S/FJ

"I WAS A LITTLE SUBCONSCIOUS..."

When nothing else works, minor league baseball works. God's weather courtesy of God. 2 out of 3 runs courtesy of DJ Boston. $12 tickets courtesy of Mickey Herbert and HealthNet. Go, Blue!

HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT

Sean Burke writes: "The identity of the Flower Guy belongs to one Michael De Feo of Mamaroneck, NY. He's a generous soul, mailing out stickers to each conscientious admirer who asks."

I like De Feo's work, especially the "blueprint" series, but I don't see any paintings on his site that match the pavement flowers. Do the flower stickers necessarily lead to the flower paintings? (Thanks to Sean also for the link to the Wooster Collective's street art site.)

SEE SHREK 2, GET TWO OF TRACY EMIN'S TICKET STUBS FREE

I left the house yesterday without a book. This was not OK. "Damn," I thought, "It's a long way to BAM." (There followed a failed attempt at versification involving Prince's "Glam Slam" and soccer player Mia Hamm.) The sidewalk saved me, as it so often does. My LA-bound neighbors had left three boxes of books for the taking on the curb. I grabbed Dore Ashton's The New York School and got on the Q. I know nothing about Ashton and only the bare minimum about the NY school of painters. (Jackson Pollock was bald and yelled at people, if I remember correctly.) The train was a-jumbling over the bridge when this passage popped out:

"War prosperity encouraged a consumer mentality, and entrepreneurs in the arts and business became legion. Some chroniclers have pointed out that certain consumer goods and services were in short ration during the war, forcing a great deal of energy in the direction of the arts. Certainly many business organizations, such as the Container Corporation of America, augmented their activities as sponsors and patrons. Even the great department store, Macy's, found space for a large exhibition of what they called 'living' American art, which was selected by Sam Kootz, who had recently published his Modern American Painters. In Macy's press release, dated December 31. 1941, the exhibition was said to reflect a number of pronounced trends in American painting, among them abstraction, expressionism, surrealism, primtivism, realism, and something called texturism. This was all posed with the end in view of contributing to a 'better understanding of our native work.' And significantly, 'in line with Macy's established policy,' the prices were as 'rock-bottom as possible.' This claim was justified, for the prices of the paintings ranged from $24.97 to $249.00. The show included among its 179 works two paintings by Rothko, entitled Oedipus and Antigone, for less than $200 each, several works by Avery ranging from $49.75 to $124, and equally moderately priced works by Bolotowsky, Holty, George L. K. Morris, and Jean Xceron."

Ashton, Dore. 1972. The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning. New York: Penguin.

(Notice that the author of the press release was working on December 31st.)

REMEMBER WHAT YOU LIKE

Hello, calendar. Leaving early for a long weekend, so nothing new until Tuesday. Say hello, ask me a question you want me to answer (you may have missed that below, cuz it's in a jump) or click the below link to read Alissa Quart's poem "Girls I Have Loved."

(Random: I am listening to Snow Patrol, who I am beginning to quite like, and hearing an almost exactly 50/50 split between Lou Barlow and MBV influences. Question: Did rock bands wait for an overly respectful time before biting the MBV tremelo bar bend w/matching vocal? Is it because folks thought MBV would come back? Or was it a genre atittude towards biting? I reckon hip-hop would have jumped on that great "booooo-eee" move and spit out 30 records with the same sound right away. Further: I loved Swervedriver's Mezcal Head and recall that it borrowed some moves, but did any bands really shamelessly bite the whole MBV stee? I am asking, for real.)

Alissa Quart:

GIRLS I HAVE LOVED

1.

R. snickers when I say I listen to public radio. Radio should be private, as in the song “Private Eyes” or a secreted social intelligence. New York exhales recession. I am ten. R. is 11 and not rich enough though she lives over a garden. Her family eats spaghetti too often and she glamorizes her bunk bed. Still, the acne on the sides of her nose enchant, two twin flags of adolescence, the miserable mount awaiting me. With extremely combed hair, luncheon foods wrapped in plastic, and old lady good handwriting, R. will win some prize, I think. She tells me to buy Best of Records. I give us code names after spices. R. is Hot Pepper. I am Cinnamon: placating, invisible. The grown-ups’ jacket pins announce their subjectivities. They are small parts of the death of punk. I write reports on the Rainforest. I would like to live there. God is George Washington on the front of the quarter.

2.

At twelve, T. looks like a horse but is too tasteful to be a horse girl. She has the long fingers of pianist. She does not have the temperament of one who practices. Tall and smart looking, she is not sixth-grade pretty. She is practicing for when she will be the living sign of young sex, in three years, impressively wry about boobs and tatas. She smokes downstairs. I don’t know where that is. She never does anything bad for the first time, has always done it already. I wonder of the latch key kid cosmopolites, the ones who don’t bunt their softballs. What do they do when they are alone? What does everybody do all day and what do they talk about? After all, secondary sex characteristics only appear to me when I look them up in the Woman’s Health Manual. My favorite dirty word is abortion.

3.

A pugilistic blonde, C. affects a half-hearted rejection of the New York rich girls that have always embraced her. “What’s your gambit?” she says. I am nineteen. Her pale blonde head and her skirt shimmers. Her self-conviction is bottomless. I learn from C. the inches permissible during the return of the flair jean—three. The proper coding for melancholia—a Neapolitan silent screen star crying. A dinner—four spoons of tahini in front of a 1960’s photo of Cuba. Generic cigarettes—proud poverty. The Good—marginal parents. Knowledge—to be worn lightly but constantly cited, and never finding its expression in the Law. Beauty —ostensibly invisible but always in use, like drugs.

4.

Then there’s diminutive, ductile, duplicitous Z., spoiled, bat mitzvah girl for the ages F., everyone-thinks-I-am-beautiful I., tall imposing sophistic E., exacting, cruel motherly L., shining, willfully complacent, star-mad J., shaky lyrical suicide-to-be P.

5.

Girls I have loved cover their eyes with fine shiny hair, tug on their small ears and wraithish wrists, emanate throaty laughs, heal occasional infections, powder over their impoverishments. Every dyad is a chance for them to deploy their own romance. They are vicious protectors with rice papery skin, slang-slingers, well-scented, brilliant, teases, baiters, evaders, wise-asses, nice people, self-adorers. I am leaving out the girls I have left.

MOVING UP

Let's end the posting day with a salute to the sun. (This flower isn't heliotropic more than twice a day, so this is not exactly a scientific tribute.)

(I've never posted any of these flowers, but I've got a bunch filed away. Does anybody know anything about this artist? He/she has left flowers all over NYC, from midtown down to Tribeca. I can't tell how old they are.)

NO BONES IN ICE CREAM

After some pauses to water the children and find synonyms for "complicit," we will indeed return to the Merrittocracy*, and we will be loaded. Nightvision, special guests, Althusser—the whole black ops crew. In the meantime, if you're not busy doing The Tabasco to Nina Sky's "Move Ya Body" or collecting information on your neighbors, why not spare a thought for some of the following mechanically reproduced recording artists?

* Courtesy of Glenn Kenny.

Martina Topley-Bird played Monday night at the Tribeca Grand. I am impressed that anybody can play that wack fake-LA bar and not come off like a clown. But what is up with showing an artist's video while she is on stage? When the room is not the size of Madison Square Garden? Cornballz. MT-B’s new material is of that high-suggestion, low-hooks, blues-derived school founded by PJ Harvey. MT-B is more “light candle and recline” than “light fuse and step away”, which means she suffers the lack of hooks pretty acutely.

One thing that should not have worked but did: A skinny white guy dressed up like John Lurie in Stranger Than Paradise was beatboxing and playing harmonica at the same time. Sounds like "avert your eyes" type of shit, right? It just killed. I couldn't get enough of that dude. Four songs was all we needed: think of shows that would be great at 12 minutes, deadly at 40. And so on. Like driving and having children, playing live is an activity you should think through calmly before undertaking.

Aren’t the failures of the left all wrapped up in Northern State, the poster children for good intentions? I can't even finish this new All City disc. Can't do it.

Would people just bug out if the Woodentops came out now? That 18 cups of coffee punkbeat and the hospital corners on the harmonies? They will wrack your soul, girl.

The incredibly watermarked and copy-protected new Corrs CD, Borrowed Heaven, is available for my audition only if I click my heels and hold a piece of paper infused with a watermarked profile of Shania Twain up to the sun at 3:15 PM. When I do all that, things seem as they should.

To declare my solidarity with Puffy's very Whitney biennial sample of a sample on "I Don't Wanna Know," I will sample Michael sampling Douglas and invite you to email me some questions. Considering that I never finished (though I will) the Big Black or Eddie Kendricks entries solicited in the jukebox, this looks like bad odds for you. It does allow you to circumvent my dumb suggestions, though.

NEVER SCARED

What? What? Excuse me? You thought emails and bulletin boredom would throw some drag on our tires? Put a stick in our spokes? Get someone here shook? Sunshine, you're dropping quarters in our slot. We love that free, unchecked talk and we salute anyone who signs their name. Keep that ball in the air. Group hug.

TESTY? FIE!

Damn, who does the blogosphere think she is? We're fooling ourselves—Christ's people got 'nuff shots to share! No ambivalent qualifiers here.

THIS IS FOR THE GOOGLER IN YOU

You would think that finding a list of the biggest selling hip-hop albums on the internet would be easy. I, however, could not. To fix this, I went to the RIAA site and pulled a list off the “Bestsellers” page.

Some technical notes:

1. The website says "This chart was generated on 8/25/2003," which is impossible, since Speakerboxxxxxx hadn't sold 4.5 million copies by August 25th.

2. The RIAA counts any 2 CD set sold as two units sold, meaning that Life After Death has sold 5 million copies, and Sboxx has sold 4.5.

3. The RIAA counts units shipped as units sold. SoundScan counts units sold at retails outlets that record for SoundScan as units sold. Billboard combines all sorts of magical data. These are three different ways of seeing the data. None of these are truly accurate account of album sales. Hip-hop, for instance, is adversely affected by the fact that many regional mom & pops don’t report to SoundScan. Unless I am mistaken, record clubs like Columbia House and BMG do not report sales to SoundScan, but I may be wrong about that.

4. The RIAA list is ordinal but unnumbered. I extracted the hip-hop records, kept the order they were in and added the ranking numbers.

5. LIST FORMAT: Rank, millions sold, title.

6. These figures are only for the U.S. World data to come soon.

7. I added Kid Rock's Devil & TLC Crazysexycool. (Thank you, readers and correctors.) Both of these albums were helped by the blurry margins that pushed their sales above those of strictly beats+rhymes albums, but they're still hip-hop albums and, more particularly, people buying these albums experienced them as hip-hop.

THE BIG DOGS

1. 11 million, KID ROCK “Devil Without a Cause” (Lava)

2. 11 million, TLC “Crazysexycool” TLC (LaFace)

3. 10 million, HAMMER “Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em” (Capitol)

4. 10 million (5 million), NOTORIOUS B.I.G. “Life After Death” (Bad Boy/Arista)

5. 9 million, EMINEM “The Marshall Mathers LP” (Interscope)

6. 9 million, 2 PAC “All Eyez On Me” (Death Row/Polygram)

7. 9 million, 2 PAC “Greatest Hits” (Interscope)

8. 9 million, BEASTIE BOYS “Licensed To Ill” (Def Jam Records)

9. 9 million (4.5 million), OUTKAST “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below” (Arista)

10. 9 million, WILL SMITH “Big Willie Style” (Columbia)

11. 8 million, LAURYN HILL “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” (Ruffhouse/Columbia)

12. 8 million, NELLY “Country Grammar” (Universal Records)

13. 8 million, EMINEM “The Eminem Show” (Interscope)

14. 7 million, VANILLA ICE “To The Extreme” (SBK)

15. 7 million, PUFF DADDY & THE FAMILY “No Way Out” (Bad Boy/Arista)

16. 6 million, NELLY “Nellyville” (Universal Records)

17. 6 million, DR. DRE “Dr. Dre 2001” (Interscope)

18. 6 million, THE FUGEES “The Score” (Ruffhouse/Columbia)

19. 5 million, DMX “...And Then There Was X” (Def Jam Records)

20. 5 million, JAY-Z “Hard Knock Life, Volume 2” (Roc-A-Fella Records)

21. 5 million, SALT 'N PEPA “Very Necessary” (London)

SKITS MYSTERIOUSLY DELETED FROM THE ORIGINAL VERSION OF DE LA SOUL IS DEAD

"When I’m not shooting pigeons out of the sky with a homemade nail gun or giving myself tonsure, I’m listening to the Buzzcocks’ Inventory, because you never should have formed a fucking band, you fuck. I see you, hiding behind your Ikea shacket hanger, you gimp."

"When I’m not cataloguing issues of Wallpaper and looking at upskirt shots of Kruder & Dorfmeister, I am listening to John Martyn’s Solid Air!"

"When I am not shredding documents and trying to remember who was in my first semester MFA seminar, I am listening to the Palace Brothers because, God help me, nothing makes sense anymore and I can barely pay my mortgage and my throat is scratchy."

"When I’m not evading responsibility for my actions and trying to steal old ketchup packets from my assistant, I’m listening to Frankie Beverly and Maze because one’s age cohort is everything!"

CA-CHUNK

New shit up in the (vault).

YOU'VE TRIED THE REST, NOW TRY THE OTHER REST

Today, we spread love like birdseed. Thank you to Jeff and Hua (the new Stan Mack) for alerting me to Federation’s spastically good new single, "Hyphy." If E-40 got his Rolodex in shape, he could take the cameo crown from Ludacris. Hua gets extra love for also introducing me to Juana Molina. In this year of the rookie, those of us both weak of spirit and easy of heart could be falling like Darrick Martin every few hours. Right now, Juana Molina is speaking to us and us alone. We are all a-quiver about the upcoming Carnegie Hall show. (My steadier, better self is betting on Keren Ann for year-end dominance.)

Alanis—relevant by commercial fiat and still having a go, but why did she lead with "Everything,” a song that not even E-40 could redeem? If we want Kate Bush metal with that baked-in whiff of “Kashmir,” “Spineless” and “Eight Easy Steps” woulda been much more best. Not that we want to discourage the whole “me and nothing but me” trope. But.

Album the 1990s did not appreciate: Cell’s Living Room. The Nirvana Youth train stalled before these guys even got their tickets punched. The new Rock is Back tent should have them headlining. Come on back, guys–there is no shame in this game. (Anyone who wants some can get in for less than a subway fare now.) This album has better legs than, hell, most mindie rock albums of the day. While you're at it, also buy Swell's Well...?, which has outlasted many albums it sounds just like.

I, like, all forgot about two-step and shit. And it’s, like, all steady chocklit donuts and zeppole when the mix does bubble. The excellently-named Syrup Girls DJ duo have released a new mix CD called Pop A Boner. Familiar only with their first mix, which could be over a year old, I am guessing the new title is earned, unless they’ve moved on to electroclash or something. The links section suggets that UK garage is still the main dish.

More soon....

THIS ONE'S FOR ZOWIE

We walked a balloon to school this morning and ran into a woman who got a little stalk-y with her child-friendly routine. "Here, let me tie it on your wrist." Let? But you just did it. Don't people catch a vibe when they're terrifying children? Or has their inner script just taken over and driven them to freestyle grandparenting, no matter the cost? I am so in favor of the social connection—just go slow, freelancers.

NOW WE KNOW WHY AMBIENT MUSIC AND THE STOCK MARKET BOOMED SIMULTANEOUSLY

This pretty much takes care of itself.

ADD 1 TSP. CRUNK, 5 OZ. EXPLANATION OF SCREW

There are a lot of words that, once used, demand some kind of diluting agent if you want them to end up meaning what you think they mean. “Hip-hop” and “blog” are two such words. Say “hip-hop” and you push a hundred distantly related buttons in a million different brains: “That music you hear coming from those big vehicles,” “the golden age of the Roland 808,” “my favorite music ever,” “something my kids listen to which makes me vaguely nervous,” “that’s that shit!” “1987,” “2001,” “the commercial force,” “the way of thinking about samples,” etc. “Blog” carries a similarly huge and geometrically increasing load: “self-centered rambling,” “unedited,” “something about people in New York who do karaoke,” “something to do with the web,” “that site where you can see the Lego version of the Bible,” “New York narcissists,” “New York media clowns,” etc. If you use a word like “hip-hop” or “blog,” there’s a necessary moment where you have to contextualize the word, apologize for it, narrow down the conversation, exclude definitions you don’t like. (Doesn’t mean you have the last word on the word—it will do its work regardless, i.e. “Don’t think of a pink elephant.” And wait—do any words simply, to use Saussure's terms, denote? Does any word not connote? Am I a little sorry I started this? No. But I'd like to rebuild it all on a slow, summer afternoon.) Yesterday, after a brief phone conversation, a definition flashed through my head: Blogs should be whatever you were going to say before you thought of a reason not to say it. Away from the editor’s demands, outside the parent company’s parenting, and against any disincentives to frank critique, you throw up whatever’s running through your veins and making you feel itchy or happy or mad or simply different than you did a moment before. If it becomes something else, is there any point? (I suppose the pictures fall into a different category.)

HOW ARE YOU? HAVE A SEAT.

The gatekeeper tells me there is a small crowd moving up the driveway. (Hold on, let me just put my robe on.) I don't have enough on hand for everybody, so I won't be able to entertain in the way I'd like to. I can probably find something in the fridge. I've got the new 8-Ball and MJG—maybe you'd like to hear that? Do you like Rolie Polie Olie? We can just make it BYOB and leave the door open.

NOTE

Thirty-one days before this collapse, we ran up and down the terminal, waiting to board. For the second time in less than a year, we looked up and asked, "How did they build this thing? It's so cool."

HOT CHILD IN THE CITY

So, you go out, and it works. Everyone's so foxy that their foxiness conducts the train. Couples are lying on each other and bending around backwards to stroke hair they can't see. The train stops, the circuit breaks and you help a woman in a green poncho carry her child up the stairs at Bedford Avenue. The child blows you a kiss and then you walk 57 blocks to a party where one guy tells you he's lactating and another tells you he has good hooker karma and, this being New York, the guys are fifteen seconds behind the girls and, this being the new weather, it's hot 'n' humid enough in May to keep you off your toes but not yet so hot you're unconscious and then it 's all over because the vinho verde runs out and you say, damn, that's good, but compared to what?

Large, oversized ups to Michael, Alissa, Kenny, Elizabeth, Jane and Ange.

SHOPPING FOR ORANGES AT A HARDWARE STORE

Jennifer Lena:

"Hornby allows this thing called “rock” (which is sometimes replaced by this other thing called “pop” because sometimes—all the time?—they’re redundant) to retain an essential core and corpus, despite the fact that he wants us to see how much change has gone on—from the mostly good rock of his youth (or late twenties—are they the same?) to the mostly “angry, weird, perverse, melancholy and world-weary” rock of today.

He’s got the “change” and “stasis” balls in the air because he can get us to accept that rock music reflects the essential qualities of youth: “energy,…wistful yearning,…inexplicable exhilaration,…sporadic sense of invincibility,…[and] hope that stings like chlorine.”

I can’t decide: is this Hornby’s life experience, or the one Rolling Stone told him he had? Moreover, even if this imagined emotional adolescence is experienced by some people, is it as universal as he suggests? (For that matter, has rock ever meant one thing to all people? Did the music of the “late 60’s and early 70’s” or the music of the “90s”?)

Moreover, even if there is/was a clique (of, I imagine, white suburban boys) who have this experience and rock music “articulated these feelings,” it is a dull student of popular culture who projects that association into the present. Rock music is not, and hasn’t been for some years, the genre of teen fans.

The RIAA reports that over the last ten years (and the trend is stronger over the last 30 years) rock music’s market share has shrunk from 35.1% in 1994 to 25.2% in 2003. Pop music’s not faring much better (despite the re-classification of much “R&B/Urban” and “Rap/Hip-Hop” into it’s ranks), dropping 1.4% during that same period. In contrast, rap sales have risen 5.4%. Moreover, over the last 30 years, rock music consumers skew significantly older—meaning, rock music consumers are older than they ever have been before.

So, rock music can’t do what Hornby wants because now-rock—or, really—now-pop is a different animal, and servicing a different public. To the extent that rock music sold itself as fuel for dis-comforting comfort, well, he really should like the “high-minded cult-rock” he buys, and thinks is great (because a lot of it gets bought by ex-pat rockers).

Hornby gives a new-ish solution to the old question: what happened to good ol’ rock-n-roll? He proscribes a middle-passage between high and low art. Strangely, this middle passage is “committed and authentic and intelligent, but that sets out to include, rather than exclude.” Well, if we’re comfortable universalizing the suburban male experience, why not? Let’s have it. The world needs to give Springsteen and James Taylor and Clapton more Grammys. But I insist—this does not require nerve, unless you’re talking about the nerve to make a copy of a copy of a copy. (Nor is it, I might add, committed, authentic, intelligent or universalizing, but I doubt I could convince him of that.)

Speaking of which, on this “digested/regurgitated” issue: Am I the only one who wonders if Hornby could derive the source for even 25% of the samples Public Enemy used in one song—let’s say “Night of the Living Baseheads?” If he can do that, I’ll concede this digestion point. Otherwise, he’s guilty of the sin of omission."

TOO MANY

If you're in New York City this weekend, consider going to this memorial for Lizzy Mercier Descloux, someone who very much deserved some of this revival juice going around. Her records are giving me great pleasure and I recommend them both without reservation.

I GET THIS FEELING KRS-ONE IS NOW SHARON'S PRESS OFFICER

"Deliberate? I meants to de-liberate someone, to stop them from being free. And we wouldn't do that, nope. Not us. We like to make people free, to set them free, to send them into orbit."

HEAVEN 17A-

A friend writes from São Paolo:

"Standing on line for three hours to clear immigration because, since January, all US citizens are photographed and fingerprinted, and there's only one immigration official at a time who performs that function. Getting into the cab and having the driver instantly switch the radio channel from Brazilian music to American pop (I asked him to change it back; he didn't speak English; "musico do Brazil?" I said, and for the entire hour-long trip we listened to great Brazilian music I've never heard before—except right before we turned into the hotel, when a song I recognized came on and my driver, who had said literally not one word to me, turned around and said "Caetano Veloso!"). Staying in a hotel that has the most majestic marble bathroom I've ever seen and is right across the street from an entire neighborhood of favelas—which are not like anything I've ever seen before, even traveling in Southeast Asia in the 80s."

JACK YOUR BODY, GET TWO BODIES FREE

Interaction Two:

1:40 PM, Wednesday.

I am the Virgin Times Sqaure Megastore. Farley "Jackmaster" Funk is DJing in honor of the Trax Records 20th Anniversary Collection. He is playing something by Steven "Silk" Hurley, which I only know because he tells us. He points out that Screamin' Rachel and Red Alert are in the house and indeed they are. They look exactly like they always look.

It is unclear how to receive Jackmaster's performance. He is stranded way up high in the hexagonal glass tower that runs the height of the store. His performance is being projected on TV screens all through the ground floor, but the camera sees only his shoulder and his back. If we crane our necks and watch him work in real time, we get a similarly obstructed view from a different angle. If we try to place ourselves in accordance with traditional stage performance rules—i.e., looking up at the performer—we block the escalators. It is very hard to be at this event or perform in a way that registers as "being at the Jackmaster Funk thing." I drift away to a listening station, because I espy Beyoncé Wembleying at me. One set of headphones brings me the sounds of Franz Ferdinand and I cannot figure out how to get the properly, crazily in love audio track. By the time I have marshaled my facilities to the task, the image has shifted to the video for Prince's "Musicology."

The audio is low, unadjustably so. Farley's house/house/house music bleeds in. The "Musiciology" video presents a boy dancing in his room to his pop's soul records and singing into a vacuum cleaner. We cut to Prince performing in some gangster (30s) era club, saluting "Earth, Wind and Fire," as well as "Chuck D and Jam Master Jay," now that he simply can't not. It's a JB vamp, barely a song. I am happy just to watch Prince being a reduced but not inaccurate version of himself, throwing out his arms and voting, over and over, for the funk. The woman playing bass is making me kinda dreamy when Jackmaster Dr. Mr. Funk lets the slipmat go under an unusually loud and gospelly track. It's what the dancers in the video are acting like they're hearing. Prince & The Devolution's "70s funk" wedding band pap wouldn't make anyone do The Wop. The tap dancers and zoot-suited folks are having the good time that all of us in the lobby should be having. To teach everybody a lesson, I buy some CDs: the new Alanis, the international version of Come On Over and the acapella CD(!) of The Black Album. This subversive act of consumption catches the cashiers off guard. They are speechless.

EL CRISPY'S

Interaction One:

10:11 AM, Wednesday:

I am walking up West Broadway, heading home. I am listening to Sonic Youth's "Silver Rocket." As the song busts apart in the middle and the bedsprings start playing the walls, I see a clump of fire rucks in front of what used to be El Teddy's, a Mexican restaurant and trendoid bar best known for what was on the roof (see above). The facade features a magical awning tricked out a la Gaudi with multi-colored tiles and bits of mirror. For a long time, there was a classic Canal Street hodgepodge of color and cheap electronics in the front window: dayglo wheels spinning before a mirror, bathed in black light and reflections from ambient light caught by the mirror.

Someone bought the building several years ago and announced he was turning it into a single-family dwelling. "When is El Teddy's actually closing?" became a constant neighborhood question. There was an abortive to make the place a landmark, but it turned out to be not old enough. (That's from memory, not Nexis.)

In the last few weeks, crews started gutting the place. At a moment I am sorry I missed, the Statue of Liberty crown was removed. And today, the roof, the roof was on fire. Someone did need some water, so the fire department did arrive to prevent the motherfucker from burning. The smoke was limited, at least from my vantage point. Neighbors watched from the fire escapes. Something I did not understand: A fireman on the roof (only about thirty feet up from the pavement) tied a rope to what looked like a bleach bottle, with the number 10 Sharpied on it, and threw it down to firefighters below. Someone caught it and put it down. And that was that.

I kept walking and on came Remarc's "Sound Murderer (Loafin' In Brockley mix)." That classic '94 sound—"Amen" breaks cut up and strung from every light fixture, some 808 kicks for a bassline and straight ragga yelling. That's all you need. But Remarc sprinkles some extra sugar on the hot-as-fuck griddle of the beat, and lets it crystallize and smoke: someone whistling "If I Were A Rich Man," strings from an old soul record. A bit more than the track needed and so welcome. I can't get enough of this moment in production. It sounds, as it always has, like a big orange Gerber daisy forcing its way up through the topsoil and punching you in the face on its way towards the sun.

ELVIN JONES, R.I.P.

Respect the god.

CROSSFADE

4:45 PM, Tuesday evening:

I am on the Q train, re-reading Geoffrey O'Brien's Sonata For Jukebox. Precisely as I begin reading the passage reproduced below, three musicians step onto the train at Union Square. A young man is carrying an upright bass (there's a big rubber stop on the bottom peg, like something you'd see on the end of an orthopedic cane). Two middle-aged men follow, one carrying a six-string nylon acoustic guitar, the other an accordion. The guitar player is wearing an electric blue shirt, a diamond loop in each earlobe and white cowboy boots. His black hair is restrained by a black cord, creating a gentle pony-mullet. The accordion player is wearing a white cowboy shirt with black piping. The subway starts up and the trio waits for a few seconds before starting a loping, Mexican version of the blues. (I should be able to ID the form, but I can't.) The words include something about "el rey": the rest is lost below the rumble of the train and my high school Spanish.

This excerpt is from pages 57 and 58 of Sonata For Jukebox. O'Brien's grandfather, Bob Owens, was the leader of the Rainbow Club Orchestra, "a bright episode in the entertainment world of eastern Pennsylviania during the early '30s":

"The Rainbow Club Orchestra was a ten-piece dance band made up largely of untrained musicians scuffling to survive in a region suffering from the worst effects of the Depression. Eking out a living as mine workers or door-to-door salesmen or factory hands, barely finding time to rehearse, lugging instruments, cumbersome music stands, the metal trumpet hats for that "burnished brass sound," and stacks of arrangements from one small town to another along narrow and dilapidated mountain roads, they were lucky if they could make five bucks a many for many hours of continuous playing. They managed to keep it together for five or six years. They never recorded or even had an offer. Their arranger eventually committed suicide. They disappeared into that limbo where unrecorded dance bands play without interruption for the ghosts of the unremembered.

Behind the recorded music from that era that I heard as a child, their absent music hovered. Ignorant of nearly everything about music except for the fact that recordings existed, I was unduly disturbed by the idea of music drifting off into the ether without leaving a trace behind. Did that mean it was for nothing?"

INNOCUOUS SUBURBAN MUSIC SOMEHOW CLEARER WHEN PAID FOR IN EUROS

It is my duty to inform you that this compilation is now available. As its big sister (Tubes 2003) pretty much ran my house last year, this is no small event. Little sister couldn't have chosen a better first track. Report TK.

(Addendum: Yannick Noah has a track on here. Lisa Miskovsky and Buck 65 have taught us that a background in professional sports is nothing be afraid of. Not yet, anyway.)

PROTECT WHAT IS BETWEEN YOUR HEAD AND YOUR SHOULDERS (FDA REPORT FORTHCOMING)

I hope to return to the differences between "clueless button-pushing" and "tin ear" and "functional racism" and "post-Paul Lynde vs. post-minstrelsy" but right now I just want a huge wave of fire to engulf the entire earth so we can start all over. "Murder!" as translated by the 21st century politics of langauge machine: "It depends what you mean by death."

PS: God is speaking through the iPod today. "Tear Out My Eyes," Tricky (9:45 AM); "The Cold Part," Modest Mouse; "My Lord," David Banner; "Through Your Head" Jae Millz (when you can't get Jada, call Jae!); "I Feel Love," Donna Summer; "The Pinocchio Theory," Bootsy's Rubber Band; "Breed," Nirvana; "The Legionnaire's Lament," The Decembrists; "# 5 (Go Bang)," Dinosaur L; "It Must Be Summer," Fountains of Wayne (1:32 PM); "Happy Birthday," Altered Images; "Track 21," from DJ Revolution's The Breaks...in High-Fidelity; "Directions/e.e.cummings," from DJ Spooky's Rhythm Science (how did it know to segue two snare-heavy beats in the same BPM region?); "Out of Nowhere," Athlete (not sure about that one, but we'll let it go); "Detached," Caetano Veloso; "The Back of Love," Echo & The Bunnymen; "Big Bad John," Big John Hamilton; "On My Way," Ben Kweller; "Genesis," Nas; "Elves," The Fall. Then Mission of Burma fucked it up. Good run. (2:37 PM.)

WHO SAID "GRIMY" FIRST? ONYX? I ACTUALLY DON'T KNOW

If you have the music without the rhyming, it's OK. And if you have the rhyming but with American music, it's OK. And if you get someone who's OK at both, it's OK. Just as it would have been in 1981 and 1988 and 1993, the best representation of this localized music would be a blazing compilation, a mix of debris from the initial explosion and packets of dust from the regional fallout. The proper cross-section would pivot on a brief footprint—a month, a week, even—and swing out laterally through neighborhoods, catching impressions of the short lives and springy muscles and wild guesses and hail marys that construct an informal brief on behalf of someone's new world.

PROG ROCK

Hope to give a short report later today on this conference, or at least the Saturday portion.

Shockingly, it didn't take me all night to come to the conclusion that Stephen "Southern Strategy" Merritt is full of ish. I will try to get to that, too, and maybe post bits from the emails I've received. (Keep sending them, but if you don't want them posted, let me know.)

LEGACIES, PART TWO

I can't tell you how happy I am that the first thing my older son asked me about when he woke up was this. I'm even handling the fact that his favorite team is the Giants. Things change, brah. Nothing changes, grasshopper. When I was exactly Sam's age, I was paying unusually close attention to the Atlanta Braves.

HOUSEKEEPING

If Ian MacKaye and Nellie got married, it would be like that whole Tom Cruz thing. (So lame—just looking for a place to put this link.)

COUNTERPOINT

To keep things interesting, let's turn it around. Let's act as if I'm wrong; let's say that my results do not hold up because they are drawn from an either non-representative or too-small sample. Let's see what it feels like to believe that, on this day in rock history, Merritt just happened to not like OutKast ("innocuous" music for suburban teeangers), Beyoncé (just an outfit), Britney (just an image) and Justin (just a sex symbol). Merritt just happened to pick a bunch of sort-of-OK records by white folks for his Playlist because, like anyone else might, he's describing his personal jukebox. Let's add this interview, courtesy of Douglas Wolk:

"a bit from an interview I did with Stephin M. in late 1999:

'What I'd like to see in the year 2000 is the abandonment of music being categorized by the race of the artist, or the perceived race of the audience. It's disgusting, and I would like to be amazed that it's still happening... [Eliminating] racism and sexism would be major improvements, and it would make an enormous difference in the music industry. It would be really nifty if black people were allowed to make records that didn't have to constantly refer to very recent
traditions of black radio. It's absurd, and at this point, it's as though the only thing the American public were allowed to hear were "coon songs" and ragtime. It's worse, I think, than it was in 1899.'

He went on to wish that there'd be more top 40 stations, & noted that the only stations that presented themselves top 40 right now generally didn't play hip-hop, & therefore didn't count as the real thing."

I need to go to a birthday party, marinate on the above, check for jerking knees, re-holster my revolver, put some ice on my dome. etc. I will return tomorrow with that semi-new shit, be it chastened, revised, renewed or refried. Your input is welcome, as always.

GERRYMANDERING, ON ICE

I am getting the picture now: The new idea for Playlist at The New York Times is to find some rockist cracker and let him loose, because Rock Is Back (no, wait, that's too dumb-sounding, we don't actually want to embrace all of rock); White People Are Back (no, that's racist, we know that's bad); Funny, Self-Deprecating People Are Back (no--that's too stuffy, like the old Times); Rock Is Back! Right, that's it, everyone will know what we mean. That albumoriffic system of meaning and blindness is "back," contrary to empirical data and a quick spin of your radio radio dial, but so what? Let's watch Stephen Merritt swing a scythe through the fields of popular music with a blindfold on. Huh! Seven "great" new pop records and not a person of color involved in a single one. That's one magical, coincidence-prone scythe you got there, Stephen. It's just his taste, man. It doesn't mean anything. They had Usher in there a few weeks ago. Lighten up.

You could unpack the idea of Morrissey as the "best lyricist in rock" or the castrati fantasy or the differential treatment of people using electronic instruments. You could go back to the New York interview and note how eager Merritt is to dismiss Beyoncé, OutKast, Britney and Justin, not just as singers and songwriters but as bearers of meaning. That's a bias. Two women, three people of color and one white artist openly in love with black American music. That's who he's biased against. You could say there's no pattern here and that taste indicates nothing more than individual psychology. You would then, hopefully, let me get a taste of whatever has made you so HIGH. Immediate action steps? Get that fucking chihuahua away from me, NOW.

PAPER SCREENS

(Photo by Elaine Didyk)

JL Borges, so fond of links, works equally well as founding father for both pro-digi and pro-paper advocates. This story doesn't make it any easier to guess which team he was really on, though it's likely he would have rejected the idea of "teams" out of hand.

WAS THERE A SPECIAL ON ALBERT GOLDMAN BIOS LAST WEEK OR WHAT?

I don't know what I'm doing giving Dave Grohl special rockist credit when so many people are earnestly huffing and puffing in pursuit of the title "Most Wack Set of Unexamined Biases in Town." I have a stomach ache and must hie to the schoolroom with my wee bairn, so please help me and gather some of the following berries at your leisure: "What's the belief system operating here? How is the music being heard, or not? What fucking year is it?" Let me know what you find. (Link via Matos.)

(Postscript: Obviously, Merritt is on some epater les everybody shit. He knows enough to know OutKast are crit faves, and dissing them is going to be evidence of his brave individualism. He also knows enough to know exactly who OutKast are and what they're doing.)

THIS DAY IN HIP-HOP, TWENTY YEARS AGO

What? What? I thought you said something. Uh-huh. Nah. Didn't think so.

PEOPLE IN THE MIDDLE AGES HAD IT GOING ON

Straight-up genius web ephemera, via Days of Leisure.

IF IT'S M.E.S. ON YOUR GRANNY'S BLOG, IT'S STILL A FALL INTERVIEW

A little late, and this matters not.

THE ARM LIFTS THE RECORD

Joe, Douglas and Julianne are the only ones to drop quarters so far. Soon, we will hear their selections coming through the tinny speakers, digi and loud: Big Black, Eddie Kendricks and a medley of numbers 17, 4, 8, 16 and 3.

COMBS SETTLES ON FINAL STAGE NAME: SEAN MACKAYE

From allhiphop.com: "Heavy D. has signed a deal with Sean "P. Diddy" Combs' Bad Boy label. In a groundbreaking agreement, Heavy will receive 100 percent of the profits from his Bad Boy release after the label recoups costs for producing the untitled LP. "Puff & I have been friends forever, were family," Heavy D. told AllHipHop.com. "He gave me the most incredible deal." A single from the LP titled "It's Your Birthday," was recently leaked to radio. The LP is slated for a fall release."

(Leaked? That's your idea of leaking?)

OUTOFYOURFUCKINGMINDSOURCING AT ITS NEWEST AND MOST NEW

That picture down there of Prince's eyeball is not a representation of the new Prince CD but rather a picture of an ad in a Paris metro stop. (It is, to date, the largest picture of Prince I've seen.) We already know that, by reclaiming his name and rejoining the major label promo stream, Prince landed his first Top 10 Billboard debut in years. The album didn't do quite as well on the French charts, but people I talked to before the release date were unanimously stoked about Musicology. Aside from hating Bush, it was the one real consensus I encountered. (How long nostalgia will keep dude on any charts has yet to be seeon.)

I sorta like "Dear Mr. Man," from Musicology, though I can't help wishing Prince, The New Donny Hathaway, would make way for, say, Prince, The New Lightnin' Rod, the kind of guy who named names and not just those of basketball teams* and Bible passages. (I was also a little surprised to hear that Prince, The New D'Angelo, had taken over from Prince, The Old Prince, but not a lot surprised.)

I was hoping he might come with something like "Cockhead International," and it might go like this: "Follow the money (eeeeh)/and you'll find the friends./Follow the blood/and you'll find the ends./Don't want your training/don't want your tips./Mothersuckers need to stay home and stop making so many trips./Why don't you come to anybody's funeral, Mr. London?"

*Big props to our friend Chris Ryan, whose basketball blog, Chauncey Billups, is moving on up to the east side. Righteous.

PICK YOUR LEGACY

Today, all four hours of it, has been bad for fatherhood. The public reasons are obvious and everywhere; the domestic cross-talk too specific to unpack. It is an unbearably big thought to hold, sometimes, this bringing of people into the world.

A few minutes ago, someone generously forwarded to me a thing that would have made my own father really, truly happy, in an involuntary way, in a way that speaks to what he cared about and hoped I would also care about. (The link will expire tomorrow and that seems right.)

ROCKISMALISM

The actual campaign for Fuse TV, a product I know nothing about, is a not actual campaign for a not actual candidate named Haymish. You can see this double dribble advertisement circulating through NYC on the sides of buses. One of the taglines being used is "No health care for one-hit wonders." This is the kind of rockist piffle we do not truck with, so fuck you, Haymish, and the bus you rode in on.

In the same vein, here's an old item we'd like to shit on right now. (I wasn't around when it hit, so don't email me your little red pen marks.) Should I ever be asked to guest lecture on the subject of rockism, and I can't convince Mark Sinker to do everyone a favor and take the gig, I will hand the following clipping to the youth. They need read no further than this passage from Dave Grohl's Playlist, originally in the New York Times Arts & Leisure Section:

"BRITNEY SPEARS -- Take it from me, the airplane videos get 'em every time. Long gone are the days of Britney's high school pep-rally dance routines. Proving once again that she will not be outdone when it comes to pop sleaze, she's back with ''Toxic'' (Jive), four minutes of ''Showgirls'' meets 007. Here, you get three flavors to choose from: Britney the blonde, Britney the brunette and Britney the redhead. Without being nasty enough to really cause a stir, she manages to make out with about 27 guys in the course of a few minutes, although it's hard to keep track, what with all the hair dye going on. Oh yeah, then there's the song. Kudos to the mad genius who finally wrote the musical equivalent of brainwash. Deprogram me, now, please."

The day Dave Grohl writes any "brainwash" as focused and tough as "Toxic," he may actually convert someone who's never heard Nirvana. The day he gets over his "female desire = sluttiness" problem, we'll take his face off the dart board. (She kisses about three or four guys, Dave, if memory serves, and what are you worried about in the first place?) And when he realizes that parodies are fair game for everybody, he will become, on that day, a man.

THREE DATA FOR THE PRICE OF ONE HERE ON PLURAL DAY

We learn in today's Times that President Bush has seen the new videos and photos of U.S. citizens abusing Iraqis.

Mr. Bush's spokesman, Scott McClellan, characterized the president's reaction as "one of deep disgust and disbelief that anyone who wears our uniform would engage in such shameful and appalling acts."

"Who wears our uniform"—interesting. Try the statement again without these words. Shouldn't it be notable that humans would engage in these acts at all? Props, though, to authors Richard W. Stevenson and Carl Hulse for the "courts-martial" plural.

Much larger props to our man Luc Sante for this editorial. The Popeil Pocket Nightmare: It's porn, but turn it over and it's a lynching!

In happier news: Die, motherfucker, die!

IN MY HOUSE, DECEMBER 23RD IS HUGE

I got the date wrong, of course. The Big Black show was part of a Homestead showcase in the a summer of 1986. It was the first time I spoke to James Lo. The last time I talked to James was at The Sands recording session last week. (Shit worked out OK, yunno? Knock wood, make obeisance, spit on ground.)

RESPONSE TO STIMULI, PARTS 1 & 2 (RADIO EDIT)

I'm like a lab rat—the sun shines, my mood rises. In unrelated news, it is hard to determine which part of the following sentence makes the least sense. (Wouldn't it, pardon my nostalgic craziness, serve Posh best to maybe resurrect the original Posh style onna Spicy track?)

"Dame Dash & Victoria "Posh" Beckham have ended their collaboration, due to Beckham's manager Simon Fuller being unhappy with her affiliation with HipHop. Dash stripped Beckham's voice off of the tracks he produced for the album and is seeking a new singer." (From allhiphop.com.)

IF I COULD COUNT IN CHINESE, I WOULD

The Best of 2004 list is now revised, engorged and somewhat ridiculous. It is only fair to point out that you should consider only the albums ranked 40 and above as "endorsed" in any way. The rest is just me keeping track. (My apologies if you gave that Department of Eagles CD to your Mom today.) The single songs are all great.

REBELLIOUS JUKEBOX

Other than pictures of rust and things painted yellow, I am not sure what you are hoping to find here. (You know, by now, that I don't have that N*lly video.) To help clear up this confusion, I have provided a menu. Choose an excerpt, let me know what it is, and I will then provide the related content, with the full acknowledgement that this self-selected sample of choices isn't a set of choices at all but an echo chamber I am asking you to kick.

1. A passage about Haitian torturer Constant transcribed from an interview with Edwidge Danticat in the new Louder Than Bombs anthology.

2. How I desparately want the evangelical tide of privatization (apparently not such a hot deal for those looking to sub-contract their abuse) to wipe out the CT DMV.

3. My observations on these recordings: Solar Disco Box Set, Ornette Coleman's Tone Dialing, and X’s Under the Big Black Sun.

4. How I learned these two German words in Crete: "affe"—monkey and "gehirnerschütterung"—concussion.

5. A repetitive, manual habit I picked up in Crete.

6. The worst song ever: Nancy LaMott’s “I’ll Be There With You."

7. How, as digi visual culture (CGI, Flash art, Photoshop) grows, a parallel need for evidence of human persistence grows (reality TV, phone sex, etc.).

8. How I fell in love with the Fearless Four's "Rockin' It."

9. The experience of watching a drum machine fail at Big Black's show in the summer of 1987 at CBGB's.

10. My amazement that Thingy and/or Rob Crow are not ultra beeg.

11. The very excellent consistency of the Tubes 2003 compilation.

12. How completely badass Sarah Jones's Bridge and Tunnel is.

13. Eddie Kendricks' retardedly beautiful second album, People...Hold On.

14. Seeing The Thermals open for Sleater-Kinney at Irving Plaza a week or so ago.

15. Summer 1980: Working at the Eagle Printing plant in East Orange, NJ, eating the best cheeseburger of all time and listening obsessively to David Bowie's Scary Monsters.

16. The beauty of the singjay style: Clint Eastwood, Trinity, Dillinger, Big Youth. Raising up on the first two beats, hammering home, then coming back up, sing-a-ling.

17. Circumstantial evidence from personal experience that leads me to believe that, absent the threat of public censure or economic disincentive, a certain class of people will act like assholes and another will behave responsibly.

18. [Related submotif: The motherfucking Harvard Law School students who stole my records seven years ago.]

19. Hydrocod**e vs Amb**n and Val**m.

20. Flamenco genius Maria Pages, the importance of rules, bullfighting and digital reverb.

21. How liquidy was a live performance by Piotr Anderszewski.

BLIND ALLEY

Nick Catchdubs reports:

"the girls used to call it "to-be-killed-in" alley when i lived in the lafayette street NYU dorm.

just in that one year (the same year puff would be accross the street every day on trial), i watched them film a good 10-to-15 terrible cop shows and films on that street. michael douglas' "don't say a word" and the ben affleck stinker "changing lanes," for instance.

noir side-streets used in b-list productions singlehandedly funding the nyc film comission? say word..."