the process of wedding out
jody & andre get married (and ask their friends to write
about some songs)
wedding reception may 16, 2015, 4 p.m.
jody beth rosen and andre lafosse
THANK you for celebrating with us! Jody drew this (never took a lesson).
EVERY party has to end
sometime, but for those who come to Los
menu
Passed Canapés:
Mushroom Tart
Whipped Ricotta on Toast
Chicken Meatballs
Angus Beef Sliders
On the Side:
Charcuterie and Cheese Boards
Crudités
Cake:
Almond Wedding Cake With Toasted Almond Cream Cheese Buttercream
Blueberry Walnut Wedding Cake With Sweet Lemon Buttercream
Coffee and Tea Service
Open Bar
events
Join us at 5 p.m. for—we hope—a Google Hangout with friends and family
across the globe, and at 7:30 for an afterparty in our Palihouse hotel room.
Room number to be announced.
olivia newton-john magic
kate izquierdo
IF you are familiar with “Magic”—even if glossy
roller-disco musicals are not your sweet
spot—the song will evoke instant rainbows,
and an aura that’s ever-so-slightly seductive.
Interviewed for a promotional behind-thescenes documentary, Olivia Newton-John
explains that Xanadu is an entertainment
picture and adds, “And I think the world could
use that now.” The music for this particular
brand of fantasy, which she goes on to call
"modern nostalgia," is an intentional blending of big-band orchestration with
the contemporary keyboard– and guitar-fused rock of the time.
Xanadu is typically associated with Electric Light Orchestra: their
appropriately modern yet nostalgic neon logo featured prominently in the
soundtrack's artwork. It floats majestically, borne aloft by Newton-John the
goddess in diaphanous shirt dress and matching leg warmers, courtesy of
costume designer Bobbie Mannix. But “Magic” had different origins. Featured
on the "ONJ" side of the album, the songwriting and production for “Magic” are
credited to John Farrar, Newton-John's longtime collaborator. Farrar,
importantly, was someone who understood Newton-John extremely well—
he’d been writing for her for decades.
“Magic” works because it was created for its singer, tailored to a voice initially
made famous in folkier settings for its power and warmth. On “Magic,” her
innate understanding of pacing allows the song to build into a sultry paean,
placing a gentle twang on her enunciation at the right moments, a perfect
match for the keyboard-slick country ballad.
All of this mood-building wraps around lyrics born of a single fantastic
premise: each life, no matter how mundane, has moments when we truly
experience joy, when all the drudgery, missed appointments, and broken
strings make sense. In moments of love, there is that chance to roll right into
the orange sherbet sunset of your choosing.
rush subdivisions
ned raggett
I ALWAYS enjoyed “Subdivisions”—
hey, it rocks. And I loved it more
from the version I actually had, the
live one on A Show of Hands, the first
Rush album I actually owned. (One
starts somewhere, after all.) I
remember a couple of people with
Signals tour shirts in middle school
in upstate New York, and in
retrospect that made total sense,
“Subdivisions” being a song about
isolation in some sense from the main scene, wherever it was. High school
halls, shopping malls—we had ‘em but they were smaller than others.
So I didn’t really understand “Subdivisions” totally until I finally flew into
Rush’s hometown of Toronto, straight to Toronto Pearson International
Airport, code YYZ itself (“YY Zed”), on a day hop from New York City a few
years ago as part of a larger trip. From the plane, I saw downtown on the
water, where it all started, and then this… sprawl. A polite Canadian sprawl, if
you like, but it seemed like this flowing grid that just kept going, going, going,
fading into haze in the distance on that summer’s day. It was weirdly
disorienting; it wasn’t like Los Angeles was any different, but then again, L.A.
was bounded by hills and ridges, broken up, where this wasn’t. The idea of a
suburbia as a subdivision, something all too cleanly organized, sure it all feeds
into the restless dreams of youth, and some end up reading Ayn Rand, but
others actually are Rob and Doug Ford. But when you actually see the damn
thing like the flat Ontarian version of the Cyclopean city behind the mountains
of madness, minus the ice, you trip out at least a little. Of course, then I
probably just went back to making “eh?” jokes.
vengaboys we like to party
scott boxedjoy
THERE'S a chiming horn at the start
of “We Like to Party” that could just
as easily be a cry of "All aboard!" (as
easily as it could be "Get out the
way!"). Because that's how the
Vengabus tours: a bludgeoning
steamroller of tinny trance synths
and ESL funtimes lyrics that's as allinclusive as the Club 18–30 holidays
it was designed to soundtrack.
With a bassline built on perpetual
motion and the deadpan, vocodered cries of the title, the Vengabus doesn't
waste a second on its journey through hedonism. It might not be sophisticated
or nuanced but there's a kitsch playfulness that no amount of grace could
substitute. "Happiness is just around the corner," it promises, but the secret
isn't the destination, it's the getting there, and on this the Vengaboys offer a
ticket that's irrefutable.
palihouse rooftop bar
buck owens who's gonna mow your grass
kaleb horton
FORTY-SIX years after
this song went to
number one on the
country charts, I was
sitting with my
grandpa in East
Bakersfield, where
everything you touch is
half dirt. I was hoping
to get a testimonial on
the damn thing: you
know, an expert
opinion, a primary
source. He was twentynine when it came out. He knows it like the back of his hand. His opinion is
worth more than mine. It was noon. I was talking and he was smoking. Not
Camels anymore. The king-size generics from the Indian reservation in
Porterville. "Well, grandpa, what about that Buck song? It was number one,
right?" Long pause. "Number one for a while."
No answer. His mind was drifting. He was still mad that Bob Dylan recently
called Buck Owens a better songwriter than Merle Haggard, an opinion known
as mathematically impossible to hold when you're on my grandpa's property.
He put their greatest hits LPs on the kitchen table and said "look at that—just
look," and the discussion was over. So here's my opinion, which is worth one
one-hundredth of his.
"Who's Gonna Mow Your Grass" came out in January 1969. It's about a put-out
fella telling his gal all about the things he does for her. It's a Buck song alright.
I can imagine bumming around town in a truck without seatbelts during
Bakersfield's notorious 115-degree winters and getting in a good ol' mood
with that song at moderate volume. For exactly one minute and twenty seven
seconds. Then the fuzztone happens. Damn.
skinny puppy censor
dan perry
SWELLING synth washes buffet the
ears and the shoulder blades grow
tense. Ambient samples fill in the
spaces left in the arrangement. A
coarse growl/howl delivers a
feverish stream of consciousness
while intermittent guitar lines
punctuate with isolated points of
melodic resolution.
Any portion of Skinny Puppy's "Censor" could be sequestered and discussed
but what ties the song together is the percussion. The drums are battering
rams: crisp, scalpel-delineated snare hits surrounded by the pummel of toms
floating over a kick drum’s thunder. The bassline is a beast, every staccato
note a plucked fury. Unsettling and forceful, the angry energy relays the lyrics’
menace and distaste without us ever having to understand a word.
When words do pierce the fog, they confirm the unease. "Censor" isn't
interested in a straightforward narrative or message; instead, a litany of
disturbance suggests a ranting street preacher, incoherently and trying
desperately to communicate the end of the world to passers-by who may
share his language but not his syntax or vision.
Hints of clarity jump out: "Livid gnaws fasting on tick and flea in vain / Again"
may be inscrutable on its face but the sentiment behind "You clown / You
asshole" isn't.
Still, everything links back to the thuds, thumps, and bangs at the heart of
“Censor.” The confluence of syncopation and vitriol buttresses the idea that
percussion is a language; here, Skinny Puppy have mastered it thoroughly.
adam and the ants cartrouble
(parts 1 & 2)
mark sinker
TOPPING and tailing a moment, "Cartrouble Parts
1 and 2” opens Dirk Wears White Sox, the
orphan alb of post-punk never quite canonised
alongside Cut or Metal Box or Unknown
Pleasures. Not named as such, “Part 2” was also
the single after the LP, the final statement
before Adam’s shift towards dandy panto-strut
and global breakthrough: indeed you can already hear this future Adam,
trademark falsetto voice-wriggles and Londonoid interjectional framebreaking, agile as ever among the moments of anxious reflective repose.
Actually “fragment” would serve better than “part,” the two sections yoked
together without transition or explanation, the mood sour, clotted, busily
over-concise—ambitiously odd in address, with hard-to-parse topics splayed
into slippily ambiguous stance, a marriage of parts radiating horrid
uncertainty, each cycling through the other, undermining and queasily
stranding the listener.
Skip to Part 2: jangly production and straighter delivery making appeal to
shared experience: “Have you ever had a ride in a light blue car?” The car in
pop is badge of hip status, means of escape to thrills and seduction-enabler.
Still-punky Adam side-eyes all of this. Existing technologies of diversion and
leisure-age domesticity are traps; pleasure is the fetishistic locus of perversity.
He’s no puritan—it really is pleasure—but he doesn’t let you forget its victims.
Part 1 provides the memory-bed for all that follows. A patter of drums and a
wiry curlicue of a riff: dry, clipped, harmonically static, the self-declaration of
someone misshapen and conventionally unfortunate, if strikingly turned out.
Maybe you feel pity and want to help. If so, the song instantly calls you out as a
hypocrite, your fellow feeling a smug flaunting of self-importance. How is it
you see victims again? “Have you ever stopped to think who's the slave and
who's the master?”
broadcast michael a grammar
michael daddino
BROADCAST are a counterfactual band:
they imagine a Swinging London
awash with synthesizers or, alternately
but perhaps relatedly, more dread
than pop music could've tolerated at
the time. A YouTube somebody set this
song to clips from Halloween, and
while this is one of the band's brighter
tunes, it's not even entirely a joke. "My
feet are dancing so much," Trish Keenan avers as Michael Myers hooks a
victim to a door, feet dangling inches above the floor. "And I hate that."
Even at their most Captain Easychord, Broadcast refuse to give you simple
pleasure. Pleasure, sure, and a lot of it, but it's never simple. “Michael a
Grammar” has an exhortation to "let go" but premises it upon ludicrously
unnecessary rhetorical convolutions: not "You wanna let go? Then let go" but
"If you're feeling like you're looking for a chance to let go, and if you're feeling
like you're looking for that chance, then let go." And as the hook, the main
hook, is my name—the receipt of the purchase other people have on my life—
it feels less like a hook than a poke at the most reactive part of my brain.
"Michael. Michael, Michael." That's my Mom's voice calling up from the stairs
to my room, the admonishment of a school teacher, my boss at work, do this
not that. And I hate that.
Well, not here. A song with nagging doesn't necessarily nag at me, not exactly,
just as a song about pain doesn't necessarily cause me pain, or a happy song
make me feel happy. But it keeps me on edge.
broadcast michael a grammar (slight return)
mrs. jody beth lafosse
MUSICIANS have ragged on their own insider-outsider culture since Talking
Heads deemed Mudd Club and CBGB less immediate than whatever crisis they
wrote “Life During Wartime” about, since The Television Personalities’ “Part
Time Punks,” since Bob McFadden & Dor’s bongo-skewering “The Beat
Generation,” since Harry Gibson’s ambivalent boogie-woogie treatises on jivetalking white jazzers (on “Handsome Harry, the Hipster,” he implicates
himself). Examples must abound in vaudeville, blues, and early popular song
as well.
Broadcast’s 2005 “Michael a Grammar” came one year after X1’s “New York is
So Cool,” three years after LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge,” and five
years after The Dandy Warhols’ “Bohemian Like You,” situating it in a kind of
micro-trend as the smallness of internet worlds made many of the
“alternative” kids (thanks, ‘90s) realize they weren’t especially special. When
Trish Keenan entreats the titular Michael to “let go,” yes, there’s a bit of dancemusic abandon packed into the meaning (with the playful beat as arm candy),
but it’s also a purposeful rejection of the anxiety of the ultramodern. Letting
go means letting yourself go: not watching the cholesterol as much, dressing
for comfort rather than high style, a resignation to dull grind instead of
assaultive novelty. Keenan frames this resignation as freeing, though. In their
career, Broadcast used the recent past as a palette of art materials. But artists
fear surrender to their media; it’s a rabbit hole they either scramble to avoid
or are lured into with attractive carrots despite their cooler-headed
intentions.
It’s within this context that Keenan lures herself, and Michael, to the Brutalist
postwar tower blocks of that recent past, away from the sawtooth wave of
being a young person in a deep-rooted city, toward the endless static of the
vaguely ahistorical but dated new town. “The old high-rise is coming down”;
how’s that for the day’s excitement? Well, it’s not the chicly tedious party of
“Come on Let’s Go” but it does promise a certain thrill (from a distance);
public-policy failures make for gripping research. And it will remain research
for these characters, because it’s too hard to stop dancing. What’s the point in
wasting time on people that you’ll never know?
ani difranco born a lion
tim finney
“BORN A LION” charges (roars?) out the
gate with a percussive flamenco strum at
once frenetic and iridescent, as if the
drug-hazed lassitude of the Meat
Puppets’ Up On The Sun was melted and
recast into urgent clarity; no drumming,
but a hand taps against the soundboard
with a boom like distant thunder. “I’m
not hurting anyone!’ Ani immediately
offers in her own defence, but this opening gambit comes off more like a boast,
or maybe a threat; either way, she sounds way too pleased to be on the
defensive.
Puddle Dive, her fourth album, is the artist’s most exuberant and, oddly,
introspective, a consistently wry celebration of both her ugly duckling status
and her restless need to keep moving; “Born a Lion” is the apotheosis of both
themes. Ani the lion can’t be pinned down, sociologically or geographically,
and the disapproval of others (“What’s the big deal? / Get over it! / Relax!”), or
the intense but fleeting relationships formed on the road (“Everything I do / I
do for the first time / I got a big crush on you / And it’s crushing my mind”),
aren’t just the wages of sin but badges of honour.
More than the thrill of there being “lots of stuff to say,” the attraction of Ani’s
world is that these choices never feel like choices, just the logical
consequences and parameters of the world through which she skitters for an
enthralling 109 seconds: rhymes so perfect but unlabored that they become
simply the language in which she thinks to herself; musical accelerations and
decelerations like limbs stretching out and retracting in a joyful canter. “Don’t
bother trying to act tame”, she advises, but here at least she never sounds like
she’s trying anything.
art garfunkel 99 miles from l.a.
mrs. jody beth lafosse
BEFORE Jay Z or Nena or Toto got there but after the bottles of beer on the wall,
Albert Hammond knew 99 was a great pop number. He knew a lot about
crafting hits, despite his chief success as an artist being a song about abject
failure—“It Never Rains in Southern California.” Indeed, one feels less pity for
that “man, it pours” broken hopeful when one learns Hammond co-wrote “The
Air That I Breathe,” “When I Need You,” and “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.”
But in 1975, he reapproached the well of despair with “99 Miles from L.A.,” a
Hal David collab that reached number one on Billboard’s AC singles chart.
Johnny Mathis covered it the same year, but the most affecting version from
1975 was Art Garfunkel’s.
Garfunkel was perpetually overshadowed by Paul Simon as a bandmate, a solo
act, and as of Simon’s first SNL appearance two weeks after the October 1
release of Garfunkel’s Breakaway album, an onscreen personality. (Garfunkel
joined Simon that night in Studio 8H, but it was Simon who would emerge
over the decades as Lorne Michaels’s darling.) The biggest U.S. hit on
Breakaway was the sole cut that survived the duo’s sessions from their
aborted reunion. The Breakaway cover art, with our hero peering past the
flurry of aloof Hollywood iniquity with a mug that puppies save for adoption
fairs, shows what a lonely place a crowd can be.
From its title, “99 Miles From L.A.” evokes getaways: the survivalist alien
arthropods on the desert road to Vegas, the seafood-chowder fog along the
Ventura coast. But the tug is downward, not outward. The chords fall steeply,
like thrill rides where machinery outpaces gravity. The name isn’t all red
herring. The “99” stops short of a tidy round number, suspended unfulfilled.
The narrator wants to distance himself from “L.A.,” the dismissive diminutive
that cuts a complex region to shreds in two haughty syllables. He’s laughing in
his new accommodations; he’s loving. He doesn’t sound happy in the slightest.
What would the hundredth mile bring?
Even in the steady chorus, Garfunkel is ill at ease; the shoe may drop and the
terror may overwhelm. As Hammond compositions go, this is not one for the
Mannequin soundtrack or the Seoul Olympics. It’s almost admirable that the
guy who helped make Starship so generic dug up a Palm Springs swimming
pool of latent ache in the soul of Art Garfunkel.
dr. buzzard’s original savannah band whispering / cherchez la femme / se si bon
michael daddino
PROBABLY 1994. A phone call. How did we start
talking about music? Maybe I put some Chopin on
my voicemail message—please, go ahead, judge me.
Later, my boss tells me to take it off. She thinks the
furniture vendors wouldn't find it "professional." I
still have to wear a tie every day. "I used to be in the
music business, you know," the guy on the other end
says. "You know Dr. Buzzard?"
1990 or 1992. An armory in Annapolis on a college weekend. Aisles of vinyl
and I think I pick through most boxes, methodically. I have nothing in mind. I
want to be surprised. The album has a green dot sticker indicating it’s cheap. I
have a budget of $100. Sure, why not? Maybe it'll have more impact than the
single alone. It sort of does: Doug E. Fresh sampled "Sunshower"!
1985. I see Robert Christgau gives it an A, with reservations. Funny name.
Never heard of 'em.
1988. There's a 12" in Tower Records. I buy it thinking I may never get closer
to the album than this. It sounds exactly like I think it would. It doesn't blow
me away.
1994 again. Oh yes. "Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band." I give him the full
name. As further proof, I sing the opening line: "Tommy Mottola lives on the
road." He chuckles in recognition. Mottola just married Mariah Carey.
Around 2004. In one of our phone calls, Michaelangelo Matos identifies the
stubborn '20s-'30s nostalgia of the '70s and I totally get what he's talking
about, immediately.
1970s. Paper Lace and Stavisky and Paper Moon and Bugsy Malone and The
Great Gatsby and The Sting. Even Star Wars in bits.
Around 1977. Even as a child I recognize it: alongside the Mickey Mouse I
know and love there's this old-looking Mickey Mouse in some Disney products
who’s weird and loose and rubbery, a triangular notch in his pupil.
1982. I build a paper Chrysler Building and realize there's a name to that
Mickey Mouse aesthetic: Art Deco. That year is also the last gasp of the craze,
right? Taco's "Putting on the Ritz," right?
1980s. Most people with real, adult memories of the time start dying off and
the culture moves on.
A day ago. @LeavittAlone, in three tweets: "One of my evergreen seasons is
how different time periods interpret the recent past, like there was a big and
long enough 1900s revival in … the ‘30s that it's hard to parse out what was
contemporary and what was throwback, which actually ended up ... bleeding
into the ‘70s interpretation of the ‘30s, ‘cause it really emphasized the stuff the
‘30s loved about the 1890s.”
Around 2004. Matos and I figure the '30s would've been especially attractive
in an age of permanent recession. A recognition that bad times could be
laughed at BECAUSE WELL IT'S BETTER THAN KILLING YOURSELF I GUESS,
and good times can't exist without bad times permanently haunting the
horizon.
1976. "Maybe he'll find her. Maybe he won't."
1994 again. This guy came from New York, maybe the Bronx. He had an
accent. I think there’s a circumspectness there: pride at what he had been, an
elision to how he went from that to selling vinyl wallcovering. I mean he
doesn’t tell me, and I don’t ask. It seems rude.
Late 2000s. There is—surprise!—videos of the band! On YouTube! RCA
actually put money into this thing! A little bit, anyway! These kids, these kids
from the Bronx, with their bowlegged moves and their music lessons, these
kids seem so young, they still have dreams, which is ridiculous. They take the
past because it is rightfully theirs, they earned it; they finally take my heart
because it is rightfully theirs, they earned it. Oh, oh, oh.
Around 2000, I guess? My company is still in the World Trade Center.
Somebody tells me the wallcovering guy died. A few reflections on mortality,
and I ooze back into work, unwillingly.
Today. I don't remember his name. I don't know anybody who'd remember;
some of them have died. Betcha Mottola doesn't even mention him in his
biography. Maybe he didn't even sell vinyl wallcoverings. Maybe it was
something else.
wang chung to live and die in l.a.
conrad flynn
Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful; and the end of that mirth is
heaviness. —Proverbs 14:13
"Everybody Have Fun Tonight" —Wang Chung
EVERY party has to end sometime, but for those who come to Los Angeles from
the normal parts of the world, which is just to say the less insane parts, the
abruptness with which the party ends in this town, or reveals itself from the
beginning to be a farce, is astonishing. One minute you're on Sunset, singing
"Hi-Diddle-Dee" with Katy Perry and Slash, and wondering where you got the
top hat that is currently on your head, and the next you're asking for strange
favors from mafia men near a North Hollywood laundromat just so you can
afford the bus ride to leave town.
Now, of course, most people's experience with the highs and lows of L.A. falls
somewhere in the middle, and that's probably what Wang Chung is singing
about here! With "To Live and Die in L.A." Wang Chung stands next to Evelyn
Waugh's "The Loved One" in literature, and George Harrison’s "Blue Jay Way"
in “bottom-of-the-catalog Beatles album tracks” in being "British chums who
come to our sunny shores, enjoy L.A, think it's great, and then are suddenly
alienated by the superficiality, the unwholesomeness, the sense that things
aren't quite as they're depicted in the brochures and ‘80s movies. That behind
all the glamor (this is Wang Chung: glamour) there is an inner rot being
concealed, and that one day the great Earthquake not only will come
but should come to this city, come and tear it all down.
The British are fascinated by the dynamic L.A. has on offer! The classical
British characteristics of understatement and modesty: inverted into showbiz
hype and sleaziness. It's the city as The City: the great opportunity and the
worst influence. An alternative version of Pilgrim's Progress, where Pilgrim
never leaves the City of Destruction.
be seeing you