The fish that Bill Flick passes around like clam dip are straight out of an old guide’s reminiscences. He doesn’t brag, but the club members know that these aren’t even the big ones. Moreover, they know they come from the next property up the road. The word is that Flick is doing research on brook trout there. Works for Cornell. Whole thing fairly quiet.
From a great piece about work to restore the native brook trout population in the Adirondacks in the 70s. It’s sort of amazing that this kind of writing was coming out of Sports Illustrated back then. It is a very different magazine these days.
Here is my comprehensive list of the best things on the internet from the year 2011:
1) The video for Wild Flag’s “Romance”
Carrie Brownstein! Mary Timony! Janet Weiss! Rebecca Cole! It’s like Sleater Kinney graduated from pop school, like that dog but riffier. The song is awesome and so is the video. It kills me that I didn’t find the record earlier. I can’t stop listening to it.
As an aside, who would have picked Tom Scharpling as the person who would singlehandedly keep the music video alive in the internet era? Good job, Tom!
Ryan Adams is a total enigma: grew up on post punk, founded an acclaimed alt country band, loves black metal, married a top 40 pop star, writes incredibly hook laden songs. The way he breaks down these Bob Mould solo tracks is amazing, with Black Sheets he takes a dirge-like feedback drenched song, one of the heaviest Bob Mould recorded (that’s saying something) and makes it delicate.
His version of Heartbreak A Stranger is beautiful and most interesting for what it did: took a raucous crowd from the Bob Mould tribute show, amped up from stuff like Dave Grohl playing drums on New Day Rising1 and getting the whole room quiet enough to hear a pin drop.
He gets a lot of shit from a lot of quarters: too much talent wasted, throws fits on stage, doesn’t curate and releases everything, etc… Read his foreword to Our Noise: The Story Of Merge Records…it’s clear this guy loves music and I think people will look back and say holy shit, that guy was pretty amazing. Also, I think he should put together a power-pop three piece.
1 holyshitholyshitholyshit: about 3:45 into this video, Grohl gets behind the kit. The hair, the power. That guy can hit.
My dad and I spent eight and a half days, with extended assists by Bill Russell and Emily, rebuilding the deck at the beach. The old one had a staircase that was rickety and more like a ladder, and had a bunch of termite damage. The new one is pretty classy looking if I do say so myself. I love Emily’s design for the railings using “goat and sheep fencing” from Tractor Supply Co.
Lou’s “Song of the Month” is fascinating, looking how Folk Implosion records were recorded more or less simultaneously with Sebadoh records, and how much John Davis influenced the songs/recording of Sebadoh stuff.
