Amidst the chaos since the waters have receded (and still waiting for that dove to come back with the olive branch), I’ve successfully built my little home studio and have begun to record new demos for the project. Monday brought the talented fellow Brooklynite Michelle Citrin (a.k.a. Rosh Hashanah Girl) to my Sunset Park abode, where she helped me with vocals for a certain traditional Hebrew song which I have deconstructed and slowed down like Derrida on ketamine.
Michelle jams out.
Housekeeping note: The blog shifts focus now as I take one foot out of the research phase of my project and the songs for my record begin to take shape. Vinyl fans need not worry, though; I’m so backlogged with amazing music (Jewish and otherwise) that the record posts must continue…
Writer, poet, critic, visual artist, radio DJ, and UPenn professor Kenneth Goldsmith– or Kenny G. as he is called on WFMU– seems to have harnessed the improbable for the purposes of everything that’s good about the art world. Goldsmith is the founding editor of UbuWeb, a large free library of avant-garde text, images, sound, and video. Because of the marginality of much of the content, and its ephemeral nature as commodity, Ubu hosts gigabytes (could it be terabytes?) of content without permission of artists and publishers, while exposing us to amazing works that would otherwise be overlooked.
Some of Ken’s sound works:
Kenneth Goldsmith Sings Roland Barthes (13:05)
Music by The Allman Brothers
Recorded at the WFMU studios, Jersey City, New Jersey, 2006
(link from UbuWeb)
More on co-host PennSound (I like Traffic, a 3-hour-long 1010 WINS traffic report,and The Weather)
She was 15, having just legally emancipated herself from her parents. She was 23 when her seventh album, with “At Seventeen,” was released in 1975.
Social commentary of an erstwhile high school girl living on the West Side of Manhattan. From the liner notes:
“She listens to a lot of music– Beatles, jazz, Billie Holiday, Barbra Streisand. ‘I listen sporadically to Dylan, because I get too involved…’”
“Society’s Child”
Sadly, this album is no longer in print in its original format, and is instead replaced by a three-disc compilation of her early years, but a few original copies are floating around.
Jewish Radio Theater presents The Mysterious Golem
with Leonard Nimoy and Gideon Zinger as the Maharal
Released by JRT Records in 1982 (”The producers request that this record rest on Shabbat and Yom Tov”), this is one of my prize finds from the WFMU record fair. Nimoy plays Rav Katz, the son-in-law of Rabbi Yehuda Loewe, creator of the Golem. Rav Katz (with a Spock accent) narrates to his son Chaim (with a Brooklyn accent) the story of the Jews’ persecution in Prague, and Loewe’s efforts, with a little Kabbalistic ritual and luck (and an Eastern European accent), to bring about a force that will rid the Jews of blood libels conducted by some non-Jewish residents of Prague (with Cockney accents, naturally).
The back cover states that this album was recorded in Hollywood (Nimoy), Israel (Zinger, Czech-Israeli actor), and New York (Chaim?).
