Jazz flute 2011

Must get out of the house now...

Where there are daiquiris, there is happiness*

Happy New Year, everyone.

* © Chad Taylor 2008

L*z

"There's a part of me that doesn't want to be a career bitch at all. That wants to raise children and arrange flowers and host bunco nights. I want to grow my nails so long and wear clothes so delicate I can't function without a man. That turns me on. And yet at the same time, I want to do the rock thing."... I hand her the pen. In script that would make Emily Post proud, she writes: "Thank you! I took the best crap!"

I love Liz Phair more every day. This and other things Katy Perry will never say here. Here she is again in a Speakers in Code interview:

Finish this sentence: The hardest thing about being a musician in today's society is...

The same thing that has plagued the artist for centuries. Most people focus on externals, don't place a premium on their inner life, so the artist, whose job it is to nurture that inner life, is subject to undervaluation at the marketplace. Yet if you removed us, the world would quickly feel the absence!

I agree with that view, the exclamation point not so much.

I, Candy

Tron Legacy is incredibly pretty. Fanboys are complaining because it's slow and wordy but so was Tron, so it's keeping with the spirit of the original. I'll write some more about it when my writing muscles have returned... Basically between the light cycles and some average "fight" sequences it's Kubrick's uplit Regency Louis XVI look from the end of 2001 and sparky spacegirls and a nightclub to pill out for, and a pretty fine story, at least thematically – so big ups to the six (ahem) credited writers. I enjoyed it because it was relaxing for the eyes as well as the mind. I was pleased when Quorra turned up, and then Gem arrived and I was even more pleased. If only it wasn't so slow and wordy...

Instant Rothko

Or Rayograph.

You burn me up I'm a cigarette

Daryl Hall is 64. Interviewed in NYMag.com:

As a doo-wop-singing teenager in Philadelphia, he knew future members of the Stylistics and Delfonics. Hall worked with Philly producers Gamble and Huff, and after he teamed up with Oates, they faced the standard challenge of their milieu: crossing over to white people. Releasing classic Philly-soul hits like "She's Gone" years before image ruled pop, Hall & Oates were typically assumed to be African-Americans. After a few years in New York, the image started to change.

"Honestly, we are a New York band," says Oates, calling from his present home in Aspen. "Our roots are in Philadelphia, but our music came from New York." As new transplants, the duo had their first commercial breakthrough when "Sara Smile" crossed over from R&B radio, and, in 1977, their first true pop hit with "Rich Girl." Then Hall & Oates started getting buzzed, morphed, and remixed by one of the most explosive cultural moments in this city's history.

The off-site money quote is from Pitchfork, on how Hall met Robert Fripp:

DH: I met Robert through a friend in about 1974, and we became friends right away. We have a lot of the same interests, and we just got along. I was first starting to spend a lot of time in England then, so I would stay at his house, and he used to stay at my house, and all that. We were really good friends. And then he went away to Gurdjieff Camp, and I was the only person in the outside world he was communicating with.

Pitchfork: Gurdjieff Camp?

DH: Yeah, he decided he was going to follow the teachings of [G. I.] Gurdjieff, which is basically like the boot camp of the mind. And so I was sort of his touch with some form of reality. And after he came through that period, he wanted to reenter the music world, because he had stepped away. And so he and I got together, and we said, let's do some projects. And we got Peter Gabriel and various other people, Pete Hammill, and the Roches-- we had a loose-knit group of people, and I did my album, Sacred Songs, and then we did Exposure, and I'm trying to think what happened after that-- well then he did the Peter Gabriel album [II aka Scratch]. But the Exposure album was the second collaboration with me, and I was supposed to be the singer on that whole album. Because he did my album, I did his album... [But] I was with RCA at the time, and they balked. They wouldn't allow my vocals to be put on his records. All the vocals you hear on Exposure are completely my ideas that were as best as could be done copied by other people, except for two or three songs. And that was really disheartening. That's when I completely fell out of love with the music business.

I bought Exposure – on cassette, FFS, from HMV Oxford Street in 1979. I must have been a fan. Fripp's League of Gentlemen is still a fave. I could never work out the Hall connection.

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