Tuesday July 7th: 7pm: The Nightingale is hands-down the coolest storefront screening room in the city. On Tuesday, they are showing a 16mm print of Theodor Dryer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc accompanied by a solo cello score by Lori Goldston. The film is astonishing, the space is terrific and uh, solo cello. Not to miss. $7-$10.
Wednesday July 8th: 10pm: Hmmm, looks like it’s gonna be a Whistler week. L’Orchestre Super Vitesse plays really great afro-pop that sounds very highlife influenced to my ears. And my folks are in town this week, and I think they’ll dig these guys quite a bit. FREE.
Thursday July 9th: I suspect you’ll be wanting to see the Fiery Furnaces at the Hideout. I can’t make it, lemme know how it goes.
Friday July 10th: 7pm: This is my favorite. On Friday, the Chicago Underground Library celebrates “The Science of Obscurity,” an evening of new, unpublished, and in-progress works presented as science fair experiments. The night will also feature a public book launch via catapult and the mass purging of rejection letters—community literary rituals in need of revival! At the Jupiter Outpost (1139 W. Fulton Market), food and drink will be available for sale + BYOB. Best.
Saturday July 11th: Hmmm, I dunno? What should I do on Saturday? I’ve been meaning to get over to Mana. Yeah, let’s do that.
dust during construction forms living dust-snowballs that stick together forming curious monsters by the kids playing around waiting for the building to be finished- The monsters melt, like movies waiting to be made, waiting for the movie palaces to begin sipping dust from the air, accreting enough bricks to seal the kids in a tomb of matinee happiness that that can be opened at any time
Thax Douglas - Schubas 12/6/04
Thax is a rock poet living and working in Chicago. He is one of the most endearing and long standing elements of the Chicago rock scene. http://www.myspace.com/thaxdouglas
This video blog series is intended to document the creation of Jitney’s untitled second record. These sessions all take place at Pieholden Suite Sound unless otherwise noted.
Session I :: May 29 - 31, 2009
It had been a difficult week and we were all excited to get back to doing what we love. Twisting knobs and making noise. We dusted off the 1” tape machine and got back to business. I didn’t have a video camera yet so this installment is made from a few photos we took during the session.
Matt DeWine engineered the session, Johnny Caluya was the assistant engineer.
Session II :: June 12 - 14
I had a most enjoyable ride on the Amtrak through the cornfields. I woke up early on Saturday to finalize the song we were to record that day. I was lucky to find a nice place in the garden to write and mess with my new $50 video camera.
We worked on the 2” reel to reel machine this weekend. Matt DeWine engineered.
By now you’ve likely heard that Champaign County Coroner Duane Northrup has issued an autopsy report that concludes that Jay Bennett’s death was the result of an accidental overdose of pain medication. As I watched this news spread around the internet, I was fairly astonished by how under-reported, and at times downright misleading, the coverage was. So let’s get a few facts straight:
Jay had a long history of chronic hip pain. Jay’s health insurance would not cover his hip injury. From the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette: “The coroner said toxicology tests confirm that Mr. Bennett died from Fentanyl intoxication. Fentanyl is a pain killer found in Duragesic patches. Mr. Bennett had one of those patches on his back when found, Northrup said.” The Duragesic patch has a somewhat unbelievable history — In 2004, it was recalledtwice. In 2006, according to the New York Times, a court held patch-maker Johnson & Johnson responsible for the death of a Texas woman who died (of an accidental overdose) from a Duragesic patch that leaked. And again in another case in 2007. And yet again in 2008! 2008 also saw another recall of the patch. In 2007, the Food and Drug Administration issued a Public Health Advisory that stated “Despite issuing an advisory in July 2005 that emphasized the safe use of the fentanyl patch, FDA continues to receive reports of death and life-threatening side effects in patients who use the fentanyl patch.”
I have no idea whether Jay had a defective patch. But I do know two things, the first related to journalism, the second to health care:
1) Jay wasn’t just another rockstar who OD’d. I was stunned to see this stated outright in an article in E Online. And was hugely hugely disappointed to see it implied in Jim DeRogatis’ story. I like DeRogatis, but that piece borders on irresponsibility. Coverage around the net was a bit better, but generally I’d see huge OVERDOSE headlines, with little mention of the controversy surrounding the Duragesic patch.
2) Jay would be alive today if enormous pharmaceutical and insurance corporations were not controlling our health care industry. There are plenty of people better informed and more articulate than I who are writing and organizing around this issue and I intend to get better informed. But in the meantime, the folks at the really terrific Future of Music Coalition have collected a bunch of really helpful resources for musicians who need health insurance.
But let’s on a warmer note. Rob Roberge, at Caught in the Carousel recently published a very kind remembrance. And this performance, from the film “Man In The Sand” about the making of Mermaid Avenue takes on new heartbreaking meanings:
Well, it isn’t often I present ‘breaking news’ in this space, but I simply can’t seem to find much information about this anywhere, and I’m really excited about it. Chicago’s Califone seem to be working on a 90 minute film called “All my Friends are Funeral Singers,” written and directed by Tim Rutili with music by the band. The projected release date is this autumn. Photographer Brian Bankston has some stills from the production that look amazing. There’s a bit of info about cast and crew on this Facebook page. And Kevin Ford, who runs the indie video production house Mo-Freek mentions on his blog that they’ve finished shooting and are in the early stages of editing. And that’s all I could dig up.
I heard some new Califone songs live last night, and was already excited for their new record and then to discover this morning that a gorgeous film may accompany the release… holy crow hooray!
Summer has finally come to our fair city and that also means there is an overwhelming amount of fun and interesting things happening around town. I’m going to try to do a little round-up every week. In the interest of full disclosure, these lists are basically going to be what I’m hoping to get out to this week!
Tuesday June 23rd: 8:00pm: The Building Stage presents the company’s new Laboratory Project. “We want to give theater artists a chance to go for it, to take a dynamic idea and run, unconstrained by the demands of a full production. Entrance and parking at 412 N. Carpenter. FREE!
Wednesday June 24th: 8:00pm: the Reconstruction Room reading series presents Bottom’s Up, a night celebrating the art of the toast. Black Rock bar, 3614 N. Damen (at Addison), FREE!
Thursday June 25th: 10:00pm: Back to the Hideout for a night of sick pop shoegaze and psyche with Allá and Brooklyn’s Cordero. $8.
Friday June 26th: 8:00pm: It’s closing weekend for the Pavement Group’s new show fracture/mechanics. Having completely adored their work on last year’s Lipstick Traces, I’m really excited to see this. “Mallery Avidon’s fracture/mechanics is a funny, sexy, and harrowing portrait of one woman’s lineage of love. Told in small snapshots in and around a bed, the play ponders the frailty of affection.” $15 suggested donation.
Saturday June 27th: 12:30pm: It’s self promotion time. The street performance group that I work with, the Summer is for Fireflies, is presenting our second piece of the season. We’ll do five performances in two hours, all around downtown. For locations and times, please check our site.
Christopher Weingarten used to play drums in that noisy great band Parts and Labor, whose new-ish record Receivers is skronky-lovely Jesus and Mary Chain static-pop. It is seriously a brilliant record, in part comprised and built from samples that their listeners and friends and fans sent them. Cool, right?
Nowhere’s Nigh by Parts and Labor
Anyway, Weingarten left the band to pursue his writing career and now freelances for Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Idolator, etc. And he’s pretty dang smart and funny. Yesterday he spoke at the 140 Character Conference, about how music blogs, twitter, etc have in part undermined actual criticism; how retweets, blogrolling, trackbacks, and crowdsourcing creates a situation in which the most palatable music gets the most attention.
I don’t know if I entirely agree with all his points, but Weingarten raises interesting ideas that resonate a lot with conversations Casey and I had when Rock Proper was in infancy. We had talked a lot about how the absolute flood of music and music writing on the net is actually making it harder to find good new music. We reminisced about discovering bands in fanzines, about listening past bedtime to the CBC’s Brave New Waves, and about the days when you would buy every single record released by a small label ‘cos you were basically guaranteed its quality. And using new technology as a platform, we’re trying to follow the ethic of those labels we loved as teenagers…
Anyway, some quotes from Weingarten:
“It’s easy to learn about stuff that is important to me; I want to learn about stuff that isn’t important to me, I want to be exposed to things! Crowdsourcing killed punk rock, crowdsourcing kills art… Crowds have terrible taste. When people start talking about indie rock on the internet, suddenly all this music rises to the middle! It’s not the music that’s the best, it’s the music that the most people can stand!”
Both Andy Wagner and Where the Moon Came From have contributed music to a new documentary by LESS Productions called “PolyCultures: Food Where We Live”. It’s a film about efforts in Ohio to revive regional, small scale, sustainable organic farming. And it features an interview with Michael Pollan, who is brilliant and has many fans here at Rock Proper HQ. And this is also cool: when selecting musicians they decided to only use regional artists in the film. They used Andy’s song “What I’ve Been Looking For” from his recent album Those Who Forgive in this trailer:
Nice collection of brief interviews in the Guardian about Blur.
Joby Sessions takes underwelming photos of mostly boring famous people. But, the flash intro to his site is real lovely.
And this is the candy center of today’s post — The Cramps, performing live at the Napa State Mental Hospital!
Lux: “We drove 3000 miles to play for you people” Audience: “Fuck yeah!” Lux: “Well somebody told me you people are crazy. But I’m not so sure about that; you seem to be all right to me!”
The living best honor those passed by living. It’s been a hard weird couple weeks around here, sometimes feeling hollow, sometimes ecstatic to realize how many lives our friend touched. I’ve spent a lot of time talking with Casey and had the chance to catch up with Matt DeWine, which was amazing. Our good friends Brother Truck went down to Pieholden to record this weekend; not only did Jay leave us with a bunch of great music but also with the resources to continue to make our own. A brilliant good man…
And so we live. Last night I had a terrific reminder of how Chicago can be astonishingly cool sometimes. Grabbed the train downtown afterwork and got to see my pals Paul and Angel performing with their band Allá on the huge outdoor Gehry-designed stage at Millennium Park. It was pretty amazing; they were great. But I couldn’t stay for St. Vincent, ‘cos I was meeting Whitney around the corner for a MusicNow concert featuring members of the CSO. The first piece was Composer-in-Residence Osvaldo Golijov’s Mariel (for marimba and cello). And it was mind-blowing. So beautiful, so sad, so well-made and so brilliantly performed. The CSO has a hidden treasure in their percussionist Cynthia Yeh, she is truly a genius.
The piece resonated with what’s been happening:
“I wrote the original version of Mariel, for cello and marimba, when I learned of the death in an accident of my friend Mariel Stubrin,” Golijov explains. “I attempted to capture that short instant before grief, in which one learns of the sudden death of a friend who was full of life: a single moment frozen forever in one’s memory, and which reverberates through the piece, in the waves and echoes of the Brazilian music that Mariel loved.”
This is a version recorded by WNYC, of a performance at Alice Tully Hall in February 2009; Maya Beiser - cello, Tomoya Aomori - marimba.
Rock Proper provides free album downloads from a select group of indie rock artists. We embrace the technology of today in order to connect our music to the largest possible audience. Please also visit: The Jay Bennett Foundation and Pieholden Suite Sound
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