Music

Some feel we should take a more active approach to managing comments. I think we do pretty well on the whole (although the Lord love you, you are a grumpy lot). Question of the day: is the unremitting, permanent badness of Matthew Yglesias’ comments the result of intentional sabotage, or can it be chalked up to his policy of utterly ignoring them at all times? I favor the former explanation, because he’s influential enough that I can imagine some testy Republican or two taking it on as a volunteer project to wreck it up constantly. There was never a time when they were good, either, even in the early days. He was assigned what I consider to be, in John Emerson’s formulation, an Al-bot; a rotating crew of people commenting as “Al” day and night there and at Kevin Drum’s and Ezra Klein’s with the result that every single thread was derailed. Final note: why has Digby never been promoted to the big leagues, despite her obvious rightness and acerbic wit? Sexism, or a lust for mindless contrarianism that she will never satisfy?
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This NPR Concerts presentation of Tom Waits, live, on his Glitter and Doom tour, may be the best damn concert recording I’ve ever heard. You can also get it through iTunes. Search NPR concerts.

While busying myself with this and that, I began listening to the new Belle and Sebastian album, Write About Love. The first track, “I Didn’t See It Coming”. But! I didn’t realize iTunes was on shuffle, so the next track up was, naturally, Iron Maiden, “Prodigal Son”, off their second album, Killers. I wasn’t focusing, didn’t instantly recognize the track. But it gradually impinged on my sphere of phenomenological awareness that I could not possibly be listening to the new Belle and Sebastian album, however cheeky these twee English (Scottish?) monkeys might be trying to be. So I ask you: at what point in “Prodigal Son” does it become metaphysically impossible that this is a Belle and Sebastian song? (Now, of course, given it actually is an Iron Maiden song, in a sense it’s a trick question. But never mind that.)

A) 0.01. From the very first second it just couldn’t be Belle and Sebastian.
B) 0.10. These arpeggios.
C) 0.16. Those drums.
D) 0.27. When it rocks.
E) 1.16 The vocals.

Or is there in actual, possible fact some Borgesian/Lewisian counterpart to our world in which Iron Maiden never recorded this song, in which Belle and Sebastian write and perform an identical song on their new album, Write About Love, with the help of some guy’s guest vocals. And how’s that working out for them?

UPDATE: I guess this is somehow related to the general issue of British austerity measures, but I couldn’t say how.

Regular commenter Tom Hurka expressed complete dismay a couple of years ago when I told him that I hadn’t seen any live music for 16 years or so (the last concert being Pentangle at the late lamented Palms in Davis CA). I did nothing to correct this omission at the time. But in February one of my undergraduate students invited me to go see her and her dad perform together at a local coffee shop: the kids (who know her a little as a babysitter) were riveted, so much so that the girls wouldn’t leave, and forced me to come back and pick them up an hour after we’d had to leave with the little horror (quite understandably, as you can tell from listening to her here — our horror was singing Jolene, with most of the lyrics gleaned from a single hearing, for months afterward, and her version of “Bad Romance” inspired our 13 year old to start playing Lady GaGa songs on the ukulele at her school talent shows). This experience prompted my wife to say we should go to live music sometimes which, indeed, we have started doing (our first outing, oddly enough, being to see Neil Young, supported by Bert Jansch who, therefore, constituted the bookends to our long drought of live music, and there’s no-one I’d sooner play that role).

So we went to see Suzanne Vega last night, with a couple of friends. I had completely forgotten that I once owned her first two albums (when they were actual records), and was therefore surprised to find that I knew about half the songs she sang, rather than just the three hits I had in my head. The venue was what I think they call “intimate” — in other words, she can’t have made much money from it (I reckon there were around 300 people in a 500 capacity theater, with tickets selling at $30 each, and she is touring with a sound mixer, a bassist, a guitarist and someone else). Anyway, she was great — her voice still pure, her songs good enough to please my wife and our friends, none of whom had as much prior interest as I did, and, most surprisingly, her stage persona quite at odds with the tenor of her songs. While the songs are reserved, reflective and not really cheerful for the most part, she is, herself, funny, self-deprecating but confident, and relaxed. After listening to a somewhat harrowing song the audience would burst out laughing at her stories and jokes.

She was promoting a series of retrospective albums that started coming out a few months ago. The second is released tomorrow, but, looking for it, I saw that the mp3 version of Close-Up, Vol 2, People and Places (Deluxe Edition) is for sale for only $3.99, today and tomorrow only. Worth it, if you have fond memories of her. UPDATE: I found a plausible explanation of the economics of the tour and album here.

Sad news.

I’ve been enjoying Duckworth Lewis Method (UK) with the kids for months now. To be honest I had never even heard of Pugwash before, and The Divine Comedy was just a name on a bunch of posters, not a band/person I knew anything about, so it took me a while to get hold of the album. But it is fabulous, full of catchy tunes, melancholic reflection on the game, and sometimes wry humour. For a while my youngest knew the whole of “Meeting Mr Miandad” by heart. My favourite is “Mason on the Boundary”, which somehow makes me think of the last time I was at the Parks (with Swift and my dad), when I caught glimpse of an elderly man in an MCC tie, whose name tag revealed him to be the godfather of a childhood friend, someone whose exploits around the commonwealth were the stuff of legend in said friend’s family. Almost certainly most of it working for her majesty, if you know what I mean. I didn’t say “hi”. There’s even an indirect tribute to CLR James (in “The Age of Revolution”). That the two best books about cricket are by North American marxists is just about ok; that the best songs are by two Irishmen is odd.

Anyway, my eldest daughter, the only one who has watched a lot of cricket, and who was for a while a fan of a certain leg spinner, laughed out loud when she got to the end of “Jiggery Pokery” for the first time. A whole song about a single ball? Gatting must be mortified. And now, with the approval of Mr Duckworth and Mr Lewis, a 14 year old girl called Claire has made an animated video for it.

And here, though you have to wait a bit (30 seconds in), is the ball in question:

Bob Harris’s 40th anniversary show, here for a few more days. Extraordinary story about David Jacobs and his mum.

What a world. You go and write a too-long post in which you raise the obviously impossible possibility that someone might argue that gay marriage is like cigarettes – i.e. you can get cancer second-hand – while apologizing for the sheer, silly disanalogousness of the analogy. And then Jonah Goldberg comes up with the brilliant idea that if you support gay marriage on libertarian grounds [as Glenn Greenwald does] … why then how can you support anti-smoking legislation? Riddle me that! [click to continue…]

I took up guitar in my middle-age some months ago. I’m teaching myself. I think that’s working out ok. But I have a question for you lurking shredders and orthopaedic medical professionals in the CT commentariat. My fretting fingers work thusly. I can make a nice A-shape chord with my pinky, which has learned to bend back at the top joint in an accommodating sort of way. But my ring finger refuses to bend back. At all. I can’t even get it a few degree back past straight, so I can’t even cover two strings, let alone three. (That whole ‘just let the high E be deadened’ kludge doesn’t work for me. I can’t get the B. One lousy note isn’t going to cut it as an A-shape chord.) So my pinky is getting a lot more A-shape barring work than is, I think, standard for his sort of finger. Yes, some people have real problems. My question is whether there is any healthy and effective way to train my ring finger to ‘break at the joint’. Intuitively the way to do it would be like learning the splits. A bit more each day until you’ve got it. But maybe I’m just going to give myself arthritis for my troubles if I try to become double-jointed where I wasn’t born to be. I’ve asked a few guitarists who have offered variations on ‘you don’t need to be able to bend your joint back, dude, just figure out how to sort of do it with what you’ve got.’ But, with all due respect, I suspect most guitarists can get their top joint to bend back at least a few degrees past straight. All my other fingers do, just not the ring finger. Discuss.

Guitar players: how far back do the top joints of your barring fingers bend? How long did it take you to get it there, if you happen to remember?

About three months ago, Tim Wise published an essay called “Imagine: Protest, Insurgency, and the Workings of White Privilege” that got a certain amount of circulation around blogs and listservs that I follow. Recommending it on Crooked Timber was high on the list of things I was procrastinating about, at the time.

That seems to happen a lot, which is why this is only the fourth time I’ve posted anything here in a year. Anyway, in the meantime, Wise’s thesis has been translated into still more trenchant form by Jasari X. So let me post it without delay, pausing only to credit Kasama.

A year ago I said I liked The Bad Plus’ cover of “Comfortably Numb”. Most everyone else seemed to hate it. So let’s get comparative. I just found out about Scissor Sisters’ cover of “Comfortably Numb”, which I also think is pretty great. I expect most everyone else will hate it. But the question is: which do you hate more? The Bad Plus version or the Scissor Sisters version? (Obviously, since I like them both, I can’t vote.)

UPDATE: The Scissor Sisters’ version is blocked in the US. Try this, per comments.

No, not that lot, obviously. (I hope Rooney put a downpayment on that caravan.) But even I have started to feel just very slightly bad about the recriminations and self-hatred engulfing English football writers at present. So here, as evidence of the sort of thing England is really quite good at, is The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain.

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I used to blog about opera a fair bit here at CT, but I’ve tended to let that go over recent years, after all, I lack the competence of a proper music critic. Still, I would like to report that Saturday’s premiere of WNO’s production of Die Meistersinger, with Bryn Terfel as Hans Sachs, was the most stunning and energizing operatic performance I’ve ever attended. Started and 4, finished at 10, but those hours went awfully quickly. The music was wonderful, Terfel is an awesome presence on the stage, and the chorus – especially in the final act – was simply amazing. The staging, especially in Act 3, was also breathtaking. When you add in that the venue is probably the best one in the UK for opera, it all came together for a terrific evening capped by an energetic standing ovation from the audience. The production will be broadcast (a concert performance) as part of this year’s Proms (Radio 3 and BBC4) so if you are somewhere you can catch it, do so. If you can get hold of any tickets for the remaining performances in Cardiff or Birmingham, do so (and sell your most prized possessions to acquire them). Today’s papers have a couple of reviews: “Andrew Clark”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f878c258-7cca-11df-8b74-00144feabdc0.html in the FT and “Andrew Clements in the Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/jun/20/die-meistersinger-von-nurnberg . What would you have to do to get unqualified enthusiasm from those guys? (UPDATE: Rupert Christiansen in the Telegraph, a much better judged review.)

Mike Harding is good this week. Around 45 minutes in you can hear an astonishing version of Ewan Macoll’s Moving On Song (by the internet-unfriendlily named Pbs 6 — go on, try googling them); then, at 56 minutes, a song I’d never heard about Desperate Dan (that makes 3 songs I know that refer to DD, the others being by the Kinks and the Bonzos — any more?).