the sticking point

The Perfect Storm

This morning was mine to wake up with the boys, H Himself & W Himself. My wife and I alternate days, hoping that the other one of us might get to "sleep in." Like, as late as 0800. For the one who gets up at the sound of the first awakened child, it's a crapshoot. The days can start anywhere between 0430 and 0700.

This one began after sunrise. The boys chose to sleep in. H is still asleep as I write this, sprawled across mommy's and daddy's bed like a hobo in a boxcar. And I've no work to get to today. A simultaneous occurrence of conditions which, taken individually, would be far less powerful than the result of their chance combination. A perfect storm. I was able to bang out a Friday 10.

01 K-hole - Coco Rosie: I haven't given the Noah's Ark disk as much attention as it deserves, I think. I usually go back to La Maison de Mon Rêve. I really dig their work; there are always nice melodies and smart lyrics tucked into the strange atmospherics of the songs. I used to think the Cocos weren't for everybody, but the more I listen to them the less challenging the music becomes. I guess that makes obvious sense. Or it's just a ridiculously stupid thing to have written. What I meant is the music not hard to get to.

02 Paid Vacation - Circle Jerks: Not the best song from the legendary Group Sex album, but hey -- that there is Keith Morris. He brings everything he's got to the vocal, every time. This is a very old album, but it never sounds that way to me.

03 Hybrid Moments - Misfits: One of my top three Misfits tracks. How cool is this song?! This version is the Static Age mix. The band used to mix and remix their session tracks all the time for singles and EPs and all the comps (it gets very confusing - this site helps). There are four distinctly different mixes of "Hybrid Moments" from one 1978 session. Who cares? I do!

04 Crater Lake - Liz Phair: I can't remember if the Whip-Smart album was well received. I'll go on those Internets and check the reviews from back then. I reckon that after Girlysounds and Exile, there was probably a battalion of sack-less writers and reviewers waiting armed behind the tree line, to fire off a backlash against ol' Liz.

05 Miniskirt Blues - Cramps: Iggy Pop! Lux Interior! This song was the only thing to get excited about from the Look Mom No Head disk.

06 Get Busy - Sean Paul: Really. I don't know which year it was. My wife and I were down in Miami working a job, and the only performer who really brought it, who was actually exciting, was Sean Paul. I respected him for that. I don't have anything else by him but this track, not even a B-side. But I'd listen if it came along.

07 School's Out - Alice Cooper: I was at the Beacon Theater in NYC one night in 1986 or 87 for a Replacements show. Got there about a half hour before opening act (Johnny Thunders) went on. The place was still practically empty. Tommy Stinson came out and sat next to me and my friend, and wanted to talk about music. He started with the song that was playing through the house PA, "Under My Wheels," by Alice Cooper. Why am I telling you this? I know very little about Cooper, but I like a lot of what I've heard.

08 Genetic Engineering - Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark: Can never seem to bring myself to abbreviate such a great band name. Of the whole glut of bands that made music like this from that era, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark is one of the two or three I'd still listen to. This track is the 7" mix.

09 If 6 Was 9 - Jimi Hendrix Experience: "I'm gonna wave my freak flag high!" First time I'd ever heard a freak flag reference was in this song. This is from the Axis: Bold As Love album, the follow-up to Are You Experienced. I think Hendrix was trying things out on this one, adding some bells and whistles that stepped in front of the music a little too much, but still a fine album. A few years ago, there was a vinyl-only release of Axis in mono. I'd love to get my hands on that, or a cdr burn of it.

10 Stop The Clock - Blasters: If you talk about good music for only a little while, of course The Blasters come into the conversation. Check out everything they've made, I say. These are incredibly talented guys who crafted great songs, and they were ferocious onstage. "Stop The Clock" is from the classic first album. Out of print, but all the songs are included on the Testament set

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To leave you on a happy note, Kurt Waldheim is dead. "Where do bad folks go when they die? They don't go to heaven where the angels fly, they go to a lake of fire and fry."

[posted with ecto]

On iTunes right now: Seasons in the Sun from the album Son of Sam I Am by Too Much Joy

Sculpture by Allen Linder, "Man Waking Up" (2005)

Welcome to the Show

Jason Giambi is getting so much heat from the gutless wonder, MLB Commissioner Bud Selig. That’s bullshit. Here is the only player who came forward to make any kind of admission of chemical enhancement use, he paid for it with his health, he made apologies, worked his ass off hard enough to be named comeback player of the year, and has recently said that the Game (players, owners, and league management) owed fans an admission that things have been fucked up. All right.

So now Selig wants to make Giambi crawl.

Giambi stepped up and did the right thing. Now, by Selig's order, if he won't give full cooperation to the Mitchell investigation – which I assume means naming names and pointing fingers – Giambi will be suspended. Selig has even said that the level of his participation will be used to determine the severity of Giambi’s punishment.

This smells awful. It’s a lose-lose situation for Giambi, who doesn’t deserve to be in that position (for all the reasons I wrote in the first paragraph). My hunch is that the investigators already have suspicions about certain players, but with little evidence or testimony there is little that can be done. Using a marquee insider like Giambi to play star witness is just a big show.

If Giambi complies (and I don’t think he will), he'll be vilified on the field and in the stands. If he does not, the Mitchell investigation will simply report allegations as facts, while Selig gives Giambi a light enough punishment to make it appear as though he chirped. It’s a classic NYPD Blue Sipowicz move.

I think Selig, being the ball-less turd that he is, would like to see Giambi deliver names in a gift-wrapped box before Bonds gets to #714. Hell, I’d like to see the truth about Bonds come to light, and I personally don’t want to see him break Aaron's record, but putting the squeeze on Jason Giambi because the commissioner won't take a stand for himself, is dirty blackmail.

Postscript: Bud Selig announced last December that he'll be retiring from his post as MLB Commissioner, and floated the name of his choice for next commish. Guess who. Really.

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[posted with ecto]

On iTunes right now: Moons of Jupiter from the album Moons of Jupiter by Scruffy The Cat

The Thing Is...

Jack White is the last guitarist still inventing riffs.

Icky Thump is out in a week.

[posted with ecto]

On iTunes right now: Been There All The Time from the album Beyond by Dinosaur Jr

25 Hurts

Interesting phenomenon at the show I worked Saturday. A lot of the acts (or, more precisely, their DJs) used painful, very low-frequency tones on their tracks. It went beyond that familiar feeling you get in your chest near a loud bass amp or kick drum; this was severe. I asked the front-of-house guy, Tony, where he estimated that frequency was and he told me it was around 25 or 30 cycles. The volume itself was agonizing: our Line Producer said OSHA measured the dB level above 125 and demanded it be brought under 114 dB. (I don't imagine that ever happened.)

At such volume, the vibration from those low tones was punishing. Where I was positioned on stage right, it didn’t just thump my chest, it made my windpipe quake. There were times I had to close my mouth because the force of the air pulsing and pushing into my sinus cavity made my face seem about to tear open. Staffers and posse members covered their ears and their chests. The stage manager and I were getting dizzy, because the force of those rumbling notes vibrated our skulls enough to make our eyesight blur. Veteran touring and sound folks I spoke to about this said they’d never felt anything like it.

These effects combined to make me feel nauseated. Every internal pipeline throbbed: trachea, spinal cord, arteries. Colon.

I started thinking about things I’ve read and documentaries I’ve seen describing how low frequencies are sometimes used in torture, or as a system of non-lethal weaponry. They will cause all the internal organs to shudder, painfully. A prisoner will share what he knows; an enemy will turn heel and retreat to escape such sound.

I remembered some of the disgusting details and, some time around the middle of either Busta’s set or Young Jeezy’s, I became convinced that even though every one of us was suffering through this… that I was sure to be the guy who shits himself.

I can’t say for sure if anyone did soil their armor but, happily, I didn’t.

I found this in a piece called "The Acoustics of War" on Cabinet Magazine:

Ultra-low frequencies will nauseate and disorient most people under the right conditions (that is, if the sound can easily couple with their bodies, which it does under water or in a high-pressure chamber).

There are notable cases of people encountering low-frequency sounds under such conditions. In one case, Walt Disney and his team of cartoonists slowed down the 60-cycle tone of a soldering iron in a short cartoon. At a low-frequency 12 cycles, they became sick for days afterwards. The inventor Nikola Tesla experimented with low-frequency vibrating platforms that he motored using simple "eccentric" wheels. He found that standing on the platform for a minute created a pleasant buzz through the body. Remaining on the platform for any longer than a minute aggravated his subjects' hearts and dangerously raised their blood pressure. His friend Mark Twain [Samuel Clemens] once got on the platform and refused to descend. As the author Gerry Vassilatos writes, "Tesla's concern was drowned out by both the vibrating machine and Clemens' jubilant exaltations and praises. Several more seconds and Clemens nearly soiled his white suit."

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Later that night, back at the hotel bar, I had quite a killer fan-boy time, feasting on the tour stories of Tony and our lighting designer, Simon. Between them, they’ve toured with some greats, like Iggy (1979), Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks, Stones, etc. Great stories to tell.

Funny moment earlier on, after Simon had been telling me about Iggy’s pre-show and pre-encore cocaine usage and how he’d (Iggy) fuck girls on the bus in the first row directly behind the curmudgeonly driver: I asked who else he’s toured with and he said, “Oh, some obscure British bands.”

I said, well, try me.

“A band called Magazine… Wire… the Undertones… Stiff Little Fingers….”

Poor bastard had no idea he was in for a couple hours more of telling me stories. You can imagine how wide-eyed I got as I said, "Fuck! Are you kidding me? I love those bands! I listen to Wire every day every day every day!"

Good guys, those two; they humored me and talked.

[posted with ecto]

On iTunes right now: This Is All I Came To Do from the album Beyond by Dinosaur Jr