Code Brown

A friend of mine has been fretting lately about his three-year-old son's recent discovery of his penis -- and, more specifically, the combination made by penis and hand, which as we all know is a whole significantly greater than the sum of its parts.

Those of you without access to toddlers might not know this, but masturbation is quite common among that age cohort, and apparently they can even get themselves off. (I've only read this, haven't actually witnessed it, so I suspect that this is restricted to girls. What I remember from grade-school health class is that boys' parts aren't all connected and functional until puberty. But, in the interests of full disclosure, I must admit that I attended grade school in Kansas, so this information could have been total bullshit intended to keep us 5th graders from attempting any funny business.)

Anyway, my friend and his wife would like the little fella to stop exciting his Little Fella, especially in public, but they also don't want scar him or make him feel bad, and they're smart enough to realize that they can't effectively prevent him from doing it.

I say, if you can't stop it, you might as well revel in it, and in that spirit, I've found the perfect gift for the little rascal:








[wait for it]










available at http://www.cafepress.com/timeriftnetwork.28176885

The iPod was really on a roll yesterday:

1. Beat Happening, "Teenage caveman," from You Turn Me On. In the top 25% of BH songs. Calvin manages to stay mostly in tune, which could be good or bad.
2. Pedro the Lion, "Promise," from Hard to Find a Friend. This one seems pretty Christ-y, by my reckoning, but the chorus ("if I look up, and the sky's not there, is there any reason that I should be scared?") is so doggone catchy, I can overlook the Christiness of the affair.
3. Yo La Tengo's cover of Beat Happening's "Cast a shadow." From Genius + Love = YLT. Nice compare/contrast with "Teenage caveman." Probably something they did on a lark in the studio. It's not overly polished, although most anything would seem awful shiny next to a BH verson of the same. But it's a lovely pop item, sung by Georgia, who imbues the song with gobs more sweetness than Calvin could or would pull off with what I've always considered his persona: a overgrown-but-loveable, slightly freaky (admit it) neopubescent.
4. Butterglory, "Those mooney stars," from Crumble. I love Butterglory. Totally underrated -- and another perfect complement to the amateurish playing and boy-girl vocals of Beat Happening, though not as amateurish, and less convincingly naive. Am I right that Butterglory signed to a major label, promptly flopped, and were never heard from again?
5. Syd Straw, "Chasing vapor trails," from "Surprise." Skipped this one. Strike 1 on the ol' iPod. A weak song on a record that I bought (on tape!) in the summer of 1989 because it had a sticker advertising "feature Michael Stipe of R.E.M.," which was more than enough selling point for me at the time. I loved it, of course, but not just because of the R.E.M. connection. Despite its overproduction and various lyrical missteps, it introduced me to John Doe, Peter Holsapple, Anton Fier. So, although not an indie-rock production, it was well connected to some signficant independent American rock music from the 1980s. By now, it seems pretty dated, and although there are some gems on it, I usually skip past, lamenting briefly the fact that someone with an incredibly beautiful voice never found the right combination of voice, instrumentation, and production to make a classic record. I'm convinced that it's in her somewhere.
6. Dadamah, "Prove," from This Is Not a Dream. Everything on this record sounds like it's coming from deep inside the earth. A nice turnaround from the sunniness of Butterglory.
7. Walt Mink, "Quiet time," from Miss Happiness. This isn't a great song (too metally), but it's pretty rockin'. And I'm devoted to the record for life, after being won over initially by a kickass live show in one of the worst venues I've ever been to -- "the bar" at the Northwestern University student union (which, at the time, had no liquor license). I DANCED MY ASS OFF!!!!!! Turns out that, after disbanding in 1997, Walt Mink is the subject of an upcoming documentary, and that the band did a reunion show (sans original drummer) in Minneapolis this past July. Damn, that would've been fun. Some good information at http://waltminkthemovie.typepad.com/mink/2005/07/postshow_update.html#trackback, though it's a bit of a clunky site.
8. Shelby Lynne, "Why can't you be?" From I am Shelby Lynne. In 2000, my wife and I drove from Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon in a rented car. At the last second, we decided to upgrade to a fancy SUV, which turned out to have a cd player (not standard issue in cars at the time). We hadn't brought any cds, and radio in the desert was unsatisfying, so we stopped at a crappy music store in Page, Arizona, and paid several dollars too much for this, because I'd read something favorable about it somewhere. It wasn't at all what I expected -- I thought I was buying alt-country, but it turned out to be . . . not that. I don't know what to call it? Soul? Reminiscent of Memphis soul, or Stax/Volt? Not my area of expertise, but that's what I think of. Anyway, I like the record.
9. Dismemberment Plan, "Memory Machine." From Emergency & I. This record sound slike what it's like to live in DC. A truly oustanding record, far outdistancing anything else that the now defunct DP made before or after, or (although it hardly needs mentioning), Travis Morrison's solo record.
10. Lucinda Williams, "Crescent City," from s/t LP. Almost a perfect record, in terms of matching singer to songs, and of arrangement, performance, and production. Plus, it's about returning to a city that will probably never look or feel quite the same as the one rendered in this song.
11. Buzzcocks, "ESP." Not many Buzzcocks songs could provide a workable segue from Lucinda, but this one does it. A typically good song, but with an extra-long fadeout that now seems quaint.
12. The Reivers, "Breathin' Easy," from Pop Beloved. Despite the band name, they're not very Faulknerian. In this song's chorus, the guy singer and the girl singer sort of duel or talk (sing) over each other for a few lines before arriving at the last line in unison. It works really well. Plus, the wife and I like to sing the respective parts loudly on car trips.
13. Sam Phillips "Open to the world," from A Boot and a Shoe. I was listening to this record one day in the summer of 2004 on my way to visit my mom in the hospital, where she was dying from leukemia. "Reflecting light" came on ("now that I've worn out, I've worn out the world"; "Give up the ground under your feet/ hold on to nothing for good"). Thinking it described something of what Mom was experiencing, I started bawling and listened to it about 6 times. (In another example of the genius of the shuffle, the same song popped up on "shuffle" on the one-year anniversary of mom's death, while I was walking the dog. Had a good cry again, but only listened to it twice. Maybe three times.) The whole album has a similar kind of hold on me.
14. Modest Mouse, "You're the good things," from Everywhere and His Nasty Parlour Tricks. You'd think Modest Mouse would have been a jarring segue from Sam Phillips, but this actually worked pretty well, because the acoustic guitar in this song's intro mirrors that in the Sam Phillips song pretty closely. Later on, this song settles into the disco drumbeat that MM used to unfortunate effect in that song that was a radio hit.
15. Gillian Welch, "Make me a pallet on your floor," from Soul Journey. Gillian Welch and her undercredited partner, David Rawlings, can do no wrong. Hell, they even made a Ryan Adams record palatable. Honestly, I would not fault a single goddamn note on any of their records. Soul Journey is a great record. Time (the Revelator) is a masterpiece.
16. The Clean, "Dunes," from Vehicle. What a weird trajectory for a band. Make a couple singles and a couple four-track EPs, disappear for, like, 8 years, do some live shows and a couple records, then disappear again for 5 years, do 2 more records, disappear again for 6 years, do another record. Bizarre. But it's all really, really good.

A long list, assisted by me missing the bus and having an extra half hour to kill.