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Saturday, May 5th, 2007
Storefront Hitchcock is a beatiful concert film. It is from right around the time of Moss Elixir/Mossy Liquor; a lot of songs from that album are featured. Deni Bonet is playing on a couple of songs and boy is she a fine musician. Tonight I am watching it and I wanted to transcribe some of Hitchcock's patter, which I found pretty fun and engaging, and vaguely apropos to this evening's Mineshaft discussion. He has just finished "Feels Like 1974" and introduced Bonet: If you stand up properly, it's possible to make yourself -- with this technique, it's called "Alexander Technique", for actors, and people who have, ah, incredibly bad posture but enough money to try and get over it. Ah, you can actually make yourself grow two or three inches by doing it correctly. They align you as if, as if your spine was an, an endless plate of crockery. And kind of line it up properly so it won't tip. Most of our spines zig-zag heinously, and you can go up for miles.They're planning... as you know, people get taller -- the average human height increases by one and a half inches every hundred years. Most of our an-- Julius Cæsar would have only come up to your pelvis. You could have broiled him, you know. He would have been no trouble -- those legions -- they were just midgets. I went to an astrologer's house in um, wherever that place is with the rose-colored rocks, ah, Arizona... built for astrolog, sorry astronomers in the fifth century BC, and all the doors were really tiny, they were like the size of cucumber frames. So I pictured all these cucumbers, going into the astronomers' house and like spiraling up the stairs. And um, well what they're planning to do is make people -- not only because people are eating more and more pure beef, which as you know is probably the best possible foodstuff that the world can produce. One of the reasons we were created, that ah Siemens and Glaxo and Virgin and Disney got together and said "Let there be humanity" was, so that we could eat beef... and I'm very proud of our wonderful country that they haven't forgotten that... Thank you. And ah, let's just hope the conservatives get in again, shall we... And ah, if you're watching this in the future, I come from a time when there was a two-party system, but things have veered toward an inevitable monopoly -- people have complained about the eastern bloc being a monopoly for years. This is exactly what's happened in the west, there's just -- when the final Big Fish fellates the last Medium-sized Fish and, and absorbs it, thoomp like that, there will just be one Big Fish with a distended stomach... Anyway, back to the beef, let's not forget it, ah people are supposed to just be getting bigger and bigger, and as you know, Neil Armstrong was seven foot seven; all those -- you've already been to the Smithsonian, you've seen those capsules, the Mercury Capsule and the Gemini Capsule, they're very tiny, they actually look like the Stonehenge in the Spinal Tap thing, where it comes down on a spider's web. This is a posthumous public relations thing by NASA; in fact these men were giants, cause they were put into a, into a (also actually in Arizona) government site, and fed radioactive carbonated beef for two years until they became very tall. Their capsules were huge, and ah, anyway they're planning for the rest of us to follow suit, and I got so angry I wrote this song: Hitchcock and Bonet play Filthy Bird. Yeah, um this is, this is another one. Thing is, people, I don't know why people ever actually introduce songs, because, the song itself is an introduction to itself. It's like if you meet somebody named Martha, they say, "This is Martha"; I mean, you know, that person happens to be known as Martha, just as I might be called Bloomingdale's, or, or you know, Deni might be called Statenisland. But that's really only the beginning of the story. There's a whole mass of molecules, and complexes, and, things bound together by terrifying physical improbabilities, and the truth is, she could fly apart at any moment. Like some terrible pent-up lock that's waiting to snap and spatter her psyche across the universe. God knows... It is disgusting Deni, it's life, and if it weren't for our ribcages, it would just be spleens à -go-go. I mean, you know people are just held in by all this, and then they're called almost insultingly by a single name. And the same with a song, I could say what a song's called, which isn't going to be much of a clue, unless you've heard it before, or I can explain what it's about, and I'm gonna be lying. So in the end it's very much, there's ah not much point in it. That's interesting, there's some people polishing a gun carriage over there. One of those big brass eighteenth-century things, for storing in time capsules. There's a very thin line between torture and cosmetics. I wonder, now's our chance to cross it. Okay, take a deep breath and yip-a-dang. Hitchcock and Bonet play Let's Go Thundering. More transcription another time.
posted evening of May 5th, 2007: Respond
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Sunday, April 29th, 2007
The Asking Tree has not AOTW got any lyrics for this tune off of Spooked. In an attempt to remediate that situation: (crackle crackle, pop.) repeated throughout song Welcome to the earth, home of the great women and men. We are animals that have ideas. Maybe cats and ravens have ideas too, but they keep them to themselves. Travelers from the whole galaxy throng to our luscious planet with its evolution-friendly climate and nourishing minerals. Take time to locate the exit nearest you. Press 1 for famine, 2 for pestilence, 3 for condoleeza, and 4 for death. Please note that pestilence closes at 6. (crackle crackle, pop. crackle crackle, pop.) Okay that was it.
(Okay! giggle)
posted evening of April 29th, 2007: Respond
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And God said "Oh, ignore him! I've got all your albums"
I said "Yes, but who's got all the tunes?" I told a friend recently that a good Robyn Hitchcock record to start out with would be Spooked, if you are looking for folksy alternative music, or Perspex Island, if you are looking for rock and roll; or, classic, iconic eighties Hitchcock sound like I Often Dream of Trains or Invisible Hitchcock. I did not recommend Black Snake Dîamond Rôle in the latter category, not totally sure why. Now tonight I am thinking about logical next places to go: respectively depending on which first step you took, it would be Moss Elixir and then probably Eye, either Respect or Olé! Tarantula, or Globe of Frogs.
posted evening of April 29th, 2007: Respond
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A Google search for "Brockengespenst" returns no results as of this writing.* But a search for "Brockengespenstphänomen" directs one to two very pretty photos, one of which is not of the phenomenon in question, but the other is. (Oops, actually the search for "Brockengespenstphänomen" returns a bunch of mostly Pynchon-oriented results. But without the umlaut you get those nice photos.)
*Hmmm... Not sure where my head was Sunday night. Blume points out that there are many thousands of Google results for "Brockengespenst", including some very pretty images. Here is one very nice page.
posted evening of April 29th, 2007: Respond
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Monday, April 23rd, 2007
Thinking about music -- I am feeling right now like on the verge of some kind of personal breakthrough, one where I suddenly acquire a sense of purpose and a mode of personal expression -- and that listening to and playing music will somehow be the vehicle of this awakening. I keep coming back to the song Ride -- All I have to do in this world, is ride, All I gotta do is ride. That if I listen hard enough I will find a way of losing myself in the song, a way that will work consistently.
posted evening of April 23rd, 2007: Respond
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Sunday, April 22nd, 2007
I have been experiencing a synæsthetic perception of Robyn Hitchcock's music that is coming into sharper focus over the last few weeks -- I am understanding listening to the music and lyrics as as a kind of movement across a landscape and through tunnels and passageways. I'm wondering if I can expand this into a way to relate to music in general -- I believe I have experienced it before though I have never given voice to it or quite understood what was going on.
posted evening of April 22nd, 2007: Respond
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The more I listen to this record, the more it is growing on me. I ordered it after I heard Deni Bonet playing with Robyn at the January 9, 2004 show -- looked in his catalog and this was the record she made an appearance on. Then on first listening I was a little disappointed to hear that the only song you hear a lot of violin on is the first. It took a couple of listenings to get past that to the point of hearing the record's greatness... The order of the songs and transitions between songs seems less important on this record than it did on Perspex Island. The songs are all beautiful and there is a common thread linking them but less of a sense of overall narrative structure. Bob and I are going to try learning to play "Alright Yeah" -- found tablature for it at The Asking Tree. (Hitchcock says "All the songs on this album were there for a purpose, not just to create the right texture." And, here is another interview from when the record came out.)
posted evening of April 22nd, 2007: Respond
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Friday, April 20th, 2007
This album is more political than I have thought of Robyn's work as being. The "before they bomb the children" line is really affecting -- the way he juxtaposes layers of meaning really draws you into his psyche. This reviewer I was reading described a Hitchcock show (negatively characterized it which did not really make sense) as taking a hour and a half vacation in his psyche. The characterization seems to me exactly correct but is strikes me as an appealing quality of listening to his music and chat. I want to figure out how to describe the physical sensation of listening to this music -- that would strike me as a sort of criticism that would be possibly worth reading. So I guess I will use this web page as a vehicle for that endeavor for a while. If you'd like to check out the series of posts I did recently about the record Perspex Island, they are here. I'm starting a series of posts about Moss Elixir now. Unfortunately I do not have comments working but if you feel like communicating in this regard, drop me a line.
posted evening of April 20th, 2007: Respond
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"I gotta split/ -- It's a quaint old fashioned way to leave the room" what a fantastic line that is! This lyric is hilarious. Like it fits together but the logic is a little otherworldly. It stands out from the album rock and roll in the middle of a lot of choral and sweetly poetic songs.
posted evening of April 20th, 2007: Respond
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I'm reading Jennifer Egan's first novel, The Invisible Circus, now, and liking it a lot. I really admired the scene in which Faith told her sister she had been at an invisible circus, and Phoebe was put out about not being invited along -- it sounded real when it could easily have been precious and forced. I recently read most of Zadie Smith's latest novel On Beauty and found it enjoyable, but didn't really think it stood up to The Autograph Man and White Teeth.
posted evening of April 20th, 2007: Respond
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