Normally, I would be writing about the discovery of the most distantquasar by ImperialAstronomers using the UKIDSS survey (using excellent Bayesian methods), but Andy and Peter have beaten me to it. To make up for it, I’ll try to get one of the authors of the paper to discuss it here themselves, soon. (In the meantime, some other links, from STFC, ESO, Gemini, …)
But I’ve got a good excuse: I was out (with one of those authors, as it happens) seeing Paul Simon play at the Hammersmith Apollo:
Like my parents, Paul Simon grew up in the outer boroughs of New York City, a young teenager at the birth of rock’n’roll, and his music, no matter how many worldwide influences he brings in, always reminds me of home.
He played “The Sound Of Silence” (solo), most of his 70s hits from “Kodachrome” and “Mother and Child Reunion” to the soft rock of “Slip Slidin’ Away”, and covers of “Mystery Train” and “Here Comes the Sun”. But much of the evening was devoted to what is still his masterpiece, Graceland. (We were a little disappointed that the space-oriented backing video for “The Boy in the Bubble” included images neither of the Cosmic Microwave Background nor the new most distant quasar….)
As I’ve said repeatedly, the Mekons are my favorite rock ’n’ roll band. Their music has sustained me since about 1990, after I first saw them at Chicago’s Cabaret Metro, already more than a decade into their careers. By then, they had already gone beyond their punk roots, invented alt.countryavant la lettre, and skewered capitalism on Mekons Rock and Roll. But despite all the complications, they love that rock and roll, and they’ve put on several of the best shows I’ve heard, starting with that gig in Chicago, which had become a sort of hometown for this widely scattered British band. I had only heard a few songs before that night, but I was immediately converted, not just by vocalist Sally Timms in her silver lamé dress, one of the sexiest performers I had ever seen, but by the lot of them, fronted by Jon Langford and Tom Greenhalgh, serious enough about their chosen music to know not to take it too seriously. Now in their 50s, they are all magnetic, still sexy as hell, even when they’re more-or-less knowingly fucking around, drinking too much, and still not taking anything too seriously.
So I couldn’t miss their latest UK visit, two gigs last weekend in London. With the blinders of any true fan, I admit I don’t understand why the Mekons aren’t a lot more rich and famous, and I was a little disheartened to find the clubs they played, The Lexington in Kings X, and the Windmill in Brixton, are basically pubs with stages. They packed the places, largely with mid-50s blokes in flannel shirts and short hair, who were maybe more interested in reprises of the 70s material than the (inarguably better) stuff from the 80s, 90s and 00s — with their first album of the new decade due later in the year — but I don’t quite get why they shouldn’t be playing and filling bigger clubs.
The gigs (yes, I went to both) surveyed their nearly three and a half decades, from punk to country to whatever hybrid they’re up to now, wielding their guitars — not to mention accordion, fiddle and mandolin — to tell what usually end up as stories of political or emotional betrayal, unrequited love for a better world. They played their gorgeous cover of John Anderson’s Wild and Blue, Sally taking some time for singing off from the shouting she seems to sometimes prefer; considered the modern history of London in Thee Olde Trip to Jerusalem; and lamented the ongoing death of rock ’n’ roll in Memphis, Egypt. Saturday, with multi-instrumentalist (and occasional cohort of John Lydon) Lu Edmonds off for the night, they devoted their encore to a reworking of their punk phase, albeit without putting down the accordion and fiddle.
Friday was tighter, less silly, probably less drunk — and was partially filmed for the still-plannedMekons movie — but I’m happy to put up with the Mekons however they come, put a few quid into their pockets so that they keep getting together every few years and give us a new record and a few gigs.
Bonus: A shambles of an encore from the Zurich leg of the tour, featuring Toronto’s Sadies and the Mekons performing “Memphis, Egypt” and “Where Were You?”. If you don’t already love the Mekons, this won’t convert you, but if you do, it may remind you why, and will certainly put a smile on your face. (Via Back to the World)
Rock’n’roll impresario Don Kirshner, “the man with the golden ear”, but better known to members of my family as “Cousin Donny”, has died at 76. He was a fixture of American adolescence from the 50s through the 70s (when rock’n’roll was mostly about adolescence).
In the 1970s, he tentatively stepped in front of the microphone as the host of Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, which brought live performances of everyone from KISS and the Allman Brothers to the New York Dolls and the Sex Pistols.
His deadpan delivery was (lovingly?) mocked by Paul Shaffer on Saturday Night Live, which is likely better remembered (and better syndicated) than the Rock Concert show itself. It was, probably not coincidentally, cancelled within a couple years of the launch of MTV (which, you may recall, used to play music videos).
My condolences to his wife and children, my slightly-more-distant cousins, who I hope will eventually be as heartened as I am by the many happy reminiscences that have started showing up at the New York Times obituary and elsewhere.
Yesterday, I went to visit Longplayer, Jem Finer’s thousand-year composition, for the eleventh anniversary of its first note, played on New Years Day, 1999. Longplayer is currently controlled (performed?) from Trinity Buoy Wharf in London’s simultaneously desolate and overbuilt Docklands, covered in newly built flats and offices, with hardly a human in sight.
Jem started out as a rock’n’roller, but has expanded into broader realms of visual and sonic art, as much interested in the logistics of producing sounds as the sounds themselves; I first got to know him in his role as the artist-in-residence in Oxford’s Astrophysics group where he drew maps, played music, and built — and lived in — a beautiful plywood-and-chicken-wire radio telescope.
Longplayer will take 1000 years to play, but music technology won’t be stable for that long a period (not to mention the sociology-political systems needed to arrange transmissions). Some of these questions have also been taken up by the Long Now Foundation, with which Longplayer has become affiliated. Jem has addressed some of these questions head-on over the last year with a series of Longplayer Live performances at London’s Roundhouse, and in San Francisco, as well as upcoming performances in LA, Tasmania and Porto. Although the main composition is streamed electronically, the live versions are performed on Tibetan singing bowls (which you can sponsor if you want to support the project). Jem has also transmuted the work into “Shortplayer” which uses the same algorithm and notation but is played on more conventional instruments.
Longplayer is stationed in a gorgeous lighthouse on the Thames. As you approach, it resonates with its extended, changing melody.
For the occasion, Jem provided drinks, bagels, and the opportunity to take in the view …
…and the music (this is apparently just a temporary amplifier as they recover from a power failure earlier in the year)…
(More pictures of Longplayer, Trinity Buoy Wharf, and environs here.)
Of course, the New Year is well-matched to the sort of long-term contemplation that Longplayer encourages. In the US and the rest of the so-called “New World”, the very idea of a thousand years is almost absurdly long — the imprint of humankind on the American continents was radically different in the year that the people there wouldn’t have called 1011. Here in Europe, not to mention Asia, much has changed technologically and politically since then, but the broad outlines of our presence would have been recognisable. But even here, the longest-lasting institutions, such as the Church, have undergone reformations and counter-reformations, sponsored states and wars between states, and certainly couldn’t be trusted to preserve a work of art for its own sake, despite the many things that have happily made their way down to us in 2011. Knowledge, of course, has proven easier to transmit than the works themselves; we can only hope that this remains true in the digital age and the rolling obsolescence of new technologies.
The Mekons are the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world. They started in the 70s as a punk band from Leeds but by the mid-1980s had picked up fiddles and mandolins to go with their loud guitars, and learned to love Hank Williams and Gram Parsons as much as they’ve sadly learned to hate the injustices meted about by the systems and people that run everything. Their “Mekons Rock’n’Roll” was a simultaneous eulogy and elegy to their loud and debauched chosen musical form, “capitalism’s favorite boychild” as they themselves described it. The followup, “Curse of the Mekons” is probably the best record made about the end of the cold war, lamenting not only their cursed bad luck, but refusing to see it even a defeat for socialism which they reasonably point out can’t “really be dead when it hasn’t even happened”. A decade later, they also probably made the best (if possibly unselfconscious) record about 9/11 and its aftermath, “Out of Our Heads”.
If all of this makes them sound dour and serious, they’re not. Or at least, they know enough to seize the day, to turn their amps up and party while they watch the decay of the world around them.
Over the years, they’ve dispersed to Chicago, New York, San Francisco, London and England’s West Country — and still get together every once in a while to record, tour and generally raise hell without, as far as I can tell, increasing their income too much. And in the process, they’ve probably been responsible for two or three of the best rock’n’roll shows I’ve ever been to, in North America and in the UK.
To honor (or praise, or bury) their career, filmmaker Joe Angio has shot the footage for a documentary “Revenge of the Mekons”. But they’ve run out of money for editing, and have enlisted the internet to help: Kickstarter is a brilliant site which enables groups to find (financial) supporters from around the world (and reward them in kind). You can support the film — the project is more than halfway toward their $20,000 goal. Depending on the amount of the pledge, you can get various prizes, including records and artwork by members of the band as well as books signed by some of the Mekons’ more famous fans (including rock critic Greil Marcus, novelist Jonathan Franzen, and writer Luc Sante), not to mention your name in the credits of a film. So, keep the corpse of rock’n’roll limping along — donate what you can.
You can find short clips on the BBC site, but here’s a video to go along with the original recorded version, from the Tabula Rasa record (isn’t it weird that I can legally embed this, but not the music alone?):
Two crucial figures from outside the mainstream of American culture have died.
Tuli Kupferberg (1923-2010) has been hanging around, writing about and stirring up trouble in New York’s Greenwich Village since the 1950s as a writer, poet, occasional political activist and rock ‘n’ roller. First in the late 60s and early 70s and occasionally thereafter, he was one of the Fugs (named after the faux-expletive from Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead) singing both the poems of William Blake as well as “Slum Goddess of the Lower East Side”. Since then, he kept writing, occasionally reformed the Fugs with his partner Ed Sanders, but had suffered a series of strokes in the last year from which he never fully recovered.
Harvey Pekar (1939-2010) was a bit better known. For the last few decades, he had been writing a series of autobiographical comics, “American Splendor”, illustrated by some of the best comics artists of the last few decades, from R. Crumb and Alan Moore to Gilbert Hernandez, Chester Brown and Joe Sacco.They chronicled his life in Cleveland, Ohio, from the tedium of his day job as a hospital clerk, a bout with cancer (in the excellent graphic novel “Our Cancer Year”), and his occasional run-ins with fame — in the 80s, he was occasional guest on David Letterman’s late-night talk show (until he famously decided to use his slot to lambaste GE, the owner of the NBC television network), and in this decade was memorably played by Paul Giamatti in a movie, also called “American Splendor”, based on the comics. Only a couple of weeks ago, I discovered The Pekar Project, devoted to getting and keeping his newest works online. He was always surly, too high-maintenance for his own good, dependably dissatisfied with whatever his life threw at him. And will nonetheless be missed.
A couple of my friends have got into a bit of a spat on the internet. Megan McArdle, a writer for the Atlantic Monthly, wrote “The Freeloaders”, arguing that file sharing, as practiced by today’s 20-something young adults, is destroying the music industry.
Marc Weidenbaum, who writes the wonderful disquiet blog, first first answered in prose. Marc argues, mostly correctly I think, that Megan’s argument conflates the major-label recording industry with the music industry as a whole. Despite the illegality (and let’s not be coy about it, there is plenty of theft involved), the more general ethos of free culture has spawned plenty of great art that flourishes outside of the stranglehold of that same recording industry.
He then realized a better rejoinder would be in the great tradition of answer records: he invited some musicians to comment, musically, on the article (and its accompanying illustration): the result is Despite The Downturn, freely available (free as in beer and as in freedom), mostly electronica, an amazing turnaround of just a couple of days from thought to expression. So at least something good has come out of this disagreement.
I awoke Thursday Morning to an email from an old friend: Alex Chilton had died. Chilton was one of America’s greatest songwriters and musicians, blossoming first as a Blue-eyed soul singer with The Box Tops as a teenager in the 60s. He reached a short-lived and (at the time) too-obscure peak as the leader of Big Star, writing more than a couple of the best guitar-pop songs since the Beatles, like the perfect “September Gurls”. After Big Star, he spent a few years sinking into fabulous weirdness, eventually becoming part of the indie (then “post-punk” or “college”) rock scene that he inspired. Since that time, there have been a few slices of brilliance like the post-60s AIDS-era “No Sex”, and lots of fun and obscure R&B covers. But by then it was clear that as much as he loved the perks of the rock’n’roll lifestyle (the sex & drugs part), he didn’t feel like playing the game (or perhaps he just didn’t like the hard work). He died Wednesday at 59, too young and not famous enough, just before Big Star were meant to perform one of their fitful reunions at this week’s South by Southwest festival.
There are innumerable remembrances around the web, even a sincere appreciation from the usually sarcastic Gawker. And then there was the unexpected statement on the floor of the House Of Representatives from Memphis’ congressman, Steve Cohen. My favorite, though, is from another old friend, Rob Sheffield at Rolling Stone. Or you can just find some performances on YouTube — and it’s not too late to buy his records.
(The last time I wrote about Chilton it was to quash rumors that he had died in his latter-day hometown of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. So incredibly sad that it’s the opposite, now.)
I steeped myself in some imported culture this week — modern classical music by two of the most famous living American composers. Thursday evening I went over to the Barbican to hear the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by John Adams, performing his own new City Noir, written about Los Angeles in honor of Gustavo Dudamel’s taking over the LA Philharmonic last year. The evening started with what seemed to me perhaps slightly halfhearted performances of Debussy and Ravel, but things picked up fantastically after the break.
Jeremy Denk took on the piano (which rises majestically from a hole in the stage) for Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments. He pounded the hell out of the keyboard, with the orchestra barely (but successfully) keeping up: Adams seemed almost to be sharing conducting duties with Denk at the piano. Although originally written when he lived in Europe, Stravinsky revisited the Concerto after he had moved to Los Angeles in the 1940s, (along with so many other European composers) so it made an appropriate prelude. City Noir fulfilled its brief: evocative of the sleaze and grit in our minds’ versions of those film-noir classics. Indeed, the only movies Adams mentions by name are the revisionist Chinatown, and “The Naked City” (which was NY, not LA, in both its film and TV incarnations), which brings to mind yet another contemporary American composer, John Zorn, although Adams works harder than Zorn to keep his chaos at bay.
The next night I went to the English National Opera’s production of Philip Glass’ Satyagraha from 1980, the story of Gandhi in South Africa in the early 1900s. Produced by the wonderful Improbable theatre company, combining the expertise of their “skills ensemble” at puppetry, dance, stilt-walking and imaginative production design with the ENO’s musical abilities in a magical production.
The over-the-top activity of the production works well with Glass’ so-called minimalism, highlighting the action and emotion present even in the intentional repetitions of notes and phrases. The centrepiece and high point of the production recounts, or at least alludes to, “The Indian Opinion” a newspaper founded by Gandhi to recount and communicate the tale of the opposition to racist policies in South Africa. Using individual newspapers, rolls of newsprint evoking the printing presses, the scene is gorgeous, one of the best-realized fifteen minutes of music and theater I have experienced in a long time.
The only glaring fault (aside from the London Coliseum’s closely-packed seats and a thermostat seemingly set about five degrees too high) was not aesthetic, but logistical: the use of projections onto the back of the stage, parts of which were hidden from anyone above the first level of seating. It was an unexpected oversight in a production that was otherwise so perfectly choreographed.
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