Thursday, October 06, 2005

Looks like nothing's going to happen, that I must confess

THE WHO "Little Billy"
THE SCIENTISTS "Frantic Romantic"
THE SHOP ASSISTANTS "It's Up To You"
GRIFTERS "Divine/ She Blows Blasts of Static"

About a year ago, I burned today's songs from vinyl and transferred them at low res for posting here, but don't think I ever did. Anyone will tell you I'm slow but eventually get things done. The Who tune is from the great Live at the Fillmore East 1967 bootleg on Trademark of Quality, one of my favorite records. The Scientists tune is from a reissue of their first 7" and I don't know if Kim Salmon's voice changed or they used to have a different singer back then but isn't it nice, regardless? The Shop Assistants tune is from their perfect debut EP, I mean unless you count the Buba and the Shop Assistants single as their first but I don't, while "Divine/ She Blows" is the flip-side to the brilliant "Soda Pop" single. Notice the continued use of the false start, one of many potentially cheesey big rock moves the Memphis band breathed a new life into. BITD, man.

After last night's episode of LOST, where the camera almost-lingers on a copy of Flann O'Brien's brilliant and hilarious and fucked-up novel The Third Policeman (this copy of it, too), I'm almost-convinced that what's happening on "the island" is all some weird kind of purgatory because that's what's going on in Flann's book. That would be too much like what the guy who made Signs would do if he were writing the show, so I doubt it's true. But it's interesting (likely only to me) that they made such a product placement of that particular bit of literature.

Also in the "only interesting to me" category, I'm a little bit freaked that there's some kinda kooky gallery/ performance space that looks like they actually have really rad things going on in the apartment below the one I used to live in when that was a rather desolate part of Brooklyn, back in '88. The space is also the same place my Portland friend Jesse Durost, a great artist, used to live in, before we met out here. I guess the future of the Keep Refrigerated/ Room Temperature type spaces has to be headed towards Bushwick and East New York now, right? Keep Refrigerated was an art installation-besotted party that would regularly happen in Williamsburg in the '80s in an otherwise unoccupied former meat storage warehouse space. It was owned by this crazy Brazillian diplomat's kid and co-curated by the great Fabio Roberti, I think. I didn't care much who owned or ran things back then, because I used to be a hell of a lot more interesting. Oh, and Room Temp. was the successor to Refrigerated, so named because it was just in a warehouse space and not one that used to house meat... Get it?

7 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks for the Grifters mp3, Mike! I'm gonna hafta check out this new band called Penis Enlargement that your visitors keep talking about -- jonhope

2:43 PM  
Blogger fulsome said...

Sigh, sometimes I wish I was art-damaged enough to do the things that make great stories 10 years later.

Thanks for The Scientists song tho!

4:45 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's Kim Salamon, as far as I know. Citadel compiled two fine Scientists collections a few years agoi, but both skip over the band's early years (anything before 1982). I have no idea why, but the fact that it was (arguably) a very different band with only Salamon as the constant might have been the reason, I suppose. Thanks for the mp3 - I don't think this single is in print anywhere right now.

-- James

7:17 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

ummm, I meant Kim Salmon, obviously.

-- James

7:20 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I've never watched Lost, but the Third Policeman is such a great book that I'm now intrigued about the show. Far and away my favorite of the five Flann O'Brien novels that I've read. Penguin published a few collections of the newspaper column he wrote under the name Myles Na G'Copaleen, which are also great reading. I named my son Myles in tribute to the man -- jonhope

9:50 AM  
Blogger Mike said...

Matrimony did an ace cover of "Frantic Romantic" on their Kitty Finger CD, too.

10:22 AM  
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