March 2001 Archives

Holy Toledo!

I was just turned on to a web resource that I think is a defining space[1], in addition to a site for which I've been hoping for years. For. At. www.oasisnyc.net is a clearinghouse of resources and information for public space, particularly greenspace in New York City. The organization behind the site (OASIS -- Open Accessible Space Information) is really a consortium of federal, state, and local agencies, in addition to public and private companies, academic institutions, and nofopros (my fave little condensation of Not-For-Profit a/k/a 401(C)(3) organizaitons). Right now, the main attraction is a mapping system, with a familiar comfortable interface similar to other mapping services through which you can pick a piece of the city by borough, neighborhood (a thorough and overlapping list that includes Cobble Hill, Cobble Hill West, Carroll Gardens, _and_ Gowanus), ZIP code, or Community Board, and retrieve a map showing Parks, Community Gardens, vacant lots (differentiated by public and private), and more. You can navigate the map using similarly common interface geegaws, and even select specific buildings' images and see their zoning codes, building types, and addresses.

For the future, the org is planning to add overlays to their aerial photographs (did I mention that they also have aerial photographs of the city?) of transit lines, trees, legislative districts, privately-owned public spaces, environmental sites (a euphemism for environmentally hazardous sites, such as power plants and solid waste processing plants), and -- what may be most interesting and ambitious -- "a set of 'what-if' functions to see how your neighborhood may change if land use patterns change".

Downsides:
Really the main downside I saw was that it's only NYC at this point, but perhaps as the meme spreads other cities and regions will pick up the concept.

Happy mapping!

"Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit."

So writes Samuel Beckett, referring to Marcel Proust, in his cute little monograph on the best writer of the 20th Century. We might reasonably wonder, to what qualities in Proust is Mr. Beckett responding?

This is simple to explain. Mr. Proust was discussing the deadening effect of repetition in daily life. He meant that people were doomed, once any wonderful thing (sex, riding The Cyclone, taking LSD) had been done more than once, to see its pleasure slowly depleted. Beckett understood that what gave pleasure to the human mind was any incident in which the rhythm of the usual was altered in some way. He took an idea from Proust and interpreted it in order to create a paradigm of such disruption.

Musicians--beautiful, brilliant, modern-day musicians--have understood Mr. Proust's comment (amplified by Mr. Beckett) and have come up with a kind of music which does exactly THAT--structures, then re-structures--musical forms. One such group is Nightmares on Wax. Another is the Viennese dynamic duo Kruder and Dorfmeister. These Simon-and-Garfunkel-look-alikes now have out, as best as I can tell, two virtually flawless masterpieces and a third that comes mighty close. The first two are DJ Kicks and the K&D Sessions. The third is a new import called, The G-Stone Book.

It might be difficult for people with non-music-critic ears and vocabularies (such as myself) to explain in language that makes sense just what happens to them when they listen to a Kruder and Dorfmeister cd. But something does, indeed, happen. The music takes place in levels. Listening to it, you are aware of a surface tension, below beats, and then structure even below that. It is music in 3-D, full of oblique, subliminal messages like shadows, and listening to it is nearly like hallucinating.

The music is percussive; it throbs. It undulates, like magic carpet. It stretches and retracts. It becomes transparent and then opaque, transparent and opaque again. And every single time you think you've figured out just what it is that intrigues you, the music changes again.

Where do Kruder and Dorfmeister get these marvelous sounds? I just don't know. I think of Proust and his little cookie, and then I fork over even more money to music vendors, trying to find that experience again.

Happy listening.

-- Alex Joseph

Well, it looks like Napster's caving in to the Controlling Legal Authority at last. No longer will anyone get free music, ever again. Unless they use gnutella. Or borrow CDs from the library. Or have friends with large music collections and a CD burner.

(Hey, if only there were some way for friends to share music over the internet. . . Oh, wait, never mind.)

By the way, has anyone figured out how Napster's proposed "copyright filter" is going to work? Any method I can think of is either easily circumvented (like, change the file names, folks!) or technically unfeasible. Maybe Giuliani's decency squad listens to every mp3?

So, in memoriam (or a last-minute shopping list), some of Ishbadiddle's latest downloads:

The best thing I've collected from the world of Napster recently has been two tracks from Emir Kusturica and the No Smoking Orchestra. Anyone who's seen Kusturica's film "Underground" (a deleriously wonderful attack on the perpetual martial conditions in the Balkans, or at least how it seemed in 1995) remembers the band that followed our two protagonists in the beginning of the movie as they lurched drunkenly from pillar to post one night. That's pretty much what the music is like on these tracks. Some sort of weird combination of klezmer, gypsy, big band, and Les Negresses Vertes music that I like to call "Hey, Hey!" music, the kind of thing that Krusty the Klown might listen to in his spare time when he's not betting on the Generals to lose to the Globetrotters. (If you'd prefer to call it "Hey! Hey! Hey!" music, you're welcome to your opinion, however wrongheaded.) Frankly, I have been too caught up in general enjoyment to take a closer peek at the components of the tracks, but they're a real hoot.

-- Trip Kirkpatrick

[NB, I think their music was also in Black Cat, White Cat, a fine example of the gypsy screwball comedy and worth a rent.]

When Sarah and I were in New Zealand, we kept hearing this great song on the radio as we were driving our Trusty Rental Car around the gorgeous South Island. The song was called Just Add Water, and it's by a guy named Dave Dobbyn. It's unbelievably catchy -- you're singing the chorus along with Dave by the time the song is halfway through.

Anyway, we finally went into a CD store and demanded that they sell us this song. They didn't have the new Dave Dobbyn studio album. But they did have an album called Tim Finn, Big Runga, Dave Dobbyn -- Together in Concert: Live. At first, I was disappointed. But they let us listen to the Live CD in the store (now why don't US CD stores let you do that?), and it is *awesome*. We've been listening to it almost obsessively ever since. Some of our favorite tracks include: Six Months in a Leaky Boat, Whaling, Just Add Water (of course), and Good Morning Baby. But they're all good.

In case you're unfamiliar with these artists, as we were, it turns out Dave Dobbyn is the Kiwi Graham Parker. Tim Finn is Neil Finn's brother. He's been in Split Enz and Crowded House. And Bic Runga is the newish NZ female pop sensation.

The CD is available on import in the US. And I've also seen the songs on Napster. You can search for some of the tracks I've named or for the artist names. Enjoy!

About a month late (sorry), my contribution to Ishbadiddle is my complete panoply of 2000 Music Top 10 lists. I do these every year and usually e-mail them to a friend or two in the industry who care about such things; thanks to Ishbadiddle, I'll be able to widen the circle a bit. I say these are late because I really wanted to time them for February and the Voice's Pazz & Jop poll, the Grammys, etc. But hey, it's not like these albums went out of print in the past month. So if you're looking for buying-guide-type thoughts, here they are.

But first, while we're talking music...

Mike asked about what we've been downloading on Napster. I wish I could say I've been digging deep and discovering lots of rare, amazing music, but really the bulk of my downloading has consisted of replacing, in digital form, my cassette collection, including some frankly embarrassing mixes I compiled in the '80s. (Anyone who needs to hear Def Leppard's "Photograph," let me know...)

* Did you know that A-ha's "Take On Me" (one of the coolest videos of all time, IMHO) is really a ska song? (Reel Big Fish)
* Or that Bohemian Rhapsody is really a Celtic reel? (Hibernian Rhapsody by De Dannan.)
* The Boswell Sisters: great 30s girl group (did they call them girl groups then, or is that only a Phil Spector thing?) I don't know much about 'em, but their vocalese shines.
* Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, Mark O'Connor: Appalachian Waltz. This is such a gorgeous piece that after hearing it on the radio I immediately bought the album.
* And of course there's the things you would never search for, but stumble across in other people's collections, like a Cantonese version of YMCA. Of course, browsing other people's collections carries the danger of the "un-covered download": the song you download because you *think* it's covered by someone else, only to discover on listening that it's not a cover, it's only mislabelled. (For the record, as far as I know the Bangles never recorded Video Killed The Radio Star.) Well, heck, what do you expect for free?