Category: Suggestions

You might be interested in…

Soul Power Sounds Spectacular

Seth Anderson1 Comment

I can’t wait to see this film, sounds spectacular.

Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, the director of the new documentary “Soul Power,” was a film editor in 1995 for “When We Were Kings,” the Oscar-winning documentary directed by Leon Gast about the Rumble in the Jungle, the 1974 heavyweight world championship bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire (now Congo).


“When We Were Kings” (Leon Gast)

That fight had a huge sideshow: Zaire ’74, a three-day music festival of American soul alongside African music, headlined by James Brown and filmed by the same crew that was in Zaire for the fight. “Soul Power” presents that festival from its precarious beginnings to the finale of a shirtless, sweating James Brown singing to an African audience, “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud.”

The festival was a striking sociocultural moment. African-American and Latin musicians were being introduced to Africa and African musicians amid Mr. Ali’s black-power politics and a hodgepodge of visiting music, sports and literary figures. “There was a lot of deeper meaning about why people went there and what it evoked for them,” Mr. Levy-Hinte said.

Brown and other headliners, including B. B. King, Celia Cruz and the Fania All-Stars, the Spinners and Bill Withers, performed at their peak, flaunting bright-colored, sharp-collared, bell-bottomed 1970s outfits that are a fashion show themselves. Americans shared the lineup with African musicians, like the South African singer Miriam Makeba and the top Zairean groups T.P.O.K. Jazz (featuring the guitarist Franco) and Tabu Ley Rochereau.

[From ‘Soul Power,’ Documentary on the Zaire ’74 Music Festival – NYTimes.com]

but who knows when the film will ever be released:

His plan was to put out concert DVDs of the festival’s performances, a fairly straightforward process. Then “I committed the original sin of filmmaking,” he said. “I fell in love with the material instead of following this rational business path.

It cost about half a million dollars, including licensing the music, to make “Soul Power.” So far there’s no deal for a soundtrack album. The DVDs will be assembled “as soon as humanly possible,” Mr. Levy-Hinte said, though that may well be next year.

“The vast majority of the material has still not been used,” he added. “There may be a whole other movie in there.”


“20th Anniversaire, Vol. 2” (Franco & T.P.O.K. Jazz)


“1972/1973/1974” (Franco & T.P.O.K. Jazz)

Bach Edition: Complete Works (155 CD Box Set)

Seth Anderson1 Comment


“Bach Edition: Complete Works (155 CD Box Set)” (Brilliant Classics)

One wonders if 155 CDs is really enough Bach. That’s like $0.50 a disc. Reading the reviews on Amazon, the quality seems hit and miss, but then I don’t know enough Johann Sebastian Bach to reliably judge. What the hell. I’ll let you know…

Infinite Jest

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Infinite Jest
Infinite Jest, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

My reading list

There’s a web-based reading group for this allegedly challenging book, but I haven’t started reading David Foster Wallace’s tome yet, still have about 100 pages left of American Pharaoh

http://infinitesummer.org/

How Kiva Works

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Stumbled upon a micro-finance website called Kiva which sound intriguing. Their bona fides seem good (partners include Google, American Express, Microsoft, and other blue-chip corporations), and their mission is one I support, as an entrepreneur myself, and as a citizen of Earth. Microfinancing, as it is called, is a fairly recent innovation, giving small cash loans to those tiny businesses around the globe that are too small to attract attention from corporate banks.

I had not heard of this organization until today, but apparently they have been in the public eye for a few years:

Kiva’s business plan was quite straightforward: An online platform would allow ordinary people to invest in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the developing world. (See “Kiva’s Loan Cycle” on page 70 for an overview of how Kiva works.) Users would log on to the Web site to read the personal accounts of Kiva’s carefully chosen borrowers and then use their PayPal accounts or credit cards to lend as little as $25 to a borrower. On-the-ground MFIs would then administer the loans to the borrowers. Users would get their money back over the course of a year, with the option of either relending the money or pocketing it. While the loan agreement was in place, users would also receive frequent updates about their borrowers from the MFIs.

Despite the simplicity of their model, Flannery and Jackley ran into a tremendous amount of resistance from microfinance experts. “The criticisms were about both the supply side and the demand side,” says Jackley. “On the supply side, critics said that the idea wasn’t scalable because of the time and effort needed to vet borrowers and then to post their stories on the Web. And on the demand side, the critics said, for whom is this product intended?” The microloans were neither investments nor donations. “No one knew what to do with this bizarre, in-between product,” she says.

Another issue was how much interest (if any) Kiva could charge borrowers and return to lenders. Kiva’s founders originally wanted to offer lenders the option of earning interest on their loans, both to attract lenders and to transform the usual wealthy donor-poor beneficiary hierarchy into the more egalitarian lender-borrower relationship. Yet returning interest on loans could have turned the loan into a security in the eyes of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Offering a security to the public would trigger a long list of SEC requirements, including sufficiently collateralizing the loans and investing only in entities that comply with U.S. accounting standards.

Kiva’s founders also debated whether to be a nonprofit or a for-profit organization. Establishing Kiva as a nonprofit was the fastest way for the founders to get the site up and running. Yet they could not readily ascertain whether a charitable organization could extend loans rather than donations. They were also unsure what tax implications Kiva and its lenders would face upon the return of the loan principals and, should they charge interest, profits.

Finally, skeptics doubted whether Kiva could actually help lift many people out of poverty. A common theory circulated that, for microfinance to have a significant impact on world poverty, MFIs would need to be integrated into the global economy and to tap into the capital markets. Yet most MFIs did not qualify for commercial-grade investments. Rather, they relied on donations, especially during their early years of operation. Observers questioned how Kiva could find enough appropriate MFIs with a reasonable number of borrowers to help the organization establish a creditworthy track record.

[Click to read more of Stanford Social Innovation Review : Articles : The Profit in Nonprofit (May 20, 2009)]

Kiva explains how the process works:

The below diagram shows briefly how money gets from you to an entrepreneur, and back.
1) Lenders like you browse profiles of entrepreneurs in need, and choose someone to lend to. When they lend, using PayPal or their credit cards, Kiva collects the funds and then passes them along to one of our microfinance partners worldwide.

2) Kiva’s microfinance partners distribute the loan funds to the selected entrepreneur. Often, our partners also provide training and other assistance to maximize the entrepreneur’s chances of success.

3) Over time, the entrepreneur repays their loan. Repayment and other updates are posted on Kiva and emailed to lenders who wish to receive them.

4) When lenders get their money back, they can re-lend to someone else in need, donate their funds to Kiva (to cover operational expenses), or withdraw their funds.

[From Kiva – How Kiva Works]

For me, whenever I am feeling depressed or angry at the world, especially around holiday season when I cannot squeeze in a trip home to see my family, I donate to food banks or other charities. I don’t talk about it with anyone: not relevant, but the simple act of anonymously sharing money with others who need it more than I do elevates my mood. When I think about it, I am extremely fortunate to be in the financial position I am in. I may not have a retirement fund, I may only have a few thousand dollars in the bank, but I’m fat and well-fed, with no material needs unmet.

Anyway, I’m reluctant to continue this thought, suffice it to say, I joined Kiva.org, and will be circulating some of my money there. You should too.

The most irritating aspect of Kiva.org is their insistence that lenders use PayPal. I don’t really prefer to use PayPal for any transaction that I don’t have to. Since I just had some cash deposited in my PayPal account, I’ll use that. I wonder if PayPal gives them a more favorable fee structure?

Oh, there is the hidden link to use a non-PayPal account. You can just donate money using a credit card after all. Well, why not, I’ll do that too…

The Modern Athlete

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“The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy” (Bill Simmons)

Bill Simmons is nearly finished with his book on a subject near and dear to my heart, the NBA. Avi Zenilman of The New Yorker interviewed Simmons on the NBA Finals, and the topic of the modern athlete came up:

The lack of college experience also means that you probably have less of a chance to have a conversation with a Finals player about English lit or political science. For instance, if you’re a reporter, maybe you don’t ask for thoughts from modern players on the Gaza Strip or Abdul Nasser, or whether they read Chuck Pahlaniuk’s new book. These guys lead sheltered lives that really aren’t that interesting. Back in the seventies, you could go out to dinner with three of the Knicks—let’s say, Phil Jackson, Bill Bradley, and Walt Frazier—and actually have a fascinating night. Which three guys would you pick on the Magic or Lakers? I guess Fisher would be interesting, and I always heard Odom was surprisingly thoughtful. I can’t come up with a third. So I’d say that the effects are more in the “didn’t really have any experiences outside being a basketball player” sense.

I can’t wait to see what happens to KG, Kobe, T-Mac, Carmelo, Howard and others when they finish with basketball. These guys have been mini-corporations and basketball machines since the age of eighteen. What will they do? What will be important to them? When I was researching my book, one thing that blew me away was how brilliant the guys from the fifties and sixties were. Not as players, as people. Oscar Robertson, Bill Russell, Elgin Baylor, Jerry West, Bob Cousy, Wilt Chamberlain…these were thoughtful, well-rounded human beings who cared deeply about not just their sport, but about their place in society and (in the case of the black guys) their stature during such a tumultuous time. Everyone knows about Russell’s eleven rings, but did you know about everything he did to advance the cause of African-Americans? Everyone knows about Oscar’s triple doubles, but did you know that he filed the lawsuit that paved the way for a real players union and free agency? These were truly great men and the N.B.A. just wouldn’t be where it is if that wasn’t the case.

Nowadays, the mindset seems to be more, “What can I do to raise my profile? How can I become more famous? How can I make more money?” We need more David Robinsons and Steve Nashes and Ray Allens. The N.B.A. does a terrific job of getting their players into a community, but I wonder how many of those players actually understand why it’s important, or if it’s just something else on their schedule right between “Make a cameo on Kendra’s reality show” and “Meet with E.A. bigwigs about a possible N.B.A. Live cover.” Five decades ago, when Russell wanted to get his point across about something that was important to him, he would write a first-person account in Sports Illustrated. Today, Shaq gets his point across in a 140-character Twitter post. I don’t think this is progress.

[Click to read more of Studying The Finals: News Desk: Online Only: The New Yorker]

Amen to that.

Alien Hoopsters 6 on 6

Hypnotic Brass Ensemble

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I forget where I first heard of the formerly-based-in-Chicago band, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, but I bought their CD recently1. The disc arrived a day or so before this New Yorker review by Sasha Frere-Jones, which begins:

The first time I encountered the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, I was walking through the Times Square subway station toward the No. 1 train. It was hard to miss the sound of eight men playing brass instruments—two trombones, four trumpets, one sousaphone, and a euphonium—while a ninth man added drums. The men stood side by side, swaying, looking a bit like James Brown’s Famous Flames. As I listened, the sousaphone player locked in with the drummer, the trombones played what sounded like a bass line, and the rest of the horns circled and echoed the main motif. Certain genres sprang to mind—a New Orleans second-line band, say, or big-band jazz—but the music wasn’t jazz, exactly. The songs set small, compact melodies against a steady hip-hop beat, and everyone played simultaneously and continuously. The band had eliminated one of the dreary commonplaces of jazz, that class-recital rhythm of soloing—you go, I go, and so on, until the main melody returns.

Several months later, I saw the band again, in front of the Whole Foods in Union Square. As I snapped a few photographs, mostly to remind myself to figure out who they were, one of the trombone players walked up to me. “You can’t take a picture unless you buy a CD,” he said, smiling. He held out three albums in slimline cases, each titled “Hypnotic Brass Ensemble” and featuring an identical black-and-white photograph of the band, beneath a field of color—one red, one orange, and one green. I bought all three (ten bucks apiece), and the trombone player slapped me on the back. “Support live music, people,” he called out, stepping in line with his bandmates. “Bring back real music before it’s too late.”

With the exception of the drummer, Gabriel Wallace, the members of Hypnotic are all brothers. Their father is the jazz trumpeter Kelan Phil Cohran, who was a leading figure in Chicago’s black avant-garde-jazz community in the fifties and sixties, and was a member of the Sun Ra Arkestra. In the spring of 1965, Cohran and about forty other musicians gathered in his living room on Chicago’s South Side to form the A.A.C.M. (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), a nonprofit that supports black artistic expression in local communities. “We had lived through the greatest decline of professional musicians in Chicago and wanted to do something about it,” Cohran says. Some of the best-known members of the A.A.C.M. include the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, and the Pharaohs, whose members eventually formed Earth, Wind, and Fire.

[Click to continue reading Serendipity: Musical Events: The New Yorker]

Even better. The album is quite good. If I wasn’t lazy and pressed for time, I might have elaborated on the thought that their sound is jazz music you could dance to. Mr. Frere-Jones concurs, albeit more eloquently:

The music that Hypnotic plays might best be described as highly composed instrumental hip-hop. If it is jazz, it’s closer in spirit to jazz from a hundred years ago: accomplished and energetic music parcelled out in short songs designed for dancing. It stays in key for long stretches, and moves in easy-to-follow periods. In a typical Hypnotic song, the shifts in key and the emergence of themes happen against a sound of massed horn parts that provide a sense of solidity. The music stays rooted to the cycle of the beat and the riff, and the players don’t leave the center behind to leap around as they might in hard bop or free jazz. Unlike the musicians in the avant-garde community that Hypnotic grew up in, these players have no interest in dissonance or “out” passages of squeaking and skronking. They keep their compositions lean and their harmonies broad and varied.

Footnotes:
  1. oh, I remember now, Uncut had a piece about Honest Jon’s records and Damon Albarn. I blogged about it here [↩]

Fools Gold

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“Fool’s Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe” (Gillian Tett)

According to Gillian Tett (by way of New Yorker columnist John Lanchester), our current financial meltdown started because of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

first bore fruit when Exxon needed to open a line of credit to cover potential damages of five billion dollars resulting from the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. J. P. Morgan was reluctant to turn down Exxon, which was an old client, but the deal would tie up a lot of reserve cash to provide for the risk of the loans going bad. The so-called Basel rules, named for the town in Switzerland where they were formulated, required that the banks hold eight per cent of their capital in reserve against the risk of outstanding loans. That limited the amount of lending bankers could do, the amount of risk they could take on, and therefore the amount of profit they could make. But, if the risk of the loans could be sold, it logically followed that the loans were now risk-free; and, if that were the case, what would have been the reserve cash could now be freely loaned out. No need to suck up useful capital.

In late 1994, Blythe Masters, a member of the J. P. Morgan swaps team, pitched the idea of selling the credit risk to the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development. So, if Exxon defaulted, the E.B.R.D. would be on the hook for it—and, in return for taking on the risk, would receive a fee from J. P. Morgan. Exxon would get its credit line, and J. P. Morgan would get to honor its client relationship but also to keep its credit lines intact for sexier activities. The deal was so new that it didn’t even have a name: eventually, the one settled on was “credit-default swap.”

[From Outsmarted: Books: The New Yorker]

I haven’t read the book yet, but I ordered it after reading these sentence:

The value of Gillian Tett’s book is in the level of detail with which she tells the story, concentrating on the specific sequence of inventions and innovations that made it possible. Tett, a Financial Times reporter who covered the credit markets, was one of the few people to have seen the implosion coming. A critical factor was that she has a Ph.D. in social anthropology—a “hippie” background, as one banker told her, intending no compliment. It helped her focus on what she calls “social silences” in the world of banking.

Midas Touch

Bankers and their greed, but of course, greed with consequence for all of us.

There was one final component to the J. P. Morgan team’s invention. The team set up a kind of offshore shell company, called a Special Purpose Vehicle, to fulfill the role supplied by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in the first credit-default swap. The shell company would assume $9.7 billion of J. P. Morgan’s risk (in this case, outstanding loans that the bank had made to some three hundred companies) and sell off that risk to investors, in the form of securities paying differing rates of interest. According to J. P. Morgan’s calculations, the underlying loans were so safe that it needed to collect only seven hundred million dollars in order to cover the $9.7-billion debt. In 1997, the credit agency Moodys agreed, and a whole new era in banking dawned. J. P. Morgan had found a way to shift risk off its books while simultaneously generating income from that risk, and freeing up capital to lend elsewhere. It was magic. The only thing wrong with it was the name, BISTRO, for Broad Index Secured Trust Offering, which made the new rocket-science financial instrument sound like a place you went to for steak frites. The market came to prefer a different term: “synthetic collateralized debt obligations.”

John Lancaster’s article is fascinating, give it a read before the Rapture takes your neighbors away…

Group Doueh: Guitar Music From The Western Sahara

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Guitar Music From The Western Sahara

If you think you’ve heard all the great electric guitar styles in the world, think again. This Saharan sand-blizzard of fine-crushed glass will grind your face to a bloody pulp. Group Doueh play raw and unfiltered Saharawi music from the former colonial Spanish outpost of the Western Sahara. Doueh (pronounced “Doo-way”) is their leader and a master of the electric guitar. He’s been performing since he was a child playing in many groups before finally creating his own in the 1980’s.

Doueh says he’s Influenced by western pop and rock music especially Jimi Hendrix and James Brown. His sound is distorted, loud and unhinged with an impressive display of virtuosity and style only known in this part of the world. His wife Halima and friend Bashiri are the two vocalists in the group. Saharawi songs are from the sung poetry of the Hassania language. The music is based on the same modal structure as Mauritanian music, however, Doueh’s style is a looser appropriation infused with a western guitar scope, one that relies, in his words, as much on Hendrix as it does traditional Sahrawi music. It also adds a playful pop element that rarely filters through in this region. Doueh has turned down countless offers from Morocco and Europe to release his music but he decided to offer us access to his homemade recordings and photo archive for this amazing debut release. This is a CD reissue of the sold-out LP edition and comes with great photos of the musicians and liner notes by Hisham Mayet.

[From Group Doueh: Guitar Music From The Western Sahara CD SF030 Reissue]

Right-o. Face-melting is apt: this music has not been filtered by Auto-Tune that is for damn sure. Hypnotically listenable, full of inventive trills, but not for the faint-of-heart, or those put off by lack of musical fidelity.

Netflixed: Xala

Seth Anderson1 Comment



A high-ranking official loses the respect of the community in Ousmane Sembene’s comedy. Set in a newly independent Senegal, the story centers on influential official El Hadji, who decides to take advantage of the rampant corruption by using government funds to marry his third wife. But on his wedding night, El Hadji discovers he has xala, the curse of impotence. With his virility in question, he tries a number of ridiculous and bizarre cures. [Netflix Xala]

Not sure how I heard of this 1975 film, but it looks interesting.

Roger Ebert wrote of it:

The white members of the local chamber of commerce have been ordered out of office, and now African businessmen take their places. But one of the whites returns to place attache cases in front of each seat. The Africans open the cases and nod solemnly, impressed by the neat stacks of bribe money inside. The old order has been replaced by the new, but it’s business as usual.

So begins “Xala,” the newest and most disturbing film by the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene. His story follows the decline and fall of one of the African businessmen, who sells rice on the black market to finance the addition of a third wife to his family. But in a larger sense, Sembene also is commenting on the failures of African capitalism and on the legacy of corruption inherited from colonial times.

This is new ground for Sembene, who is the best of the handful of African film directors.

[Click to continue Xala :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews]

While Richard Eder of the New York Times wrote:

Dancing and jubilation in the seaside African capital, where coconut-icing skyscrapers loom over the shanties, the trees are gray with dust and the bougainvillea is like a terminal illness.

Africans in bright-colored togas move into the big building in the main square, order out the white men and remove the busts of Napoleon. Next scene: the Africans, in expensive European suits, sit around the table, the white men stand importantly behind as “advisers” and pass them briefcases stuffed with money, the black soldiers push back black crowds and rid the streets of unsightly beggars.

In a way, therefore, Osmane Sembene’s cutting, radiant and hilarious film “Xala,” … is “Animal Farm” applied to Africa independence.

It is part fable and part satire, but it is much more: with the greatest fineness and delicacy, Mr. Sembene, the Senegalese writer and director who made this picture, has set out a portrait of the complex and conflicting mesh of traditions, aspirations and frustrations of a culture knocked askew by colonialism and distorting itself anew while climbing out.

[Click to continue Movie Review – Xala – Film Festival: Cutting, Radiant ‘Xala’ – NYTimes.com]

Honest Jon’s Records

Seth Anderson1 Comment

[Honest Jon’s Records Amazon MP3 store]

The July 2009 issue of Uncut has a small feature on Honest Jon’s Records, and one of their famous patrons, Damon Albarn1. There is also a 16 track sampler of songs put out on the Honest Jon label, some incredible stuff.


“Palace of the Winds” (Hisham Mayet)

Browsing Honest Jon’s Outernational page, discovered at least a dozen albums I want, and a film called Palace of the Winds:

‘Intimate and dreamlike… exploring the music of Saharawi culture from Guelmim in Southern Morocco to the Mauritanian capital of Nouakchott.’

Desert blues, right up my alley.

Also have already downloaded


“Sprigs of Time: 78s from the EMI Archive” (Various Artists)

Honest Jon’s has spent the last eighteen months delving through more than 150,000 78 rpm records in the extensive EMI Archives at Hayes, Middlesex. The results of this trawl can be heard on the Hayes Archive series, an epic 12 albums covering early recordings of music from Iraq, Turkey, Caucasia, the Lebanon, Greece, Iran (including sides made in Old Street, London, in 1909), Egypt and the Belgian Congo. The 12 volumes will be released according to the standards of HJ’s esteemed London Is The Place For Me series – with full notes, translations where possible, and wonderful artwork. A giddy summer sampler will run organ rolls from Georgia alongside Tamils impersonating motorised transport in 1906, Kabyle music from Algeria into the songs of Bengali beggars, mambos from 1950s Beirut against the Imperial Palace Band of Japan in 1903


“Open Strings: 1920s Middle Eastern Recordings – New Responses” (Various Artists)

Forgotten masterpieces, out-of-this-world improvisations from the 1920s; and dazzling commissions by Sir Richard Bishop, Six Organs Of Admittance and co. ‘Dextrous, frenzied, fearless… awesome’ (Plan B).

and have ordered several others. What a great find!


“Guitar Music from the Western Sahara” (Group Doueh)

Sahara desert rock is one of my favorite genres, check out all these great titles from the Sublime Frequency label (a division of Honest Jon’s).

Footnotes:
  1. famously the frontman for Blur [↩]

Sonic Youth 28 Year Survivers

Seth Anderson2 Comments


“The Eternal” (Sonic Youth)

Seems like I’ve been a fan for nearly as long as the band has existed, but I guess that isn’t true. Probably 23 years ago I bought my first Sonic Youth album, from the used record section at Waterloo Records. Truth be told though, their last dozen releases have been meh, but I keep hoping the next will spark some connection.

‘Bands are usually a young man’s game,” says Thurston Moore, the guitarist with Sonic Youth for nearly 30 years. “Historically, they don’t stay together. We never had any animosity towards each other. I guess we never felt like we hit a wall with what we were doing. We never really had any ambitions for reaching a certain goal. We never had a hit we had to repeat.”

“Lots of bands don’t survive that kind of spike in popularity, or ego, or finances,” agrees fellow guitarist Lee Ranaldo. “We came into this feeling fairly serious about ourselves as artists and this is our medium, which happens to involve a collaborative group – it’s just never gotten boring or rote. It’s still incredibly fulfilling and interesting.”

Sonic Youth played their first gig 28 years ago this month, at the Noise Fest in New York City. Few bands stay together for that long, and fewer still remain so vital. The quintessential New York art-rock group have survived and flourished both through a rare internal democracy (Ranaldo likens their composition process to “making a group sculpture”) and, it seems, by simply being too busy to become disaffected. Sonic Youth’s discography is a sprawling affair, now encompassing 16 official studio albums, various compilations and a slew of self-released, more experimental releases.

All four core members (Moore, Kim Gordon, Ranaldo and Steve Shelley, who have recently been joined by former Pavement bassist Mark Ibold) work extensively outside the group, producing poetry and visual art, solo albums and collaborations with other musicians and artists, and running record labels

[Click to continue reading Art-punk band Sonic Youth talk to David Peschek | Music | The Guardian ]

Am looking forward to getting my copy of The Eternal on June 9.

After years on Geffen Records, Sonic Youth return to an indie label with their sixteenth studio album. “The Eternal” is a supercharged rocker, recalling aspects of the Evol-Sister-Daydream Nation holy trinity, but with cleaner, louder production and more straightforward momentum. With Pavement’s Mark Ibold joining on bass, and producer John Agnello back at the controls, “The Eternal” takes the melodic songwriting of 2006’s “Rather Ripped” and slams down the accelerator pedal. Initial pressing in a 4-panel wallet with two printed inner sleeves; one containing disc, the other a sticker and card with credits. Subsequent pressings are jewel case. Double LP hyper-deluxe HQ 180 RTI vinyl analog in heavy duty Stoughton gatefold sleeve, printed inner sleeves, and MP3 coupon.

Netflixed My Man Godfrey

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“My Man Godfrey – Criterion Collection” (Gregory La Cava)

William Powell cracks me up

A high-society scavenger hunt leads to levity when scatterbrained socialite Irene Bullock (Carole Lombard) stumbles upon an erudite vagabond named Godfrey (William Powell) living in the city dump and offers him a position as the Bullocks’ butler. As it happens, the seemingly bankrupt bum is, in fact, the heir of a well-to-do family. While Godfrey sets out to teach the pampered Bullocks a few lessons, Irene conspires to capture his heart. [From My Man Godfrey]

Netflix didn’t ship the Criterion Collection version because this print looks a little faded1, am still anticipating watching this film. I do wish that Netflix indicated whether a film was a Criterion version or not, makes such an enormous difference.

Director Gregory La Cava deftly balances satire, romance, and social comment in this 1936 classic, which echoes Frank Capra in its Depression-era subtext. The Bullocks are a well-heeled, harebrained Manhattan family genetically engineered for screwball collisions: father Alexander (Eugene Pallette, of the foghorn voice and thick-knit eyebrows) is the breadwinner at wit’s end, thanks to his spoiled daughters, the sultry Cornelia (Gail Patrick) and the sweet but scatterbrained Irene (a luminous Carole Lombard), his dizzy and doting wife, Angelica (Alice Brady), and her “protégé,” Italian freeloader Carlo (Mischa Auer). When Irene wins a society scavenger hunt (and atypically trumps her scheming sister) by producing a “lost man,” a seeming tramp named Godfrey (William Powell), all their lives are transformed. With the always suave, effortlessly funny Powell in the title role, this mystery man provides the film’s conscience and its model of decency; the giddy, passionate Lombard holds out its model for triumphant love. In a movie riddled with memorable comic highlights, the real miracle is the unapologetic romanticism that prevails.

Footnotes:
  1. I haven’t started watching, but popped the disk in to check if the scratches were too deep [↩]

Elvis Costello discovers writing an opera is hard work

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“Secret, Profane and Sugarcane” (Elvis Costello)

According to the print edition of Rolling Stone issue 1080, Elvis Costello has stopped working on the Hans Christian Andersen opera he started in 2005. Some of the songs are getting used in a new “roots” acoustic bluegrass record, recorded in Nashville.

Though Costello releases music at an incredible pace – close to 30 studio albums since 1977 – this record was unexpected, even to the artist himself. “Two years ago, I wasn’t sure if I was going to make any more records,” says Costello, who released the freewheeling rock set Momofuku and hosted the talk show Spectacle in 2008. “It wasn’t much fun anymore.” But a stint opening for Bob Dylan as a solo act in the fall of 2007 got Costello excited about making an unplugged album. “Nobody was coming to hear me, so I could test out new songs,” he says. “The audience applauded, and then I was gone.” Most of the Sugarcane material, including a few songs he wrote for an unfinished opera about Hans Christian Andersen, was road-tested on the Dylan tour and then fleshed out with a full band at North Carolina’s MerleFest in 2007 and San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in 2008.

Burnett assembled the band of top roots sidemen – including dobro player Jerry Douglas, mandolinist Mike Complon and singer Jim Lauderdale – and also fed Costello ideas for tunes. “T Bone sent me Robert Johnson’s ‘From Four Till Late’ and a Sidney Bechet record,” recalls Costello. “And he said, ‘Can we write something that jams those two ideas together?'” The result, “Sulphur to Sugarcane,” is an “I’ve Been Every where”-style blues ramble that wryly mocks loose women from Poughkeepsie, New York, to Ypsilanti, Michigan. “I played that one with Dylan every night,” says Costello, who will tour with the Sugarcane band this summer. “And I was amazed at how much applause you can get for impugning the reputation of a city’s womanhood from the stage.”

What I heard of Momofuku wasn’t all that interesting, but perhaps this new album will be more fun to listen to.

The Wire Season 2

swanksalot0 comment


“The Wire – The Complete Second Season” (Ernest Dickerson)

As if you need any more prodding from me to watch The Wire in its convoluted, messy, beautiful entirety…

what David Simon, Ed Burns and company are doing here is revealing that “The Wire” is going to be far more than a cops vs. drug dealers saga. It’s not a crime show. There’s a lot of crime in it, yes, but it’s a story about the death of an American city (really, the death of the American city), and little by little the show is going to take us into every corner of that city. Last year, it was the projects and the drug war raging within them. This season, our focus turns to the ports, and to the state of blue-collar, industrial America, which has been phased out in favor of a service economy that many of these guys just aren’t equipped for. As Simon referred to it in a few interviews, it’s “a meditation on the death of work and the betrayal of the American working class.

As has been said many times before, the opening scene of each “Wire” premiere is like a mission statement for that season. We open with McNulty riding forlornly on the boat, staring out at the many abandoned factories ringing Baltimore’s harbor. Once upon a time, these places were thriving concerns that provided jobs for any man willing to put in the work, no matter his background or skill level; now they’re rotting husks, relics of a time that barely exists anymore. Jimmy looks at those factories and thinks wistfully about the way things used to be, the lifestyle his father and his father’s friends had. Then he and his partner Claude answer a distress call from a party boat filled with yuppies who couldn’t care less about Bethlehem Steel or Domino Sugar; they just look at the harbor as a place to get their drink on while dancing to “Blue Skies.” Jimmy notes that they have to tow the boat out of the shipping channel, but at the same time, the harbor seems so dead that it hardly seems worth the bother; it’s been a long time since cargo ships were constantly coming and going from this port.

Recognizing all of this, Jimmy takes a bribe to tow the boat to an out of the way location where the party can keep going, and there you have your season in a nutshell: the port workers are dinosaurs, being replaced by wealthy people looking to party (or buy condos with waterfront views), and the only real money to be made around here is through bribery.

[Click to continue reading The Wire, Season 2, Episode 1: “Ebb Tide” (Veterans edition) – NJ.com ]

I recently re-watched the entire series, but was too lazy to tap out my thoughts on it. Suffice it to say, I will probably watch the entire series again for a third time next year. Such a nuanced television novel rewards multiple viewings.

Steve Earle and Townes Van Zandt

Seth Anderson0 comment

One of my favorite new albums discovered this year1 is Steve Earle’s tribute album to the late great Townes Van Zandt [wiki].


“Townes (2CD LTD Deluxe Edition)” (Steve Earle)

In a certain mood, Townes Van Zandt songs are like no other songs, with their melancholy poetry and blurred edges of a life lived to extreme. Van Zandt was the sort of artist who devoted his whole being to his music, at the expense of his body, his comfort, and his family.

Joe Hagan wrote a piece about Steve Earle’s relationship with Townes Van Zandt in a recent issue of Rolling Stone, but unfortunately, as far as I know, the article is not available online. I have a scanned PDF I could send you if you want, but here are a few paragraphs transcribed from my dead-tree edition:

Steve Earle and the Ghost of Townes
The country rocker almost died emulating his damaged mentor, Townes Van Zandt. On a new tribute album, Earle looks back. By Joe Hagan

[From : Rolling Stone Issue 1079]

[quote]

IN 1972, STEVE EARLE OVERHEARD A man talking about a birthday party being thrown for Texas country legend Jerry Jeff Walker in Austin, where Earle was living. He crashed the party and, around 2 a.m., in walked the tall, lanky form of Townes Van Zandt, wearing a white buckskin jacket with fringe on the arms. “He started a craps game and lost every dime that he had, and that jacket,” recounts Earle.

…

From Van Zandt, Earle absorbed poetry, literature, fingerpicking styles and a sophisticated lyric sensibility, all while getting into legendary misadventures. Once, while visiting Van Zandt at his cabin in rural Tennessee in the late Seventies, Earle was bragging about his burgeoning gun collection when Van Zandt, exasperated with his young acolyte, loaded a single bullet into his .357-caliber Magnum, spun the revolver, pressed it against his temple and pulled the trigger. Earle was horrified – and angry. He “beat the hell out of” Van Zandt and left. “It was the only time I ever got physical with him,” he says. “It took me a long time not to be angry about it.”

According to legend, Van Zandt came by to check on Earle during the height of Earle’s heroin addiction, asking him if he was using clean needles. When Earle said he was, Van Zandt replied, “OK, listen to this song I just wrote.” “And that was the first time I heard ‘Marie,'” says Earle. He covers the song on Townes.

I sincerely hope that Steve Earle either finds a way to release these audio anecdotes, or works them into a film or a book, or something.

Earle recorded the album in his Greenwich Village apartment, working 11 hours a day for a week. With the “record” button on, Earle maintained a rolling, Van Zandt-inspired meditation, relating impromptu stories and stray recollections about his mentor. The recording engineer, Steve Christensen, told Earle he felt like he was “listening to something I shouldn’t be listening to,” because it seemed so personal. Which is when Earle says he “realized that’s what the criteria is, that’s how I don’t fuck this up.” (He hasn’t figured out yet what he’ll do with the recorded anecdotes.)

If you have never listened to Townes Van Zandt, you are in for a real treat, as a lot of his back catalog is available on CD. I’d suggest dipping your toe with a greatest hits package, and then jumping right into the box sets. There is a quite decent film called Be Here to Love Me (a documentary composed of snippets of Townes Van Zandt) available at Netflix or Amazon, I’ve blogged about it before.


“The Late Great Townes Van Zandt” (Townes Van Zandt)


“Our Mother the Mountain” (Townes Van Zandt)


“Texas Troubadour” (Townes Van Zandt)


“Townes Van Zandt – Be Here to Love Me” (Margaret Brown)

Footnotes:
  1. I use that peculiar phrase because I don’t necessarily care if an album was released recently: just if it is new-to-me. For instance, other favorites from this year so far – Louvin Brothers, Dukes of the Stratosphere, The Heliocentrics, blah blah blah [↩]