RIP Robin Gibb (1949-2012)
Fewt for Thought
RIP Richard Harding, Owner of Chicago’s Quiet Knight . . .
. . . and before that, Poor Richard’s.
Good stuff in this Sun-Times obit on the Chicago scene, mid-sixties through seventies:
Los Angeles had the Troubador. Chicago had the Quiet Knight.
Personal note: In July 1978, after seeing the Stones at Soldier Field, the ex and I were walking down Belmont Avenue, right past the Quiet Knight, en route to our friend Mark’s apartment. Mark lived in a garret atop Schuba’s (still going strong at Belmont and Southport).
And that, children, was the night the Stones, along with Willie Dixon, paid a visit to the Quiet Knight and jammed with Muddy Waters. The night we walked on by, oblivious, and missed it.
Drones and Piano
Sally Cruikshank: “Make Me Psychic” (1978)
What got me started was the discovery that animation artist Sally Cruikshank has an Etsy shop where she’s selling watercolors.
Cruikshank is probably best known for Quasi at the Quackadero (1975), which is now listed on the United States National Film Registry. Or you may have seen the animated sequences she contributed to Sesame Street in the nineties.
My favorite, though, has always been Make Me Psychic. “Which way to the we-fwesh-ments?”
(Many of Cruikshank’s films are available for viewing on her YouTube channel, laughingsal, as well as on a DVD you can buy from her Etsy shop.)
Must Pick Up
I don’t know if this made it to the Alexandria Freecycle list, but after a lot of commotion in the street at 7:30 AM, I emerged to find this on my sidewalk. Spring cleaning!
Nyan Waits
White Lily
Laurie Anderson / Rainer Fassbinder
Quote out of context
The video starts by looking up into space and then goes down to see Ladyhawke playing her guitar. Then everything goes blue but Ladyhawke continues to play her guitar. Then things start to move and you see an eye while Ladyhawke keeps turning back to look at something. She continues to play her guitar while the people moving are now clearly dancing around. There is what appears to be fire but turns out to be her outline. While she sings you start to see more than one of her; also a light starts to shine on her. You see shadows dancing while lights shine onto them. While Ladyhawke sings you see other people run across the screen. The video ends with Ladyhawke singing and fades into the darkness.
From Wikipedia.
Perhaps the world needs musicvideosasprose.tumblr.com?
Daffy’s Elixir
Bryan Scary, my favorite currently-active musical artist, has just released his fourth album, Daffy’s Elixir. I’ve been listening to it for the past week, and it’s easily some of his best work yet. I’m apparently not very good at writing album reviews, but you should totally check it out anyway.
A few weeks ago, he brought his band to do a live show for BreakThru Radio’s Live Studio:
(Definitely stick around for the piano solo at the end of the first song.)
Stuff Smith: You’se A Viper
For your pleasure on this Weed Day, 2012. Stuff Smith: You’se a Viper.
R.I.P. Levon Helm
“The music starts around eight o’clock, and it’s over when it’s over,” he said of the Midnight Rambles at his home in Woodstock, New York.
I’ve been meditating on Levon Helm since his daughter’s recent announcement that the end was near. Wondering why I felt so torn up over his impending demise.
Now he has passed over, and I’m still working on it.
The Shins: The Rifle’s Spiral
The Shins: The Rifle’s Spiral on Nowness.com.
I love this song and love the video. Not sure about the part with the ginormous rabbit.
Cynthia Dall (1971-2012)
posted by the folks at Drag City April 9th, 2012.
We are shocked and deeply disappointed to post this notice: Cynthia Dall passed away at her home in Sacramento last Thursday.
Entirely music
If you’ve been hanging out with me on clusterflock for a while, you may know that I am crazy-mad for Van Dyke Parks.
Okay, there is this interview and it focuses on VDP’s career as a child actor and it is really good and one of the things I like best is a recollected exchange between VDP and Lillian Gish.
Read more
Gavin Bryars — The Sinking of the Titanic
I could wait till the weekend to post this, but why?
Performed live by the Wordless Music Orchestra on Jan. 16, 2008, at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in New York City.
Originally written in 1969, Gavin Bryars’ first major composition, The Sinking of the Titanic, still sounds just as vital, fresh, and forward-thinking now as it did then. In a concert from the Wordless Music Series, recorded by WNYC, the piece was performed live by the Wordless Music Orchestra on Jan. 16, 2008, at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in New York City. Conductor Brad Lubman led the ensemble.
April Holy Foolish Palm Sunday Interview with Patti Smith
An hour-long interview with Patti Smith, endearing and, dare I say, inspirational.
I liked her music less and less after the first brilliant album; that much said, I worshipped her when I was in my early twenties and went to see her perform every chance I had. She was brilliant live. (And I have one of her guitar picks from the Radio Ethiopia tour.)
At bottom I have always admired her terrifically. She is tremendously endearing in this interview — both genuinely, unaffectedly girlish at 65 and mature and wise.
Watch or listen to this interview even if you do so in bits and pieces or while tending to other things.
Earl Scruggs, 1924-2012
dueling banjos
Anything but hear the voice that says we’re basically alone.
— Tim Carmody (@tcarmody) March 18, 2012
It begins w attraction, then a kind of attack, & it ends, if you are lucky, w a strong impersonation of your author. (fagles on translating)
— Sam Anderson (@shamblanderson) March 18, 2012
Bill Callahan, Jim Cain
Cowboy Indian Bear – Saline
I’ll be seeing these folks tonight in Topeka. Pretty stoked.
Dueling Banjos, Literally
Courtesy of the Sleepy Man Banjo Boys. Somewhere out there, Dapper Dan is smiling from a tight spot.
Stockhausen opera to be staged in full – helicopters and all
This courtesy of clusterflock friend @PeteAshton, who says, “Well, if we have to have a Cultural Olympiad, letting @BirminghamOpera do a batshit insane opera suits me.”
It is not the headache of four separate helicopters carrying string quartet performers that is keeping Graham Vick awake at night. It is more, he confessed, the strain of 11 flying string and woodwind soloists that is exercising his mind ahead of the first performance of one of the world’s most unusual operas.
Birmingham Opera Company has announced it is to stage one of the most challenging operas ever written, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s five-hour epic Mittwoch aus Licht (Wednesday from Light), during the London 2012 festival.
Dang. I’m planning on seeing a revival of Einstein on the Beach in Berkeley later this year, but this . . . this is is batshit insane. I love it.
“It’s not like fucking Lana Del Rey carved an upside down cross on her cheek and defecated all over herself on stage at fucking Bonnaroo.”
Bradford Cox clarifies “details from yesterday’s news story regarding the events of his recent Minneapolis show, at which he responded to a heckler’s request for the Knack’s ‘My Sharona’ with an improvised, hour-long rendition.”
(Thanks to Pete Ashton for the update.)
smoke signals
What is odd is sitting in this bar and hearing “Radio Radio” all these years later.
— Sheila Ryan (@Cirinda) March 5, 2012
And it still resonates, even though we have more choice. Ostensibly.
— Sheila Ryan (@Cirinda) March 5, 2012
I want to bite the hand that feeds me.
— Sheila Ryan (@Cirinda) March 5, 2012
I want to bite that hand so badly.
— Sheila Ryan (@Cirinda) March 5, 2012
I want to make them wish they’d never seen me.
— Sheila Ryan (@Cirinda) March 5, 2012
