WombatNation

If you plan to see Control, the biopic of Ian Curtis from Joy Division, read no further if you don’t want any spoilers, other than to know that I highly recommend the movie.

After writing and recording a few incredible albums, Curtis hanged himself at the age of 23 in 1980. Years later when I read brief news articles about his death, I learned little more than that he was a depressed musician. Control (which was co-produced by his wife Debbie Curtis) clears up a lot of the mystery. Afflicted with epilepsy, Curtis was also trapped in a love triangle with a wife that he married while quite young and with an employee at the Belgian Embassy who wants to interview bands. He loved his wife and child too much to completely walk away from them, but he also loved Annik too much to leave her, even though he knew that the relationship was destroying his marriage.

Of course, one hopes Curtis’s wife didn’t just take the opportunity to rewrite history to make herself look better. In general, she did come across pretty well in the movie, although her husband’s mistress was also portrayed as a decent person who was scared of falling in love with Ian.

Some people have criticized Control because it didn’t focus enough on the band. Control isn’t the Joy Division movie, though. It’s a movie about the life of Ian Curtis.

I recommend also watching 24 Hour Party People for another perspective on Ian Curtis and Joy Division, although Curtis is portrayed more as an abrasive jerk in that movie.

One amusing bit of trivia mentioned at IMDB is that the actor who played Curtis also played the lead singer for The Fall in 24 Hour Party People. This is amusing, because in Control, Joy Division’s manager tells Curtis that things could be worse, he could be the lead singer for The Fall.

The KALX double 7″ arrived this week. The two records are colored vinyl, one blue and one red. The sleeve and label art by Chris Hall is fantastic. The record release got great coverage on Pitchfork and other sites.

The recordings on the two discs are:

• Talking Heads - “Stay Hungry” (recorded 4/18/1978 at Lower Sproul Plaza, UC Berkeley)
• Mark Gardener (from the band Ride) - “Vapour Trail” (recorded 3/28/2003 at KALX Studios)
• Dengue Fever - “Shave Your Beard” (recorded 10/06/2005 at KALX Studios)
• Supersystem - “Defcon” (recorded 5/12/2005 at KALX Studios)

I picked up a pair of Shure E2C earphones recently because I had read good reviews about them and they were super cheap during a sale at Amazon. I think I paid only about $40. So far, I’m very happy with them. Shure discontinued the E2C and E3C after coming out with a new line of earphones, so if you find them, they should be discounted.

If you do pick up a pair, be sure to set aside at least 15 minutes to try out many of the foam and flexible sleeves that come with the fit kit. The first 5 or so I tried fit terribly. Then I tried one that didn’t look too different from the others, but the fit was great. In order to take advantage of the excellent sound isolation and bass response of these types of earphones, you need the tips of the earphones to fit snugly in your ear canal, but not too snugly that it hurts.

I enjoed using them around the house, but the E2Cs made their biggest difference when I used them on an airplane flight. They eliminated most of the background noise and allowed me to listen to my audio player as a reasonable volume. With my previous earbuds, I had to crank up the volume really high to overcome the engine and other people noise. They do such a good job of filtering out external sounds that I almost missed the announcement to turn off personal electronic devices.

An article on the comeback of vinyl records at Wired linked to from Slashdot suggests that KALX was wise to release a double 7″ compilation as one of the fundraiser gifts for donors (just a $25 add-on to one of the other packages). The 7″ was pressed by Pirates Press in San Francisco. The actual manufacturing is done in the Czech Republic, but Pirates Press provides lots of great services for bands or organizations that want high quality labels, jackets, etc. for their records.

We still own a thousand or so LPs and KALX owns tens of thousands. Many tens of thousands. Although I do love wandering the aisles of a high quality book store while browsing for interesting titles, browsing through the LPs in a collection like KALX’s ranks pretty high,too. Browsing packaged CDs just isn’t the same.

KALX started their 45th anniversary fundraiser last Friday, so call early and often to donate money to the best radio station in the world.

This year KALX has an even more awesome gift than usual. The temporary tattoos are very cool, but I’m talking about the double 45 RPM 7″ (for most of those of you under 40, this is a good time to become acquainted with historical music technologies) with live recordings in the KALX studios or in Sproul Plaza by the Talking Heads, Mark Gardener (from Ride), Dengue Fever, and Supersystem. This is your only way to get a copy of this classic 1978 recording of the Talking Heads playing Stay Hungry.

Full Disclosure: I’m married to the general manager of KALX. But I’m still an impartial observer.

Maybe a little color blind, but not tone deaf. Or so says a medical research-based Flash application. In fact, I scored 83.3% correct in my guesses careful assessments of the differences or non-differences in tone between two consecutive musical phrases.

From the results page:

The test is purposefully made very hard, so excellent musicians rarely score above 80% correct.

Don’t hate me because I’m musically superior. Hate me because I’m lucky.

Tonight I was lucky enough to see Sonic Youth perform their 1988 double LP masterpiece Daydream Nation at Berkeley Community Theater. I’ve been a huge fan of Sonic Youth ever since Bad Moon Rising was released in 1985. My favorite Sonic Youth album is Sister, but Daydream Nation is a very close second.

I’m often disappointed by live shows by rock bands, as performances are often rote copies of the studio versions, filled with distracting visuals totally unrelated to the music, or confirmations that a band has minimal talent and is totally dependent on studio engineers. With Sonic Youth, though, the live performances are a fantastic complement to the released recordings. Fortunately, the sound quality in the theater tonight was also very good, instead of the stupid over-amped distortion foisted on the crowd by half deaf audio engineers at many shows. Sonic Youth are absolute masters at controlling feedback and twisting it into amazing sounds.

Afer performing Daydream Nation beginning to end, the band left the stage and then came back for a five song encore, which they then followed with a double encore with an additional song. When they came out for the first encore, Thurston made a couple of funny education-related comments, since the theater is part of a high school (though this theater was a thousand times better than the one at the high school I went to). After a humorous dig at our dim-witted President, Thurston announced that they were now going to play all of Sticky Fingers. He then said something like, “Be sure to watch Lee [Ranaldo]. He’s going to do the Mick Jagger chicken dance.”

Thurston, Lee and Kim all seemed to be having a great time on stage. Since they brought up a friend to also play bass during the encores, Kim was freed up to just sing on a couple of the songs while dancing around on stage in her super cool shiny black and silver dress. She even jumped down into the crowd in the orchestra pit and danced around during the last bit of the final song.

If you’re still using DRM’d audio formats, you owe it to yourself to check out Ogg Vorbis. It’s not just a pretty name anymore. The FSF has set up the PlayOgg.org website to promote Ogg Vorbis (audio) and Ogg Theora (video) as high quality media formats unencumbered by patents and restrictions on your rights. There is also a great article on Ogg at Wired.com for Windows and Mac users. The article explains how to get Ogg support in iTunes and how to rip to Ogg Vorbis. I use Grip and oggenc on my Linux desktop to do all my ripping. I use Amarok on the desktop and laptop as my primary audio player.

Years ago I started to rip my CD collection to MP3. I quicky switched to Ogg Vorbis after experimenting a bit and discovering that I could get much higher quality audio files at about the same file size by using Ogg Vorbis. My wife bought me an iAudio X5L about a year ago, since it supports playback of Ogg files. Unfortunately, the iPod I bought her recently doesn’t play Ogg. I’m tempted to install RockBox on it so it will play Ogg files, but maybe I will wait at least until the warranty expires.

I may actually give Rockbox a try on my iAudio X5L. While I’m pretty happy with the X5L, the user interface is far from intuitive. Perhaps even counter-intuitive. The sound quality is great and the battery life is incredible.

More info at Xiph.org, Vorbis.com, Theora.org, Wikipedia article on Ogg.

Tonight my wife and I attended a benefit for the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland featuring a menu designed by Alice Waters and music by Kronos Quartet. We’ve donated annually to Creative Growth for many years and purchased several pieces of beautiful art there. For over 32 years Creative Growth has offered fantastic creative opportunities for adults with developmental, physical, mental and emotional disabilities. In the first photo you can see some of the art created by Creative Growth students. In the next two photos you can see some works by Judith Scott hanging from the ceiling.

The menu included (I’m guessing on the contents of the appetizers that were passed around):

• Fava bean spread on toast
• Green garlic and goat cheese on toast
• Fried artichoke with a cream dip that I think contained dill
• Acme breads and sweet butter
• Slow roasted wild salmon with frisée, pickled beets and citrus vinaigrette
• Soupe au Pistou - Provencal vegetable soup with lamb shank, garlic, and basil
• Strawberries with crème fraîche ice cream and sugared cookies

The food was wonderfully complemented by Murrieta’s white meritage, red meritage and zarzuela from Livermore Valley. Everything was great, but I was absolutely blown away by the Soup au Pistou. It’s one thing to prepare a soup like that in a restaurant with a professional kitchen, but to prepare a dish that stunning in a makeshift kitchen to be served almost simultaneously to about 300 people is quite a accomplishment. Very fine work by Olive Green Catering. Also, thnks to Monterey Fish Company, Murrieta’s Well Winery, and Prather Ranch Meat Co for donating food and wine for the event.

After the meal, Kronos Quartet performed for about 40 minutes. The second piece they played was composed by John Zorn. I think it was from The String Quartets. They also performed a piece by an India composer that was hauntingly beautiful. The final performance was a magnificent rendition of “Flugufrelsarinn (The Fly Freer)” by Sigur Rós. You can hear Kronos perform Flugufrelsarinn for yourself on the NPR website. It’s the last song in the first hour of the show.

The KALX Fundraiser for 2006 runs through this Sunday. But don’t wait, call (510) 642-5259 to donate now. Yes, now. Hey, how can you possibly live without a t-shirt displaying an acorn radio lovin’ squirrel? I like the fact that it actually appears to be a hybrid wombat-squirrel.