jane b.

Interviewing Jane Birkin tomorrow morning. As one might imagine, I'm really looking forward to it, even if I can't find a translation for "Mon Amour Baiser" and its list of twenty-one kisses, or for "Help Camionneur!" which --according to A Fistful of Gitanes-- is "about a female hitchhiker with fantasies of being fucked by a heavyweight trucker in his refrigerated lorry."

print bedia

In the August issue of SPIN, I contributed a few entries to their feature, "100 Greatest Bands You've (Probably) Never Heard." While I wasn't able to place acts like Sinamon, Dettinger, Ludus, or Gino Soccio, I did write about two favorites from South Texas and my favorite femme-noise band.

BAND NAME: Knife in the Water
Named for Roman Polanski’s debut film, this Austin band actually hewed closer to the Coen Brothers’ dark vision circa Blood Simple. Based around the haunted boy-girl harmonizing of guitarist Aaron Blount and organist Laura Krause, Knife brought a cinematic scope to their murder balladry in the late 90s, touching on everything from pill-popping to dead trannies. But even with 2003 reissues featuring testimonials from the Trail of Dead and Silver Jews’ David Berman, they fell on deaf ears.
WHOSE CAREER THEY COULD HAVE HAD: Low


BAND NAME: Big Drag
A trio from San Antonio who embodied neighboring Austin’s slacker ethos to a fault, the band melded the Jesus and Mary Chain’s fuzz and the Ramones’ three chords to sunny surf pop to create three-minute koans in the early 90s. Making believers of Yo La Tengo when they rolled through town, YLT appropriated Big Drag’s cover of the Beach Boys’ “Little Honda” (right down to the one-note guitar solo) for their own I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One.
WHOSE CAREER THEY COULD HAVE HAD: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club


BAND NAME: Ut
New York no-wave scenesters who had far more success when they packed up and moved to England in the 80s. The trio of Nina Canal, Sally Young and Jacqui Ham raised an unholy din not unlike other female groups like the Slits and the Raincoats until breaking up in the late 80s. In Gut’s House and the Steve Albini-recorded Griller remain their watermarks and if anything, Ut helped mind the gap until the Riot Grrrl movement taught a new generation of girls to rage.
WHOSE CAREER THEY COULD HAVE HAD: Sleater-Kinney

DJing tonight at Stanton Public

Tonight, I'm filling in for my friend Gerald (Other Music) at Stanton Public in the LES, which should be fun. And free. And crispy cool. And featuring a pretty sweet subwoofer to give it all some boom. I myself am a fan of cask beers and drinking Dogfish Head on tap. Though last time there, they were showing American Psycho (in black and white no less!). Kinda hard to play 80s-tinged dancing tracks knowing that up above his head, Christian Bale is espousing the virtues of Huey Lewis and the News.

r.i.p. jim dickinson

Generally, I distance myself from my early internet writings (especially for Pitchfork with their "go steal the record off of Soulseek and review it for us for free" editorial advisement, resulting in poorly-edited biweekly 800 word heavily-padded snarkfests), but I'll always have a place in my heart for the piece I wrote about James Luther Dickinson's Dixie Fried from back in 2002. Rest in peace, big papi.

animal collective after-party

BTDubya, on Saturday night I'll be DJing a stack o' sweet tracks for the Animal Collective After-Party at The Bell House starting at 10:30 or so. Later on, the AC crew themselves will hop on for a bit of round robin action. Alas, my guest list is closed but it's only $5 for entry (free with yer ticket stubs) so don't miss out.

idjut boys (and dimitri from paris) interview version 2

Part Two of my Idjuts interview, stemming from my Skype chat with them and Dimitri From Paris that ran as "Paradise Garage Regained" in the Voice a minute ago.

When’s the last time you were all in New York City?

Conrad: That would be last World Cup finals.

Dimitri From Paris: We were together.

Dan: It was great. We finished the day with some French people and Alex from Tokyo, in a little Italian restaurant. It was fairly amicable. There was a fair amount of liquor drunk and music poorly put together.

When you think about NYC at the time, as opposed to London and Paris, what separated it musically? Why did disco happen here rather than in another urban center?

DfP: As far as I’m concerned, my whole musical influences started from New York. I was a fan of all the dance music coming out of there when I was 17. I always lived in Paris, that was in the early 80s, where I started noticing that all the music I was liking was produced by some New York guys. The first time I went here was in 1986, I was already collecting music and Djing in ’82-’83—so I was just hoping I would go there and see how it was. It did play a very strong part with mythical clubs and mythical producers. I didn’t go to Paradise Garage, the one I would’ve like, as it closed down sadly a month before I first went to New York. The rest are legends I read about. But I experienced Better Days, the Palladium, Area. So the first time I went to clubs in New York, I realized just from the technical point of view, it was just another world. It actually sounded good, people were there for the music, they were dancing, there was a whole different vibe. It made sense with the music coming out of there. It did live up to the New York of my mind. I met Arthur Baker, Shep Pettibone popped in, The Latin Rascals. For me, I was a kid in a candy store. There was a real energy you could feel.

Idjuts, you had a chance to see Larry Levan in the early 90s.

C: Same thing as Dimitri, I guess, digging a lot of music of that era in the 80s and then years later finding out more about it. We never went to any of the clubs. The music that was popular in the clubs there that crossed over here, things were happening even though the clubs were very different. The gay scene of New York was integral in that. In a similar way to Dimitri, in the music we played and the music we make that aesthetic, New York was an influence on that and the obvious ccharacters from that. We’ve seen Francois K. play years ago in London. That was mind-blowing, seeing someone with a reel-to-reel. We went “Wow,” that’s a different way to DJ.

D: Maybe that the ethos of this music, it being drawn from many different sources and put into a melting pot, I think that’s what’s lasted from then till now anyway, the fact that ---even though I’ve never been to the Garage—it wasn’t the pounding kickdrum all night, the music would be varied and go different places. We were into Harvey and his parties and musically they were like that. We got to see Kenny Carpenter and Tony ____ when they came to London. That’s how I got New York from the DJs. The freeness in the music if anything else really.

So many ethnicities and minority parties come together. Maybe New York could foster it where other places didn’t.

DfP: I don’t really know what was so special about New York and why we were so influenced by it. We didn’t know anything about the city, we were only getting the music. Dan mentioned Francois Kevorkian. On record labels I was reading his name and every time I listened to his production I went “Wow, this guy is amazing.” And more than anyone else I would read his name. I had no idea who this guy was other than he had a French sounding name. I didn’t know he was a DJ. There was no information we could really get. It was primarily the music that made us like New York rather than New York made us like the music. It’s a big difference from how things evolved in clubs. Clubs became more of a place to party rather than a place to listen to music. I guess the music was of a quality that really appealed to us. It was diverse and creative, there was a lot of creative things. How those guys were DJing was like no one else we heard before. Same goes for me when I first heard Francois, and he still DJs like no one else I know. And he’s nearly 60 years old! Primarily, it’s the music.

How hard was it to come across these records? Before the internet and finding everything.

C: (Tittering) We ended up in a garage in San Francisco that was owned by a record rack. We spent two days in there amid piles of records.

D: Mid-90s. We have been to secondhand shops in London. Traveling around is a good way to consume music. You find different stuff in different places and that’s always been a winner.

C: The music that was popular in New York was bought, imported, it was all here secondhand, lots of it. Unfortunately, or fortunately, as the case may be, it seems to be endless.

DfP: I agree on this.

C: You’d know, man. It’s easier now, man.

DfP: There’s eBay now. A lot of people just got into selling records because it was a lucrative business. There are good and bad things about the internet. Traveling was a huge chance for us to buy records. Wherever we were, or if there was a thrift store. I would wake up early in the morning just to go to record stores. We are really record freaks. It was just vocal exchanges of information. The first time we met, we just chatted about record “Do you know this? Do you know that?” And I went back home with like ten new songs I didn’t know. And then you start searching for that. People who thought alike would meet eventually and exchange what we know. And that’s how the information circulated.

Disco and dance music, it’s not like there’s this centralized knowledge or this canon. You have to go out, you have to see DJs play this record. Did any tracks surprise you when Dimitri handed you the masters?

D: It goes without saying, Dimitri has always been a source of great music. I didn’t know a couple of tracks. What was fun about it was that there were tracks we'd hammered, played lots over the years. It was nice to be asked to do it. Obviously, a lot of that music was dear to me. Wuf Ticket “The Key,” it’s difficult not to take that when you travel to DJ. There’s great tracks all over.

C: Serious Intention's “You Don’t Know,” I’ve worn out two copies of that record. The Rah Band we didn’t know.

D: We were Rah Band virgins.

DfP: That’s a good example. I owed it to this other DJ, P Wax. I used to hate that song. I really didn’t like it and then he started playing it and I went “What the hell is that?” I wound up liking something that I used to hate. That’s the beauty of remixes. That’s also why I put Wham! in there because everyone goes “it’s impossible, they cannot be good.” Just open your ears and listen for yourself. When some guy gets inspired by what he finds on the master tapes, you can just make magic. Rah Band and Wham are great examples of how you can turn cheesy pop songs into something that is really ground-breaking.

Why did you pick Dan and Conrad?

DfP: I did this compilation and while I love dub, I don’t play this as much as they would do it. I play clubs that are more “Saturday night” and I felt they did it much better than me. I knew from the history we had together that they would be into some of those tracks. I just asked them and it just happened. We had discussed it in a club in Japan kind of casually. Like Idjut Boys said, Serious Intention and Wuf Ticket indeed. If you do that, you cannot bypass those tracks. It is impossible.

Let’s talk about dub reggae and how it got infused with New York disco and the resultant odd mutation, those effects made to bear on this music.

C: Yeeeeah. We had a track we had done for something. Yesterday we listened to it without all the effects. We can really overdo it, and often do. It’s the element of space… and you confuse many different kinds and juxtapose sounds and genres together, and when it’s fed through delay and reverb, and it freaks the music out. And we like the freak, to be honest. I guess that’s why it stays.

DfP: We get some echo and feedback on this and it’s perfect.

D: Sometimes a man can turn too many knobs. Don’t play with your knobs too much. When you first encounter that kind of music, be it reggae or electronic synthesizer music, dub music, or the music here, when I first heard that in the club, sonically it had so much more resonance than some of the other stuff that was played beside it, simply because of the space the effects put into it, a drama accentuating various points on the record. Obviously, someone who is the master of that and as a DJ is François, if you want to reference how to do that, and he’s done that on all manners of music, not just on this compilation. He’s done it for rock bands and a lot of it. Obviously, since we’ve known Dimitri as well, a lot of his productions apply that. He does great edits and manages to do it but not do it excessively.

DfP: I would like to add about Francois… He’s been playing at Cielo every Monday. Every time I go to new York, I make a point to go there and sit down to listen to him. even if he plays music I don’t like, the way he plays it is striking. It’s like I’m getting a lecture in music from him. I love it. He’s like those old African tribal guys, who passes the history on to the younger kids orally. He’s one of those guys.

So how did you guys meet?

DfP: Paris is Burning. It was the second Respect party, in 1997. Respect did the first one with some annoying kids called Daft Punk and I was asked to do the second one. I think Daft Punk booked Maurizio. My choice was Idjut Boys, as I loved their U-Star label. It’s in Japan that people played them the most. They had that dub sound that I loved and I never heard anyone do it like this before apart form the original guys. They came to play Respect and we talked shop for hours and that was it.

You guys want to talk about the live mix?

C: Pretty much. We got BBE to hire a Pioneer mixer and two CDJs. To be honest it was interesting as we don’t play off CD, so it was a bit of a learning curve. We just wanted it to sound like playing records in a club. We did it at night in our studio and turned the lights down and had a few drinks and just went about it as if we were playing these records out. To be honest, that seemed the most appropriate thing to do rather than make it tight.

D: We played with Dimitri in LA a few years ago. We had our usual 15 bags of records. Dimitri shows up and is --if you didn’t already know— a fierce record collector and says “I only play CDs now” and proceeded to play seamlessly a load of disco to a big room. It’s only taken about another five years for us to get on the CD revolution. We still play lots of vinyl. A lot of places we go now, more clubs are geared towards CDs now. It’s easier than breaking your back toting records.

DfP: I wanted to add something about the mix. I was happy that they did it. I know I’m a little bit more anal and would’ve spent hours taking the life out of it making it perfect. They made it exciting and it goes together with the way those records were made back then. You had to do the FX as the tracks would go. That’s on the records we hear today because of that vibe and they replicated that vibe on the mix.

Final thoughts?

DfP: The whole club scene hasn’t been about music and hasn’t been in awhile. I think these are historical pieces that were only available as B-sides of vinyl 12”s. They’re not so easy to find but they’re not the most obscure either. If you are just a music lover, you’ve probably heard such things before. This music is quite influential now, like the Norwegian guys and snippets in the music of Metro Area and Justice and the new French punk-electro scene. I felt it was the right moment to show up with these and say “Listen to this.” Music is always repeating itself, but sometimes you don’t now what it is repeating unless you are a proper nerd. It’s something that non-nerds can enjoy.

idjut boys interview version 1

2009 has been a fairly resplendent and wondrous year. Somewhere in my Top 100 greatest moments of the year thus far is the fact that I was able to conduct two interviews with the rather reclusive Idjut Boys. Dan Tyler and Conrad McDonnell have been ignoring the lines between disco, psychedelia, house, jazz fusion, balearic, Italo, dub, techno and whatever else you got for well over a decade now. This year might be something of a watershed for the Boys: they dropped their inspired collaboration with Norwegian producer Rune Lindbaek as Meanderthals, remixed the Dimitri From Paris early-80's edit set Nightdubbin' and to top it off, just dropped a bonkers new twelve, "Jammy Dodger." So here is my first interview with Dan and Conrad, conducted over email and answered in this sort of groupspeak for this feature.

First thing is some boring bio stuff: how you two met, what drew you to the other.

Idjut Boys: We met in Cambridge, mutual friends, going the same parties in peoples' houses, tonka events wherever they happened...moved to London, ended up at a later stage living together in a flat with our good buddy dickie P...weekends involved the going out ritual, filling the flat with people and listening to music whilst blitzkreiged...used to go to alot of the clubs and one off things ocurring at that time...enjoyed the ambience of the acid house as a relaxing pastime...heard and enjoyed Harvey play alot, got to understand the notion of everything having a place. Listened and dug out some of the music mixed by the likes of François and the other guys mixing in that era and realized that ...well bent is better than straight up, on most occasions..at that time there was great house music from everywhere, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Italy, here...disco, whatever being played. Not really any specific LP/12, just going out dancing to a varied soundtrack in various states.

What always strikes me with all the edits, remixes, and by Desire Lines most recently, is the massive sense of 3-D space inside everything, so I’m curious about creating such a sensation in all the tunes.

IB: Old habits..like using effects... random ocurrences, mixing live with a board,using outboard processing, rather than everything
automated...things happen live, for better or worse that we won't get programming.

Were you into rock music before turning onto disco and dance stuff? Was it a natural progression for you? Was liking disco a contrarian thing, in that punks weren’t supposed to like disco?

IB: It was a hard, strict growing up regime in both cases...once church going abated and balls dropped it was a natural progression to the mosh pit followed by the flowing mullet.

Judging by titles of the album with Quakerman and the like, it seemed like you were trying to make the UK house scene loosen up a bit at the time. Was it proscriptive and uptight in that way?

IB: Deeeeeep.

As the Frank Zappa question goes, does humor belong in music?

IB: Yes Sir Mr Zappa... We just like to precede being laughed at by laughing at ourselves first, seriousness comes too close to head arse fusion..the only plan ever in force is to get to do another record and avoid the job centre...obviously we want to be really hip and make piles of money and indulge in a mirage of warped fantasies whilst having rightfully claimed to have invented hip hop but that doesn't fit with the no-strategy walk.

Did you get to see older NY legends like Larry Levan and François K. when they would come over? Who remain your favorite edit makers?

IB: Harvey's always been great, Maurice Fulton, Thomas, Markey Mark, Chris Rhythm Doc, Gerry Rooney...heard Francois a few times, mindblowing in the right environment with a proper set up to manipulate..heard Larry at Moist only but it was great....you can't beat Francois for production, he's been involved in too many serious records and he's still standing with what seems like the same enthusiasm...Maurice is a great producer too, nobody sounds like him.

Rune talked about how records like “Jazz Fook” were big in Norway at the time and how crucial it was to that country’s subsequent “space-disco” sound. When you would DJ up there, were you at all surprised by how the scene had been influenced by your tracks?

IB: Wasn't aware of anything like that...being involved you're not really aware of that, it's nice of anyone says that was the case because there's been some great records from the people there..went over there alot and there were some great parties and some painful next days...they were already into stuff, Pal Strangefruit, Rune, Erot, Bjorn Torske, Ole Abstract..later we went over and played with Thomas, who played great music and met Terje..We obviously taught them nothing except the drink till you barf fitness regime..they are viking so it's a sport they took to with ease.

What was it about Rune’s productions made you decide to work on tracks with him, from “Laisn” to Meanderthals?

IB:We were friends for years, and he always had good music to be heard He was over and in our studio so we asked him to speak in Norske on "Laisn," to lend it that real soul, slow jam, drop your pants moment....Meanderthals happened cos we missed a flight and took refuge in his studio for the afternoon and hit the random button and he found a nice man, Joakim ready to sully his labels good name with further adventures in randomness involving a few more kind folk with instruments they were willing to play. We worked with Rune studio neighbours, Lenny and Jo for percussion, bass and guitar a couple of times at theirs and sent things back and forth, and we hung out with Per Martinsen for a day at Bugge Wuselltorf's lovely studio and recorded ourselves as an out of time percussion combo and his mate Anders on the Steinway.

What does he bring to the collaboration? Was it easy playing together? What was the process like?

IB: Rune opened the door to some great musicians in oslo..The process was most definitely random, involved much going back and forth...we went to the players with backing tracks and hung out and tried to remember to press the big red record button when something good was occurring...we then went way edited and demanded more where necessary.. setting out ideas would require some efficiency or organizational powers that were quickly acknowledged to be too challenging for the cast... it has a kinda live feel...we got what came out, we are maybe going to do a dub version of the lp because there is stuff lurking underneath that could be more club playable if undressed suitably and interfered with in the right places.

Rune mentioned Conrad having a bad bike accident right before work started on this. Can you recount that story?

IB: He was knocked off his bike. It hurt alot. He's better now.

So back to “obsessions”: what are some current ones?
Favorite comedian: George Bush III
Favorite Bohannon track: "Maybe You Can Dance"
Food you always like to eat in the studio: coffee and lamachan
YouTube clips that you like at the moment: what's YouTube ?

heep see (special summer reading edition)

David Byrne: Bicycle Diaries

A few years earlier I had been reminded that the former first lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos, was a habitué of discos during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. This would have been the era of Studio 54, Regines, Privilege and Le Palace (in Paris) and other velvet rope clubs. This was also, um, the era of martial law and heavy censorship in the Philippines. Was the lightness, effervescence, and headiness inherent in that music --and the drugs that went along with it—similar to the feeling one gets when one is in a powerful position?

Pierre Michon: Small Lives

I did not know that writing was so dark a continent, more enticing and disappointing than Africa, the writer a species more bent on getting lost than an explorer.

Cesare Pavese: The Moon and the Bonfires

Now I knew why every so often a girl was found strangled in a car on the highway, or in a room at the end of an ally. Maybe they, too, these people, would have liked to drop on the grass, to agree with the tree frogs, to be masters of a piece of earth the length of a woman, and really sleep without fear. Well, it was a big country, there was some of it or everyone. There were women, there was land, there was money. But nobody had enough, nobody stopped no matter how much he had, and the fields, even the vineyards, looked like public gardens, fake flower beds like those at railway stations, or else wilderness, burned-over land, mountains of slag…A day would come when just to touch something, to make himself known, a man would strangle a woman, shoot her in her sleep, crack her head open with a monkey wrench.

Lawrence Wechsler: Seeing is Forgetting the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin

You had no visual or audio input at all, other than what you might do yourself. You might begin to have some retinal replay or hear your own body, hear the electrical energy of your brain, the beat of your heart…There were all kinds of interesting things about being in there which we observed, but the most dramatic had to do with how the world appeared once you stepped out. After I’d sat in there for six hours, for instance, and then got up and walked back home down the same street I’d come in on, the trees were still trees, the street was still a street, and the houses were still houses, but the world did not look the same; it was very, very noticeably altered.

heep see (special summer reading edition)

José Donoso: The Obscene Bird of Night

"Boy was to grow up believing that things came into being as his eyes discovered them and died when he stopped looking at them, that they were nothing but the outer shell perceived by his eyes, that other forms of birth and death didn't exist, and, so much was this the case, that the most important among the words Boy would ever know were all those signifying origin and end. No whys, whens, outsides, insides, befores, afters; no arriving or leaving, no systems or generalizations. A bird crossing the sky at a certain hour was not a bird crossing the sky at a certain hour, it wasn't headed for other places because other places didn't exist; Boy must live in an enchanted present, in the limbo of accident, of the particular circumstance, in the isolation of the object and the moment without a key or a meaning that could subject him to a rule and, in subjecting him to it, cast him into the infinite void it was necessary for him to avoid."

Janet Malcolm: In the Freud Archives

"When I was little, I remember how astonished and interested I was in how easy it is to take life-- when you're driving a car, all you have to do is move the wheel a few inches to the left and you kill somebody and also die yourself-- and how difficult it is to keep alive someone who is sick. Building is interesting, because it's ultimately impossible, I suppose, but killing is boring. It's easy to see through something --to show how stupid it is, or how wrong-- but that doesn't take very long, and then you're finished."

Jean Renoir: Renoir, My Father

"What most struck outsiders at first meeting were his eyes and his hands. His eyes were light brown, bordering on amber; and they were sharp and penetrating. He would often point out a bird of prey on the horizon flying over the valley, or a ladybird climbing up a single blade in a tuft of grass. We, with our young eyes, had to look carefully, concentrate and examine everything closely, whereas he took in immediately everything that interested him, whether near or far...As for their expression, they had a look of tenderness mixed with irony, of merriment and sensuousness. They always seemed to be laughing, perceiving the odd side of things. But it was a gentle and loving laughter. Perhaps it also served as a mask. For Renoir was extremely shy about his feelings and never liked to give any sign of the emotion that overpowered him when he looked at flowers, women or clouds -- other men touch a thing or caress it."

John Williams: Stoner

"But he was not beyond love, he knew, and would never be. Beneath the numbness, the indifference, the removal, it was there, intense and steady; it had always been there. In his youth he had given it freely, without thought...He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive."

betealth

I haven't had health care in the 21st century. Instead, I have the God-given, American-brand freedom to practice alternative medicine techniques as I see fit, such as: only crossing busy New York City streets with the light, brushing my teeth three times a day, not letting my glasses slip off my face and break, and uh...never ever getting sick. It's my catastrophe/ dental/ eye package.

As I toil through yet another freelance gig that doesn't quite pay enough to sign up for the Freelancers' Union, one of the job's temporary perks is getting a constant cable feed. Meaning CNN for a daily fix of being filled with "O-motion" (that indescribable feeling of peace, well-being and sense of benevolent intelligence from above that stems from President Obama).

Between being inundated with updates about how his "universal health care" will be his Waterloo and/ or if Michael Jackson was killed by prescription pills (forget about any news about Iran, Honduras, North Korea, China, etc.), I've been seeing lots of commercials about how univer-- uh, "socialist" health care will take away MY rights. Thankfully, seeing the same commercial hundreds of times a day, I've finally been able to read the fine print.

Just being curious, I looked up the Patients United Now group behind the TV spots, finding out that they are in fact just a front for the Americans for Prosperity Foundation. (Turns out they share office space with the Independent Women's Forum, who have stood up for women by claiming that "the battered women's movement has outlived its useful beginnings." Or perhaps you recall them in a previous incarnation,Women for Judge (Clarence) Thomas, when they defended pubes on a Coke can for the sake of womankind.)

So when not defending women's rights, which somehow also has something to do with supporting free markets and a strong foreign policy, APF also fights for "my health care rights" by opposing clean air laws and cigarette taxes in Texas, Illinois, and D.C. And just last year, they again helped save me from health care and skin cancer with their campaign against Global Warming Alarmism. Why start worrying about my health now when we have more pressing matters for the future, like...the passing of HR 1503?

heep see (special silverdocs edition)

The September Issue
directed by R.J. Cutler

Made by the same folks that did The War Room, a shot of the interior of Vogue's offices as it gears up for their largest issue ever (a/k/a the September issue) feels more war-like than anything in the movie about James Carville. One person esteems Vogue to be more like a church, with main subject Anna Wintour the pope, "the most important woman in the United States." But strangely enough, the film's heart does not reside within this expressionless, sunglass-hidden cultural icon, but rather in her foil, Vogue's creative director Grace Coddington.

"You don't have to look perfect," Coddington assures the cameraman as she puts his beer belly body into a fashion spread at the end of the film, "It's enough that the models are perfect." She at one time was such perfection herself, modeling with the likes of Twiggy and making the swinging '60s London scene, before a car windshield put her on the other side of the camera.

Now fraught, aged, unglamorous, stressed-out, a powerful foil to that Prada-wearing devil, "a romantic left behind" as Grace puts it herself, Coddington might be the first such female figure on the big screen to be all of the above. And as the film makes evident, she's a total artist and genius as well.

No Impact Man
directed by Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein

A Gawker comment that appears in this film about Collin Beavan and his year-long experiment to leave absolutely "no impact" on the environment by not generating trash, riding in a car/ train/ elevator, and --six-months in-- not using electricity labels this man "a bourgeois fuck." And I can't say I disagree with that sentiment, as Beavan is one of the least-appealing characters of recent memory. Even though the film does inspire one to shop exclusively at farmers' markets with ones own canvas bags, staring at the smug-mug of this Fifth Avenue Co-op owner also makes one want to drive out to Wal-Mart in an SUV, throwing out Starbucks cups all along the way.

Act of God
dir. Jennifer Baichwal

Missed about half of this film, so I found myself adrift in impressionistic imagery of lightning storms. The film is about people randomly struck by lightning, and how they interpret it: as either the epitome of a random act or else its polar opposite, a determined act. Baichwal really plays with structure here, but to the point where it loses its grip on reality. There's also this immense leap into a digression about how the creative act itself is like a bolt from the blue. perhaps it doesn't quite fit, but the film ends in this uncanny duet between Paul Auster, reading a short story about a boy he saw struck dead by lightning when he was a child, and an incandescent guitar improvisation by Fred Frith.


Still Bill
directed by Damani Baker

From the outside, it seems almost impossible to fuck up a documentary about Bill Withers, especially when it opens with a pulse-raising montage of the man grooving through a series of live performances on Soul Train and other sound stages. And as a subject that probably doesn't quite get why he's getting the feature film treatment himself, he continually downplays his work with a knowing self-deprecation and wit.

Yet the film's pacing and editing runs contrary to the man's own powers. Emotionally-attuned but never maudlin, crafted but never rambling, direct and never aimless, Bill oeuvre has little in common with his documentary. He's burned out on the biz twenty minutes into the film. Chronology is abandoned midway through, amid a montage of live performances from the Bill Withers' songbook at Prospect Park, the concert strangely mute as old footage of him gets super-imposed. By film's end, we're suddenly back here.

It's fine enough to plunk the man into a backyard BBQ chat with Cornel West and Tavis Smiley, but it never quite moves beyond the novelty of its participants. We see Bill get teary-eyed over any number of things, from talking to a class of stutterers to watching his own daughter sing a song in his studio, but that sacrifice of cohesiveness for such moments still isn't quite Bill.

Bloody Mondays and Strawberry Pies
directed by Coco Schrijber

What does a dessert maker strumming Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" have to do with no-necked stock brokers, American Psycho, a Frenchman painting numbers, football hooligans, a guy lounging in the desert, a 101-year-old businessman, the woman who "doesn't like Mondays," a toothless guys selling newspapers on Wall Street, Danish teens, a female spy, and $40K wrist watches have in common? Uhhhh....despite the chicanery of editing that seemingly makes this into a meditation about "boredom," absolutely nothing.

Dancing With the Devil
directed by Jon Blair

You'd be forgiven for thinking you stumbled into yet another remake of Miami Vice at the start of this film about life in the favelas. Bombastic, brutish, with ludicrous "cop show" aesthetic choices that beggar belief. Both the muscle-bound cops and hideous drug dons of this film thank God for (fill in the blank). Well, God has alot to answer for with this one.

This is documentary porn at its most cruel. Let's get a close-up on this guy's ear, mangled by an attack dog. Now let's get a good look at his broken foot. How about this woman shot in the face? Let's hold that shot until everyone in the theater has to turn away. Now let's talk to this drug kingpin, making sure to pan down and sloooowly regard his mangled tree stump of a leg, looking like it's got shelf mushrooms growing all over the diseased skin.

But whatever we do, let's not pause to understand just how fundamentalism, religion, and capitalism helped to create this mess in the favelas. And let's be sure to only put a female in the film when it's time to show young woman dipping low to a hot favela funk track that goes "Just spread your legs/ Just squat." What ultimately wound up running through my mind while watching a pastor hand out food to these poor kids was if they were going to recycle those plastic cups or else continue to negatively impact the environment.

Treehouse 003

As seen in the New York Times!

Just don't be intimidated by the quote that Treehouse is for "serious technoheads" as --simply put-- it's party music for party people. And who better to elucidate that quality than our special guest, Alex From Tokyo. As always, it's upstairs at Frank's Cocktail Lounge. The needle drops and the disco ball starts spinning at 9pm and yours truly will be on by 10 (no doubt some of the records listed below will be in the gig bag). Hope to see you out!

heep see

Been buying up heaps of tunes while out on the road, so thought I'd laundry-list a few recent favorites:

Talking Heads: Speaking in Tongues LP (with the Rauschenberg art)
Voyage: Disco Around the World LP
Everly Brothers: Stories We Could Tell LP
Chilly: For Your Love LP
Keith Hudson: Steaming Jungle LP

Kikrokos: "Jungle DJ" (Spectacular Disco Mix by Jim Burgess)
John Tropea: "Livin' in the Jungle"
Beautiful Swimmers: "Swimmers Groove"
The Winners: "Get on Up and Do It/ Love is Free"
Hot Chocolate: "Every1's a Winner/ Put Your Love in Me"

Permanent Vacation feat. Kathy Diamond: "Tic Toc/ Zucker Hut"
Eletrik Dred: "Butter Up (Gimme Some Bread)"
Ann-Margret: "Love Rush"
The Bombers: "The Mexican/ Dance Dance Dance"
The Bombers: "(Everybody) Get Dancin'"

Sinnamon: "Thanks to You"
Susan Stevens "Boogie Walk"
PiL: "Memories"
Diskjokke: "Asa Nisi Masa"
Prins Thomas: "Mammut"

Barbara Roy: "Gotta See You Tonight"
Barbara Roy & Ecstasy, Passion & Pain: "If You Want Me"
Staple Singers: "Slippery People"
Rockers Revenge: "Walkin' on Sunshine"
Gary's Gang: "Keep On Dancin'"

washington, b.c.

The only time I had ever visited Washington, DC previously, it was for work, in the middle of the abject purgatory that was the previous regime. About the only thing I recall from then was how unsettling the Washington Monument was up close, how we had to walk past a crackhouse to get to our fancy boutique hotel, how a five-minute drive from the capital unveiled women in crusty Daisy Dukes, shriveled and toothless from too much Tina.

Not that Chocolate City has changed too much, but the entire place feels suffused with O-motion (def. that wondrous sensation of well-being that floods one's self when Obama's name gets mentioned in conversation or in a newspaper article) upon my return. This go-around, DC feels like a dream come true, to the point of it almost being ludicrous:

*Randomly run into Fugazi's Brendan Canty on a street corner, buzzed and about to go sing karaoke? Check.

*See Christo and Jeanne-Claude give documentary legend Albert Maysles a lifetime achievement award and hear Maysles talk about how in seeking to understand a person, you grow to love them? Check.

*Gardens in full bloom (and in full utilization) in every single front yard I stroll past? Check.

*Delirious amounts of Ethiopian food? Yep.

*Ridiculously great 12"s sitting in the dollar bin at Som Records? Untold amounts.

*Seeing R.J. Cutler's brilliant new documentary The September Issue that seemingly is about Anna Wintour and Vogue, yet trenchantly reveals instead the genius artistry of creative director Grace Coddington? Yes.

*Attend a block party with Trouble Funk dropping the bomb on my ass? You betcha.

dirty projectors interview

If you read the internets, you've no doubt already had the Dirty Projectors' new album, Bitte Orca, shoved down your throat. By which I mean, lovingly and deliciously shoved down your throat, as BO is a wondrous thing in 2009, something I never thought I'd admit for a work of theirs. In the past, DP mainman Dave Longstreth and his work struck me as too precious and precocious, over-thought and over-wrought. But within moments of "Cannibal Resource" I was converted. A metaphor excised from my Spin review perhaps put that transition best: "Like a pineapple, Longstreth’s prickly surface now belies the pop within: bright, tart, sweet, and gushing all at once." It helped that I spent plenty of time with the album down in the Caribbean. Anyhow, I had a chance to chat with Longstreth over a bowl of black rice as he mused about mis-translations, Coltrane's Meditations, Paper Rad, and Henry Rollins as mere mouthpiece for Greg Ginn's vision.

I moved to New York in 2005. I did finish my studies at Yale. I thought I was leaving for awhile because I hated it.

What did you hate about it?

I hated the attitude, I’m super into learning and stuff like that. Just the feeling of that at the school, is just kinda gross.

What does it emphasize instead?

Instead of a noble and clear pursuit of knowledge? The same shit that college anywhere is about, or academia. Specifically, I wanted to study painting and music together. You come up to a certain point where you can learn about the history and the technique, but you can’t really teach the thing itself.

It’s a giant metaphor.

Yeah, a giant metaphor. There’s this reverence for the way things were done that was just stiff and unnatural.

Do you study painting still?

I’m focused on music.

I think it’s funny your band name invokes this other medium and discipline.

Porn you mean.

Nonono. My girlfriend is a filmmaker and she goes “a dirty projector is my nemesis." Then there’s “DP” double penetration jokes too.

I didn’t think about that at the time.

What did it stem from?

I like the idea of it being an open phrase. I like the idea of a psychological projection, the idea of sharing or agreeing on a mutually blurred image. Also just the idea of this bloom of imagination that happens when things are translated poorly, mistranslated, um…which is something that I feel like is a generative principle in the music that I write.

Glitches and the like? I was thinking of this correspondence that takes part in Ulysses, where Bloom has this affair with a woman and the woman means to write “I do not like that word” but instead misspells it as “world.” It totally changes everything. It’s this amazing mistake.

Totally! What if she does mean ‘world’?

(mention getting a word from "Stillness is the Move" in the review wrong)

That’s my shit! I don’t know if you’re looking for it, but when it first occurred to me that one could try to re-imagine an album from memory (Rise Above) and I was thinking of Damaged, I was like…at first I was horrified of the idea but I went “That’s what I have to do.’ That was the most explicitly expository of a mode of dirty projection that I’ve done so far. The songs on this album that I wrote for the girls were coming from a similar place. Seeing if I could transpose a melody that I’ve written into this other instrument, if I could speak through them. That idea of taking one thing from one idiom and putting it in another.

Did you ever get feedback from Ginn or Rollins about Rise Above?

Rollins yes, but Ginn no. But to clarify, I'm completely uninterested in Rollins. Rollins is a figurehead; it’s Ginn’s vision. You know your shit, but it’s not about Rollins.

Ginn is the shredder visionary.

He was in some documentary recently, where they managed to interview him. And he was soooo stoney. He was on another plane. And it felt like this kind of…not to draw a Stephen Dedealus thing, but I would’ve loved to be there with him in that kind of moment, responding to it. Dead Oceans made an effort to get in touch with him, to get his approval, also from a pragmatic, copyright approach. He was just OUT. Not available. But when we played in Austin on the tour, I guess Rollins was doing “spoken word.”

AKA a stand-up routine.

AKA motivational speaking for dispossesed teenagers. Which is a mildly noble pursuit. The next day he’s in Waterloo just as my friend had pressed play on Rise Above. He was walking around, glancing up at the speakers amusedly. An interesting footnote is that apparently Rollins bought a whole bunch of Sun Ra and West African guitar music. Which I thought was hilarious.

“I suddenly need some Thomas Mapfumo…” But back to the girls and transposing your intent onto them, was there any correction on their part? Like, saying that a girl wouldn’t express something in such a way? As a man, I wonder if a woman would think like me?

No, I just wrote the songs. Haha. I was thinking about that, especially on “Two Doves.” It was really funny to write that.

That was even more of an originating idea for the album was the old truism that an indie rock band is only as good as its record collection. One thing that annoyed me about Rise Above in hindsight was how I had unwittingly played into that, pitting West African guitar music against Black Flag. It was a totally awesome thing I was thinking about, but I like the idea for the new album to be about taking the most blockbuster references. Basically carving my musical language into a bedrock of the most blockbuster references. Songs that are just unequivocally successful music, in terms of progeny that our culture has: Timbaland, Zeppelin, the Beatles. Music that it’s pointless to like or dislike and see if we could maintain that.

Bitte Orca is the German word for please and then the carnivorous whale. The song with that phrase, I feel like there was a meaning…the way it relates to the music is twofold: in the broad sense, there is something gentle and barbed in that combination of words. Something smooth and jagged. Sweet and sour. I love music like Coltrane in ’65, this kind of apex that is resolving apparent opposites, taking two things that are on opposite ends of a spectrum and showing them to be totally entwined. As Coltrane took the technical and the spiritual expression as totally one.

The end of his classic quartet or more with Rashied Ali and Alice Coltrane?

I was thinking of Meditations.

That's funny, as I always think of that particular record as having a true dichotomy between chaos and peace.

I guess in the past, I tried to do that with the music that I’ve written. Not only have it be on a level, but to have this corresponding idea frame, which I never really considered essential to the enjoyment of the music, but as another layer of it. With these songs, I tried to just ask less of the songs in the hope that they could be bigger.

You went through a lot of band members, did you not? Was it a personal thing or was it a difficulty in getting the vision properly transcribed?

Wanting to have it bend to the music. The way DP started was me writing the music because I write and I’ve always written music. It started as an art project. I didn’t think about it as a rock band or career, I just did it because I do it. It wasn’t until I was touring so much that it was time for me to simplify and codify this a little bit in January of ’07.

Was it hard to find the right personnel to carry it?

Yes and no. Our instincts were good. Looking back it feels very haphazard. It all made sense.

Was it pre-meditated to have a more feminine aspect to it?

I like music and art and literature for that matter that posits its own world. Wagner, William Blake, or Coltrane, or Ulysses, something that is an entire world. A balance of masculine and feminine. Kinda retarded but magazines ask artists to generate content for them so they don’t have to pay anyone. I ended up doing ten songs that fit the broadest and most inclusive aspects of “new jack swing.” The expressiveness of R&B to bear. Two things that appeal to me about that, that uniting of opposites and the masculine-feminine, rhythmic, melodic, bringing it all together. The way the band has formed totally makes sense.

What is startling about Bitte Orca is that the album has the feminine songs as the centerpiece.

This is the first album where I’m writing for this group of people, for Angel, Amber, Brian, me. The treatment of the girls as alternate embodiments of myself. The polyphony and hocketed stuff…That wasn’t a pre-ordained idea. I wanted it to be like a Beatles album, with everybody having their own tune. It’s just what felt natural (in terms of sequence). Which one is it? This one, it appeared in a certain form.

What about how the cover of Slaves’ Graves being re-iterated a second time?

Right! As I was writing the basic cassette versions of the melodies, I wanted that to be the cover, Amber and Angel enacting that emblem. I like the idea of revisiting an old idea in progressively greater detail..

When you read these spiritual tracts about going in a circle or what have you, there’s this sense of returning to the starting point, but one step up. A spiral more than a circle.

A cyclical idea of history. I love it. For sure.

What was the first African thing you got into?

There was that Eno essay about the migration of African musical something. He calls it something awesome, the transmigration of something. It starts with the Congo, gets into the slave trade, to the West Indies, down into Brazil, up into Spain. It’s this amazing historical map that he did. Just seeing how Fela was re-Africanizing James Brown just a few years after James Brown had gotten Africanized.

Or Ali Farka Touré hearing the blues and folding that back in, to where western ears hear him as John Lee Hooker…

I can see where that’s coming from. Oh! Have you heard Group Doueh? That to me is that moment!

(Play him the new Sublime Frequencies release from Group Bombino and then quote his quote from The Believer about "contextualizing the international music/ American 'independent' music relationship (not just sanitation, domestication, and theft, but proper deconstruction, abstraction, and creative misreading)
I like that on SF stuff, you can hear rock’n’roll becoming Thai pop but mishearing it and vice versa.

Yeah, I can’t remember the exact context in writing that but yeah, it’s an awesome time to be making music, just to be involved in the whole thing. The trading of ideas and stuff like that is…I feel like it is a different model than the Graceland love and theft way. I feel like it’s a different sort of paradigm.

Do you get to engage with people outside of indie rock, outside of the states?

We might play some shows with Ali Farka Touré’s son, which would be soo cool.

I’m one of those people that engages with the rhythm. I love to engage with language and trying to, particularly with poetry, examine from all possible angles, which can be a source of playfulness or airlessness. Earlier albums and earlier lyrics that I’ve written, I let that reign, this interest in language as a slippery thing. Less so with this album. I just wanted to be more direct. To me a way of getting at that was being less conscious of the things that we’re all singing. Just letting them. Not not editing exactly, but just doing it.

Can you tell me a bit about the lyrics for "Temecula Sunrise"?

This came out of this discussion I had with James about these Paper Rad kids camping out in these warehouses in Providence, these disused artifacts of this different social organization. We were thinking of these miles and miles of new construction subdivisions that blanket the landscape outside of every city in the US. On tour, you’re driving through them, before and after the city, these new construction zones. After the social impetus that makes these things pass, we were imagining what these buildings would be used for. We had these ecstatic artist kids just painting crazy murals and making funny Utopian art in a new construction home in Temecula, California.

beta's sweet dreams

For all of the Japanese readers of Beta Blog, a head's up: I just received a parcel from the fine people at Sweet Dreams Press. Included in the package is not only a delicate little book on Ida (including many swell pictures of one-time Graham Ave. record pusher Miggy Littleton) but also a copy of their latest issue (#4), which features a Japanese translation of my interview with Alan Bishop about "world music" (originally in The Believer's 2008 music issue).

black beta

I was stoked to play a few tunes with my DJ partner Anna for the Black Dice/ Awesome Color/ Soft Circle show last night at the Bowery Ballroom. Over the years, I've no doubt seen Black Dice more than any other band in NYC, and every encounter only convinces me that they are one of the heaviest bands out there today, at once hardcore punk and electronic and noise and avant-garde yet not belonging anywhere. And once Danny Perez's insane video projections are added to the mix, it's an assault on all eyes and ears that no one is close to topping. But my admiration of the group might already be evident. I even jotted down my setlist (which I never ever do elsewhere), which veered from New Age to R&B to post-punk in a few moves:

Tibetan Bells/ Henry Wolff and Nancy Hennings: "Wrathful Deity"
Children's Hospital: "Left Handed"
Francis Bebey: "Binta Madiallo"
Spiritual Singers: "African People"
Studio: "Life's a Beach" (Todd Terje's Beach House Mix) at about 38 rpm
Tom Tom Club: "Spooks"
Black Cock: "Love Finger" also at about 38 rpm
Aaliyah: "One in a Million"

(Anna's set and Soft Circle's set)

Ut: "Mosquito Boticelli"
Honey Bane: "Guilty" (JD Twitch re-edit)
Grace Jones: "Private Life"
Jackie Mittoo: "Ayatollah" (real world relevance!)
Funkadelic: "Be What You Is"
The Residents: "Diskomo"

(and then Awesome Color, Anna's second set, and Black Dice)

stephen o'malley interview

For the Sunn O))) listening session from a month or so back, I conducted interviews with both Sunn's Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley. I had met Anderson a few times randomly, but this was my first chance to engage in a dialogue with O'Malley. Quiet, focused, yet open, O'Malley and I chatted abit about his work with artist Banks Violette, my recent obsession with Robert Irwin and perception, and about the Richard Serra painting that adorns the cover of their latest album. Below are a few choice quotes from our chat:

The direction we decided to do before we started anything is to finally work with acoustic instrumentation, to bring that to the table. And then we fleshed it out. Specifically, the integration of acoustic instruments, we wanted it to be a real integration, not just an additional element. It had to be musically relevant. Part of the inspiration of that came from French composers who work in a ‘spectralist’ style. Their style of composition is based on computer analysis of timbre. They’ll work backwards. A lot of it sounds electronic, but it’s not so simple as that. Hallucinatory, like Messiaen. Spectral composers are scientific. That’s all about perception. It’s not illusion. Illusion is the expectation of how an instrument should sound.

It’s extremely focused on sensorial aspects. I like such extreme experiences like isolation chambers. It allows you to re-examine your own work, see flaws, see other details. Of all the records I’ve made, this is one that continually is opening up with more listening.
...
It’s like family, this band. The people that get involved, you get to be really close. But it’s not the other experience I had with bands, where it gets to be bad. You’re not in the band to be friends. It’s been one of the main points working with people. It’s that friendship. It’s a pretty tremendous experience playing the music live so you have to be trustful and confident.
...
It’s spanning generations now with this record. Those guys are old-timers, in their 70s. Dempster has more energy than everyone else. He’s been doing yoga 50 years now. Meanwhile Priester is out in the parking lot. I don’t smoke anymore actually. But they’re deep listeners. They’ve been making experimental free music since the 60s. In some ways, it’s cool to feel you are part of this longer tradition by having these guys involved. We’re the generation doing it now.
...
I hope people who get into Sunn get into other stuff, going backward through the catalogs, references, like I do with music. Real music fans are always doing that, the quest to find the ultimate records, it’s the exploration. That’s the joy of music. If we can turn some kid on at the Hot Topic...fuck. I bought Darkthrone at the mall in Seattle. To be able to do that again, that’s the theory. Hot Topic, it’s fucking hilarious. But teenagers are into it.
...
This record really goes into the musicality of it though. I used to think Sunn was more about repetition in the style of raga perhaps, then cycles. But I found recently that it seems more cyclic than ever, a continual tone, a slow build, a continual piece more than repetition. The focus on the actual musicality has become much more tuned in. musical aspects have been…There is something about the repetition of playing concerts. That’s where the music actually exists. That’s the reality, the manifestation of it, that’s the only thing that matters. Everything else is just documenting. I’m really into that, exploring that way. That seems more like penance somehow (laughs).

tortureta

For reasons just slightly beyond my grasp, I keep finding nestled underneath my "entertainments" the leviathan of torture. For example, the last two pieces I read in the New Yorker (on vacation in paradise no less) were about Rwanda fifteen years after genocide and the lingering psychological damage of solitary confinement in America's maximum security prisons.

And when I have a Netflix movie drop into the mailbox, and it turns out to be Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter, about an Nazi concentration camp survivor and sex slave encountering her master/ tormentor in a Viennese hotel, thus re-igniting their relationship 15 years on.

Giving myself over to such torture, I also tried watching Dennis Hopper in Mad Dog Morgan, which similarly depicts situations in an Australian jail in 19th century. Only, I couldn't get past Dennis Hopper all strung-out, jittery and gulping down great quantities of opium smoke while also trying to pull off an Irish brogue. Insufferable.

***

And I just finished reading Lawrence Wechsler's A Miracle, A Universe, a harrowing yet rewarding read about how societies in Brazil and Uruguay grappled with the specter of torture and punishment after decades under brutal military dictatorships. Not only can you learn just when to drink your own urine (within an hour after the uric crystals sink to the bottom of the tin can) but also learn about atypical torture techniques in Brazil, such as "cockroaches inserted in the anus, being forced to ingest large quantities of salt and then denied water for several days, being forced to drink one's own urine." Presumably, it's after that first hour has passed.

Attending a dinner party in Montevideo, Wechsler notes that one guest describes how such torture ultimately shuts down the society at large: "Our own lives became increasingly constricted. The process of self-censorship was incredibly insidious: it wasn't just that you stopped talking about certain things with other people -- you stopped thinking them yourself. Your internal dialogue just dried up."

Torture becomes less the punishment of a specific individual and more for the society surrounding that person. In almost every instance, it seeks to shred the social fabric instead. Wechsler quotes Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, noting that "the civilian public unintentionally allies itself with the torturer." It becomes a matter of inxile and introjection, being trapped within your own body and suffering "the destruction of the personhood of a person," transforming from subject into object.

***

A painter friend visited me just last week, about to relocate out west, and offered up a recent painting of his that he has yet to unload. It gobbles up an entire wall and it's a glowing, instantly eerie thing. Its subject is a non-descript tin shed erected at Abu Ghraib. The viewer might fail to grasp what truly happened behind its flimsy walls yet it somehow knows. I politely demur.