I am … unhindered by talent

CoryQ of the venerable Monkey River Town, and also a source of photographs strange and wondrous on Flickr, graduated from UMM nearly a decade ago. Among his many accomplishments at Morris was his many and varied contributions to the campus radio station (KUMM). I’ve only seen Cory once since he graduated, despite the fact that he lives and works in the Twin Cities, just three hours down the road.

So instead, we’re going to meet over here, in London.

Tomorrow.

At noon.

In the British Museum.

At the Rosetta Stone, one of the most amazing artifacts in human history.

Kind of like Cory. (I’ll spare you the stories.)

Wow.

It’s so cool that I’ll get to see Cory and wife again, and in the British Museum to boot! Be prepared for too many pictures…

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I’m sad to report that WeatherGirl and I are in the midst of what will probably be our last radio show here at KUMM for the better part of a year! We leave Morris a week from tomorrow for our year in Colchester (UK), and I can’t imagine that next week we’ll have the time to be spending three hours here at the station the day before we have to leave for a year. Sub-Evil Boy may do his 10-noon show next Sunday, though, so there is some consolation.

Doing radio here is one of the things that I’ll most miss next year - I love college radio, and being able to participate in that for over 25 years now has been a great experience. We’ve got a great staff for next year, and I expect big things, and we’ll definitely be listening on-line!

If you catch this before 9pm central time, feel free to tune in or listen on-line. Or you can check out our poorly formatted play lists on-line. Less danceable, but a lot faster and without all that annoying banter.

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We’re in pretty much full on crazy mode cleaning, sorting, and packing for our year long research sabbatical in Colchester, UK. In the process I ran across two old music lists and felt compelled to share.

The first was a little playbill sheet for bands playing at Karl’s Coffee. Karl’s was the first coffee shop in Morris and had a truly wonderful atmosphere. It arguably wasn’t managed brilliantly from a business standpoint, and this combined with some quite unjustified and obnoxious political machinations in town ultimately doomed them. The coffee shop was purchased and run by another group for a few years, and then changed hands a third time where things seem stable if not nearly as cool as they were in the beginning.

One of the great things about Karl’s was their regular and regularly wonderful hosting of live bands. In their heyday, Karl’s usually had at least one good band play live every week, and we came to love more than a few Minnesota bands through their frequent performances at Karl’s. Sadly, neither of the subsequent incarnations of the coffee shop have been anywhere close to Karl’s either in the quantity or quality of their music bookings. Both of them have been extremely conservative in the bookings they’ll allow, which has moved some concerts up to campus and caused others to just not happen. Sigh.

Thus it was really neat to find this little playbill from those glory days. In April of 1999 Karl’s had:

• Thurs., 1: 3 Minute Hero (also their old label page)
• Sat., 10: Black & White Jazz Project
• Fri., 16: Booty Police
• Sat., 17: Willie Wisely
• Sun., 18: Open Mic
• Fri., 23: Stuart Davis
• Sat. 24: Brenda Weiler
• Thurs., 29: Booty Police
• Fri., 30: John Hermanson

What a great month! Ah, for the days.

The second list is from eight months later, when Sub-Evil Boy did a radio show where he chose all the music himself at the tender age of 6 years (minus two days). For several years he did a birthday show during fall semester finals week where he would choose all the music for an hour, and this was the first (or maybe the second) of those shows. It’s been very cool listening to his shows this summer, the first time he’s ever done completely solo shows on a weekly basis, and it was really nifty to find this list and see how fun and diverse his musical tastes were even in his misspent youth.

• “Werewolves of London” - Warren Zevon
• “99 bats in my car today” - Sesame Street Travel Songs
• “La Vierge” - Al Rapone
• “Marching song” - Bonnie Rideout
• “Drip, drip, drip” - Chumbawmba
• “Geeks on bikes” - 3 Minute Hero
• “Give us room to roar” - Kalevala
• “Istanbul (not Constantinople)” - They Might Be Giants
• “Save the children” - Natty Nation
• A motet by Bach
• “Drive, she said” - Stan Ridgeway
• “Standing at the edge of the earth” - Blessid Union of Souls
• “I love trash” - Steven Tyler from Elmopalooze
• “London city” - Arrow
• “Papa’s got a brand new bag” - James Brown
• “Santa’s got a brand new bag” - The Bobs
• Theme song from “How the Grinch stole Christmas”
• “Prayer for the dying” - Seal
• “Song for Lindy” - Fatboy Slim
• “Under cover, under wraps” - Delgados
• “Hollywood” - Cranberries

Rockin!

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Making pancakes for the family and catching up on Brainwashed podcasts, I caught a deeply fun tune. The opening track on Podcast 102 (and someone’s apparently posting them to archive.org now) is “Party Crashers Unite” by Bullets 4 Brunch and it’s a blast. Sonically it reminds me a lot of the excellent Elvis Vs. JXL remix of “A little less conversation”, but this time the reference point is 60’s Motown soul. The material is also much more heavily deconstructed, to the point that there really is no original song structure left, only colors and ideas. It’s a danceable monster, though, and way too much fun to ignore, even if you’re trying to get brunch going.

It’s apparently from a new Tigerbeat6 12″ entitled The final crackdown. No idea what the rest of it sounds like, but I’m tempted to order a copy for that song alone :-).

Oh, and the rest of the podcast was pretty cool, too. Check it out.

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I’m currently happily jamming to the latest Brainwashed podcast (#99) and loved the pairing around the middle of the hour: “Cockles and mussels” by Matmos and “Do you take this man?” by Diamanda Galás featuring John Paul Jones. The Matmos piece is a cool, atmospheric meditation on this classic folk song, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed repeating it several times this morning. The Galás song is a crazy heavy beat blues monster on a relationship gone seriously (and psychotically) wrong, and she ain’t gonna take any of his crap any more. You gotta love it when the girls are doing it for themselves…

Unfortunately Brainwashed is becoming the victim of their own good ideas and success, and are apparently running into serious bandwidth issues, which is causing access problems to parts of their web site and their podcast. So don’t listen to them! Instead, buy stuff from them and send me the discs (you wouldn’t want to listen to weird stuff like that anyway). That way they get money, they can keep providing this wonderful service (for me), and I get some free music (from you). Personally, I see no downsides to this plan - so execute it! :-)

The next podcast is the big #100, and they’re asking for requests, so get in touch with your ideas.

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I’m listening to Brainwashed radio on the prehistoric tangerine iBook in the kitchen while I’m making pancakes for the fam on this fine Saturday morning. Some excellent tunes have wandered by, including:

• Cabaret Voltaire - Here to Go [Extended Mx]. Came in in the middle of this, but it made me want to dance. I suspect that WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy would have dug it, which isn’t true of much stuff Brainwashed is likely to play :-).
• Michael Prime - Timeslips. Some cool ambient sound stuff. Reminded me of several ReR records, including Lauren Weinger’s wonderfully atmospheric Silo, Peter Cusack’s very cool (ho ho!) Baikal Ice, and Chris Cutler’s excellent pair Twice around the earth and There and back again.
• Hox - 7f’s. Some wonderful heavy-beat noise dance fun. Sub-Evil Boy couldn’t help jamming out a bit when he wandered through with some dishes. I could definitely imagine spending money on that…
• The Hafler Trio - The Closed Bread/An Elderly Testament. More cool ambient stuff, but much more constructed (vs. found) than the Michael Prime piece. Reminds me of Tod Dockstader and David Less Myers’ Bijou.

I quite like both Brainwashed’s radio and podcast, and have often thought that ReR really ought to do something similar. Their music is pretty hard to conceptualize, especially if you’ve not listened to much of it before, so I think written descriptions aren’t a super effective way of conveying how cool some of it is. A podcast on the other hand…

Sure, it would require some careful editing (lots of their releases are very long, like Fred Frith’s recent Impur, which clocks in at nearly an hour), and I’m sure they’re running on a shoestring, but Brainwashed certainly shows that it’s possible. I’ll bet there’s some clever fan or three out there that would do something like this in return for access to the catalog.

Maybe I should send them an e-mail encouraging them to look into is…

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This week’s Brainwashed podcast (#96, featuring releases from Giorno Poetry System), contains an excerpt from “More I Remember More”, a long, rambling set of reminiscences from Joe Brainard from an album entitled Disconnected from 1974. It included this line:

It only snowed about twice a year in Tulsa and, as I remember now, usually during the night. So, I remember snow, more than I remember snowing.

I grew up in Wichita Falls, Texas, not far south of Tulsa, and I think that was my experience of snow as well, although I’d never really thought of it that way until I heard him say those lines.

I suspect that’s why I was often thoroughly amazed in our early years in Minnesota by the sheer volume that would be falling. And we actually live in a quite dry part of the state, and so don’t really get that much snow. Still, it would be coming down in big waves, and I would stand there staring out the window instead of lecturing, much to the amusement of my students (most of whom grew up in the frozen north).

Brainard goes on to talk about not understanding why they had to shovel the snow, because it would melt so fast anyway. In Wichita Falls, we didn’t even bother, for exactly that reason. The whole town would just shut down and wait the 24 or 48 hours needed for winter to pay its respects and move along.

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Battle of the Bands judging, originally uploaded by Monkey River Town.

Monkey River Town strikes again! Cory has posted this wonderful picture on Flickr of some of us in our misspent youths.

Oh man is this cool. Sitting to my left is Sarah Nylander; we once did a 2.5 hour show on KUMM devoted to accordion music - it was a wonderful thing. WeatherGirl’s hair has gone through many permutations since this was taken, and I was still wearing suspenders back then.

Me oh my, but Sub-Evil Boy looks just a wee bit younger than the (very nearly) teenager that currently shares our life. I suspect it was the next year (or the year after) that he and Brent Heeringa (who MC’ed the event) did a version of Pavement’s "Cut your hair" (there’s a Wikipedia entry for that?!?). Watching his little 4.5 year old self singing up there in front of all those students was a real blast. One of the many wonderful things about life at UMM.

Thanks a ton to Cory for sharing this memory!

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One of the recurring features of small town summer parades in the mid-west is politics, and yesterday’s Prairie Pioneer Days parade here in Morris must have had 8-10 different politicians ranging from the local sherriff up to candidates for U.S. Senate.

Included in this motley crew was Robert Fitzgerald, who was a student of mine as an undergrad here at UMM. Now, several years later, he’s running for U.S. senate as an independent here in Minnesota, and was back in town for the parade.

He’s got that politician’s smile down, doesn’t he?

Here he’s working the crowd, and actually talking about policy issues, which I didn’t hear any of the other candidates do. Klobuchar’s people at least passed out a little card with her key policy points on it, but everyone else just passed out stickers and candy and carefully avoiding conveying any useful information.

Perhaps following in the footsteps of a previous senator from Minnesota, he’s gone for the big, brightly colored campaign bus, which definitely was an eye-catcher in the parade. It would have helped its effectiveness if that bus had been full of supporters (or at least not empty), but such is life.

No idea if I’ll vote for him in November - I just haven’t done the level of homework necessary to make that sort of decision. I can certainly say, though, that he’s vastly cooler than 90-muchly-percent of the politicians currently in D.C. He was an exec at our student radio station, and still comes back to concerts that the station sponsors once or twice a year. Having someone in Washington that understands technological issues and digs Heiruspecs would certainly be a change.

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Why should I sit with a straight back
when there are so many more interesting positions to take up?

Ivor Cutler’s poem “To take” (from his album A wet handle) in its entirety.

I suggested earlier that people should write a strange little poem and have the courage to share it as a tribute to this wonderful fellow. A strange little poem didn’t come to right away, but I decided to instead attempt to realize an photographic idea that’s been rattling around my odd head for quite a while.

These were some pretty weird stocking stuffers that WeatherGirl got for Sub-Evil Boy and I at Christmas. We each got a glow in the dark frog and a pack of the Cat Butt Gum (she was obviously channeling an 8 year old boy). I then got the weird snake/mermaid lady, and he got the “Plastic hut: Educational and funny toy”, which still completely cracks me up every time I think about it.

I’d been thinking about creating a still life with these oddments ever since Christmas, but had never gotten around to it. I figured that Ivor deserved a tribute, and that this would be appropriate in its strange way, so here you have it. For those interested in more traditional tribute images, I highly recommend this wonderful shot by mikey delgado.

The book in the background is Concerto for stray hand on upright piano by Charlie Fowler, who’s a pretty Ivor-Cutler-like character here in Morris, Minnsota. His book Plenty of room between the trees is an absolute classic and most definitely recommended. (I think you can buy copies at the PRCA Gallery.)

I’ll close with this wonderful excerpt from “A pain in the neck”, also from A wet handle:

God: “What’s going on out there?”
St. Peter: “It’s Ivor Cutler. He doesn’t like the set up.”
God: “Tell him to go to hell.”
St. Peter: “But you said…”
God: “Never mind what I said. He’s always been a pain in the neck. He’ll be happy there.”
St. Peter: “Well, you heard what he said.”
Ivor Cutler: “I did. Hey, he doesn’t sound so bad as I thought. A bit grumpy. That’s a good sign. Maybe I should stay. … No, not to sit at his feet. Tell him ‘thank you’. See you. Hell, here I come.”
St. Peter: “Oh, hang on. God’s coming with you. He wants to check out what it’s like. Just to refresh his memory … he says. Here he comes.”
God: “All right Ivor, let’s go.”

Exeunt omnis

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