Oops, sorry, didn’t mean to get the folks at No Quarter and HillaryIs44 all excited by the title of this post, but was wondering if we had any animal tracking or raccoon experts out there. We found what appear to be muddy animal paw prints in our garden this morning and also some markings in the silt at the bottom of a large bucket that had collected rainwater. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a raccoon because my wife Chris and I once saw one up a tree in Queens and there have been plenty of sightings in this Brooklyn neighborhood. What do you guys think?
“Faith Healer” from Big Dipper’s Boo-Boo, quite possibly the best EP ever released
Thank god I thumbed through the latest Time Out New York this morning or I wouldn’t have known that two of my favorite indie pop bands of the 80’s, Big Dipper & Great Plains, are playing tonight at Southpaw in Park Slope. Boston’s Big Dipper released their first three exceptionally solid pop masterpieces in the late 80’s on the legendary (and long-gone) Homestead Records label and Merge Records was recently kind enough to re-release all of that out-of-print material and a slew of great bonus material on an insanely cheap 3-disc box set called Supercluster: The Big Dipper Anthology. Columbus, OH’s Great Plains were under-appreciated fractured pop masters, churning out smart n’ snarky clingers like “Letter to a Fanzine” (chorus: “Why do punk rock guys go out with new wave girls?"), “Dick Clark” and “Martin Luther King/Martin Luther Drinking”. Old 3C’s wonderful 2-CD retrospective Length of Growth 1981-89 is unfortunately out-of-print and fetches $99 or more online, but you can obtain a CD-R version of it from the label and apparently MP3 downloads are still available via eMusic and iTunes.
ATTENTION NYC MUSIC FANS: Might as well shoehorn this in here ... Rumproast will be giving away a pair of tix for the May 1st show featuring I’m From Barcelona & Thao Nguyen at the Masonic Temple in Brooklyn in the very near future. If you want to go (or know someone who does), keep an eye on this blog for details.
My wonderful and talented pal Elisa Flynn has been hiding out in the studio lately working on her new album (tentatively titled “Songs about Birds and Ghosts”—Elisa, please remove “tentatively"), but she’s poking her head out to perform a free show at Union Hall in Park Slope this Tuesday at 9PM. Her new live act featuring the fabulous percussive accompaniment of Anders Griffen is a thing of absolute beauty and Tuesday she’s going to unveil some of her eagerly-awaited, freshly-minted songs, so make sure you head on down.
And to further sweeten the pot, Dean Wareham (Galaxie 500, Luna) will be reading from his new book Black Postcards and performing a short acoustic set earlier that evening (7:30PM) at the same venue. If you’re a New Yorker and you’d rather sit on your couch Tuesday watching American Idol or Big Brother than spend an intimate and sure-to-be excellent evening with Elisa and Dean, you really should consider moving to New Hampshire and harvesting honey in your underpants.
According to The Brooklyn Paper, the G train will start running to Park Slope and on through to the F’s Church Avenue stop (Kensington) permanently once construction begins at the Smith-Ninth Street stop. This is great news for folks like me who have been struggling with frequent Slope to Williamsburg/Greenpoint trips. The G still sucks, but it is considerably less sucky now. Bravo.
I want to get out and enjoy what remains of this crisp fall day, so I’m going to keep this Selector short n’ (except for the FReeper link) sweet…
THE LOST SOWETO COMP: The always terrific Matsuli Music is featuring a wonderful out-of-print find of South African music released in ‘83 called Soweto. It’s a stellar comp, lovingly converted to MP3 from vinyl, and the instrumental “Here We Come” that they spotlight in their post is one of the best (and most original) African instrumentals I’ve ever heard. Highly recommended!
ELISA FLYNN’S TWO-MAN BAND: My talented pal Elisa Flynn is unveiling her new live set-up with an accompanying drummer this Tuesday at Union Hall in Park Slope. Lurid Culture recently gave her a great endorsement (scroll down) in a blurb about this show. As they say, “Catch her on the way up.” [UPDATE: Sadly, Elisa’s performance has been cancelled due to illness.]
AND SPEAKING OF WINGNUTS: Someone at Free Republic posts a story about celebrities in California having to flee their homes due to wildfires, a few FReepers launch into predictable thick-headed rants about Hollyweirdos and environuts ("I say let the whole state burn! Get rid of the nut jobs, I do not even like to admit California is one of the states."), and all hell breaks loose ("I am beginning to wonder if ‘conservative’ is such a good thing if it means heartless."). Hilarious. But remember, liberals are the crazy and angry ones…
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.
The first time I saw La Strada perform, they didn’t have a name yet and they were playing in the bowels of the NYC subway system. They completely blew me away even though the most “electric” instrument they were playing was a little toy xylophone. They have since moved on and have done the incredibly smart thing of getting a name and the even smarter thing of laying down three of their tracks. They are nothing short of amazing (imagine if Beirut knew how to be be joyous instead of melodramatic) and two rank among the best songs of ‘07 ("The Sun Song” & “Mama”—the song I saw them perform next to the tracks of the G train). If you were smart (and I know that you are), you’d head over to MySpace right now and download those three “demo” tracks while La Strada is still graciously giving ‘em away. And if you were even smarter, you’d go check out Brooklyn’s “next big thing” at one of their three upcoming local shows while you can still get in the door.
MORE: Weird. As it turns out, rockin’ Robin posted about La Strada yesterday. Since I’m no longer burdened with the horrible, horrible G train, I had no idea they were still playing that line. Robin’s got a nice recording of them doing a new (?) song “Shapes In the Sky.”
