Richard Avedon, Brandenburg Gate #1, Berlin, New Year’s Eve, 1989. I was in Berlin a week before this, during White Zombie’s first tour of Europe, a freezing, grueling, but vastly interesting affair. We spent Christmas alone in a room in a berlin club, and everyone in the band was sick but me, but we did manage to make it to the wall, where people from East Germany were streaming through for the first time. On this same tour, we played in Ljubljana and Zagreb, then part of Communist Yugoslavia, and we slept in an old slaughterhouse ( and I mean in a room with drains for blood ) in Hamburg, and we were on the last ferry allowed to cross the English channel in the worst storm in 10 years ( we arrived to find uprooted trees and overturned trucks .. and the show got canceled ), and we played in a Socialist squat in a giant old aircraft factory in Italy and a farmhouse in Switzerland and a military academy under a portrait of Marshal Tito and .. you can’t make this stuff up.
|December 30, 2011 | Stuffs
I’ve gotten numerous emails about this site’s music player not working, and, it’s true, in Firefox, the player shows ‘file not found’ – however, it does play in Chrome and Safari ( I use all 3 browsers, but I don’t usually look at my site in Firefox, so this problem eluded me for some time ). We are working on it, and a new player compatible with all browsers should be up soon after the 1st.
The other day I was sitting with my Grandmother, who recently turned 94. We were looking out the window at a big tree, which was covered with crows, fat ones, black against the colorless sky. It was windy, but they looked comfortable, holding on to rolling, swaying branches. My Grandmother started to recite a poem. ” What’s that? “, I asked. ” I don’t know “, she said. ” It’s something I learned for a school play when I was 10 years old ( that’s 1927, people ), and I’ve never known who wrote it or seen it in print again “. I asked her if she would repeat it for me, and I got my phone so I could record it. I looked up the first line and figured out the poem’s name ( Christmas In Norway ), the author ( Nora Archibald Smith ), and the book it came from ( The Christmas Child And Other Verse For Children, Houghton Mifflin, 1920 ) in about 20 seconds. My Grandmother has no use for the internet, so she was slightly amazed at that, but not nearly as amazed as I was by her.
Carol Yuenger : Christmas In Norway
Carol Yuenger : Christmas In Norway
Cerro, Havana, Cuba. We convince Cousin Augusto to take us to an exhibition baseball game at the Estadio Latinoamericano, home of the Industriales, Havana’s home team. Augusto warns us that foreigners aren’t expressly forbidden to come here, but they’re not exactly encouraged either, and that we should avoid talking or drawing attention to ourselves in any way.
This week, thanks to Augusto and Ramón, we have gotten to go several places which are normally off limits to tourists. Every time, we try to make ourselves invisible, but people make us immediately and address us in English. I ask Augusto about this and he says that it’s not our height, or our Levi’s, or our tattoos, and that we don’t even have the uniquely American way of carrying ourselves which many travelers from the U.S. do. “ They can just smell it on you “, he says.
We get through the gate without much trouble, and the cost of a ticket is something like nine cents, which I pay for with some tattered Cuban pesos I’ve gotten on the black market. ( a thing which I’ve never seen anywhere else : there are two systems of currency here – the Cuban peso, which is for natives, and the CUC, which is for visitors. More on that here )
Augusto describes the legions of secret police and sharpshooters who descend on the place when Fidel attends games, and points out the box where he sits, which is right in front of us. A few people watch us sideways, but they are genuinely interested in the game, a languid affair that they follow intently. There are no concession stands, just a few people walking around hawking food that they made at home. An old guy comes by selling coffee out of a battered teapot. ” Cuánto? “, I ask, but he refuses to sell me a cup. ” That’s okay, you don’t want to drink that shit ” says Augusto.
The sun starts to set, and the old concrete glows pink. Lights click on and buzz, and the breeze carries warbling announcements and the occasional flanging crack of a bat. A kid walks around the bleachers and blasts a horn that looks like it was made from an old radiator. There are no billboards, and no one has a cel phone. Everyone is right here, in the moment, and I find that I am content to sit very still and think about absolutely nothing.
I get a lot of email asking what I’m listening to, and these communications often have a plaintive tone to them. Is there any new music that’s any good? Am I crazy? Does it all suck? Of course not, and I caution against comparing the records that come out in one year to the entire history of recorded sound. 2011? Not a ton of stuff I like, but not so bad. I’ve been listening to a lot of rock n’ roll again – which sounds funny, I know, coming from me, but there it is. Anyway, since you asked, here are three albums, one new, two old, that I’m really into right now.
Dead Skeletons, from Iceland, play what I guess I would call psychedelic death rock, but I don’t mean to say that they’ve got a bunch of fun songs about skulls and coffins and martians and stuff, I mean that the theme of Dead Magick, their new LP, is death, and living with it: their Dead Mantra, in four different languages, is ” he who fears death cannot enjoy life “. Jón Sæmundur Audarson, the band’s singer, has been living with HIV for almost 20 years, and, yeah, think about that. There’s definitely a debt to The Jesus And Mary Chain here, and shades of Neu!, Suicide, Spacemen 3 – cool drug rock, some of my favorites. This is a super dark album, but I find myself playing it even when the sun’s shining.
01. Dead Skeletons : Yama
01. Dead Skeletons : Yama
02. Dead Skeletons : Dead Mantra
02. Dead Skeletons : Dead Mantra
Dave Bone from The Company Band turned me on to Hard Beat, a compilation of tracks by the Indonesian rock band AKA spanning 1971-1977. The funny thing is how non-exotic this is – you’d think that Deep Purple-obsessed freaks ( with a James Brown-infatuated singer, which is not so apparent from these tracks here, but features in some of the other, funkier ones ) from a predominantly Muslim country where smoking pot is an offense slightly worse than murder would make music that would be pretty goofy, or kind of alien, or super-crap, but, no, these are straight-up jams.
01. AKA : Aka Untuk Mu
01. AKA : Aka Untuk Mu
02. AKA : Open Doors
02. AKA : Open Doors
Also : I fucking love fucking Aqualung by Jethro Tull. Glad I got that off my chest. Feels good, man. There’re are all kinds of remastered albums, anthologies, box sets ( I mean, just look at this, some of the reissues that are out for Xmas this year ) coming out, and you can snark it up all you want about how this is the record companies desperately doing whatever they can to sell back-catalog music to the only people who might still actually pay for it, older people who are music geeks and mega-fans ( yeah, that’s me ) – but, so? Are you under the impression that corporations exist for some other reason than to make money? The technology available to pull the sound off of those old tapes is far more advanced than it was just a couple of years ago, and there are some very talented people being employed to do it, and I want to hear that stuff.
First I got the London Calling remaster ( luv the accompanying DVD with footage of producer Guy Stevens throwing chairs around the studio ), and then, the Beatles mono box, which I was on the fence about, but I kept on reading reviews where these audiophile snob-types were moved to tears by the amazing sound, and then one day it was on sale at the record store ( still pretty expensive ), and I bought it, and, hallelujah, it really is worth every penny. I always thought of the pre-Rubber Soul/ Revolver material as some well written, but dumb, cute stuff that you hear on the radio, and I never really considered what a real-deal, hardworking, super-tight combo they’d become from all those nights playing in Hamburg. The first album was recorded live, singing and everything, in a day. Rock n’ roll! All of the 1963-64 records have an unexpected depth, and I like the glossy little repro album covers ( complete with correct paper inner sleeves ) the CDs come in.
01. Jethro Tull : Hymn 43
01. Jethro Tull : Hymn 43
02. Jethro Tull : My God
02. Jethro Tull : My God
Every time I get a remastered version of something I’m already a fan of ( The Kraftwerk 2009 reissues, for example. I really, REALLY love Kraftwerk, and now I love them even more ), I tend to get a whole lot of enjoyment out of it, and so I’ve started to dig into reissues of albums which are classics but that I’ve never payed any attention to: The John Lennon 2010 signature box ( although I grew up with the Beatles, I never heard any of Lennon’s solo music besides the hits – I was surprised at how much I enjoy his early records, and at how obviously influential they were on other artists of the time ), the 2010 Exile On Main Street remaster ( I’ve never been a big Stones fan, but I like the clear, hi-fi treatment of this relatively raw material. There will probably not be many more recordings made by at-the-top-of-their-game millionaire rock stars in rented mansions, but this release brings that era alive, I think ).
So, the other day, I saw this brand new, remixed and remastered 40th anniversary edition Tull album, and I thought about how, when I was little, Aqualung ( the song ) was all around, in the air, for years, a parody of itself. I don’t listen to classic rock radio ( shudder ), so I don’t hear this kind of stuff nearly as much anymore, and it’s such a different time and place that even music that’s been played to death can seem fresh to me ( OK, NOT Hotel California. Fuck that song, and fuck you for playing it on the jukebox. You really needed to hear it so much that you spent a dollar on it? ), and I thought, ” millions of people love that record. I bet that’s a very good record ” – so I picked it up, and, by golly, it’s not all laughing, flute-playing gnomes dancing in the forest, but anger, alienation, questioning of religion, homelessness, globalization – same as any punk album.
