Eddies in the time-space continuum

Remember when those imps over at Driftwood Singers made you dilute your enthusiasm for the Arcade Fire by comparing them to...Eddie and the Cruisers?

Now they make hay with our Julian Casablancas adoration...by exhuming an unexpected precedent: Eddie Money!

Disambiguations for July 22, 2009

I. Over at Driftwood Singers Present:

Remember when your whole M.O. was to avoid living a life of "quiet desperation"? Books and music were going to save us. By the time you realize your liberal arts education was designed to fulfill the self-indulgent solipsism of youth, you've become a "content provider" scraping for a shred of dignity in the digital age. How poetic! Then one day you wake up and find yourself on your knees on the sidewalk flipping through boxes of crappy $1 vinyl like some vagrant off his meds: Hey, maybe this Strawbs album will be good. Pathetic. (Btw, it's horrible.)

II. A little oeuvre sleuthing over at Paper Cuts, on Nabokov and Lolita:

Nabokov himself may well have deplored this combing of his work for clues to his life, or vice versa. The alchemy between the two was among his great subjects, and even in this memoir (subtitled, significantly, “An Autobiography Revisited“) he suggests there can be no literal translation from life to literature. But he wasn’t averse to leaving a trail of bread crumbs; indeed, he left so many of them that his books sometimes seem like solid loaves of hints and puzzles.

(Solid loaves! Very funny.)

III. Re-reading around the edges: Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections. This book is TOO GOOD. I can't write about it here.

IV. The Believer music issue is also TOO GOOD to be blogged about..................I'll just say GO GET IT.......then tell me which song you liked best on the CD. (The CD is really good but there is one song in particular that is TOO GOOD to be blogged about.)

V. Why is "The Dizzies" now called "Disambiguation"? (For that matter, why was it briefly "As I Please"?) These questions are TOO MYSTERIOUS to be blogged about.

VI. Laird Hunt has an original take on the Living With Music playlist-format at Paper Cuts. Example:

6) Inflammatory Writ, Joanna Newsom. “Oh, where is your inflammatory writ? Your text that would incite a light, ‘Be lit’ ?” “The Exquisite” was, I’d like to hope, my inflammatory writ.

“Ray of the Star”: Written in one mad six-week sprint during the fall of 2007 after a visit to La Rambla in Barcelona, where the most elaborate living statues coexist with newspaper stands, flower stalls, bird vendors, locals and tourists. My fever-dream version of Barcelona includes bathing ghosts, haunted shoes, bargains with devils and demonic art critics.

Love that he ends with Sonic Youth's "Providence." (Secret source for the Psychic Envelopes "Providence #3?). Mix idea: Songs with/mentioning/utilizing answering machines/their ingoing/outgoing messages...Replacements, "Answering Machine"...that weird tidbit at the end of one of those early TMBG singles/EPs...uh...the list goes on...

VII. Am very late on this: Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker's Significant Objects project...I have written something for it (not posted yet)...More info at Paper Cuts (your one-stop shop for Disambiguation fodder)....also more at Jacket Copy.

VIII. On Sung J. Woo's site: Photos from the 7/1 Korea Society panel.

Sad-eyed lady of the shoe store

I love this post:

I tell this story to set up the premise for why I like Boz Scaggs: low expectations. Ever since I asserted my ill-informed opinion that summer (based on my absolute certainty that I could not like the same music as this sad-eyed lady of the shoe store), I basically wrote off Boz Scaggs and just knew that if and when I finally heard him I'd absolutely hate his guts. But around the same time that I was discovering Philly soul from the 70s, I tripped upon Silk Degrees in a junk shop near my house and decided to give it a spin. See, by the time you're my age, 37, you've been wrong about so many things you just figure, 'What the hell, maybe I was wrong about this, too.' And it turned out I was wrong. At least relative to this falsely established opinion, which I'd used as a wedge issue in some early music nerd throw-down with a shoe store assistant manager. —Driftwood Singers Present

"Visible Hitchcock" b/w "Paperback Writer"

Robyn Hitchcock and Elvis Costello join Nick Lowe onstage in New York to sing "If I Fell" (and "Mystery Train"):




Read the writeup over at Driftwood Singers.

(Bonus: here he sings "Surgery" for Bryant Park Presents.)

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In other Beatles news: The U.K. Times on the possible origins of "Paperback Writer."

(Via Jenny D.)

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And speaking of "paperback writer"—the new Cosmopolitan's "Paperback Page-Turners: What every chick should have in her beach bag" features Personal Days!

"If you think Pam and Jim have it bad, try spending a day with Lizzie, Jonah, and Pru at their 'Office'-like company. You'll laugh, cringe, and thank God you don't work there."

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And finally:

Among the books published under [Philip M. Parker's] name are “The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea” ($24.95 and 168 pages long); “Stickler Syndrome: A Bibliography and Dictionary for Physicians, Patients and Genome Researchers” ($28.95 for 126 pages); and “The 2007-2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India” ($495 for 144 pages).

But these are not conventional books, and it is perhaps more accurate to call Mr. Parker a compiler than an author. Mr. Parker, who is also the chaired professor of management science at Insead (a business school with campuses in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore), has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject — broad or obscure — and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one.

If this sounds like cheating to the layman’s ear, it does not to Mr. Parker, who holds some provocative — and apparently profitable — ideas on what constitutes a book. While the most popular of his books may sell hundreds of copies, he said, many have sales in the dozens, often to medical libraries collecting nearly everything he produces. He has extended his technique to crossword puzzles, rudimentary poetry and even to scripts for animated game shows.

And he is laying the groundwork for romance novels generated by new algorithms. “I’ve already set it up,” he said. “There are only so many body parts.”

—Noam Cohen, "He Wrote 200,000 Books (But Computers Did Some of the Work)," NYT

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for March 31, 2008

1. Tomorrow: Dzyd Dennis in conversation with Wong Kar-wai (!!??) at the Apple Store in Soho!

2. Vocabulary builder: "Rubber tires like these will never touch regolith, the abrasive dust and rock that covers the moon."

Preview

—"Not a Mercury or Saturn, but It Goes Way off the Road," NYT, 3/30/2008

3. For the 26 files: Dzyd Kosiya sends us Stereolab's "Olv 26." (Dzyd Hannah has some other examples.)

4. In other music news, Driftwood Singers mentions the Psychic Envelopes song "Raleigh"—download your copy today!

5. On Harriet, Ada Limón hails Jennifer L. Knox's Drunk By Noon, which I highly recommend!
(Also: The Canarium cheekily offers reviews of individual poems from its own pages.)

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for February 3

I. Great post over at Driftwood Singers Present (plus some Nada Surf):

Anyway, it gets real Raymond Carver, he needed to get to the UPS place, which was right where we were, but he insisted he didn't want to call the police or get an ambulance or go to the hospital or anything...

II. Over at Moistworks, Ben Greenman reminisces about the Black Album and elections and the store we think was called Rhymes Records...

III. Your weekend Ouroboros, courtesy Erasing—an Escher triple-ourobori/Moebius strip:



IV. Two kind of brilliant things in one sentence (emphasis added):

Every day a few hundred people dialed that mainframe for an alien signal — the then-unfamiliar squeal and crash of information transmission — and fit their receivers into acoustic couplers, like people in kayaks. —Virginia Heffernan, NYT Magazine

V. Devin's baffling Beatles trivia over at Hey Dullblog.

VI. Levi's double-jointed review: Wodehouse and Highsmith. (I highly approve of Lord Emsworth and Others, a completely satisfying grab-bag...)

VI. Weekend wisdom: Do not rent the movie Hot Rod.

Strings attached

Those of you who swooned over Joe Hagan's Bill Fox piece in this year's Believer music issue should check out the Driftwood Singers Present for some tracks from The Revelers, a band featuring Fox's brother Tommy. (Woah...suddenly I had an out-of-body experience and thought I was writing about the Replacements!)

And those Driftwooders also lead us to this sublimely bad idea: Dylan interpreted by a string quartet.

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And—WOW—while I was trying to think of a headline for this post, I thought: Strings...Air on the G string...I'm not air?...no....

And then I thought I'd Google around to see if this 7" by a group called Baby Steps could be found online...The title of their (lone?) single "Air on a G-String" clever plays on Bach's "Air on the G string," and it's so great...I put it on the turntable all the time...and now you can listen to it right here! I love this song!

Here's Sarah Chang playing the Bach:

That Summer Feeling

"Turns out I bought a lot of bad records this summer—why on earth I bought that Dr. Hook album I'll never know—but it didn't matter..."
—Lefty, Driftwood Singers Present

Click through for three classic Jonathan Richman tunes...Lefty says Jonathan Sings! and Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers are the two must-have JR albums. I'd concur with the first, and sub Rockin' and Romance for the second! (And I'm assuming The Modern Lovers is a given.)

I'm too lazy to take out the camera, so here's the Photo Booth version:

Culturebox

Those Driftwood Singers have a few chants of the Ainu up—weirdly recommended!

Also today: Park Slopers, hear Ben Greenman read from his new book, A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both, at your local Barnes & Noble.

Things get rolling at 7:30.

Just My Bill

Visitors to the Believer website might have noticed that one article isn't available online at all—not even the first couple paragraphs, as is usually the case. The piece, entitled "Transit Byzantium," by Joe Hagan, is a stunner—and you can only read it by picking up a copy of the actual magazine!

This piece alone is worth the $10 cover price, I assure you. It's a perfect example of one of my favorite kinds of pieces: The search for the reclusive genius, the creator gone mute for years, an artist of the missing. The inquisitive reporter begins with a myth and winds up with something more human—and sadder—than previously imagined.

What makes "Transit Byzantium" even more poignant is that the character in question (who I won't name here, for reasons you'll learn by the end of this sentence) told someone, who told Joe, that he doesn't want to be on the Internet. Traces can be found, of course, and I'll provide some links below, but to respect his wishes as much as possible, this story is only readable between the covers of the magazine.

Two other things:

1) A member of Team Dizzies mentioned nearly crying after reading the piece, and soon thereafter buying the album (a track of which appears on the Believer CD) and savoring it. (It's iTunes-able.)

2) A few days ago a friend mentioned she'd been listening to the Bill Fox track "from approximately ten in the morning to three in the afternoon."

Further links:

More info (and more listening) over at Joe's blog, The Driftwood Singers Present.

Here's an appearance on KCRW (mentioned in the piece) by the artist in question, found by Dizzyhead Arlo.

And just for kicks, here's some rare footage of the musician's potent power-pop band, The Mice (very different from the material on Transit Byzantium, but a kick to watch)...

* * *

And the Blvr. CD, by the way, is great. I'm From Barcelona's "The Painter" is a "Ballad of El Goodo" for the late aughts. (You can quote me.) "Don't give up on your dreams, boy/Don't give up on your dreams now, buddy," over and over again...

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Also, unrelated: Many thanks to everyone who came out last week for the LIT reading—that was fun!

(And note to Eugene H.—drop me a line via the address in my Blogger profile...the address you gave didn't work!)

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This weekend, picked up the new Esopus at Labyrinth. That's a dangerous magazine, because if you happen to glimpse it, you have to buy it. This issue has the usual wide-ranging smorgasbord...so far I've been particularly fond of the articulate and sublimely boring six-page found letter by a revolutionary (Kathy) to whom one imagines is her would-be swain, explaining why they can't get involved (all in massively thought-out political terms) . . . and the letter from Japan that artist James Lee Byars sent to MOMA curator Dorothy C. Miller. Actually it's not technically a "letter" . . . Ah, you'll just have to get the issue to see what it is.

But first—get the new Believer!

'Japan Minister Rapped on Women' — Notes on Lethem

This BBC headline conjured visions of a soberly dressed statesman 'busting out' rhymes and delighting the pop-mad J-teen masses. Plus I could combine it with yesterday's post to do a Rapp/rapping "connections"!

Alas, the story turns out to be not so exciting: Japan's health minister called women "birth-giving machines," and was rebuked by the PM.

* * *

Dizzyhead Pete directs us to Jonathan Lethem's website, where the novelist has kicked off his "Promiscuous Materials Project"—offering filmmakers and dramatists the opportunity to adapt one of his stories for the grand sum of $1. (Check out JL's interesting patchwork piece in the recent Harper's for some clues into the thinking behind this move.)

Even more exciting to me—Lethem's upcoming novel is entitled You Don't Love Me Yet, after the Vulgar Boatmen song. It might be overkill to call it my favorite song from 1991-92, but it's definitely one that's stayed with me—partly, no doubt, because the chiming riff is very simple to play on guitar! If I were mp3-savvy I'd put a link here to a YouSendIt account. Maybe someone at Beautiful Regalia or Driftwood Singers will someday...

For now, here's a glance at the album cover:


UPDATE: Visit the Driftwood Singers for a limited-time-only listen!