The dB's

Dream Baby Dream

This Suicide video is a brief addendum to my larger post on New York's Blank Generation.  I love the camerawork early in the video and, as far as performance videos go, this is amazingly poetic.  This is the band.  

Tin Pan Alley: Now and Now

More music and New York (but what better city for music).  Lost City has a post on Tin Pan Alley up.  Tin Pan Alley was a street in midtown Manhattan where, in the bleak days before recorded music, sheet music was written and sold by the million.  You used to walk down the street and have people in every window to plug you with a reason to buy their hit song.  Now, in the bleak 00s where ringtones are sometimes more popular than albums, it's a Nextel store away from erasing every trace of its past.  If you have any interest in remembering the place where Irving Berlin's 'God Bless America' and 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame' first hit, click here.  

New York in the 80s and Crackpot Ideas in Urban Homesteading

Ah bless the St. Marks Bookstore where I recently stumbled on a picture book called New York Noise. I'd heard two New York Noise albums and reading without words is a pleasant way to waste time on my way home from work. By way of background: NYN, the albums, are a collection of New Wave/No Wave/whatever you call it tunes from the last American music of note to have a time (76-85), place (downtown New York), and feeling that extended to all the surrounding arts. Disagree? Name me three bands from Seattle? Name me one play inspired by the backwards-looking NY garage-bands of the early-2000s? Find me a garage in NYC!

New York Noise, the book, sketches an interesting line between the scene's different players in brilliant black-and-white photos. Did these people know they would be famous? Was there this feeling that everything they did was important? How did they all play in each others' bands? Why are these pictures so professional? Some of the NYN players, without order:

• The Talking Heads, then band
• Steve Buscemi, now actor
  
• Eric Bogosian, playwright, monologist, actor
• Paul Zaloom, then puppeteerish monologist, now Beakman
• Madonna, singer not the religious figure, perhaps also a figure of another kind, only tangentially related.
  
• John Cage, musician we've previously mentioned
  
• Keith Harring, artist
  
• Micheal Stipe, lead singer of REM
• Liquid Liquid
• Willem Dafoe, performing with Richard Foreman's Wooster Group. See Foreman's new play.
• David Byrne, always brilliant, see him here with Richard Thompson
• Robert Longo, artist and filmmaker, forgive him Johnny Mneumonic, his prints and art is much more interesting
• Kim Gordon
  
• Richard Prince, artist, remember his advertising photos
• Laurie Anderson
  
• Jim Jarmusch, a truly talented filmmaker, one with faith in his audience's attention
• John Lurie, musician/actor/now exhibited painter, once star of Fishing with John
  
• Cindy Sherman, photographer
• Richard Hell, proto-punk, poet(?)
  
• and on...
  

It's a lot of names. It's also not that many people. Reading the book, I was under the impression that everybody in the East Village, the Lower East Side, and the crummier parts of SoHo was actually making something so infectious is the idea. It's really just 30 odd people (both meanings) yet it feels like a world.

This world is precisely why I, and I presume many others, came to New York. What is it like when the stars align and music, art, writing, theater, living all overlap in a specific time and place? I don't know. New York (2008) is not that place. Perhaps, they say, it's because living is too expensive to 'work' for money one day a week and work for yourself the rest. Perhaps, I've also heard, it's because even the service industry has gotten so professionalized that you need a degree to work tables. I disagree completely.

There are scenes of 30 that are making waves, just not with the same overall cultural impact. Why? Maybe there are too many scenes of 30; maybe they're not spread across as many disciplines as No Wave was; maybe, as with the abundance of channels, there is an abundance of scenes all fighting for your attention (I saw a concert the other week that was very Lifetime...I'll spare you); maybe we'll hear about them in 20 years time and misremember ourselves being there; maybe we were...

I think the real issue is simple: we are so easily and constantly entertained that we don't and forget how to make our own entertainment. Or, when we do, the ratio is off. I was going to say I have a tremendous respect for those who post videos on YouTube or play at open mics, but I think respect is the wrong word. Thousands of people post videos on YouTube that are not really respect-able. But making your own fun is important, it entertains your friends, get good friends, invest it with intelligence, and it can entertain the World.

I meant to include this all as background bias for my urban homesteading plan. I believe it would be a good idea if the government gave people 5 years to turn an abandoned building (Baltimore has 14,000 of them, eg.) into a home they would could own. I still believe that if you allow people with a genuine desire to build something, and if you give them ownership, new, crime-freer neighborhoods will grow out of a desire to make something permanent. I just no longer believe a new Homestead Act will create another urban artists community like in NY in the 80s (for the reasons listed above, the scene was remembered falsely, NY has little abandoned housing). Still, reinvigorating a city like Baltimore from within could, it might be argued, serve a greater good than O Superman. I know I've gotten here naively and pettily, but surely that's worth the eminent domain squabbles, disenfranchising the slumlord, and the stack of paperwork.

Ticker Tape

The Giants' win against the Patriots is one of those wins worth celebrating.  Scrappy underdog makes it to the Superbowl to upset a rough team of all-stars who were never really dignified or well-liked even before news of their cheating came to light.  

I still have a lot of questions (how, how did Tyree catch that? where could I see that again?) and one that's puzzling me is 'what exactly is a ticker-tape parade'?

Well, it turns out that ticker-tape was a long spool of paper used to print telegraphed up-to-the-minute stock information on.  Used ticker-tape was cut into confetti and that is what was thrown from the windows in the downtown Manhattan of yesterday and ten minutes ago.  All told, today's parade should use 50 tons of (shredded, standard) paper and 317 sanitation workers to have the whole thing come and go.  And it's worth it.  

Nitrogen in New York

I've lived in complete fear of these things for years and now only now do I know my enemy.  What are they and what are they for?  Short answer: to keep the phone lines dry.  Long answer: here. My answer: gain consciousness and blow up our belows.