evanevanevan

Brian pulled out of the vault this online conversation we had several years ago. This is it in its entirety; nothing preceded it. Please note that Brian's "heavy boxes" screen name predated the naming of my band by years.

heavy boxes (12:18:30 AM): boomer esiason.
RL Steinbeck (12:18:52 AM): mother goose and grimm
heavy boxes (12:19:13 AM): kirby pucket
RL Steinbeck (12:19:47 AM): mavis beacon
heavy boxes (12:20:24 AM): foghorn leghorn
RL Steinbeck (12:21:18 AM): maniac mcgee
heavy boxes (12:21:33 AM): tommyknockers
RL Steinbeck (12:22:29 AM): robert plant
heavy boxes (12:22:39 AM): judge judy
RL Steinbeck (12:22:50 AM): the big bopper
heavy boxes (12:22:55 AM): dennis leary
RL Steinbeck (12:23:24 AM): desmond tutu
heavy boxes (12:24:11 AM): boutros boutros ghali
RL Steinbeck (12:25:22 AM): kato kaelin
heavy boxes (12:25:37 AM): trajan
RL Steinbeck (12:26:32 AM): julia louis dreyfuss
heavy boxes (12:31:51 AM): niels bohr
RL Steinbeck (12:32:29 AM): marie curie
heavy boxes (12:32:57 AM): benvolio
RL Steinbeck (12:33:55 AM): sergeant slaughte
RL Steinbeck (12:33:56 AM): r
heavy boxes (12:34:07 AM): judy dench
RL Steinbeck (12:34:18 AM): candide
heavy boxes (12:34:42 AM): gustave flaubert
RL Steinbeck (12:36:41 AM): ruff mcgruff
heavy boxes (12:36:59 AM): tintoretto
RL Steinbeck (12:38:17 AM): dave berry
heavy boxes (12:38:45 AM): john rocker
RL Steinbeck (12:39:21 AM): cuba gooding Sr.
heavy boxes (12:39:57 AM): calvin coolidge
RL Steinbeck (12:40:24 AM): engelbert humperdinck
heavy boxes (12:40:34 AM): matthew lesko
RL Steinbeck (12:40:58 AM): doctor jekyll
heavy boxes (12:41:26 AM): udo kier
RL Steinbeck (12:42:06 AM): mick ronson
heavy boxes (12:42:27 AM): chupacabra
RL Steinbeck (12:42:46 AM): erroll flynn
heavy boxes (12:43:14 AM): myrna loy
RL Steinbeck (12:43:26 AM): eddie & jobo
heavy boxes (12:43:57 AM): charo
RL Steinbeck (12:45:54 AM): madame tussaud
heavy boxes (12:47:15 AM): buddy glass
RL Steinbeck (12:48:05 AM): colonel mustard
heavy boxes (12:49:10 AM): dominique dawes
RL Steinbeck (12:49:45 AM): shawn kemp
heavy boxes (12:50:11 AM): bobby thigpen
RL Steinbeck (12:50:24 AM): phil lesh
heavy boxes (12:51:21 AM): wynonna judd
RL Steinbeck (12:51:42 AM): winslow homer
heavy boxes (12:53:02 AM): cornelius cardew
RL Steinbeck (12:54:44 AM): connie chung
heavy boxes (12:55:02 AM): benjamin banneker
RL Steinbeck (12:56:42 AM): tom clancy
heavy boxes (12:58:05 AM): bob "butterbean" love
RL Steinbeck (12:59:36 AM): my cousin vinnie
heavy boxes (1:01:59 AM): bastion booger
RL Steinbeck (1:11:38 AM): mark mcgrath
heavy boxes (1:12:33 AM): pancho villa
RL Steinbeck (1:12:44 AM): betsy ross
heavy boxes (1:12:56 AM): broomhilda
RL Steinbeck (1:13:13 AM): kangaroo jack
heavy boxes (1:13:24 AM): sam kinison
RL Steinbeck (1:14:12 AM): gene krupa
heavy boxes (1:14:23 AM): dan and ada rice
RL Steinbeck (1:18:06 AM): malcolm jamal warner
heavy boxes (1:18:32 AM): macgyver
RL Steinbeck (1:18:48 AM): sister wendy
heavy boxes (1:19:10 AM): lonnie anderson
RL Steinbeck (1:19:48 AM): rupert everett
heavy boxes (1:20:04 AM): rowdy roddy piper
RL Steinbeck (1:22:11 AM): sarah jessica parker
heavy boxes (1:22:45 AM): marcus garvey
RL Steinbeck (1:23:21 AM): lance bass
heavy boxes (1:24:00 AM): rod argent
RL Steinbeck (1:24:44 AM): lawrence fishburne
heavy boxes (1:25:19 AM): william carlos williams
RL Steinbeck (1:25:53 AM): lester bangs
heavy boxes (1:26:45 AM): the banger sisters (susan sarandon and goldie hawn)
RL Steinbeck (1:27:57 AM): sancho panza
heavy boxes (1:28:27 AM): theodore roetke
RL Steinbeck (1:29:07 AM): glen anthony
heavy boxes (1:31:30 AM): posh spice
RL Steinbeck (1:31:39 AM): ginger baker
heavy boxes (1:32:32 AM): glenn gould
RL Steinbeck (1:33:56 AM): koko taylor
heavy boxes (1:34:16 AM): kiki shepard
RL Steinbeck (1:36:00 AM): morgan fairchild
heavy boxes (1:36:56 AM): sherman alexie
RL Steinbeck (1:38:04 AM): abner doubleday
heavy boxes (1:38:23 AM): horace greeley
RL Steinbeck (1:39:24 AM): eddie cantor
heavy boxes (1:41:16 AM): jake lloyd
RL Steinbeck (1:42:19 AM): sheryl swoopes
heavy boxes (1:43:04 AM): steve shelley
heavy boxes (1:44:35 AM): alright, im out
heavy boxes (1:44:37 AM): goodnight
RL Steinbeck (1:44:39 AM): se ya
RL Steinbeck (1:44:41 AM): e

The death of the era of the professional songwriters of Tin Pan Alley and the Brill Building also meant the death of something else: the standard. Particularly in the pre-rock period, songwriters explicitly wrote songs so that they would become ubiquitous, performed by everybody. Before the phonograph, the primary distribution method for pop music was sheet music, so that a home consumer in Middle-of-Nowhere, Ohio could pick up a song in the local store and perform it with their family and party guests in their parlor room. Even when the bulk of pop standards were written for specific characters to sing in musical theatre pieces, songwriters intentionally wrote them so that they would make sense out of context, hoping that as many singers as possible would pick them up and perform their own renditions.

The songs, then, did not "belong" to anyone. Though some artists may have arguably given definitive performances of certain songs, a song like "I Could Write a Book" or "Needles and Pins" was free to be interpreted by any number of performers. For example, within the span of three years, renditions of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" were released by major artists like Gladys Knight & the Pips, Marvin Gaye, the Temptations, the Miracles, Creedence Clearwater Revival, etc. Time may have been kindest to Marvin Gaye's interpretation, but all of those performances were considered separate and equally valid.

The idea of standards is still widely known in the jazz world, codified by things like the Real Book and Ella Fitzgerald's series of 'Songbook' records. But in the rock and pop world, the notion of "standards" has been entirely replaced by that of "covers." In the contemporary listener's mind, songs are linked intrinsically to their original studio recordings by their original performers, which, for rock music today, almost invariably means the song's composer. If released today, the blogs and the YouTube descriptions would all be referring to Marvin Gaye's hit not as one of many renditions of Barrett Strong and Norman Whitfield's pop standard, but as his "Gladys Knight cover."

This has benefits, of course, for the songwriter. Because the best songwriters are now writing for themselves and not for others, they're allowed to create more personal expressions through their music. It makes sense, for example, for us to consider "Lithium" in the context of Kurt Cobain's life, the Nevermind album, and Nirvana's overall artistic output.

But that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with still listening to these songs as songs either. Jon Brion often talks about how useful it is to strip "Lithium" down to its bare essentials: melody, chords, and lyrics; revealing that above all, it's simply a gorgeous, tuneful piece of songcraft, even if someone else were to perform it without Cobain's specific anxieties.

I'm starting this series of posts, then, to examine songs like "Lithium" that ought to belong in the Great American Songbook, if the book were still accepting submissions for new standards. Some of these will be songs released within the past thirty-odd years, too late to become canonical. Others will be songs from the standards era that for some reason or other failed to become one, or else has dropped out of today's public conscious.

Soon, I'll begin with a song from the tail end of the standards era that is, appropriately, about a musician reminiscing about a song he had recorded back in the good ol' days: Randy Newman's early composition "Vine Street."

Lauren Alane makes felted birdies and they are just plain adorabs. Feeling a lot like this li'l guy on this wet autumn day that we are having in August.

[via drawn]

Personas is a project by Aaron Zinman, a student in the Sociable Media Group at MIT, which turns your name into data-art by mining the Internet for mentions of it and visualizing the patterns found.

Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. It allows you to see how the machine is working, revealing the computer's uncanny insights and inadvertent errors such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world where digital histories are as important - if not more important - than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant - for now. Fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, and this kind of data is indispensable but far from infallible.

My name doesn't yield a lot of results, but what it does come up with is a little disturbing:

[personas, via lifehacker]

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has operated a successful repertory cinema for many years. Michael Govan, the director of the museum, however, has recently announced that they will be cutting the program. This, needless to say, is a horrible development, and one that has national consequences for the already ailing repertory cinema circuit. Many filmmakers and critics have stepped up to criticize the LACMA's move, including Martin Scorcese and Peter Bogdanovich, but the best critique to date has come from my good friend Kyle Westphal, who literally wrote the book on Doc Films. He eloquently touches on both the disingenuousness of the LACMA's administration, and on the need for repertory cinema in general:

Simply stated, the whole history of cinema is not available on DVD. It cannot be studied adequately in the comforts of one’s home. And that home repertory is no substitute for a curated program that responds to and is influenced by local sensibilities and tempers. It has a character distinct from the nation’s Netflix queue.

This is a hard message but perhaps not so hard. It is broadly analogous to ‘Buy Local,’ a slogan of informed consumerism that is easily understood and practiced by a substantial portion of our population. It is implicitly understood that a purchase represents not only an exchange of money for goods but an affirmative vote for a certain way of living and all of the productive infrastructure that will sustain it.

In the same way, repertory film-goers cannot be motivated by nostalgia alone. They must be made to recognize that they are stakeholders sustaining a wider movement greater than any individual institution. Museums, of course, could not mount lavish exhibitions or comprehensive retrospectives without collective action—touring programs, collaborations with peer institutions, and the like. It’s the same story for film.

Read his whole post here, and then please sign the petition to save the LACMA film program.

Also, feel free to listen to the much more lightweight defense of repertory cinema I provided a few years ago on Chicago Public Radio.

[motion within motion]

Carpeted Afterhours, the comedy-ish group I co-founded, will be appearing at O.I.N.K. at the Playground Theatre on Wednesday, August 26. I won't be in this show, at least not in the flesh, but it should be plenty creepy. Here's the promotional photo for it (it's hard to tell, but I believe I'm the bottom left mouth):

Carpeted Afterhours @ O.I.N.K.
The Playground Theatre
3209 N. Halsted, Chicago, IL
August 26th - 8 p.m.
$7 at the door