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.

OiNK Gets Boinked

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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

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.

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

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...

...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!

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.