JOSH RITTER: BETTER THAN LIARS

I saw Jens Lekman at Webster Hall two weeks ago. Lekman is one of my favorite music-type dudes out there these days. I saw Josh Ritter at Webster Hall last night. He was better, and the crowd-- notwithstanding the douchey dudes next to me who kept talking loudly about Goldman Sachs right through the encore, until I kinda threw a cup at them, and they said, "That asshole again?", because earlier they were talking loudly about getting another beer and I said I'd take one, too, thanks-- was even more fun, singing along to pretty much everything, even the old stuff ("Harrisburg"!).

New York Timesmen, if it turns out you were there too I owe you a free coke.

Eric Bachmann, thank you for playing "New Drink for the Old Drunk" and for being so graceful in front of an audience that had probably mostly never heard of Crooked Fingers OR Archers of Loaf.

HERE WE ARE NOW ENTERTAIN US

Congratulations, you've been selected to win a free Apple iPhone.
R. Kelly: Bump N' Grind

I went to see Jonathan Messinger lead an installment of his "The Dollar Store Show" reading series a couple of weeks ago at McNally Robinson. Jonathan and I worked together a few years back in the now-defunct Chicago offices of AOL CityGuide (formerly AOL Digital City). The system that brought us together was pretty messed up, even by today's permalancing standards; technically, we worked for a temp agency, which meant we had to leave after a year so AOL wouldn't become obligated to treat us as actual employees. The revolving door and surprisingly fair pay made for a young, collegial staff. Everyone I worked with was talented and clever, with diverse and fervent interests outside of work. We threw going-away parties constantly, inviting current and former staffers. We took long lunches on Tuesdays to walk down from the John Hancock building to the Virgin Megastore on Michigan Avenue and browse new CDs. We shared our favorite albums on the company server. We grumbled about that morning's Pitchfork reviews. Fritz and I started a blog. Jonathan turned me onto Jonathan Richman. It was one hell of a first job.

But this post isn't about that job. It's about Jonathan's new book, Hiding Out, which I've had since the reading but only had time to get through this weekend while up at a friend's cabin in the Adirondacks. The whole thing is, well, GREAT-- poignant and off-kilter, witty and warm, haunted by strange phobias but all the more human for them, told in the voice of the sort of ultimately optimistic but still slightly cynical friend who might turn you onto Jonathan Richman. The humor is the kind that hurts, in your guts and chest both.


Fool me into believing, I don't care if you're deceiving me.
Red House Painters: Katy Song

I hope Jonathan won't mind my posting this brief snippet:

It’s all because of my poor reflexes. A case of having little physical skill, sure, and maybe a short attention span. But there I was, hungover on a Sunday morning, in one of those indoor sports facilities that you never think you’ll see the inside of, with the walled soccer fields and artificial turf like hot steel wool. Huge pictures of athletes you’ve never heard of adorn the walls, tricking you into thinking you look like them. But you don’t, you look like me; tired and still not entirely clear on why you’re playing in this league, some five games into the season. Unshaven, unenthusiastic, nearly undead. My headache, the one from the hangover, had me running in zig zags. Every time I turned I would flinch and my body would lurch in another direction. So it wasn’t a surprise, in retrospect. It took me off-guard, but I should have known it would happen.

There was a guy on the other team wearing the Brazil national team jersey—it didn’t even say Ronaldo on the back. It was some obscure player, I found out later, the guy was such a fan. But for a moment, I stared at the back of his jersey, at the name, Azofeifa. Such a name, Azofeifa. Beats the name on the back of my T-shirt, Terry. I was staring at the name Azofeifa, wondering if this guy, Azofeifa, if he could possibly be a member of the Brazilian team, his shorts blue and new enough, his socks pulled high enough. And as I was thinking this, just watching him, Azofeifa—such a name!—wondering if I was in the presence of greatness and playing against a World Cup competitor, as this thought crossed my mind I saw the ball emerge, in the air, in my peripheral vision, and I saw Azofeifa take two confident strides away from me and then, something magical happened—and I’d like for you to understand the magic of it before I tell you the consequences, because the magic is the best part—Azofeifa took two confident strides away from me, and as the ball knuckled through the air, no spin at all, just a flat and boring thing, I watched Azofeifa leap, his left leg kicking in front of him like a ballerina, and I noticed that his thigh muscle, I believe it’s called a quadriceps, was of such girth and animal litheness that I quivered, but then, his torso realigned, so it looked like he was reclining in the air, parallel to the ground, just buffeted by the wind, gravity at the whim of Azofeifa, and as his left leg hastened back down he lifted his right so that it emerged above him, an obtuse angle on the Azofeifa plane, and again with the suppleness of the quad, and the kick, connecting with the ball and sending this object, appearing two-dimensional before he touched it, but now, in Azofeifa’s universe, it was a living thing, spinning with a celestial speed and growing larger by the second, it could only be described as magic, this bicycle kick that defied physical laws in a most real way, and the ball now coming alive and growing so large that it was there, in front of my face, and here we see the consequences of my momentary obsession with Azofeifa, my reflexes so poor, my headache so monstrous, my fleeting love for Azofeifa so pure, that I couldn’t even shutter my eyelids, and the ball hit my bare yellow eyeball and it is here, of course, that I stop remembering.

You can read a longer excerpt of the story in PDF form here. But you should really buy it here.


See you next Tuesday, you is a punk.
McCarthy: Keep an Open Mind or Else

"IT'S WHAT'S IN THE GROOVES THAT COUNT"

Minister of New New Super Heavy Funk
Abbas Kiarostami: Close Up (selection)

Most of these 45s are pretty famous, actually, although I left a bunch more because I wanted to see if any would play OK first. 2/$1 (negotiated for a tiny bit less) at the thrift store (really more of a storefront-- there's no inside) in my little neighborhood here in Brooklyn:

- Jackie Wilson: "I Get the Sweetest Feeling" b/w "Nothing But Blue Skies" (1968, Brunswick)
- Marvin Gaye: "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" b/w "You're What's Happening (in the World Today)" (1966, Tamla/Motown)
- Sly & the Family Stone: "Thank You Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin" b/w "Everybody Is a Star" (1969, Epic)
- Fontella Bass: "Rescue Me" b/w "Soul of the Man" (1965, Checker/Chess)
- Marvin Gaye: "Let's Get It On" b/w "I Wish It Would Rain" (1973, Tamla/Motown)
- Candi Staton: "Stand By Your Man" b/w "How Can I Put Out the Flame" (1970, Fame)
- Solomon Burke: "Got to Get You Off My Mind" / "Peepin'" (1965, Atlantic)
- Gladys Knight and the Pips: "Midnight Train to Georgia" b/w "Window Raising Granny" (1973, Buddah)
- Stevie Wonder: "Superstition" b/w "You've Got It Bad Girl" (1972, Tamla/Motown)
- Sam & Dave: "Soul Man" b/w "May I Baby" (1967, Stax)
- Otis Redding: "I've Got Dreams to Remember" b/w "Nobody's Fault But Mine" (1969?, Atco)
- Archie Bell and the Drells: "I Could Dance All Night" b/w "King of the Castle" (1975, Tsop)
- Jean Knight: "Mr. Big Stuff" b/w "Why I Keep Living These Memories" (1971, Stax)
- Solomon Burke: "You're Good for Me" b/w "Beautiful Brown Eyes" (1963, Atlantic)
- The Contours: "Do You Love Me" b/w "Move Mr. Man" (1962, Motown)
- The Lovin' Spoonful: "Daydream" b/w "Night Owl Blues" (1966, Kama Sutra)
- James Brown: "Papa Don't Take No Mess Part I" b/w "Papa Don't Take No Mess Part II" (1974, Polydor)
- Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell: "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" b/w "Give a Little Love" (1967, Tamla/Motown)
- The Jackson 5: "The Love You Save" b/w "I Found That Girl" (1970, Motown)
- Wilson Pickett: "Don't Fight It" b/w "It's All Over" (1965, Atlantic)
- Carla Thomas: "I Like What You're Doing (To Me)" b/w "Strung Out" (1969, Stax)
- Aretha Franklin: "Jump" b/w "Hooked on Your Love" (1976, Atlantic)
- Sam & Dave: "When Something Is Wrong With My Baby" b/w "Small Portion of Your Love" (1967, Stax)
- Isley Brothers: "Who Could Ever Doubt My Love" b/w "Take Some Time Out for Love" (1966, Tamla/Motown)

They're super dirty, but most of them play OK with some cleaning.

PLUS: Bonus Xpost:

If we shoot a video to this one, I'm gonna have to get in the gym real hard and get my LL Cool J on on in this one.
Jens Lekman: "Into Eternity" (Live in Bloomington, Ind.)

P.S. Why do I laugh at Weezy, but Britney Spears' "Fillin Me Up" makes me blush all over? Da Drought Is Over Pt. 4! What took him so long? Also, "Duffel Bag Boy" (via Intensities in Ten Suburbs).

DOES LOU REED CARE ABOUT BLACK PEOPLE?

To build a new sanctuary the old sanctuary must first be destroyed.
Lil Wayne: Gossip (xpost, but Ryan Dombal had it first over at Blender)

EVERYONE, PAT YOURSELVES ON THE BACK!!!




The New York Times frequently publishes articles and opinion pieces offering boilerplate solutions to the problems of low-income schools. For example, Bob Herbert recently wrote a column under the headline "Our Schools Must Do Better." In it, he says, "Let's identify the good teachers and find out what works." If this argument doesn't seem painfully, meaninglessly obvious to you, you're reading the wrong blog.

Sadly, such work is typical of the Times' and other major newspapers' superficial coverage of schools in low-income neighborhoods. All we need is higher standards, better teachers, and tougher coursework... right? When our schools don't do better, the Times' education reporters and editorial pages can come back with the same bromides the next year. And the next. And the next. (Rarely, however, do they recall a troubling figure that Herbert himself used in 2005: "By the fourth grade, low-income students read about three grade levels behind non-poor students.")

To state the obvious, simply stating the obvious about inner-city education doesn't help kids keep from falling behind. And if low-income fourth graders already read three grade levels behind non-poor students, the problem might be something that can't be fixed by simply raising standards, hiring more experienced teachers, or passing out books the kids can't read. Who, then, does this stuff serve? What is the point?

Well, I'd speculate that it makes the writer feel good. It makes the editor feel good. And it makes the readers feel good. Hooray for everyone for caring so much about black kids. Won't someone please think of the black kids?

The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones will. SF-J is one of my favorite music critics, which is to say he seems crazy to me slightly less often than most of the other music critics I like. Lots of people have posted about his recent article in favor of indie-rock "miscegenation." Friend of offnotes Tom Breihan blames the Velvet Underground. Lots of other people said lots of other stuff. I was kinda bogged down with CMJ and a cold and work and other work I should be doing even RIGHT NOW but here we are. In lieu of an opinion (not worth it, because what is "blackness" in 21st-century pop music, is it inherently better than "whiteness" because if not why does this matter, should white guys proud of their racial consciousness keep using the word "miscegenation," etc.), please enjoy the following abbreviated (unexpurgated!) list, which, because this entire conversation is meaningless and self-aggrandizing, lists whatever anyone wants it to list:

LCD SOUNDSYSTEM !!! SPOON VAMPIRE WEEKEND MOUNTAIN GOATS DEVENDRA BANHART THE TOUGH ALLIANCE M.I.A. DIPLO GIRL TALK JENS LEKMAN SHOCKING PINKS KING KHAN CHROMEO WHITE STRIPES STUDIO AIR FRANCE SPANK ROCK CLIPSE LIL WAYNE


A legacy so far removed.
Billie Holiday: What a Little Moonlight Can Do

There's also been a lot of debate recently over who's to blame for blog-era insta-backlash. Is it the guy who thinks a new band has four great songs, and says so? Or the guy who backlashes against that band for not having a dozen great songs, plus a laser-light show? Or is it the the guy who doesn't particularly care for that band, but instead of backlashing against them directly, backlashes against the very idea of saying a band has four great songs? This guy thinks the backlash is the first guy's fault, though of course he doesn't name names.

When Belle & Sebastian released If You're Feeling Sinister, their live show was terrible, and there was no guarantee Murdoch could continue to write songs as good as the ones he'd composed in his years of chronic fatigue-imposed solitude. (Basically, he couldn't.) Many of the bands championed by the late, legendary John Peel must've recorded one or two great singles, tops-- should Peel not have proclaimed his love for those singles? What of the Desperate Bicycles? The Subway Sect? The Undertones? What of-- as an Idolator commenter noted-- the scores of bands who released much-hyped EPs and actually went on to live up to the hype? (Buzzcocks, REM, Pavement, arguably Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio, etc.) Is the measure of four songs' excellence really contingent on whether the artist writes an album's worth of equally excellent songs down the road-- on whether their career is "built to last" (thanks, Tracks!)??? Is rockcrit just A&R now? O.A.R. now? "Oh, are they?" OH SHIT SCOOPED!!!

The rapidly accelerating hype cycle is something that has annoyed people since the moment the major labels' grunge-era signing spree started catapulting bands to fame on the basis of a couple of good live shows in Seattle. A more serious discussion ought to center around the music-- why it works, or why it doesn't-- and not the process, which we professional fogeys have been lamenting since the dawn of fogeydom, without ever finding a way to freeze time just yet.

Results 1 - 10 of about 2,250,000 for "is no exception". (0.23 seconds)

Sambassadeur: Between the Lines
It's not the band I hate, it's their fans.

UPDATE: I really should've linked to Matthew Perpetua's excellent post on related topic. And I should clarify that my complaint isn't talking about process vs. music-- context matters, and sometimes describing how art reaches us can be more interesting than describing the art itself. What I'm sick of is hearing arguments about process that are as banal and self-evident as "Our Schools Must Do Better" was for the issue of education. BLOGGERS, RAISE YR STANDARDS!

THE WEATHER'S ON THE NIGHT NEWS

I gotta get some gum.
The Redskins: Interview and Keep on Keepin' On

The truly heartbreaking thing about all the snark this century is we mean every miserable word. The girl in the "Die Hipsters Die" shirt? The guy who started sneering at his favorite band right when they got popular-- but not because they got popular? The jerk-off music critic? You know the type. For all the supposed irony in today's loose online community of obsessed music freaks, it never seems like anyone's fronting about their own fear and self-loathing.

The Tough Alliance recognize this, and they've found a way out.

The F train and the Q train are not my friends.

FASHION UNCONSCIOUSNESS IS OUT TODAY

He is the coolest dad in dad school.
Headless Chickens: Gaskrankinstation

Yer Idolators did a fine thing today (yesterday). And that is they linked to the first advance review of the new rekkid by the Radioheads. Which reminds me that I haven't yet reviewed the 40-pound hype in the room and that, unbefitting the spirit of the dude quoted in my probably inappropriate but I really don't know any better anymore previous post, I haven't written a review of an album I haven't heard, like, ever. For shame.

Can't start now, either, because OF COURSE I've heard the Radioheads' In Rainbows. Many times over. I've listened to it in the shower, I've listened to it while trimming my nails with these awesome nail clippers that catch your clippings so you can just shake them out instead of picking up after yourself, I've listened to it while making toast, and I've listened to it while sound asleep on a hotel bed with unexplained non-vomity green stuff on the bedspread and on the back of my shirt which was still on my body along with the rest of my clothes including my tie.

And I can safely say that In Rainbows is an album among albums, in that yeah it's only coming out at 160 kbps but that's better than 128 kbps and most people not reading this blog probably don't know kpbs from bpm from rpm unless I'm once again incorrectly misunderestimating the music knowledge of the gazillions of people who aren't buying music or even stealing and thus are destroying the music industry by default. So that the Radioheads can save it by releasing an album so much better than all other albums that it is four albums, two on CDs which are known for their "perfect sound forever" and thus doubly perfect, and two on records which are known for having even better PR if a worse marketing team given their lack of memorable slogan. And as every offnotes-hipped math fan knows, four albums are better than one, especially when they're four albums by the Radioheads, whose every album is better than every other album by every other band. EVER. Except Reel Big Fish's Why Do They Rock So Hard. There were some funny tunes on that one.

But it wasn't free, and the Radioheads' is unless you're a sucker, which I am, but it's free until I notice the bill, which I won't, so in a sense every album is free, even Black Kids', even Pink Floyd's Meddle which I found on Rapidshare a couple of weeks ago because I wanted to hear the soccer fans, who are even more fanatical than Radiohead fans but not in America, where Bush fans are still even more fanatical than they are in Europe and Gavin Rossdale is still somehow married to Gwen Stefani, who may be less famous by now than the girl from Kids Incorporated, which was almost as good as the new Radioheads album, but it won't make you feel more alive or keep you from doing dumb things like losing your jacket and waking up in green stuff nobody recognizes but must be your fault because how else would it get there? 26 years old no less. Equals 9.8 or 6.7, choose yer poison.

Oh whatever because Best Week Ever, of all the lame blogs, beat me to it, and beat you to it, too, so let's all hang our heads to the Radioheads' gloomy beats. Only question that matters is, does it sound good while blogging?


"Yeah I was this creepy little kid of eleven" sez a nostalgic Robert Christgau, slightly drunk (Chateauneuf-du-Pape 1969).
LCD Soundsystem: All My Friends

Hooray for Jonathan Chait, writing over at the New York Times:

"Last year, Senator John McCain earned widespread ridicule for publicly embracing Jerry Falwell, whom he had once described as 'evil.' But an equally breathtaking turnabout occurred earlier in the year, when Mr. McCain embraced the Bush tax cuts he had once denounced as an unaffordable giveaway to the rich. In an interview with National Review, Mr. McCain justified his reversal by saying, 'Tax cuts, starting with Kennedy, as we all know, increase revenues.' It was the political equivalent of Galileo conceding that the Sun does indeed revolve around the Earth."

IF YOU EVER NEED A STRANGER (TO SING AT YOUR WEDDING)

Put your troubles away until tomorrow. If you're lucky, someone will break into your house tonight and steal 'em.
Jonathan Richman: Now Is Better Than Before

Make it Meltzer?

"Knot-tying is real big in Philadelphia. They're all married. The Tearsons, the Damskers, they're all married. Hooked. Hitched. Fuckin wedded before the eyes of Big Bozo upstairs. New York there's much fewer lefthanded ring fingers with the old metal on it. When was the last one to make it legal, the Richard & Lisa Robinsons? No there was the Bud & Linda Coppas. And way before that the Ed & Jeanie McCormacks. Christgau's always auditioning somebody for the role of permanent mate but he hasn't turned up anything just yet. Richard Goldstein and his honey-bear have called it 'quits.' Matrimony in NYC is fuckin shot to shit.

"Did I say is, I mean was. Cause there's a new one now and it's the best so far. Nick & Sunny Tosches. They went down to City Hall and this guy in a lavender shirt and tie did the honors and when she couldn't get the ring on her finger he said 'Whatsamatter, eatin too many potatoes.' As a matter of fact she does like the old tuber pretty much whether it's mashed, fried, baked or boiled. Or mashed. She drinks a lotta Almaden white from Californey-ay and speaking of Californ she has fornicated. With Nick. They fucked and fucked and fugged till the cows came home and then once for good measure and this was all before the nuptials had begun."

Um. Not exactly what I'm trying to say except for like two sentences in the middle there, and I know you don't even like Tosches (but!), but hopefully you get the idea. Congrats, dudes. And thanks for hosting a beautiful wedding.