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Wednesday, January 29, 2003
Liz Belmont sends this link to Rich Black's article on Uncle in the current Long Island Press.
http://www.longislandpress.com/current/music_feature_01.asp
Much obliged, Liz!
Thanks, Rich, and hail to thee!
Jim Santo is now on board to get the website up and running, so soon we'll have that to while away our hours. I envision entire full-length downloadable feature films, soft-screen blowjobtronic apps, and time travel hyperlinks. Watch this space for updates.
Personal aside to Jaime Klein: For some reason, most of the emails I send to you bounce back "undeliverable." Some get through though. What's with that?
Remind me to tell you all about the Outsider Music Show at Fez last Friday, hosted by impresario / gadfly Irwin Chusid. Mostly a wonderful evening, especially seeing the greatest performer on Earth, B.J. Snowden, and the justly legendary, unjustly neglected R. Stevie Moore. Mr. Moore and I are keen to collaborate, which would be a glorious thing for me, as his 1970s self-releases Phonography, Stance, and Delicate Tension changed my life. As gifted as any songwriter / performer who ever plugged in an amp, RSM said "eh" to an industry that ignored his magnificent songs; he rigged up a home studio, played everything himself and just put 'em out anyway. He did this LONG before it was commonplace or convenient to do, and the results were (and continue to be... he's never let up) equal to or greater than the work of every pop wunderkind who's received the acclaim and do-re-mi RSM's been denied.
His participation in the "Outsider" fest is apropos, since he's been locked "outside" for longer than I've even written songs or thought of doing so. It also demonstrates the elasticity of the concept of "outsider music." Chr*stgau has had the audacity to publicly characterize Irwin Chusid as a "tedious ideologue with a hustle," but he is more like the Alan Lomax, John Hammond and Broadway Danny Rose of the uncool, the unsung and yeah, sometimes the unhinged. Chusid celebrates artists too "out there" to fit standard definitions of "artistry," irking standard definers whose entire theology is thereby blasphemed. R. Stevie Moore, though, has produced shelves full of work even THEY would consider valid if only he'd had the courtesy to either succeed in the biz or fail in a way they could regard as noble.
He just keeps rolling along, though, outside the radar, outside the gravy train, outside the ordinary and outside categories. Out here, he's the Beatles.
http://www.longislandpress.com/current/music_feature_01.asp
Much obliged, Liz!
Thanks, Rich, and hail to thee!
Jim Santo is now on board to get the website up and running, so soon we'll have that to while away our hours. I envision entire full-length downloadable feature films, soft-screen blowjobtronic apps, and time travel hyperlinks. Watch this space for updates.
Personal aside to Jaime Klein: For some reason, most of the emails I send to you bounce back "undeliverable." Some get through though. What's with that?
Remind me to tell you all about the Outsider Music Show at Fez last Friday, hosted by impresario / gadfly Irwin Chusid. Mostly a wonderful evening, especially seeing the greatest performer on Earth, B.J. Snowden, and the justly legendary, unjustly neglected R. Stevie Moore. Mr. Moore and I are keen to collaborate, which would be a glorious thing for me, as his 1970s self-releases Phonography, Stance, and Delicate Tension changed my life. As gifted as any songwriter / performer who ever plugged in an amp, RSM said "eh" to an industry that ignored his magnificent songs; he rigged up a home studio, played everything himself and just put 'em out anyway. He did this LONG before it was commonplace or convenient to do, and the results were (and continue to be... he's never let up) equal to or greater than the work of every pop wunderkind who's received the acclaim and do-re-mi RSM's been denied.
His participation in the "Outsider" fest is apropos, since he's been locked "outside" for longer than I've even written songs or thought of doing so. It also demonstrates the elasticity of the concept of "outsider music." Chr*stgau has had the audacity to publicly characterize Irwin Chusid as a "tedious ideologue with a hustle," but he is more like the Alan Lomax, John Hammond and Broadway Danny Rose of the uncool, the unsung and yeah, sometimes the unhinged. Chusid celebrates artists too "out there" to fit standard definitions of "artistry," irking standard definers whose entire theology is thereby blasphemed. R. Stevie Moore, though, has produced shelves full of work even THEY would consider valid if only he'd had the courtesy to either succeed in the biz or fail in a way they could regard as noble.
He just keeps rolling along, though, outside the radar, outside the gravy train, outside the ordinary and outside categories. Out here, he's the Beatles.
Tuesday, January 28, 2003
SOME STRAY BITS…
(Been slack on the blog lately, so here are some things I've had hanging around.
The first is a clipping from the L.A. Times Book Review. In 2001, they ran a lengthy review of the book AMERICA'S MUSICAL LIFE, A History By Richard Crawford. The review was by author Ken Emerson. We join the review already in progress...)
Such impertinence goes back at least as far as America's first international hit song, Stephen Foster's "Oh! Susanna." After a couple of verses of seeming nonsense ("the sun so hot I froze to death"), an unexpected hush falls "when everything was still" and a vision or the ghost of the singer's lost love comes "running down the hill," at which point the tempo picks up and the tomfoolery resumes with "the buckwheat cake was in her mouth." On his recent CD "Magic Beans" on the "Kill Rock Stars" label, Mike "Sport" Murphy dramatizes the continuity of this tradition by interpolating Foster's verse into one of his own songs and following it with a verse from Bob Dylan's "Memphis Blues Again." ("I am convinced," Murphy e-mailed me, "Dylan used 'Susanna' as his model.") Interestingly, Chadwick's "Jubilee" also quoted Foster, in this case his "Camptown Races." Perhaps what Ralph Ellison called the "near-tragic, near-comic lyricism" of the blues is the hallmark of all American music.
Ken Emerson, the Author of "Doodah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture" and Co-author of a Recent Documentary about Foster on PBS's "The American Experience," Is Working on a Book About the Brill Building Sound and Pop Songwriting in New York During the 1950s and '60s
Copyright © 2001 Los Angeles Times
(So thanks, Ken.
Here's a group of short bits from unsent batch mails I'm busy deleting. First up, a snipe.)
"I don't like his work... I think it's ugly" - Jules Feiffer on Basil Wolverton.
Ponder this a moment. Oh wait, do you know who these two are? Jules Feiffer is a New York beardo… one of these smug aesthetic wannapunchems who impress the stupid and the pretentious by simply having cultivated a louder sneer. He wrote the instantly dated Elliot Gould (see what I mean?) vehicle "Little Murders" and drew a comic strip for the Village Voice for about 300 years. The strip looked identical every week - a sequence of loose, brushed ink renderings of subjects so dull you forgot them AS you looked. The gags, such as they were, consisted of self-congratulatory p.c. ironics that sank like bad donuts every motherfucking time. What, o what could suck more than the work of Jules Feiffer?
(I never did get around to discussing Wolverton. I will, trust me. Next is an observation.)
It was revealed to me, in a blinding epiphany, that Thelonious Monk composed "Round Midnight" after viewing the Bogie/Bacall film TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT. What happened was, the score (largely a set of variations on co-star Hoagy Carmichael's "Baltimore Oriole") seeped into his head in fragments, and there took root and bloomed as the masterpiece he then entitled after a reference Bogie made (agreeing to make the plot's pivotal rendezvous around midnight) in the film. This is one way masterpiece begets masterpiece… genius inspires genius.
(And lastly, a gripe.)
Sport Murphy has never heard a note of music by Stephen Merritt. So fucking leave me alone. And Sport knows he supposedly resembles John Cusack, but come off it already.
(That's all for now. My computer is breaking down, I fear, and I have no money.)
(Been slack on the blog lately, so here are some things I've had hanging around.
The first is a clipping from the L.A. Times Book Review. In 2001, they ran a lengthy review of the book AMERICA'S MUSICAL LIFE, A History By Richard Crawford. The review was by author Ken Emerson. We join the review already in progress...)
Such impertinence goes back at least as far as America's first international hit song, Stephen Foster's "Oh! Susanna." After a couple of verses of seeming nonsense ("the sun so hot I froze to death"), an unexpected hush falls "when everything was still" and a vision or the ghost of the singer's lost love comes "running down the hill," at which point the tempo picks up and the tomfoolery resumes with "the buckwheat cake was in her mouth." On his recent CD "Magic Beans" on the "Kill Rock Stars" label, Mike "Sport" Murphy dramatizes the continuity of this tradition by interpolating Foster's verse into one of his own songs and following it with a verse from Bob Dylan's "Memphis Blues Again." ("I am convinced," Murphy e-mailed me, "Dylan used 'Susanna' as his model.") Interestingly, Chadwick's "Jubilee" also quoted Foster, in this case his "Camptown Races." Perhaps what Ralph Ellison called the "near-tragic, near-comic lyricism" of the blues is the hallmark of all American music.
Ken Emerson, the Author of "Doodah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture" and Co-author of a Recent Documentary about Foster on PBS's "The American Experience," Is Working on a Book About the Brill Building Sound and Pop Songwriting in New York During the 1950s and '60s
Copyright © 2001 Los Angeles Times
(So thanks, Ken.
Here's a group of short bits from unsent batch mails I'm busy deleting. First up, a snipe.)
"I don't like his work... I think it's ugly" - Jules Feiffer on Basil Wolverton.
Ponder this a moment. Oh wait, do you know who these two are? Jules Feiffer is a New York beardo… one of these smug aesthetic wannapunchems who impress the stupid and the pretentious by simply having cultivated a louder sneer. He wrote the instantly dated Elliot Gould (see what I mean?) vehicle "Little Murders" and drew a comic strip for the Village Voice for about 300 years. The strip looked identical every week - a sequence of loose, brushed ink renderings of subjects so dull you forgot them AS you looked. The gags, such as they were, consisted of self-congratulatory p.c. ironics that sank like bad donuts every motherfucking time. What, o what could suck more than the work of Jules Feiffer?
(I never did get around to discussing Wolverton. I will, trust me. Next is an observation.)
It was revealed to me, in a blinding epiphany, that Thelonious Monk composed "Round Midnight" after viewing the Bogie/Bacall film TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT. What happened was, the score (largely a set of variations on co-star Hoagy Carmichael's "Baltimore Oriole") seeped into his head in fragments, and there took root and bloomed as the masterpiece he then entitled after a reference Bogie made (agreeing to make the plot's pivotal rendezvous around midnight) in the film. This is one way masterpiece begets masterpiece… genius inspires genius.
(And lastly, a gripe.)
Sport Murphy has never heard a note of music by Stephen Merritt. So fucking leave me alone. And Sport knows he supposedly resembles John Cusack, but come off it already.
(That's all for now. My computer is breaking down, I fear, and I have no money.)