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An occasional blog about populist politics and popular music, not necessarily at the same time. LinksLocal Links Social Media My Other Websites Music Politics Others Networking Music DatabaseArtist Search: Website SearchGoogle: Recent Reading
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Music Week [410 - 419]Wednesday, July 25, 2018 Music Week
Music: current count 30010 [29979] rated (+31), 345 [340] unrated (+5). Week was short, for all practical purposes ended Friday or Saturday, when I figured out that the insufferable heat was due to a failed air conditioner compressor. It would have to be replaced, which took until Tuesday. By Saturday afternoon I was so miserable that I decided not to do any writing or even web surfing for the duration -- certainly no Weekend Roundup, although I figured I'd just postpone Music Week. Went to bed relatively early Sunday but only managed about four hours sleep, with a little nap Monday afternoon. Monday night was worse: went to bed at 4:30, and woke up at 7:00, so got up to wait for the service tech, and was up all day. Was so worn out last night I spent an hour staring at a jigsaw puzzle without being able to add a single piece. But by then the house had cooled, and I slept last night. Not enough to catch up, but I'm at least I'm functional today. The one piece of work I did manage to do was to post the first batch of questions and answers on Robert Christgau's website. Joe Levy suggested that Christgau do this to help promote his new book, Is It Still Good to Ya? Fifty Years of Rock Criticism 1967-2017. The obvious model is Ask Greil, where Greil Marcus fields readers' questions. That feature was put together by using the WordPress blog tool, but I thought it would work better with some custom coding. I had this pretty much worked out before the weekend catastrophe, but had trouble with the final edits, and couldn't respond to some style issues under the circumstances. We should have a page intro and a link to the question form. I'd like to have a banner instead of the usual H2 title. Joe wanted to insert some links, but I lost them (as well as a couple edits), and didn't feel up to tracking them down. Current plan is to publish a batch of these every other Tuesday -- which, as long as I'm in the loop probably means early AM (or as I prefer to think of it, late Monday). Currently have 160 questions, so demand has already way outpaced supply. My scheme will present the most recent dozen or so, letting you scroll back through the rest (like the news file). But I've thought a bit about making it easier to search back through the archive, possibly using keywords or simple text search, maybe more complex queries. It also should be possible to develop some sort of FAQ, but that would involve moving the q&a into the database, and that would complicate the still unsettled work flow. Meanwhile I'm trying to manage three sets of work involving the Christgau website. The first problem is that after my computer crash, I had to rebuild my local copy of the website from the server copy, and that revealed a fairly substantial amount of code breakage: PHP 7 dropped support for a number of functions, including literally all of the MySQL database interface. Until I fix that (in a way that remains compatible with the PHP 5 the server is running) I can't do a general website update. I got about a third of the way through that before I got distracted by a bunch of other things several weeks ago. Second, I need to update files to enforce a contractual embargo on various articles that are going into the new book. That's supposed to be done this week (three months before publications date), so has the tightest deadline. I was working on that before the air conditioning went out, and need to get right back to it after I post this. Instead of doing a general update, I figure I can do that by just updating a select subset of files, but they still have to be changed in ways that work on both platforms. Also, I'm trying to change them in ways that will also work in the future. That introduces the third set of work: the website is overdue for a comprehensive redesign. When I originally built it back in 2001, I wrote it to conform to "HTML 4.01 Transitional," using ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) character set encoding (which works for all Western European languages), implemented using PHP 3 and whatever MySQL was then (I think also 3). Some newer features have been incorporated piecemeal, but I've been fighting a rearguard battle to keep what I have working for more than a decade (I found a 2008 notebook entry about codeset problems). I'm not sure what all this entails, but a good start is to make the files conform to HTML5, and that's what I'm trying to do now, in a piecemeal framework. However, some changes will have to be applied globally -- the viewport change to better support phones, replacing table layout with CSS, and (most traumatically, I'm sure) converting to UTF-8. I hope to have the book support and enough of the code breaks fixed to do a partial update by the end of the weekend. After that, I think the next step is to build a separate beta website, first locally then on the server, to work out the kinks in the redesign. I'd be curious if anyone has ideas to incorporate -- technology, of course, and graphics (obviously something I'm weak in) but perhaps more importantly matters of usability. The other thing to note here is that my rated count passed a pretty major round number this week: 30,000. I suppose I should go back through the notebook and plot the rise. I'm not even sure when I started keeping a rated list. I bought my first computer -- and last Apple, an Apple II -- in 1979, but didn't do a very good job of carrying data forward until I set up my first Linux machine in 1998, which if memory serves was my sixth or seventh generation machine. (I still have that machine, and only shut it down a year ago, when I replaced it with an appliance router.) Sometime before 1998 I had a file called "records.txt" which was an alphabetized list with letter grades as a crib sheet (an aide de memoire in case I got confused over "which was the good one" of some poorly remembered artist). But in its early days, the list didn't capture everything I owned, much less had heard. I had very few LPs before I went to college -- maybe three dozen bought in the 1960s -- and didn't grow much until I left college and finally got a job, setting type in St. Louis. At that point, I started driving all over town, shopping every week, sometimes buying things simply because the cover enticed me. (Not always successfully, but that's how I got into Roxy Music and Ducks Deluxe.) When I moved to New York in 1976, I had a plywood filing cabinet with six drawers, each of which could hold over one hundred albums (you could thumb through them, cover facing), plus a shelf on top with two dividers that could hold a couple hundred more. Not sure when I filled them up and moved on to industrial shelving -- probably after I moved to New Jersey in 1980. I didn't write about music in the 1980s, so I probably slowed down, but my income went up, so maybe I didn't. I think I had somewhere between 2000 and 3000 LPs when I started buying CDs, rather late in that game. The CD numbers exploded in the mid-1990s as I got seriously into jazz (and had a private office where I could play music while I worked), and exploded again for a few years after moving back to Kansas in 1999 (and worked at home, before I became freer still). And from 2003 on, especially after the Voice started publishing my Jazz Consumer Guide, I started getting promos. The rated count jumped further once I started streaming Rhapsody. I started writing Streamnotes in 2007, figuring that as long as I was listening, I should take notes, and the grade is the simplest, most gut level form of note. The earliest rated count I can find in the notebook is from February 2003, when the count passed 8,000, so I've averaged about 1,420 per year since then (or 118 per month, or 27 per week). Perhaps we should divide this stretch into two periods, before and after streaming. February 2008 is a fair dividing line, I averaged 1230/year (101/month, or 24/week), which with streaming rose to 1510/year (125/month, 29/week). This confirms my subjective feeling that 30-count weeks are very common, and that 10-year average still seems to be the case. This year seems to be on track: counting 133 records in July's Streamnotes file, I have 912 graded records for the year-to-date (130/month, 30/week). That would put me on track to hit 40,000 in seven years (August 2025), and 50,000 seven years later (2032), but it's unlikely I'll be able to sustain that pace for anything close to that long -- I'd be close to 75 for the former, 82 for the latter. And every year, with well over 50,000 new records coming out, I'd fall ever further behind -- my list shrinking into an ever smaller sampling. I'm sorry but the more I do this, the more insignificant it feels. As for this week's haul, I noticed new vault tapes from Dexter Gordon and Woody Shaw, so I thought I'd see what else Napster had that I hadn't heard. Turns out there was very little by Shaw, but quite a bit of Gordon -- hence this week's "old music." One album in particular I wanted to listen to was Homecoming, since I had wrangled myself a ticket to one of Gordon's Village Vanguard shows (the only time I saw him, or for that matter the famous club). Also turns out that Shaw was on stage with Gordon there -- something I didn't recall, probably because I wasn't aware of him at the time. Still more Gordon I didn't get to (mostly on European labels, especially the one named for his tune: SteepleChase). New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Grade (or other) changes:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, July 16, 2018 Music Week
Music: current count 29979 [29939] rated (+40), 340 [342] unrated (-2). Easiest way for me to scrounge for new music is to bring up the "featured" lists on Napster, descending into my dozen or so "favorite" genre lists. (Not most useful, but sometimes easy trumps.) One surprise record on their jazz list was 5 x Monk 5 x Lacy, a Penguin Guide 4-star album that had eluded me, so I jumped on it. It had been released on the Swedish Silkheart label back in 1997, and it turns out that a whole passel of old Silkheart releases have just appeared on Napster (and probably other streaming services, as well as Bandcamp -- unfortunately only limited cuts on the latter, so they're useless for me to review). I scanned through my database and came up with a list of 24 Silkheart records I had noted but hadn't heard, and listened to 18 of them last week. Before this bonanza appeared, I had several Silkheart albums at A-:
I'll probably hit some more of them up in the coming week(s). Another album I picked out of the Napster featured lists is the Millie Jackson remix. It raised my hopes that label Ace's compilations would also be available, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Tempted me to go and take a dive through her back catalog, but I held back. Very likely my database picks will stand: the 1974 concept album Caught Up, the 1979 Live and Uncensored, and to mop up the rest, Rhino's 2-CD compilation Totally Unrestricted. The remix album frames her in disco strings with occasional but weak horns. Pretty useless, although not even Levine can suffocate "Never Change Lovers in the Middle of the Night." Some hip-hop too. Robert Christgau did an Expert Witness on a batch of six recent EPs, including four of Kanye West's 7-cut productions. I listened to four of them in previous weeks: Pusha T: Daytona [***], Kids See Ghosts [*], Gift of Gab: Rejoice! [A-], Kanye West: Ye [*]. I should revisit the first two; good chance both could be nudged up a notch. (Ye is more likely to drop one.) I did bump my initial Tierra Whack grade up after seeing her video: Welcome to Whack World: A Visual and Auditory Project by Tierra Whack. I still have reservations about musical flow, but it doesn't feel too short or incomplete when you keep your eyes glued to the screen. I've never been a fan of EPs. Always thought one needs more time to develop a statement or even a feel, but the recent vogue for mini-albums looks to be unstoppable. Probably ties to shorter attention spans and a huge explosion of digital product. On the other hand, Christgau has always been a big fan of EPs. Probably relates back to his early preference for singles over albums, and his complaints when CDs were introduced about them being too long. Last Friday we announced a new feature on Christgau's website, Xgau Sez, where Christgau will answer readers' questions. Here's a form for submitting questions. The idea came from Greil Marcus's Ask Greil posts. The timing has something to do with promoting Christgau's new (October 2018) essay collection, Is It Still Good to Ya?: Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967-2017. The initial plan is to answer questions in batches of a half-dozen or so, every other week. I've counted 73 submissions to date (not counting 2 spam). I imagine he'll pick and choose the questions that pique his interest, and adjust the quantity and frequency accordingly, depending on how much other work he has (quite a bit at the moment) and his other commitments. Meanwhile, I need to do a fair amount of work to support this new feature, and also to promote the new book. In particular, the book contract requires that most of the essays and reviews in the book be removed from the website for an extended period (if memory serves, five years), so I have to identify and flag all of those. Also write up a new book page. I hope to get most of this work done by the end of the week, but I'm still hampered by the crash and its attendant conversion issues. I'm only about half way through rewriting the PHP files that access the database. (The database interface library was rewritten between PHP 5 and PHP 7 with new function names.) Until that work is done, I won't be able to do a comprehensive update of the server, so I'll have to poke selected files. Complicating this is the longer-term need to convert the website character set from ISO-8859-1 (which handled Western European languages) to UTF-8 (which handles all languages), and to upgrade the HTML markup from 4.1 (Transitional) to 5.0. The former is simple in principle -- just run the program iconv on everything -- but has to be done all at once, upsetting the whole apple cart. The latter is complex, but may be done somewhat incrementally -- I don't have a real good handle on it. It would also be a good time to do some re-design, especially to make the website easier to use from smart phones. I'm far behind the learning curve there. Would appreciate any suggestions on this sort of thing. One big problem from last week appears to have been solved. I was experiencing sudden garbage screen updates, where pieces of previously rendered windows would pop up suddenly on top of things I was working on. I suspected the problem was the video card. Those things have much more memory than is needed for a simple screen buffer, so the computer can offload window manager display lists and buffers. Anyhow, problem has vanished since I installed a new video card (an ASUS R7240-2GD3-L 2GB, cost $75). One more (important) news item: Mike Hull has released a short video on Sacred Space, a collaborative art project that my sister, Kathy Hull, took a leading role in conceiving and executing back in 2002. It consists of eight portals: doorways from around the world, each opening to landscapes featuring endangered wildlife, viewed through the prism of the world's major religions. The portals are 7-8 feet high, 5-6 feet wide. The exhibition includes a labyrinth in the middle of the room, and origami cranes hanging from the ceiling. It is currently exhibited at Wichita State University, and will be up until August 31, 2018. However, the longer-term future of the exhibit is up for grabs. We are looking for a future home for the artwork. Anyone interested should get in touch with Mike (contact details in video). Special thanks to Joanna Pinkerton, who designed three of the portals, and appears in the video. Kathy was very excited about this showing before her death in March this year. PS: One thing that must mark me as an old-fashioned UNIX hand is a fondness for obsolete tools like the classic spell program. (Newbies seem to prefer the interactive ispell, which steps you interactively through a file, giving you alternative choices to toggle in; spell just lists possible misspelled words one per line, leaving it to you to figure out what to do about them.) I had to explicitly download spell to even get it. But when I run it on HTML files, it routinely flags lots of markup, especially URLs, as possible errors. Some while back I had written a shell script to sift the HTML tags out before piping a file through spell, but that got lost in the crash. Finally took a few moments to rewrite the script, and came up with this:
First line throws out some meta-markup I use in my faux blog files. Second is a perhaps over-simplistic way of deleting HTML tags (without deleting HTML comments or PHP markup, which often span multiple lines, but rarely occur in things I need to spellcheck). I could add code to strip HTML entities, but again they very rarely show up. A more useful enhancement would be to add a post-filter to weed out complaints about non-dictionary words that are commonly used (e.g., Silkheart, ECM, Interscope, remix). One way to do this would be to figure out how to add books to ispell's dictionary. Another would be to pipe the output through fgrep -vw and the "good word" list. PPS: Played Daytona three more times, and it didn't budge, but Kids See Ghosts picked up a notch. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, July 9, 2018 Music Week
Music: current count 29939 [29896] rated (+43), 342 [348] unrated (-6). New video card arrived today, but I figured I should post this before I risked installation. No guarantee it will fix my screen problem, and no guarantee it won't wreck everything. High rated count this week. Got off to a fast start last Monday as I was collecting data on mid-year best-of lists, and checking out things I had missed. Probably also helped in that more than a few of them turned out to be EPs (or "mini-albums"). Only one of those albums made this week's A-list (Seun Kuti's), but I was pleasantly surprised by Shawn Mendes, and at least understand the interest in the Carters' Everything Is Love and Against All Logic's 2012-2017. Meanwhile, after something of a drought, three good jazz albums -- one from my queue, the other two from Bandcamp. (Actually, pretty sure Again is also on Bandcamp.) The computer problem has kept me from doing much updating of the mid-year aggregate, but Janelle Monae managed to slip ahead of Kacey Musgraves for the top spot. I haven't factored Robert Christgau's grades in yet, but doing so would help (among the top 25): Monae (A-), Cardi B (A), Courtney Barnett (A-), Black Panther (A), Superchunk (A), Superorganism (A-), and Parquet Courts (A). My grades are listed in the file, but also not counted. I have those same records at B+(***) or above, plus Kali Uchis at A- and Saba at B+(***). Latter was hard to find a streaming source for, and I'm not sure how well I heard it. New records rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, July 2, 2018 Music Week
Music: current count 29896 [29859] rated (+37), 348 [348] unrated (-0). Nothing monumental below that I didn't get to before posting June Streamnotes on Saturday, although the Grupo Mono Blanco records are pretty nice if you're interested in Mexican folk music that doesn't veer into Mariachi or more generally Norteño. I spent a fair amount of time in the EOM crunch pouring over Phil Overeem's We're Halfway There -- But to Where? midterm list. Still 27 records in his main list (out of "damn near 100") that I haven't heard, as well as 12 title under "Old Music Nicely Repackaged." I'll try to knock a few more off that list next week. Since it's midway through 2018, I figured there would be some "So Far" album lists to look at. I thought it might not be too hard to adapt my EOY Aggregate architecture to collecting data from mid-year lists. (I've done minimal editing, so I can purge the mid-year data and reuse the program files come November.) I collected 21 lists, mostly from Album of the Year, which netted 240 albums (three are new releases of archival music so they're in separate files; two are new works by various artists, which I kept with the new music in large part because Black Panther: The Album is likely to show up on a competitive number of lists). The data is here. The top albums (my grades in brackets, but not counted):
The first number in braces is points, followed by number of lists the album appears on (I used that as a tiebreaker). Main caveat here is that most of the lists were unranked, so each album listed there got one point. Numbered lists were counted on my standard scale -- 5 for number one, 4 for 2-5, 3 for 6-10, 2 for 11-20, 1 for everything else -- although only 6 ranked lists had more than 20 albums (the max was 50, by Stereogum and Uproxx). That scale works better for longer year-end lists, especially more of them, but with such a small sample expect some distortion. I expected Janelle Monae and Cardi B to dominate the list, but not much else was obvious. I didn't like the Kacey Musgraves album at all. I'm not surprised that it has fans, but so many? The Pusha T EP was produced by Kanye West, and seems to have gotten a perverse boost as West's fortunes faded (1 mention; his Kid Cudi collaboration, Kids See Ghosts, got 2). Lot of women in the top 10 (if memory serves, 9 of 10, though only 2 of the next 8, or 4 of 20). Kali Uchis and Saba have high metacritic scores, but so do Confidence Man and Rolo Tomassi (1 mention each). Kamasi Washington's Heaven & Earth broke late (4 mentions, 4 points, tied for 54th), between Mount Eerie/Tracey Thorn and Car Seat Headrest/Ezra Furman. I played a bunch of these today while compiling the list. Unfortunately, Napster is performing poorly in the new computer, with audible glitches every 15-30 seconds. Pretty sure it's a problem with Firefox, which has split up its content handlers into multiple processes. At the moment, with music off, one of those processes is chewing up 70-78% of CPU, which probably means that some JavaScript somewhere is spinning in an infinite loop. I don't know of any way to profile individual tabs, so I'm hard pressed to map the performance loss back to specific web pages. I do find it striking, though, that Google search windows are among the slowest pages to refresh, and Wikipedia is also surprisingly sluggish. I've killed off the two most likely suspects -- Facebook and Twitter -- to little avail. One positive bit of computer news is that I bought a new keyboard -- a Logitech K740 Illuminated -- that I'm pretty happy with. Not sure what you'd call the switches, but they have a better than usual tactile feedback without being as clunky (clicky?) as the mechanical keyboards. Plus it has LED backlighting on the key legends, so I can find whatever key I'm looking for in the dark. (I am a competent touch typist, but that doesn't help if you can't find the right starting keys.) New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Grade (or other) changes:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, June 25, 2018 Music Week
Music: current count 29859 [29839] rated (+20), 348 [349] unrated (-1). I expected many distractions last week to depress this week's rated count. Indeed, I didn't manage to play any new music until Friday, when my nephew flew out after nine days of photographing my late sister's art. We did a big mixed grill bash on Thursday to wrap things up -- chicken wings; kebabs of lamb, pork, and swordfish; quail, squid, thin-sliced steak, with a range of marinades from Turkey, Iran, China, and Korea. Added a sweet potato platter, horiatiki salad, soft shell crabs, and grilled Japanese eggplant with spicy peanut sauce. Date pudding for dessert. Only thing there I had never done before was the pork, but I found some fresh ham, cut it into cubes, and mixed up a hoisin/bean sauce. Very tasty. Should be memorable. We gave most of the excess away, but I kept the lamb and made Turkish yogurtlu kebap with the leftovers. Friday I started working on the intro to yesterday's Weekend Roundup. After finding the latest Satoki Fujii in the queue, I turned to my tracking file looking for jazz I could find on Napster, figuring I would have trouble mustering the requisite attention for sorting out new pop records but I could multitask new jazz easily enough. Wound up playing a lot of records (some old) on the Danish SteepleChase label, and they all went pretty fast (although the new Pierre Dørge merited a couple of extra spins). Moved on to Clean Feed, and I'm still working there. Meanwhile, my website/system recovery work has slowed down. I probably have about half of the robertchristgau.com files working at this stage. I did manage to implement a new feature but it hasn't been announced yet: something similar to the Ask Greil thing, where you can ask questions and Bob can answer (if he deigns them worthy of an answer, or maybe just if he thinks his answer would be worthwhile). I suppose I could consider offering something similar here, if there's any interest. I've long suspected I would be more productive on demand-driven projects (or in collaborations where I'd feel more compelled to keep up my end). I'm still not doing complete updates of any of my websites. I'm not aware of a lot of unfixed problems with this one, but need to get some testing in before I feel confident to update. Nor have I extracted and tested my old disk drives. One thing I did want to do was to replace my cheap keyboard here with a fancy mechanical one. To that end I bought a Corsair Strafe, only to find out it doesn't work at all with my computer. So back to the drawing board on that. Month runs out on Saturday, so I should post Streamnotes no later than then. Draft file currently runs to 99 records (100 counting the new Lily Allen, which I'm not done with yet), of which 72 are new (65 new music, 7 compilations). Despite the shortfalls the last two weeks, should wind up as a pretty average month. Also, despite scant A-list records the last two weeks, should wind up pretty solid in that regard too. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Tuesday, June 19, 2018 Music Week
Music: current count 29839 [29818] rated (+21), 349 [344] unrated (+5). A day late and a few records short of a normal week. We attended a reception for the opening of the Sacred Space Exhibition at Wichita State University. My nephew, Mike Hull, came to Wichita for the reception, and has stayed on to continue photographing artwork my late sister Kathy Hull. My modest contribution to all this hasn't gone much beyond cooking, including a roast chicken last night, and some Korean ribs today. Unfortunately, I didn't feel up to doing a big Korean thing today, so I decided to accompany with my everyday Chinese fried rice and lima beans. [PS: Wound up also making three distinctly Korean little dishes: sliced cucumbers with garlic, sesame, and Korean red pepper; dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked and stir-fried with garlic, sesame, and scallions; and dried squid softened up in a sweet-and-spicy glaze.] Started working on the Korea piece back on Thursday, thinking of a different entry angle -- one that would focus on how Democrats should talk about Trump when he veers away from neocon warmongering. But I didn't do my due dilligence there, and as the dumb chatter died down decided not to beat myself up over it. (When Colbert last night announced he'd be doing something "after the break" on Kim, Trump, and Putin, I hit delete.) And, as I noted, the family separation at the border story has taken over. I have little to add there, and don't even feel much like piling on. (Although, here's a link to a video Mike and Ellyssa Roberson did on a demonstration here in Wichita.) Nor am I the least bit obsessive about the Russia collusion/obstruction news, but it's hard to believe that even Trump's diehard supporters aren't picking up on how guilty he's managing to look -- of course, some of them are actually get off on his criminal side. Mixed bag of records this week, including four very different ones at A-. Also a couple of lower-than-usual grades. Not much jazz. I wasn't able to find the new Skadedyr record Chris Monsen likes, so checked out the old ones but didn't get into them. Next week should be similar, maybe even shorter. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, June 11, 2018 Music Week
Music: current count 29818 [29786] rated (+32), 344 [339] unrated (+5). Not much to say about music this week. Just sort of feeling my way around the new computer. One thing I noticed is that it's much easier to go straight to a download/stream from email now that I'm doing both on the same machine. In particular, I used to get a lot of CDs from the world music publicist Rock Paper Scissors, but for the last few years all they've sent was email, which I almost never dealt with. But a couple records below (Diali Cissokho, Ginkgoa, Parliament) came out of their mail. I also made a point of thumbing through the July issue of Downbeat and looking up most of the reviewed records I didn't receive. Neither of those strategies led to great discoveries, but they did turn up some pretty good records. Overall count for the week was solid. Most likely it will fall off next week, as we're expecting company for a big event on Wednesday, 4:30-7:00 PM, at McKnight Art Center on the campus of Wichita State University: Sacred Space Exhibition Reception. This is a set of seven large portals: doorways opening to views of the world through various prisms of religion. The artwork was originally constructed and painted back in 2002, under the direction of the late Diane Thomas Lincoln, with my sister, Kathy Hull, taking a major role. I have write ups and some pictures from the original development and exhibit here. The artwork has been in storage for much of the intervening time. Before her fatal accident this spring, my sister had campaigned to remount the exhibit, and she conspired with my nephew Mike Hull to produce a documentary on the work. This project won't come off quite as originally intended, but Mike will be here to film what he can, and we'll try to be helpful. The exhibit will be on view, free to the public, 9 A.M.-5 P.M. at the Clayton Staples Gallery, second floor of McKnight Art Center West, through August 31, 2018. Coincidentally, I just heard this week that another of Kathy's major projects -- a mural based on the Mexican Day of the Dead celebration on the south side of a laundromat at Arkansas and 25th St N here in Wichita -- is going to be painted over sometime soon. I only found one Google image search picture, here, as it was being painted (Linda Jordan left, Kathy right). I also have a finished photo in my archives, as well as a picture of Kathy holding her sketch in front of the work-in-progress which at the time appeared in the Wichita Eagle. Ram Lama Hull posted a couple more recent photos on Facebook: here and here. Ram commented:
Mike has already photographed a lot of Kathy's art, and I expect he will be doing more this week, including some "last shots" of the mural. Actually, I guess I do have a couple of brief notes on music. Michael Tatum has been doing one of those "10 records in 10 days" things on Facebook. His first three picks recapitulate my own evolving tastes in the years just before I started writing rock crit: The Byrds, Sweetheart of the Rodeo; Rhino's disco compilation, Turn the Beat Around (1974-1978); and Roxy Music, Siren. I would have picked Stranded, and tried to work in Al Green, I'm Still in Love With You, and Brinsley Schwarz's New Favourites, but Michael is definitely onto something. Given that I've archived his work in the past, I've started to squirrel away these new posts. I'll also note that Robert Christgau's latest Expert Witness has two A records that I gave very solid A- grades to some time back: Parquet Courts: Wide Awaaaaake!, and No Age: Snares Like a Haircut. I see now that I screwed up the news roll notice for that post -- sorry about that. I've been making slow progress fixing my local copy of the website, but I'm still a long ways away from being able to do a general update. (Same, really, for my own websites.) I'll also note that I played the new Lily Allen album (No Shame) a half-dozen times today without being able to grade it A-. May still happen: I've decided to back off and give it some time, but it's clearly not going to be my album of the year, as her last two were. Not that I don't still adore her, but only a few songs reinforce that (like "Waste"). On the other hand, a couple songs are very bland, and "Cake" is way too much of a cliché. And only on the last play did it sink in that "Three" is meant to be in the voice of her daughter. Sure, makes sense that way, but doesn't sound right. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Daily LogMiscellaneous Album Notes:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, June 4, 2018 Music Week
Music: current count 29786 [29759] rated (+27), 339 [344] unrated (-5). Rated count better than expected, but mostly due to listening to old (often familiar) music -- only 11 new releases below. Could be that I listened to/rated/reviewed a few albums between last Monday's update and my catastrophic computer crash. If so, I'll have to go back and redo. But I did find a couple of bookkeeping discrepancies that added to the rated count. Current computer status:
As some point I may push a few of the more volatile music files onto the server. (Maybe I should try writing an explicit pathname archival tool today, since that would be useful now and again in the near future? OK, that's done.) A couple of notes on this week's music. Back in December, Cuneiform announced that they wouldn't be releasing any new music -- you can still buy their back catalog, and they've put it up on Bandcamp so you can actually listen to it. (They've always been a holdout from streaming services.) So I was surprised when the two new Thumbscrew releases showed up in the mail. Looks like they have some more digital-only releases, but these are (or soon will be) physical. And they're so good I went back and tried to play Mary Halvorson's other new record this year, Code Girl. I still don't like it, the problem a singer who grates on my nerves. Vocals also undermine the Phil Haynes double, but his No Fast Food album is possibly the best showcase in recent memory for Dave Liebman. The unpacking queue has thinned out considerably in the last month, and not having time to do much research, I've resorted to using Napster's very limited "featured" offerings. That got me to Chvrches, Gift of Gab, Pusha T, and Kanye West. I wound up giving West's 7-track "album" an extra play after a Facebook friend raved about it, and another stressed how much better it got after multiple plays. I also followed links to reviews by Rob Harvilla. Meaghan Garvey, and Lindsay Zoladz, none of which turned out to be all that positive. I looked the album up on Metacritic, where its average score is 67 for 20 reviews (user score is 7.4 on 397 ratings). I wound up bumping the album one slot, but was already regretting that before "Ghost Town" finished. I'm counting the 7-cut (21-23 minute) West productions as EPs. In the past I've often lowballed EPs, not because I think they lack value but because usually a record takes some time to make itself felt. Still, two of my A- grades this week are EPs (both six cuts, one a mere 21:16, the other a near-LP 28:40). Both are terrific, but also feel pretty substantial to me. Between the vinyl revival and the dominance of digital formats, that sort of length range is becoming common, making labels awkward. As for my "old music," one of the scripts I tested was the one that prints out my grade database for a given artist. I used the Rolling Stones as my test case, and noticed the ungraded Black and Blue and a few albums I've never heard. Most were available on Napster, so I figured they'd make for easy listening while I was working on the website. Once I caught up with the missing items, I decided to go back and pick up the UK versions of early albums I knew from US editions. (One thing that inspired me here was Michael Tatum's review of Out of Our Heads -- US edition, although I had to look that detail up. By and large, the UK editions turned out not to be as good -- or maybe they just sounded a bit thin (on the computer) and dated? I didn't do any rechecking. I also didn't prepare cover images, even when they rose to A- or even A. I imagine I'll follow similar strategies in coming weeks, and see where it all leads me. But I'll also take a look at Phil Overeem's latest list and see what else pops up. Played the new Sidi Touré album while writing this, realizing (again) there are old ones I should catch up with. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, May 28, 2018 Music WeekMusic: current count 29759 [29733] rated (+26), 344 [351] unrated (-7). Rated count down a bit. I spent most of Monday and Tuesday cooking a fairly large Indian dinner to mark my late sister's birthday, so I took the time to enjoy old favorites. After that, I made a small dent in my CD queue, which had partly been impoverished by my picking out the most promising titles earlier this month. Still, I expected good things from François Carrier's latest -- largely delivered, although I detected a bit of unsteadiness compared to recent efforts -- and a 3-CD William Parker collection. The latter samples Parker's 1991-93 Song Cycle (with Ellen Christie and Lisa Sokolov), adds some later vocal pieces, and throws in two discs of new recordings. I find most of them hard to take -- an aversion to opera, art song, and avant warble I've long held. I also sought out some recent Clean Feed releases -- long my favorite label but less so since they stopped servicing me. I also found a few recent HighNote/Savant releases on Napster -- back catalog isn't there yet, but one hopes -- and took a look at Chicago pianist Matt Piet's Bandcamp pages (but didn't bite on the 3-hour Live in Chicago). Also checked out Robert Christgau's latest picks (Frankie Cosmos and Speed Ortiz; I had already played his HMs), and Prefuse 73 (a friend was curious). Still, none of those struck me as A- records: Carrier came closest, and Piet impressed me as someone worth keeping an ear open for. Expect a Streamnotes compilation by the end of the month. I currently have 19 new A/A- releases (plus one new compilation), which is actually well above average for a month. The 2018 A-list only totals 40 so far, so nearly half of them have come in May. Ignoring January (usually just previous year catch-up) that comes to 10/month, or 120/year. That's actually a bit down from 2017, which totals 144 new A-list records (including 5 added since the Jan. 31, 2018 freeze date). I have 320 new records rated so far this year, so an average of 80/month, projected to 960 for the year. For 2017 the current total is 1177 (42 added since freeze date), so I'm down a bit this year. No real surprise given how the year has gone. The May Streamnotes draft file currently has 128 new records (including compilations), well above my average this (or practically any) year. Not much unpacking this week, but after reports that Cuneiform had closed down back in January, I was very pleasantly surprised to see two new Thumbscrew (Mary Halvorson) records show up in my mail box. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, May 21, 2018 Music Week
Music: current count 29733 [29697] rated (+36), 351 [349] unrated (+2). Got a rude shock from Twitter this afternoon when I went to announce that I had finally posted my Sunday Weekend Roundup column. After the initial shock wore off, I figured out that they didn't like my browser so decided to force me to use their "mobile" interface. It is, necessarily, more compact, dispensing with stats like how many followers I have, how many notifications I haven't looked at, and other features -- not least the form to enter a new tweet. When I found the icon, it threw away the rest of the screen. I imagine a lot of you interact with Twitter through your phones, so you're used to this, but after an experiment I stripped their ap from my phone. I'm no Luddite, but did find that the value added was far less than the nuisance received. Turns out that my secondary computer still gets the regular user interface, so I can go there (as I've had to do for Facebook for several years now). I have 298 followers. Been stuck there for a few weeks, and thought of making a pitch here to push me over the 300 number. (Would be nice to break 300 followers before I break through 30,000 records rated, no?) Link is under Networking to the left, or here. One other thing I noticed on Twitter today is that the proportion of advertisements in the feed has exploded -- as it did in Facebook maybe a year ago. It looks like they've taken a big step on the curve from enticing people with a free service to turning it into a major public nuisance. Of course, that's happening all over the Internet these days -- as if everyday life wasn't troubling enough. I reckon I'll have to stop being so offended if/when I start pulling shit like that myself, but for now I entitled to complain. I've been reading Michael Ruhlman's Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America, which follows a brief history of how grocery stores developed with a much longer investigation into the current business of one local chain Ruhlman is particularly fond of: Heinen's, in and around Cleveland (and Chicago). I've read a number of Ruhlman's books, going back to The Soul of a Chef (2000), most recently The Elements of Cooking (from 2007, but I read it, along with Judith Jones' The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, to take a break from something in 2016). The thing that Ruhlman reminded me of is how much the technology and business of good has changed during my lifetime, and that it's mostly been for the better -- despite many other metrics that have been in more or less constant decline since I was born in 1950. Ruhlman attributes this to customer demand, and paints a picture of a vibrantly functioning capitalism constantly adapting to meet demands for broader and more exotic selection, fresher and less contaminated produce and meats, and (most of all) more convenient ways of obtaining tastier meals. Sure, his favored grocery chain seems to be working harder than most to satisfy those desires, but I can see faint echoes of that in the two chains that dominate my home town (Kroger and WalMart, so probably yours too). And it is true that when capital, competitive markets, innovation, and real personal demand come together capitalism can be a wondrous thing. I'm often haunted by the question of why, if business (especially finance) is so rotten and government so corrupt, so many people think their lives are better than ever. Good food helps explain that. But Ruhlman also notes that profit margins in groceries are exceptionally thin -- something which has probably spared chains like Heinen's from the devastation of private equity firms. But I'd like to single out one more factor: taste. As Adam Smith knew, markets only work when they are transparent, which is to say when the buyer knows exactly what she is buying. As MBA students soon learn, the trick to increasing profits is to make products opaque, so people can never really understand just what they are buying. (This is why medicine has been such a long-term profit engine.) But everyone has a taste for good food, and that's what keeps the industry at least relatively honest. (Not that big processed food companies haven't exploited our weak spots for salt, sugar, and fat, but even that is relatively easy to see around.) Moreover, most of the workers and businessfolk throughout the food chain take pride in their products and services, in marked distinction to the widget-counters who dominate other industries. Speaking of food, my late sister's birthday is tomorrow, so I'll be cooking for her son and some friends tomorrow. Last year she requested Indian for her birthday, so I figured I'd reprise that menu (with a couple of minor changes) this year: lamb and fish curries, several vegetable dishes (cabbage, greens, eggplant, green beans), cucumber raita, a simple rice pilaf, some warmed-up frozen paratha (I've made scratch, but hardly seems worth the trouble). Thought I'd go with Mom's legendary coconut cake for dessert this time. (Last year was a flourless chocolate cake with ice cream.) Need to wrap this up and go shopping -- such dinners usually take 3-5 grocery store stops, but this one should actually be relatively easy. And I'll miss a couple days of searching out new music. However, this past week offers a pretty broad selection, so enjoy. [PS: Back from shopping, which proved not so easy. Took me four hours, four stores: Sprouts (most of the vegetables), Dillons (lamb, halibut, yogurt), Whole Foods (bulk rice, cabbage), and Asia Bazaar (ghee, bread, urad dal, a coconut). I expected to get by with just the first two, as I have almost all of the more esoteric Indian ingredients already in stock (maybe not urad dal, but I could have skipped it). However, Dillons disappointed me, among other things getting rid of their bulk goods section, and I didn't feel like buying a 5 lb. package of rice there. Also, no coconut, and when I got to Whole Foods I remembered I forgot the cabbage. I had enough ghee and bread, but by then I thought I might as well stop at Asia Bazaar to make sure I don't run out. Also found some nice okra there, which I hadn't planned on. Not sure how much cooking I'll get done tonight, so I may wind up having to cut dishes tomorrow.] A couple of very brief notes on the music. I went into some Otis Redding back catalogue after noticing the new compilations. All of the B+(***) albums could have come in higher had I not recalled the other records I've heard so well. I had a couple of Redding's early LPs, but really fell for him again with the 3-CD The Otis Redding Story, which came out in 1989 and still remains definitive. Needless to say, it's pretty remarkable for a guy who only recorded six years to have amassed that much great music. I also have three of the four 1968-70 posthumous albums at A- (The Dock of the Bay and Love Man are the ones omitted below). LaVette, of course, is relatively minor, but the new record made me want to dig deeper. Her best previous record remains A Woman Like Me (2003). Christgau gave a full A to the new record here, as well as reviewing two Wussy albums (one EP, one LP) that he likes much more than I do. I previously gave the EP, Getting Better, a B+(*) a while back. I like the album a bit more, but I'm more suspicious I've overrated it than under. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
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