Costa-Gravas, Costa Livin'

Sorry 'bout the potted intro, but (a shorter version of) this was for the
Collegetown paper; gotta clue in the newbies, hopefully no one else is turned off
by that, or anything else here:

COSTA-GRAVAS, COSTA LIVIN'
by Don Allred

In the early 1980s, Miles Davis came back from hiatus, but his music,
though engagingly quirky and rough-edged, no longer seemed innovative. And
post-Miles jazz-rock had hardened into fusion. Fusion was notorious for flashy
but ponderous displays of technique, like bad progressive rock. This resulted in
a throwback to 50s-style hard bop, the so-called Young Lions (or "jazz in
suits") movement, led by Wynton Marsalis.
But not all young jazz musicians were fusion heads or conservatives.
Drummer/composer Bobby Previte was well-schooled at The University Of Buffalo in
the 70s, where the music faculty included progressives like Lukas Foss,
trance poet Morton Feldman, and the anti-authoritarian authority on conceptualist
strategies, John Cage. Even earlier, Bobby P. was a underage soul/rock bar
band veteran, and both kinds of training served him well when he moved to New
York City in 1979, where he quickly became a leader in what was sometimes called
Downtown Jazz. Previte and his cohorts were as technically accomplished as
Marsalis and the fusion virtuosi, but they were also experimental, intent on
taking up where Miles had left off.
Previte's latest release, Coalition Of The Willing, is startlingly
fresh, despite familiar names, production elements, and political implications.
Trumpeter Steve Bernstein was the musical director of New York's post-punk
"fake jazz" rowdies, The Lounge Lizards, and is a key member of the calmly
audacious Sex Mob. Like Previte and others on Coalition, Bernstein doesn't let his
energy get in the way of thought or feeling: check his album Diaspora Soul,
which taps the improvisational and emotional resources of klezmer music. Stanton
Moore, who plays drum duets with Previte on several Coalition tracks, is also
a member of Galactic, a typically "fonky" New Orleans jam band, which
nevertheless rose to the occasion, when they got a chance to back Algerian exile
Rachid Taha, on his blisteringly defiant Made In Medina. (Songlines magazine
reviewer Nigel Williamson rightly considered this album to succeed, where Unledded,
Jimmy Page and Robert Plant's album with North African musicians, failed.).
Multi-instrumentalist Skerik limits himself to subtle saxophone on Coalition,
but his more varied work with the sardonically moody Critters Buggin, especially
on their 1998 album Bumpa, might be a key precedent to Coalition. Toward the
end of Bumpa, there's a sense of looming enclosure, but it's an enclosure
that's made to resonate with deep, bending, metallic tones.
On Coalition, this kind of rebellious sound (with flickering treble
added, so it also evokes John McLauglin's eerie 1970 peak, Devotion) takes on a
political context. Not only does Coalition's title refer to the Iraq War, but
several tracks (like "The Ministry Of Truth") reference George Orwell's 1984.
(As a Vietnam War era album might have, of course.)
But Coalition doesn't rely on righteously retro rhetoric, or any other
kind of default setting. Stu Cutler adds occasional harmonica, minus blues
cliches. Charlie Hunter abstains from his Blue Note albums' eight-string guitar,
and from the effects box that makes him sound like a (so-so) organist. (Why
bother, when an actual organist, the judiciously theatrical Jamie Saft, who just
released an album of instrumental Dylan covers, is always lurking nearby, and
with his own guitar as well.) Here, Hunter plays incisive six-string
Telecaster, and a twelve-string guitar that sounds nothing like The Byrds: it chimes
like an evil, elegant parody of Big Ben. (Appropriately for Orwell's dystopian
England.) Previte's lean, hungry beats and bright tonal colors (keyed by
electronic touch pads) find their way through dark shifting backdrops and corridors.
Coalition's a thriller, tracked by really good, inescapable security cameras.

Caption For A Missing Photograph

Regarding ze topigoraphy ov Belgian Waffle Ironies, M. B0b Le Fl@neur sign@lz:
When I showed the attached photo to my flatmate Zuzana, she exclaimed "I know
that spot! That's where my friend got stabbed!"

The picture was taken at the point where the corporate alleyway of Boulevard
du Roi Albert II stops dead, three blocks east of the canal and one block west
of the Gare du Nord (and therefore two blocks away from the red light
district of Rue d'Aerschot and three away from one of Schaerbeek's heavily Turkish
neighborhoods).

The photograph doesn't do justice to the building at the right, the "Hotel
Husa President", which is nearly a block long. Architecturally, it might as
well be called the "Husak" -- it could have been a gift from any Warsaw Pact
nation and served as any provincial Party headquarters or workers' holiday housing.

The photograph was used as both front and back covers to a 2006 calendar
touting redevelopment in Brussels' Rue du Progrès area. Since then, a children's
playground has been put up there.

Liquor For The Soul

Lizzy Mercier Descloux: Best Off (ZE)

In 1979, NYC's ultrahip ZE Records issued Press Color, the debut album of
Parisienne expat painter et post-punkette Lizzy Mercier Descloux. It was pretty good
punky funky no (-ish) wave. But the most striking thing about the early songs
invited to ZE's new Lizzy fair, Best Off, is the way their parsing paisley parsley
and bodyhair telegraphy grow through the French, South American, Caribbean and
African elements of LDM's Eiffel of a peak. For instance, Best Off offers a
juicy slice of 1984's Soweto-collaborative, bollocks-to-apartheid Zulu Rock, which ZE
has also reissued, with several bonus tracks. Wherever
she goes, Descloux sounds far too at home to be satisfied, but there's a
nervous delight in her flight, though it's never unsteady. She often suggests the
artist as discreetly caffeinated spectator, responding to the multiplying
dimensions in her pulsating frames. Descloux (who moved to the West Indies in the
90s, and kept painting, right up until her 2004 death from cancer) even molds
bullets from samples of jazz trumpeter Chet Baker's narcotic blue satori,
which remains undisturbed, of course. Opposites attract, eternally.(ZE site still
"under construction" last time I checked, so for instance see
http://www.forcedexposure.com) Don Allred

(update: in 2016, Pitchfork published Laura Snapes' informative,, insightful, incisive profile of LMD: http://pitchfork.com/features/from-the-pitchfork-review/9828-lizzy-mercier-descloux-behind-the-muse/)

small world, smaller country

Und now, L///ve, fr0m ze capital ov EUROPA, Monsieur BOb Le Fl@neur reportage:

This morning, in an attempt to find out how to get a work permit and/or
gainful employment, I was sent on a minor scavenger hunt through various
government offices ("a three-hour tour, a three-hour tour"). My final stop was with a
bureaucrat who happened to mention that her husband is American and a
musician.

I asked, and it turns out that the guy is Paul Zahl, drummer for The
Flamin' Groovies and TUXEDOMOON.

Tuxedomoon must have attained the status of local heroes here, because on
quite a few occasions by now I've gone into bars or restaurants and heard their
stuff being played. These places include my favorite lunch joint for street
people (for one euro you can get a usually filling plat du jour; quality is
touch-and-go but hey, that's also true of establishments where a meal costs 15
times as much) as well as my favorite bar, the Walvis
see:

http://www.CafeWalvis.be/
and

http://www.ebru.be/Cafes/CafWalvis.html/

The goof for me is that, back in Berkeley when I was buying up all the
Tuxedomoon I could find (including going to Peter Principle's NYC apartment to buy
solo CDs off him), little did I suspect that I too would decamp from the Bay
Area and eventually end up in Brussels.

btw I didn't ask the woman about Tuxedomoon's recent reunion-cum-tour
because I'll cover that topic on my next visit.

I suppose next I'll encounter a Moroccan confectionary salesman who turns out to be
an ex of Natacha Atlas ;-

__________________________________________________

I'm Telling You This For Your Own Good

A Mr. Le F. writes:
"The Hell Law says that Hell is reserved exclusively for them that believe
in it. Further, the Lowest Ring in Hell is reserved for them that believe in
it on the supposition that they'll go there if they don't."

--The Gospel According to Fred, 3:1,
from the Principia Discordia

(if you never got around to getting a copy or printing it off the Net, go
here:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tilt/principia/body.html , where you will stumble on
other wisdom such as the following:

"Did you know that there is a million bucks hidden in the house next
door?"
"But there is no house next door."
"No? Then let's go build one!"
-MARX
"There are trivial truths & there are great truths. The opposite of a
trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true."
-Neils Bohr
M2: Everything is true.
GP: Even false things?
M2: Even false things are true.
GP: How can that be?
M2: I don't know man, I didn't do it.

The LAW OF NEGATIVE REVERSAL states that if something does not happen then
the exact opposite will happen, only in exactly the opposite manner from that
in which it did not happen.

(Honey Don't) Put The OO Back In Umlaut!

Shooter Jennings Makes Retro His Own Thing (tweaked a tad, 6/01) (and 6/05) (AND 7/01: The prefect ending?!) 

By Don Allred

 Waylon Albright Jennings, born in 1979, was spared a heavy "Jr." being forever hung around his neck. (Unlike Randall Hank Williams Jr., whose Papa Hiram was proud to choose his own handle once again.) Lil J's famous father slipped in a new middle name along with his own first name: Albright, was and is as in Richie, the veteran road warrior and drummer, of the elder Waylon's band. Fittingly, because wee "Shooter," as Daddy soon nicknamed him, hailed from a crib on his parents' tourbus. His Mom, Jessi Colter, was a co-star ,with Big Waylon, Willie Nelson, and Tompall Glaser , on an epochal compilation, Wanted: The Outlaws. Which, in the mid-70s, turned out to be country's surprisingly sucessful answer to marketshare-biting rivals over on the rising Southern Rock bandwagon. Which, by '79, had pretty much run out of gas, like Lynyrd Skynyrd's plane. Or so it seemed at the time, to us fashionable types. But country is always movin' kinda slow next to rock, thank goodness, so the migratory Jennings family was still layin' down the outlaw law, next to baby dawg. When in L.A., still-young Shooter finally laid Stargunn, his own conceptually-D.O.A. (to the surviving "trendsetting major" labels of rock) dreamboat ("Lynyrd Skynyrd mutating out of Guns N Roses":[and/or vice versa]: sure, keed, su-r-re) to rest, and headed back to Nashville, and sold Universal South his already completed debut country album, and titled it Put The O Back In Country, it was commonly assumed the O was for Outlaw. Why not? He was entitled, if anybody was. Although in at least one pre-release review, Shooter did say that was what it stood for, he has, many times, since denied it: "The Outlaw Movement was a movement in time…if you call yourself an outlaw now, your fly's unzipped." He's got plenty of other Os, after all: two in Shooter alone, so he can spare one for donation. As for the O-lessness of "Country", well, um, market research has indeed shown that most country consumers are female, and Shooter explains that he wants to make music for "young people," not for "adult women," not predominately, but y'all come too, y'hear? Just don't expect thangs in country to be all chick flick, not no more! On the other hand, his ladyfriend Drea Di Matteo, late of The Sopranos, and Joey, is an exceedingly well-preserved thirtysomething adult woman, and he credits her with prevailing on him to use Put The O Back In Country as album title, and theme song (written to the [credited] tune of Neil Young's "Are You Ready For The Country"). Shooter's re-tuning of this ancient toon bounces beats like basketballs, so the performance of the song seems even goofier (and much more likable) than its point, about the risky need to rock the country, as if "rebel" rock isn't a lucrative and established practice in country today. No need to sweat it, podner. But (just to prove me wrong) the starmaking machinery was a bit slow to crank up, and Put The O, finished in January of '04, wasn't released 'til March of '05. Meanwhile, Shooter had an encounter with another adult woman: his mother, Jessi. Although he has described recording rock experiments with his father (an album, with new backing tracks by Shooter and his current band, the 357s, will reportedly be released this fall), I haven't seen any mention of his musical relationship with his mother. Not, that is, until after his father's death in 2002. In 2004, Shooter and Jessi co-wrote and recorded a song. "Please Carry Me Home" is about sweating yourself dry of temptation's power, cold turkey, and step by bare step. (Shooter's drums count out the cost, slowly, mercilessly). It's a disturbing song, because it implies the risk of losing desire along with temptation. Not a good idea, because, Smokey Robinson put it, "If you can want, you can care," and then (maybe), as long lost Southern Rockers Hydra put it, you can "care enough to survive." But Shooter and Jessi know this, and hearing is believing: although "Please Carry" is the only track he appears on, it's a fittingly dramatic climax to Jessi's new Out Of The Ashes (Shout! Factory), her first album, except for a couple of kiddie-song sets, in over 20 years. Out Of the Ashes may well be the best country album of 2006, and the rumble and flow of Jessi's gospel-schooled, piano-driven twists and turns may well have provided some of the juice for Shooter's new Electric Rodeo, which he began building while Put The O was still unreleased. . The first album has a lot of good songs, but Shooter struggles with pacing and sequencing. How do you follow "4th Of July"? It's sort of early 70s Springsteen times early 80s Mellencamp (Chuck Eddy points out the latter), and both of them drive-by the Eagles' "Take It Easy," and ultimately all this (and more!) adds up to "4th" 's delivery of Put The O's most compelling/non-who-cares? evidence for SJ's need to git back. For instance, when he (in a shredded Mellensteen voice) demonstrates how "We sang 'Stranglehold' 'til the stereo couldn't take no more of that rock 'n' roll." Not only does he sound like he's in a stranglehold, but that song is, as Chuck also points out, by Ted Nugent. And I found it on the Dazed And Confused soundtrack. Which, as Robert Christgau points out, is a 70s hard rock utopia, except, to me, the Tedster's lyrics sound like ludicrously overachieving macho triumphalism. (He should have flash fwdd to Toby Keith's "How Do You Like Me Now" to see how to do that rat). And indeed, maybe that's what Shooter really, ultimately didn't have the stomach for, rock 'n' roll-wise. He's got his complaints, but who doesn't. Plus, getting back to the c*y, ( already, on some Put, tracks, and much more on ER)he's let his voice relax and deepen a lot, plus he's (basically) not about geetar gymnastics, and Nuge is way ahead anyway. But, veering through "4th Of July," Shooter's snagging bits of rock utopia in his hair and beard, taking them back to Nashville, feeding and threading all his other tracks with 'em, and, though Put The O's wiring can look frayed, his piano (like Jessi's ,on her own album) does aid and abet the flow, though not as much it will on Electric Rodeo. He said in Harp magazine that his best songs were all written on one (piano, not a Harp). And Put The O 's "The Letter" is a swell but never swollen piano ballad, with humility and grace and scruffy frustration, and sort of a Leon Russell times Elton approach, and the basically similar unlisted track is good too. (Impulsive vocals at times, closer to Steven Tyler than Van Morrison [S.T. chatter and yowl on some other tracks too], but with some awesomely 80s movie lyrics, like "as you skate across the dance floor"!) But it seems redundant after "The Letter." And , after the git back "4th Of July," "Sweet Savannah" and "Southern Comfort" seem a bit redundant too. Especially the former, but, although "Southern Comfort" starts with him whining enjoyably about having to live in Hollyweird with that ol "SY yen tol oh gee," over equally petulant slide guitar and rhythm section, it eventually just creeps to a sluggish stop. And then of course the backup singers explode, and all but one fall away, and she does what she can and stops when signaled. On the other hand, "Daddy's Farm" creeps along 'til it gnarls just right. The lyrics are a bad ol' boy screenplay; not bad, but fairly generic. Yet he's expressing himself by experimenting with his own blend of the snakier aspects of yon Zep/Bad Co/early Aerosmith/Skynyrd approach. (Not to get too pianistic, but Billy Powell always was Lynyrd's secret weapon: those crucial accents under the final phase of guitar extravaganza put "Freebird" over the top.) So, how to you get to Electric Rodeo? Practice practice practice, but, beyond that, whether witnessing Jessi's accrual of accents into grooves into songs into implied narrative into an album put him over the top, or what, he's really tapped into a sharper sense of (and appetite for) pacing and transition, within and between tracks. Speaking of secret weapons, I was just thinking that ER's "Bad Magick" 's guitars (for he does indeed have them) weren't slamming me quite like they thought they were. Only to be curled into the undertow of keyboards, echoing through Davy Jones' Locker and the cosmic indigestion around kickdrums. Listen on headphones. But first, The preachy jive of Put The O's and Electric Rodeo's title tracks suddenly seem lived, in a song that sounds as gentle as the first album's "Lonesome Blues," 'til the pale chorus slips in: "When your heroes turn out to be assholes, and the light that you're chasing in the tunnel is a train. The singer's in key, the guitar's in tune, and the song is still slipping away." So he shrugs, means to refuel with some "Hair Of The Dog," but it doesn't rock him (or me) enough, so he chases that with "Little White Lines." Suddenly, he's bursting out with his Daddy's baritone and his Daddy's trademark "wun too, wun too" bass beats, now almost discofied, which is certainly drug- and decade- (and both of which are Daddy-) appropriate, while blaspheming against the kind of supposed cultural separatism that "Outlaw" signified for some. Which sardonic (and actually Waylonic) humor is both lightened and darkened by the George Clinton (and Tony Joe White)-worthy swamptoon of "Alligator Chomp (the Ballad Of Dr. Martin Luther Frog Jr.), As Told By Tony Joe White." Aw, you can figure out from the title how that ends, can't you. But the devil, like everything else, is still in a Shooterful of details. (Later: Okay okay, there's this one track that most everybody else felt compelled to mention, even though Shooter took it off the released version of ER, after many reviewers had already filed copy. Perhaps he finally gave into the irony of a clone-perfect cover of a song about the anxiety of influence and genetics; that would be Bocephus's "Living Proof." [Yeah, I know it's got Waylon's instrumental theme tagged onto the ending, but Hank Jr. could've done it that way, what with Waylon being an avuncular influence of sorts...] Or perhaps Shooter decided it was too far from or too close to his own POV. In any case, he made the last minute substitution of "It Ain't Easy," a polite tribute to Waylon I. Which just goes to show that references will will only take you so far; either that, or back to the drawing board, just like Daddy done ("Albright," alright).

Brie Larson Answers Our Questions

Teenpop singer and movie actress Brie Larson
(http://www.myspace.com/brielarsonmusic) answers questions from her fans
(the name of her album is "Out of P.E.," which will put one of her answers
here into perspective):

Q: 1. why are you so spectacular? 2. can you buy a private jet and save me
from florida? I think the elderly people are coming to get me.

A: 1.) i took classes from lindsay lohan. but they involved drugs and
drinking, so I failed. 2.) if I had a hammer, i'd hammer in the morning, i'd
hammer in the eve'nin, all over this land.

Q: Are you excited about turning 17 this year?

A: i'm more excited about not turning 16.

Q: Where do you get the inspiration to be a song-writer and by being an
artist (design)?

A: i dont get inspiration. I dont really know why I write about certain
things, or why I dont write about certain things. I dont really "write"
about anything. its all pish posh.

Q: So first of all i would like to ask. will you come to my house and disco
with me and my brother in the nude? Secondly. being serious and all. WHEN.
and i mean it. are you my dear, going to come to england.

A: I was in England yesterday! didnt you know? I was dressed as ringo star
and I yelled things like "NAY NAY NAY"

Q: will you sing happy birthday to me on friday? i'll be 19.

A: happy birthday Mr. president.

Q: Okay. i've got three questions. 1. do you have any pets? If so, what are
there and what are their names? 2. Have you ever watched Veronica Mars? If
not, you should. 3. Have you ever traveled overseas? if so, whats your fave
place you've been and why? p.s. Do you love it?

A: (uno) yes. simon's dawgs. and unicorn. (something) i lost my remote
(tres) i was riding on the mayflower, when I thought I spotted some land.

Q: brie!!!!!!!! will you come and chill with captain nicnic in hard rock
cafe london and bathe in baked beans? you know you wanna

A: YES YES YES.

Q: what is your fav. sport and why??

A: is that a trick question?

Q: have you ever wondered what your life would be like without the music,
the movies, and the fans?

A: yes. and then I remember that I would live the same life.

Q: 1. What is the best Bob Dylan CD? 2. Have you seen Transamerica? 3. Do
you think Reese Witherspoon should have got best actress?

A: 1.) my favorite is Highway 61 revisted. but they are all amazing. 2.)
nope. 3.) i thought she did win? am i going out of my mind? I saw walk the
line the day it came out, at midnight. LOVE IT.

Q: yes, she did win...my question is do you think she deserved it or should
someone else have got it. =]

Q: what is ur biggest wish??? :)

A: to be a character at disneyland. mostly Ariel.

Q: if you could live in any decade which decade would you choose?

A: SIMPLE. the 60s. no doubt.

Q: Do you remember going to a school called Pioneer Middle in South Florida
to talk about you're movie Hoot (April 3rd)?

A: PIONEER MIDDLE SCHOOL GIVES A HOOT. i hope cookies and cream/salt and
pepper have been feed lots of cheetos and crickets.

Q: Where'd you get your networking skills?

A: from many years of working in the netting industry.

Q: Do you want to go see the musical Wicked with me.

A: can I be in the musical?

Q: What event from your life would make the best cartoon scene? Pirates:
cool or overrated?

A: once I chased a road runner. i tried to drop an anvil on her head. but it
fell on me instead. i think that would work great as a cartoon. the best
part was that I was dressed as a coyote! how random right?! right. pirates
are overreated. I AM THE WARRIOR.

Q: How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop? Why is
the sky blue?

A: those are highly controversial question. mostly ones I cannot answer. but
I will say this. "is it safe to say C'mon C'mon? was it right to leave?
c'mon c'mon. will I ever learn? c'mon c'mon c'mon c'mon"

Q: do you like mooses? that is a weird word. mooses.

A: i once owned a bear that wore a dragon costume, named moose. so. to
answer your question. i hope mooses suck.

Q: How long does it take you to come up with all the banter you churn out? I
mean seriously, it has to be the most random irrelevant stuff I've ever
read. I guess though that is the mystery that is Brie Larson....

A: i bought the Do-it-yourself DVD.

Q: should my mum let me get my lip pierced?

A: YES. and it should be in the shape of the letter B.

Q: Do You Like Panic! at the disco? and do you think billie joe armstrong is
attractive?

A: i would say no, but only because when I hear their music or just their
name...I get this sudden urge to break my left arm and stick a fork in my
eye? billie joe armstrong is in green day. your answer is right there.

Q: What does celestial mean?

A: read a book. maybe its in there.