Popularity: 1% [?]

Soundtrack for an Imaginary Wes Anderson Film, Track #9.

The Langley Schools Music Project’s Innocence and Despair album is so 2001, but it’s worth reintroducing to all you folks who missed it at the first time. All the information you need to know is right here: ’70s pop songs sung by Canadian schoolchildren in a gym. It’s a lot more than just the potential camp value, of course; as John Zorn put it, “This is beauty. This is truth. This is music that touches the heart in a way no other music ever has, or ever could.”

The one song that everyone who has ever heard the album remembers — and now that I’m surfing the net, it’s the song that just about every reviewer singles out — is a cover version of the Eagles’ “Desperado,” sung by a nine-year old Sheila Behman in a purely unaffected, heartbreaking vocal. I remember playing it to friends who literally stopped what they were doing as the song was playing. (In any case, they wanted to hear the entire album over again.)

I’ve never particularly liked the Eagles, though there are some songs (“I Can’t Tell You Why,” “Tequila Sunrise”) that I do like simply because of their nostalgic pull. But otherwise the Eagles, who may have been well-meaning country rockers at the beginning but turned into slick adult-contemporary, were never real talents to begin with, and I could easily be happy the rest of my life without ever having to hear “Heartache Tonight” ever again. If you Americans think they’re overplayed here, you didn’t grow up in the Philippines, where every bar band has to have “Hotel California” in their repertoire, in case some drunken customer with a gun requests it. You then have a choice: “Hotel California” or death. It’s not much of one. “Desperado” is the same way: unbearably sappy, with strings swelling in the background, and faux-cowboy lyrics.

In any case, this version of “Desperado” has a force of its own in the context of Innocence and Despair; peruse the comments and you read stories about grown men weeping uncontrollably, a radio programmer pronouncing it “one of the most sublime recordings ever made,” someone on Amazon.com writing that the song “almost makes me reconsider my atheism,” a reviewer calling it one of the saddest songs they have ever heard, a driver having to pull over because she or he was overcome by tears after hearing it on the radio. A little too much to burden this one song, but… well, you should hear it for yourself.

It seems, in any case, fitting for a Wes Anderson film: you approach it as slightly arch and distancing, perhaps, and then you’re hit sideways by something genuinely moving. (There’s apparently a scene in Jim Sheridan’s In America that basically rips off the Langley Schools arrangement of the song.)

Hear it (4.93 mb, m4a).

[All mp3s on this site are posted only for a limited time and are for sampling purposes only -- buy the album! The rest of it is excellent: a mind-blowing "Space Oddity," a joyful "Saturday Night," a version of "The Long and Winding Road" that's better than the original (and there are at least a few more tracks like that).]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Soundtrack for an Imaginary Wes Anderson film, Track #8.

Every Wes Anderson film needs a good British Invasion song for the characters to run around pell-mell to, preferably in some narrow hallway. So here’s The Move’s 1967 hit, “I Can Hear The Grass Grow” — a great running-around-pell-mell-to-for-quirky-characters song if there ever was one — brought to you by Roy Wood and Company before he and Jeff Lynne (who was also in The Move) co-founded the Electric Light Orchestra.

There’s no mistaking what the song’s about, but it’s remarkably free of any psychedelic filigree (no sitar, no phasing, no stereo trickery); it’s straight-up guitar crunch and drum fills apparently nicked by Keith Moon for “I Can See For Miles.”

Hear it (4.56 mb, mp3).

Popularity: 1% [?]

There’s an article about last week’s preliminary hearing in Prof. Antwi Akom’s case in SFSU’s [X]press: the article also has a link to a .pdf copy of the police report. (To the best of my memory, he cast doubts on the veracity of some of the accusations in the report — actually, his language was stronger, referring to the unlikely possibility that he would actually dare a police officer to pull a gun while his kids were sleeping in the car outside — but I can’t find the e-mail message, so don’t quote me on this.)

[Update: I found the e-mail. Here's an excerpt of what Antwi wrote on Oct. 30: "I just got done reading through the entire police reports and I have never seen fabrication of this magnitude in my entire life. What saddens me besides the magnitude of lies and fabrication is the fact that those with less social, cultural, and economic resources could never fight this level of deception and survive. Truth be told I may not survive. I don't think I'll ever be the same person again. Fo' sure I won't. What saddens me is that I thought I had a handle on how corrupt the system was. I was way off."]

Meanwhile, the passage below was posted as a comment to an older posting; signed “Old Friend,” the whole message is worth moving up from the comment area as its own post:

Before he was the man you know as “Dr. Akom” he was my best friend…whom I called “Twi”. We grew up in a Rockwellian town in central Pennsylvania. We did all the things that make for great childhoods; played some sort of ball all year ’round, did a lot of fishing in the creeks behind our houses, had neighborhood games of tag, hide-n-seek, Army(what did we know), rode our bikes everywhere, made crank calls to bowling alleys and pizza parlors…and did I mention that we were playing ball of one sort or another all year ’round? We had great times…we lived in a very safe little town where there was no obvious crime, no gangs, no obvious poverty, everyone was relatively educated (a college town after all)the public schools were the only option and that was fine.

Then we found out that Twi was black.

That’s right, he was black. It took some mental midget behind the counter at a Dairy Queen one summer evening the year we were 11 to point out that Twi did look different from all the other people in the store…I was shocked, I couldn’t believe that he had been hiding it our whole lives. Our moms were shocked too, and they were both real, real pissed off, and you know what? That shitty old Dairy Queen closed down not long after, they felt pretty bad about making our moms mad, and I think they just figured that they would best serve the community by leaving it.

Well, I and all of Twi’s other friends (which was pretty well darned near everybody else in town) had just about forgotten that my best bud was black when our sixth grade teacher felt that she needed to keep hearing Twi read part of Mark Twains classic “Tom Sawyer” out loud and he needed to make the character of the slave sound like a real “colored”. Well that teacher was very close to retiring anyway my mom told me, and so she agreed with my Aunt Margot ( Twi’s mom) that that old teacher should apologize for being such a fool and then she oughta find a hobby for all of her free time, because she all of a sudden found herself with a whole bunch more of it.

Then there was the time a few months after the teacher thing when we were all (maybe 20 of us kids)up on campus at Rec Hall playing a game of tag/hide’n'seek that we town kids liked to play where we could hide anywhere in the entire facility. There was nothing illegal about it, heck half the kids had parents who worked up there. One sunday afternoon a couple of the campus cops decided to play, next thing you know there’s Twi spread eagled and up against a wall with one cop holding a gun on him while the other rifled his pockets (they took his packet of “Big League Chew” bubble gum). They were gonna arrest him on account of his being the only black kid in town, but some of our parents thought that was a bad idea. The parents (especially Aunt Margo) also thought that it was a mistake in judgement for those poor cops (who had been in fear for their lives they said)to point a gun at my best friend who was 12. Those two fellas got new jobs and now they don’t have to be afraid of kids anymore, isn’t that great?

These kind of things happened to Twi for the rest of his time in his perfect little home town, I picked three of them to write about, I could fill a book with this garbage and that would only take Twi through high-school. Racist Dads who wouldn’t let their Daughters date Twi-could be a whole seperate volume…I still laugh when I think of the time one Dad confronted Twi(who was 15 at the time)and suggested strongly that Twi find some black girls to talk to instead of his lillywhite little girl to which Twi shot back with “there aren’t any black girls, so yours will have to do!”

Anyway, I could go on forever, but I won’t. I will relay one more story though because it adds some depth to the man I knew as a boy; One time Twi and I were talking about life (we were probably 15) and I asked Twi if all the shit that had happened in the years since that Dairy Queen were getting to him…I don’t remember his exact words, but the gist of what he said was that he had his mom around to watch out for him and keep the racial BS at bay so that he wouldn’t be bothered and could concentrate on his education, which he felt would take him to some much more enlightened locales where his being black wouldn’t matter so much. He also told me, and I think it was in the same conversation that he would take things much more personally after his mom died. Before he became Dr. Akom he was just my friend Twi, and he was the most focused and driven and decent kid in town.

I am very sorry to have to tell the SFSU PD that Twi’s Mom is gone, and know you will have to bear the full weight of Dr. Akoms wrath. This will not go well for you.

an old friend

Popularity: 1% [?]

No, not the Throbbing Gristle song (a great song, but not as good as “Hamburger Lady.”)

As icing on my cake of penury, my car got reversed on this afternoon as I was driving out of the school parking lot; the driver of the errant truck was so eager to give his parking stub to another driver that he reversed without looking. Cue the sound of breaking glass and the oddly soft crunch of metal bending: one headlight was out of commission, with the hood poking up about half a foot to expose the wirings and stuff underneath.

The driver was extremely apologetic, and offered to pay me even in cash, pay for a rental car while the car was in the garage, even accompany me to the garage for estimates. None of this was in writing, of course, so I take down his name and address and phone numbers and e-mail address.

As I get on the freeway, however, I realize — in a sudden panic — that I had not even taken down his license plate number. Great, I say to myself. I give the number he gave me a call, hoping he’d pick up. He does, but tells me he’ll call me up in a few minutes because he’s driving. I’m thinking to myself, great, he’s not going to return the call, when the phone rings. He had pulled over, it seems, to read his license plate to me. He promises to call tomorrow after I go to the garage for an estimate. My fingers are still crossed.

I am, in any case, feeling rather bad for my poor Honda Civic. (D-Dog and I went on a Road Trip O’ Death from Los Angeles to San Francisco earlier this year, but we survived.) About three weeks ago the third of my four speakers gave way to an annoying tinny buzzing rattle, much like an old Ulver record, everytime the bass would thump. (The little tin cone inside the speaker had come off and was bouncing around inside.) Now I listen to either one speaker (the one farthest from the driver’s seat, alas) or have the bass lowered so far down; since I don’t own a stereo, it’s one of the few places I can listen to music that isn’t on headphones. (This car, by the way, was once dubbed by J-Lu as “the rustiest car I’ve ever seen;” a couple months ago the metal “HONDA” letters fell off into the trunk as I opened the door.)

So anyhow. I finally get back home. It’s dark as I pull into the driveway. As I come out of the car and pick up my stuff, my shoe hits something as I close the door; it rolls a few inches away from my feet. I figure I had dropped it, so I pick up the hard cylindrical object and turn it toward the light to see what it is. It’s a dried-up dog turd.

Popularity: 1% [?]