Bill Withers, a pop star? Unlikely. A stuttering, asthmatic child in a West Virginia coal-mining town ranks low on prospects. As an adult, he nearly became a lifer in the Navy. For a while, he worked on an assembly line, making toilets for 747s.

Suddenly, in his 30s, he wrote (or co-wrote) and sang a string of hits: “Ain’t No Sunshine,” “Lean on Me” and “Just the Two of Us.” He collected a Grammy for each. When you’ve become famous, he jokes, you start hearing yourself described in words you haven’t heard before, like “handsome.”

And then, just as meteorically, he returned to the ordinary. Today, in that L.A. way of retired entertainers, he lounges dressed in a tracksuit and spotless puffy sneakers, in a large but simple home, collecting checks from the songs he’s written. In the documentary Still Bill, we see him visit his hometown, walk the railroad tracks with its de facto mayor and look for family graves in a blacks-only cemetery overgrown with trees and weeds. They recall color lines but laugh that everyone’s black in a mining town. Bill travels, accepting honorariums and attending concerts during which other people sing his songs. He’s gracious, whip-smart and funny; I laughed a lot at his jokes, only a few of which were grandpa-like.

Although he hasn’t performed live since 1988, he putters around his home recording studio, where he claims to not even know how to operate the boards (his daughter, Kori, helps out; she sings, too, and her dad is her toughest critic). He builds songs on snatches of doggerel or poetry he writes down and springboards from (“Your love is like a chunk of gold/Hard to gain and hard to hold”). He doesn’t take himself seriously; he contributed two tracks to a Jimmy Buffet album and the documentary shows him in his studio flirting with reggaeton-style music, lyrics in Spanish, no less. Will those home recordings see release? The answer seems to be “not now,” perhaps not ever.

The documentary doesn’t pinpoint a moment that explains why the public hasn’t heard from Bill after all this time. Seeing him joke and chat with everyone from Cornell West to his old Navy buddies suggests he’s a capital-lettered Nice Guy, modest, self-deprecating, smart and real enough to have left the music business before it could inflate his ego or corrode his soul. (The movie avoids any direct coverage of the legal tussles Withers became involved with at each of the two labels he recorded for.)

He’s 71 now and retained that voice, like warm butterscotch. He stutters still, but only occasionally. The film’s most touching moment has him delivering a speech to a support group of kids who stutter. The “you can make it if you try” message, cliché by default, flows from him genuinely; the camera catches him crying.

He’s asked what he wants as his legacy. He’s silent for a long time and the movie leaves the question unanswered. I thought, he’s just that guy, you know? He wrote and sang a few songs most people have heard but his name isn’t household. And Bill would be cool with that.

Who knows where the time goes but my life sounds even more impressive¹ when weeks worth of greatest hits are edited and compressed into an entry. Have I learned my lesson? Will I resume updating daily? Let’s hope so. Hold on as I whisk you back to that magical month of November 2008.

On Halloween, I bade farewell to Inwood and moved into a new one-bedroom apartment in a mostly Caribbean neighborhood in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. I’m on Eastern Parkway a few blocks from the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Prospect Park and various peeps. I can see the Empire State Building from my bed and I’m still trying to get Raul the Lazy Super to fucking install my required apartment-to-front-door intercom/buzzer. Otherwise I’d invite you over in a heartbeat.

On Monday, November 3rd, I happened upon a great New York City stand-up storytelling competition staged by a nonprofit group I’d never heard of before, The Moth. Admission is only $6 and I’ll be attending more of these, for sure. A topic is agreed upon beforehand; at the show I attended, in the crowded basement of Union Hall, it was appropriately “sweat&rdquo). Participants independently develop a five-minute routine mentioning the topic or incorporating it as a subject. The night of the show 10 of them are picked at random from the audience to take the stage and perform; some stories are straight-up personal recollections and most are styled like comedy bits. Judges vote on each participant. Great fun.

The next day, some guy was elected President. I had pizza and beer.

On Thursday, November 6th I waited in an around-the-block line to catch a free Comedy Central “Comedy Hour” taping of a Jo Koy standup routine. His ethnic jokes bored me but I enjoyed immensely the pussy and dick jokes that dominated the second half of his set; they made me laugh those cathartic laughs that purge crankiness and worry from my system.

That weekend, I ate the best jelly donut ever, and you can only get one starting at 8:00 a.m. on weekends at the Trois Pommes patisserie on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, one of Ed Levine’s possibly top-three bakeries in New York City. They go quickly but while they’re available in a small basket on the counter, they’re still warm and filled with a homemade-tasting raspberry jam. They cost $3 each and they’re worth it. I bit into mine with vigor and blasted powdered sugar all over my hooded sweatshirt.

Later the same morning, Saturday, November 8th, I traveled to Edgewater, New Jersey for the annual bluefin tuna carving ceremony at Mitsuwa Marketplace. The crowd there pressed forward around a team of men armed with extremely sharp knives to buy the fattiest cuts of the 400-pound specimen as soon as they were cut. The fish’s head was planted in an ice-filled red plastic bucket to the side where people posed for photos with it. Later I learned that although bluefin is among the world’s finest and exclusive fish for sushi (I ate some at Mitsuwa from a bluefin carved earlier and it was amazing), it’s an imperiled species and that I shouldn’t have enjoyed myself as much as I did. I made amends on our drive back to New York by stopping at the amazing Philippine Bread House in Jersey City and eating an ensaymada, a traditional Filipino slow-death method via five ounces of donut-like pastry that’s fried, sugared and topped with cheese. So bad, yet so good!

On November 10th, I tracked down the small, great and inexpensive Mexican restaurant I knew was somewhere in my neighborhood, Chavella’s.

I now know this about Tony- and Academy Award-winning playwright/screenwriter Sir Tom Stoppard, who I heard November 11th in an interview onstage with New Yorker editor David Remnick: if I took a whiskey shot for every time Stoppard said “as it were,” I would be drunk. But: despite being wickedly smart and well-read, he’s funny and self-deprecating, uncomfortable talking about himself, a topic that arose often about his new translation of Chekov’s play, The Cherry Orchard. I plan to see it after it opens at the BAM Harvey Theater on January 2nd. Stoppard said he’s striving to make it conversational and incorporate contributions from the actors to improve its familiarity. But amid talk of great Russian authors and the challenges translating them, I was most excited by Stoppard’s lowbrow revelation that he not only contributed uncredited dialogue for Sean Connery’s and Harrison Ford’s characters in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but that the idea for the “leap of faith” invisible-bridge challenge was his.

On Monday, November 17th, my boss and eight other people in my office got laid off so the company could save money. But I don’t want to detail that here because you never know who reads what on the internet. Which reminds me: my company is swell and I certainly don’t plan on stealing a bunch of office supplies when we move down to 120 Broadway in mid-December.

That night, I saw Iron & Wine in a sold-out show at Terminal 5. I enjoyed Mr. Beam (and his sister, who sang harmony). He’s a funny guy who’s still in some awe that he can draw such a crowd. He playfully chided the crowd for bursting out into applause as soon as he hit a chord, pausing to say something like, “That’s just one chord! You guys don’t know what song it is!” I was happy he played two of my current favorites, “Resurrection Fern” and “Boy With a Coin,” and he encored on the acoustic with “Trapeze Singer.” I enjoyed his acoustic stuff more than I did the full-band jamboree. Also, I was curious to get to the bottom of the point in his web bio that “[i]n conversations with Sam while mixing The Shepherd’s Dog, he confessed to finding spiritual inspiration in Tom Waits’ pièce de résistance, Swordfishtrombones.” That’s one of my favorite Waits albums but I didn’t notice many connections other than the songs-as-stories and a pleasing amount of marimba.

I organized a Brooklyn bowling outing on Saturday, November 22nd at Melody Lanes in Sunset Park². I like this place and not just because the decor can be summed up by the digit 1989: the music is loud and mostly bad. And there was a young boy at the lane next to ours inexplicably dressed as Indiana Jones. Also, I am happy to report that Al, New York City’s Angriest Bartender, remains just that. At least to me. Here’s what happened when I ordered a pitcher of Bud. Al poured it and set four plastic cups on the bar.

Jason

Thanks. But I’m with a group, so I’ll need eight cups.

Al

[testily] I can’t give you eight cups. You’ll have to order another pitcher and I can give you four more.

Jason

[pause] O.K., I’ll take two pitchers.

Al

Or I can give you these eight smaller cups instead of the four large ones.

Jason

O.K., let’s do that.

Al

So, two pitchers of Bud.

Jason

Well, if I get eight cups, I’ll just take the one pitcher for now.

Al

[exasperated] One pitcher, two pitchers! Make up your mind!

Everyone else in the group who made a drink run reported Al was nothing but pleasant. Short and squat, resplendent in his giant ’80s eyeglasses, red suspenders and slicked-back silver hair. But pleasant, so I guess being surly with me was enough. Later, when I returned to him for another flagon of Bud, he claimed he was out of pitchers and that I’d have to bring him back an empty one.

The next night, I caught the seldom-screened and exceptionally low-budget UK punk documentary from 1982, Rough Cut and Ready Dubbed, which I enjoyed, especially the concert-riot sequences, as well as all of the angst and acne in the talking-head segments featuring Q&A with and concert footage from groups including the U.K. Subs, the Cockney Rejects and the Stiff Little Fingers, and the likes of influential BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel and Factory Records founder Tony Wilson.

On Monday, November 24th, I bought decor and other apartment stuff at the new Ikea in Red Hook, Brooklyn, with a pleasant pit stop at LeNell’s, the best liquor store in the city. LeNell Smothers is a charming Southern woman who poured me several wine samples while a Hank Williams song played. I purchased from her a bottle of Four Roses Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey for purposes of making my own bacon-infused bourbon, plus a pricey jar of genuine marasca cherries from Luxardo for assorted cocktail-development purposes.

I had a deliciously extensive Thanksgiving dinner at Jimi and Will’s newish apartment in Washington Heights. I learned I am not so great at playing Mario Kart Wii. I also made a cranberry relish recipe I clipped from the November 12th issue of The New York Times and it was delicious but next time: less onion.

And the next evening, Friday, November 28th, I finally made it into wunderkind chef David Chang’s reservations-difficult, 14-seat East Village restaurant, Momofuku Ko, thanks to the persistence of my dining companion, Sherry. Upon review, I see my notes on this disintegrate because I can’t read Sherry’s handwriting well, or mine, really; we each ordered the wine-pairing option, which amounted to often a full glass of expertly complemented wine, champagne or sake served with each course. All 13 of them.

And I don’t believe I understood a word the sommelier said. For example, describing a red amid a string of incomprehensible adjectives and Spanish and maybe Spanish adjectives, I picked up on the keyword Mendoza and said brightly to Sherry, “That’s in Spain, right?”³ when what I was actually wondering was “Wasn’t that the name of one of the bad guys in Dirty Harry?”⁴ Surely Sherry, the oenophile among us, did a lot of slow, incredulous head shaking.

Chang’s fixed-price menu, which isn’t printed publicly, changes often, so every day the courses are conceivably unique. We started with some sort of fancy pork rind; a neat cube of moist, peppered biscuit; and a non-jumbo shrimp with tomato chutney. I’m missing some matter in the descriptions there, and some ingredients, but let’s get to the big stuff. The pinnacle was the daikon soup with chunks of lamb belly, fried lily palm and fried purple mustard greens, paired with a Pinot Noir. Sherry said she wanted to lick her bowl after that transcendeliciousness but gave decorum the nod. The most beautiful dish, a smoked hen egg, its yolk broken and burst onto the plate, came garnished with a generous constellation of caviar, fingerling potato chips and sous vide onions and scallions.

Next: hand-torn pasta, cubes of snail sausage and pecorino cheese. Then: monkfish with uni and mitsuba. And: something with pine nuts and lychees topped with finely shaved foie gras which was of velvet-textured tastiness despite me not remembering what it even was.

With the plating of the most pedestrian course—roasted chicken with Brussels sprouts and mushrooms;—we were both very, very full (also: drunk; in retrospect, the stop at Decibel for sake and shochu beforehand was unnecessary). But we had one more entrée to go. It would have top-ranked had we not perceived our corpulence to be approaching that of Henry VIII’s: large shavings of beef cheeks that had been braised for 36 hours, mitake mushrooms and charred jalapeños.

Done? Not yet: two dessert courses arrived with glasses of Muscat champagne and sherry, respectively: mandarin orange sorbet with juniper and segments of bitter orange (mouth-wateringly sweet and sour) and pretzel ice cream (is that correct? or even possible?) with a yogurt-Granny Smith sauce and tiny spheres of deep-fried cheddar cheese. The pleasurable and unusual dining experience flew by and we were at Ko more than two hours; in fact, we literally closed the place.

A few days later I realized the Asian guy behind the counter the whole time whom I’d assumed was David Chang was, in fact, David Chang, which made me wonder whether I should have engaged him in conversation deeper than discussion of Mitchell, one of his chefs, and how he tried to break into the restroom while I was in there.

Update, 3:40 p.m. Hold up: Sherry reports that the guy I thought was David Chang may have been Peter Serpico, shown here. We may never know.

Also: David Chang likes Bob Dylan. The restaurant’s soundtrack is supplied by his personal iPod and I counted no fewer than five Dylan songs amid the shuffle of Joy Division, Public Enemy, Elton John, The Flaming Lips, Neil Young, Jurassic 5, Cake’s cover of “I Will Survive,” and a song named “We Here” from some group from Singapore that Sherry liked.

And that’s not even all I did on my Summer Vacation, I mean, November. But that’s all I’m writing about. Because I don’t tell all. Also, I’m tired. Could I have a more exciting month? Oh, probably. Bring it, December.

Trois Pommes

• 260 Fifth Ave. (near Garfield Place), Brooklyn
• (718) 230-3119
• Meal 45 of 52: a jelly donut ($3) and a coffee ($2).

Chavella’s

• 732 Classon Ave. (between Park Place and Prospect Place), Brooklyn
• (718) 622-3100
• Meal 46 of 52: quesadilla flor de calapaza (cactus flower) ($4.50), a giant bowl of rice pudding ($4.25) and two Pacificos ($4.00 each).

Momofuku Ko

• 163 First Ave. (between 10th and 11th Streets)
• (212) 500-0831
• Meal 47 of 52: a bunch of mind-blowing food and drink ($150)

¹ I know! I didn’t think it was possible, either! [back]
² I am not forgetting my Manhattan-based brethren and will plan an outing with y’all soon. My life is torn; a children’s book written about me would be a tender tale entitled Jason Has Two Boroughs. [back]
³ No. [back]
⁴ No. [back]

Any time I hear a song or record that meant a lot to me at a certain moment or I was listening to at a distinct time, I’m instantly taken back to that place in full detail. Whenever I hear “Feel Flows” by the Beach Boys, I’m taken straight to the back of my parents’ car on the way to my grandparents’ place, fourteen with Surf’s Up in my Walkman and the Cascade Mountains going by in the window. .... I can ascribe exact memories to songs by the Microphones, Joni Mitchell, Built to Spill, Dungen, Harry Nilsson, and so many others, and it’s a form of recall that I can actually trust.

Robin Pecknold, April 6, 2008, from the liner notes of Fleet Foxes’ self-titled LP

Ah, the Ramones: the original dysfunctional punk family. They seem to have been always ugly and always in disagreement with each other, as evidenced in the documentary I watched tonight (End of the Century: Tommy, the spokesman and early producer; Joey, the group’s gangly heart-and-soul; Johnny, the sour decision-maker; and the seemingly brain-damaged troublemaker Dee Dee. But I always appreciated their aesthetic, in light of the frequent mockery that they knew only two (perhaps three) chords: “You don’t have to be good—just get out there and play.”

After a dry patch with the ol’ backing tracks and wireless mikes, I introduced a selection of my Manhattan-based friends to a trio of my Brooklyn-based friends for two hours of private-room karaoke at Japas 55. Our room was small and the singing was loud so it was impossible to intermingle or converse freely, but I think the group had a ton of fun. Andie, crafty lass, keyed in “Hello” by Lionel Richie without me noticing and sprung it on me for a solo with but a few seconds to get into a Richie mood: how did she know my secret weapon?

Beth and I headed out to the Siren Music Festival this afternoon a bit late, around 3:30, 4:00 p.m. or so, so we missed Film School, which she’d wanted to see. But I enjoyed catching the end of the Beach House set, and The Helio Sequence, which has the happiest drummer I’ve ever seen. They played a cover of the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which was crazy. I bowed to Beth’s wishes to see Broken Social Scene vs. Stephen Malkmus. I don’t know anything about BSS or its songs but it was a raucous show; all that brass and all those guitars, plus Siren’s infamously loud and horrible speakers, made for an overwhelming sound. None of the band’s ladies made it (there was a potshot about how some of them were over on Sesame Street) but the band had a random acquaintance named Audrey come onstage to sing one song; she was wearing a summer dress made of lotteria fabric which was totally boss. We were standing front and center, about three rows back from the VIP barricade, and there was nearly a literal mosh pit going on towards the end. Hot, sweaty good times, although later I discovered some raw-meat red spots of sunburn on my right forearm where I’d accidentally rubbed-off my SPF 2000 sunscreen. Another sting was to see a “bubba,” as Beth called him, wearing a charming racist T-shirt.

I was rereading High Fidelity this morning on the A train and made it to the part where the novel’s protagonist reorganizes his record collection “autobiographically.” Then I read this A.V. Club post on a similar meme.

So here are my favorite albums from every year since my birth. Surely there are omissions, misfires and regrets. But so what. Opinions are like assholes, in that I’m convinced mine smell better than yours.

I hope compilations and EPs count as albums because my list contains a few of each. I also noticed that the best albums by the Beatles, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Stevie Wonder were released before my birth.

1973: Tom Waits, Closing Time

1974: Neil Young, On The Beach

1975: Bob Dylan, Blood On The Tracks

1976: The Modern Lovers, The Modern Lovers

1977: Elvis Costello, My Aim Is True

1978: Talking Heads, More Songs About Buildings And Food

1979: The Buzzcocks, Singles Going Steady

1980: The Pretenders, Pretenders

1981: The Pretenders, Pretenders II

1982: R.E.M., Chronic Town

1983: Tom Waits, Swordfishtrombones

1984: R.E.M., Reckoning

1985: The Cure, The Head on the Door

1986: R.E.M., Lifes Rich Pageant

1987: Def Leppard, Hysteria

1988: Pixies, Surfer Rosa

1989: Pixies, Doolittle

1990: Morrissey, Bona Drag

1991: U2, Achtung Baby

1992: Pavement, Slanted and Enchanted

1993: PJ Harvey, Rid of Me

1994: Portishead, Dummy

1995: PJ Harvey, To Bring You My Love

1996: Belle and Sebastian, If You’re Feeling Sinister

1997: Radiohead, OK Computer

1998: Madonna, Ray of Light ¹

1999: The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs

2000: Death Cab For Cutie, The Forbidden Love EP

2001: Mogwai, Rock Action

2002: Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

2003: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fever to Tell

2004: Joanna Newsom, The Milk-Eyed Mender

2005: Spoon, Gimme Fiction

2006: Cat Power, The Greatest

2007: Radiohead, In Rainbows

2008: Too soon?! So far I like Santogold, Santogold and Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago

¹ Shut up. [back]

In January 1960, Swiss artist Jean Tinguely crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth to Manhattan, which he’d never seen before. He spoke little English but immediately started planning and assembling a sculptural homage to the city—a self-destructing machine, actually—that he decided needed to be exhibited in the outdoor sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art.

The museum gave him permission and an acetylene torch, then stood back. Tinguely built the machine in part with steel tubing, used motors, a powerful electric fan, an orange weather balloon, 80 bicycle wheels, smoke signals, a car horn, a radio nailed to an upright piano and an address-labeling machine rigged to strike a bell.

Once completed and activated before a large crowd, Homage to New York smoked and trembled. The piano caught fire but continued to play a three-note dirge. A rhythm was tapped out on a washing-machine drum. The labeler thrashed and chattered while the horn shrieked. The crowd loved it and although the machine didn’t fully self destruct, “it managed nevertheless to execute a great many wholly unexpected and startling feats,” according to art critic Calvin Tomkins.

I recalled this tale tonight at the sold-out Sigur Rós¹ concert Allison and I attended in the Museum of Modern Art’s Agnes Gund Garden Lobby, which looks out into that sculpture garden through a two-story wall of windows. The sun set over the city as the band began while giant spherical lamps on posts positioned just outside the window-wall glowed with shifting colors and patterns. The band’s music wasn’t as cacophonous as Tinguely’s yet just as unusual, transcendent and loud.

Through interweaving layers of delay, distortion and echo, lead singer and guitarist Jón Þór Birgisson crooned in falsetto—often in a made-up language—and sawed his electric guitar with a cello bow with such ferocity that he frayed the bowstring to a chaotic bundle of filaments, which he then whipped into the audience. Bassist Georg Hólm bounced out a constant rhythm on his bass with a drumstick for the song “Hafsól.” Drummer Orri Páll Dýrason rocked the brushes on more introspective song segments but for the loud bits whaled through several sets of sticks. Most of the band, including keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson, got a chance on the boards—synths large and small, an organ, a glockenspiel. At times all four band members were playing keys at once.

I’d never seen Sigur Rós perform before now. They’re young guys from Iceland so most publicity shots I’d seen depicted them in cable-knit sweaters, crouching impishly on a caldera, but tonight Birgisson and Hólm were dressed in what resembled crisp, modern versions of Les Misérables-era activewear, accented with a few Adam Ant-style feathers. It seemed strangely appropriate the band shared stage space with Rodin’s craggy bronze sculpture of a robed Balzac.

A string quartet of young ladies dressed like flappers sat behind the band and provided symphonic swells, pizzicato and, for one song, exchanged their strings for cavalry drums. Midway through an early song, a male brass quintet, dressed and gloved in white, uniforms laced with golden braids and buttons, faces speckled with pearlescent glitter, marched down unexpectedly from the second-floor galleries while playing along. Later they emerged unaccompanied, awkwardly clutching sheet music, to play an impromptu and stirring rendition of the Icelandic national anthem in celebration of the country’s independence day as a republic (June 17th, 1944). The crowd was invited to sing along but only the flappers seemed to know the lyrics.

The band played my favorite of theirs, the soaring, eight-minute “Olsen Olsen.” Towards the end of the set, the audience clapped along to the speed-freaky “Gobbledigook” until its collective hands got sore. After the encore and a joint theater-style line-bow from every musician onstage, we exited over the piles of plastic cups and empty Grolsch bottles, strange debris for the stately slate floor of a world-famous museum, though less strange than the burnt machine-remains that once littered its garden.

Bonus Link: Concert photos by Brooklyn Vegan. Note the second shot from the top, in which I appear to be clutching my junk.

¹ Pronounced, according to the band, sih-ur rose; roll those R’s and say rose very quickly. [back]

Is it just me or is Coldplay lead singer/Gwyneth Paltrow-inseminator Chris Martin turning into Bono? I base my claim on having seen the iTunes commercial of the band playing its new single, “Viva la Vida.” In it, Martin sounds like Bono, sashays like Bono and sports a pompadour like Bono (otherwise known as a pompousadour).

Pitchfork notices something sonically similar as well. This blurb was posted on the site today for a review of Coldplay’s new album, Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends:

In a case of well-honed troubleshooting after the startlingly bland X&Y, Coldplay’s fourth LP is a diluted version of U2’s Achtung Baby or Radiohead’s Kid A, the “experimental” mid-career maneuvers of their peers. Brian Eno produces.

For those of you who aren’t pop trivia nerds, I should point out that Brian Eno produced or coproduced several U2 albums, including The Unforgettable Fire, Achtung Baby and All That You Can’t Leave Behind. Also funny because when Coldplay hit in 1997, they were frequently derided as Radiohead Lite.

I admire anyone who creates—musicians, artists, actors, writers, mothers, a guy who can whittle a tiny toy duck from a scrap block of pine.

But what’s bad-ass is singing. Singing a capella. Singing a capella live.

For that you’re not using any tools or utensils. You don’t have a costume, a canvas or a band to hide behind. There is no editing of the process. Sure, there are people who’ve coached you and will direct you, and those who will sing alongside you. But you’re the only one responsible for the ultimate outcome: making noise, hopefully joyous, possibly unto the Lord, if you believe in that sort of thing.

My friend/coworker Allison, she of the pitch-perfect alto (and, I’ve heard, a mean karaoke rendition of Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black”) sang in a women’s chorus in high school and a women’s a capella group in college and wanted to get back into singing, so she successfully auditioned for Amuse, a 16-voice women’s ensemble here in New York City. Tonight at the small, century-old St. Ignatius of Antioch Episcopal Church on the Upper West Side, the group’s guest-conductor, Penna Rose, the chapel music director at Princeton University, lead the group in a 15-song program of songs about Mary. The pieces were in English, Latin, Italian, Hungarian and Slovenian, some traditional aves and salves but all either arranged or composed by 20th century composers. (One was even in the audience and when called out by Penna, rose and delivered a thankful bow.)

Without air conditioning, the church was stifling. The propped-open front doors admitted a tiny breeze and the sound of the rain with traffic swishing by and buses braking on West 87th Street. But the audience stayed silent and rapt. Rightfully so: these voices could lift mountains. I liked that during some songs the group imitated instruments or added sound effects such as wind. Throughout the night it stormed but that only made the songs more poignant. As the choir stood sweating on the steps of the chancel, postured statue-straight with songbooks in hand, lightning flashed through the rose window behind them; loud thunder tried but failed to interrupt their beautiful harmony.

Beth, Mike and I immersed ourselves in the cacophony of David Byrne’s Playing the Building installation today at the Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan.

The second floor of the building hasn’t been open to the public in decades and the lower half of the room in which the exhibit rests has been whitewashed, flat over pipes, molding and wall. An antique organ placed near the center of the room is wired by what looks like surgical tubing connected to devices affixed to the room’s pillars, pipes, walls and other elements to make a different noise with each keypress of the organ: tapping, clanking, clanging, tapping, bellowing, whistling. Very strange. It sounds like this.

Needless to say, we needed a beer afterwards so Beth suggested the Staten Island Ferry: an excellent idea. It's a free 20-minute ride—welcomely breezy on a day like today, stifled by humidity and sun—with excellent views of the Statue of Liberty. Best, they sell beer on board for $3.75. And I’ve now set foot in all five boroughs of New York: to prevent hobos and exhibition-goers from having too good a time, what with the beer and the breeze, the DOT requires all joyriders to exit at Staten Island then immediately reboard the same boat for the trip back to Manhattan.

The link is old and the execution is grating, but I like the idea of “reverse karaoke”: participants supplying musical backing to a prerecorded audio track (in this case sung by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon).

Think of mixtapes as a relatively recent innovation? Jazz trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong not only made ’em (and compilations of his own songs), he decorated the reel-to-reel boxes with collage. A jazz-fan work colleague adds:

I read a bio recently that reported on his avid taping. Mostly for diary purposes as I understand. Also, yes a big daily user of laxatives—believed them to be medicinal—along with his daily lifelong obsession with marijuana.

When I read today that Sears signed an agreement with LL Cool J to introduce a line of streetwear this fall, the first thing I thought of was a song chart for “Around the Way Girl.”

More talk of mixtapes. Here’s a newer one for the Love Is A Mix Tape set (and from the guy who started Found magazine) called Cassette From My Ex. And although they’re not set up for casual browsing, I also like Mixwit (design your own custom cassette-tape graphic!) and Muxtape (mysterious, easy-to-use interface!).

I never remember fiddling much with mixtapes, either giving or receiving. I got one in college from a girl with nothing but Smiths songs on side A and nothing buy Morrissey solo-carreer songs on side B which was personally responsible for “The Last of the Famous International Playboys” being my favorite Moz song. I made one in college that I’m pretty sure had a Toad the Wet Sprocket song on it; better that one stay lost. In fact, rooting through my boxes of junk, I was only able to find one. The song selections prove its 1997 vintage. I got this one from my friend/then-coworker who was also named Jason and who at the time worked part-time in the neighborhood used record store. He used a found "passport" from the ’30s as the booklet art and hand-typed the tracklist. I’m unfortunately missing the cassette itself but regardless no longer have anything to play it on. Oh, technology.

Most anything will make me think of a pop song. Sometimes I’ll have a song in my head and realize it got there not because I overheard it, but because of something I saw or something someone said. (When I lived with Andie, we’d often break out into the same bit of a song simultaneously just after a verbal cue—a word or two that would remind us of a lyric. Unfortunately, I cannot recall one example of this magnificent and curious condition; perhaps she can.)

But, say, when I’m walking to work, maybe I see a bus and hum the refrain from the Who’s “Magic Bus.” A Staples truck passes and I make the office-supply connection with “The Rubberband Man” by the Spinners (although the song was used in an OfficeMax commercial).

On Broadway, I find myself whistling the Drifters’ “On Broadway”. On the tiny TV screen in an elevator of my office building, a PSA for lupus makes me remix Suzanne Vega’s “Luka” (“my name is lupus/I induce a facial rash”). And at my desk, when a woman named Rita calls, I think immediately of “Lovely Rita” from Sgt. Pepper’s.

This isn’t as chronic as I imply—I’m not debilitated or even distracted by the phantom strains of thousands of pop hits from yesterday and today. But do free-associations like these happen to you, too?

Before the Takka Takka/Ohbijou show tonight ¹, Beth and I stood at a table upstairs at Union Hall, rain-dampened but enjoying a Triple Threat (three Sliders with a bit of sharp cheddar and one measly B&B pickle slice apiece, with thick, heavily seasoned fries on the side) when this speedy/shifty dark-eyed fanboy sidleed up to our table and asked if we were going to see Takka Takka downstairs because they were starting in 10 minutes.

Yeah, we’ll make our way down there, we told him. He replied that he was a big fan of Takka Takka. And they’re starting shortly. Downstairs. In 10 minutes. The guy was lingering and I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I said cheerily, “Are you in the band?” That quieted him down. He smiled, muttered something about being a fan and shuffled off to bother another table.

When we arrived downstairs, the fanboy was already down there. “Hey!” we said, as if we were long-time friends. As we got the backs of our hands stamped, he seemed to be having trouble getting in and I hoped he wouldn’t ask us for help. He was pestering the hand-stamper about his Takka Takka love until the guy snapped, “Why don’t you go away?” It didn’t appear the superfan even had a ticket. We slipped past him and stood up front waiting for the show to start.

And here’s the punch line: the fanboy was the bass player for Takka Takka. His name is Grady, which seems about right. We weren’t sure what to make of all of this other than it was pretty awesome. We couldn’t even make eye contact with Grady after that because he played most of the set with his back to the audience.

Ohbijou was good, too: happy songs by happy people. I suspect it’s because of the Canadian connection but they reminded me of Arcade Fire—the whole strings, guitars, banjo, keys and pep thing—if Arcade Fire were happier, apolitical, not flush with cash and fronted by a short woman who rarely made eye contact with the audience. She didn’t have much to shy from; the crowd bolted after Takka Takka and there appeared to be more photographers (three) than there were people there listening to the music. (The crowd included more than three people but they talked loudly among themselves as if the band they’d theoretically paid to hear was a distraction.) I enjoyed especially their last song, which I think was called “The Wood Song,” for which five of the seven band members produced drumsticks and provided a beat by striking random wooden objects nearby, including an amp housing, a pillar and the wall behind the tiny stage.

Union Hall

• 702 Union St. (at Fifth Avenue), Brooklyn
• (718) 638-4400
• Meal 29 of 52: a Triple Threat ($11) and a few beers.

¹ Don’t worry; I’d never heard of them, either. [back]

You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a fan-made video of a dude dressed up like a Catholic priest, wearing shades and a giant grin, dancing and shimmying down the sidewalks of the West Village. Oh, also he’s wearing a pink tutu. It was so good, we demanded to watch it twice.

This was part of an inaugural “Gen-X Singalong series” at Pianos Lounge, which involved creative types making one music video each for every song off the Smiths’ 1986 album The Queen Is Dead. Each video had subtitles and the crowd was encouraged to sing along. The dancing priest accompanied the song “Vicar in a Tutu.” Kelly tackled “Frankly Mr. Shankly” with a creative camera mount (her bicycle) and character (a Mr. Blonde action figure), making it appear as if Mr. Shankly is superspeed-walking through Manhattan.

I had a lot to drink and then walked into a low table and knocked a quarter-sized chunk of flesh off my left shin that I didn’t discover until the next day. Later we had a late dinner gathering at the “Always Open” greasy spoon, Sidewalk. I had a fruit-covered waffle, I think. When the receipt for our group arrived, it indicated we’d “been served by Jason #14.”

Bonus video: Kelly’s version of “Frankly Mr. Shankly”

Sidewalk Bar & Restaurant

• 94 Avenue A (between E. 6th and E. 7th Streets)
• (212) 473-7373
• Meal 26 of 52: waffle and coffee!

Recently my department’s art director was building an ad to appear in one of our event programs and had been directed by the client to use this stock photo.

The model resembles the singer Cat Power, down to the fake beauty mark.

The positive conclusion to this was that the art director had never heard of Cat Power so I loaned her Cat’s three most accessible albums, The Covers Record, You Are Free and The Greatest. And fake Cat Power gained real Cat Power a new fan.

[Neil Diamond] said fans will be wowed by [his new tour this summer], which includes what he calls “technical wizardry . . . we can do things on this stage that we’ve never dreamed were possible.”

Still, when asked to give details, Diamond was mum.

Dare to dream! I’m picturing:

• the Diamond Dancers, a chorus of writhing, bejeweled backup singers
• glitter cannons
• robot version of Neil to sing harmony alongside actual Neil
• Neil takes the stage parachuting from the crown of the Statue of Liberty
• Neil departs the stage on a jetpack
• combination illegal-immigrant roundup/chorus-line during “America”
• low carbon-emission laser effects
• custom vocoder that digitally enhances sandpaperiness of Neil’s voice
• instead of confetti, 50,000 pairs of Levi’s “Slouch Straight” 504 jeans dropped on crowd during “Forever in Blue Jeans”
• special guest: Cher, facial structure and costume circa “If I Could Turn Back Time”
• And for the win, a coworker of mine submitted, “Before going on tour, Neil will have surgery to wrap 169 small LED lights around his heart so that when he sings “Heartlight’ the LEDs will flash and spell out H-E-A-R-T-L-I-G-H-T during the choruses.”

Ah, the French Kicks. Damn New York hipsters. Poppy, somewhat garagey guitar-rock, like an old-new Kinks-Strokes hybrid. I recognized the cover of The Troggs’ four-chord wonder, “With a Girl Like You.” Loud.

We did the right thing by finishing the most of our drinks and conversation beforehand at Max Fish, the ’round-the-corner bar that antidotes Mercury’s A-train-at-rush-hour vibe with a gently undulating bar, an explosion of vibrant color and weird yardsale stuff on the walls, decent drink prices, honest whiskey pours and most of Hunky Dory on the soundsystem.

Walking down Eighth Avenue to meet Andie for a dinner of shepherd’s pie and Guinness, I overheard some dude in a parked van direct a shout-out to a duo of young ladies passing by on the sidewalk.

I’m embarrassed for my gender to admit catcalls frequent my work neighborhood: random young men, of the slouchy jeans set, will holler after a lady. Typically it’s a highly obvious, frequently offensive and always unoriginal commentary on her walk or a specific part or region of her body, as if there’s a chance she’d stop and coo, “Take me now, you silver-tongued lothario!”

The guy I passed was directing his affection toward a young lady wearing black Chucks, jeans in the Barney-iest of purples, a jacket in a giant black-and-white houndstooth pattern and huge triangular earrings that appeared to be made of pewter formed to resemble bamboo. But I must give mild respect to this guy, for after his initial “Hey!” and a honk of his van’s horn for emphasis, he suggested that he sought a sassily dressed girl with street smarts by shouting “Bamboo earrings, at least two pair!” quoting one of my favorite rap classics of all time. The ladies paid him no mind. And yet: a refreshingly inventive holler, my good man!

The music of Explosions in the Sky, whose show I attended tonight at Terminal 5, is a little like life: sometimes quiet, mostly loud, and more things suggested than said outright. It’s long, instrumental “post rock,” which is a critic’s way of saying it’s updated, less wanky prog rock. We’re talking 10-minute songs of swirling guitars, all three interlocking, unraveling and entwining while the band members loped then sank, as if under the weight of the music, to mash their effects pedals and conjure squalls of precisely spectacular distortion. It’s moody, heady stuff—and loud; if these guys made arena-rockstar money, they’d be ramming their axes into the amps as an encore—and because I like Mogwai, I like Explosions. Sometime in the summer of 2001, I remember hearing their first album played on a car stereo of a friend of a friend, a DJ whose musical tastes didn’t mesh with mine, and the hair on my arms stood up and I had one of those “Who is this?” moments everyone gets with a favorite band heard for the first time.

I don’t regret the concerts I attend but because I’m a young white guy with black plastic-framed glasses, most of the action at these concerts is onstage. By which I mean the crowd is not hipping, hopping, swaying or bodyrocking. Which is why it was nice to attend the edIT show at the Knitting Factory tonight. It’s not a concert I’d choose of my own volition; Sherry follows-up on all of her invitations and is persuasive.

I liked edIT immediately when he took the stage wearing a homburg and a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt. His energy and skills at the turntables impress. He creates glitchy hip-hop electronica for neither strictly robots nor breakdancers but for breakdancing robots—in slow motion. Yes.

Beforehand we’d gotten Indian food in the Curry Hill region of New York at Banjara, which Sherry had chosen in large part on the basis that it wasn’t stereotypically decorated with strings of colored Christmas lights (although it did have a loose mosaic of mirrors glued to the ceiling).

Banjara

• 97 First Ave.
• (212) 477-5956
• Meal 20 of 52: saag paneer ($10.98).

I caught the sold-out Beach House show tonight at the Bowery Ballroom with Beth. I was expecting sweet boy-girl harmonies, in the vein of the Fruit Bats or Mates of State, but it a little more oblique, like, uh, Brooklyn’s own Fiery Furnaces around the time they starting producing concept albums involving their grandmother.

Mainly the Beach House lady sang solo and played keyboards and beatbox pedal-effects while the dude played guitar and a faceless drummer knocked out the backbeat. They were clad in Elvis-style white spangled jumpsuits that suited the spacey atmospherics. One of the openers played a Hammond organ, which I liked.

Before the show Beth and I met for dinner at Congee Bowery, which is nearly as conveniently close to the Ballroom as the Bowery station of the JMZ. I enjoyed my hot and hearty fresh mushrooms and fried bean curd and appreciated the tapioca-like concoction served as a surprise, complimentary dessert.

Congee Bowery

• 207 Bowery (between Spring and Delancey)
• (212) 766-2828
• Meal 18 of 52: fresh mixed mushrooms and fried bean curd ($12.95).

Cities are noisy. There is always noise. Traffic and airplanes and people. Horns and sirens and alarms. Dogs barking. There’s a party across the way or someone playing guitar upstairs. Even in a city’s distant reaches, in the dead of a summer night, the fans of air conditioners thrum.

Maybe the sounds of cities aren’t cacophonies but more like the familiar tumble of an orchestra tuning itself before a symphony: those trills, scales and bleats that soon shake themselves into order. The composer John Cage considered this and wrote scores for two cities, 49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs for New York City in 1977 and A Dip in the Lake: Ten Quicksteps, Sixty-two Waltzes, and Fifty-six Marches for Chicago and Vicinity a year later.

He plotted random points on maps then connected the dots with a straightedge and felt-tip pens. The score for Chicago looks like this:

Cage didn’t offer explicit instructions on how to realize his scores. His own interpretation was to make each point where the map-lines intersected represent a note. Then, in New York, he tape-recorded couples waltzing at each of the 147 intersections and assembled the snippets in random order for playback. In Chicago, he did much the same but let his recorder run without preplanned activity in the background, to capture raw city sound. The result would have sounded like this, neither melodious nor congruous. But as an idea, I like it.

To play the Chicago score in 1982, Cage spliced together random lengths of his city-sound audiotape and broadcast the results from 12 loudspeakers mounted on a steamboat docked at Navy Pier and trained west. What a noise that must have been. And how the city must have felt, startled by the unfamiliarity of its own voice: “Do I really sound like that?”

In 1977, during a fit of poetry, optimism and metallurgy, some nerds at NASA shot into space a phonograph made from copper, plated with gold and jacketed in an aluminum sleeve. They sent up two copies, to be precise, each affixed to the interior of the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft, courses set for infinity. The hope of the nerds was that eons from now, aliens might intercept the record, listen to its 27 songs representing the world’s countries and cultures, and know more about us.¹

The nerds acknowledged they were dealing with a low and particular form of audio technology, so they embossed pictographic operating instructions on the jacket. They also included a spare cartridge and needle, possibly recognizing that by the time of any interception—no earlier than 1990, when the Voyagers would pass Pluto—that even extraterrestrials would have upgraded to at least eight-track tapes.

Never mind the chance, remotely slim in the vastness of space, that any alien would find this object intact and know what to make of it. Never mind that the inhabitants of Earth, despite widely varying levels of intelligence, invariably assume that life beyond our planet will be an awful lot like us, only sporting pajamas and weirder foreheads. Never mind all that; this was a cool idea, to burn a civilization’s Greatest Hits onto a golden disc.

I’ve been skimming through the book Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record², reading of the wrestling over that 90-minute mix, particularly the pop songs and music from America that were debated for inclusion.

In one instance, the resident conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington called the Smithsonian’s curator of jazz at 11 p.m. on a Sunday, awakening him to ask whether the Miles Davis version of Gershwin’s “Summertime” would be appropriate to send to the stars. It was rejected. So was the whole of country music, offered as an option because the people who built the spaceships listened to it. Further bickering arose over Elvis, Jefferson Starship (who volunteered music for the record), Bob Dylan (“would the music stand if the words were incomprehensible?” asked Carl Sagan, a model of perfect diction) and the Beatles, of whom Sagan writes:

We wanted to send “Here Comes the Sun” by the Beatles, and all four Beatles gave their approval. But the Beatles did not own the copyright, and the legal status of the piece seemed too murky to risk.

C’mon, Carl; you should’ve sucked it up and sent it out. What did you have to lose? You’re slinging the song into a void billions and billions of miles from Apple Corps and its pugnacious lawyers.

But no contemporary pop made the cut. The four pieces of American music pressed to disc were a Navajo night chant and three songs by African American musicians: Louis Armstrong’s “Melancholy Blues,” Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground)” and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”

Other than praising Sagan & Co. for sidestepping Armstrong’s most-popular and least-representative track, the sappy “What a Wonderful World”, I’m impressed by the selection of “Dark Was the Night.”³. It’s just Johnson and his guitar, which he played by sliding his pocketknife over the strings; his hums and moans; and his blindness and loneliness. His stepmother blinded him, throwing lye in his face when he was seven. During most of his life, he played on the streets of Texas, “collecting tips in a cup wired to his guitar neck,” writes blues historian Jas Obrecht. Ailing and rejected by the hospital, Johnson died of pneumonia, sleeping on a waterlogged bed covered with newspaper.

For all the American flags waving in slow motion on Earth and those bolted to the moon, for all the space program’s hopeful rhetoric, not as much talk covers the fact that space is big and we’re little, looking for food, water, a dry place to sleep, and company. That’s just what you get—what you feel—with Johnson and his spooky little space-song, mankind’s most appropriate mix-pick.

Bonus mp3: “Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground)” by Blind Willie Johnson, recorded on December 3, 1927, the same version pressed to the Voyager disc.

Related: NASA’s page on the Golden Record.

¹ Also encoded in the audio spectrum of the record are 117 pictures, greetings in 54 human languages and one from the whales (remember, this was the ’70s) and 19 “sounds of Earth,” but for the purposes of this post, I’m only interested in the music. [back]

² It’s out of print. Snaps to the Strand for having a copy. [back]

³ In the middle of writing this post, the internet informed me that The West Wing incorporated this song and its involvement in the Voyager mission as a plot point. I missed that episode. But now I kind of want to see it. [back]

My friend Allison is staging a Brooklyn Sunday Night Dinner series, the first of which is a potluck with a “local/sustainable/seasonal” theme, so I figured I’d be spending time at the famous Union Square Greenmarket. But hold on: in Manhattan alone, there are 27 Greenmarkets. (Each is sanctioned by the city to promote regional agriculture and give family farmers the opportunity to sell their fruits, vegetables and other products directly to New Yorkers.) After checking a map, I discovered there’s been one in my neighborhood, on Isham Street between Seaman Avenue and Cooper Street, every Saturday year-round. I didn’t know that.

I walked up Broadway to check it out. Because of its location and the season, it’s small—much smaller than the Union Square version—taking up only one side of a block between an old brick school and Isham Park, where a flock of Canada geese scrounged for insects on a muddy baseball field. There were only seven vendors but each seemed chosen to avoid duplication, so that a creative cook could prepare a largely local meal from the Inwood Greenmarket: apples, beef, turkey, eggs, bread, pies and honey.

After several passes by the vendors, I decided I’d purchase locally farmed apples and eggs and remake that apple cake I first made for Thanksgiving. (At a glance, the recipe seems snotty and complicated but in reality it’s neither.) For the apples, I paid a few bucks for a half-dozen red-and-green skinned McIntoshes from Samascott Orchard, which has been growing them in Kindernook, New York since 1901. Different varieties brimmed in labeled wooden crates, resplendent in a natural glory without the wax, stickers, symmetry and surface perfection found in their supermarket counterparts. I enjoyed a sign on the crate of Fuji apples that blamed a particular hailstorm over the Samascott’s farm in May 2007 for the superficial scars on that variety. The apples were the size of peas at the time yet they carried the battle damage to their fully ripened size. After I had my apples weighed, I added a cup of hot cider to my order, which proved prescient, as a mini snow-squall arrived out of the literal blue shortly thereafter.

I also picked up a dozen large white eggs from Knoll Krest Farm, located in Clinton Corners, New York, where the free-roaming, cage-free hens are fed vegetarian diets free from hormones and antibiotics and whose eggs are “hand gathered.” Yee-hah.

Completing the hippie nature of my travels, I carried my groceries home in my canvas tote-bag from the Strand and instead of further depleting my iPod’s lithium-rich battery by listening to “Heart and Soul” by T’Pau, I sang it to myself a cappella.

Bonus mp3: “Heart and Soul” by T’Pau

I don’t condone torture, unless it’s enacted against people I just can’t stand, but I’m intrigued by this “Torture Playlist,” published online by Mother Jones yesterday. It’s comprised of songs reportedly used by U.S. military prison guards and interrogators to shock detainees into submission.

Where to start?

First, I love that the list appears to have been assembled by white, 19-year-old males from backwater towns like Orrick, Missouri, using songs that they personally find annoying or have on their iPods as “inspiration” to get them fired up in the morning. That’s great.

I approve of “America,” one of my favorite Neil songs. Need I mention that he sang it during the televised unveiling of the new-and-improved Statue of Liberty? You can’t get served a much more patriotic slice of American cheese than that.

But Prince? If you’re going for white-hot torture, I’d turn to the Purple One’s Batman soundtrack, specifically “Batdance,” a six-minute-plus annoyance larded with drum machines and samples from the movie.

And so much missing. Where’s “Believe” by Cher? No matter breaking the spirit of a terror suspect; her Auto-Tuned warble in that song could blast holes in Formica.

Where’s “Shine” by Collective Soul, reportedly a favorite of Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho?

Where’s any classical music, least of which Night on Bald Mountain? It ain’t highfalutin; haven’t these kids seen Fantasia?

And most importantly, where’s the Tuvan throat singing? As Katie will confirm, we used to play this music at closing time over the store-wide sound system at Booksellers, the independent bookstore at which we worked in Cleveland. It effectively drove out straggling customers but had no apparent effect on the homeless guy who would shamble in to wash his hair in the bookstore’s restroom toilet. No music could deter Mr. Ty-D-Dreads.

Related: Read this brief history of annoying songs played by the military that includes a playlist from the army’s boomboxing of Manuel Noriega in 1989, the first instance I remember reading about regarding music as psych-ops.

How many Japanese people does it take to change a light bulb?

Two.

Three if you count the guy who appeared to be supervising.

At least that’s how many it took tonight at Megan’s birthday party at Karaoke Duet. To be fair, it was a large bulb in a custom housing and meant solely for beaming on the disco ball in our private karaoke room, so two people was appropriate for the task. We needed that hot disco-ball action to accompany our songs. All of the hits from yesterday and today: Madonna! Bon Jovi! Peter Cetera! Kelis—certainly Megan’s milkshake brings all the boys to the yard! Good times.

Here are the top-three new songs in my karaoke repertoire, animal-tested tonight during a Japas 55 outing with Katie, Sam, Iggy, Megan and Vincent.

1. “Is She Really Going Out with Him?” by Joe Jackson, although I kept laughing at the call-and-response line:

   Jason

   Look over there!

   Everyone Else

   Where?

   Jason

   [laughing] Here comes Jeannie with her new boyfriend.

   Also, this was a good one to save until later in the evening, when my voice was rougher, so as to elicit the emotion-scuffed, tremulous vocal stylings of Mr. Jackson.
2. “Hello” by Lionel Richie. I laughed during this one, too, because Katie reminded me about the blind girl in the song’s video who sculpts Lionel’s giant head out of what appears to be deli sandwich spread. Also, per Wikipedia:
   

   Grown Iraqi men get misty-eyed by the mere mention of his name. ‘I love Lionel Richie,’ they say. Iraqis who do not understand a word of English can sing an entire Lionel Richie song.

   So you see, I had to sing this song; it was my duty as an American and a patriot, for if we let the Iraqis seize our Lionel Richie karaoke, the terrorists have already won.
3. “Mrs. Robinson” by Simon & Garfunkel. Because it’s in my range and who doesn’t like S&G (or “Mrs. Robinson”)? Koo-koo-ka-choo.

Runners-up:

1. “Two of Us” by the Beatles. It’s from Let It Be; my requisite non-single Beatles track. Plus it’s a superb song if you pair-off with someone who can sing the harmony, as Iggy can.
2. “1234” by Feist. Joyous! We were surprised Japas 55 had this song; their song directories are not known for their freshness of selections.
3. “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” by Kylie Minogue. When one has been drinking, certain songs seem like an excellent choice, but they are not. This is one of those songs.

Afterwards, Iggy, Sam, Katie and I tromped over to Columbus Circle, where you can order food by the pound at the Whole Foods Market and eat it right there, cafeteria-style, in the basement of the Time Warner Center. I was so hungry, I pilled a literal pound of food into my plastic bowl before I realized every selection hailed from the cold-food bar. My delicious-looking dumplings and soba noodles were not warm as I’d thought. Meh. I was hungry and it was delicious regardless. As we stuffed ourselves, we talked loudly about something I don’t recall but which must have been offensive because the old couple sitting to the table next to us rose silently and moved themselves and their food to a table far away from ours.

Whole Foods Market

• Time Warner Center (10 Columbus Circle, downstairs)
• (212) 823-9600
• Meal 6 of 52: 1.04 pounds of random cold food at $7.99/pound ($8.31) and a bottled water (59 cents).

Megan, Vincent and I were going to try the Clinton Street Baking Company on the Lower East Side for brunch but the wait for the hipster spot was two hours so we gave the Remedy Diner on Houston a try and it was just fine. They even put cinnamon and wafer-thin slices of orange on their French toast, which is made with a hearty, challah-like bread. Also, the servers wear tuxedo T-shirts and the place is decked out with tables, chairs and decor from a vaguely 1970’s European kitchen.

Later I got dinner with Beth at Song in Park Slope, which I’ve ordered-in from before, and we caught a show nearby at Union Hall, which is decorated like a rich old white-man’s mansion, all dark, rich woods, floor to ceiling bookshelves, oil portraits, roaring hearths, and two incongruous full-length bocce ball courts in the back. The concert was downstairs, with Andrew Kenny and the folksy, string-sectioned Ghosts I’ve Met opening for Ola Podrida, strummed acoustic guitars and the soft, tremulous voice of singer David Wingo (reminiscent of Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam) with a country tinge, recalling lonely middles-of-nowhere. Their live act is louder and faster and makes them sound like a wholly different band than on their only album, which I only previously knew via the Interpol cover art “scandal”. But it’s great music (I just ordered the CD) and there’s no bad publicity.

Remedy Diner

• 245 E. Houston
• (212) 677-5110
• Meal 5 of 52: French toast, a coffee and an orange juice.

I rely of course on my sense of sight (and to a lesser yet still vital degree, smell) when navigating the cars of the New York City subway system, but I didn’t realize to what degree I relied on hearing until today.

My new headphones arrived from J&R, Panasonic RP-HTX7PP-C retro-style monitor headphones (cream-colored for extra retro-ness), kind of like the ones we kids of the ’80s wore back then to listen to educational filmstrips or language lab. They’re snug and sound-blocking, though not technically noise-cancelling.

Anyway, at the 168th Street stop of the A train, a woman rose to exit before the train had fully stopped, so I moved quickly to take her seat, didn’t hear the train’s lurching brake into the station, lost my balance and flopped gently into the lap of a random young lady in a red wool coat, who coincidentally also had on earmuff-style headphones.

When I talk while wearing these headphones, it sounds to me as if I’m under water, so I indicated via facial expression and hand gestures that I was extremely apologetic and wasn’t trying to cop a feel or anything. If it helps you to imagine the scene—and it certainly does for me—the song playing on my iPod when this all went down was Ted Nugent’s “Cat Scratch Fever.”

Have you heard that Fight Club may become a Broadway musical? I’ve decided to start writing some lyrics for the production. Eat it, Gilbert.

Tyler

I make soap and I sell it:
Yardstick of civilization.

Chorus

We are God’s unwanted children.
So be it! Fuck damnation!

Tyler

Did you know?
To make explosives
All you really need
Is a can of Minute Maid
Plus one of gasoline?

Chorus

We did not know that.
Is that true?
Would you tell a lie?

Tyler [sotto voce]

One could make all kinds of bombs
If one were so inclined.

Chorus [con brio]

Now we know
To make explosives
All we really need
Is a can of Minute Maid
Plus one of gasoline!

Just one can of Minute Maid
Plus one of gasoline!

Another round of karaoke at Karaoke One 7. Although I didn’t sing anything, I had fun. Here are some arty photos of Andie, Katie, Ian and I taken by Andie.

I can’t believe I remember this but when I was in grade school, my friends and I had a salty, bearded lumberjack of a bus driver named Mr. Massey who chain smoked every second he wasn’t in the bus. The dude reeked like the Marlboro Man’s ashtray. As a sort-of gift one Christmas season, we developed clever new lyrics to “Frosty the Snowman” and sang the song during our commute. It was an elaborate production and I’m certain Mr. Massey appreciated our efforts. The only verses I can recall are:

Mr. Massey the bus driver
Was a very jolly soul
Smoked two packs a day
And got fricasseed
Now he’s just a lump of coal

There must have been some magic
In those old two packs he smoked
For when he placed them in his mouth
He gasped and wheezed and choked.

Andie, various coworkers, Megan, Vincent and I met at Karaoke One 7 for song and drink. The small place was unexpectedly crowded, with a large group of cute, arty types at the bar (one of them had a hair-pin illustrated with an Olde English 800 label). I realized after a time that most of them were, like, 22 and I’m not the Dov Charney type, so I concentrated instead on staying on-key for “Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now),” got angry when I couldn’t stay on key and gave it up.

Otherwise our group brought it, big-time. Andie was nervous about “Love Is a Battlefield” but did Pat proud. And I’m convinced now that one of the best karaoke songs ever is “A Little Respect” by Erasure. We got the rest of the bar to join in. Another good one (especially for cute couples like Megan and Vincent) is “Don’t You Want Me” by Human League. They also did a great rendition of “Birdhouse in Your Soul” by They Might Be Giants. A random guy, wavering and slurry from drink (and the one who sang “I Am...I Said” and sounded just like Neil, sandpapered voice and all), wandered over to personally thank us for our excellent selections.

I’m better I think at the “private-room karaoke” because I get shy in groups and go through the stereotypical motions: claim I haven’t drank enough to sing, spend a solid half-hour with my head buried in the song directory like it’s the new Stephen King novel, then later claim I’ve drank too much to sing.

Welcome to a new, possibly monthly music feature of Jason’s Journal, “B-Side Appreciation,” in which I comb my music collection for non-album tracks I like that appear on singles. I aim to favor songs that haven’t been anthologized or otherwise collected and popularized.

In February 1984, Bananarama released “Robert De Niro’s Waiting,” a single that hit #3 on the UK charts and, as legend has it, inspired the actor to contact the girl-group in appreciation of their weenie tribute. In it, they sing that their only escape from dashed hopes and stalker boyfriends is “watching a film or a face on the wall.” History doesn’t reveal whether De Niro contacted PJ Harvey when she issued her “50ft Queenie” single, a B-side for which, “Reeling,” flat out commands, five seconds in, “Robert De Niro, sit on my face.”

Idolator has already adulated the demo version of “Reeling” found on 4-Track Demos but I prefer the studio version found on the now out-of-print “50ft Queenie” single, released in the spring of 1993. It’s the only commercially available song from the December 1992 recording sessions for Rid of Me, overseen by producer Steve “Don’t Call Me A Producer” Albini, that doesn’t appear on the album.

Albini ranks Rid of Me in the top-10 of the hundreds of albums the’s recorded, but has otherwise remained tight-lipped about the sessions, choosing instead to dish out tidbits such as that PJ “ate nothing but potatoes, with occasional sauces, during the entire recording” of the album. Certainly its pinched and abrasive sound was influential; Albini reveals (in the liner notes for the Nirvana box set, With the Lights Out) that he shared with Kurt Cobain a prerelease copy of his recordings with PJ and that Kurt agreed that if its next album (In Utero) sounded like hers, he’d be happy. And it did, and he was, at least until he got a big WTF from the suits at Geffen. Way to go, PJ, the fury-muse in the high heels and leopard-print coat.

What’s immediate just listening to Rid of Me is that it’s PJ’s most violent and sexual, her most direct, and her last album before a lingering passion for synthesizers and the warm-wash production of Flood.

Cocksure larger-than-life men swagger and stomp around the album—Abraham, Tarzan, Mars, Casanova, Yuri Gagarin. In “Reeling” alone, De Niro, Romeo and possibly John Wayne make appearances among the genocide, the bragged comparisons to Aphrodite, goddess of love, lust and beauty, and reclining-odalisque allusions to Cleopatra bathing in milk. It’s an exhaustive, smoking-rubble, dick-swinging song, a fast-clip punk slingshot with punishing drums and sawtooth guitars smothering PJ’s vocal (is she singing thorough a Mr. Microphone?). Someone screams the song title throughout in a hoarse falsetto that recurs on many of the album’s tracks. (Allmusic suggests it’s Harvey herself; other sources say it’s drummer Rob Ellis, which would be my guess.) At the song’s end, PJ repeats the phrase “take me/fly me to the moon,” perhaps in reference to the Sinatra-popularized song of the same name and tying into lunar imagery repeated in the album.

Why was the song relegated to B-side status? Could it have been too fast and noisy for an album already stuffed with sonic overload? I don’t know, but it kicks ass.

Bonus mp3: “Reeling” by PJ Harvey (1993)

It’s Thanksgiving and I can’t help but notice the staggering, nearly 50-degree temperature difference between New York City and Laramie, Wyoming this afternoon: 64° in Manhattan, 15° in Laramie. But we had a delicious Andrew-prepared dinner of turkey with cornbread stuffing and giblet gravy, mashed sweet potatoes, broccolini and cranberries.

Entertainments, too. A great game even slightly better than karaoke is SingStar, which we played on the PlayStation. You’re judged on your accuracy to hold a tune on a variety of pop songs, the lyrics of which scroll karaoke-style as the song’s official video plays in the background. Battle Mode allows you to square-off by singing alternate verses with a partner. We particularly enjoyed the B-52’s “Love Shack” and Elton John’s “Rocket Man” on SingStar Rocks! and A-Ha’s “Take on Me” and U2’s “Vertigo” on SingStar Pop.

Japanese engineers have developed a musical surface called “melody roads” that recalls rumble strips except with grooves cut and spaced precisely to recreate notes when a car passes over them at 28 mph.¹

There are three musical strips in central and northern Japan, one of which plays the tune of a Japanese pop song. Notice of an impending musical interlude, which lasts for about 30 seconds, is highlighted by coloured musical notes painted on to the road.

Which reminded me: I needed to get cracking with the on-the-road music-mixes for my Thanksgiving vacation to our nation’s Square States beginning tomorrow. I’d made a mixtape for Dana and I to listen to, but I was already getting bored just looking at it, so I did the next best thing: I solicited mixtapes from two of my coworkers, prescreened for their excellent musical tastes and in-house ability to quickly crank out playlists of driving songs before I fly out of New York tomorrow.

My directives were loose, though I cautioned, “Transitions are important, as is verve. The songs don’t necessarily have to be about travel/driving unless you are some sort of Clever Dan.” I concluded: “I will repay you by either saving your life someday when you least expect it or by giving you a gift-wrapped box of Jell-O brand Pudding Pops. But only the plain kind, not the swirly chocolate-vanilla kind.”

I got S.’s first. She lives for shit like this and admitted as such. I’m a big fan of covers, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the Arcade Fire song is by the Talking Heads, the Nouvelle Vague song is by Tuxedomoon and I think she slyly chose the M. Ward song “Sadie” (originally by Joanna Newsom) because the original version fits the criteria for her Album-Song Name Game. S. was originally going to have “The Passenger” in her mix, then pulled it when she saw it in my own; then she included the same Clap Your Hands Say Yeah song I’d originally been considering for my own mix. Weird.

I nearly didn’t think I’d get one from K., but he passed his disc over at the last moment, scrawled in blue Sharpie with “JaYo’s 2007 Thanx Giving Trip Mix.” Lots of drum-machine beats with bloops and bleeps recalling Postal Service mating with My Bloody Valentine, mixed with some sort of mopey stuff, a wholesale swath of Diamond Dogs, stray weirdness and unexpectedness. Had I mentioned “Against All Odds” was my favorite Phil C. song? Or is that everyone’s favorite Phil C. song?

And here’s mine. I like how all three of us included at least one track from the ’60s/’70s amidst a lion’s share of tracks from the current and previous decade, in order to show our tastes have a range, or something.

¹ Via the article “Japan’s Melody Roads Play Music As You Drive” by Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent for The Guardian, Tuesday, November 13, 2007. [back]

Prepping some mix CDs for the drive my sister and I will take in Colorado and Wyoming next week for Thanksgiving, I conversed by email with a coworker about mixtape¹ gimmicks, such as having songs on a travel mix focus on driving, typically via an allusion in the song’s title. The robots at Tiny Mix Tapes have been churning out mixtapes like these for years.

My coworker countered with a still gimmicky but more clever idea for a work-in-progress mix that’s perfect for the music lover, and specifically, the album lover. There are three criteria each song on this mixtape must meet:

1. The lyrics of the song must contain the exact name of the album it originally appeared on.
2. The song’s name may not share the album’s name.
3. The song “obv. must be good.”

Got it? You’ll note that rule two disqualifies many songs. For example, “Everybody Knows this is Nowhere” by Neil Young with Crazy Horse won’t work. Although it contains the exact lyric “everybody knows this is nowhere,” the album on which the song originally appears is titled Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.

An example of an acceptable song would be Elvis Costello’s “Alison” because it contains the lyric “my aim is true,” which is the name of the album “Alison” appears on. Another would be Modest Mouse’s “Bury Me With It,” which contains the lyric “good news for people who love bad news” and appears on the album of that same lengthy name.

Genius, especially because, unless there’s a site listing such songs that I haven’t found, it’s nearly impossible to cheat with Google. Or at the least, it would be time consuming; most song-lyric sites bristle with pop-up ads and devote separate pages to each song on an album. No, for this game you must have knowledge of often obscure album tracks. The only three I could think of at work today are from albums I listened to a lot in high school and college:

• “Oh My Golly!” by the Pixies, from the album Surfer Rosa
• “Cannonball” by the Breeders, from the album Last Splash
• “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana, from the album Nevermind

Now go check your record collection and suss out more songs that fit the bill.

¹ I know they’re all digital or CDs now and I don’t care. “Mixtape” sounds better. [back]

I hung out with Beth, Aaron and Nick tonight at the Illinois/Menomena concert at Webster Hall, home of New York’s kindest bouncers and most expensive Jameson ($10 per plastic-cup squirt). Illinois sounded 1000% better than they did at McCarren Park this summer, based on Webster’s superior sound system. Menomena made me tap my foot with its beat-loop-based alt-rock sort of sound. Multifunctional, too: the drummer sang, the keyboardist played guitar and the lead singer played bass, sax, occasionally twirled drumsticks and sort of resembled my younger brother. As Aaron suggested, people of our age are required to be enamored with the sort of band that would parody itself via The NeverEnding Story on its MySpace page.

Kelly swung by my old apartment tonight to help clean, so that I might get at least a fraction of my security deposit back. She scoured the stove, rangetop and kitchen counter, while I swept, and cleaned the fridge, kitchen tile and bathroom floor. Prince’s Diamonds and Pearls makes great apartment-cleaning music.

I finally got Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows, and pleased to report several songs can be classified as crunchy or thrashy (“Bodysnatchers,” with lead guitars even reminds me of Sonic Youth’s newest, Rather Ripped). Plus there’s not only Melody but Several Guitars. Real Drums! Something called an Ondes-Martenot, among other keyboards!

Radiohead being what they are, Rainbows also features cutup vocal effects with bleeps and boops that swaddle lead-singer Thom Yorke’s tremulous falsetto, reflecting the group’s style over its more-electronic brethren Kid A and Amnesiac—these songs are much more warm, catchy. After a few listens, I even found a few stuck in my head. (The songs from Kid A and Amnesiac got stuck in my head, too, but only because I had purchased them on cassette and listened to one or the other ever day for the better part of a year during my work commute in Cleveland.)

Part of the warmth, too, of Rainbows, may be that second-person has supplanted the first-person that featured almost exclusively into the lyrics of earlier Radiohead albums such as OK Computer; in other words, these songs appear to be more about relationships—doomed, maybe, but relationships nonetheless—which lends yearning and hope: “You’re all I need,” “You were not to blame for / bittersweet distractors,” I don’t want to be your friend / I just want to be your lover,” “You used to be all right / What happened?”

Having exhausted the merchandising possibilities of box sets, lunchboxes and inaction figures, the executors of Kurt Cobain’s estate have lined up a writer for a biopic of the rockstar. It makes me want to curl up on the couch, strap on the headphones and listen to In Utero because biopics are inevitably a letdown compared to a band’s audio-only output.

Either such films feature that cookie-cutter pyramidal plot I’ve written about before (say, for Walk the Line or Dreamgirls). Or as with Control, which I saw tonight during a sold-out Film Forum showing, they’re no more intriguing when presented as a flat stretch of fanboy facts. Joy Division never had a thrilling career to begin with: they formed, released two alien punk-pop albums that later proved extremely influential, kicked around Europe on tour, then ceased to exist. Their lead singer, Ian Curtis, hung himself in his estranged wife’s kitchen on the eve of a potentially career-altering American tour, forever sealing the tormented-genius-dies-young mythology, an archetype profitable both emotionally and economically.

Ian’s the focus of this film and the actor who plays him, Sam Riley, resembles him very nearly, with the wicked grins, shifts of hooded eyes and robotically flailing limbs the real Curtis exhibited onstage, and sometimes off. Longtime celebrity photographer, first-time director Anton Corbijn has filmed Control in stark beauty; every first frame of each shot is composed so meticulously it could stand alone as a Corbijn photograph in ultrahigh-contrast black-and-white.

The whole thing is just such a slog. Joy Division made mostly glum music, lyrics of isolation bleated in Curtis’ weirdly deep baritone singing voice, as swampy guitars and mechanical drumbeats swirled in basement echo. Stack atop that the gloom of working-class England in the ‘70s, Curtis’ epileptic seizures, his lovetorn confusion between his young wife (a frumpy and deluded Samantha Morton) and his European mistress (Alexandra Maria Lara), a mostly diegetic soundtrack of murk from Bowie, Iggy and Roxy, plus, you know, the whole suicide thing, the buildup for which consumes the final second hour of the film, and Control clouds over as a major bummer.

A scene in 24 Hour Party People suggests that, contrary to popular myth, Joy Division wasn’t all doom and gloom by recreating a scene of the group playing a gleeful cover of “Louie, Louie,” a rowdy club audience singing along. Control tries a smidge of levity, too: Curtis claims his favorite film is The Sound of Music, and after Riley, the film’s best performance is easily the exasperated, profane and very funny Toby Kebbell as the group’s den-mother manager, Rob Gretton.

But it’s all too little of interest and for too long. A woman in my row leapt to exit as the credits hit and I heard a fragment of her complaint—not soon enough—which I would agree with in reference to the movie, perhaps less so regarding the death of Curtis and Joy Division, which can also be good headphones music to listen to on the couch.

Jason

Supposedly the attachment to this email is a photo file. I think the extension is just wrong. Any way to open it? Winner receives a copy of the Madonna CD, Ray of Light, plus a hearty handshake.

O.

I won’t try to open it based entirely on the prize offered.

Jason

Consolation prize is the Madonna CD, chucked at your head.

O.

There’s no data in the document. Tell them to send the correct fucking format.

Jason

Really all I wanted to do was throw a Madonna CD at you.

O.

That’ll cost extra.

Jason

[throws Madonna CD at O.]

For a while there, Arcade Fire seemed to favor small and oddball venues like decommissioned churches in which to play their rousing pop-rock and smack themselves on the head with drumsticks. Would their act tonight suffer from being staged at the large outdoor venue of Randall’s Island? It didn’t seem so. It started off slowly with “Black Mirror” but picked up swiftly with religious revival-style choruses, playing of the full pipe organ the band had shipped in, manic drumming and the dramatic unfurling of several banners.

The stage show centered around video projected onto not only the rear curtain on the stage but onto a half-dozen manhole-cover-sized white screens atop tall stands that were positioned on points of an arc across the stage, fed live from perhaps a few dozen tiny cameras secreted around the set, including a few mounted to mike stands that offered intimate close-ups of individual band members performing. The video was shown and cut on the fly, tinged with a variety of color effects, giving it all a vaguely propagandistic air.

The opening acts put on a fine show, too. I unexpectedly liked LCD Soundsystem, which is mostly a pudgy white guy lurching around and shrieking over constant staccato drum lines, rubbery bass guitar, and synths. The music reminded me of an updated Happy Mondays, or songs like “Temptation” from New Order’s club-music heyday, the ones that would go on forever, but in a good way.

Arcade Fire Setlist (via brooklynvegan.com)

1. Black Mirror
2. Keep The Car Running
3. Neighborhood #2 (Laïka)
4. No Cars Go
5. Haiti
6. I’m Sleeping In A Submarine
7. My Body Is A Cage
8. Cold Wind
9. Intervention
10. (Antichrist Television Blues)
11. The Well And The Lighthouse
12. Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)
13. Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)
14. Rebellion (Lies)

Encore

1. Headlights Look Like Diamonds
2. Wake Up

And they keep affixing Post-it notes to the cases.

This first one is a loaner from an editor, John, who volunteered a few choice selections from his jazz collection after I asked if he could help build a soundtrack for an afterparty at an upcoming real estate conference my company is producing. Let the record show that John is irritated by “Un Poco Loco,” a 1951 track with Bud Powell on piano, Curly Russell on bass and Max Roach on drums.

This one is from the requisite cool guy in the production department, who’s a native New Yorker and lives in a loft in Brooklyn in which he built a small recording studio. He’s been trying to bring me up to speed on the popular pop the young hip white kids are listening to these days, in this case Bring It Back by Mates of State, which is too hypercheerful and brassy for my tastes. I didn’t ask him for a loaner but I think he may have thought I was lavishing too much praise on the Kinks album I recently loaned him and figured my appreciation of American rock stopped at 1970.

Bonus mp3: “Bouncing with Bud” (1949) by Bud Powell (piano), Fats Navarro (trumpet), Sonny Rollins (tenor sax), Tommy Porter (bass) and Roy Haynes (drums).
Bonus mp3: “For the Actor” (2005) by Mates of State.

Leslie Feist’s voice on her newest album, The Reminder, appeals to me, tangled and tired at times, like she just woke up on a Sunday in that cool and lazy span between teeth-brushing and brunch. Her songs, though consistently run through with piano, echo and close-miked, double-tracked vocals, shift across the board so that she channels Astrud Gilberto-style bossa nova (the leadoff “So Sorry”), late-night Norah Jones-ey such-and-such with brushed drums, standup bass, vibes and chimes (“The Water”), even bits that remind me of Björk (the five-note knell-loop of “How My Heart Behaves” recalls a similar riff from “Possibly Maybe”). There are general points of comparison with Cat Power, “but more interesting and less overrated,” as The Onion A.V. Club sniped recently. In general, I find Feist cheerful, fresh and unexpected; case in point: “1234,” the second single from The Reminder, the most sprightly, Sesame Street-ready song about numerals since De La Soul’s “The Magic Number,” rife with banjo, piano, strings, trumpet, handclaps and Polyphonic Spree-caliber chorus.

Like everything else listworthy, there’s a list of songs about California on Wikipedia, but here are five of my favorites in my head as I fly out to that great state myself today. Per normal, you can listen to a watery mp3 of each song by clicking its title.

1. “California Dreamin’” by The Mamas & The Papas. Yes, it’s That Song, like the Stones’ “Paint it, Black,” overused by soundtrackers to evoke the dark, hippie-hedonism of the Sixties. But if you can forget that for a moment, it’s not too shabby a tune, with its magic harmonies, a bit of Byrds-y guitar chiming, empty-grain-silo reverb, and—is that a flute solo?
2. “California Soul” by Marlena Shaw. Funky!
3. “California Stars” by Billy Bragg and Wilco. Written by Woody Guthrie and put to music by Bragg (acoustic guitar) and Wilco (with Jeff Tweedy, also on acoustic guitar, and vocals). A dreamy, repetitive, strummy lullaby that paints pictures of starry nights that probably still exist in California’s desert places outside the city lights.
4. “California Sun” by the Ramones. Popularized by a surf group named the Rivieras and probably my favorite of the California Song remakes, which also include “California Girls” (The Beach Boys vs. David Lee Roth) and “Hotel California” (The Eagles vs. The Gipsy Kings, the Spanish version of which memorably graces The Big Lebowski.)
5. “Going to California” by Led Zeppelin. I went to college in the Midwest and Led Zeppelin IV was in constant rotation in the freshman dorms, typically by the guys who burned incense in their rooms for a variety of reasons and had one of those black banners featuring the ZoSo symbols and an excerpt from “Stairway” tacked up on their closet door. I’m alternately annoyed and enthralled by Robert Plant’s voice but on this one, the interweaving acoustic guitar and mandolin do it for me.

I caught another free concert at McCarren Park Pool this afternoon with Beth and friends. As before, we delighted in spotting noteworthy fashions among the crowd both impressive and wayward, including bikini-clad ladies in cowboy boots, some dude in corduroy short-pants and two sets of sneakers featuring an eye-searing array of DayGlo.

After sitting around near the back of the pool to better people-watch and listen to the openers (one of which resembled the Polyphonic Spree and covered Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” to much delight and confetti), we moved front and center for the headliner, Blonde Redhead. As the crowd waited for the band to take the stage, the guy to the left with the shaved head and the foam earplugs was engrossed in EJ Hobsbawm’s potboiler, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality while the girl to the right wormed her way through a soduku. The guy directly in front of us, in shades and curly blonde hair, grabbed any beach balls that bounced his way, deflated them and snuck them into his backpack.

I’d heard of Blonde Redhead but hadn’t heard them until today, very lush in both lowercase and capitalized forms of the word, blending Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine, with ethereal vocals by a self-admittedly drink-addled Kazu Makino (depicted below), and from the Pace brothers, washes of electric guitar with odd effects and solid, crafty drumbeats, plus a few odd synths and samples thrown into the mix.

After refreshments at a local bar, Beth, her sister Katie, their friend Brett and I were famished and spotting a restaurant name similar enough to the girls’ own last name made the selection of Raymund’s Place automatic. It featured an animal skull mounted festively on the wall, which pleased Beth, and served Polish home cooking. We feasted on potato pancakes, beet soup and pierogies, those doughy lumps of goodness I remember fondly from Parma, Ohio. The pierogies at Raymund arrive not only with a bit of sour cream, but a small side of bacon bits nestled in their own liquid grease: genius.

Raymund’s Place

• 124 Bedford Ave., Brooklyn
• (718) 388-4200
• Meal 32 of 52: potato and cheese pierogies with cucumber salad and beets ($6.75).

Beth and I hung out at the Siren Musical Festival on Coney Island today, the highlight of which was M.I.A., who almost didn’t make the show because of her troubles securing a visa to re-enter the U.S., possibly due to her dad’s association with a militant Sri Lankan secessionist group.

She’s been a darling of the music critics with her electronica/hip-hop/Bhangra (lotsa tabla!) blend of bass-thumpin’ body-rockin’ singsong such-and-such and sometimes she reminded me of the saucy chant-rap of Missy or, uh, J.J. Fad, which I mean as a compliment. She performed her hits but I’m behind the times and didn’t recognize anything other than what I believe was a crawling cover of the Pixies’ “Where is My Mind?” The crowd at large was deeply into the performance and its composition was likely among the most diverse at the Festival, lamented in recent years as the sort that gathers for whiny white-boy rock. This crowd, in which we were sandwiched tighter than panini cheese, experienced breakouts of freak-dancing, crowd surfing directly over our heads, on-point sing-alongs, religious ecstasy style arm flailing, beachball batting, and more pot-smoking that I’ve experienced at a concert in recent memory. Two crackers in front of us shamelessly sparked up and later became deeply entranced by their gallon jug of Poland Spring water, then did that thing where you become momentarily hypnotized by your own fingers.

Another guy in front of us sported a blonde Mohawk and was hoisting above his head a giant circa ’85 boombox, Lloyd Dobler-style; it wasn’t playing anything, he was merely hoisting it, as one might hoist a lighter at a particularly rambunctious rock concert.

M.I.A. busted out fresh threads for the occasion. If I had to describe them in one word, it would be “sequins.” Vest with gold-sequined shoulders. Tight pants fully spangled in black sequins. And Chuck Taylors coated in silver sequins; they glinted in the setting sun when she occasionally propped one up on the monitor speaker. She also wore a cap that she appeared to have swiped from the captain of Captain & Tennille, then adorned it with a red feather, and at one point she had her DJ pause so she could apply some lipstick and don a pair of Grace Jones-style sunglasses. There were some technical difficulties with a malfunctioning microphone and Siren’s requisite crappy sound doesn’t bring out any subtleties, but the DJ kept the beats flowing and M.I.A. rocked the mike with but only a few brief breaks. Good show. Check out some much better photos of it here.

This is kind of typical of me. Because I organized a small karaoke outing tonight and because it featured both new and infrequent members, I brought along a list of what I thought would be fun songs to sing as a group. I’d prepared this in advance, drawing on my own knowledge of easy-to-sing pop favorites as well as mining the advice of the requisite hip-guy-in-a-band in our production department. I compiled and edited the selections, then alphabetized a few dozen of them in an Excel grid, Bangles through Wang Chung.

Believe me, when you’re paying by the hour and you have but a scant two to cram in as many songs as possible, you don’t want to waste time with your head buried in the karaoke song directory.

But we didn’t need the list because we came up with fun group songs on our own, including the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine,” “When I Come Around” by Green Day, “Piano Man” by Billy Joel, “I Want You to Want Me” by Cheap Trick, “Here Comes Your Man” by the Pixies and “The Way You Make Me Feel” by Michael Jackson. Also, more of my friends know how to sing the Beatles’ “I Will” than I assumed; there’s no such thing as an obscure Beatles song.

The toughest element of the again-languishing 52 Meals Project is that it’s just so easy to return to a familiar restaurant for familiar, comfortable food. Sometimes I just want food I know I’ll like because I’m not up for the crapshoot challenge presented by a new place. Though I didn’t regret stopping by the Blue Ribbon Bakery Market tonight for an open-faced toast sandwich with cheese and sliced sturgeon because the counterguys were jiving to a lost funk classic from 1975, “Bouncy Lady,” by a group called Pleasure, apparently obscure enough to not even have their own Wikipedia entry. I had to ask the Blue Ribbon guys what song it was because I’d never heard it. I agreed with them that few groups other than one named Pleasure could extol the virtues of a bouncy lady.

I’ve been friends with Joe since junior high and for a while there in the late-’80s and the ’90s, we’d go to Cedar Point every year. As we left the park at the end of the day, elated and with that compressed-muscle feeling that we were still aboard the coasters, my tradition would be to buy a souvenir map of the park. We enjoyed unfolding it and considering where among the sparse or forested plots of lakefront property the next great ride would be built.

With work and distance, Joe and I don’t hang out as often as we used to, but in the interim, those maps grew fuller, as did Joe, when he met a remarkable woman, Andrea. I realize now that it’d be trivial yet interesting to chart the parallel progress, matching additions to those maps with milestones of their relationship. For instance, the year they saw Gosford Park together, Wicked Twister appeared. I’m sure that means something.

But to the point, Andrea liked roller coasters as much as Joe. More improbably, she shared his passion for reality television, odd eBay purchases, Broadway musicals and their soundtracks, obscure facts of American history and geography, and the sort of murder-mystery parties where at least one guest ends up “dead” on the floor in the kitchen. Both Joe and Andrea are funny, smart and sensible people, yet assuredly not the same person. She provides the brassy counterpoint to his lower register, and I don’t think I have to worry about them buying matching embroidered jean jackets anytime soon.

A guy can make questionable choices in girlfriends. The friends who know him best may find her annoying or inappropriate but remain silent because of their loyalty to him. It happens. But that’s not at all the case with Andrea and Joe and it’s my impression his friends suspected she was The One before he fully reached that conclusion himself. When he called to let me know of the engagement, I said something like, “I was wondering when this would happen, by which I mean all of us were wondering.” This much I didn’t expect: he proposed to her on the Magnum XL-200, which didn’t shock her as much as the fact he’d been carrying the ring in his pocket all day, including aboard rides that went upside-down.

“It’s insured!” he was quick to point out.

At Joe and Andrea’s wedding today, the metaphor of marriage and roller coasters was a theme. It’s true: both are thrilling, with twists and turns, unexpected or otherwise, with dizzying highs and lows. And in this metaphor, friends and family are there, too, because everyone has season passes. We’re “along for the ride,” you might say, and at the end of the day, everyone gets funnel cakes.

Bonus mp3: “Love Rollercoaster” by The Ohio Players (1975).

During the rolled-shirtsleeves vigor of the Great Depression, the WPA built a pool at McCarren Park in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, larger than three Olympic pools combined and able to hold 6,800 swimmers. Long since dry and in disrepair, it’s become a skateboarders’ paradise and a venue for free open-air movies and concerts. The scabs of aquamarine paint stuck to the ground still smell of chlorine.

Beth and I took the G train over there after lunch for a concert series featuring three bands we’d never heard of. It was free and the weather was sunny and breezy, so why not? Illinois reminded me of a more cheerful, less reverby My Morning Jacket. Dengue Fever arrived billed as ’60s-style psychedelic-Cambodian pop-rock, which made me expect a southeast Asian version of Os Mutantes, but their loungey background music inspired no body rockin’.

The main attraction, Man Man, cranked a rollicking set with barely a breath between songs that included speed-metal fist-thrusters, tribal drum-and-bass and lurching Tom Waits-style wailers with junkyard percussion, xylophone and gruff vocals.

During the quieter moments, Beth and I discussed Vice-style “Dos & Don’ts” in reference to the innumerable hipsters on hand, paying Joan Rivers-caliber attention to the vintage housedresses and ironic T-shirts. Hipster boys, those skintight jeans gotta go; although if anything about the sight of your Slim Jim legs makes us happy it’s that your sperm may be dying horrible boiling deaths and preventing procreation of yet more tightly trousered young Turks. Hipster girls, we love you but sometimes you try too hard. Take a look in the mirror before you go out and subtract one article from your Punky Brewster stylings, whether it’s that orange Pleather belt the width of a snowboard or those crocheted florescent yellow-green leg warmers.

And the tats. My goodness, what variety. It’s no more just stars, flaming skulls and "Winona Forever"s. One guy’s leg featured that iconic sketch from the cover of The Little Prince. A+, you lovably obtuse rascal. Another fellow’s lower-leg ink depicted the bugeyed head of a Boston terrier hidden among a swirl of paisley curlicues. I remain uncertain whether this is a Do or a Don’t.

At one point, as I stood in line for a frosty cup of Brooklyn Ale, I overheard a young couple behind me discuss the SummerScreen film schedule:

Girl

How about Night of the Hunter?

Boy

That has a lot of killing. I don’t know if it’d be good for the kids.

Girl

How about Purple Rain?

Boy

No, they shouldn’t watch that. They should be introduced to violence before they’re introduced to Prince.

I like music and if a story’s about mix tapes, I’m bound to read it. High Fidelity: naturally. The hipster coffee-table book Mix Tape: the Art of Cassette Culture: yes. Even lesser-known classics of the genre, like Sarah Vowell’s “Thanks for the Memorex,” a tale of a long-distance love affair by cassette tape: “While we cared for each other, we cared little for each other’s taste in music. I sent him lovey-dovey lullabies like Blondie’s ‘In the Flesh’ and he sent me back what could have been field recordings of amplified ant farms by bands with names like Aphex Twin and Jarboe.”

So it was a given I’d eventually read Love is a Mix Tape, the thesis of which is “Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up to the story of a life.” It’s a memoir by Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield of his girlfriend-then-wife Renée, and how their shared love of music and mix tapes shaped and enlivened their relationship until her sudden death at 31 of a pulmonary embolism.

Renée was a saucy Southern girl raised in Appalachia with coal-miner grandfathers. She was obsessed with funky clothes and fabric swatches and made her own dresses. Her (presumably) Southern-isms, made me laugh, aphorisms like “If it’s got tits or tires, it’s gonna cost you money“ and “we’re shittin’ in tall cotton now!” Crushing on Evan Dando, she says, “He must get more cookie than the Keebler elves.” As an adventure-seeking, outspoken woman, she’s exactly the right counterpoint to Sheffield’s introvert. They meet when they’re each 23, at a college bar in Charlottesville, and learn they not only both love Big Star but share the same favorite Big Star song (“Thirteen”).

It’s an easy yet humorous and heartfelt read. I’d invested enough in Renée’s character and her relationship with Sheffield that I’m not too ashamed to admit I cried at the point in the book where she dies. The book’s of definite appeal to a Rob Gordon-type such as myself. Each chapter is prefaced with the actual mix tape playlist that was part of Sheffield’s life at that time, from the late ’70s through last year. Musical references abound: favorite songs, worst songs, songs that stoke memories and crack heartstrings, songs modified for personal reasons (“The only one who could ever reach me/Was the Makin’-the-Pizza Man”).

Music sneaks into the mix indirectly, too. Part of a pop song, often edited slightly to fit the surrounding sentences, will pop up in the middle of Sheffield’s narrative¹. There’s Bowie’s “Space Oddity” (“Planet Earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can do.”) and Human League, by way of Philip Oakey and Giorgio Moroder (“Together in electric dreams”), among other picks absent from the college-radio-DJ playlist, like, um, Poison’s “Fallen Angel” (“Rollin’ the dice of her life”). None of these are attributed and to Sheffield’s credit, they fit where they’re placed although they distracted me at times.

The writing gets looser and more rumpled in the chapters after Renée dies, which I guess I can chalk up to the narrator himself getting shoddy. He lives a widower life on frozen steak burritos and Bushmills and sits in his back yard at night, staring into the woods at nothing. All of Renée’s things are boxed and left out in the apartment and it all reminds him of her. After too many nights dining alone at Applebee’s and returning home to watch old movies on TV, he snaps his act together, leaves the South and Renée behind and moves to Brooklyn. There’s a marvelous bit of closure during which he walks the row of benches on the fringe of the Great Lawn in Central Park and leaves one of Renée’s hats on each: a derby, a pillbox, a straw hat. Stuck to each is a Post-it on which he’s written, “Free,” and when he returns 20 minutes later, every hat is gone.

¹ Maybe you have and maybe you haven’t noticed topical references to songs and lyrics in my post titles. Glancing at my post log, this year so far I’ve referenced R.E.M., Elvis Costello, Les Applegate, Rod Stewart, They Might Be Giants, Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, Frank Sinatra, Mariah Carey and the Hungarian suicide song. [back]

That voice: a tenor, so soft and naive. I didn’t know whether a man or a woman sang “My Funny Valentine” until I saw William F. Claxton’s photos of Chet Baker, trumpet in hand, jutting jaw, pompadour, full lips, high cheekbones, heavy brow. Sexy bastard. I guarantee Chris Isaak and Morrissey have at least one photo of Chet taped up in their locker.

Another photographer, Bruce Weber, made a kind of documentary, Let’s Get Lost, a eulogy in high-contrast black and white, as the jazz trumpeter/singer haunted Europe and California in the late ’80s. Chet floated then—floated like that voice, really—in a fog of cigarette smoke and methadone, recall so ragged he nearly couldn’t remember the name of a son by his first of three wives.

But that love was a long time ago, when he played with Stan Getz and Charlie Parker—imagine, this Okie trumpeting with those guys and epitomizing West Coast Cool. Chet latched onto the expat jazz scene in Paris of the late ’50s and early ’60s. Drugs dragged him down further and he spent a year in an Italian jail for possession. Back in the U.S. in the ’60s, a group of toughs jumped him and knocked out his teeth, or so he says. He never let the truth intrude if it didn’t need to.

In Santa Monica, he’s 60 but looks 80, and in the tightly cropped shots of him seated glassy eyed in the back seat of a speeding convertible at night, he resembles a more fiercely weather-beaten Kris Kristofferson. One or two anonymous pretty women accompany him wherever he goes. He horseplays on a beach and rides in bumper cars with some young fans. They’re giddy to be in his presence although they don’t much know him beyond the fact he used to be famous for something. One asks if his trumpeting sounded anything like that of Miles Davis. Not to anyone with two ears, Chet says.

A few months after the release of Let’s Get Lost, he fell from a hotel room window in Amsterdam and died. According to Weber’s postscript, Dutch police on the scene initially reported they’d discovered the body of a 30-year-old musician.

I started late getting out to the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, then had to deal with an inoperable 1 train, a poky local A and a Q that puttered across Brooklyn like the Little Engine that Could. When I arrived at the end of the line, I had to pee something fierce but the crowds and the parade creeping noisily and colorfully down Surf Avenue blocked my way to the restrooms on the beach, so I headed into town to find a public restroom. I think it was Woody Allen who once said that you can’t consider yourself a true New York City walker until you know all of your options to pee en route. So true. A half-dozen blocks inland, wondering whether the alleys and tall bushes I passed would offer enough cover, I found a McDonald’s. It wasn’t an original idea and I had to wait in line for a solid 20 minutes.

By the time I’d returned to Surf Avenue, the bulk of the parade had passed, and there were only a few stragglers, mostly paunchy, tattooed sirens and a Neptune boasting an iridescent trident and more back hair than befitting the god of the sea. I walked the beach, ducking Frisbees and darting children, and waded in the surf for a spell. On the subway ride back, I found Sam[antha] had left me a voicemail about an impromptu mini karaoke gathering with her, Iggy and myself, so I called her back and we arranged to meet at Japas 55.

We sealed ourselves in our regular private room for a few hours. In honor of Katie, we poured one out and opted for a rousing group sing-along to one of her standards and favorite Elvis song, “Suspicious Minds.” Then we called her and sang directly into the phone, adjusting the lyrics slightly. You may know the part of the chorus that goes like this:

We’re caught in a trap
I can’t walk out
Because I love you too much, baby

We changed that last line to, “Because we love you too much, Katie.” (Later I learned she listened to our serenade while sitting on a PATH train lingering at the World Trade Center station, holding her phone to her ear for the length of the song as she laughed but said nothing, which may have caused a few fellow passengers to nervously shift away from the crazy lady.)

Surprisingly, Sam, Iggy and I had even more fun when we ventured out of our room into the higher-pressure but much, much cheaper common area. Because the photos I took of Sam and Iggy dueting didn’t turn out, let’s just say this is a photo of them, even though it’s actually two strangers we met who belted out heavenly harmonies, in Japanese, no less. It captures the Sam and Iggy spirit, at least.

After a few songs, Iggy ingratiated himself with a drunken Japanese family, headed by a Dad with a Walt Disney moustache and a wavering stance. Every time his teenaged son sang a song (in Japanese), Dad would walk around the room proudly stating, “That’s my son!” The kid was really good but Dad’s boasting would have soon gotten annoying. Luckily for us, by his second round of praise, Dad also refilled everyone’s mugs at his end of the bar from a pitcher of cold Sapporo. In addition, for our little group only, he bought a giant round of the most potent sake I’ve ever tasted, with the bite and mind-jellying vapor action of low-grade jet fuel. After a few unsteady sips, Dad had planted his elbow atop the bar to try and prop up his head on the back of his hand, only he kept nearly missing. It was clearly time for the family to go, so we engaged in hugs, handshakes and vague promises to email each other our incriminating photos. We immediately claimed as our own the four untouched glasses of sake that the family left behind.

Here’s a picture of Iggy taking a picture. It’s good his eyes are obscured because to look into them is to look into the diamond-hard eyes of Lucifer himself.

A time later, a small group of actor/singer theater types arrived and sat near us. One gentleman, short with a red ballcap, was so moved by Sam’s strong rendition of perhaps the best Power Ballad ever, “Alone” by Heart, that he earnestly and sincerely asked her permission to sing it, too. (“That’s such a great song!”) Sam agreed and it was eerie that this guy nailed all the high notes, which she appreciated but which kind of wigged-out Iggy and I, and probably Ann Wilson, too, had she been around and tanked on sake.

This was in the tape deck of my business colleague’s Jeep throughout our multiday trip of meetings in the Inland Empire, but instead we listened to Jack FM and, with the sunroof open as we hurtled down the expressway, we sang along to a Jet CD, poorly but passionately.

I checked out the Eugene de Salignac photograph exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York recently. I haven’t written about it because it didn’t rattle my bones as an excellent exhibit should. But one of Eugene’s photos, of workers in 1918 assembling a sign for the Williamsburg Bridge, reminds me of the cover for the new CD by Maroon 5.

That is all.

Looking for something unrelated, I came across this slice of a book review relating an infamous incident involving Elton John and the Pink Pussycat Boutique on West 4th Street in the Village, which Jimi used to live next door to. (Warning! Naughty language ahead!)

... legendary WNEW deejay Scott Muni once conducted an on-air interview with a very drunk Elton John, who insisted on playing deejay. (When? Possibly the ’80s; [the author] doesn’t tell us.) John read a carefully worded commercial for the Pink Pussycat Boutique, a New York sex shop, crafted to avoid an FCC indecency fine. But the glam-rocker ad-libbed: “Do you like to rim your boyfriend? Or do you just like to eat pussy? So if you’re the world’s biggest faggot, or you just like to fuck, visit the Pink Pussycat Boutique.”

Ha ha! Oh, Elton.

Another fun evening of karaoke with Katie, Sam and Iggy, and another song to add to my repertoire: “All I Have to Do Is Dream” as popularized by the Everly Brothers. It shares my range and super-whiteness, and how can you frown on lyrics that include the interjection “gee whiz”?

I like music and I buy CDs. Lots of CDs. No, I don’t think I’m better than you. Somedays I think it’s a foolish investment. I probably buy an average of two CDs a week, mostly used, and I’m proud that many of them, when their cost is divided by their number of tracks, I pay less than I would have had I purchased album from the iTunes Store.

So, wait; I guess I do think I’m better than you.

But really in this space I just want to grouse about compilation CDs, which encompass greatest hits packages, soundtracks and other such collections. I buy a lot of these and I love them because they can serve as great "mix tapes" or collections of tracks that I might be hard-pressed or inconvenienced to find separately. But there can be issues and here are the four main ones.

The Gapless Album. Offenders: the Another Late Night series and the MTV Party To Go series. Gapless albums, which contain no pauses between tracks, are a fact of the music world: many live albums are gapless and classic studio gapless albums include The Beatles’ Abbey Road and many by Pink Floyd. I don’t own any albums from the MTV Party To Go series but they were all produced in the mid-90s, those heady days when powerful, mystical DJs roamed the earth with milkcrates of vinyl in tow. An album where one track flows seamlessly into another? Wow! It’s like bringing your favorite club’s DJ home to your living room, in living stereophonic sound! Nowadays, nobody wants or needs a compilation album where everything segues into everything else because everyone’s trying to make his or her own compilation. Rip a track from a gapless album and it’s tainted by the tail end of the track before it. Give it up, gapless comps; it’s not 1993 any more. We can segue and crossfade ourselves.

The Live Track. Offenders: countless “Greatest Hits” albums. I’m only partially embarrassed to admit I picked up a dirt-cheap copy of the Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back soundtrack because I wanted the seldom-anthologized "Jungle Love" by The Time. Nowhere on the tracklisting on the back of the CD is it listed as a live track. And of course it is.

The Poorly Labeled Alternate Version. Offenders: most recently for me, the Tommy Boy Hip Hop Roots compilation, which purports to be a primer of a dozen most-often sampled tracks by hip hop and rap pioneers of the ’80s and ’90s (“Think (About It)” by Lyn Collins, “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” by James Brown). In fact it contains mostly edited/remixed version of those tracks, indicated only by a miniscule credit line on the back of the CD that I initially missed.

The Almost-There Compilation. Sometimes this will happen with soundtracks that don’t include the most popular cuts from the movie or a missing a bunch. Even worse on the non-soundtrack side: trying to find a single album greatest-hits package of certain artists. It can be a nightmare, particularly if the band/artist was on a number of labels. Nine Simone is a prime example. The Kinks are another. My old editor at my job is also a Kinks fan and we were discussing this. At length.

At a glance, the best Kinks comp is The Ultimate Collection, a 2002 two-disc import from Sanctuary Records. I snagged one from the Virgin Megastore on Times Square for a mere $10 earlier this year. Despite my rambling below, as of today, it remains the best Kinks greatest-hits package and you should buy it immediately.

But... there’s always a but. Ultimate doesn’t include the Kinks first two singles, a cover of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” and their first original composition, “You Still Want Me.” Both are included on Sanctuary’s The Singles Collection, the remaining 23 tracks of which are duplicated on The Ultimate Collection. Damn you, Sanctuary.

And although the second disc of The Ultimate Collection includes much of the Kinks’ best work from the late-’70s through the mid-’80s (“Come Dancing,” “(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman,” “Living On A Thin Line”), it’s missing key tracks from that era (“A Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy,” “Father Christmas”) that are included on Come Dancing With The Kinks: The Best of The Kinks 1977-1986. So I gotta own that one, too.

Then there are missing stay singles and B-sides (“Fancy,” “This is Where I Belong”), which appear on none of the above comps but which are on the older two-disc Kink Kronikles best-of, more than half of which is duplicated on The Ultimate Collection. Don’t even get me started about absent album favorites (“Picture Book,” “Big Sky”).

The bottom line: I must own at least six CDs with much overlap to rip a truly ultimate oeuvre of the Kinks. Someone needs to remaster all this shit and slap it on a deluxe limited-edition five-disc set packed in a velvet box containing extensive liner notes by David Fricke and genuine replica Ray Davies paisley scarf just in time for 2007 holiday giving.

Here is a list of facts based on new legislation in Florida in Utah. Try to guess the identity of the mystery object (the “widget”).

1. Businesses buying widgets for resale must apply for a permit.
2. These businesses must thumb-print sellers of widgets and copy sellers’ state-issued identity documents, such as a driver’s license.
3. Businesses may only issue store credit (not cash) for the widgets.
4. Businesses are required to hold the widgets for 30 days before reselling them.
5. Such laws are becoming so restrictive that some businesses are exiting the widget business.
6. These aren’t airy-fairy laws; they’re being enforced by local police.

So what do you think? Are the widgets guns? Cars? Jewelry?

Nah. They’re used music CDs, according to an article in Billboard last week. Naturally our friends in the music biz say this legislation is "aimed at curbing the sale of stolen goods," meaning bootleg discs. In the used music stores I frequent, bootleg CDs comprise what I’d estimate is less than 1/2 of 1% of total store merchandise. At Academy Records, I’ve noticed the same bootleg R.E.M. concert CD languishing in the bin for the past two months, the bitmapped color cover of a young Michael Stipe regarding me dolefully. The sort of enthusiast who buys dubbed crap doesn’t buy it from used music stores anyway; they buy it from shifty-eyed buskers near Times Square who spread their home-burned Shakira albums upon blankets, so as to bundle up quickly and flee should a cop walk by.

Why are CDs being singled out among other commonly resold merchandise? The implication is that it’s the clout of the music business and its pugnacious lawyers. Most states do have “pawn shop laws” that include at least some of the elements listed above, but they’re not typically enforced. And CDs appear to be getting hit worse than even DVDs and video games; Florida and Utah retailers that resell those items aren’t even required to have permits. All not to mention the hundreds of items that can be resold in a consignment shop or thrift store without any hassle whatsoever from The Man.

I can’t think of an industry more eager to presuppose its consumers are criminals than music publishers. Can’t they continue to brood and sue over online music issues and leave alone dead technology like CDs?

I was talking with someone (perhaps several people) recently about how difficult it can be to answer the question, “What’s your favorite Madonna song?” When you are dealing with a pop priestess of her prowess, it all depends, really.

Are we talking favorite Madonna song to club-dance/roller-skate to?

Are we talking favorite slow-dance/couples’-skate song?

Are we talking "personal favorite" Madonna song, perhaps an “obscure” track or one no one else likes (or will admit to liking)?

Or are we talking favorite Madonna song to hear in the car so that you sing along and pound the steering wheel for emphasis and it gets to the point that not even the gawking passengers of the car pulled up next to yours at the stoplight are enough to deter your passion? (Favorite Madonna karaoke song would also fit here.)

In that case, my favorite Madonna song is, respectively, “Holiday,” “Crazy For You,” “Who’s That Girl,” and “Like a Prayer.”

This isn’t all-time drinking songs (“Margarittaville,” “Tequilla,” “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer,“ more or less any song classified country or Pogues) but rather a few lesser songs about drinking I enjoy. In my fashion, I don’t think these are ones that would pop up in Family Feud but my personal favorites, ones that haven’t dimmed for me with pop-popularity and repetition. And although they’re not strictly songs to listen to while drinking, most of them fit that bill anyway. Oh, I have more than five favorite songs about drinking, but I want to save some others for a rainy day, as I might an old single malt. If you have a speedy connection and gumption, you can listen to a watery mp3 of each by clicking the song title.

1. “Gimme That Wine” by Annie Ross and Dave Lambert. For a few seconds, I thought this was Ray Charles when I first heard it at a trendy bar.
2. “Yes I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After You” by John Prine. The cracker in me loves this forgotten hillbilly tune. Prine never seems to have gained the cred of his 60s-70s country-ish contemporaries, like, I dunno, Neil Young or the Flying Burrito Brothers.
3. “Alcohol” by the Kinks. Yes, those guys that did “Lola.”; they were nothing if not versatile. Sounds like they rustled up a Salvation Army band and a few jugs of moonshine for this one from their Muswell Hillbillies, a sort of concept album about the British lower middle-class of the early ’70s
4. “St. Ides Heaven” by Elliott Smith. Quite a few of this fellow’s songs mention drinking or sadness or both. I like this one because it namechecks 7-Eleven and is about not only being drunk but “high on amphetamines.”
5. “I’ll Regret It All In The Morning” by Richard and Linda Thompson. A sad-sack song by the under-rated English folk-rock duo. The fine harmonies remind me of good times.

I’ve familiarized myself with repeated listens of the new Arcade Fire album, Neon Bible, that I can fall asleep to it, as evidenced by my drowsy trip into Penn Station this morning on the 1 train. It’s the newest addition to my shortlist of albums to fall asleep to. Do I slumber at this music because it’s conducive to that or because I’ve heard it so many times it’s a lullaby? Probably some combination of both.

• Dummy by Portishead
• pretty much anything by Radiohead; the robot voice of "Fitter Happier" from OK Computer always throws me off, so I banished that one from my iTunes library
• Sea Change by Beck
• Rather Ripped by Sonic Youth (silence in music is not a prerequisite for my drowsiness, as evidenced by this ruffianly entrant)
• pretty much anything by Björk or Thievery Corporation
• The Greatest by Cat Power
• Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain by Pavement
• A Love Supreme by John Coltrane
• Zidane by Mogwai, which you wouldn’t initially think possible, given it’s the soundtrack to a documentary about a footballer best-known in the states for a wicked-infamous headbutt
• Rock Action, also by Mogwai, except for that last song, which includes a drum, piano and Liberty-style bell miked so closely the resonance loosens my teeth
• generally any album by PJ Harvey except Rid of Me, the quiet-loud-quiet pattern of which is more useful for waking up

I came across a curious coincidence during a memory trip of old music videos on YouTube. Watching the 1982 video for Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love”¹. I had the volume in the YouTube player slid all the way down, when Arcade Fire’s “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” (4.4 MB mp3) started playing in iTunes. Although the songs aren’t the same length or tempo or style, parts of the video’s animation gelled remarkably well with parts of the song. It was oddly mesmerizing. (If I had a million years spare time, I’d cut the two together in iMovie to make it work perfectly. There are parallels in lyrics and imagery and a floaty transcendence about both.) Makes me wonder what other videos can take on completely different songs as backing tracks and still work (for a start, obviously videos with not a lot of lip synching; in other words, not many videos).

¹ That’s right, youngsters: it’s the song Mariah Carey plundered for “Fantasy.” [back]

Walking back to the subway from Greenwich Village during my lunch break, the wind whistled at and over my fresh haircut. I passed Jane Street and wouldn’t you know it, this Clark Gesner song from The Electric Company somersaulted into my conscious:

Scene: A montage of New York City street signs. Soundtrack: A group of kids sing-read each as it appears.

In. Stop. Park. Walk.
Yield. Enter. Exit. One way.

Jane Street. Jones Street. Park Avenue.
No right turn. No left turn. What can you do?

Gas. Car wash. Subway. Don’t walk.
No parking. Tow away zone.

Uptown. Downtown. First Avenue.
Home sweet home.

I never appreciated until now how much my childhood regimen of New York-based public television-viewing—not just The Electric Company but Sesame Street—would infuse my Manhattan existence with occasional bursts of barely remembered whimsy. (See also, before it gets pulled: Subway!)

It’s Super Bowl Sunday, that day when ad agencies thrill to have taken a break from promoting products and services to do whatever they want for half a minute, providing bloggers and white-collar workers grist for excited chatter upwards of 24 hours later.

A theme of physical violence ran through the commercials this year. Characters were struck in the head by a rock, stepped on, slapped in the face, incinerated by comet and felled by office supplies. They leapt off a cliff en masse, tripped into a closed car door and were yelled at for more fries. Great stuff. As comedians such as the Three Stooges proved, insult, injury and death are funnier when they happen to people other than yourself.

My favorite commercial overall was the one by electronics manufacturer Garmin International for its GPS navigation system. In it, a motorist gets lost and unfurls his map, only to have it expand, engulf his car and transform into Maposaurus, a lumbering origami villain.

GPS to the rescue! Another motorist turns into a Mighty Morphin’ Power Ranger-style hero in a silver bodysuit who battles Maposaurus in the style of a bad Japanese monster movie from the ’60s. They lunge at each other and knock down the flimsy scale-model trees and buildings. A death metal band provides the soundtrack and appears briefly at the end of the spot over the tagline, “Grab your Garmin/Take on the World.” (Sample song lyric: “GPS power will save the day/Grab Your Garmin, blows maps awaaay!”)

The game had its moments, too, although it got off to a bad start. When Gloria Estefan appeared on the field, I assumed I’d have ample cause to shake my body, baby, and do the conga, but instead she got stuck introducing the surreal stylings of Cirque du Soleil.

During the game, incessant rain added a wildcard Slip ’n Slide element resulting in exciting turnovers and other blunders. Grossman showed off the youthful looks and approximate skill of an eight-year-old Pee Wee player while Manning exhibited post pass-play emotions ranging from angry to very angry.

The highlight of the evening was the halftime extravaganza, during which Prince proved he’s still a sexy mf and The Shortest Working Man In Showbiz. Fireworks and dancers going off all around him, he strut out a fabulously staged medley, the centerpiece of which was “Purple Rain,” in the rain, naturally. In closeup, he appeared to have not aged one day since he last wore ass-baring chaps. Our party enjoyed the Michael Bay fireball that engulfed the stage, the Tron costumes of the marching band and the lingering shot of Prince’s shadow backlit onto a rippling silk banner, dampened by the rain with a humorously unfortunate blot resembling a giant erect penis.

Karaoke at Planet Rose is in the more traditional style versus the private-room setup at the local Japas chain I frequent. Here tonight it was loud and raucous with roving packs of East Side kids crammed into a room with zebra-print couches, alcohol aplenty and two mikes to go around. We were celebrating Brian’s birthday and there were at least two other birthday gatherings occurring simultaneously.

The way it works is you select your song from a thick book of 15,000, pencil it with your name onto a tiny Post-It Note, hand it in, then wait 1.5 to two hours for it to pop up on the screen. Pray you are not in the restroom when it does. I didn’t try to sing because there were a gaggle of people in our crew who could. Bea, Erika and Dale belted out kick-ass renditions of showtunes plus “Dream a Little Dream of Me” and other classics like “When I’m 64.” Strong, clear and pitch-perfect, Bea didn’t even stand up for her songs and she was, like, Whitney Houston caliber, so good that one guy with a song after hers gestured and complained that he had to follow “Miss Broadway over there.” Katie picked “Eye of the Tiger” as her torch song, inspiring everyone to jump in on the chorus and get juiced up enough to take down Mr. T.

There was also the obligatory pudgy white drunk guy in khakis who caterwauled his songs as he lurched around the room. I don’t remember his selections but they were the ones drunk white guys always opt for, i.e. “American Woman.” When his ass thrusting and head bobbing threatened to encroach on our corner, we all took pictures of him until the flashes drove him away. After his song, he returned, wavering unsteadily from drink, and beseeched us not to post any of the photos to the internet. We assured him we wouldn’t but we were lying.

A news item on Pitchfork today notes that Tom Waits has won another lawsuit brought by him against a consumer goods company for appropriating his voice or music for an ad. That makes a total of four such suits won: two against auto manufacturers (Opel and Audi), one against Levi’s and the first and most infamous against Frito-Lay.

Forget the fact that from day one, Waits has made it plain that he will never license his songs or his voice for advertisements (though his songs have appeared in movies and TV shows). What junior ad execs out there think the man’s voice could shill anything to a Kelly Clarkson-loving public short of an ineffective new brand of cough lozenges?

Bless him, but he sounds like that guy in the rusty white Econoline who tricks kids inside with promises of popsicles. He’s got the mug, too. A jury member in Waits’ suit against Frito-Lay took a look at him in court and assumed it was a criminal case. (“[W]hen he left the court the first time, we thought he was getting away,” the juror recalled.)

It’s sport among the Waits faithful and record reviewers to describe his voice. Feel free to select one word or phrase each from column A, B and C to make your own descriptor.

Or just listen to this 1.3 MB mp3 of his song “Anywhere I Lay My Head” from his 1985 album Rain Dogs. Ah, Tom. Your voice doesn’t make me hunger for Fritos and for that I am indebted to you and your pugnacious lawyers.

I ordered Neil Young’s 1992 album Harvest Moon from a third-party seller on Amazon.com about a week and a half ago.

This past weekend, I found a used copy of the CD at Academy Records and bought it, figuring I could use the copy I’d ordered online as a gift.

Last night, I realized with a start that what I’d ordered was also a used CD and therefore unsuitable for gift-giving. I would be stuck with two Harvest Moon CDs!

Today the shipment arrived and something happened that’s never happened to me with an Amazon.com third-party seller before: they sent me the wrong CD, a used Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show greatest-hits collection.

Ha ha!

As it only cost $3.25, it’s not worth my trouble to return it.

Also, apparently “Cover of the Rolling Stone” wasn’t Dr. Hook’s only hit. An older, lightly acid-toasted coworker of mine at least appreciated hearing “Sylvia’s Mother” for the first time since the year of my birth.

I always have fun at karaoke but usually so much fun—also alcohol—that I remember little the next day, when my voice resembles Marge Simpson’s and my head contains fading waves of “Forever in Blue Jeans.” This is bad because karaoke success depends on consistency. Sure, you can go off on a bender from time to time and sing wild songs, but you should at least:

1. Have a signature, well-practiced song or two with which to impress and/or make the audience overlook your shortcomings.
2. Know your weaknesses in terms of song selection and pitch and so on.

So when Samantha and Iggy invited me out tonight for the happy-hour special at Japas 55, I took advantage of the small-group dynamic to whip out my notebook and record what everyone sang. I’ve recreated the playlist below. This is useful, believe me, because looking at it now, I remember much more clearly what worked and what didn’t.

For instance, anyone vaguely familiar with the White Album can sing the first part of “I Will” by the Beatles, but for those such as myself not intimately familiar with it, confusion sets in by the middle-eight. Same thing with Billy Idol’s “Eyes Without a Face,” which has a tricky rapping bit towards the end that I forget exists until it’s too late.

Another problem I recall by this list is my trouble sticking to one style of singing. For instance, “Ziggy Stardust”: Should it be sung with British accent or without? The correct answer is “with” but I couldn’t make up my mind and meandered back and forth. Even worse was Björk’s “Hyper-Ballad.” I kept threatening to select a Björk song (“It’ll be fun, right?”), then I did, thinking either I would receive backup or it would be an amusing trifle, neither fantasy of which came true. For you see, I realized too late that Björk is the only person who can sing Björk songs. The sole constant in my delivery was shifting from cloying falsetto to my “normal” singing voice, bending and cracking as if I was hitting puberty over and over again. I made even myself nauseous and if Björk would have happened by, she would have punched me. And then Matthew Barney would have dumped a bucket of petroleum jelly on my bruised head.

“Here Comes Your Man” was my biggest success, in part because no one ever picks that song and even people who don’t know the Pixies or hate them in general cannot deny the tune is catchy pop greatness. (The lyrics are another story.) In general, too, country is good for me (“Folsom Prison Blues” and “El Paso”) because of the repetition and lower-voiced simplicities therein. And if you wonder why I chose to sing “Thirty-Three,” no one’s favorite Smashing Pumpkins song, it’s because that is my age. Oh, I am clever. Also, Billy Corgan generally sings with a range poor and/or basic enough for anyone to mimic. (I feel the same way about many songs of Bono, which is why I favor U2’s “One.”)

But enough about me. Turning to the people in the room who could really sing, Iggy proved he is a master of style, voice and pitch, sliding seamlessly from Barry White (complete with lusciously deep voice and spoken-word asides) to Michael Jackson (with ad-libbed hoo-hooos). He is king of the soulful oldies: see his choices from the Platters, the Temptations, Stevie Wonder, etc. Ain’t no mountain high enough for Iggy to conquer. For those of you who do not know him, I should point out that, as near as I can see, Iggy is not black. But I feel he should keep holding out for an honorary designation from the NAACP.

Samantha has a repertoire of awesome signature songs, particularly Olivia Newton-John’s “Magic,” which reminds me of The Motels’ “Only the Lonely,” another song she rocks on. She is queen of the strong voice, staying on key and hitting high notes with laserlike accuracy. As special bonuses, she will take requests (her skin-tingling rendition of Cyndi Lauper’s “All Through the Night” is a favorite of mine) and also dance along at no extra charge. For instance, she did the Robert Palmer Video Girl moves at my request during “Simply Irresistible” and, on her own, grooved “She’s a Bad Mama Jama” like a Fly Girl on Red Bull. She’s not too cool to provide backup (the repeated Les yeux sans visage in “Eyes Without a Face”) and graciously sang a Rod Stewart song Iggy accidentally keyed-in (“Love Touch”) even though she thinks Rod is a wanker.

And O those starry-eyed duets: “I Got You Babe” (more cute than corny) and “Groovin’” (self-explanatory). Well done, kids.

For the closer, “Sweet Caroline,” we belatedly activated a feature present on most newer karaoke units that tracks a singer’s key, tempo and portamento. (Portamento? I think that’s what it was.) When the song’s over, you receive an animé bar graph speckled with Japanese characters and a number. Ours was 83, which is good, I guess. We need to investigate this feature further.

As our night of song drew to a conclusion, I proved I hadn’t lost it in matters of quickly forgetting. It wasn’t until I had nearly said my final goodbyes to Sam and Iggy, heading up Eighth Avenue to the subway, before Iggy gently pointed out I hadn’t paid for my share of the festivities. That made me feel like a jerk, but it was not my intention to flee the bill and I explained more or less accurately that I usually have a stranger or someone such as Andie handle delicate financial matters when I’ve been drinking. “Here’s my wallet,” I’ll say, handing it over. “I trust you.”

Best Known As

• Gerald Ford: “oldest former president”
• James Brown: “the Godfather of Soul” and “the hardest working man in show business”
• Advantage: Brown

Legacy

• Ford: replaced Nixon
• Brown: “I Feel Good” and many other fine songs, including a #1 R&B hit about hot pants
• Advantage: too close to call

Low Moments

• Ford: pardoned Nixon; “Ford to City: Drop Dead”
• Brown: domestic violence charge, subsequent hideous mug shot; “Living in America”
• Advantage: ?

Hobbies

• Ford: golf; falling down
• Brown: sweating; feelin’ like a sex machine
• Advantage: Brown

Saturday Night Live Impersonator

• Ford: Chevy Chase
• Brown: Eddie Murphy
• Advantage: draw

Provided Own Voice on The Simpsons?

• Ford: no, twice
• Brown: yes
• Advantage: Brown

Mourning Public

• Ford: will be allowed to file by coffin in the Capitol Rotunda
• Brown: will be allowed to file by coffin at the Apollo Theater
• Advantage: Brown

Funeral Tunes

• Ford: military music
• Brown: “Soul Power”
• Advantage: Brown

Funerary Attitude (according to New York Times coverage)

• Ford: “less pageantry than the funeral of former President Ronald Reagan”
• Brown: “pomp, circumstance, chants and song”
• Advantage: Brown

Coffin

• Ford: flag-covered
• Brown: 24-karat-gold
• Advantage: Brown

And the winner after 10 rounds is Brown.

I flew in tonight to the Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport for our South Florida real estate conference here tomorrow. The venue is the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood in Hollywood, Florida, a smoky slice of Vegas in an otherwise boring part of the Sunshine State. You can see the hotel rise a half-mile out on the Ronald Reagan Turnpike, sprawling tall and spotlit gleaming white. Three toothless turrets jut up from the structure, lending a palatial air. Out back in a thicket of palm trees is a massive pool that I saw not a single person use. An island plunked in the middle is accessible by footbridge and features waterfalls, waterslides and the sorts of thatched-roof bars that serve drinks festooned with skewered fruit and tropical flowers.

I had been joking that I wanted to get my photo taken with Meat Loaf’s jacket, but inside, the hotel has seemingly every outerwear garment but the Loaf’s, displayed on headless mannequin torsos behind glass. I saw concert-costume jackets belonging to Prince, Aerosmith, Cher, Isaac Hayes, James Brown, the Yardbirds and James Taylor. John Lennon was represented by a pair of boots from the early years of the Beatles. Strangely, no jacket of Elvis’ was in the house, only a pair of ripped corduroy pants, for which I had no time to read the explanatory placard. I assume they were from one of his movies or perhaps the end of his life when he let himself go, gorging on fried food and amphetamines.

The rooms of the hotel are decked out in a lot of sexy halogen lamps and the clothes hangers and room service menu are upholstered in faux leopard fur. Snippets of song lyrics are printed on various items. My extra roll of toilet paper, for instance, was wrapped with a paper band printed with Steve Winwood’s “roll with it, baby.” My room didn’t contain any rock-star memorabilia but my TV was flanked by a framed black-and-white photo of Bruce Springsteen rocking the mike with Lil’ Steven and one of that guy from Cheap Trick with the five-necked guitar.

December 7, 2006 Update: Per an MSN Money article this morning, the Seminole Tribe of Florida, which operates the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood, is paying $965 million to buy the entire Hard Rock business (except the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel & Casino), which includes a chain of 124 Hard Rock Cafes, four Hard Rock Hotels, a pair of Hard Rock Casino Hotels and one of the largest collections of rock memorabilia.

I met Andie at Radio City Music Hall after work tonight for an Indigo Girls concert. It was a different experience from when I saw them perform at the Newport Folk Festival because here, they brought along their backing band from their newest album: a bassist, drummer and keyboardist. It emphasized even more strongly that they’re equally adept at storming rock or thought-provoking folk. Like at Newport, the Girls’ fans are voraciously participatory, singing along and going nuts when they hear the first few bars of their favorite song. The Girls even let the crowd take over vocals wholly for a few verses here and there.

I’d never been to Radio City before and it’s cavernous and spartan. During the concert there was a light show of spinning rainbow-colored discs splashed on the crowd and undulating psychedelic patterns projected on the domed ceiling that made me even dizzier than I already was when I stood up from our upper mezzanine seats, located in the row directly in front of the low balcony railing.

Setlist from IndigoGirls.com:

1. Little Perennials
2. Pendulum Swinger
3. Heartache For Everyone
4. Get Out The Map
5. Three County Highway
6. Run
7. Ozilline
8. Hammer And A Nail
9. Devotion
10. Trouble
11. Rock And Roll Heaven’s Gate
12. I Believe In Love
13. Dirt And Dead Ends
14. Closer To Fine
15. Shame On You
16. Lay My Head Down
17. Three Hits
18. Power Of Two
19. Let It Ring
20. Fill It Up Again
21. Go

Encore

1. Last Tears
2. Tether
3. Galileo

The most simple musical instruments are percussion and I had thought the most elemental among those would be a drum. You need only a stick to strike a membrane affixed to a hollow object, say, an animal skin stretched taut over a wooden cylinder.

Yes, the triangle and the cowbell are also very simple percussion instruments, but you need fire to forge those bad boys.

Then I thought of the guiro. For it you only need a stick and a gourd (or another piece of wood). You need notches in your gourd, but you can probably do that with another stick or a stone.

And the guiro is actually featured prominently in various commercial recordings of the 20th century, or at least a few my foggy memory could muster from the depths of my CD collection. I’ve made available these guiro tracks below for academic purposes.

R.E.M. even give the guiro a shout-out in the liner notes to their 1996 album New Adventures In Hi-Fi as “the ultimate in musical usefulness.”

I’ll admit that listing the Valle track is a copout; if the guiro can be considered common among a specific nationality’s music, that nationality would be Latin American. But I enjoy the track’s cheesiness and that its title seems to reference the guiro’s sound.

Have a listen and bask in the ratchety splendor of the guiro.

• “Electrolite” by R.E.M. (1996)
• “Os Grillos (Crickets Sing For Ana Maria)” by Marcos Valle (1967)
• “Tell Me What You See” by The Beatles (1965)

Along with most of Staten Island, I’ve been watching the ginormous Beatles Anthology via Netflix. It’s not too shabby, although it’s literally about 80% concert footage, 5% reaction shots of the screaming, hyperventilating young girls in the crowd, and only about 15% interview snippets from the Beatles themselves.

The series was made after John’s death but before George’s, so you get archival recordings and footage of John for his side of the story and plenty of footage with George that’s sad not only because he’s now dead but because so much of it features him during a phase in his later years when he apparently believed he looked fly with a pencil-thin moustache.

The Beatles don’t tax themselves dispelling their own perhaps literally mythical achievements: biggest concert ever (Shea Stadium), first use of backwards vocals in a song (“Rain”), first music videos (also “Rain,” with the more popular A-side, “Paperback Writer”), that they didn’t discover reefer until Bob Dylan practically forced it on them, all those #1 hits and bigger than Jesus, etc.

But the concert footage is fun, even if it does seem to go on too long—the clips nearly always features entire songs, concert-film style, which can drag after awhile. But it’s the Beatles. It’s fun to watch their styles change and their fans along with them, from the bobbed British wallflowers in horn-rimmed specs during 1962 to the borderline-hippie kids in Kodachrome-colored clothing less than five years on. Musical styles changing, too: the sudden lust for electric piano, George snapping up that sitar, the obsession with Dylan’s folksiness and the Beach Boys’ crystalline harmonies. And I haven’t even yet reached the episodes where persistent touring and infighting soured their outlook and ground them out.

Late to the Bob Dylan game, I recently bought his three-CD set of unreleased material, The Bootleg Series 1961-1991. The included booklet of photos, song descriptions and credits features a scanned brochure of Columbia Records’ marketing suggestions from 1965, the year Dylan released “Like a Rolling Stone” and went electric on Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. It’s bracing to remember every popular musician is coveted first by the biz for his “artist product,” but really this list is just funny.

IDEAS . . . IDEAS . . . IDEAS . . .

We have all tried “different” avenues of exposure in promoting our artists and artist product. You have probably done some of these “different” types of promotion on Bob Dylan, but have you tried. . .

• Getting your accounts to position Bob Dylan product in other areas of their stores besides in the folk music section, such as with The Byrds, Sonny & Cher, etc. This will afford the customer a better chance to do some impulse buying.
• Contacting musical instrument outlets and persuading them to use Bob Dylan display pieces in conjunction with their guitar, harmonica and sheet music displays.
• Contacting radio personalities in your area that have “Americana”-type shows and pointing out to them the merits of featuring Bob Dylan in an American Heritage theme.
• Getting in touch with the casual wear buyers in department stores and men’s stores and convincing them to use Bob Dylan display pieces in their clothing displays. His dress may be considered “kooky” by conventional standards, but kooky or not he is a motivating force of the youth of today, and they like to emulate their leaders.
• Contacting the little theater groups and drama groups in your area to convince them that readings of the lyrics of Bob Dylan songs would be presenting modern poetry in its finest form.
• Getting in touch with the local newspaper culture editors and showing them the merits of doing a piece built around Bob Dylan, using a changing times theme.
• Putting your ads in your local newspapers on Bob Dylan is [sic] unusual areas of the paper such as on the sport page, the women’s section or even the financial section...after all, he does mean money...for us at least.
• Putting Bob Dylan displays with displays of men’s boots (he wears them all the time), sunglasses (he wears them all the time) or ANYWHERE that they will attract attention.

Be Different—He Is!

In line for the Cat Power concert tonight at Irving Plaza, I witnessed the smoothest and quickest pickup ever.

“What kind of shoes are those?” the girl in front of me asked a guy standing near her.

She was a short, jet-set dressed young lady in her late-20’s who strove to impress that she was cool or older, mentioning her “friends in Europe” up front while also revealing she said “like” too much. I would describe her hair as “expensive.” He, dressed all in black, resembled Liam Gallagher with a Type-B personality.

He explained they were a special brand of Japanese acupuncture sneakers, “with pressure points in the soles.” I forget the name of the brand, but they’re footwear streamlined to more closely resemble socks. They were sleek and solid black and even the laces looked as if they had been designed in a wind tunnel.

“Wow, I really like ’em,” she said. “Where do you get shoes like that?”

“Online. Or in stores,” he said. “Mostly online.”

“So where are you from?” she asked.

“New York and New Jersey,” he said. “Mostly New York,” he added quickly.

And after that, two previous strangers began conversing freely, smiling and talking the whole time in line, even entering the concert together, a cartoon heart hovering above their heads. So maybe it didn’t work out, but it was impressive to behold in slow motion like that. Inspiring, too. So it’s that easy, I thought to myself. All I need are expensive shoes and the look of a British rockstar.

And then, via a clumsy segue, there’s Cat Power, who doesn’t resemble a rockstar, but is in fact a mousy 34-year-old woman named Chan Marshall. She doesn’t even act much like a musician; she acts like an eight-year-old girl. I was forewarned of her precociousness. Earlier in her career, she was infamous for stopping shows, walking off stage, and starting then stopping songs, all the while barely acknowledging or insulting the audience. Stagefright, mental issues, drugs, alcohol, general diva-ness, a combo of some or all: the reviewers bandied about possible causes, but no satisfactory answer was given. I had a ticket for a concert of hers in February when her label suddenly announced it had cancelled her entire U.S. tour “due to health reasons.”

I hadn’t witnessed her behavior before tonight but she is one strange lady. She had the audience on edge when the show started late with two instrumentals by her backing band. Then she didn’t appear until the musicians recycled through the first verse of the opening song and re-announced her, twice. She eventually sauntered onstage with a lit Parliament and a Solo cup of hot tea in one hand, while with the other she alternately grabbed the mike and presented abstract gestures to punctuate the song’s rhythm and lyrics. She put down her cigarette and drink after the opener, then busied her hands between songs waving to random people in the audience, playing with her hair and fiddling with her lavender kerchief.

These tics extended to her between-song banter, not one word of which made a lick of sense, whether she was rambling about her jet on the roof of the building or blowing raspberries like Lily Tomlin on Sesame Street. “It’s Saturday Night Live,” she said in a deep voice at one point. “Jim Belushi. Newt Gingrich!” I couldn’t tell if any of these non-sequiturs were merely obtuse or private jokes, or just sweet nothings.

During a song later in the set, she grabbed the guitar off one of her musicians, played it for a verse, then decided she didn’t want it anymore, so she held it from her outstretched arm as she continued to sing. Both the keyboardist and a stagehand attempted to convey, via a series of fevered glances and hand motions, who should grab it.

I felt for that keyboardist, the de facto bandleader who alternated songs between a Hammond organ and a piano. When he was on the piano, his back was to Cat, and he spent most of the last halves of songs with his head twisted completely around, while still playing, to catch a signal that the song was ending.

Ah, but the music. On her newest album and this tour, she’s backed by the Memphis Rhythm Band, a brassy sound of the ’70s via seasoned sessionmen including Mabon “Teenie” Hodges, guitarist for Al Green during his glory years and cowriter of “Here I Am, Come and Take Me” and “Love and Happiness.”

The sound mix emphasized the drums, keys and guitars, but squashed the three-woman string section and much of the two-woman vocal backup. Most of the songs seemed to be from Cat’s newest album, The Greatest, which I’m not familiar with, but things heated up when the band left the stage and she hit the piano solo for her cover of the Velvet Underground’s “I Found a Reason,” which sounds nothing like the original but is one of her most haunting songs. She took to a guitar solo, too, to crank out “House of the Rising Sun,” oddly. Most of her songs are like beautiful dirges and she makes other people’s songs her own. Her husky voice hangs and swoops, extending words with a kind of sad longing. It’s good music in small doses, but stacked up in concert has a narcotic effect.

Things picked up when Teenie and the band reclaimed the stage and he knocked out a song of his own. It reinvigorated the crowd and Cat came back for a great final quartet of tunes. First was another cover, “Naked, if I Want To” by Moby Grape, the best song on her compilation, The Covers Record, which she followed with the peppy “Nude as the News” (if memory serves), both songs fuller and more energetic with a full band backing. From there she segued directly into a cover of the Stones’ “Satisfaction” that got the crowd clapping. (That’s about as crazy as you’re going to get for this kind of music among trendy young white people.)

Everyone was still clapping the “Satisfaction” beat after the song ended, so Cat launched into an acapella version of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy,” an unexpected choice for a woman who counts Bob Dylan and Skip Spence among her top influences. The same girl who didn’t want to get on the stage earlier now didn’t want to get off. They had to turn on the house lights and bring down the curtain (actually a screen on which is projected a moving starfield). But they left her mike on and she kept singing from behind the screen. The audience wondered whether it should leave, but eventually the disembodied voice stopped and everyone filed out, remarking that she’s gotten a lot better.

The locusts, joined by a rooster for good measure, woke me this morning, heralding another fine sunny day in Rhode Island. During breakfast, I watched Howard, Laura’s cockatiel, cautiously creep inside an empty cereal box, where he composed a whistly tune. If translated to English, it would be a punk song with the lyric “I’m in a cardboard box” shouted over and over again.

For the second and final day of the Newport Folk Fest, Patty Larkin opened on the main stage, with some twangy-folksy songs I liked, particularly “The Book I’m Not Reading,” which makes me want someone to read me stories, and a cover she dedicated to one of her two kids, the Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday.”

There was also Abigail Washburn, fingerpicking a guitar and singing country songs—in Chinese—with backup by Ben Sollee, who plays cello as one would play a fiddle. Patty Larkin performed again, joining a troika of Muriel Anderson, who sang sappily but played a mean harp guitar and virtuoso jazz guitarist Mimi Fox. Here’s a photo of Patty from that set, snapped from our awesome seats three rows from the stage.

Through the day we also heard Madeleine Peyroux, who was too Norah Jonesey for me, though I liked her cover of Randy Newman’s “I Think it’s Gonna Rain Today”; Odetta, the husky-voiced African-American folk pioneer of the ’50s and ’60s, who had a great run on Ledbelly’s “Bourgeois Blues”; and the standup bass/steel guitar combo of the Wood Brothers.

One of two hands-down highlights was the closing act, the Indigo Girls, who inspired the crowd to sing, clap and dance along by playing a blend of fan favorites (“Chickenman,” “Dairy Queen”), radio hits (“Galelio,” “Closer to Fine”), at least four cuts from their forthcoming album and a two-song encore that included a haunting rendition of “Kid Fears.” They even awarded their guitar tech a cheesy trophy for 10 years of faithful service.

The other bright spot was infectiously cheery bluegrass singer-songwriter David Rawlings and his unbilled guest, musical partner Gillian Welch. They knocked out raucous versions of Dylan’s “I am a Lonesome Hobo” and Jesse “the Lone Cat” Fuller’s “The Monkey and the Engineer,” a silly song about a curious monkey that seizes control of a locomotive and cranks it up to 90mph on the mainline run.

We hit the road home directly after the festival, over cathedral-like bridges toward the fireball sunset. Dinner at an Applebee’s near Mystic was crappy, but the remainder of the trip was fun as we sang along to ’80s songs on the radio until losing ourselves looking for the Saw Mill River Parkway.

Laura called to see how the festival played out and how our drive was proceding. She also told us she discovered a horned owl in her barn and that she was stung by a bee today for the first time ever, a wonder considering her years of gardening. It was a tense moment as she waited to see whether she’d have a severe allergic reaction. She didn’t.

The locusts in Laura’s backyard made a valiant attempt to wake me but the earlier-rising jackass with the lawnmower won out. After a quick breakfast of hazelnut coffee and Peace brand breakfast cereal, purchased from the local dollar store and billed as “70% organic,” Katie and I took a 30-minute drive off the mainland onto Newport Island for the Newport Folk Fest.

I imagined it’d be populated by arthritic hippies, and there were a few, both onstage and in the crowd. But it may be inaccurate to call it a folk fest when performers represent not only that genre, but soul, funk, pop and country. Katie put the name game to rest by saying folk is a mindset. If I were cynical, I’d suspect the diverse lineup was to boost attendance; BostonHerald.com reported that the crowd of 4,000 today was one of the smallest in 20 years. But with a bow to brotherhood/sisterhood, love and Ben & Jerry’s Peace Pops, I’m satisfied with Katie’s definition.

Really though, 4,000 appeared like a lot of people to me and didn’t even account for the freeloaders in sailboats, yachts and kayaks that pulled as close as possible to the island to overhear the music. There was something for most everyone on the three stages of various sizes, which were positioned just outside the looming shale and granite block walls of Fort Adams, the largest coastal fortification in the country. Vendors stationed about peddled crap like dreamcatchers and didgeridoos, and I wished the fort could have been temporarily remilitarized to cannonball them into the harbor, especially mismatched and roundly mocked corporate sponsor Dunkin’ Donuts. Some of the stuff for sale wasn’t bad; Katie bought a straw hat with a beaded turquoise band and a plum-colored peasant skirt.

We listened to a lot of music, planning our movement between the stages and staying for sets by folksy The Duhks, ’60s soul diva Bettye LaVette, and Sonya Kitchell, a too-breathy 17-year-old who had trite lyrics, but a smooth, lush pop sound cranked by a stellar band. We had just a touch of Rosanne Cash, too dislike her daddy for my tastes. Closer David Gray drew the biggest crowd and dismissed his band at the end of his set to grab an acoustic for two covers: the appropriate finalé of Soft Cell’s “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye,” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Mansion on the Hill,” inspired by the grand old mansions visible on a far shore.

Highlights were Chris Smither, who sang his humorous tales solo, then shared the stage with Darrell Scott (who resembled Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski) and Jeffrey Foucault. All of them picked and strummed like men possessed. Katie and I also liked Louisiana singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier (pronounced go-shay), whose clear voice and lyrics tell sad and funny luck-down stories, including one referencing microwaving a chicken TV dinner, then getting drunk while eating it. Her between song banter was funny too, mentioning that Dylan has made it tough for folkies by stealing all the good rhymes, but that she cooked up a doozy with kitchenette and cigarette.

Hot and tired, we headed back around 7 p.m., stopping at a beach boasting a marvelous pink and blue sunset. Sandpipers skittered in the surf and in the distance, a wedding party posed for a photographer. We discovered an eroded sand castle and what appeared to be a tangle of Poseidon’s dreadlocks washed ashore.

Katie decided we should drop by Bruce and Elizabeth’s place, located directly on the Sakonnet inlet of the Atlantic. The tide comes and goes under their house, and they have a long picturesque dock. As we waited for the coals on the grill to heat for dinner, I asked Bruce, a salt at heart, how one would boat to the ocean from his place. He described the various inlets, the historical sources of their Indian names, and that the official name of the smallest state is the longest: the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Just as the anecdote was getting lost at sea, he was called to tend the meat, which he said was for the best, admitting he was boring himself.

Excepting the salad, the dinner was grilled: juicy London broil, zucchini halves topped with olive oil, fresh spices and cheese, and crusty bread. Dessert was more Gray’s ice cream, only this time topped with rainbow jimmies. Elizabeth spoke of Australia’s male chauvinism and Bruce of its blockbuster sailing, which he related with anecdotes as a cast member of Wind, the America’s Cup film that starred Matthew Modine and Jennifer Grey.

Later as Bruce and I sat in the deck chairs out back drinking whiskey, the ladies put on a Tom Jones greatest hits CD loud enough to warn errant craft, then performed a goofy and scandalous dance routine in front of us on the tiny waterfront lawn. “What is it about Mr. Jones that makes the ladies crazy?” we wondered aloud.

I remember when I was a kid, it drove me nuts to hear a new song I liked on the radio, then not have the DJ mention its name or who sang it. Usually those guys wouldn’t shut up, breaking into chatter during the song’s outro, most often when I was trying to record a clean copy of the song on my one-deck Panasonic boom box.

I’ve found now, with the search powers of the internet, that it’s easier than ever to track down any song, even one that I only know a vague phrase from. For example, I enjoyed a particular pre-movie tune played at Film Forum one recent evening, so I scrawled down a sentence of the lyric in my Moleskine: “If you’re ever gonna kiss me, it had better be tonight.”

When I got home, I Googled the lyric in double-quotes with the added word lyrics. Once I got the name of the song, I plugged it into the iTunes Music Store and listened to a few of the 30-second samples to find out which version of the song I’d heard; this particular song was a standard and recorded by a number of people. I solved the mystery in a few minutes, whereas in 1986, I’d have had to wait until the weekend for the American Top 40 to have Casey Kasem tell me who was responsible for the marvelous composition I’d heard days earlier, probably “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car” by Billy Ocean. That’s the progress of technology for you.

The song, by the way, was “It Had Better Be Tonight (Meglio Sta Sera),” a Mancini composition originally from the Pink Panther soundtrack, although the version I heard and appreciated was by Buddy Greco, with half the lyrics in English and half in Italian. I like it because it reminds me of They Might Be Giants’ cover of “Istanbul (Not Constantinople),” another gleefully chugging jitterbug of a song.

• “It Had Better Be Tonight (Meglio Sta Sera)” by Buddy Greco (1.8 MB mp3)

As I’ve noticed in other big American cities I travel to, it’s much quieter here in San Francisco than in New York. The looser density of buildings and the wider spaces of the streets and sidewalks diffuse sound. There’s not as much traffic, so there’s less engine noise and honking, and the streets are thick with bicycles, trolleys, zero-emissions buses and hybrid buses fueled by diesel-powered electric generators. The quietude made me think of New York’s most traditional summertime form of noise pollution, the lilting music-box tune of the Mister Softee ice cream trucks.

About 250 of these refreshment repositories roam the five boroughs but their siren song makes it seem like more. The jingle, which has been around since Mister Softee was founded in 1956, is recalled fondly by old-timers and is as much a city institution as the year-round strains of tripped car alarms, street musicians and the bing-bong signaling the closing subway doors.

Infamously, Mayor Bloomberg tried to silence Mister Softee in 2004 as part of a proposed anti-noise package, inspiring a wave of love-hate backlash. “Resistance is futile” from the “cacophonous creature of confection lurking about the city,” wrote Dan Barry in The New York Times that summer.

So far as I know, the proposal failed, because the trucks are out in full force this summer, the jingle tinnier than ever. At McCarren Park on Sunday, there were Mister Softee trucks planted at two of the four corners, dishing out cone after cone of soft serve in the 90-degree heat. Standing at the halfway point between the vehicles, I could hear their simultaneous jingles overlap in a hellish round that was nonetheless like Pavlov’s bell to children and the obese.

The problem with the jingle isn’t so much that it’s annoying in itself but that it’s repeated ad nauseam. Most complaints about it originate from city-dwellers whose buildings the trucks will choose to park in front of, loathe to move on if they’re attracting a steady stream of customers.

Compounding the annoyance factor, it’s been alleged in the eGullet forums that the jingle has lyrics, although the tune seems too nimble for these clumsy phrases.

Here comes Mister Softee, the ice cream man.
The creamiest, dreamiest ice cream you get from Mister Softee.
For a refreshing delight supreme, look for Mister Softee.
My milkshakes and my sundaes and my cones are such a treat.
Listen for my store on wheels, ding-a-ling down the street.
S-O-F-T-double-E...Mister Softee.

Have a listen to the jingle for yourself, recorded lo-fi by my PowerShot S30 camera, and before you consider it charming, imagine it playing on infinite repeat.

If you’re a lady, chances are there’s a song with some approximation of your name in its title. What an honor, what a coincidence. Even if you don’t have a particularly common name, your eponymous tune may be out there. I just noticed I have a song in my music library named after my sister (“Oh, Dana” by Big Star) and my mom (“Joanna” (close enough) by Serge Gainsbourg, and not the same as the Kool & the Gang song of the same title).

Lyrics are a different story. The Big Star song seems relevant to my sister only in the line about “forevermore fighting with Steven,” because I thought that was the name of one of her rambunctious charges. The rest is a free-association by Alex Chilton, slurring about how he’d rather shoot a woman than a man and something about a magic wand, I think. Nice chorus, though.

The subject of “Joanna” is wholly irrelevant to any mother not currently an entrant in the Guinness Book of World Records, seeing as it’s about a woman “as large as an elephant, the largest in all of New Orleans” who can nonetheless dance as lightly as those pink pachyderms in Fantasia. At least Serge, singing here in the mid-’60s during his “African beat” phase, seems to be enjoying himself, the off-key, laughing lothario that he was.

• “O, Dana” by Big Star (2.38 MB mp3)
• “Joanna” by Serge Gainsbourg (1.87 MB mp3)

Long a holdout to the world of mp3s, Apple Corps, the Beatles’ publishing company, has revealed it will (eventually) start selling the group’s songs through online music services.

The biggest winners aren’t the consumers, however, but the headline writers, who have been patiently waiting at least three years for this momentous event.

• Beatles Coming Together Online, E! Online
• Beatles set to join online music revolution, Reuters
• Here comes the sun: Beatles online soon, Mobilemag.com
• Beatles fans get ticket to (digital) ride, USA Today
• Beatles love me digital, iTWire
• Twist and Shout: Beatles’ Songs to Be Released Through Music Services, Gearlog
• Meet the Beatles, Online (Someday)!, Designtechnica

Ha ha! Get it? There are Beatles song and album titles in those headlines!

But will the songs be available on the iTunes Music Store? There is lingering bitterness between the two Apples, my favorite example of which is Apple Computer’s infamous sosumi system-error sound effect. During the most recent trial between the two, which recently wrapped, Apple Corps accused the computer company of violating a 1991 agreement by using the Apple name and logo to sell music downloads. There won’t be a decision on that until after Easter.

But the best part of this news is that if the remaining fab lads and assorted executors can demonstrate a warm embrace of the cold, cold digital world, might other top holdouts follow? There still, for instance, aren’t any legal digital tracks available for sale online from Led Zeppelin, Radiohead, AC/DC or Metallica.

About a year ago at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, some wonks presented a paper that concluded coworkers who share their music via iTunes form opinions about each other based upon the musical selections.

For those unfamiliar with the inner-workings of iTunes, there’s a feature that lets you listen to (but not download) music on other people’s computers within a Local Area Network (i.e. pretty much within any office) via a Shared Music tab.

Most importantly, the study found that employees used their shared music libraries to consciously portray an self-image, adding songs they thought would make them seem more cool or removing embarrassing ones. I admit that I did the latter at one point to shield others and myself from the potential uncoolness associated with my mighty collection of ’80s pop. But sometimes, one finds oneself thirsting for the synthesized drama of Cutting Crew, Bananarama or Glenn Frey.

Also, as you might expect, the study discovered that many people think their musical preferences are unique when in fact they’re not. As I like to put it, if your musical preferences are centered around CDs you bought online or in a store, then your preferences are unlikely unique. The only way your preferences are remotely unique is if your chief outlet for purchased music is wax cylinders proffered by some drunk with a hurdy gurdy on a street corner in Selma, Alabama.

Finally, the study says it drives people nuts when music is shared anonymously; people want to associate musical preferences with a face, presumably so they can mock it. The two people sharing music in my office today weren’t anonymous, but if they were or you didn’t know them, you probably still wouldn’t get a very clear picture of their personality judging them by the bulk of their musical selections.

My previous boss shares her music, and here are her top-five most-represented artists, with the number of songs in her library by each:

• 77 Steely Dan
• 42 Elvis Costello
• 28 Michael McDonald
• 25 John Fogerty
• 23 Paul Simon

O.K., so you know how old she is. (Answer: roughly as old as your Mom.) But Elvis lurking there like that is a sort of strange inclusion.

The only other music-sharer today was a girl probably in her late-20s that works on the magazines:

• 25 Billy Joel
• 25 Radiohead
• 21 John Coltrane
• 20 The Who
• 14 Bob Dylan

Again, all big names, but an intriguing mix.

If I shared my music, which I don’t, my top-five list would be:

• 46 PJ Harvey
• 33 The Rolling Stones
• 32 Sonic Youth
• 28 Madonna
• 26 David Bowie

Again with the big names, and expected from a guy with black plastic frame glasses, even if the bulk of my collection is comprised of one or two tracks by assorted and sometimes more-obscure artists.

So it doesn’t seem in the case of the two ladies in my office that they’re attempting to cultivate any cool via their shared playlists. I certainly don’t begrudge them for their Michael McDonald or Billy Joel, as I trust they would not begrudge my Madonna.

In the mid-’90s, Philip-Lorca diCorcia toured the largest cities of the world, concealing his lights on the pavement and surreptitiously photographing crowds of people on the streets and sidewalks.

From 1999 to 2001, he took a bolder step for his series, Heads. Over a sidewalk on Times Square, he set up an arc of scaffolding affixed with remote-controlled strobe lights. As pedestrians passed under the rig, diCorcia, who was positioned across the street with a long lens, would focus on individuals and snap photos.

A retired diamond merchant from Union City, New Jersey was surprised to find his photo in an exhibition catalog last year and wasn’t happy, suing diCorcia and his gallery for taking his photo, exhibiting it and profiting from its sale, all without his permission. The suit was dismissed last month by a New York State Supreme Court judge who ruled in favor of artistic expression over individual privacy rights.

What’s significant about the case, according to New York Times photo editor Philip Gefter in his March 17 article “Street photography: A right or invasion?,” is that it’s the first to directly challenge the freedom to photograph in public. (Right-to-privacy laws vary by state; in New York, they prohibit the unauthorized use of a person’s likeness for advertising or other trades, but privacy rights are waived if the image is considered art.) Disturbingly, had this case succeeded, it could have frozen the sale and publishing of everything from Walker Evans’ late-1930s Many are Called series to Travis Ruse’s ongoing photoblog, both of which feature candid photos of New York City subway commuters.

It’s interesting that as one art form has (for the time being) received the legal nod to continue without permissions, another is being further ground out by the requirement of permissions: sampling.

Earlier this week, a federal judge ordered a sales freeze of the Notorious B.I.G. album Ready to Die. Although it’s from 1994 and the rapper was shot dead in 1997, the judge ruled that B.I.G. had used an “unauthorized sample” of the Ohio Players’ song “Singing in the Morning.” The suit was brought by the companies that control the Ohio Players’ recordings (as well as those of the often-sampled Funkadelic), companies that have been busy over the past five years filing hundreds of lawsuits to collect royalties over samples.

Of course sampling resides in a commercial domain and not the public domain of street photography. But as Lawrence Lessig has written, you’re allowed to quote from a published work and you’re allowed to take a few musical notes from a commercial composition for your own without permission—you just can’t take those same notes from a recording. In other words, Lessig notes, “life in the analog world is freer than life in the digital world.”

It wasn’t always this way. Sampling had its heyday in the late ’80s and early ’90s with the albums of pioneers like Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys. The latter’s 1989 album, Paul’s Boutique, boasted more than 125 uncredited samples from other commercial recordings, including those of two infamously protective groups, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin.

But lawsuits and out-of-court settlements quickly cut down the popularity and extensiveness of sampling. In one high-profile case of 1991, Gilbert O’Sullivan sued rapper Biz Markie over an unauthorized sample of “Alone Again (Naturally)” that a judge ruled amounted not to copyright infringement but criminal theft. The album was withdrawn and the Biz bitterly titled his follow-up All Samples Cleared. The prohibitive costs of “clearing” samples have created an environment where an album with as many high-profile samples as Paul’s Boutique would likely be impossible to release today, not that people haven’t tried.

How would I feel if I learned someone had photographed me in public, was exhibiting the photo and profiting from its sale? How would I feel if I was a musician and part of my song turned up in someone else’s? I don’t know. But surely potential limitations on street photography and further legal pressures on sampling have in themselves a chilling effect on art and our potential witness of beautiful images and sounds.

I headed over to the Avalon nightclub tonight for a concert by Mogwai, five Glasgow lads that make long, rock guitar-driven suites, mostly without vocals. It’s updated prog rock, which I know can smack of wankery, but I’m a fan. For several years, their 2001 album Rock Action served as my favorite music to relax or fall asleep to, despite the electronic noise, sharp drums, distortion, vocoder bits and quiet-then-suddenly-loud structures. Mogwai songs are robot dreams of abandoned planets.

Getting past the security checkpoint at the entrance was fun. I had a run in with a large bouncer as he patted me down for illicit goods and I kept recoiling with snickers.

Bouncer [exasperated]: C’mon, guy, it’s Monday, I’m not even supposed to be here tonight.
Me: Sorry, man; I’m ticklish.
Bouncer: I’m ticklish, too, but not when another guy’s grabbin’ at me.

I didn’t know how to respond to this. I wanted to get into a discussion with him about whether tickle-response is physiological or sociological, but it was neither the time nor place, so I replied with a Jimi-style, “Right. Right.”

The venue was sold-out packed, mostly trendy 20-somethings, and the band played for an hour and a half. The setlist included two of the best songs off Rock Action, “Take Me Somewhere Nice” and “You Don’t Know Jesus.” (Like their name, which is a nonsensical reference to the critters in that movie, Mogwai pick random phrases as song titles). I saw at least three PowerBooks, including a spunky 12-inch pulsing with the Flurry screen saver, cracked open onstage and utilized for audio effects. The sound was loud, Pantera loud, but I’m not (yet) too old. As the band blasted, my scalp rattled and the electric guitar-generated breeze ruffled my pants. During one violent quiet-to-loud shift, you could feel the air sucked in by the amps and blasted back over the crowd.

Avalon is a converted gothic-revival church and couldn’t be much hipper, although with the cleanliness, red velvet curtains, waitresses in snug garb trawling for drink requests, bars on each floor and black lights, I felt residual elements of House of Blues chain-club cheesiness. Forgotten NY notes the original structure, the Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion, was built between 1844 and 1850 by Richard Upjohn, architect of the city’s grand Trinity Church. In the 1980s, it became the Limelight Disco and a deade later, the owner was busted for the rampant drug-dealing inside; under its new name, it’s been sanitized for clubgoing protection. The building’s architecture, however, hasn’t changed much at all. The exterior looks the same as it does in this photo from 1940.

For a peek inside, here are some photos from the firm that redesigned the interior. It still has the high gothic arches and wood parquet floors, although steel framework now supports a wide catwalk (great views of the stage and a way to avoid the packed dancefloor), along with several tons of rigging and lights.

Setlist from bright light !:

1. We’re No Here
2. Hunted by a Freak
3. Friend of the night
4. Take Me Somewhere Nice
5. Yes! I am a Long Way From Home
6. Travel is Dangerous
7. You Don’t Know Jesus
8. Acid Food
9. Folk Death 95
10. Killing All The Flies
11. Stanley Kubrick
12. Xmas Steps
13. Glasgow Mega-Snake

Encore

1. Mogwai Fear Satan

The East Village contains a lot of really good looking people, even on a sunny, bitter winter day like today when many of them are bundled up like surly Michelin mascots. I was in the neighborhood rooting around for a few hours in the basement of Norman’s Sound & Vision, now my second-favorite shop to snag cherry used CDs, after Academy Records. Root you shall at Norman’s: some of the best deals are to be found under the cabinets holding the higher-priced items, or thrown into milkcrates and cardboard boxes on the floor. If you go, make sure you’re not wearing your fancy pants; they may dirty as you scoot around on the floor like an arthritic breakdancer. Among my finds was a Samantha Fox greatest hits CD for $4.99! What? No, I’m not ashamed.

Have you noticed that many pop songs from the ’80s feature smoky saxophones, either in solos, breaks or prominently in the backing?

Here are a dozen of my favorites:

• Billy Ocean :: Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car
• David Bowie :: Modern Love
• The English Beat :: Save it for Later
• Exposé :: Seasons Change
• Glen Frey :: The Heat is On
• Glen Frey :: You Belong to the City
• Hall & Oates :: Maneater
• INXS :: What You Need
• Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam :: Lost in Emotion
• The Rolling Stones :: Waiting on a Friend
• Roxy Music :: Over You
• Wang Chung :: Dance Hall Days

Researchers at the University of Leicester in central England have determined that “internet downloading and mp3 players are creating a generation of people who do not seriously appreciate songs or musical performances,” the AP reported earlier this month.

The researchers concluded that because of greater choice and accessibility, music is now a commodity to which we have a passive attitude. Although we may well have a “complex and sophisticated” relationship with music in our in everyday lives, “it is not necessarily characterized by deep emotional investment,” the researchers sniff.

This isn’t news. You have to reach back at least before the Ohio Express’ “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy” to tag an era when this might have been still true, and the researchers do, pining like Miniver Cheevy for the nineteenth century, when “music was seen as a highly valued treasure with fundamental and near-mystical powers of human communication.”

Ha ha! The nineteenth century! Of course, in addition to their apparent shamanistic music beliefs, the enlightened commonfolk of that time also thought biological evolution was a fanciful notion, blacks and whites were two distinct species, and microbes were generated spontaneously. Fucking idiots.

I think more to the point is that digital music sharing and downloading don’t create listener apathy—they can brew new passions for the medium. Music downloads for me, legal and otherwise, have helped me discover music I never would never have crossed paths with otherwise. It’s inspired me to buy CDs, attend concerts and share my appreciation with others.

When I was younger, my musical interests were influenced by top-40 radio and friends whose interests were informed by top-40 radio. Now, in the great days of the internets, I not only invest more time listening to music because of what I pick up from LimeWire or the iTunes Music Store, I regularly read snotty indie music review sites. I learn about and sample obscure or forgotten music at passionately written music blogs such as Spoilt Victorian Child. I peruse and listen to what music-aficionado musicians like David Byrne are spinning in their spare time. And I use programs such as Pandora to unearth new music based on what I already like.

It may not be deeply emotional, but it’s hardly passive.

After work, I went to the Knitting Factory’s Tap Bar, located in the cozy basement of the TriBeCa club, to hear Rebecca Gates. With drummer Scott Plouf (now with Built to Spill), she was the other half and lead singer of the ’90s college-rock duo, The Spinanes. For the past two weeks, she has been serving as hostess for and playing at a series of musical “residencies” at the Factory. Last week, her featured guest was one of the chief voices of the ’90s slacker generation, Stephen Malkmus, previously of Pavement.

Tonight, Rebecca’s buddy was Richard Buckner. He seems best known for being lumped into that “alt-country” category that includes Wilco, Calexico and Son Volt (with which he toured in 1996), although I think he sounds more folksy. He also had one of his songs (“Ariel Ramirez,” from his 1998 album, Since) placed in a 2004 Volkswagen Touareg commercial.

I don’t go to a lot of concerts, particularly small-venue ones like this, but I suspect guys like these are usually in the audience, as they were tonight: a group of three frat-boy chuckleheads that talked loudly among themselves the entire concert, mainly about their reputed capacity for alcohol and deviant sexual activities. Why did they pay money for a concert to sit around and talk? How exactly did any of the acts appeal to them? Wasn’t there anything better to do in Jersey tonight, like barfighting or rape or whatever it is these Biffs do with their spare time?

But it wasn’t enough to deter me from enjoying my $6 Guinnesses and Gates’ hour-long set. With nothing but her sultry voice, an electric guitar and an effects pedal, on which she laid down some loops and backbeats, she played new songs and songs from her sole solo album that I liked but wasn’t familiar with. She did reach back to play some “oldies” from her Spinanes days; I enjoyed hearing “Lines and Lines” and “Oceanwide” from the 1996 album, Strand.

She played with her dark, shaggy hair in her face like Breakfast Club-era Ally Sheedy, and there wasn’t much chatter between songs. Setting her guitar to an especially fruity tuning for a new song, she broke a string three times in a row and was more or less forced to speak with the small crowd while hastily rewiring. She had one of her opening acts, a writer friend of hers, bound out on stage to tell some really stinky jokes (“What do control-top pantyhose and Brooklyn have in common? Flatbush!”). But she brightened while coooking up some random topics to talk about:

• Her and Buckner had been embroiled in a friendly argument backstage over which competing 1970s religious musical has better songs: Godspell or Jesus Christ Superstar. After heated debate, punctuated by song-and-dance examples, no clear winner emerged.
• Unlike certain unnamed counterparts of hers in the alt-chick-rock world, she wears underpants, so we shouldn’t get our hopes up should she be wearing a skirt (which she wasn’t) and hike up a leg on a monitor while rocking out, not that there’d be anything we’d necessarily want to see, she said.
• You meet strange characters on the bus in Portland, Oregon.
• “You’re the Reason Our Kids are Ugly,” the 1978 duet by Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty, is a near perfect country song. She sang bits of it and explained why, convincing me of her case.
• She never breaks strings; what the hell’s the deal with breaking three in a row?

The crowd stayed friendly and patient during the delay and enjoyed the banter. She never did get the guitar restrung; Buckner ended up graciously lending her his acoustic, retuned for the new song. She had to thread what appeared to be a clothesline around the guitar to use as a strap because Buckner didn’t have one.

My ex-roommate Andie’s boyfriend, Eric, had a birthday soirée this evening at the old apartment. Andie made some great soup, perfect for the bitter cold weather. Erica offered and artfully described the fine cheeses she purchased from the store at which she works, and Sherry brought some scrumptious cupcakes from Billy’s Bakery. Martinis, Beefeater gin-and-tonics and bottled beers flowed freely; a rousing time was had by all.

On my way home, on the uptown platform of the 1 train at the 86th Street station, I found dropped or discarded on the ground two scraps related to music. First is this note about keys and instruments.

I also found a photo. It looks to be from the late ’50s or early ’60s, although it’s a reprint on modern Agfa paper. There’s something sublime in the woman’s smile that bewitches me. The lad on the right reminds me of myself at the same age, with the glasses, that overbite and bowl cut. And are those spats?

Where are they now? Do the kids fondly remember Mom’s skilled squeezeboxing, or did she play inexpertly to the feigned delight of those around her? Was it a passing fancy that Christmas or did the family make her drag it out for a quick polka on special occasions? Did she play traditional Lawrence Welk favorites like “Lady of Spain” or break it down with sassy versions of current pop hits like “Duke Of Earl” and “The Loco-Motion”?

Reading and reflecting on Adtunes.com’s “Top Ad Music of 2005” list, I sheepishly admit that I do discover and rediscover songs I enjoy from television commercials. It’s not much different than when I hear a good song when I’m at a friend’s, shopping (usually at Urban Outfitters or American Apparel, where I do more browsing and music listening than purchasing) or at a bar (the kind that isn’t playing “Brown Eyed Girl” every hour).

Sometimes a commercial features a song I own but haven’t listened to in a while, so I rejuvenate it for myself by adding it to my iTunes Music Library and iPod. When it’s a new song I like, I’ll buy a CD it’s on or download it. In this sense, the commercial has become a promotion for its soundtrack and not the product being peddled. And this from a guy who claims he doesn’t watch any TV.

Here are some of my favorite songs that I heard in television commercials throughout 2005.

“Simply Irresistible” by Robert Palmer / Applebee’s
I imagine that old pop music in commercials often serves to remind boomers they’re aging, as when they’re being courted to buy a SUV or sportscar with the strains of Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones. This mortality reminder for me started head-on in late 2004 when Circuit City commandeered “Just What I Needed” by The Cars. But it hit me even harder with “Simply Irresistible,” which I remember from constant radio play in my childhood. With the black vinyl-clad vixens from the video and Robert’s explanation that his girl was unavoidable, he was backed against the wall, and she was giving him feelings he’d never felt before, what song wouldn’t make more sense to advertise the Most Stupidly Named Product of 2005: Applebee’s Irresist-a-Bowls.

“Push It” by Salt-n-Pepa / Nextel
Are all the kids where you live using Nextel-like walkie-talkies to talk to each other instead of cell phones? They’re fucking everywhere in my neighborhood, and branded into my brain is that digital chirp sound you hear every time someone presses the “speak” button. Anyway, “Push It,” another song I remember fondly and unironically from my youth, is used in this commercial to represent three whitish businessmen “cutting loose” after a job well done, facilitated, naturally, by their chirpy Nextel walkie-talkie. Ha ha! Get it? Businessmen can be uptight and that is why the commercial is funny.

“Do Ya” by Electric Light Orchestra / Monster.com
The use of “Mr. Blue Sky” by ELO in the trailer and commercials for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind reminded me that I really do like the cheesy bombast and AM-Gold haze of the band. But only the use of the gleeful headbanger “Do Ya” in commercials for Monster.com inspired me to buy an ELO greatest hits CD for myself as a Christmas gift. And I didn’t regret it.

“Everybody Got Their Something” by Nikka Costa / Pantene
Nikka’s been a busy bee shopping this song around since she cut it in 2000. According to Adtunes.com, it’s been appropriated for Sears and Mitsubishi Endeavor commercials, and a promo for ABC’s Desperate Housewives. But as the backdrop to a Pantene commercial starring Maria Menounos was the first I’d heard of it. Funky.

“Heartbeats” by José González / Sony
This song was used to strangely relaxing effect for a European commercial for Sony Bravia featuring the hills of San Francisco and 250,000 superballs. Just go watch it. Funny now that an “advert” can get its own web site, like a movie or a celebrity. Not a bad song, either, if you’re the sort of person who likes Nick Drake or long walks on the beach with someone who looks like Nick Drake.

“Hello Tomorrow” by Karen O / Adidas
Early last year, Spike Jonze directed a commercial for the Adidas_1 shoe. Karen O, lead singer of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, provides the musical backdrop. The result: a mindbending, nonsensical video with a song to match.

“There She Goes“ [originally] by The La’s / Ortho McNeil
If you’re a drug manufacturer, it can tough to represent your product, its use or really even its effects in a television commercial. This is especially true with drugs relating to sexuality, like Viagra or the pill, because you can’t show certain organs on TV in the U.S., at least not during prime time. So instead you show shiny happy people, often holding hands or laughing. In this commercial for the Ortho Tri-Cyclen birth control pill, you’ve got a bunch of willowy, earth-mother types spinning around like ballerinas because they’ve got a tingly good feeling in their uterine linings, or something. The soundtrack boasts a breathy folksinger covering The La’s “There She Goes,” which only serves to emphasize to me that “There She Goes” by The La’s is such a perfect pop song, it doesn’t need anyone to cover it, especially when there are plenty of Cranberries songs available for pushing your norgestimate/ethinyl estradiol.

Having written much about Sony’s futile efforts to copy protect its audio CDs comes an Information Week article yesterday that the newest protection can be defeated by applying a small piece of Scotch tape to the outer edge of the CD.

For those of you keeping score at home, you can add this to the list of other simplistic methods used to defeat various varieties of Sony’s protection:

• Shift key
• Sharpie marker
• Macintosh
• software written by some kid probably living in his Mom’s basement
• protection-defeating instructions from Sony itself

The Information Week article also has a fabulous conclusion on Digital Rights Management made by analysts at the Gartner research firm:

After more than five years of trying, the recording industry has not yet demonstrated a workable DRM scheme for music CDs. It will never achieve this goal as long as CDs must be playable by stand-alone CD players.

Sony seems to finally understand this, and according to the article, is ending at least its most recent copy protection tactics, recalling unsold protected CDs and exchanging already purchased ones for unprotected versions.

After my adventures with bedding, it should come as no surprise that I had difficulty tonight buying drapes. Having measured my windows as roughly 39 inches wide by 73 inches tall, I bought a two-pack of handsome blue window panels, which according to the packaging are “82 x 63 inches.” Because the packaging gave no further details, I assumed that 82 inches was the height, as curtains are well known for their longer heights to shorter widths. Wrong! 82 inches is the total width of both panels and 62 inches is the height, so after I put them up, they weren’t long enough and resembled Gilligan’s pants. Is this yet another thing about consumer goods that’s never implicitly stated but that I’m expected to know, like that the first number in jeans’ sizing is the waist size and the second is the length?

On the new neighborhood front, having walked around more to absorb the local flavor, I’ve determined a good descriptor for the area is “musical.” People blast their jaunty Spanish pop and rap from the windows of their homes and cars. In my building, on the lower floors, someone practices trumpet, and one floor down from my apartment, someone is learning to play piano or teaching lessons. The piano doesn’t bother me because it’s not played after 10 p.m., and in fact has a warm, lonely resonance, filtered through the wood floors and the walls of big rooms. The crescendo, as it were, of my musical musings occurred late tonight, as I returned from a bodega with a Goya pear nectar. Just across the street from my apartment, there stood on the sidewalk a quartet of young fellows in a loose circle and they were beatboxing. They weren’t playing for a crowd, they were just doin’ it like it was 1984. That is totally awesome.

After writing about Sony’s difficulties copy-protecting its audio CDs, I enjoyed reports yesterday that the company is again under fire for the practice. Now Sony has been outed for selling audio CDs over the past eight months that have silently installed “rootkits” on Windows computers, copy-protection software that hides itself in a hacker fashion.

According to Wired News, the rootkit enables any filename that begins with $sys$ to be hidden from Windows, which is not such a good idea because a hacker could name a truly malicious file beginning with $sys$ and wreak all sorts of shenanigans. Sony promised yesterday to issue a patch that will allow virus protection software to keep an eye peeled for such files, but didn’t seem to say anything about actually getting rid of such a bad idea.

As the risk of sounding like Paul Harvey, when did listening to music get this complicated? Whatever happened to putting a CD in your CD player (or computer) and listening to it? Not only is Sony treating its listeners like criminals, Wired News points out that the company may have committed a crime itself under the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which slaps fines and prison terms on

anyone who ‘knowingly causes the transmission of a program ... and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage, without authorization, to a protected computer.’ Corrupting Windows so it misreports the contents of a hard drive sounds a lot like ‘damage,’ and the click-wrap license agreement on the Sony disk amounts to pretty thin ‘authorization’—disclosing only that ‘this CD will automatically install a small proprietary software program ... intended to protect the audio files embodied on the CD.’

November 10 Update: A MacInTouch reader says these Sony discs will install rootkits on Macs, too, but only if the user manually runs an application in the Enhanced Content partition of the disc.

Having written in August about the music industry’s laughable efforts to copy protect its CDs against evildoers, I was amused by a Reuters article published Tuesday in Billboard, which reports that at least one music label is telling its consumers how to circumvent its own protection.

Turns out some iPod users that purchase protected CDs from Sony BMG are miffed that they can’t rip mp3s. When they complain to the company, it directs them to a webpage on its own site detailing how to sidestep the protection.

What’s more, according to the article, bands with protected CDs such as the Foo Fighters and Dave Matthews Band, “are telling fans how they can beat the system.” In at least one case, they’re doing this via posts on fan sites, supplying links to CDex, a program that disables audio CD protection.

Meanwhile, an article in today’s New York Times (“My Songs, My Format,” by Seán Captain), not only details the limitations of Apple’s proprietary AAC format (which is the format of all tracks purchased from the iTunes Music Store and the default “rip” setting in iTunes), it mentions and offers a link for Hymn, a program that removes copy protection from such tracks.

Part two of No Direction Home: Bob Dylan picks up where part one concludes, with Dylan’s growing disenchantment with the press and his audience, their anger at him for “abandoning” folk for rock, and the political turmoil that swirled in the ’60s.

There are many more historical clips interjected into this half of the documentary, somewhat clumsily, I thought: Vietnam and the draft protests, the march on Washington with Martin Luther King Jr., the Kennedy assassinations. Although he’s shown playing at the Washington march, Dylan made a point of not attending many rallies or protests, as he didn’t want to be associated as the voice of a generation or as one with the answers to society’s ills. “Spokesman of a generation,” he says. “That I could not relate to.”

Not as enthralling as the rise-to-fame theme of part one is a focus on Dylan’s celebrity. He’s berated by fans and, at press conferences, thrown inane question after inane question, and although he answers with derision or humor, he seems weary. He appears on the Steve Allen Show; hangs out with Andy Warhol for one of the artist’s screen tests; and is shown backstage with Johnny Cash, who Dylan compares to a religious figure and says was the “high thrill of a lifetime” to meet. There’s an amazing impromptu clip of the two harmonizing on Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” accompanied only by Dylan on piano. (In 1969, they’d sing a duet on Dylan’s Nashville Skyline album.)

While fame gained him relationships, it broke others. Joan Baez invited Dylan along to play many of her U.S. performances, and assumed he’d return the favor for her on his European tour, but she’s not invited to perform with him, and they drift apart. “You can’t be wise and in love at the same time,” he says simply. In 1968, Baez released Any Day Now, an album of Dylan covers, including “Love is Just a Four-Letter Word,” which he wrote when they were together but claimed to have forgotten, according to Baez.

The beginning of the end for Dylan’s folk fans was the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when he played electric guitar with a full backing band. A third of the audience booed and hurled catcalls; the consensus seemed to be that rock, compared to folk, was a sellout and a selfish statement. After only 15 minutes of loudly amped playing at Newport, during which Pete Seeger is said to have wanted to sever Dylan’s mic cable with an axe, the band beats a hasty retreat offstange, while Peter Yarrow tries to calm the audience and get Dylan to return with his acoustic. Dylan does, for a brief, spittingly direct rendition of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”

Despite what his fans wanted, it’s clear going electric was a foregone direction for Dylan’s music. Typically crusty, he cracks a big grin recalling how Mike Bloomfield, who was responsible for much of the electric guitarwork on 1965’s Highway 61 Revisited, joined the ragtag band: “He had heard my first record and wanted to show me how the blues were played.” Al Kooper remembers Bloomfield, too—Kooper was originally to play guitar for Dylan, took one listen of Bloomfield’s licks and retreated to play the organ. (That’s him playing on “Like a Rolling Stone.”)

The documentary ends with text overlays on Dylan’s debilitating 1966 motorcycle accident, after which he became a recluse and did not tour for eight years. Here’s hoping Scorsese can someday pick up from this point. Although the years covered are undeniably Dylan’s most popular and influential, there’s still a lot more to tell.

Tonight I watched the first part of Martin Scorsese’s documentary, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan.

Much of Dylan’s youth sounds similar to that of many other folks born in the Midwest in the early 1940s. He talks of growing up on Minnesota’s Iron Range in the early fifties, with its Main Street parades in the summer and duck-and-cover atomic fears. As a child, Dylan bought few albums, but intently listened to music in booths at record stores and on radio stations broadcast from afar, because the local ones tended to play popular favorites like “The Doggie in the Window” by Patti Page. He absorbed early folk, rock and country music, including Bobby Vee, Hank Williams, Odetta and John Jacob Niles. Dylan says he could learn a song after hearing it once or twice and sometimes he’d only borrow an element of it: the rhythm or the picking technique, for instance. “I had a very agile mind,” he says. He talks of being inspired in his singing and songwriting by his first girlfriends. “They brought out the poet in me,” he says with an impish grin, one of the only times he smiles during the documentary.

Woody Guthrie was a mammoth influence on Dylan, who says, “You could listen to his songs and actually learn how to live.” Dylan picked up on Guthrie’s protest hymns, his technique, his humor, the way he dressed. He hitchhiked to New York City in 1961, in part to visit Guthrie, who was hospitalized there, but also to play the folk circuit in Greenwich Village coffeehouses and lurk around to hear the other players perform. For his first performance in the city, he opened for John Lee Hooker. Dylan was only 20 years old! Joan Baez, who met Dylan at this time, recalls he resembled a “ragamuffin” and that the first thing she always notices in the photos of him and herself together from the early ’60s is the “baby fat” on their faces. A newspaper review from the time describes him as “a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik.”

His first album, recorded that year in New York, had only two original songs; Dylan says he didn’t want to give too much away. But the city sharpened his focus. In 1963, his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, contained only one cover and several of the dozen original compositions were landmark. Dylan says he didn’t know if “Blowin’ in the Wind” “would be good or bad. It just felt right.” Of course, the song was a hit, although more for Peter, Paul & Mary than himself. The documentary suggests that Dylan’s music publishing profits trumped his early album sales, pouring in from these cover versions, most of them unmemorable, but a handful era-defining, like the Peter, Paul & Mary song and “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which Dylan wrote for the Byrds’ first album.

Allen Ginsberg speaks of returning from India, hearing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” (also from Freewheelin’) and weeping, realizing that a generational torch had been passed. Ginsburg speaks of the poetry in Dylan’s lyrics, “words that are powered that make your hair stand on end.”

That year, Dylan, along with folksingers and other musicians like Johnny Cash and Howlin’ Wolf, played the Newport Folk Festival in front of 15,000 people. Part one of the documentary winds down with Dylan and the folk elite—Pete Seeger, Baez, Peter, Paul & Mary and others—in a rousing group rendition of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” But the good times wouldn’t last, the voiceover narration would solemnly intone at this point, if the documentary had a narrator, which it doesn’t, thankfully—that’d be a boring and lazy way to tell a story like Dylan’s.

Overall, the documentary’s interview footage with Dylan is well edited and precisely cut. He’s still got a bit of the ol’ mumble, but he’s more articulate than I thought he’d be. Engrossing, too. At no point did my attention waver and I nearly cursed the lack of commercials (it’s being shown on PBS) because I couldn’t tear myself away to brush my teeth. More than the concert footage of Dylan, I enjoyed the clips of Dylan’s musical influences—in fact, these far outnumber and outlast the clips of Dylan himself. It helps put his music in a historical perspective and realize how much he borrowed and stole from others, for better or worse. The documentary also seems to cut down on the myths Dylan built up around himself early in his career, such as that he grew up among the cowboys and ne’er-do-wells of New Mexico.

So far, so good; part two is tomorrow night.

I capitalized on the city’s Sales Tax-Free Week on clothing and footwear, as well as Banana Republic’s end-of-summer clearance, and purchased a pair of handsome T-shirts this afternoon. Walking back to the subway, I spotted a rummage sale in an unused parking lot at the southwest corner of W. 17^th Street and Sixth Avenue. I’d seen this sale before, with the same vendors of antiques, retro clothing, postcards and such, but the last time, I had no cash. Today I did, and perused one of the vendor’s extensive used CD collections. I got some great stuff and when I asked the guy how much the CDs were, he eyeballed my stack of eight, and said, “Five bucks apiece. But for you, $25 total.” Sweet.

I picked up Stevie Wonder’s The Woman in Red soundtrack for “I Just Called to Say I Love You” and for a well-meaning tune named “Don’t Drive Drunk.” (Although both songs are referenced in Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity, only “I Just Called” is covered in the movie version, in a rather funny scene starring Jack Black.) “Don’t Drive Drunk” is infinitely worse than “I Just Called.” How can this be? Consider this sampling of lyrics:

Boy out with girl on their first date
Gets pulled over by the law
Officer says, ‘Hey, can’t you drive straight
Or have you been drinking alcohol?’
Boy says, ‘Man, are you crazy?’
Cop says, ‘Hey, then walk this line’
But results from the breathalyzer
Proves he’s charged with D.U.I.

Even better, the background lyrics are:

Don’t drive drunk
d-d-d don’t drive drunk
Don’t drive drunk
Hiccup

I also snagged two of Billboard’s Top Hits compilation CDs from the late-80’s. Writing about one of these discs, Allmusic’s Andy Kellman points out that

the likes of Starship’s “We Built This City,” Mr. Mister’s “Broken Wings,” Glenn Frey’s “The Heat Is On,” John Parr’s “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion),” and REO Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling” are some of the most reviled chart hits of all time. Nephews, nieces, sons, and daughters who are tired of their elders whining about the current state of pop music should bring up this disc as proof that things weren't so hot in the late ’80s either.

Suit yourself, Kellman. I was growing up in the late ’80s and immersed in this music, so I like to drag it out every so often and give it a guilty listen. The glorious guitar solos and synthesizers are, to me, like a candle in the window on a cold, dark winter’s night.

Speaking of the 80’s, one of my other finds was the CD single for one of my favorite songs, L.L. Cool J’s “Around the Way Girl,” which I bought mainly so I could write about it here and perturb Jimi. Also, I was intrigued by the disc’s tracklisting for a remix by The Untouchables (a supergrouping of Johnny Gill, Heavy D & The Boyz and Al B Sure) and an instrumental version that I assumed would be perfect for karaoke. Alas, the remix is boring and naturally not as good as the original, while the instrumental version is of the remix. Damn. I’ll be keeping the CD, however, if not only for the brief liner notes, which refer to the song as “groovin’,” and for the sepia-toned cover photos, which depict around-the-way girls (Lisa, Angela, Pamela and Renee, I assume) decked out in foxy late-’80s streetwear.

Later, in celebration of Labor Day, Andie, Katie, Eric and I ordered a large meal of BBQ ribs and chicken, baked beans, green beans, mac-and-cheese and cole slaw from Brother Jimmy’s, which we ate while watching part of Forrest Gump on TNT, then Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors on DVD.

Pity Sony. Not only has the corporation been buffeted by a recent payola scandal, it’s taken the music industry’s most aggressive stance against what it perceives as piracy by selling copy-protected audiodiscs. Consumers have returned the favor for these bastard platters by cracking the protection swiftly and with remarkable ease.

In the earliest and funniest example, from the spring of 2002, internet newsgroup posters spread the word that Sony’s proprietary Key2Audio anti-copy software (used on audiodiscs such as Celine Dion’s A New Day Has Come) could be defeated by blackening the outer edge of the disk with a Sharpie.

Sony retaliated with MediaMax anti-copying software from SunnComm. Shortly thereafter in October 2003, a student at Princeton discovered that merely holding down the shift key on a Windows PC while inserting the disc would disable the protection. Amazingly, Sony was still using variations of this technology as recently as last summer on albums such as Velvet Revolver’s Contraband. The protection could still be disabled with the shift key.

This year, Sony started protecting albums with new SunnComm technology, including the most recent releases from the Foo Fighters and Dave Matthews Band. You can only listen to these albums after authorizing them over the internet and even then, you can’t burn more than one archival copy and you can’t import the music into iTunes or copy it onto an iPod.¹

One solution was quickly found for sidestepping this protection as well: use a Mac. According to a Playlist magazine report in June, such discs play normally on Macs, importing into iTunes and onto iPods without issue.

It seems clear that Sony’s protection efforts will continue to be for naught. Someone needs to gently point out to the company that it’s no longer the mid-’90s, when only the most enterprising consumer knew about that one seedy nerd with the Macrovision-stripper hardware that could be used to illicitly dub that Happy Gilmore videocasette. Any digital protection Sony cooks up will be quickly defeated, whether by some 13-year-old hacker or some other enterprising individual with access to felt-tip pens, and everyone will instantly know about it via the web. Even Apple’s gold-standard copy protection for iTunes Music Store tracks has been defeated.

Someone should also point out to Sony that it may not be strictly a piracy issue that’s putting a dent in its profits. First, it could be a matter of quality control. Celine Dion? Again: it’s no longer the mid-’90s. More importantly, perhaps if Sony spent less time on futile copy protection efforts, it could concentrate more on improving its sales of digital music and digital music players in North America and Europe.

¹ This isn’t entirely accurate because, as Sony points out, “users can get the music onto iPods by transferring files to a PC, burning them to a CD, ripping those and transferring them into iTunes.” Perhaps Sony’s consumers wouldn’t have to slog through such an obtuse and time-consuming process if the company didn’t treat them like criminals. [back]

Penis-related email subject from my spam folder or PJ Harvey song title?

1. You Come Through
2. She Knows
3. It’s You
4. Permanent Size Growth
5. Beautiful Feeling
6. Make It Bigger
7. Meet Ze Monsta
8. Bigger is Better
9. Man-Size
10. Size Does Matter
11. This Is Love

PJ Harvey Song Title: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11
Spam Subject: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10

And the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools
Tryin’ to anaesthetize the way that you feel.

Elvis Costello, “Radio, Radio” (1978)

Sony announced today it has agreed to a $10 million settlement for bribing radio stations with cash, vacations and electronics equipment to play songs produced by their labels. Today, New York State attorney general Eliot “Mad Dog” Spitzer released some of the damning evidence against Sony in the form of emails between it and station execs:

In one case, an employee of Sony BMG’s Epic label was trying to promote the group Audioslave to a station and asked: “WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO TO GET AUDIOSLAVE ON WKSS THIS WEEK?!!? Whatever you can dream up, I can make it happen.”

In another case in 2004, the promotion department of Sony BMG label Epic Records paid for an extravagant trip to Miami for a Buffalo DJ and three friends in exchange for adding the Franz Ferdinand song “Take Me Out” to the DJ’s station’s playlist.

And in another, a program director for Clear Channel radio station WKKF-FM, or KISS-FM, sent an e-mail to a Sony executive saying: “Looking for a laptop for promotion on Bow Wow,” a reference to a rapper.

But how is this news? I’ve always assumed pay-to-play is the way commercial radio works and why it sucks so wildly. I do know such payola is the backbone of other industries, especially those that aren’t scrutinized by federal regulators. A good example is the grocery industry. Major grocery chains charge their suppliers “slotting fees” for placement and/or prominent placement in their stores. Those Lay’s potato chips you see at eye level on the store shelf? It’s not an accident they’re at eye level; that’s thousands and thousands of dollars in the store chain’s pocket.

And a $10 million fine (with no criminal charges, I might add) for a company like Sony? Ha ha! That’s funny. That’s, like, Beyoncé’s clothing allowance for six months.

Also, I notice that although Sony admitted it engaged in “wrong and improper” practices, it also didn’t exactly say it’d reprimand the employees who were involved, merely that it would be “defining a new, higher standard in radio promotion.”

I think the highest standard would be to cut out the middleman: hang the DJs and use their warm, pudgy corpses as attic insulation. This is essentially what’s happening with these new automated radio stations. Do these exist where you live? If so and you’ve listened, comment. Now that I’ve aged, I can’t listen to most radio without bleeding internally, so I’ll leave it to BusinessWeek Online commentator Burt Helm to describe the DJ-free radio format, most of which have men’s first names. The most popular of these is Infinity Broadcasting’s “Jack.”

The rules guiding a Jack-formatted station are simple: Unlike a typical radio station, which regularly plays 300 or 400 hits of a particular genre, programmers on Jack stations select 700 to 1,000 songs of completely different genres. Then, they sequence them to create what radio programmers call “train wrecks”—Billy Idol will follow Bob Marley, Elvis after Guns N’ Roses, and so on. And Jack stations often (but not always) use a smart-alecky recorded voice, rather than a live DJ, to make short quips between songs.

That’s right, you nerds out there with sharp memories—it’s exactly as foreseen in that 1994 Simpsons episode with the DJ-3000: “It plays CDs automatically and it has three distinct varieties of inane chatter.”

Yet Jack seems to be working. Infinity launched its first Jack station last July at KJKK-FM in Dallas. Since then, the station has improved its rankings from 28th in the market to 5th and is now the most listened-to station in the valuable 25-to-54 demographic. New York City just got Jack on June 3 when Infinity launched the format on WCBS-FM.

Have fun with your new, payola-resistant robo-DJs, radio-listening public. I’m stickin’ with my iPod.

I wish I could tell you that I spent my teenage years suffused in the coolness of music from R.E.M., The Smiths, The Pretenders, Talking Heads, Public Enemy, Tom Waits, Prince and Sonic Youth. But while I sure enjoy this music today, what I actually listened to in the late 1980s was comparatively the aural equivalent of frosted sugar donuts.

On cassette, I owned Def Leppard’s Hysteria, Invisible Touch by Genesis, Aerosmith’s Pump and Appetite for Destruction by Guns N’ Roses, but I particularly enjoyed top pop singles of that era. I may be embarrassed to admit recalling such songs, but even now I still know them and can listen to them all the way through without getting nauseated. I’m thinking here of songs like “Rock Steady” by the Whispers and “Everywhere” by Fleetwood Mac, poppy hits by established acts that probably made their long-time fans weep. One-hundred-and-one multi-tracked Carly Simons are dancing in my head!

Even better, I recall one-hit-wonder-style songs such as “Heart and Soul” by T’Pau, “Waiting for a Star to Fall” by Boy Meets Girl, and “Seasons Change” by Exposé. Don’t pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about; each of those three songs alone made the top-five on Billboard’s Top 100 Pop Singles charts and were inescapable during certain weeks of ’87 and ’88.

Like good pop songs should, these deal mostly with love/lust, in a perky and lightheaded manner, swollen with synths and drum machines and inspiring spontaneous dancing sing-alongs. The choruses are dangerously infectious and often loaded with a smoky sax sneak-attack or sphincter-tightening falsetto.

Many of these can be classified as one-hit wonders while others have been appropriated for the New Ironic Era. For example, When in Rome’s “The Promise” is on the Napoleon Dynamite soundtrack, while Salt-n-Pepa’s “Push It” was selected for service in a GM/OnStar commercial, perhaps by the same ad exec who thought “Lust For Life,” Iggy Pop’s recollection of drugs, liquor and prostitution, would be an appropriate fit for family-friendly Carnival Cruise Lines. Late last month, I heard my first commercial-appropriated radio song that was a favorite of mine in my youth: Robert Palmer’s Grammy-winning “Simply Irresistible” from 1988 is now being used by Applebee’s to promote something called Irresist-A-Bowls. Now I know how you old people felt when you first heard “Happy Together” and “Sunshine of My Life” in the zombie service of jingles for Golden Grahams and Minute Maid.

As a semi-surprise for Andie’s birthday, Eric, Katie and I rented out a room at Japas 55, a karaoke bar on W. 55th Street. Actually, I didn’t do anything other than show up at 7:00 p.m. Eric scouted out the place and reserved the room. Katie invited everyone and brought the cake. It was a fun time with a great group of folks. For the karaoke-shy, it’s an ideal setting because you get your own supposedly soundproofed room, with comfy seats, a few wireless mikes, remotes to select the songs and screens that show cheesy video accompaniments to each song and look as if they were filmed in 1980.

There was lots of sake, beer and wine involved so I don’t clearly remember what all was sung. I do recall nearly tearing my diaphragm belting out Harry Nilsson’s heart-rending and exceptionally high-pitched “Without You.” Andie and I of course sang our theme song, “Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now),” by Phil Collins, at least one and a half times, by my count. There were a few Madonna (“Crazy For You”) and Billy Joel (“Pressure”) songs in the mix, with a Spice Girls and a Britney song for good measure. For the golden oldies, there was much passionate screaming during several Zeppelin tunes and a fun singalong with Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust.” My only disappointment was that there was only one Elvis Costello song (“She”) to select and I had been pining to sing “Allison” or “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes.”

Outside of the private rooms, in the front of the place, is the bar, and if you want, you can sing right there. An Asian couple was turning out a spookily accurate rendition of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” with the lady hitting all the high notes. A few karaoke songs at the bar were sung in Japanese, with the Japanese lyrics appearing on the screen and accompanying 1980s-style cheesy videos featuring Japanese actors. To clarify, the following photos are from the party, not the videos.

After some drinks with some friends of mine and Katie’s tonight, we were invited by them to an join a group for an evening of karaoke this weekend.

I’ve never tried this sport before and I’ve only heard it performed once. I imagine this happens often, but the night I first heard karaoke was at a bar, and some of the people were obviously either professional singers or had a particular song they had mastered. (These are the same sorts of people who derive their primary income from playing billiards at bars.) But such karaoke songs are boring to listen to. If you’re doin’ karaoke, I’ve decided, you’ve got to make it your own and not be too slavish to the original. Otherwise, we could all just stay at home and watch American Idol. Drunkenness seems to be a key factor in successful karaoke; also, duets that aren’t quite syncopated. And any hair metal. Those are a blast, karaoke-wise. (Keep in mind that one of my favorite cover songs is Cap’n Jazz’s version of A-Ha’s “Take On Me.” Now that’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout!)

So I thought about songs I like and most of them are more complicated to sing than I thought; the ones that are easier or that I enjoy singing are somewhat obscure. I’m not trying to be difficult; one of my favorite songs to sing out loud, because it was on a Smiths mixtape someone made for me in college and I listened to it constantly on my daily work commutes in Cleveland, frequently striking the steering wheel for emphasis, is Morrissey’s “The Last of the Famous International Playboys,” which is a blast of a song and has goofy lyrics, but it’s not a crowd pleaser. I mean, it’s karaoke, so people want to hear “Brown Eyed Girl” and “I Got You Babe” and such, right?

I bought Beck’s new album, Guero, when it was released on Tuesday and I’ve listened it to a few times since then. Oldschool Beck fans were largely predicting it would be the second coming of his 1995 masterpiece, Odelay. After all, for the new album, he rehired the Dust Brothers, the guys who produced Odelay and best known for their funkadelic, densely layered sampling skills—they also produced the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, for instance, which is regarded as a masterpiece of sampling.

For me, a suggestion that Guero could be Odelay, Part II were the remixes of several Guero tracks Beck released in mid-February. You’ll recall I dug the quickbeat-crazy 8-bit musical accompaniment of those four tunes.

But Guero doesn’t match the manic energy of either Odelay or those remixed tracks, which have been stripped of their fun and suited with more staid instrumentation for their release on Guero. This is especially true on songs like “Hell Yes.” I think you’ll agree that a song prominently featuring robot-voice samples cries out for Commodore 64-style instrumental backing, a demand met by the remixed version. But on the album version, “Hell Yes” gets bass and harmonica samples and never quite takes off.

That’s not to say Guero is a bad album, but it’s sedate and reminiscent of Beck’s recent releases, particularly on songs like “Missing,” which recalls his late ’90s tango with Tropicália, and “Broken Drum,” which sounds like it came from the folksinger-in-space of Mutations. The remainder of the songs feature a sprinkling of Beck conventions, including spoken-word jive, funky drumbeats and handclaps aplenty, yet unlike Odelay, you’re unlikely to spin Guero in its entirety at your next kegger.

It’s a restrained affair, but I don’t think this album will sway anyone to be a Beck fan who wasn’t before. His white-boy funk and adenoidal voice aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. Then again, this morning when I stopped in the Starbucks at W. 35th and Eighth Avenue, I noticed that right next to the jazz comps and Elvis Costello Artist’s Choice CDs, the chain was peddling Guero. “Grande skim no-whip two-shot Guero to go!” Before you know it, you’ll be hearing Beck in a Target commercial.

2:07 p.m. It’s cold, gray and drizzly in New York today and somewhere beyond the open window in our living room, someone is playing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by the Tokens (who, incidentally, were from Brooklyn). I’ve never heard the song sound so eerie. It’s an echoey song to begin with, but it’s echoing even more off the eight-story-high brick walls outside in the atrium formed by our building and the one next door. It’s also making the song’s female background singer sound just like a theremin.

It was a long time coming, but I recently made my first purchases from the iTunes Music Store. Beck is releasing his new album at the end of next month, and to whet fans’ appetites, he is selling remixes of four of the album’s songs exclusively on the iTMS. (To be fair, he released ‘em on vinyl too, but who’s got time for that?)

Normally, remixes I can do without. But after listening to the 30-second samples on the iTMS, I had to have them. The two that are remixed by a group named Paza sound as if the instrumental tracks from the originals have been stripped out and replaced by muzak created on a Commodore 64 computer. (If you have iTunes installed on your computer, you too can listen in.) Bleeps, blurps, sawtooth waves and percussion crafted from sharply modulated bursts of white noise: the synthesized sounds of my youth. Sweet!

Yet my purchases were not made without hesitation because, although I think the iTMS is well-executed and a fine way of boosting Apple’s standing in the PC world, a few things were holding me back:

1. When you buy music online, you get compressed tracks. In other words, they’re not CD quality. If you want to burn them to a CD or convert them to another digital format, you aren’t able to do so without a substantial loss in audio quality.
2. When I pay for music like CDs, I appreciate having a physical object in my possession. Not only the CD itself, but typically an informative booklet with production and recording credits, source of samples (if any), lyrics (sometimes), along with nice design and photos.
3. I’m not so keen on Apple’s DRM (digital rights management), which restricts you from playing iTMS music on certain devices and certain other computers. While I appreciate the sentiment that they don’t want you pirating music, I also don’t like my purchases saddled like that. Fortunately, some enterprising individuals, not without some legal wrangling with Apple, have found a way around these RIAA-inspired shenanigans.

In the end, it came down to the fact that I still don’t plan on buying a lot of iTMS music, and anyway, the tracks are only 99 cents each. If you’re buying a whole album, that’s not typically a good deal, but for a few tracks not available in any other format usable by me, I could make an exception.

The allure of The Trash Bar, a Williamsburg dive, can be summed up in three words: free tater tots. They’re not just any tater tots, kept neither in a bowl on the bar nor under a heat lamp. When you order a drink, you ask for your tater tots, and the barkeep will pop them in the deep fryer. Three-and-a-half minutes later, they’re served up piping hot, a pile of them heaped in a small plastic basket lined with tinfoil and accompanied by ketchup still in the plastic Heinz squeeze bottle.

Those are some tasty tater tots, crisp on the outside, rich and potatoey on the inside. Also, after midnight, cans of PBR are $2, which isn’t such a bad deal, for New York.

I was there tonight to listen to Pillow Theory, a band featuring Kelsey, a good friend of Andie and Katie. After my trip on the L and walking 10 blocks through cold, misty rain, I got to the bar around 9 p.m. and had a beer while watching National Lampoon’s European Vacation on a soundless TV above the bar. I was supposed to meet up with the rest of my group for the musical entertainment and it didn’t occur to me that I had to pay a $5 cover charge and enter through a curtain into a seedy back room to watch the band. I did this, getting a 1.25-inch square black stamp on the back of my right hand that inexplicably read “Staple This To Your Face.” The back room was darker and seedier than the front room (but not as seedy as the restrooms downstairs), with a dizzying disco ball, seats that had been removed from cars serving as comfy chairs, and a tiny open bar in the corner that had more PBR and gins-and-tonic.

Kelsey’s band played for about an hour and the hipsters bobbed their heads appreciatively. They rocked out, as I remember them doing the last time I saw them, with Kelsey’s versatile voice ranging from strong and clear, to falsetto, to screaming. Watching the drummer was amusing, his Vishnu arms battering his squat kit with vigor and accuracy.

Afterwards, we moved back to the outer barroom area, got our tater tots and had some more to drink. I called a car for my trip back to the mainland and the speed with which the driver showed up (under five minutes) and his agility timing the lights on 10th Ave. in Manhattan was impressive. Got back around midnight, happy and sleepy.

One of my coworkers, Julie, is quitting at the end of the week to move back to her beloved homestate of California for a better job and to be closer to her old friends and family. So I not only feel O.K. with revealing her name, but this somewhat amusing email exchange we had after I burned her some music from my iTunes library. For the record, I should point out that I don’t sing show tunes in the shower (much), and despite her Republicanism, Julie actually is cooler than I am, which you probably already guessed.

I promise to burn your cds this week so you can have your backup back by Monday =) Thanks again! (though Corso loves your music so she might want to borrow...)

No sweat; they're all yours. Feel free to keep them, trash them, give them away, make them into handsome cocktail coasters, use them as evidence when turning me in to the RIAA, etc.

So when do we get a sampling of the elusive Julie's musical tastes? You are conspicuously absent from the iTunes shared playlists. As long as it's not all showtunes or Norwegian death metal.

I haven't been home to even load my ipod yet! but I do own a frightening amount of show tunes (theater background), so Norwegian death metal might have to be my next purchase =)

Soon I promise and then we can make fun of me for more than being a republican.

I meant no disparagement to show tunes. I've been known to burst into rousing bits of "Oh What A Beautiful Morning" or "I Am The Very Model of a Modern Major-General," typically in the shower, because of the superior acoustics. I don't think you'd be made fun of for your music, at least not by me. My playlist may be hip enough for Corso-endorsement, but when you get down to it, what I *really* like listening to are cheesy Phil Collins power ballads, plus pop-R&B songs and hair metal from the late '80s/early '90s. My secret shame.

Well hair bands from the 80s are my personal weakness, so you just became that much cooler in my book =) I mean who doesn't love Bon Jovi? Or at least want his highlights?

And you absolutely should laugh at my music choices, I do on a daily basis! So no disparagement taken. Though even I might have something to say about "I am the very model..."

"Slippery When Wet" = awesomest Bon Jovi album. I only ever wanted Mr. Jovi's acid-washed jean jacket and his way with the ladies. I think I still do.

On a somewhat related note, I just bought "Appetite For Destruction" on CD yesterday at Academy Records and not only was it still factory-sealed, it had a faded sticker on it that said something like "Featuring 'Welcome To The Jungle,' As Heard In The Movie 'The Dead Pool'" (which came out in '88).

There was a split second wherein I considered selling this original, valuable relic on eBay, but you know, when you really want to hear "Sweet Child O' Mine," you really gotta play it right away, and loudly. And sing along.

That made me laugh out loud! Though I don't know if I could resist Sweet Child of Mine for the promise of Ebay riches. That is a true moral dilemma. And Slippery When Wet is my favorite album too. It will be on the ipod in short order (if my cd isn't too scratched to read. Man I love that thing.)

I never owned "Slippery," but I remember jammin' along to "Livin' On a Prayer" on the radio of my Panasonic boombox.

I first started buying music in junior-high and the first tape I bought, an all-time favorite, was "Hysteria" by Def Leppard. I still recall all of the songs (or at least the choruses) on that one.

The second- and third-ever cassettes I bought were "Invisible Touch" by Genesis and "King of Rock" by Run-D.M.C. Those are pretty sweet in their own right.

You just dated yourself! But to keep embarrassing facts even. My first cassettes were NKOTB and I believe Michael Bolton (after Wee Sing and Big Bird of course). I think you were cooler than I...

Is any Christmas song more annoying than “Blue Christmas” by Elvis? (Hint: No.) I was just at the grocery store and they were playing it over the speakers and it was so bad I momentarily forgot what I was there to buy (grape soda and chips). I think it’s those shrill banshee background singers going “wooo ooowooo,” needling little holes into my skull and riddling my brain like buckshot.

Then again, you’ve also got that Wings song, “A Wonderful Christmas Time,” wherein McCartney discovers the tremolo switch on his synth. And let’s review some of those inspired lyrics:

Simply having a wonderful Christmas time.
Simply having a wonderful Christmas time.
Simply having a wonderful Christmas time.
Simply having a wonderful Christmas time.

Oh, make it stop.

1982. I didn’t own Thriller, but my friend Kevin did. It was cool to own Thriller (in record format, of course) and Kevin had other cool stuff, like a dirt bike, a ColecoVision, mad karate skills, and a way with the ladies. I distinctly recall preferring “Weird Al” Yankovic’s parody version of “Beat It” (one of the many hit singles from Thriller), which was cleverly entitled “Eat It.” Needless to say, I did not have a way with the ladies.

circa 1985-1986. My favorite song during the class roller skate night at Ohio Skate was “ABC” by the Jackson 5. A super joyous rhythm on which to unsteadily circle ‘round, discoball lights flashing on the darkened rink floor. Please don’t forget that the song has the Best Bridge Ever, as shouted out by Michael:

Sit down, girl!
I think I love you!
No!
Get up, girl!
Show me what you can do!

Incidentally, my second favorite song during the class roller skate night at Ohio Skate was “Word Up!” by Cameo.

1988. My junior-high class got to choose a song to play during our “graduation” and we chose “Devil Inside” by INXS, because it clearly summed up our “school spirit,” plus it had a sweet beat. Somehow this choice was overruled and the song ended up being Michael Jackson’s “Man In The Mirror.” Damn you, Mrs. Gray.

late-1990s to present. One of my friend Jimi’s occasional interjections is to say “You ain’t bad! You ain’t nothin’!” in a Michael Jacksonish voice. I never realized what this referenced until he explained that it’s a line of dialogue from the extended version of the “Bad” video. In it, Michael plays a kid named Daryl who berates some hoodlums with the phrase after they try to get him to revert to his “bad” ways. Of course, Jimi also refers to himself as “Jimi” (“Jimi says nothing.”), which apparently is a Seinfeld reference, but I think that one’s just pure Jimi.

today. I’ve been downloading arcade games to play on my Mac using MAME, an emulation program. I’ve long since accrued all the classics from the ’80s, of which Tempest is my favorite. Looking for more recent games today, I came across Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker, released into the arcades in 1990 by Sega.

It’s great! The background music includes Muzak versions of Jackson songs like “Bad,” “Smooth Criminal” and “Billie Jean.” Many of the game’s scenes are supposed to be based on the Moonwalker movie from 1988, which I’ve never seen. (But with a cast that includes Mick Jagger, Joe Pesci and Lech Walesa(!), how could I not have seen it?). When you hit the “insert coin” button, there’s a sample of Michael’s high-pitched “whoo-hoo!”; a slower version of this sample is used when Michael “dies” in the game. Ha ha!

Michael’s “special power” is Dance Magic, which causes all enemies on the screen to dance in unison with him until they are magically dispatched in clouds of smoke. Michael can also turn into a giant robot after touching his chimp, Bubbles.

And finally (I really wish I were making this up), bonus points are added by “touching” children in distress throughout the game.

They thank Michael, then they run directly away from him in an amusing fashion.

I first heard “shape-note” singing in Terrence Malick’s great 1998 film about the Guadalcanal conflict, The Thin Red Line. In it, there are some wondrous Melanesian choir songs that resemble the shape-note songs of the Sacred Harp tradition, a non-denominational community musical event preserved in the rural South.

Such songs use only four syllables for singing the scale (fa, so, la, mi) instead of the traditional seven (do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti). Other features of shape-note singing, for the musically inclined among you, include a controlled but non-professional performance, vigorous but unsyncopated rhythm, a choral style with tenor melody, and some crazily twisty business with counterpoint.

In 1959, Alan Lomax, the field recorder who co-founded the Library of Congress’ Archive of American Folksong, was invited to audiotape a weekend of Sacred Heart singing at a country church in Fyffe, Alabama. At picnic tables under oak trees, Lomax and the congregation lunched on fried chicken, ham, potato salad, hot biscuits, corn pone “and every kind of cake and pie known to the cooks of northern Alabama.” Afterwards, he set up his stereo recording equipment and the choir got down to business. Lomax writes of the “hundred-odd farmers, country lawyers, tradesmen, and wives and children” making a “fiery choral sound” of “haunting beauty”:

The atmosphere was totally democratic, all participants displaying confidence in their natural voices, each adding his own embellishments and variations to the written part. This combination of musical skill and passionate individualism creates a thrilling choral texture, far from the classically admired blend but a quite original and fascinating way of performing counterpoint.

But as with all music, you gotta hear it, not read about it. One of the most beautiful shape-note songs to my ears is one Lomax recorded that weekend in Alabama, “Sherburne,” composed by Daniel Read around 1803. Feel free to listen to a 1.6 MB mp3 of it. The lyrics, which you can pick out of the song’s second half, are based on Luke 2:8, the intro of his passage concerning Christ’s birthday:

While shepherds watched their flocks by night
All seated on the ground
The angel of the Lord came down
And glory shone around

Having enjoyed Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind at the theater and again on the DVD I recently purchased, I thought I’d give director Michel Gondry’s recently released video collection a try. Yeah, I know; you saw all these on MTV when you were, like, 12. But I never had cable TV growing up, so they were all new to me as I watched them tonight. The majority of the 27 videos are for songs by Björk, and having viewed them all, I can make the following fresh observations:

1.) Michel Gondry is really weird.
2.) Björk is really weird.

3.) However, Björk is also really hot. So in the end, it’s a lot of fun for everyone.

Andie and I went and saw PJ Harvey tonight at the Hammerstein Ballroom, which is only 2.5 blocks away from where I work. It was a rockin’ good time.

Moris Tepper opened. In retropect, I think some of his songs sounded a bit like early PJ Harvey songs, only sung by a crazy guy with only an amped acoustic guitar. Turns out he’s played guitar for Captain Beefheart, Tom Waits and Frank Black. If you put those three guys and their instruments in a metal trash can and rolled it down a hill, it’d sound like Moris Tepper. I mean that in a good way. Never mind.

The sold-out crowd packed in for PJ and there was an inexplicable rash of guys taller than six feet standing directly in front of us, so there was a lot of head-darting to catch views of the stage. PJ looked great, as always, with her shagged haircut, handbag, sleeveless shirt-blouse thing, and a skirt that appeared to be illustrated with Animal from The Muppet Show. She said very little between songs other than a quiet “thanks” or two, but she really rocked out. No one’s got a voice like hers, where in one moment, she’s singing high and clear with operatic beauty, and then all the sudden her voice swoops down low and she’s growling and you start sweating and reaching for your revolver.

She only played five of the 14 songs from her newest album, which was good because the crowd wanted the classics. Song highlights for me were “Big Exit” and “The Whores Hustle And The Hustlers Whore” from Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea. I also enjoyed “Is This Desire?” (one of her most transcendent songs), as well as the sludgy “Meet Ze Monsta,” for which PJ played police whistle and maracas. Cool.

For the fans, here’s the setlist. If memory serves, the only cover is “Janet Vs. Johnny,” which is by The Fall.

1. Dress
2. Who The Fuck?
3. Big Exit
4. Evol
5. Victory
6. My Beautiful Leah
7. 50ft Queenie
8. Shame
9. It’s You
10. The Life & Death Of Mr. Badmouth
11. Meet Ze Monsta
12. The Whores Hustle And The Hustlers Whore
13. Harder
14. Me-Jane

Encore 1

1. Rid Of Me
2. Taut
3. Catherine
4. Fountain
5. Janet Vs. Johnny
6. Is This Desire?

Encore 2

1. There Will Never Be A Better Time
2. The Darker Days Of Me And Him

Just got back from a night out with Katie. We had watched Smarty Jones get his ass kicked in the Belmont while we enjoyed some salsa and margaritas I made, then went down to St. Mark’s Place to watch her friend Kelsey’s band, Pillow Theory, play at The Continental. We met up with Sam, a co-worker of Katie’s from the children’s books department at Barnes & Noble. I spent some time chatting with some Asian chick at our table who was all geeked-out with a mic, PowerMac, LaCie hard drive and recording equipment to capture some of the sets for burning to CD. She reminded me of that Asian kid from The Goonies with all his wacky inventions, but that might have been just because she was wearing a baseball cap.

Kelsey’s band was rockin’. They’re kinda 90’s alternarock-sounding; the last song in their set reminded me of “Black Coffee” by Black Flag. It was a tough gig because they were the first of six bands playing, and the group following them had a small, fawning crowd containing some jackass moshers. And this band had a “look”: all the guys wore polo shirts with the collars turned up; plus, one of their guitarists was the spitting image of a young John Cusack. They’re going places, I’m sure.

It got too loud and annoying, so we joined up with Kelsey’s bandmates and switched to another bar. Sam talked about her experience working as an author of kids’ picture books. It was interesting to hear from her about the submission process and the market for such a commodity; she talked about a recent submission of hers involving a seed unsure that it wants to grow up to be a tree.

I talked briefly with Kelsey about his experience recording his band’s most recent album in Chicago with Steve Albini. Steve sounds a lot like I expected him to be: technically proficient, working at the behest of the band and not his own interests, and a real nerd. Apparently he has a little dance he does when a take goes well, known as the Albini Dance, but I declined to get details. Kelsey and Katie decided to move on to yet another bar and I bowed-out.

I got home around midnight, then decided to step out again to buy some more chips in case Andie wanted some of my leftover salsa when she got home. On the way to the store, I overheard a bit of conversation from some guy talking to his woman: “I don’t care if we have no money. If we can have a baby, then we have a baby.” Then, at the store, in line with my chips, the chick in front of me is not only wearing a belt made out of a chain heavy enough to secure a prison gate, she’s buying $7.38 worth of portabella mushrooms. The scruffy old guy in line behind me says to no one in particular, “You can’t live on mushrooms alone,” and I look down at the checkout conveyor belt to see what he’s buying — two packs of hotdogs and two small plastic deli containers of something called “seafood spread.”

I love this dirty town.