We saw the Connells last night! They sounded really great, listen:
This morning when I was blow-drying my hair, I was thinking about making music — about how I have some ideas about what I want certain songs to sound like, but don’t necessarily know how to make that sound on my own. I’ll have to describe the effect, rather than the technique, to the people I’m playing with.
Standing there in the bathroom thinking about this, I remembered back to when I was a kid — probably not much more than 14 or so. I had gotten my rural-Midwestern hands on an issue of Option magazine; it had Elvis Costello on the cover. I pored over every page of it. One of the one-pagers was a little vignette on Marc Ribot, who I’d never heard of back then, and in the course of telling a story about him in the studio, he’s quoted as telling a musician to “Play it like a midget’s bar mitzvah”. There was a picture of him in profile, making like a monster motion with his arms. For some reason, I’ve always remembered that.
Four or five short years later, when I was in college, I’d find myself riding around downtown Grinnell, Iowa with Marc Ribot in the backseat of my friend Aaron’s Volvo stationwagon, along with another member or two of the John Zorn Cobra ensemble, who had just played on campus. We heard a band rehearsing in an upstairs apartment on one of the desolate streets. “That sounds live” someone said, and we stopped and went up to check it out. The band seemed baffled that we were there, so we left. I can’t quite remember what else we did that night, or why we were even driving around in the first place. Probably we just gave up and dropped them off at their hotel. I guess I didn’t think to ask him what a midget’s bar mitzvah sounds like.
I had an odd dream last night that Nick Cave covered a song that I wrote. In the dream it was not really a huge deal, it was like “oh, the new Nick Cave record is out, I forgot that they had asked me if he could cover my song”. On the record it was like a bonus track. I think it was called “The Road Song”, which is not the name of any songs I’ve written (but maybe I should write one now), and the dream gets a little murky here but at some point I think it morphed into the actual Nick Cave song “The Train Song”.
Later in the dream I was at a friend’s house (that I’ve never been to), and we were singing along to Mission of Burma — “When two worlds collide, they stick together…”. This morning, when I came to write this down, I thought “hmm, I wonder what that MoB song is called, I really like that line”. Looking it up, I was a little surprised to find that it’s called ‘Birthday’, because yesterday was my birthday.
Ever since I posted this Twitter update about the John Green/TMG/Bieber thing, I’ve gotten a bunch of weird new followers. All of the accounts have these things in common:
These are Bieber bots or something, right? But why?
[video]
This is being found ugly (click through), which is understandable, but I can imagine it working okay, on a thick enough hardcover, in the kinds of massive bookstore piles a new Mitchell book will obviously get. Especially versus the kind of stark/monolithic hardcover look that says HEY THIS IS A THING, an event — put those in piles and they seem way more assertive than a book by someone like Mitchell needs to be. Designs like this one, to me, always seem completely different when they’re actually wrapped around a clothbound spine, instead of edged off and flat and condensed (look at it larger); they can seem really inviting, like they’re trying to communicate that what’s inside is deep and textured and full of stuff, a place you can explore and sink into. It also seems like the kind of cover you start getting attached to during the actual reading of the book, which is a kind of cover I like.
(via housingworksbookstore)
I have seen it in person (a friend had an advance copy) and it was not ugly at all. I recall the colors being a little less saturated and contrast-y than this pic suggests, and perhaps printed on some kind of textured and ‘natural’-colored stock. But I could be remembering wrong, and it could be that the actual release will look different from the advance (which was a paperback). But the version I saw certainly worked (though, the more I look at that drop shadow, the less I like it).
“All night, out in the great fjord, they heard the ice, they woke, they dozed again, the voices of the ice entered their dreams, dictated what they would see, what would happen to each dreaming eye as, helpless, it gazed.” —
Thomas Pynchon, Against The Day, p. 129.
It’s been nearly two years since I picked up this book, and for some reason, I still think about this passage (and this one as well). When TRP gets his comma on, it’s magic.
