Aural Velvet Twenty-Oh-Eleven Edition

I'm going to attempt to write more in the new year, and I've read all the year-end music lists and think most of them are missing my favorite artists.  Hence, I present the music that kept me sane amidst the last 12 months.


January: The Decemberists The King Is Dead
Origin Of Discovery: heard the 8-minute "Mariner's Revenge" epic on college radio, and have been in love with Colin and his mutton-chops ever since.
Is This A 10 Song, Pop Version Of Their Normal Stuff That Seems To Be The Theme This Year? Yes
Do I Listen To/Recommend The Whole Album? For the most part, although I didn't really start playing any of it until the summer.
Helpful Hints: "Rox in the box" is actually, like, "rocks" and about mining.
Standout Tracks To Endear You To Listen: "Down By The Water", "Don't Carry It All"
Beard: Not currently


February: The Civil Wars Barton Hollow
Origin Of Discovery: this year, probably on a music blog or something
Do I Listen To/Recommend The Whole Album? not normally, as it's too much bluegrass for me to handle in one sitting, but they're great
Standout Tracks To Endear You To Listen: "Barton Hollow", "I've Got This Friend"
Beard: Yes


also: The Submarines Love Notes/Letter Bombs
Origin Of Discovery: I've had random songs of theirs for a few years, but this is the first whole album I've heard
Is This A 10 Song, Pop Version Of Their Normal Stuff That Seems To Be The Theme This Year? Yes
Do I Listen To/Recommend The Whole Album? yes, it's very pop-oriented and probably the most "mainstream" band of the albums I heard this year
Standout Tracks To Endear You To Listen: "Shoelaces"
Beard: No


March: New Numbers Vacationland
Origin Of Discovery: the drummer is in KD's band, the singer is formerly of The Jealous Girlfriends, who toured with KD
Do I Listen To/Recommend The Whole Album? yes, very great get-through-the-workday type of album
Standout Tracks To Endear You To Listen: "Hinterlands"
Bonus Endearment: their genre is listed as Big Beat
Beard: No


also: River City Extension/Kevin Devine split EP
Origin Of Discovery: KD was on tour with them in March
Featuring: KD's acoustic version of "Between The Concrete & Clouds" and the best cover ever of Tom Petty's "Walls"; RCE's "Ballad Of Oregon" -I actually didn't like them live but their recorded stuff is nice
Beard: Yes, all


April: Cass McCombs Wit's End
Origin Of Discovery: KD covering his songs
Most Common Word Used To Describe Him Since He Doesn't Tweet His Every Move: enigmatic
Do I Listen To/Recommend The Whole Album? I listened to the album a lot whilst in-flight, as it's very calming and slow, but mostly I listen to "County Line" on repeat
Standout Tracks To Endear You To Listen: "County Line"
Beard: No


May: Fleet Foxes Helplessness Blues
Origin Of Discovery: probably on a music blog or something
Do I Listen To/Recommend The Whole Album? I listen occasionally, but mostly the title track on repeat.
Standout Tracks To Endear You To Listen: "Helplessness Blues", "Grown Ocean"
Beard: Yes


also: Okkervil River I Am Very Far
Origin Of Discovery: probably on a music blog or something

Do I Listen To/Recommend The Whole Album? I listen occasionally, but mostly "Wake And Be Fine". I also saw them in concert for the first time this year and it was lovely.

Standout Tracks To Endear You To Listen: "Wake And Be Fine"

Beard: Yes


also: Manchester Orchestra Simple Math
Origin Of Discovery: toured with KD

Is This A 10 Song, Pop Version Of Their Normal Stuff That Seems To Be The Theme This Year? Yes

Do I Listen To/Recommend The Whole Album? Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes.

Standout Tracks To Endear You To Listen: "Simple Math", "Pensacola", "April Fool" "Virgin"

Bonus Endearment: every conversation I've had with Robert "Rob Blondie" Gobotron McDowell; these guys + KD are in a band called Bad Books also

Beard: Yes, are you jealous of Andy's beard?


also: David Bazan Strange Negotiations
Origin Of Discovery: as a teenager, I listened to Pedro The Lion every day (his former band)

Is This A 10 Song, Pop Version Of Their Normal Stuff That Seems To Be The Theme This Year? Yes

Do I Listen To/Recommend The Whole Album? I recommend the whole album but there's not much variation in his song style.  However, he has incredible lyrics, always, like "you can't be right about the future if you're wrong about the past"

Standout Tracks To Endear You To Listen: "Virginia", "Future Past", "Wolves At The Door" "People"

Beard: Yes


September: Blind Pilot We Are The Tide
Origin Of Discovery: probably on a music blog or something

Is This A 10 Song, Pop Version Of Their Normal Stuff That Seems To Be The Theme This Year? Yes

Do I Listen To/Recommend The Whole Album? I listen to the first four songs which actually sound like them and then skip the end because it is very slow and quiet

Standout Tracks To Endear You To Listen: "We Are The Tide" "Half Moon" "Keep You Right"

Beard: No


also: A.A. Bondy Believers
Origin Of Discovery: KD covering his songs, but then I realized I knew him in his former life in the grunge band Verbena

Most Common Word Used To Describe Him Since He Doesn't Tweet His Every Move: enigmatic

Do I Listen To/Recommend The Whole Album? I listened to the album a lot whilst in-flight, but I haven't really delved into specific songs yet

Standout Tracks To Endear You To Listen: "The Heart Is Willing"

Beard: No


also: Kevin Devine Between The Concrete & Clouds

Origin Of Discovery: Pandora, circa 2004

Is This A 10 Song, Pop Version Of Their Normal Stuff That Seems To Be The Theme This Year? Yes

Do I Listen To/Recommend The Whole Album? Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes

Standout Tracks To Endear You To Listen: the playlist ones are "11-17" and "I Used To Be Someone", otherwise don't make me choose

Beard: Yes
Thoughts That I Wrote Back In September:
The album seems to identify a shift in tone - less personal, and instead more society-at-large, a
more visceral reflection on the choices we make every day, the specific decisions we make amidst the background of the intrusive world around us. The themes remind me a bit of David Bazan's new album - trying to break out of the cycle of default thinking, of cynicism and obsession with the past, and moving on toward change and redemption. "Leave 10 years ago 10 years ago" and the refrain feel like a continuation of some of the Bad Books song themes, really making an effort to not get so set in our ways that no one can startle us out of them. I think the album is challenging us to not be afraid of the future, to somehow find a way to function amidst countless tragedies, and to discover how to keep the people we've lost at the forefront of our memories, but maybe not so prominent in our daily choices. His lyrics seem more straightforward this time around, and really motivational, like if everyone tried to do their best every day, and take responsibility for themselves, then maybe society and even religion would get better, and we would stop blaming those institutions for all our problems. The music style reminds me of Phantom Planet's first album ("is Missing") and also of some R.E.M. melodies, with a bit of The Pixies or The Ramones mixed in there, very jangly, folky. I'm really glad "Awake in the Dirt" made the cut, it's such a poetic reflection on such a lovely book (Roth's American Pastoral). The "Part of the Whole" and "Luxembourg" singles are gorgeous as well. 


Conclusion: Okay I just realized I also know about Okkervil River because KD covered "Black Sheep Boy" so yeah, I pretty much listen to all the bands he covers/recommends because they are all ridiculously talented. Let's all not get sued by Courtney Love in 2012.


I made a playlist of all the standout tracks (you may need a blip.fm account)
thanks, musicians.

fallen down the rabbit hole of Paris Review author interviews

Ray Bradbury

INTERVIEWER

Does science fiction satisfy something that mainstream writing does not? 

BRADBURY

Yes, it does, because the mainstream hasn’t been paying attention to all the changes in our culture during the last fifty years. The major ideas of our time—developments in medicine, the importance of space exploration to advance our species—have been neglected. The critics are generally wrong, or they’re fifteen, twenty years late. It’s a great shame. They miss out on a lot. Why the fiction of ideas should be so neglected is beyond me. I can’t explain it, except in terms of intellectual snobbery. 

 BRADBURY

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself. 

INTERVIEWER

Have you ever used a computer? 

BRADBURY

Up until my stroke, I used a typewriter. An IBM Selectric. Never a computer. A computer’s a typewriter. Why would I need another typewriter? I have one. 

INTERVIEWER

Most would argue that a computer makes revising a whole lot easier. Not to mention spell-check. 

BRADBURY

I’ve been writing for seventy years, if I don’t know how to spell now . . .

INTERVIEWER

Do you write outlines?

BRADBURY

No, never. You can’t do that. It’s just like you can’t plot tomorrow or next year or ten years from now. When you plot books you take all the energy and vitality out. There’s no blood. You have to live it from day to day and let your characters do things.

INTERVIEWER

What do you think of e-books and Amazon’s Kindle?

BRADBURY

Those aren’t books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.

Joan Didion

INTERVIEWER

By now you’ve written at least as much nonfiction as you have fiction. How would you describe the difference between writing the one or the other?

JOAN DIDION

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up. You have no notes—or sometimes you do, I made extensive notes for A Book of Common Prayer—but the notes give you only the background, not the novel itself. In nonfiction the notes give you the piece. Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.

INTERVIEWER

What misapprehensions, illusions and so forth have you had to struggle against in your life? In a commencement address you once said there were many.

DIDION

All kinds. I was one of those children who tended to perceive the world in terms of things read about it. I began with a literary idea of experience, and I still don't know where all the lies are. For example, it may not be true that people who try to fly always burst into flames and fall. That may not be true at all. In fact people do fly, and land safely. But I don't really believe that. I still see Icarus. I don't seem to have a set of physical facts at my disposal, don't seem to understand how things really work. I just have an idea of how they work, which is always trouble.

Jonathan Lethem

INTERVIEWER

You can’t imagine experiencing a crisis of faith.

LETHEM

Crisis of faith? But that’s not where the writer lives. He lives in sentences, in fictional architecture. Look, anyone seeking ontological meltdown can easily find it in the attempt to write. Many have. The need to fall apart is well indulged in this line of work.

INTERVIEWER

What were you afraid to do?

LETHEM

I’d be afraid to not be funny, afraid to not be charming. You can only do so many things. This is something I’ve come to understand: there’s a strict ecology on a given page. Those things that people feel are missing from books are missing because they are crowded out by other things. Not because the person wouldn’t have liked to also do them. Once you’ve devoted a lot of energy and attention to accomplishing certain things, that’s where your energy has gone. It’s a zero-sum game.

Most recently I’ve let go of a certain kind of lean efficiency, a devotion to structure. To plot. The fact is, almost every writer I ultimately find most important to me is hugely digressive, and largely uninterested in any plot that can be admired for its exoskeletal integrity.

Tobias Wolff

INTERVIEWER

What’s your writing day like?

WOLFF

Boring, if you’re not me. I take a walk or go for a swim, then go to work, eat, take a walk, write, come home. I never go to movies about writers because writers lead very boring lives if they’re actually working. When I was a kid and saw these pictures of Hemingway on safari or fishing in Idaho, or Fitzgerald in Paris, I thought, What an exciting life writers must lead. What I didn’t know is that’s what they do when they’re not writing. What’s exciting is finding a word that’s been dodging you for days, or deciding to cut something you’ve spent weeks on. The excitement’s in the writing. It doesn’t offer much in the way of drama, I’m afraid. Routine becomes invaluable to writers, and that’s why once they hit their stride, their biographies make very poor material.
Think about the way other people work—lawyers, for example. They get up from their desk, they walk into the doorway of the office next door, and say, Hey, do you remember that Warthog v. Warthog case from two years ago? and they talk about it, and that’s work. They go out, meet clients and take depositions, they have meetings where they discuss strategies for pursuing a particular case—it’s a very social profession. I wonder how much of their time is actually spent dead alone, producing hard solitary thought for hours a day. That’s what writing is and in that way it’s very hard work and it absolutely requires all the conditions that make one a bore: You have to be alone a lot, you have to be rather sedentary, you have to be a creature of routine, you have to fetishize your solitude, and you have to become very, very selfish about your time.

 WOLFF

I respond to something gracious in the writer. That doesn’t mean nice, or kind, or consoling, though it can have that effect. It has to do with a certain courage and verve and even sense of play in facing things as they are. If there’s no grace to be found in things as they are, then you’ll have to find it in things as they aren’t, and you know what Yeats wrote about that: “We had fed the heart on fantasies, / The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.”

INTERVIEWER

Is that writing’s purpose, then, to present a gracious reality?

WOLFF

I don’t know that writing needs to have a purpose in that sense. Think of Beethoven’s Archduke Trio, or Kenny Barron and Charlie Haden’s Night and the City. To the extent that I can feel the presence of grace—the operation of some kind of grace in the world—I often feel it in music like this, where the words God or revolution or even soul are not to be heard. And what does music accomplish, after all? Can it be said to offer a plan for improving us, can it be said to give us new political visions, can it be said to make an argument for this or that faith? No. It is a good purely in itself, and that is a sufficient justification for its existence.

 John Irving:

INTERVIEWER

Some people say you write disaster fiction.

IRVING

Such things don’t happen? Is that what they mean? You bet I write disaster fiction. We have compiled a disastrous record on this planet, a record of stupidity and absurdity and self-abuse and self-aggrandizement and self-deception and pompousness and self-righteousness and cruelty and indifference beyond what any other species has demonstrated the capacity for, which is the capacity for all the above. I am sick of secure and smugly conventional people telling me that my work is bizarre simply because they’ve found a safe little place to live out the chaos of the world—and who then deny that this chaos happens to other, less fortunate people. If you’re rich, are you permitted to say there’s no poverty, no starvation? If you’re a calm, gentle soul, do you say there’s no violence except in bad movies and bad books? I don’t make much up. I mean that. I am not the inventor I’ve been given credit for being. I just witness a different news—it’s still news, it still is just what happens, but more isolated and well-described so you might notice it a little more clearly.

I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of “generalization” of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.

--David Foster Wallace

infamous

The question of just how many of us subscribe to this idea of significance, and what we’re willing to do to achieve it, has only gotten more urgent in those seven years. To remind readers of watershed events such as the White House State Dinner Crashers, the Boy Trapped in Weather Balloon, the antics of Sheen/Lohan/Palin/Cruise/Kanye/Kardashian/O.J./Trump, or any number of other displays of insatiable hunger would be, as they say, like shooting fish in a barrel. We’ve grown accustomed to the idea that there are, at any given time, certain people “out there” who will sacrifice themselves on the altar of public ridicule for the higher purpose of remaining in the public eye—indeed, there seems to be an agreed-upon communal need for such people, and as soon as one atrocity begins to fade another is always ready to replace it.

Back to the paradox. So we privilege authenticity above all, but in our authentic state nearly all of us are insignificant; and we desperately crave significance, but achieving it nearly always requires a departure from authenticity. Here’s where reality television is so fascinating: It solves the paradox by dissolving, or deconstructing, the idea of authenticity until authenticity itself no longer signifies, like when you say a familiar word over and over and over again until it sounds like something in an alien language. I used to have this argument with my wife about The Hills, the painful MTV show that generously gave us Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt, surely two of the most repulsive specimens ever to crawl out of the gene pool. To boil down the argument: I would say there was no way they were authentically that repulsive, and that this alone was enough to invalidate the show’s claim on reality; and my wife would say but they’re real people, as in they exist, and if they’re willing to be seen as so repulsive just to stay on the show, if they’re willing to sacrifice all dignity and self- and other-respect and distort their already-to-be-sure-unsavory personalities in whatever outlandish direction the producers deem necessary to keep the ratings up and the advertising revenue flowing, if they’re in essence willing to annihilate their “real” selves and replace them with these manufactured doppelgangers if that’s what it takes... well, then there’s something frighteningly and shamefully real about that. And she was right.

From this great, long, article

Transient pleasures, drastic measures.

I had read Falling Man by Don DeLillo and was not impressed.  It's a story about a marriage breaking apart in the aftermath of 9/11, but has just too many scattered segues into trying to form a plot. However, I decided to give his fiction another try, as I had admired his writing style, as well as the authors he'd influenced, for many years. Enter White Noise, which has an infinite setup for each of its sardonic passages, such as the end of chapter 1: "I am chairman of the department of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill." Set in the late 80s, as far as I can tell from the book publication date and the prevalence of station wagons, it follows a college professor, his exercise-obsessed wife, and their brood of children from failed marriages through a Midwestern winter full of radiation waves, the airborne toxic event, and dealing with the side effects of our media-saturated world. Jack, our narrator and Hitler expert (who doesn't speak German), leads us through lengthy descriptions of his world, his disguises, and his personas, while finally reaching my favorite chapter, on page 293 out of 332, a Socratic discussion about the individual's fear of death with his colleague Murray. 

Murray is a New Yorker who has traveled to this quaint little college town to study the American essence of culture. He's fascinated by the mundane, by all this white noise that surrounds us, that creates in us this fawning consumerism as a repressed, unconscious sort of mannerism: expressway traffic, fast food environments, ATMs, and of course, supermarkets and televisions. Television is ''the primal force in the American home, sealed-off, self-contained, self-referring, a wealth of data concealed in the grid, in the bright packaging, the jingles, the slice-of-life commercials, the products hurtling out of darkness, the coded messages, like chants...Coke is it, Coke is it, Coke is it.'' This concept is reflected in Jack's life as there are phrases that pop into almost every conversation he has with his precocious children. The TV is always on in the background, swirling in their dreams, with its incantations of "Toyota Celica" for his daughter, or listing side effects of mind-dumbing medications for him as he strolls through the living room.

The events in this town seem to happen in waves, rolling back onto previous lives and looking into future apocalyptic ones. Every discussion is laced with ominous undertones, unvalidated emotions, and a sort of hurtling toward fate. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Socratic method-esque discussion that Jack and Murray have while strolling along the college campus:

Murray: "Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?"
Jack: "What good is preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious, quivering thing.
Murray: "True. The most deeply precious things are those we feel secure about. A wife, a child."
Jack: "So how do I get around fear of death?"
Murray: "You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out. This is the whole point of technology. Technology creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. It's what we invented to conceal the terrible secret of our decaying bodies."
Murray, continuing with other ways to get around the fear of death: "There are two kinds of people int he world. Killers and diers. Most of us are diers. We don't have the disposition, the rage, or whatever it takes to be a killer. We lie down and die. But think what it's like to be a killer, to kill a person in direct confrontation. If he dies, you cannot. To kill him is to gain life-credit. The more people you kill, the more credit you store up. It explains any number of massacres, wars, executions."
Jack: "Are you saying that men have tried throughout history to cure themselves of death by killing others?"
Murray: "It's obvious...The killer, in theory, attempts to defeat his own death by killing others. He buys time, he buys life."

Though the technology of the 80s was not even half as impressive as today's gadgets and advances, Murray was expounding upon the timeless debate of the good and evil in any invention. Technology has brought us life-saving antibiotics and revolutionary surgeries, and it has also brought us bullets and drones. It can aid us both in the creation of our self-focused lives, and in the destruction of ourselves and our world.

still haven't read Tolkien. guess i'm not a renaissance woman.

James Franco:
actor
painter
short-story author
soaking-wet Gucci spokesman
Oscar-nominee
Oscar-host
General Hospital's psychotic murderer/artist
studied at Brooklyn College, Columbia, Warren Wilson College in the last year
taking classes in filmmaking at NYU where he is also teaching
working on a PhD in English at Yale
plowing through more weed than a tanker full of Round-up

Sir Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, D.F.A.
wearing tights & codpiece under suit
pundit
author
singer
Olympic athlete
war-ender
art-world phenom
sailor
Korean pop star
rapper
ice cream magnate
Congressional witness
feminist boy-toy
March leader (to Keep Fear Alive!)
chef
Emmy winner
Grammy winner
Peabody winner
and Free Pepsi winner!

Colbert also ran for president. but Franco is single, i think, and doesn't have children.
advantage?

i was born an april fool

 So, Manchester Orchestra performed a stellar 4-song acoustic set for KROQ last week. Nadia Noir, who is listed as a staff writer, which I assume means she gets paid to write about music, was in charge of the narrative for this set. She describes them as "grunge-ish indie rock" and in the space of ten small paragraphs, compares them not once, but twice to Bright Eyes. While I enjoy the acoustic versions of songs as much as anyone, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to wonder why she didn't describe how the songs sound in the recorded versions as well. For example, "I've Got Friends" could certainly be akin to "the cathartic crunch of Nirvana-ish guitars" on the album version, while acoustically it sounds nothing like that-ish. I am glad I can hear the stripped-down version of "April Fool" since I've only ever heard it with massive guitar reverb, and now I have more of an idea of the lyrics. But especially with that song, one would think since it was the release date for the single, she may have been able to link to the recorded version for people who wanted to hear more.
Her co-worker explained "that the songs are more fantastic with all the players present." Really? One would think you could provide a link to an example of this difference, and maybe not rely on your co-workers just because it's a band you haven't ever heard. So you're not a fan of the "indie-rock" genre? Well here's a helpful hint: Manchester Orchestra really isn't an "indie-rock" band. But it's actually quite obvious you're not a fan, because you compare Andy's voice to Conor Oberst's voice, of Bright Eyes, which is apparently now the go-to band for anyone trying to make any sort of reference to music that features guitars and male singers. Andy's voice is quite high, yet gravelly, sounding as if he just smoked a pack of cigarettes and then let out a yowl or two, while Conor's, as much as I like it, sounds more like he drank ten cups of coffee and has a slight frog in his throat. And this is all just off the top of my head, because, you know, I don't get paid to write about music, and therefore don't do music research into the bands I'm assigned, or anything. Anyway, I'm going to go listen to these sweet harmonies some more. Robert and Chris sound amazing as well.