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Style Blog 1: Style Fahct: Thrift Shops & Generations

I was joking with a friend that I feel so strongly about this theory, it’s not a Style Theory, it’s a Style Fact.  I am reminded of my favorite way to imitate a drunken hooligan: “Uenglund iz the best coontry on Earth.  FAHCT.” I might insert a video of this at some point.

OK, the Theory/Fact: When kids first start consciously noticing adults as separate individuals, and noticing the way they’re being dressed, probably around the age of 3-4-5, there’s a certain style going on in the world.  Courduroys, polyester, colors, greys, shoulder pads, linen braies, whatever.  And when those kids hit their freedom/adulthood at 20 or so, they naturally want to recapture some unconcious bit of their magical childhood as they try to piece together their personalities.  So it’s nostalgia for the way the world dressed when they were 4.  So the kids who were born in 1982 were 4 in 1986 – where the reverberations of the New Yuppie, itself an echo of the early 1960s (pre-Beatles), Hair Metal combined to make the angular, one-shoulder (or shoulder pad) looks of the mid-80s.  And those same kids turn 20 in the early aughts, and boom, the 80s return, synthesizer bands become fashionable, echoing Depeche Mode, the Cure, New Order, in the 80s, as well as the Darkness becomes fashionable, echoing Warrant, Winger, Motley Crue, etc.  And people last decade were again were wearing the sharp angles of the new yuppies of the 80s.  A lot of black and white.  Nagel prints done in clothing form, etc.  Just how the youth of the 90s echoed the 70s, with orange and brown cordouroys etc etc.  Unconscious childhood nostalgia.  You could do a whole piece on this just looking at pant-width.

But beyond very-early-childhood-nostalgia-on-reaching-adulthood (I am trying to make English like German by slamming words together) there’s another technical reason the style returns in 18-20-year cycles.  Style goes from the vanguard leaders, to the masses, then the vanguard rejects the look, then the masses reject the look.  So nothing is lamer than the look of 10 years ago.  It hasn’t come back yet, it’s just lame.  But what happens to all that rejected clothes?  Inevitably a lot of it sits in closets, gradually gathering dust until it’s taken to Goodwill, or places even lower down the vintage totem pole.  Not the hip vintage stores, just the cheap-ass places.  Where it sits, priced at a dollar or less.  Eventually, the hippest kids, the vanguard of the teenagers who like to play around with style, start shopping to make up new looks to bring to school to push the envelope.  Where do they go shopping?  These kids can’t go to the expensive ‘vintage’ stores, which carry stuff from 25 years ago and up that adult hipsters can afford.  They kids don’t have any money, so they go to the true THRIFT – for when thrift means stores, the Goodwills or lower, and get the only clothes they can find to play around with.  And the cheapest clothes is that stuff from 10-15 years ago that’s just gone through the cycle of being cool, then mass-popular and mass-produced, then rejected by the vanguard, then rejected by the masses.  There’s tons of this stuff clogging the arteries of the bottom-of-the-barrel used clothes circuit.  So the style hounds go to their local true thrift store, grab these items on the cheap, and make up weird outfits to shock the school or the street with.  But these people’s art is to make whatever they’re doing look cool, they have that gift, and the other kids know it.  So in the 2000’s the hip kids scoured Goodwill and it was all crap from the 80s, just like hip kids in the 90s scoured Goodwill and it was all crap from the 70s.  And in 2012, sure as rain, it’s gonna be a bunch of bad mass-produced 90s grunge-influenced clothes, itself a combo of early 70s earthiness and late 70s cocaine color-burst gloss.  And bands like Yuck playing 90s-style are cool, at least in England.  But the style pioneer kids will make it work, and the sort-of cool kids will notice and do versions of it, then the fashion industry will pick up on it, then everyone will notice, that crap will get mass-produced, the cool kids will move on, etc.

Fahct.

But this theory is all wrong.  Cuz everyone’s dressing like it’s the 20s now.

Ok, wear what makes you happy, preferably recycled.

Vlog Blog

My brother convinced me to do some interviews, or more accurately, vlogs. Actually, he didn’t convince me, but I’m doing them anyway. Even though I won the lemon battle 3-0 to decide the matter. We’ll talk about Ethan Gold videos, the ones he worked on anyway, like this one benefitting the Midnight Mission shelter, and we’ll talk about Gold Brothers videos, for the silly times. We’ll have more Gold Brothers videos coming soon, taking us to the Pacific Northwest, and to Ireland (posing as Scotland), and we’ll try to give it the treatment we gave Jamaica (portrayed by Echo Park, LA) last year during the presidential primaries, when the muses and fates of bad punnery forced me to make my first dub reggae track. Subscribe to the Gold Brothers here after subscribing to me on YouTube if you like silly songs, and now, kind of silly talking.

Alright, that’s enough links to make a golf course, but Lord knows I’m not a sports fan. And I’m the guy who dreamed about golf course depth charges going off because they were eating into otter habitat.

The Fog of San Francisco – On the Size Queens and Tim Mooney

When I first heard The Size Queens in my brother’s car, I got the joke, but that was all. “Baby Prostitute” seemed like Lou Reed with a better sense of humor, and more humility. Later, listening to Appetite for Redaction, the Size Queens’ meditation on Afghanistan, the enveloping sound started to work on me in other ways. Along with their defiant and funny critique of a world scrambled and cheapened by American wars and cultural imperialism, the music started to tell the other story, the one that’s too specific for words. “Afghan Star” and “Red Mountain” in particular felt like somehow in the ashes of the American Century the Size Queens were finding ways to re-collect the scattered bits of magic that those of us with a tendency to depression might on first glance think had been totally pulverized by bombs and television shows. But the magic is still there, whirling down a dusty road in Kabul or floating on waves of empathy from a singer to a bag lady pouring pennies into a Coinstar® machine. I compliment myself to think I’d found kindred spirits, though really I’ve often been more unmoored than I like to admit. But here was some music and words and performances to remind me that I’ve got a brain to see a world falling apart, and a heart to mourn it. So, I did my best to give props so that other people might get the jolt that I did… Maybe a few people saw the flares I sent out here and here.

But also through all this I found myself mourning a guy I didn’t know personally: the producer and drummer of their first four albums, Tim Mooney, once of American Music Club, and involved with a lot of San Francisco bands I’d only heard about, but hadn’t heard growing up there. Mooney died last year. Never knew him. Far too young, not through any excess that I read about, just an untimely death of a man with a family. But even though I didn’t know him, and didn’t know most of the music he made until recently, in his recordings of Adam Klein and Michael Mullen and the Size Queens I can taste the fog that rolls over Twin Peaks and into the Mission, and how it reminds us of the drowning ocean that’s always so near. It must have come through in the way he put the sounds together, and also in the kindness and mature support that a good producer brings to a room, helping those who are turning their insides out to make something understandable out of what could just be a purging. So I’m grateful to him for the soul in the sounds he put together and the humanity he brought into the spaces where the recordings were made. All that made the Size Queens records possible. I obviously can’t say anything of what he brought to his family and friends. Maybe his children will know some of his humanity through his recordings one day.

So here I am in Los Angeles, thinking of San Francisco fog, its cool freshness cleansing but like death as well, damp and haunted, carrying molecules of fishermen drowned through history in the infinite ocean’s cold currents. And how that fog picks up the odorous warmth of the competing burrito shops as it tumbles down the hills, getting greased a bit and sticking to the painted wood of houses as it breaks up on reaching the Bay. And how this fog carries sadness but gently muffles echoes and makes us layer our bodies with sweaters and coats, and makes those of us with San Francisco in our blood sometimes layer our recordings with the sweaters and coats of guitars and keyboards and delays and reverbs and distant noises. I wish Tim Mooney were here for me to tell him how much I appreciate the bit of his work I’ve been able to hear this year in one band I’ve enjoyed so much.

All our souls return to the fog one day. I hope it will be warmer than it feels when night falls.

On Hurricane Sandy and Climate Destabilization, or, Pansy-ass Phrases Aren’t the Best Way to Convince People Something Terrible is Happening

So New York is starting to seem untenably low-built, along with every world port city, every wetland, every ocean beach.  The sea level is rising and we know why – heat up ice and it melts.  Is this surprising?  Result – more and more flooding.  Heat up tropical water and the storms get more violent – we know this too.  Result – crazier and crazier storms with bigger storm surges as they crash into shores.  Result again, compounding the sea level’s rise – more and more flooding.  This is all not only predictable but it has been predicted repeatedly over the last few decades.  And it will only get worse…

In the meantime, the US of A is still struggling to convince itself that any of this is real.  There are a lot of people whose current livelihoods depend on keeping us burning fossil fuels, and I sympathize with them – coal miners, oil derrick technicians, etc.  A lot of these people are barely making ends meet.  But more importantly and more disgustingly, there a few really really really rich people whose constant expansions of their already sultan-sized fortunes are made easier by keeping us burning fossil fuels.  And they have a lot of money to feed into news organizations and think tanks and political campaigns to keep the dialogue going the way they want: sowing and reaping seeds of doubt about nearly-unanimously-agreed-upon science that really should be obvious to anyone who’s breathed onto an ice cube to make it melt.

All of this is incredibly frustrating and angering of course.  Someone needs to write a blistering screed like the Vikings punter did about gay rights.  Maybe a BP oil rig worker somewhere is ready to let words rip.  Bring it on, good sir!  In the meantime, I want to say something about the weak-ass language of the left.

It must be that the same personality type that cares about things, the tender-hearted personality, also of course lacks that Machiavellian deviousness, or even just a basic grasp of the power of words, to come up with the right catchphrases.  But truth and honesty rarely win the day unless they’re cloaked in something that tugs at core human emotions.  Something that makes us feel love, fear, or whatever it is that we need the words or images to convey.  Gandhi was a lawyer, but he put on Indian peasant robes not just because they were comfortable.  He knew he had to look like a man of the people to put his message across.  Would you be afraid of “The Exorcist” if it were called “Perhaps My Daughter May Have A Cold”?  You have to sell your ideas… Can we think about how to do this?

Ok, let’s.

“Global warming”: the first phrase to the plate in recent years.  Accurate enough.  But come on, people — ‘warming’ evokes the sun streaming through a window on a chilly morning, or a puppy nestled in the lap, or the seats of luxury cars.  Crappy marketing, people.  Not as terrifying as the original “greenhouse effect”, which may not sound like a disaster film, but at least sounds like a thriller.  Get people to imagine life in a greenhouse with no possibility of escape, and it’s a lot less pleasant-sounding than “warming”.

So, now we seem to be stuck on the more general term “climate change”.  Maybe Al Gore winning an Oscar made it uncool so now the indie kids needed something better.  Or else the right successfully reframed the dialogue.  But AGGH!  Whoever came up with “climate change” needs to quit their PR job also.  Again, it’s factually accurate: the climate is being changed.  But you only need look at Obama’s 2008 campaign with the success of its hope ’n change routine to see how SCARY the word ‘change’ is to the human spirit: It’s NOT.  It’s HAPPY.  “Change your life,” “change your fortune,” “change your waist size,” etc etc – Change is a POSITIVE term.  People LIKE change.  So when you are describing something really really bad, don’t call it “climate change”!  Can I get a witness??

OK, I’m not a PR guy, or an evil-plot-scheming cat-stroking psychiatrist, or a propagandist for a 1930s politician.  So I don’t know if I’ve got the best ideas, but we need some better ones to describe the horrific gravity of the problem we face.  Here are some kickstarts to get the juices flowing, which are also accurate, but at least don’t sound so frigging pleasant as ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’…

“Climate Destabilization”. ‘Destabilize’ at least hints at chaos. “Global Climate Destabilization”.  Make it big?  “Human-Life-Supporting Climate Destruction”?  “Life-supporting Biosphere Destruction”?  “Planet Overheating”?  Help us out, people, let’s come up with a short phrase that expresses how real and bad this situation is (while still being truthful – it’s probably not going to happen in one big wave like a disaster movie, but it IS happening over a short couple generations, which SHOULD HORRIFY EVERYONE.)  OK?

PS, while we’re on it, can we also come up with a new term for ‘environmentalists’ and ‘environmentalism’?  Sounds pleasant, nerdy, and kind of trite, no?  “Green” is better — at least I can imagine the flags of victory — but it’s pretty easily co-opted, as we’ve seen with the spread of fake-natural products.  We need to proclaim the rights of the natural world, but an ‘environment’… that’s something you easily change at will.  We’re not talking about an environment, like the mood music at a boutique hotel; we’re talking about our one and only PLANET.  OK yes the Earth will survive as a chemical-laden spinning rock even if we make it nasty, brutish, and boring due to an extreme die-off of most species, but it’s not going to support life very well.  And it’s not going to support the wonderful, complex beauty that makes our ability to appreciate it in all its hugeness worth having.  So put on your thinking caps, kids, we could use more powerful words for that one too.

PPS, vote, and then after that, let’s hold the hands of whoever wins over the fire and get them to see this not as a cute little special interest to occasionally throw a bone at, but as the great challenge of our era.  Let’s make fighting for our Earth sound as important and heroic as it actually is.

Night Rider

riding through the streets of echo park, on a tuesday under streetlight.  halloween is coming and the houses are decorated with ghosts and gravestones.  the only sound is the rolling of the tires.  i’m on my mother’s bike.  hope her ghost’s not mad about what i said.  there’s no sign of human life, just houses and more houses.  staring at architecture is nice but it’s no way to cure loneliness.  the occasional flicker of a television set on a dark living room wall.

i moved to the east side after paying off birthguilt in a borderland where i’d escape the pit bull breeder’s whimpering charges next to my painted box and ride into south central knowing no-one would bother a weirdo with a helmet riding through the streets without a dollar in his pocket. but now I’ve achieved the land of the hipsters and these people maybe should be my friends but here i am still listening to the rolling of bike tires at midnight in a city that eats the days away without a sign or a season to remind you that days become years.  but at least the moon is red tonight and i can get into scaring myself cuz it looks like electricity is the only life around here.  it’s not so late for everyone to be asleep is it?  maybe everyone’s dead and they died with their tvs on.  but i spill out of ghostland on to sunset and there’s a cafe i play at and there’s people spilled onto the corner and maybe i know people there right now so on the other side of the street i roll by and look and there’s the same crew i’ve seen before but i’m not one of them so i don’t stop, i’m just as far from them as i was when i lived in the toxic borderlands.  but the garbages are all pulled onto the side streets where i weave towards home and the smell of hundreds of families’ rotting food gently clouds the quiet streets in orange and purple puffy clouds that remind me of new york in a damp summertime.  so i guiltily inhale deeply the oranges and meat and discarded cleaning products as i pedal harder over hills.

the world is receding from my grasp
i’m just rolling on the surface unconnected unattached
like a fly or an electron
these thoughts can make you crash
so to break the spell that won’t be broken by any gentle spark of lightning or the echoing roll of thunder or the soft tears of rain that would make it so much easier to kiss someone so the smarter part of me crashes easy four steps from my door. so i lay under my bike and let sweet pain wake my body in a circulating throb moves through arms and shoulders and listen to the spiders building webs between leaves and pavement

To Isis Sleeping

Belgrade, city I’ve never been to, but I’ve pushed my soul all over the world in the middle of the night, across a street is easy, and made gentler by raindrops you can hear but not feel.

Thank you Masa for making this reflection, sweetly distorted by your soul like ripples in a pond, gentle water.

This is for everyone who meets their lovers better in dreams.

Pictures from the Satellite

Pictures from The Satellite, Silverlake, Los Angeles back in February

Thanks to Emily MacDonald, Diana Phillips, Shane Greavette for the pictures.  Thanks to Emily MacDonald, Mitzi Spallas, Sara O’Donnell, and Rebecca Balin for the visuals.

Throwing History Into the Volcano of Music

This week there has appeared the first real article about my music that wasn’t only a review. Most of the album reviews I’ve had for Songs From a Toxic Apartment, my full-length debut, have been very good and nice, other than one jackass who did slack-jawed google-jockey work, dragged false biography into it, and tried to insult a band I used to play bass in by falsely outing my brother by confusing him with someone else who shares his name. In this case, this month the paper came to talk to me, two long interviews, as the writer came back a second time to get more meat, personal material he said he needed. As I might convolude, to contextualize the subject matter behind the subject matter of my debut record. The writer also did a lot of background work which shocked me when I read the article, but fair detective work in this case, pulling a lot of things I didn’t tell him into the tale, as well as making a pretty orderly digestible tale out of the disorder of reality.

Working on E.P.’s album a few years ago, we talked about whether titling his album to reflect the most recent tragedy in his personal history would drag that history back to life, and also whether it would cast a long shadow over all the other nuances on the album. Ultimately, his album title did crystallize that central theme, and the album was structured as both the portent up to and the aftermath of that violent thunderbolt. But while it was all true, it was still only partial, and his fears about this casting a shadow over some of the hope, nuance, and poetry of the record and his writing also came to pass and I think disturbed him. The press couldn’t really talk about his music without bringing his family history into it.

As last year I finished my debut album, which is now unveiling itself to the world, I became momentarily envious of novelists. I fantasized that novelists’ work is judged on its own merits, on each individual novel. The writing is talked about more than the writer. Partly because it’s easier to write about writing than it is to write about music, or to bicycle about philosophy, etc. But as literarature has shrunk into a niche, biography has become the lens into there too. There’s more interest in Virginia Woolf’s life than her work; even Shakespeare seems as interested-in now for the mysteriously limited shreds anyone knows about the guy who probably wrote all that stuff. This may be a pathology of our time in history. Freud’s actual revelations and also his overactive imagination still reverberate a century later. And this pathology (get it, dissing Freud, saying pathology, ha ha) has only been fed in an era when people think ‘information wants to be free.’ Everyone indulges the psychological detective’s impulse to dig and dig until they can piece together enough evidence to call something the truth. I don’t think this blunt-direct-cause-hunting is the only model for understanding reality, but it’s one way of understanding the world, and to be fair it’s far from the worst one that’s ever taken hold of a civilization. It’s why ‘based on true events’ and other blurry nods to reality are used to sell movies, and why there are so many writers whose memoirs are their first books instead of their tenth.

But I am having to breathe a lot more deeply this week to not freak out. There’s a lot of really personal stuff in that first biggish article about “Ethan Gold,” the guy who shares my name and looks pretty much like me. Specifically I want the A. family to know, if they read it, which I hope they do not, that a lot of what sounds like it’s about them is not, and that which is I have already forgiven. The article found a tale that makes sense, especially to make sense of The Rise and Fall of CAP, the brutal or sarcastic rock opera I set aside writing to extract my more human album Songs From A Toxic Apartment. I’d tell them but perhaps they’ll never see it. But I’m now seeing how conversation gets distilled into story. I’m far from the only person who’s gone through this experience, it happens every day in the press, but it is intense, especially for a person who by nature retreats constantly deep into the shell of privacy. This is something I am working to transform, into a stance where my shell is all of existence itself, endless and invioble.

Towards the end of college, over a long night of drinking and making pancakes, I told a friend a bit of my history. After three years of friendship, I’d said nothing about any time before we met, except my city of birth. It took me an entire night of conversation hours to even make coherent sense of the details, even to get all the facts out. And it had taken years to get to a point to even be able to say anything about my pre-history. Like a lot of kids I showed up at school having deliberately lost my baggage in transit. We move to a new phase, especially leaving home, and leave our history behind, and reduce it to one or two bland facts to display as a decoy, to survive the initial couple minutes of conversation with a new person. And then like all these new friends or lovers we all get on to being the person we are, or want to be. We exchange a tiny incidental kernel as show of faith, like a token exchange of meaningless gifts between tribes. A ritual, the facts of which are irrelevant.

But now it’s time to learn to hide in the light.

Every night this week, as if sunlight were bursting onto my eyelids on a too-bright morning, I’ve churned out of paper-thin sleep with a dread of my history encapsulated and mythologized, my cloaks stripped off. “I sentence you to be exposed before your peers,” as Roger Waters put it (appropriately enough as the article references the Wall). Naked, like maybe I’m getting branded all over again.

But it’s not my right to be sensitive about this. For one thing, the truth is this time it’s only skin. It won’t bruise. “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me,” they tell us when we’re kids, though they know that’s a pretty liberated mindset to expect kids to rise to, when most adults fight their own battles in the realm of words. Well, that nursery comfort can be true, if we nurture a strong core, or a non-attached one, or both. We can willingly be exposed before our peers, whether to ridicule or adoration or indifference, without losing an ounce of our hard-won peace. And as a musician in this era this seems to be our job, to be a totem. To be simultaneously judge, stockade-builder, and condemned man paraded through town. To be the sacrificial animal, and build the fire that burns the sacrifice, and even give the last rites while we ourselves burn. (It’s certainly better that this be the artists’ job than the politicians’, whose real work shouldn’t have any piece of this role. They’ve become required to do this job as well, and they do it horribly, since it’s so at odds with the type of personality that wants that kind of power in the first place, and even more at odds with the type of personality that can see clearly and have the courage to do what’s best for the people. But that’s another matter…)

So, it’s our lot to be in the light, to risk psychic death by exposure to the elements. And in our time the elements aren’t days of solitude facing a brutal desert sun, or a stare-down of the tigers of the forest, but it’s the endless heartless onslaught of bits and bytes of data, the information-blob that devours without mercy. To be exposed and to survive, as private people willing to lay naked, our history for the world to chew up, barf out, and make new art out of in their own winter snow, consumed.

Yet, as we are all people always living in the present tense, we may as well give our history freely. Non-attachment isn’t only to things and people, but to our biographies also. If these stories, which is all they are now, help carry art’s spear of transformation, it’s an honor to give them away.

Your life history is not you – that’s one of the messages in the music anyway. So I let it go, set it free, where it can be homeopathic poison cure for someone else’s illness. I release my past, it’s not mine anymore, it’s compost for orchards, and it’s yours now if it happens to help or heal you.

Fever.

Home with a fever on a Saturday night.  I’d say it’s as good a time as any, but for me it’s really a better time than ever to start a blog, a first try at the great art form of the aughts, and it’s already 2012.  How late am I.  Well why not now?  When I feel ill the inhibitions to love fall away.  Like a drunken text from under a table at a bar, in the fever of illness I want to tell all the people I care about that I cherish them and that their lives are precious.  I even look with amused kindness on the few enemies… Truth be told no-one seems like an enemy when in the embrace of fever.  I also get to experience the fantastic Alice in Wonderland effect.  Last night my arms seemed for a while to be legs, big muscular legs like a Scottish rugby player’s.  Twas very strange having them attached to the upper part of my body.  Too bad no balls came flying in the window, for I would have known what to do with them!  When I wasn’t getting up to blow my nose I chose to find it amusing.  As I told one of the many other sickies this week, it worked for Coleridge.  Sometimes fever produces glittering cities I can ride over like in a celestial chairlift, and the buildings go up block by block wherever I turn my heavy head.  I guess this is why some people use drugs.  It’s the best reason, but it’s still a bad reason.

Is a fever a good door to the inner workings of a mind?  Does anyone care?  Do I care?  Like many first bloggings, I’m going to trumpet it loud and proud that this is just an experiment.  Really I’d prefer to be on stage or in the studio.  Like a cheetah would rather be on the savannah, not in a cement room.  Would soldiers rather be in battle than at training camp?  I don’t know, probably not.  (Any soldiers out there, speak up.)  I can be pretty sure the generals would rather have a war to fight than be doing theoretical simulations back in Virginia.   And that is just one of our problems.  At least we can take comfort that we are not unique, the Athenians went down for the same reason…

And consider my toe dipped in this business.  Whether I continue will be made apparent by whether this entry is at the top of ye page.

And here is a picture of the fever.  I FB’ed that my fever was such that I could cook an egg on my head, and someone suggested I capture the moment.  We care about customer service, apparently.

Photos from Fais Do Do

Here are some photos from Fais Do Do show.

Rest of the album on the Facebook Fan Page.

in the mountains

thanks Anne B for the picture

New Bedroom Closet Cover

BEDROOM CLOSET COVERS
number five
“The Flesh Failures” by Galt MacDermot, James Rado & Gerome Ragni

Hair and Godspell were the only musicals that got serious airplay in my mom’s living room.  I blame the hippies for a lot of sloppy parenting but they meant well.  Actually maybe they were just narcissists…. Hair was written by people a few years older than those dread Baby Boomers.  This song is, like several others in Hair, just amazing.  It was written to by played & sung by the entire cast.  The opposite of solo.  Let the sun shine in, we need it.

Ethan

My nice skinny Greek blog review

An evidently nice review in Greece!  But we don’t read Greek.  Tell us what she’s saying….

… για όλη τη νύχτα
Στο «Why Don’t You Sleep» µια ακουστική κιθάρα σε βάζει σε ένα παραµυθένιο σκηνικό, απ’ αυτά όµως που σε µια γωνιά τους παραφυλάει ζόµπι µε άγριες διαθέσεις. Επίσης σε προετοιµάζει για ένα από τα πιο όµορφα µουσικά ραντεβού, όπου ο Ethan Gold περιµένει µε το «Songs From A Toxic Apartment» ανά χείρας.

Και ονοµάζεται «Τραγούδια από ένα τοξικό διαµέρισµα» επειδή o Γκολντ το ηχογράφησε στο διαµέρισµά του – αν και η παραγωγή δεν χάνει πουθενά, έχει τα πάντα που ένα επαγγελµατικό στούντιο µπορεί να προσφέρει. Της ιδιοσυγκρασίας του Γκολντ (που είχε κάνει παραγωγή και ενορχηστρώσεις και στον Ελβις Πέρκινς) και το «Οur Love is Beautiful» που εξηγεί µε την ευθύτητά του το γιατί πρέπει να ξενυχτήσεις µε αυτά τα τραγούδια. Επειδή έχουν οντότητα, «ζωντανεύουν» και δηλώνονται αυτόµατα στην εκλεπτυσµένη τής ποπ πλευρά.

[It's all Greek to us.  Someone translate please, thank you!]

Ethan interviewed by Jan Linder-Koda

Click through on youtube to watch part 2

Bedroom Closet Cover, number four

BEDROOM CLOSET COVERS
number four
new order “age of consent”

my high school band covered new order.  they may be a gateway drug to fascism but it is a balm for the burning blue soul when these tones blast a car’s speakers driving nowhere too fast on a rainy night.
this was my first time making loops live.  i mess up towards the end & give a guilty look.  sumner always looks upset when he plays though so it’s ok.

ethan

bedroom closet covers, number two

not everyone has sweet memories of childhood.  then again, kurt was maybe just trying to shock.  i love nirvana when they tried to be the melvins.  sludge.  fun riffs to play on guitar but i thought keyboards & live drum machine would be more punk rock.  or punk wrong.  or dunked frog.  agghh life hurts.

-ethan

On Edge (celestial porch) (video)

Made by Michael Pope, Sarah Bassine, and Trevor Ristow.  In no particular order.  In fact it was all out of order, which was right for the tale.  Sang backwards in Chinatown.  Filmed in downtown NYC, obviously.  Wrong footage mistakenly included in the reels then kept.  Brutal glory years and machines.  Fractured identities.  Another version of this song, punk and screamed and fast and loud, was in movies to imply fear.  I find this version scarier.   Edited by Pope.

bedroom closet covers, number one

THE GREAT, GLOOMY BROTHER-SISTER DUO THE KNIFE.  I IMAGINE THEM IN DARK & COLD ENDLESS SWEDISH NIGHTS, HEAT ON HIGH, LIGHTS ON LOW, MAKING SOUND AND MOURNING TO EACH OTHER.  RAISED IN THE WRECKAGE OF THE BABY BOOMERS’ LIFE EXPERIMENTS LIKE I WAS OR RAISED IN A CRUSHING ARCTIC TOWN LIKE THEY WERE, (I IMAGINE), EITHER WAY WE ALL ESCAPE THE WORLD INTO THE SUFFOCATION OF FAMILY, THEN ESCAPE THE FAMILY INTO OUR FORTS AND FORESTS AND THE ELECTRIC PULSE OF MUSIC

Bedroom Closet Covers coming!

Bedroom Closet Covers coming!

I’m making a series of covers of some of my favorite songs. All made live in my bedroom closet. It’s a lot smaller than it looks with a wide angle lens.

Poison (video)

Made in Bangkok and over skype.  Hashed it out wherever the wires connect over the Pacific.   The benefits of the global economy.  A fraction of a fraction of what a studio would have paid.  And the amazing work of: Director / Designer Tod Polson, with Exec Producer Juck Somsaman, compositing Supervisor Poul Riishede w/ Salvador Simo, CG Supervisor Ingo Schachner & storyboard Thunyawat Punya-Ngarm.

sxsw

April 2007.

I had a strange experience at South by Southwest. The band I played bass for, the Honey Brothers, had a showcase slot opening for Redman and Sage Francis at SXSW. The Brothers are not a rap band. Anyway, I’d flown to Austin with my birth brother Ari who is also in the band, and we were doing interviews and going to shows and flexing our fingers in preparation for the show. The day before the showcase, a massive ice storm hit the east coast, and two of the Honey Brothers were on the tarmac on a plane at JFK, the engine revving up – they were the very next plane in line – when the airport was declared officially closed and all flights, including theirs, were forbidden to take off. We tried to convince the boys to drive icy roads to Baltimore to catch a flight the next morning, to no avail. The whole seaboard was a mess.

So, Saturday afternoon, at about 4pm on the afternoon of the showcase, I was sitting at a bar on 6th St., kind of an awful frat bar actually with bad fajitas and so forth. I’d declared to friends that I was going to take the slot, band or not, and do my own songs since I couldn’t replace the Brothers. But I’d failed to procure a band from people I knew, other than a bass player from my friends whose record I’d worked on. After paying for the crap food, I turned to a group of strangers sitting behind me and asked:

“Are you guys a band?” “Yeah.” “Do you have any more show today?” “No.” “Do you want to play one?”

Anyway, it was this hard band from Belfast called LaFaro and the guys were game to scramble to a rehearsal room and learn my songs. So with brother Ari on ukelele and melodica, Lindsay Stella from Let’s Go Sailing on bass and violin, and Jonny and Alan from LaFaro bringing the noise on guitar and drums, we learned a set of my songs and screeched to the show, only a little late, and played a set for a large crowd of Wu Tang Clan fans. It was brilliant. A lot of tall, beefy dudes with short hair and baseball caps clapped me on the back and compliment my singing and songs, “dude”, “brah”, as I walked through the crowd later that night. It was like a scene from “300″.

Ash Wednesday Story

A few years ago, I was living in a dingy apartment, recording dozens of demos for a very dark rock opera. It was a story of rage and despair about everything that seemed wrong with men: war, sex, brutality, insecurity, existential horror. A real “good time”, as they say in disco songs. What I didn’t realize at the time was that while I was having nightly terrors and thoughts of self-immolation, my dirt-cheap, crappy apartment was also doing a fair job of killing me. A few friends commented that they didn’t feel well in my place. I knew that I’d had asbestos fall onto my head when shutting the sticky door, and also had it crumble from the wall when fixing wires in my “studio” (which consisted of a Digi001 and a Mac in my “kitchen”, which was itself merely a small area of the hall with a hot-pot and a mini-fridge). Other events that would have gotten a less self-destructive person out of that place somehow didn’t get me out: carbon monoxide poisoning hospitalized my neighbor in the same building, who was also a musician, and I once when rotating my mattress I found had termite larvae coming out of my mattress. I cut out the colonized portion of the mattress and proceeded with the high life. Good times indeed. But also, what I didn’t know was that in addition to these pleasures I also had toxic mold growing under the floors of in my apartment, which was giving me a nasty cough and also clouding my mental state. I think after a childhood of terror and cowering at home I was so used to being deeply, sickeningly uncomfortable and chronically insomniac that this was what I thought living on my own as an adult was supposed to be like.

So I proceeded with the demos, while occasionally hosting a show called the Expatriots. This was my way out of the proverbial and likely literal hell-hole: I invited other unknown musicians, friends mostly, to perform songs at various bars and clubs around town. So each night I’d invite three or four musicians to trade songs on stage. My rule was you couldn’t play any set songs, you had to play something inspired by the person who played before you. And preferably tell us how the songs connected. I generally, then as now, found acoustic songwriters so boring, that I had to find a way to bring something that would make good of the only natural advantages of the medium, the intimacy and the storytelling. And it was also the one way I could think of to get myself to play in public, as I was buoyed by the collective strength of the other lost humans I played with.  One night a friend of mine brought Elvis Perkins to one of these nights to meet me. Elvis, who I assumed at first was a rockabilly cat because of his name, (certainly not his hairstyle) gave me some songs. I listened to the wandering, sad songs on his demo. But let me go back a bit.

After moving from San Francisco, the city of my childhood, to the city of angles, I’d recorded some of my music and did some short soundtracks, among them a few for my brother, who made a movie called “Helicopter” which was about the death of our mother in a helicopter crash. After three failed marriages and a few step families, an old love affair had rekindled between my mother and Bill Graham, the ‘legendary’ rock impresario behind the Fillmore, Winterland, Day on the Green, the US Festival, and other massive rock venues and concerts. I’d been on stage at and Cheap Trick and Peter Frampton and Black Sabbath (Ronnie James Dio era) concerts as a kid, blowing my ears out and getting zipped around in a side car because of my mom’s rich and famous boyfriend. Now after another marriage and step-family in between they were dating again, my mother living a bit of the glamorous life while Bill was finally with the smart real woman who’d dumped him years before for a cowboy. Anyway, I was just about through, maybe, sorting out the chaos and deep discomfort of my earlier boyhood when the helicopter carrying my mother and Bill from a rock show in the East Bay hit a power line in a storm, and slammed back against a 200-foot unlit tower and exploded.

Cut to a few years later, and I’ve recorded a couple of records for bands in San Francisco, in my mother’s basement. I’d jumped off the college train and become a machine man. I moved to LA to be closer to my brother, who was trying to be a filmmaker and was in the midst of a terrifying breakdown. I started writing my own sarcastic reaction to manhood and rock music that opera thing I called The Rise and Fall of CAP ­ while Ari took more drastic measures. Anyway, in the meantime I recorded more at home and sometimes in a ‘real’ studio, blowing most of the insurance money I’d gotten on my mother’s death. I also got a distaste for the record industry, recording a few things for other artists who took songs and sold them to movies without telling or paying me, etc. The usual stuff everyone loves so much about this business … lambs eaten by sharks … in an amphibious reality … anyway.

Well my brother survived, made “Helicopter”, which I scored and which won a student Academy Award, and I was doing the Expatriots thing, living in the toxic apartment recording 80 demos of the opera, and generally not thriving. Elvis seemed to be in a similar situation, in some ways better off, in some ways more lost than I was. Vague unfocused efforts at recording, general listlessness, obvious sadness and depression. He’d been through something that was more broadly high-profile but also pretty similar to my story. His father was Anthony Perkins, the famous actor. His father had died years before, and then his beautiful, dear mother Berry had been on one of the planes on September 11. So he had had a very public tragedy, several of them, and was, like I was, floating sideways in the putrid wind of grief. But I’d been through it a few years before, and had had a brother who I’d made a movie about the final chapter of our family tragedy with. So I was at that point a half step further along. And I liked his voice and his songs and his spirit, but I could see him and his music just floating sideways in the putrid wind of grief or else getting flattened by one of the various producers ­ nice friends of his famous parents ­ who he was vaguely talking with at the time. I’d had some frustrations with my own earlier attempts to get a sympathetic producer who’d understand what I was wanting to do with music, and through knowing both sides of the lens as it were, I told Elvis what I thought he ought to tell the producers in order to make sure he got something that felt like the full expression of the art he was trying to make. I was advising him for a while on this, over drinks in LA bars and at the shows we started playing together, and at some point in the middle of a show of mine I got a very clear idea in my head of what he should sound like in a recorded form. I jumped off stage to tell him. His songs were poetic but very long ­ either compelling or unfocused, depending on the mood of the listener and the performer. There was something fantastic there but it wasn’t just what he was doing nor was it the pop editing and smoothing out that the producers wanted to do. Inspired by my new notion and by his old demos and his new songs which were now well in my head, I told him how I thought he should sound, how it should be recorded, instrumentation, mood, process. I took inspiration from just three old records, things we both knew and liked, and figured that no-one was doing that anymore. I thought he should to make a pure record, made up of pure performances, something with arrangements and performances that would support a poetic, abstract storytelling style. Instruments and sounds that sound like they’re from another time, a time before electricity. Elvis liked the vision enough to at some point stop asking opinions of me, and just say he wanted me to make his record.  So Elvis and my brother helped me move out of the Toxic Apartment, and I agreed to make his record.  I think we both thought those naturalistic old records were easy.   Well as much as computers can be a bottomless bit, it’s a whole different challenge to produce using absolutely no tricks (or just old tricks), everything the hard way, analog, real performances, music the naked way where it’s either working perfectly or it’s terrible.  Those guys in the old days could really play. Those skills seem lost sometimes. But eventually we did it.  I built the arrangements that I’d imagined to support his stories, and after a lot of coaxing, pain, and prodding, Elvis shrugged off the haze of lethargy and sadness and gave us searing performances of the songs that were worthy of his beautiful writing.

The world has responded to Ash Wednesday.  Elvis had gone back east to school towards the end of the making of the record, where he rejoined with old friends to make a band which could play the songs in their new form.  After I mixed the record with our great recordist Dave Ahlert, Elvis took the record back to the east coast and was selling it with his new band Dearland at shows.  The blogs started to get it first, in the middle of last year, and the proverbial buzz started, then a label called XL Recordings picked it up, and it’s now just been released to universal acclaim, as you may have heard.  Reviews in Rolling Stone, Spin, Filter, Stylus, put it at or above the best records of the indie darlings that we all know and sometimes love.  Elvis’s story been framed as a story of loss, and it is that.  Ash Wednesday indirectly reflects this country’s great loss, but far more than that it is a totally personal testament to Elvis’ own ride through the darknesses.  I hoped to make something timeless, something that is the ideal manifestation of his unique story and spirit, but also something that will sound as good and speak to people as much about grief and beauty in 100 years as it does now.