You all have to check out Sadi Ranson-Polizzoti. She's been posting some beautiful stuff over at BlogCritics.

Her latest is called Dancing in the Dark | a letter.

For an SRP orgy, check out all of her Blogcritics posts, or her own website.

gees, this world series thing is killin' me. late, late nights. too much after hours adrenaline. no time for writing.

what the hey?!!

This time, it's a full review over at Matthew Shipp's website. Yow!

There was an article in the local paper yesterday about J. Geils. Not the band, but the guitar player. He's just a 'regular guy' now, living out in Groton, Massachusetts. And though he's been long-retired from the rock scene (that last bit of real Geils Band activity was 1999's reunion tour), he's been active in music, having just released a solo jazz record (gotta track that one down).

Strangely enough (or not, if you're familiar with my penchant for musical reminiscing), the J. Geils band reminds me of a lunch counter at a drug store.

During my first year of high school I was lucky enough to have the school day begin around 11:30. Carrabec High (North Anson, Maine...not quite the 'middle of nowhere', but close enough) was overcrowded and had to run split sessions. This meant that I could indulge my teen self by sleeping to 9:30 or so, showering, and then walking down the hill to take the bus. The walk (about 3/4 of a mile, not uphill both ways) took me to Taylor's Drug Store, your typical small-town drug/variety store with lunch counter. There we would sit eating microwaved hamburgers, washing 'em down with cherry cokes (coffee cokes too, weird but good).

At the end of one of the isles near the lunch counter there was a stand-up wire display rack containing rock record albums. For months and months I looked at the cover of the spooky Geils record Nightmares. Never bought it though. At the time, "Give It To Me" (from Bloodshot) was getting a lot of airplay (back when radio didn't suck via stations WTOS (The Top of Sugarloaf) and WBLM). The version of that song was probably coming from the live record Blow Your Face Out. Once they started playing "Musta Got Lost", I was hooked. For years (until the Sanctuary and Love Stinks era) I listened to nothing but the live records (this one and Full House). They're just too much fun: blues, funk, soul, heck..even a little comedy.

If you think the J. Geils band was all about "Centerfold" you owe it to yourself to check 'em out when they were truly at the top of their hip-shakin' game.

Who's Yer Daddy?!!

From Merriam Webster's Medical Dictionary:

"Yohimbe: a tropical African tree (Pausinystalia yohimbe syn. Corynanthe yohimbe) of the madder family whose bark yields the alkaloid yohimbine; also : a preparation of the bark that in herbal medicine is held to be useful as an aphrodisiac and in treating weakness and feebleness

The Yohimbe Brothers are turntablist DJ Logic and splatter-guitarist Vernon Reid. Does their music have desire-inducing properties? I suppose that depends on who ya ask. Can their music be used to treat "weakness and feebleness". Ya know, I bet it could.

On The Tao of Yo, Logic and Reid add a few extra instruments (mostly bass and various forms of percussion) and a big team of guest vocalists (for spoken word, rappin' and plain old singin') to come up with, well...I'm not quite sure what it is.

Vernon Reid (probably best know as the guitarist from Living Colour) is all over the map here. It's actually one of the charms of this record. In addition to Reid's signature guitar-in-an-uncapped-blender soloing, we get oblique distortions (on the very African-percussion-by-way-of-Missy-Elliot opening track "Shine For Me", which features Latasha Nevada Diggs), heavy duty sludge ("Secret Frequency, The", "TV"), understated acoustic finger-tapestries ("30 Spokes"), a little delta blues slide ("Noh-Rio") , sorta-bebop ("Unimportance"), jazz ("Perfect Traveller (Tourist Europe)"), reggae ("No Pistolas") and even some tap-dancin'. Tap-dancin'? Yep, you can hear Maya Jenkins adding to the mix on several cuts. I haven't heard that combination since Gregory Hines teamed with Jaco Pastorius.

What this all reminds me of is a funk/hip-hop version of the bands Praxis and Material. While those groups were all about combining ambience with snarling rock and "out" sounds, the Yohimbe Brothers are brewing up turntableism, found sound and street attitude.

Are you feeling week and feeble?

After watching that danged baseball game, I learned that I am apparently able to survive for several hour without actually breathing!

There are a pile of British guitar players who've always struck me as being American. Not just the "White Boy Blues" guys like Clapton, Beck and Page. There's the country-ish chicken-pickin' of Albert Lee, the psychedli-blues of David Gilmour and, maybe the best example of all: the jagged chord-swagger of Keith Richards.

And then there's Mark Knopfler. He's on his own guitar island. With his attackless delivery (no picks involved), Knopfler (and his Dire Straits cohorts) created their own scene with the release of "Sultans Of Swing". I remember hearing that song and thinking of it as the first ray of light peekin' through from the general overcast of the Disco Era (though I've since come to appreciate Disco, partly due to the nostalgia factor).

Dire Straits went on to true rock superstardom before Knopfler went out on his own to record some pretty cool solo albums and soundtracks. For some people, the solo material lacked the energy and 'weight' of the Straits albums. I don't tend to 'rate' one recording against another (as in Love Over Gold is 'better' than Brothers In Arms) as it's always seemed like a meaningless exercise. Maybe it's my anti-competitive nature. Dunno.

The point, though, is that Shangri-La is different than records like Local Hero and Sailing to Philadelphia. Whether it's "better" or not really doesn't matter.

To return to that "American but really British" thing though: on this record, Knopfler takes his love of music Americana (with its rootsy country-isms) and uses it to paint some color onto some very interesting stories (including nasty crime scenarios, McDonald's & Ray Kroc, Sonnie Listen and Skiffle-king Lonnie Donegan). If you're looking for Knopfler guitar-whiplash here, you're going to be disappointed. It's all subtlety and shift.

One of the most interesting uses of music Americana is the Elvis 'tribute' "Back To Tupelo", which uses a very "Ghostriders In The Sky" chord progression underneath its verses. That music puts extra emotional 'umph' into the Elvis-gone-commercial lament:

when you're young and beautiful your dreams are all ideals later on it's not the same lord, everything is real sixteen hundred miles of highway roll back to the truth and a song to give your mother in your first recording booth

The clever use of the Ghostrider-ish music beneath the lyrics is one in a long list of past Knopfler-isms. Up until this song, my favorite has always been the lyric (and musical) quote of "My Boyfriend's Back" in the middle of "Romeo and Juliet".

Much like the "what's better" question, the matter as to whether I think of Mark Knopfler as Britsh or American is also a non-starter. He takes elements from both cultures and turns out some unique art.

Heck, it doesn't even bother me when he pronounced it "Jag-U-Are". Heh.

The in-laws are here from California, so we went down to visit 'em in Newport. Gees, what a swanky little town. Kind of like Portsmouth, NH on steroids.

Good thing I didn't have a truck with me, because we went into an antiques joint that had two absolutely mint cabinet-style Victrola's available. I was drooling. I still may be drooling.

There's a great article about musician/wizard Jon Brion over at Perfect Sound Forever.

What?! You've never heard of Perfect Sound Forever? C'mon...yer kiddin' me!!

The original LP version of London Calling was released on December 14th, 1979, just a few months after that classic & iconic cover shot was taken of Paul Simonon smashing his bass into the stage of the New York Paladium.

London Calling rests easily in my list of favorite rock records of all time. It was one of a handful of recordings that kicked off my musical branching out process. The Clash made me check out reggae, ska and rockabilly. I already had punk in my backpocket (thanks to the Sex Pistols and those earlier Clash records) and then London Calling blew up in my face.

To this day I can remember where I first heard side one. It was up in my high-school buddy's bedroom at his house on the little lake deep in central Maine. His dad's stereo was normally used for blasting John Phillips Souza-type stuff but on that day "London Calling" and then "Brand New Cadillac" pinned me to the wall.

Somehow, a pile of years have flown by and I'm sitting here holding London Calling, 25th Anniversayr Legacy Edition in my hands. It contains the remastered original music, second disc of demos known as "The Vanilla Tapes" and a DVD of sorta-documentary material and videos & stuff. I suppose the demos disc is for completists only (count me in) but I just love hearing how these songs were hammered into their final form. Plus, the cover of Dylan's "The Man in Me" is kinda cool.

Dammit, I still miss Joe Strummer.

Let me come right out and say that if there was an entry for "Difficult Listening" in the musical dictionary, there'd be a picture of Anthony Braxton beside it. His music is built from fully notated passages combined with improvised elements. The thing is, it's pretty danged hard to figure out which is which. Maybe that's missing the point. Dunno. I do know that if you're interested in building and stretching those "listening muscles", this might be a good place to start.

While you may at first think that Braxton's music is 'jazz', you'll soon come to realize that this isn't your garden variety head-solo-head kind of thing. For years I had wondered what was going on with this stuff. Then I stumbled upon a book about Braxton called Forces In Motion, by Graham Lock. In this book I discovered that Braxton has created a whole system and language that describes how he thinks about and constructs music. Even if I didn't completely understand concepts such as "pulse tracks", "flow of events" and "horizontal variables", the reading was truly fascinating. To give you an idea, here's a chunk of liner notes quoting Braxton's description of Composition 124:

...'multiple line structure that explores arhythmic phrase grouping formings'; that is, it uses the linear phraseology characteristic of bebop but extends it into a context of more exreme time relationships, so 'the line itself is farther out of time'.

Now that certainly is a mouthful, but it's also an earfull...and totally worth exploring.

A 'bonus' on this two-disc set are the bits of Graham Lock/Braxton interviews. Lock used these interviews as the basis for his book. For a guy who's so full of seemingly high-fallutin' ideas about music, it was kind of refreshing to discover that his roots included simple (relatively speaking) stuff like Frankie Lymon, Bill Haley & the Comets and Little Richard.

Open your ears people. Let Braxton and his cohorts (Marilyn Crispell, Gerry Hemingway and Mark Dresser) show you what a good "multiple line structure" sounds like.

OK, first they have tv ads that make it sound like DSL is only a half-step faster than a 15k dialup connection.

Then they spin up a yarn about satellite tv....that if you order it a guy shows up at your house with the dish & related parts and just dumps 'em on your front porch.

But then there's the true sleaze: they totally ignore (at least on their website) the existence of routers. Well, gee...why would they do such a thing? Because they can get people to sign on, at the rate of $5.95 per month, for adding extra computers to the home network.

Sorry, but that doesn't play in my book.

A very helpful article on the Linksys website gave me a schoolin' on "MAC address cloning". We're now back to three computers (including my tasty Linux box) on the home network.

I may live in the middle of nowhere but, dammit, I've got high speed internet access.

What a country!

Obsessive rituals of youth.

It's all boils down to pants. Blue jeans, specifically. See, back before we had "pre-washed", "stone-washed", "acid-washed" or any of them other variants, we had plain 'ole blue jeans.

And let me tell you...they were very blue and very tough. There was a lengthy (and somewhat painful) breakin process. Even after those first two or three washings, a nasty thigh-chafe could persist. To ensure a more perfect fit, some kids would go so far as to take a bath with their new jeans on, spending the rest of the day walking around in wet Levi's, creating a sort of custom denim body mould. In time, the harshness would fade and your pair of jeans would take on their true character. Each pair was different. Some looser (or tighter) in the seat. Some softer than others. No matter what breakin technique you used, sooner or later your jeans arrived at their ultimate state. They became your current favorite pair. More than that, they pretty much defined your idea of 'blue jeans'. Their "jeans-ness" had peaked (I told you this was obsessive).

The point here is not to toss out an easy cliché, comparing the music of Tom Waits to a well-worn pair of jeans. That wouldn't be fair to either Mr. Waits or the legacy of Levi Straus. Plus, sometimes Waits' music just isn't all that comfortable.

No, what triggered memories of respectful blue jean husbandry was the idea that occurred to me after several listens to Waits' latest, Real Gone. It was that, like that perfect pair, this record defines Tom Waits' "Waits-ness".

Tom Waits is an artist who draws on so many aspects of culture, musical & sociological, United States & World, that you can think of him as a one-man melting pot.

So on this extremely Waits-y recording, we have field hollers mixed with turntables (Waits' son Casey, on "Top Of The Hill"), slinky guitar (Marc Ribot is all over the place, turning in some fine solos and atmospherics), sleazy blues ("Shake"), wacky & busted sorta-tangos, lots of junky percussion and stories of love, death, coping and lust.

Then...there are the characters. Music this textured deserves 'em. Horse Face Ethel, Jenny with the Light Brown Hair, Bum Mahoney, Bowlegged Sal, Piggy Knowles. They're all there, inhabiting Waits' underworld.

And lets not forget Waits' voice. He caresses, croaks, screams and grunts his way through this big, beautiful mess. Hell, he even samples himself and uses it as a percussion element. It's fun and a little disconcerting, both the sound of it and the idea of Waits using modern technology (let's face it, what thing makes more "Tom Waits Sense": a sampler or the sound of a pipe wrench wackin' a trash can?).

Perhaps most shocking (and most American) of all are the bits of political musings. Though a very small part of the whole deal, they do hit their mark. The divided nature of our opinions regarding the war in Iraq (actually, war in general) are beautifully expressed in the form of a letter from a soldier ("Tomorrow"):

You can't deny, the other side Don't want to die anymore Then we do, what I'm Trying to say is don't they pray To the same God that we do? And tell me how does God Choose, who's prayers does he Refuse?

Real Gone may just be Waits' most focused album. It's not pre-washed, stone-washed, or any of that other faux-marketing nonsense. It's the real thing. Sincere and without pretense. Waits has, accidentally or not, produced a record so "self-iconic" that..well, cheap cliché or not...it really is like your favorite pair of jeans: well-worn, full of character and hard to improve upon.

Things you don't want to hear at the house during the first couple of days of the post-move phase:

"I thought you brought the toilet paper!" "Hey, there's water running out of that radiator valve" "What's that smell?" "Do you know what box my underwear is in?"

...and on it goes.

The CD's, all fifteen boxes or so (schlepped all the way up to the third floor...thanks guys!), are still sitting in the hallway. They're waiting until I can figure out how to bring the rack of doom back to life.

So I figured that this morning it'd be a somewhat fitting maneuver to just randomly pick a CD out of a random box. The selected box was labelled "Geils -> Cake" (yes, I nerdishly packed everything in reverse order to ease the unpacking process). After cutting the tape off the boxtop I stuck my hand in there and came up with Cheap Trick's Woke Up With A Monster.

I couldn't have asked for a better way to kick off the weekend. All those seuthing late-70's nostalgia juices (even though this particular album came out in 1994) to calm my rattled nerves. There's a pile of great songs on this one. It's a little perplexing that it disappeared without notice. Heck, they even brought in Ted Templeman as producer. Who knows...maybe a big slab of powerish pop made no sense in 1994. All I know is that it made perfect sense for the drive away from the forest of packing boxes and through the country, passing the horse farms, pumpkin stands and dew-laden fields.

There's a Tom Waits review in the works. Part of it currently resides scratched out on a yellow legal pad (no, wait...is it a legal pad if it's not that long stuff?) and the rest is in my head.

If the cable guy shows up today and everything goes well ("What? You don't have a computer with Windows on it?") then mebbe it'll show up this week. As in..tomorrow.

I stayed home yesterday to get some work done (I'd go into details but my company wouldn like it...plus, you'd be bored outa yer socks...well, maybe not if you're into blood & guts and stuff) while waiting for the heating guy to show up. We've got a couple of leaky valves in the steam system.

I am now the house's expert on steam heat. Valves, air vents, pipe dope and big-ass pipe wrenches. What I learned:

never turn off a radiator's valve the air vents are important and should be replaced if they stop workin' the radiator needs to tilt back towards the valve steam travels in the pipe at 65 mph

Plus, the Sox won last night (so I heard this morning, I've got no cable yet).

What I learned: those crates of records are much, much heavier than they were twenty years ago.

Vitamin "I" (Ibuprophen) to the rescue.

It is time to move on.

No, not from Blogcritics...from my old house.

Yes, the entire Saleski family is in the process of packing up and moving out from the bland, soul-sucking suburbs to a new place out in the country. Actually, I should mention that the 'new' house is actually a 150-year-old federal. It sits right on Main St. tucked between and behind the Historical Society building and the Grange Hall. Cripes, I may have to buy a pair of overalls. And, yes, the rack of doom is coming with me.

So here's the deal. While I sit here in my bathrobe typing this stuff in, I am listening to the song "The First Circle" by the Pat Metheny Group. It will be the last tune that will pass through my stereo before disassembly begins. It will also be the first song played after stereo reconstruction (you're thinking, "What's the big deal?", but if you're ever dealt with a low-power, tube-based system, you know that it's not as simple as cdplayer->receiver->speakers).

"The First Circle" was the first song played after moving to my current place, so I see it as a continuation of my good musical karma.

Now, if you're not familiar with guitarist Pat Metheny, this may not be the best place to start. This particular song is an odd one. I'm not sure I'd even call it 'jazz'. It is in an odd time signature (22/8). What's moving about it is the nine minutes-plus emotional rollercoaster constructed out of the handclaps, furiously strummed acoustic guitar, glockenspiel, piano and soaring, wordless vocals. In our case, it draws many parallels to what we've gone through in this crazy home sell/purchase process.

OK, I've gotta go finish packing now...