David Rawlings Machine (incl. Gillian Welch, Jon Brion, Benmont Tench, Sebastian Steinberg) - Queen Jane Approximately (Live at Largo, LA)
From a David Rawlings Machine live performance that I downloaded recently, this is certainly the best cover I've ever heard of the Dylan classic, and (dare I say) may even rival the original. If that sounds blasphemous, I should admit that QJA is my least favorite song on Highway 61 Revisited. Of course, that album has no bad songs, or anything remotely close, but I've just always found "Queen Jane" a bit repetitive. It drags in a way that "Desolation Row", at twice the length, never does (thanks in large part to Charlie McCoy's acoustic guitar).
Rawlings and company (who probably wouldn't agree with my assessment) address this problem, such as it is, very simply and effectively, with superb instrumental performances. The acoustic guitars propel the song forward, and Benmont Tench's piano (from what I've been able to determine, it's Tench on piano and not Jon Brion, who was apparently on guitar) provides ultra-tasty accents throughout. The combo of acoustic guitar and piano is a great, underexploited sound, and the way the band rides the instrumental groove they've built up toward the end of the song reminds me of some of Ronnie Lane's songs with the Faces, with their instrumental outros giving Ian McLagan a chance to shine.
On record, David Rawlings has always lived in (or been) the shadow of his partner Gillian Welch. His harmonies are so exceptionally tight and close that he seems to disappear into her voice at the same time as he's hugely enhancing the effect of it. Live, though, his acoustic guitar playing tends to steal the show. No one plays quite like he does, a bluegrass flatpicking virtuoso's dexterity with an expressive, emotional depth and directness that, at its best, seems to be on loan from Neil Young. The Machine has a record coming out soon - pretty safe bet that it'll be a winner.
The Bottle Rockets - Lookout Joe (Live at the Mercury Lounge, NYC)
As I may have mentioned before, The Bottle Rockets are the greatest interpreters of Neil Young's music out there today. The only officially released evidence of this is on their sole live album (a new live DVD is in the works), in the form of savage versions of "Hey Hey My My" and "Cortez the Killer", but anyone who has followed them over the years (or done some YouTube searching) has probably heard a wide variety of other Neil material, from "Walk On" to "Down By The River". The David Rawlings show I discuss above contains good versions of "Field of Opportunity" and "Cortez", and I've heard Welch and Rawlings absolutely nail "Albequerque", a slow, minor-key song perfectly suited to their style, but no one can touch the Bottle Rockets when it comes to getting across the raw gut punch of Neil's best electric music.
Lately they've honed "Lookout Joe" (from Tonight's The Night, and referenced in the BRox deep cut "Dohack Joe") into one of the most sure-fire, fearsome weapons in their arsenal. As the seemingly unplanned final encore at the band's recent Mercury Lounge show, it brought an excellent night of rock'n'roll to a satisfying conclusion. They totally inhabited the song's peculiar groove and achieved ragged glory on the bridge's "craaaazy clowwwwwn" peak. Like I said, untouchable.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Abe, Whig In The City*
I took in the new Lincoln and New York show at the New York Historical Society recently. The show strikes a pretty good balance between the type of (theoretically) kid-friendly, interactive, multimedia exhibits that have become standard history and science museum fare in recent years - touch screens allowing you to create your own 1860's era political cartoon, a sound and light room meant to recreate the chaos of the Draft Riots, a shooting gallery-style lineup of Copperheads with sound tubes allowing you to listen to their anti-Lincoln grumblings - and the more traditional artifact-based approach to presenting history. For me, the slickest, most graphic-rich touch screen imaginable could never be as meaningful as being inches away from the inkwell that Lincoln used to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, but different strokes...
The show is arranged in a logical, chronological fashion, from Lincoln's visit to New York to deliver the Cooper Union speech that helped make him a serious contender for the Presidential nomination to the laying in state of his body at City Hall after the assassination. The portion dealing with the Cooper Union trip contains some fascinating displays, including a section on his visit to Matthew Brady's studio and a large map detailing Lincoln's movements in Manhattan and Brooklyn (where he attended Henry Ward Beecher's Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights, the initial source of Lincoln's speaking invitation). The map was of particular interest to me, as I fall squarely in the overlap zone of the "maps+Lincoln" Venn diagram.
The complexities of Lincoln's actions during the Civil War are well represented in the show, with a focus on how his policies were received in the deeply divided, sometimes violent atmosphere of wartime New York. Few of Lincoln's wartime acts were as complex, in execution or implication, as the Emancipation Proclamation. Alternately seen as a divinely inspired writ of liberation and as a coldly strategic military document, the Proclamation was neither entirely one nor the other, and can't be fully understood or placed in context without taking into account the 13th Amendment that followed and the fact that Lincoln actively pushed for its passage and ratification. The exhibit covers all of this, but someone moving quickly through the exhibit might miss the Amendment, seemingly doomed to live forever in the shadow of the Proclamation.
Although Lincoln's assassination is one of the most well known facts about him, after spending a lot of time in the exhibit pouring over the details of his wartime struggles, his death still managed to carry a measure of shock and horror - "how could the story end like that?" The final wall with excerpts from Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" is a fitting conclusion, an American elegy suitable in stature to the life it commemorates. In fact, I can think of only one other artistic response to Lincoln that succeeds on the level of Whitman, landscape architect Jens Jensen's Lincoln Memorial Garden in Springfield, Illinois. Whitman's elegy is full of landscape and plant imagery; Jensen's garden takes a poetic, symbolic and associative approach to commemorating Lincoln. Both are alive in ways that a more literally representational stone or bronze monument can never be.
The Lincoln show is a lot to take in, but the one-room John Brown exhibit upstairs makes for a nice aperitif or digestif (chronologically, I suppose it makes more sense to see it first). Brown was also commemorated by a great American writer, that other Civil War poet, Herman Melville.
*Lincoln left the Whigs for the recently formed Republican Party in 1856, making the title of this post historically inaccurate insofar as his 1860 visit to New York is concerned.
Bonus Links
The best thing I've read on Lincoln by one of his contemporaries: Frederick Douglass' oration at the dedication of the Freedmen's Monument in 1876. How could a speech containing these lines also be perhaps the greatest, most apt tribute Lincoln ever received?:
"He was preeminently the white man's President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country."
Read it and find out.
The show is arranged in a logical, chronological fashion, from Lincoln's visit to New York to deliver the Cooper Union speech that helped make him a serious contender for the Presidential nomination to the laying in state of his body at City Hall after the assassination. The portion dealing with the Cooper Union trip contains some fascinating displays, including a section on his visit to Matthew Brady's studio and a large map detailing Lincoln's movements in Manhattan and Brooklyn (where he attended Henry Ward Beecher's Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights, the initial source of Lincoln's speaking invitation). The map was of particular interest to me, as I fall squarely in the overlap zone of the "maps+Lincoln" Venn diagram.
The complexities of Lincoln's actions during the Civil War are well represented in the show, with a focus on how his policies were received in the deeply divided, sometimes violent atmosphere of wartime New York. Few of Lincoln's wartime acts were as complex, in execution or implication, as the Emancipation Proclamation. Alternately seen as a divinely inspired writ of liberation and as a coldly strategic military document, the Proclamation was neither entirely one nor the other, and can't be fully understood or placed in context without taking into account the 13th Amendment that followed and the fact that Lincoln actively pushed for its passage and ratification. The exhibit covers all of this, but someone moving quickly through the exhibit might miss the Amendment, seemingly doomed to live forever in the shadow of the Proclamation.
Although Lincoln's assassination is one of the most well known facts about him, after spending a lot of time in the exhibit pouring over the details of his wartime struggles, his death still managed to carry a measure of shock and horror - "how could the story end like that?" The final wall with excerpts from Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" is a fitting conclusion, an American elegy suitable in stature to the life it commemorates. In fact, I can think of only one other artistic response to Lincoln that succeeds on the level of Whitman, landscape architect Jens Jensen's Lincoln Memorial Garden in Springfield, Illinois. Whitman's elegy is full of landscape and plant imagery; Jensen's garden takes a poetic, symbolic and associative approach to commemorating Lincoln. Both are alive in ways that a more literally representational stone or bronze monument can never be.
The Lincoln show is a lot to take in, but the one-room John Brown exhibit upstairs makes for a nice aperitif or digestif (chronologically, I suppose it makes more sense to see it first). Brown was also commemorated by a great American writer, that other Civil War poet, Herman Melville.
*Lincoln left the Whigs for the recently formed Republican Party in 1856, making the title of this post historically inaccurate insofar as his 1860 visit to New York is concerned.
Bonus Links
The best thing I've read on Lincoln by one of his contemporaries: Frederick Douglass' oration at the dedication of the Freedmen's Monument in 1876. How could a speech containing these lines also be perhaps the greatest, most apt tribute Lincoln ever received?:
"He was preeminently the white man's President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country."
Read it and find out.
Friday, October 23, 2009
On Vampire Weekend's "Horchata"
I enjoyed VW's debut album, and the one live show I saw at Corlears Hook Park. I even enjoyed following, at least for a while, the now familiar, internet-fueled hype-backlash cycle that played out from the time that their pre-album online singles first appeared. I was interested at the time to see where people came down on them. Though the strength of reactions varied (is a "meh" of indifference really much better than outright hatred?), it seemed that everyone had an opinion (and the opinions just keep coming).
Whether it was deliberate or not (and the uncertainty about this is one of the compelling things about the band for me), VW's "preppy" Upper West Side signifiers, both in their lyrics and their look, certainly succeeded in pushing a lot of buttons. As for the music, I loved that they were drawing on the bright, bouncing sounds of soukous guitar, even (or especially) if it was filtered through Paul Simon. The Paul Simon-VW connection has been overemphasized (as has its overemphasis), but I do think that Graceland (perhaps because it was such a widely popular album) and Rhythm of the Saints (perhaps because it gets lost in the shadow of its predecessor) are underappreciated and under-influential. I'm sure there's something I've forgotten about or am just ignorant of, but Paul Kotheimer's (criminally, practically unknown) "Bicycle" is just about the only obviously Graceland-influenced track that comes to mind outside of VW. (I also think that some of Simon's lyrics on those two albums belong among the greatest achievements in pop songwriting, but that's another story.)
All of which brings me to the recently released (as a free MP3) "Horchata". Reports seem to indicate that the forthcoming album is perhaps a bit more eclectic than the first, but basically similar in spirit. I hope, then, that "Horchata" is more an aberration than an indicator of what we can expect from Contra. With this single, it sounds like they've removed the most appealing elements of their sound - Ezra Koenig's guitar, Chris Tomson's indie/faux/cod-ethnic drumming, a certain youthful (coltish?) energy - while retaining their most questionable - gimmicky overreliance on exotic-sounding words, busy string arrangements that don't quite fit the songs.
The relatively minimal synth-and-marimba-dominated backing track focuses attention on the vocals for much of the song, but there's not a strong enough melody or lyric to carry the weight. With a different arrangement, either incorporating guitar and drums or, if a new direction was the idea, a more thorough exploitation of electronic sounds and rhythms (which, to be fair, could have gone horribly wrong), the song might've been a modest success. As it is, "Horchata" seems like a modest experiment that came out a bit flat.
[Update: I realize now, after coming back to finish up this piece, that I've had the damn song stuck in my head for much of the week. Does that mean I was wrong about it not having a strong melody?]
[Update #2- 10/27/09: It's still growing on me. I've found that listening it to it louder helps. I still like VW a lot better with guitar, though, and I'm still not crazy about the lyrics - "pincher crabs that pinch at your sandals"?]
Bonus Link
Quite possibly the most level-headed and intelligent piece yet written about this much-written-about band.
Whether it was deliberate or not (and the uncertainty about this is one of the compelling things about the band for me), VW's "preppy" Upper West Side signifiers, both in their lyrics and their look, certainly succeeded in pushing a lot of buttons. As for the music, I loved that they were drawing on the bright, bouncing sounds of soukous guitar, even (or especially) if it was filtered through Paul Simon. The Paul Simon-VW connection has been overemphasized (as has its overemphasis), but I do think that Graceland (perhaps because it was such a widely popular album) and Rhythm of the Saints (perhaps because it gets lost in the shadow of its predecessor) are underappreciated and under-influential. I'm sure there's something I've forgotten about or am just ignorant of, but Paul Kotheimer's (criminally, practically unknown) "Bicycle" is just about the only obviously Graceland-influenced track that comes to mind outside of VW. (I also think that some of Simon's lyrics on those two albums belong among the greatest achievements in pop songwriting, but that's another story.)
All of which brings me to the recently released (as a free MP3) "Horchata". Reports seem to indicate that the forthcoming album is perhaps a bit more eclectic than the first, but basically similar in spirit. I hope, then, that "Horchata" is more an aberration than an indicator of what we can expect from Contra. With this single, it sounds like they've removed the most appealing elements of their sound - Ezra Koenig's guitar, Chris Tomson's indie/faux/cod-ethnic drumming, a certain youthful (coltish?) energy - while retaining their most questionable - gimmicky overreliance on exotic-sounding words, busy string arrangements that don't quite fit the songs.
The relatively minimal synth-and-marimba-dominated backing track focuses attention on the vocals for much of the song, but there's not a strong enough melody or lyric to carry the weight. With a different arrangement, either incorporating guitar and drums or, if a new direction was the idea, a more thorough exploitation of electronic sounds and rhythms (which, to be fair, could have gone horribly wrong), the song might've been a modest success. As it is, "Horchata" seems like a modest experiment that came out a bit flat.
[Update: I realize now, after coming back to finish up this piece, that I've had the damn song stuck in my head for much of the week. Does that mean I was wrong about it not having a strong melody?]
[Update #2- 10/27/09: It's still growing on me. I've found that listening it to it louder helps. I still like VW a lot better with guitar, though, and I'm still not crazy about the lyrics - "pincher crabs that pinch at your sandals"?]
Bonus Link
Quite possibly the most level-headed and intelligent piece yet written about this much-written-about band.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Leitch At The Movies
Ex-Black Table, ex-Deadspin, now New York Magazine scribe Will Leitch occasionally posts movie reviews on his blog. Even in his casual, spare-time way, he's a better, more perceptive film critic than the vast majority of the full-time professionals currently writing for major publications (unfortunately, that pool is shrinking rapidly). Try comparing his most recent batch of reviews with those for the same movies in your publication of choice* and see if you agree (and don't miss the priceless Soderbergh anecdote). His recent, perhaps overgenerous, Tarantino apology, which helped me overcome my reluctance to see Inglourious Basterds**, is also well worth a look.
As I'm fond of telling people when his name comes up, I've been reading Leitch since about 1993 or 4. We attended the same school, and I consumed lots of his sports reporting and movie reviews in the (surprisingly professional - you actually had to pay a subscription) daily college newspaper. Although he was clearly passionate about sports, I always assumed that he'd end up as a film critic, following in the footsteps of the man he often cited as his inspiration, Roger Ebert***. Given the current state of that profession, he was probably right to take a different path, at least financially, but I can't help thinking that the little world of people who read and write about movies would be better off if Will Leitch's voice had a more prominent place in it.
*I really need to see A Serious Man, if for no other reason than to see how it can inspire such night-and-day different takes as Leitch's - he thinks it may be their best work - and Ella Taylor's frontal assault on the Coens in the Village Voice, in which she comes very close to accusing them and the film of contributing to anti-Semitism.
**I was glad I changed my mind. Though I thought QT made some questionable calls along the way, Basterds managed to justify, and seem quite a bit shorter than, it's 152-minute running time, no mean feat.
***I want to take this opportunity to mention that Ebert, probably because he became so TV famous, is generally, and shamefully, underrated as a critic. I'm sure a lot of intelligent people who think of him as some kind of middlebrow joke would reconsider if they read some of his writing (good examples of which are accumulating rapidly on his very active blog).
As I'm fond of telling people when his name comes up, I've been reading Leitch since about 1993 or 4. We attended the same school, and I consumed lots of his sports reporting and movie reviews in the (surprisingly professional - you actually had to pay a subscription) daily college newspaper. Although he was clearly passionate about sports, I always assumed that he'd end up as a film critic, following in the footsteps of the man he often cited as his inspiration, Roger Ebert***. Given the current state of that profession, he was probably right to take a different path, at least financially, but I can't help thinking that the little world of people who read and write about movies would be better off if Will Leitch's voice had a more prominent place in it.
*I really need to see A Serious Man, if for no other reason than to see how it can inspire such night-and-day different takes as Leitch's - he thinks it may be their best work - and Ella Taylor's frontal assault on the Coens in the Village Voice, in which she comes very close to accusing them and the film of contributing to anti-Semitism.
**I was glad I changed my mind. Though I thought QT made some questionable calls along the way, Basterds managed to justify, and seem quite a bit shorter than, it's 152-minute running time, no mean feat.
***I want to take this opportunity to mention that Ebert, probably because he became so TV famous, is generally, and shamefully, underrated as a critic. I'm sure a lot of intelligent people who think of him as some kind of middlebrow joke would reconsider if they read some of his writing (good examples of which are accumulating rapidly on his very active blog).
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Thatsa Nice Lookin' Sandwich (#2 in a Series)
Monday, October 19, 2009
In A Pig's Eye
I'm far from a vegetarian, priding myself on the list of odd bits and parts I've eaten over the years (brain taco, ear taco, tongue sandwich, pig "snoots", etc). Still, in looking through this slideshow of the recent NYC feast put together by London's marrow-popularizing Fergus Henderson, I couldn't help thinking that things had gone a bit too far, that some line had been crossed, some unspoken rule violated.
Is Henderson trying to confront diners with the harsh reality of their carnivorousness by putting them literally face-to-face with the animal they're consuming? Certainly, the meal (or at least the slideshow) seems to have been impeccably sequenced, building from some relatively innocuous salad courses up to the full-on horror of a tongue and an eyeball being plucked from a pig's skull and eaten. When I got to the lamb's neck about halfway through the slideshow, I knew things were getting weird.
If the practice of eating meat ever dies out, I wonder if our descendants will look back at "FergusStock" with the same horror with which we now view certain practices of the Romans*.
*I was thinking here of vomitoriums, but have since learned that they did not actually exist, at least in the sense of venues for deliberate vomiting. The role of vomiting in upper class Roman dining practice still seems to be in dispute, however.
Update:
Another day, another food blog post involving eyeballs, actually a pretty fascinating step-by-step demonstration of how to cut up a (supposedly sustainable) bluefin tuna. Among the handy tips:
"Cut around the eyeball and gouge it out with your hand."
"Rip out the eye. The eyes can be eaten raw or wrapped in foil and cooked."
Is Henderson trying to confront diners with the harsh reality of their carnivorousness by putting them literally face-to-face with the animal they're consuming? Certainly, the meal (or at least the slideshow) seems to have been impeccably sequenced, building from some relatively innocuous salad courses up to the full-on horror of a tongue and an eyeball being plucked from a pig's skull and eaten. When I got to the lamb's neck about halfway through the slideshow, I knew things were getting weird.
If the practice of eating meat ever dies out, I wonder if our descendants will look back at "FergusStock" with the same horror with which we now view certain practices of the Romans*.
*I was thinking here of vomitoriums, but have since learned that they did not actually exist, at least in the sense of venues for deliberate vomiting. The role of vomiting in upper class Roman dining practice still seems to be in dispute, however.
Update:
Another day, another food blog post involving eyeballs, actually a pretty fascinating step-by-step demonstration of how to cut up a (supposedly sustainable) bluefin tuna. Among the handy tips:
"Cut around the eyeball and gouge it out with your hand."
"Rip out the eye. The eyes can be eaten raw or wrapped in foil and cooked."
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