OK, the Europeans know a lot more than us about some things. I think this clip is from Finland. YouTube isn't letting me post the video itself, but you must watch this. It is ridiculous.
The mixed tape is an age-old art! Well, at least since the 8-track... How better to demonstrate your love, if you are an awkard teenager, or your style and good taste, if you are a perhaps somewhat less awkward, but gruppy adult? There is no better way.
I would not fuck around with Ted Leo. Chisel is Ted Leo’s band, from the early 90s D.C. scene. “Hip Straights,” with its angular guitar lines and signature yelps, is one of the standouts from 8 AM All Day. “Looking Down at the Great Wall Of China,” also from 8 AM All Day, opens up the second half of the mixtape.
The brown-eyed renaissance in Sweden is utterly charming. They apparently find love boring, funny, and joyous, all at once. Why more bands don’t use a great, simple beat as the foundation for their “pop” songs is beyond me. Peter, Bjorn & John sure can make you want to punch them in the face from time to time (“I laugh more often now / I cry more often now”), but “Young Folks” caught my attention the first time I heard it, and despite the whistling, I still enjoy it. The rest of Writer’s Block is pretty good, too. Jens Lekman is one of the funnier and more sloppily sentimental songwriters working these days. “You Are the Light’ is a buoyant song, and the video is equally charming.
Tucked between these two tracks is Portland, Oregon’s Viva Voce. The husband-wife band has released some up and down albums, but I enjoy the “sweet groove of “Alive With Pleasure” and “High Highs,” included later on the mixtape. Both songs are off of The Heat Can Melt Your Brain.
Honeycut, on DJ Shadow’s Quannum Projects, is a San Francisco-based, what, white boy soul group? I don’t really know. “Shadows” is catchy, though.
Dr. Dog has the worst band name of any band I’ve seen in the last two years. They also write lyrics that don’t mean anything at all. Not in the Stephen Malkmus, cryptically-don’t-mean- anything-but-fuck-you-whatever sort of way, but in the perfectly plain and simple these lyrics are stupid (“Ain’t it strange how everybody says I love you / Ain’t it a shame how a word can tell you more than words can say”) sort of way. Normally, two massive strikes against. But the band is endearing, like Animal from the Muppets, and “Ain’t It Strange” is a pretty little song.
I’m of two minds about Of Montreal, but “Bunny Ain’t No Kind of Rider” gives me triple happiness, with its fuzzed out introduction, it’s joyous pop bursts, and the lyrics “You’re just some faggy girl / And I need a lover with soul power/ And you ain’t got no soul power.” Winner!
Seriously, girls, what's up?
Au Revoir Simone and Fur Cups For Teeth provide a triple-punch of sassy hot Brooklyn nerd-girl synth and iMac action. Five years ago, you could have found them at Cokie’s. Now they are all probably married. Full disclosure, FCFT are good, old friends of mine, but they get props, as it were, for “Darling, Darling / Your love is like a mystery train,” which is surprisingly clear, given that there is no such thing as a mystery train, and choosing against the obvious rhyme with “Wherever it goes, it goes / It’s never coming back-ack-ack.” “The Disco Song” and “The Winter Song” are off the ponderously titled Verses of Comfort, Assurance, and Salvation while FCFT keep it real with Allergic 2 Fur, where you can find “Mystery Train.”
Beulah is a California band, and man, do I miss them. Beaming melancholy through the sunshine, they were a band after my own heart, and Miles Kurosky’s lyrics were more charming than most (“I heard he wrote you a song/ Well, so what?/ Some guy wrote sixty nine/ And one just isn’t enough”). I’m waving the flag, I guess, by including three Beulah tracks, just in case you forgot about the band. “Popular Mechanics for Lovers” and “A Good Man Is Easy to Kill” off of The Coast Is Never Clear and “If We Can Land a Man on the Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart” from When Your Heartstrings Break. If he’s not doing anything else these days, Miles Kurosky should teach a course for the kids, on the difference between being clever and trying too hard.
The Walkmen and Lambchop are two fairly different bands that I like a lot, and everyone else is pretty ho-hum about. I guess it’s the New England talking, at the end of the day, that files the cashmere-sweater, prep-school assholism under charming. “Louisiana,” with horns, wanders just slightly off the cold-winter night tracks of previous Walkmen records. I like it. Lambchop are another story, the favorite of tortoise-shell frame wearing, library-card toting girls in stockings, their design school boyfriends, and me. “I Have Been Lonely For So Long” is a cover of a Frederick Knight song, showing off Kurt Wagner’s falsetto and good taste.
Norfolk & Western are massively under-appreciated. Fronted by one Adam Selzer, and comprised of members of the bands that back such folks as M. Ward and the Decembrists, and play beautiful and hushed little songs about love and wandering. “Terrified” from Dusk in Cold Parlours is one of my favorites.
Dump is the solo side-project of James McNew, from Yo La Tengo. The cover art A Grown-Ass Man, is a cute and funny drawing by Archer Prewitt, about a rabbit wearing a business suit, going to work. “Cowboy Song” is a Thin Lizzy cover, I believe.
Malkmus gets in with “Baby C’Mon.”
William DeVaughn’s “Be Thankful for What You Got” was supposedly a gospel track released in the service of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. That’s what I heard on B101 the other day. Yo La Tengo cover it on the Little Honda EP.
Track listing, for April 2007 mixtape :
Demetri Martin's comedy is a wonderful mix of absurdity, childishness, verbal dexterity, and hipster cool. He's very funny. Check out his 3/22 appearance on the Daily Show (where I guess he is a correspondent) titled "Viacom sues YouTube." I first saw him at the UCB Theater in New York, where he performed pretty regularly. He's on TV now often, so I guess he's sort of famous. But still, underapreciated.BLVR: Where, as a little kid, did you get a gorilla suit?
DM: No, no, no. I did that in law school.
BLVR: You need to explain that.
DM: Oh, I had it in college, too. I had the gorilla suit in college because when I was a little kid, I always thought it would be funny to ski in a gorilla suit. Because when you’re wearing an animal costume and something bad happens, your facial expression doesn’t change. The animal is deadpan the whole time. If you’re skiing in a gorilla suit and you fall, you just see a gorilla who has no emotion. It’s just a stoic gorilla, wildly falling down a hill, out of control. I was like, “That’s fucking hilarious.” I love Buster Keaton and I love physical comedy when it’s done in an emotionally understated way. I just like to play it, and I needed the attention. So I got the gorilla suit in college and I’d wear it when I went skiing.
BLVR: So this isn’t something you rented? You owned this.
DM: Yeah, I got it for Christmas. That was my ski suit. The head, the hands, everything. A full gorilla ski suit. You couldn’t see my face and I could barely see. There’s no peripheral vision because I’m looking through gorilla eyeholes. The best thing about it was when I was in the lift line with my friend and this guy said, “Hey, Willy! You want a banana? Ha, ha!” I got really irritated and I told my friend, “These people are assholes. They won’t leave me alone.” And he said, “You’re the asshole in the gorilla suit, man! You chose to wear a gorilla suit on a snowy mountain.”
BLVR: So you wore it to law school?
DM: Yeah, I was bored. It was probably nearing the end for me in law school. One day I was skipping class and I had my gorilla suit on and I was like, “Fuck it. I’ll go down to school.” So I started walking around campus and I went into classrooms. I didn’t jump in and go, “Hey!” I would just open the door in a subtle way. I’d walk in and be like, “Oh, this is the wrong room,” and then just leave. Once I looked at the professor and she stopped, like “What the fuck?” And I left. The door closed behind me and I could hear the laughter as I walked away. It was so fun.
There are some amazing photos being posted on Flickr, by servicemen and women. Exploring through any of the Flickr groups and pools dedicated to the current wars the US is engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan is well worth a few minutes of your time. Politics aside, for those of us sitting entirely on the sideline and speculating our way through these wars, Flickr provides a close-up look at various aspects of the war.
February, 2007:
At the end of February, 2007, I returned from a holiday in India. The trip was outstanding, the occasion was my cousin's wedding, but I took the opportunity to spend an extra month, traveling in Bengal and then to Mumbai and Goa, where I spent two weeks beach-bumming it. Since it's been eight years since I've been in India, this was a very necessary trip, as every return to India is centering and motivating -- and it's amazing the rate at which the country is changing.- Ritik Dholakia, March 2007
---- Notes on India travel ----
An Impossible Town
Darjeeling is an impossible town, located at some 7000 feet, in the Himalayan foothills. To get to Darjeeling, my friend Indranil and I took an overnight train to Siliguri, a sprawling mess of a city located in the forested North Bengal Hills. We spent a few days in the forest before starting our ascent into the Himalaya. Unlike Hillary and Norgay, we charted a course up the southern face of the mountains, in an SUV. We left in the mid-afternoon, on a bright sunny day. In the mountains, men drive like goats, careening around hairpin turns, passing lorries on narrow roads, driving through cloud-ensconced hamlets at forty miles an hour, and interrupting the occasional rag-tag cricket match, where one boundary line is a cliff face, and the other, a thousand foot drop. Maybe they've known these roads all their lives, maybe that's an excuse. But still, SUVs tip over.
Three hours up, and the sun has abandoned us, and we're dropped off at the foot of Darjeeling town, on a dark, gray afternoon, in the middle of a hailstorm. And it's cold outside. We have a short walk up a hill to get to our hotel, the Old Bellevue, not to be confused with the New Bellevue, located across the street, under different management.
The Old Bellevue, we'll come to find, is a charming place. Set at the top of central Darjeeling, on the Mall (pronounced "Maal"), we are provided a panoramic view of the hills surrounding the town. Or so we are told. On days one and two in Darjeeling, we see nothing but freezing cold, inching out from in front of our faces, with the wonderful mountain people ghosting in and out of the fog on their daily business. There is nothing to do but drink.
The one thing that is noticeable, as we wander through the fog, is that Darjeeling is a town built on the sheer face of the mountain. It's the sort of town that makes me thankful that I wasn't involved in its construction. Because it would've been a steady chorus of "Well, why don't we just build the town down there?" "Where?" "Down there, in the plains. Where it's flat. And our homes won't look like they constantly want to just tilt over and fall down the mountain. And where it's easier." The mountain people are tougher than me, and I'm sure I would've annoyed them. But now that the town is built, we get along fine. They are sweet and very generous.
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