The Morning News

Digest: No Take Backs [Listening]

2009-05-13T08:55:38-05:00

Listening • No Take Backs

Four Tet is actually Kieran Hebden, a post-rock/electronic musician from London. Dubstep producer Burial, after a great deal of speculation, finally owned up to being William Bevan. Hebden and Bevan are mates, as they say across the pond, which is why they collaborated for the two tracks on a super cryptic, just-released-last-week 12-inch called Moth/Wolf Cub.

Since this is post-rock—or whatever—it’s recommended that you listen to the tracks from this new collaboration while in a state of altered consciousness. If you’re cool, man, you will achieve this altered state by doing drugs. This isn’t disco or pop, so using coke, amphetamines, speed, ice, glass, crystal, crank, or study drugs won’t be necessary. We rather recommend weed, marijuana, pot, opiates, opioids, barbiturates, benzos, lysergics, dimethyltryptamines, psilocybins, Sherman Helmsley, Kojak, Bob Hope, trollers, strollers, slowmos, goofballs, screamers, squeamers, porkers, dorkers, fudgies, huffers, gaggers, gassers, poopers, ‘ludes, scrudes, ‘tudes, dudes!, doobles, triple doobles, no-take-backs, mulligans, double taps, chicken feet, fire drills, bus stops, spanks, cheeseballs, cheez-its, meesters, menthols, shmegenoids, or wet sticks. Or all of the above.

For you “proud to be drug free” types, there are plenty of other ways known to induce hallucinations: Try taping ping pong balls to your eyes, eating fish, spinning around really fast, meditating on a koan, or taking one in the jewels. The best non-pharmacological way to generate a preparatory altered state for listening to this Burial and Four Tet collaboration, however, would be to listen to this Burial and Four Tet collaboration. For an added consciousness boost, try listening to this collaboration at the same time, i.e., play the song linked below simultaneously in multiple browser windows. It’s hard to get synced up, but well worth the mind-blowing difficulty.

And a final note: As diligent readers no doubt have noticed, there has been a dearth of recent activity here on the Digest. This is due largely to the editors being involved in the development of new projects; as such, the Digest as we’ve known it will cease to exist, and this is the final post. We hope you’ve enjoyed it, and that you’ll come back to see where these new developments take us. We heart you. —Erik Bryan, May. 13, 2009

» Listen to Moth/Wolf Cub at My Old Kentucky Blog

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Digest: Waiting for the Right Move [Listening]

2009-05-06T02:12:19-05:00

Listening • Waiting for the Right Move

Less than a month has passed since up-and-coming Austin act VEGA, who were pretty well-received at SXSW earlier this year, allegedly stole Crystal Castles’s guitar pedal, and yet we’re all just barely getting over the conflict. Two full weeks later, the questions that remain are still gnawing at us, like, “Crystal Castles plays guitars?” and, “Don’t you mean—as Teen Vogue so adroitly reports—one of those other ‘crystal’ bands, one better known for playing guitars?” and, “Are you sure? Because I was under the impression that Crystal Castles was just a guy who played 8-bit stuff through computers and a chick who yelled stuff over it?”

Well, as hard as it is to believe that one of our fleeting hipster-centric interests (the Castles being so 2008) which is still pretty cool to listen to while riding the train and also has a cute/insane frontwoman can have stooped to such low, self-important, hipster-centric-hype-of-last-year tactics, the band VEGA, who allegedly stole their precious guitar pedal, is coming out of the whole fracas seeming like an unfortunately beleagured set of polite, underdoggedly good guys. In anticipation of their debut EP, Well Known Pleasures (obviously a direct answer to Joy Division’s more cryptically titled debut album), the band has released their first single, “No Reasons.” The song is a very retro, sunny take on 90s club music, which means it may be heralding a revival of the genre, cyclical as these things tend to go. While the merits of such a revival are extensively debatable, VEGA’s bellwether is perfectly innocuous and fairly infectious, and the people over at Gorilla Vs. Bear are calling it a contender for “summer jam ‘09,” which everyone knows is the most coveted title in music each year. Good luck, contestants. —Erik Bryan, May. 6, 2009

» Listen to "No Reasons" at Gorilla Vs. Bear

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Digest: The Renegades [Reading]

2009-04-22T09:00:00-05:00

Reading • The Renegades

I haven’t read T. Jefferson Parker’s books for a while, though when I spoke with him in the mid-’90s I was favorably impressed with his writing. Along with Michael Connelly, Thomas Perry, Don Winslow, and Robert Ferrigno, Parker is one of a handful of crime writers who either live or formerly resided in Southern California and who deserve not to be saddled with the stigma of genre writing—a stigma that happily for them does not attach to their revenue streams.

Anyway, last year I reacquainted myself with Parker in L.A. Outlaws, which boasted a mildly improbable heroine, Allison Murietta, who follows in the footsteps of her legendary Mexican Robin Hood/outlaw ancestor. Parker claims that novel was inspired by Joaquin Murrieta, a famous bandit who terrorized California until he was shot and beheaded in 1853. In The Renegades (Dutton), Allison’s one-time lover, L.A. Deputy Sheriff Charlie Hood, is drawn into a web of intrigue that features a really creepy sociopath deputy and the best description of narcotrafficante characters and the wild and wooly Mexican-American border since Winslow’s great novel, The Power of the Dog.

With quiet precision, this narrative unfolds into a riveting tale of greed, arrogance, and dogged investigative persistence. Unfortunately, Parker will not resist the call for serializing Hood—a burden not many characters can carry (excepting Philip Marlowe and Harry Bosch). —Robert Birnbaum, Apr. 22, 2009

» Read an excerpt from The Renegades

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Digest: The Life You Can Save [Reading]

2009-04-20T09:00:00-05:00

Reading • The Life You Can Save

There is much anecdotal evidence to support the view that despite America’s vast riches (yes, even now) we are still in thrall to a lifeboat mentality. On the other hand, the nongovernmental response to disasters such as Katrina, the tsunami, and numerous earthquakes are a sign, as Mark Twain held, that each of us contains a secret kindness.

In The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty (Random House), Peter Singer—Princeton mentor, animal liberation activist, and a philosopher who cares to bring his cogitating to bear on the real world—asserts that this is a propitious time to consider what each of us can do to end world poverty and its attendant cruelties and suffering. He suggests:

…Many of us find it difficult to consider giving money to people we have never met, living in distant countries we have never visited. This obviously doesn’t get any easier during periods of economic uncertainty, when many people are justifiably anxious about their own economic prospects. While I don’t seek to diminish in any way the challenges that attend rough economic times, we should remember that even in the worst of times, our lives remain infinitely better than those of the people living in extreme poverty. I’m hoping that you will look at the larger picture and think about what it takes to live ethically in a world in which 18 million [10 million children] people are dying unnecessarily each year…

Toward the end of removing the scales from our eyes, Singer arrays ethical arguments, examples, case studies, and thought experiments to form a seven-point plan that blends personal philanthropy, local activism, and political awareness. The good professor has written a lucid and compelling call to action that convincingly argues how all of us can make a difference in the lives of others without reducing the quality of our own. What could be better than that? —Robert Birnbaum, Apr. 20, 2009

» Read an excerpt from The Life You Can Save

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Digest: For a Bigger City [Listening]

2009-04-14T09:54:31-05:00

Listening • For a Bigger City

The Dirty Projectors sound weird. Not weird like never letting your children celebrate their birthday, or like an extensive collection of Beanie Babies. The Dirty Projectors are weird like people who refold their napkins when getting up from the table, if only for a bathroom break, or like a bunch of guys who grows mustaches together, or David Byrne. Fitting then, that the Dave Longstreth-led revolving cast of a band recorded a song with Mr. Byrne earlier this year for the Dark Was the Night charity compilation.

Late last week, a new Projectors album (Bitte Orca, which I believe is German for “please kill a whale”) was leaked on the internet. The band’s label, Domino Records, is doing a bit of damage control by going ahead and releasing the track “Stillness Is the Move” on their site. The music on this new album is somewhat of a departure from their last, 2007’s Rise Above, but that’s to be expected considering that it was a cover of Black Flag’s Damaged entirely from memory. Practically everything is a departure for these guys, which is refreshing. On the single, singers Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian seem to take a more central role in the proceedings, but Longstreth’s mashed up, herky jerky songwriting makes it all possible. His guitar sounds kinda weird, too. —Erik Bryan, Apr. 14, 2009

» Listen to "Stillness Is the Move" at Pop Tarts Suck Toasted

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Digest: Free Music Archive [Listening]

2009-04-08T09:07:19-05:00

Listening • Free Music Archive

For those of you with a guilty conscience looking to sit out the battle between the record labels and the maniacally shortsighted (though preciously so) “everything should be free” people, look no further than the new Free Music Archive. Brought to you in large part by the guys and gals of WFMU, the FMA is just what it sounds like, “a social music website built around a curated library of free, legal audio.” Unlike plenty of other free music sites, this one is being carefully curated by the participants and boasts in its tagline, “It’s not just free music; it’s good music.” Of course, there’s no accounting for taste, and the “Most Interesting” top ten list on the FMA’s homepage regrettably features the Vivian Girls, but to their credit they also currently have tracks up by Max Tundra, the Lucky Dragons, and Kurt Vile, which are great. Also, some people calling themselves Psychedelic Horseshit who totally deliver on that premise.

Not that I’m any more right in my opinions. The whole reason to have things like FMA is to share music and stir up a dialog. The more people use and contribute to this site, the bigger and better its potential. Curator Jason Sigal gets things started with a track from some of Dan Deacon’s Baltimorean associates, Teeth Mountain. Their track “Keinsein” sounds like a joyful collaboration, ragged at the edges, but decisively cut of its own cloth, much like the Free Music Archive it’s being freely used to kick off. —Erik Bryan, Apr. 8, 2009

» Listen to "Keinsein" at the Free Music Archive

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Digest: Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard [Reading]

2009-04-06T09:35:22-05:00

Reading • Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard

I recently noted British bad-boy photographer Martin Parr’s slip-cased, two-volume Parrworld: Objects and Postcards, the latter volume of which displayed Parr’s 5,000-strong postcard collection. Now comes a (relatively) new Walker Evans book—Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard by Jeff Rosenheim (Steidl)—and an exhibition of Evans’s serious, lifelong postcard collection (which numbers over 9,000) at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 25.

As can be seen at the Met, Evans not only collected postcards, but also bottle caps, beer tabs, driftwood, and road signs. That he took seriously the postcard as an art form is an additionally significant aspect of the great photographer’s interest in what are commonly looked upon as social and cultural ephemera: He went so far as to print some of his own images in the postcard format for a 1936 assignment from the Museum of Modern Art. —Robert Birnbaum, Apr. 6, 2009

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Digest: Thinking This Is Fun [Listening]

2009-03-31T01:36:22-05:00

Listening • Thinking This Is Fun

Winning is hard, really for two main reasons: first, you have to win. The best winners make this look easy, but it never is. The second reason concerns what happens after you win. All the striving and dedication to your craft has paid off, but it puts you in a dangerous position. Not only will everyone who supported your rise to the top expect the same results from you every time, but everyone looking to make a name for themselves will be gunning for you. You might think that these eventualities only pertain to athletics, homecoming queen elections, or high finance, but rock bands are just as likely to win, too.

Take Phoenix, for example. They win. This French indie rock outfit has a new album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, due out in May, but, wouldn’t you know it, the whole thing’s leaked online already. And the preliminary reviews are quite positive. Maybe not everyone agrees that Phoenix is winning at the moment, but those who disagree are just wrong. Their sound is fun and washy and dramatic and beepy and the singer has a sorta wussy voice. They sound like your childhood getting out of school for the summer. This band is screwed. Down the road, they’ll have plenty of opportunities to impress us again, but it probably won’t sound as fresh and exciting as this album does right now. Luckily, it’s still now now.

There are so many great songs to recommend from the album (some of which are scheduled to be performed on SNL on April 4), so it’s fortunate that the site Et Musique Pour Tous has corralled a bunch of them for your perusal. (Fair warning: the writer seems a bit hung up on Sophia Coppola, the lead singer’s wife.) We’re recommending “Fences,” a groovy pop song not unlike those regularly produced by of Montreal, although “1901” is the already-released and nigh-universally enamored single. Well done, Phoenix, and God help you. —Erik Bryan, Mar. 31, 2009

» Listen to "Fences" at Et Musique Pour Tous

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Digest: Waltz With Bashir [Reading]

2009-03-29T23:08:22-05:00

Reading • Waltz With Bashir

Like Art Spiegelman, I have an aversion to the rubric “graphic novel.” Golden Globe-winning Israeli film Waltz With Bashir was first an animated film and now also exists as a 128-page book (Metropolitan Books)—novel, comic book—do you care? In both iterations it is a powerful story based on Tel Aviv filmmaker Ari Folman’s army experience in Beirut in 1982.

Folman witnessed massacres perpetrated by Christian militia in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila; 20 years later he had no memory of this horrific crime against humanity. This narrative follows his efforts to reconstruct the events and give sense to the dreams and hallucinations (powerfully rendered by illustrator David Polonsky) that haunt him. Frankly, I prefer the book to the movie—firstly, it is not subtitled. Secondly, the text balloons make it clear who is speaking. And finally, the printed images seem more vivid and connect and flow more coherently. In either version, this weighty story is a potent testimony—not that anyone was ever punished for this genocidal event. Nor was the hollow declaration “never again” heard. —Robert Birnbaum, Mar. 29, 2009

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Digest: Chewing Up the Small Screen [Watching]

2009-03-27T10:40:30-05:00

Watching • Chewing Up the Small Screen

In the vast wasteland known as television, the gap between the Olympian heights of shows such as The Wire and the subterranean depths of reality TV and that ode to puerility, 24, is occasionally filled by brief flashes of inspiration (usually accidental): The Practice, Grey’s Anatomy, The Closer, and West Wing come to mind. What occasionally catches my attention is the appearance of splendid thespians not noted for working on what used to be called the small screen.

The new season (such as it is) brings two shows of some promise—for the most part based on imposing lead actors—the great Tim Roth (Reservoir Dogs, Rob Roy, Gridlock’d, The Incredible Hulk) in Lie to Me (Fox) and Ian McShane (Sexy Beast, Scoop, Deadwood, We Are Marshall) in Kings (NBC). It must mean something that both Roth and McShane (as well as House’s Hugh Laurie) are British. But the important thing, if I may say, is that both these gentlemen are actors who play their roles fully as opposed to stars, who normally play themselves.

In Lie to Me, Roth plays Dr. Cal Lightman, whose expertise lies in the detection of the truth, based on his skill in the analysis of a person’s face, body, and vocal mannerisms—currently known as “micro-expressions.” As a leader in this burgeoning field, Lightman and his team are employed by all manner of clients in urgent need of infallible lie detection. Dr. Gillian Foster (Kelli Williams—they should do something about her hair) assists, though woodenly—as opposed to her fine work in The Practice. Eli Loker (Brendan Hines) practices “radical honesty,” standing in as the kook of the team, and Monica Raymund (Ria Torres) plays the tough, seen-it-all Latina who is a natural in her new occupation. (Lightman hires her based on her interrogation of him in the airport security line.) This micro-expression thing wears thin, and I’m going to be surprised if the writers can fill even a season’s worth of shows. Of course, I was wrong about 24.

In Kings, McShane portrays King Silas Benjamin, who rules Gilboa, which has a war on its hands with neighboring Gath. David Shepherd (Chris Egan) disobeys standing orders not to cross enemy lines to save recently captured prisoners of war (of whom one is the king’s son)—David battles some Goliath tanks (oy) and retrieves the prisoners. Instantly a hero, David is invited to the court in Shiloh, the pristine, crimeless capital city. Intrigue, deceit, closeted skeletons, disaffections, and all manner of human foxfire are in play. Queen Rose (Susanna Thompson) is an incessant table-setter and tie-straightener—suffice it to say a frost seems to envelop her. Michelle Benjamin (Allison Miller) is the perky, five-talent daughter. (Guess who she puts in her sights.) Gen. Linus Abner (Wes Studi—who was outstanding in Walter Hill’s sadly underrated film Geronimo) is underutilized as one of the king’s advisors and William Cross (Dylan Baker) does his usual turn of Caucasian duplicity and malevolence. Given McShane’s endlessly fascinating, craggy visage and his ability to remain in the center of every frame with a kind of banked, tamped fury (he punches out a messenger who brings the news that his son is a prisoner of war), this story has promise of some durability. —Robert Birnbaum, Mar. 27, 2009

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