Friday Listening

7-yr old daughter this morning: "Dad, EVERYTHING is easier said than done."

Teenage Fanclub - Shadows
Tom Waits - Orphans
Bishop Allen - & Broken String
Bobby Patterson - Soul Is My Music
Anthony Braxton - Opus 82
Tracey Thorn - remixes
Bob Marley & the Wailers - Soul Rebels
Jeffrey Dean Foster - Million Star Hotel
Articles of Faith - What We Want is Free EP

Art Rock

An NC show for Superchunk has been added to our September tour dates -- 9/16 at the amazing Nasher Museum of Art in Durham. It will serve as an album release show for Majesty Shredding as well...here's some details.

listening:

Dara Puspita - 1966-1968
Arcade Fire - The Suburbs
Chuck Prophet - Let Freedom Ring (great show in Winston-Salem last night)
New Pornographers - Together
The Church - The Blurred Crusade
The Church - Sing-Songs / Remote Luxury / Persia EPs
Best Coast - Crazy for You
Drake Tungsten - Six Pence for the Sauces EP

Daniel Schorr RIP

So sad to hear about the passing of Daniel Schorr at the age of 93. The NPR obit calls him a "Journalism Legend" and i don't think it's an overstatement.

Hot Tuesday

on the stereo:

King Sunny Ade - Juju Music
Delorean - Subiza
Andrew Hill - Black Fire
Mark Eitzel - Brannan St.
The Smiths - The Queen Is Dead
The Fall - Rough Trade Anthology

and The Love Language live on the radio! on WUNC show The State of Things btw noon and 1 today.

Thursday Listening

Overcast but still hot as Hades, really unfortunate weather.

Medications - Completely Removed
Janelle Monae - The Archandroid
Strange Boys - Be Brave
Sir Victor Uwaifo - Guitar Boy Superstar 1970-76
Broken Social Scene - Forgiveness Rock Record
The Fall - Your Future Our Clutter
Joe Henderson - Blue Bossa
Maybe It's Reno - s/t (this is Bridget Cross!)

RIP George Steinbrenner

The Boss (the other The Boss) looms large as a figure in my nascent sports fandom; as a kid in Ft. Lauderdale we had season tickets to Yankees spring training games. This is probably from 76-79, pretty good years to be seeing the Yankees. You could wait by the players' parking lot, surrounded by a flimsy chain-link fence, and get Mickey Rivers' (favorite Yankee) or Willie Randolph's autograph after the game. I read the box scores in the paper each morning, and remember where i was when i watched Bucky Dent beat the Red Sox in the one-game playoff one afternoon after school. During this time period Steinbrenner was in the news almost as much as the players it seemed, and my dad thought the back and forth between him and Billy Martin, with the hirings and firings, was hilarious. He seemed to soften in his old age (Torre managed there forever, compared to his predecessors), maybe he just wasn't around as much. But he was such a character that despite the fact that he was such a hot-head and a meddling jerk of an owner much of the time, it was hard not to feel some affection for someone so emotionally involved in owning a baseball team. Then again, i never had to play for him.

Listening

Wild Nothing - Gemini
The Lloyd McNeill Quartet - Asha
Richard Hawley - Truelove's Gutter
V/A - Zanzibara 5: Hot In Dar
Fred Anderson Trio - Live at the Velvet Lounge
Dum Dum Girls - I Will Be

I Wanna Know Girls - Poetry Division

for subscribers to Merge's 20th Anniversary Box Set "SCORE!" (and there are a few complete box sets for sale on the Merge site) you may have seen Phil Morrison's video for the Portastatic song "I Wanna Know Girls" (both the original version from Bright Ideas and also a cover by Lambchop embedded below), which incorporates a new poem (called I Lived Among Girls) by Keith Newton that accompanies the song and kind of runs parallel in a really interesting way to the lyrics.

here's a post on My Blog Could Be Your Life which includes the video for the Portastatic version those folks w/out SCORE!

Vinyl Weekend

hope everyone had a great Independence Day, World Cup action was pretty great though i was pulling hard for Ghana to go through; brutal way to lose. Gonna be sad when it's over.

listening to records this weekend:

John Coltrane - Impressions
Wayne Shorter - The All Seeing Eye
V/A - Light: On The South Side (Insane Numero Group package w/ amazing book)
Wesley Wolfe - Storage
The Replacements - Tim
Monsters of Folk - s/t
Joe Strummer - Streetcore
Nina Simone - Nina Simone & Piano
The Homosexuals - The Homosexuals Record
Destroyer - Thief / City of Daughters dbl-lp