Staff Picks - August 30

Just in case you're interested, we've asked various members of our staff to contribute a little cultural tidbit/random thought/funny link...we're calling them "staff picks." Here's a list of what we're into this week and stay tuned for bi-weekly updates.

John Mark:

Online, I’ve been reading Brand New, which covers the world of corporate logo re-designs and its sister site Art of the Menu, which is about menu design. I have no idea why I enjoy these so much, but find them oddly compelling. http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/ and http://www.underconsideration.com/artofthemenu/

Offline: Faithful Ruslan by Georgi Vladimov from Melville House's excellent reprint series The Neversink Library. Utterly heartbreaking and engrossing so far... http://mhpbooks.com/book.php?id=543

Ally Jane:

There are hundreds of photography blogs devoted to creepy abandoned places, but no one does creepy and abandoned quite like the Japanese. They even have a word for it: Haikyo, literally “abandoned place.” http://www.haikyo.org/ . Years of neglect after periods of boom have lead to an incredible array of abandoned real estate developments, theme parks, hospitals and factories. One Haiyko photographer explains the mysterious ruins of the “Royal House” in a twisted and fascinating story here: http://gakuranman.com/the-royal-house-haikyo/.

Katie:

Book: Madam Bovary – still reading it, and waiting for the big ‘thrill’ that is to be had while reading this modern novel

Movie: Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies – how the beginning of filmmaking affected these artists and their cubist movement. Interesting concept, but the movie got stale. Not sure if all those voiceovers would have been allowed, had Scorsese directed it….

David:

I’m just starting Lev Grossman’s The Magician King, the follow-up to his brilliant The Magicians from a couple of years ago. Fantasy is a genre about which I know very little so I’m guessing that 90% of the references buried in these books fly right over my head – however, one of the best things for me about Grossman’s writing is that he finds it wonderfully difficult to resist a silly joke. In this new novel we’ve already had “Fillory Clinton” and there are dozens of fun, childish passages like this:

“Jesus Christ” was an expression the younger Fillorians had picked up from their new rulers. It was impossible to explain to them what it actually meant. They were convinced it was something dirty.

And here’s some linkage for you: Dan Kois, author of our excellent 33 1/3 volume on Iz, reviewed The Magician King for the NYT the other day:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/books/review/the-magician-king-by-lev-grossman-book-review.html

How I spent my hurricane vacation:

Watching old youtube clips from The Dukes of Hazzard featuring country musicians performing at The Boar's Nest to pay off trumped up speeding tickets from Boss Hogg's Celebrity Speedtrap. Enjoy! (Embedding has been disabled on several of these videos, unfortunately, but you can click through.)
Buck Owens
The Oak Ridge Boys
Johnny Paycheck
Tammy Wynette

Necessary viewing

Stevie Nicks gets her hair did.

Television on the Radio

Bryan Waterman (Television's Marquee Moon) will be on WNYC's Soundcheck on Wednesday, August 17 from appx 2:30-3:00pm EST. If you can't tune in live, I will update this post with an archive tomorrow. here's the link!

Wayne Coyne & Mark Richardson

Ed McKay bookstore in Raleigh, NC is curating an amazing series of artist and author talks and panels September 8th, 9th, and 10th. The last of the series features Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips and our own author of the 33 1/3 on Zaireeka, Mark Richardson. But I'm going to repost the entire lineup because it all looks fantastic.
THE EDWARD MCKAY USED BOOKS & MORE ARTIST AND AUTHOR SERIES AT HOPSCOTCH 2011

Thursday, Sept. 8
Raleigh City Museum, 3–5 p.m.
Present the Past: Honoring and Outstripping Influences
Everyone has influences, from parental figures who shape your attitude to friends who influence your actions. This panel gathers artists who turn what they’ve learned from clear, identifiable forebears into something altogether different. William Tyler, for instance, is an acoustic guitarist who has clearly moved beyond the mold of John Fahey acolytes, while Jamie Stewart’s magpie tendencies in the band Xiu Xiu create a fascinating, fresh web of references and meanings. Today, they’ll talk about how they’ve gotten beyond the past.

WITH

Rhys Chatham
William Tyler
Jamie Stewart (of Xiu Xiu)
Cheyenne Marie Mize
Yair Yona
David Daniell (of Rhys Chatham Guitar Trio, San Agustin) Brian Corum (of Lonnie Walker)
Moderated by: Grayson Currin

Friday, Sept. 9
Raleigh City Museum, 3–5 p.m.
Simple Words: The Power of Narrative Songs
The number of ways you can write and then record a song are infinite. But some songwriters seem to find a way to tell us a story that, though it may be personal to them, feels personal to us, too. The Drive-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood is among the best ever with these sorts of songs; he’ll join this panel of fellow standout writers and the head of a record label built on such traditions to talk about why narrative in music can be so very compelling.

WITH

Patterson Hood (of Drive-By Truckers)
John Vanderslice
Dolphus Ramseur (of Ramseur Records)
David Menconi (of The News & Observer)
Heather McEntire (of Mount Moriah, Bellafea)
James Jackson Toth (of Wooden Wand)
Ross Flournoy (of Apex Manor)
Moderated by: David Klein

Saturday, Sept. 10
Raleigh City Museum, 3–5 p.m.
The Bubble: The Limits of Pop Music
The Flaming Lips’ 1997 album, Zaireeka, consisted of four compact discs, each holding one stereo track for each of the eight songs on the album. In order for the album to be properly heard, these four discs had to be played simultaneously. Indeed, if any act in the past two decades has challenged what the notion of pop music might be, it’s The Flaming Lips. The band’s Wayne Coyne will be joined by Mark Richardson, the Editor in Chief of Pitchfork Media and the author of a recent book about Zaireeka. Others who have explored the core and fringes of pop, both as musicians and critics, will also speak.

WITH

Wayne Coyne (of The Flaming Lips)
Mark Richardson (Editor in Chief of Pitchfork Media and author of Zaireeka)
Peter Holsapple (of the dB’s and R.E.M.)
Julianna Barwick
Sam Herring (of Future Islands)
David Tompkins (author of How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop, The Machine Speaks)
Moderated by: Brian Howe

MORE INFO HERE.

Early '70s Radio

We are proud to announce the release of "Early '70s Radio" by Kim Simpson. The title speaks volumes for the content and there's a bit about the book over on Continuum's Film and Media Studies Blog.


Kim Simpson explores the different formats that emerged from both a technical and a historical perspective, definitely Required reading for the radio enthusiast. Whoever thought the "pod cast" would replace the radio show was seriously disturbed.

Ohh and if you like radio, I mean really like radio, check out these two radio history-heavy 33 1/3rds.
John Dougan's "The Who's The Who Sell Out"
and
Bruce Eaton's "Big Star's Radio City"

Kim Simpson has a blog about the book which is quite mesmerizing. www.early70sradio.com

Distilled Christgau

I once had a professor who tried to explain the frustration around translating Russian curses (or was it Hungarian? Or Czech?) into English, saying that for a native speaker on a real tear, each curse added to the string multiplies the previous curse exponentially and lays a foundation for the next, so in effect you have an insanely intricate and interconnected castle of curses being constructed around the speaker.

Courtesy of the WFMU blog, here is the music criticism equivalent to slavic cursing:

The Consumed Guide is a text composed from thousands of negative words and phrases assembled from 13, 090 reviews by Robert Christgau and turned into a single review.

Brilliant.

Bono & Steve Catanzarite's 33 1/3 on Achtung Baby

For certain volumes in the series, it is not unfathomable for the author to get to meet their book's subjects. But for artists at a certain echelon of fame...well, you just don't expect it to happen. Here's the story of one of those unlikely meetings from Stephen Catanzarite, author of the 33 1/3 on U2's Achtung Baby.

"Standing backstage less than a half-hour before U2 hit the stage in Pittsburgh, writer and FOB (Friend of Bono) Neil McCormick presented Bono with a copy of "Achtung Baby: Meditations on Love in the Shadow of the Fall." Neil is a fan of the book and had offered to get a copy to the man himself. It took him two years -- he wanted to make sure the timing was right. He certainly delivered. U2 is set to release a 20th anniversary box set of "Achtung Baby" later this year, and the band has been playing several tracks from the album on its massive 360 Tour. He also scored the author with a private meeting with the legendary singer. Neil told Bono of the premise of the book: "Stephen says your album is really about the Fall of Man." Bono nodded and said "That's right, it is." He then turned to me and said "Do you know what we were going to call the album?" "Sure, 'Adam'," I replied, to which the superstar laughed and said "You're good, man." He took a copy with him, but also signed a copy for my wife. McCormick also told Bono of my theorizing of a "conservative voice" in the songs of U2. "You're a statesman in the same mold as your fellow Dubliner Edmund Burke" I said, to which Bono replied "Well, thanks -- that puts me in fantastic company."

Music writer Neil McCormick presenting Bono with a copy of the 33 1/3 volume on "Achtung Baby" as author Stephen Catanzarite looks on.

Bono and 33 1/3 author Stephen Catanzarite, taken backstage at Heinz Field, Pittsburgh.

Bono's imprimatur on the 33 1/3's "Achtung Baby" (inscribed to the author's wife).

Odds and ends...

Our friends at WNYC's On The Media briefly discuss the volumes on Paul's Boutique and It Takes A Nation of Millions and conclude that "it seems like absolutely no one likes Russell Simmons." [The weekly staff picks on the blog are well worth checking out. Actually, everything about that show is worth checking out. Highly entertaining.]

The blog Psychobabble has some very nice things to say about the volume on Marquee Moon:

[Waterman's] book serves as a well-researched biography of the band’s earliest days, which means it tells the portion of Television’s story that will most interest fans...Compact yet comprehensive, Bryan Waterman’s Marquee Moon crams a lot of interesting information and insights onto its 211 tiny pages.

Oh, and also, THE WU-TANG CLAN NEEDS AN INTERN.

Pretty Hate Machine / Song Cycle

I've got two very nice items to share with you today:

The first is a fantastic review of Richard Henderson's volume on Van Dyke Parks' Song Cycle from Crawdaddy.

"Henderson’s impeccably researched volume tells the story of a young vagabond landing in Los Angeles and falling in with an elite circuit of musicians and intellectuals. Henderson traces Van Dyke Parks’ climb through Warner Brothers Records’ ranks, from a low-rung arranger to top-shelf solo artist with seemingly unlimited resources. ...Like The Rest Is Noise author Alex Ross’ ability to make dense topics accessible, Richard Henderson excels at embracing the technical innards of music in a universally fascinating manner."

The second is this fascinating in-depth interview with Daphne Carr from the KEXP blog about her volume on Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine (and much more). It's very very good.

Tiny Music Makers

From way back in 2005, here are some nice pocket histories of five short but ubiquitous songs, if you could call them that, in the words of their composers (Apple start up chord, THX sound, Microsoft sound, etc.)

"He had developed what is now called the THX sound system. It was to premiere with Lucasfilm's "Return of the Jedi." They were making a logo to go before the film. I was asked by the producer of the logo piece to do the sound. He said he wanted "something that comes out of nowhere and gets really, really big!" I allowed as to how I figured I could do something like that."

Sesame Street breaks it down from Wonderful Creative.

Some recent reviews...

Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal was selected by Flavorwire as one of “10 Great Books about Music by Female Writers”

Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson (“Erudite and eye-opening”) and John Darnielle's volume on Black Sabbath's Master of Reality were both reviewed as part of Pitchfork’s “Our 60 Favorite Music Books” feature. Here's a quote from the Sabbath review:

“Darnielle-- who worked as a nurse in a mental hospital and presumably met quite a few smart, lost kids like Roger-- speaks to the soul-damaging aspects of locking up problem teens and offers a piece of music criticism that illuminates the edifying qualities of heavy metal.”

Bryan Waterman's volume on Television’s Marquee Moon was reviewed on Crawdaddy!:

“Waterman [has done] extensive research, culling from NYU’s archive of Richard Hell’s papers, rock journalist reviews from the era (Christgau, Bangs, Kent, et al.), and extensive interviews, making sure to maintain the composure of an academic thesis, and not a fan boy rag.”

A review also appeared in This Ain't The Summer of Love:

"Fans of the band should consider "Marquee Moon" as required reading. The book will also be a welcome addition to the bookshelves of anyone who is seriously interested in the history of the CBGB scene and the early-mid 70's era musical and artistic landscape of New York City as a whole."

And Bryan was also interviewed by Vol. 1 Brooklyn.

And last but not least, Tony Toth Yost Tost's volume on Johnny Cash’s American Recordings was reviewed in the Milwaukee Express

“Tost is like a foster son of Greil Marcus, beating his own path into old, weird America through the life of the Man in Black.”

As the summer kicks into full gear, I would do well to remind you of the wonderful podcast that is Tony Tost's America (also findable and free in the itunes store). Seems to go well with heat and dust.

Nation in Love with Girl from Record Store

One of my all-time favourite Onion stories, from June 2001...

"[Metzler] works at the coolest record store in Athens, and she's totally up on all the latest stuff," said Ryan Griggs, 48, a television repairman from Salem, OR. "You have no idea how many people go in there every day and buy some obscure Go-Betweens B-sides collection or the latest Stephin Merritt side project just to try to impress her."

Guest Blog: Scott Tennent on pre-Slint band Maurice

Maurice (Pre-Slint) Demos Now Available

If you've read my book on Spiderland, you know that one of my main arguments in the opening chapter is that the significance of Squirrel Bait in the pre-Slint soup is somewhat overstated, considering David Grubbs wrote the majority of that band's music and lyrics and that Brian McMahan and Britt Walford were not really in the band at the same time. But there's a recorded documentation of Squirrel Bait and all those names are in the liner notes, so there you go. Rather, in my interviews for the book, it was made pretty clear to me that another band had a much more direct tie to Slint: Maurice...

Linkage to the full post: http://prettygoeswithpretty.typepad.com/pgwp/2011/07/maurice-pre-slint-demos-now-available.html

David Pajo has made the full demos available on his bandcamp page: http://music.davidpajo.com/releases

Enjoy!