Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Best of Year # 4: Parquet Courts - Sunbathing Animal

Parquet Courts Sunbathing Animal cover
So, true story, I found out that Parquet Courts had scheduled a show in Gainesville for the last Friday in January, and had also booked one in Tampa for the following night. Then I saw they were taking a day off and playing a Monday show in Tallahassee. So I wrote them and said they ought to come down to Miami and play Churchill's on Sunday.

To give them credit, the response I got was quick. It was also negative. The band in their reply noted politely that February 1 was Super Sunday.

Didn't know that indie bands gave a shit about the Super Bowl, but hey. No Miami show. Guess I'll be driving somewhere. Melanie's got people in Tampa, and Cerveza has someone in Gainesville, we'll see who wants to roadtrip more.

Don't think that not doing something is an option. Parquet Courts have rapidly become one of the most important indie bands out there, and to be honest one of the few I care about. This Sunbathing joint is not their best one yet, if only because it almost doesn't make sense to talk about any one of their four releases as best. They've worked quickly (so quickly, in fact that Sunbathing Animal, though issued in 2014, is no longer even their most recent

Parquet Courts Content Nausea cover
release), and their output has been uniform--and uniformly excellent. Neil Young said that Crazy Horse was all one song; I think that for Parquet Courts so far, it's all been one album.

Sunbathing, since I haven't heard Content Nausea is a great fucking album, and one that draws on only the best. "Instant Disassembly" manages to channel both Pavement and Television. "Black and White" makes you think of Pavement and Wire.

Alright. Pavement are sort of like the elephant in the room, if people are always talking about that elephant. Yeah, they sound like Pavement. So what? Stephen Malkmus isn't bothered by it, so why should anyone else be? Hell, Parquet Courts could have chosen to sound like Linkin Park or something. And the other thing is, to sound like Pavement, you got to have good songs and melodies, and the ability to play noodly skronky guitar solos, harmonies and clever lyrics.

Who's got all that, anymore? Even Malkmus himself has been reduced at this point to only one of the five, maybe two on a better than average Jicks track.

Let us not nitpicks our talents, let us celebrate them. "Always Back in Town" is a great song from Sunbathing, the title track rips, and "Ducking and Dodging," too. Parquet Courts are quirky, intelligent and rocking, and they've got the right fucking influences.

Good enough for me, and damn good enough for 2014.

File under: According To You

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Best of Year # 3: Thou - Heathen

Thou Heathen cover
Thou are a three-piece progressive doom/drone/sludge band from Baton Rouge,Louisiana, and you'd think at the very least just based on their hometown that they were notable. They've had a pretty decent career since they formed in 2005, and if they weren't quite Taylor Swift, their 2014 was pretty good, as well. Their self-maintained--though still incomplete--discography lists 25 different releases in which they've had a hand, and the current version of the band has played almost 450 shows. On March 19, 2014, National Public Radio of all people began streaming their 2014 release, entitled Heathen, and that album, released on March 25, which I myself managed to put my greasy paws upon some time later, has gone on to receive all kinds of accolades. For example, it was named Show No Mercy's best album of the year, was named one of the 50 on Stereogum's general list, and also made Wondering Sound's Top 25 for the year.

For all that, the album has its ups and downs. Some of the tracks do not differentiate themselves from any sludge doom you may care to name; others, however, sparkle. Lengthy dirges "Into the Marshland," and "At the Foot of Mt. Driskill" are shiver-inducing for their tone, and yes, melody. "Feral Faun," though after a pastoral intro just as long and just as dirgeful, did not grab me, because the tone and melody were not there. A third class of track, dubbed interludes, but perhaps given the brutal and unrelenting nature of the remainder of the material better understood as respites, lets the band flash its more proggy horns, as they are shorter much more tranquil works, employing organ, acoustic guitar and clean female vocals.

The entire effect even with the weaker tracks is stunning. Heathen is 75 minutes that hammer you, then gives you a break, then hammers you some more. With nods to Parquet Courts and Witch Mountain and Woods of Desolation and Mr. Jarmusch, and some others, I don't think it's the best album I've heard this year, but it is definitely one of them. It's very good, and considering that there are people out there who liked Heathen even more than I did, Thou are certainly a band to follow, and one that is dare I say, notable.

Funny to find, then, that Wikipedia's once-extant page on the band has been deleted for non-notability. We're all used to seeing Wikipedia act in strange ways when it comes to politics, but heretofore I'd thought that articles on the arts wouldn't be subject to stupid revert wars.

Wikipedia logo
The thing is, anybody qualified enough to know whether Thou and their excellent new album are notable enough or not to warrant inclusion in their encyclopedia would know that they were. Basically, you've got an editor who presumes to know, but doesn't.

This offends more than just my metal fandom. I know this doesn't apply to academia (so much), but the rest of us have made Wikipedia the default authority to appeal to, in much the same way we've made Amazon our default bookseller--all great until Amazon decides they don't really want to sell the books of those authors published by Hachette, or Wikipedia decides that this sludge metal is just a little too specialized for inclusion.

I don't know; maybe it's just me. The other thing I think of is that the band themselves could have put their page back at any time. So maybe they don't care. Which would mean that the site I look toward for capusle biographies has simply become irrelevant while I wasn't looking.

And that would be just as upsetting.

Saturday, December 27, 2014

Best of Year # 2: Witch Mountain - Mobile of Angels

Witch Mountain Mobile of Angels cover
Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?

The idea that the good stuff is over by the time you've heard of it will be a familiar one to anybody who came of age during the Bush presidency, but it is also a particularly apt one for rock and roll.

Were you at Cream's Farewell Concert? Did you catch a date on the Sex Pistols' American tour? Did you attend one of Kyuss' Generator Parties?

Me neither. Time waits for no man, all that, all that. And even if you're lucky enough to co-exist with the good stuff, your particular accidents of hometown and employment obligation most often conspire to shut you out.

Witness Witch Mountain. The closest analogue to them may be Fairport Convention, wherein a solid, though unspectacular, band with a strong vision releases a debut, then is re-defined when a woman of startling vocal talent joins up.

Witch Mountain's Sandy Denny was named Uta Plotkin, and her soaring two-octave voice, full of vibrato and blued notes each at different registers, turned a decent band into a great one. Witch Mountain play a fairly distinctive brand of bluesy doom metal. Dread as you would expect is certainly one of the emotions conveyed, but especially after Plotkin's entry, the music is also colored by brooding melancholy, giving it a multidimensionality not often seen in cult metal. And never mind Plotkin's voice--its capabilities are not often seen in rock and roll.

Witch Mountain South of Salem cover
Plotkin joined the band in 2009. Subsequent albums were South of Salem from 2011, Cauldron of the Wild from 2012, and this year's effort named above. I probably prefer Cauldron best, if only for the incendiary "Shelter," but all of the albums, including the new one, are powerful and emotive and distinctive against the competition.

And <sigh> now it's all over. Plotkin announced earlier this year that with the release of Mobile in September, she would be leaving the band.

The rest of the undeniably talented band--drummer Nate Carson, bassist Charles Thomas, and guitarist Rob Wrong--has been careful to emphasize that they will continue, as they search for a new vocalist, but some mere months after I discovered the group, it's hard not to think of Fairport, and believe the best is probably (once again) past.

Witch Mountain 2014 Carson Thomas Wrong Plotkin

File under: Carpe Diem, 2014

Friday, December 26, 2014

Best of Year # 1: Only Lovers Left Alive OMPST

It's that time of year again, when I look at the arid wasteland of this blog, and wonder whether I can post anything before the end of the year that will make the thing slightly less arid and slightly less wasted. I don't think I listened to as much new music in 2014 as I did in 2013, but there's still more than a couple of albums I heard noteworthy enough that I think I can come up with something to say about them. I hope to write more, no promises, but for right now, here's discussion of a rather noteworthy movie and its remarkable soundtrack

Squrl & Jozef Wissem Only Lovers Left Alive OMPST cover
There are motion picture soundtracks, and then there are original motion picture soundtracks.

I'm sure you pick up on the difference.

Quentin Tarantino, for example, has become known for assembling obsurities and forgotten hits into his soundtracks that capture the mood he wants to create. Yet his soundtracks are for the most part compilations and not original. April March's incredible "Chick Habit," to mention just one song that has become linked with Tarantino's musical curation, was originally released 12 years before it was used in Death Proof. And, you know, "Stuck in the Middle With You" wasn't original to the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack, either.

What QT does is interesting, and sometimes maddening, but it's not what I'm talking about here.

I'm not talking about The Singles soundtrack, or The Graduate's, or the one to Clerks. Great music in all of these, and pretty much groundbreaking across the board for their use of the music in a film context, yes. But the music contained in the soundtrack was not original to the film.

What I want to talk about here are the few original motion picture soundtracks that have gained a fame separate and apart from the movie they were designed to score.

Pink Floyd More OMPST cover
I now understand that Barbet Schroeder's More is actually considered to be a pretty good film, but the Pink Floyd soundtrack album is much more well known, and I spent a good portion my life rocking out to "The Nile Song"--and chilling out to "Cymbaline"-- without knowing about Schroeder's paean to junkies.

I've written about how the album assembled from Tangerine Dream's score to Sorcerer may actually be their best; I know for a fact that Friedkin's movie is fantastic, yet the sountrack is to my mind, both better and more significant.

And I think this rare case--original soundtrack outshining the movie--may be what we have with Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive.

Only Lovers Left Alive Theatrical Poster
I think Only Lovers is considered to be something of a comeback movie for Jarmusch. After practically defining indie cinema in the '80's and '90's, Jarmusch's always-slow pace of work decelerated even further after the turn of the century. 2003's Coffee and Cigarettes is interesting and fun but ultimately insignificant, with its indie icons like Roberto Benigni and Jack White dropped onto the screen like bandnames dropped into a fanzine's music review--for the appeal to coolness only. Broken Flowers (2005) with Bill Murray full-swing into his late-career focus on introspection and regret was great, but 2009's The Limits of Control was considered a failure by most who saw it.

Only Lovers has its flaws, too. Jarmusch's films always look great, and his new one is no different. Set in both Detroit and Tangier, the film presents Detroit as a dark and nearly abandoned landscape, in gorgeous ruin, a space ten times too big for its current bedraggled population. And the Old City of Tangier looks exactly like what it is: 2500 years old, full of mysterious alleyways and tunnels slithering through the sandstone buildings.

Yet as gorgeous as this vampire movie is, it's not much for plot.

It's not surprising that Jarmusch has finally made a vampire movie. Ever since The Lost Boys, Western pop culture has varnished the older vampire tropes with a thick patina of cool. And Jarmusch has always of course been obsessed with cool.

Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston by turns have it all down pat: the dark shades, the even darker clothes, the buzz-music, the world-weariness, the name- and relic-dropping, the contempt for the squares.

Adam with his collection of stringed instruments and Eve with her books (and Christopher Marlowe with his notoriety) are certainly a solid foundation for any movie Jarmusch may have cared to make. Plus vampires, right? But each time a fragment of plot threatens to break out, Jarmusch's script squashes it flat.

Listen: your movie can't just be a music video, and your characters can't simply be receptacles for cool. A story might be nice, but there has to be more.

In a way, though, I guess, there is something more. There is the soundtrack album. Along with a Dutch lute player* by the name of Jozef van Wissem, the music for Only Lovers is played by SQÜRL, a band led by Jarmusch himself. And the music is such a success that the cynic in me wonders whether Jarmusch made the film as a vehicle for the music, rather than the other way around.

The movie begins with montages of our two characters as they go about their separate jaded ways in their separate jaded rooms, with the band's version of Wanda Jackson's "Funnel of Love" swirling as the camera swirls. Guitars highly distorted by wah-wah and fuzz pan across the soundfield as a woman by the name of Madeline Follin alternately howls and warbles. It's tremendous, and from there, in the manner of an extended music video, the movie sews together bits of Eastern-ish drone, doom, infinite delay postrock, and yes, Elizabethan lute into a collage that, when completed, easily outshines the movie it was created for.

I have reservations about Jarmusch's movie, but none whatsoever about his music. I believe that the Only Lovers Left Alive original soundtrack is not only one of the best albums I heard in 2014, it is one of the best original soundtracks ever made.

File Under: Vampire Blues, 2014

*And isn't this a nice Elizabethan touch, in a movie that features Christopher Marlowe in a supporting role? (Return)

Sunday, December 21, 2014

Alastair Reynolds - On the Steel Breeze

Another book review I posted at Goodreads, if you can stand it

Alastair Reynolds On the Steel Breeze British book jacket
Spoilers of a sort:

I have long been a major fan of Reynolds' short fiction, but I've found his novels to be more hit-and-miss. I enjoyed Pushing Ice pretty well, and Chasm City, too, but Terminal World left little impression on me, while I was unable to finish both the first Revelation Space book, and The Prefect.

I think he's turned a corner with The Poseidon's Children series. Blue Remembered Earth was sitting on my bookshelf for over a year when I finally picked it up, but once I started, I finished it quickly, at least considering my usual pace. I immediately ordered On The Steel Breeze through SFBC, and that too was finished quickly. These books are in fact page turners.

Both books highlight sprawling and complex futures, against which brisk and mysterious plots are set, but that part of it is nothing new for Reynolds. Where he breaks new ground is in his characterization. Geoffrey and Sunday in the first book, and Chiku in the second, are well-drawn characters who act not simply in the interest of moving the story forward, but in the deeper way that is true to themselves. A consequence is that these characters make mistakes. Reynolds never gets so intrusive as to say, "hey look at these people screwing up!"--he just presents their decisions, and allows the reader to consider the consequences. Chiku in the newer one, especially, makes her share of mistakes. She's smart, decisive, and the kind of person who makes their mark, and you like her as she moves through the tale--but she's also arrogant, and probably a little cold.

One of any author's biggest challenges is transferring the needs of the story onto the characters. You need the characters to initiate action, else you have no story. But it can only be believable when you've constructed the character such that the decisions that are necessary for the story don't contravene human logic, or more importantly, human nature.

Alastair Reynolds
Reynolds passes the test in On The Steel Breeze. Chiku lies to herself a little bit about how important her family is to her. Yes, as far as story mechanics, that why she's the character that's being written about, why she's the character that has the adventures. But to the reader, it simply means that she is believable, and her actions are believable.


It's a neat trick, one that all the best novelists know how to perform, and one that I'm not sure Reynolds had pulled off in his longform work before Blue Remembered Earth.

Another interesting thing going on here is how this book retroactively illuminates its predecessor. In BRE, Reynolds posited something he called The Mechanism, basically a worldwide surveillance system that does quite a bit of good, eliminating crime and war, lost children, etc. He has a small community on the moon that foregoes the thing, but basically it obtains everywhere else. It is just accepted by the major characters, and Reynolds except when he's talking about this one lunar community never even brushes against the pros and cons. Well, in On the Steel Breeze, he gets to it pretty directly, noting one very dramatic objection to The Mechanism. Reynolds in some interviews I've read has been wrestling openly with the consequences of the British survillance state he lives in, but I think in On the Steel Breeze he shows he has made up his mind. Funny--people mentioned how Blue Rememberd Earth was a utopia; this book is in one sense a dystopia, and pretty clearly is something of a treatise on civil liberties. He reminded me in achieving this of Silverberg, always a good thing: like Valentine Pontifex, OTSB retroactively illuminates and elevates the first book in its series.

Jim Burns cover art for Valentine Pontifex
There are a couple things that keep me from giving the book five stars. The first is sort of a small thing, but VERY annoying. Reynolds wishes to present another of his complex characters as voluntarily sexless, which is interesting. What kind of person would give that up? But he never truly addresses the issue, instead highlighting it each and every time in passing by making up a set of personal pronouns for the character. Instead of saying "his" or "her" when referring to this character, Reynolds writes "ver." Instead of "he or "she" Reynolds writes "ve." It's an interesting concept--and it totally fails. PERHAPS if Reynolds had actually addressed the decision this character made to forego a sexual life, and delved into the particulars--but no: there's no way language of this sort can be anything but annoying. A mistake on the author's part.

And it's not particularly unsatisfying, but the fact is that the resolution of the story--the solution to the ultimate problem in the book--occurs offstage. Reynolds sort of explains why that had to be, so clearly he understood that some readers might take issue, but still--given that this grand agreement is some sense is the whole point of the book, I might kind of have liked to have seen it, rather than simply being told about it.


So, not a flawless book, but a very good one, and one that again seems to show Reynolds growing his game.

Through reading his blog, I gather that Reynolds has delivered to his publisher Book 3 of Poseidon's Children. But it's some months before it gets published in his native UK, and given the past history of his books, then some more months before it gets published in the US. So I've got a while to wait for the sequel. But I will be buying it, and I'm pretty sure reading it very quickly thereafter.



4/5 Stars

On the Steel Breeze by Alastair Reynolds

Top 8 Rock Albums of All Time

Or some shit like that.
I know it's a snare and a stupid one at that. I know it's just clickbait, I know it's designed by soulless cynics to do exactly this to me; I know I should not allow myself, simply because I happen to care about music, to get sucked in. But here I am, nailed and inhaled, snookered despite the better, wiser, part of myself that when confronted, simply ignores stupid shit on the internet.

But <SIGH>I just came across a resolutely idiotic Best Rock Albums list at http://thedailyeight.com/ entertainment/ top-8-rock-albums-of-all-time/, and no you shouldn't click that's what they want, so I then felt absolutely COMPELLED to spend 60 post-midnight minutes researching and formatting a list that, as gruesome and horrid as it may be, is also at least as valid as one that puts stupid Born To Run at number one, stupid Dark Side of the Moon at number two, and lists Houses of the Holy while neglecting IV. And makes mention of Workingman's Dead*.

So . . . . Take this Top 8 Rock Albums list and insert it up your bunghole, you dumb people Daily 8 you!!!!!

1. Cryptopsy - None So Vile
2. Carcass - Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious
3. Napalm Death - Scum
4. Cannibal Corpse - Butchered at Birth
5. Death - Leprosy
6. Cephalic Carnage - Exploiting Dysfunction
7. Deicide - The Stench of Redemption
8. Obituary - Slowly We Rot

May you Daily 8 be reduced to gore and putrefaction by the swarming Antichrist minions, and may God forgive me for my incredible naivete about the internets

File Under: If the Universe Went To A Death-Metal-Only Format, pwned

* Maybe, just maybe, I could've forgiven the other stuff, but this last is unforgivable by reasonable men anywhere. (Return)

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Safe as Maron

So, Melanie and I were trying to figure out something to watch Saturday night, and because Netflix streaming kind of sucks, and perhaps because we both would have rather been reading, but were afraid to admit it to each other, we spent like, ten minutes--more--scrolling through choices and rather apathetically dismissing them.

Marc Maron Thinky Pain
Finally, a little exasperated at our bland and unadventurous selves, I came across Marc Maron's taped standup gig Thinky Pain, and after a moment's thought (still struggling to slay the reluctance) I pounced.

"Let's just watch this," I said, as emphatically as I could manage, and Melanie, who'd seen snippets of Maron's IFC show a couple times, and probably just wanted the agonizing selection process to be over, said alright.

I knew Maron from when he hosted the morning show on the ill-fated Air America radio network. If you recall, Air America was an attempt by corporate cash on the left to create a network similar to the one under the control of Rush Limbaugh on the right--only it didn't go so well. Debuting on April Fool's Day of 2004, Morning Sedition with Marc Maron lasted less than 18 months.

Air America logo
But I listened to most shows during that year and a half. The Bush presidency seems so long ago, now. Listening to that show, I felt like a full-fledged Member of the Opposition. In between Maron's stories about his cats, and his other neurotic expositions, I learned quite a bit about the sneaky methods and the truth abolition of the dangerous right.

I was first able, for example, to put all those "litigious society" stories I used to think were so funny in proper context because of something Maron said on Morning Sedition.

And then the show went away. I listened to the ESPN morning show with Greenie and Golic for a while, and then I bought an iPod. Started a music blog. Morning talk radio has never been a regular thing for me since.

Nor has Maron, though I did read an excellent a 5-10-15-20 piece he wrote for Pitchfork recently, and it did alert me to something I didn't know back in the Air America days: that the comic's something of a music fan.

But more on that later. for now, here's the thing that leaves me a little conflicted (as ever, right?) about Maron.

Marc Maron's WTF pdocast
He's since become pretty popular with that podcast of his, and he's got a TV show and specials and everything, and his schtick involves him talking about what a mess he used to be. Drugs and ex-wives and employer issues and job-related failures dredged from the bad old past . . . which in some cases is exactly the time when I became familiar with his work.

I thought he did a good job, you know? In talking now about how crappy he used to be then, he kind of discredits my own experience.

It is of course all about him, as he'd be the first to tell you, but it's that kind of conflict I was kind of dealing with as we began to watch the 2013 special.

But it's funny. Watch it, if you can at all stand the Neurotic Jew thing.

And quite apart from all the riffage on that, if you're a music geek--and why else would you even come across this site?--there's another treat.

Early on--really, it's the first funny bit--Maron's talking about how he woke up one weekend morning and his GF was sick. So he suggests walking down the street and getting her a breakfast burrito to make her feel better or something. But what he actually wants to do is to go into the used record store, and pick up that Captain Beefheart album he'd been thinking about.

Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band Safe As Milk
So he kind of times it all out, ordering the burrito, then going down to the record shop, picking up Safe As Milk, and then walking back to the breakfast place, feeling all hipster superior as he clutches the Beefheart debut under his arm. And then some dude at the breakfast spot--have I said I *didn't* think this was in Brooklyn?-- peaks into his bag, and says yeah, Safe As Milk is "a good start," and Maron is all like his podcast, WTF? I just ran into a major Beefheart fan at the breakfast bar? Who the fuck does he think he is?

Me, I have never gotten Captain Beefheart. They say he was like some genius painter, so there's that, at any rate. Cerveza tried to get me into Doc at the Radar Station when we were in college. "Ashtray Heart" conjures the sounds of scratched chalkboards and dislodged phlegm, for me. I tried Trout Mask Replica right around the formative days of this blog. Couldn't name a song these days without looking it up.

No dice.

Butthole Surfers Cream Corn From the Socket of Davis UK EP
All of Beefheart sounds like "Moving to Florida" to me, except that it's not as well-played. I've read some criticism, read reviews, message board postings, the whole bit. I've tried. Still I don't get it. I don't get it, and won't ever get it. (Unless writing this post spurs me towards trying <sigh> yet again).

But, boy, do I get Maron trying to brush up himself. I'm a music nerd. Of course I understand. There's no canon like the music-geek canon, and it is so very much like a music geek to not only buy the Beefheart album, but then to start feeling all superior over it.

It's all fun for the most part; I don't really think I'm all that great when I school Cerveza's kid about Dust, or Free, or turn the kid out in the warehouse on to Russian Circles and Atheist. But, you know, I kind of do. That son of a bitch Maron in his self-loathing was describing behavior I exhibit myself.

Which was why I found it so hilarious.

I mean, let's be honest. If I *wasn't* a music person, or if I were forced to look at my music fandom from an outside perspective, if I had to evaluate the whole thing with its "essential" canon of relative obscurities like The Stooges and Wire and Nick Drake and Skip Spence and fucking Boris, I don't doubt that I would find it all tremendously annoying, with its received knowledge and hipper-than-thou namedropping.

Original pressing of the first Faust LP
But of course, I *am* a music fan, so any annoyed headshaking from outside the camp of the sort that I would surely provide if only I *were* outside the camp is looked on very negatively in these parts.

They can't talk about our club that way. Only we can talk about our club that way.

Marc Maron is clearly part of the club, so in my book, he can say whatever he wants.

And I'll laugh and laugh and laugh, and then go find me some crucial wax, something like Sweep the Leg Johnny, or Faust.

File under: Hipster Assholes, and others like me

Saturday, November 29, 2014

The Properly Prepared Oyster Shooter

Feel like Jim Morrison, all badass, sorta: Woke up this morning and made myself an Oyster Shooter. Had several Friday, too. And it goes without saying that I partook of three or four on Thanksgiving, also. The Oyster Shooter is well nigh a holiday weekend tradition here at the rastronomicals fortified compound.

What's that you say? That I haven't shared my recipe for the things?

No sooner said than done.


Three fingers of North American Lager -- Myself, I always use Bud longneck, though in a pinch, Corona will also work. Avoid skunky German pilsners at all cost, however: you need a fairly transparent medium for the rest of the ingredients. And something well carbonated.

Tablespoon of Cocktail Sauce -- Melanie picked up some from Whole Foods on Thursday, and their version doesn't include High Fructose Corn Syrup. Yet I found it indistinguishable from other brands, and I have to imagine the HFCS, whether it's present or not, is irrelevant to the success of the recipe. Never done it, but if you wanted to further break things down into components, and simply add ketchup and horseradish and vinegar, rather than buying something, I'd imagine that'd be fine, too.

Dash or three or four of Hot Sauce -- Been using the very fine Cholula brand this weekend, but I know for a fact that Tabasco and even Crystal are suitable for this purpose, as well. Avoid the (usually superior) chunky Jamaican varieties, however. You want to up the acid content, and the easily available commercial stuff has plenty of vinegar.

Squeeze or three of Lemon Juice -- Like I was saying, acid.

One oyster -- Not enough of a connoisseur to advise a varietal here, though I will say that the Sewansecotts I've had over the last three days have a flat base that makes them a true pain in the ass to shuck. I've had to resort to a hammer in some cases. Include as much brine as you can.

Method -- Dump all ingredients into a highball glass, stir well, watch it become frothy. Down the hatch in one smooth drought. Take a bite of the oyster as it goes past.

Yum.

 

 

 
File under: Accesories to the La Historia lifestyle, Recipes

Saturday, October 18, 2014

Lavie Tidhar - Osama A Novel

Just wrote what I thought was a decent review of this book at Goodreads, and given the dearth of new material here, thought I might crosspost, expecially since Goodreads gave me the option of copying my html easily. Fans of music only please forgive, but I'm scrambling for content here, you know?

I recently discovered Tidhar through the new Dozois Year's Best, which included "The Book Seller," a tale told in the author's "Central Station" universe. Dozois describes this universe as being set ". . . during a time when humanity--including part human robots, AIs, cyborgs, and genetically engineered beings of all sorts--is spreading through the solar system."

"The Book Seller" takes place in Tel Aviv, but as I discovered when I went back into previous editions of Dozois' series, searching for more by the man, Tidhar's stories in the cycle are just as likely to be set on Titan, or on one of the moons of Pluto. "The Memcordist," a story I found in Year's Best # 30, itself spans the solar system, and is certainly one of the best sci fi short pieces published this century.

These two, and others, beyond presenting a somewhat outsider (read: non-WASP) view of the possibilities in the sf field (as both reviewers and Tidhar himself will be proud to tell you), are extremely character-oriented. Tidhar presents his evocative world, introduces a character . . . and then not much happens, the author being content to present the character and his history against the multicolor background. Let me stress this is not a flaw. His characters are so good, they even make the intoxicating variegated future he postulates recede a bit.

Was reading comments somewhere, and the commenter compared the Central Station stories to a less-dense Rajaniemi. That may give you an idea, since Rajaniemi would be pretty fantastic if he just knew how to write characters.

Anyway, all the excitement I felt about the Central Station stories drove me in the direction of the author's non-series novel Osama, which very famously beat out works by George RR Martin and Stephen King to win the World Fantasy Award in 2012. Those who know me and have read here know I've got a few opinions on Global Islamic Terrorism . . . so you might find the review/discussion of the book I wrote somewhat surprising.

But then, Osama is a surprising novel, a fantastic one I wholeheartedly recommend. It's about what you think it is, but only partly so. Perhaps what I've written below will give you some additional things to look for if you choose to read it.

 

The deliberate internet contrarians who are starting to pop up notwithstanding, I think the comparisons to The Man in the High Castle you see in many of the reviews here are dead on.

Joe's reality at the beginning of the book has simply unraveled by the end of it, and if that ain't Dickian, I don't know what is.

I enjoyed Osama more than I enjoy most of PKD's fiction, and the reason is interesting to me. Dick, for all the gobsmacking he does, for all the times when he turns the reader's expectations upside-down in the span of one paragraph, was quite ordinary in plot and in characterization. You might well then say that this sets up the greater contrast for him, and I wouldn't argue, but the fact is his characters are boring. They have boring jobs, they're married to boring wives, they live in boring places.


Well, not so Joe. He's a deadpan drinkin' 'n' smokin' gumshoe in Laos. How about that for exotic? How about that for coolness? It's as if Dick had written his Deckard in the way that the movie did. I've been obsessed with cool ever since I learned how to behave and affect my way out of being the grade school nerd; of course I wanna read about Joe. Shit, I'd love to be Joe. Cheap suit, bottle of Johnny Walker in the top drawer of the dusty desk, and always two packs of smokes at hand, in case you empty the first one.

Of course, there's somebody else who deep down wanted to be Joe, and that's the ur-Joe, the Joe that existed before he became a refugee, or fuzzy-wuzzy. And Tidhar wants the reader to think about that well.

Sure, you've got the gradual unmooring of reality. Sure, you've got the pain of these clinically-described terrorist acts, but Osama is also a rumination on how we'd--most of us--love to re-write ourselves in response to social and literary tropes.

There's another book with the word "Castle" in its title that comes to mind when considering Osama, and that's Lord Valentine's Castle. Silverberg's book begins as the once and future Coronal ascends an overlook. We the reader know nothing more, and neither does the character. Like Joe, Valentine has had the entirety of his life ripped away from him by an act of war, and like Osama, the rest of LVC is concerned with the discovery by the main character that the life he is living is on every level a fabrication.

The only thing is, Valentine, when confronted by the facts, chooses to resume his earlier life. Silverberg's book is heroic fantasy, and what else would a hero do? Full of duty, he (at times reluctantly) reassumes the mantle of kingship, and goes back to who he had been.

But Joe's no hero, and neither are most of the rest of us. At the end of the book, Joe is literally slapped into recognition of his former life by the woman whom he had loved, and still--STILL--he refuses to go back. He'd rather continue playing the hardboiled detective in the tropical paradise.

Of course there are other things going on. Joe's wife was murdered in ways both brutal and clinical, and that's a pain he'd have had to deal with every day for the rest of his life had he chosen a return.

Yet it remains that Joe took the easy and lazy path. He uncovered the truth and ignored it, and I can only assume it was because he liked the fantasy life--the cardboard fantasy character he was playing--better.

You see criticism of Tidhar's characterization in Osama here and there. I find that interesting because his Central Station stories are almost exclusively focused on character, at least given their particular exotic milieu. So, what? Did Tidhar forget his characterization skills for Osama?

Not likely. Instead, I'm sure that he wrote to pulp trope to serve a purpose, to highlight an uncomfortable truth about us: that we'd play a fantasy role, even a stock one, rather than inhabit the well-rounded, if mundane, one we are all heir to.



OsamaOsama by Lavie Tidhar
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sunday, October 5, 2014

As A Matter of Fact I Like Beer

Love living on the northwest corner of the intersection of pop culture components. It's not just like that Heavy Metal Burger Joint in Chicago you've heard about*, or like that not-quite-as-cleverly-integrated Death Metal Pizza joint in Austin*. They don't just mix the music with the food, they mix it with the beer, as well. How about that?

One of my errands yesterday was to go down to the Total Wine & Spirits, and pick up a four-pack of the new Fat Head's pumpkin beer for the lovely curvy missus. It's called "Spooky Tooth," and that got me thinking . . . .

Coolest Music-Inspired Craft Beers

10. "Wake Up Dead" from Left Hand Brewing - Russian Imperial Stout
Named of course after the third- or fourth-best track from Megadeth's revolutionary Peace Sells album of 1986, the label of this heavy duty dark bad baby, like several others on this list, has the iconography down pat.

9. "Racer X" from Bear Republic Brewing - Double or Imperial IPA
Might be higher on this list, except I'm not exactly sure that the beer was actually named after the Big Black EP that got the band going on its path to noise-rock greatness. It may have simply been named after the Japanese proto-anime character, you know, Speed Racer's significantly more badass brother. Which would be cool, but not as cool.

8. "Hellhound On My Ale" from Dogfish Head Brewery - Double or Imperial IPA with Lemon


Well-crafted reference to Robert Johnson, don't you think? After letting it sit on our wire shelving rack for three years, I learned to my dismay that "Hellhound" wasn't actually all that great a beer. But the label is beautiful, and throwing some lemon in there and then saying the tart citrus was in honor of Blind Lemon Jefferson was both too clever and just clever enough.

7. "Fade to Black" from Left Hand - Black Rye Ale
More great iconography, and this is in my opinion, the best-tasting beer on the list. It's damn near a classic. The coolfest is tamped down somewhat by the fact that they honored probably the weakest song from Ride the Lighning. If someone out there wants to do a "Call of Ktulu" Cream Ale, I'm right there, dude.

6. "Bitches Brew" from Dogfish Head - Imperial Stout with Honey and Gesho Root
Haven't had this one yet, and got to admit, I'm unsure about "gesho root," but it looks so pretty on the rack with the Mati Klarwein artwork, plus, you know, Miles.

5. "Spooky Tooth" from Fat Head's Brewing - Imperial Pumpkin Ale
I'm not sure the world needs an Imperial Pumpkin Ale. Yikes, 9%. But Beer Advocate gives it an 86, and getting a pointer in to the wiseacres who brought us You Broke My Heart So I Busted Your Jaw is nice. Even if not all that many get the rock and roll reference.

4. "Brown Shugga" from Lagunitas Brewing - Barley Wine
Everyone gets this reference, which is, perhaps, to its detriment. How come you taste so good lyrics on the box, for sure, but no Stones iconography, which would have helped hammer it all home. Still, as far as I'm aware, this is the best Barley Wine anywhere, the completely over the top and ridiculous Bigfoot notwithstanding.

3. "Purple Haze" from Abita Brewing - Fruit Beer
Perhaps the most well-known brew I've included in this list, but a review at the top of the page at Rate Beer suggest it's a little "artificial seeming." I would suggest it's sort of like Hendrix' pop-rock work in that it's a bit overrated.

2. "Brother Thelonious" from North Coast Brewing - Abbey Ale


Best taken straight, no chaser, this is a beer so good it gets up from the piano bench and starts dancing around while the rhythm section carries the groove.

1. "Johnny Cask" from Dogfish Head - IPA Blend with Maple Syrup
Actually now simply called "75 Minute IPA" and the whys of it may make an interesting story. It appears some on the internet believe that Dogfish Head may have gotten a cease and desist from the Cash Family Trust. Which is why they put the glasses and bushy mustache on.

 

*Wait. You mean you haven't heard about that Heavy metal Burger joint in Chicago? (Return)

*It's here. (Return)

Saturday, August 30, 2014

McCartney Forgets Song He Wrote

 

  Just read on CNN that Paul McCartney signed the open letter asking the Scots to vote to stay in the UK. The article mentions "Mull of Kintyre," but fails to mention another, earlier song.

  http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/30/world/europe/uk-scotland-independence-mccartney/index.html

Thursday, August 21, 2014

The Name of This Band Is . . . .

Boing Boing directed me to an interesting article at The Atlantic about the use of the definite article in orchestral and popular music band names.

The history lesson it gives going back to the 1890's is illuminating, but me being me, I'm most interested in the bands I listen to, most of which have flourished since the beginning of the '60's.

In thinking about music going back that far, it seems to me that the use of the definite article was the more usual one. The Beatles named themselves in deference to The Crickets, who themselves had taken inspiration for their name from the doo-wop groups of the '40's and '50's, who were almost invariably had names of the form /The [songbird]s/.

The Byrds got generic with it, and a little freaky. The Yardbirds got in a jazz reference. And everyone else figured that even if you moved away from our fine feathered friends, you still had to put the word "The" in front of the name of your collective.

The Rolling Stones and The Who and The Kinks and The Beach Boys and The Ventures and The Turtles and The Monkees and The Zombies and The incredible motherfucking Sonics and The Kingsmen and The Trashmen and The Shadows of Knight and The Mindbenders and The Count Five and even The Beau Brummels.

Starting in 1966, that began to change. Small Faces were sometimes advertised with the The, but on their albums were always just Small Faces. They were instantly huge in Britain, though they didn't make the American charts until 1967. Strangely--or maybe not so much--the single that broke them in the US, "Itchycoo Park," credited the band by using the definite article.

American bands to pick up on the trend started by Messrs. Marriott and Jones and Lane and Mclagan were led it seems by San Franciscans. Quicksilver Messenger Service and Jefferson Airplane come rapidly to my mind. A more detailed search of Billboard's Top 100 by year shows that "Somebody to Love," released as a single in April of 1967 makes Jefferson Airplane the first band in Billboard's Top 100 to skip the The.

"A Whiter Shade of Pale" from May of the same year makes Procol Harum the second. Small Faces could have been third, right? In 1968, Billboard's list would include Cream, Steppenwolf, 1910 Fruitgum Company, Blue Cheer, and Vanilla Fudge.

So, raise your consciousness and drop the definite article, everyone.

But consciousness-raising is hard, I guess. It's worth noting that Jefferson Airplane and Cream, although they were never credited on a record with the definite article, were often credited on posters and gig flyers that way.

Status Quo made Billboard's list for "Pictures of Matchstick Men" of course, and when they did so, they went by their name with the definite article attached. In 1969, they decided that they wanted to drop it, so you can date your copy by whether or not "The" appears on the sleeve or the label.

A little similarly with Pink Floyd. Syd Barrett originally named them "The Pink Floyd Sound" which got shortened to "The Pink Floyd" before they signed and then was further chopped to "Pink Floyd" after the release of their first single, "Arnold Layne."

Pink Floyd's mates at the UFO club took a little longer to figure out which they preferred. The Soft Machine was the name of the debut from Robert Wyatt and company, and Volume Two was credited to The Soft Machine as well. But Third was distributed without the "The" on the cover, and every album thereafter while the band was extant. The posthumous--and uneven--Kings of Canterbury revived the definite article, though most other posthumous releases just called 'em Soft Machine.

And give credit where it's due to the collective defined by David Byrne but made great by Eno--they never had any doubt about eschewing that definite article. Maybe it was that the band felt locked in once Eno had written "King's Lead Hat" in their honor, or perhaps they couldn't convince Mr. St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno to write another anagrammatic tune entitled "Led Giant Shaketh."

File under: Nomenclature

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Roger Waters and Neil Young

Roger Waters at the Israeli West Bank Barrier
Notes on how complicated things have gotten:

Stumbling about the internet yesterday, I became aware of a letter to Neil Young that Roger Waters had written, and then when he got no reply, posted to his Facebook page.

Evidently, Waters had heard that Young had scheduled a concert in Tel Aviv this week, and wrote the letter trying to convince Young to join the BDS movement, those who want the world to Boycott, Divest of, and Sanction the Israeli state.

There was some regret that I was having to think about this at all, but I found myself glad that Young had not responded, and had not cancelled the show.

Yay, team.

Although I am not religious, I was raised Jewish. Although I am liberal, I support the struggle of the civilized world against the forces of terrorism. I support the State of Israel, and I condemn Hamas.

So I've come to the conclusion that Roger Waters, no matter his erstwhile contributions to music, is at this point nothing more than a clown and a tool.

And that's a terrible conclusion to have to come to. I wish that Waters understood about Hamas' 13-year campaign of missile strikes against Israel. I wish he understood about the true and avowed terrorist nature of Hamas. But mostly I wish that the world in its flaws did not require a man to come down on the wrong side or the right side here. I wish that the next time I pull out Animals, I didn't have to deal with the dissonance to the art that the man now provides.

Neil Young & Crazy Horse Tel Aviv 2014
Reading this morning that while Young himself never pulled out of the show, the Israeli police, citing security concerns, have done it for him. Too many missiles coming down, they concluded, for a large crowd to be safe.

Fucked up world, my friends, fucked up world.

Monday, June 23, 2014

Comments Elsewhere: On Led Zeppelin at Consequences of Sound

Sheldon Pearce at Consequences of Soundoverstated, I thought, the amount of critical shit Led Zeppelin took in their early days.  So I posted something.

John Mendelsohn and Rolling Stone reviews notwithstanding, Led Zeppelin’s quick success was not a surprise to very many.

Check out Tony Wilson of Melody Maker, quoted on the back of the first Yes album–

“At the beginning of 1969, I was asked as were all Melody Maker writers to pick two groups who I thought would make it in the following year.
One of my choices was LED ZEPPELIN. A bit obvious perhaps, but then we all like to back a winner occasionally.”

A later unsigned review of Led Zep I at Melody Maker said “Jimmy Page triumphs!” with the exclamation point intact.

Or Felix Dennis at long-forgotten OZ magazine:

“VERY OCCASIONALLY a long-playing record is released that defies immediate classification or description, simply because it’s so obviously a turning point in rock music that only time proves capable of shifting it into eventual perspective. (Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, The Byrds’ Younger Than Yesterday, Disraeli Gears, Hendrix’s Are You Experienced? and Sgt. Pepper). This Led Zeppelin album is like that.”

And even Mendelsohn called II “a fucking heavyweight.”

It’s clear there were some bad reviews of early Zeppelin, but I think the article overstates their preponderance; and more importantly, their significance. Bad Reviews of Physical Graffiti, for example (maybe in Creem?), would have perhaps pointed to Zeppelin’s bloatedness, which in the light of the coming of punk rock, were somewhat accurate charges which thus would have meant more than some dude in 1969 simply failing to get it.




Thursday, February 6, 2014

Queens of the Stone Age with Chelsea Wolfe at the the Fillmore Miami Beach February 5, 2014

First time I'd been to the Fillmore and first time I'd seen QOTSA. Sometime during the show, Josh Homme said that it'd been 11 years since the band had played South Florida, which means that the last time they played in the land of bikini waxings and easy Oxycontin, I knew nothing of them . . . or of Kyuss, if you can believe that.

It was a long time ago. Never mind that I'm pushing 50, Josh Homme just turned 40.

Well, it's good that some things don't change. Except for a lame ballad or two (which, unfortunately, the band wasted precious set time with last night), QOTSA's still fairly new . . . Like Clockwork is chock full of the same robot rock that the band has always played. And the show amply demonstrated that Queens, whatever its current personnel, is still very able to pound that groove into your head over and over and over.

It's a wonderful thing, even if the coming back to South Florida thing was an afterthought. When the tour to support . . . Like Clockwork was first announced back in June, South Florida was not included.

Support for the first leg of the tour was provided by British post-punk revivialists Savages, but when the tour expanded into 2014 and to include Miami (hooray!), the backing band named for the second leg was Chelsea Wolfe.

It wasn't quite as bad as when the second leg of Nine Inch Nails' recent US tour switched support from Godspeed You Black Emperor! to Gary Numan, but I would have liked to have seen Savages play, and I certainly had never heard of Chelsea Wolfe.

While there's certainly nothing new or exciting about the goth-chick schtick she's got going, I thought her set was nevertheless interesting. Wolfe sang and played guitar on songs that had an electronic pulse, but seemed to have their backbone in noise and old-style reverb. Not all of the tunes overcame a certain melodrama, but enough did for me to buy her most recent album--Pain is Beauty, natch--during the intermission. My initial listen is making me think that Wolfe's set was heavier, and better, than her record.

Something about "Keep Your Eyes Peeled"--maybe it's the pots and pans intro, maybe it's the midtemponess, or maybe it's just that it's the first song on the new album--made me think in the days running up to the concert that it would be the show-opener for Queens.

It wasn't. "You Think I Ain't Worth A Dollar, But I Feel Like A Millionaire" did the honors. And good enough; it's as representative of the bands pound-the-groove approach as anything else. But, turns out, my imagined highlight wasn't even played. And a few other songs I would have liked to have heard--the songs that I feel pound you the hardest--were missing as well. No "Battery Acid." No "I'm Designer". No "Everyone Knows That You're Insane."

That they missed great stuff is indicative of the deep catalog they have built. You maybe--I maybe--may not have realized just how many good songs QOTSA has.

  • "Little Sister
  • "Sick Sick Sick"
  • "Burn the Witch"
  • "Go With The Flow"
  • "Better Living With Chemistry"
  • and let's include the new "If I Had A Tail" coz it's fucking great, you know it is
They played all these. But I do wish--especially considering they were pretty much obligated to play "Make It Wit Chu"--they'd skipped a couple of Clockwork's power ballads. They did "The Vampyre of Time and Memory" (the best one of the bunch) and "Kalopsia" and the title track to the new record, and it was too much schmaltz for a band that's about driving straight ahead hard rock, too much, frankly, for a band that decided to skip "Battery Acid."

One thing I did learn with all the the power-ballads being played, and I'm glad in this weird cynical way that I did, is that these kids these days, they still do the stupid lighter thing during the power ballads.

They still do the lighter thing, and they also as you know spend the entire show taking video with their phones, but they also don't move that much. Or at least they don't at Queens of the Stone Age. Josh Homme--again, 40 years old--spent the night dancing with his guitar. Yours truly, nearly half a century on this tiring tired globe, spent the entire show dancing spastically, banging his head, and strumming his air guitar. I worked up quite a sweat there in row five as I looked out over the groundlings who never once formed a pit.

Metal up your ass, kiddies, and get off my lawn!