Atomic - Blondie - Eat to the Beat - 1979

So the other night I was out with my buddy Anand and we ended up in some wine bar on the outskirts of Soho/Tribecca. In our quest to find new bars, we had intended to close out our evening at City Winery on Varrick, only to discover that there was some sort of show going on that you had to have tickets for to even come into the bar. Having decided to close out the evening with wine, we ended up going into this hole in the wall place.

It was quiet and tasteful seeming, with oak book shelves and a jazz tro playing in the corner. The forty something, librarian-ish hostess spotted us and took an almost immediate dislike to us. It's probable that she assumed that we were wasted (correctly) and that we might cause a scene. Little did she know that we were trained professional drunks with ninja-like skills at keeping it together. She was condescending from the get go, trying to usher us into a back corner.

Once we were seated, we ordered a couple of glasses of wine and a meat and cheese plate and got on the business of planning our next adventure. A youngish waitress brought out our glasses of wine, and promptly proceeded to dump both glasses on me. Now I wasn't dressed terribly well, and it was Rose, so it wasn't really a big deal...but still...

Anand and I both looked at each other to confirm that niether one of our drunk assess had been responsible for the accident. The condescending hostess zoomed over to wipe down the table and move us to another one, her condescention now tempered by the knowledge that her staff had fucked up...but still present. Our wine, was of course on the house. The waitress who had spilled on me refused to look at either us, or her boss for the rest of the night...spending the following half an hour furiously scrubbing the espresso machine.

As we wrapped up, the hostess came around to give us our check and asked what had made us come into her place. Anand told her that we liked to wander from neighborhood to neighborhood and check out different bars.

You could see the lightbulb go off in her head...she thought we were restaurant reviewers...and she realized that her waitress had probably shot the review in the foot. It was totally amazing the speed with which that condescention turned to obsequeisness. Our remaining five minutes in the bar were filled with ass kissing on a level I've rarely experienced. We quietly left, tipping well, and letting her stew in the fear that she'd shot her business in the foot.

I'm just barely old enough to remember the time when Heart of Glass was a hit. To me, Blondie were always that band. It was only as I got older that I discovered that there was a much more interesting band behind the hits. Atomic, with it's Spaghetti Western Guitar, disco drums and typically haunting vocals show a band with much more going for it than you'd think.

Armagideon Time - The Clash - London Calling B-side - 1979

So I watched the Coen Bros Burn After Reading last night...I have mixed feelings about the Coen Bros and equally mixed feelings on the film. On the one hand they are the directors of my favorite film of all time, Miller's Crossing...a beautiful, sad and lyrical film that manages to encompass all of the genre trappings, cartoonishness, and showy violence the Coen's are known for while still being a touching statement about loneliness, self-destruction, redemption and loyalty.

The Coens have made many other fine films as well the wonderfully tawdry Blood Simple, the hilarious Raising Arizona, the enigmatic Barton Fink, their Oscar films Fargo and No Country for Old Men, and of course the sublime Big Liebowski...but they have also made some crap. Hudsucker Proxy is an interesting failure, whereas Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers are just failures. And even in their best films lies the sense that we are watching a movie. Even the semi-realistic tones of films like Fargo and No Country are steeped in cinematic convention and idiosyncratic behavior. Even when their movies are good...they remain fake.

Burn After Reading is probably closest to Hudsucker in terms of it's success, though the two films are very different. The attempt to satirize modern Washington DC, a city where even the people not involved in the government are involved in the government, is interesting and certainly not something that I have seen explored before. It is probably the only comedy I can think of that uses the Valerie Plame affair as it's cheif inspiration. And there are some wonderful little bits of characterization (Most of the stuff Brad Pitt does, Clooney's dildo chair, JK Simmons doing his usual unflabbable thing) but as a comedy...it just isn't that funny. And as a politcal mystery...it's rather lackluster...which again, is sort of the point, but then it needed to be a stronger comedy.

The Clash's Reggea attempts are much like this. It was an admirable attempt to fuse punk with the new found sounds of Carribean music...to fuse the tone of one dissaffected culture with the tone of another. Again, the attempt is admirable, but how often do you want to listen to it?

Another Brick in the Wall - Pink Floyd - The Wall - 1979

From 2000-2002 I worked for a small dot.com down in the financial district. Our boss/CEO was easily one of the most odd people I have ever encountered in my life. He was a former Israeli tank commander who kept photographs of the people he had killed on his desk. He was a rabid stoner, who would shut the door and smoke up in his office and then come out yelling and screaming that we weren't working hard enough. Despite having lived in this country for many years, his English was still awful and his spelling worse. I wrote most of his emails for him...and the ones I didn't write were nearly unreadable.

So one friday evening we were all sitting in his office with a six pack when he opened with one of his usual bizarre non-sequiters. He was speaking to the british salesman in our office and he says something to the effect of "Ehhhhhh (he always begin with a long "Eh") Chris! I feel bad for you British people...it's like, when you are school kids, ehhh, you have to walk into that thing that grinds you up. Makes you hamburger It seems very sad."

Now, to this day, I'm still not sure if he honestly believed that british school children had to walk into a meat grinder as part of some intiation, or if, he actually understood the metaphor (or even what a metaphor was) of the school system as part of british societies culture of repression but either way, it was an odd moment from an odd man.

Animals - Talking Heads - Fear of Music - 1979

Ok, so this track is completely fucked...and no, not in the way David Byrne/Brian Eno meant. More in the I illegally downloaded a shitty copy from the net and it doesn't work way.

Deleting

All The Right Friends - R.E.M. - ...And I Feel Fine - 2003

It's one of the great mysteries of music how All The Right Friends never made a proper R.E.M. release. The song had been floating around since their early days as an Athens college bar band, and definitely shows the band at their most charming with Buck's chimey guitars, and a great harmony part for Mike Mills.



I used to date a girl who was an R.E.M. fanatic. She had a shoe box full of old bootlegs from those Athens bar days, and this song was certainly one of the highlights...hearing the band in 1979...4 years before Murmur and Rolling Stone's canonizing them as the greatest rock band in America...8 years before Document and the beginning of the arena rock days...10 before Losing My Religion...before the bloat and so on. Just seeing (hearing) them as young southern boys playing a unique brand of rock n roll in a time when bands still played original music in bars was refreshing and gave me a whole new perspective on a group that I thought there was nothing left to know.

Air - Talking Heads - Fear of Music - 1979

I downloaded Fear of Music following reading a book of essays by Jonathan Letham. In one of the essays he described his love for this album. It's a TH album, produced by Eno, with a significant contribution by Robert Fripp...sounds like a sure thing, right. Actually it leaves me a bit cold. There are definitely some interesting Eno-esque textures, and great moments...but at the end of the day, I find the songwriting lackluster.

This song ain't bad, nothing on the album is bad...it just doesn't thrill me.

Accidents Will Happen (live) - Elvis Costello - Armed Forces Disc 2 - 1979

This is one of the informative uses of this project, listening to these two versions back to back you can see both sides of the Elvis coin. In one you have Elvis the snot nosed punk, in the other you have the future Bacharach colleague peaking his flaccid head out.

What happens to musicians as they get older that they decide the world needs more piano ballads? And what's worse is he's turning a great song into this treacly nonsense. The great thing about Accidents is that he is so freaking ambivalent about his confession...making the song mournful robs it off that dissonance.


Honestly, it's not terrible...but why?

Accidents Will Happen - Elvis Costello - Armed Forces - 1979

The great thing about young Elvis Costello was his understanding of masculinity. He gets it. We're kinda fuck ups, we're disappointments, but his unique approach was to be completely unapologetic about it. Before the Paul McCartney and Burt Bacharach collaborations, before Diana Krall, before VH-1, Elvis was just a pissed off British kid with hipster glasses and a "fuck you" snarl who was tired of being asked to live up to unreasonable expectations. He just wanted to be loved for who he was.

And if he goes home with that girl from the bar, even though he knows it's a stupid thing to do, accidents will happen...