Venice’s Hotel Danieli, built in the 14th century as a Doge’s Palace, has been host to great writers such as Dickens, Zola and Goethe and features Murano glass chandeliers and original works of art. 
However, last night, it had an strange lilt, as the piano player was deferring to his American clientele with such songs as Sweet Home, Alabama (Lynyrd Skynyrd), Crocodile Rock (Elton John) and Take Me Home, Country Road (John Denver) to which many sang along. 
It was an odd tone only made worse when I asked for the bill, “Compiti, grazie.” (Indeed, like many, I needed to do my homework.)
Category Archives: music
My Bloody Valentine Play New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom
My Bloody Valentine are, as Rolling Stone Magazine says, committed to distortion; they deliver a wall of sound and light, and turn that around on itself.
My Bloody Valentine plays Hammerstein Ballroom on November 11
They take turns singing, or seeming to sing; there are no intelligible words, just murmuring beneath the din. 
The sound builds, seems to get louder – although nothing like their 2008 tour – pauses and starts again, a certain blissed-out monotony, chaotic but not, that wears everything down, until it’s just one long thing, only stopping to breath, all of this until the last song, You Made Me Realise. 
This final, drawn-out moment goes straight in, vibrates against the organs and veins and fights your heart rate until you feel like you’ve been initiated into a murderous cult. 
And then they leave, and that’s that.
Enduring Racism
I went to a concert last night in Brooklyn where everyone attending was white and everyone serving was black.
Nine Inch Nails, Barclay’s Center
I took the subway home. 
I walked a few blocks. 
And thought about that some more.
We’re only Carbon Neutral
The Marquis de Sade writes in his controversial novel Justine that we, as a species, tend to exaggerate our relevance:The power of destruction is not in the gift of Man. He may, at the most, change the form of things but he does not have the power to annihilate.
Oh, what does it matter to Nature’s eternal creation that the mass of flesh which today makes up a biped creature should be tomorrow reproduced as a thousand different insects? 
I say this: all men, all animals, all plants that grow, feed and are destroyed, reproducing themselves by the same means, never truly die but merely undergo variation and modification.
Modest Mouse offers a similar sentiment in their 2004 song Parting of the Sensory. 
I’d start at the dawn/Until the sun and fully stopped/Never walking away from/Just a way to pull apart/Dehydrate back into minerals/A lifelong walk to the same exact spot/Carbon’s anniversary/The parting of the sensory.
In other words, we’re just not that big a deal.
Bernardo at Hank’s Saloon in Brooklyn
Bernardo played its first-ever gig at Hank’s Saloon in Brooklyn last night, thanks in part to Bill Murray on a bicycle.
Hank’s Saloon’s facilities
Lead man, Mike Deminico, walked into the bar a couple of weeks back, inquiring into playing at the venue, and received an indifferent response and email address. Somewhat miffed, Deminico considered abandoning the enterprise when Bill Murray bicycled past and returned Deminico’s greeting. 
His resolve buoyed, Deminico got in touch with the manager and was on stage shortly thereafter.
Mike Deminico leads Bernardo at Hank’s Saloon.
The music of Bernardo is an unadulterated pleasure, straight ahead and wildly fun; the short 35-minute set was simply not enough. Deminico promises more in the months ahead.
Sex Symbols of the 1960s
A tantalizing contradiction seems to exist in the sex symbols of the 1960s, a sexuality that simultaneously offers lust and innocence. 
Paul McCartney used this iconography on the Out There tour as a stage backdrop for his performance of Paperback Writer.
Paul McCartney, Barclay’s Center, Brooklyn, June 10, 2012
The Dandy Warhols used similar imagery while playing Good Morning.
The Dandy Warhols, Terminal 5, New York, May 30, 2012
The images are provocative – more so than most graphic visuals of today – as they tiptoe along the line of what might be allowed.
Brigitte Bardot
Raquel Welch
Jane Fonda
In other words, it’s not so much the nudity as the pose, a faux timidity almost asking, “Do you mind?” Of course those were different times.
Bloom Jimmy & “Call the Dancers”
Call the Dancers, a short novel, almost a novella, is set in Dublin and features a punk band, Bloom Jimmy, who only perform the words of James Joyce. 
The lights went out. Bloom Jimmy returned to the stage.”Like to be that rock she sat on,” Jack announced quietly and then sang, “‘O sweety all your little girlwhite up I saw dirty bracegirdle made me do love sticky we two naughty Grace darling she him half past the bed met him pike hoses frillies for Raoul to perfume your wife black hair heave under embon senorita young eyes Mulvey plump years dreams return tail end Agendath swoony lovey showed me her next year in drawers return next in her next her next.'” The drums and guitars began. He began screaming. “Darling, I saw your! I saw all! Darling, I saw your! I saw all! Friction of the position! Like to be that rock she sat on! Like to be that rock she sat on! Like to be that rock she sat on!” 
The music was churning; the crowd smoked and thrashed. Stephanie was glad for the shelter provided by Nicholas. Joyce or not. It wasn’t good. What would he think of this? She had read a little of Ulysses, but just the sections about sex, penises being hat racks and crowbars. What was her name? Milly. The wife was Milly. That wasn’t right. Molly. That was it. Her name was Molly. Ulysses intimidated her. All of the masterpieces did, To the Lighthouse, those, consciousness and no story.
Retribution Ragnar Kaufman ask: Who Are We?
Is thinking a specifically singular activity? Is existence utterly isolated? Is “to think and be” a thing to do alone? Is it at all possible that there be a “we” in this thinking, we as a collective of “I”s? Can we think of ourselves as a “we”, truly together, or do we just go along, watching the stupidity of each other and try to get away with what we can? Can we think – and be – together?
We certainly have a notion of a “we” in cities, laws, families and music. 
It is in the interplay between right and wrong, sense and chaos, lyrics and rhythm. Retribution Gospel Choir – on stage this week with Wilco’s Nels Cline at Brooklyn’s Knitting Factory – offered a number of connecting moments, long and straining, the guitars back and forth, Alan Sparhawk singing: Nobody put up a fight. Everyone out on the ice. You and I don’t lie. 
It is moments like these that there seems to be some sense to “we”, the intertwining sounds, like we’re going somewhere, wonder and excitement at every turn. Ragnar Kjartansson’s work The Visitors – at Luhring Augustine until March – develops this feeling of joy and unity as well. 
The communication between musicians, each alone in his/her own space, joined only by headphones, the music, flowing through crescendos and silence, until coming together, exiting the house into the wide misty expanse of what might come next. Hope looms. The same cannot be said of Andy Kaufman.
Kaufman’s work – celebrated this week at the Maccorone Gallery in Greenwich – centered on the characterization of idiosyncratic individuals who didn’t fit in with the everyone else. Wide-eyed, smiling, Kaufman looked back like he wanted to be understood, waffling between child-like wonder and childish behavior, pushing us to reject him, which we inevitably did. “You could never like me. I always knew that.” That’s how he wanted it; if you weren’t in on the gag, so what?
As much of a cornerstone as the “I” might be in the work of Kjartansson and Retribution Gospel Choir, there is the invitation, a query as to what might be thought of next – not just the those on view – but the “we” in all of us “I”s too.
New York Inspired V: Ragnar Kjartansson’s “The Visitors”
Ragnar Kjartansson’s new show The Visitors opened at the Luhring Augustine Gallery in Chelsea last night. Hundreds of visitors – including Bjork, Antony, dozens of project participants, not to mention the artist himself – filled a space not made for such a crowd. And so it was hard to digest the work, a 53-film displayed on nine different screens, all of them surrounded. 
The title of the piece is derived from the 1981 album The Visitors by Abba, their final work together. 
The film opens with isolated people in different rooms – kitchen, living room, bathroom – connected to each other only by headphones, humming, strumming and singing lyrics from a poem by Ragnar’s former wife, Asdis Sif Gunnarsdottir: Once again I fall into my feminine ways. 
The music is entrancing, the tone meditative, the desire to sing along hard to resist; it is at times ecstatic – Ragnar, in the bathtub, raising his guitar above his head, a wheel-less canon fired into the evening – and always inviting. Everyone eventually exits their disparate spaces to join together at the front porch of the house (Rokeby Farm), still singing, to walk down into the fields together.
I was tired when I arrived at the gallery, feeling the flu coming on, and the crowds didn’t help. I wanted to leave, come another time, but stayed and was, once again, enveloped by Kjartansson’s work. It was not only the music, but the hypnotic quiet, in spite of everything, my tired knees, the inability to see much of anything, missing screens, unable to move, the anxious pushing around me, the chic personages. Indeed, I was privileged in the end to meet and thank Kjartansson for his work and expect to return – a few times, I imagine – to see what it’s all really about. It’s Bliss all over again! 
Googling the Past: Don Pullen to Adam Davidson and back again
Transferring cassettes to MP3 files is an arduous process. The technical aspect is easy enough; it’s the labeling of tracks that’s confusing. My printing is faded and obscured. There are distracting icons in the background of the paper, what looks like some sort of skeletal figure, holding eggs maybe. 
The title for one song is clear enough: Malcolm X extract…but I can’t make out the name of the composer. I remember finding the album in the dollar bin of a secondhand record store many years before; I can picture it well, a bright cartoonish lake. 
But I can’t remember the name of the composer. I remember the piano music. And then I remember that it is from the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. 
I was very excited about discovering that in the record store because I had just been in Montreux on a bike trip with 15 others. We had seen B.B. King at the festival and listened to Trio’s Da Da Da in the disco clubs across Europe. 
I bought the album on impulse, and everyone on the trip signed it. I must admit to going kind of crazy in those summer weeks. I pedaled right off the road. Furniture was dumped into a pool. A hotel door was burned with 160-proof rum. 
I even refused to visit a concentration camp because I didn’t want to be depressed. There was wine – and rum – involved in all of that. And I remember getting into a long discussion with a friend I had made through these travels, Adam Davidson, about everything from literature to the Holocaust. I pontificated nonsense while Adam was personable and good-humored. I really enjoyed his company and then lost touch with him as soon as the trip had ended. He was playing college football in Ohio; that was all I knew.
Years passed, and I was watching the Oscars Awards, and Adam Davidson’s name was announced as a nominee in the category for Best Short for a film called The Lunch Date. 
I knew it had to be another Adam Davidson, but then The Lunch Date won, and Adam Davidson, the Adam Davidson I knew, was thanking people on stage. That was really weird. I wanted to make contact but I didn’t know how to go about it, and I thought it would seem like I was just calling him because he was famous…which I probably was. I later rented the film and used it in my teaching.
It was some time after that again that I mused with a friend about wanting to get in touch with Adam. She worked at the D.A.’s Office and put together a print-out of his home address and phone number. That was too weird – and probably illegal – and so I tore it up…which brings me to now, me working on this blog.
Adam Davidson’s name comes up as the director of a number of television shows, including Grey’s Anatomy and Lost. 
However most of the Google images for Adam Davidson are not of the Adam Davidson I know, but of a NPR radio host who has been accused of journalistic corruption. 
That definitely isn’t him. I just had to scroll down further to find an image of my Adam Davidson. 
And another from a 2006 wedding announcement in The New York Times. 
I have consider trying to contact him now, but I know that would really be weird. It’s been almost 30 years. I would look like a stalker and he would probably be polite but then file an injunction or something to make sure I didn’t bother him again.
And so I get back on task and google what I was supposed to be googling: Malcolm X Jazz Montreux…and there it was, the same album I had found in the dollar bin of the secondhand record store years ago. 
The composer’s name was Don Pullen. And then I realized I didn’t have the track name correct. It wasn’t Malcolm X. It was called Dialogue Between Malcolm and Betty. I typed that into the iTunes box.