It must be weird to be asked to talk to someone with a camera long enough to have an hour and a half of footage. I’m watching the William Gibson documentary No Maps For These Territories, and I’m struck by the difficulty of this kind of “performance.” No doubt it is a performance: sitting around and talking is different from sitting around and talking to a camera. It’s interesting in a number of ways. It certainly provides some context to Gibson’s career, especially his recent comments about SF and the comments in the documentary about the relative difficulty of imagining …
Category: MUSIC
Pedal Up
Rahsaan Roland Kirk, 1975. Damn!
Pipi Band and Po-keu Song
Yay! Lime got me a few of the CDs I asked her to order for me. Among them, 불가능한작전 by 삐삐밴드 (Pipi Band). Often referred to as “punk,” I find them more a kind of mixture of freakiness, electronic, and rock. Apparently they spat onto a camera or the ground or something while they were on TV once, and people thought they were bizarre and rude as a result. They’re not really around anymore, but that CD was still available. Bizarre stuff, moreoso if you’ve had the lyrics explained. As I have had, though I may sit down and try …
Woman Got Pipes
I am probably the absolutely worst person to be introducing Lime to Aretha Franklin, since I really only know a couple of her songs, but when I got home tonight, for some reason, a little chunk of the backing vocals on “Respect” had suddenly bloomed into an earworm, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. I think the word “respect” summoned it up, but in any case, it’s the bit in some versions where the backing singers start chanting “Sockittomesockittome…” [Sock it to me, but really fast] over and over. In my head it comes at a major …
Watched/Read/Listened: July 16th to August 13th
First off, I’m writing this in pieces, as I complete each book, so that my comments about each aren’t based on hazy recollections of a month past or more. BOOKS: Blameless in Abaddon by James Morrow I’ve been a fan of James Morrow’s writing for years now, since I read, by chance, his novel Only Begotten Daughter back in my undergrad days. Since then, I’ve read Bible Stories for Adults, This is the Way the World Ends, and Towing Jehovah, the latter of which is the book to which Blameless in Abaddon is the sequel. Morrow’s made a name for …
Wanna Turn on a Wind Musician?
Checking out The Bis Key Chronicles, a saxophonist’s blog, I ran across this post about a Bb bass sax that this guy is having built for him. I followed on to the homepage of the instrument maker who’s building it for him, custom with a low-A key, Benedikt Eppelsheim Wind Instruments, Munich, and, well, this is what I’d call porn for wind musicians. There are clips so you can hear what the instruments sound like, too. I don’t know… the Bb Tubax seems a little TOO extreme for me, but I’m suddenly thinking I might prefer a Bb bass sax …
Read & Watched & Listened
This list spans June and the first half of July 2007. READ: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs.Fascinating, disturbing, and surprising. It has the usual disclaimers from locals, but what I found unusual and particularly inspiring was her continuous reminders of the kind of horrific objectification that was forced on female slaves in America, on the downright moral and sexual depravity of white masters. What was striking was that she spoke less in abstract terms, instead slamming home her point with specific examples from her life, which were enough to turn my stomach. She wrote …
Threes
My netfriend and fellow writer Stephanie recently wrote: I recently read in a book that stories and life happen in three acts: wake up, do some work, go to bed; you’re born, you live, you die; etc. This is what my life has been feeling like lately, like I’m just going through the motions… I really hear her. I’ve been there before myself. It’s funny… the three stages or “acts” in the drama of my life tend to be: 1. Really believe in (or wish to believe in) some model of the world: an ideology, a system, an explanation for …
Forget Rain, Forget Hakwons. Parents: Think Kim Sun Wook.
Like any other Westerner in Korea, I’m completely amused, and unsurprised, by the way 비/Rain’s so-called “World Tour” is turning out to be a collossal failure. (Inadequate stage setup? I have trouble buying that, as do many others.) World popularity isn’t a nationalist-netizen-driven thing, as Rain and his promoters — and hopefully the Korean pop music industry, is painfully realizing. But there are Korean musicians who are world-class, and one of them is Kim Sun Wook, whom Lime just mentioned to me. Here’s an article on him from 2006, at KBS GLOBAL: Eighteen-year-old pianist Kim Sun-wook has won the 15th …
Joe Sample & Randy Crawford
Quite a while ago, Lime discovered that the Seoul Jazz Festival was happening (I blogged about it here) and asked me what show I’d like to see. IF you look at the program, you’ll see that it’s dominated by Japanese jazz fusion and Pat Metheny (whose music I despise), so the sensible choice was to see whatever else didn’t fit that category. She ordered the tickets, and that was that. Well, the other night, the day finally arrived, so we went and saw Joe Sample and Randy Crawford, who were accompanied by Joe Sample’s son Nicklas Sample on bass and …