perfidy

I know it's surely in poor taste, but this ifilm video clip from the Late Late Show allegedly showing the President deep in his (fictional) cups (which he hasn't done in years, Mr. TIA/Carnivore/Sekrit NSA Person) made me laugh so hard some pee almost came out. My nose. Some slowed-down-type video footage is all it is, and yet here I am wiping what I hope are tears out of my eyes.

Many thanks to new unfogged coblogger apostropher.

There's an old joke I used to hear in the music bidness, one you'd pull out when bitching about artist managers, A&R, (especially) booking agents, concert promoters, radio promo guys, anyone really.

And since it's Friday, my inbound commute this morning took 135 very cold and standy minutes, and I'm feeling petty, I whip it out once again for your... enjoyment...? That's not the word I want.

Q: Is it possible to get pregnant via anal intercourse?
A: Of course! Where do you think lobbyists come from!?

[wik] Be sure to watch Ed Helms' piece on searching for the taint in Washington on the Daily Show. It's a real... shocker.

According to the Washington Post, notorious burnout, drug casualty, and musical genius Sylvester Stewart might be rejoining the great original lineup of The Family Stone to perform at this year's Grammys.

I'll believe it when I see it, but I will damn well sure be watching!!

I don't have much to add to all the professional and amateur punditry surrounding Hamas' win in this week's elections in Palestine, except to say that George Bush was right, and I was wrong. Democracy is the future of Middle East!

It's a pity, though, that "democracy" and "freedom, liberty, and Enlightenment values" don't mean the same thing like Bush's cabal seem to wish they did.

Alert fans of my writing (all six of you) may recall that back in November, I reviewed an EP by the New England-based quintet The Beatings titled If Not Now, Then When?.

The band are now set to release their second full-length, Holding On To Hand Grenades, later in January, and everything I said about the advance single is true once again. In that piece, I wrote:

It is not damning with faint praise to say that the Beatings remind me of Mission of Burma; only rarely can a band pursue Burma's post-punk ideal of brittle soundscapes replete with feedback, scratchy guitars, and dry vocals and have it sound any good. Usually such bands just sound like they're ripping off Burma with a little Pixies on the side. But the Beatings have managed the rare trick of appropriating some of the astringent, hyperintelligent sound invented by Mission of Burma but making it sound human, intimate, and alive in a way that Burma never could.

But the Beatings aren't a tribute band. Although they do wear their influences on their sleeves (touches of Radiohead, Pixies, Sonic Youth, and giant helpings of Husker Du is what I'm hearing), this is to be expected for a relatively young band working in a close-knit genre looming with giants. It is really, really hard to find your own voice and write original songs (I should know... I've been trying (and failing) for fifteen years), but four(ish) short years into their career, The Beatings sound most like... themselves.

If greater success eludes The Beatings with the release of Hand Grenades then there is no justice in the world. On Hand Grenade the band combine the spiky astringecy of their biggest influences with a deft melodic sense that makes their best songs refreshingly sweet and tart at the same time. Every song on the album is better than those on their previous EP, suggesting that they are growing quickly as songwriters and arrangers.

Like many of the recent generation of indie rock bands, The Beatings thrive on tension. The Pixies' signature loud-soft dynamic makes up a large part of their DNA, but they add new dimensions to this by-now routine strategy by adding Sonic Youth-style sheets of noise and by using three singers, one male with a brittle monotone that can burst into melodic (almost-)screaming, one male with a high and thin voice, and an occasional contribution from bassist Erin Dalbec who (in the best Kim Deal/Kim Gordon tradition) acts as a burst of sunshine over the grey-blue musical landscapes.

Guitarists Tony Skalicki and E.R. interweave their turbulent guitar lines over powerful drumming from Dennis Grabowski. All bassist Dalbec has to do with so much going on is add drive and punch to Grabowski's drumming; that she is able to add harmonic interest is just icing on the cake. The muscular sound drives the fast songs and keeps the slow ones moving along, and the band create gorgeous textures to go with the turbulent rhythms. I don't think I've ever heard a band before who could sound like Public Image Ltd. and Galaxie 500 at the same time, but I'm glad to have had the chance.

Highlights on Holding On To Hand Grenades include the stately and noisy "Upstate Flashbacks," the driving hookiness of "Feel Good Ending," the chilly resignation of "Stockholm Syndrome Revisited," and the cute little weird vignettes like "Oh Shit, My Phaser's Jammed" and the acoustic "Harry's Wild Ride." The album does peter out a bit toward the end, stumbling with "Pennsyltuckey" and "Villains," which simply go on too long, and "False Positive," which mainly suffers for sounding like a couple songs sequenced before it. Still, out of sixteen songs a maximum of three or four could be considered as filler - an impressive ratio by any standard.

It's not as if Boston's punk tradition needed saving, and it's not as if The Beatings need their talent affirmed by comparison with the greats of that scene, but it's true: if ever the world needed an heir to Mission of Burma, Galaxie 500, The Pixies and so on, The Beatings are it, and on their own terms. Holding On To Hand Grenades is an impressively self-assured statement of purpose that should be the Beatings' entry to the World of Bigger And Better Things.

This album is available from cdbaby.com.

Al Bundy may well have been on to something when he said, "It is good to hate the French," and indeed it is easy and often pleasureable to do so. But it is important to compartmentalize. I do get riled at French government, French foreign policy, and French collective opinions. But the French themselves, and the wonderful bon-vivant culture they have created.... now, those are wonderful things.

For Christmas, I was the beneficiary of an extraordinarily generous gift, a gift certificate to Formaggio Kitchen, a store over in Cambridge who are serious about food. Dead serious.

Yesterday I ventured over there, and aside from a small bottle of 20 year old balsamic vinegar (which is the culinary equivalent of a fine Cuban cigar) and a few impossible to find odds and ends like grey Normandy sea salt, preserved lemons, and black sesame seeds, I picked up dinner for tonight. To wit: a very nice and somewhat pricey Burgundy, a hunk of aged goat's milk cheese from the same region, a hunk of Trois Laits, which is a soft and stinky three-milk cheese also from the same region, and a quarter loaf of pain Poilâne, the signature bread from the most famous baker in France.

Formaggio Kitchen aren't messing around. The cheeses I bought were purchased green from the source, and aged to perfection in a stone cellar purpose-built for that in the basement of the Cambridge store. The bread was baked Wednesday morning and flown via Federal Express to Boston. Lionel Poilâne himself claims that his signature pain Poilâne, a large round three-build sourdough loaf made with 85% extraction flour which he calls a miche, is best eaten about three day after baking, so I'm in business.

Tonight I will sit in my little kitchen in Salem, Massachusetts, and I will eat bread, cheese and wine from Burgundy and Paris nearly as fresh as if I were there. It is modern times, and it is good to love the French.

[wik] N.B. I did try a slice of pain Poilâne last night, and I see what all the hoopla is about. Holy crap. And I, I have the recipe.

Between 1968 and 1973, Sly and the Family Stone had an amazing run. Between their instantly legendary performance at Woodstock and their last hit album in 1973, the band would release three classic records: 1969's Stand!, a party record full of hope and vitriol that is for my money the best album of the 1960s or '70s; 1971's There's A Riot Goin' On, a claustrophobic and paranoid funk workout that jettisoned the upbeat veneer that had lightened Stand!; and 1973's Fresh, full of more conventional grooves but lyrics just as outspoken as the previous two albums.

The Family Stone's signature blend of rock, funk and soul has become a fundamental ingredient of modern hip-hop, R&B and neo-soul, and the legacy of Sly Stone (whose real name is Sylvester Stewart) as a musical innovator remains undimmed. The Family Stone was also the first fully integrated band to hit the big time, an innovation that has not endured quite as well. Unfortunately, with this titanic string of successes came a spiraling drug problem that seemed to sap Stewart's mojo. Although he continued to turn out mediocre-to-decent albums, by 1976 his career was undeniably petering out. Since then Stewart has been reclusive, occasionally turning up to record a (usually perplexing) track here and there.

Considering that The Family Stone remain an important if relatively under-celebrated force in popular music, and considering that the band's leader is apparently no longer able to make new music, Sony's recent idea almost makes sense.

The company owns all the master tapes to the great Sly & The Family Stone albums. On their own these tapes are just sitting in a climate controlled room sucking up rent and not producing income. But if Sony were to lend those tapes out to a wide variety of chart-topping artists - The Roots, Maroon 5, John Legend, will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, Chuck D, Big Boi of Outkast, Buddy Guy, and so on, to do with them what they please, Sony has a chance to hit that beautiful spot where a cheaply produced album will successfully market to multiple audiences and sell like crackberry hotcakes.

This is an excellent way to make easy money, especially now that the recording industry as a whole has run like Wile E. Coyote off a cliff and is only moving forward thanks to momentum. If the whole label-distributor-retailer physical-product sales scheme is to survive a little longer, it is high time to grab the easy cash wherever it can be found.

So that is exactly what Sony did: lent the tapes out to a number of artists with the understanding that each artist take an original song in its final form and use it to create a new piece of music. Do they creatively lift portions of a song and radically incorporate them into a new track? Do they remix the original substantially, adding their own creations here and there? Or do they just let the original tape roll and overdub a wanky guitar solo or new vocal wherever it fits?

No matter what the strategy, the final result should ideally be a cross between hybrid and homage, a live-action mashup of the old and new. And given the high quality of the originals, artists need to really deliver the goods if their own contributions are going to measure up. Sony even got Sylvester Stewart to give his approval to the enterprise, so this album is coming out as a Sly & The Family Stone recording complete with Sly Stone's own thumbs-up.

The result, titled Different Strokes by Different Folks, is a creatively bankrupt collection of mostly terrible vandalisms of some of the best songs by Sly & The Family Stone. But make no mistake. Despite the billing, this is not a Sly and the Family Stone recording. Instead, it is an awful and embarrassing collection of sort-of covers by some of the biggest names in music.

The worst offenders fall into two categories; those who don't seem to even understand what worked about the songs they are "covering," and those who have nothing new to add, meaning their contributions are at best extraneous and distracting.

Two examples sum up the first group. Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas shoehorns the fuzzy driving stomp of "Dance To The Music" into a boring, plodding and nearly undanceable Black Eyed Peas-style "funk" track. The song's throbbing groove is replaced with a lurching two-note riff that sucks all the fun out of the original tune's vocals.

Worse yet, Nappy Roots and Martin Luther manage to miss the entire point of "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey." Whereas the original provocatively explored the dilemmas inherent in American racial politics and pleaded for a solution, the new version jettisons all that in favor of a verse of stock thug/hustler rhymes complete with Glocks and rocks and 'doing what you got to do', a verse about how white kids call each other "nigger," and a verse-long complaint about how black kids today are too materialistic and listen to too much gangsta rap like, presumably, the first verse of the song.

In the second category, Stephen Tyler and Robert Randolph tackle "I Want To Take You Higher" by basically singing and playing along with the complete original master track. Apart from a few seconds of gospel-style introductory music, the entire track is practically intact except that about half of Sly Stone's vocal lines are cut out to make room for Tyler's. The result is perfectly unimpressive; I did the same thing in my bedroom when I was sixteen with a four-track and a Pink Floyd album. But like most things I did alone in my bedroom at sixteen, I never felt the results worthy of public scrutiny.

Devin Lima's version of "If You Want Me To Stay" dresses up the original with new percussion and skritchy guitar that neither adds to nor detracts from the song, but his vocal is a close impression of Sly Stone's original - sometimes so close that I can only tell some of his contributions apart from the portions of Stone's that remain because I have heard the original hundreds of times. While an interesting exercise in impersonation, it is also totally pointless.

The missteps abound. Moby turns "Love City" into a Moby song, too techno for day-spas and too limp for clubs. Buddy Guy and John Mayer (John Mayer?!? When the hell did this walking haircut get street cred??) make space in "You Can Make It If You Try" for some wanky solos that really contribute nothing to the original. John Legend and Joss Stone prove by negative example the value of restraint on a remixed and over-sung version of "Family Affair" that interpolates a few seconds of the Family Stone's "Loose Booty." John Legend and Joss Stone are phenomenally talented newcomers. Unfortunately, as with Stone's appearance with Melissa Etheridge at the 2005 Grammys, all they prove is how far they have to go before they can stand shoulder to shoulder with their idols.

The most disappointing thing is how many people involved in this project should know better. Why did Isaac Hayes and Chuck D agree to participate? Their updated version of "Sing A Simple Song" with D'Angelo basically amounts to Chuck D rapping over the original track about how great a song it is, D'Angelo singing a line or two, and Isaac Hayes literally saying a word here or there. The final result sounds merely rushed and stitched together. So, Chuck... the original was that good? Then why not shut the hell up and let me hear it uninterrupted?

Not everything is so dire. A few interesting choices partially redeem some participants. The Roots, for example, submerge "Star" in their own track in a way that seems more like homage and less like cannibalism, and Maroon 5 (of all people) radically re-conceive "Everyday People" as a techno-guitar workout. This experiment doesn't quite work, but it at least is much bolder than most of the limp and uninspired dreck included elsewhere.

The best cut is probably the last, where DJ Reset does a mashup of Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation 1814" with the Family Stone's "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" to surprisingly good effect. Jackson used a sample of "Thank You" as the basis of the original "Rhythm Nation," so although this pairing is obvious, it also works perfectly well.

All in all, Different Strokes by Different Folks does one thing: the album makes me desperate to listen to the original Sly and the Family Stone songs free of all the extra crap and doodazzery smeared on top. I urge all interested souls to pass this compilation by and invest a little money in the original albums. Stand! should be in absolutely everyone's record collection, and There's A Riot Goin' On and Fresh, as well as the Greatest Hits album that sums up everything pre-Stand!, are not far behind.

Different Strokes By Different Folks is a total stinkbomb, a waste of time and money that reflects well on practically no one involved and makes the iconic music of Sly and the Family Stone seem lesser by association. It is too much to expect that Sony Music Group and its employees will ever feel shame over releasing this cheap and cheesy little low profile cash-in at a whopping $18.98 retail, much less billing it as a Sly & The Family Stone album, but at least I can dream that some day when their shortsightedness, avarice, and allergy to creative business practices put them out of work, they come to regret a few of their mistakes.

It's amazing how a seemingly elegant story can become astonishingly complex the closer you look at it. Take, for example, Darwinian evolution. Darwin's original notion of the place where life on Earth began was a gentle "warm pond," a conceptual predecessor to the "primordial soup" that most of us probably learned about in high school.

In the middle of the 20th century it was more commonly believed that life began, whether in a pond or not, in the fairly harsh environment of a noxious atmosphere composed of ammonia, methane, ethane, and other gases (oxygen only came later, a product largely of plant-based photosynthesis). The famous experiment from the 1950s where scientists created amino acids by running lighting through a flask full of these gases was the watershed moment in this line of thinking.

More recent research confounds this thesis in turn, arguing that organic compounds -- especially RNA, the probable evolutionary precursor to DNA -- dissolve readily under such conditions, and therefore would have a hard time surviving such an environment.

The current thinking is that the early evolution of life on earth was many-pronged, possibly resulting in numerous forms of life (e.g. protein life, RNA life, even rudimentary life based on clay crystals) that were eventually outcompeted by DNA-based life, viruses, and certain possible forms of RNA-based life that may yet survive. Yet more radical theories argue that the early chemical precursors to Earth life may have formed on Mars billions of years ago, when that planet's chemistry and climate were more favorable to the formation of RNA-like compounds, and then came to earth by accident after meteor strikes knocked some of Mars out into space.

The point, before I bore all my readers into submission, is that history is always far, far more complicated than it at first seems. The simple classroom narrative almost always covers up all the interesting complexities and for this can end up being almost wrong.

This goes for music history too. Every so often, new recordings emerge into popular view that change the dominant narrative of pop music as we know it. Just last year Rhino released One Kiss Can Lead To Another: Girl Group Sounds Lost And Found, a tour de force compilation of 120 girl-group recordings from the 1960s that acts as sort of a companion piece to that label's four-disc Nuggets set, which collected American garage rock from roughly the same period.

Together these two box sets amount to a drastic revision of the usual quickie history of Rock and Roll in which rock and roll hit a dead patch after the Elvis joined the Army and didn't get interesting again until the Beatles wave broke over North America, and didn't get good for Americans until the Summer of Love. Judging from songs collected on these two Rhino sets, that history is not only wrong but monstrously unfair to a huge number of artists working between 1959 and 1968 who have had the misfortune to fall on the wrong side of tightly controlled Oldies Radio playlists.

One lesson to take away from both my tiresome little homilies is that what we think we know, what survives to make up our worlds, has as much to do with accident as with design (whether "intelligent" or not). So why did I just expend 500-odd words on jibber-jabber about DNA and Rhino Records? Because of a new compilation called Godfathers of L.A. Punk: Today Its Time To Wake Up Again America!!!, out now on Siamese Dogs records.

The usual narrative of punk rock goes something like this: The Stooges begat The Ramones begat the Sex Pistols who begat Everyone Else, world without end, Amen. This is a neat little chapbook of a history that, while elegant, completely fails to explain what the Dead Boys and Rocket From The Tombs were doing in Cleveland in '74, how the Saints came from Australia, or why when the Sex Pistols went to California for the first time, there were punk bands ready and waiting to open the show for them.

It turns out that -- surprise! -- there's more to the story.

Siamese Dogs Records is the brainchild of one Philippe Mogane, a French photographer who, in the 1970s, found himself in Los Angeles with a bagful of high-end cameras and a serious jones for the Detroit-bred musical stylings of one James N. Osterberg, better known as Iggy Pop, and his band The Stooges. Mogane found himself in fact living in the same tatty building as The Stooges, and in time became sort of a go-between among the warring Stooge factions. The photos he took of the group were published in Europe, resulting in renewed interest in the group there.

At the same time, Mogane became interested in the local bands that were following in The Stooges' footsteps, and with Stooges guitarist James Williamson founded Siamese Dogs records to promote these groups. Their first releases were a couple archival singles by the Stooges, "I Got a Right" and "Gimme Some Skin."

By the time 1978 rolled around, the punk sound was on the breeze and Siamese Dogs was riding the first wave of Los Angeles punk, releasing music by (as Mogane styles them) "the Godfather of LA Glam Punk," The Max Lazer Band, "The Godfathers of LA Hard Punk," The Weasels, and "the Godfathers of LA Punk," The Controllers, among others. Mogane now feels the world is finally ready for the music he recorded nearly thirty years ago, and has revived the Siamese Dogs imprint to release Godfathers of LA Punk.

One thing for sure is that the bands recorded by Siamese Dogs are clear ancestors of many great California legends. Godfathers captures something about Southern California, a feeling that would eventually play out in recordings by dozens of bands we know well. For example, The Controllers and The Weasels point the way straight to The Germs, Black Flag, The Weirdos, Suicidal Tendencies, Bay Area bands like Flipper and The Dead Kennedys and even Jane's Addiction. And though it is surely heresy to say so, you can hear in the glam of The Max Lazer Band a little bit of the strut and swagger that influenced the metal scene that spawned Guns 'n' Roses. In these latter cases, it's not so much a sound as a vibe, a creeping Californianess that colored each nascent scene and ties together bands as diverse as The Doors, X, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Suicidal Tendencies.

But all this historical importance is of interest only to snotty record collectors who own Stiff Little Fingers LPs on vinyl and can name from memory the birth-names of all the Ramones, CJ included. Without decent music, no disc like Godfathers of LA Punk will be anything more than a curiosity, a mildly interesting document of a time just as well forgotten. Luckily, that is not the case. Instead,Godfathers of LA Punk is very worthwhile listening for any serious punk collector. Besides its historical value, there is just too much music here of surpassing quality to pass up.

To begin with, the Stooges tracks, "I Got A Right" and "Gimme Some Skin (both alternates from the Raw Power sessions) are practically worth the price of admission on their own. But beyond the long shadow of Iggy is a surprisingly diverse collection that probably has something to please punk fans of every stripe.

My personal favorites are The Weasels and The Controllers, who in particular anticipate merchants of gratuitous outrage like The Circle Jerks and The Dead Kennedys and the hard-boiled tales of X. The Weasels' biggest hit, "Beat Her With A Rake," is a song about a guy who beats his girlfriend to death for giving head to another guy again in public. Objectively, there is absolutely nothing redeeming about a song whose message line is "beat her with a rake and make her pay for her mistake." Indeed, it's only sorta-funny in the way that appeals to world-weary eighteen year olds. Nonetheless, over a trashy and muscular punk riff that is years ahead of their time, The Weasels sell "Beat Her With A Rake" and another domestic abuse single (this one with a Nazi twist!) called "I'm The Commander" to the hilt, reveling in their brazen crassness.

Similarly, The Controllers' melodic proto-hardcore stomp "Do The Uganda" is about wanting to "get VD and be real mean, I wanna be black and look like Idi Amin," only to conclude that "You can't leave Uganda, yeah the joke's on you!"

Mean-spirited joke songs like these seem indigenous to California's punk scene. It would be a surprise if a young Jello Biafra hadn't come across these records up in his Bay Area home.

With such classically tasteless offerings as these on hand, it is no wonder that Philippe Mogane himself emailed me in response to my request for a review copy of this album, warning me that "it might be too staggering for your proper, nice and orderly mind." Well, fair enough. But I've heard songs like "Beat Her With A Rake" before, going all they way back to The Leaves' and Hendrix' versions of "Hey Joe," Jim Morrison's half-silly spoken word rants about killing his parents, and even John Lee Hooker's lovingly detailed torture-murder fantasy "Bad Like Jesse James." And if I can enjoy Snoop singing about how he "don't love these ho's" or the Meatmen singing about how crippled children suck, then I can surely get a thrilling transgressive frission out of the absolute awful, terrible wrongness of a chorus that goes, "beat her with a rake and make her pay for her mistake."

Beyond the manic (but today fairly orthodox-sounding) punk of The Weasels and The Controllers, Godfathers is a gratifyingly diverse set. The Max Lazer Band enriches glam rock with saxophones and a punk edge, and if "Street Queen" isn't quite as ferocious as some of the other offerings here, it still glitters, writhes, and bites hard.

More interesting still are the arty, jagged noise experiments of Nu Americans and the Attitude, both of whom even employ - gasp! - keyboards! The Attitude's cover of "Hound Dog," featuring some hot piano from Little Richard, is a nicely sacrilegious good time, and Nu Americans' bizarre "Listen To Your Heart" sounds like some unholy mix of The Slits, Devo and Captain Beefheart. That is, except for one thing: Devo and The Slits had yet to release their first records. (Indeed, this is just one of the many ways in which the bands on Godfathers of LA Punk were ahead of their time. Iggy Pop may have showed everyone the way as far back as '73, but even in 1978, the day of punk had yet to arrive.)

Together the Attitude and Nu Americans remind me of a one-shot video I have of a band called the Steel Tips, who opened for the Dead Boys at CBGB in '77. The Steel Tips mixed Zappa with The MC5 and added some atonal riffing on top, in what I presume was an effort to sound like no other band ever. Having now heard The Nu Americans and The Attitude, I now suspect that bands like this were incredibly common in 1978 and have now been all but forgotten. And although I'm not personally in love with that sound, your mileage may certainly vary.

If a French photographer had never shacked up with the Stooges in a grimy Los Angeles loft, the bands on Godfathers of LA Punk might never have been committed to wax. And if said French photographer hadn't decided that it was time for America to hear these sounds again, they would be lost forever but for faint memories in the minds of Los Angeles' oldest bartenders and punk progenitors.

Godfathers of LA Punk isn't necessarily the alpha and omega of Los Angeles punk rock, but it is definitely of interest to any and all fans of the genre. More importantly, it helps shed some light on the murky beginnings of one of punk's most important scenes. Punk was the one of the last great gasps in rock and roll's evolution before its long, slow decline toward the millennium, and we owe it to future generations of truth seekers to give them the straight story. I'm sure that what Philippe Mogane has done in reissuing these songs could be done (has it been done?) in Houston, in Cleveland, in Chicago, and every little jerkwater burg in between. And even if all the music so rediscovered is not worth saving, it would be nice to make that decision consciously rather than let happenstance and obscurity swallow dreck and diamonds alike.

One final note: Godfathers of LA Punk contains the answer to a question I didn't even know needed asking: what's the deal with Pauly Shore? Readers of a certain age will remember that in his MTV days, Pauly Shore would frequently refer to himself in the third person as "the wea-sel," with just that singsongy skip in the middle: "wea-sel." Well guess what? I think I know what Pauly Shore was listening to before he hit the big time, because The Weasels introduce themselves in the live version of "Beat Her With A Rake" as, you guessed it, "The Wea-sels." You learn something new every day.

The following is a review that originally appeared on blogcritics.org. Not that that's interesting or anything; everything I write for them turns up here eventually. But this time it's special and stuff. You see, I came across the CD reviewed herein thanks to a another review I wrote a while back of the latest album by Poncho Sanchez. Apparently people read what I write, because I got an email from a guy in Yonkers asking if I'd care to review his CD; he liked what I'd said about Poncho. Turns out, he's pretty good too.

Flute is a scary instrument; jazz flute doubly so. Too often flute players fall back on either candy sweetness or the tired breath tricks that Ian Anderson has been doing with Jethro Tull for more than thirty years now. The instrument suffers as well by its overuse in Muzak and tepid soft rock, to the point where people reflexively assign flute music to the "eww" file. For my part, all the great jazz flute players who push my buttons (and that's not many, owing to my own ignorance) are experimenters who use the flute as a tool to explore the outer limits rather than just play some good old straight music.

All this goes triple for Latin jazz flute, where the light tone of the instrument can get buried underneath an avalanche of percussion. It's a neat trick, then, that Yonkers, NY native Carlos Jimenez has pulled off. As a young Latin jazz flutist, he has made an album that leaves the flute front and center, counterbalanced by a rhythm section that for all their propulsion and weight still leave plenty of room for the flute on top. Moreover, Jimenez is a straight-ahead player interested in exploring groove and melody rather than orbiting Neptune on a descending-modal whole tone run. And even though the words "tasteful flute" generally make me want to run screaming for my Slayer albums, he has made a very promising debut album, titled Arriving.

Jimenez' tone is light and airy, about as far from the round caramel sweetness of classical flute as it's possible to get, and he has developed a voice as a soloist that makes the most of this lightness. He sometimes leaves phrases open ended, building up questioning statements for bars at a time before tying them together again. Although he is young (and plays young), his ideas have enough meat on them to promise a lot of room for him to develop as a player.

His band backs him up in style with great comping and tight rhythms that balance the Latin and jazz sides of their sound nicely. Bassist Geoff Brennan in particular skips across the beat with a feel that digs in like Stanley Clarke but bounces like a salsa band. The percussion line of Hilton Ruiz (piano), Guillermo Jimenez (timbales), Aryam Vazquez (congas) and Adam Weber (drum kit) keep Brennan tied to earth with knotty and dense rhythms that smolder and spark. In particular, Ruiz' solos and tartly dissonant comping fill in harmonic and rhythmic details beautifully, and the occasional backbeat fill from Weber sometimes send things in a welcome bebop direction.

Arriving is a collection of originals by Jimenez (plus Miles Davis' "So What"), most of which are open-ended head charts that devote most of their space to soloing (I'm not even sure if a couple of Jimenez' compositions even have heads or not). While this suggests that Jimenez' writing has a lot of growing up to do, it doesn't actually detract from the album as a whole. With a rhythm section as tight and alert as his, Jimenez can carry tunes on solos that, though sometimes limited, are expressive enough to retain interest.

Standout tracks include the opening "Tomando Cafe," "Natalie's Cha Cha Cha" and "Arriving," which percolate with sparkling rhythms and probing solos from Jimenez, Ruiz, and guest player Bobby Porcelli (alto sax) on "Arriving." Elsewhere, as on "Tunnel of Flowers" and "My Allison," Jimenez and crew give over to prettiness that goes on too long to really hold interest.

The greatest compliment I can give is that I have Arriving on an IPod playlist with a number of heavy hitters in Latin and Latin hybrid music - The Spanish Harlem Orchestra, Mandrill, Jimmy Bosch, Poncho Sanchez, Mongo Santamaria, and so on - and the best selections from Arriving always send me rushing back to the "now playing" screen to remind myself who's making this good noise.

Although not perfect, Arriving is a strong debut from a young player.

Loyal Reader EDog sends along a story about an actual, real vampire who is running for governor of Minnesota.

Check out the testes on this guy:

"Politics is a cut-throat business," said Jonathan "The Impaler" Sharkey, who said he plans to announce his bid for governor Friday on the ticket of the Vampyres, Witches and Pagans Party.

. . . . .

"I'm a Satanist who doesn't hate Jesus," Sharkey told Reuters. "I just hate God the Father."

However, he claims to respect all religions and if elected, will post "everything from the Ten Commandments to the Wicca Reed" in government buildings.

Sharkey also pledged to execute convicted murders and child molesters personally by impaling them on a wooden pole outside the state capitol.

Sharkey told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that he's a vampire "just like you see in the movies and TV."

"I sink my fangs into the neck of my donor ... and drink their blood," he said, adding that his donor is his wife, Julie.

Well, we are a representative democracy, and Vampir folk as a voting block are under-represented, so... why not? At least he's upfront about his skimming off the top.

I wonder if he'll let Minnesotans pay their state income taxes in pints of A-negative?

The era of forward-thinking acoustic folk music never quite seems to arrive. Name a decade, name a year, and there are always a handful of fantastic musicians bubbling under, never quite obscure but never quite breaking through to popular success.

Of course, this make sense. No matter how fast an acoustic guitarist's hands, no matter how subtle their tonal shadings, they are automatically relegated to the second rank of artists as far as popular success goes. Look at Picasso's charcoals. They are breathtaking in their power, full of energy and vigor and darkness and light, and the best of them are fully the equal of his greatest achievements as a painter in my humble and perfectly uninformed opinion. If the attractions are more subtle for the lack of color, I at least find them no less profound.

And so it goes with acoustic guitarists. Not to take anything away from Edward Van Halen, but every sixteen year old guitar novice soon learns that it really is easier to sound awesome on the guitar if you crank up the volume to 11 and slap on some echo. That's great and fine - there is no moral dimension to rocking out - but it is a much more demanding thing to blow minds if it's just you, your fingers, and six strings on a hollow box of wood. The musical statements are just as compelling (and undoubtedly more so in many, many cases), but there are just not as many people willing to extend their ears a little and listen.

I once stood outside the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton, Massachusetts for forty-five minutes in the cold, transfixed by the late acoustic guitar master Michael Hedges. I was early to see whoever was playing the late show, I didn't have a ticket for Hedges, and the place was sold out. So I stood outside in the snow, watching in awe as Michael Hedges scattered flurries of notes all over the room, as he half-danced along with the music he made, as he spun heroic tales all on his own with two hands, six strings, and an electronic echo box. As a guitarist, as a music fan, as a person not particularly open to the attractions of poetry (much less new-agey guitar music) I was flabbergasted at the spectacle. The fundamental laws of my universe changed a little on that snowy New England night.

The new compilation Imaginational Anthem on Near Mint Records is a lovely collection of acoustic guitar performances both old and new. The oldest recordings date from the mid-1960s, the newest were recorded last year, and it's nearly impossible to tell without reading the liner notes which is which. Taken together, the songs on Imaginational Anthem are a stunning digest of the past forty years in solo acoustic guitar music. The best of them changed my universe a little once again.

The title of the album is borrowed from a nifty little tune written by Phil Ochs' cousin Max which appears here twice, in a 1969 and a 2004 version. Fittingly, Ochs wrote the tune as a tribute to the godfather of modern acoustic guitar music, Michael Fahey, who also appears on Imaginational Anthem with a perfect little jewelbox of a performance of "O Holy Night."

Although he is represented only by this one rarely heard cut, Fahey's spirit looms large over the entire collection. As the foremost formal innovator of acoustic guitar music in the 1950s and 1960s, Fahey set the tone for an entire half century of musicians with his wide-ranging genre excursions, unorthodox tunings, and use of non-western scales and styles. As a teacher, he nurtured legends like Leo Kottke. As head of Takoma Records, he released albums by a number of great guitarists who otherwise probably would have gone unheard on record. (A number of Takoma releases have been reissued in the past ten years or so. Intrepid souls would do well to check them out.)

For having nearly every note on it made with six strings and a hollow box of wood, Imaginational Anthem is a refreshingly diverse collection. Fahey's "O Holy Night" is a neat and orthodox reading of the Christmas carol, albeit a lovely one with proper voice leading and perfect technique. On the other end of the spectrum are Gyan Riley and his father, renowned minimalist composer Terry Riley, who offer up "La Cigale (the Locust)," a contemplative piano and guitar duet that is as unfocused, conversational, and random-sounding as "O Holy Night" is perfectly mannered.

The rest of the album falls between these extremes. Brad Barr (guitarist for the Rhode Island jam band The Slip) delivers an amazing tune called "Bouba's Bounce," a stunning display of technique and musicianship that lacks structure but hangs together as a piece nonetheless thanks to Barr's ability. As with Fahey's, Barr's performance lives and dies by the expression he brings to his playing, and even if I wasn't already aware of his considerable talents I'd know from "Bouba's Bounce" that Barr is a player of uncommon sensitivity.

I could also listen all day long to standouts like Jack Rose's "White Mule III," a muscular modal workout blending folk and flamenco techniques played on a guitar equipped with drone strings, and "Night After Sidewalk" by Kaki King.

A word about King. She is a bartender at the New York rock venue The Mercury Lounge, and is one of only two women to appear on this compilation. She is a guitarist blessed with a terrifying amount of technique and interpretive ability, and "Night After Sidewalk" is a gorgeous and quiet piece of still beauty which is for me easily the best track included here: a Picasso charcoal for sure. King is also young, and her presence and skill (and that of the similarly youthful Brad Barr) is excellent news for the future of this music.

There are only a couple tracks here that don't quite please my ears like the rest. Harry Taussig's "Dorian Sonata," recorded in 1965 is, in fact, in the Dorian mode, but the piece doesn't have enough motion or melodic interest to keep my attention. (Probably my ears are too used to this kind of selection, having heard dozens of similar pieces in the forty years since this one was penned.) Depending on my mood, I find myself either mildly interested or mildly irritated by Riley and Riley's "La Cigale." I feel the same about much of Terry Riley's canon, so your mileage my vary. And whether or not "Imaginational Anthem" itself (in either version) appeals to me also depends on my mood. Although more structured than Barr's "Bouba's Bounce," the intricate melodies sound in turn exciting or aimless, and the gestures it makes seem less remarkable in light of the other, newer, innovative music included here. Perhaps this too is an encouraging sign for the future.

Imaginational Anthem isn't for everyone, but it is awfully good. Bringing together some of the finest acoustic recordings from the last half century, it makes a strong case that the genre is alive, well, and even thriving. Near Mint records plan to release more albums of this same ilk in the future, and I wish them the best of luck.

(Reprinted from blogcritics.org)

Brew #7

For this beer, I was lucky enough to have access to the strain of yeast used by a famous Belgian-style brewery in Cooperstown, NY. In fact, this brew is a more-or-less clone of their signature ale. It is intended to be a Belgian Strong Ale, and as such is absolutely packed with fermentables - about 8 to 8 1/2 pounds of sugar in the batch as opposed to the usual 5-ish. The suggested 70 degree fermentation temperature is a challenge in my apartment, but I hope that by wrapping the bucket in a blanket, I can keep it nice and warm enough. Perhaps it's lunacy to think I can make a Belgian ale in the cold of a New England winter, but dammit! I wanna!

Both hops are straight from the source. The guy I get my supplies from has a friend in the Czech Republic who buys the local hops and ships them direct to the USA. Thus, they are as fresh as they can get. I need to exploit this connection while it lasts, as really good Styrian Goldings are hard to come by, and absolutely delicious.

As for naming this batch: Last week was the third birthday of Trogdor The Burninator. Make a more different S.

Trogdor The Burninator "Consummate V" Belgian Strongbad Ale

9.9 lbs Munton & Fisons extra light liquid malt extract (3 cans)
8 oz light Belgian candi sugar
2 oz Styrian Goldings leaf hops, 4% alpha acids, bittering
1 oz Saaz leaf hops, 3% alpha acids, flavoring
8 oz aromatic malt
8 oz crystal malt, 60L
2.5 oz chocolate malt
2 oz honey malt
1 Whirlfloc Irish moss extract tablet (clarifying agent)
EasYeast Cooperstown Belgian Ale liquid yeast

Steeped grains for 1 hour at 160 degrees +/- 10 in 1 gallon tap water.

Broght 3 gallons filtered tap water to boil. Added steeping water, LME, candi sugar, and Styrian Goldings hops. At 42 minute mark, added the Saaz hops. At the 45 minute mark, added the Whirlfloc tablet.

Cooled wort in ice bath. Added 2 gallons chilled water to fermenting bucket. Oops... a little too much. Ended up with about 5.5 gallons of wort, which is a little dangerous since I'm making a Belgian-style that will ferment vigorously, producing lots of foam and attended gases. I really, really don't want to blow the top off my bucket. Headroom is paramount!

It took hours and hours to get the wort to a good pitching temperature (73 degrees). This is because I'm an idiot.

Instead of an airlock, which only lets a trickle of air out at at time and would therefore lead to a beer explosion, I used a blowoff tube to vent this batch, made from the 3/8'' plastic tubing from my siphon setup and a short length of 1/4'' brass pipe, with the end of the tube submerged in a bucket of water. This turned out to be pointless, as the seal between the brass pipe and the grommet in the lid of my bucket was imperfect, allowing gases to escape around it. This is really not that big a deal, as the outward pressure of the fermentation will keep the bad things on the outside. I will just need to put an airlock on there once things slow down a bit.

[wik] So far so good. A very vigorous fermentation and a batch temperature of 70-73 degrees. Yay! Now all I have to do is get my porter out of my other fermenting bucket before it's time to rack this stuff to secondary. Hrm......

[alsø wik] A word about the yeast I used this time: EasYeast is a one-man company, a microbiologist from the University of New Hampshire who ranches brewing yeast on the side. He markets the strains locally in pitchable amounts (meaning you can just dump them as-is into your wort), and also sells small amounts of sterilized wort for those of us too lazy to make starter worts for our other, inferior brands of liquid yeast cultures (I'm looking at YOU, Wyeast).

[alsø alsø wik] HOLY CRAP!! Good Beer!! As of May, it's a delicious, malty, bracing, crisp, delicious Belgian Strong style with a nice backdrop of Saaz and a foreground of spicy esters. It's well-balanced, complex, and deceptively easy-drinking. Ohhhh, I kick ass.

[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] As of October, the last six pack of this stuff is really nice! Fading, mellower, but taking on lovely pear flavors. I bet I could get a good year out of this. Outstanding.

Today would be the 300th birfday of America's greatest founding father, natural philospher, aphorist, and pussy-hound, Benjamin Franklin.

Click the link for a list of festivities nationwide. Tonight I will be attending a lecture by a local (Boston-area) historian on the continuing influence of Franklin's inventions and ideas. There will also be wine and cheese; the Johno is most pleased.

Best of all, if you are so inclined you may hoist a Poor Richard's Ale in honor of the man himself. Moreover, you may also brew some yourself- a PDF recipe is contained in the foregoing link. As the man said, "beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."

Paul Stanley of KISS recently underwent Hip replacement surgery.

Best wishes to him on his recovery. I was going to recommend that now he has a titanium joint he should probably hang up the Les Paul, but I have reconsidered. When I was a little kid KISS seemed like superheroes. I mean, there they were on Sesame Street (Sesame Street!!) with their smoke and leather and studs and fire and that drum kit that flew down from the rafters, and I was too young to understand that the scary guy with the evil shoes and the bass shaped like an axe was really an oversexed rabbi-school dropout and comic book fan named Chaim Witz who would go on to have awkward interviews with brittle NPR hosts.

But if KISS have all their collective joints replaced with titanium upgrades, why, the sky's the limit! The KISS Army would have a new calling and purpose, rushing to the aid of their invincible leaders whenever trouble threatened! Evildoers and bluenoses, beware! For KISS and their minions are on the move!!!

...at least until 4:45, when it's time for the early bird turkey dinner special down at the Country Kitchen.

h/t to Llamabutchers.

A group of Jamaican nuns of the Order Of The Sisters Of Mercy are directly responsible for the evolution of ska and reggae.
 

Although I'm a couple days late in posting it, just in time for Orthodox Christmas (which happens on the twelfth day of Christmas (this year December 6), which is widely held to be the day that the Three Wise Guys found the manger with the baby Jebus) comes the 73rd Carnival of the Recipes. It's fashioned in an Orthodox Christmas theme, and if you too are a lapsed Methodist with no experience with our Eastern bretheren, the linked carnival will be both appetizing and educational.

Piroshi!

Loyal Reader EDog will be hearing from the Perfidian Coalition of Really Unpleasant and Evil Lawyers (P-CRUEL). He emails me with word that last week, President Bush signed into law a bill making it a felony to annoy anyone via the internets or e-mail. The nugget in question merely extends an older law against harassing telephone calls, but it was attached by my friend and yours Arlen Specter to the "Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act," which hadda pass because, you know, it'd be terrible to vote against a bill that will stop all violence against women forever. And what Senator hates justice? (All of them, it turns out, as long as you frame the question appropriately.)

I'd love to see this enforced. I'm incensed on a regular basis by Powerline, Atrios, spammers, Instapundit, Emperor Misha, Kos, RedState, the New York Times, The Washington Times, mimes, and our own Buckethead, and they all must be stopped using the full weight of the long arm of the law. Which in this case looks more like a big swingin' wang.

So, thanks to Edog, whose email caught me at the low ebb of my blood sugar and was therefore, in fact, deeply annoying. Start stuffing cartons of Marlboros up your fundament, Edog. Them's currency where you're going.

[wik] I have to admit. I wrote this post for two reasons only: to rag on Edog a little, and for an excuse to use the word "wang," which I find inexplicably hilarious.

The truth of the matter is, naturally, far more modest than the linked column above will have you understand. The redoubtable (which means formidable, not "twice doubtable") Orin Kerr makes a strong case that the act in question doesn't do much we need to care about - "speech" is only restricted when it would contravene the First Amendment anyway. It seems like this was merely (merely, ha!) a move to make existing telephone harassment laws apply to the internet and especially to VoIP. The wild west is becoming more like a theme park by the day.

The Ministry cordially extends its congratulations to Perfidious crony "NDR" of Rhine River, who has won an actual award for his weblog! In meatspace! From real people he met!

At the AHA meetings this year, a special panel on history-blogging named his series, "The Geographical Turn" the Best Series of Posts of 2005.

"The judges thought that, of the nominations, this was the best example of historical scholarship. It was a well-written, thoughtful and accessible essay about an important historiographical movement that may be unfamiliar to many non-specialist readers, while for academic historians it discussed a less familiar aspect of a well-known subject. As such, it represented an excellent example of the uses historians can make of blogs both to explore their ideas and to increase understanding of the past and of the discipline of history."

Damn straight. It's true that NDR is a stone badass (a self-deprecating, disarmingly modest and amicable stone-cold badass), and it is good to see him get a modicum of recognition for this.

Moreover, NDR and his lovely wife are expecting their first child. 2006 is looking like one fantastic year. Mazel tov and best wishes!

Brew #6

Hey, Porter! Porter

I loved the porter I made the last time, but it could be improved upon. For that one, I used Hallertau Mittelfreuh hops (the same as used in Sam Adams lager) and kept the profile very dry. That was really nice, but the hop nose actually only emerged after three months in the bottle after I had drunk all but two bottles.

So for this one I set out with the intention of making a slightly sweeter porter with a warmer hop profile. Then.

2 cans (6.6 lbs) John Bull pale liquid malt extract
3/4 lb 40L crystal malt
1/4 lb 60L crystal malt
1/4 lb chocolate malt
1/4 lb black patent malt
1 smack pack Wyeast 1028, British Ale yeast
1 oz Perle hops (6.7% AAU), bittering
1 oz Fuggles hops (4.2%), aroma

Made my starter wort for the smack pack on Wednesday, using a small jar of sterilized wort from EasyYeast. It was completely done fermenting and fully settled out in 18 hours flat, which was bad because I wasn't brewing until Saturday. So, we'll see from the start if this works.

Steeped grains for 1 hour at 160 degrees in 3/4 gallons water. Boiled 2.75 gallons water and sparged specialty grain bag in the larger volume of water. Added malt syurp. Added bittering hops.

At 50 minutes, added aroma hops.

Cooled the wort in ice bath plus a frozen soda bottle right in the wort. Took 15 minutes from 212 to 85 degrees. Sweet!

Pitched yeast at 67 degrees. The starter wort was a little warmer than that, since the room was so warm. They say ("they" say) that starter worts can sit for 1 or 2 days after fermentation. I'm pushing it on two fronts. Again, I hope I didn't shock or kill my yeast. If I did, I don't have a backup except for a pack of Windsor, which is really not appropriate for this beer. So, fingers crossed. I hope this will be a little maltier, just a tad heavier, and with the 1028 yeast and Fuggles, a little more warmth in the flavor and aroma. If it works; nummies.

[wik] Hey! It lives! I had to leave my fermenting bucket in the warm apartment overnight, but this afternoon it began bubbling. So that's nice. Looks like I'll be sharing the dining room with five gallons of nascent beer for the next week or so. I'll get the air mattress.

[alsø wik] ....aaand we're delicious! As of March 10, I've got a very nice and complex porter with a faint roasted edge, plenty of body and moderate sweetness, and the complicated spiciness of just enough Fuggles. I really like the Perle hops on the back end, too. They are sort of light and spicy, not at all cloying. Nice! Next time I could probably stand to add even more caramel malt, maybe something in the 90-120L range, and a pound of dry extract in order to make a bigger beer. What would be totally boss would be to use a few ounces of biscuit or Victory malt, if I can get away with steeping them. The bready flavor seems to be in vogue, and I do dig it. I love the London Ale Yeast with this one too. Adding more stuff to this beer will also differentiate this porter from my other one, which is drier, lighter, and uses Hallertau Mittelfreuh for flavor and aroma.

[alsø alsø wik] One thing that has emerged over time (now after about 4 months in the bottle) is a slightly too-strong burned flavor. If I back off next time on the black malt, back to 2 ounces, I think I could keep everything else pretty much the same and hit the mark perfectly. That's the ticket.

One of the awful tragedies of history is that it's always in the past. I'm not being glib. Once it's gone, it's gone.

The Library of Congress has a remarkable exhibition now of color photographs taken in the World War II era of life in the United States. Go look. Here's the main page. It is a time we usually see in black and white, and no matter how good it looks, it is still black and white and therefore just a little too alien for us to perfectly connect with. I guarantee you that at least one of these images will change that.

I fear death and I loathe the perpetual lostness of the past. Sometimes it is a small miracle to through some means - a diary, a photo, a painting - to connect with another person, another time, that is perfectly comprehensible for being human, but enticingly alien as well.