Tag: Rich Stim

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4/5

Last year on this date, 4/5, we had a 45 party. Maybe it was the year before. Everybody brought a few records and we whooped it up. I wanted to do it again but we have an art opening to attend so I made plans to talk about the new Real Angel Corpus Christi record. Lindsey Hutton writes the liner notes and I should probably just reprint those but here goes. 

The package is stunning, like a giant 45, a European one on the front and and an American one on the flip side. We have two Angel Corpus Christi 7 inches and three of those four sides are included here. The record is chocked full of singles. 

The accordion is exactly the right instrument for Angel’s International pop sound. Pull Girl is a smash. The low end quiver on Dream Baby Dream rattles the dishes in our cupboard. The ultimate Suicide song features Alan Vega himself on backups. Angel’s Barbarians cover, a perfect choice for her, sounds like it’s being performed live in a teen club, maybe a converted bowling alley, the way bands sounded in the Panorama Bowl when I was sixteen. Dean and Britta join Angel on an a dreamy, instrumental version of Femme Fatale, maybe my favorite cut. I would die to hear that played on the street in SF the way she used to.

Sadder is Peggi’s favorite! If only Lou Reed had taken the advice Angel offers on Lou Reed’s Hair. MX80’s Bruce Anderson plays guitar on Face in the Crowd and the lp finishes with a brilliant mash-up of Walk on the Wild Side and Henry Mancini’s Elephant Walk.

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Gettin’ Like Unreal

Today’s blue skies had me in lockstep with this MX-80 song from their newest, “So Funny.” It is a pretty healthy pace for the woods. We passed a neighbor and she was listening to the Saturday afternoon broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera. We never take sound producing devices in the woods and why would you need it when you can’t get some songs out of your head?

I miss the hard-core drive of Dave Mahoney’s drumming and I wish people would quit dying but Bruce Anderson’s guitar is still stellar and the band sounds more melodic than ever. You can watch the entire lp, cd or whatever it is on YouTube or FB.

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How Does It Feel To Feel?

Side of yellow wooden building on Goodman Street in Rochester, New York
Side of yellow wooden building on Goodman Street in Rochester, New York

Vinyl does sound better even when it’s an mp3 file made from a 45 from 1967 and especially when the song is by The Creation.

In my reading the newest release from MX-80’s Bruce Anderson and Rich Stim, the heroic “Bar Stool Walker” nods a few times to Rochester’s Margaret Explosion. The music is lyric free, there are songs called “Happy Hour“, a video shot on the Golden Gate Bridge and “Tall Boy” and they have a clumsy drummer.

Bar Stool Walker is a multilayered project and I can’t say for sure that this is the case but we haven’t found any sax in there yet. Rich Stim taught Peggi to play sax. Her first song was “Hava Nagila.”

Rich Stim wrote a popular Personal Effects song, “So Hard.”

Many of the songs on Bar Stool Walker are already fully realized videos but it looks like we will have to wait a bit for the luscious Beach Boy cover “The Warmth of the Sun.”
Happy Hour
Calcutta Cutaway
Smoky
The Unsuspected
Major Pipe
The Bridge
Paper Hat
Hodaddy Humanoid
Tall Boy
The Warmth of the Sun
Bar Stool Walker

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I Look Like I Know You

Leonard Cohen movie still from little Theater in Rochester, NY
Leonard Cohen movie still from little Theater in Rochester, NY

We brought some Vietnamese food out to Peggi’s mom’s apartment. We call it “Chinese” and it seems to go down better with her mom but she is not eating all that much these days. I went down to get my mother-in-law’s mail and pick up a prescription that had been delivered to the front desk. I volunteered to do this since I hadn’t had any exercise all day. Plus the temperature in the apartment is in the eighties and it’s hard to think in there.

A woman with oxygen tubes in her nostrils was talking to herself at the mailbox. She looked up at me and said, “I look like I know you.'” I kind of knew what she meant and introduced myself. I said, “I’ve seen you around.”

We stopped in the Little Theater last night to see the new Leonard Cohen concert movie. I don’t know what it’s called. We were late and missed the credits. Oddly there were no credits at all at the end of the movie. People were complaining about it being too short but it felt too long to me. It seemed all the songs were in exactly the same mode.

Our friend and neighbor, Rick, does a show on WRUR from 6 til 8pm on Thursdays. He’s calling it “Gumbo Variations” and he told us he plans to play a wide variety of music. He played a Monk tune last week and apparently jazz is a little too wide. He got an email from the big cheese over there telling him the jazz tune seemed like it lasted an eternity. Speaking of music that is not jazzI love the video of Neil Young delivering the video of his new album on an iPad to the execs at YouTube. And I love the movie Rich Stim did for Angel Corpus Christi’s version of “Heaven“.

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Marlene Dumas Is A Saint

If Padre Pio can be a saint then Marlene Dumas can be.

Martin Edic forwarded an email from Boo Poulin this morning with a link to a video with Marlene Dumas paintings in it. Boo assumed I had seen it but asked Martin to forward it just in case. I watch about as much YouTube as I do TV and that’s hardly any. I had not seen the video and I still haven’t. I keep pausing the damn thing so I can look at the paintings. I will take me weeks to get to the end. And the music – I turn the sound off and it works much better.

Is it legal to open a book, scan a bunch of paintings and have that be your whole video? Rich Stim would know. He writes and Intellectual Property blog for Nolo. Marlene Dumas painting or drawing, now there would be a video. Marlene Dumas talking about painting or drawing would be a good one too. I’d take a video of Marlene Dumas crossing the street so I do love this video.

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