Steve Heller posted a fascinating entry on Design Observer about pricing graphic design ephemera.  Are you a bin digger like me, trying to find treasure in the trash?

Playlist from The Acousmatic Theater Hour with Jason G and Karinne on WFMU, from May 31, 2009

This week’s edition of Here’s What’s Awesome seems quite householdy – I guess working in the garden and trying to fix up the house geared me toward green, domestic awesome links. Just be thankful I didn’t run across any stories about Saturday afternoon reruns, I guess. “University researchers have discovered that Urkel can power up to 16,000 homes…”

The power of prayer

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Covers etc has added a photo to the pool:

Artist is J. Pollack, this edition from 1959.

Covers etc has added a photo to the pool:

Should read some Lew Archer.

I jammed all evening in the garden at Dick & Jane’s party on Friday, and I had a great time.

We had good players, including mandolin, fiddle, and resonator guitar, and IMO we made a crunchy little beat happen. You could tell by the gushy reactions when we got up to leave.

So here’s my plea: hire us! We don’t need amplification, you don’t have to give us money, we’re not going to steal silverware, and we’ll make it a happening little party. It’s easy — just send me driving directions and I’ll do the rest.

@atduskgreg has remixed one of the jazz recordings I posted on Soupgreens.com about a year or so ago. From his tumblr log:

Today, I re-discovered some old loops I’d made from one of Lucas Gonze’s Alvin and Lucille songs and end up working them up into the bones of a song. Next up will be bass and some percussion overdubs, but what you’re hearing here comes entirely from the guitar part for Romance Without Finance.

His mix is a sythetic alien mime with a sexy walk. Pretty much.

Incidentally, the guitar tone on that recording comes from the unique instrument — a 1930s remake of an 1890s parlor axe. That small-bodied style of guitar has a distinctive boingy sound in the bass. No low end thump at all, but lots more wiggly high end than on a modern instrument. Here’s photos:

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I need to find a way to cover or remix contemporary internet-based stuff like this without abandoning my premise. It’s good to make my stuff available for other people to remix, but it’s narcissistic to do it without also remixing other people’s music.

I brought this up over on Twitter:

I wish that my own genre of guitar instrumentals had some way for me to make remixes. It’s selfish for me to not do it, not never RTing.

@atduskgreg replied:

you could do covers of other people’s songs. You do that now, but it’s like you’re RTing long dead people.

Obviously I could just become a remixer, but the world already has plenty of those. I’ll make better music by sticking to what I know.

Any ideas? How can acoustic real-time musicians engage with remixers?

Anyhow, as always you are welcome to reuse the Alvin and Lucille recordings in mixes or videos. They’re under a creative commons license, and I’m happy to use just any license that suits you. There are full-resolution AIFFs available. The mixes keep vocals in one track and guitar in another, so that you can demix the parts. I like the music Tequila and I made, and I’d prefer to have it go to good use.

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Incidentally, the song that me and Tequilla were playing is “Romance Without Finance,” by the long forgotten minor swing guitarist Tiny Grimes. I owned a cassette of it because Charlie Parker played in Grimes’ band back before Parker got his superpowers. The song has a sly sense of humor and raw rockinness along the lines of Luis Prima. The cassette was a Bird comp, not a Tiny comp, btw. Tiny’s gone gone gone, like a gravestone you can barely read any more.

Oops. I posted something here that belonged on the blog for my music making. Go there if you want to see it.

I keep these blogs separate because I don’t think there’s much overlap between people who like one or the other.

With elements of arena rock, hair metal, punk, and classic rock, "rock urbano" in Mexico describes a genre of music and a subculture that flourished in the outer slums of Mexico City for many years before being eclipsed by new rock currents and by reggaeton.

Largely forgotten, rock urbano has not entirely disappeared. You can still find toquines on the D.F.'s fringes that celebrate this scene -- although the rockers present can often be a bit on the gray side. Above, a king of the genre, El Haragán, or Luis Antonio Alvarez, blasting through his anthem "Muñequita Sintetica." It's sung in that unmistakably barrio, rough-around-the-edges manner. Enjoy.

* Previously, "Excavations: The rock underground in 1980s Mexico."

The fact that I have read three of these five books about running (FT site registration required) makes me wonder whether that is because I am obsessively bookish or just obsessed with running. Simon Kuper is too hard on Murakami here, I think (I loved that book, though admittedly I am the perfect target audience for it), not at all too hard on Liz Robbins and quite right, too, about Christopher McDougall's Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen. At first I was a little wary of McDougall's facetiousness and certain journalistic habits of chapter-structuring, but it is really a wonderful book, in the writing as well as in the subject matter - this one is strongly recommended if you have a serious interest in the physiology (especially the biomechanics) of distance running and/or the history of endurance sport. I read it in one sitting the other night, and wished it were longer.

Another book I read with absolute delight and in one sitting was Lee Child's latest Jack Reacher novel, Gone Tomorrow. I went so far as to have it Amazon Primed (along with Charlaine Harris's Dead and Gone) to my hotel in Florida so that I could read it on the plane home - I was cracking it open in the Orlando airport, and pretty much the next thing I knew, I was turning the last page as the plane began its descent into LaGuardia. Lee Child is a genius of light reading - in fact, I am hoping to channel a little of that genius as I inject some superior thriller-type pacing into my sequel rewrite...

Also: Rebecca Goldstein's The Mind-Body Problem, which I bought some time ago without quite realizing the extent to which it would fall under my self-imposed ban on reading academic novels. One year post-tenure, my disgust for such books has worn off - I needed a small light entertaining paperback to take with me on the subway the other day, and in fact I polished the rest of it off later that night with considerable enjoyment. It is an appealing and engaging novel, with some funny similarities to Fear of Flying; though I will say again that the academic novel I am most wanting to read is Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals, forthcoming in October (hmmm, maybe someone has an ARC for me?).

Other things that have struck me over the last couple days:

Nancy Drew as childhood role model for female Supreme Court Justices.

"Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future" (a review of Giles Foden's Turbulence, which it looks to me I should pick up a copy of in England in July - ditto Jake Arnott on the fictional lives of Aleister Crowley).

"Five crosses and the Rasmussen factor": belief in the overriding power of the female line in horsebreeding continues to characterize twenty-first-century American breeding practice...

Finally, Christopher Ricks very much likes Stanley Plumly's Posthumous Keats, and Oliver Sacks is speaking about hallucinations and the life of the visual brain on Wednesday at 5pm as part of the "Narrative Medicine Rounds" - might be that I should temporarily slip out of the coils of sequel-revising and triathlon training and go to that one...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, this week, to the following high-, low-, no-, and hilobrow heroes. Click here for more Hilo Hero birthdays.

MAY 31

Back when rock’s head was swelling, when the attention deficit disorder of a Keith Moon could be mistaken for genius, JOHN BONHAM (1948-80) was largely dismissed as a ham-fisted lout. Now we know that the quintessence of rock is the ham-fisted lout. As such, Bonham’s volume and physical command, his concern for rhythmic commitment rather than finesse or filigree, lends his sounds the meaty presence of a Rodin sculpture. The funkiest of classic rock drummers, Bonham peeled away the sluttish sauciness of the groove to reveal a chthonic vein of bubbling pitch that rooted his rhythms in the earth. Though many find the use of such organic metaphors a dodgy move in criticism, with Bonham one must simply bow before the upwelling force. If we do not acknowledge how low the lo in hilo can go, we are lost in the muddle of the middle, the fussy fill before the resounding return to the beat. — Erik Davis

JUNE 1

An intellectual historian and historian of intellectuals, CHRISTOPHER LASCH (1932-94) picked up the torch offered by negative-dialectical curmudgeons (T.W. Adorno, Dwight Macdonald) who’d rejected the shibboleths of liberals and conservatives alike. Pinpointing the social, political, cultural, and economic ills of the 1960s-80s, Lasch traced their origins to crucial moments in American history when reformists and change agents compromised their principles or lost their way. Why did the Left embrace a secular-messianic vision of an all-encompassing change in the human condition, achieved through the revolutionary transformation of society? Why did the Right abandon its suspicion of capitalism and its disastrous effects on traditional institutions? Lasch answered such questions with every bit as much anarchical lucidity as Thomas Pynchon and Woody Allen, whose greater wit made them not one whit more capable of preventing their Boomer juniors from exacerbating the errors of earlier rebels-with-a-cause. — Joshua Glenn

JUNE 2

In the endless metamorphoses of Black Flag, it fell to DEZ CADENA (born 1961), son of a West Coast jazz producer, to be the band’s third lead singer, and then its first second guitarist. To both tasks he brought a weight of soul and a purity of intent that were the definition of Black Flag’s early years: hoarse, skinny, and existential as a frontman (”Just around the corner, there’s a bed of cold pave-ment, waitin’ for meeeeee….!!!!”), he switched to guitar upon the arrival of Henry Rollins and immediately added a dimension of almost limitless solemnity to the sonic brainstorms of Greg Ginn. There’s a lost-gospel feel to this brief five-man incarnation of Black Flag: scantily recorded, its heaviness is best commemorated on YouTube clips wherein you can also admire Dez’s beautiful and punk-enraging long hair. — James Parker

JUNE 3

There are two kinds of people in this world: Shaft and Superfly people. But while Shaft and Isaac Hayes have long enjoyed an irony-driven revival, the far superior Superfly and CURTIS MAYFIELD (1942-99) are overdue for a comeback. Paralleling the films’ qualities, Mayfield’s soundtrack is simultaneously more campy, more moving, and more subversive than Hayes’. Mayfield did have his share of hits, both in and out of The Impressions: among them, “People Get Ready,” “Move On Up,” and “Freddie’s Dead.” But considering his influence on artists as diverse as Whitney Houston and Bad Brains, and his unique ability to chronicle urban black America from the tumultuous ’60s to the apocalyptic ’70s, we should be surrounded every day with Mayfieldiana. — Jason Grote

JUNE 4

With his casual athleticism and big white teeth, with his good-looking features that somehow fail to coalesce into good looks, BRUCE DERN (born 1936) is the dropout personified — the kid who had every advantage but turned out bad. For all his superior acting chops, he seems most at home in an old Gunsmoke or a Movie of the Week. He’s usually playing some combination of motormouth, dreamer, or hustler, and he’s always at least a little unhinged. He strikes us as someone we’d like to go on a bender with. Maybe it’s all those Roger Corman movies (The Wild Angels, The Trip, Bloody Mama); Dern just seems like he’d be up for anything. — Mimi Lipson

JUNE 5

PANCHO VILLA (born Doroteo Aranga Arámbula; 1878-1923) was an outlaw with a world-class strategic intelligence who became a general during the chaotic and unending Mexican Revolution. John Reed was present in the Governor’s palace in Chihuahua when Villa was honored by the elegantly turned-out officers of his artillery corps: “He was dressed in an old plain khaki uniform, with several buttons lacking. He hadn’t recently shaved, wore no hat, and his hair had not been brushed.” He slouched on the throne during the speeches, “his mouth hanging open, his little shrewd eyes playing around the room.” When they gave him the medal, he peered at it and said, “This is a hell of a little thing to give a man for all that heroism you are talking about!” Then he spat violently on the floor. (Insurgent Mexico, 1914) Actors who have portrayed Villa include Wallace Beery, Leo Carillo, Alan Reed, Yul Brynner, Telly Savalas, and Freddy Fender. — Luc Sante

JUNE 6

Filmmaker CHANTAL AKERMAN (born 1950), the arthouse precursor to Charlie Kaufman, Jem Cohen, and even Sam Mendes, took one small step for a woman, and one giant leap into interstitial space, with her investigations of what lies between the subject and the object, the intention and the action, the you and the me. Akerman works against the phallic thrust of narrative climax by alternating between leisurely investigations of domestic details (Jeanne Dielman, shown above), and manic picaresque activity (Toute une nuit), the kind usually left out of “the story,” in order to show how we build our lives between the overlooked and the busy. Refreshingly feminist, and often very funny, she uses absurd and unrelated settings and events to release the tethers from our stories and set them free. — Peggy Nelson

"The most important piece of musical equipment of the last 10 years is not an instrument or a physical object. It’s called Auto-Tune and is used on roughly 90 per cent of all pop songs. It is what’s known as a ‘plug-in’, a specialized piece of software made to be inserted into other, bigger pieces of audio software. Auto-Tune bends off-key notes into pitch perfection.

Auto-Tune was initially used discreetly to smooth over wrong notes. It is fitting that Cher’s 1998 single ‘Believe’ brought the first cosmetic (rather than corrective) use of Auto-Tune to mainstream visibility: when the taut skin and other side-effects of repeat plastic surgery form their own aesthetic, we can think of it in terms of Auto-Tune. Where you can hear certain phrases on ‘Believe’ go robotic – that’s Auto-Tune at work. Within a few years the production secret (and illegal copies of the expensive software) had seeped into studios worldwide, problematizing the connection between voice and body along the way."

Click to read the full article in Frieze.

The Woman in the Woods has added a photo to the pool:

Cover by Oliver Brabbins. Corgi Books paperback (1958).

Until Friday, it had not occurred to me to subdivide yoga into cultural and lingusitical categories. Enter Lisa Grunberger, author of Yiddish Yoga, who documented “an act of translation” that involved yoga and her grandmother Ruthie.

It has been suggested by more than a few parties that my BookExpo coverage betrays a sourpuss disposition. It has also been insinuated that I was predisposed to find negativity within this three-ring exposition. Not at all.

Here are some positive observations: The fine folks at Firebrand managed to set up a booth at BEA that proved to be a popular destination point for any number of quirky literary types. The many perspectives that will emerge from the fairly open press credentials policy will certainly assist Reed Exhibitions (and others) in determining BEA’s future. There are a number of passionate people who still believe in books — perhaps epitomized best by the emerging consultant/communal evangelist Richard Nash, who has hit upon the very sensible idea that writers are also readers — and who are making slow but steady progress in getting others to understand present developments. 7×20x21 suggested that there was no shortage of young energy willing to take on the troubling problems of the future. If the interest and presence from the big publishers were reduced, there remained many small presses and university presses who saw a consistent level of foot traffic comparable to previous years. (I didn’t quite find the crazy guy hawking his self-published book in a rented booth, much less the guy with the toilet seat around his head who had showed up at previous BEAs. But there did seem to be a larger makeup of aspiring authors cropping up at panels.) If Penguin wasn’t exactly promoting Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice at BEA (as Kirk Biglione wisely observed) and China Mieville remains one of those names that people get excited about on the floor but that Del Rey seemed strangely diffident in pushing, there remain numerous advocates under the radar. The book bloggers panel, which seemed to me a strange repeat of the 2004 litblog panels, attracted a fairly packed house. The wheel may be reinventing itself, but the one-two shuffles haven’t stopped and the enthusiasm hasn’t permanently quelled. And for all of my complaints about the Book Reviews 2010 panel, there was nevertheless a healthy swarm of spectators. People may not understand the present forms, but they certainly want to. It’s just a question of how much they are willing to adjust their thinking. And it’s also a question of whether the publishing industry wishes to latch onto the unhelpful panacea of Chris Anderson-style generalizations.

My suspicions about BEA have more to do with whether this massive conference is presently in the right form with which to bring together these many viewpoints. Perhaps the manner in which we unite publishers, booksellers, authors, and assorted parties needs to match the drastic manner in which the industry is changing. The digital enthusiasts need to understand the perspective of a 60-year-old publisher who will never use a Kindle. And the frightened publisher needs to comprehend why readers aren’t jumping up and down about DRM. It has become vitally important for us to listen to the opposite perspective. We can’t just keep to the comfortable corners of the room.

I always meant to keep going with it, you know. Thanks to those of you who emailed wanting more! It’s been so long since the last episode that I’m not sure I remembered how to code it properly to show up in iTunes, but you can download an mp3 of me reading Act I, scene iii of The Rules for Hearts here.

And hey, if it doesn’t show up in iTunes within the next day or so, let me know…especially if you can help me make sure it does!

Edited to add: In case you missed the first two episodes, you can download them, too:

The Rules for Hearts, part one
The Rules for Hearts, part two

This has been a very exciting few months not only for my own music but for a lot of the projects I’ve been involved in as a collaborator. The most immediate and exciting thing is that Nadia Sirota’s CD First Things First has been released on New Amsterdam Records. You can buy it via iTunes here or via New Amsterdam here. This is an awesome disk not only because it has three pieces of mine on it, but because it’s a very brave statement: a solo viola CD made up of only commissioned works. I guess I say brave because it sounds really depressing if you don’t know better! Anyway, it’s a fabulous CD that everybody should buy.

The next thing that’s been going on is the release of Grizzly Bear’s album Veckatimest. Now, everybody’s been freaking out about this album for good reason because it’s totally great. Most exciting for me was that I got to make arrangements for the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, as well as the ACME String Quartet, which is my favorite: to keep everything in the family.

Here’s the song Cheerleader:

I managed to sneak in a Security Blanket Gesture:

Did everybody see the weirdly mean-spirited review in the Times of the Grizzly Bear show last night? You know you’re in trouble when a review begins with the sentence:

Music moves; it can’t do anything else.

Ahahahahah. God. What does that even mean? I’ve been thinking about it all day and I still have no idea. It goes on:

There is a nearly suffocating fussiness in this band. It can’t be altered: it’s the life force of the music, which is full and tense, and extremely cold.

Now, I agree with the use of the word Fussy. I like the implications of that word; it doesn’t seem problematically un-musical and I would agree that their music is fussy (the opposite being a Hot Mess, I suppose?) I would say that, you know, Prokofiev is fussy whereas Shostakovich is not fussy. Anyway, life-force. . . I’m a little suspicious of, and “cold” I’m very suspicious of indeed (as a word to describe music, that is).

Rhythm is a frozen concern here, several orders less important than harmony.

What? A Frozen Concern? It sounds like a vegan popsicle.

Then it goes on, and is basically just descriptive, and basically fine, but then comes this horseshit:

But wow, these songs are precious, and they occasionally came spangled with extras that made them even more so. The chorus was one of those elements, sorry to say.

Oh snap! Apology accepted. Now, I have major objections to the word “precious.” It tends to be borderline homophobic in its coded usage, first of all, but second of all, it’s a derogatory adjective with no alternative. It’s reviewspeak. What I mean is: if you say, “that’s ugly” somebody else can say, “no, it’s beautiful.” If you say, “it’s over-stuffed” somebody can say, “really, I thought it was pretty thin.” So the problem with a word like precious is that the scale of adjectives with “precious” on it belongs solely to the reviewer and is just a way of being mean. Case in point: this whole nonsense about Sufjan Stevens’s’s BQE Thing. Words like fey, twee, and precious have become these little nuggets of coded disdain, but they are really just useless self-congratulatory gestures on the part of the reviewer. What is the opposite of twee? Muscular? It all reminds me of the insane misogynist critiques of Jane Austen’s novels. I guess the place for a word like that would be in a larger piece about the music world — there was an enormous brouhaha in Iceland about the so-called Krútt scene. Krútt is probably the closest approximation in Icelandic of “precious” — it refers to Múm, kind of Sigur Rós, and a lot of imitators: it denotes little bells, reversed glockenspiels, fairytale vocals, cutely-outfitted brass bands. Now, all of that is just a description and not derogatory; my iPod overflows with this shit. Anyway, to go to a concert of that kind of music and be like, “it’s precious,” all you’re doing is going to a Chinese restaurant and being like, “wow, they were serving mad chinese food up in there!”

Another irritating thing that comes up in reviews sometimes, too, is the word pretentious. Now. Beloveds. The word literally means Having Pretensions, like, the Thing is Pretending to Be a Thing that it is Not. Pretentious is these houses in New Jersey. It’s Madonna’s accent. It’s big entryways in the suburbs. It’s a whole lot of things but what it always requires is The Object or Person in Question referencing, in his or her head, Another Model, Object or Person. Pretension moves; it can’t do anything else. Monodirectional binary! Anyway, all of this is shorthand for me saying, my show got called pretentious in the Guardian and I was like, okay, maybe you didn’t like it all that much, but it’s the wrong word. (The review actually isn’t that bad). I would love to know what my show is attempting to be; if anything, I have the opposite problem of not having any directional concept for it aside from just playing music well, in a pleasing sequence. There’s something irritating, also, about being called pretentious by somebody who has taken it upon himself to learn how to make an umlaut, and then proceeds to fuck up Valgeir Sigurðsson’s patronymic all in the same gesture. Anyway: my music isn’t a McMansion, I swears it!

Moving on. Everybody should also buy these amazing remixes Son Lux did of My Brightest Diamond. I love her — one of the things I like about her so much is how she’s not scared of the weirdness of her voice. If I were a female vocalist with an interesting voice, I would find it incredibly difficult to have a solo career – especially an electro-acoustic one – because of the looming shadow of Björk. No matter what all you want to do, she’s done it already, and done it really, really well. In fact, that whole Krútt business: it all comes from the landscape of Wespertine. You want to scream? She did it before you were even born. Beautiful song with a choir in the back? She got you. Dance anthem that builds slowly? She got that, too. Zap Mama doing Icelandic Folksongs? She’s on it. Anyway. I’d be paralyzed. Good job, My Brightest Diamond, for not giving a shit and plowing ahead anyway! Album & Remixes sound great!

The mayor will be starting at Seek Books and moving along Centre St. this afternoon cutting ribbons, with stops at Pazzo, Skara, the new used clothing store, maybe Boomerang, etc. Should be here around 4ish, though who knows. We’ll be serving some madeleines and tea that would make Proust remember something ASTOUNDING. [...]

Here are some kids listening to some MCs spit at the fancy Nike theme store on Teotihuacan in Condesa, Friday night. Who were they? Don't know. We were passing through, and they were wearing really bright colors.

Anyway it appears the real stars of the party were the brands: Nike, Dos Equis, and Vitamin Water. Gotta do what you gotta do, I guess.