Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
One of the great pleasures of working at Lawrence is getting to see someone like Michael Mizrahi play on a regular basis: different music, different groups, different stages, but all of it thoughtful, moving, and beautiful.
& He makes me miss my town with this clip, too.
Ah, Magnetic Fields.
I was never a fan of Cheap Trick, but I wasn’t not a fan, either – and then I went to Joey Ramone’s 50th birthday party which was, of course, a wake of sorts too, and in addition to The Damned (who flew in from London to play), Cheap Trick took the stage and my long-time concert-going self was duly impressed: what a tight, amazing, LOUD, band! It turned out Joey was a fan, and that night I became one too.
The Montreal-based transgender indie/electro experimentalist just released their sixth album, I Can’t Keep All Of Our Secrets — an emotional electro pop exploration of grief and loss inspired by the death of a friend. Musically, it’s the former Calgary country crooner’s most electronic offering to date, a dance-floor friendly collage of heavily programmed production, analog synths and distorted electric guitars.
In addition to promoting what is arguably their best album yet, Spoon will also be publishing their first book, First Spring Grassfire — a semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical account of growing up trans in Alberta — in the fall, and the National Film Board has a documentary about the fascinating artist in the works.
Spoon has also been a vocal advocate for gender-neutral pronouns as of late. Early in 2012, they posted an open letter to Toronto-based gay publication, Xtra, in response to the backlash the magazine received after refusing to use “they,” the preferred pronoun of transgender visual artist Elisha Lim. It was a subject that hit home for Spoon, who struggled to come out as ‘he’ in the early 2000s; editors claimed it was confusing for readers to hear Spoon’s high voice and then see a male pronoun. “I was 22. I needed the press so I didn’t protest the way my identity was being treated,” Spoon wrote in the letter. (Like Lim, the musician now prefers to go by the gender-neutral “they.”)
It’s a great little interview, & a lovely track. Do get check out Amazon’s Rae Spoon offerings
I saw these guys last night, and wow were they fucking incredible. Honestly, if you get a chance to go see them, do. They made this Brooklynite proud, too: way to represent, guys. I wanted them to play for three days straight. Damn.
Josh Williams was performing the song “Mordecai” at a Bluegrass festival this past May 5th when he had a little visitor. Check it, around 1:30, and watch to the end.
Gorgeous.
Rachel calls it my clink-bang-whizz-brr music. (Tom Waits, amongst others, is in the same category.)
It still makes me happy, and they were amazingly cool live. They were the only band I ever played that my mother asked me to turn off, and I vaguely remember her calling it something like “Nazi death music.” I love this description at Trouser Press:
Part deadly earnest post-musical composers, part boys- with-toys goofballs whipping up a ruckus for the pure joy of making noise, Berlin’s Einstürzende Neubauten (Collapsing New Buildings) have built a distinctive, challenging and extremely imaginative sonic career out of implements generally intended for other utilitarian purposes: power drills, humming power lines, water towers, air-conditioning ducts, plate steel, glass, boulders and various large metal objects beaten with sledgehammers, pipes, wrenches and axes. Even traditional tools receive similarly brutal mistreatment — Blixa Bargeld’s pained vocals and guitar are often blurred to the point of abstraction. While Einstürzende Neubauten occasionally veers into song form with intriguing, even attractive, results, the group’s output more typically resembles a bunch of highly amplified (or, in some cases, barely audible) industrial sound-effects records being played at each other with little concern for anything but the raising of blood pressure and artistic hackles. Good shit.
Ah, Blixa: check out the creepiest version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” ever recorded. (He was one of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds too, by the way.)
or there’s always this option.
As someone who goes to see a great deal of music these days – go figure, but it turns out I love chamber music – I tend to leave my phone somewhere in the entrance / antechamber to the actual performance hall. It would make sense if people could check their phones before walking into an event.
Two drummers, goddammit, rhythms right out of Funboy 3’s best stuff, piano that sounds like it came off Rufus Wainwright’s first CD, and thumpy, sexy basslines. Honestly, they’re like an answer to a question I’ve been asking for 20 years.
Now they just have to add some local live dates, and I will start 2012 off exactly right.
Rufus Wainwright’s Poses
Take, for example, the deceptively buoyant “California.” Although Wainwright’s songwriting ability has been compared to that of Joni Mitchell, this song is decidedly the opposite, in spirit, to her song of the same title. The Sunshine State, in Wainwright’s view, is hardly “home” but a freon-fueled mess hall of vapid, self-conscious poseurs (sure). There’s hardly a more damning conclusion than “Life is the longest death in California,” but what a deliciously delivered pronouncement it is: Wainwright’s specialty is the beautiful pain behind the bruise. The song’s gift lies less in its misery than in the insidious glee of its tune. If New York brings out the brooding sweep of Wainwright’s voice and lyricism, then California shellacs his melancholy and shoves it out with a bright fuck-you.
I once heard Poses described as the perfect modern penthouse apartment – especially as compared to Wainwright’s debut
There is one note in “Greek Song” that to this day can make me weep when I hear it, even out of the blue: the perfect melancholy tone, a cri de coeur but beautiful. Just listen to it, the first “all” in the refrain.
If any generous soul out there would like to buy me his House of Rufus box set
