Thursday, November 5, 2009

Yessss!


Guess who I met today?





Listen to Mike Newman's interview with Derek on EVR: just select the Nov 5 archive. Mike always scores the best guests--because of him, I've been able to interview Faust and Sergio Dias over the past few weeks. He records his show in the live booth while I pre-record No Pussyfooting upstairs, so I made sure to run down and meet Derek. I think he was surprised that I was so excited to meet him. Thank you Mike!!

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Blog Songs, episode 1


Speaking of religious zealots...I want to try posting music on this blog, as often as possible, so I thought I'd inaugurate what I hope will become a regular thing with some Bill Fay. Here are two tracks from his second and final album, Time of the Last Persecution, originally released on Decca in 1971. A couple of years ago Eclectic Discs reissued both of Fay's albums under the title Bill Fay Plus (I think), so go find that and buy it if it's still in print. Otherwise, his stuff is easy to find on the net. You guys know how to google.

Anyway, I really like Bill Fay's first (self-titled) album too. It's definitely over-orchestrated, but I'm a sucker for that kind of over the top shit, especially when the orchestration is a little bizarre, as is the case here. In Time of the Last Persecution, however, the arrangements are utterly wacked out. The album was produced by Ray Russell, and the dude just wails over Fay's somber tunes with heavy fuzz guitar solos, epileptic shredding, and multilayered, noisy orchestration. I really like how the orchestration just drops in out of nowhere on a lot of the songs on this album, just barfing all over the tracks. As for Fay, he's been compared to Roy Harper, Alexander Spence, Scott Walker, Nick Drake...you get the idea. Deep, depressed, kind of nutty British guys. And if you haven't guessed already, Time of the Last Persecution is totally apocalyptic. Get into it!

This first track, "Release is in the Eye," is pretty characteristic of the rest of the album, although it lacks the unexpected arrangements I mentioned earlier. Nice melody, weird Christian lyrics, flat singing, awesome fuzz.


"I Hear You Calling" is a simpler cut, but really compelling (in my opinion)


I hope you like it! Leave a comment if you do, or if there's anything in particular you'd like me to post on here. If that something happens to be out of print, expensive, or absent from the net, I'll try to make it appear.

A Quip About Nips

I saw a lot of ugly, offensive shit this summer while I was apartment-sitting in a place with cable TV. Not the least of which was this ad for a stupid bra that conceals your nipples with two petal-shaped padded concaves on the inside of the bra cup--a stylish secret for extra modest ladies! Give me a fucking break. From a pragmatic standpoint, I get it--most women (myself included) hate to have their nips ogled on a cold day. But these "concealer" bras are just insulting--better cover up those nips, girls, or else you're just asking for it! If ever there were a time to bring back bra burning...but there isn't, really. I feel like nowadays it's just as futile to complain about nip concealers in a public forum as it is to prance around shamelessly in a thin shirt--being open about such things carries its own (backwards) sex appeal, and who am I to criticize a guy for checking out a nice set of boobs if they're in plain sight? But creating a bra that hides or constricts your rack even more than usual isn't going to stop men from being assholes--it's only going to make women even more ashamed of what they're carrying. Just from googling around for some info on that stupid bra, I found all kinds of disappointing "tips" from women on how to hide your nips so that you can work in an airconditioned office building, how to pull duct tape off your nips at the end of the day with the least amount of pain, etc--on sites like eHow and Yahoo! Whatever. I'm not bold enough to withstand the social side effects of going blatantly braless, so I usually make a halfhearted effort to keep my nips in check. But if they show, I deal with it. I'm certainly not going to spend money on a special bra just because pervs on the street can't keep their boners to themselves. Maybe men should try a little harder to conceal their thoughts and quit rubbernecking. It's not very attractive.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Another Funk Show

The playlist for tonight's show is mostly funk. Lately I've been playing a lot of long songs during the first half hour of the show--a decision that I've come to regret, considering that the new streaming setup prohibits listeners from being able to skip through shows. So if you've listened to my show recently, and found yourself stuck in an interminably long song, I'm sorry. Hopefully this week's No Pussyfooting will pick up the pace! Let me know what you think; feel free to email me with requests, questions, comments, complaints at radiomargaret@gmail.com or leave a comment here.

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Nicholas Ray

I've gone to Film Forum every day this week for the Nicholas Ray retrospective. If anything, seeing a few of his films in a row has caused me to think about the patterns in his casting--loner pretty boys like Farley Granger and James Dean; blacklist Leftists like Sterling Hayden and Robert Ryan; strong willed, feral leading ladies like Joan Crawford, Gloria Grahame and Ida Lupino; and lots of sad-eyed P.Y.T.'s with interesting faces. These are all actors of great character, many of whom led fascinating, offbeat lives offscreen. And if good direction can be attributed to expert decision-making, Ray's eye for people only makes me admire him more.

I first checked out Johnny Guitar, just to see it again, on a nice 35mm print. It remains one of my favorite films, and certainly my favorite Crawford performance. Too much to say about that one, so I'll just stop here before I start rambling.

Next up was On Dangerous Ground-I went in to that one assuming from the get-go that I'd like it because it stars Robert Ryan (see above), but as it turned out Ryan's perfectly reticent, devastating performance was only the tip of the iceberg. The film was incredible; pretty much blindsided me. You know how The Asphalt Jungle ends suddenly out in the countryside, where Sterling Hayden goes to die out on the farm with the horses? That was always my favorite part of that movie, how it shifted abruptly from the setting of a "gritty" urban noir--down in the sewers, even--to the bright open space of a farm. Well, you get a similarly jolting change of setting here, with the first half of On Dangerous Ground taking place in the dingy city, with Ryan playing a hot-headed, nihilistic detective in a cop-hating town. Then he's given a slap on the wrist and sent out to the mountains on an assignment--to help the even more hot-headed Ward Bond track down his daughter's handicapped teenage killer, in the snow with a rifle. The outdoor photography here is beautiful and crisp, and very different from the back projection that makes Johnny Guitar so (wonderfully) hokey. The cinematography is really inventive, both in the mountains and in the city--some really exciting (and unique) handheld camerawork, and a few weird but perfect shots taken from inside cars, plus a couple of moody superimpositions as the characters drive hopelessly through the city and in the snow. The same can be said for They Live By Night, which I saw yesterday--it was surprisingly well shot, considering that it was Ray's first film. One moment in particular was so impressive that my friend, usually a quiet film-watcher, let out an uncharacteristic "wow." (At least it was a quiet "wow").

I have to say, the romance works in They Live By Night, too. Even knowing that Farley Granger was gayer than a 3 dollar bill in the real world, I was surprisingly able to suspend my disbelief and fall for his pretty face. I think it was the storyline that swayed me, because normally I'm not attracted to pretty men at all. I think the lovers-on-the-run genre has a lot going for it, because the general premise is chaotic and absurd enough to float a convincing romance. One just doesn't have the time to slip into the boring routine of everyday life; of running out of things to talk about, deciding what to make for dinner and watching TV together--when you're living a life of crime. Nicholas Ray draws attention to this, while offering us a character study of the type of people who are eager to drop everything and run off--people who are both survivalist and admirably naive, who don't own anything worth holding onto and so depend on each other as a means of substantive living. Up until the end of They Live By Night, the couple operates on the assumption that eventually they'll hit a safezone, work out their legal issues and live in comfortable amnesty. But their rotating fantasies are clearly untenable, and Ray lets us know ahead of the curve that the couple wouldn't be happy living in the "real world" anyway--they don't like to dance, they think sports are stupid, and they feel out of place in social situations. It's not so much that they're running away from a broken and irreparable past as they haven't really lived yet. They're constructing a new way of life in transit that's pretty exciting and unlike anything I've ever experienced. The whole scenario befits the movies well, and I like it!


I haven't written much here about Nicholas Ray in particular, but it should go almost without saying that I'm now hooked on him. None of the internal details that I've mentioned, like character development, acting and story would be at all effective if his direction wasn't on point. Especially with a genre as tiresome as the melodrama, the direction needs to be tight to keep me awake, let alone interested, and so far he's really impressed me. I'm going to see this series at Film Forum through.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

No Pussyfooting this week

After it aired, my show disappeared for a few days this week while the station fiddled with the new stream. The new website, if you haven't noticed, has some kinks, but it's still very promising. My show is back on the air so stream it now if you feel like it. I'm posting the playlist here because I wasn't able to upload it to my show page.

By the way, does anyone know why the Zombies misspelled "Odyssey" on their "Odessey & Oracle" album? I suppose I could just go to google.... Anybody know?

playlist for 7/19/09
1. Robert Lester Folsom "April Suzanne" (Music and Dreams)
2. Caravan "Winter Wine" (Land of the Grey and the Pink)
3. George Edwards "La Jolla" (38:38)
4. Faust "Just a Second (Starts Like That!)" (IV)
5. Cos "Fanfan la Tulipe" (Viva Bomma)
6. The Music Emporium "Velvet Sunsets" (s/t)
7. McDonald & Sherby "Space Beam" (s/t)
8. The Idle Race "Hurry Up John" (s/t)
9. Arcadium "Poor Lady" (Breathe Awhile)
10. Comus "The Prisoner" (First Utterance)
11. Mandrake Memorial "House of Mirrors" (s/t)
12. Eroc "Sternchen" (Eroc Eins)
13. "The Feedback"-- anyone know what this is? I found it on my computer.
14. Os Mutantes "Jogo de Calcada" (A Divina Comedia)
15. Axis "Materializing the Unlimited" (II)
16. Joe Tex "I Gotcha" (I Gotcha)
17. Iron Knowledge "Show Stopper" (Chains & Black Exhaust)
18. Morricone Youth "The Black Forest" (Silenzio Violento)
19. I.d. Company "Bhagavad Gita" (s/t)
20. Gong "Radio Gnome/You Can't Kill Me" (Camembert Electrique)
21. Jack Bruce "Victoria Sage" (s/t)
22. Flower Travellin' Band "Intro" (Made in Japan)
23. Fairport Convention "Some Sweet Day" (Heyday)
24. Igor Wakhevitch "Ritual de Guerre" (Hathor)
25. Les Rita Mitsouko "La Jalousie" (s/t)
26. Ejwuusl Wessahqqan "Passaceety" (s/t)
27. Zombies "Beechwood Park" (Odessey & Oracle)

Sincerely,

Margaret

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Tonight


Prog + fashion? Kind of. I'm dj'ing at Arlo & Esme's tonight, at 42 east 1st, to celebrate the launch of Greg Armas's clothing line. Greg is a long time follower of No Pussyfooting, and a purveyor of great taste. His shop, Assembly New York, is right around the corner, below Houston. This should be a lot of fun. I plan on playing a lot of danceable, heavy tunes. Believe me, "danceable" and "heavy" can intersect, under the right circumstances. I'm going on second, after "AZY Soundsystems" and before "Jordan Schroom," around 10:30 or 11. Hope to see you there!