C and I bike along the bike path that runs along the Charles River to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. It’s a gorgeous fall day and the leaves are just beginning to turn here. We’re going to see the famous collection of glass flowers made by father and son Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, who were based near Dresden and worked from 1886 to 1936. For the time being, some of their glass sea creatures are on loan here as well. I’ve heard about these for ages but have never seen them, and they don’t disappoint. They’re entirely made of glass, though there are, sometimes, invisible wire supporting structures. Even the coloring is made of glass and they aren’t transparent or translucent as one might expect. The brothers used a kind of painted enamel of colored glass powders which was then fused with the models.
One might also expect exclusively flowers, as that is what the collection is called, and one might imagine vaguely pretty copies of lilies, roses and orchids. Well, those are there, but most of the specimens — they were commissioned by a Harvard professor for teaching biology — are much more mundane, and all the more spectacular for it. Some look like common weeds, ripped out of the garden with a tangled bundle of roots dangling from the bottom. And here they are, made entirely out of glass.
Here’s a tangle of leaves, tendrils and the traps of a pitcher plant:
It’s all glass. Just amazing. Sort of crazy too. But when one imagines that there was no color photography to speak of then, and this would have been an imaginative way for the professor to have “specimens” available for his classes all year round…add to that that it would have been a lifelong commission for the Blaschkas, and the obsessiveness makes a little more sense. The father and son team took their secrets to the grave.
Here’s a sea slug made of glass:
This wonderful little museum is located right in the middle of Harvard University. We rode through the yard to reach it. The nicely mowed lawns, hidden from the surrounding streets, the august halls and weight of history and reputation — well, one can easily see why students here might come to feel separate from the world, and slightly superior to it as well. Cambridge, in England, has a similar vibe, a feeling that here is where the masters are handed their instruction manuals.
After that we biked to the relatively new Institute of Contemporary Art building to catch Tara Donovan’s show there. The ICA is located in a sea of parking lots just south of downtown Boston. It’s an odd area, but they do at least have a spectacular view of the bay. Donovan’s show was just amazing. Her work usually consists of installations of ordinary materials, lots and lots of them, arranged on a wall or on a floor in a way that, hey, reminds me of coral reefs or weird sea creatures.
Photography was not allowed, but I snuck a snap of a ceiling piece made of Styrofoam cups. Sometimes these pieces are not even glued together. There was a spectacular wall of drinking straws that, we were told, collapsed during installation, and so tiny bits of glue were needed to prevent another disaster.
As you can imagine, these pieces can’t be picked up and plopped down just anywhere. Transportation is impossible for many of them. They have to be, most of them, re-made every time. The local biologists, evolutionary scientists and similar folks at Harvard and MIT are, we were told, enthralled. You can see why.
It’s getting colder. There’s snow on the ground, but Lily, Mark, C and I bundle up and ride down along the canal that borders the St. Lawrence until we get to the old part of town. We stumble upon a couple of amazing costume shops and, as Halloween is tomorrow, we stock up. The shop is crowded — today must be their big day — and the place is filled with folks who want something beyond the traditional mass produced costume. The transactions are all in a mixture of French and English. I purchase some items for everyone and everything I buy is white.
The show is in a massive club, almost like a theater, with the front area reserved for standees. So this particular audience is on their feet from the start. Friends from Arcade Fire drop by — they’re in the very early stages of beginning a new recording — as does Dan Levitin, the neuroscientist at McGill who writes about music.
C and I bike around town to check out the various contemporary art museums. The Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation is closed, as is the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art and the Art Gallery of Ontario, which is being remodeled. I opt for getting my bike repaired; the travel has taken its toll.
The air is cold and clear and the wind in the early part of the day is bearable, so we bike south along the lake for a few miles. Heading back towards town, gray clouds roll in and it cools down. The wind picks up and we see some snowflakes; not so pleasant anymore.
Our show is in the opera house — very fancy, prestigious and grand. I am surprised that the folks in charge allow the audience to dance in the aisles, as they do for the last third of the show. I can’t imagine that being allowed at Lincoln Center, for example.
The next day C, Mauro and I bike out to Oak Park, where there are a whole bunch of Frank Lloyd Wright houses, including his very first commission after he left the Sullivan firm. That one looks more like a Victorian Gothic mansion gone out of control, but one can see hints of what was to come. I prefer the prairie style ones that came later, which seem to contain mixtures of suburban ranch, Gothic fortress and art nouveau/deco.
Some of his other vaguely modernist ones look less uniquely modern in the context of the surrounding houses in this neighborhood. The Wright houses are sometimes like morphed versions of the surrounding midwestern suburban houses — elongated, fractured and stretched — but with many of the same elements still intact. One can see where his style came from by looking up and down the street. In architectural books one sees his houses in isolation and they seem to have sprung out of Wright’s imagination fully formed and out of nowhere, but that’s clearly not the case. While the other houses are nowhere near as original, there is a common solidity and grammar.
Wright’s home and studio was in this neighborhood too, at least for a while. It seems almost a little incestuous; the neighborhood architect, getting commissions from his immediate neighbors (many of his commissions are on his own block), reworking the kinds of houses that surround him.
On the way out, a long bike ride west on Chicago Avenue, we passed out of downtown, over some rivers and then first through a Latin neighborhood in the process of being gentrified and flavored with some hipster elements. Alongside the bodegas and Mexican groceries are some indie record shops and fancy restaurants and lounges. Interspersed with this are elements of the long established Eastern European population that makes up much of Chicago’s history. The layers of communities and immigration are all right there. The Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art is closed, but their website shows that there is a lot more going on besides pierogies and kielbasas. A little further away from downtown this neighborhood gives way to the ghetto, where there are storefront churches, guys in hoodies manning the corners, lounges, fried chicken and fish fry joints, liquor stores and check cashing stores. One church creatively uses a 60’s plastic chair to represent the hand of God, or maybe Jesus.
A lounge called Dr J’s Place also sells package goods. Their sign lists 3 kinds of music that they feature — rock, blues and dusties. Dusties are RnB oldies from the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s.
There’s a major FFA (Future Farmers of America) convention in town. They’re swarming all over the hotel and the surrounding streets, with their blue jackets with patches commemorating their achievements. I covet the jackets, but don’t think there’s any way I will get one.
What is polyculture that Charlie digs? It’s growing multiple crops, a sort of imitation of natural diversity. It often replenishes the soil and is more efficient in the long run; the need for fertilizers is reduced, as well.
The big monument in the center of town celebrates a series of historic land grabs masquerading as wars.
A series of military actions, in which land was usurped from the Mexicans, the British, the Indians, and then the Mexicans again, for a second time. The winners erect monuments to their victories while the losers quietly seethe and never forget.
In an interview with The New York Times, Eminem reveals he rides a bike. See you on the streets of Detroit in a few days, Marshall.
We have a day off here in the Land of Cleve, so a group of us hailed 2 taxis to take us to a movie theater in Shaker Heights to see W. I ride shotgun and when we tell the driver we’re going to see a movie, he volunteers that the last movie he saw was Last Tango In Paris. Hmmm. We ask the driver for his number so we can call him for a drive back and he hands me a card, saying, “This is MY number.”
We arrive and the fare is a little over $18, so I pull out my per diems from my pants pocket and give him $100 and two singles and ask him for $80 in change. He takes just the 100-dollar bill and puts it near his crotch and begins to fumble with his change purse. After a bit of this, I remind him that he doesn’t have to make change — just give me $80. He then says to me that I never gave him the $100. I say I did, and he points to the remains of my per diem in my other hand and says, “There’s your hundred right there, this one is mine.” I say, “No, I definitely gave you the $100.” He repeats, “That’s your hundred in your other hand.” Oh, man.
This goes back and forth a couple of more times and soon Ray and Kaïssa in the back seat both say, “We saw him give you the $100,” which gives me the assurance to keep pressing. If it were just me in the car, I might have started to doubt myself at this point…which is how these scams work. I say calmly to the driver, “Don’t do this, don’t go there,” but he keeps at it. A couple more calm exchanges, and then I snap. I start screaming at the top of my lungs at this guy, and remind him that “I’ve got your number in my back pocket and if you don’t fucking give me the money, I’ll call the cops, right now.” I have my hand on the door handle. He still hesitates and I continue to scream at him, “Alright, I’m calling the cops, you fucker.” I begin to open my door. He hands over the money and I give him a 20, plus a 2-dollar tip. Why in the world did I tip this guy?
His initials on his card are R.A.S. and the phone number is 216-440-8568.
My adrenaline is now sky high and Kaïssa and Ray help calm me down as we wait for the others to arrive; THEIR cab driver got lost! And this is not an obscure place, but a major intersection with shops all around.
The next day in the afternoon, I ride out to a camera store to replace a lost charger. I go east on Euclid Avenue, one of the main drags of Cleveland. Or what used to be the main shopping street. For about a mile, I pass building after building, boarded up, abandoned or empty. Beautiful buildings too, with lots of character. It seems like this was, not too long ago, the main shopping street — a bustling area filled with folks buying and selling. Big department stores and offices. Some of these buildings are in the midst of renovation; their facades partially ripped off, scaffolding here and there, but the work seems to have stopped midway, for lack of funds I suspect. And given the economic earthquakes of the last few weeks, they’ll stay that way for a while. One boarded up building houses a child care center on the ground floor; another — this one not boarded up — is a center for monitoring child support. Ads on the bus stops remind young men that dads are important.
It’s all too easy to connect the dots in the scenario painted by these institutions, or lack of institutions. One passes block after block of empty buildings and shops and asks, “How was it allowed to get this far?” Granted, lots of towns still have vibrant centers, and parts of Cleveland are still active — the clubs in the warehouse district and the fancier suburbs like Shaker Heights. But when encountering a place like Euclid Avenue, one thinks of the Mayan temples that were already being abandoned before Cortés even arrived.
What kind of people lived here? What did they make? Why did they leave?
This was always a factory town, full of immigrants, mostly from all over Europe. Poles and Greeks, Italians and Ukrainians. The lovely greenway I biked, along Martin Luther King Boulevard from the art museum to the lake, was dotted with statues and terraces commemorating each immigrant group. The Azerbaijanis pulled out all the stops. So, while Chicago may have the Anish Kapoor Cloud Gate in Millennium Park, Cleveland has this:
There’s an inscription nearby, just in case you don’t get the point, which says, “Azerbaijan, land of eternal fire, ignites the imagination, warms the spirit and kindles the soul.”
The sons and daughters of these immigrants made for a legendary Rock and Roll audience in this town. Hard workers and hard partiers. They lay claim to the first Rock and Roll radio show and Allen Freed claims to have coined the phrase, though I suspect a “race” record used it way before that. So, there is some justification for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum being located here. Hard to bottle the manic release associated with that music and its audiences and the loopy creativity of the forerunners of self-made popular music in a respectful museum setting. Hard bordering on impossible. Like most of these places, the organizers kind of throw up their hands and end up exhibiting a bunch of outfits and artifacts — my old big suit being one of them.
I was tipped via an e-mail sent by a man named Tim Rossiter to my office. Tim wrote: “I've got to tell you about a special Cleveland treasure, Glenn Schwartz. Glenn started the James Gang in the 60s, then moved to California and was in the Pacific Gas & Electric Co. He flipped out soon afterward and was in religious communities. He's had a rough life and is tortured and crazy…Now Glenn is 67 years old and plays in a blues trio for free late every Thursday at a small bar called Major Hooples. There are typically 20-30 people there and he is jaw-droppingly amazing to see. His playing is like electric bolts straight from his psyche. He jumps off his amp and plays guitar with his teeth. And he often preaches fire and brimstone between songs. It's something very special and you won't see anything like it except on Thursdays in Cleveland.”
Well, Tim didn’t exaggerate. The place was a low-key little dive and at one end, not even on a stage, was Glenn, his brother and a drummer, all playing at full volume.
Sure enough, between amazing and inventive Hendrix-like solos, he would admonish the audience and prophesize “blood on the moon and War in America.” He may have lost his mind but his fingers are firing on all cylinders.
The bartender told Natalie that if you wanted him to stop playing you just had to dance. Well, see for yourself. Apologies for the mostly lousy sound quality; Glenn’s playing deserves better, but you’ll get the idea. As Tim said, only in Cleveland.
We’re staying at 21c, a combo museum and hotel here in downtown Louisville. The ground and lower floors are given over to curated shows of contemporary art, much of it from the collection of the owner, Steve Wilson and his wife.
I was given Wilson’s contact by Stefan Sagmeister, who designed the package for the various physical manifestations of my current album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, as well as many of my past CDs. My palatial room (for which I was generously comped) features a whole wall of photos of Thai Ladyboys (sex changes), a series of photos of a woman undressing in front of a variety of men, and a muscular Chinese man in his underpants holding up the top of the picture frame. I guess some of these pieces were deemed not quite appropriate for the lobby.
(That’s not Kurt, by the way)
Well, I wasn’t going to make much use of this luxurious apartment all by myself, so I invited all the band and crew to stop by for mint juleps after they had their dinners. Jenni volunteered Steven to bartend, and with the huge patio there was plenty of room for all of us plus local musician/actor Will Oldham and some of his pals. It’s not really his kind of scene, I imagine, this hotel, but it was nice to meet.
During the day a few of us biked to the massive Cave Hill cemetery, which is so big it has a lake with a fountain, ducks and swans. Colonel Sanders is buried there, but we missed his gravesite. We moved on, through a neighborhood of large houses, to nearby Cherokee Park, “built” by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also designed Central Park and quite a few other urban parks, and we stopped for some homemade applesauce at a picnic table.
Apparently, Elizabeth found happiness at our picnic table.
Others biked in the opposite direction and came across blocks of burnt out buildings.
Some of our group wanted to do the arch (there’s a kind of funicular that goes to the top), but Obama was speaking there, so the area was cordoned off. Natalie and Jenni went to the speech and said the vibe was wonderful, hopeful and optimistic, with women noisily correcting him every time he said, “IF I become president,” with cries of “WHEN, WHEN!” People were carrying “Republicans for Obama” signs.
I rode southwest in search of a museum on the edge of town that ended up being too far. I passed a day-old bakery with a suggestion to “Get your buns in here!”
A yard with a dead plushie.
The central plaza reminds me of Karl-Marx-Allee in the former East Berlin. The civic buildings are remarkably similar — the architecture of control, as some would describe it, has a grammar that transcends ideologies.
This was only a small portion of this allee. If one turned around, one would see the Arch at the end of the boulevard, a piece of massive sculpture that wouldn’t have been out of place in the Soviet Union. None of this shock and awe takes away from the magnificence of the arch or these government buildings, the feeling that we can only surrender in the face of such awe-inspiring solidity, power and symbolism. I’m getting carried away.
A few of us ride through the empty center of town to the Grand Center arts district where the venue is located. We pass block after block of vacant office buildings and warehouses, beautiful buildings most of them. Steven comments, “At least they haven’t torn the buildings down and replaced them with ugly modern condos.” Some have signs on them that they are available for lease; others stand dark and empty. There is no traffic. It’s Saturday afternoon at 4 p.m., and we can ride down the middle of the street in the center of town.
The venue, “The Fabulous Fox,” is a former movie palace in the Orientalist mash-up style — strangely skinny Buddhas sit in sconces, lions with glowing eyes flank the lobby, and an elephant looms way up high above the proscenium. It’s way over the top and massive, almost the size of Radio City Music Hall in New York City.
There are “inspirational” pinups above the urinals in the men’s room.
Jackson Browne and some of his band came to our show and we chatted a bit afterwards. A former girlfriend of his was close with Jenni when Jenni was a kid, so they reminisced. It turns out we have Spanish friends in common as Jackson passed through Zahara, the little town on the Atlantic where I’d spent a few summers. He was impressed that big TV personalities, who also summered there, like El Gran Wyoming, would sit around with the local townspeople and sing songs late into the night. There’s no pretension, which I also found incredibly refreshing.
Mauro, with some help from Jenni, organized a trip to an indoor go-kart racetrack here.
The next day, I bought a few CDs at Homer’s, the local indie record store in the Old Market district, and then rode across the river on the pedestrian bridge to Council Bluffs, Iowa, continuing downstream along a bike path past Harrah’s Casino. After passing through a bit of woodland, I came upon another casino with a fake riverboat attached. The bike path routed through the casino parking structure.
After going a few more miles, I wondered to myself if it might be possible to cross back and return on the western bank rather than retracing my steps. If there were another bridge somewhere I could do it. Most of the bridges, however, are for the interstates and bikes are strictly forbidden. My map says there is a bridge nearby, the South Omaha Bridge. I see workers building a clone bridge alongside the old bridge and others making a bike path that will be like an access road running parallel to the highway when it’s done. Right now, it’s too muddy to ride on.
It’s raining, so plans to bike down the lakefront to the new Calatrava designed museum are scuttled, but Lily has a school friend Andi here who has a better idea. A group of us pile into Andi’s car and head for the house of Andi’s friend Paul, who lives in a boat that was built on dry land. Paul, says Andi, is a bit of a historian of the rich local culture, so together they’ll take us on a mini tour.
Paul’s house was originally built by a man who accidentally sank an identical boat in the harbor. Out of remorse or sheer perversity, he decided to rebuild that boat, but on dry land, “where it could never sink again.”
When he applied to the local city board to build this structure, the approval was denied, so he built it off site and surreptitiously dragged it up here one night. Needless to say, it’s since become a local landmark; Paul says it’s not uncommon for couples to consummate their relationship on the lawn. After that, a dentist lived in the boathouse and is the current landlord. Not your ordinary dentist — a wacky dentist/inventor who among other things invented a dog-powered chariot and a dental hovering device, consisting of a series of bungees and pulleys that would allow him to perform dentistry while suspended ABOVE the patient! I wish I could have seen this device. Can you imagine being this dentist's patient? Paul said this dentist also performed a root canal on himself. “Those damn dentists are so expensive!” he was quoted as saying.
Paul said that when he was in 8th grade, he was hitchhiking and he got in a car and the driver was playing the song “Life During Wartime.” Young Paul found the music somewhat disturbing and told the driver he really didn’t like this kind of stuff and could he get out immediately. Of course, a year or so later, he changed his mind.
As in Pittsburgh, some parts of town that were deemed not worth “saving” in the urban renewal schemes in the 60s and 70s are now the neighborhoods that are the most full of life, the ones that are coming back in some fashion. Where Andi lives, there’s a food co-op that only sells organic and local foods, artists studios, and a Polish social club whose traditional mission was to provide gymnasiums for the youth of various cities. This one still has a gymnasium attached. Nearby is a tiny herring factory and downtown there are still big sausage works. The breweries that once dominated this town used to build little taverns on every corner, to feed and lubricate their workers. Some of these remain, but not very many.
We head over to the ghetto, to Satin Doll’s Lounge, run by Doll — Minette D. Wilson — a former dancer with Duke Ellington and others. She wasn’t going to let us in at first, as someone across the street had called her and said, “There’s a white man taking a picture outside.” That was me.
She did let us in, however, and we had a round of drinks while Paul caught up with her. Someone had poisoned her dog, which was not good news. The room was filled with Christmas decorations, faded photos of Doll with Duke and some more recent soul singers, stuffed animals and Milwaukee police patches. One door was labeled “sleeping room” which we guessed must be a place where customers who were too drunk to get home could sleep it off. Paul claimed that I was a gun freak, so Doll pulled a .38 revolver from under the bar and we passed it around. She removed the bullets before handing it to me.
Paul explained that Milwaukee experienced one of the last waves of Black migration from the South. And therefore, those who came only experienced about 20 or so years of the city’s industrial heyday. That’s not long enough for a second generation to get a good foothold. The 1st generation of newcomers are often just surviving and it’s their kids who more easily navigate their way into the workforce and build new neighborhoods. But just before this might have happened, Milwaukee, like a lot of other industrial cities in the US, went into a decline. The folks in this part of town were discriminated against and had little recourse or resources to enable them to rise. It became a welfare zone, which it still is to a large extent.
On the way back, towards the center of town, we passed the home of a Cherokee with a McCain placard in his yard. And what a yard it is:
Around the side there was even more. The planter in the foreground is a coffin!
We continued our Milwaukee tour with an impromptu stop at a Shriners Lodge, the Tripoli Temple. The building is a massive faux Arabic pseudo-Taj Mahal, designated a historical landmark. The side door was open so we went in. A woman, sensing our curiosity, generously offered us a tour.
She said they had recently renovated the place, at considerable cost, as all the walls were discolored from years of cigar smoke. Here’s an ashtray designed to hold multiple cigars.
The décor was, as is typical in these lodges, a hodge-podge — a mash up of what folks in the US must have imagined was oriental. Thus, in the Oriental theater here, Buddhas, camels, and Arabic motifs are all mixed together. Why the fascination with the Middle East? Was it because it was the “holy land?” Was it the birthplace of masonry (the pyramids) and of the weird and ancient mysteries — arcane links to the order of the universe once known only by the wise inscrutable ancients? An order kept hidden and encoded for centuries, not to be told to just anyone, but to be revealed to American businessmen smoking big cigars and doing good works? Needless to say, whatever it emerged from, it’s truly impressive. A grand physical metaphor for something, something we can’t quite put our finger on. A kind of syncretism seems to be at work here as well, a melding of opposing beliefs and a substituting of one set of symbols for another.
I gather that these types of places went into decline with the emergence of television. The rise of mass entertainment meant that these men (and they are mostly men’s organizations) could now zone out in front of the tube and forgo the dues and duties of these social organizations. Something was obviously lost — a community, a network, and the fulfillment of a biological need to be together in a large room. Now they hold weddings here. We were shown the room where brides could select from potential reception décor. And wedding parties don’t have to be dues-paying Shriners to be welcome anymore.
We headed for our last stop, the Calatrava designed wing of the art museum, situated right on the lakeshore. As in other cities, these architectural baubles are, I imagine, built to attract cultural tourism and also to give the city a visible “brand.” Don’t know how well it’s achieved those goals, but his work is certainly spectacular. Here’s the parking garage located under the museum:
The entrance foyer is the most alien biomorphic cathedral-like space in the building, pretty awe-inspiring.
There was one show in this particular “building,” although most of this building more accurately functions as a gateway to the older museum building alongside it (designed by Eero Saarinen).
The current show, of techie interactive art, had one spectacular and creepy piece. It was by Daniel Rozin, whose work more often consists of wall mosaic-like structures that mirror, by tilting their various “tiles,” the person who is looking at them. There was one of those in this show as well and there were a few in the “Machines and Souls” show I participated in over in Madrid.
This one was a little different. In a dark room, a sort of semi-transparent screen had a projection, which mirrored anyone who stood directly in front of it. But the mirroring was weird and disturbing. It saw the edges of our shapes, the outlines, and filled them in only if you stood still; and then if you moved, the pixels projected on the scrim would disperse, fall and disintegrate, as if you were crumbling like a pile of powder. In the way some insects only see things that move, this only sees things that hold still. Here is an image of Andi (Andrea Maio) who got up close…you can see a really creepy smile.
In the older museum building, Paul rushed us up to an upper room that had quite a few pieces by the late Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, the “outsider” artist from around here who worked in a variety of media and styles. He made vaguely, almost abstract, apocalyptic paintings by smearing paint with his fingers, baking tools, and his wife’s hair (!) into contorted plant-like shapes. They’re very colorful and slightly disturbing. He also made sculptures out of chicken bones. I’d previously seen little towers. Here, there were a couple of tiny thrones made of painted chicken bones.
He idolized his wife Marie, and had a unique way of showing it. He took lots of pictures of her, dressed and more often undressed, quasi-classically posed, a little like in girlie magazines sometimes, and sometimes wearing crowns he had fashioned for her.
Oh, to be worshipped, to be the muse and inspiration of a genius who fills the house with chicken bones.
Our show is at the ornate and beautiful Pabst Theater. The metal chairs in the top balcony all say Pabst in metal across their backs. During soundcheck, we started working on a new old song, “Air,” a song I haven’t played live in 30 years, I suspect. In figuring out the tune, I notice that the lyrics have no rhymes and that’s not the only peculiarity. The song moves back and forth from rhythmically stop-start sections in minor keys to lyrical sections in major keys. I can see a link between the approach to the text and the rhythmically abrupt sections and the band who some of us rush over to see after our show.
Deerhoof and a few other bands were playing at what seemed like a former social hall on the 3rd floor of a building downtown. We catch the end of their set. It’s pretty magnificent in a fractured way. Very sophisticated. There’s ultra precision in the drums and guitars — abrupt, perfectly timed short outbursts — while the vocalist, Satomi Matsuzaki, sings in a calm voice. Their lyrics have no relationship whatsoever to typical rock lyrics (though I can see a link to the non-rhyming lyrics of “Air”). The vocal melodies are atypical as well. I’m not claiming to be an influence on Deerhoof, though it would be flattering if I were, but more that songs like “Air” are part of a link in a chain, or drops in a small river, that approach music and lyric writing from a different, slightly mutated angle. As if to emphasize that none of their musical structures are accidental, the band sells sheet music at their merchandise table, as well as the usual t-shirts and CDs. They made the sheet music for one song available to fans before their new record was released.
Guitar Dance
I’m standing on a chair watching and listening and admiring the physical interplay between the 3 guitarists, and Greg the drummer, who sometimes rises out of his seat and even walks around his drums at times. It’s a kind of dance that’s evolved over the course of many performances, both consciously and unconsciously. I don’t imagine anyone says to the others, “When I do this sound and movement with my guitar, or drums, what if you did that, physically, in response?” but it’s a kind of emergent choreography all the same. Of course, I now think to myself, “What if we did a new thing with the dancers that made that 'guitar dance' more explicit?” I write to Annie-B, who it seems, is thinking almost the exact same thing. There are a few days in the November break when we can try something out.
