1/ Donald Barthelme, “For I’m the Boy” (1964):
The bottle was old and dirty but the brandy when Huber returned with it was tasty in the extreme.
2/ Grateful Dead, “Brown-Eyed Women” (1971):
The bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean.
The complete absence of country music on the whiplashing summer-music chart New York put together last week is even less surprising than the New York Times’s similar sin of omission a few weeks ago. And yet if New York is really, as I suggested to a friend the other day, the People magazine for people like us, you’d think they might try to imagine an “us” with a little less constricted sense of what counts as summer sonic fun.
There’s something to Jane Dark’s suggestion that these blind spots are all about class, but I don’t know if that fully explains it. I mean, hell, in every respect save disposable income and zip code, I’m at the demographic heart of the class their ads are gunning for, right down to Dr. Hakimi’s Art of Oral Harmony. But there I go again, listening to—and, shh, even liking!–country music.
Not that I’m too worried; we all, somehow, find our own ways to survive the diktats of glossy-magazine taste. But still you have to wonder what it’s going to take to make country music safe for the architects of mediated cool, when even the high-profile defections of Jack White, Robert Plant, Jewel, Jessica Simpson, and Jon Bon Jovi couldn’t do it.
You have to wonder, that is, until it hits you: Hootie!
Darius Rucker will save us all.
Maybe you knew about this, but I didn’t:
The recordings, which range from the late 1930s to recent times, are especially strong in the areas of fiddle, banjo, harmonica, and dulcimer tunes; secular ballads and songs; gospel songs, and the unaccompanied lined-out and shape note singing styles. Included as well are such relative unknowns as the mouth bow with origins in Africa, Cherokee singing and dance music, Swiss-American singing and yodeling, Hungarian-American cymbalum playing, and the jug band sound from the early 1900s comprised of a loose rural-urban mix of blues, hillbilly, and jazz.
In many instances the repertoire and playing styles documented in these recordings date well back into the 1800s. Among the music’s readily detectable influences are musical expressions arising from slavery, minstrel stage music, Civil War military music, and the dance music of Britain, Ireland and, in some instances, France and Germany.
(via Silas House)
On the off chance you take your reading cues from rock stars, here’s something from an interview with Radiohead at the Observer Music Monthly:
Thom’s reading Q by mysterious Italian anarchist group Luther Blisset. I tried to read that once, I tell him.
‘Oh it’s fucking ace! But my missus, that’s her specialist field, so she’s been explaining it to me all the way through. Medieval church carnage. It’s mental. I want to get it made into a film. That’s my next mission.’
Using the In Rainbows profits?
‘Mmm-mm,’ says Thom Yorke, shaking his head. ‘I doubt it. That would cover basically the catering.’
Not to spoil the mystery, but “the mysterious Italian anarchist group” who wrote Q comprised four of the five members of the group currently known as Wu Ming, the authors of 54, Manituana, and the two stories I translated for Chicago Review 52:2/3/4.
The Radiohead/Wu Ming connection is actually apt, since Wu Ming makes all their work available as free downloads.
For the record, here’s what the rest of Radiohead is reading:
Colin is currently reading Piers Brendon’s new The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, Jonny’s re-reading Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ed’s just finished Man’s Search For Meaning by Victor Frankel (’Brilliant. He’s an Auschwitz survivor’), Phil’s reading Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother.
In an article on the dollar’s depreciation in today’s NYT, Katie Hammer and Julia Wedigier write:
The dollar’s fall has been so drastic, it has seeped into the popular consciousness. In his last video, rapper Jay-Z cruised the streets of New York flashing not a stack of Benjamins, but a fistful of euros.
The implication seems pretty clear*; as James Cramer put it last month: “When things have gotten to the point that even people like Gisele [Bundchen] and Jay-Z realize the dollar is too weak, things have gotten out of control” (my emphasis).
Yes, we get it: the point of the anecdote is to add color (no comment) to the story, to break up more mundane sentences like the one that follows. (”The dollar had been at relatively low levels against the pound and euro for most of this year, but in April it broke the $2 for £1 barrier…”)
But stop for a moment and ask yourself: by what standards does Jay-Z count as a representative of the popular consciousness? Consider what it means to be a person “like” Jay-Z:
+ According to Rolling Stone, Jay-Z earned $17.5 million in income during 2005 (more…)
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