obligingly warbled an old indian tune into the phonograph

ever wonder what i'm doing when i'm not conquering the world through writing reviews for AMG? i'm listening to dead anthropologists' old magic lantern shows about the wiley natives. This one, actually, is charming bc it's the first female ethnomusicology, Frances Densmore. This piece is the opposite of the sort of amazing experience I had this summer at the Battle of Little Big Horn, which is now part of a reservation and run by the National Parks Service. The site has guides from the tribes and, accordingly, has been really sensitive to tell the story from both sides. It is truly beautiful out there, if you ever drive out west - stop and look out over the expanse of grass.

I think that I'm going to start collecting, informally, the ways that biographers set off that their subject was/might have been gay. Oh ye out there in blogland, can you think of any good examples?

gone the way of the dodo, do these headphones hide my ipod?

the viola may be "clumsy to play, and uncomfortable to write for," maybe only not weeded out of the worldbecause who wants to make the violinists happy? but you know, i do love a good viola player, and even bad ones. i firmly believe that people gravitate to instruments because of the aesthetics of that instrument, and i love a dark, fatalist viola player.

today was the first day that i took my spiffy new ipod out on the road. i used black headphones so no one would get hurt. does this make me anti-status? seems there has been a big disussion about this in the world already. ya, i just got here. anyway, i can't deal with the random feature because how many times does one need to hear 'king of the bongos' every day? it's a great song, granted (best novelty song of the early 00s?), but it seems weird to be on the 2/3 thinking about little monkeys.

parking lot shows bushwick 2004

so, my apartment, i might have mentioned, gives me some anxiety. it's really far away from the city and sometimes i just plain feel like i live in philly, only there's no dudes in sweatpants eating cheesesteaks at 8am in the morning down the block from me, and considerably less trash on the streets. whatever. there are single family stand alone dwellings on my street, which does not bespeak of metropolis.

anywayyyz, caleb correctly called bushwick the "williamsburg diaspora," and such was evidenced by the Friends Forever/Tyondai Braxton/Dan Friel show at the Asterisk Art Project, which answers yes to 'do you guys like, live in this space during the day? and is inconvieniently located in bushwick, but not my bushwick (or kerrywick, as i said in a moment of politick fever pitch). it is L train bushwick, but if !!! is so '02, then JMZ recordsmight just be the now commuter zeigheist (like Fast Food Nation's call for slow foods, I shall call for slow trains...(que Yorke) hey...man...slow down).

Show = yes to bike messenger as the back to school look of love. braxton's sex faces actually still show up for the solo work and his corny grin crooning is either super disorienting/annoying or wonderful when looped in his stompbox army. i like shows where some dudes put one leg up on the stage and start like, massaging the other bands' gear cause the dude is just SO FREAKING INTO IT that he doesn't know how freaked he looks (and how freaked gearowner* looks). people love tb, i might love him. battles still needs to chill out. FF was, you know, pure spectacle, crappy distortion, reluctant rave-up (the provi kids say things like 'people in new york just don't dance' by dance meaning jerk around, which isn't true but i don't know at this point if the ny'ers dance bc that's what they see in DVDs about providence -help!) fireworks, vans on fire, coke slut sunglass girls beating palms on the van roof slightly out of time, (they're always slightly out of time), beautiful night amid particle board stacking fork lifts, high rise housing projects, my car parked precariously and rad show friend Amy Phillips making the return to brooklyn, nyc, east coast something new and maybe something good?

yes, in short.

Oliver has a good blog entry about the ethics of journalists reporting about local artists. It worries me a little bit how much everyone he asked (non-NYC writers, for obvious reasons) talked about it from the business perspective. It's a topic worth discussing at length.

location, location, location

this evening i interviewed climax golden twins for a piece on the use of field recordings in contemporary sound art and composition for new music box. i was struck at the show by their incredibly well-timed and charming senses of humor, which is of course juxtaposed to the isolationist icescapes, victrola nostalgia and weird found sound collage that sometimes turns crate-digging music nerds into mad, junk culture vultures with an over-refined eye for the absurd. the CGT's curated 78 rereleases seem problematic from the standpoint of intellectual property, but provocative within this weird world of 'celebrating long lost, mediated dead people' which seems to preoccupy me when thinking about phonography and photography as now in their maturity. what does it mean to have long-dead recording artists? how does music making and listening change in reference to the artist(s) with this knowledge? does age automatically connotate nostalgia/memory, or is that a function of the sound of mediation (scratches, dust, skips, you know, your average portishead song)? how will this change in the era of digital recordings? will digital sound bad to use in 50 years? i met some dude who used to work at Quad Studios (Tupac RIP) who is now producing the s/s John Wesley Harding and who was railing on (imagine how bored other conversationalists were) to me at a party about how when digital music first started, a competitor of Sony's used a much higher sampling rate, but then Sony and Phillips got together, bought out the competitor, and shut it down so that they could make CDs at a lower bit rate. CONSPIRACY! well, maybe we'll be listening to higher quality digital audio in the future, but this dude seemed unconvinced as the wonderful world of consumer electronics continues to dump slot-machine screen AIWA shelf systems on the world for cheap, disposable and ugly listening.

frosted tips torched by alt.weekly - shocking!

a friend forwarded me this link to a piece on the ten most hated men in rock and the most interesting thing about it to me is that the dubious selection process included "a secret eleven-man panel." can you believe bush-era tainted ballots and backroom business has even infected the once venerable and transparent world of hating on celebrities? the unsurprising rockist bullshit is compounded with the usual homosensual anxiety read as anti-Goo Goo Dolls and Elton John (men with streaked hair as obvious target) and anti-schlock as opposed to real evil-doers in the male pantheon - Toby Keith, Mark E. Smith (hey, you can hate him and still love the music), or, I don't know, R. Kelly. Oh wait, it's ROCK that we're talking about, so including people like Phil Collins wouldn't be justified (oh wait! he's there).

Speaking of which - where the hell is J. Timberlake these days?

Off to Providence this weekend. Will report to you on Monday.

dykehouse and dancing duds

two pieces in this week's Seattle Weekly:

Scream Club, Northern State, Gravy Train!!!!

Dykehouse

Am mostly happy with the girls gone wild one, though I wish I had time to talk about how performance figures into these lady's music, and how that might be the best venue for experiencing them (at least in GT and SC worlds, Northern State wound down miserably when I saw them live). Caryn asked "isn't it okay for these bands to just be fun" and my answer is yes, of course, though in the case of the Club, it seems impossible to have it both ways -- spending 3/4 of your album taunting invisible foes of minority identities and the other quarter mouthing off-key r&b hooks while never bothering a moment of self-reflection on where you as queer/female/white/middle class person fit into the world - nuance, i suppose, is what is lacking. An earlier draft went off a little more about the self-styling of Scream Club as 'superheroes,' which reinforces one of my reasons for disliking them - they erase more shadows than they make, and not by shedding light on the corners either, but by turning their world into a cartoon.

I am actively seeking feedback on the piece - so please comment here or email me! pinkgerl@yahoo.com

Also, from last week:
Bumbershoot Box starring also Amy Phillips!

DJ Shadow's Live! In Tune and On Time

mad max meets dr. brilliant, helps me find two apartments

From the NYtimes article on Craigslist:

"Lately, Mr. Newmark's pet project is making sure that apartment rental agents in New York do not post in a section reserved for no-fee apartment listings."

also:

"Dr. Brilliant, noting that Craigslist has had buyout offers from numerous major Web sites, said that the secret to its popularity was that it did not strive for profit at every turn. The result, he said, is that the site feels welcoming and authentic - attributes missing from dozens of profit-maximizing sites that have floundered or failed."

I guess that when I get my PhD I'll have to pick some other sinister surname since that one is spoken for. I like when things feel welcoming and authentic, especially when it means that I can read anonymous posts requesting sexual partners for the one or two day liasons. Wasn't there a documentary made about a day in the life of Craigslist? I'm willing to bet it is better than 90 percent of anthro focused on American culture. Dirty little secrets, old word-processors and the man with the van - the essence of the bazaar.

First day of school: ahhh! Went to czech and the dude only spoke czech! All of my notes and things are still in storage and all the books in Columbia's library are from the cold war "revolucni odborove hnuti" = revolutionary trade union movement, fyi.

I'm sure that in the next week weeks I'll be boring you with my return observations to NYC, since I feel like a lucid dreamer walking through familiar streets full of strangers. Today I am going to say that iPods, cell phones and PDAs make people look even more like cyborgs on the subway than ever before. The retro technofetishism reminds me of badly rendered Illustrator advertisements from the dot.com boom. The ultimate democracy of the cellphone = the belt clip, just like any other tool in a man's arsenal. I wish that iPods and cell phones had leashes like wallets do.

Also, on Saturday I saw a woman wearing white cotton balloon pants that tapered at the leg, down to little Debbie Gibson flat shoes. She was wearing a white cut off sleeve tank top, long straight earrings and a white snap cap. After having gone briefly to the blah blah parking lot show in Williamsburg featuring all the usual suspects (Liars, Panthers, Lightning Bolt on the same bill? It's still 2001!) I was convinced of Luke Luckydragons comment about how everyone in Brooklyn dresses like Mad Max extras doused in neon paint. It's like some weird bike messenger chic. In short --tough, dirty, and outside.

back to life, back to reality

Sooo. Drove back crosscountry, saw a few county fairs and landed ass first in Bushwick. I've had a little getting used to this neighborhood, and don't think I'll really get adjusted still for some while. There's something strange and unsettling about the fact that I seem to moving further and further away from the NYC core as I continue to live in this town.

Was reading the first of an anticipated very many books on the J train today - Ferlinghetti's Love In the Days of Rage, which is short and brisk, long flowing sentences and so many allusions to other written works that I wish I had an AMG of books for it. Through the voice of Annie, the Yonkers born Parisian '68 transplant artiste there is a discussion of the masculinity of light in New York City, how the big sky that leaves the country unbounded begins even among the harsh skyline of overbuilt commerce. It's hard, thin and far away, true - this is something I noticed on the gradual dig through history that was driving back from Seattle. Around Wisconsin, the sky gets this way, disinterested.

I was thinking about it as I came over the East River, thinking about how strange and alien I feel in this city after having lived here for so long and having been gone only for two years. I don't think I'll 'readjust,' because people, places, institutions, ideas, all have changed. Instead, I feel confident in who I am and where I am in the world, and for that I am thankful. It makes getting back in to the peculiarities of city living more of a choice. It reminds of something that Rhett Miller said, which I of course thought was corny, for the Songcraft exhibit at EMP - that 'songwriters have to wake up every morning and get into the place where they see the world for the first time.' It's almost as if I have given myself this rare oppurtunity to see something for the first time and while knowing it, learn it like a stranger.

This isn't about music. Sorry. If you want to think about the historicizing of something truly zeigheist then look at this Wired article about a conference and exhibit on the history of computer hackers. I'll report on this next Monday as I'll be up in Providence this weekend at the exhibit as well as packing a damn van full of records to bring back to the city.