Straight to

On my way in to work this morning, I flipped away from NPR when they started repeating stories and scanned the dial until something caught my ear. A snippet from “Straight to Hell,” by the Clash, was looped behind another singer, and the sampling song immediately interested me for a variety of reasons. It turned out to be Paper Planes, a controversial song by MIA, which was released in February 2008.

The song refers to other Clash songs as well, notably in the children’s chorus heard occasionally in the tune (a nod to the Clash covering itself on Sandinista with the kids’ version of Career Opportunities). The song became more and more complex to hear when I realized that the key rythym points in the chorus were sampled and processed gunshots, with the sound of a pinging shell ejection acting as a hi hat. The tune hooked me solid and I turned it up as loud as I could.

The morning DJ at KEXP, “John-in-the-Morning,” is a respected indie programmer who knows his stuff and how to put a set together, and while his musical programming only occasionally works to hold my attention, when he chooses to appeal to my demographic, he excels. In this instance, he knocked it out of the park by providing a seamless, beatmatched transition directly from the end of Paper Planes straight into Straight to Hell, which was exactly what I wanted to hear. I actually exclaimed out loud, “No way!”

Singing in English in quotations as drove my car to the drummer man’s beat, I savored the thematic interplay of the songs. I joined in that chorus of the Amerasian blues. Two songs later Kanye came on and bored me to catatonia. As I drifted off to sleep in the freeway merge lane a passing semi awakened me, and I turned the radio off.

Gone

A friend of a friend – of many, many friends, actually – died overnight, it seems. The departed is not Seattle local and to my knowledge, I never met him. But lots of people I love chose to love him too, and so I’m unhappy. Reflective, maybe. Moody.

WFHB is having the locals show – Frankie, Phil and Al played. Jim hosted. Now they are playing a song by someone I’ve never heard (Tinyfolk, it seems) called “Oh, I miss my Indiana” which appears to contain a Dale Lawrence lyrical reference and which appealed to my current melancholy.

The Ministry of Vegetables

Supposed to hit seventy today and the upcoming week’s lows are all over forty. Time to move plants around and get some more into the ground. Back to the garden.

Hit it, Jason.

Huh, might as well make the to-do list here as anywhere.

1. Mow lawn.

2. Pot tomato suckers, start a few more.

3. Site herbs: Sage, sage, rosemary, lavender, rosemary, oregano.

4. Plant taters.

5. Pick up compost bins, soil sifter.

6. Sift soil, replace as needed, discard rocks.

7. Fertilize as needed.

8. Compost deer ferns.

9. Set up floral seed sets.

10. De-winterize back deck.

How's that again?

NYT: Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison

“Researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison’s invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades. The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians.

It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.”

First: EIGHTEEN SIXTY? Wah, cool.

Second: the editorial decision to use the word ‘recording,’ while semantically accurate, is misleading, as the use of the word in an audio context implies something which was designed for playback when it was, as we say, recorded.

The etymology of the word, however, permits its’ misleading use in this context.
Imagine, for example, a seismograph being referred to throughout an article about an earthquake primarily by the word ‘recording,’ and noting in passing that the seismograph had been converted to audio from paper-based waveform records.

Anyway, this is still really cool.

Not my BKB

At work today, a co-worker was listening to a Philly sports radio station when he heard a promo for some St. Paddy’s Day shows by Philly’s own The Bare Knuckle Boxers.

He and I both found this amusing, having been founding members of Seattle’s own BKB. Given the Google results for bare knuckle boxers, it seems unlikely that the Philly gents are unaware of our now-departed Pacific coast enterprise. Thinking back to my own days of four St. Paddy’s gigs in a day, I’ll doff my hat to the youngsters.

There are some odd resonances that I wish to note, as well.

At work we commonly play one or two episodes of the absurdist, cynical, and potentially nihilist sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and consequently I will always imagine the Philly BKB playing in Paddy’s Pub.

When Seattle’s BKB started playing, another post-Pogues Irish rock band was active locally (and may still be), Saint Bushmill’s Choir. As is currently visible on the website I just linked to, the band would occasionally give a shout out to your Philadelphia Flyers.

So, far be it from me to make sense of this. But it seems plainly apparent that Philly, Seattle, and Irish music times the rock and the roll are somehow bound by destiny. Take it up and shape it, ’cause I’m going to bed.

Cities in dust

On my way to NWFF tonight, I walked around my old neighborhood gawking at the massive changes that two years have brought. I was gawking at the new buildings, but evidently crime is up as well. Lots of shiny new restaurants targeting an upscale demographic, lots of closed mom-and-pop storefronts and empty old standbys.

The old standby I selected ws Bill’s Pizza and Pasta, mostly empty (as were the majority I walked by).

The first song to roar off the jukebox as I settled in was Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Your City Lies in Dust.

Leap Day

For reasons unknown (alien invasion?) KUOW ran next week’s WNYC-produced Radiolab, a live show recorded in front of a loving audience in Minneapolis, tonight.

The show uses Radiolab’s signature overlapping audio, which to my ear derives most directly from Altman and Firesign Theatre, to explore the production and legacy of the storied Mercury Theatre on the Air “War of The Worlds,” to great and personally moving effect.

I have been familiar with Radiolab, and its’ leading light, Robert Krulwich, for years. While generally I have admired both Krulwich’s reporting and his commitment to puyshing the mediujm as an aspect of his reportage, Radiolab did not sell itself to me. Overlapping found and reported audio accompanied by well-informed commentary was, it seemed, not enough for me.

Given that Krulwich’s grail is indeed as it has seemed to me for some time the transformation of the reported story into dramatic and audio entertainment, it’s only natural that one would expect him to explore the October 31, 1938 Mercury Radio Theatre on The Air broadcast of their adaptation of The War of The Worlds.

Without going into detail, it is clear to me that the show I have just listened to achieves the goal of transforming reportage into something new, not news, not drama, not anecdote. The show conveyed new information regarding something I have been fascinated with since childhood, entirely new and unexpected fallout from the broadcast, and direct, thoughtful commentary from the hosts on the topic at hand.

It was fantastic, and if Krulwich can find the correct choices to address moving forward with the show, new ground has been broken in three disciplines: radio, journalism, and drama.

I suspect that this may be what the guy’s been after for umpteen years. I’ve been listening, and I never heard it click previously, although I always appreciated Krulwich’s aggressive pusuit of the edge.

The dog ate my…

On arriving home tonight, I was greeted by the conspicuous absence of attention-hoggery and tailwagging from Rocket which inevitably means something has been thoroughly chewed to bits. In normal circumstances, this affects shoes, and consequently Viv, more than me. We’ve adapted by locking the shoes up.

Casting my eyes about what should I see, but THIS:

That is what remains of the book I wrote about fondly yesterday. It should be noted that the damage is largely restricted to the cover and table of contents, and one piece of the cover in particular appears to have been chewed for some time like a piece of gum.

That is of course the section of the cover that I held for the longest period of time last night as I played from the book. Apparently my dog loves me so much he just wants to eat me up, or at least chew me like gum.