MP3 of Natalie Goldberg talking about her latest work.
And Chomsky on Democracy Now! today.
The other Times features an audio interview with Stephen Malkmus. Good stuff. More talk about therapy and breast pumps than I could have anticipated. And an article about him, too, which oddly is not linked to from the podcast page. Oh, well the article is sort of a rehashing, erm, repurposing of the podcast. Rather smart of them, that.
102 points for playing CLEAVER on two Double Word Scores. Bam!
Nice quote from Nels Cline’s Web page: “The more one studies the harmony of music, and then studies human nature,how people agree and how they disagree, how there is attraction and repulsion, the more one will see that it is all music.” — Hazrat Inayat Khan. I’m enjoying a track from his Draw Breath right now (Cline’s, that is).
I’m just busy busy busy. Oy. But some quick things.
I’ve been hearing a lot of this Thao Nguyen, a local woman, and her band, but hadn’t actually heard any. Then I’m driving to Whole Foods Saturday and catch the tail end of a Studio 360 feature on her, and they play a little music, and oh man I know I have to hear more. Unfortunately she’s not on eMusic, and I’m pretty much only buying music on eMusic these days, plus I’m a little short on the moolah. But I want to hear more. Listen to the feature at Studio 360’s website. (And who’s this Jesse Dukes? He’s in my city reporting on my artists. Not like I’m doing any of that, but I’m already very possessive of my potential freelance subjects, even the ones I’m not doing anything about (that is, nearly all of them).)
That is a sexy, sexy picture on Thao’s website. Speaking of sexy: Marion Cotillard. Whew. I’m convinced that America cannot allow this encroachment of French actresses on our cinematic turf. Because, if we do, they will dominate. Or, if there is any justice in the world, they should. France has a long history of actresses who are effortless scenery-chewers. Moreau, Signoret, Bardot and so forth. They will eat our young, stick-proportioned actresses for lunch. Only Scarlett Johansson may be equipped to save us. She needs to be drafted into service.
The more I don’t listen to the Postal Service, and then hear them on ads and mix CDs, the more I like them. That’s a compliment, really.
Radio Lab’s Jad Abumrad: “More porn composers should utilize the woodblock” (from here).
I saw Idlewild the other night. One reviewer apparently called it “neither fish nor fowl,” which I think is pretty accurate. It was mostly unlike anything I’ve seen, but worked primarily as straight-up entertainment and not so much on a deeper level. I guess most musicals are like that, though, aren’t they? So I probably shouldn’t have expected more. Three Netflix stars out of five.
This post on the Bad Plus’s awesome blog, Do the Math, includes a version of “Silence Is the Question,” one of my favorite Bad Plus tunes. With sax! I’ve become a collector of every version of this tune that I can find, in somewhat the same way that I’ve become a collector of versions of “Skokiaan.” (I still haven’t found the version that first introduced me to “Skokiaan” — the track at the end of Richard Linklater’s Slacker.) Sometime I’ll have to write up capsule reviews of all the versions I’ve heard.
In my research for my next post in the series about noncommercial radio that I’m writing for the Future of Music Coalition’s blog, I came across this website of a Christian radio network. (Be warned that following that link will cause Christian music to emanate from your speakers.) I’m finding it absurdly fun to mouse over the images repeatedly. Go, roller-coaster riders, go!
I was also amused that Googling “network of glory” brought up a page about, erm, the “network of glory holes.” (No link necessary.) How exactly are glory holes arrayed in a network of any kind, and do I really want to know?
Last night I dreamed it was nighttime and I was walking through my parents’ neighborhood. A small boy had found a green caterpillar. He turned it over and showed me the gooey underside and said “That’s where I come from.” At another point I was eating some dark chocolate as I wandered around and I thought, damn, this is some good chocolate.
I learned this morning as I was driving through Arlington and listening to some podcasts I downloaded that Paul Muldoon is now poetry editor of the New Yorker. That strikes me as promising. Muldoon is a poet of eclectic style and tastes, and I can imagine he would shake things up a bit at the New Yorker. I heard a former poetry editor of the New Yorker speak years ago when I was at Wake Forest, and I got the impression that she didn’t think about poetry in a terribly original way. She spoke as if she’d downloaded her view of poetry direct from the Establishment. So I was enjoying listening to Muldoon discuss his views of poetry. You can download the podcast here.
I’m sitting in my butt-cold bedroom with Bernard on my lap and the space heater blowing on me, drying me out and making me thirsty, and I’m listening to Bill Frisell’s East/West.
I was buying a six-pack of Green Flash West Coast IPA at a beer and wine shop on U Street Saturday night. The cashier was listening to something — I didn’t know what it was, but I heard the unmistakable sound of cheesy synths pitched to an Ethiopian scale. Music to my ears! “What is that?” I asked the cashier. “It’s a song. From Ethiopia,” she said. “Is that the radio?” I asked, because all I could see behind the counter was a little clock radio. And yes, it was, 1390 AM, she said. They play Ethiopian music on the weekends, she said. DCRTV sez that’s an station in Arlington. (Since when does DCRTV charge for some stuff? Man.) Maybe I’ll have to venture over to the AM dial more often, though, sarcasm aside, I’m not really into the more contemporary Ethiopian music I’ve come across (mostly at Ethiopian restaurants). I can only take so much cheesy synth. Catherine thinks that even the synths on the older stuff that I love so much sound cheesy, but not I. Maybe listening to Stereolab inoculated me?
