Thunderstorm

Toto's Africa by Perpetuum Jazzile, performed live at Vokal Xtravaganzza 2008 (October 2008) - arranger Tomaž Kozlevčar.

For Falling Down

In the early 80s, Kim and I laughingly made "I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down" a kind of personal theme song for ourselves. The song was covered by Elvis Costello in his Get Happy album which got plenty of play in our house at the time, and still occupies a spot on a shelf in all its vinyl-ness in my basement.

Tonight, PBS' The NewsHour interviewed Elvis about his career and his music. Take a look:

Google Humor

Mystery Train

Another Playing For Change collaboration:

Under Milkwood

This afternoon I had a chance, while recuperating from a back outage, to catch up on the Netflix backlog. So Kim and I watched The Edge of Love. I knew virtually nothing about the film beforehand, and thought it was going to be a sort of dramatic quasi-documentary about Dylan Thomas. But it turned out to really be about the two women in his life ... and we enjoyed it.

This led me to recall how, years before I met Kim, I heard a radio broadcast of the Dylan Thomas "play for voices", Under Milkwood, with Richard Burton as the main voice, on late night KPFK in Los Angeles. I captured it on cassette tape, but haven't heard it for years. I used to replay it like music. The tape is presumably somewhere in my basement, garage or storage shed. Somewhere. And who knows in what condition. In the meantime, I came upon this, the first few minutes of this remarkable classic:



This should whet your appetite for the whole thing.

And here is a nice reading of Thomas' piece for his dying father, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, with photos:



Somewhere I have John Cale and Brian Eno putting this thing to music. But I much prefer it as spoken poetry.

And ... finally, was Thomas really the inspiration for the name Bob Dylan (once Robert Zimmerman) assumed?

Toyota Designs A Font

To promote its new iQ model in Belgium, Toyota commissioned the services of graphics designers, a pro racing car driver and a software programmer to create a unique font, based on movements of its car, as seen from overhead cameras. See the video then go here and here to learn more.

iQ font - When driving becomes writing / Full making of from wireless on Vimeo.

Song of the Day

Shankill Butchers by Sarah Jarosz

From the "Song Up In My Head" album. One gifted teenager. Covering the Decemberists here.

Featured on NPR a while back, too.

Song of the Day, Four Decades On

Ghosts of American Astronauts by The Mekons (ca. 1988) from their best, IMHO, album: So Good It Hurts. Known as Brit punk rockers, here they sound more like alt-country; think Cowboy Junkies with angry politics.

Entrancing, dreamy sound and provocative lyrics with references to the moon landing conspiracy theory, Viet Nam and more ("... Nixon sucks a dry martini ...").

Yes, like some of you, I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing on July 20, 1969 ...

Whip It; Whip It Good

The other day, while prowling the dusty shelves of my basement, I happened to come across a vinyl copy from ca. 1980 of my Freedom of Choice album by Devo, featuring the notorious "Whip It" cut. For a moment, I considered ripping it toWAV/FLAC/MP3, but quickly decided that I had higher priorities for conversion ...

Then today my attention was directed to what is said to be the spiritual inspiration for that song, slightly risque that it is:

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/07/16/bb-video-the-1944-so.html

Watch at your own risk.

P.S. A Little Trivia: Did you know that Devo's first album was produced by (IMHO, the great) Brian Eno?

July: Oregon Awareness Month for Ernest Bloch

So declares our state's governor. Bloch lived his later years in Oregon, probably becoming the state's best known composer. So let's listen to one of his most popular compositions, Schelomo Rhapsody for Cello and Orchestra. Here, by Mstislav Rostropovich in an obviously old (when? Berstein died around 1990) partial (where is the rest of it?) performance with the French National Orchestra being conducted by Leonard Bernstein:



And here is an interesting, quite different performance done with double bass (Boguslaw Furtok) and piano (Ewa Warykiewicz):

Danger Mouse + Sparklehorse + David Lynch = Dark Night Of The Soul

Okay, I know this is old news. But I finally got around to streaming the tracks from "Dark Night Of The Soul" (DNOTS). In case you don't know, this is a non-album or a CD with no music, composed by Sparklehorse and Danger Mouse, originally to accompany photos by film director David Lynch. I was intrigued from first hearing about this a few weeks ago, if for no other reason than being a David Lynch fan from the time of Twin Peaks TV series to The World's Angriest Dog cartoon strip (my absolute favorite of his work) to Eraserhead and his other films. Due to a legal quagmire with EMI, you can go to the DNOTS site and order the CD and poster (the book of photos is apparently sold out now), but it comes with the notice, above left.



So tonight I am streaming the entire album from NPR (and so can you), where the back story is also presented. And don't ask me whether I am capturing the stream so I can play it on my iPod and surprise daughter Ivi with it when she returns from Europe late this month ...



Each track features a different performer, and they are an interesting lot, as you can see from the poster image above. This music is growing on me. Take a listen.

UPDATE 11 JULY 2009: This morning I awoke to the clock radio tuned to NPR's Weekend Edition and caught the last half of an interview with David Lynch about the Danger Mouse - Sparklehorse project. You can hear here and see some of the related photos now being shown at the Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles.