Hiatus

I've got a new job and I've moved to Atlanta, so that's why no posting recently. I'll be back to posting soon!

Frank Black and Herman Brood

Andrew from Jimmy Paige's Sweater Vest sent me a note arguing that Frank Black's new album is Advanced. His arguments:

He's released an album under the name Black Francis (point 1). All the songs on it reference "eccentric Dutch painter/musician Herman Brood," the press kit says (point 2). And [t]here's a song called "Test Pilot Blues" (point 3).

Point 1 is the most persuasive in my opinion. Anyway, this is something to keep an eye on!

Advanced Music Headlines

• The Cure are going to release a double album. That's a little bit awesome at this stage in their career.
• According to a friend, Jim Morrison died in a nightclub of an overdose then was moved. The friend, a naked Native American, coincidentally has a new book coming out soon.
• Axl Rose wants you to know why GN'R didn't play Live Earth. I think it's because he was afraid that Madonna would have totally kicked his ass.
• Another note about Live Earth: When I heard Keith Urban go into "Gimme Shelter" I cringed. But then when Alicia Keys came on, everything made sense. She totally ruled that song, and I think I love her now.
  
• Raquel Welch says that Elvis became less sexy as he aged. Ageist.
• The Washington City Paper music blog, Black Plastic Bag, wonders about Billy Corgan's Advancement. The evidence: "you [Corgan] abandon your solo career to reunite your band with no other original members except for the drummer–who played on your solo record anyway–and record a new album which will be released in four different and equally unnecessary editions." Clearly the folks at BPB undesrstand the theory!
  

Music Industry News: The Phoebe Buffay Law

This is kind of amazing (from Florida Today):

Six months after raising the curtain on their gourmet coffee shop in the beachside Indian Harbour Place shopping center, Laurie and Jim Hall decided to offer live music on Friday and Saturday nights. The performers, normally duos, mainly covered songs written and made famous by other musicians. There was no cover charge, no pay for the musicians, no limit to how long patrons could sit on a couch with their coffee, playing chess and enjoying the music.

No problem.

Then a few months later, music industry giant ASCAP started calling and sending letters saying East Coast Coffee & Tea was in violation of copyright laws. The fee to continue the music was $400 a year.... Six months later, other music copyright companies began calling the Halls and demanding money. Most days there would be three or four phone calls from each company, Hall said. Finally, unable to afford the fees, she had to call most of her musicians -- those who did not play original music -- and tell them they would not be allowed to continue performing.
...
[This} comes on the heels of a massive music industry crackdown during the past several years on illegal downloads from the Internet. Whether it's a professional recording taken from a Web site or an accordion player singing a Jimmy Buffet tune in a small venue, the industry is working to collect royalties for whoever wrote the songs.
...
Singer/songwriter Al Urezzio, who played at East Coast Coffee, said he recently lost his steady gig at the Getaway Lounge in Suntree because the owners were being asked to pay copyright fees as well. Now Urezzio, who performs as "Grumpy Al," is relegated to performing only his original compositions. That means his options on where to perform are limited. "This is really bull," said Urezzio, who owns the Burger Inn on U.S. 1 in Melbourne. "East Coast called and told me to only play originals from now on."

So you see, it's really the audience who will be suffering. Smelly cat, oh smelly cat, what are they feeding you?

Lou Reed - Sweet Jane - live in Paris, 1974

A little funk on Friday. This version of "Sweet Jane" is quite Advanced.

Super Karate Monkey Death Car

Something fun for Friday. The writing is amazing in this scene, but the delivery is absolutely perfect.

Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature: Not True

Psychology Today has a list of ten "politically incorrect truths about human nature." This caught my eye:

7. What Bill Gates and Paul McCartney have in common with criminals

For nearly a quarter of a century, criminologists have known about the "age-crime curve." In every society at all historical times, the tendency to commit crimes and other risk-taking behavior rapidly increases in early adolescence, peaks in late adolescence and early adulthood, rapidly decreases throughout the 20s and 30s, and levels off in middle age.

This curve is not limited to crime. The same age profile characterizes every quantifiable human behavior that is public (i.e., perceived by many potential mates) and costly (i.e., not affordable by all sexual competitors). The relationship between age and productivity among male jazz musicians, male painters, male writers, and male scientists—which might be called the "age-genius curve"—is essentially the same as the age-crime curve. Their productivity—the expressions of their genius—quickly peaks in early adulthood, and then equally quickly declines throughout adulthood. The age-genius curve among their female counterparts is much less pronounced; it does not peak or vary as much as a function of age.

...A single theory can explain the productivity of both creative geniuses and criminals over the life course: Both crime and genius are expressions of young men's competitive desires, whose ultimate function in the ancestral environment would have been to increase reproductive success.

That my be true about creativity in general, but I don't think it really applies to true geniuses, especially Advanced ones. I would be interested in hearing what their definition of "creative genius"is because genius comes in so many forms. For instance, I happen to believe in a sort of genius that is ageless and a looks a bit like this: long hair in the back, black sunglasses, black leather jacket.

Walk on the Wild Side Headline Watch

The Evening Standard has an article about Lou Reed's Berlin revival (which I reviewed too). We'll get to the headline in a minute, but first, a bit of the article:

Every song, even the already wondrous Caroline Says II, was an improvement on the recorded version and the sound was the finest I've heard at any venue in years. Most brave and most incongruous was not merely the brass and string sections, but the 12-strong New London Children's Choir, whose angelic vocals, particularly on the closing Sad Song, acted as an innocent counterpart to Reed's tales of darkness, squalor and violence.

As ever, Reed ran to form by not speaking during the set (some narrative to a tale sorely lacking it might have been a benison), but the troupe did craft an encore of non-Berlin classics: a raucous Sweet Jane; an almost unbearably gorgeous Satellite Of Love, where bassist Fernando Saunders sang one verse and the choir another, and Walk On The Wild Side which fooled the censor in 1973 and, in 2007, still sounds subversive with children on backing vocals. Mesmerising.

Nice. But back to the headline. As you probably know, every article about Lou Reed has to have "Walk on the Wild Side" in its headline, and this most recent story is no exception. But they have twisted things a bit because it is not Reed who is talking a walk on the wild side (or mild side or wilder side) but his album instead. Here it is: "Dark Classic Takes a Walk on the Wild Side." I love how completely meaningless that is. First of all, can an album take a walk? And second, nothing in the review suggests that this version of Berlin is wilder than the original. Nevertheless, "Dark Classic Takes a Walk on the Wild Side" is the editor's final decision.

Sly Stone Is Back

I've written that the most Overt hairstyle you can have is a green mohawk. But the mohawk can be an Advanced hairstyle in the right context.

Sly Stone is nothing but context. (And he's giving interviews.)

Greatest Movie Quote Ever

From Idiocracy:

People wrote books and movies; movies with stories that made you care about who's ass it was and why it was farting.

If you haven't seen this movie, I recommend your renting it today. (I saw it a pretty long time ago, but for some reason the quote popped into my head this morning. I've been laughing about the line--and Luke Wilson's perfect delivery of the line--for the last couple of hours.)

Brian Eno Interview in Wired

Here's some of it:

Wired News: What drew you toward working with generative art and generative music?

Brian Eno: Well, part of it is that it's an extremely good value (laughter) because it was possible to make a lot of work from a very small amount of original material. That was one thing I found very interesting, because once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music -- not like a record that you'd put on and which would play for a while and finish. I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn't want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing. So I developed two ideas in that way. Discreet Music was like that and Music for Airports. What you hear on the recordings is a little part of one of those processes working itself out. Theoretically, the processes were infinite but unfortunately, recordings aren't of infinite length. So you sort of had a diagram, or really you got a "still" from the piece. That was really the best way of explaining it.

***

WN: How much of a relationship does place have with how you think the audience perceives 77 Million Paintings? You know, where it's installed, whether they're viewing it at home or in a gallery.

Eno: It makes a lot of difference. First of all, if people go somewhere to look at something, they've already made a commitment of time. They are therefore likely to make a bigger commitment. It's unlikely that they'll ride all the way across town, look in and leave in 15 or 30 seconds. You'll probably think just because you made that long journey, you'll stay longer. [Brian Eno would make an excellent online marketer -jh]

If you want to feel like a talentless dummy, go read the rest of the article.