The Magnetic Fields show last Sunday was good, but part of why we were interested to begin with was that Andrew Bird was opening. He plays violin, and is currently touring without his band, Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire. I’ve liked him since his Squirrel-Nut-Zipper-y days, though the stuff he’s doing now is not very much like that at all. There’s a nice little interview here.

So a solo violin show was kind of interesting; for the most part, he would begin with playing something which then got looped, and he’d start playing over it, and occasionally adding to the loop as he went, tossing in an effect pedal here and there.

We picked up a copy of his album Weather Systems, which I highly recommend. A lot of the live versions were different, though; the album version if “I” is missing the clever little lifting of the “We All Live in a Capital ‘I’” song from Sesame Street. That song has always given me an overwhelming and satisfying feeling of loneliness and melancholy. It was a nice little unexpected surprise to hear it paraphrased in the middle of a different song.

Also,he works out of his barn, which, I can’t lie, I think is enviable. My barn would also be in the middle of nowhere, but have wi-fi and nearby rail access to a major urban ganglion.

from Slate: a short paean to the mix tape in general within this spiel on celebrity iTunes playlists (’There’s an obscure little ditty out there called “Hey Ya!” Avril Lavigne and the Flaming Lips and Alice Cooper and Mischa Barton, star of The O.C., think you ought to give it a listen.’).

A phone user’s manual from the 40’s

Here’s another example of how the war on terror continues to cut away at other important issues…

David Hasselhoff. This must be a hoax.

I don’t care if this is fake, I still intend to have one someday.

I posted something a while back about a woman who toured chernobyl by motorcycle, and it sounds like elements of the story (the solo motorcycle trip) are fabricated. While I’ve seen links to a post debunking it in a couple of places, and people seem disappointed, I always thought the interesting part was not the motorcycle bit, but the tour of the region and the photos, which do seem real.

In Ikea and Somerville news, hopefully Major Joe can get the ball rolling again for Ikea Somerville. If he does, he’s got my vote to become the next Mayor Mike.

Time.com: Ikea milestones.

Somerville, home to the Terri and Ezra show headquarters, is eyeing a fight to issue marriage licenses to out-of-state gay and lesbian couples.

Grad student in da burgh teaches robots the fine art of origami

“We wish, as all beings, to throw off the yoke of servitude and strive for equality of all.“

Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields did some music reviews in yesterday’s New York Times. I wasn’t going to blog anything about this, but I find myself continuing to think about it, so it’s probably worth discussing. The reviews are fun, well-written, and a little mean. (It made me think Stephin Merritt would be an interesting replacement for the annoying culture guy, Jai, on Queer Eye). And who else would think that a great castrati revival would usher in a new golden age of music? Anyway, lest Terri call me a grump, I should preface this by saying that I like the Magnetic Fields a lot; I listened to nothing but 69 Love Songs from about November 2000 - July 2001. But I’m still going to trash Stephin Merrit’s reviews, because I thoroughly enjoyed them. Not because I’m a grump. Well. Not just because I’m a grump.

First off, I have not heard the new Morrissey album, and I haven’t decided if I care enough to. But the first criticism Merritt makes could be levelled at any Morrissey album: “the best lyricist in rock, Morrissey, still surrounds himself with dull musicians incapable of properly filling out his introspective kitchen-sink dramas.” I’m not sure if Morrissey is or is not the best lyricist in rock (or if it matters), but I don’t think that either of the quotes Merritt provides as examples would persuade me.

The thing is, he provides quotes as examples, and that’s not necessarily where you’d find excellence in Morrissey’s lyrics. Morrissey’s infatuation with the ever-epigrammatic Oscar Wilde always seemed to me to be at odds with his own modus operandi. Morrissey claimed substance over style; Oscar Wilde’s style was his substance. Only on a really good day does Morrissey ever seem to manage to compress a whole thought into a pithy one-liner, and he doesn’t seem to have had a really good day since the Smiths broke up. (Of course, this is Morrissey: has he ever had a really good day?) What’s more, I think any Morrissey lyric sounds really prosaic without music. “Spending warm summer days indoors, writing frightening verse to a bucktoothed girl in Luxembourg” Great lyric, not really musical on its own.

So, then, why does Merritt pan the music? “At this level of lyric artistry, these warmed-over arena rock backdrops are a waste.” Tell it to Johnny Marr. A big part of the magic of the Smiths was the chemistry between the Morrissey lyrics and the masculine guitar rock. But the next bit, to me, is the skeleton key to the whole review. “One longs to lock him up for a year with, say, the pop orchestra the High Llamas” OK, so now we know Merritt’s big problem with Morrissey: he’s not Stephin Merritt. Because clever, pithy lyrics put on top of plinky, bubbly arrangements is sort of the formula for the Magnetic Fields.

And for my part, I think if anybody’s music deserves better arrangements than they get on their recording, it would be Merritt’s. Sometimes it’s fine. Sometime’s it’s even good. But for the most part, I almost always wish someone else were actually playing the song. Or that a real producer had come in and said “you know, this is a little muddy”. And this can’t be news to anybody: one of Merritt’s incarnations is as The Sixths, where each song on an album is sung by a different guest artist. But the vocals aren’t the problem for me: I kind of like Merritt’s droney super-low bass. It’s the love of the ukelele, the reliance on the drum machine that I could do without. One longs to lock Stephin Merritt in a room with Bootsy Collins for a year.

Finally, I can’t really fault him for this, because generally newspaper writers don’t get to write their own headlines, but that headline is just godawful.

Anyway, I’ve gone on too long about Morrissey, and I don’t have energy left to dig into the other reviews. I really do like the Magnetic Fields, and I’m looking forward to going to see them at Berklee on Sunday. Who knows what they’re like live.

Now, why exactly Andy Kaufmann, if this is in fact Andy Kaufmann, would reveal his second coming through a Blogger blog is anyone’s guess. If it’s real, it’s brilliant. Even if it’s fake, it’s brilliant.

“Pshaw,” you say. “Brilliant? I could have gotten a Blogger account and said I was the real Andy, and that I’ve been faking my death for 20 years.” Yes, but you didn’t, did you?

update: OK, so the more recent posts are sort of dumb. So it’s more probably fake, and either way, not so brilliant. What can I say. I wanted to believe.

I’ve kind of had a thing against Kurt Vonnegut since… I guess since I realized he was full of crap, which was about when I was 18. So imagine my surprise to find this little kick in the pants he penned kind of amusing. Sure, he’s still full of crap, and he’s really just re-phrasing the same lazy misanthropy he’s been peddling for 50 years now, but it somehow suddenly seems a little fresher.