A digestion of contemporary life through contemporary art and MP3s. I'm an artist and neuroscience student based in Madison, WI. The posts primarily focus on my favourites... conceptual art and indie rock music.
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You can hear the felt. Socks scurrying across a drafty wooden cooridor. A pause at the base of the stairs. The intention is the percussion between seconds. You can hear the space for miles.
Another incredible music weekend sweeps through Madison with the early November cold front... My pick is to start tonight at the beautiful Majestic for a warm set by Over the Rhine (this time with Minneapolis' Haley Bonar), sprint over the Club 770 to meet up with homemade Best Friends and Best Fwends, and set your jeans on fire in a Matt & Kim riot. If the night truly ends by midnight, you'll have plenty of time to rest before Deerhunter & Times New Viking grind strangely against the concrete of the High Noon on Sunday. And just because a weekend isn't long enough... the UW kids have assembled an incredible lineup topped by No Age to smash your Monday into fuzzy irregular pieces. What are you up to?
I apologize for the delay. My hard drive crashed and I've lost my music and art collection. Actually the story goes that my hard drive was in failing health and I pulled the plug. The nice young man with an English accent and a new haircut at the Apple Store asked if I wanted to backup my files and transfer them to my new hard drive. And without hesitation, I said no. Not even a passive no. There is nothing important on there, I said. Why? Because I wanted to start over. I think. To tell you the truth, I don't really understand. And I guess that is a new feeling too. Which is good. I think. Holy balls.
We live among photocopied ghosts, with unemployed ghosts, in ghost houses. Sometimes it feels like parts of ourselves, ghosts. Have you watched a banner ad scrolling silently, endlessly, for hours? These days are like this. Looped and left playing to no one in particular. Our hopes of shopping and immortality are sent through the air to bounce off the empty walls and linger as memories in a room without anyone to remember. They are all dead. We will play forever in this way. Click here to win an iPod. Our legacy an endless, silent banner ad for a trick, for something that doesn't exist. This page cannot be found. Many people click on those banner ads. They will soon be dead too.
Wil-Mar Center polling station. 7:15am. A line around the block. The sun rising gently over the trees along the lake behind us. Pajamas and wet hair, some in ties on the way to the office. A homeless dog sniffs around the playground for breakfast or maybe a tax cut. The door to the building is propped open with a sign that offers voting assistance upon request. The line snakes past the mural depiction of the Willy Street Fair, a flier for an upcoming Ludefisk dinner, the free bread bins, a gentlemen with a tired face checking email in the computer lab. 8:00am. There are very few people with last names starting A-L in line, the man behnd me cites healthy German consonants as the reason. A white-haired poll worker yells for "A-L last name registered voters or any unregistered voters", sending the line into a little confused fury. A woman gently asks him to yell about one item at a time. The referrenda are taped to the wall with masking tape and the hurried enthusiasm of posters hung in a teenage bedroom. The explanations are both simple for space constraints and confusing for those reading them for the first time. Registered voter M-Z? Last name, address. 8:15. A small piece of paper with the number 307. A blue folder with the coveted white questions peaking out. A few steps to a flimsy plastic booth. A pen, a line. A change.
We arrived near the Schroll Brewerie in Nankendorf just after passing noon on a windy road not much wider than our car. Leading up to town, the road was flanked by an autumn forest and an inner row of reflective white pegs - about one foot tall - perhaps to keep our wandering from bounding off course to follow the river more literally. We parked as usual like a brute on a cobblestone sidewalk, this time below an authoritative but ailing building high on the hill like an elder who speaks no English but watches intently. Nankendorf is like the others, a cluster of houses separated only with tight streets to not waste any farmland surrounding. This same philosophy naturally grows a town this size every 1km or so, similar to thoughtfully spaced crops. And the crops in Franconia are watered with bier. Breweries are strangely sophisticated basement experiments perfected over hundreds of years to produce a unique local brew that is more flavorful and balanced than we deserve in American big gulps. No bottling, no drink specials. Here your grandma would have a familie brewerie and open one of the rooms in her house (complete with fake pink flowers and doiles) as the gasthaus. It's an intimate, family experience that nourishes a town. From inside the gasthaus we grasp tight to our mug and stare out the window. We watch the rain fall steady like the carbonic bubbles rise in the local Vollbier - the Urhell too, though it'll force you to make an inappropriately sour face for the warm countryside and warm host washing glasses and watching TV behind the bar. It's hard to believe that this is the same country whose pride recently ballooned to superiority, who invaded Poland and exterminated it's own citizens. Its hard to understand that the bier brewed and shared here remains like it was 500 years ago, without the taste the auto industry or burger kings or cigarette machines or genocide. Though the hops is grown on vines and poles in the same soil that was torn by bombs only sixty years ago, it seems to have forgotten entirely.
He doesn't know if you do this too. Instead of controlling his emotions, he controls his playlist. He controls the extent to which his melancholy seems ridiculous by blasting power pop and scowling motionless to the jangly beat. If it's eighties inspired, he's pulling out all the stops. If it can remind him he's white and spoiled, even better. His playlists aren't mood-changers, they make him realize his mood deeper by challenge and comparison. He likes to sit in a bubblebath, but not force a wash.
I'm breaking up with an idea, and it hurts just as hard. I tell myself the same things that millions have used to gauze their breakup wounds; that this is a new beginning, that this will make me stronger, that everything happens for a reason. I've rationally described to myself that my ego is causing my own pain. I'm making realistic plans for how I'll react when I run into the idea at a bar, when it goes on to success without me, when it calls me late at night for help. I'm trying to keep my distance, keep it positive, keep myself busy with other things. I've made lists of all the reasons the idea is awful, and lists of every place I failed. I've already carved out several scenarios where we get back together and am trying not to think about them obsessively. I guess these things just take time.
Masaru Tatsuki - Untitled #11 (2005) [from "Decotora: Japanese Art Truck Scene"]
To plastic neon glasses and day glo t-shirts, I present trump. The hip indie accessory for 2009 will be a Japenense Decorata truck rigged with flashing neon lights, back lit graphic cut-outs, hand-painted cats, and plenty of chrome. These functional objects can transport bushels of potatoes with enough embellishment to excite a party on any rural highway.
A general rule: More things should be more like casinos. For example, I offer two songs that are pretty but don't go anywhere...
This is officially the first in a six month series of goodbyes to summer. Today I start living in reverse, each step a retrospective of bloated summer dreams before they began to wither. I will be accompanied on the trip by two young cousins named Guillermina and Belina from Buenos Aires whose wide eyes and newspaper costumes believe that even a desolate family farm deserves a Renaissance.
Gina Tuzzi - (Let Me In) May I Please Call It Home (2006)
A little bustling, here and there. A little clattering, the achingly sweet. Prolific, mesmerizing, a whole lot of loneliness. If only. If only we could listen, know, understand. If only we could hear it. If only we could just try.
Windmill - Plastic Pre Flight Seats(mp3): The camera pans down a gray terminal from well above the buzzing traffic of business travelers. G23, G22, G21, G20, G19. Our attention rests on a panel of dark blue leather seats in an overflowing boarding gate. Cameron Diaz sits alone and unglamorous in a sweatshirt and an iPod, ignoring a carelessly-folded newspaper to stare blankly into the eye of the crowd. The staccato keystrokes build to swelling strings and it becomes clear that she is far from home. She has left someone behind. She is chasing something. She has made a sacrifice. She is uncertain. She gnaws on the straw of an empty Starbucks Frappuccino like she's teething a solution from her gums. There are voices in her eyes saying "jump in, jump out". End scene.
First Hundred Years
Corey Arnold - Swans Are Evil (2003)
The Terrodactyls - Growing Old (mp3) I remember this moment clearly. I was running in boots in the street, you next to me. Though there was nowhere important to be, it really mattered that we get there quick. It was important so you'd know I wouldn't be in this naive skin forever. I had places to go. The kazoo was the quickest accompaniment since it required no lessons and sounded most like I intended. I had plans.
The Terrodactyls - Overcast Summer (mp3) And this. The same but barefoot.
[See The Terrodactyls live in Madison this Thursday (10/9) at The Sitting Dutchman - 201 S Baldwin]
What Girls in the Midwest are All About
Apes and Androids - We Don't Understand You (mp3): Just when you thought you could no longer tolerate the new wave of glam-inspired classic rock, Apes and Androids spits in your eye until it looks like art. In a good way. So good that it may be worth ditching the plastic sunglasses. So get fucked up. Party like it's the first time you've heard this track and are kind of obsessed. Dress up like a gothic unicorn or a baseball-paying alien and reenact fast-forwarded William Wegman videos until the keg is emptied. To avoid stepping over the line of bad taste, try to avoid Weimaraners and the guitar solo in the album's second track.
JustSayin Presents: Mount Eerie & Julie Doiron (10/21)
Phil Elverum & Julie Dorion's collaborative album "Lost Wisdom" comes out tomorrow (buy) and JustSayinIsAll.com is honored to present the pair live at the beautifully intimate Gates of Heaven Synagogue in James Madison Park (302 E Gorham St) in just two weeks. Julie's harmony adds a deepened accessibility to Phil's soft vocal while accentuating its characteristic rawness of previously untouched forest. To hear their live echoes in this veune will be a very unique experience, as it was when Phil's wife Genevièvevisited us at this time last year. Tickets are at the door, but because it's such a small space you can email me your name to reserve your spot.
Mount Eerie (Microphones) & Julie Doiron - O My Heart(mp3)
Sword swallowers and belly dancers. Jazz ballads and accordions. Tattoos and beards. Stripes and tassles. Burlesque and bohemia. Witness as Madison's own Majestic Theater is transformed into an adult carnival the likes of which haven't been seen since Houdini graced the historic stage. Tomorrow (10/2) Yard Dogs Road Show hits town and I'm all but standing on an overturned bathtub and screaming at you in that annoying roaring twenties accent to pay a buck to see a one-of-a-kind monstrosity behind a curtain. One night only folks, come one come all. [tickets]
Elena Willis - In A Beautiful Place In The Country (2003)
Yael Naim - Bachelorette [Bjork Cover] (mp3): A blade of grass bends seductively at its middle and touches the tip of its lamina to the moist soil to its left, raises straight again, and then to its right. Dusk is the smoky lounge tonight. Its individual form disappears into the hypnotic synchronicity of the lawn's dance. Sway and stop, sway and stop with the bass, tighten with the tapping heel of the claves. Everyone is crowded on the dance floor tonight.
This is the cold pressure of rain like whiskey on the roof of your mouth. It is the sustained drench of days counted at the pace of thoughts left alone to concentrate. What does the mouthful say? That your salivary glands are a slow-motion car wash. And that every experience sounds better when gargled with the members of a choir.
I haven't forgotten about you. I've just been thinking about you so much that I didn't have time to write all my thoughts down. So here they are: Your shirt is wrinkled. It's important to regularly check that a smile is your default expression or you may be sending the wrong message. Contracts should always be written and signed. One day I'll tell you all you've done for me. It's time to get back to the games again.
Thanks to everyone who came out in support of Forward Music Festival this weekend. It was an incredible sight to see music fans jumping from venue to venue and enjoying what Madison has to offer. We hope you enjoyed the experiment as much as we enjoyed experimenting.
Thao with the Get Down Stay Down - Feet Asleep (mp3)
Prayer For The Doers
Carey Young - Body Technique [after Encirclement, Valie Export, 1976] (2007)
Yeasayer - No Need To Worry (mp3): Voices waft into the air like dust to describe their becomings in this prayer. They are cells that once belonged on the skin, at large family tables, in grad schools and Gaussian corrections. They remember once building attempts to steal away and start new. But now the voices build piles of themselves, coating the books on the shelves and resting in gray clumps in corners and under the stove.
Pink and Big
Edward Del Rosario - Contest of Champions II (2007)
The Hood Internet (Mickey Avalon vs. CSS) - Dick Move (mp3): A nasty grinder for the late night peacocks on the town tonight. Careful unzipping your pants and whipping out your metaphors in public. I take that back, don't be careful, be awesome.
2008 FMF Preview: A Catapult Western
Corey Arnold - Lonliness (2002)
Artist: A Catapult Western Website: www.acatapultwestern.com Regional Connection: Based in Madison Showcase: September 20, 2008 at Cafe Montmartre Co-Performers: Gentlemen Auction House
The performance at Forward Music Fest will be the last for Madison's own A Catapult Western. Jason Nyberg will be moving to Austin Texas to give their booming music scene a shot. If you haven't tasted their lullabies of shut-ins and dark beer, Cafe Montmartre will provide the perfect atmosphere. It's bound to be bittersweet and unforgettable.
We are our words and our worst. Except when we are not. And then it's difficult to explain. And even more difficult to ever sound authentic again. Except that we can tell the difference in ourselves. For holes and sticky fly paper, there are scissors and ladders to remedy a situation too gruesome. For fist fights without reasons, there are choices to never return.
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