In 2002, Phil Elvrum (better known as The Microphones and/or Mt. Eerie) released one of my favorite albums of all time. Little Bird Flies into a Big Black Cloud was recorded in one take and recorded on sony cassette recorder set atop the the organ while Elvrum was playing. This recording exists in stark contrast to most of Elvrum’s other songs, on which there is frequently a mass of instruments and singers. Little Bird Flies into a Big Black Cloud’s minimalism showcase’s what, in my opinion, is Elvrum’s most accomplished song writing. The words of this album were written in a journal style book while Elvrum toured through Europe, and then later concieved as songs.
This album was had a very very small run of only 400 vinyl copies. Each one came with it’s own special hand painted water color cover, and each one was a different image (mine is the one above). It is a real shame that so few people have access to this amazing recording, so I thought I’d put some of it up here for you to listen to. Below is most of side “B” of the album. It takes a while to buffer, so be patient. By the way, this is best listened to in your bedroom with all the lights turned off.
…check out this disturbing clip to jog your memory.
Brazilian model/singer Xuxa (pronounced shu-sha) had this absurd tv show in America for a short while back in the early 90’s. I admit it had it’s appeal back when I was a 9 year-old gaywad, but watching this now freaks me out. Just look at the faces of those kids, nobody’s home! It reminds me of the time my 8th grade girlfriend took me to her Pentacostal Church - everyone was hopping around, shouting, and just generally spazzing out. I had to call my mom to come get me because I couldn’t handle it. In spite of the creepiness I applaud Xuxa for taking fashion risks, most of her outfits were equally over the top. I also like the sexy circus ladies doing crowd control.
Check out this adorable live show The B-52’s played at the Downtown Cafe in Atlanta. The B-52’s look like fresh faced kids coming straight from the garage and sound like riot grrrl - fagatronic sensations. The performance happened in 1978 prior to the release of their iconic, self-titled yellow disc:
30 years later….
Next month, The B-52’s will keep the party going by releasing their first studio album in 15 years, appropriately titled, Funplex. Regarding the new disc, Fred Schneider claims the music contains more “sexed up” electronica and is “sexier than ever”. The single for this album (also called Funplex) is now available for download TODAY on I-Tunes.
…just because you’re pregnant it’s no excuse to dress like a goddamn clown!
Many of you will remember this hideous number from back when she was still denying the baby rumors…
Admittedly she’s further along now and full of twins, but this recent one reminds me of grimace in a choir robe…
this one makes her look like she’s got cancer rather than babies…
It doesn’t matter how expensive they are, maternity clothes are ugly as sin. I guess it’s hard to be fabulous when you have two parasites making you look like a giant potato, but oversized frilly shit and monster pleats don’t help.
I recently learned about a new term used to describe a type of modern advirtising. “Greenwashing” refers to:
“ when a company or organization spends more time and money claiming to be “green” through advertising and marketing than actually implementing business practices that minimize environmental impact. It’s whitewashing, but with a green brush” -Enviromedia
With all the enviromental empathy/panic that has been dredged up in the hearts of mainstream America recently, every suburban SUV owner has decided to “go green”. Think reusable shopping bags at Whole Foods. Because of this mostly symbolic shift in the lifestyle of the middle class, using “green” catch words (Hybrid! Clean! Energy Security! Renewable!) has become a real cashcow.
I remember a few years ago when media literacy was such a buzz topic! “Oh, adbusters this! Oh Naomi Klein that!” It seems we have all but forgotten to be critical of what we are told in marketing.
Thank god for a new website called The Greenwashing Index . They have created a project where advertising that is using green ideas to sell a product is judged by the public. After viewing different ads, they are ranked on a 1(true)-5(lie) scale, and voters can leave comments.
…this is fucking genius!
This 1988 film was my absolute favorite movie when I was five years old. Geena Davis plays an airhead valley-girl. After she finds out her husband is cheating on her aliens crash land in her swimming pool and cheer her up. Check out the trailer!
And yes, that’s Jim Carrey playing the red one. Julie Brown plays the best friend, so of course it’s full of her singing a bunch of crappy songs. Now that it’s been 20 years since the movie came out I think it’s high time for a rebirth on Broadway, or at least a Hollywood remake. Broadway actress Kristen Chenoweth has already done a stage reading of the story. Take a look at this clip.
It’s good but I’d like to see it done with a real budget, and maybe some drag queens. What do you think?
From NYC director Benh Zeitlin, this film looks amazing and I hope it’ll be showing in Portland. My sister lives in New Orleans and hung out with some of the crew while they were filming. It wasn’t too long after Katrina and I can tell you shit was scary down there back then. I think the film will be released soon, so support the filmmakers and go see it if you get the chance! You can watch some of their short films here.
REPORTER may not be as tragically unheard of as you think (ie. Recently they opened for The Thermals on a cross country tour and under former moniker, Wet Confetti, they received rave reviews in Portland and had an album released by a member of Gang Of Four). However, lucky for YOU, they aren’t so famous they couldn’t answer a few questions for GAYCONDO via email!
Reporter VS. Wet Confetti. Describe the reason for the name change and compare the music/performance differences between the two.
We don’t really consider it a name change, we think of it more as same people new project. We decided to start Reporter because we wanted to do something different musically and we just thought that taking Wet Confetti there wouldn’t be right. Wet Confetti was more technical, noisy and weird where as Reporter is more natural, fun and straightforward without being boring. Influences for both bands are completely different.
What are your top 3 tour moments?
1.The club we were playing in Oklahoma had an upstairs and downstairs and we were playing the downstairs and the Chip n Dales were performing upstairs. The Club employees snuck all the girls into the upstairs. It was a lot of little underwear, bowties and boots. Some really drunk girl zeroed in on us because we were hiding in the back looking terrified and she dragged me all the way to the front slapped a dollar in my hand and made a stripper dance with me. The other girls I was with almost died of laughter.
2. We spent Halloween in NYC and ended up having the funnest night ever. We first went from Brooklyn where we were staying with our friend Matt and met up with The Thermals to go to the Halloween parade. We attempted to see the parade but it was so insane with people and cops we couldn’t get by. So we all went drinking and then our band and Matt went back to Brooklyn to go to a party. At the party some girls that use to live in Portland recognized “Wet Confetti” and decided to be best friends with us for the night and got us a bottle of whiskey. Then all of us headed over to a second party that was really crazy. Dan (our guitarist) was instantly crowd surfing within 3 minutes of entering the party because some big guy just picked him up and threw him on the crowd! We all danced and jumped around like we were 16 again. Then when we decided to go out for fresh air some guy and girl were just having sex right there on the street. Then the guy that was just having sex decided to get in a fight with a bystander. Then the same guy decided he wanted to kill our friend Matt so we had to run! About a block away some random girls chase us down and ask us to go to another party with them and we were like “ya okay”, but then their really drunk friends (one dress as Joey Ramone, the other as teen wolf) showed up and were so drunk they were throwing themselves into piles of garbage so we decided maybe we shouldn’t hang out with these freaks and walked off. But when they finally noticed we had walked off they yelled, “Get em!” and we yelled “RUN!” and the chase began. We ran as fast as we could through the streets of Brooklyn until they stopped chasing us, which was about 3 city blocks. It was literally a scene out of 28 days later but with a lot more laughter and with Joey Ramone vs. a zombie. Then we grabbed burgers at a late night diner and called it a night!
3. Our Englewood Colorado show was really funny. We played first of three and the crowd was going insane for us. We had to stop the performance and ask if they thought we were The Thermals. It was really amazing.
Report your favorite bands you feel gaycondo readers should know about.
The Vanishing kids, The Dirty Mittens, Fist Fite, Kickball, The Fucking Ocean, Panda and Angel. Old Growth, Tu Fawning.
How did y’all hook up musically?
Through a classified ad. No joke
Any details you care to spill about your next release?
We have been recording our debut LP ourselves over the last few weeks and are so excited about the way it’s all coming together. We will go to a professional studio to mix but we are really enjoying recording everything ourselves. We’ll probably put it out late spring or so.
hello blog world!
Last summer I bought a digital camcorder on credit, joined a film collective, and then made this video with my best friend Bonnie. Here is some back story: Bonnie, my house mate at the time, and I woke up feeling like we needed to have a dance party in our living room. I set up the camcorder and we danced our asses off to the Wedding Singer soundtrack, filming the event. Several sessions of editing later I came up with this video!:
My video was inspired by the Blonde Redhead music video, “Top Ranking”, made by Miranda July. I initially shot the footage of my friend and I dancing sans knowing what I would do with it. I was inspired by how the poses in July’s video complemented each other in each sequence. I started to see how frames from my video footage could be put together and create a visual sequence to a song. Some of the shots of my video fall parallel the musics’ rhythm and create their own flow with it. July’s video is made of posed frames she puts together that are premeditated. It only seems fair that I also include the original inspiration of Miranda July’s music video for Blonde Redhead’s “Top Ranking”
…don’t believe the internet rumors!
Contrary to what Em said in her comment on my recent post about Elijah Wood’s appearance on “Yo Gabba Gabba!”, Steve did not kill himself. Another popular story in circulation holds that he died in a drug overdose. Don’t believe it! It’s all false, though one could easily understand the speculation in light of his unceremonious disappearance from Blues Clues. This no doubt pissed off millions of children. One day they turned on the tv to find Steve gone, and in his place this guy:
One could easily have inferred that he’d murdered Steve and taken over his life, the dog eventually coming to accept him. I admit that several years a go I might on occasion pause for a few moments to watch Blue’s Clues while flipping through channels. This is purely bacause Steve was kind of cute. There’s no chance of that happening with this new guy. I bet there was a huge drop in ratings following Steve’s departure as mothers no longer had any interest in watching the show with their kids.
Anyway, Steve is alive and well. He even has an indie rock band called “Steve Burns (and the Struggle)” and they’re on Myspace. While the music isn’t my cup of tea it’s worth a listen. I’m not sure why he gave up his Nickelodeon stardom, I guess filming in front of a blue screen for hours on end finally took it’s toll.
…is making it so that we can all “travel through time (sort of).
In the year 1977, the two voyager space crafts were launched on a mission to study and send back information on Jupiter and Saturn. A countless amount of priceless knowledge was gained in this study of the outer planets of our solar system. However, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were concieved as martyrs. No return route was possible, so eventually, the two crafts would reach a point where they escaped our solar system, and then eventually passed the point where communication was possible. In fact, this occured in the last decade.
Knowing that this would eventually occur, a team headed by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan was formed to create a sort of time capsule of life on earth to include on both space crafts. The form for the time capsule was a golden record:
This analog format was chosen because it was important to insure that any intelligent life that discovers it will be able to figure out how to use it as easily as possible. Images carved on one side of the disc explain mathimatically (and quite eliquently) how to play the record.
The opening letter of the “program” begins with this message
“This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours” -Jimmy Carter
A small sampling of the contents of this record include:
Salutations in 55 languages
115 images documenting human life
the sounds of birds, whales, thunder, and the ocean
Navajo Indian chants
“Johnny be Good” by Chuck Berry
Several pieces by Bach
In addition to these, another very touching audio recording was included: The sound of a beating heart belonging to a woman who has just fallen in love. The heart in question belonged to Ann Druyan herself.
Watch the interview below to hear about it in her own words:
Love breaking the barriers of both time and space? Literally moving forward for all time? Now if that is not a heavy real life metaphor, I don’t know what is.
Currently, the voyager space crafts are still 40,000 years from reaching the nearest solar system (and that is at an impressive 35,000 mph), which will be the first feasable time that intelligent life may be able to find them. By that time, human kind will either be extinct, or drastically changed. The existance of these records will most likely eventually be the oinly documentation of our having ever existed at this time.
Though the odds of it ever being discovered are slim to none, as Carl Sagan said, “the launching of this ‘bottle’ into the cosmic ‘ocean’ says something very hopeful about life on this planet“, and I believe that hope is a kind of transcendence through time. That maybe we can all exist forever.
…this is what happens when you let a bunch of gay burnouts make a kids show.
Now Let’s Go CRAZY!!!
In case you don’t have cable or know any small children, Yo Gabba Gabba is the gayest kids show around. It might have scared me a bit as a child but as an adult I think it’s pretty great. I’ve never really had a thing for Elijah Wood, but I think he looks smokin’ hot here. Oh, and Jon says he has nice eyeballs.
It is a sad, tragic day when you realize you can’t relate to one of your favorite singer’s creative vision anymore:
Cat Power: WTF is with the hat?
For me, this singer is Cat Power. I was SO stoked to give her a second chance after she did a bloody nose dive on The Greatest (2006), which was clearly her worst album to date…Until today, when I was barely able to make it through the 30 second samples of her latest mistake, Jukebox.
I personally liked Cat Power better when she was a bit crazy and self destructive making death rattling, haunting southern alternative folk music. A woman who made herself a legend because she could barely make it through a song live due to her debilitating emotional pain.
Now, she just sounds like a watered down, cheap whiskey, a recovering alcoholic who makes wonky, down-tempo and tepid sounds, CROSSING THE BORDER INTO ADULT CONTEMPORARY BULLSHIT LAND!!!!.
It really is sad when your best recorded work in several years is a Cat Stevens cover you recorded for a commercial for diamonds:
SOMEONE NEEDS TO SEND THIS WOMAN TO MUSIC-REHAB with a bottle of Southern Comfort Blues or else I fear their may be a Christian-Alternative Rock album on the way.
Lucky for me, I don’t get sick of her earlier works. That being said, I am willing to give her a third chance (but we all know the rules of baseball).
YOU ARE FREE (2003)
Listen: “WEREWOLF”
How on earth can someone take a dive in the wrong direction after an astonishing well done album like this one? This album is a happy marriage of Cat Power’s gut wrenching emotives with power pop optimism. There is a bit of studio musician backing going on, but in a tasteful way. Eddie Vedder even makes a vocal appearance without ruining the mood. I love the quiet piano on opener, “I Don’t Blame You”, acoustic rocking sing-a-long of title track, “You Are Free”, the bottom of a bottle of blues back porch confessions of “Good Woman”, the reviving howls of “Speak For Me”, the haunting croons in “Werewolf”, the pop sensational drive of “He War”, the chills and forewarning of “Shaking Paper”, the sullen minimalism of “Baby Doll”, the trembling harmonies found in “Maybe Not”, the poetic requests of “Half Of You”, and the haunting sound of spiders retreating into the night on “Keep On Runnin”.
COVERS RECORD (2000)
Listen: “Sweedee dee”
I cannot even think where to start on explaining why I love this album so much. It is extraordinary. I guess it is because it is so stark and simple, and doesn’t fuck around with frills, and just stabs straight to the emotive heart. I don’t know much about how the original versions sound but I definitely feel Chan Marshall touched them individually and left a part of her soul. I can tell she chose each song for a reason. This album destroys me. Listening to it feels like the comfort after screaming at the top of your lungs or crying for the first time in months. I can listen to it when I want to be calm, when I want to bring up the devil in me and confront him, when I want to look out the window on the train, when I want to be lost in the moment of the words. It is difficult to find a favorite song on this album because they are all so damn good. There are love songs, songs of loss, words of lust, words of deep seeded pain, words of the layman all sung over gently played guitar or piano in Chan’s thick smoke curling draw.
MOON PIX (199
Listen: “He Turns Down”
This album was the first I heard from Cat Power. My friend put a few songs from Moon Pix on a mix tape and it didn’t really help me get out of my 11th grade depression. It did give me something to relate to though…I wore it thin. I love the percussive instrumentation on “American Flag”, how it relates to the words, the flute and guitar entangled “He turns down” and the bottom of the bottle melancholy of “Moonshiner”.
Watch: “Cross Bones Style” Music Video:
WHAT WOULD THE COMMUNITY THINK (1996)
Listen: “Nude as the News”
This album is very shoe gazy at at time wishy washy, but there are some gems, such as the driving “Nude as the News”, emotive crescendo of “fate of the human carbine”, guitar violently ending “Enough”, and the cold spoken repetition of “The Coat is Always On”.
MYRA LEE (1995)
Listen: “Rockets”
The second disc of the session with Sonic Youth drummer “Steve Shelly” collaborates with Chan on this record whose name helps to propel her into shy indie darling status. This album contains a good balance between driving blues songs such as “We All Die”, “Rockets” and “Top Expert” and chilling minimalism in songs like “Great Expectations” and “Wealthy Man”.
DEAR SIR (1995)
Listen: “Itchyhead”
A lot of these songs feel like the first take of many that reappear on Myra Lee. This album is extremely rough, almost nightmarish in it’s manic tendencies. My favorite songs include “Itchyhead” where Chan seems to put herself into the head of a crazy jail dweller who has lost her mind with nonsense words such as “I’m 65 and nobody in my family knows I’m alive / Hey little girl, I wanna cut your hair off / So I can pour butter on you”.
