The alternative to flowers!Thursday, September 30, 2010School nightI did something I rarely do last night; I went out to see music on a school night. Maxwell's had a triple bill put on by WFMU: Italian fuzz-psych-garage quartet Vermillion Sands, who I had never heard of, Dump, the solo project of James McNew, bass player for Yo La Tengo, and New Zealand legends The Clean. I'll be honest, if it had just been The Clean, I probably would have stayed home, which will sound like blasphemy to some of my long-time Kiwimusiphile friends. But the real draw for me here was Dump. James doesn't come out with records very often, and he doesn't really tour Dump; he's pretty busy with his day job, after all. Dump's set was short, only 30 minutes, but it was a perfectly distilled nugget of awesomeness. His songs often start slow and build in layers, like a new wave equivalent of Steve Reich or John Adams, and that worked really well on stage, with the help of some kind of looping sampler that let him lay down the basics and add pieces gradually. I think my favorite on this was "Daily Affirmation" from Dump's most recent album, 2003's A Grown-Ass Man. It starts with about 30 seconds of chaos and gradually assembles into something that makes sense. The trip from baffling to wonderful takes about ten minutes all in all. This video from 2008 is pretty close to what the song sounded like last night. Ira's not the only guitar shredder in Yo La Tengo. A+.
The Clean seemed a little off last night. I've seen them probably four times over the years, and this was easily the worst. That said, much like sex, bad Clean is better than good anything else. I don't know what the problem was. It might have been a bad mix; The Clean is a sturdy platform put up by Robert Scott (bass) and Hamish Kilgour (drums) for David Kilgour (guitars and organ) to build mountains of sound on. But there were a lot of points at which you could hardly hear David's guitar, at least where I was standing. Even when you could, it often lacked the bite of Kilgour's best guitar work. Borrowed guitar and amp, maybe? Or maybe the band's just Getting Older. I never expect them to be tight; the ramshackle nature of their performances is expected given that one member lives in New York and the other two in New Zealand, and usually it's charming. It didn't bother me that songs kind of fell apart at the end rather than coming to a full stop all at once. But something was just off last night. Even the encore closer, "Point That Thing Somewhere Else", wasn't the usual rouser that it is. I know the band likes to mess with their songs; I even have a copy of "Point That Thing" where the main melody is done on piano, and the bite of the song survives that. Even with all that, it was a solid B perfomance.
Vermillion Sands, who opened, were a band I'd never heard of. I thought they did a good job winning over the crowd with their catchy songs. I bought their CD from their singer after the show, so I must have thought they were pretty good. They'd fit right in on Little Steven's Underground Garage. B+/A-.
I was dragging this morning, but made it through the day without falling asleep, so I guess I'm not as old as I felt at 6:53 this morning when I woke up (53 minutes late and I still made the last express train into the city and got to work at my usual time).
Now listening to: "Monsoon Blues" from Vermillion Sands by Vermillion Sands.
Tags: maxwells the clean vermillion sands dump hoboken Posted at 9:29 PMLink to this entry || No comments (yet) || Trackbacks (0)Tuesday, August 31, 2010Karl Jansky and the birth of radio astronomy
A friend of mine posted a link to a PDF on the web site of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, about an attempt in the 1990s to build a replica of the original antenna used by the first radio astronomer, Karl Jansky back in the 1930s. I happen to know a little about Jansky, because the site where he discovered / created the science of radio astronomy was at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, where I worked for several years. In fact, while I was the webmaster for the Bell Labs site, we posted a story about a couple of Bell Labs scientists who decided that Jansky's work should be honored with a monument at the exact location where radio astronomy was born.
The monument took the form of a stylized rendition of the original, which you can see in both of the links in the first paragraph.
Sadly, Bell Labs moved out of the building in Holmdel a few years ago. There have been attempts to sell the building and redevelop the huge tract of land in the middle of a very wealthy community, but they've come to naught, and the property is blocked off and basically inaccessible at this point. Back in 2007, shortly before the barriers were erected, I visited the site and took some pictures. Lucent, the corporate father of Bell Labs, had fallen on hard times, and the maintenance of a monument to their glorious corporate and scientific past at a location they didn't even want to own any more took a pretty low priority.
The text of the monument reads:
At this location in 1931, Karl Jansky, a Bell Laboratories physicist and radio researcher, recorded for the first time radio signals from beyond the Earth. The source of these signals -- radio noise at a wavelength of 14.6 meters -- was the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
This sculpture commemorates Jansky's discovery, first announced in 1933, which gave birth to the science of radio astronomy. The sculpture is oriented as Jansky’s antenna was at 7:10 p.m. on September 16, 1932, at a moment of maximum signal. As his directional antenna rotated, the center of our galaxy came into view in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, low on the southern horizon.
Radio Astronomy pioneer Karl Jansky died in 1950, years before the scientific community realized the significance of his discovery. In 1973, the International Astronomical Union gave his name to the international unit of radio flux density. Jansky’s work led to a number of breakthroughs in astronomy: the discovery of quasars, pulsars, radio galaxies, and near this site in 1964, the Nobel Prize-winning discovery by Bell Laboratories scientists of the cosmic microwave background which has revolutionized our understanding of the origin of the universe.
It’s sad that the monument was left to the elements and blocked by barricades. I hope that someday it will be accessible again.
Tags: jansky Posted at 9:00 PMLink to this entry || 3 comments || Trackbacks (0)Saturday, July 31, 2010Youth Tunes Turning Brown and Torn in Two
This video by Toronto’s Little Girls for their song Youth Tunes...
...always makes me think of the video Chris Knox and Alec Bathgate did for the Tall Dwarfs song Turning Brown and Torn in Two
That’s only fitting, because Little Girls kind of sound like they could have been a Flying Nun band.
Tags: tall dwarfs little girls Posted at 10:42 PMLink to this entry || No comments (yet) || Trackbacks (0)Wednesday, June 30, 2010Japandroids
You hear the band name “Japandroids”, maybe you think “Haircut 100 Tribute Band”? Something like that. Definitely an 80s synth-pop thing going on here.
Uh-uh.
Think more along the lines of classic NZ noisemeisters Bailter Space, shimmering waves of melodic noise. Great stuff. In this video from KEXP, they take Big Black's classic “Racer X” and make it their own.
They’re currently touring the world and releasing a single every two months that includes an interesting cover on the B-side. The first one, which had Racer X on it, is sold out, but you can get their new Younger Us single b/w a cover of X’s “Sex and Dying in High Society”. While you’re there, feel free to buy their two albums as well. Great stuff.
Tags: japandroids bigblack racerx Posted at 9:46 PMLink to this entry || 3 comments || Trackbacks (0)Monday, May 31, 2010Robot Ponies
I've been spending more time than usual on YouTube lately thanks to my new iPad. One of the most amazing music videos I've found is for Laura Barrett's song Robot Ponies. My musical hero John Peel always said "I just want to hear something I've never heard before." This song definitely qualifies.
Tags: music ponies laurabarrett Posted at 9:58 PMLink to this entry || 2 comments || Trackbacks (0)Friday, April 30, 2010Too Many Days
There are too many photo days all clustered up at nearly the same time. Last Sunday was Pinhole Day. I took my new Gakken Stereo Pinhole Camera out for a spin. This weekend, being May 1st, is International Commie Camera Day 2010. I hope to take my Kiev 88cm and Kiev II out for the day. Next week is ’Roid Week. I have plenty of Polaroid cameras to use for that, although I should probably repair my 250, which has a few tiny pinholes in it; the light leaks only tend to show up when I use 3000 speed film in daylight, though.
Tags: pinhole communism kiev polaroid photography Posted at 9:46 PMLink to this entry || No comments (yet) || Trackbacks (0)Wednesday, March 31, 2010Silver Shade
The Impossible Project did it; they released new film for Polaroid cameras. The first film out is for SX-70-style cameras only; good thing I have three of those (two actual SX-70s and a OneStep). They'll be releasing 600 and Spectra style films over the next several months. The 600 is supposedly a more traditional black and white film, unlike the PX100, which has a kind of sepia tone. It also seems pretty picky; you need to protect it from sunlight, you need to develop in a narrow range of temperatures, and so on. Still, I've seen some pretty interesting shots so far on Flickr. I ordered five packs of the PX100 on the day it became available, so hopefully I'll have it soon.
Posted at 8:49 PMLink to this entry || No comments (yet) || Trackbacks (0)Sunday, February 28, 2010I'm always throwing hack weight
I didn't get to watch as much curling this year as I did during the last Winter Olympics, but I still got to see a fair amount, including the championship games for both the men and women. I used to watch curling on TV when I was growing up in Detroit, because the Canadian TV station across the river in Windsor used to air it often. I think it appealed to my sense of the absurd, with the sweeping in particular looking profoundly silly. But seeing it as an adult, I can definitely see the subtlties that evaded me when I was a kid. And I love a sport where some of the best athletes are in the forties. Kevin Martin, the Canadian men's skip, and Cheryl Bernard, the Canadian women's skip, are both 43; Carolyn Darbyshire of the Canadian team is 46. It's a pity we won't be seeing any more curling here in the U.S. until the next Winter Olympics, because I genuinely enjoy watching it. Then again, maybe we're better off not having it on TV here; NBC's host last night joked that NBC stood for "Nothing But Curling", but it was more like "Nothing But Commercials". It felt like we were only getting to watch half of the spiel.
In honor of the just-completed Olympic curling competition, here's my favorite curling-as-metaphor-for-failing-romance song, Tournament of Hearts by the Weakerthans.
Tags: olympics weakerthans curling Posted at 4:39 AMLink to this entry || 3 comments || Trackbacks (0)
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What do you mean there is no cat?"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."
- Albert Einstein, explaining radioThere used to be a cat![[ photo of Mischief, a black and white cat ]](/moosechief.jpeg)
Mischief, 1988 - December 20, 2003
![[ photo of Sylvester, a black and white cat ]](/coneheadsm.jpeg)
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