Some cool stuff I saw in Chicago

This is my favorite painting in the whole museum, a study for "The Jungle" by the Cuban painter Wilfredo Lam. Sorry about the reflections.


My mom studying a huge Miro


The Buddha...this is the old part of the museum, obviously.


We went to the Chicago Art INstitute on Saturday -- and visited the new wing, where all the modern art is, for the first time since it was constructed. The new wing is amazing all by itself, full of natural light and really serene and beautiful, and of course, it has most of the stuff that I'm interested in. They also allow photos as long as you don't use a flash, so I took some.

Oh, and here's a photo of me and my dad. I swear I'm not drunk, though I look it.

Hey cool, new Giant Sand

Big Blurry Mountain will be out November 25. Until then here's this single, called "Fields of Green," which is excellent...love the little snippet of "there's a kind of hush all over the world."

"Fields of Green"

I'm in another dry spell for reviews.

One more for the road...acoustic guitar style

I’m going to Chicago for the weekend for my dad’s birthday, but I leave you with a review of the latest installment of the Imaginational Anthem series, which ran a day or two ago at Blurt.

The Imaginational Anthem series started in 2005, as a way to unearth forgotten guitar pickers from the American primitive tradition. For Volume 1, label head Josh Rosenthal doggedly sought out men (and one woman) from the Takoma school's 1960s heyday, resurrecting the careers of Steve Mann and Harry Tausig, remembering Takoma-school patron saint John Fahey, and also welcoming younger players like Harris Newman, Glenn Jones and Jack Rose. Yet as the series continued, it has moved out of the past, towards a younger generation of folk blues traditionalists. Volume IV focuses almost entirely on younger players, demonstrating, if nothing else, the strength and staying power of acoustic guitar blues.

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Tompkins Square is not big on free mp3s, so there’s nothing to post from this installment, but what the heck, here’s James Blackshaw playing “River of Heaven,” from #2, which is better anyway…

Watt and friends

Mike Watt has an album out with kind of an all-star back-up band – Nels Cline to start, but also Yuka Honda and Dougie Bowne. It’s called Floored by Four, and I have a review of it up at Dusted today.

Floored By Four is a one-off collaboration between a quartet of musicians, each with at least one foot in conventional rock, the other in more experimental jazz and improv. Mike Watt, who started the project, splits his time between playing bass for The Stooges and Porno for Pyros on the mainstream side, while also working with people like Elliott Sharp and Nels Cline. The latter, too, has a rock day job with Wilco, in addition to more eccentric outlets via his own solo work, the Nels Cline Singers and numerous jazz and improv collaborations. Yuka Honda made her name in Cibo Matto, but also partners with Boredoms percussionist Yoshimi Pe-Wei and has three records on Tzadzik. She used to be married to Dougie Bowne, the Lounge Lizards drummer, who has himself collaborated with John Cale, Arto Lindsay and many others. Now Honda is engaged to Nels Cline. It’s an interesting collection of talents, to say the least, and connected to one another with varying degrees of history, mutual understanding and past collaboration.

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At Summerstage last summer…

Demon's Claws

I have a review up today at Dusted of the new Demon’s Claws album, The Defrosting Of, which I called “laid back and loosely strung even as it blows apart at the joints, a countrified shamble buried in its most frantic moments”

It ‘s also the only album I can think of this year that rhymes “carolina” with “vagina.”

The full review

Probably best experienced live…

Static Static

My husband, Bill, and I (mostly me) recently discovered that you can download WFMU shows onto your iPod touch and then listen to them over and over again until you've pretty much memorized them, then go back to the WIFI cafe and get another one.

You have no idea how happy this made me. I basically haven't been able to listen to WFMU since they upped the bandwidth of their transmissions and put it out of range of dial-up connections. So, now I can. Though I don't have a Touch myself, so I have to pirate Bill's when he's not looking. I hear rumors, though, that I might get one for my birthday.

Anyway, I was listening to Liz Berg's show from 9/20 for the second or third time, and it occured to me that I just LOVED a couple of songs by a band called Static Static, who are, I think, from Canada, and post-punk-ish in aesthetic.

THey have a MySpace here.

They also have the two songs that caught my attention ("Satanic Speaker/Dementia", but especially "Dementia") on the Free Music Archive right here.

Okay, here's your chance to vote on my professional life. Should I take on a job that's huge and that pays about a tenth of my going rate, just because I'm not busy? I sort of tentatively said yes to ghostwriting a textbook at an absurdly low pay scale (I get three or four times as much for writing Philadelphia Weekly blurbs and I do that for fun), and ever since, have been getting a whole bunch of much better, paying assignments. Which makes me feel like I should maybe concentrate on the good stuff. However, I'm superstitious about turning down work, because god listens when you say you don't need anymore of it, and damn, I could sure use a steady stream. So, do I suck it up and do it? Or not?

Brad Laner

Another really nice piece of work from Home-Tapes, the wandering indie experimental label that used to be in Arkansas, then Athens now somewhere else entirely. It's Brad Laner, who does a kind of soft-focus, but challenging layered experimental pop.

I reviewed it last week in Blurt:

Meticulously plotted daydreams, Brad Laner's songs shamble and wander through flowery psychedelic landscapes, all ease on the surface. Scratch that surface, though, and obsessively pixilated detail emerges, a mesh of intersecting layers and sounds that shifts measure to measure, second to second. The primary colors may be Beatles psychedelia and Beach Boys-ish vocal counterpoint, but you can also find little intervals of shoe-gazing guitars, electronic glitch, sound collage, hip hop beat making and Hall and Oates-esque soul falsetto. On the best songs - "Brain" for instance - Laner spins out swirling mandalas of indistinct revelation, precision subsumed in clouds of intuitive feeling.

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“Eyes Close”

It's raining here...time for a sloppy, squishy kind of run.