Some Words

This video has hijacked my brain. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve watched it over the last week and a half.

I went to see Anathallo last night. They were at the Varsity Theater, which is a pretty good venue. Matt was hanging around out front, and I talked to him a little bit. He’s even taller than when I last chatted with him, which admittedly was before he graduated from high school. It was, on the whole, a very odd experience. Matt is just a straight up friendly guy. Based on my experience with him, I don’t think he can help being nice to people. Chatting with him, and then seeing how he held himself on stage, I remembered what he was like when I last saw them, playing at New Moon Records in Mt. Pleasant. The whole band was better. They’re more comfortable on the stage and it shows.

I was frustrated by the opening act though. It was Page France. The lead singer has an interesting enough voice, and is passable on the guitar. The rest of the band didn’t seem very musical though, including a woman who played keys one handed all night. She also sometimes pulled out a tambourine or played the glockenspiel, again one handed. Her voice seemed hesitant and she was a bit unsure of the beat. The drummer and bassist were never called on to do much of anything. The point seemed to be cramming as many uses of the words dove, blood, fish, and chariot into each song as possible. I feel I’m being a little too mean, as I was clearly not the audience they had in mind, but on the whole I felt it was like listening to Neutral Milk Hotel, if they had been put on lithium, robbing them of the raw crazy passion that made them interesting.

Crooked Timber just had a link up to this site. It’s three minute musical sequences, based on colored dots rotating in a circle at fixed speeds, a visual music box.

Today I tried to buy tickets online for a show on Sunday. There were complications, relating to Ticketmaster not believing that I might have moved in the year since I was last forced to use their online ticketing system. Before I even got that far though, I had to enter a word from a jpeg with hashes across it. It’s a fairly standard thing these days, to prevent automated use of sites. The word that Ticketmaster wanted me to enter was ‘choke.’ That seemed about right.

Oh, and because the show was cheap, their fees literally doubled the cost of ordering online. I’m going to buy them in person now. Ah the convenience of this modern world.

So, a classic club has closed its doors. I never got to go. I don’t get out of the house much… and I live in Minnesota. But I read this post at Martini Republic and I did feel a little sad to hear this place was closing. It’s been about to happen for ages, but arts institutions always seem to be on the brink anyway, so often it doesn’t get noticed.

I don’t have a CBGB shirt, but judging from how many of them I see around town (and how few of those people have probably been to the club) the place has reached a point where it was more legend than fact. Punk stopped meaning what it used to long ago. The reality of the club was probably the same, but whatever reality it had, it no longer exists to counterbalance the myth.

Every now and then I check out what’s happing to my
Uncle Charlie. He’s in this odd little musical space somewhere between rockabilly and a hard place. Anyhow, he’s got a new album out, and there is also a podcast from a radio show he did a little while ago. There were a few good laughs in it, so I thought I’d post it here. The highlights as I see it are a song about propecia, rambling about being in Ann Arbor loving Iggy or Commander Cody, and my uncle contemplating his musical relation to Weird Al.

Edit: I swear I didn’t realize I was making that pun. Please believe me.

Old link from Boing Boing in which the entertainment industry calls people who use encryption are pedophiles. Man… I work at an ISP, and by that standard everyone I work with has short eyes. But that’s actually really canny. There’s a history of pedophilia being used to tar things. Think about that. If you hear about pedophiles in the media, the reporter always goes out of their way to underline that they find the activity loathsome. It’s so stigmatized that just reporting on it makes you have to deny that you are one. Painting encryption as the domain of sex offenders may be the entertainment industry’s only way of stopping this otherwise totally sane and sensible thing to do with your data.

Oh and speaking of data, this other Boing Boing post underlines how they want you to give up the right to own it.

The Valve had this little bit about why people like me are posting pointless chunks of our personal lives online.

Matthew Yglesias laments that he likes a band that Pitchfork doesn’t. I feel for you Matt. Maybe not on that band, but for a review site Pitchfork often feels like they’re too worried with being trend setters, or getting caught out liking something dorky. That might harm their indie cred, but it would tell me that they actually cared about the music, or having fun with the stuff. Still, there are times when the reviewer seems to know that music can be about fun more than art or that you don’t have to take yourself seriously all the time. Sometimes they even let on that personal taste or situation might effect you’re like or dislike of an album, not its inherent value as some sort of object of art.

And finally, me wanty, but $30 is a bit high for a t-shirt to me.

P.S. Jewish Priates!

I want to sail the seas in search of booty like my ancestors.

I appears that my uncle has put out a new album. I’ll have to check that out. I’ll be honest, he’s not always to my taste. But I sing “Without My Woman” in the shower all the time. When his stuff does work for me, it’s really fun.

And also, college Republicans at the U of Mich are crazy. I must be reading the wrong blogs though, because I didn’t see any of them link this story to the Dick Cheney Hunting mishap. For shame.

iTunes 7 still can’t get the album art for “Come on Feel the Illinoise!” Come on iTunes, I can see it in the damn music store. Don’t punish me because my brother gave me the album as a gift. Not since transparency worked its way into Xorg have I worked this hard to get a pointless feature to work.

So, I was dumb, and in trying to make iTunes 7 get more artwork for albums (If I see Come on Feel the Illinoise! in the iTunes store, why can’t you download the artwork?) and I managed to cluster fuck a bunch of the ID3 tags in my library. I restored to yesterday’s library, but sadly there were about three gigs of songs that did not come back. I’d imported them since the last backup, so the overwritten tags couldn’t be restored. That’s been fun… Overall, while I like the album art, and the view is nice eye candy, I can’t help but feel that iTunes 7 isn’t as nice as 6. It just feels… ugly.

Boing Boing has this bit about a new source of free classical music. I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, but hopefully they’re good performances. If classical music had a lot of free recordings out there, I have this feeling that it might help more people get into it. Call me crazy, but there is really good stuff out there, and while not everyone these days is going to go for classical, some people will be drawn to it. Making it free lowers the bar of entry for exploratory listeners. That’s always a good thing, because the real money, and about this I assume classical music is like popular music, is in people coming to concerts, not the recordings. Of course people still have to find it…

Back in the day I had an incredibly crappy web page, where from time to time I would post thoughts and things I had written. It was like this blog, but without php making things easy, nasty graphics that I had done myself in photo shop, and even less frequently updated. I can tell you’re all wondering why I’m not an internet phenomenon already.

Anyhow one of the things I wrote about back then, was how I wished there was a service, either a little program (the sort of thing that would now go in the OS X dashboard) or an email service, that would aggregate all the bands I wanted to track so I would know when they were coming through town. A lot of bands had sign up lists, but it was not consistent, and usually they would just send out a big tour schedule. I’m lazy and I wanted it to feel personal.

Well, yesterday the good folks of Fabulist let me know that such a thing now exists. Tourfilter, and here I link the Twin Cities portion, but it’s there for a bunch of other cities. Lets you track who’s coming to town. They send you email notices and if you want to, you can post it to your blog. And oh, what’s this I see? It can integrate with iCal and thus end up in your dashboard. Now I have even less excuse for why I don’t go to all those shows I miss.

I saw this post over at Fabulist. Now, I like jazz. I also like The Bad Plus. Several people I know, who care about jazz, don’t really like The Bad Plus. They don’t think that it’s jazz. I haven’t really given it much thought, but I saw that they had exclusive tracks on iTunes and went there to check it out. iTunes lists them as rock, pop, and jazz. Give, an album my brother gave me a while back, thank you Jamie, can be bought as either jazz or rock from iTunes. That’s all well and good, but it costs a dollar more if you buy it as jazz. I assume that there is no difference in the albums. The track listing is the same for both purchasing options. What gives? Am I supposed to be wealthier if I like jazz?

Full disclosure, my brother has had a hand in Anathallo over the years, and is with them right now.

All right. I was surprised by the Anathallo review at Pitchfork. I didn’t think they’d be getting a 10 or anything, but a 2.7… Ah well. Everyone gets to have an opinion. Not everyone is going to like the album. I guess I have nothing to argue about.

Oh wait! I care about grammar, punctuation, and how arguments and stories are put together…

What’s with that colon in the first sentence? Sure, you’re making a list, but that’s one long fucker of a sentence. Couldn’t you break it up? Colons are so easy to misuse. You’d probably be better off making three sentences out of the opening one.

Now I’m going to quote the review to illustrate some points.

“Adds lead singer Matt Joynt, in choirboy melisma that intermittently froths with emo-kid angst: ‘See, all things are so bright and spiritual.’”

Some have called me naive. Nevertheless, I favor a formula of one sentence, one intent. You’re trying to get a dig in on the vocals while setting up your next quip. If you think something is worth making fun of why didn’t didn’t you give it its own sentence?
Additionally, when you put two ideas in one sentence punctuated by a colon people will think the second supports the first. I’m hoping “bright and spiritual” isn’t how you define angst. I define it as “a feeling of anxiety, apprehension, or insecurity,” so does Merriam-Webster.

Side note: How does a choirboy melisma froth with anything? Is it carbonated?

After the angst sentence is a paragraph break. Then the next paragraph starts:

“Oh, are they? The band’s name may be Greek for ‘to renew’, but criticism comes from the Greek krinein, or ‘to cut,’ and here on the world wide internet there’s plenty of space for saber-baring. Floating World’s ostensible centerpiece is the song cycle from caroling, discordant “Hanasakajijii One: The Angry Neighbor” to the, yes, “Chicago”-like “Hanasakajijii Four: A Great Wind, More Ash”– although naturally, the tracks are out of order and interspersed with the rest of the album.”

Now I know they told you in high school that the end of one paragraph should naturally lead naturally into the next. I was there too, and it’s not a horrible rule. If you can get one topic to flow into the next topic that’s great. The problem is, you just stuck the end of the second paragraph on the third. It’s like you were telling a joke at a party, then you paused before the punch line and struck a pose. In the pose you looked around to make sure everyone was still paying attention. Then you finished the joke. For an example of kind of textual mugging, see earlier in my post when I do the same thing by saying, “Oh wait.”

That passage raises a lot of questions too. Was world wide internet supposed to be cute? Shouldn’t it be world wide web, or just the internet? Is the phrase you’re looking for saber rattling? Why do you say “the, yes, ‘Chicago’-like?” Are you answering someone? Do you have multiple personalities? Could one of them have edited this for you?

“They’re based on a Japanese folktale about a dog digging up gold in a neighbor’s yard. Typical lyric: ‘I, of wicked deeds, snarling mouth/ Wandered away, wandered by.’ Clearly, none of this is Japan’s fault.”

If brevity is the soul of wit, keen observation is the rusty prison shiv it sticks in your eye.

Of course it’s not Japan’s fault. Who said it was? Allow me to make a simlar construction:

Pitchfork is doing that whole reviewing albums on a website thing that you see a lot these days. Sometimes they don’t edit the reviews before posting them. Clearly this is not the web’s fault.

“Complexity for complexity’s sake is lame, and nothing inherently privileges music that tries to bring “higher” arts into plain ol’ pop…”

That’s classic rhetoric. I’m not saying it’s bad. I’m just pointing it out. Notice how it tries to hide that this is opinion and not fact. There’s no way to prove that Anathallo’s intent was to make it complex. For all the reviewer knows the guys in Anathallo just hear that kind of music in their heads. It’s has a well chosen caveat too. He says there are acceptable ways to mesh high art and pop music, but does not give an example to back up his statement.

Hey Marc Hogan! It’s fun to hate bands. I make fun of bands all the time. But the next time you decide to be witty and cut a band down to size, you need to actually be witty and cut a band down to size. It’s hard to do that when you don’t edit for clarity and meaning. Of course I’m going to make a hypocrite of myself by not doing the same with this post. But then, I’ve wasted too much time on this already and I’m not a big site like Pitchfork.