canucketa

Am told that in the more upscale Anglophone parts surrounding the McGill campus, you can spot them, but I don't spy an iPod once during my week in Montreal. The city itself is so bereft of noise pollution (the whumph! of Nerf maces don't count) I have no need to even pull mine out. Instead I can feel my skull de-pressurize, no longer battered on all sides by truck brakes and indie rock deadlines.

Sans earbuds in the populace, it means conversations and interactions beyond the norm, but in a city where girls will do something as crazy as make eye contact with strangers, that is almost a given. Where such a dearth of ayo technology is most noticeable is in the shop soundtracks. Rather than being subjected to employee iPod shuffles that put The Grey Album next to Nirvana next to Madonna next to Sufjan Stevens next to Journey that ruin almost any bar/ coffee shop/ boutique experience in Gotham, instead it seems that full albums still rule Montreal. (Radio rules as well: my first night, I hear not just cuts from the On the Corner box set, but also Alice Coltrane and a noise that could only be Pierre Henry's brainwave-melting Cortical Arts III.)

Not saying it's all great. When you go and get a crepe and "Two Tickets to Paradise" blares out from the kitchen, it means that if you sit to manger, you'll soon be subjected to the rest of Eddie Money's hits, which doesn't include the follow-up "Two Pickets to Tittsburgh." Better to let the cold drizzle fall on that folded-up Nutella goodness. And while sipping coffee to the somnambulent strains of Cat Power's The Greatest offsets the effect of the caffeine, almost every girl seated there rocks that Chan-look, so I give it a pass.

In the course of a single day I hear:
Serge Gainsbourg Comic Strip at an internet café
Ali Farka Touré Red Green at a soup spot
Albert Ayler (one of the weird later vocal albums) at a used bookstore
and Joe Tex at another café, which basically means that I want to move there.

beta week ever

Sunday - Animal Collective
Discussion at the bar about a friend's music project (which apparently sounds like Junior Boys) reveals that Phil Collins has become the most crucial artist of the 80s. It dovetails nicely with my pet theory that the most influential Beach Boys album for the 80s generation is not Pet Sounds but rather whatever one had "Kokomo" on it. That's the one that everyone grew up on, believing the band to be The Suck, until Napster (or maybe watching Forrest Gump) proved otherwise.

Still not proceeding just yet to Webster Hall (so as to avoid $8 beers) we muse that surely there's another artist from the 80s who is secretly crucial. Paul Simon's Graceland? Maybe, but you can't just go on the fact that there are more NYC media-centric thinkpieces on Vampire Weekend than actual VW songs, so Simon is out.

Then it happens. "Bowm-bowm-bowm-doo-doo-doo-doo" comes on over the bar speakers, the opening moments of TVOTR's "Ambulance." And then it all makes perfect sense, as we stagger towards the Animal Collective: Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy" is the skeleton key for all of Brooklyn rock.

Monday - Control press screening
Most of my thoughts are covered here. Forget to mention that the gent who plays Hooky here is also Maxwell in Across the Universe (he's a dead-ringer for the next Kurt Cobain bio pic, too). As the VHS or Beta piece states, I find Closer to be physically affecting and I wonder what other music out there causes a similar reaction in folks. One friend says "The Marble Index." Anyone else?

Tuesday - War/ Dance press screening
Out in December, I believe, so as to angle for Oscar consideration in Best Documentary. A story about three teens in a northern Uganda refugee camp who travel to that country's National Music Competition. Thankfully, the film isn't pedantic in unpacking the struggle. In fact, the depiction of these rebels as inscrutable bogeymen who kill in the night actually works in this context.

Back to Graceland, and a quote from the New Yorker profile on artist Kara Walker, about the inclination towards "the vision of 'tribal art' as a tool to be used by more sophisticated Western artists...the message...was that people of color don't exist unless whites say they do." Seeing the film's subjects (one an orphaned child, one bade to commit atrocities already, another who wails at the overgrown marker of her father's otherwise unmarked grave) as they perform and dance, it's self-deceiving to continually paint African music as this naif ebullience, as if it conjures some longed-for, uncomplicated humanity. To reduce the irreducible innovations of musicians like King Sunny Ade or Fela and make it heel to Ivy League quandaries is infuriating. But then again, so is the film's use of eerie ambient washes and b-rolls of thunder to storytell some of these children's waking-nightmare stories. Just hearing a 14-year-old talk about having to bludgeon some peasants to death with a hoe and then bury the hacked chunks in a shallow grave doesn't need any editing room pizazz.

Wednesday - Damon & Naomi/ Boris
Damon and Naomi's strongest suit is curation, from the Exact Change imprint to International Sad Hits Vol. 1 to slowing down both George Harrison and Caetano Veloso on their last album of sloooooow ballads. Within These Walls is no different, although its curatorial aspect lies in how they match Damon's twelve-string and Naomi's keyboard to their collaborators: Espers' cellist to Bhob Rainey's microtonal horn (he looks as if he just left a Supertramp recording session with Ornette's toy horn) to Michio Kurihara's understated plasma leads. With his big hair and furious strumming, Damon at one point actually achieves the sound of Tim Buckley's Starsailor.

Thursday - Mix Tape reading
See three short stories read aloud centering on pop song appearance in the story: Spinanes, the Human League, and the Ramones. Bummed not so much for not knowing how to participate in future readings (I am) but in missing the reading that involves the main character getting a BJ whilst dressed as Harry from Harry and the Hendersons.


Friday - Wordless Music series
Wordless, my ass. Beirut bleated a week or so back, as does Sandro Perri tonight. Is this what Arthur Russell wrought, a non-singing made into singing via loops and sparse effects?

The church is packed and hell-hot. Are there really that many Columbia students into neo-classical music by one-time Bjork collaborators? Muhly is sneaky, performing a piece entitled "Mother Tongue." His soprano recites strings of numbers and every phone number and address she can think of. Swear that amid "962560773" and 43102458465" I can hear subliminal messages like "104.5 KZEP" and that most baleful string of numbers, "90210," throughout.

WIll Oldham comes out to sing a few songs with Valgeir's arrangements. Is that what all the kids are here for, "Bonnie" Prince Billie? As the overlong schvitz/recital finally wraps, the secret is revealed: Sigur Ros is gonna come out and do an acoustic set. So that's why the church is packed with believers? Okay, so I don't speak Hopelandic, but seriously, does anyone in the crowd realize that they've just been listening to twelve minutes of Adult Contemporary?

Saturday- Arcade Fire/ LCD Soundsystem
Most! Important! Concert! Ever!
It is here that I coin a new word: "Whipster." It's sorta like a "Blipster," except you're white. The island acrawl with them, it proves that this is definitely the Whipster Generation.

betanimal

I know I wasn't alone in my underwhelming response to the latest Animal Collective, but as the band in the past has proved fully capable of boring me live --even in the throes of true fandom-- surely the inverse seemed possible, too. While their last NY show had the now-trio grappling with a new set (wholly excluding SJ), for their homecoming last night, they had fully come to terms with (gasp) audience expectations.

It was downright anachronistic, as AC actually delivered the hits, those known sounds, and most-startling of all, total satisfaction. I can't think of a time, in the dozen shows I'd ever witnessed, ever recognizing more than a quarter of their set, yet they both drew heavily from the current album and from previous highs, delivering throbbing versions of "Who Could Win a Rabbit?" and "Leaf House." Album cuts that previously left me shrugging (like "#1" and "Fireworks") were both bass-bludgeoning and high-freq tingly all at once, meaning they sounded like big glittery techno tracks.

I may have been alone in these feelings though, especially in light of the Brooklyn Vegan bitch-fest, where the bass was a complaint, as was the setlist, as was the exclusion of certain songs, as was the set length, as was the beer prices, as was the parking, as was the...all of it boiling down to a pissing contest between the seniority of fans who took stemmy bong hits to Person Pitch when it leaked in January versus those who stole Jam in July, between those who graduated this spring versus those who already moved to the Williamsburg campus last September.

Regardless, what came across on disc as sonically-thin and stagnant, revealed innumerable onion layers live. Through the night, I could glean African pygmy chants, Kompakt's Pop Ambient series, Franco-picked Congolese, dub, Tropicalia, and happy house (well, two of the three dudes did work at Other Music) in these songs, yet none of it ever seemed willful or didactic; instead everything gleefully hit at once. Perhaps the night was put best by a text message my friend received mid-concert:

3====D~

betales

Against my better judgment, I sat through Across the Universe, knowing full well that my personal mythology that these songs soundtrack would withstand whatever was flung onto the silver screen, but I really didn't expect such revulsion at the finished product. How can an already-delusional generation grow any higher on its own fumes?
About the only thing I can be grateful for is that they didn't concoct a Yoko Ono character that lets out a scream and ruins "the dream" for everybody else. To this day, there's no finer way to pick a fight in mixed company (short of admitting that you can't stand Neutral Milk Hotel) than to state that you love Yoko Ono's music or consider what she did 'music' (speaking of, there's an illuminating and slightly daft interview with Ms. Ono in the now-revitalized Arthur Magazine). And yet, for those who take the Beatles myth as gospel, Yoko is crucial. Cast her as Kali or Mary Magdalene or the Wicked Witch, but she is the underlying reality to that Fab Four religion and the vitriol against her remains undiminished. Just read the comments that accompany her devastating "Cut Piece," which anticipates such anonymous (and festering) hatred within the very piece.

beta mix tapes

For whatever reason, over the years peeps have been cowed when it comes to cooking up mixes for me. I love the act of making them, from track flow to wtf? pic to the withholding of info until the mix has been auditioned. Yet rarely if ever do I get them in return. Which I don't understand, as I have considerable gaps in my musical knowledge (which perhaps is otherwise formidable?) and love the handmade intimacy of a mix like anyone else. Thankfully my recent birthday was excuse enough for two to be made in my honor (by music critics, natch) and I've enjoyed them a great deal, both musically and in pondering why each song was selected so as to contribute to the aesthetic whole.



The first one I received has written in purple crayon: "Betasm: Sexy Inna Drink" surrounding a pic of a naked man swimming near a waterfall. Not sure what that's all about, but it features a slew of older stuff: Yellowman, Stetsasonic, Coasters, Comus, Del-Vikings, Lora Logic, Linda Perhacs, as well as new indie rock stuff that --if it dropped through the mail slot-- I might've just trashed on sight: Dirty Projectors, Vampire Weekend, Marnie Stern, Big A little a.

My favorite song here is by High Places, a winning slice of bedroom exotica, if something made in my own neighborhood can be deemed "exotic." There's a tinge of African highlife to the guitar tones throughout (DP, VW, LL, then made explicit on the Franco song), though the languid touch arising from Mother Africa is replaced here by Brooklynites who perhaps down too much espresso (or forget their anti-anxiety meds). Brittle, bumpy, yet strangely assuaging, the adenoidal indie songs here work in small doses, making for a mix of little pleasures.


The second disc has writ across it "Dance to the Beta/ 'Who is Cerrone?'/ Hopeful Rarities," though a better subtitle might be "The Secret Life of Stevie in Disco," in that there number disco versions of Stevie Wonder songs (a stellar cover of "Love Having You Around" by First Choice), a track by his ex-wife, Syreeta ("Can't Shake Your Love"), and innumerable instances of jittery electric keyboard skittering atop the deep funk. The mix deals strictly in disco edits and edicts, the texture of prototype synths slowly giving way to hand percussion textures as the mix progresses. Some of it I knew well, like a Dinosaur L number, as well as The Winners "Get Ready for the Future," from that crucial David Mancuso Presents The Loft comp from '99 (which first introduced me to the world of Arthur Russell).

Much of the mix is revelatory though: Fern Kinney's "Baby Let Me Kiss You"; Two Man Sound's "Que Tal America"; Kirk Franklin's "Looking For You (Track Bandits Edit)." That Franklin cut is so ridiculously potent that it first converted me over to Judaism, then made me go all "Jews for Jesus." I then found myself watching Creflo Dollar last Sunday, but if Kanye can blipster over to Keane, then why not the other way around?

heep see

As Ratatouille helped me realize, America loves rats. I all but forgot how much I loved them myself as a child, until this clip helped me remember my favorite game, "Who Can Spank Chuck E.?":

***
Second acts in life are tough. Take my first job out of college, selling cell phones in the mall, before becoming an internationally-renowned music critic (where, in the last days of the Voice, I did indeed play "Who Can Spank Chuck Eddy?"). But even I was shocked to see the renaissance of Pol Pot on Today. Apparently, the Cambodian dictator had been keeping a low profile as a cell phone salesman before the UK's most zealous crate digger Simon Cowell re-discovered the Khmer Rouge superstar (as well as his old partner, Nuon Chea) and brought him onto Britain's Got Talent:

***
OJ, struggling now with his third act, surely had enough time to watch Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob Le Flambeur and realize that heists at casinos are bad news, even if you employ an electroacoustic composer as safe-cracker:

heep see

Perhaps to flush Chris Crocker's peroxide out of my eyes, I found myself instead watching old Bobbie Gentry appearances on The Smothers Brothers Show and on The Johnny Cash Show, singing "Ode to Billie Joe" and her other hits. On the notes to the recent Jim Ford reissue Sounds of Our Time, he takes credit for co-writing "Ode," which sounds like idle boasting. But as the man can also boast of being that offay hick on the back cover of There's A Riot Goin' On, he may be right. At the very least, Gentry also covers his "Niki Hoeky." While I'm marveling Bobbie's candy-colored polyester pantsuits and 'do throughout, dig her shy alternation between standing and steppin' on "Fancy."

Since YouTube is all about rabbit holes (and office cubicles) I couldn't help posting these Delaney & Bonnie clips, even though one will appear at Idolator later today. Christgau once estimated that D&B "nail such pieties as the joy of music-making and the pleasure of the groove," which you'll see here. And dig Delaney's Mexican tuxedo (though Northerners will call it a Canadian tuxedo)! An appraisal of D&B is part of my new column over there, VHS or Beta?, wherein I talk about movies and their soundtracks. Hopefully, I will soon get to topics like Toru Takemistu & Hiroshi Teshigahara, Scorsese's Taxi Driver, Forbidden Planet, The Andromeda Strain, Performance, Cassavetes's Faces, and Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.

heep see

The Naked Kiss dir. Samuel Fuller

Leave it to punch-drunk Fuller to film my favorite opening sequence in forever. Godard deemed it "cinema-fist" and your eyes immediately open to the sight of a call girl wailing on her audience and her john, sending the camera reeling. She kicks the ass-whup up a notch when he yanks off her wig then puts on her face over the opening credits. It's pretty much down hill from there, at least until the doe-eyed crippled children's choir comes in to cut their latest hit. Tearjerker seems too placid an action to apply to Fuller; it's instead kin to taking a pair of needlenose pliers to the tear ducts.

La Jetee/ Sans Soleil dir. Chris Marker

I liked that when I screened 1983's Sans Soleil for some friends, half of them fell asleep within the first half-hour, their slumbering forms mirroring those of the commuters captured early on in the film. Perhaps being asleep is the best way to process the dreamlike logic that Marker follows, or, as his narrator puts it: "Not understanding adds to the pleasure." Between this and the recent picture book of his photography, 2007 has given us the most tenable grasp of the man in a good number of decades. How it makes me long to see his 48 other films of his that are impossible to track down save as bootlegs (Le Joli mai is on the way to me as I type). Already, he wanes just like his beloved Cheshire Cat.


The Lady Vanishes dir. Alfred Hitchcock

Marker's mid-movie meditation on Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and that Sisyphean search for perfect memory led me back to the man. I've been grappling the past couple days about why I loved Hitchcock so much as a child. At first I thought it had something to do with the Alfred Hitchcock Presents Nick at Nite reruns that I saw as a child, that iconic silhouette and weird lumbering music intro to his show, his droll, black liquorice humor. That didn't seem quite right though, and then I remembered that I had a complete set of Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators juvenile detective novel series. Could he have been responsible for both reading and movie-watching? And is there any director working today to have that sort of ubiquity to where he is a fictional brand-name, much less a recognizable portrait? Scorsese's Dead End Kids? Wes Anderson's Effete Wilting Flowers?

Despite that childhood fascination with Hitchcock, I have barely built on it as an adult. And I had definitely never seen any of Hitchcock's UK work. With its toy-like opening, The Lady Vanishes evoked the miniatures of childhood, but it still almost lost my roommate and me in the first half-hour, displaying his peculiar brand of humor that makes the movie seem like the grandmother to 1955's The Trouble with Harry. By the last third though, it swerves into some crackling espionage.

Lola dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Will I be able to stand the nine hours plus change of the forthcoming DVD set of Berlin Alexanderplatz? As I seem to be drawn to women who work far too much, surely I can get with a man who his friends deem died of overwork, releasing some sixty films in thirty years.

While a staple of my Existential college courses, I hadn't revisited Fassbinder since then. I have Despair (still unavailable on DVD) and am curious to revisit that, but watched Lola first, a part of Fassbinder's BRD Trilogy. His theatre roots and obsessing over Douglas Sirk comes through in his gels, the characters wading through rooms and courtyards drenched in amber and plum, character faces awash in clammy blues and flustered, almost feverish pinks. What startles me in the commentary (yet explains how he worked so fast) is that Fassbinder insisted on first takes and also emphasised not explaining character motivations to his actors. He believed that just as we move through this farce of a life not quite sure what we're doing or why, so should his actors.

beta's night in paris

So I came this close (imagine me squeezing my sore thumb and pointy finger together) to being flown to Paris for a cover story on Wes Anderson. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but who wants to go to Paris in August, much less interview Wes Anderson, whose most brilliant and penetrating work remains a self-mocking two-minute spot for American Express?

Regardless, I rewatched what I deemed my favorite movie of his, Rushmore, as research, only to be reminded that I find Anderson's very act of storytelling to be loathsome. Cute, over-stylized, precious, detail-obsessed to the point of being emotionally circumscribed, I remain unable to put my thumb exactly on what shuts me down whenever someone in mixed company gushes about how The Royal Tennenbaums changed their life. Call it the "IAAOTS" effect.

As consolation prize for not taking that transatlantic trip, I instead went to an afternoon screening of The Darjeeling Limited. The story of three brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman) on a continental train through India, it won't soon get mistaken for Jean Renoir's The River, much less A Passage to India, but Anderson has never been about outer landscapes. And for all his hinting at inner landscape (dashed when his characters suddenly state exactly how they're feeling), he hasn't been really about that topography either.

Yet Darjeeling surprisingly is his most emotionally resonant effort, despite his seeming intention to dash that at almost every turn with his over-reliance on soundtrack (synched to sloooow-mooootion movements), meticulous set dec, and too-clever dialogue. Which he does, opting out of a low-key soundtrack of music cues from Satyajit Ray and Ravi Shankar so as to inject some klassic Kinks and Stones back into the characters' iPods. Even the movie's most emotional and hard-fought scene in India threatens to get dashed completely when Anderson inserts a slapstick flashback. And aside from perhaps a contractual obligation to Ms. Natalie Portman (for getting buck-ass naked for her one scene in a Paris hotel, which was then edited from the film), I still cannot fathom why you have to watch it as a separate mini-movie before the real movie even starts.

When the movie excels is when Anderson slackens the reigns and allows things like gesture and silence to accrue between the brothers. “Maybe we could express ourselves more fully without words” is the suggestion made by Owen Wilson's character. Thankfully, it's then followed. Acting through a thick swaddling of gauze and padding throughout, Wilson at one point unfurls this mask, revealing some truly hideous gashes. Staring into the mirror, unable to deny the truth of his injuries, he then carefully re-wraps his open wounds and mumbles "I've got some more healing to do." The psychoanalysts at US Weekly are gonna have a field day with that scene.

Invoking paparazzi (what's beta blog coming to?), a painter friend recently went out to LA, where he found himself not only at the dinner table with that other Paris, but subjected to the surreal strobe light gauntlet of flashing bulbs as they then made their way to some party. "So what's she really like?" I asked. He remarked that she was in complete control of the circus, expertly playing her part. So as to not post both a video link to YouTube and Celebs.com in one entry, you can look for his potato-head popping up here. He says that the clip does not adequately convey the hallucinatory gauntlet of popping bulbs that accompanied their every step, making for a strange trip down the block.

thumbeta

I can't think of a more debilitating injury (and dose of poetic justice) to have befall me than a bum thumb, which is what I've been dealing with the past couple of weeks. When I went to see my doctor, Dr. Webb, MD, s/he diagnosed it as either gout, arthritis, skiier's thumb, or an inflamed tendon. I opted for the latter.

Regardless, I was wholly without use of my right hand for a good two weeks, making the mere act of holding a pen in my hand feel like it was a marshmellow roasting over an open campfire. Some activities greatly affected: meal preparation, going to the gym, washing dishes, journaling, text-messaging, thumb-wrestling, opening doors, pulling on clothes, pulling off clothes, hitting deadlines, flossing. Oh right, and blogging.

fly beta

Perhaps due to Luc Sante's essay on Buddy Bolden and his tune "Funky Butt" collected in Kill Your Darlings, I re-read Michael Ondaatje's distilled, disquieting book Coming Through Slaughter. Tangentially about Bolden, the legendary New Orleans cornetist who went mad within his music mid-parade, Ondaatje conjures a phantom, in that the only proof of Bolden's existence is to be found on Folkways Records, wherein contemporaries whistle songs of his. In a book filled with billowing, phantasmal imagery, a passage shook me. Bolden has lacerated the face of a colleague and since disappeared. A friend looking for him tracks down the victim, motionless in a dope din:

He found Pickett in the room of flies. The air damp and thick. He had to practically sweep the flies off his face and hair.
...
He did this. Pickett clapped his hands near his face so the flies left it for a moment and then settled back.

That vision suddenly parallels something else I've recently reviewed, a DVD entitled The Pink Floyd & Syd Barrett Story. Of course, most of said DVD is bereft of Syd, instead showing members of Pink Floyd talking about how they wrote "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" (about as appealing as listening to Wynton Marsalis performing Bolden numbers like "Funky Butt" and "If You Don't Shake, Don't Get No Cake," I reckon). At one point, one of Syd's drummers says that there were "no flies on Syd," meaning that he may've just been acting crazy. He then has an epiphany on-camera, realizing that Syd drew flies on the cover of Barrett! Ah, drummers.


The film struggles with the problem of how do you make a documentary of a disappearer? There are quick snatches of the band making the "Oik! Oik!" "Doy! Doy!" noises of "Pow R. Toch" live at the UFO Club, but it lasts just a few seconds. There is also home movie footage of Syd disintegrating and reveling in the clutches of his first LSD trip, fistfuls of mushrooms in his loosening grip. Even when there is a scrap of footage of Syd flecking at his guitar, in his black hole eyes, he's already vanished. Past that, we are given lots of visual metaphors for mental illness: empty rooms, shaky handheld cameras down hallways, slo-mo scans of both.

Empty rooms figure prominently in Coming Through Slaughter as well:

In the room there is the air
and there is the corner
and there is the corner and there is the corner
and there is the corner.

If you don't shake, don't get no cake.

...
Recent reads that extend the metaphors: a story about the death of Disco D, and the death of honeybees.

luc sante

You may not be anticipating it yet, but the forthcoming collection of essays from Luc Sante is killer (which is apt, since it is entitled Kill All Your Darlings and of course, this was the man whose book Evidence looks at old bloody crime scenes with fresh eyes). Reading Low Life was revelatory, if revelatory can mean eternally bummed by the realization that the New York that I now reside in is by far the safest, cleanest, least suicidal, weakest, and most boring it's ever been in its history.

I wrote a brief feature on Sante for a forthcoming issue of Paste Magazine, but wound up using little of our email discussion. And so here's the bulk of our exchange.

I get curious. Usually I have some fairly nebulous questions--nebulous in that they're not articulated and also that they're not particularly rectilinear. That is, I'm not going to find the answer clearly stated, or in any one particular place. Very often they have to do with the emotional gestalt of a particular time and place. I'm always launching the time machine. For some reason, the historical timeline is my underlying reference. I'm the only person I know who arranges his books in chronological order.

Writing about specific people sharpens the focus, since I can see such things through their eyes. Of the subjects covered in the book, some (Rimbaud, Dylan, Magritte, Evans) are obsessions that go back to adolescence, while others (Hugo, Mapplethorpe) I learned about as a consequence of the assignment. But with pieces as big as the last two, the subjects aren't chosen idly. I knew enough about them to have nagging questions that prompted me to want to know more.

I'm writing a book about Paris. It was my agent's idea, but it's perfect: a true lifelong obsession. I won't really know what it's about or where it's going until I'm finished--I'm sort of an idiot savant, never knowing what it is I mean until I've gotten to the end of the sentence. It's not a history, really, and it's sure not a travelogue or an explanation. I'm slapping together a lot of old obsessions (the serial novel, the Commune, the underworld, Surrealism, movies, the Situationists) with some things that are relatively new to me. It does have something to do with Utopia.

I'm obsessed with the past (see above), in particular the 19th and 20th centuries. I'm interested in the present, but when I stopped being young, some time ago, I dropped out of the loop. Right now I am doing some catching up--most of the people I talk to frequently are somewhat younger than me, which helps.

Times Square is a theme attraction, the LES is a theme attraction, etc. I think of the term "dive bar," which seems to refer to bars that wish to project an ambience that resembles that of the popular idea of deadfalls from the past. It's calculated. The bars I frequented in NYC in the past were dives, period. They'd been that way for years and nobody planned it or ever thought of doing so, and you can still find bars like that in certain less favored cities. The change since 2000 seems incremental. A momentum began in the middle '80s and has just been proceeding along the same road. Money and congestion are the primary motifs. On the other hand, I'm really unable to find much specifically post-9/11 change to speak of, beyond the stuff that affects the whole western world.

On things feeling old: I may be living in a different world than you, I don't know. Smoking is busy reappearing among a lot of people I know, for example. Giuliani, on the other hand--well, he is running for prez, so not irrelevant these days, but there's also the fact that I haven't personally experienced any of Bloomberg. Things do quicken up, but that has the hidden benefit of allowing things and people to make multiple stage appearances over time, instead of splashing and fizzling.

Who am I catching up on? Well, primarily all the French stuff I mentioned in my last message. Especially Rivette (me and 200 other people, that is). I'm reviewing the Original Scroll of Kerouac's On the Road (last read the book itself in 9th grade) and I'm really caught up in it, a bit to my surprise. The songs in heaviest rotation at my house are Mos Def's "Crime and Medicine" and Sizzla's "Don't Be Sad" (yeah, I know, I always get to things late). And very belatedly I've discovered the Go-Betweens.

bbqeta

Finally made it to Hill Country, yet another attempt by Yanks to recreate the singular experience of southern barbecue. While a BBQ joint in Brooklyn attempted such a thing (Fette Sau on Metropolitan Ave.), the layer of gristle comprising my beef rib and the sarsaparilla bottled a few blocks away, not to mention the "Southern Pride" convection oven that served as their "smoker," was an abject failure, Hill Country does mimic the green green grass of home. It helps that they base it on the venerated Kreuz Market in Lockhart, Texas, which means that the mark is set so high that even falling well short still counts as a success of sorts. Seriously, how do you compete with a place that posts a manifesto like this at the door?


As I approach the Flatiron hotbed, I must admit the scent of smoke is comforting. And the pits in use here are cute indeed (even if they are 1/150th the size of deployed at Kreuz). Piled atop a saltine cracker, the Hill Country-smoked "moist" brisket is about as evocative of my uncle's smoke pit as I can find in the 212 area code.

My dining companion then asks: "But do they serve a Kreuz Margarita at Kreuz?" Hunh? "Do they really make mixed drinks with Big Red?" What? A guava mojito arrives in a mason jar, much like the booze did at Fette Sau. Not to gripe, but I feel that I should break some news: Southerners Don't Drink Out of Mason Jars! We don't. Most restaurants down in Texas instead pretend that they are chic New York establishments. So it goes.

Everything needs a gimmick these days to work though, be it concerts or restaurants or trend articles. New York Magazine has to proclaim "BBQ is the New Hamburger!" You probably couldn't swing a restaurant investor unless you have such a gimmick (all the food is pink!), much less convince an editor to run a story unless you make parse it as a new trend. As my companion and I lament such hooks and ploys, imagining a future of more trite and blatant gimmicks, she casts an eerie prediction: "Soon, we'll all be living in a world of wrestlers."

beta's trip

My original title for this piece was "Rather Ripped Van Winkle," which perpetuated both the dreamy weirdness of that band playing the entire album live while also reinforcing the act of getting blotto'd that informed both the album itself (see Byron Coley liners expose "Silver Rocket," "Devil's Daughter" and "Joni" as hooch slang) and my teen listening habits.

It's a gimmick of course, and it's doubtful McCarren Pool would have been such a sardine can without the premise of recreating something canonical like Daydream Nation. Otherwise, who would go to hear songs from "Rather Ripped"? Seems a shame that Rock the Bells couldn't swing something similar with Public Enemy (reforming that same night on Randall's Island) and arrange for the performance of It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, seeing that Chuck and Flavor Flav were but a few miles north of the Greenpoint Necklace. A friend and I have already decided that this should be the next album re-created live, alongside Drive Like Jehu's Yank Crime and Pharcyde's Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde.

So, was Daydream Nation good, you might ask? Bad? Such distinctions seem wholly irrelevant when discussing something as subjective as Sonic Youth's lexicon, to the point where it is an integral aspect of my musical chemistry. I mean, was puberty good/ bad? Was it Superbad? The only thing I kept wishing for was that Kim would've changed the lyrics to "Eliminator Jr." so that it went: "Take a walk through McCarren Park? SHIT YEAH!"

moma beta

Having recently written a piece about the foolishness of asking a question like "What is (insert genre tag)?" I wasn't really holding my breath on the sixth-floor of the MOMA, at an exhibit entitled "What is Painting?". I mean, there was still the powerful Richard Serra exhibit to attend to, his Sculpture Garden pieces sizzling in the sunlight. And last time I was at the MoMA, the curation wasn't so hot.

Separated from the process of the work itself, such artistic investigating by artists is usually a fruitless endeavor (for a similar parallel, see that section of Paper Thin Walls when musicians rate other musicians, handing out 10.0s and 9.5s like Halloween candy and shouting "Yay Everything!"), and in the initial rooms, I was underwhelmed. Each room revolved around a theme (portraits, color schema, painting/ not painting) that seemed trite in its organization. Who I did recognize seemed to be poorly represented, the paintings by no-brainers Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Chuck Close feeling perfunctory at best.

With each successive room though, the work grew stronger, and most surprisingly, the paintings that reverberated the most were also the most recently rendered. I became giddy at the work done by heretofore unknowns as Wade Guyton, Gabriel Orozco, Elaine Reichek, Shirazeh Houshiary, and Beatriz Milhazes. While most exposure to modern art radiates process, color wheel, and long-stewed theory first and foremost, their work exhibited here thankfully answers the question proposed by eschewing it completely and making it moot. The work exuded a real sense of play and discovery.

Playing "Fort" at the Richard Serra exhibit.

Such giddiness and playfulness poured over into the Richard Serra exhibit. How does his overwhelming work not strip away all postures of human importance, of control, of adulthood? Walking through Band, Sequence, and Torqued Torus Inversion, all recently rendered works, I became as a child again: my body weak, wobbly, uncertain of the world surrounding. Dwarfed by 20 foot tall slabs of weathered steel, you can't help but be cowed by their demands. As knee-buckling as El Duque's curveball, or else like an inner-ear affliction, the viewer becomes unbalanced, disoriented, shrunk, helpless.

Such sensations lead to a freedom though. I am a child again, gazing in wonder and seeing the infinite in rusted industrial metal. In the way that Serra's formative early work suggests such possibilities (who else could make lead look so at ease, light and graceful?), I find myself at play among such immensity. My friend and I play "Shoot 'Em Up" amidst the stoic slabs of Equal-Parallel: Guernica-Bengasi, bounce our throats off of the reverberating contours of Band, delighting in the echoes and decay. The curvature and contours appear to be conquerable; inviting but ultimately untenable. Despite not partaking in such recreational activities, I find myself wishing that Serra would get out of the art world and instead draft some monochromatic first-person shooters or else design impossible skate parks.

heep see

Manufactured Landscapes dir. Jennifer Baichwal
While I wish the emphasis of this at-times powerful documentary on photographer Edward Burtynsky was less on what he thinks and more on what he sees (and hope the DVD would option no commentary), this is still a moving piece of cinema. Once focused on the coal-dug landscapes of Pennsylvania, Burtynsky now documents the industrial revolution in China. The digital grain of the camera often times cannot bear the infinite scenes being captured: fan factories in Beijing, tanker-disassembly in Bangladesh, where computers go to die and be hammered apart in abjectly destitute Chinese villages, to where the screen takes on the gauze of a mirage.

The minutiae of everyday objects are shown in the mysterious origins. It takes a good five documented movements before the viewer realizes that irons are being assembled. Visual vignettes integrate into greater themes: tires, parking lots that stretch to the horizon, knots of overpasses without escape, the scum of oil at the bottom of an abandoned tanker. The opening scan is dizzying, the mind unable to grasp the immensity of the factory, unable to locate itself in the space without walls or vanishing point. Can such human hives exist? Only my rotating fan tells me so.

Tees
In a ten-minute span, I espy a tee shirt featuring Swedish jazz guitarist Terje Rypdal's album Waves and one featuring Don Cherry's overlooked Where is Brooklyn?, replete with neon font. Find it odd that while Blue Note stocks shirts based on album designs by the likes of forgotten trombonist Grachan Moncur III and temporal tenorman "Tina" Brooks, they can't keep the actual albums in print.

Animal Collective @ South Seaport
"I thought they were an indie-rock band," I overhear someone say in the sardine can that is the AC show out on the pier. Alas, not a guitar is in sight. Instead, the trio of Avey Tare, Panda Bear, and Geologist (with the lanky Deacon chillaxin' on the wings) hunch over knobs for most of the show. Tunes that should be familiar (like "Leaf House") are rendered unrecognizable, reverberating to the point of dissolution. As the Collective is wont to do when it's time to metamorphose, they look to their brethren in the Black Dice, as well as the dub section of their record collection. And while one snatch of lyric is about "wearing flowers in your hair," this set is a rockers' soundclash for indie rockers.

Oneida @ Sound Fix
I have Oh My Rockness! to thank for hepping me that the mighty O. were playing three shows on "Fat Bobby Returns to New York Weekend" as a five piece, including someone on clarinet(?!). As Oneida fans are already resigned to them never ruling the universe, they are now free to actually rule the universe. Lots of new songs, with inclusion of "History's Great Navigators" and "Lavender." The first time I've ever seen them not play "Summerland." Come September first, they'll have been together ten years.

La Cravate dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky
Found in a German's attic and wedged into the recent Jodorwosky boxset as the man's true debut, before El Topo and Fando y Lis, I wish it would've stayed put like Anne Frank (too much to hope for Sante Sangre instead?). Anyone who doubted that the psychedelic Jodorowsky got his start in miming will find ample proof here. Gaudy in colors, simplistic in its execution, La Cravate is basically a tale of facelifts, decapitation, and soul-killing, rendered for children. I do however, like the man's lesson that "enlightenment doesn't exist."

Ace in the Hole dir. Billy Wilder
This Criterion Collection advance just arrived in the mail, commenting on the media feeding frenzy and dovetailing nicely with that recent breaking news story about some poor blonde girl that was buried alive in a well. Didn't eat for 28 days or something. What was her name again? Knew it was someone important.

Ratatouille dir. Brad Bird
Directly proportional: the most hilarious moments are also the most skin-shivering.

Pink Flag/ Dad Rock
Mike and I bond over how "Reuters" on Pink Flag always makes us tear up. As does "Pink Flag" at the end of side one.

Stemming from this accusation about Vampire Weekend making "music for dads," I ask for clarification on what "Dad Rock" actually sounds like: "You mean it sounds like Map of Africa?"

beta lost in transcription

Two doozies on tape to transcribe this week. One subject, composer Nico Muhly, was hyperactive, bouncing off the walls, turning up speakers, thumping the wooden table in time to Colin McPhee and Benjamin Britten's well-intentioned but oblivious gamelan transcriptions for piano, jumping up to yank books off of shelves, playing snippets of new compositions, and speaking in rapid-fire. A stellar conversation, but unpacking it may take awhile. Add to it the fact that the batteries on my tape deck were slooooowing down (making normal playback even chirpier) and you basically have my interview with Chip'n'Dale. One choice line that probably won't make the cut:

"Jane Austen is soooo genius; she's way more bitchy than Flava of Love. She's working behind a curtain, but she's definitely gonna cut a bitch."

Another interview subject was trumpeter Eddie Gale, who played with the likes of Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Larry Young, and John Coltrane, in addition to releasing his own albums Ghetto Music and Black Rhythm Happening. I called him after his performance at this year's Vision Festival, and the man hadn't slept a wink. Gale had a voice like an old campfire: ashy, low, still smoky. A good five minutes would go by where I couldn't parse a single phrase. Some tantalizing lines that are forever riddled with maddening ellipses:

"Basically Sun Ra did his own recordings. It was very interesting the things that Sun Ra...he would include everything around him...He would create very beautiful, emotional...of music."

"Saw Lena Horne, Redd Fox in that area of Brooklyn. I got to play the clubs when under age...what was going on with the music...you listen to gospel on the weekend, the blues on Saturday...people at parties and things...sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, we’d play after-hour parties for the community."

"Sun Ra, Cecil, Coltrane, people really doing what I’d like to get into...I heard something...there it is. In any form, in any styles...I used to do some vocalizing too...doo-wop singing on the corners as a kid. We used to get out there and harmonize, that’s where I got voices...dancing. Part of my songs were dances, they’d sing my songs and they would dance to it."

"That was too much...person involved, getting the right thing done, what I was doing. I had the other musicians giving me information...all of that. I hadn’t even...since 1969."

beta does not break glass

A week of prep and research for an interview with composer Philip Glass ultimately came to naught, due to the composer's overwhelming schedule. Looks like the Don DeLillo quote on 'the work' proved telling. Guess I won't be rewatching Koyaanisqatsi after all.

Unasked questions for Philip Glass:

From a recent New Yorker article on the Don DeLillo archives at UT's Ransom Center, with DeLillo explaining to young novelist David Foster Wallace:

Anyway, all of this happened over time, until eventually discipline no longer seemed something outside me that urged the reluctant body into the room. At this point discipline is inseparable from what I do. It's not even definable as discipline. It has no name. I never think about it. But there's no trick of meditation or self-mastery that brought it about. I got older, that's all. I was not a born novelist (if anyone is). I had to grow into novelhood.

Are people still deluded into thinking of the creative act --be it novels or operas or sculpture-- as one of inspiration rather than sheer work ethic?

With your hectic schedule, have you had a chance to see the Richard Serra exhibit at the MoMA and new large scale works like: Band, Sequence, Torqued Torus Inversion?
Did you first know Richard when he was still a painter?
Did you both begin to work on larger scales (that unfurl in time and are cognizant of space) around the same time?

What were your first impressions of New York City when you moved up here?
Did you ever get to see Moondog perform on the corner of Sixth Avenue?

What was the scene like in that era, with practitioners like La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, Steve Reich, Charlemagne Palestine and the like all performing in art galleries and non-traditional venues? Was everyone close or were people off on their own, mining similar veins?

Do you still find it odd to be considered a "minimalist"?

Who in your estimation was the most unheralded composer of that time?
Having championed and released his work on your own imprints: Chatham Square, Point Music, and now Orange Mountain, were you pleased with the revitalization and renaissance of Arthur Russell's music?

Art of collaboration (Errol Morris, Alan Ginsburg, Robert Wilson, etc.)? How do you sublimate the composer ego enough for it to work?

beta remembers to forget to remember

Blab about your music-writing profession and the first question you get asked in mixed company is about what you're listening to. Or even worse, petitioned: "I've got this fye gift ceritficate for $25 from my Aunt Janice. Should I buy the new White Stripes? Or Justice?" Open bar or no, I can't think of a single instance wherein an on-the-spot self-inventory revealed any artist or title whatsoever. If it weren't for the list of titles along the right side over here, I'd promptly forget.

Nearing the midway point of the calendar year, the people want to know what are the noteworthy albums of the year. One discussion with a writer friend prompted the claim that it's been a bad year for music. Reading Amanda's Top 07 of '07 list, I ask her why she even bothers to list albums that she couldn't even deign to give a 7.0 to on Pitchfork. Then I realize she maybe just listed 14 records she actually remembered hearing this year (which would explain Young Jeezy and Andrew Bird).

So listening becomes an act of forgetting. As in: "That's funny, I swore I only gave three stars to Icky Thump and yet Paste says I gave it 4 1/2. Hunh?" My mind verily swears that there aren't stacks of CDs atop the record player and surrounding the stereo on all sides, absent-mindedly left on the kitchen table and on the boombox, piled next to the rest of the household mail, or elsewhere, and yet there are things to recall and recommend.

It dawns on me that what always catches my attention when listening to a new record for the first time is instant amnesia. A bolt upright as I go: "Wait? What is this again?" The title, the artist, the cover art, the PR people, all instantly forgotten in a Lethean flush of noise. Albums that make me snap out of revery and re-check more often than not become favorites, recreating that initial rush of disorientation.


Meg Baird: Dear Companion
Big Business: Here Come the Waterworks
Caribou: Andorra
Kevin Drumm: Sheer Hellish Miasma (reissue)
Feist: The Reminder
The Glimmers: Fabric mix
Eyvind Kang: Athlantis
Lindstrom & Prins Thomas: Reinterpretations
Lubomyr Melnyk: KMH (reissue)
Nico Muhly: Speaks Volumes
Takeshi Nishimoto: Monologue
Optimo: Walkabout
Panda Bear: Person Pitch
Pantha du Prince: This Bliss
Spoon: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Valet: Blood is Clean

beta gone fishin'

Having read the assertions of marine biologist Alister Hardy and anthropologist Elaine Morgan that humans might've evolved from a strain of water-borne primates (noting our hairlessness, salty tears, layer of subcutaneous fat, streamlined body, salt water blood, and voluntary breath control) in Diane Ackerman's An Alchemy of Mind, I have up and gone fishing down in Texas, dousing myself in brine and scarfing down shrimp and crab legs in the process. Come a sunset of azure and hyacinth, the fish start jumping and biting. We pull up mud cats, redfish, and speckled trout. Of course, as the fish bite, so too do the mosquitoes.

Returning home gives me a curious opportunity to go through storage, unearthing such things as the backing cards for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures as well as those of C.O.P.S., some weird cock diesel law enforcers. I turn up my old yearbook, revealing a portrait of my young afro balanced atop a pinhead and clenched smile, and a page in the back that my best friends and I bought, espying the culture clash that was my teen frame: flannel shirt, Jesus Lizard tee, Birkenstocks. We quote Minor Threat andthen run a laundry list of obscure in-jokes, no doubt all pertaining to dope-smoking. Due to such origins, I cannot recall what any of them meant.

I have a shit ton of records here still, but decide that --having not spun them in nearly a decade-- I can continue to exist without such titles as Spiderland, Songs of the Humpback Whale, the Easy Rider soundtrack, Mulligan Meets Monk, the Unwound discography, Squarepusher's Big Loada EP, and a dished copy of Blackboard Jungle Dub in my life. However, Pink Floyd gatefolds, Pharoah Sanders, and Beastie Boys singles must continue to remain in my clutches.

Going through boxes of old books from high school and college, I am glad that I developed the curious habit of sticking stray paper in as bookmarks. Some items that shake free from the leafs:

-a picture of John Wayne Gacy as a clown
-a newspaper clipping of an enormous woman dancing in a wedding gown
-notebook paper with Chinese characters and the word "matrices" written five times
-directions to a kegger
-a work schedule from when I flipped burgers
-a photo of a drawing on someone's arm, their head superimposed with an ocean scene (this falls out of Jung's Synchronicity)
-a flier I made for a party at my house using a Buckminster Fuller diagram, featuring eight bands and the understatement that: "$2 for bands would be hella nice"

Going fishing for the second straight day, I am told the adage: "It's called fishing, not catching." Regardless, I now delight myself in the ephemera of what remains in my net.