Hope you are having a great night. Not ready for Monday? Here’s a little more weekend for you.
Have a great night.
Daily Archives: March 13, 2011
8 posts
*This is also posted on my personal blog, which was quiet this week due to school obligations.*
I listen to music constantly, and I’m constantly acquiring new things. So much, in fact, that serious evaluation on an album-by-album basis is impossible. To ensure my musical hoarding doesn’t amount to too much waste, I’ve elected to begin picking out choice tracks from my catch and reviewing them, here. I’m hoping to make this a weekly thing, every Thursday or Friday Saturday night, mods willin’.
*** This week is all-digital. We’ve got a track from Wagon Christ (aka Luke Vibert), Angel Eyes, and Baths.***
Wagon Christ – Mr. Mukatsuku (from Toomorrow on Ninja Tune)
It was sort of a shame that attention towards the 90’s IDM boom so often focused on Warp’s Big Three – Autechre, Aphex Twin, and Squarepusher – resulted in a lot of other, equally interesting producers (Jega, u-Ziq) falling by the wayside. In terms of recognition, Luke Vibert probably falls in that second category, but it hasn’t really stopped him from continuing music well into the present. Vibert is so ultra-prolific that he adopted numerous aliases that were all about as productive as your average mono-moniker’d producer, and each one filled a different stylistic niche. Harder junglist impulses were sated via the Plug alias, acid house / techno tracks went to a whole host of aliases including Ace of Clubs, disco went to Kerrier District, and drum and bass went to Wagon Christ. In all cases, Vibert’s signature silliness and love of old funk drum break samples remained constant.
But somewhere around the middle of the 00’s it seemed like Vibert had tired of all his pseudonyms. The last seven years or so have seen Vibert releasing music almost exclusively under his own name, all displaying a greater focus on the acid house influences that act as a sort of great unifier for all first-wave IDM artists. So it’s sort of odd that he’s decided to dust off the Wagon Christ moniker after 7 years of dormancy.
While much of the Toomorrow album is hard to distinguish from more recent music released under the Vibert name, “Mr. Mukatsuku” manages to recapture the weirdly melancholy feel much of Wagon Christ’s earlier music had (which often contrasted nicely with the Looney Toons-indebted madcap goofiness of the persona), most of which is attributable to the iconic sound of the Rhodes electric piano, used to great effect here, and the swooning brass samples applied in all the right places. The languid pace of the drum machine boom-bap (with just a bit of swing, for a jazz feel) gives the proceedings a sort of “lounge music for robots” feel, which is entirely appropriate, and the quivering acid synthline leaves no real doubt as to the song’s author. It could have seamlessly fit into Musipal, which is about as high of praise as you can give a Wagon Christ album. If only the rest of Toomorrow was as focused as this.
(The physical versions of “Toomorrow” are due next week, but you can acquire the digital version presently over atBleep.)
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Angel Eyes – Dire Dish (from Dire Dish on Not Not Fun)
Gotta feel for Andrew Cowie – the Australian lo-fi recording artist who releases music as Angel Eyes and who, if he had come around just a year earlier, would have been enjoying all the critical acclaim that Forest Swords is at the moment. At first listen, the two sound extremely similar, but patient listeners will find ways to distinguish the two in ways that serve Angel Eyes.
The production is what will fool you – both artists use a lot of reverb and lo-fi recording techniques, giving the sound a hollow, dubby feel. But the actual style of the music itself is different enough – the guitar work of FS and Cowie are both clearly indebted to Ennio Morricone, but Cowie often goes for expansive, ambient-ish meditation where FS aims for a curious sort of muddy bombast. Ultimately it’s the instrumentation that really does it – The pounding drums of Dagger Paths is entirely absent on Dire Dish, while Cowie utilizes synthesizers in an intriguing way that’s absent in his contemporary’s work – the low fidelity recording takes the keening tone of the synth and strips it of a few layers, resulting in a harsher, but also warmer, sound that gives “Dire Dish” much of its character. Now, if Angel Eyes ends upcovering an Aaliyah song, at that point we’ll start having a real problem.
Stream “Dire Dish” on Soundcloud.
(You can get “Dire Dish” digitally via Boomkat.)
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Baths – Nightly, Daily (from The Nothing / Nightly, Daily on Anticon)
Whither Anticon? The venerable Californian “backpack” (read: white) rap label seems to have largely lost interest in the sorts of music that it helped to pioneer, ostensibly at least. In part this might be due to some latent desire to “transcend” hip hop, and while a lot of their artists definitely fit the bill as rappers, some of their more famous acts display a (foolish?) musical ambition that seems to belie a dissatisfaction with the genre. Just read any interview with Adam “Doseone” Drucker and in his own colorful way he’ll outline for you what is either disappointment or resentment or a good old-fashioned chip on his shoulder with regard to rap music.
It’s been happening for a few years now. It started out with WHY?, who started off as a hip hop band and turned into a sort of indie sing-spoken poetry thing (they put on a truly abysmal live show in my town and since then I haven’t given them the time of day), and continued with the patronage of perpetually stoned electro-bro Tobacco, who’s taken to collaborating with a tired-sounding Beck lately. The latest acquisition for Anticon’s diversified portfolio is Will Wiesenfeld aka Baths, a young guy with muttonchops from Chatsworth, California who’s operated under a few different names, notably Post-Foetus (unfortunately it does not sound anything like Foetus).
Baths’ music is markedly different from the aggressively weird acts that make up the rest of Anticon’s new school – a lot of critics have lumped him in with LA’s Low End Theory scene, America’s pre-eminent electronic music movement at the moment, but Baths (usually) dispenses with thudding bass in favor of more delicate pop harmonies. “Nightly, Daily” furthers the trend, with a lovely indie-folk sensibility that meshes impressively with the usual scraping, hissing drum programming. It reminds me a lot of the sorts of little dalliances that Hrvatski would venture on 6 or 7 years ago, but this is really the core of Baths’ aesthetic – sunny, sweet music for gentler people than you’ll find out in the clubs on any given night. It’s pleasant and a little bit light in comparison to some of his album cuts, but that might be why it’s on this short EP. Given another album or two of music this consistent, Baths could end up as the best thing on Anticon’s roster.
(You can acquire “The Nothing / Nightly, Daily” in lots of different places. I got mine from Bleep.)
Welcome back to another edition of Netflix Sunday. I was originally planning on sharing about more British shows, but then I remembered American TV has some awesome stuff. America! F*CK YEAH!
So this week’s Netflix contender is 1994’s My So Called Life.
My So Called life was a short-running show with all of 19 episodes, but one of my favorites that pretty successfully encapsulated the teenage experience in the 1990’s.
The story centered on a young Claire Danes as Angela Chase, a girl growing up in a suburb of Pittsburgh, who, like most of us, was growing older and emotionally ambivalent towards her parents, while discovering new friends and life experiences.
Her two best friends were Rayanne Graff, a free spirit (whose wardrobe I always idolized) with an alcoholic, mostly absent mother and a drug problem, and Rickie, the eyeliner-wearing boy who lived with his abusive uncle. Rayanne was the bad influence, but her affection for Angela was apparent, as was her hidden vulnerability, distrust of people, and her desire for her friends to act as her family, because her family had failed her, causing you to both love and hate Rayanne.
The show was rather topical and took on some intense issues in its short run – child abuse, sex, drug use and had an openly gay teenager. This was before Ellen Degeneres came out publicly in 2002 1997 or ’98, which was a HUGE deal, so for a show to portray a gay teenager in the mid-1990’s in a sympathetic way; in such a central role to the show was a fairly influential to a lot of people my age.
The show also starred a young Jared Leto as Jordan Catalano-the dreamy object of Angela’s affections, an eye-opener to those of us who had raging crushes on the brooding, guitar-playing hottie that pretty much all teenage crushes suck.
While show portrayed several difficult social issues, it managed to not be overly preachy. It’s honest look at teenage life and angst wasn’t necessary sympathetic or critical – Angela makes a lot of decisions she’s not sure if she should be proud of, but shows that time for what it is – a difficult time of self-discovery as teenagers realize their potential to become independent adults, while dealing with learning some of the harder lessons alone. Also, the soundtrack is classic 1990’s. Can’t beat that!
Rejection is a bitch. A big one. She’s one of those friends you try to keep at arm’s distance because you know she can’t be trusted. But she still has access to all the hot parties and coolest people, so you allow yourself to go along for the ride. Sometimes, you let your guard down and convince yourself she’s “not so bad.” But she’ll always betray you in the end.
Rejection is a drama queen. If things aren’t about her, she’ll make them about her. And when she’s not getting the attention she thinks she deserves, boy does she let you have it. And when Rejection lashes out at you, duck for cover! She’ll always go for the jugular and ensure that you are made to feel as shitty as she wants you to feel.
You are always a little uneasy about the information you share with Rejection. From petty embarrassments to deeper insecurities, you never know when the information you provide will be thrown back in your face. She swears that your secrets are safe with her, but you’ve heard her talk about other people so many times that you are always on edge. Somehow she manages to get the goods anyway. She’s great at prying for information.
Rejection has one hell of a jealous streak. She’s that friend who, when you come home from summer camp, always wants to know everything about the people you met and connected with there. She’ll trash them so thoroughly and repeatedly that you’ll start to believe her. That really cool kid that you had a great time with, but who lives on the other side of the country? When rejection is done messing with your head, you’ll be convinced he was a bully and user who only hung out with you because of the copious amounts of Pop Rocks in all of your care packages.
Rejection lies. A lot! She’ll tell you that someone said you were fat, unattractive, not successful enough, super annoying and that you smell like cheese. Even if the other person simply said they thought the jeggings you wore on Friday made your ass look lumpy.
Unfortunately, Rejections is also a family friend that you grew up with and have known your whole life. You may successfully avoid her for years. But the threat of running into her at a family party or seeing a Facebook update is always present. When she does reenter your life, it’s always like a hurricane. Only someone who knows you as well as she does can get under your skin like that.
In other words, Rejection is an inevitable presence in your life. As such, she’s sort of useful. Sure, you may want to bash your head against a wall for weeks after running into her. But once you’ve calmed down and put things in context, some of Rejection’s lessons can be useful.
It’s useless to stay mad at her. That’s sort of what the ol’ drama queen wants anyway. The best way to handle it is to take a breath, think it through and then move on. After all…
70 summers ago, a beautiful young woman’s lifeless body washed up on the sugary sands of the Long Island beach town that I currently call home. Her name was Starr Faithfull, and she was 25 years old. What follows is what we know, and what we don’t know.
Long Beach, NY, is a small jewel of a city on a barrier island off Long Island’s South Shore. It has wonderful restaurants, a state-of-the-art library, and a proudly diverse population. Its cleanliness and proximity to New York City draw droves of tourists in the summer months, and even in the winter it bustles with activity. There are flowers and trees everywhere you look. It’s the kind of place people dream about living in. And people really come here for the miles of white sand and glittering waves.
70 years ago, things were slightly different. Everything was new. 1920s Long Beach was just getting started as a fashionable beach community, with hundreds of Spanish Revival white stucco mansions and bungalows with red tile roofing, as required by the zoning code. Grand hotels lined the boardwalk, and every type of amusement from golf, to tennis, to horseback riding was available. Prohibition was largely a joke here, and it was a flapper’s paradise. Starr must have enjoyed it – as much as she was able to.
But to really understand Starr, we have to go back still further – almost 100 years – to 1917, when she was just 11. Unfortunately, by all accounts, Starr’s parents frequently left her in the care of her middle-aged cousin Andrew Peters, then mayor of Boston. He later became a congressman and was quite famous, even serving as Woodrow Wilson’s Assistant Secretary Of The Treasury. He would have been infamous if anyone suspected what he was doing to his 11 year old cousin. He was giving her ether to break down her resistance to his molestation of her.
Like many children in this situation, Starr became withdrawn and reclusive. She even tried dressing like a boy to divert his interest. This failed and the molestation continued for years.
Upon being caught in 1924, Peters paid Starr’s family hush money to protect his career, and they took it. That was it for Starr. She began going to speakeasies and taking cruises to Europe – sometimes not really planning them, but just showing up on board to bon voyage party and simply staying when the ship left. She continued to abuse inhalants and barbiturates.
On May 29, 1931, a drunken Starr was forcibly removed from the Franconia, screaming “Kill me!” and “Throw me overboard!” . On June 5, 1931, her family saw her for the last time, and had reason to suspect that she had sneaked aboard the Mauretania, which was bound for the Bahamas.
On June 8, 1931, her body washed ashore on Long Beach. She was wearing a black and white summer dress from Lord & Taylor with nothing underneath, and her body was badly bruised.
There were several suicidal notes written by Starr, and one was to a doctor on whom she had a crush. There was also a diary detailing Starr’s wild life, including assignations with 19 men and a veiled reference to her cousin. The primitive toxicology reports showed her liver to be full of Veronal, a powerful barbiturate. Although initially suspicious, Nassau County detectives were inclined to leave the case there.
But Starr’s stepfather accused the Nassau County DA of dragging his heels for political capital. Back then, this was more than plausible. He produced – too late – the $20,000 check from Andrew Peters and the 1927 agreement to hold Peters harmless for molesting Starr when she was 11. He accused various political figures of having Starr murdered.
Peters had a nervous breakdown at his office in Boston. The New York Daily News uncovered that Mr. Faithfull was nearly broke and had gone to Boston to get more money from Peters a few days before Starr disappeared. And the Nassau County Police Department held an inquest, which lasted 15 minutes and drew no conclusions.
We’ll never know what happened to this tragic young woman in her final moments. But I hope she found peace. When I’m out on the Atlantic at night and I see the lights of Long Beach come into view, I wonder which ship she was really on, who she was with, what her final thoughts were. It’s easy to feel lonely at sea, even with so many people so close by.
Newspaper clippings here and here.
Among the non-fiction books dealing were her death are: “The Aspirin Age” by Morris Markey (1944); “The Girl on the Lonely Beach” by Fred Cook (1954); and “The Passing of Starr Faithfull” by Jonathan Goodman (1996). Her life has been the subject of fiction in a number of novels including: “Some Unknown Person” by Sandra Scoppettone (1977) and “The Memory Book of Starr Faithfull” by Gloria Vanderbilt (1994). On Broadway her life was dramatized in the play, “Courting Mae West” by Linda-Ann Loschiavo (2005).
In 1935, the famous American author John O’Hara wrote a novel on Starr but changed her name to Gloria to avoid being sued by the Faithfull family. In 1960, the novel was made into one of Hollywood’s most famous films, “Butterfield 8.” In this movie the Academy Award was given to Elizabeth Taylor for her portrayal of Starr Faithfull. – Derry Times
Top photo Wikipedia.
Our anniversary was last week, and to celebrate we walked around Burlington and then we went out to dinner.
It was an amazing dinner. In fact it was so good, that I intentionally left about half of it on my plate to bring home for dinner the next night. But, the restaurant was busy, we had shopping bags in the booth with us, and it took us a while to pile on our layers of winter attire. As a consequence, I didn’t realize that I had left my doggie bag on the restaurant table until we were half-an-hour away.
I’m not going to lie, I was irrationally annoyed.
And I know that, “Something, something, something, is the chipotle chicken of invention.” So I decided to try to recreate the dish.
Chipolte chicken with cumin cream sauce
- 4 chicken breasts
- 1 tablespoon of chipotle powder
- 1 tablespoon of ancho chili powder
- 1 tablespoon of hot smoked paprika powder
- 2 teaspoons of cayenne powder
Mix the spices together on a plate.
Cumin cream sauce
- 1 large diced red onion
- 1 large sliced shallot
- 3/4 cup of white wine
- 1/3 cup of half and half
- 3 teaspoons cumin
Rub the chicken breasts with olive oil on both sides, and coat the breasts on both sides with the spice mixture.
Grill both sides of the chicken until done and tent the with foil to keep warm.
For the cumin sauce: In a small saucepan saute the sliced shallot and diced onion in olive oil. When the onions and shallots are soft, add the white wine and remove from heat. Stir in the cumin and, when the sauce has cooled for approximately 5 minutes, turn the heat on low and slowly add the half and half. (Letting the sauce cool for a few minutes will keep the sauce from breaking. (Or it least it helped quell my paranoia about the sauce breaking.)
Slice chicken and serve on top of Spanish rice with the cumin sauce drizzled on top.
Somewhere in the middle of the sultry summer night, nature called. My lover unzipped the front flap of our tent and we headed outside onto the sand of a secluded beach cove along the southern California coastline. As we were alone, we exited the tent nude. A pleasurable breeze greeted us, briefly alleviating the swelter. Even with a nearly-full moon, the lush ceiling of stars above us was breathtaking. Adding to our overall feeling of auspiciousness, a shooting star fell seemingly directly in front of our path. My jaw dropped in awe, and I wondered aloud a most sincere approbation, “Oh, how you bless us God, life, spirit, universe…”
With that grateful invocation, my lover and I proceeded to relieve ourselves in the majestic ocean. (We rationalized that our good actions far outweighed this relatively minor infraction.) The shock of contrast between our warm bodies and the still-cool water was exhilarating. We dove under holding hands, then after we arose, we exuberantly collided in a delicious, playful kiss. As we separated our bodies ever-so-slightly, we noticed a captivating phenomenon: the bright light radiated by the moon cast us in an immaculately explicit, lucid shadow against the backdrop of pristine sand.
As we stood in the ocean, we were bewitched by watching the exquisite subtleties of our well-matched physiques. Every slow, sensual move we made was mirrored and magnified in the remarkable chiaroscuro of moonlight and shadow. In my heightened state of arousal, I felt my skin turn incarnadine, like a lust-drenched niacin flush. Without needing to accede, my lover and I met each others’ unspoken desires, choreographed in equal parts by erotic providence and spiritual syncretism.
Deliberately, we decided to delay the consummation of our mutual yearning until we got back to the tent. Both of us later confessed our suspicions that we might have literally drowned due to our sensual distraction. We returned to the tent giddy, overly-amped and very ready to merge our inner empyreans. As we made love, time became evermore malleable and fluid, its interstices seemingly yielding to our mutual need for extended, undulant erotic equanimity.
It was the ultimate power trip: we were reveling in the complementary, egalitarian nature of true inner power. Luxuriantly supine, I decided that if I had to die, I’d like to do it with him inside me, in precisely this position. But for the moment, I was ravenously consumed and consummately nourished by the vitality of living abundantly.
When I awoke a few hours later in the full illumination of dawn’s gorgeous color palette of light, my lover was momentarily gone. Resting on my belly was a velvet drawstring bag, sewn in the design of a labyrinth. Inside the bag was a smooth, flat dark-grey large stone that was a lapidary masterpiece. In Celtic-inspired calligraphy, it read in Latin:
ab ovo, ut terminus
et ab novus orsa
saecula saeculorum.
On the other side of the stone was the English translation:
from the beginning, to the end
and from the new beginning
to all eternity.
My lover returned in time to witness the resultant awe I felt at reading such lofty words which I had inspired. My stupefaction derived from being so comprehensively recognized and acknowledged by someone so much like myself. We kissed deeply, and as we prepared to delve again into erotic joy, I had an amazing epiphany:
Whole, healed lovers everywhere are the living antidote to Pandora opening the Box. By unleashing harmony, joy, understanding and reverence, perhaps we may break the spell of all the ills that have been cast upon this world.