you should call your grandparents and ask

today the world war II memorial opened in washington, dc. reading the article in the nytimes, i was struck by the sadness that 1,100 veterans of that war die every day. am reading 'homefront' by catherine lutz, which traces the history of ft. bragg, and address the camp-followers and war workers, many of them women, who go unpraised, relatively, for their work and hardship during this time. i can't possibly imagine being part of daily life in 'the good war,' and i bet you can't either, so i encourage all you whipper snappers to call your cute grannies and grampies and ask them...

IN OTHER NEWS:

Madonna has picked the worst time in the world to ask for 2.4 billion dollars for her label. And, umm, Jaged Little Pill sold 4 million copies more than Like A Virgin?

the summer's here and the time is right...

people keep talking about the summer, and it makes me want to sing 'summertime' as covered by the zombies, which is one of the best songs by the best bands of the '60s, imho. flip flops, free movies outside, bike rides...i'm starting to sound like a playboy pin up.

i've been writing about new jersey, southern new jersey shore towns, for two years now, but i still barely understand bruce. i'm watching 'the history of rock' which has too many shots of the man, sleeveless, neck straining, and i get uncomfortable thinking about muscular dudes making music in general. the exhibit at EMP, on bruce and roads (duh), was so bland it could have been a rolling stone picture book. or wait...but, it's only through songs like "racing in the street" or some parts of nebraska that i can really get it. mansion on the hill? good song (better book, tho) but all those big rock saximaphones? backing vocals? stupid stadium drums? somehow it doesn't fit that voice - which to me is so tired it barely fits a young man's body - yet along the jubilant outfitting of a doo wop studio band.

on that note: i've been previewing through the stacks of incoming tonight, among other things, and wondering when it was that i made the shift between wanting to be 'that girl who knew all the up and coming bands' and being 'that girl that knows the history of pop music pretty damn well'. the short answer - the shift from college newspaper to real world freelancing? who knows. i have a younger friend who does the newspaper/webzine thing, and it is strangely intimidating to chat with him about music - because he just knows so much and reads everything about new bands - but i never see him at concerts (like the most excellent chris cutler performance this evening...that guy is so expansive, playing better drums with a ping pong ball than meg can with two big sticks) of established musicians. hmm. how quickly the novelty of youth wears off? how soon the old dig into the bins, trying to find things *worth* writing about? Well, I do both, but I'll tell you what, I'll be damned before I review any of the following sucky records

The new I Am The World Trade Center - tacky boring eurohouse and, duh, change your band name cause it's just not even funny anymore. I mean, these two hipster coathangers put out a press release maybe two weeks after 'the incident' saying that they'd changed their name to "I Am The..." then they switched back. Can't buy Manhattan back with beads, bro.

Broken Spindles - mentioned before, pretentious crap from the faint. why is it that bands don't even have to break up anymore for us to their their lackluster members' solo efforts? INDIE LABELS, I BEG YOU TO NOT PUT OUT GRATUITOUS CRAPPY SIDE PROJECTS JUST TO CASH IN ON THE NAME BRAND. IT IS TACKY AND OBVIOUS. but not as tacky as remix records of said record starting other washed up ex-members (tigerstyle, rip).

les san culottes - the name of this album is 'fixation orale' it makes my spine shrink in horror.

wait, all press is good press. Good records: Iron and Wine: Our endless numbered days, Mahjongg: Machinegong, Division of Laura Lee: DasNotCompute (another terrible album title)

mahleritus

ohh...i just got the baton and have to teach a 2.5 hr long class today on turn of the 20th century music, including everybody's favorite party animal, mahler. these are the types of things my nightmares are made of - quick, teach 20 kids something that you really don't like!


in case anyone wants to fly my to prague, tho, i would love to go to the prazske jaro series. also, dunno what's up with this czech world music series, but i have to learn more about that too.

spooky goth girls

okay, so i read Smithsonian but I'm under 50 and don't drive a Volvo stationwagon, sue me. I read an article about this sort of annoying seeming goth chick who considers herself an urban archaeologist and lurks around forgotten nyc places, taking pix and throwing parties. the big secret? this might be one of my lost at birth bosom buddies (so anne of ggables, ya!). only, i don't wear tights.

music. holy shit! i'm finally working on my masterpiece, fill. it's a genius four minute collage of phil collins drum solos. is to be mixed in 5.1 surround sound, so the fill will be even more epic. John Oswald, watch out.

gnus

an article on session musicians, including Carol Kaye, who appears to be a totally kickass bass player (better even than kim gordon).

also, this slightly evil article about content/hardware handshaking. although i applaud the ipod (someone should send me one, i'll promise it a good review) i'm starting to wonder if maybe its success is prompting a lot more consolidation in the hardware industry's control of intellectual property, and if that's really in all of our best interests.

EVERYTHING SOUNDS LIKE ENO

coming out of a listening cocoon and both the new broken spindles and of montreal have serious b.eno-isms. the faint dude lacks, does the byrne-era bush of ghosts plus synth minimalism thing, doesn't work, but of montreal (a band i have loathed since e6 was something you could namecheck in print without a sneer) manages to get the right amount of early-eno post glam ridiculousness (baby's on fire, only more reedy, which is to say, not as good as the o-rig) with their weird, badly realized rubber kick drum thing. sad band, them, but i can finally see a way in.

and in a sinister funk right now, since i am crushed out and in dismay. am going to watch "deadheads:an american subculture" to get myself psyched for the absurd once again. nothing like blatent hatred of hippies to brighten my day.

offlist

hey folks,

two things. my noise paper is now in working order, so if you missed my EMP presentation or are floating thru the world and thinking "geez, I really want to know a little bit about the Providence noise scene," then email me at pinkgerl@yahoo.com.

also, Front Row Center #3 is now open for subs. The topic is "most intense live show you've ever seen" and as always, 350-400 words max. you can do that! email yr sub to me + yr nom de plume + yr address and I will send you a care package of free zines to distro among friends and loved ones. What's the catch? No catch. Also, email me if you want back issues:

#1 Sympathy for the Devil
#2 Songs to Love and Hate: a song that has such an effect, you can't listen to it

shouting the poetic truths of high school journal keepers

so, ya, i interviewed kim gordon on thursday, and although i mustered up the strength to transcribe the MD, and really it wasn't that bad, it felt like a total nightmare. i have zero desire for access, and would have never asked to do this if i didn't think i had something to say, but it was still nerve-wracking to talk to a woman who's art/life has so fully served as a sort of roadmap to autonymy when i was younger.

who doesn't want to meet their thurston, make a great alt.power couple, and become cultural emissaries w/o having to water down taste?

what i realized in talking to her is that 'kim' as icon has little to do with kim as person, and i am more interested in the impact that the reality. got me to thinking how amazing it would be to do a cavicchi style book about kim/thurston, fans and how they used sonic youth in their lives/development. potentially more interesting/problematic that writing about bruce fans bc the Youth have been so shaded, careful of their image and seemingly spontaniously silly - calculated chaos.

so out of touch, they even bribe the wrong people

Subject:
Lollapalooza

Date:
Thu, 22 Apr 2004 15:59:46 -0500

From:
"Siebert, Erik"   Add to Address Book

To:
pinkgerl@yahoo.com

Hello Megan,

Wondering if you guys can start giving away tickets (5 pair) for Lollapalooza?  We're announcing this early.  Let me know if you can start these going.  We would like to get them up an going this weekend.  Pick a single day, if this is too overwhelming. Well get you more tickets later on.


Thanks,
Erik


Lollapalooza

July 18th & 19th 

Shoreline Amphitheatre

Tickets on sale Sunday, May 2 at 10am!


 Day ONE July 18


Main Stage

Morrissey


Sonic Youth


Le Tigre


Modest Mouse


Black Rebel Motorcycle Club


 


Second Stage


 


Broken Social Scene


The Walkmen


Wolf Eyes


Danger Mouse


The Datsuns


Sahara Hotnights

Chill Tent

DJ Peretz


Solar Tent

Bumblebeez

Secret Machines

The Killers


 


DAY TWO July 18


 


Main Stage


 


String Cheese Incident


Flaming Lips


Gomez


Polyphonic Spree


 


 


Second Stage:


 


The Thrills


The Coup


Sound Tribe Sector 9


Elbow


Wheat


 


Chill Tent:


 


DJ Peretz


 


Solar Stage:


 


Dresden Dolls


 

in music, there are no losers

Met music writer Robert Morast at EMP last weekend. he's from Sioux City, N. Dakota, and I know exactly ONE PERSON who is also from this great state, a person named Chad who was learning to make hip hop beats at The Recording Workshop, this funny place I went to in the summer of 1997 to learn how to clean tape heads. Bet ya didn't know I could do that. Anyway, I asked this Robert did he know a guy named Chad who made hip hop beats and guess what? He did. The midwest is funny like that.

Anyway, Robert wrote an article about music criticism (which is linked thru his name, above) and concluded, through this statistical analysis that Motley Crue is the worst best selling band of all time. Hmm, I wonder what Klosterman would say about that? I know what I would say, "BOLLOCKS," and would point to my 8th grade yearbook, published by one Neil Publishers, which was modified into an "I heart Vince..." by yrs truly, A1 crue fan. Amass knowledge, think clearly, exact judgment and whip it with style, that's my game, and it's one I hope is a little more subtle than March Madness.

random long string word list type of thing

I just got an email from 'Watanabe Audio Death Claw,' who is promoting some b-list NYC off-night alt.DJ night, and was thinking 'what's up with this Voice-style Soluble Fish mashup of unsexy wordies to conjure an image like one of those tornados-in-a-glass instead of just making a nice, well structured point?' har.

Just dropped $85 on 12 CDs at the In Yr Ear 40% off closing sale. Bought a bunch of random hip hop CDs (should have bought. O.Wang's book on hip hop classix so I would be a better shopper (oh the writing-to-consumerism hex)) and the first Galaxie 500 LP, the fourth Pearls Before Swine LP (god help us, but I love the reedy lisp of Tom Rapp) which might be some prog rock BS and not a spindly psych folk masterpiece like One Nation Underground, with it's funny Bosch cover and "Come Out and Play With Me" shudder, a cover of a children's song my mom used to sing. Weird that most others she sang were from the Bing Crosby songbook - fake Irish lullabies, my intro to ethno authenticity.

when chickenheads come home to roost

okay, this is really disturbing to me, a man in a chicken suit just waiting for you to ask him to do the moonwalk.

am back at home after a wonderful, exhausting emp. too much to do to really write the whole thing now, but i was so overwhelmed and excited that saturday, the night i wrote the previous blog entry, i fell into a late night funk re: why can't it always be so honest, experimental, full of comraderie, etc. went out to lunch with tim quirk, who has become my A1 EMP Jillian's drinking bro, the next day, and he too felt the fog, though he wasn't willing to speculate from whence it came.

now i'm back in proviland, wanting to hear waltz #2 by elliot smith and listening j. cash/j.strummer doing 'redemption song,' which has that sort of fake upbeat spanish guitar over the college dropout strums, still made good with harmonium or something -- the power of personality to take you beyond your usual, to listen to something slightly absurd.

we love you, get out

it's four in the morning...

ya, fully just got kicked from the after emp party at a&e, baby time. weird and mysterious things have happened here, some good and some bad. too little time, mostly, lots learned. mostly it means i want to go back to provi and read 1) cavicchi's book again 2) love saves the day, because tim is truly one of the most intense, self-posessed humans i have ever been too afraid to talk to, and bc i bet his take on the implications of nyc dance culture in the 70s are well worth the word time, and 3) the woman, who's name escapes me right now, who writes about the sinister implications of 'cute'. right?

the hip hop writers ruled the roost. the dynamic and presentation is different than that of punk and rock writers, one of ownership and complicite knowlege of field - yes, this writing is part of the dialogue.

other highlights - tim quirk's paper on the spiritual implications of pete townsend's windmills, namely, reclaiming the right to be within the moment and to do something, through ritual, that feels automatic and pleases the audience, instead of the usual 'gesture is tradition is rendered meaningless;' karyn brooks' paper (in fact, the whole dixie chicks panel) on how the chicks and liz phair's movement towards mid-career style/political change lost/won audiences and symbolically freed them from genre constraints suchs as, for the chix, conservativism and xtianity, and for liz, the a-word aka indie cred + singer songwriter closeness; daphne brooks' 'critical karaoke' about journey's 'lights in the city' song, in which she strung together the most beautiful set of postcard memories of childhood, curtain gauze dreams of california and car trips to the south with her family, her dad in control of the radio, her dad now missing from her life. ya - it fully made me cry.

re: my panel. greil marcus came in mid-session and sat directly and completely in front of the podium, where i was up last with powerpoint nervous shaking not-really-stumbling but unposessed of my language which i believed but couldn't speak, and here was this icon, this figurehead and really, if you're going to be someone who does social/intellectual history of pop music, who else do you look to? reading and looking up to the twenty something plus sea of do you hate this nine a.m. listeners. it went well, people said they liked it, and those people also reported that other people liked it. i felt that i had narrowed myself enough to really, really understand some small idea of what i was thinking about - the word noise in providence - and that i did it with clarity. what more? what was the outcome, i'm not sure.

pretty girls, pretty boys, have you ever heard your mama say...

noise annoys.

12:22 am, still going. i just decided that the whole 'community' aspect of my paper is going to be interview recordings. watch me get murdered by the vested-interest-in-critique-as-only-valid-form-of-music-writing folks.

hit me

hey, re: dialogue, i'm at pinkgerl@yahoo.com, post me and tell me also can i post yr response on the music issue.

planes mistaken for stars

---

--

It is apt and strange that we would commemorate the death of Kurt Cobain not with the day he died, but the day his body was found. He was to me, after all, nothing but what was reported of him, a star who only lived when I turned on or thought about his music, say his grin beaming down from my from my then-boyfriend's bedroom wall, or picked up Spin magazine. To paraphrase Bono, who quoted himself in his most recent braggard BS in RS, "Kurt killed himself before America could kill him."

Or at least I could kill him, as I have killed countless other stars, because when you stop looking, then someone stops being a star - gets killed.

I had a friend named Luke, he played the drums in what would have been my first band. We were terrible and played Smashing Pumpkins coves, Nirvana covers. After Kurt's death, both he and my then boyfriend tried to kill themselves and failed. Then Luke tried again.

I do believe in the copycat effect, but I don't believe that it is a reason not to talk about suicide (look on the bright side). Of course, I don't think that chatting with Benji from Good Charlotte is the way to do this, but I'm not 15 again, so I can't be sure. I'm definitely old enough now to 'know better' about the bright side, because as Thurston cultural gatekeeper Moore mentioned, if Kurt would have lived, 'he would have liked it.' Ya, that's the feeling you get about friends who kill themselves, like for the rest of your life you wonder if they would have been psyched about whatever silly thing comes along. The new Pringles flavors, rap-metal, the Strokes, hybrid cars.

I was a freshman in high school when Kurt died. My mom didn't think it was a big deal that he died, but she always talked about how when Kennedy died, she contacted him with a ouija board and was so scared she threw the board across the room. I was at my friend Sarah Gasper's house, spending the night there because her parents were lenient and we could walk to our boyfriend's houses, some guys in a band who skateboarded and listened to grunge, boys who would later be the trenchcoat mafia and ultimately, townies. Sarah and I talked with her little brother about Kurt all day long, because her brother bore a striking resemblance and really emulated the rocker. We called our friends on the phone and told each other about it. We went about our days, but with a little sadness.

My boyfriend, the one with the poster, used to have a quote on his wall. "The same rain falls on all roofs, but on the tin ones, it sounds louder." or something like that. Sometimes I thought he was just trying to be dramatic, but it turned out he and Luke had real, really deep troubles. The quote was from Kurt, who was his idol. I always thought it was kind of silly and childish to worship stars in that way, but I can think about it as a way for him to understand the world, to maybe express the queer or alienated parts of himself that weren't out enough in Ohio in 1994. I didn't understand it then, and maybe I only understand it now that those boys, now men, are beginning to write about what they loved in Kurt in developed, adult ways. Look at the Whitney Biennial this year and you'll see it in the art. There are comps of Nirvana covers sprouting up around, and yes the media has put him in the canon. But I really think that I'm only beginning to see what those 15 year old boys already did because as a girl at that time, I didn't have an idol like that; I had to make my own. (if only I had known about Kurt's former girlfriend then, instead of his wife).

Hmm. This is by far the most blog like thing I've written for the Music Issue, and I can imagine people thinking, "why is she writing such sentimental claptrap about this construct of the rock dinosaur press?" and partially maybe, this is because the fact that Kurt died 10 years ago makes me feel like a bit of a dinosaur myself; periodizes me, to borrow Frederick Jameson. And maybe because dumb Thurston, who everyone wanted to be in 1994 so bad it ain't funny, really managed to say something human in his NYTimes piece, which is to say, he's grown up too.

Sometimes it feels like Luke isn't dead at all, only that we've gone our seperate ways. Would it be better if we all forgot about these deaths? Is remembering again and again part of why he killed himself in the first place? Or, like Ian Curtis, part of the cruel irony of the self-concious myth maker? I don't have an answer, but I am up for more conversation on the topic.