Every year since 2007, DJ Earworm has brought us the United States of Pop for the given year, made of the top 25 hits on the US charts. (2009 was the breakout year that he took it to the next level, though.) DJ Earworm is by no means my favorite mashup artist, that being Girl Talk. (Or bootleg artist. Remember when they were called bootlegs? Remember get your bootleg on, guys? OK, successors exist wev. Le sigh.) But what Girl Talk does is take good songs–well, and some cheesy songs that you suddenly love–and make amazing, full-length immersive album-length experiences. If he has a defect it’s that he’s a cock-tease. He will have you losing your mind for 53 seconds after which the dropped stitch of under-track two is picked up to be the instrumental for a hilariously incomprehensible Weezy rap about how it ain’t his birthday but he got his name on the cake. Which, admittedly, is funny, but sometimes you just want to shake Girl Talk by the shoulders and say, “enough with the art, bitch; make me a song!” Like here, this whole track should just be Radiohead vs Jay-Z. It is superlative. Yet!–the last minute is a riot and could hold its own as a separate track. It would rank #108 vs the first minute’s #1, but still.
From the category archives:
Arts
What Todd Rundgren song is my favorite power pop song you ask? Which? Which Todd Rundgren song?! Clamor has been building up on the blog for some time now. I really thought that would have been obvious, but tastes differ an all. It’s: Couldn’t I Just Tell You. What happens that’s very special? At 2:40 things quiet down; 2:50 all the instruments cut out except the guitar, pretty much, and then they come back, in the form of the drummer coming in and knocking the entire kit over in the business at 2:59. (This latter, by the way, is the perfect length for a song according to The Clash’s Hitsville UK, which notes that “the band went in/and knocked ’em dead/in two minutes fifty-nine.” I loved this song inordinately when I was young, even though in retrospect it sort of has an excess of singers and maybe xylophones or something. No, wait, definitely an excess of xylophones.) The outro has a perfect bend you weren’t expecting.
There’s a playground near John’s parents’ house and I remember going there with his mom and letting her play with then-toddler Zoë while I swung on the swings, pumping my legs back and forth under the overcast, metronome back and forth and just hitting << when the song ended, for more than half an hour. This soft/loud thing at 2:40 sq is a classic power pop move, and in general: having a killer bridge, being relatively short, and not overusing your “rock trick” are the keys to power pop awesome IME. (This track has 16 sec of Todd & co forgetting to start playing after the guitar intro and exhaling bong/nitrous hits at the start, making it in truth a deceptively slim 3:19. It was put out in 1973, a time when people thought things like “sure, keep the tape rolling while you guys do whippets” and “let’s give Todd Rundgren the money to make a double-album!” seemed like good ideas.)
What if I just randomly played other power pop songs from the 90s, 2000-2010 (noting is springing to mind for the last three years) that pulled these moves off well even though it digressed from my 70s-80s power pop thing and put off my epic discussion of the metaphysics of Cheap Trick? What then? Could I get you to argue about that? Or about Todd Rundgren sucking? I feel as if this were a challenge to my blogging powers. If I can possibly induce anyone to argue about Todd Rundgren, well. Oh, shit I could get you to argue about The Strokes thought right? That would be tedious and idiotic of you. DONT BOTHER.
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No, IRL it’s The Clash. Nonetheless, power pop–it’s so wonderful! What’s the best part? The pop? It…sort of better be the pop because I like the Raspberries and, let’s be frank, the amount of “power” involved is limited. If I had to pick one power pop song that was my favorite ever, I would–I would first declare all Big Star songs off limits so they wouldn’t occupy all the top spots, but it would be “Jesus Christ”, and, well, it should oughta be The Flamin’Groovies'”Shake Some Action,” right?
But screw it, and forget the thing I implied .04 seconds ago in writing this post, because it’s really by Zion, Illnois’ finest, Shoes:
Oh but Belle, what is this mysterious power pop of which you speak? Is it a bunch of lame white bands from the late 70s and early 80s? No. It is a bunch of lame completely awesome white bands from the late 70s and early 80s. (There were some black power pop-style musicians I know nothing about, prolly. Tell me about them, edumacated readers.) Yeah, Americans liked the Beatles, but it took them years to get even the most basic grasp on the thing, during which they sounded like Badfinger, and then new wave started happening, which pushed people into a different confused direction. With the result that, amazing things happened, as above. See also:
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One time I made a mix that was Belle’s Saddest Mix Ever. This was to go with my brother Ben’s Saddest Mix Ever. The were not disjunct. This song by Toots and the Maytals was on both:
Everytime I see your face
Something moves within my heart
And it thrills me to my soul
And tells me that
Love is gonna let me down…
I bought this album by The Reddings for .99. I could tell it was going to be amazing because of the Platonic solids–it’s Back to Basics! Also, that one dude doesn’t have any glass in his glasses=WIN.
The Reddings/Back to Basics
But then I couldn’t listen to it till now. So I didn’t know how awesome. OMG! It’s all the deep cuts I wanted! And two of the dudes are Otis Reddings’ sons. Not to be confused with Shuggie Otis (son of Johnny Otis) and his superlative Information Inspiration. Oh damn I have to play that now in case you don’t know this song. It contains the line “here’s a pencil pad/I’m gonna spread some information.” I don’t know why, but this fills me with a deep, deep feeling of satisficing the criteria of a good life. John totally agrees (N.B. may not actually agree.)
I took the girls to Mint, the Singapore Museum of Toys. This place is just amazing! The girls got to be photographed in front of a 6-foot tall Tetsujin 28! ‘Nuff said. Plus:
Sooooo, the youngs. you may have heard they like Justin Beiber or Rhianna or something. They don’t. They like computer constructs, only one of which is human, and we hear her voice only, and anyway there is some debate about whether she’s canon. Vocaloids! The original technology was invented by Kenmochi Hideki at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain in 2000. Backed by the Yamaha Corporation, it developed the software into the commercial product “Vocaloid.” (ボーカロイド Bōkaroido). (This product exists separately from the Vocaloids I’m talking about and is used to generate back-up vocals and other things like that in ordinary pop songs). The most popular is naturally 01, Hatsune Miku. You can even see her perform live! (You should really watch this–it’s not clear quite how bizarre the scene is till partway through.) Her ‘voice’ is compressed into the upper range of human hearing, and beyond what any human could sing. But it’s not merely a person’s voice sped up; it’s constructed (though some samples were taken from a Japanese actress).
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I think it’s possible–nay, probable–naw, it is a nigh-certainty that you have not seen one of the best music videos ever made, quite randomly for French electronica duo Justice (they aren’t even, they’re sort of a rock band. But not.) It stars a young Snake Plissken (presumably before he is inserted into, and subsequently [SPOILER ALERT] escapes from, New York, in the movie “Escape From New York.” I strongly encourage everyone to go on and click full screen and listen to the song and everything. Dudes this is so fucking awesome. C’mon. Did they actually program a computer from the 1980s to make some of the “high-definition” graphics?
My best friend from middle school and I once wrote a program like that which, by displaying a series of screens on which we had drawn the lines point to point, created the image of a rotating green wire cube on a black screen on her Apple II c. It took us like four hours or something. More? Her family’s cook made killer shrimp tempura, though, so that was sustaining. And then coffee milkshakes and chocolate cookies for afters. Actually she would ask you egg preferences the night before and bring us breakfast in bed every morning that I ever slept over, which was a billion. With fresh-squeezed OJ. With sugar in the coffee already how she knew you liked it. Mrs. Hong was the shit, but she was prone to get angry and would not let anyone go in the kitchen and make a peanut butter sandwich or anything. Or even a bowl of cereal. Eventually Sacha’s mom had to fire her when Mrs. Hong threw a huge-ass knife at her during an argument over menu planning and it stuck, quivering, embedded a good two inches in the plaster of sloping ceiling of the back stairs. Even then it was a struggle (internally, for her mom). Mrs. Hong claimed it was a “warning shot” and hadn’t gone that close to Sacha’s mom’s head, which was kind of true but kind of not super-relevant. Anyway, A ROTATING CUBE YOU GUYS RLY! We were siced. Just like how siced I am about this video right now.
ETA: sometimes the frame isn’t quite wide enough, so watch on YouTube if not.
Last Thursday I went to the launch party for Katie Green’s Lighter Than My Shadow (just published by Jonathan Cape) a graphic memoir in which she tells the story of her descent into and recovery from anorexia (and quite a bit besides). It is a big book, 524 pages in all, which somewhat belies its title, yet I read the whole thing in one sitting. I know I’m not alone in having done this: once you start, it is very hard to stop. It is compelling but a hard book to read: I felt the tears welling up several times. It is also a great book. The graphic format works perfectly for the story and Katie – a terrific illustrator – has managed to convey very vividly some little part of what it felt like from the inside. The black cloud of despair, the screaming monsters in the head, the desperate urge to control, control, control and the sense of alienation from those closest to her, the pain she knows she’s inflicting on them but can’t help doing so.
When she spoke at the book launch Katie said that she hadn’t written the book to help anyone. Nevertheless, I’m sure it will help one very large group of people, the people who can’t imagine what it is like for someone in her position, who can’t understand the sense of compulsion, and why the sick person can’t just “pull themselves together”. In giving voice to this inside, Katie has pulled off something comparable to what William Styron did for depression in Darkness Visible. That’s a pretty high standard of comparison, I know, and I’m feeling swayed by the immediate experience of just having read Lighter Than My Shadow, but I don’t think it an unfitting one.
I should disclose a slight interest. I know Katie slightly (she’s a friend of one of my children) and a photo I took is on the cover flap. So I’m not entirely impartial. Still, I think this is, objectively, a very great achievement. And I don’t mean to relativise in a way that suggests that it is great for someone who has gone through her experience to have produced something this good. I mean that it would be great for anyone to have created this, even though her experience is a condition of having done so. Anyway, people out there, this is a book that most of you ought to read. You can get it at Amazon of course, but better to buy from somewhere else. (The Guardian had a feature on the book last week.)
“All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.” – J. K. Galbraith
Kickstarter is glorious insofar as it is a well-earned kick to a rotten door.
That’s why a lot of people are griped about Zach Braff funding his Garden City sequel this way.
The idea – and it’s a great one – is that Kickstarter allows filmmakers who otherwise would have NO access to Hollywood and NO access to serious investors to scrounge up enough money to make their movies. Zach Braff has contacts. Zach Braff has a name. Zach Braff has a track record. Zach Braff has residuals. He can get in a room with money people. He is represented by a major talent agency. But the poor schmoe in Mobile, Alabama or Walla Walla, Washington has none of those advantages.
Yay, I found my lost copy of The Lost Art of Heinrich Kley, volume 1. And my first post got such a good response – one comment, and counting! – that I had to do a follow-up.
Here is the cover of my copy of Der Herr der Luft [Master of the Air], a 1914 anthology of ‘tales of fliers and airtravellerstories’ [Luftfahrergeschichten].
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It’s illustrated by Kley, and you can find the various plates in Lost Art, vol. 1. But for some reason they left out the cover illustration. (Or you can download the book from the Internet Archive. But, again, the cover image is omitted.)
Why do I like the cover so much?
It is, I believe, the first occurrence of a phenomenon that would become tragi-comically common, in the decades to come: a fantasy or science fiction book – especially an anthology – with a cover that promises some way cool [am oberaffengeilsten] story that isn’t actually in the book. Usually the book is ok, of course. But there is a special, bitter-sweet feeling in the soul of a 12-year old boy (mostly boys, but I by no means hereby deny the existence of female nerds) when you realize you aren’t going to get to read that awesome story about the naked airdude (probably he is wearing a tarzan loincloth) and his friend, the fierce flying fish dude. You will just have to wait until Mike Mignola invents Abe Sapien to read about anyone who looks half that good. (And even Abe can’t fly.)
Here’s the table of contents for the volume.
Der Kondor. Adalbert Stifter
Der Türmer Palingenius. Karl Hans Strobl
Hans Pfalls Mondfahrt. Edgar Allan Poe [trans. “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfall”]
Der Unheimliche Gast. Jules Verne [transl. “Un drame dans les airs”]
Luftpilot Jacquelin. Otto Rung
Die Geliebte. Karl Vollmöller
Geflügelte Taten. Hermann Heijermans
Die Reife um die Erde in vierundzwanzig Stunden. Maurice Renard
Das Flugtreffen von Ardea. Gabriele d’Unnunzio
Die Melodie der Sphären. Jage von Rohl
Das Lebendige Mastodon. Paul Scheerbart
Der Ozeanflug. Leonhard Ubelt
Der Flieger. Wilhelm Schmidtbonn
Die Luftschlacht am Niagara. H. G. Wells
Der erste Mensch. Alfred Richard Meyer
Now, I have a confession to make. I actually haven’t read it. Much of it, anyway. The blackletter type stabs my eyes, and my German is weak after years of disuse. But I’m reasonably sure there’s no flying fish man to be found, because fish guys are just one of Kley’s go-to motifs. He likes ’em. He likes ’em in Victorian bathing outfits (fishman and mildly nsfw lady under the fold.) [click to continue…]
I was going to review a couple of new books I picked up – The Lost Art of Heinrich Kley, Volume 1: Drawings
The books are in a Lost Art series that is clearly a labor of love for Joseph Procopio, the editor.
In honor of our Real Utopias event, I’ll just give you Kley on politics and metaphysics. (These particular images aren’t from these new volumes, but they’re nice, aren’t they?)
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One of the ways in which blogging has changed in the past decade is that there are far fewer posts just pointing to recommending stuff. That business has gone elsewhere, to Facebook and Twitter, whilst blogging takes the form of longer (and longer) essays. That’s understandable, but in some ways a pity, and risks turning blogs into sequential slabs of dull but worthy texts (with the occasional gem of course). Anyway, I was just about to plug Iconic Photos to friends on FB, but I think the recommendation deserves a wider (and different) audience. The author (A.A.S. Holmes, whoever he or she is) takes, as the title suggests, an “iconic” photo and supplies fascinating commentary, often focusing on who the protagonists were, how they happened to be there, and what happened next. Particular favourites of mine are his commentary on Robert Capa’s L’Épuration, and Marianne of ’68, where things aren’t what they seemed. Enjoy.
I’m reading a book on Mannerism
As I was saying, here’s Alberti, warning us that, even though good istoria painting should exhibit variety and seem alive with motion, you shouldn’t go all Escher Girl boobs + butt Full-Monty-and-then-some:
There are those who express too animated movements, making the chest and the small of the back visible at once in the same figure, an impossible and inappropriate thing; they think themselves deserving of praise because they hear that those images seem alive that violently move each member; and for this reason they make figures that seem to be fencers and actors, with none of the dignity of painting, whence not only are they without grace and sweetness, but even more they show the ingegno of the artist to be too fervent and furious [troppo fervente et furioso].
On the other hand, here’s a quote from Pietro Aretino, praising Vasari’s cartoon of “The Fall of Manna In The Desert”:
The naked man who bends down to show both sides of his body by virtue of its qualities of graceful power and powerful ease draws the eyes like a magnet, and mine were held until so dazzled that they had to turn elsewhere.
Oh, I know what y’all are going to say. You’re going to say it’s wrong to like R. Kelly because his music is bad. No. Unnnh huuh. “But it’s got T-Pain in it!” You like “I’m on a Boat,” don’t you Sherlock? Further, “I’m a Flirt” is insanely catchy. Now you object that the Venn diagram of insanely catchy and bad has a large overlapping area, because you wrongly hate hillbilly-from-the-future Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe,” but nonetheless, “I’m a Flirt” is just a good song. No. You know why else? Because I told you so. Also, everything silly you wanted in a video. Expensive cars? Stupid big jewelry? Honeys up in the VIP room? So many honeys. I’m gay for this video.
But it might seem as if it’s wrong to like R. Kelly’s music because he’s committed statutory rape on multiple occasions.
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