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May 3, 2006

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Around The Ivies

By | May 3, 2006

Harvard

Kaavya Viswanatha, the Harvard sophomore who wrote Opal Mehta, has recently been accused of plagiarism. The Harvard Crimson announced yesterday that the publisher has cancelled her two-book contract and the recently released novel will not be re-released.
The Crimson also reported recently that Prof. John K. Galbraith, economics, Harvard, died at 97. “A popular professor,” Galbraith advised five Democratic presidents and was renowned for his humor and wisdom.

Princeton

The Daily Princetonian reported that both former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer spoke at Princeton last weekend. Albright outlined her “14 Points” for foreign policy, promoting a “combination of Wilsonian ideals and enlightened pragmatism.”
Breyer discussed the role of the Constitution in politics and the importance of political participation in a public discussion with Prof. Robert George, politics and constitutional law, Princeton.

Columbia

Art Garfunkel, a 1965 graduate of Columbia College, was honored with the third annual I.A.L. Diamond Award at Columbia last weekend, according to The Columbia Daily Spectator. The award is given to a Columbia alumnus who has made great contributions to the performing arts.
Columbia pledged Friday to divest from 18 firms that conduct business in Sudan; the decision was partially based on a presentation by the student-run Columbia University Sudan Divestment Task Force last November.

Archived article by

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As Sweet As It Gets

By May 4, 2006

The Fiery Furnaces love to frustrate, dangling bits of pleasing sound and then ripping them away. While many thought that the band’s penchant for alienation had hit its apex on Rehearsing My Choir, their latest outing Bitter Tea proves that their ability to disorient knows no ceiling, and shows that Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger are impishly content to tease the listener into a painful case of auditory blue balls.
I should apologize for making an irresponsible analogy between Bitter Tea and the disastrous Rehearsing My Choir. Bitter Tea is surely the Furnaces’ best work since EP, and shares many sonic and textural similarities with the excellent Blueberry Boat. However, that does not change the fact that Bitter Tea is easily the group’s most difficult and inaccessible record to date. Volatile bodies of sound, Bitter Tea’s compositions are more prone to metamorphoses and violent aberrations than the mythologies of Ovid. But it is the collective chemistry of his instrumentals and his sister’s vocals that bind the album together nicely and, at times, beautifully.
Unexpected and numerous movements within a single song are to be expected with the Furnaces, but a listen to the first four tracks of Bitter Tea is enough to induce vertigo. The constant shifting can be self-defeating, particularly on the first two tracks, but on third track “Black-Hearted Boy” the Furnaces unearth some mysterious and alarming rhythms. “Teach Me Sweetheart” is unapologetically disarming and heartbreaking, featuring some of the Furnaces’ sharpest and most affecting songwriting. “I’m Waiting to Know You,” with it’s cosmic slow dance rhythm, sounds like it was pulled from the best prom ever that never happened, and is every bit as gorgeous as “Teach Me Sweetheart.” The bounding club beat and handclaps of “Oh Sweet Woods” make it (gasp!) downright danceable, an outright heresy for the Furnaces, but one of Bitter Tea’s brightest moments. That the song retains its danceability against walls of buzzing feedback that populate its second half is truly miraculous. The Furnaces greatest weapon has always been Eleanor’s voice, and throughout the album Matthew plays to her strengths, not only manipulating it in production (at points he plays her singing in reverse, creating a bizarre, almost primordial language), but giving her enough non-sequiturs and consonantal wordplays to stretch her range.
Still, there is one giant flaw that weighs Bitter Tea down – it’s length. Clocking in at over 70 minutes, the album falls victim to the same bloated excess that doomed Blueberry Boat from becoming a masterpiece. The longer the album runs, the more that the Friedberger’s experiments seem like gimmicks. The Furnaces have clearly shown that they know how to craft an album. Now they need to learn when to pull back.
Then again, the Furnaces have never given a fuck about satisfying critical expectations, and their rote experimentation has made them into a blisteringly original band. Simply put, they sound like no one else. Bitter Tea is frustrating and endlessly enigmatic for sure, but it is precisely those qualities, and its fearless will to carve out its own identity, that makes it a work of art.
Archived article by Zach Jones
From The High Priests

By May 4, 2006

Remember the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the Ark of the Covenant is stuck in a crate and stowed away in a warehouse somewhere with a hundred other identical crates? Like that artifact, this album is important in part because the music is every bit as awesome as it was just unearthed after 50-plus years in hiding, but also because it is the only decent live recording of a monumental quartet led by pianist Thelonious Sphere Monk, one of the inventors of modern jazz, that featured future luminary John Coltrane on sax. Monk, known in the forties as the “High Priest of Bop,” had a singular style that the public at large saw as nothing but demented. It went beyond music. In a time when American culture was stagnating in suburban stability, Monk explored the logic of disorder, the wisdom in madness.
One way to hear this remarkable album is as a battle of wits, a prize fight between two heavyweight champions. They chase each other around the melody on “Monk’s Mood,” closely but ably dodge the other’s every punch on “Evidence,” endure vicious taunts from irate drummer Shadow Wilson on “Epistrophy,” and in the climax of “Blue Monk,” the High Priest’s most famous composition, their fists collide Looney Tunes-style with enough force that the reverberations knock out not only the fighters but everyone who has had the guts to listen all the way through.
A word of warning: this album is not the place to start with either and is certainly not the place to start with jazz. If you are a newcomer to the medium, you begin with Miles Davis’ A Tribute to Jack Johnson (the boxer, not the wimp-ass singer), which is louder than any Scandinavian metal band, Herbie Hancock’s funky Head Hunters, and a good Billie Holiday collection before getting started proper with Miles’ perennial Kind of Blue, also featuring ‘Trane.
Those who question this music’s power would do well to check out a documentary about Monk called Straight, No Chaser. If you were wondering as I used to why Monk often just stops playing, you can see the answer for yourself: the man became so enraptured, he had to get up and dance. One can only imagine how good it felt to be smiling that twisted smile, to be behind those mysterious shades and under that strange hat, standing in one spot and slowly rotating counterclockwise. We’re lucky we can at least listen to what came out of there.
Archived article by Shuja Haider