old post #12, 17 apr 96

Posted on February 14th, 2010 by Scraps.
Categories: Lists, Words, Comedy, Untruths, Old Posts.

I taught Madonna to eat, sleep, drink, breathe, ride trains, open envelopes, file taxes late without penalty, drop heavy objects from tall buildings, execute perfect triple axels, throw darts accurately with either hand, compensate for the distorting effects of rear-view mirrors, cheat, fly (with or without wings), sprint backwards, extract revenge with no chance of prosecution but with full knowledge of the victim, open child-proof packages effortlessly, play accordion while retaining her friends, tighten belts, loosen sockets, chew gum in a beguiling working-class manner, groan convincingly, belch like a lady, construct origami pets of every genus, pop corn in her mouth, lead oppressed south americans to freedom, defend a field hockey goal mouth, swim, dropkick, shimmy in a corset, tap the zeitgeist in her dreams, and die in her sleep.

In return, she taught me to relax. Ahhhhhhhh.

0 comments.

fifteen books in fifteen minutes (approximately)

Posted on June 15th, 2009 by Scraps.
Categories: Lists, Words.

Don't take too long to think about it. List 15 books you've read that will always stick with you -- The first 15 you can recall in 15 minutes.

Velma did this on livejournal, and I am curious what books my memory pulls up, especially now with my damaged memory.

Little, Big by John Crowley
The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (aka Brian O'Nolan)
Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things by Gilbert Sorrentino
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree, Jr (aka Alice Sheldon)
Love Trouble by Veronica Geng
The Most of S.J. Perelman
Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme
Lanark by Alaisdair Gray
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
The Collected Poetry of James Merril
The Collected Essays of George Orwell [5 vol.]
The Collected Poetry of W.B. Yeats
The Collected Poetry of Emily Dickinson
The Novellas of Hortense Calisher

The Collected Essays of George Orwell is cheating. And I wanted to include a book I'd never read -- probably The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer -- but that felt like cheating, and cheating is proper only once per list, I figure.

Your turn.

2 comments.

eponymous hiphop?

Posted on December 10th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.

It was only when I began actively compiling Eponymous Albums That Aren't Debut Albums -- now up to 86 items -- that I became aware that there seems to be a much lower percentage of eponymous albums in hiphop than elsewhere. Does that seem true to anyone else?

0 comments.

eponymous update

Posted on December 6th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.

The list of eponymous albums that aren't debut albums is up to fifty. A surprising number of them are from musicians who actually had an eponymous debut, but chose to repeat the title.

17 comments.

eponymous but not first

Posted on December 5th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.

Over at the useful and fun website Rate Your Music, I have begun a list of eponymous albums that aren't debut albums. I've seeded the list with twenty albums, and am takin suggestions for more (I have to add them myself). I'm only interested in standard albums of new material: not compilations, box sets, etc.

11 comments.

slough of despond - a list in progress

Posted on December 4th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, Lists.

Months ago I promised our friend Joy the bartender a mix of bleak, dark, depressing songs, and finally got round to recording it a couple days back. It's far from perfect; in its eventual final form I wouldn't be surprised if I replace half of these:

3 comments.

ten bands with vowels in their names

Posted on September 17th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Lists, Comedy.

Abba: The vowels in their name stood for vowels in the group members' names as well.

The Velvet Underground: Introduced zeugma into rock lyrics.

The Monkees: I think the "y" in monkey is voiced like a consonant, don't you? Yuh. Monkey-yuh. Right? So they picked up a vowel here.

The The: Still cracks me up! The The. The The The The The. The.

Van Der Graaf Generator: The doubled "a" is surprisingly common among Dutch bands, but is eschewed by Frisians.

Van Morrison: Not actually a band, but a person. His real name is Van.

Ebn-Ozn: Lost two of their vowels in a lawsuit, sparking their satiric masterpiece "AEIOU and Sometimes Y".

Styx. Name doesn't look like it has any vowels, yet it does. Look closely.

AEIOU: The only band name to have all the standard vowels of the alphabet, in alphabetical order!

XTC. Technically not qualified for the list, but I didn't think I could leave them off.

2 comments.

one for the well: top 50 xtc songs

Posted on May 24th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, Lists.

Velma told me today that my name had come up at my old online home, The Well, when discussing XTC -- it was opined that Scraps would doubtless have a list of top 50 XTC songs. And so, of course, I do.

Top Fifty XTC songs:

Earn Enough for Us
Great Fire
Making Plans for Nigel
1000 Umbrellas
The Mayor of Simpleton
Collideascope
The Wheel and the Maypole
Life Begins at the Hop
Pale and Precious
Towers of London
No Thugs in Our House
Generals and Majors
Scarecrow People
That Wave
Respectable Street
Season Cycle
Beating of Hearts
Jason and the Argonauts
The Mole from the Ministry
Love on a Farmboy's Wages
Ten Feet Tall
The Meeting Place
Human Alchemy
All of a Sudden (It's Too Late)
Another Satellite
Pink Thing
Senses Working Overtime
Dear God
The Loving
Day In Day Out
Vanishing Girl
Funk Pop a Roll
The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul
Washaway
Big Day
Then She Appeared
Ball and Chain
Me and the Wind
War Dance
Burning with Optimism's Flames
Deliver Us from the Elements
River of Orchids
Love at First Sight
Dear Madam Barnum
Snowman
Wake Up
Sacrificial Bonfire
Across This Antheap
English Roundabout
This Is Pop

The last few could easily be replaced by any of nine others.

13 comments.

updating 1999

Posted on May 11th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.

I borrowed a few 1999 albums from the library to try to fill some of the many listening gaps in my 1999 top fifty list. A few quick notes:*

Mos Def's Black on Both Sides is probably one of the twenty best hip-hop albums I have ever heard.** It may end up in my 1999 top ten. It's long, but engages my interest all the way through, and its musical textures are right up my alley.

Sigur Rós, Ágætis Byrjun. I'm trying to give this a fair shot, but through two listens in headphones at work I've been thoroughly bored. Not only does this seem to be all about sound with little attention paid to structure, nothing about the sound grabs me. It just feels meandering and moody. Maybe something will snap into place some listen down the line.

Flaming Lips, The Soft Bulletin. Somewhere between the previous two. Intermittently engaging, sometimes very interesting. I'm remembering a lot from play to play, which is always a good sign. I tried this album years ago, and it left me cold; ever since I've grouped it with Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs, albums from the same period that lots of people thought were right at the top of the year and that didn't put me off but didn't grab me, either. I came back to The Soft Bulletin because I was blown away by "Free Radicals" from At War with the Mystics (and listening to that song again now it reminds me of a Ween song from Pure Guava, but I can't remember the name).

Marion Brown, Live in Japan. I've only listened to this once, but it sounded great, with long songs that never palled. This will make the list, but I haven't begun to learn it yet.

*I'm trying to figure out how to get substantial writing done here. I haven't had time to flesh out ideas into the kind of posts I like, so I am trying writing quicker, shorter things, to see if I can build them into more substantial posts.

**An area in which my opinion means fuckall.

8 comments.

1999: another shortlist for the incredibly pointless 999 albums project

Posted on April 14th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.

I am slowly compiling a list of my favorite 999 albums from 1951 to the present, playing by the same rules as the 99 albums list (no best-of compilations, etc). I'm doing this a year at a time. This is the second shortlist: my 1999 top fifty (the first twenty to twenty-five will probably make the final list). 1998 through 2000 was the most intensely obsessive stretch of new music listening in my life; this list may be the peak of albums that make people go "who the hell is that"? Yet in these three years I was more aware than ever of all the albums I didn't and couldn't hear, all the new music I couldn't follow. Many -- most -- of the albums in rateyourmusic's top fifty are ones I never heard, or heard once, or heard one song from. When Sonicnet got eviscerated by MTV and I lost my job professionally keeping up with new music, I abruptly gave up on digging for new music on my own, letting stuff come to me more than I pursued it; since then most of my active searching has been through the past, and there are far fewer obscurities on my new music lists.

Choosing among the top three in 1999 is one of the toughest decisions for me in any year:

1999

The Dismemberment Plan, Emergency & I
Of Montreal, The Gay Parade
Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs
Lilys, The Three Way
Fiona Apple, When the Pawn...
Sleater-Kinney, The Hot Rock
Self, Breakfast with Girls
Randy Newman, Bad Love
Applesaucer, Applesaucer
The Vandermark 5, Simpatico
The Negro Problem, Joys & Concerns
Abigail Grush, The Phantom Beat
Kristeen Young, Enemy
Bis, Social Dancing
Dave Holland Quintet, Prime Directive
Les Savy Fav, The Cat and the Cobra
R. Stevie Moore, The Future Is Worse than the Past
Shannon Wright, Flightsafety
Wilco, Summerteeth
Opeth, Still Life
Pinback, Pinback
Sam Prekop, Sam Prekop
Joel Forrester & People Like Us, Believe It
Lamb, Fear of Fours
Joe Henry, Fuse
Greg Brown, One Night

(a live album, but the songs are mostly otherwise unrecorded; originally issued on vinyl in 1982, but the cd resissue is the complete show.)
Archer Prewitt, White Sky
We, Square Root of Negative One
Built to Spill, Keep It Like a Secret
The Roots, Things Fall Apart
Friends of Dean Martinez, Atardecer
Jason Falkner, Can You Still Feel?
The Beta Band, The Beta Band
The Aluminum Group, Pedals
The Olivia Tremor Control, Black Foliage
U.S. Maple, Talker
Owsley, Owsley
Hovercraft, Experiment Below
Blinker the Star, August Everywhere
Etienne Charry, 36 Erreurs
April March, Chrominance Decoder
Prince Paul, A Prince Among Thieves
The Music Tapes, First Imaginary Symphony for Nomad
XTC, Apple Venus, Volume One
The Science Group, A Mere Coincidence
Oneida, Enemy Hogs
Kristin Hersh, Sky Motel
Clare Cooper, Valentine
Steve Coleman & Five Elements, The Sonic Language of Myth
Clive Gregson, Happy Hour

4 comments.

1989: the first shortlist for the incredibly pointless 999 albums project

Posted on March 11th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.

I am slowly, in my copious free time, compiling a list of my favorite 999 albums from 1951 to the present, playing by the same rules as the 99 albums list (no best-of compilations, etc). I'm doing this a year at a time. This is my 1989 top forty (the first twenty to twenty-five will probably make the final list):

1989

The Pixies, Doolittle
Volcano Suns, Thing of Beauty
De La Soul, Three Feet High and Rising
NoMeansNo, Wrong
XTC, Oranges and Lemons
Kirsty MacColl, Kite
Dave Holland Quartet, Extensions
Peter Blegvad, Downtime
Joe Jackson, Blaze of Glory
My Dad Is Dead, The Taller You Are, The Shorter You Get
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Tangle
Bob Mould, Workbook
The Momes, Spiralling
Lou Reed, New York
Television Personalities, Privilege
Jane Siberry, Bound by the Beauty
Steve Lacy, The Door
Elvis Costello, Spike
Lyle Lovett, Lyle Lovett and His Large Band
Glass Eye, Hello Young Lovers
Bob Stewart's First Line Band, Goin' Home
3 Mustaphas 3, Heart of Uncle
Lounge Lizards, Voice of Chunk
Thinking Plague, In This Life
10,000 Maniacs, Blind Man's Zoo
Pere Ubu, Cloudland
Bel Canto, Birds of Passage
Shrimp Boat, Speckly
The Frogs, It's Only Right and Natural
Neneh Cherry, Raw Like Sushi
The Ex, Joggers & Smoggers
Michael Penn, March
Marilyn Crispell, Live in Zurich
Jack Walrath, Neohippus
Ut, Griller
Muhal Richard Abrams, The Hearinga Suite
A Confederacy of Dunces, Tsk, Tsk, Tsk
The Wedding Present, Bizarro
K.D. Lang, Absolute Torch and Twang
Boiled in Lead, From the Ladle to the Grave

15 comments.

bad rhymes

Posted on March 9th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Lists, Badness.

The Wombat File is asking for everyone's worst song couplets of all time. Help out this worthy cause.

I would also like to collect here rhymes that are forbidden until further notice. At the top of my list is "use/abuse". Any word where you have a good shot at guessing the rhyme word before the next line starts is a possible contender. Hall of fame entry: "museum/see 'em".

15 comments.

sunday top five

Posted on March 4th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Lists, Stuff, Cartoons.

Top five incomprehensible animated characters:

5 - generic Peanuts parent*
4 - Kenny
3 - Boomhauer
2 - Mushmouth
1 - Donald Duck

*perhaps not strictly qualifying as animated, since never visible

1 comment.

lost sides

Posted on February 15th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Lists.

I've been going through some old mix tapes. In a way mix tapes were more fun than mix cds, in the same way that vinyl record programming could be more rewarding: you can fool around with the sides. You also had four primary positions available -- the first and last songs on each side -- instead of two.

The best mix tape I made, though, might as well have been a cd. It was a thematic loop:

Moebius: a mix tape

side one

Gruppo Sportivo, "Mission a Paris"
Shudder to Think, "X-French Tee Shirt"
R.E.M., "Hairshirt"
Pavement, "Cut Your Hair"
Barbara Manning, "Scissors"
Chickasaw Mudd Puppies, "Words and Knives"
Brian Eno, "Dead Finks Don't Talk"
My Dad Is Dead, "I Had a Dream"
Blake Babies, "I'm Not Your Mother"
Juliana Hatfield, "My Sister"
Peter Blegvad, "Daughter"
Railroad Jerk, "Call Me the Son"
Pylon, "M-Train"

side two

the Motors, "Airport"
the Pixies, "Motorway to Roswell"
the Raincoats, "Off Duty Trip"
Lowell George, "I Can't Stand the Rain"
Pal Shazar, "Three Sheets to the Wind"
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, "My Pal the Tortoise"
Tortoise, "Along the Banks of Rivers"
Wire, "Sand in My Joints"
Culture, "International Herb"
Volcano Suns, "Bumper Crop"
MX-80 Sound, "Fender Bender"
Tuxedomoon, "Crash"
the Residents, "Die in Terror"
Mission of Burma, "Smoldering Fuselage"

I think I need to make a mix this weekend.

3 comments.

sunday top five

Posted on February 11th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, Lists.

Top five songs about waiting:

5 Pere Ubu, "I Will Wait"
4 Pretenders, "The Wait"
3 Velvet Underground, "Waiting for My Man"
2 Ed's Redeeming Qualities, "I Will Wait"
1 Matthew Sweet, "I've Been Waiting"

Top five songs about waitressing:

5 Tori Amos, "Waitress"
4 Jane Siberry, "Waitress"
3 Heavens to Betsy, "Waitress Hell"
2 Suzy Bogguss, "Eat at Joe's"
1 "It's an Art," from Working

12 comments.

personal radio

Posted on February 7th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, Lists.

Phil Ford at Dial M for Musicology issued an Ipod Random Challenge a while back that has resulted in several interesting posts. The lists are supposed to be annotated. I'm going to stick to one observation per song, which may have very little to do with the actual song. A few of these are songs I'll be writing about eventually in the Song Project.

Here are the first twelve songs my ipod (a Zen microphoto, actually, but i hate the name Zen) served up:

Ultravox, "All Stood Still"
Ultravox polarize me: I love their robo-synth uptempo stuff like this and "Sleepwalk", which are like Gary Numan songs with more active menace. I hate their languorous stuff, because I think they still sound robotic, but with overemotive Bryan Ferry-type music the effect to me is like an obscene parody of passion.
Self, "Meg Ryan"
Self is probably best known for recording a version of "What a Fool Believes" -- and an album of originals -- entirely with toy instruments. "Meg Ryan" is not from that album.
George Harrison, "Wah Wah"
Recommended listening in a footnote in the great Donald Barthelme story that consists of a letter from a man to a psychiatrist explaining why he's agreeing with his girlfriend's decision to end her therapy and buy a piano.
Quasi, "Our Happiness Is Guaranteed"
My favorite science fiction song ever.

top five science fiction songs:

5. Devo, "Jocko Homo"
4. Gary Numan, "Are 'Friends' Electric?"
3. the Pixies, "The Happening"
2. the Dismemberment Plan, "Memory Machine"
1. Quasi, "Our Happiness Is Guaranteed"
Soft Boys, "Strange"
My favorite Robyn Hitchcock song. I'm a sucker for this kind of eerie sound.
Tin Huey, "New York's Finest Dining Experience"
From their great and underdiscussed new wave or whatever -- art pop? goofy post-punk? -- album Contents Dislodged During Shipment.
Undertones, "It's Going to Happen!"
Oh, these guys are another entry for the Best Album Is Not The One Everybody Says It Is list. Both their second and third albums are better than their nearly unanimously preferred debut.
X, "Nausea"
Does their great slow menacing thing. I saw them live more often than any band in my life.
Dead Kennedys, "Nazi Punks Fuck Off"
And this is the band I saw second-most often. Wow. (I use the past tense because it's really unlikely I'll see anyone more often than this. Well, maybe Joel Forrester.) What a great punk song this is, fierce and smart and no-bullshit, a barrage.
Charles Mingus, "Pussy Cat Dues"
One of the half dozen songs I'm most likely to whistle idly.
Lambchop, "Let's Go Bowling"
A vividly sad song.
"You Must Meet My Wife", from A Little Night Music
I really want to learn this with Velma to sing in piano bars. It is hilarious, and while the man gets most of the singing the woman gets most of the best moments, with "yes that much seems clear" and "no I'd strike her first" two of my favorite line deliveries in all of Sondheim.

My player is heavily weighted to the pop song side of my taste; I do most of my listening while commuting, and I enjoy having (mostly) songs I've known long and well.

That was fun.

1 comment.

sunday top five

Posted on February 4th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Lists, Stuff.

Top five fictional stalkers:

5 Inigo Montoya
4 Charles Kinbote
3 Rupert Pupkin
2 Ahab
1 Gollum

11 comments.

five things

Posted on January 18th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Lists, Stuff.

Richard at The Existence Machine tagged me to write five things about myself that You probably don't know.

I've done this one before, on my more personal weblog, but that post wouldn't really fit here, since I amuse myself by treating Parlando as a more purely subject-oriented weblog, not so much about me except in the ways that can't be avoided. It's an interesting exercise for me here on two levels: first, I don't have a sense of how much I have generated any expectations about who I am here at all; second, I don't yet have that good an idea who You are. But I'll try.

1 - I barely went to college. I thought I technically never graduated from high school, but my parents maintain this isn't so, if I recall correctly (and see below). I went to a program that was supposed to be three years of high school and three years of college (a really bad idea in my case). We "commenced" from high school after three years, and received the remainder of our credits to graduate from high school in our first year of college. But once in college, I transferred out of the program. I don't remember ever receiving a high school diploma, and I dropped out of college in (I think) less than a year. I'm not specifically sorry about this, but my entire education is a series of missed opportunities for various reasons, and I am very sorry I never went to a good college, and missed the whole college experience (for good and ill, yes).

2 - Yet my first full-time job when I arrived in New York in the mid-1980s was helping edit volumes of litcrit for the Chelsea House Library of Literary Criticism (under the supervision of Harold Bloom, though I never met him). I loved that job. Most of my days were spent researching at the NYU and Columbia libraries. I'd never burned out on academic criticism in school, and I almost entirely got to read and choose what I liked. Mostly I was editing chapters on obscure authors, some of whom were a revelation to me, but occasionally I got a major author that no one else wanted, and those were great fun. I got to do huge chapters on Dickens and Wordsworth, for example.

3 - I have a godawful memory for the events of my life. Even my recent past is hazy. Specific events come back to me if the memory is triggered in some way, but even then the memory won't feel lived in (especially visually); it will be more of a narrative memory. I remember things I hear much much better than things I see.

4 - I read slowly. I read everything as a voice in my head, so if you read something aloud, that's the basic speed I read at, and that is considerably slower than most readers I know; but I also stop frequently to think about what I've just read.

5 - I will buy any book that has a cover by Leo and Diane Dillon.

5 comments.