http://www.covermesongs.com/MP3s/News0412/30Quickies/EverythingIs.mp3

on a site devoted to covers, via Brent Amaker, who also has a song on there. It’s really well done by an Albuquerque band called Sad Baby Wolf. Their recording is very close to the original, but just different enough to be worth doing.

Last week I posted some thoughts about NMH and seeing Jeff Mangum at the Moore and then made it private because I’d rather keep (most of) it to myself. The short version is that I’m kind of over it. NMH felt more meaningful when I was younger, which is a bit sad to realize but there it is. Hearing that cover though brought a bit of it back. I used to cover “Everything Is” a lot during the summer as it’s a good summer song, and one of NMH’s more cheerful, Tall Dwarfs-ish sounding ones.

Coincidentally enough I just went to Sad Baby Wolf’s website and, in addition to the band having former Shins members in it, also has Sean McCullough on bass, whom I met that fateful night in Albuquerque when Jeff Mangum was in the bar and overheard me cover “Engine.” I hung out with Sean that night and the next year when I came through Albuquerque again. It’s good to see he’s still active in the ALB scene, and damn I quite enjoy these coincidences.

First, Andrew Bird played an in-studio at the radio station where I work, and I watched for a couple of songs. I’m not strictly an Andrew Bird fan, but he is something to see. For this performance he and his band were assembled around one microphone, old-school radio style, with drums, acoustic bass, and acoustic guitar. Bird himself played fiddle (both fingerpicked and bowed), sang and whistled, effortlessly, perfectly, completely in control but with feeling. It was great, and an awesome thing to watch a professional of that caliber up close.

Then last night was Radiohead at the Key Arena. A whole lot of talent went into that event, but I make a point to contrast Thom Yorke’s twitchy, sloppy genius with that of Andrew Bird. Very different, but again something to see, wondering which of their eight albums’ worth of amazing songs he’ll pick next. They mostly stuck to their last three albums, and as usual left me wanting more.

My error was mainly in thinking this is a simple passive circuit with no components besides connectors and switches. It turns out that’s not true at all, that there is in fact a preamp and some passive filtering going on in the iRig and other phone/guitar interfaces. I didn’t think active circuitry would be present without a battery, but it turns out that the iPhone’s mic connection puts out 2.7 V in order to polarize condenser mic elements. The iRig seems to use this to polarize a JFET in its preamp.

So, long story short I need to spend more time on this. Here’s a thread I found recently I wish I’d seen earlier, it explains a lot.

Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2008) was something. Documentarians catch up with a somewhat influential (in metal circles) early 80s hair metal band from Toronto that never achieved success but also never quit trying to achieve success. The film opens with scenes from the band’s peak in 1984 playing a metal festival in Japan, followed by scenes of the present day (2006 or so) of the lead singer/guitarist (“Lips”) going to his low-wage day job in Toronto, and then scenes of the band playing their local pub to 100 or so devoted fans.

At this point I had some conflicting reactions.

It was heartening to see how good they are. And shocking — had they cut from the 80s concert scene directly to the ’06 concert scene the only difference would be thinning hair and wrinkles. They never stopped playing. Lips and drummer Robb are the original members, in their 50s at this point, still great players (instrumentally at least) and as energetic and present as they were in the 80s. It was also nice to see what kind of support they have in their hometown after 30 years of playing, that 100 people would come out to see them. So what more could you want?

Sadly, they have a dream, and even thought he object of their dream (80′s hair metal world stardom) no longer exists, the film follows their one last attempt at realizing it. It gets depressing. Quixotic? That’s the word. It’s worth seeing though, you can stream it on Netflix.

Last night I heard D. A. Pennebaker on public radio’s American Routes discussing Dont Look Back, his 1967 film of Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England. The modern age being as awesome as it is, I promptly rented it online.

I’m on a weird 60s kick right now and Dont Look Back fits into that nicely, and is quite a different music documentary than Anvil. I don’t have a lot to say on it other than the film itself has a great pacing and feel to it, and captures the power of Dylan’s solo performances perfectly. I haven’t spent time with and/or don’t understand later Dylan enough to appreciate the wheezing unintelligible figure he turned into (his MTV Unplugged album was one of the worst things I ever bought), but watching him here is just magic. It’s an honest portrayal (or as honest as something as contrived as an authorized documentary can be), showing an impatient churlish side to the man, in his interactions with the press, etc. Plus, everybody’s smoking! Constantly. The whole thing reminded me a lot of the 1998 Radiohead documentary Meeting People is Easy, which I also really like, and my guess is it isn’t an accident (on Radiohead/Grant Gee’s part, obviously).

Speaking of TV, the episode of 30 Rock, whose exterior shots allowed me coincidentally to see Tina Fey and Jane Krakowski last month in New York, aired this last Thursday. So it did happen. My photos didn’t turn out that great but you can see people wearing the yellow and blue that forms one of the episode’s very silly plot points. Not their best work, but it’ll do.

Here’s a photo I found on CNN.com of this scene (on the left), and a photo I took of more or less the same scene (on the right). The whole thing happened very quickly, I don’t think the crowd was there more than 5 minutes. The actors kept appearing and disappearing, and the stage hands kept telling the tourist crowd to stop using flash cameras, and then the whole scene dissipated and everyone left. It was weird.

As with every BoW release there’s a show, and I’ll be playing it, tomorrow (the 23rd) at the Sunset Tavern, starting around 9pm. Here’s a Facebook invite.

As for the song, I submitted an old one that was initially meant for a different friend’s homemade horror movie. That was four years ago and he either never finished the movie or didn’t want the song, so there it is. You can listen to the comp and even (gasp) buy it right now at Bandcamp.

First, Overdrive for iPhone. Overdrive is required by the Seattle public library eBooks collections and is not terrible, but a few things keep it from being truly good. First, images. You can’t zoom in on images at all, which is beyond annoying, particularly if you’ve got charts, any images with text in them, of which A Billion Wicked Thoughts has a few. Second, you can’t select text to copy, and there’s no built-in dictionary if you want to select something and look it up. Finally, and probably worst, the footnotes system is terrible. I downloaded Infinite Jest from the library and couldn’t get too far because you need to be able to navigate footnotes. Instead of each individual note’s link taking you to that note, it takes you to the beginning of the entire notes section. So, clicking on note #34, for example, will take you to note #1, and then you have to advance yourself to 34. This was ok for a while, until I reached a certain note in the book that’s dozens of pages long (a list of the main character’s father’s movie projects). I don’t know if this was the reader’s or the file’s fault, but either way the book became unreadable.

Worse than Overdrive though is the Google Books reader for iPhone. I bought A Dance With Dragons for this format because one of our local bookstores (the Elliott Bay Book Company) had titles for sale via Google. One of the disadvantages of the eBook format is not being able to support local booksellers, so I thought hey, this is perfect, until I had to use this reader. I think it was version 1.2.0, and what a piece of crap.

Two main problems: the reader is very slow, and it routinely gets stuck such that you can only advance the pages, and not go back, or vice versa, depending on how you’re reading. The way this becomes most noticeable is, say you read through a passage and want to go back a page or two to review something. Good luck to you sir! The reader might let you page back, but it will be slow about it, and once you’ve paged back it won’t let you page forward again (this is particularly true across chapter boundaries). You can work around it by paging back some more, then paging forward again, but you’ll have to stare a the “spinny” icon for a while while the app decides what to do. Truly awful. I suspect that the length of the book was a factor (it’s a pretty long book), because otherwise I don’t see how Google could release such a lame app.

As with Overdrive, you also can’t zoom into images or highlight/copy/look up text. The next thing I read was back in iBooks. What a difference. I’d love to buy more eBooks from Elliott Bay but I won’t do it until Google fixes their reader.

At any rate:

George R. R. Martin, A Storm of Swords (2000), A Feast for Crows (2005), A Dance with Dragons (2011) – A
What I said the last time still applies. This series is addicting, and reads so fast you hardly notice how damn long it is. Reading these back to back kept me in a dark place for a while though, and I was glad to be done with them. I don’t mind having to wait however many years for the next one.

W. Craig Reed, Red November (2011) – B+
This one’s a pretty fascinating and enjoyable read about submarine warfare during the Cold War. I was a bit of a submarine buff in my teens (I played many hours of Gato) and it was fun to relive that for a bit (I looked at a lot of Wikipedia while reading this). You get a nice overview of the events, brinksmanship, and technology of the era, some of it widely known and some that’s relatively newly revealed.

Ogi Ogas & Sai Gaddam, A Billion Wicked Thoughts (2011) – C
Sex! Now that I have your attention, these authors attempt to bring together theories of male and female sexual desire with an analysis of what people search for and look at on the web. It’s all pretty interesting, though maybe too ambitious and probably full of crap. Reviews by people who know something about the science find a lot not to like, but as far as facts are concerned vs. analysis or explanation, it’s probably still a good read.

Anthony Summers & Robbyn Swan, The Eleventh Day (2011) – A-
Given what an effect 9/11 has had on American decision-making and world events in general in the last decade, you’d think the facts in the case would be more settled and widely understood. Summers and Swan do a good job laying out the known knowns and unknowns as well as the ways in which these differ from the popular understanding. The results are quite surprising and generally exasperating.

I do wish the authors had spent more time refuting conspiracy theory. That section of the book may be the weakest; it doesn’t cover all of the most popular assertions and it often appeals to emotion rather than sticking to evidence. Still the book is worth reading.

Stieg Larsson, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2008), The Girl Who Played With Fire (2009), The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (2010) – A
I wanted to know what all the fuss was about, and now I get it man, I get it. I picked these up (electronically, thanks everyone for the iTunes gift cards) and couldn’t put them down.

The story is kind of like Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Ender’s Game. Larsson invents a fantastical cyber-punk heroine to beat the crap out of and later reward by letting her realize some elaborate revenge fantasies. The big theme is female empowerment within a male-chauvinist Swedish culture, though it’s a bit hard to take seriously when the male hero is a cartoonish womanizing action-nerd.

There are other themes, the most interesting is Larsson’s commentary on journalism, first specifically regarding economic journalism’s stenographic tendencies in Dragon Tattoo, at least five years before Jon Stewart’s Jim Cramer takedown. This builds into a larger statement on the power and responsibility of investigative journalism to uncover abuse and corruption, and modern journalism’s abdication of this responsibility. This, years before Stephen Colbert’s White House Correspondents Association dinner speech, which was when a lot of us became more aware of it. Clearly these have been issues for a while but Larsson may have been more prescient than most.

Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War (2011) – A+
We’ve all seen Vietnam war movies like Platoon or Full Metal Jacket that depict the misery of that period. Matterhorn is something else. Obviously a book can only go so far in portraying the war experience, but I’ve not seen or read anything else that gave a better sense of the tactics, weapons, operations, routines, emotions, and politics that a Vietnam-era soldier (or Marine, in this case) would have dealt with. It’s an inspired work, not to mention a page-turner.

Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work (2009) – B
Most everyone will find something to like in what Crawford has to say regarding the cult of college, the empty promise of a future where we are all fancy “creative class” knowledge workers (in the States at least), and the increasing disconnect between how one earns a living and what gives one meaning. Everyone might not like the way he says it though… it’s a bit of a dry, academic, philosophical treatise (which is a bit ironic given his general contempt for academics). The best parts are anecdotes from the author’s experience as a mechanic and electrician, and these are often in the footnotes. I took exception with one or two of his arguments at some point, but I forget now what they were, and I don’t care enough to go back and figure it out. So let’s call it good.

That’s all for now. On a whim I just “graded” these books. My criteria are a combination of how well-written I think the book is and how much fun it was to read, and I have 3 seconds to decide.

Hello everyone,

I’m using a sports reference (double-header) to describe what’s happening Saturday. It means something happens, then some other thing, then everyone goes home. Nailed it!

Sun Tunnels (formerly the graze) is playing at the Brown Lantern tavern in Anacortes, Washington, Saturday (tomorrow) 1/28. Sorry for the late notice! Right after Sun Tunnels will be An Invitation to Love, meaning that I personally will be performing for two hours in a row. I don’t remember writing that many songs, but we timed it at rehearsal and there it is.

Here’s a flyer:

Long-time listeners might recall the last time I played there was 2004. No doubt everyone in Anacortes remembers and will throw me a parade.

Hope to see you there!

Louis

PS: That pretty full-color photo was taken by our friend Josh at our Josephine show back in November. Thank you Josh. The Brown Lantern’s booker Erik made the flyer. Thank you Erik.

The economics of live music is weird. From my own observation, there are thousands, millions of bands. Most are not that great but lots are very good. Each band has a natural monopoly over their own music but that doesn’t mean anything. A band’s incentive to play is generally not monetary. Bookers’ incentives are primarily monetary and draw equals pay, short-term or otherwise. For new clubs, long-term reputation is going to be less important than just keeping the doors open.

I’ve often been frustrated by bookers who let me do all of the work of booking and promoting a show, who then still take a sizable amount from the door. Musicians’ and bookers’ interests are pretty well aligned, they should work harder to help each other.

That’s what I get for being slow and lazy. I’ll finish that page soonish, I’ll be out of town for a while though and have to rebuild the device and draw a schematic. It’s stupid simple.