annoying autobiography

notes for "1970s underground pop" (mix for internet radio)

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[I am working on a mix for (open source) internet radio streaming. Below are notes explaining my choices. The mix is scheduled for this Thursday, Nov. 11, 8 pm Eastern on ffog's Myocyte show on tilderadio and anonradio. Please note that with the recent time change the mix is an hour earlier than it's been for the last 6 months. The official time for the mix is Nov. 12 at 0100 UTC.

Update, November 12, 2021: Thanks to all who listened and/or commented last night. The archived version of the mix in mp3 form is here.]

In the bleak mid-'70s, a time when horrible songs by Elton John and Captain & Tenniel dominated the airwaves, a mutated form of '60s pop song persisted in the college radio underground. This mix examines pop themes in the prog rock, dub, punk, and jazz rock subcultures of the '70s. Some fairly eccentric '60s songs are also sprinkled in for context. Many of these artists are now considered classic but at the time, only music nerds were listening to them.

Donovan's "Wear Your Love Like Heaven" kicks off the set, mainly to show how effortlessly it segues into a quite different song, Genesis' "Trick of the Tail." "Trick," coming from a then-arty band known for its portentous, doom-laden catalog, surprises with its catchy vibe and sprightly Brian Wilson-esque vocal harmonies. The doom isn't completely absent, however, in this concise science fiction fable of a Satyr-like humanoid from a parallel universe who is imprisoned on Earth and jeered at by people who "got no horns and got no tail." "Love Street," by The Doors, continues the keyboard pop of the first two songs and also has some odd mystical elements, particularly that "store where the creatures meet," which causes Jim Morrison to wonder, suggestively, "what they do in there."

desperate_straights350w

Infectious piano (by Ray Manzarek) drives "Love Street" and the same can be said for Anthony Moore's ivory-tickling in "Apes in Capes," a joint Slapp Happy/Henry Cow project. In 1975 Dagmar Krause's warbling vocals sounded downright strange, and they still do. Another chanteuse from the skewed side of pop, Dorothy Moskowitz of the short-lived '60s art-rock outfit The United States of America, sings about "Coming Down" from an acid trip. She never "belts it out" a la Grace Slick but maintains an air of beatnik cool as she sings of Reality, which, as we know, "is only temporary."

A startlingly clear "alternate mix" of The Mothers of Invention's Freak Out has recently surfaced on the web, yielding tonight's version of "You're Probably Wondering Why I'm Here," sung by Mr. Zappa, alternating vocal chores with the late great Ray Collins. Before Zappa could afford elaborate horn charts he played a kazoo, and this is possibly the most sarcastic use of that instrument ever heard. Next up is a '60s throwback from 1978, Tina Peel's "Knocking Down Guardrails." A friend of mine was the roadie for this band and I fondly recall sitting with him on the stage at Max's Kansas City one night after all the band's instruments had been packed up. (I also once visited Tina Peel frontman Rudi Protrudi in his Alphabet City apartment.) The same year, Tuxedomoon released "New Machine," which didn't look back to the '60s but rather forward to the '80s, with its beatbox, synths, and anguished vocals from Winston Tong. A trace of the former decade can still be heard, however, in Michael Belfer's unabashedly psychedelic guitar wails.

Next we hear an improbable (but smooth) transition to Curved Air's "Not Quite the Same," a song about masturbation sung with impeccable English reserve by Sonja Kristina Linwood, over a tight arrangement of trumpets, trombones, violin and VCS3 synth. Although keyboardist Francis Monkman didn't write the song (that was Linwood and violinist Darryl Way), a similar eclectic style can be heard in Monkman's later soundtrack for the film The Long Good Friday. Then, DC art rock band Grits takes us "Back to the Suburbs," in a Zappa-esque plea for regression to babysitters, bowling alleys, and other markers of a safe childhood in the burbs, after the singer finds it too much of "a strain to be alive and so neurotic." Infantile regression can also be heard in Zappa's own "Let Me Take You to the Beach," expressing a simple desire for a weekend weenie-roast, made to seem ironic only because everything Zappa writes is sarcastic.

revolution_dub

Kevin Ayers' evocation of a romantic Paris sidewalk cafe, "May I?," complete with accordion and street sounds, nowadays could be instantly summed up with the words "trigger warning." Nevertheless, Ayers' perambulating bass and Lol Coxhill's ethereal sax perhaps succeed in charming us more than the dated come-on in the lyrics. Meanwhile, Can's Damo Suzuki is having none of it with "Don't Turn the Light On, Leave Me Alone," a melange of gypsy-caravan ambience and rock jam, propelled by Jaki Liebezeit's always-seductive drumming. The spirit of collage continues with Lee Perry's "Doctor on the Go," a slinky reggae beat layered atop a British sitcom that blares tinnily from a TV monitor (or so it sounds). Then it's back to the '60s with Rajput & The Sepoy Mutiny's amazing, struggling sitar rendition of "Up, Up & Away." This gem languished in obscurity in the US until its inclusion in Re/Search's 1993 anthology Incredibly Strange Music, Vol I.

"That's Ramsey F---ing Lewis, right there," announced l0de AKA Zak ZYZ on his YouTube radio show, as he listened to "Cry Baby Cry," an over-the-top lounge-jazz version of John Lennon's song. "Lounge" then had its avant garde apotheosis 10 years post-Lewis with Gary Wilson's cult LP You Think You Really Know Me, from whence comes the next tune, "You Were Too Good To Be True," a winsome, slap-bassed instrumental. Quentin Tarantino already rediscovered the penultimate track, George Baker Selection's "Little Green Bag," and used it in the "cool gangsters walking" intro of Reservoir Dogs. And lastly comes The Modern Lovers' "Old World," from the period before Jonathan Richman went full-blown twee, included here for the organ work by soon-to-be-Talking-Head Jerry Harrison, as well as the involvement of '60s-turned-'70s-trailblazer, John Cale, who produced this track.

Playlist

0:00 Donovan, 7 inch, Wear Your Love Like Heaven (1967)
2:20 Genesis, A Trick of the Tail, A Trick of the Tail (1976)
6:40 The Doors, Waiting for the Sun, Love Street (1968)
9:24 Slapp Happy/Henry Cow, Desperate Straights, Apes in Capes (1975)
11:32 The United States of America, The United States of America, Coming Down (1968)
14:09 The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out, You're Probably Wondering Why I'm Here (1966)
17:44 Tina Peel, :30 Over D.C.~~Here Comes The New Wave!, Knocking Down Guardrails (1978)
19:15 Tuxedomoon, No Tears EP, New Machine (1978)
23:33 Curved Air, Phantasmagoria, Not Quite the Same (1972)
27:17 Grits, As the World Grits, Back to the Suburbs (mid-'70s, released 1993)
31:23 Frank Zappa, Studio Tan, Let Me Take You to the Beach (1978)
34:06 Kevin Ayers and The Whole World, Shooting at the Moon, May I? (1970)
37:56 Can, Soundtracks, Don't Turn the Light On, Leave Me Alone (1970)
41:34 Lee Perry & The Upsetters, Revolution Dub, Doctor on the Go (1975)
45:24 Rajput & The Sepoy Mutiny, Flower Power Sitar, Up, Up & Away (1968)
47:35 Ramsey Lewis, Mother Nature's Son, Cry Baby Cry (1968)
50:50 Gary Wilson, You Think You Really Know Me, You Were Too Good To Be True (1977)
52:45 George Baker Selection, 7 inch, Little Green Bag (1969)
55:58 The Modern Lovers, The Modern Lovers, Old World (1976)

notes for "2000 Tech House" (mix for internet radio)

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[I am working on a mix for (open source) internet radio streaming. Below are notes explaining my choices. The mix is scheduled for this Thursday, Oct. 28, 9 pm Eastern on ffog's Myocyte show on tilderadio and anonradio.

Update, October 29, 2021: Thanks to all who listened and/or commented last night. The archived version of the mix in mp3 form is here.]

If you happened to be in New York City in the year 2000 and hung out at Chinatown's Good World Bar & Grill on a Wednesday night, you may have heard the tunes in this mix. The Bowery Boogie website remembers Good World as a happenin' place and lamented its passing a few years later:

Just like CBGB’s, Max’s Kansas City, Studio 54, Danceteria, The Mud[d] Club, Twilo’s, The Saint, The Sound Factory, Tonic, The Crobar, 8BC, Club 57, The Paradise Garage, The Peppermint Lounge, Save the Robots... The Good World Bar is now just a memory. And we loved being a part of it and will always miss it...

"The first alternative restaurant below Delancey" (as the owners described it in their goodbye notice) is now an ugly glass building. Bowery Boogie remembers:

It was a Scandinavian-inspired cool kids hang which got its start in 1999 when co-owners Annika Sundvik and John Lavelle converted a sketchy Chinese barbershop (i.e. brothel) into Good World. New York Magazine called it a “pioneer” in the area, championing its “long beer list, house cocktails, and rear courtyard.” All under the watchful eye of a stuffed caribou.

Annika and John invited me to spin records on Wednesdays and generously gave me a cut of the bar. I started off playing my own collection and then became obsessed with finding current music suitable for a place where people were eating and drinking (and occasionally illegally dancing -- this was the Giuliani era of crackdowns on fun). From January to November I gradually built up a collection of "deep house" vinyl scarfed at places like Satellite Records and Throb. Near the end of my tenure one of the co-owners complained "you started out great and now you're just like all the other DJs playing this damn stuff." Considering my learning curve I took it as a compliment but I wasn't around much longer after that conversation.

For this mix, I used the original wax and did a "rough cut" using two turntables and a mixer. All the sounds were eventually digitized and timestretched to compensate for my mediocre beatmatching skills. There is some mashing up, too. Most of these are "deep house" or "deep tech house" tracks released the year I was DJ'ing. It was a fun year. People were still smoking in restaurants back then and the place was always full.

00:00 Dan Electro "I Hear Music in the Air" (Better EP)
06:16 Phunky Drakes "Guilty (Classic Rework)" (12")
12:44 Noisy Beach "Stax Music" (Where's Montpellier? EP)
19:37 Harley & Muscle, "Friends and Enemies" (House Church EP)
25:41 James Flavour "Full Flavour" (If the Pimp Calls Back EP)
28:05 Forme "Instant Space" (Aqua-note EP)
32:18 B-Funk Production "Ladies and Gentlemen" (Ladies and Gentlemen EP)*
32:18 Steve Bug "Magic 120" (B_Series Vol.1 EP)*
37:52 Sascha Funke & Djoker Daan "Yachad" (Doppelpass EP)**
37:52 Leandro Fresco "Amor International" (Amor International EP)**
40:40 Scott Findlay "Untitled" (The Modern Dance EP)
44:34 Fish Go Deep "Sweeter" (Flying Funk EP)
47:40 Betamax Crew "Abrasera" (The Betamax Crew EP)
51:21 Cozy Creatures "Wanna Sing" (12")
56:54 [Reprise/filler] Steve Bug "Magic 120" (B_Series Vol.1 EP)

*B-Funk and Bug are mashed up, hence the duplicate start time
**Funke and Fresco are mashed up, hence the duplicate start time

The essay above also appears on the anonradio blog.

about those engines

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A few years ago, one of the new media brats made fun of this blog for "not liking recommendation engines."
The blog probably didn't call them that but instead something like "that thing where amazon or netflix thinks it knows the inside of your brain and makes shitty suggestions based on your past consumption."
"Engines" is too fancy a term for this. Engines generally work.
The brat's assumption here is that "engines" deserve consideration -- that they might be just as good as critics, even.
The societal problem isn't algorithms, per se, it's a loss of belief in criticism.
It's a Catch-22: one would have to have critical faculties to perceive that critics do a better job of choosing artworks.
Schools don't really teach that anymore (right?), hence faith in "engines."
Another way of asking this is "who designs the Turing Test for the critic AI?" If it's a software engineer what do they know about art criticism? Are the tech schools turning out polymaths lately?

annoying autobiographical post (3) - "retro" computer art

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When I started making drawings on an office computer with Microsoft Paintbrush (mid '90s), and music on a Mac SE with Music Works software (late '80s), they weren't retro. My hope at that time was to demystify "computer art" by using everyday programs that people might have come into contact with. The key word wasn't outmoded, it was "simple." I was dismayed by the bad programmer art I was seeing, which was starting to appear in museums. I thought the best way for a fine art trained artist to use a PC was in the most straightforward, transparent way. For example, to make a hand painted portrait that was clearly done with a paint program and no accompanying narrative about the means of production. This turned out to be harder than I thought -- viewers assume anything made on a PC uses algorithms or software "cheats." Hand skill is effectively overwhelmed by the medium.

By the mid-2000s, I was stubbornly clinging to MSPaint and 8-Bit music as they became retro styles. In 2004 I began experimenting with animated GIFs, applying some of the pixelly MS Paint ideas I had been working with. At that time GIFs were definitely retro and seen as a '90s, dot com era phenomenon. I thought about Richard Phillips' use of dated fashion photography to make large scale oil paintings and remembered this 1987 quote from Dan Graham:

According to [Walter] Benjamin, "progress," the 19th-century scientific and ultimately capitalist myth, is expressed in commodities, fashion goods which "produce a sense of eternal newness." This makes progress a mythical goal, never to be reached, for there is always the new and it is always superseded by the next new. For Benjamin, then, progress is actually a state of stasis. And yet it is the very stasis that makes the recovery of the just-past potentially subversive.

I believe now that the task of the artist is in part to resuscitate the just-past -- that period in time made amnesiac by commodity culture -- and to apply it as an "anti-aphrodisiac" (Benjamin's phrase). The Rolling Stones song "Yesterday's Papers" -- "Who wants yesterday's papers? Who wants yesterday's girl? No one in the world" -- makes this anti-aphrodisiac aspect of the just-past clear. [1]

I never articulated my "program" the way artist and musician Pierre-Luc Verville does below but I think he gives a compelling reason for all those MS Paint drawings and animated GIFs:

What is contradictory in the computer aesthetic is between what we expect from computer tools and what they do. Moody exploits this paradox by turning the fundamental elements of the perceptual system of computer environments into expressive elements that refer directly to the history of art. By exaggerating what the computer may or may not be expected to produce aesthetically, Moody reveals a world whose conditions of aesthetic possibility are constantly being transformed by the machine.

The appropriation of obsolete devices is thus the occasion for a critique of the obsolescence of the various aesthetic stages of the computer, for a re-reading of the horizon of expectation which frames the experience of it. [2]

Just as the "simple" had been used to critique the overly complex, the "old" can be used to critique the seamless world of the so-called 4th Industrial Revolution: the interconnected virtual reality of smartphones and platforms -- the latest incarnation of Benjamin's stasis of eternal newness. A pixelated sphere was the best a drawing program could do in 1984. What limitations (or assumptions) might a super-duper slick iPad be putting on something made right now? I also appreciate Verville's implication that art history can be used as a gauge or measuring device. Unlike my attempts at portraiture, everyone can see that the pattern of concentric circles (Kenneth Noland target) is made up of pixels in my OptiDisc gif. What similar soon-to-be-dated constituent part might the seductive iPhone be hiding? In future posts, I'll be comparing my theorist of choice, Dan Graham, with Verville's, Marc Augé, on the topic of past-as-critique. (They are saying very similar things.)

pause_prelude_optidisc

Tom Moody, OptiDisc, projection of animated GIF file, "PAUSE (Prelude)" exhibit, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, 2018

NOTES

1. Dan Graham, "Legacies of Critical Practice in the 1980s," Discussions in Contemporary Culture, Hal Foster, ed., Dia Art Foundation, 1987

2. https://leparergon.org/index.php?title=Tom_Moody (French) https://www.tommoody.us/archives/2021/06/08/le-parergon-tom-moody-bio/ (English)

annoying autobiographical post (2)

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I took Life Drawing my first semester in college. The professor was Bob Barbee, a short-statured man with a mustache, vaguely military bearing, and a constant cigar in hand or mouth. He would walk around the classroom critiquing students' knowledge of anatomy and offered very little else in the way of art insight. Supposedly one of my classmates "came all the way from Los Angeles to Virginia to study with Bob Barbee" because of the professor's anatomical expertise.

life_drawing_skeleton_650w

Above is one of my drawings from the class; I was 17 or 18. Were I the teacher I might compliment the aggressive foregrounding (Barbee didn't tell us which part of the skeleton to draw so that was my framing) and the almost abstract emphasis on patterning in the bones and shadows. Or perhaps the use of the hand bones as a punning coda to the rib arrangement. My recollection is that Barbee stopped in front of the drawing and said something like "The xiphoid process should be more elongated, and you need to work on the angle of the acromion." That's the only kind of comment he ever offered.

Later, I decided to complete a studio art major in my last year and a half of college (plus a couple of summers), after having finished my required courses for an English Lit major. Barbee was the only instructor who opposed this "crash course" of almost full-time art practice. He felt like a major should be stretched out over four years of schooling. I had "A" grades in every art class I took except Barbee's. He gave me a B for the Life Drawing class and a C+ for his figure painting class (where students hammered out anatomically correct "mud women," as another professor called them). His reasons for the grade had nothing to do with the quality of the paintings but his belief that I didn't work on them obsessively enough. He pointed admiringly to another classmate, Susan F________, who came in after class hours to work on her painting. (Which is true but she was a clumsy painter and her piece was probably worsened by all the extra effort.) Barbee also candidly admitted he gave me the C+ because he felt I shouldn't be taking so many art courses at the same time.

At the time I took his classes I had never seen his own work. Years later I saw an image of some tree logs in a swamp (I think) done in a somewhat Thomas Hart Benton-esque style. I wasn't too impressed. I was correct about his military background. An obituary notice for Barbee [https://art.as.virginia.edu/sites/art.as.virginia.edu/files/FallWinter2002.pdf] says that his "early training was interrupted by World War II, when he served in the Army Air Force as a bombardier/navigator in Italy." The writer goes on to note, diplomatically, that

"Bob’s work was widely exhibited early in his career. He was represented by a well-regarded gallery in New York, and was included in regional exhibitions in Virginia and the Southeast. His early paintings show the influence of Cézanne and some of the School of Paris painters who were fashionable at mid-century, influences that became less and less important as his art matured. His painting became less abstract and more personal. He came to rely more and more on his keen observation and his real gift as a draftsman. He worked slowly and carefully, sometimes spending years on a painting, and became less interested in exhibiting his work or promoting himself as an artist."

So the moral of the story is, spend years on a painting.