burning beta brides

Here come the waterworks.

As a rule, I bawl at weddings. The controls on the waterworks are sensitive, turning on with the slightest of stimuli: how a vow gets recited, on what word the groom's voice cracks, how flower girls perambulate down the aisle, the parents that didn't live long enough to see this day, how geese take to the skies above, whatever. And this past weekend was no different. Thank God the ceremony was outdoors, so that I could wear my cop shades.

It helps me prepare for when I head to a Texas wedding next week, wherein I will bust out such moves as the "Texas Two-Step" and "Cotton-Eyed Joe" (and no, not the Eurodisco version they play at Yankee Stadium). The best thing about Texas weddings, aside from a catered barbecue dinner, shots of Hot Damn!, and tables full of sliced jalapenos and pickles, is this giant processional dance, "The Grand March." Hard to unpack here but let's just say it's about as close as I get to being in a Busby Berkeley musical, participating in that ineffable dance of humanity that is part geometry, part biology.

In the week preceding that white wedding, Nick and I trade emails about wedding reception playlists. He noted that at the last wedding he attended, "lots of people would get up all the sudden and say this is 'our song' and go dance and 'our song' would be something like Earth Wind and Fire's "September" or Kool and the Gang's "Celebration."' Funny enough, neither of these were on the playlists. Instead, we got the next generation of "our song," which translates as "Hey Ya." And of course, Johnny Cash's dour "Ring of Fire." Finally, I admit to myself that I'm just not a fan of the Man in Black. Everytime I hear his voice, it invokes only John Wayne, bulky and wasted. I was pleasantly surprised to hear Sparks' "Perfume" (the bride doesn't wear any) and realized out on the dancefloor just how long and ludicrous the breakdown for "One More Time" is. You could nap in it.

The best song of the entire affair though came early on. After the two families entered to the blaring horns of "All You Need is Love," all fell quiet. The opening notes of "Here Comes the Sun" were plucked as the bay doors swung wide so that the bride could enter in all of her luminance. Of course, it made me cry.

dur dur d'etre beta

First I have to give thanks to Mister Burns for getting me into the Jordi Savall concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Having only recently become enamored with the early-music maestro (courtesy of his disc exploring the curious folios of 17th century composer Tobias Hume), I was beside myself to get into one of these performances, but two dates he's playing in the US. For all the upscale grandeur of going to a concert at the Metropolitan Museum, they instantly set our minds at ease by making the audience enter through the cafeteria.

As a newbie to this music, I'll admit to being somewhat lost amid the blue hairs in attendance and what exactly to listen for, but the program notes attest that before 1800, it was expected that composed music were to have some of its music improvised in performance, so that it might blossom freshly-created for its audience. So whereas I might otherwise not have familiarity with the folios of composers like Diego Ortiz, Mr. de Sainte-Colombe le pere (or his son, Mr. de Sainte-Colombe le fils), and Marin Marais (or even Bach, honestly), I could at least appreciate the spontaneous moment.

Not necessarily one for etymology, I find it curious that names for themes (canario, chaconne, passacaglia) stem from New World explorations, even though they are ultimately of Old World lineage. Tonight, Savall plays a viola da gamba crafted in 1697, in a line-up including harpsichord and a dual neck stringed instrument, the theorbo (think medieval Jimmy Page here). When the trio commences, the most shocking thing is how quiet the music is. Unamplified, there's an inherent hush to the audience as well, yet my ears panic, harried that they're missing something. But wait, it's just that the ears have always been reactive, dealing with overload and volume, the necessity of shutting out. Now, in the quietude, they slowly begin to open up, so that the music blossoms mid-performance.

As I'm most familiar with the work of Tobias Hume, I can hear how Jordi Savall teases out new filaments, new pathways in the notation. Hume is as bizarre a figure in the early-music world as he would be in modern music, which is no doubt what draws me to him in the first place. First and foremost, the Scotsman was a soldier of fortune, prefacing one of his 1605 folios for viol with the claim that "the onely effeminate part of me, hath beene Musicke; which in mee hath beene always Generous, because never Mercenarie." If this music is effeminate, then lord only knows what he must've been like in the flesh (in old age, the notes say he was reduced to eating snails in the field, for lack of mercenary work); his program is in stark contrast to the other pieces of the night. Savall's bow work is volatile, at times physically attacking the viola, barking out proclamations between flurries of plucked and bowed passages, rapping kinetic taps of the bow across its strings.

Throughout the night, I am reminded of Joanna Newsom's most recent EP, perceiving it as this attempt to bridge new music and old. From its instrumentation (and their furious interplay) to its artisan craftsmanship down to its poetic imagery, almost none of the music elicited by her Ys Street Band strikes me as "indie." Talking to a friend afterwards, while he thoroughly enjoyed the evening's performance, noting Savall's masterful tone and exuding of grace, he sheepishly admits that he still has a Hall & Oates song stuck in his head. His date claims that the quicksilver lines on theobro evoke Fleetwood Mac's "The Chain" in her own head. And so worlds collide.

beta stops smiling

The irony is not entirely lost upon me: handing in my article on Breathless femme fatale Jean Seberg for the upcoming Ex-Pat issue of Stop Smiling I can barely breathe come the Stop Smiling party on Tuesday night due to an allergy attack. Lucky for me, my publishers are similarly voiceless, so I spend much of the night wheezing to Dave Tompkins and Pete Relic instead, as Chairman Mao and Pete Rock spin like its 80s Night.

Go figure that the first portion of Dave's Scorpio meditation is all about huffing hay (and features fine deployment of the word 'williwaw'). Dave corrects one trainspotter who opines Gigolo Tony when in fact it's Afro-Rican. "Throw the D" comes on, and it's as if I'm trapped inside the head of a madman. Which reminds me that I need to YSI him these Pompidou tracks (the Jamaican toaster known for his 'synthesizer voice') as it'll push Dave's long-threatened vocoder book back another decade, thus giving us hacks some breathing room.

beta gets feisty

Simply put, aside from my own music-making, I have never had a greater bias towards an album than I do with Feist's The Reminder. The connection is not of import here, but rest assured, it is close to my heart. Coming wholly from the aesthetic side of music appreciation as a critic and reared in a world of music-making (in small town punk-rock club culture) where the idea of monetary success meant free beer on a Saturday night, it has been illuminating to finally glean the gears (and greasing) of the music industry, to see the to-and-fro of both frontlash and back, to know just what commercials will pay for a slice of pop music, to learn how $25 million ad campaigns and big-budget motion pictures get edited in rhythm so as to woo a certain song's placement amidst their visuals.

It was a curious vantage point to watch that critdom race to proclaim Feist first, to see articles jockey for position in the NYC market, to realize how an 8-hour fashion shoot only translates into an inch of space in a glossy, to know that the name "Busby Berkeley" appeared in a video proposal, and to understand why certain authors appear strangely stymied regarding their subject. Similarly, I have never experienced the true "behind the music" workings of a major label album and how it gets sold in these days of diminishing returns until now. How music gets sold alongside frappucinos, how labels haggle over that obsolescent creature of the music industry (barring 8-tracks): the music video, how songs wind up on prime time, it was all revealed to me. It is not glamor, but the direct result of hard work. And I now pray that Leslie Feist does don the mantle of "the hipster Norah Jones" and sell 20 million copies.

It's gotten to the point that I dreamed the other night of gushing to an old high school friend about the room sound on The Reminder, relishing the texture of the field recordings, the suspended air surrounding the piano chords and woodwind breaths, the grain of Leslie Feist's throat, explained with zeal the 3:1 ballad ratio. I dream of certain remixers for songs like "Sealion," revel in how that fritzing electric organ bleat on "My Moon My Man" recreates exactly the interference of a certain somebody's overworked Blackberry when near my stereo. Every time I hear that single sonic element now, it conjures their presence instantly.

In waking life, I bully a professional acquaintance for positing a theory about "sophistication" with regards to Feist's thirtysomething audience while having never heard a single note. I laugh at the notion that on a corporate countertop lies the widest dissemination of my words. And when my mother calls to say that the album reminded her of Carole King's Tapestry, I beam. Okay, The Reminder isn't that great, but such a testimony is nevertheless music to my ears.

bemp

This here is a copy of the paper I presented at the Experience Music Project in Seattle, Washington this past weekend.

"Is Anybody Going to San Antone?"
Doug Sahm, the Sir Douglas Quintet, and Memories of Home

Howdy, my name is Andy Beta and I'm a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, New York. My paper concerns a sixties pop song that evokes my hometown of San Antonio, Texas. I haven’t lived there in well over a decade, yet the city is never far from my mind.

Take for instance my neighborhood bar, a watering hole called Daddy’s, but a few doors down from me in Brooklyn. This place evokes the Texas I always remember. Mounted deer heads and horseshoes hang from the rustic wood walls, reminding me of them old ranch houses that you might find up in the Hill Country of South Texas. And yet, there’s few bars in Texas that pretend to be a ranch house. Instead, they hang knots of neon beer signs and banks of TVs, their light glistening off the dark polished wood. Patrons mingle about giant cardboard cutouts of NASCAR racers or big-titted bikini models peddling Coors Light.

One night, I walked into Daddy’s and heard a song I probably hadn’t heard in close to ten years. “The Sir Douglas Quintet is back,” a familiar southern drawl announces, thanking their fans and “all the beautiful vibrations.” “Mendocino” was spinning overhead, by a band also hailing from my hometown, the Sir Douglas Quintet. It’s a song wherein the frontman of the group, a fellow named Douglas Wayne Sahm sings about teenyboppers that blow his mind, going so far as to liken one to a “groove.” Who calls someone a “groove”? It was the band’s second national hit.

It wasn’t the first taste of fame for Sahm though. Born to German and Irish immigrant parents in San Antonio, he was a prodigy on fiddle, mandolin, and steel guitar. At the age of five, Doug began playing honky-tonks backing touring country acts. He even played behind ol’ Hank Williams but two weeks before he died in the backseat of a car. As a ‘tween, he could walk across a neighboring field to a club and check out T-Bone Walker, Bobby “Blue” Bland, or James Brown on any given night. But his momma made him turn down the Grand Ole Opry so that he could attend high school in San Antonio.

Doug Sahm cut honky tonk and R&B in his teens, trying in vain to convince a local producer named Heuy P. Meaux to record him. Appropriately dubbed “The Crazy Cajun,” Meaux had a string of local hits and couldn’t be bothered. It was only when Beatlemania descended like locusts across America’s musical landscape, wiping out all that came before, that Meaux (after holing up in a hotel room with every Beatles single he could find and a couple bottles of Thunderbird wine) decided to clad Sahm and a few other boys from San Antone in British suits ‘n’ boots, and call ‘em Sir Douglas Quintet, so that these vatos might pass for limeys.

The Sir Douglas Quintet’s first hit came in 1965, a greasy and quintessential cut of garage rock called “She’s About a Mover.” A melding of the Beatles’s “She’s a Woman” and Ray Charles’s “What I Say” onto a Cajun two-step beat, the music as rendered by Sir Douglas Quintet is pure Texas: rattlesnake hip-shake, ballpark organ blat, Huevos Rancheros with refried beans, a sound as blue and smoky as a broke-down jalopy.

With a Top 20 single to their name, Sir Douglas Quintet gigged Hullabaloo and Shindig, saw the world, wound up out west to make it with sweet things that “blow your mind every morning,” as their follow-up hit, “Mendocino,” states. And yet for all that globetrotting and evocation of California sun, “Mendocino” remains the epochal South Texas single. In under three minutes, it blends garage-rock with soul, country & western with cojunto, blues with oompah bands, with every ethnic culture of South Texas present: white, black, brown, red.

It dawns on me that in nearly 40 years, there hasn’t been a more-enduring band to hail from San Antonio than the Sir Douglas Quintet. And there’s no greater native son than Sahm. Who else could get Bob Dylan to be in his backing band? Ask Elvis Costello, who stole both Sahm’s singing style and that needling organ tone for his own band. Sure, there’s the Butthole Surfers, but folks in San Francisco, Austin, and Athens can lay (partial) claim to them. And the lead singer from that faux-grunge band Candlebox, he was from SA, but he doesn’t count.

Is that why I knew “Mendocino” all these years, as a matter of hometown pride? That’s why my best friend from high school and I played his copy of Mendocino to death. That whole album became second nature to us: we’d take a break from making music (okay, making noise), draw on some Mexi-dirt, crack a cold one, and we’d spin that sucker all night long, relishing with pride when that one number came on, near the end of side one. “At the Crossroads,” it was, where Doug Sahm belts out: “But you just can’t live in Texas, if you don’t have a lot of soul.”

Slouched on my bar stool in Brooklyn, I catch myself singing that line now. I no longer live in Texas though. In fact, I don’t even own the record. My best friend did. And even though we still sometimes bump each other on the streets of Brooklyn, we don’t speak anymore. We’ve grown apart, things changed, we’re not the same people anymore. And yet as “Mendocino” plays on, I’m right back in his living room, the air still hazy with smoke. Maybe I didn’t have enough soul. Maybe neither one of us had enough soul, and that’s why we’re no longer in our hometown, but thousands of miles away.

But when Doug sang those lines back in 1969, he wasn’t in Texas neither. After touring through Europe in ‘65, Sahm got busted in the Corpus Christi airport with some grass and --Texas laws being draconian (just ask Roky Erickson, who opted for a mental asylum rather than do jail time)-- was soon exiled. He went thousands of miles away too, to sing about Mendocino, a little coastal enclave north of San Francisco, off the Pacific Coast Highway. The album itself was recorded at Columbus Recording in San Francisco and in North Hollywood.

And yet he never stopped thinking about Texas. In an article from Texas Monthly in 1974, author Gregory Curtis details a friend who has also left Texas, yet cannot escape its pull. “You can’t just leave Texas the way you can just leave Idaho,” the friend slurs one night, the latest Doug Sahm platter cranked up on the stereo. He turns to drunkenly address it: “I don’t need goddamn Doug Sahm to tell me about leaving Texas,” he said, “but he sure as hell knows what it’s like.”

He sure as hell does. There’s a palpable sense of estrangement and mal du pays throughout that album. One song has the title: “Lawd, I’m just a country boy in this great big freaky city.” And in much the same way that he took what the Beatles and Ray Charles had recorded as the basis for his first hit single, so too does he co-opt Otis Redding to fit his own situation:

I left home in Texas, headed for the Frisco Bay
Encountered a lot of hard times, through changes all the way.
Now I'm up in Sausalito wondering where I ought to be.
And I wonder what happened to the man inside,
the real old Texas Me.

Here he is, smack-dab in the middle of hippie paradise, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, yet he misses dives like Farmer’s Poolhall on the east side of SA and redneck backwaters like Port Arthur. Severed from his roots, he begins to question just who he is. As his surroundings have changed, so has his interior landscape. “I have always snapped that environment shows in music,” Doug stated on the liner notes for one of his records. Things aren’t the same out there, and neither is he. It saddens him to realize that, despite how desperately he wants to hang onto that “Texas me,” inevitably he can’t.

And yet he always dreams of a change that will revert time back, a return to how things used to be. And then I glean something else in “Mendocino.” Sure, it is outwardly about a barely-legal chick, but there’s also an undertow to it too, a desperate prayer beneath its come-on: “Stay here with me,” Doug Sahm pleads. “Please don’t go.” It’s this futile fight for a paradise lost, a past now made untenable.

It’s what I want to tell my old friend when I pass him on the street, when I run into him in Brooklyn, so far from our hometown. I too want to believe in Doug Sahm’s plea at the end of “At the Crossroads”: “Some day a change will come and you will be beside me one more time.” I want those intervening years to disappear, the distance between here and ‘home’ to be eradicated, to be back in that little room of San Antone, where we’d play music and spin them old records, oblivious to the paradise of that time together. I want to just hear “all the beautiful vibrations,” Augie Meyer’s incessant, asthmatic Vox organ, and that eternal bit of sunny Tex-Mex pop, “Mendocino.”

And then it hits me, right there on my barstool in Brooklyn, why I always felt that I knew this song. It wasn’t because my best friend and I learned of it ourselves. It wasn’t on oldies radio when I was growing up. The reason I knew “Mendocino” was because my father used to sing it to me! That’s how I knew it! He’s the one that grew up on it, he’s the one that heard it blaring out over the radio in the summer of ’69.

My father always talked about that song. That’s why, when I was thumbing through my best friend’s record collection, I picked it out. Because I had never heard it before. My father would reminisce to me about his own time back in high school, when he and his best friend, a fellow named Leonard, would deerhunt, do farm chores, drive tractors, all the while the radio was cranked up to resound across the plowed fields. To hear him describe it, that was the greatest summer of his life, that summer of 1969 when “Mendocino” dominated the airwaves in South Texas. That was their song, he would recall. And yet I never had that testimony corroborated by Leonard himself. In fact, I never even met his best friend, as they hadn’t been on speaking terms my entire life.

It’s come full circle: a poppy Tex-Mex 45 about teenyboppers, the quintessential South Texas single, a tune that has soundtracked two generations of friendships, also hints at the shifting sands of paradise, an ebullient pop song that reveals that all things come to an end. No matter how many times Sahm pleas “I love you so, please don’t go,” however many times my father evoked that magical summer, or however many times I hear it in my head now, there’s no holding onto people. They don’t stay put in Mendocino, they don’t remain “in a love house by the river,” they don’t remain in San Antone or wherever home may be.

And I want to talk to my father about this now, but we no longer speak ourselves and haven’t for a good number of years. Thousands of miles from home, the song from my hometown long since replaced in that jukebox, I just shake my head to think that this all transpired in my mind for the duration of a side of a 45, at a bar called Daddy’s.

heep see

Texas Monthly

This month features a portrait of a (real) Texas Ranger who has the most-awesome name ever: Clete Buckaloo.

Kevin Drumm
Sheer Hellish Miasma
Editions Mego

This was my first review ever for Pitchfork Media. I cringe to re-read my early flailings there, my insistence on running a metaphor (a blizzard broadsided New York right when I was listening to the album daily) deep into the tundra. My first paragraph joked about a Rhino reissue in twenty years time, opining titles like Brain Scratch Avalanche and Demonic Wasabi Colonic. Go hyperbole! Guess we didn't even have to wait five years for it to re-surface, though. It's a slight relief to be back so soon in that (as was often the case at PFK) I never got a real copy of the album before it went out of print (kids loved them some Chicagoan post-rock/ power-electronics/ black metal hybrids, no doubt). It even comes with a bonus track.

"Blue" Gene Tyranny
Out of the Blue
Unseen Worlds

I had the privilege a few years back to trade emails with Robert Scheff, a man who revels in his own pen name and injects it into his own titles, much like a certain writer who posts here. It was for a set of liner notes to this archival release, Formations. It intrigued me to learn that Scheff was also from my hometown of San Antonio. Yet while I spent many a high school day getting burnt on the grounds of the McNay Art Museum, Scheff and Phil Krumm spent their high school days staging world premieres of John Cage pieces a the McNay (also pieces by La Monte Young, Yoko Ono, and Richard Maxfield).
Not familiar with either Blue's operatic works nor those he made in conjunction with Bob Ashley, Out of the Blue is a winsome, disarming listen. A friend and I agree on the wonkiness of the instrumental here (he hears Herbie Hancock, while I hear Zappa), but the sprawling recitative works (see title track) balance stoned letter-writing rambles with minute cosmic epiphanies. And I can't help that when the letter notes the bar that changed hands again, recalling how Blue and his companion used to get stoned and sing along to the songs on the jukebox, that said dive bar might in fact be SA's legendary Tacoland.

Philip Cohran and the Artistic Heritage Ensemble
The Malcolm X Memorial
Katalyst

You can see a third of trumpeter Kelan Phil Cohran's progeny perform on the streets of New York as Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. This is the second album of paternas Cohran to get reissued, after the astounding On the Beach. A live performance mourning and celebrating the death of X, its four movements embody each persona of the man, from his birth as "Malcolm Little" to his pimp name, "Detroit Red," through his rebirth as "Malcolm X" on into his final metamorphosis (post-Mecca) as "El Hajj Malik el Shabazz." Each transformation is rendered in the music, starting out as bluesy, moving into jazz, before becoming chant-heavy and tribal. Dig their marching band outfits as well as the only pic I've ever seen of future Miles Davis guitarist Pete Cosey sans-shades.


The Mouse That Roared dir. Jack Arnold
Five years before Peter Sellers achieved comedic godhead as a trinity of characters (or is that warhead at Trinity?) in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying an Love the Bomb, he debuted in this slight comedy playing three roles as well (Grand Duchess Gloriana XII, Prime Minister Count Rupert Mountjoy, fool Tully Bascombe), across from the cardboard flat of actress Jean Seberg. In much the same way that Strangelove was eerily prophetic though, so too is the act of war declared on America in this film. Sellers proclaims: "They forgive everything! No sooner is the aggressor defeated then they pour in food, machines, clothing, technical aid and lots and lots of money for the relief of foreign enemies."

Black Dice
"Manoman"

Thankfully, the recent Optimo mix Walkabout (which --in the terminology of an Aussie-- is killuh) made me go back to this all-but-ignored 12" from the Dice. First audition felt way too slight and spacious, as opposed to the density of the band to that point. Filed it away. Rather than skull-crush, they pulled back, creating something as weird, yet less tethered to weight, than anything else they've done to date. Keep thinking Residents, but that's not quite right either. Regardless, they're going to remain misunderstood for another decade at least.

Drag City cover art
I know I've been dealing with different PR folks over at the esteemed Drag City as of late, but what gives with the heinous cover art? Did they go the way of the Voice's art staff? Both the PG Six and Bill Callahan boast the ugliest cover art of the year, making it way too easy to dismiss the finely-honed folk-pop within. It's great fodder for the Assumer Guide though.

Battles
"Atlas"

Here's hoping some visionary music director at The Palace in Auburn Hills or the Staples Center realizes that this is the second coming of Gary Glitter's "Rock'n'Roll Part II" and begins to blast this blistering stomp of gibberish during the next time-out to get the crowd of Oompa Loompas hyped.

vonnegeta

...think back to that fateful day, ensconced in my room as the cold front blew through, fearing for my life as I finished Cat's Cradle, believing the world had indeed turned to ice...

Such news isn't depressing though, but indeed a relief. Kurt Vonnegut's website today has a picture of a birdcage, its door opened, its occupant escaped. I go back to the fine interview my editor JC Gabel conducted for Stop Smiling last year, when Vonnegut stated:

I've said everything I want to say, and I'm embarrassed to have lived this long. I so envy Joseph Heller and George Plimpton and all these other friends of mine who are pushing up daisies...That's what I want to do. I think I'd do a swell job.

Hoping that he gets to that work as swiftly as possible, there remains work for us as well. Elsewhere, Vonnegut tells that art is a state of becoming, as necessary as food and sex. He recounts a challenge he gave out on the lecture circuit:

Write a poem tonight. Make it as good as you possibly can...Don't tell anybody what you're doing. Don't show it to anybody. When you're satisfied it's as good as you can make it, tear it up in small pieces and scatter those pieces between widely separated trash receptacles and you will find out you have received your full reward for having done it.

betahunter

Deerhunter

I didn't write about going to Pitchfork's party during SXSW. And I probably wouldn't have gotten in at all if I hadn't hunted down my good friend Mark Richardson, who had to claw his own way back into the venue. The line to enter into the Pitchfork party at Emo's stretched in one direction up Sixth Street, down Red River in the other.

I couldn't think of the last time I had been at Emo's, but it had to have been nearly seven years ago. Thankfully, little had changed (meaning that the Wilma and Betty lesbian bondage montage still adorned the interior wall). Back before they expanded into four separate locations on Sixth Street (with the surreal Emo's Las Vegas in the works), Emo's was the locus of innumerable transcendental concerts for me in the nineties.

I can recall that fateful night back in high school, on a whim driving up to Austin well below the legal drinking age and experiencing the Jesus Lizard. My HS friends and I knew Goat already, quaking slightly at the thought of seeing such a band in the flesh. Even the openers were monstrous. Some scuzzy band Johan Kugelberg mentioned in SPIN called the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion; the sight of drummer Russell Simins hammering his kickdrum into the floor was frightening, but that was nothing compared to Spencer's climactic squall of the theremin. None of it could compare to when the Jesus Lizard finally crept on, though. David Yow was shirtless, looking as if he'd been drinking Boone's down by the river all day. Duane Dennison's aluminum guitar glimmered like cougar teeth under the stage light. With neither signal nor count, the Jesus Lizard pounced on our throats with "Boilermaker," the crowd now a blender of sweat, feverish bodies, ecstatic screams. Somewhere in the miasma of the night, David Yow's orange-sized testicles got whipped out, pressed against the microphone. Did anyone hear it?

Drinking in daylight with Mark and Scott Plagenhoef, I conjured up the wasted nights I had spent at Emo's in my past, experiencing Stereolab, Fastbacks, Brainiac, Unwound, Palace...but what meant the most was seeing my friends play there, toiling haplessly in obscurity, never to make it out alive. There was no hope. Sure, people can boast of seeing the bands named above, witnessing these bands in the era before the internet, before such instantaneous networking made word of mouth spread like Hill Country brush fires, but who was going to invoke Gut, Glorium, Multitude of the Slothful, American Psycho Band, Big Horny Hustler, Brownie Points? Austin bands that killed it/ fucked up/ sucked ass/ blew ears and minds on any given night at Emo's, only to be lost irretrievably down the memory hole.

It's hard to argue for who had the most hype coming into the Pitchfork Fest. Was it Girl Talk? Pipettes? Marnie Stern? Peter, Bjorn, and John? I went to see Deerhunter, after the incessant gushing about their "insane live shows." Standing in a venue where such a presentation was necessary just to avoid getting blown off the plywood, to the point of being a given, I wonder where the insanity is during Deerhunter's rather pedestrian performance. Am I at the same show as my editors and peers, who get glassy-eyed by set's end and proceed to hosanna about them online?

Perhaps not. But as I get this Deerhunter assignment, I find the disc more enjoyable, though nothing brilliant. It's a good start, nothing less or more. Hopefully it augurs well their next few years, allowing them to really do something, but for now, they remain just this pretty good rock band. Why do they deserve such a shitstorm of praise following them everywhere?

During my phone interview, I ask singer Bradford Cox about what it means for Deerhunter to be deemed 'insane.'

Cox asks me upfront: "When you saw us were you let down?"

“Sorta. I mean, I didn't see what anyone was talking about.”

"That’s because you're a rational, sane person," he laughed. "You wanna know the secret? You're probably a nice dude, that's what it is. It's your problem, not mine, buddy. You're too nice, rational, and smart. Let me tell you why. If you wanna know what this 'insane live show' boils down to is: people have never seen a skinny person before get on stage and not be shy about it. I don't have to do anything. I just have a weird appearance."

Such is hype.

Should you be in the market for obscure but crucial female folksingers, might I recommend the recent reissue of firebrand Anne Briggs, and her penultimate album from 1971, The Time Has Come. I wrote the liner notes, which was a total honor.

glitcheta

Snap, Crackle, Pop: Pole, The Field, and Panda Bear (NY Sun)

Singles Going Steady: Remixes by Carl Craig, Ricardo Villalobos, EYE from Boredoms (Village Voice)

Stars of the Lid (making Calgon joke at PTW)

Religious Knives (making Italo-zombie soundtrack joke at PTW)

beta gets wet

Shohei Imamura's The Pornographers is one of my all-time favorite films: voyeuristic, savage, frame-expanding, kinky, caustic in its wit, brilliant. And yet it's been almost impossible to glean anything else from the man's four-decade long oeuvre. Even going to Kim's Video shakes loose but a few late-period movies: The Eel, Black Rain, Vengeance is Mine. Even his Palmes D'Or-winning The Ballad of Narayama is nearly impossible to hunt down.

And yet, my elation at BAM's massive retrospective on the man (subtitled: Pimps, Prostitutes, and Pigs) is tempered by the fact that the nearly two dozen films run for a single day at most, and mostly while I am down in Texas for SXSW, meaning I miss a good four-fifths of them. The good news is that with Criterion's forthcoming release of Vengeance, it hopefully presages a deluge akin to that of the young girl from his 2001 film, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge.

While 1987's The Pimp continues Imamura's rib-elbowing rails on nationalism, misogyny, and Japan's bestial sexuality (often within a single scene), the next year brought his devastating Black Rain to the screen. A demure slow-burn shot in black and white, it looks as if it could be a counterpart to Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff or something, totally out of time.

Black Rain is about those that survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Though survive isn't quite the word. The movie begins placidly, though we understand what is forthcoming, what is inevitable when the clock hits 8:16. A girl sits on a boat; her uncle boards a commuter train, ready for work. There's a fluffy parachute making its way down, ever so gently. And then the horror is upon us, in charred bodies, dangling eyes, skin shriveled into alien drapery on skeletal forms, kin rendered unrecognizable, somehow still walking but already dead. The fires of an earthly hell roar around them. The river clogs with bodily flotsam. In the audience, we suddenly remember all too well that it is us who have wrought this upon our fellow humanity. Or wait, do we just forget, doomed to repeat such atrocities elsewhere?

Imamura focuses intently on the nature surrounding his protagonists. We watch as rice grows tall in the paddies, how the tiny carp in the pond grows to over a meter in length by movie's end. And yet, the people who plant and the people who fish these carp are withering on the inside, sores and lumps become evident on their faces. But then of course, we forget that they already died within the first five minutes of the film; it just takes awhile for the flesh to finally come to pass. And even that's not the worst of the girl's fate, in that despite this imminent mortality, she is still defeated by petty human traits such as rumor, innuendo, pride. Nature abounds, humanity abates.

Hopeless cul-de-sac though the human condition may seem, Imamura posits hope in the last film of the series, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge. No doubt, it's not his finest work, but the film's gimmick is a gut-buster. A young Japanese girl must perform a wicked act (either shoplifting or torrid sex with a stranger) in order to let loose a torrent of water. Not water sports, but sprinkler against the window-type splashing, snaking garden hose gushing, flood the basement and replenish the ponds and streams. Okay, it's a dam-buster.

Surrounded by sexual manuals from a thousand years ago, be it the Kama Sutra or Ovid's Amores, a sage man laments those too learned to partake in their most lascivious desires, noting that the ruling classes have always been about food and sex, that base desires continually rule humanity. The movie has little else to offer aside from such refreshing spritzes, but the lesson resounds regardless. Her warm water brings the carp near, draws the birds in from overhead, sweetens the sweets. Imamura, hinting at such truths all along in his other films, finally gushes with the truth: woman is goddess, is bounty, is eternal, replenishing the earth where it might otherwise shrivel and die.

beta pays his landlady

Assumer Guide on Jandek, Air, Gruff Rhys, and the Eternals

Assumer Guide on Gui Boratto, Adult., RTX, and Slim Thug

Palace Brothers - There is No-One What Will Take Care of You

Bonnie "Prince" Billy - The Letting Go

Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Panda Bear - "Bros" single review
(making horny Tian Tian panda bear joke)

Dungen - "Gör Det Nu" single review
(making global warming joke)

Valet - "Blood is Clean" single review
(making a touched by the babysitter joke)

bxbw

You weren't invited, but then again, neither was I.

Idolator's SXSW Outlaw Field Reports:

SXSW Report 1
SXSW Report 2
SXSW Report 3
SXSW Report 4
SXSW Report 5
SXSW Report 6
SXSW Report 7

I did buy you a stuffed jackalope though.

bxbw

Before I know it, I will be down in Texas for SXSW. It will be curious to return as a tourist to my old haunts. No doubt I will be daytripping down to partake in delicacies such as brisket on a saltine. Apparently some bands are playing as well.

beta commedia

My Philosophy 3101 fails me now as I search in vain for who noted that laughter signifies the death of an emotion. And I'm not sure what's so funny about a job that places me outside of a comedy club every night for the past week, assembling a script for a slew of unknown comics talking about such staples as how white people walk, masturbating in the shower, taking a dump, Bar Mitzvahs, O.J., vaginas, beating children, smoking weed, fat chicks. The halls here are lined with photos of the famous ones: Chappelle, Seinfeld, Lewis Black, Sarah Silverman. Me, I get to meet that one guy who appeared on Seinfeld, selling Jerry a van, despite protests that Jerry's "not a van guy." He then digs a hole in Central Park and cries in it. Such is comedy.

Making people laugh is a grim task, buoying the drunken masses in the face of senseless life. When uncomfortable, a kneejerk reaction to fend off disquiet, social awkwardness, the ever-encroaching silence, is to make 'em laugh. Tonight, watching Lewis Black, I realize that while topics rarely change (bodily functions, the President), what sets the brilliant ones apart is tone, timing. Certain words get emphasis, jokes are spaced to resound through the faux-smoke of the comedy club setting for greatest effect, Black's voice --smoky as brisket-- is his instrument.

During the jazz age, music and comedy hewed closer together. Not sure what the wedge was between the two crafts, perhaps music's tackling of serious topics, emo howls, and not seeing what was side-splitting about such cry-baby shit. Listening to a late-period Joe Tex record the other day, he reminds me less of James Brown, more of Redd Foxx, but both were on the chitlin circuit. Musicians and comedians performed in the same clubs; emphasised the shared craft of ostinatos and improvisation on a familiar themes/ topics; smoked and shot similar substances. Aside from rare events like David Cross opening for the Strokes or this upcoming SXSW clusterfuck, these twains rarely tangle now, despite a mutual appreciation of swapped discs on tour buses. The show's writer likes it that way. He tells me of opening up for the Charlie Daniels Band in the deep south. Nothing goes over better than a Jew from Jew York.

Speaking of Jews, I finally found a copy of Lenny Bruce's How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, a book I hadn't seen in ages. In high school, I bought some tee shirt with Lenny's visage on it, spewing a stream of asterisk-denoted filth and for whatever reason, felt a sympathy for the man. Aside from routines like "How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties" ("That Bojangles, CHRIST, could he tapdance!") or a junkie movie producer who greenlights a project about the well-adjusted narcotics user and his family, I know little about Lenny's material, consumed instead with the biography that shades his humor, that anticipates certain doom, that suicidal dance through moral minefields (Christ, could Lenny tapdance) that finally caught up with him. At a Sonic Youth in-store, I had the band sign the shirt, effectively ruining said garment.

Every comic that walks in here has to be "on," and it must exact a great psychic toll to always have a response. At least it feels that way until someone stumbles in on the verge of tears, having just heard that a comic friend of hers committed suicide. We scramble to google this unknown name, realize we recognize the face. At least until a bullet was put through it in selfish despair. No matter how we want to halt the whole procession, to mourn, we're laughing a few hours later about a 12-foot Animatronic Jesus and buttfucking, our diaphragms clenched. And so passes another emotion.

beta is a mixtape (side 2)

I made two mixtapes recently, both concerned with jazz music. One was for a friend who knows little of the genre but wished to learn. Knowing that her inclination is towards indie-rock, I picked hummable selections (Thelonious Monk's "In Walked Bud"; Miles's "Freddie Freeloader"; Mingus's "Hora Decubitus"), a few interpretations of "Everything Happens to Me" and "Come Rain or Come Shine," and the sweetest song on an otherwise oddly-angled 'out' album, Eric Dolphy's "Something Sweet, Something Tender." Of course, the honoree accuses me of 'dumbing it down' for her.

The second mixtape was in response to a discussion with Mark Richardson, stemming from his recent Resonant Frequency column about "difficult" music and the rewards it can provide over the course of a lifetime. We bandy about some similar records, from John Coltrane's OM to Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica. I wonder what he thinks of other notoriously difficult listens, such as Royal Trux's Cerebus-headed junkie mess, Twin Infinitives, the Butthole Surfers' Hairway to Steven or Cecil Taylor's bustling, bristling Unit Structures.

To my shock, he admits a blindspot for the music of Taylor, saying that his taste in jazz had been in a holding pattern of sorts: Coltrane, Ayler, Jarrett, Bill Evans. Having spent more than a decade chipping away at such alien monoliths of Taylor, especially Structures and Conquistador!, I seek to remedy that with a mix of my favorite "New Thing" stuff on Blue Note: Taylor, Lee Morgan's shimmering Search for the New Land; Grachan Moncur's tilted and anxious Some Other Stuff; Tony Williams's assured mature debut Life Time, Jackie McLean's suspended Destination Out!; Bobby Hutcherson's woozy and drunken Dialogue.

And yet, the first CD of songs is the more arduous to assemble. All of my listening life, I've flown towards the abstract and obtuse; to compile something focused on songcraft is far more difficult for me. The first jazz CD I ever heard was Coltrane's OM. Mark commented in his column that he still hasn't gotten his head around it, and despite having it on the shelf for more than a decade, I can't say I've figured it out myself. My subsequent reaction hasn't grown far beyond my initial one, hearing that morass of voices, moans, bells, soul cries, and thinking, "This is Jazz?!?"

How did I learn to appreciate such difficult listening? What allowed me to bypass my gag reflex and choke it down for digestion and appreciation? there's no way I would've 'gotten' Trout Mask Replica the first two dozen times, no matter how many joints we smoked, yet there was always something to hook me, to draw me back. Looking back nearly 15 years now, it took me forever to figure out just what that gateway was. It vilifies me to concur now with Frank Zappa's question as to whether or not humor belongs in music, yet being able to laugh along with this audacious, unbearable, teeth-gnashing noise no doubt sprung me. It was worth suffering the pink fish head with the shuttlecock top hat cover of TMR knowing that at some point I would get to:
"Fast'n' Bulbous!"
"That's right, the Mascara Snake! Fast'n'bulbous."
"Bulbous also tapered."
"Right, but you've got to wait till..." cryptic still, ultimately unknowable, but fun to try and recite when the dialogue came around. And what's more knee-slapping than the serious groans of OM, the loosed howls, and the line about clarified butter? I still get the rat creeps from that Royal Trux album, and there's nothing inherently funny about an ocean of black bile and junk-sick, but I found the vomit sounds and stiff drum programming to be somewhat non-serious. The Butthole Surfers were noxious, fucked sounding, yet I would make the loogie-spitting sound on Psychic, Powerless, Another Man's Sac's "Lady Sniff" or the dialogue that opens "Sweatloaf." And it was impossible not to crack up at the creepy little boy voice that would crop up on Hairway and squeal "Oh Daddy, don't touch my little peeeeeenis."

beta is a mixtape (side 1)

By my count, I lost at least half-dozen editors last year. They all exacted a great toll (such as the firing of Chuck Eddy) but none was as devestating as the leaving of my third editor (and second editor of that calendar year) at City Pages, Lindsey Thomas. Which may sound odd to say, since I never met her and she was only my editor but for a few months before she moved to New York with her boyfriend, writer Keith Harris. It was his abdication that really affected me, as the move meant that he had hung it all up to attend law school here.

Harris (who I think I briefly met once) was a writer who simultaneously thrilled me with his clarity, wit, and insight and made me despair for the exact same reasons. Why would I even attempt to write about, say, Sleater-Kinney or Lil Wayne when Harris could bazooka me out of the pond? To have a mind like that arrive at the endgame of criticism was a clarion call of sorts, though it's nice to have a flash of him appear every once in awhile, as in this recent piece on Rob Sheffield's Love is a Mixtape.

I haven't gotten to read the Mixtape book yet, but look forward to such writing about music that connects to time/ space, to a listening that has emotional levity at its root. It's what I hope to accomplish with the paper I will be presenting at EMP this year in Seattle, about how overhearing a song in a Brooklyn bar conjures decade-old listening with my best friend from high school in San Antonio. And as I sit and listen to that song spin again, admiring how the turntable moves clockwise yet the spiral scratch moves counterclockwise, in the direction of the unconscious, I come to realize that my father and his best friend listened to the exact same song some thirty years previous...

mud flap beta

Assumer Guide about monkeys, bugs, bears, and mud flap mammas

The Charlie Louvin Baseball Fantasy Camp

Love TVP, love remixes, love Black Dice, detest this

my bluebeta nights

As I explained to someone recently, my days are being spent on My Blueberry Nights, my nights with a girl that baked me a blueberry cobbler. Together, we watch Wong Kar Wai's simultaneously opulent and constrained In the Mood for Love, swooning at the wallpaper hues, the purl of cigarette smoke, the mirror shots, Maggie Cheung's high-neck collars, Nat King Cole's eee-nun-cee-a-ted Portuguese.

There is constant traffic of people desperate to work on the film, to work with the man. Surely the list of stars is testament to that (Jude Law, Rachel Weisz, Ed Harris, Chan Marshall), as is the number of film students who are wide-eyed as they take out the man's office trash. One particularly jittery kid shows up, begging to work with Kar Wai. Such zealotry is a problem though, as recent production notes for the re-shoots recently wound up online. I guess it puts the kibosh on me starting a new blog wherein I scan the office's lunch order for Grand Sichuan and then post them online.

At dinner last night, I meet a fellow whose girlfriend basically runs Janus/ Criterion. How that two-faced Roman deity altered my life down in central Texas, with videos of Bergman, Kurosawa, Truffaut, Fellini expanding my perceptions. I recount going to my college job fair and swooning upon gazing on that stone visage hanging from one booth. How crestfallen I was to learn that it's also an investment banking firm.

Our dinner guest also tells me that Criterion tends to temper access to film fanatics. If certain persons let show their fandom, they never gain admittance. Having just received a newsletter announcing a two-disc version of Carol Reed's The Third Man, two of Jules Dassin's pre-blacklist movies (The Naked City and Brute Force) not to mention Jean-Pierre Melville's chilly and gray-blue Army of Shadows, it's all I can do to play it cool.

beta's mind is enlarged

I met Dennis Hopper last night, as part of a lecture series at NYU. When I mention a project I'm working on that I need to interview him for, his eyes widen and shine. For a man as renowned for madness, for willful trepanning his cerebellum with chemical "combo plates," his memory is surprisingly lucid, expansive.

Discourse on the night ranges:

• James Dean (they worked together on Giant and he recounts how Dean took a piss before 200 people so he wouldn't be so nervous in his scene with Elizabeth Taylor)
• Andy Warhol (he bought one of the first Campbell soup cans and a visit to Hopper's pop playground pad out in LA blew Warhol's mind much like how a visit to the Factory blew Hopper's mind)
• Dean Stockwell (the boy with green hair who wrote a screenplay to accompany Neil Young's After the Goldrush)
• Rod Serling (from his work on The Twilight Zone)
• Miles Davis (on the displaced junkie jazz scene that hung in LA and how if Miles hadn't turned his back on the crowd, jazz might still be America's dominant art form)
• Marcel Duchamp (he tells of a displaced Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Man Ray hanging out in Hollywood)
• David Lynch (he is the real deal, the quintessential scout leader)
• Bruce Conner (who bursts into tears when Hopper offered him a deal with Universal to make his films, crying ""What do you think I am?!" before storming out. Apparently Conner is in the hospital right now and very ill)

He talks about how stuntmen provided him with his education of physicality, as did Dean and his ability to project with his body. He doesn't dig Godard's movies but realized how the man enlarged his mind. In the studio system, "they built Europe on the lot. (Post-Godard) the world was a soundstage." Duchamp was revelatory, telling him in 1963 about the artist of the future, a person who will "just point his finger and say, 'it's art' and it'll be art." If only Rrose Selavie coulda watched some YouTube. If only The Last Movie could've been shot on digital, he now laments, perhaps to take its rightful place alongside Lynch's Inland Empire and Anthony Hopkins's forthcoming Slipstream.

***

Explosions in the Sky - The Flood That Was Remarkably Similar to the One that Hit Spiderland in 1991

Matt Valentine & Erika Elder were Too High To Reply to My Questions feature

VA HEAVYbreathing compilations of Hot Air

The Psychic Paramount Shouldn't Read The Book of Law whilst enrolled in the School of Rock