Mick Jagger—“Memo from Turner” (from the film Performance)
BOBBY CHARLES: I got turned on to Bobby Charles while listening to Devendra Banhart guest DJing on WNYC’s “Spinning on Air.” It was a warm spring night, I had the radio on out in the garden, and Charles’ song “I Must Be in a Good Place Now” wrapped snuggly around my head like the most comforting cloth ever created. An absolutely gorgeous moment. Charles’ phenomenal debut album, recorded with most of the members of The Band and Dr. John, inexplicably swings in and out of print and The Heat Warps was kind enough to upload it recently for your listening pleasure. Believe me, you need this.
BOOT CAMP—THE END OF THE LINE: Robin completed her initial six-weeks of hell in boot camp and the whole series has been an entertaining, ahem, “reed.” Click and scroll around her blog (pretty much the closest thing I get to exercise these days) to see what she went through.
UPDATE FROM READER H.S. IN COMMENTS: “Actually, the show has been sold out since the day it went on sale. The tickets available on Ticketmaster.com now are through auction only.”
TO MY GREAT CHAGRIN: The eagerly-awaited (in my house, at least) world premiere of the documentary To My Great Chagrin: The Unbelievable Story of Brother Theodore comes to MOMA this Wednesday, February 13th (also playing on March 1st). He was a complex, brilliant and vastly underrated performance artist and you can view some of his pitch-perfect and hysterical ravings in a video compilation we posted here back in September.
FUERZABRUTA: Friday I took my lovely wife Chris to see Fuerzabruta, the new spectacle from the creators of De La Guarda, for her birthday at the Daryl Roth Theatre and was totally blown away by it. I enjoyed De La Guarda, but thought it was a little over-hyped and found myself wishing it would come to an end about 45-minutes into it. Fuerzabruta, on the other hand, I never wanted to end, noticing at several points during the performance that my face was smeared with a thoroughly ridiculous shit-eating grin that only a child can accommodate without feeling like a complete tool. As an added bonus, I was selected by one of the Fuerzabruta “dancers” to join her on a metal platform and dance in front of hundreds of people before having an oversized, exploding paper cinderblock dropped on our heads. According to Chris the crowd was cheering me on (I inserted several of my death-defying robot maneuvers into my routine) and afterwards the dancer came over and gave me a big thumbs up when she found me back in the crowd. If you’re a New Yorker, I highly recommend checking this show out. If the $72 price tag is too steep for you, they sell $25 rush tix at the box office two hours before each performance.
Here’s a sneak peek at Olafur Eliasson’s “New York City Waterfalls,” which will send water cascading from under the Brooklyn Bridge and from three free-standing scaffolds in New York Harbor — including this view of Governors Island off Red Hook — from July through October.
In the spirit of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “The Gates” project, Eliasson’s $15 million art project will consist of four waterfalls, towering between 90 and 120 feet, that will gush between 7 am and 10 pm every day.
You can view all of the waterfall images here. You can check out more of Eliasson’s work here.
Jeffrey Lewis—“Anxiety Attack” (unauthorized fan video)
The Hyena and Other Men: If you’re a New Yorker you’ve only got a few days left to immerse yourself in Pieter Hugo’s stunning exhibit at the Yossi Milo Gallery. It’s comprised of large-scale photographs of a band of Nigerian men who roam the country with a menagerie of animals and a six-year-old girl named Mummy. You can view most of the photos at the gallery (and many, many more) here (hint: view images separately—right-click), but the small JPGs are nowhere near as impactful as witnessing them blown up and surrounding you.
Butter 08: Egg City Radio is giving away Butter 08’s way-fun and punk-funky (and out-of-print) selt-titled ‘96 release featuring Miho from Cibo Matto and Russell from the Blues Explosion. From Miho saying, “Thank you, daddy” to the last throbbing yelps of “Butterfucker,” this delivers great gifts to your needy assbone.
Why I Believe Bush Must Go: George McGovern writes an editorial in The Washington Post calling for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. Yes, that sound you hear off in the distance is the howler monkeys of the right going batshit.
This is a quick reminder guide for my fellow Big Applets:
Williamsburg: Go to the Rwanda Reporting benefit tonight at Supreme Trading featuring a performance by Francis and the Lights, free hard-to-find Rwandan food and an hour’s worth of complimentary Bass beer. The donation is a measly $20.
Manhattan: Go to see the wonderful and unique documentary Billy the Kid that opened last night at the IFC Center for a limited engagement. I haven’t had time to finish my review, but you can read some of the raves at Metacritic.
Manhattan: Go to see the long-awaited Holy Modal Rounders documentary Bound to Lose (and accompanying live music bonuses) at the Anthology during its one-week run (starts this Friday).
UPDATE: In comments the delightful and reliable Robin from oh. you. again. recommends buying tix for Au Revoir Parapluie (Farewell, Umbrella) at BAM in downtown Brooklyn. I’m doing that right now.
FANTASTIC DOCUMENTARY COMING TO NYC: The wonderful and unique documentary Billy the Kid is opening this Wednesday, December 5th at the IFC Center in Manhattan for a limited engagement. Carve out some room for it if you live in NYC because it’s highly recommended. Make sure to check out the excellent trailer at the documentary’s web site (or these outtakes at YouTube). You can read our review of it at some point tomorrow here at Rumproast.
UPDATE: A new entry for our horribly neglected Worst.Band.Name.Ever category. One of the bands opening for Mudhoney tonight is called Pissed Jeans. No matter how good they are a little part of me will always hate them for that.
Normally I only write “The Selector” on Sundays but I am so freakin’ excited about the new documentary Bound to Lose that I had to shoehorn in another post. The Holy Modal Rounders were the most godwonderful skull fuck to crawl out of the NYC folk scene in the early 60’s. Their first two albums, unimaginatively titled The Holy Modal Rounders and The Holy Modal Rounders 2, stand to this day as first-rate alterna-folk treasures and have thankfully been re-released by Fantasy as a jam-packed two-fer that is one of the best deals you can find on a single CD today.
I had the pleasure and displeasure of seeing the reunited Rounders twice in the late 90’s in NYC. The first show at the now extinct Bottom Line was a real treat, an ear-to-ear smile-athon ... just way too much fun. So much fun, in fact, that a totally inebriated Steve Weber (is there any other?) had to, quite literally, be dragged off stage. The second show I witnessed at the also extinct Tonic was a contentious mess, Weber and Peter Stampfel clearly not enjoying being in the same room together, let alone sharing the same planet. Bound to Lose appears to cover all of the love and all of the loathing and it has finally crawled (probably on its belly) to NYC for a seven day run (12/7-12/13) at the Anthology Film Archives. The first and last nights will feature performances by Stampfel (with Jeffrey Lewis & the Jitters—and an open bar—and Gary Lucas, respectively) and they’ve tucked all sorts of goodies into the length of the run (including playwrite and ex-Rounder Sam Shepard rejoining Stampfel for a performance at Pianos following the 12/9 showing).
For more information, check out the film’s MySpace page (you can see the trailer and an outtake there, as well) or look below the fold for the info I lovingly cut n’ pasted for your edification.
My dear pal Amy has put together a benefit to support the making of Rwanda Reporting, a documentary she’s producing. I encourage all of you Big Applets to attend this worthwhile event (I certainly will). It will feature free beer, Rwandan food and the music of Francis and the Lights, who are rumored to be amazing live. I’ll let Amy take it away from here:
In January 2008, I will travel to Rwanda to spend a month following four journalism students - two Rwandan genocide survivors and two exchange students from Carleton University. The film will document their struggle to cover post-genocide Rwanda, thirteen years after the news media fueled the horrific violence and killings.
A portion of the funds generated from the completed film will be used to create a scholarship fund for journalism students at the National University in Butare. Your support at our fundraising event will help make this project and trip a success!
Brilliant stuff at the Morning News. Olivo Barbieri utilizes a technique called “selected focus” using a tilt-shift lens to make aerial photographs look like snaps of miniature models (scroll down for a brief interview with Barbieri). He currently has a show at the Yancey Richardson Gallery in Manhattan (address below the fold) that runs until December 22nd.
Gibby Haynes—de facto leader of the exponentially unfathomable, long running psych-punk-whatever amalgamators Butthole Surfers—will join a cadre of kiddies from the Paul Green School of Rock for a series of six dates in February (one, on the 12th, has yet to be confirmed). And together they’ll play Butthole Surfers material.
The Paul Green School—featured in the documentary film Rock School and not the similarly titled Jack Black/Richard Linklater film School of Rock—is a network of intensive music training programs for kids aged 8-18, and the school’s “All Stars” often pay tribute to and even gig out with famed musicians many years their senior.
Pitchfork seems a little shocked by this decision, but, c’mon, think about how righteous it would be to hear a choir of kids chiming in on “Lady Sniff”? I can’t imagine anything more beautiful.
Jose Serrano, a minister at St. Columba Church in Chelsea, says his mostly senior-citizen worshippers are not easily shocked. “Our neighborhood is flexible and open,” he says.
Minister Serrano was commenting on this:
How then will the city’s new cold-shower climate receive Enrique Ramirez, the 38-year-old owner of face to face nyc in Chelsea, who is rolling out a pro-anal-bleaching campaign on October 22? The edgy ads, which feature pretty boys in various states of undress, will appear on posters, in local gay magazines and in phone booths along Eighth Avenue. The ad blitz promotes a cosmetic treatment that evens out the pigmented skin around the anus.
The American Planning Association has picked Park Slope as one of the 10 greatest neighborhoods in America. Great, now this place is going to be overrun with yuppies and baby carriages. Time to move back to Williamsburg before that’s discovered.*
And don’t be envious, Manhatters, 125th Street was picked as one of the 10 greatest streets. I’m guessing that’s based solely on the fact that the street is the home of not one, but twoJimmy Jazz stores.
* If you lived here, you’d know those last two sentences are drenched in sarcasm.
If you’ve got some time to kill, local public radio station WNYC is asking NYers how much they’re getting gouged in their neighborhood for a six of Budweiser, a head of iceberg lettuce, and a quart of milk. Kinda interesting and somewhat depressing after that cruel, deranged woman from Columbus, OH lays out her local pricing. Bitch.
