Had to post this beautiful song after an inspirational recording session earlier today with our band Norushi Minx. Now that I’m thinking about mixes and references for beautifully dreamy guitars, this sublime piece comes to mind. The Cocteau Twins created dream pop perfection too beautiful for the hoi polloi to even comprehend.
One of BlackSwanSongs.com all-time favorite artists, Adam Franklin (Swervedriver, Magnetic Morning) continues his prolific run with a new Adam Franklin and the Bolts of Melody album entitled I Could Sleep For A Thousand Years which will be released June 29, 2010, on Second Motion Records.
You can hear an acoustic version below of a beautiful track from the upcoming album entitled “Yesterday Has Gone Forever.” The melancholy lyrics and atypical pop song structure are just the type of soul-penetrating solipsistic poesy that make rainy days feel that much more lonesome. As Mick Jagger once said to John Lennon, “It’s a blues, John. It’s a blues.”
And if you can’t wait until June 29, 2010 to listen, you can hear a sample of the entire album right now on Amazon.com.
Get ready to pull up the calendar section on your iPhone/smartphone. On September 14, one of BlackSwanSongs’ favorite bands, Superchunk, will release Majesty Shredding on CD, LP and digital download. The band have announced summer festival dates and September east coast dates with west coast dates to be announced soon. Superchunk will also perform on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon on Monday, September 20, their first television appearance since 1994. (Let’s pray they announce an Austin show!)
The press release on the Merge Records site reveals:
Having cleared the deck of odds and sods with last year’s Leaves in the Gutter EP, Superchunk frontman Mac McCaughan set about to write a batch of songs that would capture the spirit of the band’s live shows. From 1997’s Indoor Living through 2001’s Here’s to Shutting Up, Superchunk had written most of their records together, building their songs through collaborative writing and rehearsal. But, in an effort not to overthink their new material (and because drummer Jon Wurster lives a couple hundred miles away from the rest of the band), Superchunk approached Majesty Shredding the same way they approached their early records: McCaughan provided skeletal demos to his bandmates, who in turn fleshed out the songs during a brief period of rehearsal and recording.
This sense of purpose is enhanced by the presence of Scott Solter, an engineer and producer (The Mountain Goats, John Vanderslice, St. Vincent) known for coaxing exceptional performances out of the artists he works with. Majesty Shredding is a powerful document of Superchunk as a band, augmented as needed with well-placed harmonies, keyboards, and guitar overdubs (and some backing vocals courtesy of the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle).
Since releasing their first 7-inch in 1989, Superchunk has run the gamut of milestone albums: early punk rock stompers, polished mid-career masterpieces, and lush, adventurous curveballs. Conventional wisdom holds that a band two decades into its career can only rehash or reinvent, but with Majesty Shredding, Superchunk has done something entirely different. Neither a return nor a departure, Majesty Shredding telescopes two decades into 41 indelible, action-packed minutes. It is the sound of youthful exuberance fine-tuned with grown-up confidence. And it may very well be Superchunk’s best record yet.
Superchunk also recently drank the social media Kool-Aid too; check out their twitter.
Track Listing:
1. Digging for Something
2. My Gap Feels Weird
3. Rosemarie
4. Crossed Wires
5. Slow Drip
6. Fractures in Plaster
7. Learned to Surf
8. Winter Games
9. Rope Light
10. Hot Tubes
11. Everything at Once
Superchunk tour dates:
6/19 Denver, CO – Westword Music Festival
6/20 Chicago, IL – Taste of Randolph Street Festival w/The Love Language
7/24 Omaha, NE – MAHA Music Festival
9/17 Washington, DC- 930 Club
9/18 New York, NY – Bowery Ballroom
9/19 Brooklyn, NY- Music Hall of Williamsburg
9/20 New York, NY – Late Night with Jimmy Fallon
9/21 Boston, MA- Royale
9/22 Philadelphia, PA- Trocadero
BlackSwanSongs.com had the extreme honor of attending two Sixteen Deluxe reunion shows, as well as interviewing them for a short feature in the Austin American-Statesman. Easily the best band to emerge from Austin during the 1990s, Sixteen Deluxe had the potential to be a label’s prestige act. Warner Brothers signed them after a small bidding war. But I personally didn’t feel like Warner Brothers properly promoted the release, “Emits Showers of Sparks” during those dark days just prior to mass Internet adoption.
If you enjoy My Bloody Valentine, The Flaming Lips, Swervedriver and other noise pop/space rock bands, please seek out Sixteen Deluxe and their music. Then convince your friends that are music supervisors to use their music in films.
Re: no worries if you aren’t checking email and/or don’t see this in time…
mailed-by
srs.blackberry.com
Yes!
——Original Message——
From: Black Swan
To: Mac McCaughan
ReplyTo: gmail.com
Subject: no worries if you aren’t checking email and/or don’t see this in time…
Sent: Mar 18, 2010 11:04 AM…but is Superchunk the special guest at 7:00 p.m. for the Merge Showcase tonight?
From an old-school Austin fan (the brotha that comes to all your Austin shows),
Looks like this is the first year in a while that I might not be writing reviews for any publication other than the one you are reading, but my editor at the Austin American-Statesman asked me for some showcase picks and the following showcases are what I delivered to her. I’ve provided links for some of the bands that I think you must hear:
Note: showcases in bold hold the highest probability of my attendance.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
8:00 Strange Boys – Emo’s Jr. 9:00 Here We Go Magic – Club de Ville
10:30 Motorhead – Austin Music Hall
12:00 Nas & Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley 1:00 Sixteen Deluxe – Encore
Thursday, March 18, 2010
8:00 Ozomatli – Auditorium Shores (free show; no wristband or badge required) 9:00 Miles Kurosky – Emo’s Main Room 10:00 Rogue Wave – Emo’s Main Room
11:30 Band of Horses – Stubb’s 12:00 Centro-matic – Emo’s Annex 1:00 Evan Dando – The Ale House
Friday, March 19, 2010
8:55 Band of Horses – Central Presbyterian Church 9:30 Cruiserweight – Buffalo Billiards
10:00 Smokey Robinson – Austin Music Hall
11:00 Girl in a Coma – Buffalo Billiards 12:00 Broken Social Scene – The Parish 1:00 Dengue Fever – Encore Patio
Saturday, March 20, 2010
8:00 She & Him – Auditorium Shores(free show; no wristband or badge required)
9:30 Sarah Jarosz – Austin Music Hall 10:00 Margaret Cho – Esther’s Follies
11:20 Xzibit – Club de Ville 12:30 Big Star – Antone’s 1:00 Adam Franklin & The Bolts of Melody – The Tap Room at Six
LOST's season 6 promo photo resembling da Vinci's "The Last Supper." The homage was no accident.
LOST’s final season has been slightly disappointing…until last night’s (Tuesday, March 9, 2010 in the United States) Ben-centric episode #7, “Dr. Linus.” The episode pulses from a lively, yet taught script and an original vision deftly directed by veteran actor/director Mario Van Peebles.
Whoever the genius was that hired Van Peebles – an established independent film director – to direct such a pivotal episode in the LOST mythology, they deserve much credit for helping to create what proved to be a series-defining episode. Van Peebles has made a few cheesy choices as an actor, but the majority of his work as a director is passionate, powerful and under-appreciated (including NEW JACK CITY, PANTHER and his pièce de résistance biopic about his father, BAADASSSSS!
The LOST creative team have produced a unique situation in network television: for the first time, fans are looking forward to the end of a series…as opposed to watching a great series continually get green lit until it becomes mediocre, running out of new ideas and story themes until finally advertisers drop off and the series is cancelled.
With LOST’s planned series ending, longtime fans anticipate the wrap-up of plot points and conflicts introduced five and six years ago. The writers continue to innovate, appropriately blowing up your standard serial drama expectations as they developed an entire new time line with season 6, further complicating the master story arch.
Now casual and devoted fans alike, don’t get discouraged.
LOST writers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof have already used the first 7 episodes of sesason 6 to pay off some of the island’s biggest mysteries:
1. The numbers – We now know where the origin of the numbers significance. Candidates from a master list of mortal heroes. Mortal warriors for the forces of righteousness, fallen and flawed as all humans.
2. The Smoke Monster – …is nature’s dark force. A force that also uses a genetic replica of John Locke’s body to walk the Earth island in human form.
3. Jacob – …God? Buddha? Jesus of suburbia? The Holy Ghost? Jacob has clearly come into focus as a force of nature. A force of positivity. A steward of the hero candidates.
4. Super Fanboy Easter Eggs – …continue to pay off. Minor characters like Rose, Leslie Artz and many, many others continue to return with crucial plot-forwarding screen time. Likewise, popular deceased characters like Boone Carlyle and Alex Rousseau have returned as part of the “flash sideways” time line. Wikipedia reveals – complete with credible sources – that nearly every major and minor character from the series will return for season 6 including Elizabeth Mitchell as fertility specialist Dr. Juliet Burke, Michelle Rodriguez as police officer Ana Lucia Cortez, Dominic Monaghan as rock star Charlie Pace, Jeremy Davies as deceased physicist Daniel Faraday, Rebecca Mader as anthropologist Charlotte Lewis, Harold Perrineau as Michael Dawson Maggie Grace as Shannon Rutherford, Katey Sagal as Locke’s ex-girlfriend Helen Norwood and Cynthia Watros as Hurley’s short-lived love interest, Libby Smith.
Considering the season 5 cliffhanger wherin series hero Jack Sheppard (his last name is beginning to have added subtext) puts the gears in motion to blow up an atomic bomb and yield the dual timelines in season 6, Jack has been a reflective, passive protagonist throughout season 6…until episode 7.
Absorbing and internally deliberating the universal forces of darkness and light – forces beyond his control – Jack’s standoff with fate, as the lit stick of dynamite hisses, allows the audience to see that Jack’s inner battle has been resolved: his transformation into a man of faith is complete. The prodigal hero even impresses ageless Others’ adviser Richard Albert with his show of faith in Jacob’s motives (at the crucial life-saving moment when Albert has lost his own faith).
Considering the show’s Western hemisphere production, it would be easy for the writer’s to make the good-versus-evil themes play out in a Judeo-Christian sub-textual framework. But show runners Cuse and Lindelof have managed to evade that pothole in which creative works like THE MATRIX and LORD OF THE RINGS unavoidably fell…an endorsement of monotheism by proxy. The promo photo tribute to “The Last Supper” might suggest otherwise, but LOST entire current season is more of a battle between good and evil as opposed to the Christian God and Devil.
Ben’s monologue at the end of act 2, prior to the final commercial break, pulses as a moving work of mannered acting, eliciting that same emotional push/pull that only an unspeakable car-crash combination of happiness and sadness can pronounce. That cold weather melancholy only a Superchunk song can elicit. Or a Nick Drake, Elliott Smith or Big Star song. Prosaic pop songs wherein crushing sadness is only alleviated because you (the listener) realize that there is at least one other person in the world (the songwriter) that feels the way you feel.
The monologue is punctuated by the unexpected response from Jacob’s mysterious guard, Ilana. Her character’s emotional response to Ben, that she’ll be willing to vouch for his soul, to give him another chance at redemption is one of the most original, pure storytelling devises that Lindelof and Cuse have created. Completely unexpected, the often tragic history that we’ve seen associated with Ben’s character arch makes the monologue and the entire episode payoff with a deep emotional punch unlike anything network television storytelling has ever encountered.
When I was a little kid, I thought the United States was the greatest country in the world. And in 1976, it very well may have been.
I remember singing Yankee Doodle Dandy in a chorus line at my private elementary school during our end of the year pageant. Being that it was the United States’ bi-centennial celebration, the feeling in the air was quite magnanimous and fantastic. Parades made their way through the Southern Florida streets. In Boca Raton, the Florida town where I spent my first 7 years, many of my schoolmates parents worked at IBM, as did my father, so there was a sense of financial security and middle-class stability as it was still possible to achieve the American Dream.
My father was a hard-working high school valedictorian who ran out of money while attending junior college, yet he was still able to secure good jobs at Lockheed Martin, then later at International Business Machines (IBM). I was proud of my dad when I was a little kid…and I didn’t even really know why. I think I was able to figure out just by watching popular culture that there were not a plethora of African American men working as systems analysts at IBM. Even as a young tyke, I knew my dad was special. Likewise, I quickly picked up that my mother was one of the most gifted high school English teachers in the country.
Now – all these years later – while I think about my country and my president…I feel more pride than I felt in 1976.
And I find it interesting that none of the news cycle pundits are questioning why Congress is voting down party lines – for every vote – for the first time in its history.
If you could put a microphone in the Republican’s caucus meetings, I’m convinced you’d hear: “The Nigger gets none of our votes…not a one…not for anything.”
I can’t wait for that racist, homophobic, sexist baby boomer generation to finally die off.
“The music business is a scornful, mirthless lover hellbent on breaking most musicians’ hearts,” said a very wise sage. Actually that’s not true, I just made that sentence up, but I think it’s more often true that not.
No talent pop stars with beautiful smiles often rise to the top of the mediocrity heap while some of the greatest recorded works by the most artful musicians never see the light of day. My friends and their former band Dynamite Hack still watch their greatest creative work collect dust as an unreleased album. Likewise, my old band Schatzi’s sophomore album Snow Is for Saving Hearts remains unreleased, tied up in legal limbo. (The film industry has it’s own version of this scenario – something called “development hell,” or turnaround purgatory – when a project or a great script can never get beyond developmental talks and negotiations.)
That jaded experience aside, Jan and Dean’s lost album Carnival of Sound is an interesting piece of music history that is finally seeing some sunlight thanks to Rhino Records’ Handmade division.
If you enjoy California surf music from the 1960s, you’ll enjoy this creative curiosity that Jan Berry spent 3 years recording after his unfortunate car accident on Dead Man’s Curve, ironically the very same stretch of road that his band immortalized with their hit song of the same name years earlier.
I love the majority of art created during the fertile period between 1967-1969. And Jan and Dean’s lost tracks are no different. Poppy, whimsical and artfully mixed in mono, Carnival of Sound is a deserving legacy to two musician’s that caught a horrible break during the height of their career.
As distribution becomes more and more available to the masses, albums like Carnival of Sound will hopefully find the appreciative niche audiences that they deserve.
I’ve been admiring Kristen Wiig in bit parts (ADVENTURELAND, KNOCKED UP) for a while now, but I hadn’t watched enough Saturday Night Live (SNL) to discover that she is a comic genius…until I watched her host the SNL primetime Christmas special as Gilly.
With Gilly – the little trouble-causing, Orphan Annie-resembling, minx – Wiig’s face becomes elastic, her voice and spacious timing are dastardly neurotic while her eyes bug right out of her head. You can tell that Wiig has fine-tuned her comic skills with more than 10,000 hours of rehearsal, improve and performance from the sheer intensity…she never breaks character (Jimmy Falon anyone?). With years of training as a member of The Groundlings, her focus and comic timing leave some of the other SNL cast members appearing amateurish and boring.
Digging up the best holiday related clips from season 1 to the present, the entire special was hilarious, but it was the Gilly character that forever sold me on Wiig’s mighty thespian powers.
The Gilly character and her childish desire to create anarchy while remaining mostly silent holds a mirror up to society. She becomes both light and dark, good and evil…and Wiig abandons her mastery of sarcasm with Gilly. Sadistic and adorable, Gilly is Wiig at her most brilliant…rolling the entirety of the dark chaos of the human condition into a character that barely speaks. It’s both creative and creepy…and I totally understand why they had Wiig host the Christmas clips show as Gilly.
I absolutely get it…and it’s genius. Look for Wiig to become SNL’s next break-out superstar.
This weekend, Wanda Sykes brings her super-blue, lesbian-friendly stand-up comedy to the Austin Music Hall. Sadly tickets must be moving slow as promoters have instituted a “buy 3 tickets get 1 free” campaign. Hopefully that enticement will get groups of friends up off the couch to see one of America’s funniest comediennes working.
Hollywood loves to cast Sykes as “the funny friend” in star vehicles with Anglo leads, but she’s at her best when she playing the part of someone 180 degrees opposite from her own persona…like her turn as Biggie Shorty in the 2001 cult favorite POOTIE TANG. That role also revealed that Sykes is a stone cold fox! Well aware of the subtext interlaced in Hollywood’s gender politics, Sykes often downplays her beauty. She also dresses without showing off a ton of skin or clevage, making sure she doesn’t upstage her co-stars in their various leading roles.
Sykes killed it at the recent presidential correspondent’s dinner, so look for her to be in top form.
I ran across this quote the other day from Hunter Thompson, a journalist that has always inspired me.
“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” -Hunter S. Thompson
I couldn’t agree with this statement more. The music business is like a sleeping with a super cruel lover. Someone that bites you during oral sex. I miss touring the country and the freedom of waking up and knowing that all I had to do is play music with all my heart for about 45 minutes in the evening. But, I don’t miss the business of music: dealing with labels, booking agents and managers. (Although I must note here that the 2 booking agents I worked with the most – Deb Dietz and Tim Edwards of Flower Booking – worked tirelessly very hard for very litte money.)
Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks: Malkmus (in blue shirt) was making literate indie rock before it was cool
Less than 10 years after the 1990s’ melancholy sunset, critical consensus continues to build that Stephen Malkmus and his old band Pavement were one of the most influential rock bands of that entire decade, forging timeless indie-ethos rock from a crucible overflowing with high art/post modern aesthetics, sardonically poetic lyrics and a new genre pastiche wherein “Exile on Main Street” loose-feeling slack rock combined with the steely song craft of one of Malkmus’ favorite bands, The Fall.
Malkmus and his current band The Jicks are currently touring – at their leisure – behind their 2008 release “Real Emotional Trash,” his fourth – and best – post-Pavement solo album.
When I woke up Malkmus at his Portland home for this interview (first published in a super-abridged version in the Austin American-Statesman), he was initially groggy. After a few yawns, the lyrically hyper-literate, ever-ironic songwriter proved to be uncannily happy to expound on his early influences, whether or not Sesame Street’s Elmo inspired a song on “Real Emotional Trash” and how he considered becoming an Austinite after the release of Pavement’s “Terror Twilight.”
Black Swan : First of all I want to thank you for taking time out to do the interview cause I know you’re super-busy. I really appreciate it.
Malkmus:(He replies totally groggy as if he literally just woke up) Yeah. No big.
Black Swan : I got the tape recorder going; so I’m just gonna roll on through (the interview).
I’ve been listening to your music for years and I’ve probably seen a zillion Pavement shows – and your solo shows too – and have enjoyed them all. But some of your recent guitar playing on “Real Emotional Trash” is ridiculously smokin’. Did you start playing when you were five? Or did you come out of the womb playing?
Malkmus: Yeah. Ummm. Let me think. Not really. I played acoustic guitar and stuff before high school. And then I played bass in a punk band. But I always thought that I was going to be a guitar player.
Back in those days, there were people like Greg Ginn and Flipper, the Butthole Surfers and the Meat Puppets who were playing punk music but they were playing it differently. I got to see them in person. And I’d rather be those guys than just the bar chord guy in the Circle Jerks, you know?
So anyway, I was into that, and then over the course of 20 years I’ve just been listening to lots of different stuff. Now I can go ahead and be myself and have a voice on guitar instead of just have it be a backing instrument, you know? (He yawns. He’s still waking up.)
And so, that’s what I’ve been doing.
Black Swan:The way The Jicks do it live…is it a little bit different without a second guitar player?
Malkmus: Well, (Jicks’ multi-instrumentalist) Mike Clark plays guitar sometimes. Depends on the song. Sometimes he plays piano. But yeah, we’ve always had a rhythm guitarist in the live outfit – like Scott (Kannenberg) from Pavement and Mike to fill out the parts that are on the albums.
It sounds like the record, sort of, you know? Mike has room to go off on some of the guitar parts he plays. He doesn’t really play the solos (exactly the same), like (for instance on) “Hopscotch Willie” on the album. But, he’s got his choice to let it go where he wants.
Black Swan:I don’t want the interview to all be about guitar playing. But then again, almost everybody in Austin plays guitar, so I think people will enjoy hearing about it.
Malkmus:(He laughs) Yeah, they have a guitar legacy in Austin. People there love guitars for some reason.
(I spare him the litany of Austin guitarists like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Johnson, Paul Leary, etc…because he obviously is already familiar with Austin’s most notorious guitar players.)
Black Swan: On “Dragonfly Pie,” kinda toward the end of the song, there is something that the guitar does where it almost starts to sound like a keyboard. Is that a pedal that you use live?
Malkmus: That’s just that Ooh Wah pedal that Zvex makes. Yeah, when we did that song we were just thinking of a way to make it less Sabbath-y and (for a way it could) morph into something weirder. So I was adding some electronics on it. Like, there’s some Moog keyboard I played in the other parts of the song…just something to make it so it was not so Queens of the Stone Age, or a Sabbath-type song, you know? The chorus is never like that. But I think that’s what the goal was by treating the guitars and adding these crazy keyboards.
Black Swan: I also wanted to ask you about tunings, and then I promise this will be my last guitar question.
Malkmus: No problem.
Black Swan: I have a friend named Austin Miller that was sitting down trying to play some of your songs, and he was like, “Dude, I can’t, I can’t do it. I think there is some alternate tunings going on that I can’t figure out.”
Malkmus: (yawning) Yeah. On this record, there’s maybe…that first song, “Dragonfly Pie” is a standard one. But I’ve been doing more. I used to be doing a lot of varied (tunings). The “Drop D” is kind of the gateway on (alternate) tunings that most people begin with. I fiddled around with that in a lot of different ways. Tuning some of the lower strings to higher and lower tones. But, there was a lot of tuning the E string to C and the A string to G and variations on that. A lot of the songs are in that tuning this time. But I’ve had a couple of other tunings through the different eras. I’ve kind of settled on that G – playing things in sort of an open G basically – but with the first string tuned to C also, which is my own invention, slightly.
Black Swan: Cool!
Malkmus: That’s probably why (your friend Austin couldn’t figure out how to play some of the songs). I mean…(the alternate tunings) make the songs…you know…and I’m playing chords and some standard things where I’m not really going for a build up of dissonance of the Sonic Youth variety. We’re just going for a way to make things sound not exactly normal as we’ve been through this rock ‘n’ roll (thing) for quite a while.
Black Swan: Yeah the first time I saw you play was opening for Sonic Youth in Austin at Liberty Lunch on Wednesday, September 16, 1992.
Malkmus: Yeah…Isn’t that a restaurant now or something?
Black Swan: Yeah it’s a restaurant and an empty Intel building. So it’s really kind of sad that they paved it to put up an empty computer building where the company never even moved in.
Malkmus: Yeah, that’s bad. That was a nice place. That was like the classic Austin experience – the indoor/outdoor type place. They’ve still got those places, but that one was kind of the perfect size and stuff.
Black Swan: Yeah it had a great vibe.
Malkmus: Yeah. That was a long time ago. Good job.
(The interviewer laughs from the congratulatory compliment on being considered an old-schooler.)
Malkmus: How old were you then? Were you in college?
Black Swan:Yeah I was probably like, 23 or something. Definitely good times.
Malkmus: Yeah.
Black Swan: The song “Baltimore” on “Real Emotional Trash,” it kind sounds like the band is getting to open up, almost like the sections where you’re jamming could have been improvised in practice. Did those sections come about like that? Or were they created after more planned-out demos?
Malkmus: Yeah within reason, the “Baltimore” one, those are all parts. I just made a riff. For the end of the song, it has got a sort of generic riff. I would call it. Slightly generic, in that, I imagine it like a Who song or something. It doesn’t sound like it’s from their really rocking time. And it’s kind of rocking, but obviously not as good as them. But, towards the end we’re just going off in a crazy direction. But that one is (actually) organized.
I’d say that “Elmo Delmo” has some space in it. And the end of it – and some of the middle – wasn’t made up. Except on that take, I don’t think there was any plan on when the song was going to end. On that take (yawns) it just…it was kinda new, so…”
Black Swan: Did the song title “Elmo Delmo” off “Real Emotional Trash” come about from you being a dad now, and you probably having seen a couple of episodes of Sesame Street with “Tickle Me Elmo”?
Malkmus:(laughing) Yeah. I probably said (Elmo Delmo) cause I wouldn’t have said Elmo, but I was just looking for something slightly retarded, in a non-pejorative way, to rhyme there. Something like The Fall would do if they were kind of ganged up, but then unfortunately it was Elmo, you know?
Black Swan: It’s cool though.
Malkmus: Yeah. (Laughing) That’s the way it goes. It’s not that fun to sing anymore, I wish I had changed it. But…you know. I kind of feel dumb singing it now. But that’s what it was at the time.
Black Swan: Well, I know I seen a few shows in the past where you changed the entire words to a couple of songs. You can always do that.
Malkmus: That’s true. I could make up something else to chant there. It’s hard to make something phonetic in those parts. That came out, but I feel a little bit embarrassed sometimes singing “Elmo Delmo.” It is kind of dumb (he laughs again).
(Rallying) But it’s more about the music at that time. By song eight…by song eight you shouldn’t really be listening to the lyrics anymore (he says slightly facetiously). You should be doing your own thing. The music’s just in the background.
Black Swan: Yeah…by that point you should be…you should be inspired…doing your thing…
Malkmus: You’re there…painting, drawing, writing your great screenplay or whatever…inspired by the band (Both interviewer and Malkmus are laughing).
Black Swan: This next question – I tried to research it cause I didn’t want to ask you questions that a zillion people have already asked you – but how did Janet Weiss (Sleater-Kinney, Quasi, Elliott Smith’s touring band) become a Jick?
Malkmus: Well, you’re going to break this to all of Austin, and maybe the world, as the web is the world. She’s friends with (Jicks’ bassist) Joanna Bolme and me from the old, local rockers of Portland. She’s part of the establishment – and Austin obviously has one too, I’m sure. She’s been playing here in a lot of different bands.
I met her in the ‘90s. When Sleater-Kinney broke-up, I thought, “Well Janet’s free, and she’s a free player too,” so it wasn’t very hard. And Joanna plays in her band, Quasi – they took on a bass player about 2 years ago. So, it was like: hop over here on to our stool.
It was pretty natural. And it was good timing and all that. I hadn’t started (playing) with somebody else. It just made sense.
Black Swan: How did you settle in Portland? Obviously a lot of your lyrics talk about California where you grew up. But what drew you to Portland?
Malkmus: I don’t know, you know? Probably you could ask a lot of people from Austin how they ended up there, the ones that aren’t from Texas. Or you could ask a lot of people here that are from Austin, but are moving here now (i.e. Brit Daniel of Spoon).
It just seemed like a nice place at the time. Not trampled over. It seemed kind of like an experimental city in a certain way. And also not a completely homogenized place, you know? Every place has a soul and everything. But from the outside, in Portland there is some variety in the architecture and the businesses and stuff.
And I’m from the West Coast.
(With a resolute sigh while changing gears in his mind) Why I stayed is more a matter of stasis. And once you get up here in the corner, it’s hard to leave, you know?
Black Swan: Had you ever considered moving to Austin?
Malkmus:(enthusiastically) I have before.
Black Swan: Since the two towns have a similar vibe?
Malkmus: Yeah, totally! I have before. (He strikes his most enthusiastic tone of the interview. Now he finally sounds totally awake.)
At the time I moved (to Portland), I thought, “Well a lot of people have moved here.” When I was in my early 30s, I thought it was more collegiate or youthful there (in Austin) in a certain way. And a lot of my friends that have moved to Austin moved there straight out of college, like people are doing here now.
So I thought, “Well, I’m not looking for that right now. I’m looking for something…more mature.” (He says laughing). And I thought, “I’ll go here (to Portland).” And I found out, obviously there are all kinds of people that live in Austin and it’s not only 20 somethings…or “Slackers,” whatever that is. So that’s why I moved and that’s why I came here.
But, it could have been Austin.
And then I thought that maybe it’s too hot there in the summer.
Stephen Malkmus understands the importance of rock music and swimming at night.
Black Swan: No, you were right. It’s ridiculously hot here.
Malkmus: So I wasn’t sure. I know the winter is better (down in Austin). But here, if you like these medium-sized American cities that are kind of liberal, you could have it perfect if you lived in Austin in the winter and here (in Portland) in the summer. You could really work something out there.
Black Swan: Yeah…that’s something to consider doing.
Malkmus: But who really wants to invest that much of their soul in these perfect little cities? I don’t know. Maybe it’s better to live in New York and Hawaii or something for more intense changes, you know?
Black Swan: Well, but there’s that thing about New York. And you’ve lived there so you would know. But when you think about man and the state of nature, and how in a perfect world in the state of nature, you might not have so many people packed into so little space. And you get away from your natural inclinations because you are so disconnected from nature.
Malkmus: That’s true. (He says earnestly) I think it’s weird there. And people do get a little crazy. But they also seem pretty happy, you know? There are people that I know that live in NYC and there is just something…
There’s a lot of cool people and because of all the people, there’s a lot of great people there. Maybe they’re forced to live there, or they like it. I like that about it.
(Changing mental gears again) But I feel cramped, very often, with the kids there (in NYC). We spend some time there and I feel…I get mad at inconvenience and I feel cramped in crappy supermarkets. My bourgeois body can’t take it anymore, my 42-year-old bourgeois body. Once you’ve lived in these places (like Austin and Portland) where you just go down to the local supermarket, where it’s just more casual, you know? I don’t know.
Black Swan: Yeah, I know what you’re saying.
Malkmus: Yeah, but…if you’re loaded with cash, you get your groceries delivered and you take car services everywhere and then your bourgeois body is fine. (Laughs)
Black Swan: “Bourgeois Body.” That is a good prospective title, I think.
Malkmus:(laughs) Yeah.
Black Swan: Hey, I read that you studied History. And I know that History classes and English classes will sometimes overlap. Like you could sign up for an English class, but you could sign up for the same class in the history department.
Malkmus: Um, hmmm.
Black Swan: So I guess what I’m getting at is this: did you also take a lot of English classes?
Malkmus: Not really. No, I didn’t. I just thought I could read on the side. Personally, I didn’t like classic stuff, just from going to high school (and reading it). You know, when they would start doing John Dunne – that’s really boring – or Chaucer. I don’t want to read that. So I thought, “Well I can just read my own fiction books on the side and get my own free education there. I don’t need to go to class for that.”
Black Swan: What about creative writing classes?
Malkmus: Ummmm…no. I never took any of those. I applied for one once and they didn’t accept me because it was kind of limited to get in there. And you had to give a sample. And I think I wrote a sample, but it was really stupid I’m sure, you know? Like it was some conceptual, 2 page, really dumb thing. I can see it now. It wasn’t like…real at all.
Back then in the ‘80s, you were supposed to be real, like maybe you are now. But there wasn’t any George Sanders or anybody like that yet. (He sighs.) You just had to write about what you know…or whatever (laughing).
Black Swan: Yeah…I was an English major at UT here in Austin. And anything that was unique or different, a lot of times they’d just want to squash that creativity right out of people. Well, not every time but sometimes.
Malkmus: Not always, I’m sure. But yeah, if you were at Virginia (back then), it was really a conservative writing department.
Black Swan: Yep. UT Austin was the same.
Malkmus: And you know it was also Raymond Carver time. And Tobias Wolf. And real writers of great prose. And I appreciate that stuff. But at that time I was probably writing something more imaginative and not, you know, it probably wasn’t that good also (laughing).
So I got rejected. I never did that.
There were also plenty of young guys that thought they were writers back then. They were trying to get laid by being writers or whatever.
Black Swan: And where are they now…
Malkmus: And it would work (though). Yeah, this one friend of mine, he went to writers’ school. He was a chef and he could cook Cornish Game Hens. And he was really trying to get the chicks that way. And it was workin’ for him.
(We both laugh.)
They caught on eventually, I’m sure.
Black Swan: He was all like, “Yeah…let me write you some poesy and cook you some Cornish Game Hens.” (I jest through my laughing.)
Malkmus: Yeah…exactly.
Black Swan: OK…I think that’s the last question. Although I should probably ask you – because people are going to be curious – are you going to play any Bob Dylan or Pavement songs?
Malkmus: Ummmm, I don’t think so. (But) if that is going to make more people come to the show…? It’s probably going to be close to sold-out, although Cat Power is playing that same night. So you can ask her. She did a song for that (Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan biography I’M NOT THERE) too.
I don’t think we’re going to play any of those songs. But, you know, it’s going to be a really phantasmagoric event regardless.
Black Swan: You know, if you played the whole new album start to finish I think people would be happy.
Malkmus: That would be good.
We’ll play a selection of songs. But we don’t do any Pavement jams. And we don’t do any Dylan. We have some other covers we’ve been working up, so…we’ll see if we bring those out. Some of those are screamers and I probably don’t want to lose my voice on the first show of the second leg.
Black Swan: I guess that’s it. But one more aside: “Gangsters and Pranksters.” I don’t know how in the world you came up with that song?
Malkmus:(He laughs) It’s pretty funny.
Black Swan: …Sometimes I’ll be on the floor laughing while I’m listening to it because it’s so sincerely funny.
Malkmus: That one came out good. It was very spur of the moment. Sometimes spur of the moment things are good, and sometimes, you know, they’re “Elmo Delmo,” which is all right…but thanks a lot.
Black Swan: Oh yeah. Thanks again. And thanks for taking time out.
Malkmus: Nice talking to you. And way to be a survivor. Still crazy after all these years. That’s what I say to the people that keep going to shows like I would (if I weren’t touring all the time).
I met some people in Western Massachusetts, a really cute couple. They were older than me and they were like, “We’re here to see the show!” And I’d been running into teenager kids that are just like, “I never saw Pavement” and “You’re my hero!”-type kids, you know?
Black Swan: Yeah…
Malkmus: And then there are (occasionally) these older couples (that come out to shows). I was like, “All right.” These Western-Mass.-kind-of-liberal-people.
Black Swan: Yeah, yeah.
Malkmus: They were almost kind of working class looking people, you know? Or just…normal. Cause people are normal out there.
And I was like, “This is great. You’re real music fans.” You know, I don’t see them very often (he says sighing slightly). (Occasionally) we have these people that you can tell, they like to rock or whatever…still. (laughs)
Black Swan: But that’s cool to have kids coming out that are actually getting into for the first time.
Malkmus: Yeah that’s kind of weird though when something (like Pavement) has a life of its own. Obviously it’s weirder for these baby-boomer icons…when it happens forever…like Jim Morrison or Hendrix or something. I’d never put myself in those categories. But you kind of almost feel like the Velvet Underground or something…when something becomes iconic. That’s kind of funny.
But we need new things for that. And I guess it’s gonna happen for every decade. (Although) you know the ‘80s was hard I guess (since they don’t have an iconic genre defining underground rock band).
Black Swan: I don’t know what’s coming next. But it does seem like the Pavement’s records and legacy have taken on a life of its own. But it’s cool now that you are on the fourth solo records. The Jicks records are getting a life of there own too.
Malkmus: Yeah…well, this time at least. It’s gone hand-in-hand with people wanting to know about Pavement a little bit, and a canonization of Pavement and me – and then about this new album. There seems to be some sort of…whatever its called…where…not synchronicity…but that thing where things are going together. It’s that dumb business term people try for. They bring some guy in and pay him $2000 to come up with the word.
Black Swan: Synergy?
Malkmus:(laughing) Yeah. They pay him $2,000 to say that word, you know…some business coach.
I want to be one of those guys. “We need more synergy.” (he says in mocking jest) “I’m a futurist and we need synergy.”
(After realizing the time) I gotta roll.
Black Swan: Hey good talking to you.
Malkmus: Hey, likewise. I’ll see ya’ in a couple of days.
Vocalist Aaron Berhens and keyboardist Thomas Turner rock Trophy's.
I just uploaded some shots of Austin, TX electronica rockers Ghostland Observatory rocking Trophy’s Bar back in 2006 (back when they could still play small clubs in Austin. I’ll upload the definitive interview I did with them quite soon. As soon as possible. You can check out the other Ghostland photos in the blackswansongs flickr photostream here.
The interview was conducted over three different sessions. The first with both members after a show. Then the second and third parts were conducted with each member seperately. Behrens and Turner have such unique backgrounds that them at first seem like unlikely partners, but so many things had to align just perfectly that their collaboration feels more like fate during the telling of their story.
Friday night, the eve before my birthday, I stayed in my tiny downtown Austin apartment and enjoyed a Sidney Poitier film retrospective on one of my favorite television channels, Turner Classic Movies (TCM). I just happened upon the fest, but it was exactly what I was looking for and I happened upon it at exactly the right time.
After watching A RAISIN IN THE SUN and his academy award winning turn in the sublime LILIES OF THE FIELD, I watched a film of his I’d never heard of…BUCK AND THE PREACHER. After an informative introduction from TCM host Robert Osborne, I got comfortable on the couch and strapped in for two (more) hours, but this time instead of Poitier’s brooding antihero or his amiable Christ-like everyman, he wowed me with an original action tale amid 19th century black activism.
Poitier deftly directs himself in the lead as Buck. And it must be noted that this was his debut turn as director, Osborne said that he took over as director only a few weeks before shooting began in the middle of Mexico…without the studio’s official consent when Poitier and co-producer, co-star Harry Belafonte realized that the man they’d chose to direct wasn’t the right fit.
Released in 1972, Poitier takes the “exploitation” right out of Blaxploitation. The story revolves around Buck, a “wagon master” that attempts to lead freed slaves from Louisiana westward so that they might receive their 40 acres and a mule. The freed slaves encounter genocidal night raiders (masquerading as plantation labor recruiters) as they try to make their way to Colorado. Amazingly the clan also encounters a con-man preacher (Belafonte) who they must also escape until he changes his ways and decides to help Buck and the freed slaves.
The pace is brisk and accelerated with a clever sub-plot involving native Americans, accurately portrayed (as opposed to the mumbo-jumbo spouting caricatures that Hollywood was well-accustomed to depicting).
I’d always dug Belafonte, but now I have a new appreciation for his acting prowess. Belafonte obviously relishes his role as the smooth-talking, rotten-teethed grifter who has a change of heart at exactly the correct time. Belafonte is the court jester to Poitier’s kingly, Christ-like Buck. He is the Flavor Flav to Poitier’s Chuck D. And he is so much more…Belafonte character arc has a much larger pitch than any other character in the film. Poitier might have had the meatier, harder role with its subtle degrees of dramatic modulations, but Belafonte’s scene-stealing role should have been an Academy Award winning performance. Sadly the Academy’s blindness to great performances by people of color was still institutionalized despite Poitier’s undeniable winning performance in LILIES OF THE FIELD.
Action, adventure, comedy, drama, tragedy, pathos all rolled up into the story of freed slaves trying to make it to the promise land. It’s a thing of glory and much better than the trailer lets on.
Make sure to set your TIVO, iCal, Google Calendar or DVR for September 18, 2009 at 10:00 p.m. and/or October 03, 2009 at 2:00 p.m. as it will show again on Turner Classic Movies.
TCM’s timing for Friday night’s Poitier retrospective couldn’t have been more prescient: on Thursday President Barack Obama awarded Poitier with the highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Radiohead's artwork for "These Are My Twisted Words"
Well either Radiohead never had anything planned for Wall of Ice or they did have something planned and now they are just really pissed off that the shark got jumped a little early…cause the wallofice.com page is no longer linking to their W.A.S.T.E. store.
But, in chummy Radiohead fashion, they’ve released a new single for all to download – complete with cool artwork – for free.
The five gentlemen from Oxfordshire, England have done it to me again. While In Rainbows continues to climb my all-time favorite albums ladder, I heard “House of Cards” this evening and tapped into the subtext of the lyrics at exactly the prefect time. I felt like Mr. Thom Yorke had penned the lyrics exactly for me. I researched the video and was reminded that in lieu of traditional cameras, the video’s director “shot” with lidar technology which detects the proximity of objects from a sensor and yields a grainy, grid-like appearance.
Turns out the technology is not proprietary; the data used to make the video was released under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license and is available at Google Code.
While the story of the lyrics echoes a scene from the masterful Ang Lee film THE ICE STORM, I keyed into the initial couplet:
I don’t want to be your friend.
I just want to be your lover.
And then I got wrapped up in the next:
No matter how it ends.
No matter how it starts.
Luckilybefore I got too depressed thinking about lost love, I started thinking about M-theory string theory. I watched a documentary on the Science Channel that explained M-theory in layman’s terms. It worked out to be a much needed distraction for my brain’s solipsistic nature.
Once they broached the eleventh dimension and parallel universes, I was sufficiently safe from entering a manic episode.
Author Martin Amis smartly put his writing room in his garden...away from the house, where he can still hear his kids play, and where he's allowed to smoke.
Currently I’m trapped in an over-priced apartment in downtown Austin, but that will change beginning January 1, 2010 (when my lease expires).
Assuming I’m still living in Austin, Texas, I look forward to finding an affordable duplex…or something with lots of windows and less people. Living here, I’m reminded why I’ve always hated apartment complexes: people and their horrible habits. People that don’t pick up after their dog. People not correctly disposing of their garbage. People being loud. People, people, people.
A recent article in Lifehacker reminded me that there are more fortunate souls in the world working in much more calm and friendly environments.
I’m picturing – and looking for – a garage apartment that overlooks green spaces. Perhaps something like author Martin Amis’ workspace…but with two rooms.
Check out this article from LifeHacker which shows the work spaces of some very industrious and intelligent people.
Film auteur Roman Polanski was arrested while attempting to enter Switzerland for the Zurich Film Festival earlier today. He faces possible extradition to the United States where he has remained a fugitive since 1977 for having sex with a 13-year-old girl, authorities said Sunday.
This case is very, very complex. Polanski has already paid a settlement to his victim, Samantha Geimer after she sued him. Both Geimer and Polanski have asked a U.S. appeals court in California to overturn a judges’ refusal to throw out his case. Polanski’s attorneys claims misconduct by the now-deceased judge who had arranged a plea bargain and then reneged. Further, speculation remains that Switzerland may be trying to placate U.S. justice department officials who have been attempting to add transparency to Switzerland’s bank account system wherein rich individuals around the world are allowed to “hide” their money in the Swiss accounts without paying taxes in their home country. (If this changes, plot points involving Swiss bank accounts in James Bond films and other espionage movies will be forever altered.)
Polanski has had his fair share of hardships between escaping genocide during WWII and the Manson family killing his pregnant wife Sharon Tate. But I personally don’t think that should exempt him from paying his debt to society. Between O.J. Simpson, Robert Blake and countless others, we’ve all seen that if you have money, connections and celebrity in California, you can be above the law. I think the dismissal of Polanski’s case would just be further grist for that warped and smelly mill.
If California does decide to seek extradition for Polanski, I think they should mark the moment as a sea change wherein money and fame are no longer allowed to trump truth and justice in our judicial system. Polanski has created some amazing art in his lifetime…and he has been well compensated for it. But those things, accompanied with his hardships, do not make it OK to get a 13 year old drunk on champagne and then perform oral, anal and missionary sex on her. I know it was the heady 1970s and all – and he was under intoxicating environs house-sitting for Jack Nicholson – but that shouldn’t give you license to date rape a child.
"Some of your friends are already this fucked," said Steve Albini.
Within a two week period I’ve had two friends approach me about attending a seminar…one to join Ignite Energy and one to join LTDTeam.com. Being that I’m incredibly skeptical of anything and everything, especially anything that promises financial rewards, I Googled both companies because something just seemed fishy.
A couple of Google clicks on “LTDTeam.com” combined with the word “scam” immediately brought up this Yahoo answer. Likewise, one click of “Ignite” and “scam” brought up a ton of hits.
At first I felt a little insulted that these friends would try to suck me into their collective mess(es), but then I remembered that these “multi level marketing” businesses often insist that the participants try to get their friends and family involved before anyone else.
I feel sorry that someone wasn’t able to warn these two friends of mine. They are both women, but one has a rich husband and the other does not…meaning, the results are going to be much more disastrous for one of my friends.
If a mult-level marketing company tells you how much you will earn by recruiting rather than by selling, then it is moving closer to a pyramid scheme. People often get hooked in because they see all these possible profits from recruiting others: friends, families, acquaintances, the guy pumping gasoline on the other side of the pump. Unless you get in at the beginning, your earnings will come from recruiting other people.
Unless you love sales and are willing to sell to everyone – from your neighborhood letter carrier to the woman ringing people up at Luby’s Cafeteria – avoid multi-level marketing schemes.
Saturday evening – just two nights ago – I had the pleasure of attending a sold-out Grizzly Bear and Beach House show at Emo’s. I only caught the last Beach House song…and I’m glad because what I saw of their last song did not sound very good.
I like the Beach House mp3s I’ve heard, but whoa, was the bit I heard of their live show shaky.
Now Grizzly Bear on the other hand, were really amazing. I’m not surprised Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood called them his favorite band.
I wrote a review of their show which was published in the Austin American-Statesman here.
Last night I attended one of the best show’s I’ve seen in a long, long time. I have a copy of the Bon Iver record “For Emma, Forever Ago,” and I knew that the show would be good, but I didn’t expect it to be one of the best shows I’ve ever seen.
There is something about vocalist Justin Vernon’s voice and songs that I identify with wholeheartedly. Knowing his story – how he wrote and recorded the album in isolation, hibernating away in upstate Wisconsin after breaking up with his girlfriend and his previous band – allows the songs to resonate in your soul that much more deeply.
Bon Iver — a.k.a. indie-folk musician Justin Vernon and band — turned in one of the most memorable performances from the entire ACL Festival weekend Sunday evening at a sold-out show at the Paramount Theatre.
The band’s final performance before their tour-ending Wisconsin homecoming show couldn’t have been scripted better. The sold-out audience was hyped, fueled by adrenaline, alcohol (and who knows what else) after three days of music, sun and rain. The Paramount Theatre’s acoustics sounded as if they had been fine-tuned especially for Vernon’s booming falsetto. The show was also the final night of Bon Iver’s tour with opening band Megafaun (a freak-folk group of stunning power featuring members of Vernon’s previous band DeYarmond Edison).
Vernon was very gracious the entire evening, whether he was calling up an old friend to start the show by reciting a poem, or whether repeatedly thanking the audience for taking part in an evening that was seemingly a poignant apex in his life.
“I can’t express enough gratitude for y’all showing up to fill this beautiful theater,” Vernon said.
Bon Iver began the show with the first three songs from debut album “For Emma, Forever Ago” played in sequence, a comforting start for those familiar with what’s turned out to be one of the strongest debuts of the decade. The band’s emphasis on tone and harmony was obvious from the detail in the arrangements of their four-part vocal harmonies to the intricacies of their instrumentation. On “Skinny Love,” bassist Matthew McCaughan and guitarist Michael Noyce both played drums, adding a primal, inescapable beat accompaniment. On other songs McCaughan simultaneously played bass and a kickdrum with his foot while drummer Sean Carey played a small electronic keyboard.
As strong as the songs on “For Emma, Forever Ago” are, the band’s tireless touring for the past two years has developed them into an impassioned unit. Whereas some artists become detached from songs after performing them again and again, Vernon slipped into the songs like an old comfortable vintage sweater, filling them out with his passionate voice. The crooks and crannies of each song were not dusty and dark, but were places where Vernon’s bright voice illuminated, revealing the artistry of his song craft.
Just past the set’s mid-point, Vernon played an unexpected, rousing cover of the Outfield’s “Your Love,” inciting screams and laughter from the audience. Vernon pulled back the rhythm and created a bouncing groove, emphasizing a backbeat pocket that doesn’t exist in the original song.
An ethereal and sublime version of “re: Stacks” followed where Vernon played solo for the first time of the evening. The instrumentation stripped away to just his voice and guitar emphasized the power of the lyric and Vernon’s immense songwriting talent, recalling everything that was inspiring in Nick Drake’s music while being wholly original.
Bon Iver closed the night with a two-song encore. The first was the elegiac “For Emma,” then he brought Megafaun and various friends up on stage to cover Megafaun’s “Worried Mind” (In the video above, you can see a version of the two bands performing “Worried Mind” in San Francisco a few days earlier). The group of musicians huddled along the edge of the proscenium and used only the theater’s acoustics as amplification, Asylum Street Spankers style. After a few verses, they called on the audience to sing-along to the chorus, a cathartic “Come ease your mind, come on ease your worried mind.” The collaboration received a standing ovation (as did the first set and Megafaun’s brilliant opening set), proving that sometimes the most powerful performances at a music festival are not merely the loudest and largest.
Setlist
Flume
Lump Sum
Skinny Love
Brackett, WI
Blood Bank
Beach Baby
Josie
Creature Fear
re: Stacks
The Wolves (Act I and II)
Some nice person was generous enough to post their high definition video of Thom Yorke’s new (and still unnamed) band during their live debut Saturday night at the Echoplex in Los Angeles.
The band definitely qualifies as a supergroup: Yorke in front on vocals, Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, Beck/R.E.M. drummer Joey Waronker, percussionist/multi-instrumentalist Mauro Refosco, and Flea on bass.
Check this video out! And don’t forget to blow it up to full screen. Or better still, cable it to your 1080 p television and check it out super large. The sound is decent and the HD digital video maintains so much quality that the bigger it gets, the more you feel like you are actually at the show…a strange effect of the HD video combined with the location in the room where the videographer is standing.
The one-sheet for MANCORA...I feel your temperature rising already.
Late night Saturday night at my crib included an HBO On Demand screening of MANCORA, a tight, sexy, Peruvian film directed by Ricardo de Montreuil.
This film blindsided me because I hadn’t read or heard anything about it. It made the festival rounds last year, and it appears to have received an excellent reception at Sundance Film Festival’s 2008 screenings.
MANCORA was very stylish. The cameras moved smoothly through the environment with the life-like grace of the hand-held camera work you might see in a documentary. Peru served as a lead character too: the landscape, people and culture all colliding to guide the lead character Santi into a life-changing epiphany regarding sex, desire and coping with the loss of a family member through extreme balls-to-the-wall hedonism.
This film was steamy. Sexy. Caliente. It will make you want to hang-out with your lover and just take all your clothes off and jump into an enormous, warm body of water. And the film wasn’t at all sleazy or corny. It was just pure, unbridled Peruvian sensuality captured on film in a very creative and original way.
There is subtext about class-battles between dark-skinned Indian people from the country side versus the young, urban, light-skinned Spanish and Portuguese-speaking upper class. And Miami-born actor Enrique Murciano nearly steals the film portraying Iñigo, an affluent “gringo” and Lothario-type who speaks fluent Spanish, yet plays the part of the Ugly American with devilish elan.
I’m reluctant to give any of the plot away, because the film unfolds like that adventure you always dreamed of taking during college. The director spent many years as the creative director for MTV Latin America, so he has a highly-trained visual eye and keeps the viewer entertained with about five or six of the most beautiful young actors in all South America. There’s plenty of eye candy for both men and women in this sexually-charged drama.
I watched it alone, but I definitely recommend watching MANCORA with your significant other…then after the film is done the two of you can plot and hatch plans for your own trip to northern Peru’s bohemian beach paradise.
To view the film’s official Flickr photostream, click here.
One of the BlackSwanSongs’s contributors received a byline on http://brooklynvegan.com for an excerpt of the report below combined with the photos above.
Jay Z appeared very comfortable playing the role of the gracious “king of hip-hop.” Memphis Bleek dropped counterpoint rhymes, providing hardscrabble verbal interplay without the silliness of a sideman like Flavor Flav. I was a casual Jay Z fan going into the show (I bought a “Hard Knock Life” mix tape and have downloaded a couple of other records), but by the end of the show I had been become a hardcore Jay Z fan for life.
The show highlights were too numerous to list here, but they included the rock and bass bombast of “99 Problems,” the audience’s deafening call and response during “Jigga What, Jigga Who” and the booming, thuggish, palpitation-inducing low-end produced by his 10-piece band during “Dirt” and “Big Pimpin’.”
And when Jay Z wasn’t showing us Texans how his crew goes hard in Brooklyn, he spoke from the heart during his between song banter. “I know it sounds cliche, but don’t let any haters block your dream,” Hova said earnestly during one of the final breaks. Another one of the show’s more intimate moments came when he brought up vocalist Bridget Kelly for two songs. After her inspired assist on “Empire State of Mind,” Jigga Man smiled his biggest smile of the evening and said, “Damn…she put something extra on it for Texas…she put some extra bar-b-que sauce on it for Texas!”
Before Jay Z’s final curtain call, he took a break to turn on the house lights and point out individuals in all areas of the basketball arena, personalizing the show and reducing the scale as he talk to individuals, calling them out by their attire, homemades signs, dancing skills, etc.
The set list below is word-for-word identical to the setlist at the front of the stage (which I photographed). I’ve left their abbreviations and notes in tact.
SETLIST: RUN THIS TOWN
D.O.A.
Takeover
U Don’t Know
99 Problems
Show Me What You Got
Give It To Me
Diamonds
Jigga
Izzo
Jigga What
P.S.A.
Heart of City (live)
Already Home (last verse Acapella)
Empire State of Mind
A Star Is Born
So Ambitious
Dirt
—–break—–
Thank You
(PLAYBACK SET)
Big Pimpin’
Hardknock Life
Encore
Forever Young
The first time I’d heard of Owl City was when I checked the Emo’s show listing in the back of the printed edition of the Austin Chronicle and their show at Emo’s was sold-out about three months in advance. Out of 50 upcoming road shows, the Owl City show was the only one sold-out. I immediately went to their MySpace page (normal early 21st century protocol) and diligently listened. I had to know: “What’s the deal?” Why were they special?
Part-time Austinite Alan Palomo is Neon Indian (with a little help from his friends).
Within 10 seconds of hearing their music I discovered that they were one of those bands that would have never gotten exposure even ten years ago, before the days of MySpace and Facebook, back when radio, a killer live show and an A&R guy dictated what records got recorded.
Owl City is one guy…creating music on his computer…in his bedroom. Owl City is just a kid that spent way too much time listening to the Postal Service; Owl City’s music is like vanilla tasting vanilla ice cream. Their tracks have the gloss of a $100,000 studio, yet its just ultimately…a guy making pop music for the masses out of his bedroom.
Granted, musicians have always recorded masterpieces in their bedroom or rehearsal space, but prior to a few years ago those musicians never had a world-wide distribution network which costs pennies on the dollar. They never had blogs and social networks to spread the buzz. In fact, a great mixtape was lucky to make regional impact.
Now that technology has evened the playing field for recording and distributing music, the bedroom Beethoven can now find his/her niche audience. And his/her niche audience can become such passionate proselytizers that their feverish fandom becomes contagious.
During the music businesses’ old business model (selling CDs), the artists never made money on albums unless they were moving several hundred thousand. The companies had the machine rigged that way (See Steve Albini’s treatise, “Why Some of Your Friends Are This Fucked”).
While Owl City’s music these days exudes a hi-fi gloss, Austin’s latest bedroom maestro Neon Indian (a.k.a. Alan Palomo) possesses a novice, lo-fi charm. Earnest in its cheekiness, the Neon Indian listener feels like they could play in the band. It’s accessible while being arty. It’s the perfect mix of low art and high art pastiched into pop art and pop music.
Neon Indian list their location as Brookyln (cq)/Austin on MySpace. The hipsters of the world with too much money are moving back and forth these days (and occasionally to Portland and San Francisco). This artistic collision between Brooklyn and Austin was inevitable sealed with a miss as soon as Brit Daniel remixed Interpol several years back.
Prior to that, many hipster musician discovered Daniel Johnston through Kurt Cobain, although they likely won’t admit it now.
Every now and again a musician bubbles up from the underground scene in Austin and becomes the flavor of the month in taste-maker circles the world over. Ghostland Observatory took Bob Schneider’s formula for success (self released product + killer live show x ass shaking = exponential word of mouth fame) and moved the happening from the frat party to the dance party, complete with smoke and laser lights.
Now Austin has birthed another musician that combines dance music with a dreamy visual special effects show creating pastiche remix pop art with the insider-meets-outlier feel of someone like Andy Warhol or Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Neon Indian tastes like psychedelic candy mixed with late-night discussions about why every moment in the present is the most important moment in the universe. We live in the moment that will simultaneously decide our broken past and our translucent future. Can you dig it? Let me know what you think about the current Brooklyn-Austin collabo…
Grizzly Bear: “Cheerleader (Neon Indian ‘Sega Genesis P-Orridge’ Remix)”:
Grizzly Bear: “Cheerleader (Neon Indian ‘Studio 6669′ Remix)”:
Friday, November 27, Neon Indian will headline the kickoff show for a new series sponsored by Austin transplants WOXY.com. Click here for tickets.
Fashion designer and director Tom Ford makes his model work.
As Tom Ford jumps from career to career, from fashion design to filmmaking, I find myself fascinated by his life story. Born in Austin to realtor parents, Ford’s family moved around Texas a bit before settling in Sante Fe (one of the cities on the hippie trail that leads up the West Coast). Ford left Santa Fe to attend New York University at age 17; then he dropped out of NYU after a year to focus on modeling and acting. Ford found time to study at prestigious art schools in New York during the Studio 54 days. Later, he provided the artistic vision that resurrected the Gucci fashion line as well as their overall brand. Ford would go on to start his own line, complete with a few boutiques spread around the world. And that is where my Ford appreciation burns hottest: the man knows how to design clothes…from head to toe, glasses to shoes.
And did I mention hisclothes. I have no idea how much they cost, but I know their expensive, becauseno prices listed on his online store. Perhaps Ford will one day expand his brand to include the middle class…
…or maybe his brand will remain a fashion-forward lifestyle that we can aspire to.
Tom Ford’s directorial debut A SINGLE MAN is garnering rave reviews in limited release around the United States. Blackswansongs.com looks forward to viewing it.
mergerecords.com
