It sounds like this.
It looks like this:
and this:
Friday, November 9, 2007
Friday, October 19, 2007
What's the Definition, the Definition?
Okay, so let's go ahead and define our terms...
First of all, though I will not entirely restrict discussion to things bland (I have been known to ride a tangent to ridiculous extremes), that will be the default.
To really determine the taste and texture of things bland, I here refer to the OED:
bland as a noun has its roots in the Old English word blande meaning 'in mixture, in union' with an adverbial and prepositional form ("together," and "among," respectively). It would then make sense that the word also would be used to designate "a beverage of hot whey mixed with water" or a combination of buttermilk and water mostly consumed in Orkney and Shetland. Nice.
In its adjectival form, bland denotes things "soft, mild, pleasing to the senses; gentle, genial, balmy, soothing" and people "smooth and suave in manner; mildly soothing or coaxing: gentle." I'm guessing, like the mixture and beverage, this is a rather obsolete meaning. Though I like the idea of a fellow having "bland temper and winning manner" not to mention a "bland and benevolent face." It seems it also is used to describe mild and "unirritating" medicines and "not stimulating" food (Shetland, take note).
There is also the obsolete verb which means "to mix, intermingle, blend" and "to soothe, flatter (a by-form of the fantastic "blandish").
As a side note, the word "blandandering" means to cajole (Kipling and Shaw seem to have used this colloquialism to great effect. I suppose in the end, we all must refuse to be blandandered.
But this blog is called blandemonium, a term coined by Seth H-K. and honed by him and Sean T-D. It is from them I learned the term... one they used to describe a specific genre of music bounded both chronologically and aesthetically. In time I plan to expand it a bit into a more totalizing concept that moves beyond just music, but for the time being, I will focus much of my discussion here on things musical, though the definition I've worked out hints at wider goals.
Here's a beta version:
Blandemonium (noun):
A category of cultural texts exhibiting a genial and balmy nature that so intermingles with and permeates the text's aesthetic and linguistic makeup that all meaning and intention encoded in production are entirely subsumed by said blandness.
I think it's a start. But I certainly will return to it as I move along....
First of all, though I will not entirely restrict discussion to things bland (I have been known to ride a tangent to ridiculous extremes), that will be the default.
To really determine the taste and texture of things bland, I here refer to the OED:
bland as a noun has its roots in the Old English word blande meaning 'in mixture, in union' with an adverbial and prepositional form ("together," and "among," respectively). It would then make sense that the word also would be used to designate "a beverage of hot whey mixed with water" or a combination of buttermilk and water mostly consumed in Orkney and Shetland. Nice.
In its adjectival form, bland denotes things "soft, mild, pleasing to the senses; gentle, genial, balmy, soothing" and people "smooth and suave in manner; mildly soothing or coaxing: gentle." I'm guessing, like the mixture and beverage, this is a rather obsolete meaning. Though I like the idea of a fellow having "bland temper and winning manner" not to mention a "bland and benevolent face." It seems it also is used to describe mild and "unirritating" medicines and "not stimulating" food (Shetland, take note).
There is also the obsolete verb which means "to mix, intermingle, blend" and "to soothe, flatter (a by-form of the fantastic "blandish").
As a side note, the word "blandandering" means to cajole (Kipling and Shaw seem to have used this colloquialism to great effect. I suppose in the end, we all must refuse to be blandandered.
But this blog is called blandemonium, a term coined by Seth H-K. and honed by him and Sean T-D. It is from them I learned the term... one they used to describe a specific genre of music bounded both chronologically and aesthetically. In time I plan to expand it a bit into a more totalizing concept that moves beyond just music, but for the time being, I will focus much of my discussion here on things musical, though the definition I've worked out hints at wider goals.
Here's a beta version:
Blandemonium (noun):
A category of cultural texts exhibiting a genial and balmy nature that so intermingles with and permeates the text's aesthetic and linguistic makeup that all meaning and intention encoded in production are entirely subsumed by said blandness.
I think it's a start. But I certainly will return to it as I move along....
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Never on the Golf Course
Somewhere in the late eighties, I was given a modest stack of records by a set of older relatives. The albums were representative of up your usual 40s-70s american middle class "music to live by" sort of life: Ray Conniff, Jackie Gleason, various Glen Miller nostalgia records, "Golden Age" compilations, The 101 Strings, etc... But in the midst of this lovely, frayed pile there was a matte-ish black, less glossy affair that was beyond anything I'd yet experienced. I'd heard of the borscht belt and I knew what it meant to be 'lounge-y' (if nothing else from Bill Murray), but I was not ready for Bob Newkirk. How could I have been?
I guess I should begin with the album cover:
Collectors take note, that is his real signature...
This album was released by the apparently homosocially adventurous (check out the logo) Gemini records in 1973. It is numbered 91728, and were I to find out that there were 91,727 more records like this in the world, well then we would have solved at least one of the world's more nagging problems.
A live album, this record (a quadrophonic pressing, no less) seems to be a 'best of' his run at a very typical dinner lounge filled with very typical mid-century Floridians, the scene awash in clanging flatware and table knockers. You do know table knockers, don't you?
While there is much in the way of wonderfulness in this recording, it's his My Fair Lady medley that is the real gem (though his version of "If I Were a Rich Man" has a "HUB-BUB-A-BOYA" solo that makes me weep, the Brigadoon medley is pretty stellar, and the two (yes, two) versions of "Old Man River" are enough to give anyone significant pause...). It is a kinetic (almost aggressively so) amalgamation of the Lerner and Lowes musical that verily SHINES in the middle of the album. The real brilliance in a medley is its ability to disassemble an entire "work" into its constituent parts and then reassemble it, relying mostly on the use of musically solid (or at least novel) transitions. That is certainly what we're dealing with here. It is solid AND novel AND downright terrifyingly fun. Table knockers ahoy.
From the get-go this song charges full tilt with a timpanic-ish percussive flourish that sparks a vibrato-laden and huge Newkirk D that he carries for a full ten seconds before slowing and sidling up to the "towering feeling" that is "On the Street Where you Live." After our few seconds of "Street", we careen into the double time march fun of "Get Me to the Church on Time" where we meet Bob's congenial cockney accent as he sings out "bloomin' love." His accent is probably about as good as Ms. Hepburn, had we been able to hear her actually sing in the film...
The song then right-angles into "I could've danced all night" and really stretches out in it, giving us a chance to feel his Broadway chops. But then the momentum is checked and "I've grown accustomed to her face" slows down the march, though we hear a touch of the dinner performer peek out here when he says "her UPS, her downs..." with that weird wink-wink conversational tone expected in parodies of the lounge singer genre. Then come the jaunty woodblocks and the LOVERLY that just get us geared up for what I think of as THE LINE.
Via a nice little "Show Me" segue, Mr. Newkirk jumps into "Rain in Spain" with an enthusiasm that seems to suggest that he would rather have just sung this song in its entirety.... But. . . This is the moment.
With a long rolled R and the faint sound of a fork hitting a plate, Bob gives us:
"The rrrrrrrrrrain in spain falls mainly on the plain (but NEVER on the golf course, folks)! The rain in spain falls mainly (haha) on the plainnnnnnn."
I'm still amazed that he actually says that. "NEVER on the golf course folks."
Then the song goes back into the tail end of "On the Street Where you Live" which wraps the whole thing up in pretty predictable fashion.
But that golf course line paired with the not-so-vaguely cynical laugh is what still sticks with me. I guess when I first heard the song I really believed he believed it. He just sounds like he's working a crowd, well within the contextual boundaries of mid-century lounge singer. It was (and is) funny. And, when listened to in the midst of the entire record, so much the better. it makes sense that he would talk like that. However, over time, I've grown less sure of that reading and, as such, I keep wanting to know more about this whole thing...
So, some years later--this is through the early days of searchable music content on the internet--I would regularly hunt for Bob (using webcrawler, altavista, all of them), wondering if he still had a career and so on, but it wasn't until just a few years ago that I found out that he had managed to make his way back into the entertainment world, though in a rather odd way... It seems Bob married a showgirl named Diana in 1965 and began to tour across the US (stopping in Miami for a spell, where this record seems to have been made). Along the way they had a few kids and the showgirl found Jesus and divorce proceedings and subsequent remarriages rendered them all a well-and-truly-broken American family.
Now, years later, Bob no longer sings for a living. It seems he "[carries] out health checks on customers at supermarkets" (this is a direct quote from an article I found, as I'm not quite sure what it means to do this, but it can't help but sound a bit sad) while one of his daughters from this first marriage is a big pop star in Europe and Asia... She goes by the name Anastasia, but she is Anastasia Newkirk, daughter of our dear Bob. It seems they were estranged all these years but, in the process of writing one of those probing bio-interest-celebrity pieces for the Sunday Times, Paul Scott reunited the two (or at least let poor Bob know who and where his daughter was).
By the way, Anastacia was a finalist on the MTV show "The Cut" and since then she's been on VH1's "Diva's Life," sold millions of records for Epic Records, and even has a "Best Of..." compilation.
I guess the most heart-rending moment in the whole story is where Bob talks about listening to her on the radio (he calls her "Stacy") without realizing it was his daughter... and then goes on about how his children have ignored him: "I haven't moved in 12 years. I am in the same place and they are certainly aware of where I'm living. My number is in the phone book, so Stacey is being not too truthful when she says she doesn't know where I am." But it all ends on a positive note: "I am so proud of her, but the fame doesn't matter, I would just like to meet her and see if we can start again. I don't want her to leave it until it is too late."
Now as I go back and listen to those little adlib moments in the medley, they sound dark to me, like he's playing to the cliche in this pre-ironic, though self-aware (and a wee bit angry). Of course he was in the heat of the moment, but there is an odd bit of bitter prophesy in this song. Just as when he asks people to "grab those table knockers and swing out, this is fun time" at the start of "King of the Road"... one feels a touch of contempt for this Miami audience that keeps dropping forks and coughing during his well-wrought, perfectly timed, one-from-the-heart set(s).
Scott notes in his article that when the Newkirks were in Florida for these shows, he would often get the kids up on stage to sing to keep them from "getting bored"... I can't help but think this is a rather callous way to envision the whole thing, obviously colored by years of distance and bitterness on Bob's part and a wee bit of condescension on Scott's. However, maybe this is as close as Bob was to get to real stardom: singing together with a girl that is to become the "pop star Anastacia" on a Florida dinner stage, table knockers in full knock and family in full swing. A much finer picture of the musical family than the singer-cum-customer-analyst estranged from his diva daughter (just look at that picture of her).
I guess now I just see Bob Newkirk as emblematic of so many failures that nostalgia and kitch culture gloss and haze into quaintness. Maybe we should keep music off the golf course after all.
If you'd like to read more about the two: the article is here.
I guess I should begin with the album cover:
Collectors take note, that is his real signature...
This album was released by the apparently homosocially adventurous (check out the logo) Gemini records in 1973. It is numbered 91728, and were I to find out that there were 91,727 more records like this in the world, well then we would have solved at least one of the world's more nagging problems.
A live album, this record (a quadrophonic pressing, no less) seems to be a 'best of' his run at a very typical dinner lounge filled with very typical mid-century Floridians, the scene awash in clanging flatware and table knockers. You do know table knockers, don't you?
While there is much in the way of wonderfulness in this recording, it's his My Fair Lady medley that is the real gem (though his version of "If I Were a Rich Man" has a "HUB-BUB-A-BOYA" solo that makes me weep, the Brigadoon medley is pretty stellar, and the two (yes, two) versions of "Old Man River" are enough to give anyone significant pause...). It is a kinetic (almost aggressively so) amalgamation of the Lerner and Lowes musical that verily SHINES in the middle of the album. The real brilliance in a medley is its ability to disassemble an entire "work" into its constituent parts and then reassemble it, relying mostly on the use of musically solid (or at least novel) transitions. That is certainly what we're dealing with here. It is solid AND novel AND downright terrifyingly fun. Table knockers ahoy.
From the get-go this song charges full tilt with a timpanic-ish percussive flourish that sparks a vibrato-laden and huge Newkirk D that he carries for a full ten seconds before slowing and sidling up to the "towering feeling" that is "On the Street Where you Live." After our few seconds of "Street", we careen into the double time march fun of "Get Me to the Church on Time" where we meet Bob's congenial cockney accent as he sings out "bloomin' love." His accent is probably about as good as Ms. Hepburn, had we been able to hear her actually sing in the film...
The song then right-angles into "I could've danced all night" and really stretches out in it, giving us a chance to feel his Broadway chops. But then the momentum is checked and "I've grown accustomed to her face" slows down the march, though we hear a touch of the dinner performer peek out here when he says "her UPS, her downs..." with that weird wink-wink conversational tone expected in parodies of the lounge singer genre. Then come the jaunty woodblocks and the LOVERLY that just get us geared up for what I think of as THE LINE.
Via a nice little "Show Me" segue, Mr. Newkirk jumps into "Rain in Spain" with an enthusiasm that seems to suggest that he would rather have just sung this song in its entirety.... But. . . This is the moment.
With a long rolled R and the faint sound of a fork hitting a plate, Bob gives us:
"The rrrrrrrrrrain in spain falls mainly on the plain (but NEVER on the golf course, folks)! The rain in spain falls mainly (haha) on the plainnnnnnn."
I'm still amazed that he actually says that. "NEVER on the golf course folks."
Then the song goes back into the tail end of "On the Street Where you Live" which wraps the whole thing up in pretty predictable fashion.
But that golf course line paired with the not-so-vaguely cynical laugh is what still sticks with me. I guess when I first heard the song I really believed he believed it. He just sounds like he's working a crowd, well within the contextual boundaries of mid-century lounge singer. It was (and is) funny. And, when listened to in the midst of the entire record, so much the better. it makes sense that he would talk like that. However, over time, I've grown less sure of that reading and, as such, I keep wanting to know more about this whole thing...
So, some years later--this is through the early days of searchable music content on the internet--I would regularly hunt for Bob (using webcrawler, altavista, all of them), wondering if he still had a career and so on, but it wasn't until just a few years ago that I found out that he had managed to make his way back into the entertainment world, though in a rather odd way... It seems Bob married a showgirl named Diana in 1965 and began to tour across the US (stopping in Miami for a spell, where this record seems to have been made). Along the way they had a few kids and the showgirl found Jesus and divorce proceedings and subsequent remarriages rendered them all a well-and-truly-broken American family.
Now, years later, Bob no longer sings for a living. It seems he "[carries] out health checks on customers at supermarkets" (this is a direct quote from an article I found, as I'm not quite sure what it means to do this, but it can't help but sound a bit sad) while one of his daughters from this first marriage is a big pop star in Europe and Asia... She goes by the name Anastasia, but she is Anastasia Newkirk, daughter of our dear Bob. It seems they were estranged all these years but, in the process of writing one of those probing bio-interest-celebrity pieces for the Sunday Times, Paul Scott reunited the two (or at least let poor Bob know who and where his daughter was).
By the way, Anastacia was a finalist on the MTV show "The Cut" and since then she's been on VH1's "Diva's Life," sold millions of records for Epic Records, and even has a "Best Of..." compilation.
I guess the most heart-rending moment in the whole story is where Bob talks about listening to her on the radio (he calls her "Stacy") without realizing it was his daughter... and then goes on about how his children have ignored him: "I haven't moved in 12 years. I am in the same place and they are certainly aware of where I'm living. My number is in the phone book, so Stacey is being not too truthful when she says she doesn't know where I am." But it all ends on a positive note: "I am so proud of her, but the fame doesn't matter, I would just like to meet her and see if we can start again. I don't want her to leave it until it is too late."
Now as I go back and listen to those little adlib moments in the medley, they sound dark to me, like he's playing to the cliche in this pre-ironic, though self-aware (and a wee bit angry). Of course he was in the heat of the moment, but there is an odd bit of bitter prophesy in this song. Just as when he asks people to "grab those table knockers and swing out, this is fun time" at the start of "King of the Road"... one feels a touch of contempt for this Miami audience that keeps dropping forks and coughing during his well-wrought, perfectly timed, one-from-the-heart set(s).
Scott notes in his article that when the Newkirks were in Florida for these shows, he would often get the kids up on stage to sing to keep them from "getting bored"... I can't help but think this is a rather callous way to envision the whole thing, obviously colored by years of distance and bitterness on Bob's part and a wee bit of condescension on Scott's. However, maybe this is as close as Bob was to get to real stardom: singing together with a girl that is to become the "pop star Anastacia" on a Florida dinner stage, table knockers in full knock and family in full swing. A much finer picture of the musical family than the singer-cum-customer-analyst estranged from his diva daughter (just look at that picture of her).
I guess now I just see Bob Newkirk as emblematic of so many failures that nostalgia and kitch culture gloss and haze into quaintness. Maybe we should keep music off the golf course after all.
If you'd like to read more about the two: the article is here.
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Noise and Mayhem
I guess I really should talk a bit about a song that I swear by. . . in that most literal of terms. When I need to make a "s'wounds" sort of swear, I reach for Ali Thomson's "Take A Little Rhythm." Nothing says soft anger like a man muttering "take a little of that sweet sweet music" under his breath in a public space.But...
Part of me wants to consider this song an anchor point on the tail end of the blandemonium canon. It seems so much a part of the soft rock idiom (the jingly and persistent acoustic paired with vibes and a decidedly grooving rhythm section) while still nodding forward to mid-eighties soft synth pop (it's that damn smooth sax, i guess). Though I still don't know what to do with the vibra slap.
It's just such a weirdly liminal song. It's got equal parts thompson twins AND dave mason.
Anyway, this was one of those songs that kept wanting me to remember it, but it took a trip to the grocery store in 04 to make that happen. That day I stopped dead with a box of boil in bag rice half off the shelf. Now it is a daily driver, if you know what I mean.
It doesn't seem that Ali really did much else. Hell, the poor guy doesn't even have a wikipedia entry. There was this album in '80 (named after the hot hot single that made it all the way to 15 on the billboard charts) and another in 81 called "Deception is An Art" (worth noting that this follow up album featured Stuart Elliott on drums, the session guy who played with another blandemonium mainstay The Alan Parsons Project as well as Kate Bush and Chris DeBurgh). Maybe if I actually buy that presskit on ebay I will know more....
In the meantime, I'll just end with a meditation on the verse:
Seems like madness is everywhere
Only noise and mayhem fill the air
Ooh, you're body's hurting and your mind is slow
Just sit back and let the music flow...
If ever there was a battle cry (albeit a rather long one) for the blandemonium war, this might be in the top 6.
Saturday, October 6, 2007
Introducing Mung
I've been posting/reading/fearing Mung cartoons since 1991. The thing is about them is, well... they push you around a bit (see http://www.trifectapress.com/MUNG/ for more). Not in that editorial cartoon with a warped sense of humor sort of way, but in a more explicitly Freudian back-from-the-dark-places sort of way. I can't help but feel this one (titled "that part of town") almost vibrates in a Ben Franklin-ish register. The lurking bird gets the ride, the last starfighter carpools, whatever.
Wolfking
It's true what they say about John Phillips' solo record (unofficially and fantastically titled "John, the Wolfking of LA"). It's just damn amazing. Like "Sweetheart of the Rodeo" with a much darker worldview. Not as soft and bland as I'd like, but lovely in its broken way, careening toward the 70s and rehab. Good times.
PS. Hello again, hello.
PPS. Nice. Check out the popmatters review here.
PS. Hello again, hello.
PPS. Nice. Check out the popmatters review here.
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