Bob Dylan’s Tempest Album Has The Wheeze And Gargle Of An Old Man


The Bob Dylan media onslaught has already begun…

Neil McCormick of The Telegraph writes:

The word is that Dylan is pleased with his latest effort, or, as someone at his record company told me, “he wants people to hear it.” I have had the privilege of being amongst a select few journalists around the world to be allowed a sneak preview. It would be absurd to attempt a definitive review based on such a cursory listen but I was blown away with the mad energy of the album.

At 71-years-old Dylan is still striking out into strange new places rather than revisiting his past. Although he no longer attempts to scale the heights of poetic imagery and dense metaphor that established him as popular music’s greatest lyricist, instead writing in bluesy couplets, the extreme collision of ideas and characters and the mysterious, ambivalent arcs of his narratives creates a pungent effect. Dylan still has the power to disturb and thrill. I emerged from this listening session feeling like I had been on a journey into the weird dream territory of Ballad Of A Thin Man, where nothing is quite what it seems.

His voice, often little more than a croak on stage these days, invests these ten tracks with the spirit of something ancient. Sure, he has the wheeze and gargle of an old man, but the words come through loud and clear, delivered with real relish. Los Lobos founder David Hidalgo’s fiddle weaves through the acoustic shuffle of Dylan’s touring band, guitarist Charlie Sexton, Stu Kimball and Donnie Heron, drummer George Receli and bassist Tony Garnier.

The sound is a continuation of the blues, country and folk styles that run through all his later work, but with less of the kind of Thirties pastiche he’s played with since 2001’s Love And Theft . There is a sense is that Dylan is still honing in on that wild, mercurial music he hears in his head.

(click here to continue reading Bob Dylan’s Tempest: first listen – Telegraph.)

I’m sort of sick of that 1930’s pastiche actually, will be glad to hear something different.

Tom Waits – Hell Broke Luce


 A surreal yet intriguing music video of the Tom Waits song, Hell Broke Luce, from his 2011 album, Bad as Me.1

Directed and photographed by Matt Mahurin, and only recently released, as far as I can tell…  ((as of right now, only 307 views, despite being linked from TomWaits.com ))

Footnotes:
  1. Wikipedia []

Arrested Development’s 4th Season

Fox canceled “Arrested Development,” about an absurdly dysfunctional family, in 2006 after three seasons. But it developed a vocal cult audience. Netflix has taken it over and is producing a fourth season as original programming. The twist: As with the company’s other original series, all 10 new “Arrested Development” episodes will go up for streaming at the same time. Mr. Hurwitz is sure some fans will devour the entire five hours in one sitting. “It’s throwing me,” he says.

His solution was to build each new episode around one character. The stories in all 10 episodes unfold simultaneously, overlapping here and there. Unlike writing a traditional sitcom, Mr. Hurwitz says, “we’re sort of driving into the next episode rather than wrapping things up.”

(click here to continue reading Binge Viewing: TV’s Lost Weekends – WSJ.com.)

Can’t wait. 

 

Steve Holt!

Wordcount of A Song of Ice and Fire

IMG 0149
A Dance with Dragons

I finished zipping through the first five books of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels in record time (started the first novel, April 4th, finished the last May 9th.) Heavy, dense histories and political dissertations are my more usual fare, but I never consume those kind of books quite so fast as I sprinted through the faux history of Westeros and Essos and the dynastic civil wars engulfing these continents. Almost 2 million words in a month. Yikes…

Was it great literature? No, but it was fun to read, and iBooks/ebooks are easy enough to read while running on my treadmill, or whenever I have a moment before a meeting somewhere.

Wordcount of A Song of Ice And Fire – George R. R. Martin

  • A Game of Thrones: 298k words
  • A Clash of kings: 326k words
  • A Storm of Swords: 424k words
  • A Feast for Crows: 300k words
  • A Dance with Dragons: 422k words

Total: 1M 770k words

(click here to continue reading Wordcount of popular (and hefty) epics | The Cesspit..)

I enjoyed puzzling over the various maps of the kingdoms as well. The maps changed, grew more detailed as the series continued. According to the author, this was intentional.

My main complaint is that the sixth volume of the series, to be called The Winds of Winter, is not published, and only the Seven know when it will be, besides the author. So there are plenty of cliff-hangers waiting to be resolved.

The previous installment, A Dance with Dragons, covered less story than Martin intended, omitting at least one planned large battle sequence and leaving several character threads ending in cliff-hangers. Martin intended to resolve these cliffhangers “very early” in The Winds of Winter, saying “I’m going to open with the two big battles that I was building up to, the battle in the ice and the battle at Meereen—the battle of Slaver’s Bay. And then take it from there.”

Martin confirmed in March 2012 that the final two novels will take readers farther north than any of the previous books: “What lies really north [The Land of Always Winter], we haven’t explored that yet, but we will in the last two books.” The sample chapter on Martin’s website is written from Theon Greyjoy’s viewpoint and shows his interactions with Stannis Baratheon as they are camped in the snow on his march to Winterfell. Martin has also said that “you’re definitely going to see more of the Others in The Winds of Winter”.

At 2011 WorldCon, Martin read an Arianne chapter, during which she heads for Griffin’s Roost to see the young boy who is calling himself Aegon. Victarion’s chapter will take off five minutes after A Dance with Dragons, taking place on the eve of the Iron Islanders’ surprise attack on the cities in Slaver’s Bay

The HBO series is fun, too, btw, if a bit like a Reader’s Digest version of the plot, and with more sexposition.

National Train Day In Chicago

300 S Jackson - Ilford Delta 100
300 S Jackson – Ilford Delta 100

It might be fun to attend this, but on the other hand, I like to sleep in a bit on Sundays.

Union Station 225 South Canal Street, Chicago, IL 60606

When: 11:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m., Saturday, May 12 General Admission: Free

Now in its 5th year, National Train Day is back to celebrate train travel and the ways trains touch the lives of people with events across America. This year, festivities will highlight the unique perspective passengers enjoy as they take in the vastness and beauty of the American landscape, from cities big and small, to country vistas and everything in between, when traveling by rail. As part of National Train Day, each major market event features live entertainment, interactive and educational exhibits, kids’ activities, model train displays and tours of Amtrak equipment, freight and commuter trains, and notable private railroad cars.

(click here to continue reading National Train Day In Chicago.)

Got the Wine Country Blues
Got the Wine Country Blues

Captain Beefheart’s Bat Chain Puller to get first official release

Beef Shank Bone from Irv & Shelly's Fresh Picks

Beef

Cool. Looking forward to hearing this.

Captain Beefheart’s legendary and widely bootlegged record Bat Chain Puller is going to be officially released for the first time. The original tape was never mixed and released, but alternative versions of some of the tracks appeared on Beefheart’s Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller), and as bootlegs.

Wire contributor and Beefheart biographer Mike Barnes says “The tape is owned by the Zappa estate and although Don didn’t want it released they’ve been true to the work. Not only that, its availability was announced on the anniversary of Don’s death and will be released on his birthday.”

This release has been mixed by Magic Band members Denny Walley and John French, who also provide liner notes. It contains the 12 original album tracks plus three bonus tracks and is expected to arrive around the 15 January.

(click here to continue reading The Wire: Adventures In Sound And Music: Article.)

 

The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami

mzi.tqeikwgb.225x225-75.jpg

Sam Anderson1 went to Japan and hung out with a literary hero of mine, Haruki Murakami, in anticipation of Murakami’s newest novel, 1Q84 being released in America. I look forward to reading it…

Who is Haruki Murakami? Well, read on…

Murakami has always considered himself an outsider in his own country. He was born into one of the strangest sociopolitical environments in history: Kyoto in 1949 — the former imperial capital of Japan in the middle of America’s postwar occupation. “It would be difficult to find another cross-cultural moment,” the historian John W. Dower has written of late-1940s Japan, “more intense, unpredictable, ambiguous, confusing, and electric than this one.” Substitute “fiction” for “moment” in that sentence and you have a perfect description of Murakami’s work. The basic structure of his stories — ordinary life lodged between incompatible worlds — is also the basic structure of his first life experience.

Murakami grew up, mostly, in the suburbs surrounding Kobe, an international port defined by the din of many languages. As a teenager, he immersed himself in American culture, especially hard-boiled detective novels and jazz. He internalized their attitude of cool rebellion, and in his early 20s, instead of joining the ranks of a large corporation, Murakami grew out his hair and his beard, married against his parents’ wishes, took out a loan and opened a jazz club in Tokyo called Peter Cat. He spent nearly 10 years absorbed in the day-to-day operations of the club: sweeping up, listening to music, making sandwiches and mixing drinks deep into the night.

Haruki_Murakami_signture.svg

His career as a writer began in classic Murakami style: out of nowhere, in the most ordinary possible setting, a mystical truth suddenly descended upon him and changed his life forever. Murakami, age 29, was sitting in the outfield at his local baseball stadium, drinking a beer, when a batter — an American transplant named Dave Hilton — hit a double. It was a normal-­enough play, but as the ball flew through the air, an epiphany struck Murakami. He realized, suddenly, that he could write a novel. He had never felt a serious desire to do so before, but now it was overwhelming. And so he did: after the game, he went to a bookstore, bought a pen and some paper and over the next couple of months produced “Hear the Wind Sing,” a slim, elliptical tale of a nameless 21-year-old narrator, his friend called the Rat and a four-fingered woman. Nothing much happens, but the Murakami voice is there from the start: a strange broth of ennui and exoticism. In just 130 pages, the book manages to reference a thorough cross-section of Western culture: “Lassie,” “The Mickey Mouse Club,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “California Girls,” Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, the French director Roger Vadim, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Elvis Presley, the cartoon bird Woodstock, Sam Peckinpah and Peter, Paul and Mary. That’s just a partial list, and the book contains (at least in its English translation) not a single reference to a work of Japanese art in any medium. This tendency in Murakami’s work rankles some Japanese critics to this day.

Murakami submitted “Hear the Wind Sing” for a prestigious new writers’ prize and won. After another year and another novel — this one featuring a possibly sentient pinball machine — Murakami sold his jazz club in order to devote himself, full time, to writing.

(click here to continue reading The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami – NYTimes.com.)

 

Footnotes:
  1. no relation that I know of []

Desert Blues, Recorded On-Site

tumblr_lqt2u26dnJ1qz4m9to1_400.jpg

I just got my copy of Tinariwen’s Tassili today, as a matter of fact. I’ve listened to the CD once, so far, but like it a lot1. If you have a chance, pick up a copy. There is no “Auto-Tune” in use on this desert blues…

In the language of the Tuareg nomads, who for centuries have roamed the most remote reaches of the southern Sahara, “tinariwen” means “deserts.” But ever since the musical group of that name released its first CD in 2001, its members have recorded not on their home turf but in much the same way that American and European bands do: in the artificial environment of a recording studio, in cities like Paris and Bamako, Mali.

With “Tassili,” released on Tuesday, Tinariwen, whose music is a hard-rocking hybrid of Berber, Arab, Western and black African styles, has sought to return to its beginnings. Named for a spectacular area of canyons and sandstone arches near Algeria’s border with Libya, the CD was rehearsed and recorded out of doors there, in tents and around campfires much like those where the group’s founding members, political exiles then living in refugee settlements, first came together to play.

“We wanted to go back to our origins, to the experience of ishumar,” a word in the Tamashek language referring to exile or being adrift, explained Eyadou ag Leche, the band’s bass player, speaking in French during an interview in New York in July. “Those were times when we would sit around a campfire, singing songs and passing around a guitar. Tinariwen was born in that movement, in that atmosphere, so what you hear on ‘Tassili’ is the feeling of ishumar.”

“Theirs is music that at the same time seems very familiar, starting with the guitars and the call and response element in the vocals, but also sounds exotic to the ear,” said the guitarist Nels Cline of Wilco, who supplies an eerily swirling guitar background on “Imidiwan Ma Tennam,” the new CD’s opening track. “You’re listening to stuff that really rocks, but is also very stripped down. There is an air of mystery and longing, and that creates a mood that is palpable, very compelling and attractive for all kinds of people. It’s wonderful music, and not just for guitarists.”
Tinariwen’s music has sometimes been called “desert blues,” and the group’s penchant for writing songs in minor key modes certainly creates a sound that has a blue feeling. But the band’s members prefer to talk about “asuf,” a sentiment from their own culture that describes both a sense of spiritual pain, yearning or nostalgia and the emptiness of the desert itself. That, they acknowledge, creates a certain kinship with the bluesmen of Mississippi and Chicago.

“We didn’t know about these people at first because we were in our own universe,” Mr. ag Leche explained. “But when we first started hearing Hendrix, just to name someone, we felt something immediately. It was almost as if I had known that music from the day I was born. I’m told that a lot of the Africans who went to North America came from West Africa, from our part of the world. So it’s all the same connection. I think that any people who have lived through something that is very hard, feel this asuf, this pain, this longing. That is what will make their music sound similar to each other.”

(click here to continue reading Tinariwen’s ‘Tassili’ – Desert Blues, Recorded On-Site – NYTimes.com.)

 

Footnotes:
  1. as I suspected I would []

Bill Moyers Returns

Lonely Zenith
Lonely Zenith

PBS should be ashamed, siding with the Fox News Tea Party Republicans instead their long-time employee, Bill Moyers. Bill Moyers has more credibility in his shoelace than any corporate putz working for PBS.

Bill Moyers says he is returning to public television in January, but he won’t be found on the PBS lineup. His new hourlong weekly show, called “Moyers & Company,” will focus on one-on-one interviews with people not often heard on television, “thinkers who can help us understand the chaos of this time,” Mr. Moyers said in a telephone interview. “We’re going to be concerned with the state of democracy and the state of affairs, but we will leave the daily and weekly story to others and try to do the back story.”

Earlier this year, Mr. Moyers, who retired from PBS in April 2010, said he had received $2 million in financing from the Carnegie Corporation of New York for the new show, but PBS had told him it couldn’t find an appropriate time slot.

(click here to continue reading Bill Moyers Returns to Public Television, but Not PBS – NYTimes.com.)

The Crimean War – By Orlando Figes

Crimean War Memorial
Crimean War Memorial

I’ll have to  look for this book, my knowledge of this era is fairly shallow.

The Crimean War was the first major war to be covered by professional foreign correspondents, who reported on the disastrous blundering of commanders and the horrors of medical treatment at the battlefront. Today, we remember fragmentary stories: the charge of the Light Brigade, symbolizing the blundering; Florence Nightingale, for the medical treatment. But the real war has faded away, eclipsed by the two vastly worse world wars that were to come.

Still, the Crimean War — in which three-quarters of a million soldiers and untold multitudes of civilians perished — shattered almost four decades of European peace. It inflamed Russia’s rivalry with the Ottoman Empire over the Balkans, providing the tinder for World War I. And by thwarting Russian’s ambitions in Europe, it made possible the fatal rise of Germany.

In “The Crimean War: A History,” Orlando Figes restores the conflict — which predated the American Civil War by eight years — as “a major turning point” in European and Middle Eastern history. He argues forcefully that it was “the earliest example of a truly modern war — fought with new industrial technologies, modern rifles, steamships and railways, novel forms of logistics and communication like the telegraph, important innovations in military medicine and war reporters and photographers directly on the scene.” The ferocious yearlong siege of Sevastopol “was a precursor of the industrialized trench warfare” of World War I.

The war itself was initiated when religious squabbles over holy places in the Ottoman towns of Jerusalem and Bethlehem prompted Russia to march troops into present-day Romania, threatening the partition of Ottoman lands. In response, the Ottoman Empire declared war, and Britain and France rallied to its defense. The devastating combat around the Black Sea proved unbearable for Russia: two-thirds of the soldiers killed in the war were Russian. After losing Sevastopol, Russia accepted a humiliating peace.

Figes, a renowned professor of history at the University of London, might be thought the loneliest of creatures, the Crimean War buff. But his history is a huge success

(click here to continue reading Book Review – The Crimean War – By Orlando Figes – NYTimes.com.)

There’s an excerpt here or at the iTunes iBook store if you are interested but still undecided…

A Walk Through H

hotpocket plats
hotpocket plats

A Walk Through H is a film I saw years ago  1, and haven’t seen again, but still remember vividly, at least on an emotional level. A powerful film in other words. See it if you can. Looks like it is available via Netflix, I’ve just added it to my queue.

A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist was the culmination of Peter Greenaway’s 1970s short-form work. It is a 40-minute abstracted journey film, told almost entirely through the use of a series of 92 “maps,” a set of drawings and patterns gathered together in a museum by the mysterious Tulse Luper, a character who has wandered through many of Greenaway’s films. The narrator (Colin Cantlie) drolly describes each map in turn, recounting a journey through “H,” though the meaning of this journey or what “H” stands for is never explained outright. Instead, as Greenaway’s camera pans across the surface of each drawing, following the maze-like paths that lead from one map to the next, the narrator describes how he came to possess each of these maps, and what his journey is like. Greenaway occasionally intercuts images of birds and sunsets, the only figurative images in the film with the exception of the bookend sequences in the museum where all these maps are framed and displayed. Otherwise, the film is “set” entirely in the world of “H,” which is represented only by Tulse Luper’s maps, an elaborate guide through a mystery region, with a mysterious purpose as the goal.

This film is a culmination of Greenaway’s tendency towards lists and repetitions, a motif that would soon be elaborated on even further in the three-hour epic of The Falls. Here, Greenaway’s deadpan wit is comparatively concise, and about as mordantly funny as he’d ever be. The narrator is entirely straight-faced, but his bizarre, offhand descriptions of people and places and incidents — all of it tossed off with a tone that suggests he expects his audience to know exactly who and what he’s talking about — are often hilarious non sequiturs. Some of these characters and ideas would later show up in Greenaway’s feature films, and it’s not surprising: A Walk Through H suggests a thriving, fully populated world beyond its narrowly defined borders, with a great deal of intrigue and activity leading up to the gathering of these maps. The entire journey is driven as well by the propulsive, looping score of Michael Nyman, a chiming, hypnotic piece of music that accelerates to a frenzied crescendo for the breathless conclusion, in which an ornithologist is (possibly?) reincarnated at the journey’s end. This is a strange and unforgettable film, an imaginative mental odyssey, a map leading into the creative jumble of Greenaway’s fertile mind.

(click here to continue reading Only the Cinema: Films I Love #32: A Walk Through H (Peter Greenaway, 1978).)

 

Footnotes:
  1. while a student at University of Texas, basically on a lark, on one of those nights with nothing going on []

Best Songs for The Rapture

The End of the World Is Nigh

I’m sure I’m missing a few songs since this playlist took about ten minutes to compile, but here’s a good start for an End of the World Party soundtrack.

  1. MinutemenGod Bows to Math
    Double Nickels on the Dime
  2. Jimi Hendrix Experience…And The Gods Made Love
    Electric Ladyland
  3. Sun Kil MoonJesus Christ Was An Only Child
    Tiny Cities
  4. Dandy WarholsGodless
    Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia
  5. Big StarJesus Christ
    Keep an Eye on the Sky
  6. PoguesIf I Should Fall From Grace With God
    If I Should Fall From Grace With God
  7. Billy Joe ShaverJesus Christ, What A Man
    Old Five and Dimers Like Me
  8. Fahey, JohnIn Christ There Is No East Or West
    John Fahey, Peter Lang, Leo Kottke
  9. SloanIt’s Not the End of the World
    Never Hear the End of it
  10. A.A. BondyWorld Without End
    American Hearts
  11. Jello Biafra Mojo NixonJesus Was A Terrorist
    Sky Is Falling & I Want My Mommy
  12. Count BasieDark Rapture
    Ken Burns Jazz: Count Basie
  13. Rolling StonesI Just Want To See His Face
    Exile On Main Street
  14. MinutemenJesus And Tequila
    Double Nickels On The Dime
  15. Stills, StephenJesus Gave Love Away For Free
    Manassas
  16. ByrdsJesus Is Just Alright
    Live At Royal Albert Hall 1971
  17. Of MontrealRapture Rapes the Muses
    Satanic Panic in the Attic
  18. Josh WhiteJesus Gonna Make Up My Dying Bed
    Uncut – April 2008 – When The Levee Breaks
  19. CAKEJesus Wrote A Blank Check
    Motorcade Of Generosity
  20. Sonic YouthDo You Believe In Rapture?
    Rather Ripped
  21. Johnson, Blind WillieJesus Is Coming Soon
    The Complete Blind Willie Johnson
  22. Drive-By TruckersToo Much Sex (Too Little Jesus)
    Alabama Ass Whuppin’
  23. A.A. BondyRapture (Sweet Rapture)
    American Hearts
  24. Cash, JohnnyPersonal Jesus
    American IV: The Man Comes Around
  25. Nick Cave & The Bad SeedsJesus Of The Moon
    Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!
  26. Little FeatBrides Of Jesus
    Little Feat
  27. Johnson, Blind WillieIf It Had Not Been For Jesus
    The Complete Blind Willie Johnson
  28. The Velvet UndergroundJesus
    The Velvet Underground
  29. Super Furry AnimalsIt’s Not the End of the World?
    Rings Around the World
  30. Costello, ElvisWaiting For The End Of The World
    My Aim Is True
  31. Friedman, KinkyThey Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore
    Old Testaments & New Revelations
  32. Sun RaIt’s After The End Of The World
    Soundtrack To The Film: Space Is The Place
  33. The Blind Boys of MississippiJesus Gave Me Water
    Theme Time Radio Hour – 23 – Water
  34. ZZ TopJesus Just Left Chicago
    Tres Hombres
  35. Vaselines, TheJesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam
    The Way Of The Vaselines
  36. Sill, JudeeJesus Was A Cross Maker
    Judee Sill
  37. Rivers, BoydJesus Is On The Mainline
    Living Country Blues – Mississippi Moan
  38. Kurt VileJesus Fever
    Smoke Ring For My Halo
  39. WilcoJesus, etc.
    Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
  40. Waits, TomChocolate Jesus
    Mule Variations
  41. Norman GreenbaumSpirit in the Sky
    Spirit in the Sky
  42. R.E.M.It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
    Document
  43. Lennon, JohnGod
    Plastic Ono Band
  44. Elton JohnWhere To Now St. Peter?
    Tumbleweed Connection
  45. U2Until The End Of The World
    Until The End Of The World
  46. Green DayEast Jesus Nowhere
    21st Century Breakdown
  47. Dandy WarholsHard On For Jesus
    Dandy Warhols Come Down
  48. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds(I’ll Love You) Till The End Of The World
    Until The End Of The World
  49. Circle JerksKilling For Jesus
    Wonderful
  50. BeulahMe And Jesus Dont Talk Anymore
    Yoko
  51. Rebirth Brass BandGlory, Glory/Jesus On The Mainline
    We Come To Party
  52. Depeche ModePersonal Jesus
    Best
  53. BlondieRapture
    Autoamerican
  54. Spacemen 3Walkin’ With Jesus (Sound Of Confusion)
    The Singles
  55. Prine, JohnJesus The Missing Years
    The Missing Years
  56. Cohen, LeonardThe Future
    The Future
  57. CoupMe And Jesus The Pimp In A ’79 Granada Last Night
    Steal This Double Album
  58. Jethro TullMy God
    Aqualung
  59. Flaming LipsJesus Shootin’ Heroin
    Hear It Is The Flaming Lips
  60. Green DayJesus Of Suburbia / City Of The Damned / I Don’t Care / Dearly Beloved / Tales Of Another Broken Home
    American Idiot

What it is

What else should I add?

Wordle: Rapture Ridicule part 2

Random Friday Shuffle -Accidentally Like a Martyr edition

Fierce

Haven’t played this game in a while, so here is what my iTunes randomizer coughed up this morning.

  1. Zevon, WarrenAccidentally Like A Martyr
    Excitable Boy

    Warren Zevon ballad that gets me every time. The hurt gets worse, and the heart gets harder . From his 1976 debut album chock full of gems, including this song, Werewolves of London, Lawyers Guns and Money, etc. Apparently Jackson Browne and J.D. Souther contribute background vocals, though that matters less than the tune itself. Sentimental, not maudlin.

  2. Clarence Frogman HenryAin’t Got No Home
    Chess Rhythm & Roll

    Famously covered by The Band, sung in alternatively falsetto and “frog” croak voice. Swinging tune, R&B as it used to be constructed, full of sly humor and danceable rhythms.

  3. The Velvet UndergroundAll Tomorrow’s Parties
    Velvet Underground and Nico

    A Nico song, famously loved by Andy Warhol. Nico is predominant, Lou Reed and John Cale let her take the spotlight. In fact, Nico often sang it sans accompaniment when she played this song in later years.

  4. Thompson, RichardBeat The Retreat
    Pour Down Like Silver

    For a while, this album was out of print, maybe because it was the last album Richard and Linda Thompson recorded before joining a Sufi group, and didn’t have any top 40 hits on it. Down beat, and yet joyous. Music for a rainy day.

  5. Jens LekmanBlack Cab
    Maple Leaves

    The opening bars sound a lot like a Planxty song, or something similar. A bit of a shaggy dog story about NYC nightlife and cabs without medallions, but catchy all the same.

  6. Nelson, WillieBlue eyes crying in the rain
    Super Hits

    One of my favorite Willie Nelson songs in fact. Originally from Red Headed Stranger, which everyone should own a copy of, btw.

  7. Gil Scott-Heron & Brian JacksonThe Bottle
    Winter In America

    Gil Scott-Heron often pegged as a proto-rapper, which is sorta, sometimes true. He does chant his poetry more often than sing on some songs, but not on this stellar autobiographical song about alcoholics. Obviously from the mid-70s, as evidenced by the flute trills.

  8. SeedsCan’t Seem To Make You Mine
    The Seeds

    Sky Saxon recently died, this song will remain part of the soundtrack for a specific era of garage rock.

  9. Little Stevie WonderCastles In The Sand
    Hearing Is Believing: the Jack Nitzsche Story 1962-1979

    Wonder if Jimi Hendrix realized how close the title of his song was to Stevie Wonder’s 1964 version1. I’d assume yes, even though the songs are much different in execution. Stevie Wonder’s voice is much higher octave than later in his career, but still sings the heck out of the track. A little too much buried in strings for my taste, but not bad.

  10. Max Romeo & The UpsettersChase The Devil
    Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas K-JAH

    The Grand Theft Auto videogame franchise have quite excellent diegetic soundtracks2, including this classic reggae cut from Max Romeo, Lee “Scratch” Perry, and the Upsetters.

  11. Adams, RyanCome Pick Me Up
    Heartbreaker

    Usually my favorite Ryan Adams album. Folksy, for the most part, and strong lyrically. Such as this song with its chorus:
    I wish you would
    Come pick me up,
    Take me out,
    Fuck me up,
    Steal my records,
    Screw all my friends,
    They’re all full of shit,
    With a smile on your face.
    And then do it again…

    ha! I think he means it!

  12. Stevens, SufjanDecatur, Or, Round Of Applause For Your Stepmother!
    Come On Feel The Illinoise!

    My favorite song on this oddly compelling album about Illinois.

Previously I might have linked to Amazon, but since they don’t want to pay sales tax in Illinois, or elsewhere, screw those guys.

 

Footnotes:
  1. Stevie Wonder was 14 []
  2. diegetic in the sense that the car radio play these songs []

Group Doueh – Treeg Salaam

Feeding My Addiction

Desert blues news from all over…

Western Sahara’s story is a sad but typical one for a post-colonial land with bigger, stronger neighbors. In the ’70s, a nearly century-long episode of Spanish occupation gave way to bruising jockeying for possession between Morocco (which currently holds sway), Mauritania, and the homegrown Polisario movement of nationalist liberation. Episodes of war have generated a civilian diaspora that’s spread from refugee camps in neighboring countries to Cuba, but life for the people who have stayed behind carries on like it does anywhere. Folks still like to marry and party, and if they do so in the coastal city of Dakhla, they’re likely to hire Group Doueh to bring the tunes.

The group is part of a family entertainment business run by Doueh, a Dakhla native whose birth name was Salmou Baamar. As a youth, he took a shine to the sounds of James Brown and Jimi Hendrix, which he heard on cassettes imported from Spain. His first experiences as a professional musician playing at local parties coincided with Mauritania’s occupation of Dakhla, and you can hear both Western rock sounds and Mauritanian rhythms in his music, which he’s been performing throughout the region and marketing on cassette for over a quarter century. Doueh plays the tinidit (a.k.a. tidinit), a Moorish four-stringed lute, and electric guitar; according to a recent Wire article, he favors a Fender run through a few pedals. The rest of the group includes vocalists Bashiri Touballi and Halima Jakani (his wife) and keyboardist Jamaal Baamar (his son). Rhythm duties are shared between collective handclaps, Halima’s tbal (a hand drum), and the keyboard’s drum programs.

When they aren’t playing at local festivals and weddings, Doueh runs a cassette dubbing shop, and that’s where Sublime Frequencies’ Hisham Mayet located him after a search up and down Morocco to find the musician responsible for “Eid For Dakhla,” the raucous, backbeat-heavy ruckus that opens Doueh’s first LP Guitar Music From the Western Sahara. That record also kicked off Sublime Frequencies’ series of vinyl-first releases of contemporary guitar music heard around the Maghreb. Although Group Doueh’s music enjoys the same no-budget recording quality as the rest of the series, it differs significantly from the Touareg-rooted approaches of Group Inerane and Group Bombino. The music of the desert interior sounds like the blues, sometimes jacked up to rock distortion and intensity; Doueh’s has a more complex rhythmic underpinning, closer to the Master Musicians of Jajouka or flamenco, and adheres to traditional Mauritanian modes that spin the melodies down different paths than those of their deep Saharan brethren, more elaborate but less open-ended.

(click here to continue reading Dusted Reviews: Group Doueh – Treeg Salaam.)

Interview:

It’s hard to imagine what the four Muslim members of Group Doueh thought about their first gig outside Western Sahara, playing inside an Anglican church that served cold lager within the gay neighborhood of one of the most flamboyantly gay cities in Europe, Brighton, England. A couple of hours beforehand, Terminal Boredom got a few moments to sit down with the band in the church basement after sound check as the musicians ate takeout chicken and tabouli. Sublime Frequencies Co-founder Hisham Mayet translated from English to Arabic and back: vocalist Bashiri Touballi provided answers on the band’s behalf while guitarist Salmou “Doueh” Baamar stood squarely in front of and pointed a video camera directly at their English-language-only interviewer. Outside, a peculiar mix of middle-aged, upper-middle-class world music fans and scruffy weirdos on drugs lined up — an audience peculiar for most bands, sure, but not a Sublime Frequencies one.

 

(click here to continue reading Terminal Boredom – DOUEH.)

I’d usually link to Amazon’s copy of this album, but since they ended my affiliate program in a tax-dispute snit with the State of Illinois, I’ll let you discover the album on your own, from wherever.

Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?

Symbolic

Matt Taibbi wonders, as do we all, why teachers in Wisconsin have to give up their pensions, and Wall Street crooks get to sleep on1 bags of krugerands without consequence.

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

This article appears in the March 3, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available now on newsstands and will appear in the online archive February 18.

The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What’s more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even “one dollar” just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick “The Gorilla” Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.

Invasion of the Home Snatchers

Instead, federal regulators and prosecutors have let the banks and finance companies that tried to burn the world economy to the ground get off with carefully orchestrated settlements — whitewash jobs that involve the firms paying pathetically small fines without even being required to admit wrongdoing. To add insult to injury, the people who actually committed the crimes almost never pay the fines themselves; banks caught defrauding their shareholders often use shareholder money to foot the tab of justice. “If the allegations in these settlements are true,” says Jed Rakoff, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, “it’s management buying its way off cheap, from the pockets of their victims.”

 

To understand the significance of this, one has to think carefully about the efficacy of fines as a punishment for a defendant pool that includes the richest people on earth — people who simply get their companies to pay their fines for them. Conversely, one has to consider the powerful deterrent to further wrongdoing that the state is missing by not introducing this particular class of people to the experience of incarceration. “You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street,” says a former congressional aide. “That’s all it would take. Just once.”

But that hasn’t happened. Because the entire system set up to monitor and regulate Wall Street is fucked up.

 

(click here to continue reading Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail? | Rolling Stone Politics.)

The chairman of Goldman Sachs isn’t going to a pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, nor is any CEO. Unfortunately. Not that anyone should be raped, even Jamie Dimon, but you get the idea. A little bit of actual penalty would be good for these assholes.

Looks like Matt Taibbi has written a book on the subject:

Taibbi eviscerates Wall Street for what he considers frauds perpetrated on the American people over the last ten years. Deftly delving deeply into complicated financial history and lingo, Taibbi deftly lays the subject bare, rendering heretofore-dense subject matter simple without being simplistic. Blame for the recent mortgage collapse, commodities bubble, and tech bubble are laid at the feet of a relatively small number of bankers and traders who, in the author’s opinion, act without fear of reciprocity from a U.S. government no longer representative of the American people. He begins by awarding the title “Biggest Asshole In The Universe” to former-Fed Chief Alan Greenspan, taking him to task for willfully or stupidly disemboweling what little regulation the financial markets may have had before his tenure. This theme resounds throughout, and Taibbi asserts that the collusion between Wall Street and the White House has effectively turned the United States into a massive casino, in which working Americans are regularly bilked out of their savings and homes while the wealthy are repeatedly rewarded for their graft. It’s an important and worthy read, but not for the Randian disciple or Goldman-Sachs alum

But if you are too cheap to buy Taibbi’s book, at least read his article.

Footnotes:
  1. metaphoric []