lend a hand. I snuck my gear in during the dinner, noting to my utter horror the lack of beer bottles and wine glasses on the dinner tables. A couple folks were sipping some sort of blue concoction, but for the most part this looked like a dry event. A dry dance party. I swear, I am never going to try DJing in Salt Lake City. You need social lubricant, people! Especially if you’re as socially…creaky as some of these ladies and gents.

Once I was set up, I snuck over to the McDonalds for dinner, where the young man at the counter sans front teeth reminded me that no matter how this week ended, I should count it in the plus column since I’m still wearing my whole face despite last Friday’s accident. A moment of relative peace before heading back. You know the view from up by the mall is actually…nonexistent.

Back to the Ramada, I excused myself to get passed a young lady managing to block the doorway all on her own. This is actually my first glimpse of the blue beverages, which I think Esteban jokingly mentioned to me as “synthahol” earlier in the afternoon. I think he was joking. The first emcee—

Time out. Two things have just happened. First, I noticed that everyone in the room was at the opposite end of the banquet hall, staring at me like the Blues Brothers in the country bar scene. Secondly, the very nice older dude with the hell of white mustache came over and requested some slow songs. His reasoning:

“A lot of us guys during this conference, we’ve got our ladies with us and we don’t get to spend much time with them. So this is our chance to make it up to them. So if we don’t have a couple slow dances, we’re screwed. Actually, we’re not getting screwed, which is the problem.”

Anyway, I put on “You Were Always on My Mind” by Willie Nelson followed by “Unchained Melody” by the Righteous Brothers. And you know what? “Unchained Melody” kind of choked me up. No joke. I mean, that’s a whole lot of fucking song.

—the first emcee was giving out awards for Best Officer, Best Enlisted Man—

Time out again. Three Icelandic brothers, statistical outliers far to the left on the weight chart. All sporting hammer pendants. Hammer of Thor, they inform me. You’re thor? I’m tho thor I can’t thtand it. They don’t like me. No one here likes me.

—and so on. Did I mention that the Starfleet is divided into ships? Yep, it’s divided into ships. They’ve all got the name of their ship on their lanyards, along with their ranks, like, “Lt. Ed of the USS Syracuse. Why is it the Star Trek ships are all designated USS? Isn’t there supposed to be some sort of United Federation of Planets or is this just reinforcing US cultural/military hegemony? Hey, you know the Beatles version of “Twist and Shout” actually rocks pretty hard. And this whole endeavor is making me dumber by the minute. Also, not to be racist, but these people seem to only like music by white people. Stevie Wonder=death. Oh, and they all love KISS. And schmaltz! Any song I thought was far too sappy to be played went over like…I don’t know, what goes over well? Is that woman wearing fringed chaps?

Following the awards (which begin the trend of injokes I don’t at all grasp) is the auction of goods that would be passed over at your average flea market. Star Trek trading cards. Action figures on which the number imprinted on the foot must be checked before bidding can begin. Next time I go back to Buffalo, I’m totally digging out my old Star Wars toys and checking the tiny numbers on their feet. A picture of Patrick Stewart playing Captain Picard dressed as some kind of private eye, signed by Patrick Stewart. A set of commemorative coins that go for (no joke) a thousand dollars. More jokes I don’t get that slay the crowd.

And now it’s my big moment. I lead off with Peter Schilling’s “Major Tom”. Which I thought, you know, science fiction related. Involves counting. German. Can’t lose! The main organizer (decked out in what tuxedos will look like in the future) digs it, but he’s pretty much alone on that. At about this point, the first request for Faith Hill comes in and I started scanning the table around me for sharp objects. Requests that followed included: “Can you play some eighties?” during “In a Big Country”. House music. At least three separate requests for “Time Warp”. At least two separate requests for Journey. And I fucking hate Journey! Everyone knows that. I took out that ad in the Ithaca Times. At one point this eight year old kid starts requesting album tracks by Depeche Mode, waving away “Just Can’t Get Enough” in favor of “real Depeche Mode”. He’s thrilled I’ve got “Black Celebration” and for a moment I think there’s hope. Then his dad dragged him upstairs to their room and I’m left with the rest of them.

So the rest of them got me thinking a bit, as I warded off requests for really just the worst songs you can imagine. Now I am very much a geek in any number of ways. I can bend your ear on comic books, Star Wars, X-Files, you name it. I've never gone in for Dr. Who, but I own all of The Prisoner. But the Star Trek stuff has always left me pretty cold. I always thought it was because you had to keep track of a lot of stuff and I like my sci-fi pretty simple ("There's this Force. It has a Dark Side and...well, a side that isn't so dark.") But now I’m realizing the actual reason. Take Star Wars, for just a minute: a plucky band of rebels plots to destroy the oppressive empire. X-Files: a plucky pair of FBI agents attempts to decrypt a vast conspiracy by a shadowy and oppressive government. Star Trek: everyone dresses the same, has a military rank and everything’s pretty okay. It’s the ultimate dream of a police state, free will subjugated to a vaguely defined “common good”. The state is no longer the enemy: the state is ubiquitous. No wonder its fans seem to be, for the most part, conservative and fairly passive. They're supposed to be geeks, but geekism, I always thought, involves a basically inquisitive and acquisitional nature. There's nothing to acquire/inquire about the world of Star Trek that I can discern. Everything is in it's right place, Roddenberry's in his heaven and all is right with the world. All watched over by military-industrial complexes of loving grace.

And I realized I actually wished these people harm. I wanted bad things to happen to them. I wanted them to be eaten by Klingons or anally raped by Romulans or something unpleasant and thematically appropriate. But I couldn’t help trying to please them, struggling to make them like me, please for the love of god LIKE ME!

It didn’t work. They paid me, but they didn’t like me. And I’m out hopefully in time to see some of the Hubcap show. Those guys like me.

Mind-Blown on a Saturday Afternoon

2008-06-28T12:39:00.000-07:00

Okay, if you haven't gone and downloaded the new Girl Talk album, "Feed the Animals", you really need to. I mean, you know this guy's shtick by now and this one doesn't really do anything fundamentally different from "Night Ripper", although it seems to me it's a little less heavy-handed with its hiphop samples. That is, Gregg Gillis isn't so much laying his frantic collage of pop hooks behind extended hiphop samples; he's integrating them more fully into the songs. It still has the breathless name-that-tune vibe of his earlier efforts, but it seems a little less ADD. When, for instance, Deee-Lite and Nirvana are seamlessly blended together, you get the feeling that both samples have been digested by the DJ, not just thrown together haphazardly. And yes, there's some Metallica in there and, well, I don't want to spoil any of it. I'm not sure it'll bear repeated listening: the primary joy of Girl Talk is just that: primary. It's the act of discovery, of puzzling out. What's left once the mystery's solved remains to be seen, but for now, this is speeding up a day that'd otherwise be creeping by.

Of course, maybe I'm just happy because there's a lot more classic rock on here. A lot.

Get it here.

The Pretty Things That Summer Brings

2008-06-15T12:27:00.000-07:00

During my daily staring at my face too long in the mirror just now, I had cause to wonder if my nose has been knocked off center by my recent encounter on the Commons. The light makes it tough to tell.

Enough about my face, let’s talk about me. I’m finding myself in the last summer of my twenties, which it turns out is a little scary. Oddly, while most summers my mind turns to one thing (kidding, actually. I meant what you probably thought I meant), this summer I’m just feeling sort of quiet, cheerful in a general sense I think is not blindly optimistic but informed by an idea that even with my finances in a state of shambles and the most meaningful relationship in my life existing between me and my cat, things are better than they have been.

Luckily for me, this summer has led off with a couple albums that perfectly suit this mood. Vetiver’s Things of the Past, Bonnie Prince Billy’s Lie Down in the Light and even the Silver Jew’s Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea are pleasant, hopeful little albums. They’re more about affection than love, more about the dawn and the hours after than the night, although it’s clear all three have arrived at the dawn by waiting up.

A new Will Oldham, although not all that rare an occurrence, is always a welcome one. On one hand, Will gives me the creeps. Not just because a lot of his stuff is creepy, but a lot of his material in Palace goes to dark places that I find consistently thrilling and unsettling at once. He’s creepy because he manages to emote with an almost autistic blankness that allows the emotions to be drawn small and explode off the album. As he claims on Lie Down in the Light’s “For Every Field, There’s a Mole”, Oldham is the king of infinite space, but often it’s the infinite space between moments, or eyelashes. The massiveness of the very small, the infinitesimal of the gigantic. And, wait, is that an oboe?

In a recent interview, David Berman, who is another animal entirely, claimed that he could never collaborate with Oldham because Will collaborates with everybody. Berman deftly carried this analogy over to state that “collaborating with Will would be like collaborating with everyone Will’s ever collaborated with.” Which would mean collaborating with this guy:

But seriously folks. In the past few years, Oldham has moved past the stark roots of Palace to collaborate with the heavy guitars of Matt Sweeney on the amazing Superwolf album, then switched over to the guitarless kids in Tortoise for the fantastically weird but aptly titled covers album, The Brave and the Bold. Last year’s The Letting Go was a perfect distillation of what Oldham does with, an exquisite piece on mourning and loss with hints of what sustains us through the roughs. With Lie Down in the Light, the roughs are behind him and the listener is left with what remains: close friends and lovers, current and past. Lie Down in the Light is a collection of objects held so close to the heart they permanently retain their heat and an invitation to hold those objects in your hands, to take a little warmth from them to wash off the last lingering chills of the night before.

Pigs and music (but not music for pigs)

2008-06-12T10:40:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to put this piece up, but as I was less than thrilled with some of the edits it saw in print, I held off for a bit. But if you dig on pig, here's my piece from last week's Ithaca Times in the original, and over at my new favorite toy, muxtape there's a collection of pretty lazy songs, which is kind of what my brain has felt like the past couple days. That Mary Wells song just slays me and if you don't know the Capstan Shafts, the dude is the king of the under two-minute gem and loads of his stuff is available for free in various online places. And yep, that's Ithaca's the Settlers. Now with production! I'm not sure if the new album is supposed to be hush hush, but it needs to be out in the world, wreaking havok soon.

I might post about new stuff before the week is out, since there've been a couple remarkable albums out this month. But first I need to figure out how I feel about the new My Morning Jacket. The key lies in "Highly Suspicious", which you can go download here if you hurry. Is it a joke? Is it deadly serious? Not sure. I can tell you the new Silver Jews, Bonnie Prince Billy and Fleet Foxes are all lovely and make for good headphone fodder on a summer day.

On to the pigs!

This Little Piggery Went to Trumansburg

It’s spring, when a young man’s fancy turns to pork. Well, mine at least. Blame it on growing up in Buffalo, the easternmost outpost of the Midwest and a city that loves meat. After moving away, I was horrified to learn people thought they could have a barbeque without the inclusion of kielbasa or brats. There aren’t many things I miss about Cheektowaga, but the availability of great sausage is one of them. Oh, and my family. Them too.

So it was with trepidation I first approached the Piggery’s booth at the Ithaca Farmer’s Market. Proprietors Brad and Heather Sanford were friendly and eager to tell me about sustainability and the humane treatment of their hogs, but the proof is in the casing. An hour, two links and a dash of mustard later, I was drafting an evangelical email to friends and acquaintances, urging them to get themselves to the Piggery.

Lips and Otto (von Bismarck)

Off the grid in the outskirts of Trumansburg, Brad and Heather maintain a seventy-acre farm. As I pulled up the drive, scanning the pastures, I spotted a sheep lazing near a shed that looked like something out of the Smurf village, along with some good-looking chickens and myriad pieces of farm equipment. But, oddly, no pigs. I went around the back of the house and let myself into the basement kitchen where Brad and Heather were grinding meat for sausage.

Otto von Bismarck famously opined that “Laws are like sausages: it is better not to see them being made.” In this case, Otto was more on the mark with the former than the latter. In most states, USDA regulations make it nearly impossible to run a commercial kitchen in your home. That same set of regulations limits the seasoning that can be used in sausage, while saying little about the meat content. This allows larger sausage making companies to dominate the market with low quality product. Luckily, New York State allows Brad and Heather to operate in-house under the same codes as a restaurant kitchen.

The small kitchen was sparsely fitted out with two coolers,both full, a three-bay sink and an old chamber stove, a 1950’s throwback known for fuel efficiency. “One of the things people usually ask is, ‘Where’s your equipment?’” Heather told me, but all of the production is done with a simple hand grinder and a manual device for packing the sausage into its casings. I scoped out the hopper of the grinder to see what was going into the sausage, half expecting the mix of lips and assholes we fear are in our processed meats. Instead, I saw healthy chunks of meat with of fresh garlic and herbs. There might be lips and assholes involved in law making, but there were none in this sausage.

Pigs and their cellulite have gotten caught up in an unfortunate political analogy, wherein anything unnecessary and harmful to a legislative bill is branded “pork barrel”. Once a staple of the American diet, pork fell into disfavor due to its relatively high fat content. The result was two-fold: the price of pork plummeted and pork farmers moved toward leaner animals, producing pork chops that had all the gustatory appeal of a hockey puck. Even a dosing of Shake-and-Bake can’t conceal that without the fat, pork cooks up dry and flavorless. As Brad wrapped up a set of pork chops each roughly the size of my head, he pointed at the inch of fat girding each one. “That’s where all the vitamins are,” he assured me. “All the good stuff.”

Brad and Heather Bought the Farm

Just goes to show, your Cornell degree doesn’t dictate your destiny. Brad and Heather both graduated from Cornell with degrees in genetics and engineering, respectively, but ended up in New York City, with Brad attending the French Culinary Institute and Heather working in the record industry. About four years ago, they moved back to the Finger Lakes to take on “some sort of agricultural thing.” Originally planning to start up a hard cider orchard, they ended up purchasing their first couple pigs.

This is their first year of regular production and sales, but Brad and Heather have been busy in the interim. They’ve been building, trying out recipes and learning the finer points of pig husbandry, setting up their operation with an eye towards sustainability; the house and the kitchen run almost entirely off wind and solar power generated on the farm.

While Heather played with the punk band Trabant, whose single “Fascism is Sexy” was chosen as the theme song for a French children’s show, Brad hit up the Culinary Institute for a refresher course and has devoured every available book on chaucetuerie. Brad said 18th century books are the most helpful while modern books are pretty boring. “Feed them soy and some corn and they’ll be fine,” seemed to be the attitude of most texts, he said, dismissing texts intended for much larger farms. With the increased demand for corn for use in ethanol production, grain prices have gone up nearly seventy percent from last year, encouraging Brad and Heather to form partnerships with local growers while looking for alternative methods of feeding their pigs. Brad described using the pigs as plows, spreading barley and oats in with the larger grain feed so the pigs plant the next generation of their food while eating. Some of the plants were already sprouting and would soon provide a dietary supplement for the hogs.

Meet the Pigs
Pig aren’t as diverse as dog, but there are a number of distinct heirloom breeds. Chunkette, for instance, would chafe at being called simply a pig, since she is, in fact, a Mulefoot hog: a rare breed nearly bred out of existence due to changes in the agricultural market. The Piggery is also raising a number of half Tamworths, larger pigs with thick, bristly auburn hair, better suited for colder environments. But standard, pinkish Yorkshires (think Babe and Wilbur) are also well represented: one of the pastures was teeming with them, lazing about under a simple shelter, chomping on grass and goading Brad and Heather to play with them.

The idea of pigs wallowing in crap and eating whatever they’re slopped with is more of a judgment on how they’re traditionally raised than their natural habits. Given a little room to run, pasture and play, pigs are, in fact, kind of adorable. Contemplating whether or not I could keep one as a pet in my apartment, I asked Heather and Brad if they ever had trouble serving up animals they’d raised from infancy. She shrugged a little and told me they’d just had “one of our moms” in the kitchen the previous week. “But I guess I’ve come to terms with it,” she told me. “It’s all part of a circle of life thing.”

Scattered shots...

2008-06-03T14:32:00.000-07:00

Joyce said the broken mirror is the symbol of Irish art. Of course, Mick said that time is on my side and frankly time and I are staring at each other across a line of scrimmage right now, so maybe one shouldn't trust everything one hears from across the pond. But if Joyce is right, my brain is currently the symbol of Irish art. Meaning I have the attention span of a Stiff Little Fingers song.

Which is to say, I haven't had any new musical obsessions of late and music has become more background noise than anything else. This was one of my primary fears opening the store, and while I'm sure it will pass, for right now my turntable is gathering dust. The week before last was spent largely researching and writing about Ithaca's new roller derby team, last week was a piece on pig farming and charcuterie which will hopefully see daylight tomorrow, and this week I've been jotting down notes for the other blog and wondering how I can make this into an article. And for whom. There's just so much I don't know about the circus arts. Does anyone know of any particularly good lit on clown colleges?

Also, in my capacity as drink-makin' monkey, I'm making a summer transition from whiskey to gin. I know, it's sacreligious and I will probably keep it like a secret when I visit the NYC for SchubertFest on Saturday (scroll down a bit). But a fellow ginthusiast has highly recommended I go to Death + Company, so a pre-rock show pilgrimage may be in order.

In other news, the book is back on definite go status after a month or so in a gray area. After some scheduling shifts and a fair brutalizing from the surviving member of the band in question, it looks like late September is the new July. On the bright side, that means I might have a free minute in July to get out of town, on the downside it means the advance check that's supposed to pay off the brand spanking new computer I'm currently typing on may slip even farther into the future.

New York crew, see you at Fontana's this Saturday, n'est pas?

Of mustaches and such...

2008-04-24T15:55:00.000-07:00

Can I just very quickly point you towards some music. It's the end of the work day (part one) and I've spent most of it thinking about bus tickets to NYC and the incredible ATP Festival line-up in the Catskills of all places (Shecky Green opening for My Bloody Valentine!) and generally being antsy. It's my own fault, I wore very mismatched patterns and it's tweaking me out.

The two things that have been calming me down are the new Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album, Dig, Lazarus, Dig and the Fuck Buttons' Street Horrsing. First of all, I should admit I am not a lifelong fan of Mr. Cave. Mostly, I have been glad Nick Cave is out there being Nick Cave so I don't have to. Not that I could. But the last album with the Bad Seeds, which sported one good title, Abattoir Blues and one unforgivable title, The Lyre of Orpheus (I mean, come the fuck on) snuck its way into my regular listening rotation, borne largely on the back of "Cannibal's Hymn", which is heartbreakingly perfect, and by the time Mr. Cave wandered into the middle of The Assassination of Jesse James wearing a mustache that could shelter a small village through the rainy season, I was saying to myself, "Hey, this guy no longer seems like he might eat a baby for laughs." Follow that up with the Grinderman album, which might not eat a baby for laughs, but don't go handing your babies off to it just yet, and I'd swung around to being vocally pro-Cave.

This album knocked it down. I am getting Nick Cave's face tattooed over my face. Or at least his mustache. Cave settles into the creepy preacher vibe he's toyed with throughout his career and with the Bad Seeds (now with the Dirty Three's Warren Ellis firmly at the helm) locked in behind him, delivers dark, hilarious monologues that make the political seem irrelevant. When Nick Cave sees a problem, he skips write past the government and writes angry letters to God. In the same way certain Dylan songs can grab you by the throat and shake you with nothing more than a verse-verse-verse structure, Cave's lyrics are jaw-droppingly good, the urge to go back and hear a line again overwhelmed only by the need to hear what's next.

On the total other end of things are the Fuck Buttons, who have I think been getting a fair amount of press or at least a big gooey one from Pitchfork. Normally, the 'forkers choices in electrodrone leave me pretty cold, but this one gets it right. Some of the satanic screaming noises I could do without, but the tracks that don't sound like an exorcism in process are perfect examples of how repetition can be emotive. "Sweet Love for Planet Earth" with darkles and tincts with guitars (can anyone tell me where that phrase is from? it's been stuck in my head for half an hour) like the beginning of the best Explosions on the Sky tracks, but holds back the bombast. Imagine being at the planetarium, but the guy manning the show is so baked he abandons all the comets and big bang nonsense to just watch things flicker. "Bright Tomorrow" surges forward on a pushbeat that would be at home in 90s house music but manages to never feel rushed.

If you're feeling sinister (or not sinister enough), check out the new Nick. If you're feeling drony (which I am, I think due to a lack of vitamin B?), a couple FB tracks are pretty sweet evening wear.

All right, off to NYC for the weekend to see Misters Thomas and Kupstas in their performing capacities. If you're in the area: Goodbye Blue Monday, 8pm Sunday night. Awesomeness. Now I'm wondering if I can fit the new episode of Lost onto my crappy little iPod.

A Rather Lengthy Interview with Alison Bechdel

2008-04-04T09:16:00.000-07:00

All right, first of all, if you haven't read Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home", you need to go out and do so. Preferrably by purchasing it and preferrably from your local bookstore or comic book dealer. As someone with a general distaste for memoir, I've had plenty of crow to eat lately with the publication of this book and "Persepolis". What Marjane Satrapi accomplishes is a series of broad-stroke vignettes, Alison Bechdel renders in a story intricate within a single panel and as a whole. Images, characters and books recur throughout, changed in each appearance by their context, by new information gained by the narrator and given to the reader.

Okay, before I start actually writing my article, I should draw back a bit. This week, I interviewed Alison Bechdel for the Ithaca Times. She'll be speaking at Cornell on Thursday, April 10th. Since only a line or two from the long and pretty awesome interview (especially after my contributions were edited down to make me sound like less of a slack-jawed mouthbreather) will make it into the article, I wanted to post the interview here. Thanks to Alison, and also to Devon Sanger and the FedEx guy.

Bob Proehl: I wanted to start off, I know this is a certain kind of nerdy, but, talking to you about digital distribution. I was noticing that you seem to be primarily moving Dykes to Watch Out For over to the website and more what you mention as being a kind of NPR model of financing. I was wondering if you were finding people were generous or supportive of that kind of model.

Alison Bechdel: It’s not working that great. People do make donations but it’s not making up for what I’m losing in newspaper revenue as all these papers are folding. It’s something but it’s not totally working. I think I’ll figure out a way to make it work. I’m not aggressive about it, I don’t push people to make donations cause I feel awkward about it, so I don’t know what would happen if I did more of that pledge scenario like they do on NPR.

BP: I was curious about that, as far what form that would even take.

AB: I could put up a post like, every six months saying give me some money. Cause I feel awkward about it. I don’t like paying for online content, nobody does.

BP: I’m kind of curious as to how these speaking engagements work for you. It seems like the visual and the prose are so tightly linked, particularly in Fun Home. So when you do these speaking engagements, are you lecturing, are you reading from the work, how do you generally operate these?

AB: The magic of Power Point, my friend. It’s really fun because I’m reading the script and showing pictures at the same time, it’s like a whole different medium. It’s like I have control over timing when I’m reading in a way that I don’t when people are reading on there own. It’s a really interesting experience, exactly when I click to the next slide and when I choose to read my narration. It’s really fun; people I think find it pretty engaging. It’s like you’re being read a picture book. You know, did you ever watch Captain Kangaroo when you were little and they would read with pictures? I used to love that. It’s kind of like that.

BP: When you do that, do you use the full panels with text or do you strip the text from the panels and just use the illustrations?

AB: I strip the narration from the panels but I leave the dialogue cause that’s too complicated to remove. And also, the other interesting thing. Part of it is I’ll be reading from my work but also I’ll be talking about my work and showing images of it as I go and that’s kind of like doing a live comic strip because you have a picture and then you have narration that goes along with it. And with sort of the two of them it creates sort of this third level, which is fun to play with.

BP: Kind of following up on that, I wanted to ask you a little bit about process. Clearly you’re doing a lot of photo referencing. The level of detail is kind of an amazing and on par with the kind of detailing you find in TinTin comics. At the same time you lead off in the narrative by describing yourself as Spartan and having this design aesthetic that’s antithetical to your father’s more ornate aesthetic. I was wondering if you find this kind of packing of detail in your art to be at odds with that description.

AB: That’s kind of an interesting observation. I never equated—I do have an extensive level of detail, I think often it even obscures my work a little bit. But I never thought about it as a kind of ornate-ness. I guess it is. I think of it more as I’m so desperately trying to get things down accurately, it’s hard to know when to stop with the detail. You know, do I draw the name of the book on the spines of the books on the bookshelf, do I draw the logo of the publisher on the spine, do I draw the wood grain on the bookshelf? At a certain point, it all becomes illegible. But I find it hard to know when to stop with that. But I feel like it’s somehow in keeping with my Spartan aesthetic. I want to be accurate.

BP: I didn’t mean ornate to come across in a sort of negative or over embellished sense.

AB: Well, I see what you mean; you could make a case for that.

BP: I was just wondering if you see that as being practical or literal to what you’re doing.

AB: It’s like an uncontrolled literalism. I wish I could be easier with more abstraction.

BP: I wanted to ask you about the function of books within the text. There’s a heavy level of allusion and there’s whole books that are being used as a mode of communication, particularly between you and your father. Particularly the writings of Collette and “A Happy Death” and…

AB: Yeah, the physical book becomes a kind of character.

BP: You actually make a mention of refusing to take your father’s copy of…I can’t remember which Camus book it is right now.

AB: Oh yeah, “The Myth of Sisyphus”.

BP: As someone who, for a long time has not been working in a book format, how is seeing this as a cohesive whole and more of a physical object different from a syndicated strip?

AB: It was kind of a hard leap to make. Because I’m so used to this temporal, temporary nature of the comic strip, you know? I make kind of things up as I go along, I can’t really go back and revise anything. I can make small changes, but I can’t change the story. So this was working with a level of permanence I wasn’t used to, and it was very daunting. But once I realized that I could rework stuff, it was really exciting to have the whole thing there before me and be able to manipulate it and get everything just right and work in all these internal structural things that I’ve never been able to do with the comic strip, so I kind of got into it, but it took awhile.

BP: Did you embark on this thinking of it as a book-length project?

AB: I did, I did. And that was just, you know, mind-blowing. I’m used to creating a two-page story at a time and now I have two hundred plus pages yawning ahead of me, I didn’t know how I was going to….

BP: Well, that’s quite a jump.

AB: In a way, what helped me was learning that even a graphic novel, even a full-length graphic novel has structural constraints to it. There are things you have to pin down and start working around. And that helped me to manage all those empty pages, when I learned that they weren’t really all that empty.

BP: What kind of structural constraints did you find you were running into?

AB: Things like, you want to use the act of turning the page, like if you have a surprising image or a surprising moment coming up, you don’t want people to just see that before its time, so you try to time it so it’s on a left hand page, so they turn the page and there’s the big moment. It’s like you’re telling stories in a physical way, in a two dimensional way. I think of prose writing as like one dimensional, it doesn’t really matter where anything falls on the page. And graphic storytelling is kind of like poetry, or concrete poetry, at any rate, in that it very much matters where on the page or within the chapter. You really have to deal with the physical reality of the book in an interesting way. And then I broke it down into chapters, which helped, and each chapter would have a beginning, middle and an end, it’s own little structural constraints.

BP: I mean, you can see the attention to some of the page layouts, but the idea of saving something for the left hand page—

AB: Well I’m not even very good at that. You know, real masters use that. And people also use the composition of a page spread better than I do. Sometimes I’ll use the opportunity of a page spread to further the narrative. Mostly I’m just going panel to panel.

BP: I wanted to ask some sort of general questions about fathers. You have a comment earlier in the book that the bar is set lower for fathers than for mothers. And in Dykes to Watch Out For, you’re kind of exploring this sort of reversal of gender roles in parenting, where you have a father figures who’s more of a traditional, feminine mothering role. And I was wondering, do you think the shift in gender roles in parenting, if there are any, are going to affect—you discuss your father as being sort of, I don’t know if mystifying is the word, but there’s a distance and mystery that doesn’t come across in the character of your mother. I was wondering if you think that shift is going to affect the sort of mysticism that parents can carry for their kids.

AB: I imagine that it would, that that’s all changing. I mean, somebody must be studying this. When I say the bar was set lower for fathers than for mothers, that’s very much a generational thing. My dad’s from a generation when fathers didn’t change diapers. And now they do. It’s really different. I’m sure that the whole absent father thing is going to change for the next generation, and they’ll be writing about their overbearing fathers.

BP: I was surprised to see, well not totally surprised, to see that the book had nearly been banned. There was a situation with a library in Missouri that was attempting to ban both “Fun Home” and [Craig Thompson’s] “Blankets”, which is kind of an odd pairing. I was wondering what your reaction and what your involvement was with that process.

AB: No, I didn’t really have any involvement, I kind of just watched from the sidelines. And actually, they put the book back. It was really kind of an interesting situation and it makes sense that it was “Fun Home” and “Blankets”, because they’re graphic stories and it was the images that they were objecting to, because the illustrated story is presumably a sort of an attractive nuisance, like kids are going to be more likely to pick this book up than another book that might touch on adult themes, that didn’t have pictures. And I don’t know, I guess that might be true, but banning it doesn’t seem like the proper solution.

BP: I mean, these are not books that are more explicit than a prose text.

AB: Only in so far as pictures are more explicit than words. And there is something to that, you know? I don’t know what the proper way of handling it is. My book is also, there’s something going on in Utah, at the University of Utah. A student, I think it’s just one lone student, but he protested having to read it for his English class. Because it was pornographic! He’s part of some group called No More Pornography. And so he got the teacher to assign an alternate text for him. It was on the news and everything. And it was just cause there’s one picture of, like, me having oral sex with somebody. I guess that could be pornographic, I don’t know.

BP: But other than the fact that it’s visual, it’s no more pornographic than the stuff you might read in a standard English class text.

AB: Exactly.

BP: The last quick thing, are you working on any sort of larger project now, other than keeping up with the strip every couple weeks?

AB: I’m working on another memoir. Theoretically. I’m kind of having trouble getting down to it. I’m writing a book about relationships. I’m going to draw on my own relationship history and weave it in with psychoanalytical reading that I’m doing and maybe more literature like I did in “Fun Home”. It’s all kind of hazy right now.

BP: Do you think there’s any particular reason that—

AB: Bob, could you hold on for one second, I think the FedEx delivery is here.

BP: Oh sure.

(At this point, AB goes to answer the door, carrying her phone and the FedEx guy takes over the interview for me)
AB: Hello.

FedEx Guy: That’s for you.

AB: Oh, and that’s for you. Did you know I had something for you?

FEG: Well, yeah, somebody called it in. Evidently, it wasn’t you?

AB: Yeah, it was me.

FEG: And you know, I gotta tell you, I’m psyched, cause I read the Best American Series…

AB: Oh really?

FEG: I love it and I was psyched to see your stuff in there. And I’ve been dying to tell you that, I’ve come here a couple time and you haven’t been here. I wanted to tell you I was psyched.

AB: Cool. That’s really sweet of you. Yeah, it’s a great series.

FEG: It really is. As far as I’m concerned it’s absolutely required reading. I haven’t really gotten into the other ones; I know there’s a bunch of them. A poetry series and a fiction.

AB: They doing a comics one now too, that’s just comics.

FEG: Is that right? Graphic novels?

AB: Best American Graphic Narrative or something, it’s called.

FEG: Cool, anyway I was psyched. Good to see you.

AB: You too. (Returning to the phone) Hello?

BP: Hello.

AB: Did you hear any of that? I was trying to hold my microphone up. (laughing) That was the FedEx guy.

BP: Yeah, I heard all of that.

AB:Isn’t that wild?

BP: That was great.

AB: Anyhow. What were you asking me?

BP: I hadn’t really formed this question too well, but the form of autobiography and memoir seems so prevalent among, I don’t know if I want to use the term alternative comics artists, but you know, outside of superhero publishing. Do you think there’s any particular reason for you that this form of expression seems to work so well for memoir and autobiography?

AB: I keep trying to work up my grand theory of this, because there is something that seems peculiarly conducive to autobiography in graphic storytelling. But I can’t think why. Except, the furthest I’ve gotten is the act of trying to draw yourself, it forces a kind of objectivity about yourself. I mean, this could be totally bullshit. I’m sure prose memoir writing, if you’re any good you also have to have a degree of objectivity about yourself. But something about that act of looking at yourself from the outside, the way you do when you draw yourself…I mean, I haven’t worked out this theory.

BP: If you think of writing longer prose memoir, you still have the project of constructing the “I”, of imagining yourself as a character.

AB: Now I’m thinking of examples of first person shooter style comics that I’ve seen, where you see everything through the narrator’s eyes, you don’t actually see this guy as a character; you just sort of see what he sees. But that’s sort of an experimental thing. You couldn’t really sustain that.

BP: And it seems that the opposite is more common of autobiographical comics work, the idea of having the artist in the panel.

AB: But maybe it’s just the tradition. I feel very inspired by R. Crumb and Harvey Pekar’s work for example. That kind of kind of gritty daily-ness and trying to be really honest about their real lives. Maybe it’s just that tradition that’s inspired everyone else to keep doing it.

As promised...

2008-04-03T14:35:00.000-07:00

These things always take exponentially longer than I'd like, but here it is: ze mystery blog. Actually, there's no mystery to it. This is where you'll be able to find information on the book and the tour events as they develop. Things are starting to cook up a bit, especially given the fact it's all three months away. We've got our recruits.

The Gilded Palace of Sin

A Week or So of Nerdiness

2008-04-03T09:48:00.000-07:00

Ah, the 60-cycle hum of dead air. Sorry for my absence of late. Several projects are in the works, some of them music related, some of them comics related. One of them might see a post later today, but for now, the fine folks at PopCultureShock have my review of "The Ten Cent Plague" up in their Alternate Currents column, which for a comic book nerd is pretty cool. You can check it out here.

Today or tomorrow, I'll be posting my interview with cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who wrote one of the best graphic memoirs I've ever read with 2006's "Fun Home". In fairness, the high point of the interview is the UPS guy. Next week, I'll be posting an interview with another of my favorite cartoonists, Terry Moore, whose "Strangers in Paradise" series was one of the few reasons to regularly visit a comic book store through much of the late 90s and whose new book, "Echo" just started last month. One of the original self-publishing brats. And yeah, mystery link later today.

The cookies of others.

2008-03-13T11:00:00.000-07:00

When someone sends you semi-anonymous cookies in the mail, it means you have done something right. Or you have just eaten a fatal dose of arsenic. For now, I'm going with the former, but if this is my last blog post, assume it was the latter all along.

One of the nice things about being, at this point, primarily a vinyl listener is that you can get completely bogged down in one side of an album. That's what's going on with me and Beach House's "Devotion" right now. Beside the fact it's hardly come off my turntable at all (until yesterday morning when I was jonesing for Mingus with my coffee and eggs), very often after the need scratches the label on the first side, I just lift it back to the outer edge of the disc rather than flipping the whole thing over and exploring further. I love it when this happens, it's like planning a long trip full of stops you know will be amazing, but lingering a couple extra days with friends who are just too lovely to leave.

I saw these two open for Grizzly Bear a whiles back during my finish-the-book/visit-the-parents retreat and it was fantastic. Perfect music for the beginnings of a spring thaw. Diffuse light, cold with surprises. I thought I was hooked on the first track, but now I'm caught up on the third. Here they are, in order (the second, not included, is pretty swell as well):

Wedding Bell
Gila

Because some of you might enjoy it, here are a couple live tracks from the Super Furry Animals show at the store a couple weeks back. The one that was going to put the store on the map and ensure that we did tons of business for the rest of the semester? Well, the doldrums continue, but the show was one of those things where you just shake your head and wonder if it's really happening.

Rings Around the Moon
Runaway
Golden Retriever
In other reportage of things other people have known about forever, I finally got around to seeing "The Lives of Others". I mistakenly netflixed (it's a verb now) "Little Children" instead and forgot about my original target film. The Lawyer put it best (he so often does) in mentioning how remarkable it is that while American twentysomething filmmakers are largely producing meticulous mits of omphaloskeptic self indulgence (which is to say, "I saw 'Darjeeling Limited' this week"), this German cat, all of twenty four years, puts together this sprawling, near perfect commentary on, let's see, interpersonal relations, the role of the artist within the state, the history of the East German regime and the nature of the human soul under such an oppressive government. I'd be more enamored if the film dropped the "see what I just did" denoument, but it looks like my favorite recent films list just got another German in the mix.

This weekend, I am learning James Dean. I've never seen anything of his other than "Rebel Without a Cause", so Sunday night is going to be a "Giant"/"East of Eden" double-header. Ideally, this is going to kick off a sort of American Icons series for me. I'm loading some John Wayne onto the Netflix cue, maybe some Gary Cooper. Given that I'm already well-versed in Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart, who else should make the list? Maybe some Bogart? I dunno, Gregory Peck?

Take 'em to Missouri.

Intellectual props (or "Talented Portly Dudes, Thievin' on the Beatles").

2008-03-13T09:48:00.000-07:00

Has the copyright recently expired on the guitar riff from "Dear Prudence" by the Beatles? Along with the entire song's abhorrent deployment in "Across The Universe", that riff has shown up in LCD Soundsystem's original "steal all you can motherfucker" masterpiece of a self titled album (which also includes everything this side of David Byrne's wallet)(incidentally, David Byrne's wallet is on the second album), but now the ultimate grimy duo the Gutter Twins have wheeled out this rocker from the crypt. George Harrison's corpse must be exhausted, and that dude was pretty tired while he was alive.

Don't get me wrong, I'm hell of psyched to have an album that combines the Marvin Gaye on ketamine vocals of Greg Dulli and the "bodies are buried in the barn" baritone of Mark Lanegan. Ideally, I'd be carving pumpkins to it, but tisn't the season. So I've been carving scary faces onto grapefruits to it. Not quite the same effect (more pulp, less structural integrity) but tres emotionally satisfying.

I tried very hard to find a picture of Jane Seymour's sister, to whom "Dear Prudence" was originally dedicated. For the record, she was hanging with the Fabs while they were learning to be more socially disconnected under the tutelage of the Maharishi Mahesh Yoshi (I think I have that right). While this period only did mild damage to them plucky Liverpudlians (inducing George to steel mantras from the Chiffons, among other tribulations), it was mentally destructive for the little Seymour sister, who suffered a breakdown and got a Beatles tune in return. It ain't enlightenment, but baby, what is?

Compare, contrast, lather, rinse, repeat.
"Dear Prudence"-The Beatles
"Never As Tired as When I'm Waking Up"- LCD Soundsystem
"I Was in Love With You"- The Gutter Twins

Photoshop is comfort food.

2008-03-07T09:50:00.000-08:00

So yeah, I got the thumbs down from U Mich. But on the bright side, I made this.

Man, I need coffee.

These are the Daves I Know

2008-03-03T13:35:00.000-08:00

You know what the awesome, superfun thing about applying to grad school is?

Nothing. There is nothing awesome, super or fun about applying to grad school. As a process it seems designed to cause total neurosis in anyone who embarks upon it. I'm applying to grad school, is this not sufficient evidence of pre-existing neurosis? Anyway, in case you're scoring, I'm currently 0-1, with three more responses expected in the next two weeks. If you're looking for me between now and then, check behind a glass of whiskey.

But not all is doom and gloom! March has shone her sunny face down upon Ithaca, making my scarf temporarily obsolete. Even now, someone is cleaning the outside of the hard-to-reach record store windows to allow precious natural light into our little fluorescent lit cavern. Hopefully this sunshine will be accompanied by her sweet sister, Commerce, although the closing of Juna's, long threatened and finally carried out, does not bode well for the downtown area.

On the plus side, we've had some pretty darn remarkable shows out over here. Just a few days after traveling to Hamilton College to watch those practioners of post-quarterlife panic, the National with a small collection of nineteen year olds who (I'm guessing here) have never had a job, much less one of the "dead end" variety, the store ended up playing host to the Super Furry Animals, who are the nicest group of Welsh people I've ever met. Which is to say the only group of Welsh people I've ever met. When I get the pictures from Damascus, I'll put them up, but a good time was had by all, even if I did fall off the steps of the tour bus at fourish in the morning after what felt like a tour of all the world's whiskeys. All credit goes to the Lawyer on putting this one together, but thanks go most especially to Damascus, the Midget, a handful of FanClubbers and John from Sound on Sound for playing roadie with us. By the way, let me warn you off: being a roadie is a young man (or woman)'s game; it is not for the faint of heart or feeble of back. Lesson learned.

In other good news, and part of the reason for this post's title, my editor, Dr. David Barker was nice enough today to assure me that the book is still happening and has been announced for July. Which means at some point in the summer, I'm going to be looking to come to your town and read in your favorite book store. Any help on this front will be greatly appreciated and reciprocated with whiskey (which has now officially become the theme for this post). Other top-notch Dave, who heads up the sales department at Matador records, has been nice enough to provide the store with the new Stephen Malkmus CD which is pretty darn good, especially given how lukewarm I've felt about other post-Pavement stuff from the Malk. I think this one is catching me at just the right time; the weather's improving, my seasonal affective action is winding down and I needed a cheery guitar rock album. Plus there's something about knowing Sleater-Kinney's Janet Weiss is still working that assures me all is right with the world.

I'm going to do a March events posting tomorrow, cause we've got half an assload of stuff coming up.

New Stuff vs. Old Stuff

2008-02-04T12:02:00.000-08:00

In the category of Old Stuff, Saturday's Madonna vs. Blondie Dance Party rocked fairly hard, due in no small part to the Midget reminding me of the existence of "Call Me" at the last possible moment. A totally unforgivable oversight on my part. I mean, who the hell forgets about "Call Me"?

In the category of Not Quite as Old Stuff is the Guatamalan coffee Jessica was nice enough to bring me back from Ritual Roasters in San Francisco, quite possibly the most aesthetically pleasing coffeeshops on the planet. How could it not be with this handsome former gimme employee at the helm?Fantastic design sense and a great light roast Guat. PA and I have been french-pressing it all week and today I've been running shots through what's left. Pretty bright, but it's still making me happier than the local stuff, which has been a little thin and dull lately.

On the new tip, I finally made it down to Danny and Emily's new place in the West End, Fine Line. We weren't overly adventurous in our ordering, but the pork tenderloin with polenta and the mussels were pretty solid. The prices are decent (hopefully the wine pricing will be comparable once they get their liquor license), but the service was puzzlingly slow given that the Lawyer and I were far outnumbered by the staff. Craigslist claims of a "Little Brooklyn" are probably premature, but I think once they've had a couple weeks to work out the kinks and get their beer and wine operating, this will be a nice addition to Ithaca's list of places you can take someone who isn't necessarily a date but you might like the option of making out with.

Even newer than that, today the Big Brown Truck of Fun dropped off a buttload of records! I'm trying to decide how many are just coming home with me, but the new stuff I'm psyched about are the debut album by Basia Bulat, "Oh My Darling" and the third record by the Devastations, "Yes, U". The fine folks at Matador were nice enough to send an advance copy of the new Mountain Goats and Monade albums, which will make for nice post-trivia listening this evening.

Basia Bulat hails from the commonwealth of Canadia, home to such greats as Gordon Lightfoot (is Gord still alive?) and Tom Cochrane (the chubby dude who sings “Life is a Highway”). In far-flung London, ON, detached from Toronto’s Arts & Crafts behemoth and Montreal’s post-rock and Anglophone indie scenes, Ms.Bulat has more in common with the utterly amazing Julie Doiron than with the Broken Social Scene girls, although there’s a definite Feist element in the production. Lots of strings, very shiny. When I say she’s not as universally palatable as Feist, can we all understand that I mean that in a good way? Legs has pointed out that she sounds weirdly like Shakira if Shakira were good, a statement with a whole lot of assumptions built into it. She’s been touring around with the Veils, a band the Midget likes quite a bit and I find kind of histrionic. She falls somewhere between folk and pop, and if this picture is any indication, she plays one of those autoharp things.

Wow, the new Mountain Goats is sounding really good right now. And it has a song called “How to Embrace a Swamp Creature”. Anxiously awaiting Darnielle’s Black Sabbath book, which will apparently be out before mine.

The Devastations are from the whole other side of the world, a little joint called New Zealand, which I’m told is full of sheep and hobbits. A definite debt to Nick Cave here, although they’ve abandoned the resonant baritone vocals that marked their last album, “Coal” (get it, it rules). The vocals here are more full, the attempts at rocking out given up in favor of one long mid-tempo piece of inspired sleaze. The kind of sleaze that makes you aware of your whole body at once. Smokey stuff, a creeper. Now that I have to play a Vampire Weekend track by request every time I DJ in public, stuff like this is nice to come home to, accompanied by a finger of bourbon and bad thoughts.

Okay, halfway through the Mountain Goats and it’s trumping the last two albums, although not quite on par with “We Shall All Be Healed”. Going home to contemplate the removal of my beard.

The Last of the Last Man

2008-01-29T14:11:00.000-08:00

Okay, so this is ostensibly a music blog, but you can't listen to music all the time. Sometimes you need to read something while you're listening to music. And sometimes it's nice if the thing you're reading has pictures. So since everyone else on the internet wants to talk about Vampire Weekend and I don't, I'd like to devote a little space to a non-musical item dropping this week, the last issue of Brian K. Vaughn's ˆY: The Last Manˆ.

First of all, it should be mentioned that I'm a huge comic book geek. In the past couple years I've been a little more "out" about it, but I've been a pretty regular comic book reader for about fifteen years, since roughly the same time I started avidly listening to music.

It was also around the time that DC Comics started allowing creators, particularly writers, the freedom to do long-form stories that stretched over a number of years and ended when and how the creators chose to end them (assuming the titles sold enough copies to be viable) instead of the standard model wherein a writer would pick up an established character, write the title for ahile and then hand it off to someone else. Within the new model, creators also retained the rights to their characters, which is a whole other issue I'm not about to address here. The shelves are full of failed attempts, series that never caught on and had to be ended earlier than the creator intended due to low sales. In fact, only a handful of series have made it to their natural end (thinking here of Neil Gaiman's ˆSandmanˆ, Warren Ellis's ˆTransmetropolitanˆ, Garth Ennis's ˆPreacherˆand James Robinson's ˆStarmanˆ, a list which leaves out a number of amazing self-published works) and this week, ˆY:The Last Manˆjoins their ranks.

Brian K. Vaughn is one of very few mainstream comics writers who didn't earn their chops writing the capes. In fact, BKV's superhero work before ˆYˆwas pretty unsucessful: Vaughn claims he single-handedly ruined the ˆSwamp Thingˆfranchise, although to be fair, no one's really had much sucess with Swampy since Alan Moore. ˆYˆcemented Vaughn's reputation as a writer, earned him a spot on the writing staff of ˆLostˆand, he recently admitted, paid for his house.

The story follows a young amateur escape artist named Yorick Brown (his father was was an English professor who named Yorick and his sister, Hero, after minor characters in Shakespeare) who is the last male survivor of a plague that has wiped out every animal on the planet with a Y chromosome except for Yorick and his pet monkey, Ampersand. The two are joined by a government agent named 355 and a geneticist named Dr. Mann and travel across the country and later the world trying to...well, that's less clear. Yorick's trying to find his girlfriend, who was in Australia when the plague hit. Dr. Mann is trying to figure out what caused the plague and save the human race and stuff. 355 is being pretty bad-ass and knitting a scarf.

Over its five year run, ˆYˆhas slowly and delicately developed its central characters while examining the results of eradicating every male on the planet. The characters run afowl of the Israeli army and the Australian navy, the dominant military powers in a post-male world (the Australian navy is one of the only navies in the world that allows women to serve on submarines). They encounter a community of escapees from an all-female prison, most of whome had been serving sentences well beyond those issued to men who had committed similar crimes. There's even a power struggle between the female Democrats in Congress and the widows of Republican Congressmen who believe they are entitled to their husband's seats (only five of the sixteen women currently in the Senate are Republicans). The series addresses gender imbalances built into existing systems of economics, ideas of beauty (although under the pencils of series co-creator Pia Guerra, there's not a bad-looking character in the series. Guerra, incidentally, is one of the very few prominent female pencillers in mainstream comics) and systems of government. Sex, particularly the sexual availability and responsibility of the last man on earth, features heavily in the series, but is dealt with carefully and in a manner that stays true to the characters. It's that finest type of speculative fiction: the kind that's intended as a mirror held up to the present, a medium for exploring ideas by shifting them and positing the ultimate question of whether the elimination of every dude on the planet is necessarily a bad thing.

I'm going into the final issue with a bit of trepidation. The last year of the series has been a little shaky, with the disappointing explanation of the plague's cause and a couple issues that felt like filler, returning to play "where are they now?" with minor characters from earlier in the series, but the last storyline has been nothing short of heartwrenching. BKV has opened the "it was all a dream" door and the last issue's cover (pictured) suggests he's not afraid to use it, but these are his toys after all and he can do what he wants with them.

Anyway, here's a link to the entire first issue (scroll down to the bottom) in PDF. It's like "The Stand" crossed with Three's Company, plus a monkey. The paperback collections are fairly cheap and totally worthwhile. Hell, I'll lend them to you if you'd like.

Secret Origin of Mack the Knife, Part One

2008-01-28T14:19:00.000-08:00

I'm questioning my own wisdom on this, but my head's a mess, I want to post something and I just don't feel that my critical facilities are at their strongest. So this is a fiction piece I've started working on, which is about music, so it counts. I want to write about the Piano Creeps and the next dance party, but for now, here's this. It's completely unedited and rough. The rest will show up as it gets finished. Hope you can stomach it.

*******

Eddie stared over the turkey and across the small table in the Zirkowitz's kitchen at his grandmother and silently catalogued the things that were going wrong with his body. His teeth would barely pull apart wide enough to chew, the molars locked together staunchly. Even when he managed to get something chewed, his throat was attempting to refuse entry. His parents were talking like a tennis match on either side of him but his eyes stayed fixed on his grandmother, her head down as she picked at peas, carrots, mashed potatoes.

This, thought Eddie, whose emotions normally ranged from enthusiasm to mild embarassment, is what it feels like to hate someone. Remembering almost as a footnote the violent throngs of kids his age he'd seen crashing into one another at the feet of concert stages on teevee, he thought, this is what music can do. Music can prepare you to hate.

The first song Eddie really listened to was the last song the Zirkowitzes ever listened to at the dinner table. The classic rock station was a constant in their tiny split-level, at least when the teevee wasn't on. Of course, the content varied, but only within a certain range and Eddie, when he thought about it at all, considererd the radio his father's influence on the house, the echo and complement to his mother's obsession with lamps. Not a week went by that the lighting situation in the cramped living room didn't undergo some change, since Eddie's mother couldn't drive past a Salvation Army or thrift store without stopping in to peruse the lamp selection. Finding one or two she liked, usually for less than ten dollars a pair, she'd cycle some currently in use into the basement, which had once been his father's workspace but was now nearly overrun with lamps past. Even the most unloved was never actually discarded since in proper combination it might complete some ideal form of a living room that existed purely in Eddie's mother's mind. Lamps would be redeployed after exile in the basement, just as some would arrive in the house and be immediately relegated there. Eddie accepted this flux as standard operating procedure, just as he accepted that coming home from school he would be greeted by the sound of electric guitars before hellos. But just as he'd never taken the time to evaluate any of his mother's individual lamp choices, he never paid attention to the individual songs that filled the house in four minute spans.

The dinner in question, eaten as usual before Eddie had begun to feel remotely hungry, was porkchops and the drive time show. The deejay, deep and buttery voice, talked more than Eddie or either of his parents, although his mother ran he and his father through the usual catechism of how was your day questions. Eddie, scrawny, sat between his heavyset parents, thinking primarily of schoolwork and how he should have picked up that copy of the next Stephen King book at the library that afternoon, since he'd more than likely finish his current one before he went to bed. During an unusually long pause in this ritual, Eddie looked up to see his mother glowering at his father, chewing with a slow determination. His father, as was usually the case, seemed oblivious. Swallowing a bit of green beans down, Eddie ventured,

"Mom, what's wrong?"

"Ask your father," his mother snapped. Eddie turned to his father, who fit a hunk of porkchop between his expansive beard and walrusine mustache and shrugged almost imperceptably. Eddie turned back to his mother, who was apparently not feeling as reticent as she had a second before.

"Your father," she declared, holding her fork in the air officiously, "once wrote some ˆchoiceˆlyrics from this song in a letter to me." And with that, she hoisted herself from her chair, stalked across the room and shut off the radio, as she would do the moment she started cooking dinner from that night on. The three of them ate the rest of the meal in silence.

After dinner, his father took up his usual post on the recliner six feet in front of the teevee. His mother retreated upstairs complaining of a vague unwellness while Eddie washed the dishes. Running down the list of his friends and evaluating each of them on the basis of how much help they'd be in this particular situation, Eddie decided on Owen and called his apartment after the last dish was set in the drying rack. He worried momentarily that Owen's roommate Julie might answer; she had a way of looking at Eddie that made him uneasy, like she knew something about him he didn't know about himself. Luckily, it was Owen who picked up.

"Eds!" exclaimed Owen. "To what do I owe?"

"I had a question," said Eddie.

"Fire away, Eds."

"Do you know this song, it's like a classic rock song? Something about a rose in the thrift store gloves?"

There was a pause on the other end of the line and Eddie imagined he could hear Owen running his hand thoughtfully over his stubble.

"Wait," Owen asked, "was it 'fisted'?"

"Was what?"

"The glove. A rose in the fisted glove?"

"Could be."

"And the eagle flies with the dove?"

"I think."

"Yeah, that's Manassas. Kind of a shitty song, to be honest. Why do you ask?"

"Do you have it?"

"Naw, Stills is pretty much dead to me after the Springfield." Owen might as well have been speaking Greek.

"Um. Okay. Well, I sort of need it. That song."

"Huh. Shouldn't be a problem. Can probly pick it up on the cheap downtown. What're you up to tomorrow?"

The next day, Owen picked Eddie up after school, his baby blue Dodge Dart idling loudly out front waitinf for Eddie to jump in. Past a row of yellow buses, the Dart eased and sputtered itself away from the school towards downtown with Owen prattling about the collapse of the LA music scene at the end of the sixties. Eddie listened attentively, unsure what any of it had to do with the rose, the glove and the eagle, not to mention his parents' argument at dinner.

Nimbly piloting the boatlike car, Owen parallel parked right out front of Transmission Records, on the lower level of an Fredtown house on Stephen Street. The store's logo, a charcoal sketched mock up of the RKO Pictures radio tower hung above the door and between the windows of the upstairs windows like a nose, giving the housefront the vaguely anthropomorphic look of three prong outlets and clocks at certain hours of the day. A step behind Owen, Eddie walked into the store's mouth.

"My good man," proclaimed Owen broadly to the room as the door shut behind Eddie. A handful of the shop's patrons looked up from their browsing, but for the most part, the click-click-click or CDs being flipped didn't stop. Tom the clerk simply rolled his eyes a little, having dealt with this particular eighteen-year-old before.

"My friend here," Owen announced, clapping Eddie on the shoulder," would like to purchase a Manassas album."

Tom arched his eyebrows, someone nearby snickered and Eddie realized a shibboleth had been spoken and had marked him an outsider. He felt the need to loudly explain about the fight at dinner, about the fisted glove, and he wished Owen had not made this announcement.

"Dollar bin," said Tom, motioning with his eyes before returning to the magazine he'd been thumbing through. Owen made a little bow and led Eddie to the dollar bin.

"Last refuge of the damned," Owen explained. "Castoffs and cutouts. These ones were so small, the culture at large threw them back."

"So the album we're looking for isn't any good?" asked Eddie, still eying his fellow patrons as if they might turn on him at any moment.

"No, Eds, I'm afraid it isn't. One last attempt to catch a spark on wet kindling. The problem with a musician who's been well-fed," Owen said, pulling the Manassas album out of the dollar bin and pointing at the paunched image of the man on the cover, "is they can no longer sound hungry."

Ed had no idea what the advantage of sounding hungry was, but as Owen flipped the album over to scan the song titles, his confusion deepened. Why had the song been worth arguing over if it wasn't even any good?

"Wait a minute," said Owen. "Hey Tom, what the fuck?"

"What's the trouble?" Tom asked.

"This album," Owen said, brandishing it in the air, "doesn't have the love the one you're with song."

"Love the One You're With's not Manassas," explained Tom. "It's on Stephen Stills Stephen Stills."

"What the hell right does Stephen Stills have putting out an album doesn't have Love the One You're With on it?" Owen asked incredulously. "That's like Big Country putting out an album without In a Big Country."

"Actually, the second Big Country album is pretty good," offered a smartly dressed patron in the Brit Pop section.

"What're you, Scottish or something?" interrogated Owen, turning on the patron, who jumped back from Pulp to Blur.

"Hey relax," said Tom. "I guarantee there's a Stephen Stills Stephen Stills in the dollar bin." Owen pointed a threatening finger at the boy in Brit Pop, who quickly looked back down at the Charlatans UK. Owen returned to the dollar bin and quickly extracted the album with a little "aHA!" With a flourish and another little bow, he placed the album on the counter and stepped aside so Eddie could pay. Feeling smaller than he could remember ever having felt, Eddie paid quickly and greatfully accepted a bag to hide the album in.

More to come...

Such Deadly Wolves Round the Town Tonight

2008-01-21T11:33:00.000-08:00

If the State Theater’s new managing director, Dan Smalls never brought in another concert, I’d be indebted to him for two shows. The first would be last year’s Solomon Burke show, and the second would be the upcoming Neko Case show. I might write something about Mr. Burke at another time, but for now, I’ve got Neko Case on the brain.

From my understanding, Case made her mark on the Canadian music scene pretty quickly, first with the punk outfit Maow and then on her own. With almost clockwork regularity, Case’s solo shows, backed by high octane cowpunkers like the Sadies or the Blacks, would include the performer draping her panties on the mic stand, which is certainly a way to make an impression.

The Virginian, her first album with the loose collective of musicians known as Her Boyfriends was an outing in the country, a deep homage to the likes of Loretta Lynn and Kitty Wells. The Boyfriends in question have included Carl Newman, Ron Sexsmith and members of Calexico, along with girlfriends Kelly Hogan and Carolyn Mark. The Virginian included covers from Scott Walker and Ernest Tubbs and was impressive if not innovative. The album’s cover presented Case as a chanteuse, a skilled interpreter of other people’s songs. It wasn’t until Furnace Room Lullaby that Case’s songwriting moved to the front, with amped up odes to her burned out Tacoma home and lightning fast husky come-ons like “Whip the Blankets” that had only been hinted at on the previous album’s “Misfire”. Her ballad work was sparse and heartbreaking, carrying entire compositions on her stolid alto.

Case made a leap forward on the next album, Blacklisted, which no longer bore any reference to Her Boyfriends. Comprised mostly of originals with a pair of well-chosen covers, the album is dark country soul, a constant threat of a knife wrapped in silk. It also sees Case experimenting with composition and production tricks, as songs rise eerily out of radio static and fade back into a buzzing of bees. Her rendition of “Running Out of Fools”, I hate to admit, tops Aretha Franklin’s original in its breathy vitriol and her plea of “pretty girls, you’re too good for this” sounds like the final shaking off of her country chanteuse persona.

I’m leaving plenty out here, including her work with indie supergroup the New Pornographers, collaborations with the Pine Valley Cosmonauts (better known to the world at large as the Mekons) and the Sadies as well as two fairly brilliant live albums (particularly Tigers Have Spoken, which includes a couple knock down Loretta Lynn covers and a heartbreaking rendition of “Wayfaring Stranger” backed by a chorus of one hundred and fifty panel discussion participants), but only because I’m rushing to get to her most recent studio effort, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. Dark and lyrically strange in ways one would have been unable to predict, the album drops brilliant lyrics into compositions that range from Bacharach pop syncopation to twisted gospel call and response. With this album, Case moved a step ahead of the rest of the singer songwriter crop. While contemporaries like Gillian Welch and Cat Power have found their voices largely by adopting genres, country in Welch’s case and, most recently, blues in the case of Cat Power, Case moves effortlessly in and out of genres even within single songs, blurring them into something uniquely her own. Tinged with dark lyrics that seem at once obscure and transparent, Case’s work creates its own terms, inviting the listener into a lyrical mythology shot through with musical aspects that seem simultaneously familiar and strange.

The Ithaca Business Apocalypse

2008-01-20T16:10:00.001-08:00

I've been listening to a load of new music this weekend, including the new Cat Power, Devastations and Destroyer albums, but this seemed like the thing to post this evening.

It nearly broke my heart to walk into Ithaca Books looking like it had been looted. This is probably due largely to my affection for bookstore s in general, I’m sure some people had the same reaction when they saw the Going Out Of Business Sale sign on the bead store.

Tis the season for the GOOBS in Ithaca, it seems to happen in six month cycles that a number of operations shut their door s for good. This time out, we’re losing the bead store, the book store and the deli (although rumor has it Juna’s is itching to get out as well), and maybe it’s only that all of these business are located on the Commons that this seems like a portend of the Ithaca Business Apocalypse.

I feel I’m in something of a position to prophesize doom for business owners in Ithaca, being one of them myself. And there are any number of reasons that a business goes under. The deli, for instance, kept sporadic hours, used less-than-fresh ingredients and was overall sketch. The bead store, well, there’s a lot I don’t know about the economics of beads. But there is one unifying feature of these stores, which is their location on the Commons, which means they all share (or shared) absurd rates of rent.

Rents on the Commons run in the range of $2 per square foot. This varies from location to location, of course, but any spot on the Commons will run you a pretty penny. How many beads do you have to sell to come up with $1000 a month rent? A truckload, give or take.

So what’s to be done? Ithaca is seeing growth, but the growth seems to be occurring in more outlying areas of town, be it the Miracle Mile of big box stores, where a lot of smaller businesses are choosing to carve out niches, or the West End, separated from downtown by a couple blocks. Rents are a little more reasonable out those ways (or, say, just off the Commons on the wrong side of a one way street) and some people are looking at the West End as undergoing the same sort of gentrification seen in outlying areas of larger cities. But the cities in question have already established their central downtowns, whereas our Commons have been struggling economically for at least as long as I’ve been in town.

As it stands, the Commons is pockmarked with vacancies, and this is the first issue that needs to be address, as it is closely paired with the rent issue mentioned earlier. A small start up business can scarcely afford the level of rent demanded by Commons landlords and chain operations have either shown no interest or been discouraged by the city (the exceptions being the Subway and Jimmy John’s, whose operations scarcely helped out the homegrown Lou’s Deli. Or Sadie D’s deli, which closed its doors earlier this year). So the spaces sit open, and when they sit open for long enough, they become tax write-offs for their landlords, many of whom live out of town. Every time you see a yellow –on-black FOR RENT sign, you should hear the sound of blood being sucked out of the economic jugular of Ithaca. And while it doesn’t currently bear such a sign, the most egregious example of this is the stunning and beautiful Masonic Temple that sits vacant waiting from someone to stumble into the money pit Jason Fain has left there.

The city could staunch this bleeding by enacting tax penalties for downtown commercial spaces that sit vacant for more than six months. This would create an incentive, albeit a negative one, for downtown commercial landlords to set rent rates commensurate with the amount of business someone could conceivably do on the Commons. At lower rent rates, these spaces might reinvigorate the Commons with new business rather than serving as a comfortable write-off for absentee landlords.

There are other things. Watch, for instance, the positive effect that an active State Theater has on downtown. Now imagine that the Masonic Temple, which could easily house two music venues, a cultural center or any number of public spaces, was actually in use. Not too long ago, someone tried to provide Ithaca with just that, but was prevented from doing so due to the violations that remain on the liquor license attached to the site. Without a change of ownership, no one will be able to sell booze in that location because of the sheer idiocy of the last renter. Had the city intervene, had the mayor or members of city council written to the liquor board and said that this business would be a cultural and economic boon to the city and that violations seven years in the past by individuals unconnected with the current business should be overlooked in view of the benefits the business would afford the city. I can only hope that if another business owner is brave enough to attempt the same, someone in municipal government has the good sense to vocally support them.

An anchor store needs to be actively recruited, and I know this is going on, so I’m only saying this to support current efforts. Personally, I’ve got little use for an Urban Outfitters on the Commons, but I know a couple universities full of students that might take more of an interest in a UO or an Anthropologie than they did in a bead store. The same kind of sweetheart deals brokered with big box stores should be instituted on a smaller scale to get a national upscale retail store to open up on the Commons.

But before that happens, the Commons themselves need to be cleaned up, and that starts with removing some trees. I know this is Ithaca and we all love us some trees, but folks, we are surrounded by trees. This city has more public park space per block than anyplace I’ve ever been. Stand in a park and throw a rock, you know where it’s going to land? On some kid throwing a Frisbee in another park. Look in any direction, you’re going to see trees. But the Commons is overrun by aesthetically unpleasing trees that block sightlines, filter our the already limited sunlight and house hundreds of starlings, twittering little crap-machines that leave the brickwork filthy. Not to mention the fact that because these are trees unsuited for the middle of a city street, their overlarge root structures buck up bricks and concrete alike. With smaller, manageable foliage, the Commons would look like a city block (which is what the Commons in Boulder and Burlington look like). Paired with the storefront cleanup grant, this would make the entire area more pleasing too look at, brighter and cleaner and more appealing out outside business.

Right now, the trees and the landlords are winning. As young business owners look to outlying neighborhoods without even considering the Commons, Ithaca runs the risk of having a gaping hole in its heart and becoming a loosely strung together collection of satellite enclaves, each struggling to avoid their own business apocalypse.

We got the Magnetic Fields back!

2008-01-18T09:55:00.000-08:00

The Magnetic Fields' 1999 triple disc album "69 Love Songs" is nothing short of a monolith. It's a treasure trove of mixtape fodder, a survey course in American music and contains some of the smartest sentiments on being sentimental ever put on a disc. It's not even an album you can debate much. I challenge anyone to hate the whole thing, to find nothing lovable among its bounty. But try positing a "best song" on the album and you're likely to be mobbed, not only by your friends, but by your own past testimonials. Some days, "Grand Canyon"'s echoing drum beat is going to resonate in your chest cavity, other days "Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side" is going to make the perfect driving song. But if someone has whispered "Love is Like a Bottle of Gin" across a pillow in the wee hours, you're never going to dislodge it from a place of primacy in their heart.

But if you happen to be Stephin Merritt (which you are unfortunately not), how in the hell do you follow it up? The Fields had been largely a synth-driven band before "69LS", recognizable in equal parts for their pop hooks, lush synths and Merritt's brilliantly flat baritone. With "69LS", he didn't just show off a few new tricks, he sawed the lady in half while wearing a straitjacket and found your card imbedded in her heart. Nearly abandoning synths altogether, Merritt ranged from Holland-Dozier-Holland hooks to Gilbert and Sullivan indulgences and perfectly delivered arch-country ("Papa Was A Rodeo" being a more accurate rendition of the genre than any of the attempts on "Charm of the Highway Strip"). When Merritt returned to the Fields a few years ago with "i", it seemed clear that the synth had been thrown in the trunk and Merritt had become enamored of all the new toys he'd played with on "69LS". The Magnetic Fields now included a banjo, and there was nothing you could do about it, except to put on "Get Lost" and pine.

With “Distortion”, out this week on Nonesuch, the Magnetic Fields have found their way back to the synth sound through a circuitous route. Merritt has claimed he wanted this album to outdo the Jesus and Mary Chain at their own game (it doesn’t. No one can out-JAMC JAMC. Go back and listen to the tragically out of print “Psychocandy” or “Stoned and Dethroned” if you don’t believe me). Pop songs drenched in feedback, almost to the point of drowning their brilliant hooks. While the vocals on “Distortion” are never as buried in the mix as they are on early JAMC albums, they are moved far enough back that listeners can appreciate the cleverness of Merritt’s lyrics without being overwhelmed by them. Before even pressing play, this is apparent in the title. While “i” advertised an album unified by the first letter in the song titles, putting the stress immediately on the lyrics, which veered from too clever to too maudlin while hitting some brilliant moments in between, “Distortion”’s title fronts the sound and production, although distortion is equally a theme within the lyrics. “Distortion” opens with the nearly lyric-less “Three-Way”, announcing the album as more of a team effort than “i” which kicked off with Merritt crooning “I Die” over a barely-there string arrangement cribbed directly from “69LS”’s Gilbert and Sullivan numbers.

From there, the vocals are taken by Claudia Gonson, singer for Merritt's Future Bible Heroes featured on several "69LS" tracks and sadly absent from “i” (thank you CW for the correction. She and Merritt take turns on lead throughout the album, including the duet, “Please Stop Dancing”. Merritt’s cleverness and sense of play are allowed back into his pop songs rather than being encased in light opera arrangements, with funny but compelling songs like “Zombie Boy” and “The Nun’s Litany”, which manages to avoid coming off like a period piece. Listening to “Distortion” is like running into an old friend who’s made it big and discovering they still tell the same jokes, order the same drinks and try to impress you with that same silly card trick they did back in the old days.

(at some point I'm going to start putting pictures and music on here, I promise. But while Gimme Coffee downstairs is being gutted, internet access upstairs is no longer working, so we're sort of on austerity budget.)

The theater's empty during the day

2008-01-17T10:53:00.000-08:00

So over at the aforementioned terribly smart and pretty Probably Awkward, owned and operated by the terribly smart and pretty HT (who, contrary to popular opinion, is not two depressed upstate NY lesbians), has been nice enough to pretty up and post some stuff I wrote about Julie Taymor's "Across the Universe", which is the current title holder for Worst Movie I Saw Last Year and didn't manage to block out. You can read about it here.

And for over here, a brief bit on “Juno”, if only to dispel LB’s belief that I love it.

Yes, I like the soundtrack. Kimya Dawson does the cute thing for me better than a whole lot of folks and her presence here almost helped me glaze over a lot of the problems I had with this movie.

First off, something LB pointed out, there’s the standard trope of “character equals quirk”. Both of the central characters are introduced by their odd consumption habits, complete with quirky brand choices: Juno drinks Sunny D (later blue Big Gulps, although we never see a 7-11), George Michael (sorry, he’s always going to be George Michael to me) eats orange Tic-Tacs. Through the coolness of their “uncool” consumption, we know that these kids are outsiders, which is good because the movie never gives us enough of a wide-view of the social structure in town to establish this in any way organic to the story. Better film makers have used a quirk as a jumping off point for character development, but “Juno” uses quirks as a substitute for personality and, eventually, a plot device to reconcile the movie’s two central characters.

The problem of coolness persists. Everyone is just so nonchalant and the only character who shows any kind of emotion reaction to the pregnancy, the skeletal Jennifer Garner, is ridiculed throughout the film for her feelings, although she’s ultimately necessary to save everyone involved from the burden this baby would become. The baby, it seems, lucks out by seamlessly exiting the film’s world of low class, bad home decorating and emotional numbness by entering the caring and well-painted world of Garner’s single parent home. In short, everyone will be fine as long as there are still a few barren female up and comers with ticking biological clocks and inherent maternal instincts. Or at least a few books on the subject.

What bothers me even more is that this type of film is now what constitutes an “indie hit”. Just like last year’s “Little Miss Sunshine”, “Juno” seems to have won a place in people’s hearts. Some people anyway. This despite the fact the film is largely derivative, coming off like Wes Anderson-lite, as well as the fact it provides not just a tacit but an explicit endorsement of anti-abortion sentiments. The physical realities of the young girl’s pregnancy are never addressed. The pregnancy is little more than an inconvenience, and even that is due more to issues of appearance than anything else, but the fact the fetus has fingernails is compelling enough to override all other pragmatic concerns.

Weren’t the major studios supposed to have us covered in the feel-good department? Weren’t independent films supposed to be a little less…safe? While I wait for “There Will Be Blood” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” to show up at Ithaca’s independent theaters, wait for the more adventurous programming at Cornell Cinema to start up again and wonder why “Juno” needs to be showing on two out of five screens (a third one is showing “Across the Universe”) , I’ll be thinking not about why the indie theaters feel the need to keep this on screens, but why movies of this type seem to draw the biggest audiences. Of course, I paid my eight fifty, so what the hell do I know?

Blasphemous Rumors...

2008-01-16T10:35:00.001-08:00

So here's what I've heard, and I make no promises. I've heard Akron/Family at Castaways in March or April. I've heard the New Pornographers and Okkervil River (separately) at the State Theater. I've heard Super Furry Animals at Cornell and Yo La Tengo doing "Sounds of Science" at Cornell Cinema. That's what I've heard.

Any other music related Ithaca rumors floating around? Can anyone confirm or deny any of these?

Realizations in the New Year

2008-01-15T14:37:00.000-08:00

You know, all this time I thought I was avoiding the Cult of Gmail and today I realized I actually have not one but two gmail accounts? How do these things happen? In coming to this realization, I also realized that two dozen-some bands have written to me at an email address I never use to get me to post their tracks. If any of those bands are reading, I'm really sorry.

Other things I've realized: certain people seem to be ashamed to admit how much they like the new Radiohead album. So let's talk about that for a minute. I understand the indie impulse to be wary of praising a juggernaut like Radiohead. We've all been hurt before. We've all bought one REM album too many or worse, championed an album, let's call it "New Adventures in Hi-Fi" as their best work since "Green", only to have "Up" come along and tear one leg out from under our arguments, followed by "Reveal", which made the whole REM project indefensible. U2 put people in a similar situation, putting out a series of post-"Achtung" albums that were simultaneously defensible or reprehensible, depending on the company you kept.

And for many of us, we'd watched Radiohead being born, in a strangely lit "120 Minutes" concert-style video of screeching falsetto and alienation that would put Morrissey to shame. We'd seen the brash adolescence of "The Bends" grow into the confident concept album swagger of "OK Computer", and the strange creeping growth of "Kid A" and "Amnesiac". We'd watched a band constantly pushing...something. I mean, let's face it, they were never really experimental, they were just brilliant at incorporating fringe elements into essentially pop songs and crafting albums that sustained a narrative for forty-plus minutes. They didn't reinvent the wheel, they just strapped four of them together with a stronger engine and smoother transmission than most bands could muster.

Arriving at "In Rainbows", we're finding out that Radiohead was building a luxury car all along (I'm stealing this analogy from 33 1/3's David Barker) and is inviting us for a ride. Down the road, the threat of a fully adult contemporary album looms and the desire to be first among the haters, the avant garde of dislike, has its draws. But rather than distributing faint praise in hushed tones, I think it's time to salve the old wounds and appreciate that every now and then, talent and commercial success are completely coincident. "In Rainbows" has everything in its right place, Thom Yorke exhibits scalpel sharp control of both his voice and his lyrics and Jonny Greenwood, who is the Hardest Working Man in Things That Aren't Rock and Roll (check out his score for "There Will Be Blood" or last year's "Jonny Greenwood is the Controller" on Trojan Recs if you don't follow me) builds out beautiful playgrounds for Yorke's vocals to slide through. This album makes me want to smoke pot or drink wine or make out or nod off or rock out or write blog entries again.

Tomorrow, some notes on the new Magnetic Fields. Later in the week, a review of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol comics, which have been keeping me away from "Anna Karenina" all week, dammit. And at some point, a post originally intended for the much smarter blog Probably Awkward on Julie Taymor's compelling awful "Across the Universe", which was both the perfect Beatles movie and the worst film I saw in 2007.

OiNK Gets Boinked

2007-10-23T10:47:00.000-07:00

In other news, torrent site OiNK is yet another fatality in the War on Information. The invite-only site, which had about 180,000 members was pretty kickass for getting you things before they existed, but the British techie who ran it and the Amsterdam servers that housed its info are now in the hands of the police. That's what you guys get for kicking Tender Button out of your little clubhouse.

Slowly we creep back to the dark ages when you actually had to wait for an album to be released in order to hear it. The horror, the horror.

Itha-Go-Go, Anyone? Matt+Kim

2007-10-23T09:39:00.000-07:00

There are so many things I should be working on right this very minute but I wanted to babble about some shows for a little bit, since last week was a pretty good one for shows. Last Tuesday, a lady friend and I hiked up to Cornell's Risley Hall for the latest Fanclub offering. I was pretty psyched thinking the show was in Tammany, a little coffeespace with a proper stage and such where in Fanclub days of old we caught Portland IDMers Badger King and Bobby Birdman, but for reasons which passeth understanding, the show was in Risley's dining hall, which lady friend informs me is a reproduction of a dining hall at Oxford. Very Harry Potter, without the pointy hats. Muddy accoustics and no stage, but about seventysome kids packed up at the front.

Titus Andronicus started off the night with a pretty straight-up Clash homage. I believe the case has been made elsewhere, if you're going to steal, steal from the best. Mostly London Calling-era sound, letting my mind drift off to the copy of the Joe Strummer bio I'm waiting to borrow from Mr. Excitement. The fact I was more interested in thinking about reading about the Clash than paying attention to the band was more my fault than theirs.

The next band up was the unfortunately named Midnight Prayers (who we thought for a while was called Midnight Cruise. Not much better). A couple songs in I got to thinking how neat it is when new possibilities pop up on the menu of what kind of band you can be. These guys started off sounding a little like Deer Tick or O'Death: pseudo-old-timey ramshackle playing with high nasally vocals, a sound which is kind of popular with the kids these days. Not much new until they ripped into a garage cover of The McCoys' "Hang On, Sloopy" (the official rock song of the state of Ohio, apparently). Let it be known that I heart me some sixties pop, especially songs that seem irredeemably silly in retrospect, so these guys set the hook in my heart with this one, but the garage translation was a perfect way to combat some of the silliness in the original. From there on out, it was garage all the way, up to and sort of including a slightly draggy cover of the second half of "Shout!". Err...unless you can play wicked fast and have a pretty firm grasp on your loud/soft dynamics, this one's best to be avoided.

On the plus side, let's cast a vote right now for sixties garage pop and Phil Spector girl groups to be the next big thing. It makes sense! Interpol gets into Joy Division and Television and bam, a whole bunch of bands go Ian Curtis. Arcade Fire and Clap Your Hands evoke the spirit of the Talking Heads and whoosh, bunch of Talking Heads bands. My Morning Jacket attempts to redeem southern rock and we get the Black Mountain family of bands. Time has come to move a little further back. The Black Lips have the garage sound knocked down but even cooler is the girl group sound, not of the Pipettes but of Grizzly Bear. Recommended three in a row: "Knife" by Griz, "Putty in Your Hands" by the Shirelles, "Veni Vidi Vici" by the Black Lips. Oh, and also, more bands need to include baritone sax.

(At some point I'll figure out/remember how to put songs up here, I really will.)

Matt+Kim finished out the show and they were just cuter than two little hamsters driving a toy car! Giggling in a skeleton teeshirt as he stood up on his chair to see the audience, Matt was like an amphetemine-fueled QVC host, telling the audience how EXCITED they were to get the OPPORTUNITY to play here, and how AMAZING it all was. I know I sound snarky, but in fact it was pretty goddam adorable. Oh, and also they played music. M+K sound like a more muscular Mates of State (who are equally adorable, substituting googly for giggly), with hints of the aforementioned Portland IDM sound. They let the audience surround them, to the chagrin of the sound guys and the kids were pretty boppy into it, lot of cheery pogoing, sweaty undergrads, crowd-surfing opening band.

Which brings me to the main point here. In addition for a call to garage rock, I think the time has come for Ithaca's answer to Chic-a-Go-Go. All we need is a room, a bouncy band, a bunch of the kids and a couple cameras. Oh, and a slot on public access. Come on, who's in?

Stupid Bloody Tuesday

2007-09-11T12:44:00.000-07:00

Continuing with the new musics! Hooray for the return of our espresso machine!

Dirty Projectors- "Rise Above" With a couple more listens, this one could well replace Animal Collective as my favorite album of the week. Not as frantic, obviously, but just as complex and far more fleshed out than previous albums by the Projectors. They've grown into a rock band, and it kind of rocks. Sometimes a band just needs to get in touch with their muse, and it turns out for these guys that muse was Henry Rollins.

The Go! Team- I've already forgotten what this album is called. Their first one was loaded with hooks, every other song was a pop hit. This one feels slick, slippery. I hope I'll get back to listen through it again, but chances are strong I won't.

Black Lips- "Good Bad Not Evil"- One of those bands who's just good at what they're doing. The Black Lips won't change anybody's life like hearing the Sonics for the first time, and this album is not all that different from previous efforts, but it plugs along like a late model Honda Civic. Straight garage, solid driving music.

St. Vincent- "Marry Me". No. Wispy, meandering. I actually forgot I had it on.

Shout Out Louds- "Our Ill Wills" Holy Swedish! Shiny pop from Scandinavia, The SOLs are like candy. Lyrics that indicate English is only their second language and melodies that prove pop music is their native tongue. Listened through it twice today, grinning vapidly. I like me some vapid grinning.

Know what else I like? Posters by Laura Brothers!

I can't remember if I'm US or UK, but this should be a big ol' throwdown. Which I also like.

Treat Me Like You Did the Night Before

2007-09-10T13:29:00.000-07:00

The writing of this post is going to stretch over the next few hours as I wade through today's shipment of tomorrow's music. The folks at Matador were nice enough to sneak me advances of the upcoming Devendra Banhart and Cave Singers albums, but there are more immediate concerns at hand as I whip out the ol' exacto knife and quietly slice into this week's new releases, starting with-

Animal Collective- "Strawberry Jam" They sound more like Panda Bear's band than ever, which is a good thing. Not as spacious as "Person Pitch" but with hints of that spaciness and the whooping and yelping one expects from an Animal Collective effort. This is the one I've been looking forward to and have studiously avoided listening to advance tracks. Feels like "Feels" a little in its overall consistency, none of the dizzying highs paired with almost staggering lulls of "Sung Tongs". I think they might have resurrected Vincent Price for the mildly "Thriller"esque voice over on "Winter Wonderland", paired up with Panda's looping high vocals. If all of this week's stuff is this good (one imagines it couldn't be), I'll be a happy little store-jockey.

Various Artists- "Wattstax" I've heard most of these recordings before, but it's nice they've been given the deluxe treatment. Sound quality is great, better than I've ever heard and the packaging is lovely, sharp, crisp, iconic. Plus it's four hours of music, which is an assload of Stax. Makes a nice counterpoint to their 50th anniversary collection, painting a deeper, less broad picture of the label in 1972. I especially appreciate the inclusion of Jesse Jackson's intro to the festival and bits of Richard Pryor's stand-up, which flesh out the festival as being about more than just music.

Kanye West- "Graduation" Conversely, the packaging for the new Kanye sucks. Unless you like semi-retarded looking anime bears. Which maybe you do. "You can be my black Kate Moss tonight"? Actually, that's some pretty clever stuff, but to quote Tom Petty, I don't hear a single. And man, that voice modulation crap that Cher invented bugs the hell out of me, which is not to knock Cher or any of her scientific advancements. Did you know she invented the fishnet stocking? Okay, we all know I don't have anything halfway intelligent to say about hiphop, so on to...

50 Cent- "Curtis" Wait, this is hiphop too. I think I'm rooting for 50 in the sales battle, just cause I don't imagine Kanye would quit the busines over such a minor thing. Maybe there will be a tie? 50's definitely got the allstars on his side, but the album feels disjointed and anyway, Steve Gollnick could probably get Timbaland to record a track with him at this point. That'd be hot, I'd buy that.

More to come later...

Body Kinesthetic Politic

2007-09-06T12:02:00.000-07:00

Two fold purpose here. One is to pull out the paddles, rub them together and shock this blog back to life. The other is to do a post mortem on last weekend's dance party, a success in many ways thanks largely to my DJing counterparts, but also kind of a new development in what we've been doing this whole time.

To start then, a brief history. The dance parties pre-dated me as something called the Revolutionary Dance Party. The idea was a small, early party on a Friday or Saturday night, concentrated entirely on dancing and then spilling out into the town at large, with a group of people wound up physically and mentally, yes, but even more important (it seemed to me at least) grounded in their own bodies, aware of them as instruments of activity and joy. The individual body is the most basic unit of the state and when the body is viewed in this way, a locus of joy, the impact on the state will be positive. When the body is viewed as a locus of pain, of punishment or restriction (as is the case at the state level currently), the body and the state will always be in opposition, the state inflicting itself on the body rather than the body, or a collection of joyful bodies, restructuring the state into a network of interactions based in joy, pleasure, fulfillment.

This both is and is not as sexy as it sounds.

Revolutionary in goal, the RDP was famously fascist in execution. The rules were as follows:
1. Everyone must dance.
2. No one cannot dance.
3. Everyone must bring music to share*.
4. Everyone must bring a dance move to share.
5. Everyone must dance.

*In a strict RDP, the music had to be in a physical format, that is to say that iPods were frowned upon.

Because these events were small, intentional communities, the rules were easy enough to enforce: anyone who chose not to participate was asked to leave. The result was fluid and dynamic: it had no maker, no singular originator.

Contrast this with the auteur school of DJing: a singular virtuoso DJ (or series of DJs) exerting total control on a dance environment. This, of course, is the standard club model and can be downright amazing. Again, there is at least the auspice of an intentional community, since people who go to a dance club must do so at least on the pretense of dancing. But once in the environment, the myriad desires of the community members fall at odds to one another: people who came to dance are pestered by people who came to hook up, crowded by people who came to passively observe. At the same time, the DJ holds ultimate sway over the environment, and the crowd is at the whim of his personality. One DJ may favor feats of mixing, overlapping and blending over danceability or (as is more often the case) may fall back on prescripted sets that are entirely disconnected with the audience, relying on time-tested hits or (worse!) nostalgia and (worst!) imagined nostalgia to keep a crowd barely moving.

When we began doing dance parties in public, we faced an immediate problem. By nature of being public, the strict rules that held together RDPs could not be enforced (although we did have a little Dance Gestapo to gently encourage people to dance or else), but we had no inclination to have just another dance club setting. We wanted a Dance Party, dammit. With Dancing! So we tried the dialectic model. Benefits are obvious, I think: you winnow down your audience til you once again have a more or less intentional community. People would only come to, say, a Bowie vs. the Talking Heads dance party for one or a combination of three reasons:

1. They like Bowie.
2. They like the Heads.
3. They want to dance.

You have the added advantage of a certain level of partisanship, such that even people who aren't dancing at any given moment will more than likely be involved in the music through debate, a debate echoed by the back and forth of the music.

Also, you have the back and forth of the music: the DJs must be responsive to one another and, in an effort to make a case for their band of choice, must be responsive to the crowd's reactions. A crowd that dances hardest to rock-era Bowie is going to get more rock-era Bowie (and more rocking Heads songs), while a crowd that responds to the heavy polyrhythmic Heads tunes is going to get more of the same from the Heads, and an emotionally shattered Bowie DJ.

Part of the reason, I think, that we started with and have returned to the Cure vs. the Smiths is that there you've got two bands with whom people have a deep emotional, often personal memory, which, unlike an encyclopaedic knowledge of 80s pop stored in the cortex, is often written directly onto the body, deep down in neural passages formed in the vital and emotionally active teenage years. Note how this is diametrically opposed to nostalgia: it's not a pining for a time past, it's a visceral experience of an aspect of that time, of a different aspect of one's emotional being. Which is why the people really into it, many of them excellent dancers, tend to dance exactly the way they would at age 16 at the Smiths vs. Cure parties.

Finally, we expanded into what we had last week: the open source model. Let me stress that part: it's intended to be fully open source in that any one of the people DJing is fully replaceable, given that their replacement is equally impassioned about the music they intend to play. The open source way allows for maximum fluidity, maximum responsiveness to the crowd and, like the original RDP, a creation with no creator, an event that creates, fuels and sustains itself, that shapes its body out of its evolving self. The first time we tried it, I think we (and thus the event) was caught up in silly ideas of one-upping each other, with certain songs brought out for shock/kitsch value, but this time we had a real challenge. People began dancing at 9:30 and a mistake could kill momentum, cause the entire thing to collapse.

This is not entirely true after a point. Momentum can sustain itself through at least one dud. Isn't that right, Miami?

But this time, something really amazing happened. A community in place, intentionality built itself. Confirmed non-dancers danced, the "audience" in the spectator sense, found itself devoured, shaped into the body of the dancing crowd. Intentionality conquers apathy and the body kinesthetic rules over all!

Big successes: All of My Friends by LCD Soundsystem, for all eight minutes (credit to Luke), Balkan Beat Box, novel and unstoppable (credit to Jason) and the Passenger, bouncy, familiar and imbued with the creepy, beautiful energy of being swept along by a larger current (credit again to Jason).

Downpoints: the afterparty. Not because it was a bad afterparty, it was actually quite nice. But the afterparties are almost always a downpoint, even if they don't involve my ass gettting handcuffed. Because the only suitable follow-ups to a successful dance party of this type are as follows:

1. More dancing (why does this never happen, by the way?)
2. Making out*
3. Smashing the state into a million shiny pieces (why does this never happen either?)

*I sincerely hope many dancers are opting for this rather than the afterparties. Making out is (or at least should be) the final choosing of joy over the state.

Next month we go back to Vs. for a bit, give ourselves a little bit of structure, scratch the ol' dialectic itch. As far as this little blog goes, I have every intention of keeping it going this time out. I've got some album review/previews drafted, some thoughts on the comeback albums of indie bands and whether it's axiologically different from/better than yet another Who comeback and, umm...much much more!

How Easily We Are Flattered...

2007-03-19T21:57:00.000-07:00

Someone actually asked at Trivia Night if I published playlists. Which made me blush, naturally. And as I'm typing this, someone else asked the same thing. Since some quirk of iTunes leads to only 5 out of 40 songs being available if I publish the list on the iTunes store thingie, I'm putting it up here and will try to do so every week if I'm feeling frisky.

Paint's Peeling- Rilo Kiley
Try- Michael Penn
Bring on the Dancing Horses- Echo & the Bunnymen
Retrieval of You- Minus 5
Eye of Fatima- Camper van Beethoven
A House is Not a Motel- Yo La Tengo
The Hardest Button to Button- White Stripes
Happy Jack- The Who
Who Taught You to Live Like That?- Sloan
Pablo Picasso- The Modern Lovers
Dashboard- Modest Mouse
Who Do You Love- Ted Leo/Pharmacists
Suffer for Fashion- Of Montreal
Hot Burrito #2- Flying Burrito Brothers
Close to Me- The Cure
Because You're Frightened- Magazine
Dance Steps- The Natural History
Folsom Prison Blues- Johnny Cash
Someone Great- LCD Soundsystem
Road- House of Love
6'1"- Liz Phair
Friend of Mine- The National
Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space- Spiritualized
Beanbag Chair- Yo La Tengo
Fiery Crash- Andrew Bird
Older Guys- Flying Burrito Brothers
Happily Ever After- The Rosebuds
Torn & Frayed- Rolling Stones
Fire Island, AK- Long Winters
The Well and the Lighthouse- The Arcade Fire
Sex and Dying in High Society- X
Mama Wolf- Devendra Banhart

Hope that helps. If there's a question about a particular song, post it in the comments and I'll try to elucidate. Which is like ElimiDate, only more helpful.

Rocktober

2006-10-02T11:16:00.000-07:00

Hey we're in the papers again. Check out this supernice article in the Daily Sun. I actually don't sound like a total twit!

Ithaca, Independent Rock City

Goodness me, but the new Hold Steady album is pretty rockin. I think they've actually gone more E Street than the last album. You all understand I mean that in the best way possible, right?

This Wednesday, we've got a show at the store which I will unfortunately be unable to attend. Paul Buchholz will be playing with Tim Hazen. It should be nice, I'm sad that I'll be stuck slingin' drinks. After that, it's a couple weeks til our next show, which is Barn Burning from Providence. They're heartbreakers, those kids.

The always impressive Mr. G, who survived a weekend that would have killed lesser men and still managed to wail through Little Black Egg on the Commons and slug back chardonnay after the band stopped and the man upstairs wept on us a bit, is currently on his way to the shop with 2000 copies of Chapter and Verse. Soon, very soon we will spread it across the northeast like some beautiful trembling virus. Being a simple and physically oriented lad, there's a high level of anticipation tied into holding the album (or ten boxes of the album) in my hands.

New Outrageous Cherry album sounds like Bernadette by the Four Tops for exactly six seconds, then briefly sounds like Come Up and See Me (Make Me Smile) by Suzi Quatro.

Oh, and if you like tweakers (you know you do!), check out this out. I'm still not exactly clear on what Insound is offering here, but watching Devendra and J.D. is always entertaining.

Save the Album

Return to Shelf Life: Z

2006-09-21T12:20:00.000-07:00

As many of you already know, launching the good ship record store involved the total looting of my CD collection. And vinyl collection. Total. Every time I look at my shelves, I've been getting that Old Mother Hubbard feeling.

We have a remedy! (we have?)

So I've started giving myself an allowance of one CD per week. And being, well, slightly off in my thinking, I decided I would start from the end of the alphabet and work backwards, picking out one album for each letter. Which brings us to our first account of my slowly restocking shelves:

Odessey and Oracle by the Zombies

A couple weekends ago I was attacked by Zombies on the Commons. It was a wonderful way to end an evening, swarmed by attractive people in hideous makeup, mauled and gently gnawed on. I think Odessey and Oracle is probably an awful way to end an evening. I can't imagine listening to this album and then wanting to go to bed. It does make for a brilliant start to the day, sunny piano and seventy-three part harmonies with your morning coffee.

We are all concerned with the future, for that is where we will spend most of our time.

2006-09-19T11:01:00.000-07:00

Partly I wanted to put this list up so people could find it and read it. Partly I wanted to put this list up because I've been carrying it around in my pocket and I'm afraid I'll lose it. But here is what the musical future looks like in Ithaca. Must say, it looks pretty darn good.

Friday September 22: The Old Sweethearts with Jairo van Lunteren and Amanda Lynn Perkins
at No Radio Records, 7pm
Saturday September 23: Steve Gollnick and friends
at the Rongo
Saturday September 23: The Mountain Goats with Christine Fellows
at Becker House on Cornell Campus
Saturday September 23: The Trachtenberg Family Slide Show
at Castaways
Saturday September 23: Missing Marcus
at the Haunt
Thursday September 28: The Gunshy with Idatel and Andrew Bryant
at No Radio Records, 7pm
Thursday September 28: Umphrey's McGee
at the State Theater
Friday September 29: Yellow Swans with Grouper
on Cornell Campus, somewhere
Saturday September 30: Hubcap
at the Chapter House
Saturday September 30: Crow Greenspun and the TalktoMes
at the Haunt
Saturday September 30: Old Crow Medicine Show
at the State Theater
Saturday September 30: Dufus
at the ABC Cafe
Sunday October 1: Hubcap
on the Commons for Apple Harvest Festival
Sunday October 1: Robert Cray Band
at the State Theater
Wednesday October 4: Paul Buccholz with Tim Hazen
at No Radio Records, 7pm
Saturday October 7: Richard Buckner with the Atomic Forces
at Castaways
Thursday October 12: Small Sails
at Cornell Cinema
Friday October 13: Missing Marcus with the Splendors, 6 Fingers, Another Day Late
at the Haunt
Saturday October 14: Tilly and the Wall
on Cornell Campus
Thursday October 19: Barn Burning with Candy Floss
at No Radio Records
Saturday October 21: Art Brut with Tokyo Police Club and the Bloodsugars
on Cornell Campus
Saturday October 21: Jennie Stearns and the Fire Choir
at Felicia's
Saturday October 21: Steve Gollnick CD Release Party
at the Chapter House

And that's just the start! After that, there's still Deer Tick, Jana Hunter, Girl Talk, Casper and the Cookies and !!! More to come, but right now I'm done typing and must do a little boppity-bop dance to the new Hidden Cameras album. It's semiotastic!

A Time of Great Flux/A Return to Normalcy

2006-09-08T10:29:00.000-07:00

Hello kids, if any of you remain out there reading. Last time I wrote on here, the record store was "starting to look like a record store". Now it actually IS a record store. I know because I sold some people some records, just a few minutes ago. So I'm restarting this mess here. With announcements, no less. BIg announcements for the moment include our writeup in the Ithaca, which is Ithaca College's campus paper. Sure, they got the address wrong, but only by a block or so.

Second announcement is that you need to get yourself to a record store next Tuesday. New Yo La Tengo, TV on the Radio, the Rapture, the Black Keys, Richard Buckner, Junior Boys, Xiu Xiu and something else I can't remember. Mastodon? Just saying, yeah, get in here and get something.

Third announcement is that the Gunshy will be playing an evening instore performance on Thursday September 28th, along with Idatel (the hardest working band in Ithaca) and Andrew Bryant. Donations towards gas money for the bands would be greatly appreciated.

Lastly, because I'm a bit self-obsessive, here's the playlist from Korova last night. In the near future, these will be posted in some sort of listenable form, but I've got to learn some technology first. This was a so-called 70s night, and you'll notice I mostly stayed within my mandate.

1. Cosmic Dancer- T. Rex
2. You Make Me So Very Happy- Alton Ellis
3. Straight to Hell- The Clash
4. Because You're Frightened- Magazine
5. 10:15 Saturday Night- The Cure
6. Fan Club- The Damned
7. O My Soul- Big Star
8. (I Thought) You Wanted To Know- The dbs
9. Roadrunner- The Modern Lovers
10. X Offender- Blondie
11. Surrender- Cheap Trick
12. Are Friends Electric?- Gary Numan
13. Making Plans for Nigel- XTC
14. King's Lead Hat- Brian Eno
15. Contort Yourself- James Chance and the Contortions
16. Whoo! Allright-Yeah...Uh...-The Rapture
17. Optimo- Liquid Liquid
18. We Can Work It Out- Stevie Wonder
19. Hit It and Quit It- Funkadelic
20. You Said A Bad Word- Joe Tex
21. Sexx Laws- Beck
22. Look Back in Anger- David Bowie
23. Eton Rifles- The Jam
24. The World's a Mess, It's In My Kiss- X
25. Shot Down- The Sonics
26. Philosophy- Them
27. Teenage Kicks- The Undertones
28. Two Little Hitlers- Elvis Costello
29. See No Evil- Television
30. Stand By Me, Yeah- Sloan
31. Not Great Men- Gang of Four
32. Till Victory- Patti Smith Group
33. Digital- Joy Division
34. Do the Strand- Roxy Music
35. Do It Clean- Echo and the Bunnymen
36. No Growing (Exegesis)- Olivia Tremor Control
37. Miss O'Dell- George Harrison
38. Tenth Avenue Freeze Out- Bruce Springsteen
39. Who Is He (And What Is He to You)- Bill Withers
40. The Great Curve- Talking Heads
41. Pretty Girls- Joe Jackson
42. Cindy Tells Me- Brian Eno
43. Laughing- The Guess Who
44. Judy is a Punk- The Ramones
45. So Lonely- The Police
46. The Magnificent Seven- The Clash
47. Strange Brew- Cream
48. Your Time is Gonna Come- Led Zeppelin
49. Long as I Can See the Light- Creedence Clearwater Revival
50. Angel- Jimi Hendrix
51. Ballrooms of Mars- T. Rex
52. After Hours- The Velvet Underground

Try it at home!

And All the Sudden, It Looks...

2006-08-10T18:14:00.000-07:00

...like a goddam record store. Shelves are in an arrangement. Walls are in tact. It's dirty as all get out, but I tell you what, it's going to be a record store pretty darned soon.

New cds are being delivered tomorrow, including, I think, my stuff from iTown. Or is is I-Town? Has Apple so violently appled my brain that now whenever I see apple, I assume it's apple?

And the sign is coming on Saturday! That's right, what was once a myspace icon will soon be TWELVE FEET ACROSS!!!

Along with about a thousand radio tower logo stickers.

My dad's coming out on Saturday as well, although he will not be twelve feet across. He is pretty tall. He and my youngest brother are going to put their shoulders to the wheel. I won't say which wheel.

Opinion question of the day. I have a bright, almost tarheel blue paint that I used for some of the trim around the windows. I'm thinking of using it to paint the back wall. I think a bold-colored wall at the end of a long room (particularly if the room is done in lighter and darker shades of the same color and has openings into other colored rooms) makes a nice visual focus when one enters. Plus it would create a situation where the storefront would be the color of the sign's background and the back wall would be roughly the color of the sign's font. Plus it would mean I wouldn't have to go back to Sherwin Williams for the hundredth time. Some people disagree and are voting for a more neutral color or a very pale blue.

Given that you have only vague ideas what I'm talking about, what do you guys think? I'll need opinions by tomorrow round noon.

You've Been in the House Too Long, She Said: Dance Party Returns!

2006-08-08T17:34:00.000-07:00

Hello Ithacans! Oh, my lovelies, I had such plans for this summer. This was to be The Summer of Rock! It was going to rock through June and July, til we all got August wondering, "Could this rock anymore?" And then it was going to continue rocking!

Instead, here at the offices of No Radio Records (soon to be relocating from out of my livingroom and into the larger world), it has been the Summer of Crushing Heat and the Summer of Inhaling Fumes. Which still makes it better than 2001, which was the Summer of My German Soldier. That summer was no fun at all. But terribly punctual.

But no more! In the interests of
1. Charity
2. Shameless Self Promotion
3. Rocking

we at No Radio are proud to announce....

DANCE PARTY
round whatever the christ round it would be if we hadn't gone so long without a dance party that I forgot what the last one was
The Smiths vs. The Cure
Saturday August 12th
at the Chantiloft
(above and ever-so-slightly beyond the Chanticleer)
staring at 9pm and going til I kick you deadbeats out of the inevitable afterparty at my house.

Luke (DJ Luke Fenchel) Fenchel and myself return to our Dance Partying roots with the original Chantiloft match up. Last time, my Morrissey respect barely edged out Luke's teenage-girlish love of Robert Smith and all things B-side. Since then, Luke has been repeating the mantra "Just Like Heaven is a great song, Just Like Heaven is a great song" with monkish dedication, while I've gotten in touch with my inner Morrissey on a karaoke stage in Chicago (I've been telling people for years I had a little celibate British man inside me, but most of them thought that was a metaphor). So this time out it's anybody's game. Not that we're competing or anything.

More importantly, all proceeds will benefit Ride for Life, which, in case you don't know it, is a fundraising event for STAP, a thoroughly fantastic group of folks who do HIV counseling and outreach across the Southern Tier.

Come early so you can hear stuff like A Forest and Rubber Ring. Bring friends so you can reel around the fountain and do that little Love Cats dance you do that's so durn cute. Forward this message to other folks who like goodness and dancing and other such things (those of you with listserv access would earn a special special place in my heart).

Please do come, it's been so long since we've seen you in all your finery.

Faster than Fast Update...

2006-08-07T10:35:00.000-07:00

Hey folks. Sorry for the downtime. As mentioned before, sometimes it's a drag to spend all day doing things only to come home and write about having done them. Usually, after a whole day of the doin' stuff, it's time to drink.

But here's the situational update.

I am currently in my living room with a couple thousand used cds, all of which need to be entered into a database to be cross-referenced with the outgoing orders for new cds. Cause let's face it, we only need one copy of Wowee Zowee to start up, and if I've already got a used one, I don't need to drop money on a new one. So that's what I come home to every night. Data entry.

On site, the wall has been removed and the joint compound is drying. Once that's sanded, the last bit of painting can get done. The bathroom, back hall and front of the store have all been painted by myself and my team of experts. Luke and Shaianne, that is.

The shelving units are built and sanded, but they need to be finished. I think I've probably talked a bit about how the building material works, but what it comes down to is that they all need to be slathered in oil-based polyeurythane, which smells bloody awful. It's on my list of things to do today, but I'm mildly dreading it.

Magazine and sundry orders will be going in later this week and I may order the new stock as soon as Wednesday. The sign is being made and should get here by the end of the week, or next Monday at the latest. The thing that's worrying me right now is that the price gun I bought off eBay apparently has to be shipped from Hong Kong (price gun capital of the world, it seems) and might not get here in time. It was pretty cheap, but new ones are a little pricy. Might be a last minute buy.

Question for peoples regarding filing. I've heard two suggestions on this. One is to have no genres, all music filed in alphabetical order. This makes things easy to find and prevents the use of the term "Urban" to describe "Music Made By Black People Not Using Guitars". The other suggestion was a sort of hypergenre-ization, where things would be broken down into categories like "Post-Punk", "Twee" and "East Coast Hip-Hop". This sounds like it might be a fun project for me and Amy, and it does have the benefit of introducing stuff to people by association (e.g. "I love Matthew Sweet, but who is this Big Star band filed next to him in "Power Pop"), but does introduce problems. Like do you put the first two Wilco albums under Alt Country and the others under Krautrock?

Let me know what you think.

Late Introduction...

2006-08-01T07:20:00.000-07:00

So I nearly forgot to introduce Amy. Amy is the first No Radio employee and new participant here on the blog. Please treat her with the same slightly condescending tolerance you offer me.

little fish big pond

2006-07-31T10:52:00.000-07:00

Hello there
I called upon an old friend for some advice in reference to punk and she said to check out Ian Mackaye's label Dischord Records. Oh and I like the Germs and the Wipers and Wire. Also another label of interest...The Social Registry housing such bands as Blood on the Wall and Gang Gang Dance among others.
Ok well bye for a bit

Let My Burden Be

2006-07-27T10:08:00.000-07:00

Abandoning my post for a couple days to soak up the hipsterism at the Pitchfork Festival. It should be condescenderific! Laying aside my differences with the vintage teeshirt set, it'll be nice to see some decent live music, and to slip from the sweet smothering embrace of the Ithaca summer.

I had kind of expected the cash register to show up in the mail today, but no dice. Going to swing by Staples and see if I can acquire a price gun, with which I will fire prices at innocent bystanders.

Talk to y'all Tuesday.

The Combination of Doing and Writing About Doing

2006-07-26T07:42:00.000-07:00

If I were a smarter man, I'd have pictures for you. Alas.

Sorry there's been no action on ye ol' weblog, but that should not be taken to mean that I am sitting around on my couch. Although right now, I'm sitting around on my couch. And a lot of the work I've been doing involves sitting around on my couch.

The prototype shelving unit has been built and unbuilt. It is the type of thing you can build and unbuild very easily if you have special powers. Powers like a power drill. It's about four feet across and will hold around 450 cds. After a fair amount of hemming and hawing we've decided to seal it with polyeurethane rather than paint it. The stuff it's built out of, MDF, is like superdense cardboard and, like cardboard, will soak up any sort of moisture that gets near it.

Speaking of moisture, let's talk water staining! Yup, the ceilings need a little bit of love. The landlord has assured me that all those leaks have been fixed (somehow magically without disturbing the ceiling they were leaking onto), but a whole bunch of panels need to be cut and replaced.

Also, No Radio Records has its very first employee! Photog and fellow Gimme-vet Amy Pennington will be grinning at you from behind the counter on opening day, while I run around screaming.

Yesterday I managed to score a Bunn Pouromatic restaurant-style coffee brewer and an old dresser we'll be converting into an espresso counter, both on the cheap. All the purchasing for the coffee end of things is more or less done at this point, and the cash register should be on its way to my place even as we speak. Mostly what we still have to buy includes the stereo system, paint and cleaning supplies.

Painting starts next week. Who's in?

Learning the Hip Hop Music

2006-07-19T12:14:00.000-07:00

Back on the waiting tip. Tick tock tick tock. On the plus side, we've got two shows lined up for in the store. Idatel will be playing in August and the Gunshy will be playing in September. Not sure on the logistics just yet.

This weekend, while many of you do a little spinning hippie dance out at GrassRoots, I will be trying my hardest to absorb massive amounts of hip hop. Dead Prez, Blackstar and Madlib are first on the queue.

Knocked down Touch and Go, K Recs, Jade Tree and Kill Rock Stars yesterday, but there are always more labels to get through.

Do You Realize?

2006-07-18T11:18:00.000-07:00

Are you folks all aware of the sheer bulk of music that's out there? Did you know there are over twenty releases just by Black Flag? That's not even including whatever Henry Rollins is doing right now (I bet he's sitting at home staring lovingly at his muscles). And Zappa? The last four pages of the Rykodisc catalog are ALL Zappa albums, and who the hell needs the Japanese import version of Sheik Yerbouti anyways?

As stated last time, I'm slowly working my way through distributor catalogs. On the advice of Brian at Galaxy Music, I am limiting myself to about half an hour sittings. It's like driving through the Great Plains, your eyes just go all fuzzy and a little voice starts saying, "Yes, you will need all the Minutemen albums...you can't have a record store without them..."

So far I've waded through Merge, Matador, SST, Sub Pop, Rykodisc and Nonesuch. 4AD, Kill Rock Stars and Saddle Creek are on the docket for this afternoon. Input is greatly appreciated, especially in the fields of punk and hiphop, where I am completely ignorant.

Signs and Portends

2006-07-17T08:44:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm back up and running on the computer of the esteemed Mr. Livingston while my own darling is shipped off to Appletown. But I wanted to update you all on the state of things.

At least some of the waiting referred to in the previous post (and the Tom Petty song) has ended. The final design for the sign is completed (you're looking at it) and thanks to Sarah's exemplary efforts at ladder-holding, the sign has been measured and sent to print. Which I guess means more waiting.

Also finished this weekend were the designs for the shelving units. Joel assures me that once they are cut, they'll be easy enough for a monkey to assemble. A monkey with a power drill, anyway. We loaded ten very heavy sheets of Medium Density Fiberboard out to his shop in Lansing yesterday in the blistering heat. MDF is kind of like superpacked cardboard, about an inch thick and cut into 4'x8' sheets. We're estimating it's going to take at least twenty sheets to build all the units. The first prototype is being built some time this week. Which I guess means more waiting.

But oh let me tell you about my new hobby. On Friday I set up distributor accounts with three companies, so I now have access to three fairly daunting wholesale catalogs. To give you an idea, the smallest of the three companies carries 22,622 items. Yesterday I picked out everything I wanted from Merge Records. Today I'm going to work my way through Matador. But here's your chance, folks. What albums do you absolutely need to see in No Radio Records. Sound off.

Experiencing Technical Difficulties

2006-07-11T13:37:00.000-07:00

Hey kids. Oh the past two days have been an adventure. Part of the adventure I can't really talk about. Part of the adventure simply serves as proof that Tom Petty was right, the waiting is the hardest part. And part of the adventure is that my darling computer is once again on the fritz. Optimistically, the OS is "severely corrupted". Pessimistically, the hard drive is shot. Either way, the brains of No Radio Records are currently out of commission, leaving me to engage the spare Central Nervous System that is the Public Library. Luckily I still have my Portabrain and my Spare Brain, but without a monitor, these don't amount to much.

In other news, Steve G. will be operating the hi-fi at Kbar this evening. Steve's a deep catalog man. At least that's what I hear. I'll be rushing over there after I get back from the 'Cuse. I get to make two, count em two trips to the 'Cuse this week. Jealous?

Tomorrow, the meeting with Habitat of Ithaca to talk furnishing. Thursday, the meeting with the landlord to talk repairs. This weekend (fingers crossed) a look at the first assembled shelving unit. And more importantly, the return of the Professor! She will bring us secrets of the inscrutable East and we will bring her...beers, and possibly some chips!

Press! Barely!

2006-07-07T12:08:00.000-07:00

Oh yes, my friends, raise your hand if you were peripherally mentioned in the local paper. Anybody? Anyone? Oh wait, No Radio Records was peripherally mentioned in the local paper! Page two of the local section, bitches!

Oh snap!

Ahem. You can click on the post title or the link on the sidebar thingie to read the article.

But who, you ask are these gentlemen here? Well, the gentleman on the left is Dr. Nick Hopkins, who six years ago today removed a fairly ugly piece of my spine, allowing me to continue activities such as...walking. So yeah, raise your hand if you've had one of the top neurosurgeons in the country get all up in your spinal column. Anybody? Anyone? Oh snap!

Anyway. Thanks, Dr. Hopkins.

Oh, and that other guy I'm sure is pretty swell also.

And no more "Oh snap"s, I promise.

Pretty on the Inside.

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

You know the Christmas tree in the Charlie Brown Christmas special? How at first it's kind of sickly, and Chuck's all depressed (Tough luck, Chuck!), and then someone says "It's not a bad tree, Charlie Brown. It just needs a little love." That's how I'd like you to view these pictures. The store just needs a little love. And like real love, in-store love starts with sledgehammers. Next week, we start hammering our store with love.

I was in the store for about a half hour yesterday before realizing the power was on, thus this Tunnel of Light shot of our front room, which will serve as the retail space. That blue door there leads to the basement, which we'll talk about later. It also marks about where the register and espresso machine will be.

Shot through a window that will soon cease to exist, this will be our listening room. We're removing about 10 feet of wall to open it up to the front room, and that countertop on the right side is not long for this world. Hopefully (details are working themselves out) this room will be furnished with swanky stuff from Habitat of Ithaca. Or my grandma's old couch. Time will tell.

This is the creepy surgical steel tattoo chair left by the former tenants. If anyone knows anyone who needs one of these, we promise to not ask what for. Otherwise, this billy is ebay bound, cause it gives me the howling fantods.

Here we see nature introducing itself to the inside of our store via the space between two window sections. Part of me want to say, "Way to go, nature!" Part of me wants to smoke cigarettes and cry. All things considered, a minor intrusion of nature is pretty minor, and could be seen as a good omen. Somehow.

Lastly but not leastly, here is the kindly and psychedelic visage of Brian Wilson (thanks Erik!), watching over it all like machines of loving grace.

For Your Achy Breaky Heart: Sampler #2 Tracks 16-20

2006-07-06T09:31:00.000-07:00

Been listening to a truly daunting amount of 70s rock these days, in anticipation of tonight's premiere Twice Shy Thursday. There's only so much Yes a man can take. Later this afternoon, I'll post some pictures from the inside of the store, since me and Chi are supposed to scope things out this afternoon. But for now, here's the last bunch of tracks. If I haven't already, I should mention that the credit for the cover photo goes to Sarah Schendel, from her Bonaroo Adventure.

Brandenburg- Beirut
Zach Condon is an unfairly talented 19 year old, who is the newest member of the "Compared to Jeff Mangum Club". While the muted horns on "Gulag Orkestar" may bring back Neutral Milk Hotel memories (NMH vet Jeremy Barnes also contributes to the album), Condon's vocals and guitar work seem more like a gypsified version of the cinematic country practiced by 16 Horsepower or the Pinetop Seven.

Dr. Monroe- Casey Dienel
Does she sound like a less self-absorbed Tori Amos? A girl Randy Newman? Casey Dienel writes little storysongs and sprinkles them with jazz lounge piano and croon, and her debut full-length, "Wind Up Canary" is by turns melancholic and funny, while avoiding the hokey pitfalls often encountered by folks who bring their baby grand out on tour.

Queen of the Rummage Sale- Bishop Allen
Nothing says summer like garage sales and this is the best tribute I'm aware of to that stately institution. Bishop Allen are one of the great unsigned bands out there and are currently in the middle of my favorite weird ambitious project in the offing. The band is self-releasing a four sond EP for every month of the year 2006, which is way more reasonable than a 22-song epic for every state (there are only 12 months, after all). Halfway in, the Brooklyn popsters have shown a diversity their album only hinted at. if these guys don't have a record deal by the end of the year, there is no justice in these united states.

This Heart's On Fire- Wolf Parade
Wolf bands are so last year, true, but this non-Spencer Krug track from "Apologies to the Queen Mary" sees the Quebeckers in top form, turning essentially one line into an emotional bludgeon, Dan Boeckner's smooth Shins-like vocals degenerating into a beautiful raw rasp by the end.

Woman- Wolfmother remixed by The Avalanches
It’s just so nice to see something be utterly destroyed! I’ll freely admit that I’m not swooning over Wolfmother. The vocals sound too much like Led Zeppelin, the guitars sound too much like Led Zeppelin, the drums, well you get the idea. Which is why listening to the Avalanches reduce the bombastic guitars to sparse piano parts and off-beat blurts of noise is pretty spectacular. Maybe the song is frustrating, ultimately unsatisfying and annoying, but it feels like a perfect deconstruction of a metal band to me.

Pictures later! I'm off to pick out which walls must be destroyed.

All Your Summer Songs

2006-07-04T09:52:00.000-07:00

Happy Blowing Up of Things Day. Putting up music seems too labor intensive, and the combination of heat and Smog (the band, not the weather phenomenon) has reduced me to a heap on the couch, waiting for his pie to bake. Question put forth: what are the truly awesome summer albums? Not of this year, but in general. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking of Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville, Jefferson Airplane's Volunteers, The Dirtbombs' Ultraglide in Black and The Sea & Cake's The Biz. Tiajuana Moods by Mingus is in there as well. Sound off, what rocks in July?

Incidentally, a compromise has been reached in the legs vs. cabinet debate. Detente!

For Your Achy Breaky Heart: Sampler #2 Tracks 11-15

2006-07-03T09:24:00.000-07:00

Happy Monday, folks. Busy business on the plate for today. Before I get to enjoy watching the City of Ithaca's premature Blowing Up of Things Day fireworks, I have to get through a meeting with my shelf-builder to discuss the cabinets vs. legs issue (that is, should the cd racks have cabinets or legs underneath them. I'd been leaning towards cabinets, just in the interest of storage space, but it involves a lot more wood, and after watching the Other Music clerks video on You Tube this morning, I kind of like the openness of just legs. Anyone else care to ring in?), followed by a meeting with The Talent to discuss the upcoming release of No Radio Records catalog item #001. Long, involved conversations about lumber followed by long, involved conversations about fonts. Also, today I'll be calling in the order for the first batch of No Radio stickers.

More tracks!

Mornings Eleven- The Magic Numbers
"Mornings Eleven" is a terribly cute mini-epic of a song (although according to the rules, a mini-epic must clock in at under five minutes. Prime example: "Alec Eiffel" by the Pixies). Unimpressed by brother/sister duos like the Fiery Furnaces, the Magic Numbers decided to be a brother/sister/brother/sister quartet, believing this would make them exponentially superior. Next they locked themselves in a house in England and listened to everything ever recorded by the Mamas and the Papas, including demo tapes and home movies. Finally, they unleashed their self-titled album onto US shores like a quadripedal pop monster. With harmony claws!

Shame- Devendra Banhart
Remember when Devendra Banhart recorded his albums on people's answering machines? If I was surprised by the quiet, tongue-in-cheek goodness of "Rejoicing" and "Nino Rojo", I was stunned when I first heard "Cripple Crow" and found that the Reigning Lord of the Wizard Beard Set had reinvented himself as Marc Bolan fronting the Coasters. This b-side from the "I Feel Like a Child" single plays around with the more rollicking elements of the album, Mr. Banhart and the kids prancing and sprightly.

Diary- Saturday Looks Good to Me
Technically, this is not a new song, but the massive SLGTM compendium, "Sound on Sound" is, so I'm allowed to include it here. I don't have enough superlatives on hand to talk coherently about Saturday Looks Good to Me, so I'll just mention that this is yet another of Fred Thomas's perfect pop songs, a straight-ahead rocker with few of the accoutrements common to Saturday tunes, just Fred's vocals barrelling through.

The Party's Crashing Us- Of Montreal
Is it even possible the same band that laid down the low-fi jangling accoustic guitars of "Cherry Peel" are also responsible for the disco-synth of "The Sunlandic Twins"? Of Montreal manages to surprise with every album while remaining unmistakably the same band. I heard they married a whole audience at a show. I'm incredibly enamored of the upsweep in Kevin Barnes's voice on the chorus's dizzying last word.

The Henney Buggy Band- Sufjan Stevens
I know it's way cooler to bash Sufjan than praise him. I know "The Avalanche" is not going to be radically different from the material that made it onto the stunning "Illinois" album and probably won't complete the album the way the plaintive hymns on "Seven Swans" completed the odes to urban planning on "Michigan". But I also believe Stevens crafts these songs with a savant-like belief that the songs NEED trumpets and glockenspiel and a backing chorus, and that he's written nearly fifty songs about the state of Illinois because that's how many songs about the state of Illinois he had in him. This little confection doesn't have the sheer weight of some of the pieces on "Illinois", but it does have that dash of glockenspiel that's been lacking in your life.

Enjoy the Blowing Up of Things Day festivities, all. I am going to attempt to make the fabled "Bloobarb" pie suggested to me last night, using the fresh rhubarb I found in my mailbox this morning. It probably goes without saying, but "bloobarb is my new favorite word. We'll see if it becomes my new favorite pie.

The Goods

2006-06-30T09:10:00.000-07:00

Last night I promised Kevin I'd at least part way come through on this blog's stated purpose of detailing what goes into opening a record store. In fact, I promised I'd do so before two o'clock this afternoon. Hold onto your hats kids.

This afternoon, Luke and I will be meeting with the bank to talk about loan stuff. The first thing to know about opening a record store is that it is more expensive than, say, shopping at a record store. So we are trying to find a bank that will give us a goodly sum of funds.

Also this week, there's been the raging debate over whether the shelving units being built by my former roommate will be built out of plywood or MDF. "MDF" is kind of a low-rent plywood, which costs half as much but takes a whole bunch of work to finish. If anyone digs huffing polyeurythane, I may have a job for you in late July.

The sign permit has been submitted and we're waiting for approval. Also hoping to get Chi, our contractor guy, into the store to look at walls that might be prime for knockin' down. There will be pictures as soon as that happens. Pictures of destruction. And then later, construction. The discussion of storefront colors has begun, but has not yet reached the "looking at paint samples with overwrought names" stage.

I'm also working on getting furniture for the listening area. My "clever" plan to convince one of the local furniture stores to consign items in the shop has so far yielded no response. If this doesn't come together, I'll be faced with that age old furnishing dilemma: Ikea or Hub's Place?

Told you it'd be exciting. More details as they become available, more songs later this afternoon. If you've got nothing planned tonight, Drag Ball, Lost Dog. At least part of the proceeds go to me, which means they go to the record store, which means in a roundabout way, they benefit you. So come benefit yourself. Also there will be dancing.

For Your Achy Breaky Heart: Sampler #2 Tracks 6-10

2006-06-28T10:58:00.000-07:00

What's more exciting than a nightclub downtown? DONUTS! Particularly, Dunkin Donuts. Soon our town will be blessed with the sweet angel's touch of the double D. This little child of the suburbs couldn't be happier. The donut drought has come to an end, we're all going to be so terribly fat.

The teeshirts, which those of you who made it out to the last Twice Shy Tuesday got to see in various sizes, are done and turned out pretty wonderfully. If you'd like one, let me know. They're going fairly fast, but I may do another printing if demand demands.

And what's more exciting than teeshirts, donuts and nightclubs? Tracks six through ten!

She Sees the Good in Everyone (Because She's Not Very Bright)- The Capstan Shafts
Dean Wells is The Capstan Shafts. Before I finish this post, The Capstan Shafts will have released another EP of ultra lo-fi, clever, hypershort pop songs which I think they do every week or so. Guided By Voices comparisons are inevitable, so I’ll let you make them on your own. Like the best GBV stuff, the Capstan Shafts songs leave you waiting for that hook to come around again, but opt for concision over satisfaction. Luckily, the hooks are memorable enough that you can play them back in your head.

Julie- Jens Lekman
I would like to vote for this song as the “Cecilia” of the coming century. At least until something better comes along. Swede (Swede!) Jens Lekman’s collection of EPs, “Oh You’re So Silent, Jens” brings together the best in wuss-rock with samples from Belle and Sebastian, the Left Banke and a Beat Happening singalong! Who wouldn’t want to sing along with Beat Happening? This song has the loose feeling of a pickup band forming itself around Lekman’s sweet vocals and guitar.

I Turn My Camera On- Spoon
Spoon have been turning out solid albums for years, but Gimme Fiction (I'm always tempted to put an exclamation point after every gimme I write) rocks in so many ways, from the spacy first track to tight Stones tributes like "Sister Jack", but this bassline is the funkiest thing I've heard from an indie rock band in a while. Yup, I said funkiest.

Incinerate- Sonic Youth
Pop song and Sonic Youth might not be synonymous, but "Rather Ripped" strips away a whole lot of the standard SY experimentation and noisery in favor of concision. Plus, Kim Gordon is back to actually singing, which can be chalked up in the column of good things. The trippy "Do You Believe in Rapture?" is still my current favorite off the album, but this is the one that jumps out on a first listen and holds your attention after a couple go rounds.

Burn- Pink Nasty
I know I've already voiced my disapproval of hiphop covers by caucasians with acoustic guitars, but I'm giving this one a pass since I heard it before the Usher original. Pink Nasty is the sister of the mildly disturbing Black Nasty and is a backup singer for Will Oldham on his most recent live album. What I like about this song, in addition to Pink Nasty's delivery and phrasing, is that I can't for the life of me figure out the motives of the speaker. The first verse is a send off, but the rest seems to be a get back together plea. Plus, I just wanted to put "Burn" and "Incinerate" back to back, because it brings me amusement to do so.

I'm looking for advice on the upcoming 70s-based incarnation of Twice Shy. Anyone know of any secret geniuses of the 1970s? It would be extra added wonderful if these secret geniuses were something other than guitar based rock.

Confirmed!

2006-06-27T15:26:00.000-07:00

The rumors are true! The Masonic Temple on Cayuga St, formerly the Odyssey, will be reopening as Club Euphoria and the Elixir Lounge, indicated by little awnings over the windows on the Seneca St side of the building. Sure, the names aren't too promising, but the idea of a nightclub downtown is a positive thing. I like bars as much as the next heavy drinker, but don't you want at least the option to dance to bad music? It's tragic that the only regular dancing opportunities in town are Willhelm K and Nicky Wood. Let's get those young people down to the Commons. Dance dance revolution!

Since this confirms information received a few days ago from a certain source, does this mean that sources claim of a July opening is also legit?

Nite Club- Old 97s

Nite Klub- The Specials

Can't find my copy of "Clubland" by Elvis Costello. Shame, that.

For Your Achy Breaky Heart: Sampler #2 Tracks 1-5

2006-06-27T08:48:00.000-07:00

As we embark on this second mix cd together, I should explain the bifurcated nature of this particular beast. At this point in my life, I've had to start listening to music in a number of different ways. Does it rock? Will it sell? Does it make me intensely happy when I'm sitting on my couch with my cat? Would it be appropriate for a drag ball or 70's rock night?

With that in mind, each of these tracks will include usage directions, like drugs! Incidentally, the drug I am currently hooked on (in addition to standard caffiene and alcohol consumption) is celery. I am convincing myself this is having fantastic health benefits.

Also, many thanks to SS for the cover image. AD just sent me a shot that nearly displaced it, but this shot from a plaque next to a defibrilator in Tennessee won out.

Tracks!!!!

Been So Long- Vetiver
The creek outside is all a rage since it's been raining a bit, so my apartment gets this quiet rushing water sound that's almost indistinguishable from the 60-cycle hum of speakers left on. Sometimes I imagine this song rising out of that creek noise at night. Devendra-protege (has anyone not been mentored by Devendra Banhart?) Andy Cabic and friends have put together songs that are full of so much space you could go walking around in them, and is one of the strongest lyricists on the freakfolk front, writing lyrics that are thrifty and perfectly suited to the instrumentation.

Directions: This track, and all of "To Find Me Gone" should be applied to your porch and backyard. Use with citronella candles.

Ladyflash- The Go! Team
Once the drum locks in over the Midnight Cowboy-style sample and looping strings, there is no way to get out of this song. The Go! Team's "Thunder, Lightning, Strike!" has been compared to "Paul's Boutique" in it's sheer ability to embrace everything this British cheerleader troupe can get their samplin' little fingers on, but this track reminds me mostly of the highpoints on The Avalanches' "Since I Met You", with more of a focus on songs. While The Avalanches sometimes play their samples for a laugh, The Go! Team plays everything, samples, drums, tinkling keyboards and their own vocals, for kicks.

Directions: Take one with pep rally.

And I Was a Boy From School- Hot Chip
The past couple weeks have been so tough for full album listening. Between Vetiver, two settlers albums and the new Sonic Youth, it took me a bit to get around to Hot Chip's "The Warning" even though HAT told me months ago after a live performance in NYC that she had seen the future and it was a bunch of dudes standing behind keyboards. The song starts of with a tense little keyboard part that runs throughout and the band builds and pulls back over the beat to a haunting effect.

Directions: Primarily intended for car stereo use. May be drag ball appropriate (ask me on Saturday).

To Die A Virgin- The Divine Comedy
This song was too much of a blantant Bowie homage for me not to fall madly in love with it. In fact, I just heard it this morning for the first time and said "Hot damn, that's going on the sampler!" I'm trying to decide whether it belongs on "Low" or "Heroes". Throwing every Eno-period Bowie cliche together isn't enough for the Divine Comedy, though. They also amp up Bowie's sense of humor (Bowie had a sense of humor, right? Everyone else thinks TVC 15 is hilarious, right?) vamping on seductive lines like "With all the bombs and the bird flu/we're probably going to be dead soon/and here we are in your bedroom/Did I tell you I love you?"

Directions: Actually I have no idea.

Lollipop- The Hidden Cameras
Anyone who can figure out the lyrics to this song wins my undying love. Or five bucks. If you don't know, the Hidden Cameras are comprised at least in part of semiotics grad students from the University of Toronto. Which leads me to believe they may actually just be making non-signifying noises on this track. The new Cameras album, "Awoo" won't hit the US til September, but the stuff floating around out there has the same rat-tat-tat drumming and rhythm guitar that made "Mississauga Goddam" sound like a gay Canadian version of the Supremes on speed (yes, that's it exactly), but other than this wonderfully frantic rush, sound more unified, with Joel Gibb's voice playing off the xylophones rather that just doubling them, and floating string arrangements.

Directions: Best suited for dancing in apartment alone.

Be sure to come out to Korova this evening for the end of two eras. One is the Era of Twice Shy Tuesdays, which will come to an end, only to rise again as the Era of Twice Shy Thursdays. The other is the Era of Erik in Ithaca, which will come to an end, only to rise again as the Era of Erik in New York Becoming Wildly Famous. Plus, it'll be your first chance to see the thoroughly awesome No Radio teeshirts, designed by the above mentioned Erik. Like the samplers, the teeshirts are part of the Summer of Potlatch, so ask and you shall recieve. All we ask in return is that you ramble to your friends and loved ones about the amazing new record store opening at the end of the summer, at any given opportunity. Which you were probably going to do anyway.

Extr

Holy Swedish Cross-Referencing!

2006-06-23T07:54:00.000-07:00

Oh, I fear my swedophile friends have all forsaken me. How else could I be unaware that the Legends and the Acid House Kings (pictured) are both the Scandinavian brain children of one Johan Angerald? I didn't even know the Acid House Kings were Swedish, although now that I look at them, it does seem a bit obvious. In Sweden, the sun only shines two months out of the year. The other ten months, the wily Swedes are forces to bathe in sugary pop music to ward off Seasonal Affective Disorder, which in Sweden is just called Socialism.

Here are pretty little summer songs from a land where summer doesn't really exist.

He Knows the Sun- The Legends
This could be a b-side from the Cure's "Wish" album, but is actually the first single from the Legends second disc, "Public Radio" which hits US shores on Tuesday. Enjoy the underwater bass solo and the "Oh it's pretty/oh so pretty" chorus, but remember that for pallid Swedish people like Johan Angerald and his bandmates, tanning can lead to almost immediate death, and becoming sun-smitten is inevitably fatal. Still, bouncy little song, eh?

I Write Summer Songs for No Reason- Acid House Kings
The Acid House Kings might have the most inappropriate name of any extant band. And I'm not buying the "It's our second language!" excuse. There are zero elements of Acid or House on "Sing Along With Acid House Kings" and the band includes at least one Acid House Queens. At least with Acid Mothers Temple, the band sounds like they might be doing acid. With your mother. The Acid House Kings bop through folk sounds, pop rock that sounds quite a bit like earlier Legends material and disco beats that call to mind recent Belle and Sebastian

Special Bonus Swedish Reference:
Of Montreal is certainly not Swedish, but they make very little sense and it is very possible they've done a lot of acid. Here is a friendly love song to poor little Nietzsche.
What a Strange Day With a Swede- Of Montreal

Dreaming of Canada

2006-06-22T13:02:00.000-07:00

Anyone feel like driving to Toronto tomorrow night? It's a nice drive and Toronto is a very clean city. Plus, Jay Mascis (of Dinosaur Jr) will be playing with Broken Social Scene (of pretty much every band in Canada). Not opening for, mind you, but playing with. Word is it's a one time thing, but I have faith in the ability of wily Canadian kids to sneak recording equipment in and out of the show. Hopefully, we'll be hearing this stuff by Monday. BSS may say they're dreaming of Pavement, but maybe the kids have a wee little crush on some old Dinosaur Jr stuff, maybe you think?

Ibi Dreams of Pavement- Broken Social Scene

Green Mind- Dinosaur Jr

Of course, no one ever really goes to Toronto. Sure, they talk about it, but no one ever really goes. Those of us who are staying town-bound might be interested in hitting up the Books Through Bars benefit at Castaways tomorrow night. The Settlers, mentioned here just the other day, are playing along with Johnny Dowd, Thousands of One and some other bands I don't know. Show starts at nine and the moneys go to a great charity that sends books to prisoners across New York State.

Keep an eye on the Ithaca Journal this week, there should be a story coming out on the burgeoning record store scene in Ithaca. I don't exactly know what it will say, but I should admit that the interviewer woke me up and started in on the questions, so I might not have been at my peak smartness. No one is at their peak smartness before they put on pants. Pants equals smarts.

Lastly, in the "Yes, I'll agree to anything department', apparently I'm DJing a drag ball at the Lost Dog Lounge next Friday. Last week I was asked to DJ a "fundraiser", and today at lunch I found out that "fundraiser" meant "drag ball". My first wedding and my first drag ball, all in one month. June is a month for pioneering, and has extra long days to provide time for extra pioneering. Pioneer something this week, before it's too late!

Spazzin Out With the Holy Ghost: The Settlers

2006-06-20T14:17:00.001-07:00

I had honestly no idea where to start when it came to praising Ithaca bands, so I chose the CDs that happened to be on my couch. Complicated system, that.

The Settlers are fairly new to the Ithaca scene but have already turned out a pair of fantastic albums. Their music is a weird crossbreed of the Silver Jews and the Vaselines and, so yes, perhaps not everyone's cup of tea, but they have a cult-like following among the Ithaca cognescenti. Cos seems to be one of those folks who writes more songs than he knows what to do with and Ciele provides simple bang-a-can drums and backing vocals. I'm not even sure the albums are available anywhere other than at shows, but here's two tracks to get started on. They'll be at Grassroots (if you're into that sort of thing) and at Castaways in July.

Driving Nails

On the Bar

Visit The Settlers on MySpace.

Listening to Records & Doing Scrapbook: Sampler #1, Tracks 18-21

2006-06-19T09:36:00.000-07:00

End of the line, folks. Here's what we've had so far:

1.Worms-Beth Orton
2.Cheated Hearts- Yeah Yeah Yeahs
3.Rough Gem- Islands
4.Crazy- Gnarls Barkley
5.Lloyd, I'm Ready to Be Heartbroken- Camera Obscura
6.The Gap- You Say Party! We Say Die!
7.The Big Bang Jump!- Office
8.Honey Child What Can I Do?- Mark Lanegan and Isobel Campbell
9.Wille- Cat Power
10.Painter in Your Pocket- Destroyer
11.Police Sweater Blood Vow- Fiery Furnaces
12.Thou Shalt Wilt- Loose Fur
13. The W.A.N.D.- The Flaming Lips
14.Make Out Fall Out Make Up- Love Is All
15.LDN- Lily Allen
16.Cowbell- Tapes n Tapes
17.Black Swan- Thom York

...which brings us to...

Mothers, Sisters, Daughters and Wives- Voxtrot
Someone told me the other day that the first Voxtrot EP blows away "Mothers, Sisters, Daughters and Wives". He stated in fact, that the latter amounts to only 5% of the quality of the former. But until that shows up in the mail, I can only attest that this Austin act has turned out a handful of tight little pop tracks with songwriter that edges up just short of sentimentality.

At Last is All- I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness
Austin can't be that bad, even if it is in the middle of Texas. After all, it's got Voxtrot and I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness. Of the crop of post-Interpol bands, ILBICD (I'm not going to keep typing it out) stands out by virtue of their stark songwriting and haunting guitar lines that call up the Psychedelic Furs and other high quality brooders. "Fear is On Our Side" is their first full length, following up 2004's self-titled EP, and the album is steadier than the band's previous efforts, sustaining a cheerfully creepy vibe that few current bands (The Organ springs to mind) can manage.

Star Witness- Neko Case
I'm giving up the dream that Neko Case is going to come and play in our town, or, you know, in my living room, or whatever. Backed by the Calexico guys and Ithaca's own Willie B, "Fox Confessor Brings the Flood" knocks down everything Case has done previously. Her lyrics are imagistic and intuitive, the vocal harmonies by Kelly Hogan and Carolyn Mark swirl around Case's vocals, which have never sounded cleaner or more confident than they do here. "Fox Confessor" is tied with the demos for Steve Gollnick's upcoming album for most played album of the year around my little abode.

Stadiums and Shrines II- Sunset Rubdown
It was so difficult to pick a track off "Shut Up I Am Dreaming", the first full-length from this side project of Wolf Parade's Spencer Krug. Every track has at least one moment that is completely brilliant. Amazingly, Krug's songs on this album make his Wolf Parade tracks seem oddly normal. Plinking pianos, carnivorous animals, and swift verbal reversals traipse throughout the album, songs bleeding into one another with a foreign logic that becomes immediately explicable upon listening. Krug is currently working with Dan Bejar and Carey Mercer from Frog Eyes on a project called Swan Lake. You'll hear it as soon as I do.

Tomorrow we'll see the first weekly installment of Musical Reasons to Live in Ithaca, and more on the rumor that Dinosaur, Jr's J. Mascis is fronting Broken Social Scene. How cool is that? Happy monday, people, I'm off to pop my World Cup cherry.

Listening to Records & Doing Scrapbook: Sampler #1, Tracks 14-17

2006-06-16T10:29:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I swung by the record store to pick up the new Sonic Youth, which sounds (so far) pretty damn good. Alas, the only SY represented was a weird Japanese import of "Goo" and I ended up going home with the new Vetiver album instead. If you have a porch, you need to get this album. Because I want to come over some night this summer and listen to this album on your porch. Not that it sounds like it was played on a porch, it's far from foot-stomping. But it's picture perfect cool summer night with a beer music. Porch owners, you've been warned.

I was going to post a couple tracks but my computer is currently cluttered with music for a wedding I'm djing tomorrw and I didn't want to risk a song like, say, Brooks and Dunn's "Boot Scootin Boogie" infecting Andy Cabic's efforts with its phenomenal craptacularness.

Anyway. Here's tracks 14 through 17 which are not craptacular in the least.

Make Out Fall Out Make Up
Some of you may ask, "What are these kids saying? Did they say 'living room' right there? What is this song about?" The answer is, these kids are Swedish and what they're saying is secondary to how they're saying it. And they're saying it by yelling through reverb, with plunking bass and crunchy saxophones (and yes, some handclaps). Love is All embraces the cyclic nature of relationships and throws it a little party. A Swedish makeout party.

LDN- Lily Allen
Lily Allen has more MySpace friends than Jesus. In fact, she has more MySpace friends than several versions of Jesus. So, logically, if the Beatles were bigger than one Jesus, and Lily Allen is bigger than several Jesuses, Lily Allen is bigger than several The Beatles. Follow that? Unfortunately, what the British songwriter/DJ/MySpace heartthrob doesn't have is a CD available in the US. Luckily for all of us, the internet spans the mighty Atlantic and brings Ms. Allen's songs to us here in the colonies. Words like "summer hit", "pop gem" and "first track on road trip mixes" come to mind when I think of this little back and forth tribute to Allen's home city. It's so hard to hate cities in the summer, isn't it? Unless you're the Lovin Spoonful.

Cowbell- Tapes n Tapes
Tapes n Tapes have been at the center of a weird war between bloggers and the print media of late. TnT have been labelled "the type of band bloggers love". WTF? Yes, the lead singer is a graduate of the Frank Black School of Singing All Twitchy Like (FBSoSATL, now accepting applications), but hey, everybody else is doing the David Byrne style neurosis, let's mix it up a bit. The downside is, the song includes no presence of its titular instrument. On the upside, it has a wonderfully hooky singalong chorus. It's all about balance.

Black Swan- Thom Yorke

(sorry folks, word on the street is that Thommy's lawyers are on the warpath, so this track is no longer postable. It is still on the CD, if you happen to have a copy. Please don't tell Thom Yorke's lawyers I gave it to you, okay?)

You may have heard of Thom Yorke. He belongs to an obscure British band called something like Stereoface. If you were to put a butterfly net up in the air, you would probably catch two or three tracks from Thom's forthcoming solo album, since they are bouncing around the internet (which, you probably know, is located up in the air) like the multiball bonus in Arkanoid. Young whippersnapper are claiming "The Eraser" is a bold step forward for Thommy, but those of us who were legitimately mopey when "Creep" first hit the airwaves (and totally miserable by the time "The Bends" was released), might hear it more as a step back to "Kid A/Amnesiac" territory, which was a nice stretch of land. Unlike those albums, here Yorke's misery-loves-melody vocals come through without frustrating effects, gliding smoothly over slick instrumentation. No Radiohead (see how I did that? Slipped the name of our record store into the review?) fan will be disappointed, even if Yorke is just preaching to the converted.

Tomorrow brings the last four tracks and the end of this particular mix cd. But we'll always have the memories. Remember that time I slipped the name of our record store into a Thom Yorke review? Man, those were good times. After that, who knows? For now, I must concentrate on my goal for tomorrow's wedding: make Aunt Sophia dance. Since she's not my Aunt Sophia, I don't know what might cause Aunt Sophia to dance, or if Aunt Sophia is even physically capable of dancing, because I imagine Aunt Sophia is an Italian woman who is roughly 102 years old. Hopefully she likes Outkast.

If you want to buy any of these CDs before August 19th, you can do so here:

...but after August 19th, sister...

Listening to Records & Doing Scrapbook: Sampler #1, Tracks 10-13

2006-06-15T13:19:00.000-07:00

Well, the weather these past two days has not exactly screamed "Hey, sit inside and write journal posts!" Already I've been lured away by a boat and lunch at a certain hippie diner, which it turns out is an afternoon-long undertaking. But duty calls, and for my sins I'll be posting four tracks a day til Sunday. I know you're thrilled.

Have we all noticed people doing work in the old Odyssey building? Tim "Mr. Rochester" confirms two R-city nightclub owners have rented out the joint. To what ends, no one is sure. There's also a rumor going around that Urban Outfitters is looking for a location on the Commons. And we're scaling back to just one head shop. Progress takes many forms.

Tracks ten through thirteen, kids!

Painter in Your Pocket- Destroyer
There are things Destroyer's Dan Bejar likes to sing about. Destruction. Rock music. Girls with names. Other Destroyer songs. Somewhere on the interweb there is a Destroyer drinking game that could more than likely kill a hearty drinker after two albums of Bejar's recurring themes. And yes, sometimes his songs do sound like they were written by high schooler for some grand Canadian musical. But Destroyer is music for people who like really listening to music, and "Rubies" fits right in with "Thief" and "Streethawk" to form a set of three fairly brilliant, lyrically difficult albums worth the time and effort.

Police Sweater Blood Vow- The Fiery Furnaces
It occurs to me that today's songs are all by bands you may have already formed a pretty solid opinion on. I don't know if this track is going to convert anyone to Fiery Furnaces fandom, but a couple listens to the rest of "Bitter Tea" might just. There's always something childish and wonderful about the Furnace's music, like no one ever told them, "No kids, that's not how you do it. That's not how you do it at all." Every Furnace's song sounds like something they found entirely on their own.

Thou Shalt Wilt-Loose Fur
The second album from this sort-of Wilco side project finds Jim O'Rourke still at the helm, but a little more focused than 2003's self titled album. Backed by Jeff Tweedy (who you may have heard of) and Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche, O'Rourke puts together songs with his warm piano sound and arid wit. Listening to O'Rourke's musical efforts make his producing contributions on albums like Beth Orton's "Comfort of Strangers" and the last two Wilco discs all the more apparent. Plus, the guy is pretty damn funny.

The W.A.N.D.- The Flaming Lips
There's not a heck of a lot left to say about the Flaming Lips. Unlike Jim O'Rourke's work, I've always found it better not to listen too closely to Wayne Coyne's lyrics. I like robots and magicians as much as the next guy, but I'm more interested in listening to the way Coyne plies his strange high tenor against the guitar effects, tight snares and psyched out backing vocals. The Lips never fail to disappoint and ever so slightly confuse.

Four more tomorrow. Enjoy the sun, cats and kittens. More news to come.

Listening to Records & Doing Scrapbook: Sampler #1, Tracks 7-9

2006-06-13T10:51:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the third installment of the first CD with the seventh through ninth tracks! Feel free to do the math on that. I think the answer is 20, or possibly Egypt.

Two things before we talk about songs. One, did you know you need a permit to put up a sign in the city of Ithaca? Indeed. So today is official declared Apply for a Sign Permit Day! I hope you will all celebrate by applying for a sign permit in your district or municipality, or by placing flowers (or a sound image of a flower) on the grave of Ferdinand de Saussure.

Two, the person purporting to be my mother on the comments is, in fact, my mother. The crazy spammy nonsense person on the comments is, I suspect, your mother.

Songs!

Big Bang Jump!- Office
A couple tracks off this Chicago band's self-released debut "Q&A" showed up on a blog called Good Hodgkins a few weeks ago and I was well and mightily impressed. Things to like about this band: they dress up like people in an office, they like dancing, they sing la-la-la's, which is always a good idea. Also, one of their songs gets introduced with a "check, check" as if they were mc's or sound guys instead of a pop band temping at an ad agency.

Since they are impossible to google, you can find Office here:

Reach Office

Honey Child, What Can I Do?- Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan
I want to say that Isobel and Mark are channeling Lee and Nancy, but as far as I can tell neither Lee nor Nancy is dead (allmusic.com, by the way, refers to Lee Hazlewood as "an irascible genius", which is my new goal in life). Whoever came up with the idea for stealing Isobel Campbell from Belle and Sebastian, removing Mark Lanegan from the cigarette smoke-filled chamber he's been trapped in since the Singles soundtrack and having them record an album of duets together should be given an award for "Greatest Completely Bizarre Idea of the Year". The person who came up with the Matthew Sweet/Susanna Hoffs duets album should have to present the award, thinking to himself, "Maybe next year" and dreaming of Greg Dulli and Joanna Newsome performing cabaret songs together.

Willie- Cat Power
Two separate statements: 1. Chan Marshall is dreamy. 2. Cat Power is dreamy. The first one has really nothing to do with anything, it's just a fact, like "Clouds are puffy-shaped". The second one explains why I can listen to this song over and over, just going all smiley and sleepyheaded. For a long time, I dismissed the bulk of Cat Power songs as sad heroin music, but on "The Greatest" Cat Power's brought things up to a state of lucid dreaming. It doesn't rock, by no means does it rock. It moves along like a hot air balloon, mostly drifting but carefully steered by muted horns and vocal harmonies when needed.

Seven through nine, ladies and gents. You'll start to notice certain themes emerging. Canadians. Pretty girls singing pretty songs. Handclaps. Dancing about scientific and social concepts. Tomorrow, more Canadians, siblings and Bible jokes. See you there!

ps. The Blogger Spellcheck program does not recognize the words "blog" or "google". Way to go, guys!

Listening to Records & Doing Scrapbook: Sampler #1, Tracks 4-6

2006-06-12T10:53:00.001-07:00

Forward, onward! Boldly we go to track four...

Crazy- Gnarls Barkley

I don't know much about the hip hop. I do know that the photo of the Gnarls Barkley kids dressed up Clockwork Orange-style gives me the creeps and that this song has been so quickly embraced by the scene that it has already generated folky acoustic cover versions on NPR, which is of course what all hip hop songs aspire to. Good for summer mixes (assuming summer shows up at some point). Serve with Curtis Mayfield, diamond in the back, sunroof top, diggin the scene (with a gangster lean, incidentally).

Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken- Camera Obscura

Man, Scotland must be twee as fuck. Maybe when you arrive at the Glasgow airport, they give you little square glasses, an old Tallulah Gosh album and a very nice sweater. I bet Glasgow makes Olympia, Washington look superpunkrock. These Glaswegians are so excited about getting sad! And being made sad by a guy named Lloyd, which is even worse. If you like Belle and Sebastian, it behooves you to like this band. If you love Belle and Sebastian, you are probably already on the Camera Obscura mailing list. "Let's Get Out of This Country" has lots of pretty songs full of strings and handclaps. Handclaps for sadness!

The Gap- You Say Party! We Say Die!

Just like the band's name, this song has a word-to-exclamation-point ratio of 3:1. I've heard these spunky Canadians compared to Le Tigre, but YSP!WSD! doesn't get all bogged down commenting on social issues, they just yell the name of the social issue at you and move on. YSP!WSD! doesn't even claim the gap between the rich and the poor is a bad thing. There's a gap! Dance!

Tomorrow, tracks 7-9. Tomorrow, the new Sonic Youth and Hot Chip albums hit the streets, along with a new and supposedly improved Best of the Replacements compilation, if you're interested in those types of things. If you're interested enough to buy them, you can do so here:

Listening to Records & Doing Scrapbook: Sampler #1, Tracks 1-3

2006-06-11T14:43:00.000-07:00

It's a pretty transparent ploy.

You get handed a CD, or you pick it up in a coffeeshop maybe, or at a show. And perhaps you actually listen to it, because you're an inquiring type of mind. And possibly, you actually like a couple songs. It's possible, a lot of them are quite good. But some difficult little monkey has failed to put track list on the damn thing and has instead sent you here.

Sorry about that. I'm afraid I'm the monkey in question.

This is the first of five sampler CDs that'll be showing up in various spots around town over the next ten weeks (hence the number 5. We're counting down, get it? Work with me people). The central organizing principle behind it was just "Really good music that came out or is coming out this year". Which would have made a terrible title. If you're reading this, don't have a copy of the CD, feel free to download the stuff. If you have one and want to make sure you get the next one, let me know.

In an effort to continue being difficult, I'll be talking a little about three tracks each day this week and posting the full listing next Sunday. Hope you like the music. There's more coming.

Worms- Beth Orton
I've liked Beth Orton's stuff and at the same time been convinced she records all her albums immediately after waking up. "Comfort of Strangers" puts Beth together with producer Jim O'Rourke and manages to keep that warmth while adding a bit of teeth, sounding more fully realized than her previous efforts, or at least more awake. That, and jokes about the Bible are fun (see Track 12).

Go visit Beth Orton

Cheated Hearts- Yeah Yeah Yeahs
So maybe these aren't all the most obscure of bands, but the new YYYs album is pretty darn hot. Instrumentation a little more laid back than "Fever to Tell" let's Karen O's vocals move forward and come through cleaner on "Show Your Bones". Simple vocal melody perfectly delivered and backed by building guitars and drums. Not to mention handclaps.

Go visit the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Rough Gem-Islands
Dudes stole a keyboard line from Prince! Ballsy Canadians. Rising from the ashes of the quirky-nearly-to-the-point-of-annoyance Unicorns, Islands seem to have kept the quirky, lost the annoyance. Luke says it's a new In the Aeroplane...but said so at three in the morning after copious amounts of whiskey, so is not accountable. Might be what the Mates of State would sound like if they were dudes from Canada and let their songs go on for 6+ minutes. Which you can do if you're funded by the Canadian government.

Go visit the Islands.

If you can't wait 10 weeks, you can buy these albums on the computer. Tracks 4-6 will be up tomorrow.

Greetings/Salutations

2006-06-10T13:47:00.000-07:00

Welcome welcome. Sometimes a project is just so awful big it starts growing extra limbs, and this is one of them. Call it full disclosure. We want to do everything out in the open. This is a space we're going to fill with every little thing that goes on, each tiny detail of what it takes to get No Radio Records up and running. If you're interested. It's also a space where anyone who wants to offer comments or abuse can do so. We heart comments and abuse.

The story so far: about a year ago, some of us got it in our heads that Ithaca needed a decent music store. Not just needed, but deserved. We set to working at it, and over the course of a couple months, we got a few people on board and got a little momentum going. Finally, a couple weeks ago, we signed a three year lease on the storefront at 312 E Seneca St (formerly Sfumato Tattoo. Next to the Got Beef? store. In the meat district). We've set an opening date and now it's all engines to August 19th when No Radio Records opens its doors.

Ten weeks from today, ladies and gentlemen.

Above is the incredibly talented Dan Knapp's initial sketch for our sign. More parts of the process will be showing up on here as we go along. Keep reading, shout back at us when you feel like it, and we'll see you all in ten weeks. Til then, here's an old Saturday Looks Good to Me song, cause it's always nice to listen to Fred and the Ann Arbor gang.

Record Store- Saturday Looks Good to Me