44 WINDOWS THAT ARE OPEN ON MY PHONE RIGHT NOW
Ryley Walker, Steve Gunn & Ryan Jewell Trio: March 5, 2019 Union Pool. Hosted by nyctaper.com. Posted over a year ago, and I haven’t even listened to it yet. Should be amazing.
Puzzling Music Archive. Let’s hear it for weird music, and for the Web 1.0! “Most recently modified: 24 April 2006”!
BWP (Bytches With Problems) “We Want Money.” As recently heard by me on the soundtrack to Just Another Girl on the IRT (1992, d. Leslie Harris), along with the absolute stone classic “Daddy’s Little Girl” by Nikki D.
Which Way Now by Harry Miller’s Isipingo. Hmm, why was I looking up this album? Don’t remember. Cuneiform Records? Probaby good, then.
Here’s what you need to know about living through the coronavirus crisis in Illinois. Topical material.
“Call It a Layoff, a Furlough or a Cut Shift: Americans are Losing Work.” See above.
“Toward a Useful Ignorance: From connection to coexistence” by Daegan Miller. Someone sweet and trustworthy recommended this essay months ago, and I’m 100% sure I won’t ever read it, but what I will be able to do is have it as an open window on my phone this whole time, without even knowing it until today.
Lost at Sea by Glenn Phillips. One of the Hampton Grease Band guitarists released this solo record in 1975 on his own Snow Star Records label. Heard it was good, so I looked it up, like five months ago. Still haven’t listened to any of it.
Best-Ever Succotash Recipe from Southern Living. Still haven’t made it. Or eaten it. Or bought the groceries for it.
In Review Online’s Top 100 Films of the Decade. I won’t spoil what #1 is, but #99 is The Mend (2014, d. John Magary) and that’s a really good, intense, unnerving film.
An interview on Perfectsoundforever.com with a guy from Presidents of the United States of America. “Lump” is a killer song, don’t front.
For Every River Buried by For Every River Buried. Another mysterious mid-1990s Jandek homage on Bobby J Records by the Johnny Jewel guy? (See also This Skin Is Rust by the Twenty Six?)
Aztec God Poster Print by Jim Blanchard and lots more amazing art for sale at jimblanchard.bigcartel.com.
Deconstructed Special: The Noam Chomsky Interview. Based Noam.
Rich and Johnny’s Inzane Michigan Podcast, Episode #3 featuring Steve Miller (The Fix, Blight, Strange Fruit, more). Good guest, good interview.
Peter Bagge’s “In Defense of (and Praise for) Mike Love.” To be honest, I think Mike Love is an absolute key musical contributor to the Beach Boys. I also think he’s not very musically talented. I also think he’s a gross Republican asshole. You can believe all three things simultaneously.
“Watch a 2.5-Hour Talk with Bong Joon Ho, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Taika Waititi & Sam Mendes.” I’ll watch it. Someday. (No I won’t.)
“Reading Colonialism in Parasite.” Speaking of Bong Joon Ho, this essay (and movie) ruled.
Bong Joon Ho’s 20 Upcoming Directors for the 2020s. Speaking of Bong Joon Ho just a little bit more (and 20 other exciting filmmakers)…
Lenise Bent - Recording Engineer & Producer. She recorded “Rapture” by Blondie! One of my favorite pop songs ever. Don’t even front on Debbie’s killer rap because she already ate you alive, much like the man from Mars would have, although apparently he has stopped eating cars, and eating bars, and now he only eats guitars. Anyway, this interview is from the great Women in Vinyl site.
Foo Fighters vs. the Foo. This meme entertains me greatly, unlike the Foo Fighters themselves, who are truly one of the most boring bands I’ve ever heard. Granted, I’ve only heard them maybe three times, and for no more than 30 seconds each time, but that’s because I always had to stop listening quickly, out of sheer boredom. (Not exaggerating.)
MRR Best of the 2010s. So much (non-boring) music to learn about here.
K-Punk. The blog of the late Mark Fisher, whose writing is brilliant, knowledgeable, post-post-modern, and so British… I hadn’t knowingly read his stuff until Sir Reggie Queequeg turned me on to his great riffing on Buckingham/Nicks era Fleetwood Mac.
“Storms” by Fleetwood Mac. Speaking of Bucknicks Mac, forgot about this deep Stevie cut.
Robert Rauschenberg Oral History Project. Why is this 53 page book open on my phone? I have no memory of clicking on a link about it. But it does look like something I’d love to read.
The Trap Set with Joe Wong interviews Thor Harris (Swans, Thor & Friends, Bill Callahan, Etc.) Like Thor says in this interview, “You ask really good questions, Joe!” They have a pretty intense exchange about depression. Thor: “I can certainly think of huge swaths of time that I would now call depressive episodes, but at the time, I don’t know, I just thought that the world was a bleak place, so why wouldn’t I feel terrible for a year or a year-and-a-half?” Joe: “You mentioned John Congleton earlier. He and I were talking about this same thing, and something that he said, that stuck with me, is what your depressive mind tells you isn’t untrue. All that stuff is true, but the thing is, it doesn’t have to be your sole focus. The world is a bleak place. It’s also a beautiful place, you know? And when you get depressed, the bleakness overshadows the beauty.” Thor: “Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think depression is a kind of mental illness — I mean, I call myself insane a lot, but I think it is a kind of mental illness that is like — it’s like being just focused on what is horrible and unfair about this world.” Joe: “There’s a lot to focus on, then!” Thor: “Yeah there certainly is, especially in the Trump era. There’s plenty to focus on.” Joe: “I mean, I have a theory that people that are artistically minded tend to also — because I think it’s really useful for an artist to have a heightened sense of empathy, and maybe that empathy opens the door to depression, or perhaps depression opens the door to that heightened sense of empathy.” That’s just a brief excerpt, they talk about it quite a bit more.
That Record Got Me High podcast w/Tom Smith. Tom Smith from To Live and Shave in L.A., phoning in live from Hanover, Germany, rhapsodizes about The Saints’ third album Prehistoric Sounds. Great to hear Tom spieling away and having fun. Reminds me of him DJing insane records on late-night WFMU way back in 1998-ish, and me tuning in very sporadically on the narrowest-band internet connection imaginable. First time I heard Lightning Bolt! (Now that record got me high. Brian Chippendale was also just on The Trap Set podcast.)
The House at Windy Corner by Windy Corner. Amazing progressive raw acoustic baroque psychedelic band from Amsterdam. They released 100 copies of this debut in 1973. You can buy one on Discogs right now for a mere $3,800.
“The GOP used a Two Santa Clauses tactic to con America for nearly 40 years.” Sometimes I still catch myself reading infuriatingly accurate political articles. For the dopamine rush.
“Mike Watt’s Ball-Hog or Tugboat Turns 25.” I need to get this CD back out. Probably haven’t even listened to it in the 21st Century, but I can still hum a bunch of tunes on here. “Ooh, ooh, ooh, piss bottle man…”
Diggers Docs: A tribute to the San Francisco Diggers, by Jay Babcock. Unbelievably extensive interviews by Babcock covering fundamental history of the American counterculture. Great work.
Vali Myers. How had I not heard of this visionary woman until this year?
Recorded in Miami 1989-1991 by Watt. Bill Orcutt’s band just before he formed Harry Pussy. Guitar and drums duo, and pretty damn incredible. More proggy, more jazzy, more clean, more cerebral, more like the Minutemen (as the band name might suggest), or a post-Minutemen possibility, which of course they were.
Brian Turner plays a bunch of killer Baltimore Club back in 2005 on his WFMU show. Nowadays you can hear BT “every other Tuesday night 8-10pm on Brooklyn's Newtown Radio.” (NOTE: These hours may be affected by the coronavirus (COVID-19). But maybe not!) Rabbithole: After he back-announces the Baltimore Club set, BT shouts out the address printed on some of the records: 206 West Saratoga Street, so I look it up on Google Street View, just west of downtown Baltimore, in the middle of what looks to be a thriving and bustling strip of black businesses, and I head west from there on Saratoga for several blocks, and at least 90% of the faces I’m seeing on the street are black, and I’m thinking this is “a black-ass city,” which is what drummer Ben “Hell” Hall called his city (Detroit) on the great (now Patreon only) 5049 podcast with Jeremiah Cymerman… New Orleans comes to mind, Memphis too… Gary, Indiana… but back on Baltimore, it is indeed 63% black and 30% white, so now I’m poring over demographic maps, seeing how the white population clings in a narrow band from the Inner Harbor straight north, staying close to the main freeway Interstate 83, as it heads north from the harbor and downtown, splitting the city into two rough halves that are otherwise mostly black. As U.S. 83 gets closer to the northern border of Baltimore, and further away from the high density population of the inner city, the white population starts spreading out, taking up a large part of the city’s northwest. In the northeast, however, the black population stays stronger, and in fact this black/white split between the northeastern and northwestern quadrants is clearly marked by a single north-south street called York Road, which bisects the city even more cleanly than Interstate 83, becoming U.S. Highway 45 on its way out. Imagine what goes into keeping black people and white people split that cleanly by a single road. Lots and lots of over-policing, to be sure, but even deeper than that, it has to be driven by the real estate industry, who, like the police force, must be at least somewhat openly racist in their internal-facing policies.
“A Forest” by The Cure. Killer song Angelina and I were listening to the other night.
Arthur Russell: Roulette, Brooklyn, New York, March 2, 1985.
https://wp.nyu.edu/darknessspeaks/wp-content/uploads/sites/3674/2016/04/King-Stephen-The-Mist.pdf
I’m a little surprised that Tina Chen, the Chinese/American actress from the first reel of Three Days of the Condor (1975, d. Sydney Pollack, kinda not a great movie), isn’t more famous.
“The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats. Because it appeared in voice-over in a film I just saw, although I can’t place which film it was. Maybe it was No Place Like Home, the 1975 follow-up by Perry Henzell to his cult classic The Harder They Come, that wasn’t actually finished until 2016? No wait! I know what it was! It was a film by Nick Alonzo! Either Shitcago (2015) or The Art of Sitting Quietly and Doing Nothing (2018). Both excellent. I’m pretty sure it was in Shitcago.
Wolf Eyes: Godfathers of American Avant-Noise. A nice professional presentation, deserved by these elder statesmen (sic). Also, I just love it when they do interviews. Nate has good spiels.
Bach Cello Suite #6 in D by Yo-Yo Ma. There’s this section that starts heating up around the one minute mark and then really gets crazy around the 1:20 mark, almost microtonally hovering well into 1:40 territory. The piece returns pretty quickly to more traditional Bach moving chordal arpeggio passing-tone genius, but for 30 seconds or so, you just kinda get pinned to the wall.
“What are the longest living marine species in the world?” Yo, spotmydive.com… thank you. (Pictured: Bowhead Whale mother and calf. Photo credit: NOAA.)
