All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.
So I’ve done a little bit of upgrading around the place. I’ve now got more storage space and a better domain situation, such that both www.palaverist.com and www.palaverist.org will point here, and my other blog can now be found at unist.palaverist.org.
With the increased space, I’m going to try to focus more on music, posting both from my own collection and from what I find out there on the web.
Butthole Surfers: Lady Sniff | Human Cannonball
I spent the summer after my junior year of high school hanging out with another guy named Josh, a long-haired recovering acid fiend and alto sax player who liked two kinds of music: bebop and industrial. When we weren’t at his place, hanging out with his dog Layla and eating microwave pizza, we tended to go back and forth between the Poo-Ha, which is what we called the local pool hall, in downtown San Rafael, and the Corte Madera Denny’s. If we were lucky, we’d have some pretty girls in tow. More often it was just the two of us, but chances were always good that we’d bump into someone we knew down at the Denny’s because it was the only place in Marin County where someone under 18 could hang out after hours.
I always carried a banged-up acoustic guitar in my trunk, and some nights when we were wired on too many free coffee refills, I would take it out and detune the hell out if it, and Josh and I would serenade the parking lot with our howling rendition of “Lady Sniff.”
Ah, suburban life! It was exactly this kind of story, painfully extended, that used to bore the living shit out of my classmates when I was a writing major at Columbia.
In any case, you can find a whole bunch of Butthole-Surfing goodness, helpfully presented as in Tamil newspaper format, at Latino Buggers MP3s, which is part of the Surfers’ official site.
Since Jenny started her new job at Princeton Consultants, she’s had a hard time explaining what it is she does. The New Yorker this week has a cartoon that sums it up perfectly:
Bonus: See Jenny’s bio on the Princeton website (scroll down to September 26).
Everclear: Heroin Girl | Pale Green Stars
I just got my first MP3 player — a Creative MuVo2 FM — and so last night I went through my CD collection in search of good music to listen to during my commute.
After several days of listening to the rich, complex, ethereal music of Noe Venable, I was ready for something raw, straight and simple. And I wanted lyrics that meant something, now that I would be in an environment where I could actually pay attention (as opposed to work, where I’m usually either reading or writing, which makes it hard to focus on lyrics).
I settled on Everclear’s underrated Sparkle and Fade.
In my opinion, Everclear made exactly one good record, and this is it. Art Alexakis’s deceptively simple post-punk songs are tight little narratives on difficult subjects — divorce, family secrets, interracial dating, and especially addiction and recovery. (Much of the album plays like a sort of soundtrack, or perhaps footnote, to Infinite Jest.) There are, of course, endless rock songs about addiction, but relatively few about the actual challenges and torments of recovery, from falling off the wagon (“Strawberry Burns”) to being driven insane by your chipper sponsor (“Her Brand New Skin”).
And then there are certain lyrics that just bring you up short, like the opening of “Nehalem”:
There is this rumor about
They say you’re leaving Nehalem
Ever since our baby died
You’ve been seen with another guy
Ever since our baby died? Holy shit.
“Heroin Girl,” which was a hit when the record came out, works by introducing you to its main character, letting you get to know her a little, and then showing you her lifeless body in a field. I chose the second song, “Pale Green Stars,” for the lyrics, which are (mostly) from the perspective of a father watching his relationship come apart and seeing the effect this is having on his daughter:
Scared little girl watching Aladdin on TV
Amanda always cries when you yell at me
Yeah, please don’t yell at me
Climb up all the stairs
Close the door
Doesn’t want to hear us fighting anymore
Yeah, better call it a day
Yesterday I took our new speechwriter over to the UN cafeteria and was happily waylaid by an international food fair being held in the lobby of the Secretariat Building, which featured dishes from all over the world: Carribean pastries, Ukranian dumplings, Chinese mixed platters, ANZAC cookies from New Zealand. The Iranian pulao platters were selling like the proverbial hotcakes, but what caught my eye was the Nepali delegation’s chafing dish full of momo (dumplings).
I asked how much for just the momos, and the woman said she’d give me three for $2, a mix of veg and chicken momos. Deal. “This will bring back happy memories of my visits to Kathmandu,” I said.
“Oh, you have been?”
“Yes, I’ve visited Nepal twice and I loved it.”
“Here, let me give you some more vegetable momo, this one has different taste.”
Your intrepid reporter did not refuse. Hot sauce was also proffered, and it was good — almost as good as the hot sauce at the now-defunct Tibet Shambala.
Describe me in one word — just one. Leave a comment here, then post this same thing in your blog if you have one, or email your friends.
Let’s see if anyone answers this time.
I’m watching American Experience: Las Vegas, a PBS documentary about the city in the desert (sponsored in part by Las Vegas), and it keeps making the point that Vegas was a place where people came to be free, to be liberated from the constraints of 1950s America, to get away with what was a sin back home.
This got me wondering, because I always thought of San Francisco as the place where people went to be free and live in what was elsewhere considered sin. But the difference, I think, is that San Francisco is where people went when they wanted to live a new lifestyle — the freaks settled the place — whereas Vegas was the place where you visited an exotic lifestyle, while the people who settled there were mobsters and stars eager to make money off the weekend sins of others. In other words, you moved to San Francisco to fuck, but you moved to Vegas to fuck people over.
For the last few days, I’ve been obsessed with the music of Noe Venable, a San Francisco artist who I first learned about through an ex-girlfriend who went to high school with her. This was way back when Noe’s only recording was the 1996 demo “You Talkin’ to Me,” an enormously compelling set of songs that still don’t sound much like anyone else’s work. The closest comparisons I can think of are Tom Waits and CocoRosie. Like them, Noe creates a hermetic universe charged with mystery (a trick also pulled off by the writer Francesca Lia Block, author of Weetzie Bat), and her waif-naif vocals certainly resemble CocoRosie (who came much later, of course), while her storytelling, demonstrated on the song Jaime Goes Home (MP3), is more like Waits. But what really did it for me was her melodic sensibility on songs like Euridyce (MP3).
Her next album, No Curses Here, had plenty of fine moments, but what really grabbed me again was the third release, Down Easy, a live recording on which Noe’s voice harmonizes with the extraordinary violin of Alan Lin. (The trio is rounded out by Todd Sickafoose on upright bass.) The songs are dense, complex, and both the lyrics and the melodies reward multiple close listens. Dear Carolyne (MP3) seems to be about a last-ditch attempt at redemption through low-grade Nevada gambling, while Six Prayers No. 1 (MP3) remakes the Hurrian Cult Hymn, the world’s oldest recorded song, into an encounter with a Gypsy fortune-teller.
For a long time, Noe’s subsequent records, Boots and The World Is Bound by Secret Knots, didn’t do it for me. I felt like she’d abandoned the complex harmonies and melodies that gave her earlier records such power. But recently they’ve begun to click for me. The two opening tracks on Boots, Boots (MP3) and Prettiness (MP3), have become favorites, and the little section of vocal harmony that bridges them gives me chills.
Secret Knots remains a more challenging record, with easy choruses few and far between, and a fair bit of vocal experimenting on songs like Black Madonna (MP3) and Feral (MP3). But a lot of the songs have been getting into my head. Here are Juniper (MP3) and Garden (MP3).
Check out this weirdly satisfying game, if you can even quite call it a game. My high score was around 1500. How well can you do? (Via Ambiguous.org.)
A friend sent me a link to The Flash Mind Reader, an eerie little toy that seems to read your mind, and asked if I could figure out how it works.
I didn’t work it out on my own — my math skills are one big reason I’m a writer — but I did do a little Google searching and came up with the answer. Kudos if you can work it out yourself first, but if you can’t, the answer is pretty entertaining. Hint: It’s important that the symbols disappear when you click on the crystal ball, and that they’re in a new order every time.