« June 2006 | Home | August 2006 »

July 28, 2006

Just Noticed...

...that there's a blink and you'll miss it Har Mar cameo at 3:01 in Spoon's "Small Stakes" video.

Posted by timothompson at 11:33 AM

July 27, 2006

Copy and Paste Culture

From a fireside chat at Signal vs. Noise by designers Richard Bird, Jim Coudal, and Carlos Segura (and yes, I copy and pasted this convo):

Carlos: the period we are in now is one of reservation

Carlos: especially in type

Jim: the beginning of the "ironic" voice

Jim: agreed carlos

Carlos: "helvetica" is in, and has been for some time

Carlos: we can’t wait to copy each other

Carlos: i think that sometimes our colleges define how good you are based on how good a copy you can make

Jason: Really interesting point, Carlos.

Jim: reworking old styles

Jim: instead of making new ones

Carlos: right

Jim: eventually we’ll be nostalgic for yesterday

Jim: or this morning

Matt: sounds very similar to music these days where remixing, mashups, sampling, etc. are growing in popularity.

Jim: interesting point

Jim: searching for authenticity

Carlos: right

Jim: things seem so temporary

Jim: we try to emulate stuff from the past that "mattered"

Jason: We’ve seen this from time to time with our products. Someone was so excited that they copied Tada List.

Jason: But what’s exciting about a copy? That’s saying "I don’t have anything new to offer."

Carlos: the US car industry is a great example

Carlos: trying to re-live the good old days

Jim: its everywhere guys

Jim: cars, music, movies, music

Matt: they all influence each other too obvs

Jim: its like paying an old song in a commercial

Jim: push button for emotion

Matt: heh, when i hear "lust for life" on a carnival cruise commercial or janis joplin selling mercedes benz, it makes me crazy. wtf?

Jim: ‘(we sound like a bunch of old grampas)

Jim: grrrr fucking kids’

Posted by timothompson at 06:29 PM

My Ideal Stones Set

With the Rolling Stones playing Zilker Park in Austin October 22nd, Joe Gross of the Statesman asks us for our ideal top 25-song Stones sets. Here's mine in fairly chronological order. I considered adding newer songs like "Saint of Me" and "Rough Justice" to be realistic, but who am I kidding? They are good, but don't cut it.

1. 19th Nervous Breakdown (Single)
2. That's How Strong My Love Is* (Out Of Our Heads)
3. Paint It, Black (Aftermath)
4. Under My Thumb (Aftermath)
5. Ruby Tuesday (Between The Buttons)
6. 2000 Man* (Their Satanic Majesties Request)
7. She's A Rainbow* (Their Satanic Majesties Request)
8. Jumpin' Jack Flash (Single)
9. Street Fighting Man* (Beggars Banquet)
10. Sympathy For The Devil (Beggars Banquet)
11. Live With Me (Let It Bleed)
12. Monkey Man* (Let It Bleed)
13. Midnight Rambler (Let It Bleed)
14. Gimme Shelter (Let It Bleed)
15. Honky Tonk Women (Single)
16. Brown Sugar (Single)
17. Moonlight Mile* (Sticky Fingers)
18. Rocks Off (Exile On Main St.)
19. Happy (Exile On Main St.)
20. Tumbling Dice (Exile On Main St.)
21. It's Only Rock 'N Roll (But I Like It) (It's Only Rock 'N Roll)
22. Miss You (Some Girls)
23. Emotional Rescue* (Emotional Rescue)
24. Start Me Up (Tattoo You)
25. Undercover Of The Night* (Undercover)

(* Not played on 2005 tour.)

Near Misses:

1. Get Off Of My Cloud
2. 2000 Light Years From Home
3. Soul Survivor
4. Bitch
5. Dead Flowers
6. I'm Free
7. Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadow?
8. Mother's Little Helper
9. Hang Fire
10. You Can't Always Get What You Want
11. Before They Make Me Run
12. Sweet Virginia
13. She's So Cold
14. Waiting On A Friend

Update: Sirius has compiled its own list of people's favorite Stones' songs and will be playing the top 100 during Labor Day weekend.

Posted by timothompson at 02:19 PM

July 26, 2006

Robert Hilburn on Criticism

Robert Hilburn of the LA Times looks back on his career as a critic [via]:

The next year I raved about John Prine, a young Chicago singer-songwriter whose folk-country style employed a literary ambition and soulful insight that was extraordinary. But Prine never became a major seller, though he is widely regarded as one of the greatest songwriters of his era.

The lesson was that it takes more than raw talent — and glowing reviews — to reach the top commercially. More important, it taught me that critics can't always predict stardom, but they can spot excellence, and that, ultimately, is the most important thing they can do.

Posted by timothompson at 06:35 PM

July 25, 2006

The Problem with Criticism

Russell Brown explains why film criticism is lacking in today's media in The Simon:

Great film criticism has been devoured by its ugly kid sister, the film review. I personally find it so dull to read what some guy sitting in an office thinks of this performance or that performance, this screenplay or that one -- it all seems dreadfully irrelevant to me. What turned me on about John Simon or Pauline Kael was how they brought films into their own philosophy of life and art -- how it was placed into a larger context. And in doing so, they were as vulnerable as the artists putting their work onscreen, and demanded the same respect. The film review, on the other hand, is simply the process of providing a cursory "authoritative" explanation for an argument (is it "good or bad") that is pretty pointless. There's nothing personal about it -- no glimpse into the soul of the person writing -- just a dashing off of "what I liked and what I didn't." There's rarely any comparison to other art forms or placing of the film in a social or political context. It's as colorless as a studio coverage form, a checklist of "what worked and what didn't" with a few snarky turns of phrase tossed in the mix. They never really "say" anything, and it's hard to imagine any critic writing today publishing a compilation of their work 20 years from now, because their writing is only about the movie.

Methinks it wouldn't be a stretch to replace "film" with "music."

Posted by timothompson at 01:16 PM

July 24, 2006

Reasons to Oust Rick Perry

Texas Governor Rick Perry must go. There is no doubt in my mind. I don't care if Kinky, Carole or Chris takes his place. We need to say adios to the well-coifed mofo.

In that spirit, I'm going to try to do my small part by starting a series pointing out reasons to oust Rick Perry.

Reason #1: He wants to fast-track coal plants: "Public advocacy groups, including the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense and Public Citizen, since January have been pressuring TXU to use cleaner technology. The groups have charged publicly on numerous occasions that Perry approved fast-tracking the permits as a favor to the utilities, in particular TXU, which have contributed to his political campaign. A Perry spokeswoman has denied that, citing a need for additional power supply in the state."

Posted by timothompson at 11:38 PM

New Misprint Magazine

Local ironic zine includes Q and A with SOUND team, Williamsburg, cheesy bars, Voxtrot, WMMF, metal typography, etc. No one's spared (including Misprint).

Posted by timothompson at 01:07 PM

July 23, 2006

August 1, 2006: Fortieth Anniversary of Charles Whitman

On August 1, 1966, ex-Marine and University of Texas student Charles Joseph Whitman rode an elevator to the observation deck of the UT Tower and started picking off people within a five-block radius (somebody must be slightly obsessed because this is one of the most comprehensive Wikipedia posts I've ever seen). Texas Monthly features an oral history (media preview) of the event [via].

Related: Peter Bogdanovich's movie "Targets"

Update: News 8 Austin is covering it and will have an hour-long special about it on Sunday, July 30th.

Posted by timothompson at 09:56 PM

July 21, 2006

"Wowee Zowee" Reissue Update

Lukas Glickman (aka Simmer Simmer Down) says he's received word on what's planned to be included in the upcoming deluxe reissue of Pavement (hopefully out in November 2006):

Patrick from Matador recently informed me of some details about the upcoming Wowee Zowee Reissue. As of now I must remain vague, so here is what I can tell you:

• Multiple album covers [like 20!] by Steve Keane [sic]
• A never before heard [atleast to my ears] concert during the Wowee Zowee Tour
• A bundle of previous unreleased tracks and rarities note: many of the unreleased tracks are alternate takes

Please, please, let "Rattled by La Rush" and "Pacific Trim" be on there.

Related: Said the Gramophone likes "Pueblo". [via]

Posted by timothompson at 03:38 PM

Henry Luce on American Masters

I watched the American Masters biography of Henry Luce last night. Though I've associated his name with the Time-Life empire, I never really knew his background or influence. Some quick notes:

• When Time first started, Luce and co-founder Briton Hadden did no actual reporting. Not only that, they were literally making details like characterizations of world leaders up. The impression I got is that they were melding literary devices with wire stories to make the reader feel like they were present while events were happening, something that writers later on would use intrepid reporting to perfect. Reading articles in the archives, I get the impression that the ledes of these articles tended to beat around the bush:

  If you go out of Washington by the northwest, you will pass the Chevy Chase Country Club. There is a links. It was somewhere near the eleventh or twelfth hole—accounts vary—somewhere near one of these holes, on a pleasant June day, that a foursome was in progress.
  
  Out of Russia, weird and mystic land, whose soul is steeped in the mysterious, the fire of whose eyes is sometimes fanatical, and whose life breath has been impregnated with flesh-creeping legends, comes a story, intrinsically Russian in its bizarre setting.

• Time Magazine's design, even early on, seemed impeccable, melding great typography with beautiful charcoal sketches, on the cover. Luce's magazines always had great art direction – especially Fortune Magazine, which had some of the best spreads, art and photography I've ever seen. As American Masters Stephen Stept says in this interview:

  And Fortune magazine - oh my God. When I first started doing the research for the NEH proposals [that funded the script and production], I thought that somewhere in there we'd have to do something on Fortune, thinking that as a business mag it would be of limited cinematic interest. And then I finally got my hands on the original issues from the 30s and 40s. You have never seen a magazine like this! Gorgeous cover art, inside pages on thick textured paper, exquisite photos, and brilliant storytelling in a hand sewn binding - an issue today would cost in the neighborhood of $15, and no publisher would dare do it. There is nothing else like it. It tells you a lot about Luce: his insistence on quality, his artistic approach to business and journalism, and his supreme confidence in the capitalist enterprise. The first issue came out two months after the stock market crash of '29.

• Later, Time Magazine developed the concept of group reporting, in which multiple field correspondents wire stories back to editors and writers at the home office. Then these writers compiled the different reports into one cohesive story. While purporting to be a filter of objectivity, what often happened is that higher-ups like Luce would distort the field reports to hue to their editorial objectives, resulting in blatant subjectivity. In addition, the stories would be once removed from the actual source. Hello, Fox News Network.
• I didn't realize how much influence Luce had over the anti-Communism movement. However, he contradicted himself by hiring writers in the 30s whom he knew were Communist sympathizers.
• David Halberstam on Luce:

  It (when Luce's sympathy for China's totalitarian leader Chiang Kai Shek over Communists resulted in Time being wrong about the Communist takeover) was a historic juncture for our country. Do we accept the reality of the rest of the world, or do we try to impose, as Luce cared to do, his reality on what the rest of the world should be like?

  One can see the implications of this in our current administration's outlook. One person in the documentary termed Luce a man "with 19th century views in the 20th century whose outlook would come to define the 21st century."
• Gore Vidal on Time's McCarthyist style (now echoed by Karl Rove and the Republican party): "(it was) hit and run. Make a charge. Chuck away from it. Deny you ever said it. Print a retraction on page 340. That was the Time style."

Posted by timothompson at 10:51 AM

July 20, 2006

Why Our Housing Prices Are Out of Control

Steve Crossland of Keller Williams Realty here in Austin posts about the housing bubble today, citing this interview with Mark Dotzour, an economist with the Texas A&M Real Estate Center. With a 12 1/2 percent appreciation rate, Dotzour notes that the U.S. housing market has been driven by "intense demand in the United States to buy a home, in part driven by the basic need for shelter, but also by investors' lack of trust in Wall Street." As his post notes, people are wary of putting their money into foreign markets like India.

Here in Austin, aka "Flip Central", we've really been feeling the heat for the last two years, with Californians and other investors licking their chops. I was talking to my friend who's looking to buy a house, and she said the city should pass a law requiring prospective home buyers to reside in a house for at least a year before moving on. Is this naive? Anti-capitalist? Have a snowball's chance of Hell of becoming a law? Kill the economy? Deplete the city and county's tax base? I know, I know... But is there anything we could do to make it a fairer market and disincentivize the flippers and out-of-state investors? Pie in the sky or not, it would be nice to be able to afford a house without moving to Kyle or Buda and eating ramen noodles. I suppose it's the price to be paid for living in a popular place.

Posted by timothompson at 02:10 PM

July 19, 2006

Live Pavement

Here and here.

Posted by timothompson at 01:44 PM

July 18, 2006

On Ranking Music

"ryan adams" commenting on stereogum:

nobody is "better" than anybody else. records arent baseball cards where one is in better condition so its better. they are not fucking speed trial. people aare not erunning laps up and down a tennis court. its not football. its not sports. nobody wins and loses. bright eyes is conor. i am me. starship is starship. its ridiculous to think you could compare and contrast a painter with another or writer or musician. its just pointless.

Mark Hemingway writing in "Big Takeover":

Then let’s not talk about Blender magazine’s infatuation with lists. By the time you get to the “The 25 Biggest Wusses In Rock” you’re scraping the barrel. And VH1 is practically the Channel of Lists.

I’m not foursquare against combining lists and music by any means. Making lists is an easy point of reference and arguing music’s relative merits is fun. But it would be nice every once in while to enjoy music for its own sake. I can barely listen to any new music without immediately trying to contextualize it. I have no doubt that my voracious consumption of music journalism is a large part of this conditioned response.

Posted by timothompson at 01:59 PM

More Syd

• Jason Gross found a Robyn Hitchcock interview about Syd (Hitchcock mentions this Nick Kent article).
• Eric Francis examines Syd's astrological chart.

Posted by timothompson at 01:44 PM

July 17, 2006

Cover of Syd Barrett's "Bike" by Travis Higdon and Britt Daniel

Travis Higdon of Peek-A-Boo Records has posted a 1995 cover (fairly short) of Syd Barrett's "Bike" covered by him and Britt Daniel. I think Britt sings only the last verse, but Travis does a great job channeling Syd. Here's the story behind the track.

Posted by timothompson at 02:36 PM

July 12, 2006

Mexico: Voto Por Voto

Greg Palast reports on the Bush v. Gore scenario in the recent Mexican election (AlterNet has a counterpoint, noting the ChoicePoint angle is taken from three years ago.).

Posted by timothompson at 08:05 PM

July 05, 2006

Sound Team v. Pitchfork

I've commented before on anecdotal evidence that a Pitchfork review can make or kill a budding musical career. However, though many bands have been slammed by Pitchfork writers (who use a 10-scale binary digit ranking instead of the Rolling Stone-influenced 5-star system), I personally haven't seen a band react to a bad review like Austin's Sound Team or its fans have. After receiving a 3.7 from Pitchfork writer Marc Hogan, the band has produced a video of an effigy/proxy being poked, mutilated, hurled off a cliff and burned.

In a way, you have to give them credit for hitting back with a metaphor on the Pitchfork effect. On the other hand, there's a part of me that cringes a bit when seeing the video. It's like begging for change or something. Still, it's about time that someone called "bullshit" on the Pitchfork effect (and it's getting people to write about it, so it's good publicity).

In addition, Christopher Zane took it upon himself to defend Sound Team by writing a letter to Marc Hogan and posted Hogan's reply.

Like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Tapes 'n Tapes and Voxtrot, Sound Team owes a great deal of its buzz to blog pimping. But backlash strikes so quickly nowadays, and some people would love to be the first ones to puncture the blog hype balloon, because how could any band live up to the constant encomiums of the mp3 blog community, who constantly need to find new music to embrace, and pounce on each feted discovery until the life is sometimes squeezed out of it before the album's release date.

Does that mean Sound Team got a raw deal from Pitchfork, perhaps in reaction to blog hype? Noise for toaster comments "if (Pitchfork) can't handle the rise of influence from independent music bloggers, even with the same ultimate goal in mind - that is, to share good undiscovered music - and continue relentlessly to step up and imitate the qualities of blog posts (mp3 downloads, youtube streaming, live concert pictures blog-style), we have a bunch of immature foot-stomping adults on our hands". Or is it true that their "adenoidal overemoting and Wall-of-the-Edge guitars can't hide a shortage of, like, actual decent songs"? In this case, the answer most likely exists somewhere between the blog and Pitchfork hyperboles.

Posted by timothompson at 12:30 PM

July 04, 2006

Support Our National Ketchup

YLT calls upon every country man to stand united behind our national condiment. [via]

Posted by timothompson at 05:07 PM

July 01, 2006

Been Busy

Everything's all blending together. Scanning blogs, reading "The Epic of NYC," cudgeling together cartoons for executives, thinking about how "Jams Run Free" is the best Pavement song of this decade, sketching (badly), playing guitar while my cat rests his head on my thigh, watching the TiVo of Scorsese's "No Direction Home." It's all passing by so quickly, and I have thoughts once in a while. Once in a while I connect the dots, and I can see the Wizard behind the curtain. Or maybe it's the Wizard--maybe it's a trickster prince. I dunno. Bob Dylan tells Joan Baez how he doesn't know what he's writing about. He doesn't know what it means, and he asks her to explain it to him. One thing he does know is that "they" will be trying to explain what it means for years afterward. Lou Reed tells somebody why he can't be what people expect him to be--he's just passing through. Bob Dylan's 1966 British fans express disappointment at his constant morphing and shape changing. Ray Davies is telling me how we are creatures of little faith, even after he got shot in the leg. Stop whining. My fortune cookie says to accept the fact that I can't be number one--be content with my lot in life. You can worry -- or trust that ultimately, all is fine! I keep wanting to record these thoughts, but I can't stop to take notes. Relax. Let it go. Good night.

Posted by timothompson at 01:42 AM