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June 1, 2007
April 2007 Largehearted Boy Wrapup
April was a busy month at Largehearted Boy. Along with the daily posts of free and legal music downloads, bittorrents of live performances, and music, literature, and pop culture news, featured posts (along with an excerpt) included:
Book Notes (authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates to their book):
Tao Lin, for his collection of short fiction, Bed:
There are nine stories in Bed. I will type about each. I will choose one song for each story that I think I listened to the most while writing that story. I listen to music when I write. Some of the songs I choose will be complete guesses, because I just thought about it and don't remember what I listened to the most while writing each of these. I won't choose Britney Spears or No Doubt or something "just to be funny." I will be professional.
Tao Lin, for his novel, Eeeee Eee Eeee:
Eeeee Eee Eeee has intelligent animals. I'm going to create a mixed CD for intelligent animals. Eeeee Eee Eeee has moose, hamsters, bears, dolphins, aliens, and Elijah Wood. I will create a mixed CD for all those animals and Elijah Wood. One song for each species. They will share the CD. I want them to sit around a campfire in a K-mart parking lot at 3 a.m. listening to the songs with a very small stereo. Whenever a certain animal's song plays that animal will feel self-conscious. At one point Elijah Wood will stand up with a worried facial expression and a hamster will say, "Sit down Elijah Wood," and Elijah Wood will sit down.
Michelle Richmond, for her novel, The Year of Fog
15. Village People, "San Francisco": Penned by the Dallas-born Victor Willis, this song is possibly the greatest tribute to the City by the Bay. Yes you can laugh, though first I challenge you to put it on and not dance. It's impossible. A relic from a more hopeful time, the song is a fine anthem for anyone who has come to adopt San Francisco as his or her true hometown. "... Dress the way you please and put your mind at ease/It's a city known for its freedom...Inhibitions, no you don't need them." Of course, having been born and raised in Alabama, my favorite phrase from the song is, "San Francisco, y'all!"
Gayle Brandeis, for her novel, Self Storage
In Self Storage, Flan finds a box at a self storage auction that is empty except for the word Yes; this sends her on a quest to figure out what makes her say Yes in her own life. I don't let myself admit this very often, but of course I would love for someone to turn Self Storage into a movie. That would be a very big Yes indeed. So I'm going to indulge myself here and cast the movie and give it a soundtrack. I know Flan would approve.
Nick Bertozzi, for his graphic novel, The Salon
I wasn't influenced by songs while I was working on THE SALON, I was influenced by DJs at WFMU. The radio station that is the self-proclaimed audio home for "onanistic shut-ins", "An Extremely Enjoyable Radio Station For Young and Olds Alike That Will Shake Your Bottoms" and a station "Where You Can't Tell the Music from the Technical Difficulties." I could not make comics without them. It's no coincidence that the year I first discovered the station I also decided once-and-for-all to be a cartoonist, rent and ConEd bills be damned! The 'FMU DJS have challenged me, annoyed me, charmed me, pulled from me tears of joy and tears of shame, cut me up, and stuck my ears deep into this dimension's aural plane, but they have never, ever bored me. This is not a fashion-y college station, nor is it a tiresome public radio station with formatted "Blues in the Evening"-style blocks of programming--this is FREEFORM! Plus, they don't run commercials, not even the underwriting kind. It's insane, this station. So instead of songs, here's a handful of the DJs without whom I would be unable to draw my little illustrated whimsies.
Ben Greenman, for his collection of short fiction, A Circle is a Balloon and Compass Both
When I write, I don’t really listen to words with lyrics – too distracting – but many songs are in my mind, and as soon as I’m done writing, I run off and listen to them. This list is seventies-heavy, for some reason. Other days, in other moods, it might lean toward the nineties or toward the fifties.
Tamara Faith Berger, for her novel, A Woman Alone at Night
Some people say that those who don’t know music are soulless. I am a little soulless in this sense. I try to cure that through writing but it doesn’t always work.
Nick Mamatas, for his novel, Under My Roof<
9. "Another Girl, Another Planet" by The Replacements
Yes, I know, this is another cover. I'm a cesspool of useless information, much of which I crammed into the book in the hope of getting rid of it. I even have a recurring daydream in which I've been hit by a taxi or something and a loved one is cradling my bloody head in her lap. My last words to her are, "Remember, if you're ever in a pub trivia contest one day, the first performers of 'Another Girl, Another Planet' was The Only Ones, not The Replacements. It's important to know this….urk!" Then I shudder and die. I truly believe that people are smarter now than they ever were, but that popular culture exists just to fill our brains to such a point that we cannot comprehend the world around us.
Shauna Seliy, for her novel, When We Get There
“Ti Si Rajski Cvijet” by Jelena Ana Milcetic (a.k.a. Helen Merrill)
This is an old Croatian folk song, sometimes called “Samo Nemoj Ti.” This song is also in When We Get There. In English the song translates as, “I saw you picking flowers. Don’t tell your mother I love you. You are a flower from heaven. The world admires you. I’ll never stop loving you.” When I was growing up going to Croatian Clubs as a kid, everyone knew all the words to this song. Dear reader, it is one of the prettiest songs that ever lived.
Interviews:
Ned Vizzini interviews Rasmus Holmen, founder of the Internet Nirvana Fan Club
Ned Vizzini: You've been running the Nirvana Fan Club for ten years. How have you seen the audience change?
Rasmus Holmen: It's difficult to say since I haven't really run any demographic studies over those years. But I think the audience has somewhat remained the same. By that I mean that most of the audience is teenagers and, perhaps surprisingly, not so much comprised of people who were Nirvana fans back in the early 90s when the band was still active. I get the impression that my website appeals more to "new" Nirvana fans, particularly people who are teenagers today, as opposed to people in their late 20s or early 30s who may have been a fan of the band when they were still active.
Contests:
PETA is holding a sexiest celebrity vegetarian contest, win a copy of Isa Moskowitz's cookbook, Vegan with a Vengeance, by leaving a comment with your favorite vegetarian's name.
Hillary Clinton Campaign Song Contest:
With the Clinton campaign choosing a campaign song, Largehearted Boy readers offered suggetsions (both in favor of and against Senator Clinton).
The winners:
"Man Smart, Woman Smarter" by the Grateful Dead
"Flirtin' with Disaster," by Molly Hatchett
Note Books (musicians discuss books):
Jerry Dannemiller of Moviola listed several of his favorite books.
Power Politics – Arundhati Roy
If you ever want to run the gamut of feelings from disgust to outrage to resignation to empowerment to inspiration, Roy is the perfect path. Even though this book is nearly seven years old at this point, a lot of her arguments and descriptions are scarily prophetic concerning globalization, the rise of terrorism, Western greed and lack of diplomacy. After a while on this earth, you begin to realize when you’re in the company of someone of extreme intelligence, and you just stand back and let them talk. Power Politics is such a moment.
see also:
