ransom
I’m started to get worried. Actually worried. Really.
At first I was the kind of worried that you get when you purchase a new microwave and are unsure of its heating capacity. So you decide baked beans would make for a good test run and set the time to oh, I don’t know, four minutes forty three seconds because you think four minutes fifty seconds would just be overkill. But now I’m the kind of worried that makes you wake up every five minutes for a full hour before your alarm is set to go off.
Kyle† is missing. Gone.
†(Kyle is my roommate and best friend. Best friend seems a bit drab insofar as there should be a special word or phrase for “best friend.” Obviously BFF is out of the question. Another friend that was not Kyle and therefore not my best friend referred to her best friends as “besties,” I like that. However, I’m not quite sure I could pull it off so I’m forced to continue to call him my best friend even if it just doesn’t have the proper amount of attitude/joy permeating through its essence.)
Now after telling you all that he’s my best friend, and I feel horrible for saying this, but I’m not sure how long he’s been gone for. I’m pretty sure I saw him just the other day. Then again days could easily mean weeks and weeks months or decades or eons – I just cannot be sure. One may call me a horrible person for forgetting how long your bestie (Yup, I was right…that will be the first and last time I use ‘bestie.’ It had such promise, dang.) has been missing. But when your friend is gone its tough to keep track of it – it’s not like a bowel movement’s departure which is impossible not to keep track of. No, this is different and I just can’t be sure if I saw him Tuesday or last Tuesday or the Tuesday before the last Tuesday before that. At least I’m genuinely worried, right?
And now his notes assuring my of his safety have ceased to arrive (his last note being the best, of course) and I have begun to question whether prior notes were even genuine. Or, were they just elaborate hoaxes created by his kidnappers to make his loving friend unaware and docile to the fact he was being imprisoned against his will only to be heinously slaughtered, his kidneys sold on the black market but his liver discarded after they discover how much fun we’ve had.
So now he’s gone (or in Washington DC for a few days) and I am left in solitude (or left to hang out with some other besties).
Album is out September 22nd on True Panther.
Sans Terre: How to Write Music Journalism
What in the name of God is music journalism? Drawing insightful associations between whatever music is in question and art, literature, religion, etc.? Offering arcane factoids about the artists? Tracing possible influences from one band to another? Relating subjective experiences? God forbid. If this was the case I would have retired long ago (or at least I tell myself I would have). Music journalism is… well before I say that I should say that music journalism often employs all of these possible avenues, sometimes in the same article. But there is something more to the craft too.
What is that you ask? I will tell you. Ok. Ready?
The sacred art of music journalism hinges on two things. The first concerns being able to finish the phrase “this song reminds me of” in a manner that is not unforgivably boring or absolutely trite. This of course necessitates actually knowing something that is not unforgivably boring or absolutely trite. Personally, I go out of my way to saturate my articles with hyperlinks like this one and this one so as to enrich the reader’s experience with often dangerous and exciting information. You know that feeling you just got when you went to those sites? Well, that feeling is the essence of the second aspect of music journalism. Let’s call it vitality. An overabundance of vitality is the key to great music journalism even though it usually ends in suicide or accidental death. Vitality expresses itself in music journalism when the music journalist is where they are supposed to be for the simply reason that they wanted to be there, for better or worse.
With all that said, how weird is this song?
Ove-naxx – “Ovekeyashiki”
FREE Tickets to See Béla Fleck; Performance + Q&A + ‘Throw Down Your Heart’ Documentary
Coolidge Theatre is like my middle school girlfriends. I go over to see her, we sit in the dark for a couple hours watching a flick and by the end my legs and arms are sore and tired because I was too nervous to invade her personal space.
Coolidge Theatre is not like my middle school girlfriends because they never brought Béla Fleck over to answer my questions and play music for me. Granted in middle school I didn’t know who Béla Fleck was, but that doesn’t excuse them for not thinking of my future interests.
In order to make ammends for my middle school girlfriends I am (with the help of the generous folks at Coolidge) offering up two pairs of totally free tickets to see Béla Fleck’s recent documentary Throw Down Your Heart. Béla Fleck will be there to introduce the film, answer questions and perform!
The screening is on July 9th at 7pm.
HOW TO WIN:
- Leave your name and email address in the comments below and I’ll pick two lucky winners who will each get a pair of tickets.
- Contest ends Wednesday July 1st at 11:59pm (in order to make the whole affair more dramatic).
- Simple right? Here’s an example to make sure there is no confusion whatsoever.: aaron enoughcowbell at gmail dot com.
More on the proceedings follows, courtesy of Coolidge Theatre:
THROW DOWN YOUR HEART
Film Preview at the Coolidge Corner Theatre
with introduction, Q&A and performance by banjo pioneer Béla Fleck
Thurs, July 9 at 7 pmTHROW DOWN YOUR HEART follows American banjo great Béla Fleck on his journey through Africa to explore the roots of the banjo and record an album. Fleck’s boundary-breaking musical adventure takes him to Uganda, Tanzania, The Gambia and Mali, and provides a glimpse of the beauty and complexity of Africa and the richness and diversity of its musical traditions. During his travels, Fleck works with an array of musicians – from local villagers who play a twelve-foot xylophone, to a family that makes and plays the akonting (thought by many to be the original banjo), to international superstars such as the Malian diva Oumou Sangare. Using his banjo, Fleck transcends barriers of language and culture, finding common ground with musicians from very different backgrounds.
Considered by many to be the world’s premiere banjo player, Béla Fleck is a powerfully creative force in bluegrass, jazz, pop, rock, classical, and world music. The multiple Grammy winner has virtually reinvented the image and the sound of the banjo in a performing and recording career that has taken him all over the musical and geographic map. He is best known at the helm of the groundbreaking group Béla Fleck and the Flecktones.
Tickets to the July 9 preview available in advance online at www.coolidge.org/showtimes or at the Coolidge Corner Theatre box office, located at 290 Harvard Street in Brookline. The Coolidge will present additional screenings of THROW DOWN YOUR HEART beginning July 10. For more information, visit www.coolidge.org or call 617/734-2500.
Official THROW DOWN YOUR HEART site: http://www.throwdownyourheart.com/.
Critical Buzz:
“An exhilarating feast of sight and sound.”
LA Times“You don’t need to know the language to be gripped by the force…”
New York Times“Vibrant and spontaneous…”
Film Threat“A heartfelt personal journey…refreshing”
Village Voice“Both the documentary and the disc of Throw Down Your Heart justify their existence independently—and rather beautifully.”
Time Out New York“Demonstrates that no other language is needed when two people sit down with their instruments and make them sing.”
San Francisco Chronicle
my friend peter (sellers) & emil & friends & my parrot
Prologue:
Peter Sellers died on July 24th 1980.
* * *
I met Pete Sellers last week. His hair, what was left of it, was unkempt. Strands darted in every direction, but the majority lunged forward trying to jump ship. He was a lot thinner than I remembered from the movies. His clavicles, shoulders and neck formed a clothes hanger that propped up his head and hung his clothes loosely over his frail body. The glasses he wore were purely perfunctory as he could no longer see.
I asked, “How are you?”
He responded with “What?” while he cupped his hand against his ear.
I raised my voice and asked again.
He responded in the exact same fashion.
At this point I leaned in closely and began to shout my questions at him. “HOW ARE YOU?”
“What?”
“HOW! ARE! YOU!?”
“Okay.”
Emil and Friends – Downed Economy (Mr Vega Stimulus Remix)
Downed Economy 7″ (Downed Economy/Josephine) is out July 27th. Pre-order. Be-friend.
* * *
Love On An Oil Rig is out in September. Be-friend.
* * *
Epilogue:
Before I met Peter he had unsuccessfully tried to convince his female caretaker to help him do things with himself. His hands no longer functioned well enough to do it on his own. She was not pleased by this. Neither was he.
Well, he was Okay.
* * *
The preceeding was a true story. The bands featured however, are imaginary.
das rascist.
Flexitarian, Pescatarian, Vegitarian, Lacto-Ovo-tarian, Vegan, Freegan, Fruitarianism, Su vegetarianism, Raw veganism, Pollotarianism, Locavorianism and flavor slave. These constitute just a few of the food consumption orientations which populate the memeosphere. To all of these there is much to be written, but for the sake of cogency let it suffice to say that people should think about the objects they stuff into their gullets and even more so if that gullet leads to a stomach which has expanded to a size, which in terms of evolution, is just as innovative as elastic-waist pants.
Similarly, this type of thinking goes for those forward-thinking (or “degenerate” if we ask Žižek) souls who call themselves environmentalists. The Brooklyn group Das Racist’s single “Chicken and Meat” is about food in some regard. As the latest to emerge in the free-association-bilingual-rhyming synth-music genre (Lil’ Wayne being the Abraham in this Genesis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh69LBrB48U), the bespectacled and bearded Victor accompanies Hima to compose the entirety of the group. The video for the aforementioned single chronicles this duo eating chicken in three symbolically fecund locations: the forest, the F train in NYC and what is presumably their kitchen. While there is scant room for a full exegesis, it seems as though this group has decided to confront the nebulous galaxy of food orientations through tracing the movement of “food” from its origins as macrobiotic life to its consumption and conclusion as human shit. While we could fault them for their anthropocentric bias (the origin of what human’s eat is clearly not the harvest field and its conclusion is obviously not human feces) the video works and the message is well received. As an added bonus the savvy duo subtly gestures towards, if i can borrow a phrase from Renata Adler, a “radical middle” with Debord’s Society of the Spectacle popping up as well as homages to Evil Dead in the forest scenes. In sum the final analysis for Das Racist echoes what was agreed upon by the Tenenbaum family at Royal’s funeral, that is to say they are “most satisfactory.”
Michael Jackson Is Dead.
* * *
You can only live this hard for so long.
cocaine and coffee
His face was made of bark that was deeply cracked by seasons of frost. It was wide, rounded and terse. Behind him the man dragged a full tree, its pine needles thinning as they dragged through the deep snow. The trees (the one’s that were still standing) sparsley dotted the perfectly sloping hill. He was to drag the tree through the entire forest. Then he’d drag another. And another. His stature was that of a normal man, his pace was slow and the short days long, but it was his work.
* * *
I’m breathing guts. A stray rib is pressing against my cheek as my hair mops up innards, which happen to be surprisingly fresh given the circumstances. This person’s insides still have a hint of warmth but they’ve clearly cooled from the temperature they once were. Even though my head rests uncomfortably in an open chest cavity I don’t dare turn my head to survey my surroundings. Being situated in an insides is not ideal, but finding out what all your other parts are lying is not appealing either. Eventually I look up and see the lips of a frosted pit, whoever was once standing there is now gone, although present company probably won’t be moving on particularly soon.
The easy question to ask in situations such as this is, “how did you come to find yourself in a pit such as this?” (Doesn’t it always have to do getting mixed up with the “wrong crowd?”) The more difficult question, partially because it forfeits one’s ability to ask the first question, is “what are you doing after?” The answer?: Getting a cup of hot coffee.
* * *
One can never be sure how cocaine comes to half cover a mug as if it had been a candy apple haphazardly rolled in confectioner sugar. One can be even less sure how such a mug would be handed to you at a roadside diner. Regardless, one can imagine how it might be rude to ask for another and one can most certainly rest easy on the fact that before you finish that coffee a police officer will sit at the stool next to you.
* * *
Rainwater Cassette Exchange EP
Sans Terre(or)
From an early age my thoughts on monsters went as follows: Provided there are dangerous monsters lurking around in my bedroom/attic/closet then, by that same logic, would there not be some other force or species that keeps these creatures in check? Does not Darwin tell us of such? To put a finer point on it, does not the fact that we are not over-run with monsters speak to the reality of these non-empirical monster hunters? Oh, this has just come to me. What if the creatures that eat the monsters are not friendly to humans? What if they are just so busy mutilating monsters that they do not have time for humans. Should I then be searching out for monsters in order to solicit my aid in their war against the even greater creatures so as to secure their patronage and to save off the coming Armageddon? And what if there are other forces even stronger than both? Dear God what have I done… This line of thinking, termed “negative epistemology,” is what Arthur Machen and after him H.P. Lovecraft wrote about. Scary stuff for sure. And in the same way that their stories are only stories and have nothing to do with real life, “Gloomy Sunday,” also known as “The Hungarian Suicide Song,” is just another song and has nothing to do with anything other then background noise. Yet, unfortunately we have come to see that the Cthulhu mythos are not just stories and “Gloomy Sunday” is not just a song.
Originally composed by Hungarian pianist Rezső Seress in 1933 with the lyrics taken from the László Jávor poem “Szomorú vasárnap” in which the poet morns the untimely death of a lover and contemplates suicide, the song was banned by both the BBC and a number of radio stations in the US for purportedly being the cause, the inspiration if you will, for a wave of suicides (Seress himself committed suicide in 1968). Originally performed in 1935 by Pal Kalmar, the song has been covered by innumerable artists including Bjork, Lou Rawls, Ray Charles, Elvis Costello, Peter Wolf, Sinéad O’Connor, The Dead Milkmen, Sarah McLachlan, Serge Gainsbourg, The Unbending Trees, Billie Holiday, he Associates (the lead singer of which committed suicide) and even the famed Theistic-Satanist Anton LaVey. Its haunting presence was also featured at the start of the film Schindler’s List as well as being mentioned as “Blue Monday” in the work of Kurt Vonnegut (see “Breakfast of Champions: Goodbye Blue Monday”) and Charles Bukowski (see “Notes of a Dirty Old Man”). Scarily enough there is even an Occultist/Discordian/Chaos group in Boston that listen to a record of Billie Holiday’s recording during some of their rituals. In my opinion it is one of rabbit hole leitmotifs of negative epistemology that is best left alone. For if Nu-Japanese horror or the second Ghost-Busters movie has taught me anything it is that once we acknowledge the power of a suicide song, let alone the reality of fiction (or fiction of reality) there is no telling how far or quickly the real, or reality rather, will turn into a nightmare.
PS A Japanese film about this song has recently come to my attention. It is called “Denten Uta” which roughly translates to “Suicide Song.”
