Seeking Ferret

A few nights ago I saw the Mountain Goats in Asbury Park. We had a violent thunderstorm a few hours before the show around here, so a number of the roads both on the way there and in Asbury Park were blocked by fallen trees. That was exciting!

Because of apocalypse related traffic and detours, I got to the show about five minutes before opener Erin McKeown went on. She was really good, and it was really amazing to hear her cover of the Mountain Goats' "Jenny" as featured in I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats, with John Darnielle popping onstage a verse into the song to play keyboard and sing backup vocals. ("It surprises me every night!" McKeown joked.)

Then came the main show, which was wonderful. They started and finished the show with songs from my favorite Mountain Goats album, "The Life of the World to Come", and in a double fit of luck, they were both Old Testament songs so I didn't have the squeamishness I feel sometimes listening to, say, "Matthew 25:21". But no, the first song was "1 Samuel 15:23" and the final encore was "Psalms 40:2" and it was amazing. "Psalms 40:2" put me in such a happy place. It was delightful to skate the line of the irony of Darnielle's lyrics. My faith is as passionate as the narrator of Psalms 40:2, but channeled very differently.

I was less comfortable with skating the irony in the crowd dancing to "Sicilian Crest" off the new record, which as Darnielle is very explicit about, is about the appeal of fascism. I think it's an excellent song, and I have been thinking about how to make it viddable, but dancing to it was a bridge too far for me.

Otherwise they darted through the catalog, which is deeper and richer than I have delved into it. I'm probably deeply familiar with five or six Mountain Goats records (Hmm... Tallahassee, The Sunset Trees, All Hail West Texas, Moon Colony Bloodbath, The Life of the World to Come, Beat the Champ. Six.), and intimate with a dozen or so other songs. The Mountain Goats have a lot more music than that, though, and much as I wanted to hear the songs I know well, it was just as exciting to hear new things. Darnielle's 'creative anarchy', as I've referred to it before, leads him to create shows that never commit to a pattern. That is probably the most exciting part of a Mountain Goats show, the fact that Darnielle himself, the ringleader, seems rapt at all times, ready for the good things to come.

I had a lot of fun at the concert Saturday night. It was organized as part of Yiddish New York, a week long conference/festival of Yiddish culture, most of which I won't be able to go to. The crowd was mostly weird Jews of all sorts.

Natalie.Computer opened. She is an electronic noise musician. Mostly I didn't find the music too interesting, but she concluded the set with a nice spectacle by projecting the code she was using to synthesize her music onto a screen so we could see as she adjusted decay periods and frequency generation expressions and so on.


Then came Koyt far Dayn Fardakht, playing punk versions of Bundist anthems and similar music. It was a lot of fun to dance to, and to feel their joyful fury, though I had mixed feelings about some of their Anti-Zionist music, as a Zionist. Obviously early 20th century Bundist anti-zionism is not the same as contemporary progressive Jewish anti-Zionism; the two seemed to me to mesh a little dissonantly. But I'll tell you what, this is how you do Anti-Zionism in a way that's clearly not anti-semitic. Every single gesture Koyt far Dayn Fardakht made showed their deep love for Jewish culture and history.

But they managed a setlist that in general made brilliant connections between the politics of now and the politics of then. Anti-prison and anti-police protest songs, songs about refugees and exile, songs about workers and struggling against poverty.


Lastly, God is My Co-Pilot was pretty spectacular. Apparently they were kind of a big thing in the indie music scene back in the early '90s, a no-wave/queercore band. I don't think I'd ever listened to their music, but the name sounded familiar. But based on the skimming of stuff on the internet I did before the show, I expected something more musically primitive than what we got, which was a mixture of off-kilter punk guitar with free improvisation and Eastern European folk music. I never thought I'd hear a weirder "Siki Siki Baba" than Beirut's, but GodCo's was much weirder. Much much weirder. Also, Frank London joined them on trumpet, which was... I mean, Frank London! I'm always there for Frank London.

I went to an Idan Raichel concert at the Beacon Theater on Tuesday. Crowd was like 120% Israeli and much of the rest of the crowd was Orthodox Upper West Siders. It was kind of delightful to be at a concert with a crowd like that, to not feel like a little bit of an outsider as the only guy in a yarmulke at the rock show.

Ostensibly the show was a stripped down Raichel and his Piano concert, and he did some excellent, fascinating solo interpretations of a number of his songs. Always he did something interesting with his piano ornamentation, something more than just a simple base to sit below his singing. Always he had deliberate, purposeful variations in vocal phrasing compared to the recorded version. These were essentially interesting new songs, not gimmicky 'soulful' versions of the songs. Mournful songs of loss were reinterpreted at a slight, ironic remove. Yalda Sheli K'tana, a song commemorating the birth of his now four year old daughter, got an added, completely adorable accompaniment from a toy xylophone that he claims is one of his daughter's toys. It was particularly great, and in a certain sense gratifying, to hear the whimsical humor brought out in his solo rendition of "Ma'agalim", the song I vidded for Club Vivid two years ago. It's a song whose sensitive, poetic lyrics are not quite serious, constructed in service to a larger joke, and the piano version highlighted the musicality in the lyrics, the lilt of the repetition of sounds.

And then, of course, to nobody's surprise, the show was not purely a solo show. Raichel's music is all about collaboration and community and musical friendship. One of his greatest gifts as a pianist is making other musicians sound better, and another is his astonishing ability to listen to other musicians and really hear what they're trying to do. He was joined at various points by Malian kora player Yacouba Sissoko, Palestinian qanoun player Ali Amr, Cuban singer Danay Suarez, and an Indian singer and Iranian musician playing a bowed string instrument whose names I didn't catch. The top highlight of the show was a trio of Raichel, Ali Amr, and the Iranian musician doing a wild, ecstatic version of Raichel's hit "Bo'ee".

And in so many wonderful ways, the show was Raichel in a nutshell. There was singing in at least four different languages, probably more. In between songs he was hyper and cracking lazy, stupid anti-jokes: "People have complained to me that I don't explain my songs enough in between songs. The last song I just sang, I think it's important to say... was in Hebrew. That's what I wanted to say."

I did something this week I'd been meaning to do since I was in college: Went to one of Andy Statman's regular residence gigs at the Charles Street shul in the Village. He's been in residence there since, like, the late 90s, and I spent four years in the mid '00s just a half mile east, and I knew he was playing shows, and I knew I loved Andy Statman's music like burning, but I never managed to do it. Because his weekly gig was on Thursday nights and Thursday nights were usually frisbee team practice in Union Square, I think.


Statman is a klezmer clarinetist and bluegrass mandolinist and sometimes a jewgrass mandolinist/clarinetist. He plays both instruments with prodigious speed and fluency, and more importantly, with tremendous soul and spirit. He was a student of the great klezmer clarinetist Dave Tarras and became one of the great proponents of the '70s klezmer revival.

I came across one of his albums in the library last week and said "Hey, I wonder if he's still playing at Charles Street" and I checked and he was, so I went in to the City to see the show.

The concerts are in the tiny and cramped basement of the shul, with Hebrew school posters of the Alef Bes on the walls. There was a bottle of vodka and some pareve cookies on a table, apparently for anybody who wanted to take. They didn't take admission, but at intermission the shul president asked everyone who could afford it for a fifteen dollar donation. When a woman tried to give him a twenty, he forced her to take change. It was, in short, one of the most heimishe concerts I've ever been at.

And the music was splendid, an opening set of klezmer with Statman blowing beautiful strings of notes on his clarinet along with his trio of bassist Jim Whitney and drummer Larry Eagle (Highlighted by 'the Lobster song', supposed a song played by Romanian Jewish lobstermen in early 20th century Maine while they gathered their treif bounty), followed by an instrumental bluegrass set. They were later joined by visiting guitarist and bluegrass singer Gene Yellin for a handful of songs. They made up the setlist as they want along, sometimes just strumming a chord or a simple melody to get the rest of the band on the same page. Yellin wanted to play a couple of songs that Whitney and Eagle didn't know- Whitney told Yellin and Statman- "You two get started, we'll either figure it out and catch up or we won't." Spoiler alert: They figured it out.

The whole experience was a blast, getting to hear such great music in such a low key setting. I need to go back again when I get a chance.

Terry Riley's "In C" is a really special piece of music. It consists of about fifty short snippets of music, all of course in the key of C, to be performed by any number of musicians, in order, but each of the snippets is to be played any number of times, at the discretion of each of the performers. The result is amazing, a tug of war between musicians that will never turn out the same way twice. The piece can be as short as twenty minutes, or over an hour in length.

I got minorly obsessed with it last year and collected about ten different recordings, all of which I've listened to multiple times. It astonishes me how the same piece of sheet music can yield so many different interpretations, and each of the interpretations astonishes me on its own as an expression of musical joy and creativity. What I have always loved most is the moments of overlap, where some musicians have moved on to the next snippet while others are still playing the last one.

A high school friend invited me to see the Darmstadt Ensemble play it live at le Poisson Rouge last night and I could not say yes fast enough.

And it was a blast, a performance that lasted over an hour, some thirty musicians playing and singing for the love of it for a rapt, packed crowd. And though what I have always loved most about "In C" is those moments of overlap, what caught me seeing it live was something else. The moments of overlap represent the negotiation. Riley has, of course, ceded some of the composer's power to each of the musicians. In order for music to emerge, they must negotiate with each other to decide how to perform. And I've always loved listening to that negotiation, the back and forth, the disagreements. But what was coolest about Darmstadt's performance was not the negotiation, but the eventual agreements that emerged, those times when the whole group found itself together again. Those were moments of the highest kind of musical communion, ecstatic celebrations of the power of music.

I saw The Mountain Goats last night at City Winery. It was fantastic.

The Mountain Goats new album is a concept album about wrestling, which is intriguing. As I think I mentioned in a recent post where I mentioned this, I like the idea of wrestling, of storytelling made physical, more than I actually enjoy watching wrestling programming. The thing I thought was interesting about the songs from the new album that Darnielle played was that they committed to kayfabe a lot more than I thought they would. I figured Darnielle's angle would be behind-the-scenes, telling stories about the lives of the wrestlers, and to a degree he did, like "Southwest Territory", but he also had songs that were in-character, or at least mostly in-character, like "Werewolf Gimmick" ("a song about a wrestler who has a werewolf gimmick") and "Foreign Object".

In a way, it's a little perverse that I love the Mountain Goats. John Darnielle is one of the ultimate creative anarchists, and my aesthetic preoccupations are almost always obsessed with form. Darnielle doesn't subvert form- he flat out isn't interested in form. During both covers he played during the show- Ozzy Osbourne's "Shot in the Dark" and the Grateful Dead's "St. Stephen"- he stopped in the middle of the song to ramble about his interpretation of the lyrics. He claimed to have retooled the band's orchestrations in a stripped down form just that afternoon, and while I've heard other claims like that from bands at concerts that I put down just to showmanship, I'm pretty sure Darnielle wasn't lying- the band was too discombulated for it to have been a total lie. He told the crowd at another point that he'd put an audible into the show- a place he'd worked out with the sound people where he could choose to play one of two songs. And as he was explaining this, he was very clearly working out in his head which of the two songs he wanted to play.

The early Mountain Goats shows were famously anarchic venues for Darnielle's musical whims, but playing with a full band and touring a new album, this show was clearly about the internal struggle between Darnielle's raging inability to be consistent and the responsibilities of his fame. The result was entertaining, particularly because the Mountain Goats have so many good songs that whatever Darnielle chooses to play at any given moment, you're going to get something good.

He played "This Year", famous for the brutal chorus "I am going to make it through this year if it kills me." He played murder ballads and broken love songs and songs about the brutality of professional wrestling and a song about endangered species. He didn't sing "No Children" because he didn't have to. The band just played it and the entire crowd sang the song while Darnielle walked around the room, high fiving people and gesticulating wildly. It was just a lot of fun.



I know I promised a baseball playlist for opening day, but I'm sorry, Pesach was distracting. Here it is now.

1. Joltin Joe DiMaggio by Les Brown and his Band of Renown

Everything about this song is perfect, from the sound effects to the name "Band of Renown" to the fact that it's a song about how awesome Joe DiMaggio is at hitting the ball.

2. Van Lingle Mungo by Dave Frishberg

This song is just a catalog of old timey baseball names. Van Lingle Mungo actually was a pitcher. And I actually knew that before I knew this song existed, because I'm a baseball nerd. But this song is awesome because of how these almost nonsense sounds are invested with meaning by our shared baseball fandom.

3. Pastime by The Baseball Project

The non-famous guys from REM singing a song about the history and legacy of baseball. I think I particularly like it because its random sweep of baseball history means I don't need to include Terry Cashman's "Talkin' Baseball" on this playlist.

4. Tessie by the Dropkick Murphy's

Yes, yes, I know, I'm a Yankee fan. But look this song is catchy and fun, and then you add in the backstory and it's perfect: "Tessie" was a vaudeville hit adopted by Red Sox fans in the early 20th century as a theme song of a fan club called the Royal Rooters. After nearly a century without a championship, the so-called Curse of the Bambino was broken the very year that the Dropkick Murphy's did a punk cover of "Tessie" that featured several Red Sox players on the chorus. This song is literally magic.

5. Take Me Out to the Ballgame by St. Paul School

Because this version is adorable.

6. Rincon by Dan Bern

Entering the extended Dan Bern part of this playlist. This is my new favorite song about baseball, though I'm not sure I can explicate why. It's a narrative about stalking a past-his-prime, cheating Barry Bonds to a medical clinic where he may have gone to seek a 'magic cure' to the old age that is finally dragging his skills down to Earth. It's a song about the lies we tell ourselves about baseball and life, it's a song about compulsions and desires and our failure to live moral and rational lives. It is a bleak, terrible song, and yet I don't read it bleakly. The magic cure doesn't exist, and Montezuma won't find his gold, and Columbus won't find the new world, and in seeking desire without any limits, we only leave destruction in our wakes. But that's life, and the rain will wash it away to give us another chance tomorrow.

7. The Year By Year Home Run Totals of Barry Bonds

Precisely what it says on the tin. The numbers themselves are marvelous, without any adornment. One suspects that Bern's "Doubleheader" was supposed to be a Barry Bonds concept album that he couldn't quite flesh out, but the Bonds songs that Bern has are uniformly magnificent. The other song, the one I'm not including, is a dirge about Bonds's World Series appearance, in 2002.

8. Merkle by Dan Bern

Fred Merkle was a New York Giant who famously made a baserunning error that cost the Giants the pennant. This is a song about dwelling on failure to an almost obsessive extent, that marvelously droning chorus "Merkel shoulda touched second base." repeating and repeating until it has no meaning left.

9. The Game by the Damn Yankees cast

Because baseball is a game that worms its way deep inside you until you have feelings that you can't control.


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And on another line, I want to recommend Courtney Barnett's new album "Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit". On "Pedestrian at Best", the album's best song, she sounds like a really, really good Nirvana rip off. At other places, her discursive storytelling, precise phrasing, and wicked vocabulary remind me of Dan Bern, Craig Finn, Joanna Newsom, and other favorite musicians. It's a really awesome set of songs.

Last night I saw Roomful of Teeth sing in a half-empty auditorium. The half-empty auditorium part was a bit disappointing, because Roomful of Teeth is amazing and deserved the place being packed to the rafters, but I really can't complain about getting front row seats to see the Pulitzer and Grammy winning ensemble for ten bucks.

Roomful of Teeth is an eight member chorus dedicated to pushing the envelope of the use of unusual vocal technique in contemporary classical music. Their music involves throat singing, yodelling, overtone singing, blends of spoken word and choral singing, unusual rhythmic structures, choral warmup techniques, unusual harmonies. It all works because of clever composing and telepathic precision among the members of the ensemble.

Their debut CD has been at the top of my rotation for most of the past year- probably my three most listened to albums of 2013 were Roomful of Teeth's eponymous debut, Josh Ritter's "The Beast in its Tracks", and Stephane Ginsburg's "42 Vexations of Erik Satie".

So it was amazing to see them live, to see the energy they brought to the music. It also called my attention to aspects of the music I hadn't quite noticed before, like the way many of their pieces involve interplay between the female vocal parts and the male vocal parts as separate units in dialogue. I also liked the way several of the pieces involve moments where a motif is passed conversationally down the line from singer to singer. It's really cool how Roomful of Teeth juggles very informal folk singing practices like that with precisely coordinated, classical timing and technique. And it's particularly striking that they do it with self-conduction and more or less asynchronous antihierarchical coordination. At different moments it was the responsibility of different members of the group to deliver cues, and they passed that responsibility seamlessly.

Last night was pub trivia. Our team, newly renamed Innuendon't after a brief and unfortunate flirtation with The Pocket Rocket Surgeons (one pun too many... Pocket Rocket Scientists is puerile but mildly funny; The Rocket Surgeons is unexpected and a little goofy. The Pocket Rocket Surgeons goes a little too far), pulled off a surprisingly easy victory. We got butchered in Music IDs like the last time, but unlike last time, our chief competition didn't have their top music person this time. We swept the TV category and the wordplay category (devoted this week to 'misnomers' like French Horn and Chinese Checkers) and kept sharp in the other categories. Man, I like trivia. I like winning trivia even more.

This past weekend I saw Ivri Lider with Lee and Talia, thanks to roga's heads-up that he was in New York this week for CMJ. Perhaps more interesting to the majority of my readers, the opening act was Gordon Gano and the Ryans, Gano being interesting to the CTYers in my readership as the former frontman of the Violent Femmes. The band in fact did play "Blister in the Sun", a strange arrangement with Gano playing electric violin, so I can now say I've heard three Canon songs by their original artist.

Lider was awesome, too. It was an all-English set, which was kind of strange given that the audience was about a third Israeli, but it seems he's been trying to launch himself as an English-language star the way Shakira did, so... it didn't make a difference, the music was alternately slow and gorgeous or bouncy and danceable and Lider's voice anchored everything. It was a great time.

He finished by performing his cover of Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl", which is great, of course. He's totally saved that song for me.

But the real thing I guess I wanted to spend time on in this post is Stargate Atlantis, because I just finished the first season and hmm... I HAVE THOUGHTS.

1. McKay's still my favorite, to no one's surprise. Just saying. I like the other scientists a lot, too. My brother told me I'd love Zelenka and he was dead on. Zelenka's the man. The Asian lab assistant who finally got to express herself in Letters from Pegasus needs more screen time. Grodin... Oh, poor Grodin. Even Cavanaugh occasionally makes me giggle, and I HATE scientists like Cavanaugh. Basically, I heart all the SGA scientists. And I heart that unlike in SG-1, scientists on Atlantis get a chance to be characters instead of punchlines, get chances for heroism and opportunities for narrative growth.

2. Sheppard is, well, he's Sheppard. He's not Colonel MacGyver and I think the writers are slowly figuring that out, that Sheppard can't wisecrack in the middle of a battle the way O'Neill did. I'm fascinated by the way they seem to write him as warrior-savant, this skinny, awkward young guy who can fight with any weapon, fly any ship, outmaneuver any tactician. It's silly, but Flanigan actually sometimes sells it. Sheppard is the weirdest badass character ever.

3. Teyla's awesome, if kind of underused. Weir is horrible. The writers of the show seem to have no idea how to use her, how to integrate the diplomatic elements of her character into the military SF tone of the show. She basically appears to be the worst diplomat in the history of the world, and I can't count the number of times where her decision-making has made me say "How did this woman get made head of the mission?" She is the reason I occasionally sympathize with Cavanaugh. I don't know. I hear Carter's going to head Atlantis in later seasons and I'm looking forward to that the way I was looking forward to them getting rid of Sinclair in Babylon 5. I think I have longer to wait, though.

4. The show has seemed at times oddly fixated on suicide. I think death is a lot cheaper on Atlantis than it ever was on SG-1, and I think that's strange given the isolation from the plentiful manpower reserves of Earth. The exchange that I just watched between Sheppard and the colonel who was friends with Sumner, where the colonel tells Sheppard he understands why Sheppard shot Sumner, is so bizarre. That's supposed to be your redemptive moment where Sheppard and the asshole Colonel come to an understanding? Why would the understanding be "Death can be a welcome release?" And that's in the same series of episodes in which Sheppard nearly detonates a nuclear bomb with himself next door, and where one of the scientists kills himself rather than deal with the aftermath of a Wraith feeding, and where Grodin... oh, I don't want to think about how heartbreaking Grodin's end was.

I appreciated Weir's string of letters of parents, thought it was probably her best moment in Season 1, but it doesn't feel like enough given just how much death is part of life on Atlantis. I want to see these questions explored more deeply than the SGA writers are capable of doing.