am about to disappear likely for the next two weeks - masters due on the 6th.
saw 'jersey boys' on broadway, which yes was a total pander to the b&t theater crowd, so much so that jersey in-jokes got more laughs than the characters, but it was a pretty well-told and interesting story - about frankie valli & the four seasons, complete with ugly mob and gambling debts, lost relationships and all of it. they tried to say that fv&4s were the working man's beatles, which i don't think is entirely true, but it is one of those kind of historical readjustments - they sold 100 million records and worked into the late 1970s but have what to me always felt like a really early 1960s sound. Am realizing how wrong I was.
In other news: the 'neighborhood' guy from the play was portraited as a little too jersey to get the subtle meaning of "walk like a man." The producer yelled, 'It a metaphor, Tommy. A metaphor." Which is what I want to yell to people who blame the violence in France on hip hop.
11.26.2005
11.23.2005
shotgun wedding
Shotgun wedding. Called three and one half weeks in advance. Bought tickets. Whisky.
Church. Wood paneled foyer. Picture of the new pope, too small in the room. Robin’s egg blue. Friend from the Navy flies in on “a shotgun flight” and ushers. One half church Irish one half church Italian. Babies everywhere. Someone is karaoke singing songs, sentimental country ballads I don’t know. Suspect they are by the same artist whose CD was for sale at the check-out at JC Penny’s this afternoon while buying novelty underwear with mom.
Paper walkway pulled by kids like a silkscreen roller, little tear in the bride’s side. Maid of honor, champagne dress. Flip flops. Bride beautiful, taller than I remember her. Simple gorgeous gown – more tasteful than Youngstown. Ceremony. Sisters read the gospel, look so alike. Look like their mother. Catholic church, forget the rules, but the brain tunnels through the ritual unaided.
Groom. My prom date. Just friends. Later my mom makes it sound different. Very awkward. 8th grade, erased his picture from my yearbook. *picture not available. Hilarious tease. Friends for life, but always that distance because I’m a girl.
Mr. and Mrs. walking. Everything framed as “first time,” even in the sermon. Greeting in the foyer, end of ceremony, heightened speech continues. Pawing to not use clichés, making general but sincere wishes. Poetics of escaping the church without a faux pas.
Reception. Friend enters to Williams' “Imperial March.” Tom Waits as their dance. Tables close together, excuse me. Cookie table, regional tradition. Bar staffed by uncles. Joke is they’re all named Vinnie. Like Tony and Tina’s, even the food. Sitting at a table with family of the groom – the husbands are talking about whether children belong to parents, or to god. This is the same room where the cool bands from high school would play gigs because we were too young to go to bars. Brother makes a speech. “At least we finally know he isn’t gay.” Later frames it as younger sibling retribution. Shows speech, written on torn piece of Budweiser box.
Evoke privately held thought with friends who live out of town: The deer hunter. Laughter. “Maybe he’ll strip naked and run down the street.” Drink too much red wine. Convinced this will not make me a mean, odd or stereotypical wedding drunk. The DJ plays “Brick House” before nine p.m. Later the DJ says, ‘this one goes out the guys in the kitchen.’ People dance line dances they learned after I stopped learning line dances. Twenty women to one man on the dance floor. Toddlers to pre-teens half dance half fighting. Some kind of Grease enactment. Never learned the words. Hiding out by the bar with the Vinnie’s, everyone’s smoking cigars. Single friends huddled in corner, conspiring about remaining single. When’s the baby due? Is a phrase I have never said before without irony. Hard to muster enthusiasm – all weekend mom makes excuses for being single, 27, with no kids and in school “she’s a new Yorker” Imagine myself with a monocle in a cartoon on the same page as the blow card, “Babbitt was my mother’s maiden name.”
"A boy named sue" comes on. All the male friends get together in a circle, singing. Stand outside taking a cell phone picture. Feel outside just like high school. No one has a tie around their forehead though.
After last song. Let’s go, please. Clean up tables, throw away extra cake. Take care not to throw away mom’s cake knives. “It’s from my wedding.” Still have the box. Wheel tables to corners, stack the chairs. Gallop off to the parking lot.
Suddenly at “Salty Groggs” Three dollar cover for all but the military guy: put that away. A band is playing. Everyone in it looks like Vince Neil during his solo period. Friend eyes the weird chick from our high school English class. “Is that” almost as dread a comment as “When?” People without children keep showing up, mentioning names of people I have forgotten. Band hammers “Mustang Sally.” Girls in the bathroom all from the wedding, in dresses. I’m wearing all black, but more like an orchestra musician than Roy or Johnny. I try to chat, but I’m not one of them and they know it.
Home. Terrible feeling. Am I too drunk, or just overwhelmed. Can’t sleep all night.
Church. Wood paneled foyer. Picture of the new pope, too small in the room. Robin’s egg blue. Friend from the Navy flies in on “a shotgun flight” and ushers. One half church Irish one half church Italian. Babies everywhere. Someone is karaoke singing songs, sentimental country ballads I don’t know. Suspect they are by the same artist whose CD was for sale at the check-out at JC Penny’s this afternoon while buying novelty underwear with mom.
Paper walkway pulled by kids like a silkscreen roller, little tear in the bride’s side. Maid of honor, champagne dress. Flip flops. Bride beautiful, taller than I remember her. Simple gorgeous gown – more tasteful than Youngstown. Ceremony. Sisters read the gospel, look so alike. Look like their mother. Catholic church, forget the rules, but the brain tunnels through the ritual unaided.
Groom. My prom date. Just friends. Later my mom makes it sound different. Very awkward. 8th grade, erased his picture from my yearbook. *picture not available. Hilarious tease. Friends for life, but always that distance because I’m a girl.
Mr. and Mrs. walking. Everything framed as “first time,” even in the sermon. Greeting in the foyer, end of ceremony, heightened speech continues. Pawing to not use clichés, making general but sincere wishes. Poetics of escaping the church without a faux pas.
Reception. Friend enters to Williams' “Imperial March.” Tom Waits as their dance. Tables close together, excuse me. Cookie table, regional tradition. Bar staffed by uncles. Joke is they’re all named Vinnie. Like Tony and Tina’s, even the food. Sitting at a table with family of the groom – the husbands are talking about whether children belong to parents, or to god. This is the same room where the cool bands from high school would play gigs because we were too young to go to bars. Brother makes a speech. “At least we finally know he isn’t gay.” Later frames it as younger sibling retribution. Shows speech, written on torn piece of Budweiser box.
Evoke privately held thought with friends who live out of town: The deer hunter. Laughter. “Maybe he’ll strip naked and run down the street.” Drink too much red wine. Convinced this will not make me a mean, odd or stereotypical wedding drunk. The DJ plays “Brick House” before nine p.m. Later the DJ says, ‘this one goes out the guys in the kitchen.’ People dance line dances they learned after I stopped learning line dances. Twenty women to one man on the dance floor. Toddlers to pre-teens half dance half fighting. Some kind of Grease enactment. Never learned the words. Hiding out by the bar with the Vinnie’s, everyone’s smoking cigars. Single friends huddled in corner, conspiring about remaining single. When’s the baby due? Is a phrase I have never said before without irony. Hard to muster enthusiasm – all weekend mom makes excuses for being single, 27, with no kids and in school “she’s a new Yorker” Imagine myself with a monocle in a cartoon on the same page as the blow card, “Babbitt was my mother’s maiden name.”
"A boy named sue" comes on. All the male friends get together in a circle, singing. Stand outside taking a cell phone picture. Feel outside just like high school. No one has a tie around their forehead though.
After last song. Let’s go, please. Clean up tables, throw away extra cake. Take care not to throw away mom’s cake knives. “It’s from my wedding.” Still have the box. Wheel tables to corners, stack the chairs. Gallop off to the parking lot.
Suddenly at “Salty Groggs” Three dollar cover for all but the military guy: put that away. A band is playing. Everyone in it looks like Vince Neil during his solo period. Friend eyes the weird chick from our high school English class. “Is that” almost as dread a comment as “When?” People without children keep showing up, mentioning names of people I have forgotten. Band hammers “Mustang Sally.” Girls in the bathroom all from the wedding, in dresses. I’m wearing all black, but more like an orchestra musician than Roy or Johnny. I try to chat, but I’m not one of them and they know it.
Home. Terrible feeling. Am I too drunk, or just overwhelmed. Can’t sleep all night.
the catalog.
From the Future of Music Coalition newsletter comes the most point blank statement about the change in how we think about music and its commodity status:
In other words, the music industry is moving rapidly away from selling albums to monetizing the value of accessing and interacting with entire catalogs of music. As the music industry changes, we need a copyright system that compensates all the members of the creative team for their work.
the whole language of listening is changing, it seems. accessing instead of buying or owning, curating instead of DJing, the end of scarcity (which is something that I had always had fantasies about, living with a record collector nerd who refused to even let me listen to his records because I didn't put them back properly and quickly enough) meaning a whole different relationship to 'discovery.'
On an entirely different note, the reason that Madonna song "I Love New York" sucks isn't the lyrics or the very haughty concept, it's the timpani rolls, how silly are they? it sounds like some ill-concieved crossover remix.
And in the weird world of celebrity crossovers, here's Mark E. Smith reads the soccer scores
In other words, the music industry is moving rapidly away from selling albums to monetizing the value of accessing and interacting with entire catalogs of music. As the music industry changes, we need a copyright system that compensates all the members of the creative team for their work.
the whole language of listening is changing, it seems. accessing instead of buying or owning, curating instead of DJing, the end of scarcity (which is something that I had always had fantasies about, living with a record collector nerd who refused to even let me listen to his records because I didn't put them back properly and quickly enough) meaning a whole different relationship to 'discovery.'
On an entirely different note, the reason that Madonna song "I Love New York" sucks isn't the lyrics or the very haughty concept, it's the timpani rolls, how silly are they? it sounds like some ill-concieved crossover remix.
And in the weird world of celebrity crossovers, here's Mark E. Smith reads the soccer scores
11.21.2005
Sweeter than the music of a lovesick mocking bird
Stroll, don't cakewalk, on over to the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project to hear an amazing collection of 5,000 cylinder recordings from the 1890s-1912. Read more about cylinder recording and then put on your smoking jacket and listen to the Early Black Artists and Performers radio show with a fire burning and Nipper at your feet.
Some days I just love the internet.
Some days I just love the internet.
11.14.2005
it was a bear costume, not a bunny costume
hey i'm teaching Bartok tomorrow in class. i can't seem to find any movie stills from the scenes of the twins in the hallway, aka, the adagio section of music for strings. what is the internet coming to?
11.13.2005
formed a band
yes, that's right. saw art brut last night after falling mildly in love with them sometime this summer, likely after being stuck in the car with some pitchfork writers on the way up to mutek.
in the crowded, not quite ideal venue confines of Tribeca Grand's basement (which feels often more like a sweaty wedding afterhours sesh when all the 'grownups' go home and the DJ turns out to have better jams then "brown eyed girl-lady in red-wonderful tonight" medley, which makes it sort of better than a REAL nightclub, tho Dave P's Philly home is a little more suited to the grime and glitter nature of these events) Art Brut came out: playing the intro to Welcome to the Jungle, no less.
I ran into their booking agent, who I once shared a bunkbed with at an indie rock retreat in college, who informed me that they were "really excited to go to LA" after I told him "Move to LA" was one of their weaker songs...Ehh.
Anyway, the lead singer Eddie Argos looks like an overdone Shakespearean actor with his rouged cheeks and unibrow - he's uniquely ugly in a way that made me hope he had the stage presence of David Byrne. He doesn't, but his banter "we just got a new guitarist, we're told he's the only attractive one in the band" was endearing enough. Thing is, Art Brut is something like the punk rock version of BARR - inspirational self-concious DIY creation that both exposes and questions its being and attempts to incite the audience to join in, since they've set the bar so low. How do you begin? Begin!, brendan would say. Eddie Argos is more typically British. "I will be coming back to New York City in the unforeseeable future, and when I do I am going to walk around, go into the subway, and find every single one of you and I am going to ask you, 'have you formed a band' and if you say no, I am going to be. I am going to be...very....disappointed."
Argos asked each of the band to take solos as he introduced them, in the last song: each member sucked in a way that suggested maybe they were trying a little too hard to suck. The show is Argos, who sing-speaks through the set as a pomo rock god jester not unlike Jarvis C. before he went capital A art. It is this year's best meta-rock, by far. That Nickelback song about being a rock star? The worst.
in the crowded, not quite ideal venue confines of Tribeca Grand's basement (which feels often more like a sweaty wedding afterhours sesh when all the 'grownups' go home and the DJ turns out to have better jams then "brown eyed girl-lady in red-wonderful tonight" medley, which makes it sort of better than a REAL nightclub, tho Dave P's Philly home is a little more suited to the grime and glitter nature of these events) Art Brut came out: playing the intro to Welcome to the Jungle, no less.
I ran into their booking agent, who I once shared a bunkbed with at an indie rock retreat in college, who informed me that they were "really excited to go to LA" after I told him "Move to LA" was one of their weaker songs...Ehh.
Anyway, the lead singer Eddie Argos looks like an overdone Shakespearean actor with his rouged cheeks and unibrow - he's uniquely ugly in a way that made me hope he had the stage presence of David Byrne. He doesn't, but his banter "we just got a new guitarist, we're told he's the only attractive one in the band" was endearing enough. Thing is, Art Brut is something like the punk rock version of BARR - inspirational self-concious DIY creation that both exposes and questions its being and attempts to incite the audience to join in, since they've set the bar so low. How do you begin? Begin!, brendan would say. Eddie Argos is more typically British. "I will be coming back to New York City in the unforeseeable future, and when I do I am going to walk around, go into the subway, and find every single one of you and I am going to ask you, 'have you formed a band' and if you say no, I am going to be. I am going to be...very....disappointed."
Argos asked each of the band to take solos as he introduced them, in the last song: each member sucked in a way that suggested maybe they were trying a little too hard to suck. The show is Argos, who sing-speaks through the set as a pomo rock god jester not unlike Jarvis C. before he went capital A art. It is this year's best meta-rock, by far. That Nickelback song about being a rock star? The worst.
11.12.2005
soft news
Man, I really HAVE always wondered why drivers mount stuffed animals to truck grilles, I mean, in a kind of urban, anthropological sense. I wish I had written this article.
Reading a really not very good book about Roy Orbison and 'alternative rock masculinity,' which basically argues that his persona was all about a) the glasses, duh, but traces a nice history of other spectacled rockers, and b) his 'man in black' thing, which apparently comes from the dour 1830s to the present tradition of serious men wearing black, whereas men seems to be more colorful in the past. Anyway, wonder who else has written about this kind of stuff - what about the gender persona of folks like calvin, thurston, trent, billy c., stephin, colin, etc etc. Biblio suggestions, please!
Reading a really not very good book about Roy Orbison and 'alternative rock masculinity,' which basically argues that his persona was all about a) the glasses, duh, but traces a nice history of other spectacled rockers, and b) his 'man in black' thing, which apparently comes from the dour 1830s to the present tradition of serious men wearing black, whereas men seems to be more colorful in the past. Anyway, wonder who else has written about this kind of stuff - what about the gender persona of folks like calvin, thurston, trent, billy c., stephin, colin, etc etc. Biblio suggestions, please!
11.09.2005
nyu on strike: even bono supports
Today NYU grad students began their strike after NYU refused to renegotiate after the expiration of their 2000 contract as part of Local 2110 of the United Auto Workers. After securing the first ever contract for a private university, the NYU grad students lost support as National Labor Relations Board, given a Republican majority by George Bush, in July 2004 reversed an historic 2000 ruling that acknowledged graduate students as "employees" not "students."
If you follow the 2110 link, you'll see a picture of Bono wearing a pro-union button at a recent NYU panel. That guy.
More on the strike and its backhistory here.
If you follow the 2110 link, you'll see a picture of Bono wearing a pro-union button at a recent NYU panel. That guy.
More on the strike and its backhistory here.
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