One last photo from Seattle.

Standing in front of the Virgin Mary are Jackie Kennedy and Queen Elizabeth II.

posted 1 April 2011 in Photos. no comments yet

My old friend Marc Weidenbaum has high-quality blogs to cover every conceivable interest. Well, if you can’t imagine being interested either in anything other than the iPad or ambient and electronic music. But they’re both excellent–go check them out.

posted 31 March 2011 in Links. no comments yet

“Young Satyr With a Theater Mask,” a Roman statue (dated from 100 to 200 AD), photographed at the Getty Villa.

posted 25 March 2011 in Photos. no comments yet

Another five-star review from the Rolling Stone “Hall of Fame”:

L.L. Cool J, Mama Said Knock You Out (1990)

“Don’t call it a comeback!” L.L. Cool J shouted at the start of “Mama Said Knock You Out.” By 1990, for all his bravado, L.L. was sorely in need of a career boost. As he rapped on “Cheesy Rat Blues,” his self-mocking tale of woe: “I wanna fall off, but I don’t know where the edge is / I’m so hungry, I eat my neighbor’s hedges.” The twenty-two-year-old got new life on his fourth record by hooking up with legendary New York DJ Marley Marl, who produced a radio-ready hip-hop masterpiece: not just spare, muscular beats, or self-conscious samplefests, but a smooth blend of borrowed licks with real instruments and vocals. When you played the album in your car, it had so much propulsion, it started the ignition and rolled down the windows all by itself.

L.L. had a lot on his mind–his stature in the rap community, insults to be avenged, life in Queens, the power of God–but what he rapped about on most of the fourteen tracks here was women, particularly the homegirls with bamboo earrings he praised on “Around the Way Girl.” L.L. portrayed himself as a good-natured Lothario; he had enough confidence to assume that all women would want to sleep with him and enough perspective to laugh when they turned him down. On rap after rap, he stretched metaphors for sex as far as they could possibly go–and sometimes beyond, as on “Milky Cereal,” where he crammed more Kellogg’s trademarks into a single song than you would think possible. But “Illegal Search” was brilliant: L.L. took the indignities of racial profiling and effortlessly flipped them into the efforts of seduction.

(By Gavin Edwards. Originally published in Rolling Stone 928 (August 7, 2003).)

posted 22 March 2011 in Reviews. no comments yet

(New to the countdown? Catch up here.)

Adam Curry returns to introduce “Terence Trent D’Arby, with the first number-one hit of his career.” At the time, “first” seemed an entirely reasonable adjective in that sentence, although “last” or “only” would prove just as accurate. Curry continues, “It’s from an album that he claimed was the most brilliant debut from any artist this decade and it was better than the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album.” Ah, the things people used to say to get attention in the British music press.

Curry throws to another clip from the same D’Arby interview we saw before “Sign Your Name” a few hours back at #71. D’Arby is still being filmed in the hallway of an awards show; there’s more people in the background now and he has to speak louder, with an accent more British than American: “The reason that I’m sharp, if I could use that, is because I’ve got rough edges. If I would sand those edges down, I would no longer be sharp, I wouldn’t be cutting.” D’Arby pulls a few braids out of his face; he probably had to do that a lot. “Which is more important?” he asks. “Selling lots and lots of records or being respected as a viable serious artist?”

If D’Arby has an answer, we don’t hear it, because we cut to the video for “Wishing Well,” and see him in black and white, walking through a public park, wearing sunglasses and a big puffy hat. He passes by a beautiful brunette girl sitting on a bench; she looks up at him.

Cut to color footage of a set draped with a large copper cloth. In the foreground is an antique microphone; in the background are three guys in the band, all wearing sunglasses and slapping their instruments in time with the drumbeat. D’Arby slides into the frame as if somebody greased the floor. He overshoots the microphone and sings “Kissing like a bandit, stealing time” as if he’s barely aware of where the mic is. The effect is cool rather than confused. For the next line, he looks into the camera, apparently wanting to emphasize “underneath the sycamore tree” as if it were an important clue in a million-dollar scavenger hunt.

Closeup: the silver sheriff’s star on the left breast pocket of D’Arby’s jacket. D’Arby keeps singing, letting us observe that he appears to be wearing a mock turtleneck.

Back to the park: D’Arby sits down on the same bench as the brunette. She is reading a newspaper; he unfolds one too.

In color on the set: D’Arby shimmying his shoulders, bobbing in time to the music, and attempting to seduce the microphone. On the line “I’m falling in love with you,” he strikes a pose, extending his leg in one of those diagonal postures Bob Fosse loved so much. There’s a quick flash of D’Arby in front of eight black-clad dancers, all striking the same pose. If this were a movie, a vignette like that would be a sign that D’Arby was cracking up under the pressure. In other words: can D’Arby play the Black Swan?

Quick scene in the park, D’Arby is flirting with the brunette, who just wants to read her newspaper–which is the Paris daily, Le Monde. (She might be the same model who played “Frenchie” in the “Sign Your Name” video; at the very least, we can tell D’Arby has a thing for beautiful Frenchwomen. The two videos form a nice diptych of seduction and separation.)

On the set, D’Arby flips his braids around. The semi-coherent lyrics are “A wishing well of crocodile cheers / Sing”–and when he gets to “sing,” he flips his hands up and gives a comic look into the camera, a rare moment where he punctures his own self-importance.

Park: D’Arby keeps macking on the brunette. She purses her lips and looks away, bored. Given that she’s reading a French newspaper, there’s no guarantee she understands anything he’s saying.

Set: D’Arby snaps his fingers up by his cheekbones, as serious and precise as if he were doing open-heart surgery. “Wishing Well” can be precisely carbon-dated by its production, especially the drums and the synthesizers. As a song, it’s a catchy piece of nonsense. But as a single, it’s still a marvel, mostly because of D’Arby’s voice: rough but sweet, capable of sliding elegantly from conversational tones to upper-register squealing.

Park: D’Arby keeps jabbering, and finally, the girl laughs.

Set: D’Arby does a little stuttering dance. When he gets to the “riverboat gambler” line, he mimes the tossing of dice. Overliteral acting out of lyrics: never a good idea.

Black and white: D’Arby has convinced the brunette to leave the park and get a drink with him at a café. We can see now that she’s wearing a leather jacket, and generally, looks tougher than he does. In a fight, the smart money’s on her. To make the cameraman’s life easier, they’re sitting side by side.

“So you want to be a midnight rambler,” D’Arby sings, with twitchy fingertips and a knowing grin. Um, wasn’t the midnight rambler of Stones fame a rapist-murderer? Emphasizing the D’Arby-grows-unhinged subtext, we get another Bob Fosse/Black Swan flash. The camera tracks in for a close-up as D’Arby bobs in time to the music.

Breaking news from black-and-white land! D’Arby is doing very well with the brunette, and has progressed to whispering in her ear and nuzzling her neck.

Back to color. Damn, D’Arby looks skinny. More intense finger-snapping, and then some herky-jerky choreography. It’s mimicked by the backup singers, in sunglasses and white turtlenecks, and it’s sufficiently odd that I wonder if they’re deliberately mocking D’Arby.

Clips of the (interracial, but mostly white) band: the drummer has a minimal kit; the two guitarists and the bassist swivel back and forth in the rhythm of the song. D’Arby reappears to throw his hair back and say “on the beat now, unh,” as if he were a junior James Brown, leading a bunch of white British guys and a drum machine. The white-turtleneck pair make minimal pointing gestures. Okay, they’re definitely taking the piss.

We interrupt this video for a black-and-white news flash: D’Arby has gotten the brunette into bed. He is lying shirtless, reading a book. She has her clothes on and is looking at the same book.

A saxophonist emerges from behind D’Arby, honking away, doubling the bassline. D’Arby responds by pulling out every dance move he knows, pivoting, grabbing, vibrating, leaning, flipping. He kicks the microphone stand away, pulls it back, kicks it behind him, pulls it back one more time, and does a split. D’Arby’s been paying attention to Prince. (And somewhere in England, Roachford is paying attention to D’Arby.)

Meanwhile, in black-and-white, D’Arby and the girl are naked under their bedsheets, kissing each other gently. For those of you keeping score at home, D’Arby got her into bed in under three and a half minutes. Then we switch back to color: D’Arby does another split, just in case you missed the first one.

“Wishing Well” hit #1 on the Billboard singles charts (for one week). You can watch the video here.

posted 18 March 2011 in 1988. 10 comments

Photographed last month in Seattle.

posted 11 March 2011 in Photos. no comments yet

R.E.M. have a new album out today, called Collapse into Now. I like late-period R.E.M. more than your average muskrat–but I still can’t get used to the notion that their albums now have lyrics sheets. If you want to revisit the bygone days of 2008, you can check out my article in the archives about them backstage at the Hollywood Bowl, touring behind Accelerate and drinking red wine.

posted 8 March 2011 in Archives. no comments yet

Back in 2004 and 2005, I did a series of flipwalks in my neighborhood in lower Manhattan: I would leave my house and flip a coin at every intersection to determine my route. After an hour, my timer would go off and I would photograph the block where I ended up. I posted the pictures along with a little report on each hour-long walk and called the series “48 Hours From Ground Zero.”

Reviving them in Los Angeles is an experiment: I know there won’t be as many people on the sidewalks, I know nobody will be handing me flyers or newspapers, I know some of the residential areas may blur together. But I’m hoping that by giving myself up to the forces of randomness again, some secrets of my new neighborhood will unfold.

9 Feb 2011
2:33 pm to 3:33 pm
Ending point: corner of Wilshire Blvd and Hauser Blvd
Latitude/longitude: 34:03.44.74N/118:21.05.21W
Distance from home: 0.9953 miles
Coin: 2008 Hawaii quarter (D)

I left the house and walked straight south, past well-groomed suburban lawns and very few pedestrians. (Not many cars, for that matter.) Some kids–old enough to take care of themselves, too young to drive– walked home from school laden with backpacks.

I circled around the intersection of La Brea and Wilshire for a while, heading onto quiet side streets and then right onto busy commercial streets with businesses such as “Lawrence of La Brea.” As I walked, I figured out how to handle the Los Angeles terrain for flipwalks–I decided that generally, alleyways were okay but parking lots were not.

A young man took a picture of a black BMW with his cell phone. His car? Somebody else’s? Six weeks after Christmas, there were some particularly sad trees left out by the curb, rapidly fading in the California sunshine.

posted 4 March 2011 in Photos. no comments yet

It has to be Steven Tyler adding a whole “Baby, let me follow you down” section to “Dude (Looks Like a Lady),” doesn’t it?

posted 3 March 2011 in Tasty Bits. 3 comments

1. Elvis Costello, “Blue Chair”
2. Hoagy Carmichael, “Rockin’ Chair”
3. Neil Diamond, “I Am… I Said”
4. Jeff Buckley, “Musical Chairs”
5. Terence Trent D’Arby, “Dance Little Sister”

The Carmichael song has been covered by everyone from Louis Armstrong to Frank Sinatra to Richard Thompson.

posted 1 March 2011 in Tasty Bits. 4 comments