Category: Suggestions

You might be interested in…

Kassin +2 Touring

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“Futurismo” (Kassin + 2)

Hitting the Old Town School of Folk here in the Big Potato, and other places too

December 13, 2008
Old Town School of Folk
Chicago, IL

Kassin + Domenico + Moreno = The Plus 2’s, LIVE!!!
For the past few years, Kassin has been one of the most exciting names in Brazilian music. From his Monoaural Studio in Gavea he has produced records by singers like Marisa Monte and Bebel Gilberto and made an album from the bleeps of a Gameboy. He has played bass for Caetano Veloso’s live shows and masterminded the Orchestra Imperial project, in which samba classics are given a modern twist by a loose and ever-expanding live band. And given his status as a leader of Brazil’s musical avant-garde, the biggest surprise from the +2’s latest release, Futurismo, which Kassin wrote and produced, is its bossa-rooted accessibility.

Back to FUTURISMO
The tracks on Futurismo are melodic gems. They were written at different periods in Kassin’s life and recorded quickly, mostly on acoustic instruments with electronic flourishes added later. Fellow band members Moreno Veloso and Domenico Lancelott join Kassin for the live presentation of these songs.

Kassin told Yahoo’s Spinner blog: “The tour will be based on the last album (Futurismo) with parts of the previous 3 albums we have along with the new material we are writing. We have many new songs and have been playing this new material live. We are enjoying our lives a lot these days and we are pretty excited to go back to the USA.”

[From Welcome to Luaka Bop]

Sounds interesting, but not sure if I’ll be in town to see them. Bummer.

Netflixed: Bob Le Flambeur

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“Bob le Flambeur – Criterion Collection” (Criterion)

[Netflix page]

A Criterion Collection release of a 1955 Jean-Pierre Melville movie, this one I rented on the strength of Touchez Pas au Grisbi some time ago [Netflix page] (and the magic of the Netflix suggestion engine)

The plot to the Bob Le Flambeur1 could be explained in ten lines2, but that isn’t really the point of the film. Ambiance is. The ambiance of French cafés and nightclubs, jazz, neon signs, glistening streets, characters who go to sleep at 6 AM, and arise by noon, casual sex, gambling, and gamblers, and male friendship. You get the idea. Certainly worth looking for if you haven’t seen it before, and worth a re-watch if you have.

Roger Ebert reviewed Bob le Flambeur as part of his “Great Movies” series:

Before the New Wave, before Godard and Truffaut and Chabrol, before Belmondo flicked the cigarette into his mouth in one smooth motion and walked the streets of Paris like a Hollywood gangster, there was Bob. “Bob le Flambeur,” Bob the high-roller, Bob the Montmartre legend whose style was so cool, whose honor was so strong, whose gambling was so hopeless, that even the cops liked him. Bob with his white hair slicked back, with his black suit and tie, his trenchcoat and his Packard convertible and his penthouse apartment with the slot machine in the closet. Bob, who on the first day of this movie wins big at the races and then loses it all at roulette, and is cleaned out. Broke again.

Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Bob le Flambeur” (1955) has a good claim to be the first film of the French New Wave. Daniel Cauchy, who stars in it as Paolo, Bob’s callow young friend, remembered that Melville would shoot scenes on location using a handheld camera on a delivery bike, “which Godard did in ‘Breathless,’ but this was years before Godard.” Melville worked on poverty row, and told his actors there was no money to pay them, but that they would have to stand by to shoot on a moment’s notice. “Right now I have money for three or four days,” he told Cauchy, “and after that we’ll shoot when we can.”

This film was legendary but unseen for years, and Melville’s career is only now coming into focus. He shot gangster movies, he worked in genres, but he had such a precise, elegant simplicity of style that his films play like the chamber music of crime. He was cool in the 1950s sense of that word. His characters in “Bob” glide through gambling dens and nightclubs “in those moments,” Melville tells us in the narration, “between night and day … between heaven and hell.”

[From Bob le Flambeur :: rogerebert.com :: Great Movies]

and offers this brief bio of the director:

Melville (1917-1973) was born Grumberg. He changed his name in admiration for the author of Moby Dick. He was a lover of all things American. He went endlessly to American movies, he visited America, he shot a film in New York (“Two Men in Manhattan”), and Cauchy remembers, “He drove an American car and wore an American hat and Ray-Bans, and he always had the Armed Forces Network on his car radio, listening to Glenn Miller.” He inhaled American gangster films, but when he made his own, they were not copies of Hollywood but were infused by understatement, a sense of cool; his characters need few words because so much goes without saying, especially when it comes to what must be done, and how it must be done, and why it must be done that way.

One unrelated note, I wish Netflix compiled a list of all the Criterion Collection films they offer. I did suggest it to a Netflix staffer years ago, but they haven’t gotten around to doing it yet. There are user-generated versions, but these are decidedly less useful.

Footnotes:
  1. Flamber (verb, French): To wager not only the money you have, but the money you don’t have. [↩]
  2. as Daniel Cauchy exclaims in an included interview [↩]

Vacuum Decanter

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“Metrokane V1 World’s First Vacuum Decanter” (Metrokane)

I wonder how useful this vacuum wine decanter would be? Seems sort of cool, but I don’t often have dinner parties these days.

  • World’s first vacuum decanter maintains wine character until next pouring
  • Set features 52-ounce handblown crystal decanter
  • Also includes stopper with vacuum gauge and hand pump
  • Lead-free decanter eliminates worries about leaching into wine
  • Wash decanter by hand; 5-year warranty on stopper and pump

Adobe Photoshop CS4 One-on-One

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Picked up a copy of Deke McClelland’s new book for Adobe Photoshop CS4. Came with 4 hours worth of lynda.com instructional video, and plenty of tips and techniques. I usually find at least a dozen good new things in these sort of books, and relearn a bunch of things I used to know. Too bad there isn’t an upgrade price for computer manuals too.
From the Amazon site – top ten new features, even though some aren’t really that new:

10) Spring-loaded tools. Temporarily select a tool by pressing and holding its shortcut key. For example, when retouching an image with the healing brush: Press and hold Y to temporarily get the history brush, erase part of your modification, and then release Y to return to the healing brush.

9) The Adjustments palette. Nondestructive adjustment layers (which are independent layers of editable color adjustment) are now handled in a palette. Some folks will love the convenience, others will lament the many changes that were required to accommodate this feature. Mostly, though, the palette aggregates stuff that’s been there for ages. One new item, Vibrance, enhances color intensity without exaggerating noise.

8) The Masks palette. CS4’s other new palette is largely another aggregator, providing convenient access to old features. Three new items: The wonderful Color Range command can now directly generate masks. Color Range can see base colors based on proximity. And you can blur edges parametrically (meaning non-permanently, by the numbers).

7) The enhanced Bridge 3.0. The Bridge is CS4’s asset manager, permitting you to preview and organize your images. Auto-updating workspaces, a review mode complete with image carousel, full-screen preview, folder-independent image collections, and search-based smart collections are just a few improvements. Oh, and you can assemble multipage PDF contact sheets from the Output panel.

6) Improved toning tools. Paint with the dodge tool to lighten an image; paint with the burn tool to darken. Only thing, the tools used to suck. Now they’re so good, I actually use them on a regular basis. They’re still destructive (meaning they permanently change pixels), but in a good way!

5) Camera Raw 5. Essentially a logically organized and altogether independent color adjustment application, Camera Raw continues to be that top-secret tool that makes every version of Photoshop worth buying. This time, it offers the equivalent of nondestructive and highly customizable dodge and burn. Which you can apply as brushstrokes or gradients. Plus you can add vignettes inside crop boundaries. It’s like a free copy of Lightroom bundled inside every version of Photoshop. Which given that Lightroom costs more than a Photoshop upgrade, and this is just feature 5 of 10, is fairly significant.

4) Target adjustment tool. Associated with three color adjustments—Hue/Saturation, Black & White, and Curves—the target adjustment tool lets you selectively modify colors and luminance levels by dragging in an image. For example, drag on a model’s lips to boost their saturation. No need to isolate a hue range. Just drag. Honestly, if you aren’t loving this tool within a week, check to make sure you have a pulse.

3) The tabbed-window interface. This feature has already proved controversial, with a few noisy Macintosh users in particular voicing disapproval. But speaking as a cross-platform guy with a decidedly Mac bias, it’s a net-sum gain. You now have the option of docking every image in a tabbed window. Click a tab to switch documents. Drag a tab to reassign priority. Plus, you can drag-and-drop a layer onto a tab to move that layer from one image to another. The tabbed window interface is a masterpiece of design and a thing of beauty.

2) Content-aware scaling. Part of Adobe’s advance compositing suite, the Content Aware Scale command lets you stretch or squish low-contrast “background” elements independently of high-contrast “foreground” ones. Which means you can bring people together, turn horizontal images into vertical ones, and otherwise transform photographs intelligently. My guess: five years from now we’ll all be mocking this feature for what it got wrong. (The degree to which it can mess up certain images is fantastic!) But in the moment, you’re going to be singing its praises. This is Photoshop’s first truly magical feature since the magic wand. And that was 18 years ago, babies. (Okay, the healing brush was also magical. And that was, what, seven years ago? So we’re talking three magical features in two decades. Got to admit, magic is rare.)

1) OpenGL navigation. Forget all that other stuff. Seriously, content-aware scaling? As if. So far as I’m concerned, Photoshop CS4 offers one and only one new feature: OpenGL navigation. Assuming you have a video card that supports OpenGL (most do), then here’s what you get: Slow continuous zooms. Rotate the view. Get the hand tool, toss the image, and watch it sail across the screen. Hold down H and click and hold for bird’s eye. And by God if every zoom level isn’t a thing of bicubically rendered beauty. (No idea what I’m talking about? Trust me, huge.) OpenGL navigation is so good it makes me hate CS3. Some nights, OpenGL navigation and I open a bottle of wine and just talk about how lucky we are just to have met each other. It’s that good.

Stars of Track and Field

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“If You’re Feeling Sinister” (Belle & Sebastian)

For some reason, I was humming this song when I awoke today. Probably related to some now forgotten dream, but am passing it along for you to decipher.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIF8n5-hbrg

The lyrics are something like:

Make a new cult every day to suit your affairs

Kissing girls in english, at the back of the stairs

You’re a honey, with a following of innocent boys

They never know it

Because you never show it

You always get your way

They never know it

Because you never show it

You always get your way



Have you and her been taking pictures of your obsessions?

Because I met a [boy] who went through one of your sessions

In his blue velour and silk

You liberated

A boy I never rated

And now he’s throwing discuss

For Liverpool and witness

You liberated

A boy I never rated

And now he’s doing business



The stars of track and field, you are

The stars of track and field, you are

The stars of track and field are beautiful people



Could I write a piece about you now that youve made it?

About the hours spent, the worldliness in your training

You only did it so that you could wear

Your terry underwear

And feel the city air

Run past your body



Could I write a requiem for you when you’re dead?

“She had the moves, she had the speed, it went to her head

She never needed anyone to get her round the track

But when she’s on her back

She had the knowledge

To get her into college

But when she’s on her back

She had the knowledge

To get her what she wanted”

The stars of track and field, you are

The stars of track and field, you are

The stars of track and field are beautiful people

Ethiopiques 19

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Another Quickie review


“Ethiopiques 19” (Ethiopiques (Buda Series), Mahmoud Ahmed)

I don’t have every album in this series1 , but every CD except one has been a great addition to my African music library. My favorite song on this album, called Tezeta, has a simply stunning bass line, along with a moody vocal, sort of like a Hazzan2, though in Ethiopian. Great sax too.

Tezeta means nostalgia, a bittersweet longing for the past, btw, and is a frequent song subject. In fact, there is an entire Ethiopiques album devoted to it.

Footnotes:
  1. estimate without counting that I’ve picked up slightly more than half of the 23 titles, mostly from my pals at Aquarius Records in San Francisco [↩]
  2. cantor [↩]

Ten Thousand Hours

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“Outliers: The Story of Success” (Malcolm Gladwell)

I’ve already ordered Malcom Gladwell’s new book, Outliers1 just on the strength of a few excerpts I’ve stumbled upon. His New Yorker magazine style of writing is easily consumed2, and his ideas are usually interesting, if not always perfectly formed. His theories are what they are, but truth be told, I really just like his anecdotes. Speaking of the Beatles, I did not know this factoid about their Hamburg days…

Is this a general rule of success? If you scratch below the surface of every great achiever, do you always find the equivalent of the Michigan Computer Centre or the hockey all-star team – some sort of special opportunity for practice? Let’s test the idea with two examples: the Beatles, one of the most famous rock bands ever, and Bill Gates, one of the world’s richest men.

The Beatles – John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr – came to the US in February 1964, starting the so-called “British Invasion” of the American music scene. The interesting thing is how long they had already been playing together. Lennon and McCartney began in 1957. (Incidentally, the time that elapsed between their founding and their greatest artistic achievements – arguably Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the White Album – is 10 years.) In 1960, while they were still a struggling school rock band, they were invited to play in Hamburg, Germany.

“Hamburg in those days did not have rock’n’roll music clubs. It had strip clubs,” says Philip Norman, who wrote the Beatles’ biography, Shout! “There was one particular club owner called Bruno, who was originally a fairground showman. He had the idea of bringing in rock groups to play in various clubs. They had this formula. It was a huge nonstop show, hour after hour, with a lot of people lurching in and the other lot lurching out. And the bands would play all the time to catch the passing traffic. In an American red-light district, they would call it nonstop striptease.

“Many of the bands that played in Hamburg were from Liverpool,” Norman continues. “It was an accident. Bruno went to London to look for bands. But he happened to meet a Liverpool entrepreneur in Soho, who was down in London by pure chance. And he arranged to send some bands over. That’s how the connection was established. And eventually the Beatles made a connection not just with Bruno, but with other club owners as well. They kept going back, because they got a lot of alcohol and a lot of sex.”

And what was so special about Hamburg? It wasn’t that it paid well. (It didn’t.) Or that the acoustics were fantastic. (They weren’t.) Or that the audiences were savvy and appreciative. (They were anything but.) It was the sheer amount of time the band was forced to play. Here is John Lennon, in an interview after the Beatles disbanded, talking about the band’s performances at a Hamburg strip club called the Indra: “We got better and got more confidence. We couldn’t help it with all the experience playing all night long. It was handy them being foreign. We had to try even harder, put our heart and soul into it, to get ourselves over. In Liverpool, we’d only ever done one-hour sessions, and we just used to do our best numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg we had to play for eight hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing.”

The Beatles ended up travelling to Hamburg five times between 1960 and the end of 1962. On the first trip, they played 106 nights, of five or more hours a night. Their second trip they played 92 times. Their third trip they played 48 times, for a total of 172 hours on stage. The last two Hamburg stints, in November and December 1962, involved another 90 hours of performing. All told, they performed for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, they had performed live an estimated 1,200 times, which is extraordinary. Most bands today don’t perform 1,200 times in their entire careers. The Hamburg crucible is what set the Beatles apart.

“They were no good on stage when they went there and they were very good when they came back,” Norman says. “They learned not only stamina, they had to learn an enormous amount of numbers – cover versions of everything you can think of, not just rock’n’roll, a bit of jazz, too. They weren’t disciplined on stage at all before that. But when they came back they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.”

[From Extract from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: Is there such a thing as pure genius? | Books | The Guardian ]

The excerpt goes on, click if you want to read more. Or just buy the book!

Footnotes:
  1. Amazon sent me an email today that the book was shipped from their warehouse – I should get it by Tuesday [↩]
  2. I tried to avoid using the phrase, breezy, but it does fit [↩]

Forca Bruta

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Another Quickie Review


“Forca Bruta” (Jorge Ben)

The guitar rhythms circle around a moving middle, makes me move my belly button in concentric ovals in my chair. Huge thumbs up.
From the Amazon blurb

First time on CD in the US – and first time in the world in over 15 years! A groundbreaking album from the young Jorge Ben – one of Brazil’s most soulful singers ever – heard here at a pivotal point in his career! Forca Bruta is a record forever transformed Brazilian music with its unique blend of samba and soul – and it features some tremendous rhythm work from Trio Mocoto – who bring in a wide variety of percussion techniques to make the whole thing groove. There’s an earthy, laidback feel to the whole set – one that makes the album feel like a spontaneous expression of genius, even at the few points when larger orchestrations slide into the mix. The album’s easily one of Jorge Ben’s greatest – and it’s a much-heralded Brazilian treasure that’s finally getting reissued!

Henri Cartier-Bresson

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“Henri Cartier-Bresson (Aperture Masters of Photography)” (Aperture)

Was lucky enough to sneak over to the Art Institute of Chicago this week, and explore the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibit. Wow. My art-speak muscles have atrophied from inactivity1, so I’m not going to bore you with faux critical analysis, suffice it to say, I was blown away, and want to explore the exhibit again before it leaves, January 4th, 2009. I was not familiar with his work, besides perhaps one image that became famous recently2 when uploaded to Flickr. Amazing will suffice as an adjective for Mr. Cartier-Bresson.

The exhibit also mixes in drawings3 from contemporaries, sometimes uncannily similar, sometimes related in other fashion – such as a photo of Henri Matisse in his studio alongside a Matisse sketch.

From the AIC:

To celebrate the centenary of the birth of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the Art Institute will present, for the first time, a comparison of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs to the modern drawings, etchings, and paintings of his contemporaries—works that would otherwise be in storage in preparation for their installation in the Modern Wing.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, the legendary photojournalist whose work was characterized by the term “the decisive moment,” began his career as a painter influenced by the Surrealist poets who were a mainstay of Parisian café culture in the 1920s. Although his subsequent work in photography was concerned primarily with time and timing, it also reveals an appreciation for the irrational and subconscious gleaned from the work of writers and poets of this time.

Pulling from the Art Institute’s Julian Levy Collection—the legendary gallery director who assembled the first exhibition of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs in the United States—this exhibition provides a rare glimpse into the early stages of Cartier-Bresson’s career. Work by his painting instructor André Lhote parallels Cartier-Bresson’s early photographs, as does that of Salvador Dalí. Also included will be work by Giorgio de Chirico, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso that relates to photographs by Brassaï, André Kertész, and other photographers active in Paris between the World Wars.

When I got home, I ordered this book from Amazon

Henri Cartier-Bresson reveals–as only a few great artists have done consistently–the richness, the sensibilities, and the varieties of the human experience in the twentieth century. This volume of Aperture’s Masters of Photography series confirms the genius of the photographer whose pictures with the new, smaller hand-held cameras and faster films defined the idea of “the decisive moment” in photography.

Cartier-Bresson’s imagery is intimate, but it is also utterly respectful of his subjects. In his wide travels throughout the world, he has captured universal meanings through the glimpses into the lives of individuals in scores of countries. Each photograph is in itself a masterpiece of dramatic form; taken together, Cartier-Bresson’s works constitute a personal history of epic scope.

Henri Cartier-Bresson presents forty-two of the artist’s photographs, each recognized a a masterpiece of the medium. In addition, Cartier-Bresson offers a brief statement of his own artistic ethos, his striving for the spontaneity through intuition that imbues his work.

Forty-two 5″X7″ quality reproductions, well worth the $10 price tag. If you have the slightest interest in photography or art history, you should swing by the Art Institute, or at least pick up a copy of this book.

Footnotes:
  1. University of Texas was a long, long time ago [↩]
  2. A wiseacre uploaded this photo to a Flickr group called “deleteMe”, a group that invites photography critique. Some of the more dismissive comments seem to have been deleted, but plenty still remain, criticizing his lack of focus, weird depth of field, should have been in stronger focus, and so on. Flickr is a great site, but rewards a certain type of photo over all others. Color photos of beaches are fine, but are they really art? Over-saturated postcard style images usually get viewed much, much more than photos containing less technical polish. [↩]
  3. and paintings? The trouble with spending a couple hours browsing the Art Institute is that there is a certain amount of blur [↩]

FreeDarko presents The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac

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“FreeDarko presents The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac: Styles, Stats, and Stars in Today’s Game” (Bethlehem Shoals, Dr. Lawyer IndianChief, Silverbird 5000, Brown Recluse Esq.)

Received my copy today. Looks like a lot of fun. Bloggers making good – the tome was written by Bethlehem Shoals (Author), Dr. Lawyer IndianChief (Author), Silverbird 5000 (Author), Brown Recluse Esq. (Author), Big Baby Belafonte (Illustrator). Excerpts are available if you want to dip your toe in FreeDarko waters. I jumped right in on the strength of their brand.

Mellos Nuts

The indispensible, amazingly illustrated companion to today’s NBA—a roundball Rosetta Stone that hilariously decodes the trends and tendencies of pro basketball.

The NBA of the moment is a league of hugely charismatic celebrities, crackling aesthetic intrigue, sociopolitical undercurrents, and raw humanity: every Kobe Bryant pump-fake or LeBron James dunk holds within it a Shaq-size load of meaning. The Macro-Phenomenal NBA Almanac is a one-of-a-kind guide to this tumultuous and exciting league. In a series of brilliantly illustrated chapters—from Master Builders like Tim Duncan to Destiny’s Kids like Amare Stoudemire to Lost Souls like Lamar Odom—the almanac breaks down the styles of the NBA’s most colorful characters, showing what each one reveals through his play and conduct, both on the court and off. Filled with some of the smartest, funniest sportswriting known to fankind, this book will cast an entirely new light on one of our favorite games.

Basketball Jones

From the book site:

The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac functions simultaneously as the ultimate basketball book for the ultimate NBA fan as well as the ideal sports book for the person with no interest in sports. This book will satiate the passionate sports fan’s desire to see athleticism legitimized as a cultural element extending beyond mere cro-magnon brawn.

Within the pages of this tome, NBA hoopery collides with Japanese noise-rock, municipal politics, experimental zoology, Belgian surrealism, and behavioral economics like never before. The mystical deities of this hallowed league of professional basketball are finally given the treatment they deserved, as they are scrutinized not as men, but as embodiments of our own core cultural values and insecurities.

Whereas past sports-literary endeavors have attempted to paint sports as a metaphor for life or life as a metaphor for sport, we depict the National Basketball Association as a universe unlike any that one would encounter in daily existence. The NBA is a sphere in which Indiana farmboys, housing project messiahs, African tribesmen, and escapees from war-torn Eastern Bloc countries, coalesce by the nature of their superhuman physicality. Free Darko was born to make sense of it all.

Awesome I say, awesome indeed.
One other point: the book is well designed, slick, with heavy paper stock, and brightly colored illustrations. Not a tri-fold manifesto published at night at a local copy shop, but a book that feels like it is something.

Louis Armstrong and Johnny Cash

Seth Anderson2 Comments


“The Johnny Cash Show: The Best of Johnny Cash 1969-1971” (Michael B Borofsky)

I feel strongly that Louis Armstrong was one of the foremost geniuses of the 20th Century. Not just for the jazz world, or the music world, but in every aspect, Louis Armstrong accords respect as an innovator, and creator of themes emulated, copied and echoed by others. A genius, in other words.

I would have never guessed, but Louis Armstrong was a guest on the Johnny Cash Show. This and the story about Satchmo and Jimmie Rogers show how diverse musical tastes these men had and once again that music is a great connector.

This is from episode 38, Oct., 28, 1970 and must be one of Satchmo’s last performances. He was such a great performer right to the end and the Nashville audience and Johnny just loved him.

Louis Armstrong cracks everybody up at the start of the song: Let’s give it to ’em in black and white.

THIS AND OTHER GREAT PERFORMANCES ARE NOW AVAILABLE ON A 2-DVD-SET “BEST OF THE JOHNNY CASH TV SHOW”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqc209-rwNI

Jason Kottke links to this Paris Review sampler of some of Louis Armstrong’s visual art:

When not pressing the valves on his trumpet or the record button on his tape recorder, Armstrong’s fingers found other arts with which to occupy themselves. One of them was collage, which became a visual outlet for his improvisational genius. The story goes that he did a series of collages on paper and tacked them up on the wall of his den, but Lucille, who had supervised the purchase and interior decoration of their house in Corona, Queens, objected. Armstrong decided to use his extensive library of tapes as a canvas instead, and the result is a collection of some five hundred decorated reel-to-reel boxes, one thousand collages counting front and back. The collages feature photographs of Armstrong with friends (like the snapshot captioned “Taken at Catherine and Count Basie’s swimming pool, at his birthday party, August 1969”) and with fans (Armstrong seems never to have refused a photo op or an autograph); congratulatory telegrams and clippings from reviews of his performances; a blessing from the Vatican (as reassembled by Louis, the first lines read: “Mr. and Mrs. Most Holy Father Louis Armstrong”); and cutouts from packages of Swiss Kriss herbal laxatives, which, judging from the label’s ubiquity in these pieces, were as much a staple of Armstrong’s daily life as playing the horn. Only occasionally do the collages indicate the musical content within; usually there is no correlation. Armstrong made generous use of various kinds of adhesive tape not only to attach images to each box but also to laminate, frame, or highlight them. The works are untitled and undated, but he was making them as early as the 1950s; in a letter from 1953 he wrote, “Well, you know, my hobbie (one of them anyway) is using a lot of scotch tape . . . My hobbie is to pick out the different things during what I read and piece them together and [make] a little story of my own.”

[Click to read more of The Paris Review – Reel to Reel]

and we posted this a year or so ago…

As mentioned on a Bob Dylan XM radio broadcast, Louis Armstrong appeared in a Betty Boop short.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVIb72b12OI

One of the classic Depression-era musical cartoons created by Max and Dave Fleischer. Satchmo’s soundtrack obviously inspires the artists – even if the visuals aren’t in any way “politically correct” 70-plus years later.

Yes, besides the wince-inducing racism, this piece is a great meld of Fleischer brothers cartoon, live action of Louis Armstrong’s crack jazz band of the 20s and 30s – The Hot Fives and Sevens, and Mr. Armstrong’s floating head.


“The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings” (Louis Armstrong)

Jimmie Rodgers and Johnny Cash are important musical icons too, any fledgling musical historian should own multiple albums by both, but Louis Armstrong transcends them.

Brighten the Corners Reissued

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“Brighten the Corners: Nicene Creedence Edition” (Pavement)

Matador Records is re-issuing Brighten the Corners, Pavement’s penultimate album, with a second disc of goodies, and more.

Our latest edition of Buy Early Get Now is perennial favorite, Pavement’s classic album Brighten The Corners!

Buy Early Get Now and receive the 2 CD deluxe edition in an embossed and die-cut slipcase, with a 62-page perfect-bound book AND a stream of the album, two bonus tracks and a whole vinyl LP containing an unreleased live show. That’s right. A free LP if you Buy Early Get Now. The bonus live LP was recorded during the first Brighten tour and scheduled for release as OLE-324 in July 1998, but was then shelved… until now.

[From Matador Records ]

I assume this bonus LP will eventually be released in the future in other formats, but maybe not.1

Pavement is intertwined with my memories of the 1990s, they were by far my favorite contemporary band, eclipsing even the mighty Sonic Youth who had already started their decline by then. Pavement rewards multiple, concentrated listening, their lyrics were comprised of obtuse bits of American indie subculture, and whatever else was on our bookshelves. In my own iTunes rating scheme five songs are classics, 4 star songs that are always included on my iPod2.

Clicking around to read contemporary reviews of the album, stumbled on this gem from Pitchfork. I imagine the reviewer3 smoking a big bowl of something interesting, and then being unable to write anything coherent about an album he loved, but still typing something anyway on his laptop. Err, or something. I simply don’t know what you are implying.

Still shocking the music world with their wacky, off-kilter brand of music, Pavement come back hard in 1997 with Brighten The Corners. Having never released an album that was even remotely bad, Pavement continue to awe with songs like “Shady Lane” and “We are Underused.” Yeah, it’s a fact. Stephen Malkmus and company pretty much got it goin’ on.

When this disc opens with “Stereo,” you’re immediately compelled to grin. And grin you do. For the duration of the album. A natural high, the tracks roll on. “Transport is Arranged,” “Date With Ikea,” “Old to Begin.” Each one somehow ultimately more awesome than the last. Stuck in a joyous stupor, your only option is to go limp and let the music move you.

Luckily, the disc ends and after a few minutes of continued incapacitation and twitching, you’re able to move again. Best not put it on repeat.

Actually, Robert Christgau wasn’t much deeper in his rave:

Brighten the Corners [Matador, 1997]

Mature or die is the whole of the law. So of course there’s no longer much insurgency in their ill-mannered sounds, now deployed to serenade a self-sustaining subculture and celebrate a band’s collective success. Moderate tempos that once breathed psychedelic wooze turn reflective if not thoughtful as lyrics reference the material emoluments of middle-class life. Yet it’s still exciting, because it isn’t dragged under by the nagging disappointments that generally dull such music (and security). As convinced ironists, Pavement never expected anything else. Closure is a chimera–they’ll drink to that. Onetime insurgent Thelonious Monk–they’ll drink to him, too. A man known for his brilliant corners. A

At least neither reviewer4 uses the word, angular.

Footnotes:
  1. Only available directly from Matador, not the Amazon link, btw [↩]
  2. Stereo; Blue Hawaiian; We are Underused; Starlings of the Slipstream; and Fin, in case you were curious [↩]
  3. Ryan Schreiber [↩]
  4. nor myself, up until this point. Doh!! [↩]

Wilco Blue ray ripoff

Seth Anderson0 comment


“I Am Trying to Break Your Heart – A Film About Wilco” (Sam Jones (IV))

Wilco emails warning about an upcoming Blue-Ray disc that is not worth purchasing:

Also, we have a CONSUMER ALERT. Without consulting us, the DVD company (not WB/Nonesuch) that released “I am trying to break your heart” is about to issue a Blu-Ray Edition which, no surprise, costs considerably more (nearly 2x) than the standard DVD. We’re unsure as to the rationale for the release, given that the film was shot in beautiful grainy B&W and has a stereo-only audio track… there is, in our opinion, not much to be gained by spending the extra cash. It’s your money… and in this case you should probably hang onto it. [From W I L C O – N E W S]

The film is quite interesting, if you are familiar with the band, but apparently, you can just rent it from Netflix instead of forking out for the new version. Or get the standard DVD.

or just read Greg Kot’s book:


“Wilco: Learning How to Die” (Greg Kot)

Sugar Mountain Live

Seth Anderson0 comment


Neil Young’s Sugar Mountain Live

Forty years after its recording, “Sugar Mountain”” by Neil Young will finally see the light of day, live Michigan gigs which helped establish the singer as a solo artist.
Young’s solo career launched in earnest with an engagement at The Canterbury House in Ann Arbor, Mich. Having left the Buffalo Springfield six months earlier, Young brought just his guitar along to the University of Michigan facility.

The gig was a stealth booking to determine if audiences would accept Young’s music in its most elemental form since he previously was in band.

The night of Nov. 9-10, 1968, he performed his music and told stories between the songs. The performances were recorded those evenings on a TEAC 2 track tape recorder, the tapes kept in storage over the intervening years.

“Sugar Mountain Live At Canterbury House 1968” will be out Nov. 25 by Reprise as part of the continuing Neil Young Archive Performance Series. The 23-track album will include recordings made on both nights. The album includes songs that were written during his Buffalo Springfield tenure as well as newly written material that would appear on future solo albums. One of the spoken word pieces is a tale of Young’s hapless “day job” experience working in a Toronto bookstore.

[From Neil Young’s “Sugar Mountain Live” sees light of day]

I’m sure this is better than Living With War…