The Pretty Things That Summer Brings

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)

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...

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...

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

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...

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

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.

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").

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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...

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

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.