Bare Minimum >> Marking the unmarkable pristine sea

Bare Minimum - "Night We Streak, Divine Failure"

(Sub Pop Records, 1995 / Rx Remedy Records, 1996)

Here's one of the most intense songs I've ever heard, by a band that is tragically unknown.  As you can imagine, there are a lot of bands with this name, so be sure to demand the real one (born in Cali, raised in Seattle) at your best record store.

The intensity is ramped up masterfully over the course of the song, with a fairly astonishing ending section.  This song was recorded in March '95 by Barrett Jones and released as a 7" single by Sub Pop later that year:

Mediocre pic taken from an eBay auction; evidence of olden days when indie labels were apparently not prohibited from using black vinyl by arcane guild rules.

Amazingly, this single didn't turn them into the new Nirvana or even the new Dickless or Cat Butt.  Despite this, Sub Pop obviously dug the song, because it was included on the band's Night We Streak EP the following year, on a short-lived Sub Pop imprint called Rx Remedy.  I think this label was some sort of minor league where Sub Pop's less-commercial bands could develop for a while, but none of them ever gained any notoriety.

I once read an interview with Bare Minimum in which they talked about being the Foo Fighters' opening act in summer or fall of '95.  (This is possibly related to the fact that Barrett Jones also produced the Foos' early stuff, and previously had done some production for Nirvana.)  The thought of a few thousand teen grunge fans being subjected to Bare Minimum's angular chaos when all they really wanted to hear was "Big Me" or some Nirvana covers is really amusing.  I would kill to hear some live recordings of B-Min from this tour.  Props to Dave Grohl for taking them on the road.

I first got into this B-Min when I bought a promo CD* of their proggy opus Can't Cure The Nailbiters in January '99 at the Mushroom on a whim.  (I'm pretty sure I also bought my promo CD of Drive Like Jehu's Yank Crime there on the same day.)  I then tracked down all their other stuff, including a very rare self-titled EP from '93 that I recently downloaded.  But I have yet to corrall the "Night We Streak" 7", or the split 7" with post-hardcore icons Angel Hair.

Bare Minimum had some quirks: Singer Brian Speckman sang about eyeballs a lot, e.g. "Cursed with black widow eyes" in this song.  Their two guitarists are credited as "left guitar" (Brian Speckman) and "right guitar" (Mark Pinkos).  Their song titles were generally complex and impenetrable: "Star Raise Iodine Failure Drainpipe To The Bottom," "Substitute Genius For Jesus And Poke His Eyes Out," "Zero Discuss", "Waterfight Or Firefight, Sand Or Baking Soda," "Swim In Anxious Moment," "A Dime's Body Makes Him A Diver," "Platinum Eyes Three Quarters Open."  Definitely one of the artiest and most oblique of all the so-called "post-hardcore" bands of the '90s, often treading into abstract realms that their apparent idols like Unwound, Fugazi and Sonic Youth seldom did.  Their dense, dueling guitars have been was compared by All Music Guide to those of early Glenn Branca orchestras.

The lyrics from the Night We Streak CD booklet:

They are mostly accurate, though he does not actually say "on the outskirts of" or "when I've sunk back into the sea"; I think he says "emotional" instead of "motion"; and he substitutes "their" for "black widow" near the very end.  And the line "marking the unmarkable pristine sea" is ominously intoned by a different, lower voice while Speckman shrieks "Marking! The pristine sea!"  It's probably Speckman doing both voices via overdubbing.  After about 10 years of thinking this song has something to do with drowning or dying, today I realized it's pretty obviously about sex and the guilt related to it.

Drummer Joe Plummer went on to play in mediocre-to-dismal pop bands like The Black Heart Procession (mediocre), Modest Mouse great to mediocre), and The Shins (dismal), and participated in the Boredoms' 88-drummer performance in 2008.  Of course, his shoddy Wikipedia page makes no mention of the words "Bare" or "Minimum."  I don't know what the other members have been up to, but if anyone knows, please leave a comment.

Discography:
Angel Hair / Bare Minimum - split 7" EP (Titanic Records / Gold Standard Laboratories [GSL], 1994)
"Night We Streak, Divine Failure" 7" (Sub Pop, 1995) ✇
Bare Minimum CD (Rx Remedy, 1996) ♨
Bare Minimum LP (Rx Remedy, 1996) (alternate cover) ♨
Night We Streak CD EP (Rx Remedy, 1996) ☠
No Cure For The Nailbiters (promo CD) (Rx Remedy, 1998) ✈☂
Can't Cure The Nailbiters CD (Rx Remedy, 1998) ☂
Can't Cure The Nailbiters 2xLP (Rx Remedy, 1998) ☂

Incredible Notes:
✇ - Translucent paper sleeve
♨ - Recorded in '95
☠ - Mostly recorded in '95; one song in '96
✈ - The promo CD for their last album is titled No Cure For The Nailbiters and has slightly different titles for several songs
☂ - Recorded in '97

How bots seized control of my pricing strategy - "...a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less printed and read."

Video clip of a mind-boggling collection of Mammillaria cacti in Russia:

Due to their small size, toughness, abundant flowers, crazy spines, etc., Mammillaria is the main genus of cacti that I, and most other cactus fanatics, collect.  But this collection rivals that of any big-time botanical garden, and this clip proves there's a new Cold War, or dare I say a new Hot War, brewing.  So we need to develop a nuke that can kill all the male citizens of Russia, but spare all the women and cacti.

Planets with similar climates: Unwound - "What Was Wound" (1993) & "Petals Like Bricks" (1995), Bleach - "Headless" (1991), Fugazi - "Sieve-Fisted Find" (1989), ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead - "Homage" (2001), Drive Like Jehu - "Here Come The Rome Plows" (1994), Helmet - "Murder" (1990).

Moonshake >> In the woods where the wild women grow

Moonshake - "Girly Loop"

(Too Pure Records [U.K.], 1993 / Matador Records [U.S.], 1994)

This is from Moonshake's brilliantly energetic, genre-redefining EP Big Good Angel.  I was stunned to find it in the $2 section at the Mushroom on one of the last days of 2011, after lusting after it for a longish time.  I think it was yet another example of Blowtorch Baby karma coming my way.  I proceeded to listen to it in my car for about two weeks straight.  (In the CD booklet, the opening lyric is "Where do I pick up a wild woman?  In the woods where the wild women grow," but I think Margaret actually sings the last word as "go.")

This song absolutely has to be listened to on a good stereo, or in a car, because the dynamics are just amazing, and computer speakers can't really reproduce the deep bass notes.  Even a mediocre car stereo provides a surround-sound listening experience, and the empty spaces inside a car's panels / hood / trunk etc. become makeshift resonators.  Hence why you'll hear a lot of bands or producers say "After finishing up the latest batch of songs in the studio, I threw it in the tape deck in my car as the ultimate test of whether it sounded any good," or just "I wanted to see if could pass the 'car test.'"  Anyway, much like Minutemen's "Anxious Mo-Fo," this song has several different mind-boggling basslines, enough to make the average funk band's bass player quit his instrument and go become a monk in some remote, cliff-laden dictatorship.  Just check out the different bassline that bassist John Frennet casually throws in at the 1:40 mark.  This EP is one of the most dazzling bass tours-de-force ever recorded, and my hypothesis is that Moonshake were trying to incorporate the then-nascent drum & bass / jungle sound, but using actual instruments rather than drum machines and samplers.  In other words, a few years before d & b hit U.S. shores, Moonshake were already blasting past it and trying to reconfigure it in a rock format.  Truly one of the most envelope-pushing bands ever, which is befitting of a band named after a CAN song.  Oh yeah, the tropical drumming is nothing short of jaw-dropping too.  I already showed the video for this EP's track "Capital Letters" in my other post about Moonshake.  You will see that Frennet was sporting shants (super-long shorts) way before they were cool.  "Flow" is a rubbery, passive-aggressive ode to fellatio.  "Séance" is probably the best song on the EP, and could've been a hit single.  (No singles were released from this EP, unless you count the "Capital Letters" video which MTV probably showed somewhere between 0 and 1 times.)  I would've rather posted "Séance," except that I already posted a Dave-sung song in my other post, and I wanted to do a Margaret-sung one this time.  Pretty much every Moonshake song was written by one or the other of them, and they only sang together on one song that I can think of.  So the band basically had "Dave songs" and "Margaret songs."  She and Frennet left to form Laika this same year, and Moonshake was never the same again.  Polly Jean Harvey and Stereolab's Katherine Gifford took over vocal duties for her on Moonshake's next album, which had a very different sound, mainly because it had zero guitars.

Sunday: Went to a Metairie parade (Corps de Napoleon) with my dad; the grand marshalls were, I kid you not, those bozos from the TV show Swamp People, you know, the ones with the catchphrase "Choot it!"  We stopped by Mr. Gyro's for a pita, but found it had sadly gone out of business.  Picked up some pizzas at Reginelli's instead.  The three very young (white) girls working there all started singing along and shimmying as the end of "Baby Got Back" played over the stereo; FWIW, I was about to ask one of them if she was offended by that song, but I obviously got my answer.

Monday: Went to a far superior New Orleans parade (Orpheus) with Emily, Tace, Alex, and Vanessa.  Before the parade we walked around the Julia Street arts district, but the galleries were all closed due to Mardi Gras.  Got a spinach & feta croissant and iced coffee at PJ's; I'm not a coffee-shop person at all, so I had to pause and think for a moment when the redheaded girl asked me what kind of milk I wanted. After thinking about all kinds of impressive Italian terms I was probably supposed to use, I realized I could just say "2%."  She was super-cute and I'm sure I did not impress her.  We (not me and the coffee girl, unfortunately) hung out at the upstairs bar (called the Polo Club or Polo Lounge) at the very posh Westin for a while, then stopped briefly in a few bars in the Quarter (Old Absinthe House and some new place).  Then went back to the Polo bar and had an amazingly chance meeting with a smugly funny doctor who had delivered Whitney Houston's baby(!)  He informed us, by using medical jargon that my doctor companions (E, T, A) were able to decipher for me, of a crotchal disease she (Whitney) suffered from, and I might be sued for libel for saying it, so I won't.  I'll just say that upon learning this, my first thought was that Bobbi Kristina must've been born by C-section, in order to protect her from it, but the doc said she was born normally.  The Orpheus parade was good, and I think this was my first time ever seeing it.  Cyndi Lauper was the grand marshall, but I didn't see her.  We got four mini pizzas and it rained a bit.  Afterwards my sister made us all watch Rihanna videos as usual; this time it was a countdown of her top 20 sexiest videos as decided by the Fuse network, but we skipped past most of them.  I went to see Khris Royal & Dark Matter as the opening act at a free show at The Howlin' Wolf.  I only caught their last song, which incorporated the synth line from Kraftwerk's "Trans-Eurpoe Express."  I think they also did this, as well as a Tears For Fears cover, when I saw them at Jazz Fest last year.  Jazz Fest stalwarts George Porter Jr. & The Runnin' Pardners were headlining, but I skipped them.

I decided to crash at my parents' house closer to the Lake so as to avoid the crushing Fat Tuesday traffic downtown the next day.  I realized that the Mushroom was open 24/7 during Mardi Gras, so I stopped in there at 1AM and bought Moonshake's "Secondhand Clothes" CD single for $2, even though I already had all three of its tracks as bonus tracks stuck onto the end of Eva Luna.  While leaving at 2AM, I finally asked the girl working there, the one who had said hi to me at the Boris concert, her name.  She said it was Sam and we talked for a few minutes.  I forgot to ask her how True Widow was or what her favorite bands are.  It was a good end to a strange day.  I only wish I had stayed and gone to Zulu the next morning, since the last time I went to it was probably at age 14 or 15.

Wednesday: Bought a sweet bookcase at Office Depot because I figure it can hold LPs, and I need to start getting mine out of their randomly-scattered plastic milk crates.  It's called the 4-Cube Bookcase by RealSpace (Magellan Collection), in cherry finish, $80.  I will probably buy a few more when they go on sale.  Linsanity continues unabated, with an incredible (unprecedented?) two Sports Illustrated covers in a row, and a book scheduled to come out in May.  Speaking of that mag, its idiotic swimsuit ish cover girl Kate Upton was on Jimmy Kimmel last night, responding to the millionth question about the YouTube clip of her doing the Dougie.  She made a point of repeatedly mentioning Cali Swag District in order to appear knowledgable about the subject, but when Kimmel asked rhetorically if the dance was inspired by Doug E. Fresh, she developed an even-blanker-than-usual look on her face and said she didn't know who that was.  Awkward.  I laughed.

Thursday (today): I embarked upon filling in the Nielsen survey for the next week.  They pay you $35 cash to do it, so it's a no-brainer, and it'll be interesting to see just how much TV I really watch.  I can tell already that MSNBC is gonna wind up being my most-watched station.  I watched an interesting documentary called The Loving Family.  I had no idea until the end that it was their marriage that led to the Supreme Court legalizing interracial marriage nationwide in 1967.

Planets with similar climates: The Pop Group - "Colour Blind" (~1980), CAN - "Vitamin C" (1972), The Make-Up - "I Want Some" (1998), Enon - "Murder Sounds" (2003), Talking Heads - "Once In A Lifetime" (1980), Long Fin Killie - "Cop" (1996).


Currently eating or drinking: Xingu Black beer (from Brazil; awesome, like a lighter Guinness Draught); Elmer's Chee Wees cheese curls; Alessi Eggplant Appetizer (Sicilian caponata); Al Fresco tomato & basil chicken meatballs (amazing); Killian's Irish Red lager (okay); Abita Amber lager (bad).

Colfax Abbey >> Could you complicate your mind?

Colfax Abbey - "Feel"

(Prospective Records / TRG Records,1995)

The song title and vocal stylings could lead this to be considered some sort of shoegaze-emo hybrid.  The pummeling drums and passive-aggressive guitars inflict a surprising amount of ear damage.  I can't overemphasize how dazzlingly creative and amazingly stupefying the guitar tones on this album are; it just might be the holy grail of tone in my book, along with stuff like early Verve, Hovercraft, early U2, early Sand Rubies, and Poem Rocket.  "Shanesong" in particular is just incredibly intense and dark, while retaining plenty of shoegaze DNA.  At a time when almost every true shoegaze band had abandoned its sound in favor of more dad-friendly '60s/'70s-oriented pastures, you have to hand it to Colfax Abbey for doing its uncompromising thing, and doing it with tons of panache, which means charisma.  I think I said almost the exact thing about Volplane a few months ago, come to think of it.  If anyone ever saw the Fax Abbs live, I'd love to hear about it.

I bought this CD, Drop, in 2001 or 2002 after hearing the band touted on the Blisscent mailing list, and I was blown away by it right away, as I was in a phase of worshipping stuff like Catherine Wheel, Verve, and Slowdive.  (Coincidentally, Verve's 1992 single "She's A Superstar" had a b-side called "Feel," compiled on their amazing self-titled EP later that same year.)  Every song on the album, except for one or two, is a perfectly-formed gem.  Listen to and/or download sample mp3s of every song here.  The band bio on that page says "And then from out of nowhere... Colfax Abbey. Four pieces of an ultra sonic puzzle. Droney guitars swirl around aural landscapes into a never ending infinity of ethereal delight. Colfax Abbey will thrill and delight all audiences young and old as they take the air around them and bend it into trance inducing guitar pop that takes you into the other side and beyond. From the heart of Minneapolis, the dynamic drumming of champion beat master Rob Walsh, the throbbing bass of Troy De Groot, the neo-psychedelic twists and turns of guitar of Mark Margosian, and the hypnotizing vocals of Christian Rangel come together to create a sonic assault of beautiful noise."


This band was from Minneapolis, was on a subsidiary of Twin / Tone Records, and had a name apparently borrowed from Bram Stoker's Dracula.  So you might think they're a shitty plaid-clad Soul Asylum clone with goth overtones, but luckily that type of band will never exist.  Half of this album, including "Feel," was recorded at The Playground studio in Chicago; the other half was recorded at The Terrarium studio in Minneapolis.  The Chicago tracks were produced by Keith Cleversley (Flaming Lips, Hum, Submarine, Morella's Forest, Spiritualized) and the Minn. ones were produced by Colfax Abbey & Ed Ackerson (of Polara).
Fun Fact: There's a "minus time" instrumental track hidden in the middle of the CD called "Drop," which is basically a lengthened and morphed loop from "Once In A While."  Well, it plays as a minus-time track in my car, but on my Mac it plays as just a hidden track at the end of song 5, which is "Silver."
I got their follow-up CD, Penetrate, the same year, but it's basically an instrumental space-rock album with four long tracks.  A few years back I bought their lone 7", "Chameleon" b/w "Silver," on eBay.  So I now have all whopping three things that they ever released.

Not much info is available about this band online, but this page has some interesting stuff, including a gorgeous acoustic radio performance of "Feel" which shows that it's a brilliant song even when stripped of all the guitar pyrotechnics, and also one of "Chameleon" (ditto).  Wow... Maybe more shoegaze bands should do unplugged albums?  Plus a pic of the Drop promo poster and a tour poster as the opening act for the Brian Jonestown Massacre.  He opened it by saying "Shoegaze monsters Colfax Abbey grew at such a fast pace once they got started, they went from opening in The 7th Street Entry to national tours in what seemed months. In concert, they perfected something I’ve never seen beforehand or since: even as the band was blissfully noisy & washed in droning sheets of sound, they were quiet, and you could carry on a conversation right in front of them. It was inviting & personal, yet very polished and produced sounding. Unique. Their two CDs & 7″ single are nothing short of beautiful."

Check out the wonderfully mutilated English by this overseas shoegazer:
"on the begining 'Snowshine' track i've been thinking this is like song from Nirvana (but its wrong)
i think Snowshine is the best track in this Album (agree or not... whatever!, thats what i thought)
for all over this track i feel dreaming, i dunno why"

I I took this pic of the beginning of my iTunes "bestGUITARtone" playlist on 6/14/06; you can see Colfax Abbey is well-represented:

I saw a young jazz singer named Sasha Masakowski twice at the Balcony Music Club in spring 2010.  I told myself and anyone else who would listen that she was gonna be a big star, and she's recently landed in a commercial (well, actually three different ones) by local lawyer Chip Forstall, who always enlists local musicians to do his theme song:

Also watch the version with just Sasha.  The "one man stands tall" line is clearly a joke, since you can see that CF is rather short.  The band members are hamming it up for the camera; rest assured that they do not do that in their real concerts whatsoever.  Apparently they all are graduates of UNO's jazz studies program.  Drummer Nick Solnick is an absolute monster, one of the best jazz drummers I've ever seen, at least when he's playing with actual drumsticks.  Sasha's bro Martin played bass when I saw them, but he's not in this commercial.  Their dad Steve is a local legend of jazz guitar.

I'm skipping a This Will Destroy You concert tonight at Siberia.  I saw them last summer in Baton Rouge, and they were good, but I don't know if I need or want to see any of these loud-soft-loud-soft post-rock bands more than once from now on.  And at $12, the cover is very high for a relatively unknown instrumental band.

I mentioned that I saw a local band called The Honorable South do a free in-store CD release party at Euclid Records a few days before Xmas, attended by about two dozen people.  Well, they're on the cover of the new issue of Antigravity zine:

I saw In The Heat Of The Night for the first time tonight, since I will fervently watch anything with Sidney Poitier in it.  I recognized the line "Where whitie ain't allowed" at about the 100 minute mark, since it was sampled in Abecedarians' song "Where Whitie Ain't Allowed" on their 1987 album Eureka.

'Piggyback bandit' puzzles high school officials in Northwest

Rock is the new jazz.  Sorry, rock. - "A visit to the Billboard Hot 100 today yields only two songs in the top 20 that could be argued to be “rock.” Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger” (#13) sounds utterly not like rock (dancebeat bass drum, the tinge of auto-tune, a chirping synth hook), and Gavin DeGraw’s “Not Over You” comes a little closer though it seems more like a pop throwback tune than anything with a genuine edge. Further down the chart there’s a little country and one indie-rock hit (Foster the People’s “Pumped Up Kicks”) and that’s about it. The Black Keys in position 67 are pretty much the flag-wavers for “rock” in early 2012."  For what it's worth, I turned on MTV this morning.  They were showing a bunch of those teen mom shows in a row, so I scanned ahead to see when their next music-related show was, and there literally was nothing music-related the entire day.  They saw fit to air multiple episodes of That '70s Show, though.  This news is probably shocking to no one, which says it all.

Planets with similar climates: Drop Nineteens - "Delaware" (1992), Volplane - "Wash Away" (1997), Sunny Day Real Estate - "Snibe" (2000), Glide - "Water Falls" (1992), Verve - "All In The Mind" (1992), Catherine Wheel - "Texture" (1991).


CDs currently in my car: Band Of Susans - Veil, Temple Of The Dog - Temple Of The Dog, Slowdive - Souvlaki, Isaac Hayes - Hot Buttered Soul, Black Box Recorder - Passionoia, Massive Attack - Mezzanine, some mix CDs

Tortoise >> Millions now & beyond

Tortoise - "Glass Museum"

(Thrill Jockey Records, 1995)

Tortoise are one of the best-known bands in indie history, so I shouldn't have to say much about them.  I would post their genre-defining classic "Djed," but it constitutes about half of the album's running time.  "Glass Museum" is no slouch, friends.  It lives up to its name with elegant pacing, a waltz beat, and a shimmery, sun-dappled overall feel.  There's also a jazzy, subdued, impressionistic guitar solo at 1:13, and a pretty dramatic ramping-up of intensity at the 3-minute mark that always catches me off-guard.  I'd probably play this song for someone who has never heard this band before.  Before Tortoise went on autopilot and became Bonnaroo darlings, they were pretty great, at least on their 2nd and 3rd albums.  (I dislike their bafflingly overrated debut album.)  I think one unintended consequence of early Tortoise was that the vibraphone / xylophone became so ubiquitous that later post-rock bands disassociated themselves from it and tried to up the "intensity" levels and make lots of "climaxes" at the end of every song, which eventually spelled the downfall of the genre as it was once known.  (Though bands like The Six Parts Seven, The Mercury Program and The Dylan Group based their entire sound around hypnotic vibraphone.)  As All Music Guide said, after raving about "Djed," "The other songs on Millions Now Living are hardly afterthoughts, though; highlights 'Glass Museum' and 'The Taut And Tame' display the band quickly growing out of the angular indie rock ghetto with exquisite music, constructed with more thought and played with more emotion, than any of their peers."

In 1997, I was getting into this post-rock thing that all the zines were talking about.  I had first read about it in the Feb. 1996 issue of Guitar World magazine, which ran a long article on the genre, with a heavy focus on The Sea And Cake, Laika, Pram, and Long Fin Killie.  It didn't mention TSAC's sister band Tortoise at all, though.  Anyway, I bought Tortoise's Millions Now Living Will Never Die CD (in apparently-rare paper gatefold packaging) that summer as a birthday gift for my dad.  But I got antsy and opened it to listen for myself, which turned out to be a wise decision.  (Keep in mind there was no way to preview songs online back then.)  I also did the same for Jale's So Wound, and eventually gave him Guided By Voices' new CD.  That fall, I remember developing photos in Loyola's darkroom for my Fine Arts Photography class, and I heard "Djed" coming from a radio inside one of the private darkroom booths.  So I knocked on the door and he opened it and I asked if he was a Tortoise fan.  It turned out that his radio was playing WTUL, which is the radio station of the college right next door, Tulane.  I don't know if the guy in the room, Brad, was impressed when I told him the name of the track, but we ended up becoming something like friends, and we saw Macha in '99.  He later put out a solo CD-R under the name Sad Smile or SadSmile, which I have somewhere.  By late '97, anticipation amongst bespectacled indie rockers was building to a fever-pitch for Tortoise's next album.  To tide fans over, Option magazine even ran a two-page article about the recording process of it.  In the interim I bought Isotope 217º's stunning debut album The Unstable Molecule, simply because it was a Tortoise side project.  In March '98, I ordered and received this new album, TNT, a few weeks before it even hit stores.  I then saw them live, as mentioned in my previous post:

I bought a Tortoise shirt and tour-only 7" there, and there was a hip-hop / dub afterparty DJ'ed by a person or persons from WTUL's "Below The Basement" hip-hop show, but I think I only caught a little bit of it while milling about at the merch table.  I sold the shirt to my friend Andrew a few years later.

Fun Fact: I recently learned that Millions Now Living Will Never Die is a Jehovah's Witness slogan, but I always thought it was a reference to the school of fish on the cover.  (The school continues to the back cover when you open the paper case.)  In any case, it's a brilliant merging of title and artwork.

Fun Fact 2: After composing this post, I was pleasantly surprised to see that "Glass Museum" is Tortoise's second-most-downloaded song on iTunes; I had thought it was one of their more obscure cuts.

Fun Fact 3: I saw Modest Mouse & Califone the night before at a Baton Rouge club called The Bayou, where all the bar scenes in Sex Lies And Videotape were filmed.  There were a few dozen people who were specifically there to see the bands, whereas most of the crowd was apparently frat boys who were there to play pool and try to hook up.  The club burned down several years later and is now a Reginelli's Pizza.

The only thing I can say about Whitney Houston's death is that I'm still mad at her for derailing Bobby Brown's career trajectory, and I hope Maya Rudolph will still dust off her Whitney impersonation from time to time.  Please, folks, no jokes about the band Krackhouse that I mentioned a few posts ago.

I showed the above disques to my family before we watched the Grammys, and my dad mentioned that they must be worth a lot of money.  I didn't have the heart to tell him I got them all at various thrift stores for around 50 cents each.  My mom almost died when her favorite band, The Civil Wars, performed.  The only other collections of 7"s that I own that rival this one are probably of Madonna, Unwound, Janet Jackson, and The Police, with Simple Minds slowly gaining momentum.

After trimming some palm trees on a gray, drizzly Monday, I took this cactus I've had for 14 years to a few plant nurseries to see if they could diagnose what its orange spots meant.  (Probably a fatal fungal disease.)  I ended up stopping by Sunrise Trading as a last-ditch effort.  This is the local grower of most of the cacti & succulents that are sold in the New Orleans area, and my cactus was presumably grown by them long ago.  It's supposed to be only a wholesale operation, but I asked if I could look at the greenhouses, and the guy, Steve, said sure.  (Note the coincidental relation to the concept of "glass museums.")  So I went in and had my mind blown for about 2 hours, picking out kewl plants.  He said he didn't think my cactus would die, but I believe he just said that to make me feel better.  He told me some fascinating anecdotes about varieties of plants that are named after people he knew, and some of the lengths to which he has gone to ensure the survival of some of his specimens.

Tuesday was a pretty strange day.  I went down to Houma to exchange a Mammillaria hahniana cactus, buy this space-saver rack at Bed Bath & Beyond, buy a mini pitchfork for my mom, and play some basketball.  My Beyonding wasn't successful, but I did snag Isaac Hayes' Hot Buttered Soul on CD for only about $5.  They also had the latest Liz Phair dud, among other random albums.  Who knew?  While sizing up a photo of four birds in a bare tree, I noticed lots of chemtrails in the sky.  Two of the birds flew away when I turned the music in my car off, so I decided to aim upward and take a shot mainly of the sky instead:

Taken facing NE at 2:52 PM

These long streaks are each probably 20 or so miles long; regular-old vapor contrails from planes are only a few hundred yards long and evaporate quickly, whereas chemtrails stay suspended in the sky for hours on end.  Then I went and shot hoops about 10 miles away literally right under some chemtrails that I had just seen being laid down, kind of as an experiment to see if I would feel ill effects from them.  There was a helicopter making lots of suspicious trips back and forth through the area, presumably to check on the concentrations of the chemicals.

I was unable to part with the cactus, so I brought it home with me; at least it got to go on a fun field trip in my center console cup holder.  I shot threes at Gray Park for about an hour, then hit Rouse's in Thibodaux.  They were out of Guinness and Murphy's, so I settled for some Killian's Red, which I had never tried before.  That night at 9PM, I made a literally last-minute decision to drive to NOLA to see A Silver Mt. Zion, or Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra, to be more exact.  I had bought their debut album at a Godspeed You Black Emperor show in 2003, and an EP in 2006, but otherwise had never paid much attention to them.  I was holding a cup of coffee (instant coffee in Lactaid milk) in my hand at the aforementioned time, and said to myself, "Well, if you drink this, you have to go, otherwise you'll be up all night for no reason."  So I chugged it and went.  By this time I had a massive headache and some brain functioning problems, but I couldn't figure out why; then I remembered the Houma chemtrails.  "Better living through chemistry," I said, and popped a Tylenol Extra Strength.  Zion is not the kind of band whose music I listen to very much, and their sample clips at online vendors' sites don't impress me, but I had a feeling that they would have a certain vitality live, and I went by the rule of "It's better to go to a concert and have it suck then to not go and wonder for the rest of your life if you missed a great show."  With my head exploding and right on the verge of falling asleep, I did the 50-mile drive in to New Orleans.  Getting stuck in standstill traffic for half an hour was the icing on the cake.  About a block from the club I noticed a restaurant called Vacherie, so I stopped in.  The bartender guy told me they were closed, but I asked for a menu and said "I'm from a city... well, town, called Vacherie."  I walked into One Eyed Jacks as the Zions were doing their first song (there was no opening act), so I had to chuckle a bit at my good fortune.  They turned out to be just as endearingly annoying and pretentious as I had expected, but in a good way.  The dual violins and upright bass made for an excellent sonic bed over which singer Efrim Menuck could yelp about various abstract problems and existential musings.  Efrim did some funny banter with the crowd during two Q&A intermission sessions.  Example: Someone in the crowd asked him his name.  He very casually said "Jack White.  Ask me again."  So the question was asked again.  "The Edge.  Ask me again.  I could go on like this all night..."

I took this during the encore, an extended rendition of "Horses In The Sky." 

I just noticed that the people up front were pretty nattily-dressed, whereas towards the back and middle there were lots of anarchist types with face tattoos, leather jackets, dreadlocks, etc.

Man stricken eating 'Triple Bypass' burger - "'It was no joke,' said Jon Basso, who promotes himself 'Doctor Jon,' his scantily-clad waitresses as nurses, and customers as patients."

Fox News commenters respond to Whitney Houston's death with deluge of hatred and racism

Megadeth lead singer Dave Mustaine endorses Rick Santorum - I knew this guy was a douche, but this shocked even me.  "Holy Wars" indeed...

Planets with similar climates: Tristeza - "City Of The Future" (2000), The Mercury Program - "Fragile Or Possibly Extinct" (2002), Isotope 217º - "La Jetée" (1997), The Dylan Group - "Running In Pairs" (1999).

Oval >> Meddling machine muzak

Oval - "Shop In Store"

(Thrill Jockey Records, ~1994-96)

I saw, and hated, Oval opening for Tortoise in May of '98.  Since the other dude from the "band" had recently absconded, it was now just a solo project of Markus Popp.  He stood there on the stage while staring dispassionately, and pretty much unblinkingly, at a Mac laptop computer, occasionally clicking it to adjust some algorithm or trigger a sample or what have you.  I exited the Howlin' Wolf shaking my head in disbelief after 4 or 5 songs, then returned about half an hour later to catch Tortoise's triumphant set.

"Shop In Store" is one of two bonus tracks added to the U.S. issue of Oval's influential third album 94Diskont.  For some unknown reason, despite hating Oval live, I bought it on LP in summer '98 from Thrill Jockey mailorder.  This U.S. LP comes with a bonus 12" of remixes by very hip dudes: Jim O'Rourke, Mouse On Mars, Scanner and Christian Vogel.  (To summarize, the German CD came out in 1995 on Mille Plateaux Records, and only has 5 tracks; the U.S. LP+12" came out in 1996 on Thrill Jockey, with a a whopping 11 tracks.)  Few of the tracks on the album have as much vigor as "Shop In Store," with most of them taking on a more aquatic, ambient feel, so you may be disappointed if you go buy the whole album after enjoying "SIS."

This album and Oval's previous one, Systemisch, pretty much invented the whole glitch genre, and "Shop In Store" introduced an undulating rhythmic quality to the genre.  It's a pretty revolutionary track no matter how you slice it.  Read some interesting info on 94Diskont here.  If you hadn't guessed from the music and the name of the genre, Oval made its music by literally flipping over CDs, scratching them up with metal implements, and then playing them and isolating little segments to create longer loops, etc.  At least that's how I've always understood it, though I'm sure I'm omitting some steps.  In any case, this kind of music could be described as both the literal and figurative destruction of music as most people know it.  And I remember reading somewhere back in the day that he actually used mainstream pop n' rock CDs, which makes the end result even cooler.  Alvin Lucier pioneered the concept of making music out of non-music with his piece "I Am Sitting In A Room" decades ago, and others have pushed the envelope further.  Christian Marclay intentionally scratched up vinyl records in the '80s and recorded / looped the skipping and crackling sounds they made upon playback.  Oval found a little niche and exploited it well for a while, but it cannot be denied that they were doing exactly what Marclay did in the '80s, albeit with CDs instead of vinyl.  (One kind of plastic instead of another.)  I think Oval is still around, but I stopped following them a decade-ish ago after buying the album Dok and realizing there wasn't much room for their sound to evolve within its self-imposed straitjacket.  Any chimpanzee or lemur could theoretically scratch up CDs or LPs and play them back and call it music, and I'm sure someday a record label will put out just such an album, garnering an insightful 7.4 review from a greenhorn Pitchfork scribe hopped up on a tall espresso.

The full album version of "Do While" is 24 minutes long; a music video was made for a drastically shortened version of it named "Do While ⌘X":

In 1995, Popp joined with Jan St. Werner of Mouse On Mars to form the very Oval-esque duo Microstoria.  I believe I got their remix CD Reprovisers in that same Thrill Jockey order in summer '98.  TJ also included a cool promo poster combining album covers by Microstoria (the Init Ding and _Snd album covers), Oval (94Diskont), and I think Mouse On Mars.  I'll have to dig it up and photograph it sometime.

An episode of the show How The States Got Their Shapes ran a fascinating bit last week about a proposed 51st state called Jefferson, which is apparently gaining a lot of momentum.

In addition to a card with an audio clip of the first 15 secs. of this Phil Dunphy quote from the pilot episode of Modern Family, my sister gave me the new issue of GQ for my birthday:

In the article, she mentions that her dad gave her Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground for her 12th birthday.  She then became legally emancipated form her parents at age 15.  Coincidence?  I tried reading that book a decade or so ago but found it too miserable for me to get very far.

On Saturday & Sunday I started putting in an herb garden in my mom's friend's yard.  On Sunday at Lowe's I got a sweet cactus which I believe is a Mammillaria celsiana or M. muehlenpfordtii, but I can't tell yet.  I also finished up a painting, my first one done on the new easel, during the Super Bowl.  The commercials were incredibly bad.  The Saints (boasting arguably the best offense in NFL history) would've throttled the Patriots (with arguably the worst defense in NFL history), let's not kid ourselves.  Pats diehard Maria Menounos lost a Super Bowl bet and had to wear a Giants bikini in Times Square, so thank you, Mario Manningham.

Planets with similar climates: Nobukazu Takemura - "Icefall" (1999), Replikants - "Agent Oranges (Fancy Mix)" (1994), O.S.T. - "Fe" (2001), Kreidler - "Cube" (1998).

Lee Ranaldo >> You are in my headlight, in my present tense

Lee Ranaldo - "Deva, Spain (Fragments)"

(Stomach Ache Records, ca. 1988; later released by Musical Tragedies, 1992, & Atavistic Records, 1995)

In honor of Lee's birthday, here's a short piece that I've put on many a mix CD over the years.  Apparently a lot of record label owners have liked it too, because it originally came out on a Mexican compilation 7" in 1988 (Bullets Wrapped In Sugar), on a U.S. compilation cassette in the early '90s(?) (Spill Your Guts, Friend), on a German split CD EP with a band called Something To Burn in 1992, and on Lee's career retrospective CD East Jesus in 1995.  It was more recently used by Lee himself as a component of his self-remix album Outside My Window The City Is Never Silent: A Bestiary in 2002.

The fact that Stomach Ache Records was based on Mexico says something about how far Sonic Youth's notoriety had spread by the late '80s.  I don't know if he also made a longer version, but hopefully one will see the light of day.  I like the line "You are in my headlight," which seems to specify the headlight of a motorcycle or train, rather than the headlightS of a car.  But it can also mean the light or energy inside one's head / mind.  Deep.  I mentioned three months ago that I had just gotten an LP pressing of Lee's baffling debut album From → Here Infinity, but I have to report that I still haven't played it.  I guess I'm afraid that the brief (a few seconds long) lock grooves on it won't live up to the enhanced / extended loops on the CD and cassette issues, both of which I've owned for about 10 & 15 years, respectively.

Note: This song has been variously titled "Deva, Spain Fragments," "Deva, Spain (Fragments)" and "Deva, Spain: Fragments," depending on the release it's on, but I have to assume they are all the same song.

I have a few more pics and videos from Prospect.2 to unload, so bear with me.  A painting (er, actually, it's credited as "insect screening") by Kathleen Loe, on an upstairs wall of a new facility called the New Orleans Healing Center on St. Claude Avenue:

Peter Pan's Shadow (84 x 132"; $3200)

She had lots of other helicopter-themed works on display, a few of which you can see here.  There's also a little grocery store co-op, gym, herb store, book store, and other cool stuff in this nondescript building.  For those not from New Orleans, Rampart Street is the north border of the French Quarter; it extends to the east through the Ninth Ward / Faubourg Marigny neighborhood under the name St. Claude Avenue, with lots of upstart DIY art galleries, bike shops, vegan cafés, and the like.  Not all of the residents of this gentrifying neighborhood are happy about these developments, as you can tell by this flyer I saw on an abandoned building a block away on the same day:

To the right of it was a poster paying tribute to the two African-American victims of the notorious Danziger Bridge shootings.

In honor of Spain, here are some Ricky Rubio highlights, since Pau Gasol is having an off year.  This was his first-ever NBA start, just a few weeks ago.  He effortlessly picked apart my Hornets as I tried to explain to my dad why Rubio is such a big deal:

I saw Gasol a year ago this week from front-row seats at a Hornets-Lakers game.  Our chairs were literally on the court.  Gasol humiliated us for something like 30 points in the first half alone.  At one point I wondered loudly "Why isn't Chris Paul in?," after which coach Monty Williams looked to his right at me from about 10 feet away, then hollered at CP3 to get in the game.  The Lakers won by only a few points, despite outshooting us 24 to 4 in free throw attempts, if I remember correctly.  And people wonder why the same teams get back to the playoffs every year... Gotta love that referee bias towards big-market teams.  I've read entire long, footnoted articles about how NBA refs have more control over the outcome of games than do the refs of any other major sport, and this game was a crystal-clear example of it for me.

Yellow Magic Orchestra - "Tighten Up" + awkward interview on Soul Train, 1980

4 ways to enjoy nature according to insane old magazines
Sample cover:

Planets with similar climates: Sonic Youth - "Satan Is Boring" (1984), Poem Rocket - "Saint Sebastian's Halo" (1995), Windy & Carl - "Kate" (1997).

Margot Mifflin >> Do you feel yourself to be capable of being manipulated?

Margot Mifflin - "Backlash"

(Arrest Records, 1992; reissued by MuWorks Records, 1993, & Atavistic Records, 1996)

This is on the tremendous and varied compilation State Of The Union.  It originally came out as an LP on Zoar Records in 1982, obviously without this song.  I have the 1992 CD version on Arrest Records and the dramatically expanded double-CD 1996 version on Atavistic Records, both of which do feature this song.  (I ripped this mp3 from the 1996 edition.)  The gimmick is that every song on all versions of SOTU is about 1 minute long, making each artist really strive to get to the point quickly, often with fascinating results.  See the full tracklisting of each edition by clicking the links under the "Notes" section here.  Some of the more well-known contributors: John Lurie (of the Lounge Lizards and an ill-advised acting career), Arto Lindsay (DNA, etc.), the late actor Spalding Gray, turntable virtuoso Chrtistian Marclay, Adele Bertei, Tuli Kupferberg (of The Fugs), noise rock producer Martin Bisi, Fred Frith, Borbetomagus w/ Voice Crack, drummer Ikue Mori (DNA, Death Ambient, etc.), God Is My Co-Pilot, Marc Ribot, John Zorn w/ Yamatsuka Eye, Nicholas Collins, Syd Straw, Mofungo, Henry Kaiser, John Duncan, Ui, PainKiller, Penny Arcade, Chris Haskett (Rollins Band guitarist), Maggie "Hey Baby" Estep, Allen Ginsberg, Lenny Kaye, DJ Spooky, Andrea Parkins, Sim Cain (Rollins Band drummer), Zeena Parkins, Lukas Ligeti (son of György), Kurt Ralske (a.k.a. Ultra Vivid Scene), M. Doughty (of Soul Coughing), and a Mars Williams / Ken Vandermark sax duo.  However, most of the artists are complete unknowns, with baffling and/or awesome names like Krackhouse, Grafted Media Devil, A Thousand Tiny Fingers, Circuit Redux, Pharmacy Lounge, Sonorexia, Babytooth, Jody Dunaway (she plays balloons... really), and Dim Sum Clip Job.  That was honestly not an attempt at keyword spamming.

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, this song doesn't feature Mifflin herself on vocals, but maybe the intro yodel is her, or maybe the closing voice?  The song has an abstract feminist undertone that can be ascertained by the line of condescending questions asked by the sampled male voices; the female voice at the end ties it all together.  It's amazing that this was done 20 years ago, considering how many bands would be considered edgy and fresh if they were to put it out in 2012.  The layered mechanical drumbeat is almost industrial in some parts.

The bio on Mifflin's website says: "Margot Mifflin is an author, journalist, and professor who writes about women, art, and contemporary culture. The author of Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo, she has written for The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Believer, ARTnews, and Salon.com. Her book The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman was published in April, 2009. An associate professor in the English Department of Lehman College of the City University of New York (CUNY), Mifflin also directs the Arts and Culture program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, where she teaches arts journalism. Mifflin has appeared as a lecturer and keynote speaker at dozens of colleges, universities and museums, including Barnard College, Parsons School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design and Los Angeles MOCA. She appeared in MSNBC’s documentary “Women and Tattoo” (2001) and CNN’s “Women of the Ink” (1998). She was raised in a Quaker family in Swarthmore, Pa. and now lives with her family in Nyack, New York."

Here is a film piece called Atlante by Grazia Toderi that was being shown at the CAC (Contemporary Arts Center) as part of Prospect.2.  I think this is the entire thing, and I've read that it was shot in Portugal.  It was projected simultaneously onto two screens on walls that were slightly angled in towards each other:

On Saturday I stopped by at the monthly (last Saturday of each month) Arts Market on S. Carrolton for the first time.  Most of the art was pretty tourist-y.  Some freak wind gusts came through and blew some vendors' shit over, which actually amused me.  Then I went to National Art & Hobby to get an easel my parents had gotten me for my birthday.  (I've never owned one.)  I picked up a free flipbook-sized publication there, by some publisher called America Sutra.  It's simply titled Love Song on the cover, with no author name or publishing credits, and is full of intentional typos.  The back cover just says americasutra.com, and going to that site told me that their books are apparently by someone named Amit Desai.  I think this must be some sort of teaser for their upcoming book series.  Or maybe it's some elaborate hoax?  Very cryptic.  You know I love palm trees, hence you know I had to post this sample:

That line reminds me of House Of Sand And Fog, in which the main guy cuts down all the trees on his new property that block his view of the ocean.  After leaving the art store, I drove down Magazine St. a mile or so and then pulled over to check out a garage sale.  After picking out three CDs sans cases (Sade - Love Deluxe, Chet Baker - Let's Get Lost - The Best Of Chet Baker Sings, and Roberta Flack - Killing Me Softly), I found a dollar bill on the ground, and then went to pay for the goods.  "Just give me a dollar," she (I overheard that she's a photographer named Alex Bono) said.  Yeah, I felt a little guilty.  But factoring in the hundreds of CDs, tapes, records, books, etc. that I've given away to thrift stores over the years, I don't mind getting my karma returned once every so often.  The Sade CD was quite a coup, since I'd been wanting it for a long time.  Fun Fact: I could've also bought Public Enemy's Apocalypse '91 CD there, but just looking at the names of the terrible songs printed on the CD elicited a flood of memories and emotions, bringing me back to the day I bought it (namely, the week it came out in October '91).  I had to put it down and walk away.  Let some other shmuck waste 33⅓ cents on it.  Then I went to a Goodwill on the way home and came across what I always think of as a "suicide donation" or "death donation."  By that I mean lots of obscure albums by someone who must've been savvy enough to know he/she could get some good money for them at any used CD store.  Hence the presence of them in a thrift store means the person probably died, and his/her parents or spouse just gave the music away.  I got CDs by Christian Marclay, Black Box Recorder, Lync, Themselves, Furry Things, Morcheeba, Slowride (a pre-True Widow band), Lamb, Blackalicious, M83, Myshkin, and Breaks Co-Op.  There was even one by annoying drone merchants Pelt which I passed on.  I also passed on a recent one by Trail Of Dead, whom I used to worship back when they didn't suck.  Anyway, R.I.P. dude or dudette, and R.I.P. Don Cornelius.

Planets with similar climates: Negativland - "Methods Of Torture" (1987), Emily XYZ - "Put A Little Distance" (2000), The Art Of Noise - "Beat Box" (1983), Was (Not Was) - "Dad, I'm In Jail" (~1987), Kallabris - "Untitled (#2)" (1987), Public Enemy - "War At 33⅓" (1990).