Author: Josh Philip Ross

Shashwati: Kaliyon Ka Chaman (WMA Video)

DJ Doll: Kaanta Laga (WMA Video Popup)

In the summer of 2003, Hindipop was suddenly all over American music. Punjabi MC’s hit “Beware of the Boys,” a bhangra banger featuring Jay-Z, was thumping from the trunks of cars rolling through the Brooklyn projects, while Britney Spears’s “Toxic” (video, IE only) and Beyoncé’s “Naughty Girl” (video, IE only) played with the sounds of Bollywood strings and even went so far as to mimic the distinctive Indian falsetto style — Beyoncé on the verses, Britney on the bridge. Later that year, Timbaland & Magoo released “Indian Flute” (video, IE only), in which they actually rhyme in Hindi.

Earlier that year, I was still in India, where pop music was moving in the other direction, closer to the West. Turn on a TV or walk down the street and you were likely to hear the “Kaliyon Ka Chaman,” a remix of an old Lata Mangeshkar song, or DJ Doll’s “Kaanta Laga.” Shashwati was the voice behind both recordings, which mixed Hindi lyrics and melodies with club beats. The tracks were controversial, at first because of the racy videos, then because the Bollywood songwriters weren’t getting their cut of the royalties for the songs. But there’s no denying that they’re also stylish and interesting records, and that the videos are fun to watch. We ended up coming home with CDs of both tracks, and now we can watch the videos again online.

Beck: Guero (Team Shi Latino 96.3 Remix)

A couple of weeks ago, music (for robots) posted this remix of Beck’s “Guero” by the Mae Shi, which turns the song into some heavy reggaeton in an “attempt to capture the sound of 2005 in the same way Beck captured the sound of 1985” with the original.

Meanwhile, at Beck.com, you can hear a couple of newly recorded Nick Drake covers — “Parasite” and “Which Will” — and a number of tracks from Guerolito, the Guero remix album. (Hint: If you want to stop that irritating noise that goes with the picture of the satellite dish, click on “Discobox” and listen from there.)

It’s disheartening for me to say this, but the “Guero” remix, the Nick Drake covers and the Guerolito material are all better and more interesting than anything on Guero itself.

Don’t get me wrong: Guero falls short of Beck’s other output, but it’s still a very good record that holds my interest better than most albums by most acts. If there were no Odelay, no Mutations and no Midnite Vultures, Guero might have been a sonic landmark. But those other records all came first, and they were each richer and truer than Guero, on which the lyrics feel like they were written at arm’s length.

The remixes of songs from Guero have the virtue of juxtaposing Beck’s trademark voice and flow with unexpected aural landscapes, while the Nick Drake covers bring to mind the greatness of Mutations and Sea Change, not to mention some of Beck’s other masterful covers, like his version of the Korgi’s “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime,” which graced the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind soundtrack. So I guess the silver lining is that this proves Beck is still capable of making gorgeous music with richness and depth, and also that he’s still interested in new sonic directions. I look forward to hearing it all.

When I was teaching English in Korea, I once taught a lesson on “What do you want to be?” to a class of ten-year-olds. Most of the kids came up with the expected responses — boys declaring, “I want to be a soccer player!” or “I want to be a firefighter!” while the girls expressed their desires to become teachers and doctors. But there was one student who was struggling to express something different, something that wasn’t there in our limited employment vocabulary. Finally he blurted out, “I want to … paduk!”

With the help of some drawings, I was able to work out that paduk (바둑) is the Korean version of the boardgame called igo (囲碁) in Japan, weiqi (圍棋) in China and “go” in the United States. My ten-year-old student wanted to be a professional go player!

Even after that curious incident, I’d never given the game much thought until my friend and upstairs neighbor, Robert, expressed an interest in learning to play. With the help of some rules printed out from Wikipedia, he, Jenny and I played our first games against each other this past Saturday, and though we weren’t sure who had won or why, we were all hooked. Far more fluid than chess, but at least as complex, go isn’t about killing the enemy’s king, but about massing your pieces, controlling territory and maintaining “liberties,” or open spaces adjacent to your stones. I don’t want to read too much into the political metaphors at this point, but they do strike me as an interesting insight into differing Eastern and Western concepts of warfare and the state.

Back at work on Monday, I asked my colleague Young what she knew about paduk and discovered that it’s one of those things all Koreans learn at some point, like taekwondo, though she never much cared for it. She also told me that good players say they can learn a person’s personality from the way he or she plays.

For those interested in learning to play, or just learning more about the game, here are some useful links:

• Wikipedia: Go (board game) provides a thorough introduction, with links to articles on the rules, the history and more.
• GoBase.org is a major go site with commented games, go problems, rules and more.
• The American Go Association has lots of useful tools, including Karl Baker’s 22-page handbook, The Way to Go (PDF) and a page of Go computer programs.
• Hiroki Mori’s Interactive Way to Go is an enjoyable and helpful interactive introduction to play and strategy, well worth a look.
• Wulu (ZIP file) is a go program for Windows that allows you to play 9×9 and 13×13 games, with or without handicaps, and gives you a fair amount of flexibility regarding who goes first, difficulty level and scoring method.

As with chess, there is a tremendous amount to learn about this ancient and absorbing game. I don’t know how far we’ll get, but it should be an interesting journey.

Horrible news, and I don’t know how to put it any other way: the Second Avenue Deli may be closed forever. The Times has a detailed writeup, and I don’t have all that much to add at the moment, except to say that my family has been going there since it opened in 1954 — my Great-Aunt Sylvia lived across the street — and this is a tremendous loss for me, my family, New York City and the world.

No one does chopped liver better. No one. Come back to us, Jack Lebewohl! We need you!

Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project

This extraordinary effort by the Department of Special Collections of the Donald C. Davidson Library at UC Santa Barbara has made thousands of early cylinder recordings available for listening on the Internet. They include vaudeville performances, classical music, every conceivable variety of American folk music and much more.

One pleasure of this collection is that it gives us a window into what music used to sound like before recording changed it forever. Of course, cylinders imposed their very specific limitations — hiss that had to be punched through, time limits — but the music recorded in the teens must nevertheless reflect the sounds of live performance of the era, if only because the most popular stage artists would have been the ones contracted to make cylinders.

How different was music then? Take a couple of opera tracks: Addio del passato (1913), performed by Adelina Agostinelli, and Pagliacci (1910), sung by Florencio Constantino. The vocal vibratto on these performances is notably restrained compared with what is standard today.

Another fascinating piece is Beethoven’s Menuett (1913), played by the Tollefsen Trio with a loose, ragged feel that would today be scoffed at as hopelessly unprofessional. The tone is closer to Irish folk dance than to classical performance today, and this strikes me as the essence of what has gone wrong in classical music (and, more recently, jazz): technical proficiency has reached an extraordinarily high level that can only be matched through years of rigorous schooling, leading to a deadened academic mannerism. In the classical world there has been much emphasis on remaining true to the scores as composed, but it strikes me as deeply false to play Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky and the rest with a technical precision that didn’t exist in their day and has only become possible with recording technology, just as it would be false to play Renaissance music on 19th-century instruments. Not that there’s anything wrong with that kind of divergence or reinterpretation, but it should be understood as such, and not as a true rendering of the sound-world in which the composers would have lived and composed.

There is much beyond classical music to explore in this collection, including dialect records (some of them starkly racist), political speeches and early jazz, among many other curiositities.

And finally, one for Kinky Friedman. (Via Slate.)

Too Short: He Loves Her (WARNING: Dirty, Dirty, Dirty!)

This track by Too $hort is, like almost every other track by Too $hort, a sex rhyme. What makes it unusual is that it’s about two women getting it on, very specifically without the presence of a man:

juices flowin like a stream
with no man in between
feels like a dream

It’s a surprising turn for $hort to take, but then the record it’s from is called Married to the Game and features women in bridal lingerie on the cover, so perhaps $hort has begun exploring the needs and interests of women more generally. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that he could keep writing dirty rhymes for this many years without occasionally thinking about them, at least a little.

Too $hort has the curious distinction of being the first West Coast rapper to make it big, and he remains a huge seller to this day, having sustained an unusually long and successful rap career despite a notable lack of talent. What he does have is a dirty mind, and just like 2 Live Crew, he figured out how to turn filth into gold.

I first learned of Mr. $hort at the Hebrew Academy of San Francisco, in seventh grade, when my classmate Ben, something of a basketball genius, started hanging out with the black kids at a gym in Marin City and came back with fascinating musical finds. Too $hort’s Freaky Tales, a catalogue of perverted women the young $hort had known, was passed back and forth on a walkman in the lunchroom and carefully memorized like a secret code.

It was also around this time that Ben introduced us to 2 Live Crew’s first record, featuring We Want Some Pussy, and Kool Moe Dee’s solo debut, featuring Go See the Doctor, a song about STDs. He was also devoted to a buzzing, jangling record called Yo! Bum Rush the Show, by a group called Public Enemy, but that didn’t catch on with the rest of us at the time, who were anyway moving toward an exclusive devotion to thrash metal that would last until Guns N’ Roses arrived late the next year to shake things up. (Via The Tofu Hut.)

One of my favorite, websites, Overheard in New York, is soon to be available in book form, which makes me wonder whether any of the contributions from yours truly made it in. Probably not — my stuff was okay, but hardly top-tier. Still, you know that as soon as I see this thing sitting on the shelf at Barnes & Noble, I’ll be flipping to the back to see if “Palaverist” is there in the list of contributors.

Of course, though Michael Malice and S. Morgan Friedman are listed as the authors, and contributors are given credit as well, the real authors are the anonymous millions of New Yorkers who say completely insane things within earshot of total strangers, helping to make our little Dutch village the most compelling city in the world.

It’s good to know that the kids down at the University of Virginia Comp Sci department are working on important things. Things like The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia, which taps into the IMDb database to help us find out how many degrees separate any actor you can think of from Kevin Bacon.

Even more interesting is creator Patrick Reynolds’s discovery that Kevin Bacon is only the 1,049th-best connector on IMDb — still in the 99.9th percentile, but hardly at the top. The list of the 1,000 best centers has lots of people you’d expect up top — Dennis Hopper, Donald Sutherland, Harvey Keitel, Michael Kaine — but the top two, Rod Steiger and Christopher Lee, would never have entered my mind. Further down, I found names I’d never even heard, like Udo Kier (26), Vernon Dobtcheff (33) and Vrasta Vlana (837). Who would have thought to play Six Degrees of Vrasta Vlana?

I also noticed a preponderance of men, especially at the top of the list. The highest-ranked woman is Karen Black, who comes in at No. 21, sandwiched between Ernest Borgnine and Dean Stockwell (there’s an image to give you nightmares!). This suggests that women tend to have shorter acting careers than men, and that there are far fewer small roles for older women than for older men, making it harder for women to rack up the cameos.

In any case, here’s to Rod Steiger, the center of the Hollywood universe! (And, since Steiger passed away in 2002, here’s to Christopher Lee, the living heart of Tinseltown.)

<ego-trip>

So I was googling myself — admit it, you’ve done the same thing — and was fascinated to discover some of the places that the Palaverist has popped up.

I wasn’t all that surprised to see that artist Sam Clayton has topped his page with the glowing review I posted of his work as part of my AGAST roundup.

A little more curious was my discovery that an Indian guy named Kush Tandon, who lives in Oregon, has included me among his favorites. How this came to be, I haven’t the slightest, but I’m hoping he’ll tell me.

</ego-trip>

Over the weekend, Northern California was hit with a tremendous rainstorm. The Governator has declared a state of emergency in 23 counties, including my home county of Marin, as well as much of the Redwood Empire and Central Valley.

When I tell people on the East Coast that despite the snowstorms and the cold out here, Northern California has far more violent weather, they look at me like I’m nuts. But while blizzards may be temporarily paralyzing, they’re not exactly fierce, and summer thundershowers tend to explode for 45 minutes and then disappear. In California, by contrast, I’ve seen things like 80-mile-an-hour winds out of nowhere or a 24-hour lightning storm with strikes coming as fast as one every ten seconds and not a drop of rain.

More common are the heavy rains that come not for an hour or two but for days on end, until the ground is saturated and the hillsides start to give way. The worst I remember was in 1982 — what my parents call “the Mabul,” which is the Hebrew word for the Biblical flood. Sections of Sausalito fell away, and a power outage forced my elementary school, Brandeis Hillel, to close for the day. My parents couldn’t get there in time, so I was taken home by a family I didn’t really know and fed something smelly and upsetting for dinner. Later I remember seeing water shooting out of the storm drains in Lucas Valley, the force from upstream turning them into murky fountains.

But what took place Saturday is the worst devastation I’ve heard of in Marin. In Lucas Valley, just blocks from where I grew up, a mud flow burst through a house after a culvert was blocked up. You can see a map here, and if you look at the top of Mt. Tenaya, you can see the ravine (marked by the line of oak trees) that channeled the flow into that first house. According to my parents, who were at the Chabad of Marin synagogue (map) when the mud and water came rushing through, the flow came down Tenaya, made a left onto Idylberry, swamped half the Dixie Elementary soccer field, poured down Mt. Palomar and pooled up in the cul-de-sac, and also continued to flow along Idylberry until it reached the eastern junction with Mt. Lassen and poured into a small stream there.

My dad’s car was parked in front of the synagogue as all this was happening, and he looked on helplessly as neighbors moved their own vehicles out of the way of the rising muck. As an Orthodox Jew, he couldn’t violate the sabbath to rescue his own car, but as the water level reached halfway up the hubcaps and sizeable debris began to threaten serious damage, a friendly non-Jewish neighbor came into the synagogue and asked if anybody needed their cars moved.

Other parts of Marin were hit even harder, and other parts of California suffered still worse damage. The Marin Independent Journal provides pictures of the flooding (1, 2, 3) and reports on the $30 million damage to San Anselmo, as well as a good overview of the situation.