#folkways: a vision shared

[brucebracket]

Lightning Round - Match 3

Winner of this 24 hour poll will be the 32 seed in the Disc 1 Side B bracket, going up against number 1 seed Rosalita (Come Out Tonight).

Vigilante Man from Folkways: A Vision Shared

Atlantic City from Live 1975-85

Video for both songs is under the cut!

[objectivesubjectivity]

I love a good cover song but due to the strict guidelines I created for this project, most of my collection of cover albums won’t be seeing the light of day as they tend to be compilations rather than traditional albums. This is a great disservice to the masterful arrangements found on  “Folkways: A Vision Shared - A Tribute to Woodie Guthrie and Leadbelly,” and “The Duran Duran Tribute Album,” but it also saves me from listening to “Rock Music: A Tribute to Weezer,” and basically all of the “Punk Goes [insert genre here],” disasterpieces. 

But as luck would have it, this past week, I ended up listening to three cover albums, all very different in tone and style, and it got me thinking about what makes a good cover and, furthermore, what makes a good cover album.

The first was from the kings of the punk cover: Me First and the Gimme Gimmes. These arrangements are simplistic in nature (figure out the power chords and speed up the damn thing) but Me First, every now and then, has the ability to transcend the anarchic destruction or satirical rendering of the original track that plagues most attempts and present something that feels both reverent and original. The tempo and distortion can breathe new life into old tracks and on “Have A Ball,” songs like “One Tin Soldier” and “I Am An Island” are given this treatment. But 12 tracks are a lot, even for an album clocking in at under 30 minutes and most of the other tracks either fall victim to the punk cover curse or come off apathetic. 

And then there’s “Version,” Mark Ronson’s Motown-ing of acts such as Radiohead, Britney Spears, and Ryan Adams. Like the punk cover, there is also a formula for this treatment: give it a funky beat, toss in some horns, and record it to tape. For much of the album, it works: “Stop Me,” “Apply Some Pressure,” and the magnificent “Valerie,” possess earnestness and heart, that while perhaps present in the original, are entirely novel in Ronson’s reimagining. But there is also a sheen of self-gratification present in these tracks. The majority of the songs stem from the mid-aughts and, sonically, are aged backwards: “now” doesn’t sound as good as “then.” If you only hear one or two tracks out of context this criticism is far less present than if you listen to the entirety of the album. While the punks might not care, Ronson wants the listener to know that he thinks he can do it better.

And then there’s “Hope,” which is a cover album of songs by the band who wrote those songs in the first place. Manchester Orchestra’s “Cope” is a barrage of straightforward, smart, aurally engaging rock and roll and “Hope,” is basically “Cope” acoustic. I used to salivate at acoustic renderings: the original “Punk Goes Acoustic,” is the one exception to the previously mentioned shit-shows of “Punk Goes...” albums. But as I grew older, I started to hear “stripped-down” as code for “I need some money.” So I approached “Hope” with great trepidation and for the most part, my initial concerns were validated. But then “Every Stone” stripped nearly everything away and brought forth a haunting beauty that is masked by the wall of sound in the original. And I became a little less cynical about why a band might want to take a stab at reimagining their compositions. 

“Every Stone,” in many ways, presents the perfect reason to cover a song: the artist hears something imbedded in the original work that they want to bring to the surface. This is remarkably evident in Johnny Cash’s version of “Hurt,” or Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah,” or even The Ataris’ “Boys of Summer” (@ me bro). And while both Me First and Ronson have their examples, it’s hard to string together an entire album’s worth of material that reaches this level. 

“The Duran Duran Tribute Album” does it but unfortunately it’s not a stop on this journey. 

Here are some Spotify links to the tracks referenced:

One Tin Soldier I Am A Rock Stop Me Apply Some Pressure Valerie Every Stone (Cope Version) Every Stone (Hope Version)

What I listened to last week:

Top 100 contenders in bold.

Marianne Faithful - Vagabond Ways

Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest

Archers of Loaf - Vee Vee

The Hives - Veni Vidi Vicious

Mark Ronson - Version

Dillinger Four - Versus God

The Verve Pipe - The Verve Pipe

The Promise Ring - Very Emergency: A far cry from “Nothing Feels Good,” but Tracks 2-5 are fucking stellar.

Thrice - Vheissu

Panic! At The Disco - Vices & Virtues

Pinehurst Kids - Viewmaster

The Verve Pipe - Villains: Like most people, I bought this album because of “The Freshman.” But perhaps unlike most people, I’m really glad I did. “The Freshman,” may, in fact, be my least favorite track on the album.

Depeche Mode - Violator

Neko Case & Her Boyfriends - The Virginian

Onelinedrawing - Visitor

Pearl Jam - Vitalogy

Viva Death - Viva Death

Coldplay - Viva La Vida or Death and All of His Friends: This was a track or two away from landing a contender spot and, while remembered for its title track (or, rather, the first half of the title), it should be remembered for Violet Hill and Lovers in Japan/Reign in Love.

Matchbook Romance - Voices

Jay-Z - Vol. 2: Hard Knock Life: I don’t get it.

Slipknot - Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses

Jay-Z - Vol. 3... Life and Times of S. Carter: I still don’t get it.

Gatsby’s American Dream - Volcano

Volcano, I’m Still Excited!! - Volcano, I’m Still Excited!!: This is Mark Duplass’s band (you know, the guy from The League and Creep) and they sound like Rivers Cuomo had a younger brother who also wanted desperately to be cool but in an entirely different way than Rivers. It’s absolutely worth your time.

cky - Volume 1

She & Him - Volume 1

She & Him - Volume 2

D’Angelo - Voodoo

Pearl Jam - Vs

Catch Up Albums (Albums I missed or purchased/acquired since beginning the quest):

2 Chainz - B.O.A.T.S. II#METIME

Rainer Maria - Catastrophe Keeps Up Together

Mercury Rev - Deserter’s Songs

The Dictators - Go Girl Crazy!

Me First & The Gimme Gimmes - Have A Ball

Manchester Orchestra - Hope

LCD Soundsystem - LCD Soundsystem

Propaghandi - Today’s Empires, Tomorrow’s Ashes

Albums listened to in total: 1,884

[seeselfblack]

Bernice Johnson Reagon

Bernice Johnson Reagon, singer and song leader, civil rights activist, scholar, advisor, Festival participant and staffer, Folkways artist, colleague, and friend, has had a profound influence upon the Center and its work.

Bernice was born in Albany, Georgia, in 1942. She recorded her first solo album, Folk Songs: The South, with Folkways Records in 1965. As she wrote: “My history was wrapped carefully for me by my fore-parents in the songs of the church, the work fields and the blues. Ever since this discovery I’ve been trying to find myself, using the first music I’ve ever known as a basic foundation for my search for truth.”

In the 1960s, she was a member of the SNCC Freedom Singers, at the forefront of the African-American Civil Rights Movement. James Foreman wrote about Bernice: “I remember seeing you lift your beautiful black head, stand squarely on your feet, your lips trembling as the melodious words ‘Over my head, I see freedom in the air’ came forth with an urgency and a pain that brought out a sense of intense renewal and commitment of liberation. And when the call came to protest the jailings, you were up front. You led the line. Your feet hit the dirty pavement with a sureness of direction. You walked proudly onward singing ‘this little light of mine,’ and the people echoed, ‘shine, shine, shine.’”

For decades, Bernice has made groundbreaking contributions to the arts, the humanities, and social struggles. Bernice’s quest for artistic excellence, knowledge, and social justice has been closely connected to the daily social and religious lives, aspirations, and aesthetic and performance traditions of the Black Belt South. This brought her into contact and collaboration with artists and communities across the world, extending her artistic vision and informing her creativity and voice.

Bernice’s Smithsonian career began in 1969. Ralph Rinzler, whom she had met through the Newport Folk Festival and the Highlander School, invited her to develop and curate a 1970 Festival program, Black Music Through the Languages of the New World. In 1972 Bernice began a collaboration with Gerald Davis, the Festival’s assistant director, and other scholars to develop the unprecedented African Diaspora program (1973-76), which she describes was “presented as a part of a world family of culture based in Africa and extending to the Caribbean and Latin America to the United States.”

Bernice then founded and directed the Program in Black American Culture at the National Museum of American History, presenting performances, exhibitions, workshops, and symposia. As curator for the museum’s Division of Community Life, Bernice examined the need for collections and exhibitions representing the African-American experience. She advised scores of community groups, museums, scholars, and educators.

Bernice has chronicled African-American religious, social, and cultural history through her artistry and scholarship. She is the founder-director of the Harambee Singers (1968-70) and founder-artistic director of Sweet Honey in the Rock (1970-present). Her books include Black People and Their Culture and We’ll Understand It Better By and By. Her Ph.D. dissertation work at Howard University informed Voices of the Civil Rights Movement, first published by Smithsonian Recordings and then reissued by Smithsonian Folkways.

Bernice received two George F. Peabody Awards as principal scholar, conceptual producer, and host of the path-breaking Smithsonian Institution and National Public Radio series Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions, and as producer, composer, and performer for the WGBH CD recording Africans in America. She is also the recipient of the Charles E. Frankel Prize, Presidential Medal, for outstanding contributions to public understanding of the humanities, a MacArthur Fellows Program award, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change Trumpet of Conscience Award, among others.

Bernice’s association with the Center has continued through participation in numerous Festivals and special Smithsonian programs such as the Birthday Party on the Mall, the Millennium celebration, and a cultural exchange program with the Soviet Union. She, with Sweet Honey in the Rock, performed on the Grammy-winning benefit album Folkways, A Vision Shared: A Tribute to Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly. Bernice has served as a member of the Center’s Advisory Council and Smithsonian Folkways Editorial Board.

[prairiedust]

The Folkloristics of Supernatural

So. Something interesting is happening in Season 14. I suspected that it was coming when they revealed in 12 that Jack’s name would be Jack. Jack as in “the Giant Killer” Jack. Jack like “Jack Tales.” Jack from all of the “Jack and the Devil” stories. This Jack. But Dabb is running a long mytharc, so last season was the set-up for this season-- priming the pump, if you will, for what the writers are doing now, and it came to fruition in the first few episodes.

As I said before, we got a hint of this theme in Jack’s name as well as in the way the season wrapped up with grieving Dean and Dead!Cas mirroring the last scene of despairing Cas and Possessed!Dean. Folklore brings with it the other thematic elements we’ve seen so far-- mirrors (oh my god the mirrors,) recursion and repetition, callbacks, sleep, and sleep-like death.

But why folklore *in particular*? And how is “folklore” as a theme in seasons 13 and 14 any different from the fact that this is a show *based* on folk tales?

This season, the writers are not only telling stories drawn from folklore, they are using folklore and folkloristics (the academic discipline) as a theme.

Andrew Dabb wrote a formulaic tale into the premiere, and I flipped my lid. A formula tale is one that relies on a set structure, such as the tale of Henny Penny, The Little Red Hen, or the Fisherman and his Wife, where challenges or episodes are repeated over and over until all the possibilities are exhausted or something breaks the chain. The story of Michael’s quest is a tale that relies on formula as well as on the structure of a “rule of three,” or two challenges that fail and one that succeeds. He asked a human and an angel what they wanted, before finding a monster whose desires he considered purest. Compare that structure to Goldilocks and the Three Bears, or The Three Little Pigs. I have a much more in-depth analysis of the “rule of three” that I will post later. This and other “folklore” elements in the next three episodes established this as an official “Thing on the Show.”

For now and for those of you new to the idea of the study of folklore, I’ll summarize the history of the academic discipline of folkloristics.

More than six hundred years ago, in post-Renaissance Europe, concerned scholars and bored aristocrats started doing something strange.

They started collecting folk stories from the lower classes.

This was strange because the disdain that the “upper class” (which included not just nobility and gentry but clergy and those squirrely scholars as well) felt for the emerging middle class and the peasantry can not be overstated. But perhaps because they were fascinated with that which they looked down upon, many learned men and women during the Age of Enlightenment began to study folkways and oral tales.

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, “fairy tales,” “wonder tales,” “Märchen,” and “Mother Goose” stories lit up courts (and later salons) all over Europe. People recorded them from a handy peasant, wrote them down with a judicious application of upper-class refinements, and later crafted original stories inspired by them. There are works that were preserved from an oral version, like Giambattista Basile’s “Sun, Moon, and Talia” (which is based on a Neapolitan folk tale but is considered a literary work rather than a transcription and if you read a faithful translation you’d get why that is, he very much polished it with literary allusions and asides) as well as those found in Grimms’ first edition (1812) of collected oral stories which included the bloody version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” then there are folk tales that were cleaned up and sanitized for your comfort, like every Grimm edition since that one, ha ha, and at last there are “literary” fairy tales, or stories that are “original content” but were constructed on a folkish scaffolding like, Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” and Oscar Wilde’s “The Nightingale and the Rose.” Authors still use fairy tales to inform and inspire-- Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling edited several anthologies of contemporary fairy tales or retellings of old tales by modern authors, beginning with Snow White, Rose Red in 1993 and ending in 2000 with Black Heart, Ivory Bones which, if you enjoy trope subversion and walking around for days bearing a lingering sense of disquiet, are seriously worth reading.

While the Grimms’ work in collecting German folk tales is considered the “watershed” moment for European folk studies (the Chinese, in contrast, have been archiving oral poetry and stories for thousands of years and Arab Muslim scholars may have started collecting folk tales as early as the 10th century CE,) it wasn’t until about a hundred years had passed from the Grimms’ first publication that the discipline took a distinctly scientific turn.

In 1910, a Finnish folklorist named Artti Aarne published a work entitled ‘Verzeichnis der Märchentypen,” or “Types of Folktales.” He had analyzed his own extensive collection of Scandinavian folk stories and realized that these tales often shared the same plots and elements—helpful animals, daring rescues, clever wives, and more-- albeit in different configurations. He broke the stories down to their essential components-- decoded their DNA, if you will-- and asserted that these story elements were used like beads on a string to construct a myriad of tales. He called these elements “Motive,” or motifs. In 1960, an American anthropologist named Stith Thompson translated Aarne’s work from the German and expanded upon it to include stories from a broader European sampling as well as Native American traditions. This became known as the Aarne-Thompson Motif Index. It is one cog in a larger academic movement during the 50’s and 60’s wherein researchers of all stripes endeavored to unearth the earliest roots of mankind—from the search for fossils of the earliest hominids, to tracing the very first languages, to reconstituting the ur-myths that shaped human culture. Academics and field researchers were determined to pinpoint the moment in time when we became more than just a bipedal primate (if we ever even have.) The Index revolutionized folkloristics as anthropologists and other scholars realized that they could trace these story motifs through time and across geography the way linguists were already doing with sounds and words to compile Proto-Indo-European, the language of Neolithic humans who settled India and Europe, and how geneticists today can trace human migrations out of Africa by studying human genomes.

The Index is a taxonomic classification system, like meteorology or the Dewey Decimal System. There are twenty-six parent categories, with subcategories and more subcategories. The Motif Index is organized alphabetically from A-Mythological Motifs (like creation myths) to Z-Miscellaneous Motifs (such as “Z210: Brothers as Heroes.”) There is an adjacent Index of Tale Types, as well, which works similarly. In the Tale Types Index, for instance, “Tales of Magic” comprise subcategories 300 to 799; one subcategory in “Tales of Magic” is “Supernatural or Enchanted Relatives,” which covers tale types 400-459. Tale type number AT 410 is “Sleeping Beauty.” The Basile tale “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” “Sleeping Beauty in the Woods” by Charles Perrault, as well as Grimms’ “Little Briar Rose” fall under this category. The two indices operate in tandem-- for instance, the Basile story and the tale collected by the Grimm brothers are the same kind of story, but they have unique motifs. Both Perrault’s princess and the German Briar Rose are the subjects of a dire prophecy-- motif M340-- and fall into a magic sleep, which is motif D1960. Other motifs are not shared among all three stories, like cannibalism. Yeah, that story is buck wild once you go back a few generations.

Anyway, in 2004, the Aarne-Thompson Tale Type Index was once again revised, this time by German scholar Hans-Jörg Uther, in an attempt to make the index more inclusive of other global folk traditions, and it was renamed the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Classification of Folktales.

The quest to uncover the proto-stories of our ancestors continues in this very decade in the work of Julien d’Huy, who uses computer modeling to make “phylogenetic maps” of stories from around the globe. He can then create diagrams of a universal story-- for instance the “Cosmic Hunt” (D’Huy 2014).

You can also see the concept of the AT motif index in computer-generated novels and scripts, which are “written” by AIs who have ingested and digested and then assimilated whatever weird-ass shit their creators feed it and from that we get gems like “There is more Italy than necessary” from an AI-scripted Olive-Garden commercial.

The website TV Tropes works very much like the motif index, although in a much less taxonomic fashion—for instance, one trope they describe is “Room Full of Crazy,” a “motif” if you will that tv writers often use as a way of indicating quickly to the audience that a character is off their rocker (or at least obsessive to the point of near-insanity) by showing them writing or drawing something over and over in a notebook, on their bodies, on walls, etc. Supernatural used this recently to let us know how very messed up Gabriel was after his time with Assmodeus in season 13 “Bring ‘Em Back Alive.”

But it is important to remember that Kripke has used this exact trope before, in “I Know What You Did Last Summer” to let us know that Anna was having visions and hearing what would later be known as “Angel Radio.”

To some extent, Room Full of Crazy was also used all the way back in season one in “Dead in the Water” to represent the little boy’s repressed trauma.

The repetition of tropes (or callbacks) that have already been used earlier in the series is another signal that telegraphed this shift into the realm of folk tales and mythology in a thematic sense.

Yes, Supernatural has always been about folk tales and myth. Native American stories like that of the wendigo, urban folklore like the story of the hook man and other perils of “parking,” shtrigas, skinwalkers, etc, have served as both monsters-of-the-week and Big Bads. The premise of the show draws, pishtaco-like, from world stories to survive. But we’re going to dig down and find not just the fairy tales of season 14, but the tale types and the motifs and discover what this kind of focused close-reading can tell us about this season’s values.

Lots of people point out that the Index is dry and strips away so much that you could literally tell a story just by listing the motifs in order (this comment from my folklore prof many, many years ago when we got into the motif index in class.) But that is not at all how the originators intended the index to be used. If anything, as evidenced by the “phenogenetic” tale typing of d’Huy, the presence of a folktale motif is more powerful than any literary allusion or pop-culture reference. If you realize that you’re watching a story that involves a “beat the Devil” premise, and you’ve read some of those tales, they should all light up like a constellation in your memory. You might even mentally replay the electric guitar riff from Charlie Daniels’ “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” When we learned that the nephilim was going to be named Jack, and that his mother was hanging all of her hopes on him, you may have subconsciously thought of Jack and the Beanstalk or other Jack tales and made a prediction about the kind of story that we might see Jack feature in*. All the protagonists, all the challenges, all the outcomes of those stories will spread like beacons across a plain-- which is what comparative literature is all about in the first place. It is less about reducing a story to its DNA and more about finding that story’s family tree. And writers like Jane Yolen and the aforementioned Datlow and Windling use these bits of stories to write new ones. Oh and writers like Mr. Andrew Dabb, who used a most familiar formula (to his American audience at least) to start out the season. It’s wild, y’all.

So welcome to the folkloristics of Supernatural. As my favorite professor used to say, are there any thoughts, questions, miscellaneous abuse? My asks are open.

Here’s to a fantastic mideseason.

*allusion is not allegory, meaning you bring in an allusion to another text for depth; if you want to retell the story of Jesus and Christianity you write the Narnia Chronicles. However. Just because Jack was not the one to kill Lucifer does not mean Lucifer’s death was not foretold… the point of retelling these stories in a literary setting is to find the other values that the story can reveal, or to take a trope and twist it to reveal something that had not previously been considered.

Caveat: I’m NOT a prophet. None of us meta writers are. Nothing is stopping anyone involved in the show from making a decision that runs contrary to the story’s architecture, and it’s even been done before. I even have a post about trying to predict from the subtext or even text of a serial publication, like a tv series, that I’ll fit into this series. But anyway, use these posts to “prove” that destiel will be going canon at your own peril. And also I won’t be focusing only on “destiel” subtext. There’s stuff in these episodes for everyone, it’s chock full o’ nuts.

ALSO I have been deliberately staying away from a lot of meta while I compiled this, so if there’s more going on along these lines please feel free to tag me in :)

[rydain]

Author's Notes from a Modern Brutale - Liberties of Adaptation

Tip of the iceberg canons are fun as hell for me to write for because they allow for such freedom of personal influence in sorting out their unstated specifics. I prefer to go more interpretative than compliant, building on the broad strokes of personality and chemistry and setting that strike me the most - bringing in the particulars that fit my greater vision, shrugging off those that don't, and giving a good yank to the author's strings as needed. As the Chips Fall toward their finale, I figured it would be fun to look back on some particulars of development for the cast and the manor that brought them all together.

Here there be spoilers, both for my series and The Sexy Brutale, if you wish to settle in for a long look behind the curtain.

Tequila

The glass shattering siren from modest means is drawn along the lines of a Deep Southern belle or a Texan pageant queen. Her roots wound up a ways north for me, though far enough in Appalachian coal country to be within that cultural ballpark, thanks to My Old Kentucky Home - just too perfect a song for the hope and homesickness of leaving town and country behind for such a foreign world of glamour. Kentucky's patchwork of dry counties also has special relevance to a particular paint can banging uncle I saw fit to imagine as an ace moonshiner.

I wrote Tequila as a rising star rather than an established one to explore the challenges of fitting into that new world - the polish of fashion and posture and speech and presence, the countless social norms learned on the fly but perhaps never fully internalized. The sense of impostor syndrome thus resulting, the conflict between pride in what she had earned for herself and the fear that she was only this far ahead because of Lucas - and that without him, she would only go right back to where she was. I made the two of them official beyond the canonical winking and nudging because she seemed too well stuck on him for an unrequited crush. This also got her across the pond early in her career for the challenges of culture shock and self-doubt outlined above.

Willow

Canonically a purveyor of curiosities and wrangler of eldritch horror, Willow was a tough one to develop within my idea of modern heightened reality. With her creation of charms and a mention of voodoo, I reimagined her as a consultant and adviser with deep family roots in the faith, and her second sight as an instinctive bent toward conversation that amounts to effective cold reading. This involves communication with spirits who Willow would have a literal sense of speaking to - especially Baron Samedi, lwa of death brought to mind by her skull motif, who can assist with the transitions of loss experienced by Tequila and others at the Brutale, and is very much the type to get handsy with lovely ladies.

Willow established her career in New Orleans' French Quarter near the voodoo shops of Rue Royal, inheriting a small townhouse from a beloved aunt who mentored her in such traditions. Word of mouth and within walking distance, her ecosystem supports a frugal lifestyle based on folkways and homesteading skills learned growing up in the bayou - which, along with an understated modest aesthetic, gives Willow a sense of having stepped out of time. This is a point of compatibility with Tequila and her focus on the classic jazz age and the Great American Songbook, modern music along similar lines, and subtly updated vintage style to complete her timeless presence. More fundamentally, both of them work with the emotional texture of everyday lives - stories that Tequila embodies onstage and Willow seeks in her clients with a guiding hand toward a rewrite.

Greyson

I gave Mr. Yolo Swaggins a hand up toward reformation catalyzed by the shock of a prison sentence he subconsciously courted to kick his own arse toward a clean break. This made for a focus on conflicts of the legitimacy Greyson wants so badly to earn. As a professional, he needs to work with difficult types like Thanos, who values traditional university education and thinks his secrets to be well beyond what he sees as inferior intellect, and Clay, who Greyson could bond with over a rude sense of humor and understanding of each other's cynicism - in turn, sharing respect and eventual friendship rather than begrudging acceptance for Redd's sake. Greyson continues to wrestle with temptations of larceny and proving himself to be beyond them, ultimately rejecting the torment and manipulation of a treasure hunt - Lucas' cruel generosity of playing to others' vices for his own amusement. Which Redd plays his own part in, saving Greyson in the psychological sense rather than physically hauling him out of trouble - helping to reinforce the stability Greyson is already working to develop, and that he gravitates toward Redd to share in.

Greyson's considerable ego - once a force behind the more elaborate and higher risk schemes he took part in - is now fed by his infiltration and analysis of locks and safes and security systems, his determination to be better than the epithets granted by his criminal record and prove his naysayers wrong with a glorious display of upright professional competence. Of course he's not above ripping off some scam or another, but Clay does appreciate the unofficial backup.

Redd

By way of this adorable cartoon and followup ask from @frayed-symphony , Redd likes to read. I extrapolated this into university study of literature and a keen sense of wordplay including all the best worst sorts of puns - an embrace of his awkward streak implied by those untucked shirttails and the Old Habits dance lyrics fail. He works through dense classics with the analytical focus of his piano playing, and he gravitates toward biographies and memoirs of infamous figures who lived much larger lives than his Good Boy nature and risk aversion would ever allow. This fascination also influences his attraction to Greyson and his intrigue of Lucas' employ and the Brutale itself, which Redd feels some desire to properly belong to beyond his initial goal of performing piano. Lucas takes a certain interest in Redd as well, wondering what hidden fatal flaw must reside in someone so upright and considered. Redd doesn't have anything nearly as spectacular as the likes of Greyson. Rather, there are natural disadvantages to his polite reserve - hesitation to go after various personal and professional goals, struggle to provide emotional support to Tequila out of discomfort with that messy and potentially prying sort of talk. Redd needs to learn from someone like Willow, with her well developed emotional intelligence, that he's overthinking the matter like so many others.

Redd plays a strong supporting role throughout my work. Favorite characters tend to do that, and he strikes me as a backbone of the Brutale anyhow - a highly capable, dependable, and well liked linchpin of the casino and music hall. His performance career had a good nudge from Greyson, who convinced Redd that he deserved to take the spotlight instead of feeling that it would be unseemly to ask - seizing a chance as he saw it rather than enduring in silence with that stoicism so clear in his game counterpart's somber expression.

The Rockridge bros lift because of shameless personal bias, because Redd needs to get his cage bending strength somewhere, and because I love the imagined contrast of their training - Redd lifting with meditative focus, Clay forcing himself through the most brutal of circuits because it's not a real workout until he's cursing in a lake of sweat. GO HAM OR GO HOME

Clay

With his responsibilities as head of security and care for Trinity beyond their good-natured trolling, Clay came off as a lovable roughneck rather than someone far more abrasive. He and Redd were implied to run the casino together on various occasions, so I imagined that he shared a close bond, mutual protectiveness, and a measured share of bickering with his much gentler brother. Clay is perceptive about scams and the people apt to run them and just as myopic about Redd's romantic proclivities because whatever happens in the flat - and not very often for either of them - tends to occur when they're on opposite shifts. Redd has good reason to know that Clay is accepting - and he is, beyond his initial frustration that of all the blokes in the world, why did it have to be a flashy, arrogant ex-con strutting around on every last one of his nerves? - but he also thinks it would be something he'd feel a need to explain, which of course he can't. This all let me play that eventual talk for laughs and brotherly bonding with just a fun fleeting touch of embarrassment.

Clay has an intense nature and a self-punishing, self-destructive streak that fueled both his prize fighting career and alcoholism. Despite being the older of the two, he long since felt that he lived in Redd's quiet academic shadow, which caused him to give up on himself in various ways that he regrets. Trinity helps Clay to see his life, lumps and bumps and all, as experiences that tested him and left him better for the wear.

Trinity

Trinity first tried sculpting out of stubbornness to prove herself so capable, especially as her overprotective parents thought it would be nigh impossible. She took off well enough that her well off family willingly supported the study of working with expensive materials, the extra tutelage required to do so by touch, and her life in general until her work became steady enough to rely on. Annoyed at the fussy mores of her stuffier relations and the wealthy sorts who commission her, Trinity finds Clay's blunt and unfiltered nature refreshing. Her part time assistant, who helps with tasks beyond the capabilities of touch or muscle memory or adaptive technology, has a sense of down to earth polish and similar head for eloquent vulgarity.

After her in-game rescue, Trinity encourages an already trolleyed Clay to do shots. Rather than think she was bringing him down, unwittingly or otherwise, I see her as a hedonist who overestimates others' ability to compartmentalize. It's just a party - what's the harm in a bit of excess? Rather than feed Clay's alcoholism, Trinity helps him out of it - genuinely appreciating him just as he is, which inspires him to appreciate himself just the same.

Canonically, Trinity and Tequila are stepsisters in some official sense of the term. In my AU, this particular connection would have been difficult to make naturally because they grew up so differently, separated by an ocean and levels of financial means. In the game, the stepsister relationship implies a closeness between the two, gives Lucas a means of introduction to Tequila after admiring her from afar, and piles on the horror when Trinity finds Tequila's body in the laundry chute. The same sort of closeness arises, with found sisterly implications and all, as Tequila is adopted into Trinity's circles by way of her friendship with Redd. Tequila meets Lucas through the posh New Orleans parties she is hired to sing at and thus needs no other connection to him.

Lucas

So here we are in this hopeful world of competence and agency and self-actualization. And then there's Lucas - who I couldn't stand to leave as enough of a knobhead to not only pull an insurance fraud scam in the first place, but contrive it into a flagrant courting of disaster that I don't see myself ever forgiving his canon incarnation for. Then perhaps a magnificent trash fire as opposed to a dumpster inferno, so let's have at him, shall we?

My Brutale can be saved and is heavily implied to be. For that, I planted some seeds of Lucas' sense and a slow trend toward dialing back the worst of himself. He shows a capacity for analytic thought in his artistic patronage, biting poetic wit, and often successful divining of others' deepest desires. He keeps a modest office and cultivates a friendship with Willow, first seen as a quaint curiosity and soon respected for her straightforward insight and steadfast way of pitting such against his own. Lucas wants to do better on some level, but is welded to his identity as a master of ceremonies and peddler of overindulgence, as a grandiose gambler who very much meant to make a bad bet or three because he wound up with a better one eventually and a good story in the bargain. He gravitates toward people with stories of their own, and who have vices he finds amusing to play with, or who fascinate him - and perhaps somewhat frustrate him - because he can't figure out their downfall.

Lucas' issues are more of psychology than cash flow, and able to be turned around before his ledgers go fatally red. Before the worst can happen, other personal losses show Lucas the need to put real work into himself and his dealings - to fight his compulsions toward high risk propositions and assorted impractical excess, to face his failures of neglect and mitigate their fallout.

Eleanor

In the game, Eleanor is an archetype of purity whose forgiveness is meant to redeem Lucas in the player's eyes. I meant to parlay her cheeky macabre quirks into an endearingly oddball artist with an anthropomorphic sense of humor and a larger than life sense of whimsy, fundamentally compatible with Lucas and apt to help him toward his senses. Eleanor is as intrigued by the Brutale's legends as Tequila is tired of their absurdity, breezy and casually polished as Tequila struggles to play the lady of the manor in structured couture. They meet on neutral terms to be naturally contrasted but not cruelly so, and very much without tired tropes of romantic rivalry.

Lafcadio

A symbol of repentance for sins, canonically a separate character as per the origin comic, which made me very happy because he's interesting to envision as an actual person beyond some idealized facet of Lucas’ personality. In my take, Lucas admired Lafcadio's ability to walk away from the Brutale as it was dragging him down. They both preferred to tell the story as the spectacular bet from the comic - a fateful game of roulette - that Lafcadio arguably came out on top of by ditching this liability. This echoes the theme of rock bottom arse kick that my Greyson gets well ahead of time, and canon Lucas doesn't until it's far too late.

Lafcadio and Willow both intrigue Lucas with the depth of their respective faiths. They bond over their insights into their host and desire to inspire him toward better, though Willow is limited by never having seen the Brutale in its prior incarnation, or Lucas at his worst. In my narrative, Willow works behind the scenes by helping people unearth their own deeper truths and provide emotional support to others, mirroring Lafcadio's role in the game - though he will go on, offscreen as this might be, to likewise mirror the Willownage of Lucas that needs to continue.

The Sexy Brutale

Loath to commit the British equivalent of dropping a small city of a warehouse store on top of Tequila's old trailer in Closplint, Kentucky, I researched stately homes for inspiration toward location and overall aesthetic. I later learned I could have handwaved one within brief vague driving distance of any city, and perhaps in the city itself. Still I'm most confident in my sense of veracity when I can point to a spot on a map to rebrand. In this case, Somerleyton Hall, within train commuting and day trip distances of various points of interest, and with an appealing style and a clock tower that sealed the deal. As did its 19th century transformation by a private entrepreneur - which, in my alternate reality, would have been supervised by a master builder named Gorecki, whose descendants continued on with his upgrades and maintenance of the manor. Its adjusted name is Somerthwaite after the meadow surrounding it, thanks to a jaunt down the rabbit hole of Anglo-Saxon geographic nomenclature to ensure I wasn't trying to bollocks the manor on the edge of an active volcano.

British manor houses are so varied and eclectic that a place like the Brutale seems more matter of course than bombastic fantasy. Casinos in the UK were all private clubs until recently and can certainly carry on as such, and any property can house the owner's particular interests. To balance homage with my sense of historic floor plans, I kept the common areas of interest with some remodeling - great hall, casino, theater, music hall and practice rooms, library, conservatory, gardens - and closed off the south end of the west wing as Lucas' private quarters. The basement is for utilities and storage, the uppermost floor for guest rooms both rented and bespoke for close friends of Lucas.

[overlooked-tracks]

Art Rosenbaum, Ethnomusicologist Behind Iconic Field Recordings, Dies at 83

The following article has been posted on September 19, 2022 at 07:31AM:

An Overlooked Tracks News Finding: Here’s an article you might have overlooked. Having a partnership with NewsAPI, we try to catch music entertainment news for you to view, read and possibly enjoy. We will continue to find what’s available in the world of music entertainment, concert information and music releases. But obviously you – the listener and reader are the biggest source for news in your area, so if you can share with us. For right now, look at what we found for you:

From the Pitchfork Music Website – “Art Rosenbaum, Ethnomusicologist Behind Iconic Field Recordings, Dies at 83”

Art Rosenbaum, the painter and folk musician known for sharing field recordings from across the spectrum of American folk music, has died, The New York Times reports. Rosenbaum’s death was confirmed by his son, Neil Rosenbaum, who told the paper that he died of complications from cancer on September 4, 2022 in Athens, Georgia. He was 83 years old.

An influential figure in the American folk revival of the 1960s, Rosenbaum’s field recordings have been celebrated alongside the work of Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger, a hero of Rosenbaum’s since childhood. His recordings—which saw widespread release on collections including Dust-to-Digital’s The Art of Field Recording and Smithsonian Folkways’ *Folk Visions and Voices: Traditional Music and Song in Northern Georgia—capture the intimate acoustic environments of the American South and Midwest, with extended stretches of music that bask in an observational ambience.

Equally celebrated as painter, his work has been shown widely throughout the United States and Europe. Michael Stipe, frontman of R.E.M. and a celebrated visual artist in his own right, famously studied under Rosenbaum at the University of Georgia and made occasional appearances in Rosenbaum’s artwork. In 2006, the Georgia Museum of Art hosted Weaving His Art on Golden Looms, a major retrospective of his work.

Arthur Spark Rosenbaum was born on December 6, 1938 to David and Della Spark Rosenbaum of Ogdensburg, New York. His mother was a medical illustrator and his father was a doctor with the U.S. Army, a job that forced the Rosenbaum family to relocate frequently during Art’s childhood. After periods in Hattiesburg, Mississippi and Augusta, Georgia, the family settled in Indianapolis, where Art attended Shortridge High School.

Art Rosenbaum

It’s in Indianapolis that Rosenbaum found his passion for both painting and music. As a high school student, he entered and won an Indiana State Fair art contest, later spending his $25 winnings won on a banjo. Rosenbaum moved to New York City at the height of the folk revival, performing with friends while earning both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the visual arts from Columbia University.

During his summers off from school, he would return to the Midwest, where he recorded the songs of migrant workers and the folk and blues musicians that would pass through the area. Rosenberg was among the first to record the music of Scrapper Blackwell, and has collaborated with the artist and minister Howard Finster, who’s paintings have been used as album art by R.E.M. and Talking Heads.

Read More Music Headllines

and can be found on the Overlooked Tracks website: https://ift.tt/qgo0DOE. Check out more music news from Overlooked Tracks! Music Headline News, Albums, Concerts, Ethnomusicologist, Music, Music Releases, Performer, Rosenbaum, World

[lastchancevillagegreen]

Chicago: 8-10 April 2022 

Folkways: A Vision Shared (A Tribute To Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly) Various Artists (Columbia) released in 1988

Another double from my brother who has a promo version which features the hype sticker on it.  And as it seems to often seems to be the case, I bought this when it came out way back in 1988.   Dylan, Springsteen, U2 and even Mellencamp were all pretty big guns in 1988.  I was well aware of Folkways, the record label but in 1988 I owned nothing from the label nor did I own anything by either Guthrie or Leadbelly.  That would come in later years.  In 1997 Smithsonian Folkways will release a four disc series of Woody Guthrie music subtitled The Asch Recordings and that jump starts my excitement about Guthrie’s music. In 2015 they will release a five disc Leadbelly box titled The Smithsonian Folkways Collection that is comparable to the Guthrie set.

I somehow ended up with this album on CD after I got rid of the LP.  Not much of a trade off, I’ll tell you.  I prefer having it on vinyl and I’m glad to take my brother’s extra copy off his hands.

The top photos are of the album cover, the gatefold and the back of the cover.  The bottom photos show both sides of the inner sleeve and both labels.

[hannesvonchaos]

My typewriter says: this was basically bought because it's by Led Zeppelin's bass player. A weaker soundtrack to a film I haven't seen yet. But Crackback with Jimmy Page on guitar really rocks. Christie and When You Fall In Love are also decent tunes. Various Artists - Folkways - A Vision Shared - A Tribute To Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly 🤘 🤘 🤘 #folkways #woodyguthrie #rock #rocknroll #vinyl #vinylcollector #vinylrecord #vinylcollection #vinylonly #vinylrecords #onlyvinyl #vinyloftheday #justgoodmusic #vinylfan #vinyljunkie #justgreatmusic #musicgeek #musicfans #musicnerds #musiclovers #typewriter #musicnerd #musicforever #musiclover #musicfan #music #chAos #vonchAos (hier: United States of America) https://www.instagram.com/p/CWNtT0jtmOI/?utm_medium=tumblr

[uomo-accattivante]

The troupe — a roving band of actors, musicians and directors who produce a variety of plays and entertainment — is centuries old. So why has this generation of stage, television and cinematic impresarios found new resonance in this old form of communalism?

IN “HAMLET,” WHEN the hero wants to put on a play to “catch the conscience of the king,” he engages the services of a band of itinerant actors, a motley troupe of entertainment professionals instructed by the Danish prince to “hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.”

As the Renaissance scholar Siobhan Keenan notes in her 2002 study, “Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England,” the author of “Hamlet” based that fictitious company on something “he had lived for real.” Troupes of mimes and acrobats, musicians and mummers were ubiquitous in early modern Europe. Their performances were both religious and profane, encompassing everything from passion plays to puppet shows to commedia dell’arte sketches. They cobbled together material from various sources — Shakespeare’s own compositional method — and tailored their performances to local tastes and prejudices. Tradespeople as well as artists, the troupes operated according to a flexible organizational chart. In their working relationships they were companions more than colleagues, forging quasi-familial ties (including love affairs, of course) as they wound from town to town. The whole village would come to the show, and the community onstage, with its exaggerated conflicts and beguiling harmonies, served as a mirror for the audience, binding its members, at least for an evening or two, in common troubles and delights. A few young people might run off with the troupe, further blurring the boundary between the players and their public.

For centuries, these troupes defined popular culture in much of the world. They show up now and then in modern paintings, novels and films: in Seurat’s “Circus Sideshow” and Picasso’s “Family of Saltimbanques”; in novels such as Emily St. John Mandel’s “Station Eleven” and Barry Unsworth’s “Morality Play”; in Theo Angelopoulos’s “Travelling Players” and Fellini’s “La Strada.”

Those works evoke nostalgia for the rough magic of a bygone way of life, one that slipped away silently and suddenly, like the circus setting off for the next town at daybreak. Over time, the troupe aesthetic fell victim to the usual forces of modernity. Art, even when it depended on collective labor, became increasingly individualized in Europe after the Middle Ages, and the consumption of art followed the same fate. Culture now travels, for the most part, electronically — reaching the public through the invisible corporate workings of television networks, streaming services and movie studios. Live theater, where it still flourishes, is concentrated in commercial or philanthropically supported institutions. The scrolling credits and the fine print in the playbill record a strict division of labor. Though there is, technically, a “company,” it’s often an ad hoc confection brokered by agents, producers and other offstage dealmakers. The artists are individuals, and so are the members of the audience. The romantic idea of performing artists as a vagabond tribe, commingling with the rest of us and then moving on, has been dissolved in the medium of modern celebrity. And the corresponding ideal of the public — gathering to share in a common treasury of imagination — has withered as tastes have fragmented.

BUT THE HUNGER for that older way of doing things persists. Movie studios and television networks are soulless, monstrous entities, ravenous heads of a corporate hydra. A Broadway theater is an empty shell. There is not much we see that commands our loyalty, or inspires our solidarity. The unsatisfied, atavistic part of ourselves that harbors a dim memory of those wondrous nights in the village square experiences a special frisson, a jolt of recognition and excitement, when we witness the work of players who seem loyal to one another.

This is why we react with a special kind of excitement when we encounter what looks like the work of a genuine troupe in the crowded, highly mediated, aggressively monetized postmodern landscape where we scavenge for beauty, fun and enlightenment. What connects certain television shows, movies and stage productions to ancient folkways is a particular blend of novelty and familiarity. You see the same faces again and again in new disguises. The afternoon’s clown is the evening’s tragic hero; yesterday’s princess is tomorrow’s wicked stepmother.

To be more specific: The young actor Evan Peters, who creeped you out as a sweet-faced, homicidal teenager in the first season of “American Horror Story” on FX, returns in subsequent seasons as a falsely accused murderer, a reanimated fraternity brother, Charles Manson, Andy Warhol and Jesus. This is not an exhaustive list. In the same series — the flagship production of what we might call the Ryan Murphy Troupe — Jessica Lange has been a sinister nun, a witch and a maniacal, musical mistress of ceremonies.

To take another example: Ben Stiller, a fixture of several distinct, overlapping quasi-troupes (including his own), shows up in “Greenberg,” Noah Baumbach’s 2010 romantic comedy, as the misanthropic, underachieving brother of a successful Los Angeles hotelier. He cycles back into the Baumbach universe in 2015’s “While We’re Young,” playing the somewhat less misanthropic, not as spectacularly underachieving son-in-law of a prominent documentary filmmaker. And then, a couple of years later in “The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected),” he’s the successful sibling, a financial adviser based in L.A., struggling to keep his misanthropy in check and dealing with the narcissism of his father, played by Dustin Hoffman. (Hoffman was accused late last year by several women of sexual misconduct or assault. He has apologized to one of the women and has denied other allegations through his lawyer.)

If you are a habitual visitor to Baumbach’s galaxy, you are accustomed to seeing some of the same faces in altered guises. Florence Marr, played by Greta Gerwig in “Greenberg,” is not the same person as Frances Hamilton, Gerwig’s character in “Frances Ha” (2013) or Brooke in “Mistress America” (2015). But these young women stand in relation to each other like conjugations of the quintessential millennial verb “to adult.” They are melodies played on different instruments in the same family: clarinet, oboe, bassoon.

After “Greenberg,” Baumbach and Gerwig began writing together (they also now live together). “Frances Ha” and “Mistress America” are the fruits of that partnership, a fusion of complementary, but also distinctive, styles and sensibilities. “It’s like we’re standing on the beach picking up the same kind of rocks,” Gerwig says of their collaboration. (Gerwig’s solo voice as a writer and director burst forth in “Lady Bird,” one of the defining movies of last year.)

“Part of what’s great about working with the same people is that it’s an ongoing conversation that you’re having from movie to movie,” says Baumbach, whose troupe of repeat collaborators includes crew as well as cast. “How can we continue this thing we’ve been developing? And then there’s also the thing of explaining yourself to new people, which is good too. So you want some healthy dose of both.”

Baumbach’s characters are defined by their idiosyncrasies and imperfections, by their snowballing failures of communication, planning and insight. Bringing them to life demands precisely those things in heroic measure, and an enormous amount of work: endless rewriting, numerous takes, an editing process that begins while the script is still being written.

Ryan Murphy, by contrast, likes to surprise his actors, to spring ideas, situations and scenes on them in medias res — midseason and even mid-episode. “It’s always a little hair-raising,” says Jessica Lange. “With ‘American Horror Story’ we often wouldn’t get the first pages of the episode until the day we started shooting. I think anybody who’s worked with Ryan, especially on ‘American Horror Story’ — I mean, it is kind of by the skin of your teeth.”

“He can get sort of uninterested in a story he’s telling,” Sarah Paulson said, “and then decide to take it in an entirely new way that does interest him. So you can be going along, playing a particular thing and then all of a sudden you find out, oh, you really did kill your sister, and you ate her for dinner, and you didn’t realize that because you’d been playing the whole time that you really loved your sister. But it actually adds a beautiful nuance to your work.” The result is an ever-expanding, theoretically limitless multiverse of stories, and a thorough reinvention of the possibilities of serial television. “American Horror Story” derives its coherence not from a stable set of characters and situations but from the opposite. The through line is stated in the title — horror, a property that can be found in serial killers, witches, nuns, Charles Manson and our country’s current political climate. More concretely, it flows through the faces and voices of actors like Peters, Lange and Paulson, who discover, from one chapter to the next, the thrilling and spooky dimensions of their own talent. “It’s an incredible gift that you get to work for four to five months on something very, very intensely,” Paulson says, “just like you would on a film or a play, and then it’s over.”

A TROUPE, YOU will have noticed, is not necessarily a democratic phenomenon. Someone has to be the boss, providing both vision and connective tissue for the work of fellow artists. The current golden age of television has seen the rise of showrunners like Murphy as objects of critical scrutiny and fan obsessions, much in the way that movie directors were elevated to the status of artists during the postwar blossoming of film culture. Previously they had been seen as guns for hire in an anonymous industrial system.

Theater is an older art form, with a more complicated distribution of creative authority. Supremacy is habitually granted to the writer, who is sometimes also the star, and therefore a physical presence on the scene, but who more often is dead long before the curtain goes up. The popular image of what happens backstage involves a flurry of activity involving directors and dramaturgs, producers and impresarios scrambling to boost morale, prevent disaster and keep the bills paid.

Oskar Eustis is all of those things and also something else. The artistic director of the Public Theater since 2005, he leads in the tradition of two great New York showmen: George C. Wolfe, who directed “Angels in America” (1993) on Broadway and “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” (2017) for HBO, and Joseph Papp, the Public’s founder, who grew free outdoor performances of Shakespeare into a mighty civic institution. Under Eustis’s aegis, the Public, now housed in the former Astor Library in Lower Manhattan, has incubated such future Broadway hits as “Fun Home” (2015), “Hamilton” (2015) and “Latin History for Morons” (2017). It has been a home base and R&D facility for the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights Lynn Nottage and Suzan-Lori Parks. Season after season, it’s a whirring carousel of diverse, ambitious and politically urgent theater.

Eustis’s vision of the Public is of a kind of city within the city, a community open to new arrivals who settle in and stay for a long time. He likes to keep up with old friends and partners and to fold new talent into the mix. His relationships with playwrights like Tony Kushner and Nottage go back decades, predating his arrival at the Public. In the time he’s been there he has gathered in artists like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Oscar Isaac, John Leguizamo, the composer Jeanine Tesori and the playwright and actress Lisa Kron (co-creators of “Fun Home”).

These artists and others collaborate in a process that is intensive and exhaustive, a kind of rolling workshop that can continue for years. Theater, Eustis told me, “has to go through every phase of human experience, from the writer alone in their room chewing on their pencil to the conversations with the director or dramaturg as the piece is written, to the reading aloud with actors once a draft exists. So step by step until finally you have something that literally hundreds of people have been involved in putting together that’s being performed for hundreds of thousands. There is almost no example of a great work of theater that doesn’t involve many great collaborations.”

And that process has a meaning that extends beyond the theater itself. “This is such a transactional, atomized world,” Eustis said at the end of our conversation, “where everything gets a dollar value put on it. Everything is ‘I’ll give you this if you give me that’ and ‘What have you done …’ And to try and really build a counter to that, to say there’s actually a better way of people relating to each other, and while we can’t completely remake the world in our image, we can try to remake the theater in our image, and by doing that hold, as ’twere, a mirror up to nature.”

What we see on the stage and on the large and small screens are reflections of human social interaction. Every play, every film, every television show, is about a group of people — a family, a workplace, a neighborhood, a nation. The purpose of those art forms is to show us to ourselves, in glory and disgrace and at every point on the spectrum in between. The ethic of the troupe provides another, less obviously visible but no less powerful mirror. What we witness in the collective pretending is the result of individuals working together at a common task, in circumstances that, however grueling and disharmonious in the moment, are also utopian. This looks like the opposite of alienated labor, not just because it seems like fun — it’s not called “playing” for nothing — but because it transcends both the narrow individualism and the impersonal corporatism that defines so much of our working lives. The enchantment that we experience, craning forward in the audience, is not just with what we’re seeing, but with what we intuit about how it was made. Look: This is what we can do. This is who we might become.

[minstrel75itg]

Folkways: “A Vision Shared - A Tribute to Woody Guthrie & Leadbelly” is a 1988 album featuring songs by Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly interpreted by leading folk, rock, and country recording artists. It won a Grammy Award the same year. On CBS/Columbia Records - C 44034. Produced by Harold Leventhal, #woodyguthrie ‘s long-time business manager and folk music and theatrical impresario, the album received widespread critical acclaim and included performances by Guthrie's son, Arlo Guthrie, and many other luminaries: Bob Dylan, Fishbone, Emmylou Harris, Little Richard, John Mellencamp, Willie Nelson, Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Little Red School House Chorus (Sarah St. Onge, director), Taj Mahal, U2, and Brian Wilson. #folkwaysrecords #leadbelly https://www.instagram.com/p/CJrARpTLYTe/?igshid=x07ujc9sl7jg

[beatdisc]

Here's a selection of some of the 2nd hand vinyl that's gone out in the racks the past week or so. Check our website for the latest in-stock catalogue and get in touch if you'd like to place an order. #beatdiscpreownedvinyl THE NICE - FIVE BRIDGES $20 (6303004, AUS, 1970, GATEFOLD) Media: VG+ / Sleeve: VG THE FIXX - SHUTTERED ROOM $15 (MAPS10491, USA, 1982 w/ INSERT) Media: EX / Sleeve: VG+ MIDNIGHT OIL - BLUE SKY MINING $30 (4656531, AUS, 1990 w/ INNER) Media: EX / Sleeve: VG+ MOMUS - THE POISON BOYFRIEND $30 (CRELP021, UK, 1987) Media: VG+ / Sleeve: VG+ NILS LOFGREN - I CAME TO DANCE $15 (L36132, AUS, 1977 w/ INNER) Media: EX / Sleeve: VG JACKSON BROWNE - s/t $15 (SYL9002, AUS, 1972) Media: VG+ / Sleeve: VG+ KEVIN COYNE & DAGMAR KRAUSE - BABBLE $30 (V2128, UK, 1979) Media: VG+ / Sleeve: VG+ V/A - GODZONE BEAT $20 (WAR2010, NZ, 1988) Media: EX / Sleeve: VG+ BOBBY BARE - FOLSOM PRISON BLUES $15 (CAS2290, NZ, 1968) Media: VG / Sleeve: VG+ SOUNDTRACK - URBAN COWBOY $20 (DP90002, AUS, 1980, GATEFOLD 2xLP w/ INNERS) Media: EX / Sleeve: VG+ V/A - FOLKWAYS: A VISION SHARED $20 (4609051, AUS, 1988) Media: EX / Sleeve: VG+ ANDRAE CROUCH & THE DISCIPLES - TAKE ME BACK $15 (LS5637LP, USA, 1975, GATEFOLD) Media: VG+ / Sleeve: VG+ CHRIS SQUIRE - FISH OUT OF WATER $15 (SD18159, AUS, 1975, GATEFOLD w/ INNER) Media: EX / Sleeve: VG+ BILLY ECKSTINE - STORMY $15 (SKL934041, AUS, 1971) Media: VG+ / Sleeve: VG+ THE ELEVENTH HOUSE FEAT. LARRY CORYELL - LEVEL ONE $20 (AL4052, USA, 1975) Media: VG+ / Sleeve: VG+ THE ELEVENTH HOUSE FEAT. LARRY CORYELL - ASPECTS $20 (ARTY133, UK, 1976) Media: EX / Sleeve: EX (at Beatdisc Records) https://www.instagram.com/p/CCFllbohad7/?igshid=1hhhwbd3w6n8u

[houstonlocalus-blog]

Birthday Club Prepares For Tour Kickoff

Birthday Club. Photo: Bryan Chan

  You don’t have to look far to find indie rock bands with plenty of pop hooks, and while that’s become the norm, it shouldn’t be lost on anyone that you’ll remember a catchy track just by hearing the name of the band who performs it. That’s what happens to me when someone mentions the band Birthday Club. The Houston four-piece, which rose from the mind of Stephen Wells after the demise of his old band Featherface, dropped an EP last year that featured several songs I just couldn’t shake. After song premieres in national publications, a tour, and slots at some great shows, Birthday Club is ready to spread the sounds of Lighten Up to other parts of the country. Free Press Houston caught up with him prior to the band’s tour kickoff show this Friday to see what we should expect from the band at their show and what they have planned for the future.

  Free Press Houston: For those who don’t remember, you were in a band called Featherface before this band. Can you tell us why Featherface ended and what prompted the formation of Birthday Club?

Stephen Wells: We had started touring around the country quite a bit towards the end of the band and there’s an interesting thing that starts to happen when you’re locked in a van day after day for 4 to 8 hours at a time. The van becomes a strange sort of isolation chamber where you’re given many, often much needed, opportunities to be alone with your thoughts. I think at that point we had been a band for a little over 5 years, and although things really did seem to be picking up for us, it was definitely getting harder and harder to ignore the fact that we were beginning to go in different directions.

It’s the natural cycle of things that people grow and change, and no matter how hard it can be in the moment, it’s always an incredible experience to remind yourself that you have the ability to create a new reality at any moment. We all went through that extremely challenging process of breaking up, and the rest of the band ended up moving out to Los Angeles. I decided to move back to Houston from Austin to begin working on my new material and start getting a band together. You can hear the end result on the Lighten Up EP.

  FPH: The indie rock landscape is a pretty large one. Were you concerned about breaking into such a crowded marketplace with a new indie rock band when you started Birthday Club?

Wells: Honestly, I wasn’t really thinking about that when I started the band. I had all of these songs in my head, and I definitely wanted them to be heard by as many people as possible, but my main focus is always first and foremost trying to find a way to accurately convey whatever is bouncing around in my head. The songs won’t stop bothering me until they finally get let out, so that’s my focus, for my own sanity. I think as long as you’re working on staying true to your vision and voice, it doesn’t really matter what genre or label gets applied to the end result, because the end result will always speak for itself.

  FPH: You’ve added what sounds like plenty of Britpop influence and hooks on the Listen Up EP, what were you listening to when you wrote and recorded it?

Wells: I’m definitely able to admire a well written pop song, but the genre tends to be what I listen to the least. It’s like candy for me, so I can really only take so much of that without getting a little sick. I listen to a pretty wide variety of music from day to day, and I think part of what’s so fun about songwriting is that you’ll notice that these little artifacts from everything you read, listen, watch or experience start popping up in your writing in really unexpected ways. At the time I was writing and recording, I was thumbing my way through a sliver of the Smithsonian Folkways catalog and spinning an awful lot of Lata Mangeshkar, Kim Jung Mi and Big Star. The album art for the Lighten Up EP,  which was shot at our first show at Walter’s, is actually a bit of a nod to the cover art of Big Star’s Radio City LP.

  FPH: For the tour kickoff coming up this weekend, you went with a warehouse instead of a traditional venue. Was there a reason you decided to do it all on your own rather than the traditional space?

Wells: We knew that we wanted to have the tour kick off party in a space that would not only provide the visual canvas that we wanted for the projectionists, but one that would also get people excited about experiencing something new in an unexplored space, right here in Houston. The venue is located at 215 Grove Street and it’s owned by an very generous and active member of the community who also operates the Preston Theater. When we first stumbled upon the space and pitched the show concept, he was extremely enthusiastic and encouraging about it, so things sort of fell into place organically.

I think it’s really exciting for us because we love seeking out spaces that bands and artists may not ordinarily consider, like when we had a big listening party for our EP at TOMO Magazines in Montrose before our fall tour. It’s also been inspiring playing and visiting the great shows that Mario and Elizabeth throw at the Wonky Power Records warehouse, which could also be considered a non-traditional venue. They’re actually helping us put the whole tour kick off show together, and we’re really grateful for their help in the community. It’s honestly just a whole lot of fun to do something different!

  FPH:  The lineup is pretty diverse, including Galveston’s EL LAGO and the visuals of Austin’s Ether Wave. What gravitated you to working with both and what should people expect from the pay what you can show?

Wells: I was first exposed to Ether Wave’s work as liquid light show projectionists during my time living in Austin with Featherface, and I was completely blown away. Ether Wave has done projections for Austin Psych Fest and more recently for the Japanese band Kikagaku Moyo. They use a combination of live liquid light performance with both analog and digital video manipulation that constantly shifts and morphs into itself. It’s really beautiful. While I don’t necessarily consider Birthday Club to be a “psych” band, what really attracted us to their work is their skill at seamlessly blending, interacting and accentuating different elements of a band’s performance on the fly and in the moment, regardless of genre or sound.

As far as the bands go, people can absolutely expect shredder sets from Holly Halls, EL LAGO and a few guest DJ’s, including Pearl Crush. Holly Halls are an incredible new band that we stumbled upon during one of their shows at Axelrad. They are a pretty new project in the music scene but we really believe in their music and I’m really excited to see where they go from here. Don’t miss their set! EL LAGO have also become friends of ours and we’ve also become big fans of their band. We’re really looking forward to hearing their new record when it comes out.

  FPH: We’ve discussed this in the past about how a band should ultimately spread a wide net that goes well outside of their stomping grounds. Do you ever think that people don’t get that you’re not against the scene here, but rather that you’re looking at having a presence in a larger pond than just in Houston?

Wells: I think it really depends on what a band is looking to achieve with their music and how they are willing to share it. Some bands and artists are content with putting out singles or records and then just playing a few shows here and there, in or around town. That’s definitely nothing to look down on, but it’s also something that I don’t think we’re interested in. For us, we’re working as hard as we can to spread our music as far as we can because it’s so exciting and fulfilling for us to physically share and spread something that we really believe in, no matter where the audience happens to be. Houston is our home base, but it’s not our end goal. It’s such a great place to live and develop as an artist, and I’m very thankful for the community we are all growing, but I think that our hometown is just one piece of a very large, challenging and fulfilling puzzle we’re all working to put together. I don’t think that’s anything to look down on, either.

  FPH:  At this point, the EP is getting closer to a year old. What’s next for the band after this tour is done and when should people expect a full length?

Wells: Since the EP came out on September 30th, we’ve been doing several rounds of national touring through the South and Midwest, but there’s still plenty of touring left to do on our EP throughout the year, especially out to the west coast. Our summer tour is taking us on a two week long run along the east coast to NYC and back, and we’re hitting a lot of spots along the way that we’re really excited to get back to — I’m looking at you, Mobile, Alabama. We are constantly working on new music, and there’s definitely going to be some new material not found on our EP performed at our set this Friday. As far as what our next release might be, we’ll have to make that a separate interview.

  No matter what you think, Birthday Club is nothing if not ambitious and driven to make it in every place they play. You can stream their “Lighten Up” EP at all of the usual platforms, you can purchase it here, and you can catch them at 215 Grove St, on Friday June 30 for their tour kickoff party. The show has doors at 9 pm and a pay what you can cover, with sets from EL LAGO, Holly Halls, a DJ set from Pearl Crush and Ether Wave visuals, with all of the details here.

Birthday Club Prepares For Tour Kickoff this is a repost

[musicazca]

Best Sellers in Country Rock #10: Folkways: A Vision Shared - A Tribute to Woody Guthrie & Leadbelly… https://t.co/xnELwtFnlf

Best Sellers in Country Rock #10: Folkways: A Vision Shared - A Tribute to Woody Guthrie & Leadbelly https://t.co/50lJnEpX2K #Rock pic.twitter.com/PXToOaDaWu

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[aberjona]

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Seemed appropriate after Wilson’s biopic opened Friday and Ronnie Gilbert passed away Saturday.

[musicazca]

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