SOUNDTRACK: THE GHOST OF A SABER TOOTH TIGER-Tiny Desk Concert #92 (November 17, 2010).
The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger is a band created by Sean Lennon and Charlotte Kemp Muhl. I really liked their most recent album so I was pretty interested to hear this much earlier Tiny Desk Concert.
I love this acoustic pairing. Lennon plays the acoustic guitar (and sings and sounds a bit like his father’s more delicate side. Meanwhile, Charlotte plays a ton of instruments and sings as well.
The show starts with them talking about tambourines and how they are unavoidably loud (so Sean’s is on the floor).
“Jardin du Luxembourg” has some great chord changes and Charlotte’s lovely accordion (with a kind of French flair). As with all of these songs, there’s interesting lyrics like, “people say your brain is like cream cheese it takes the shape of anything you please.” At the end of the song, Charlotte comments that she tried to play the accordion quietly but if she does it sounds like it has emphysema. Sean says that she just learned to play it ten days earlier.
For “Schroedinger’s Cat” she switches from accordion to melodica and xylophone. Charlotte sings harmony along with Sean. There are more interesting lyrics here too (trippy ones, of course). It references Socrates, Aristotle, Dorian Gray and many more cultural touchstones.
On “Dark Matter, White Noise,” Charlotte plays bass (and sings lead on alternating verses). The chorus is gorgeous again, with a sort of minor key tone.
“The World Was Made For Men” is the first song they ever wrote together. Again, they sing together and sound fantastic.
At the end of the show, he threatens to do a 2 hour tambourine solo.
GOASTT is really something. I am bummed that they opened for a band I wanted to see this summer but was unable to attend. I hope the two bands tour again together this year.
[READ: January 6, 2015] “Nice Insane”
This was the second short piece in this issue of Harper’s. I don’t know Seth Price. This is an excerpt from his novel Fuck Seth Price.
Generally, I dislike reading excerpts, although sometimes they make you want to read the full novel. That did not happen in this case, though.
This excerpt focuses on the “moment of inspiration that had rejuvenated his [presumably Seth’s] painting career, making him rich but ultimately leading him to reject contemporary art.”
This moment came as he was sitting in a restaurant in 2000 thinking about how people love comfort food (like spaghetti and meatballs). Long ago Italian food was Italian American food–lots of red sauce and cheese. And then it became lowbrow. One day a chef realized that people liked comfort food so he trundled out lowbrow recipes and thematized them. To use a mid-Nineties term, the old recipes were “upcycled.”
There’s great paragraph after this in which he talks about upcycling and how in this age we have rich people who eat “expensive fetish food” and “poor, uneducated parents [who] name their babies deJohn because it sounds pungent yet sophisticated” (while they are unaware that it comes from an 80s TV commercial).
He tied this upcycling to abstract art, thinking that it too was due for a revitalization. He imagined a painterly abstraction that embodied cultural sophistication and “nowness.”
There’s an interesting paragraph about criticizing art. How people will point at a painting and say “That’s good” or “that’s bad” although they’re more unsure about being so nonchalant about a scrappy installation or conceptual work.
So he decided to make sure his abstract art looked “Cool”–appearing classic and minimal while emanating a vague awareness of rich historical struggle. It would seem tasteful but be tasteless. Or vice versa. And it was a success. But he soon became bored with this and decided to move to writing.
I felt like the excerpt needed either a few more or a couple fewer paragraphs to be really enticing. Rather, the ending was a little too nebulous.
I enjoyed the writing style and many of the paragraphs, but I don’t want to read any more.
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