music is good and so is saturday
Another of Theo Jansen's marvelous Strandbeests, via Dennis Cooper's The Weaklings
Here’s an interview with Titus Andronicus about their album, The Monitor, which I’ve been enjoying the hell out of lately. Question: am I the only person who thinks that first question about the lyric fusing allusions to Springsteen and Billy Bragg in “A More Perfect Union” also contains a third reference that they don’t mention? The line they quote is “I never wanted to change the world/ but I’m looking for a new New Jersey”, which is the Bragg paraphrase (“I’m not looking for a new England”), but the next line is “Cuz tramps like us, baby we were born to die”, which obviously is Springsteen at the beginning, but did anyone else hear “born to die” and think CHOKING VICTIM? Seems like something these guys would have on their radar. Anyway. If you like the idea of something that sounds like Bright Eyes but with its ball intact, or some version of the Hold Steady that is just as passionate but never has quite as much fun, this is maybe your new jam.
Here’s a playlist by fantasy/sci-fi legend Michael Moorcock at Paper Cuts. This made me really happy to read–his thoughts on the Dead (at the top) and Dylan (at the bottom) pretty much describe my own feelings to a T. The rest is good too.
Sometimes I wonder why I still bother to go to Pitchfork. Then I remember. It’s because sometimes I learn stuff like this.
From the Archives of WTF (not held at UT Austin): The year is 1996, and Snoop Dogg is reviewing The Aristocats for Entertainment Weekly. (via Angela Petrella‘s facebook.)
And Boing Boing offers up Son House’s “Death Letter” as their Greatest Song of All Time of the Day.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDCNbacVt5w&
another day another roundup (also, BANJO FEEVER continues)
Strandbeest by Theo Jansen, courtesy of Gallerie Dennis Cooper
The Rumpus has a conversation with Banksy.
Here’s a Times article on testing Google’s new translation software (via Sara Faye Lieber’s facebook).
Jezebel has a sympathetic Q&A with a guy with a female-constipation fetish (believe it or not, this is actually SFW).
Julia Cohen posts poems by her 4th and 5th grade students.
Ron Rosenbaum, who you probably know better as Slate‘s resident Nabokov-obsessive, reviews Seth Rogov’s Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet for the Jewish Review of Books. Depending on your personal feelings about Dylan, this piece is either about as much or slightly less fun than it sounds like.(via Arts & Letters Daily.)
And in today’s installment of BANJO FEEVER, we’ve got Frank Warner and Pete Seeger on Pete’s old RAINBOW QUEST TV show, doing Frank Proffitt’s “Tom Dooley.” This was the first bluegrass song I ever got obsessed with. The version that caught my attention was Doc Watson’s, from a live album that I picked up because I wanted to hear a “more authentic” version of “Shady Grove,” than the Jerry Garcia / David Grisman version on their album of the same name, which I was already in love with.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OATZrTibcFY