Allow me to second Steve Langendorf's recommendation of Tashi Monday night at Ravinia. I haven't heard Tashi's recording of Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time," ashamedly, but I have heard pianist Peter Serkin's solo recordings--right now I'm listening to Vingt regards sur l'Enfant Jésus, which I was lucky enough to acquire for a song at Hyde Park Records, one of my favorite stops for cheap classical LPs--and they're very good. He's an odd composer, but he pushes a lot of my buttons--mystical Christianity, the American West, ornithology.

The real Messiaen throwdown comes in October, with the U. of C.'s 2008 Messiaen Festival, featuring Pierre Laurent-Aimard, eighth blackbird, the Pacifica Quartet, and others.

Do yourself a favor: print out this editorial by David Brooks--shame of the Chicago Maroon--on acid free paper and store it in a cold dry place, or put it on your flash drive, or your Kindle, or on a server at your favorite hosting facility, and when you turn 50, reread it, and if you think, hey, that's me now, ask yourself why you are professionally self-conscious about taste, and think about technology throughout history as an evolutionary process and the role of early adopters and cultural exchange, and read Ecclesiastes, and just try not to be a dick about it going forward because if you even have time to think about eclecticism as an aesthetic you probably have it pretty damn good.

Plus: Hey, speaking of eclecticism, I can't say how much damage to society you would do by going to see a free in-store from a wonderful local, kind of obscure psychedelic rock band whose lyrics are all in Spanish, but Allá is playing Permanent Records tomorrow in support of the gorgeous new El Tiempo, which Miles Raymer convinced me was great, and it is. Local, "obscure" tastes--part of what makes Chicago, like many places throughout the world, a wonderful place to live. Or you could wait until they're in the New York Times or whatever.

Update: Now I'm listening to Lonely China Day's Sorrow. They're kind of the Coldplay of Beijing--the lead singer definitely picked up a bunch of tricks from Chris Martin. It's pretty interesting; I wouldn't say I'm a big fan, but it's pleasant and nice to work to. Incidentally, I didn't discover this through the Evil Internet but through the very 20th century medium of the newspaper promo copy dump box.

*Title of the e-mail from Chicagoland correspondent ptb that included this link. 

Pvt to David Brooks: I'm listening to Keith Jarrett's recording of the Goldberg Variations; the next thing in my iTunes (ooh) library is Lifter Puller's Fiestas and Fiascoes. Because they're both remarkable works of human achievement that make me glad to be alive. [Blogger: raises middle finger.] 

I can't believe I missed a William Bolcom premiere in my own neighborhood. The Trib has a piece about the restored E.M. Skinner organ at Rockefeller Chapel; John von Rhein predicts "the instrument should make Chicago the Midwest mecca of the organ world for a very long time to come."

Here's Bolcom's rag "Poltergeist":

Just because the Red Menace is now just a sometimes catchy ("July July"), sometimes grating ("Song for Myla Goldberg") band from Portland doesn't mean we have to stop being afraid of it:

"Hugh also notes that The Decemberists typically open their shows with what I'm sure is a stirring rendition of the Soviet national anthem. No word on whether they opened the Obama rally with such a performance, but I'm certain our trusted media would have reported it if they did."

Thers at Whiskey Fire notes: "Quick, someone e-mail Michael Goldfarb a detailed explanation of how Obama only connects with African-American voters because he won the endorsement of Death Cab for Cutie. Bet you a nickel he'd go for it." I am excited about the integration of establishment indie culture into mainstream political narratives just because of the silliness that will result. Somehow we skipped politicians having to answer for Husker Du or something. Wasn't that what Rock the Vote was for?

PS: I go back and forth on Death Cab, but "Company Calls" is pretty undeniable. Maybe because it's the closest they get to sounding like Heatmiser? Anyway, here's Ben Gibbard covering the Mountain Goats' magisterial "Palmcorder Yajna" (real version here). It's weird.

Worth noting: Songza, from (or a side project of?) the local software company Humanized, is awesome.

Syl Johnson came and sang a record to me the other day — how many people can claim to that? He came and sang over an instrumental that had been released, but the vocal had never been released. He made something that publicly never existed before. And even though our core listeners are a mostly younger crowd, we’re drawing from history that is dying — these people are literally dying. We have to do this now — you may be around in sixty years, but these artists won’t, and you’ve gotta get this stuff down while you can.

Dan Morgridge has a great interview over at Gapers Block with Ken Shipley and Rob Sevier from the Numero Group, a label that's done amazing work in finding almost-lost music from around the world. Their compilation Eccentric Soul: The Bandit Label inspired one of my favorite Reader cover stories of all time, Bob Mehr's "The Godfather of King Drive." Print it and read it on the commute--it's long but amazing.

Though I admit this may be mostly psychological, I think the old equipment helps give some value to the notes.

Andrew Bird has been recording at the Wilco Loft, which sounds like grandma's attic for post-rockers, and reflects on the range of gadgets (old and new) he's employing and why he does so. Also proof, if proof were needed, that The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction will never, ever not be relevant, at least until well after we hit peak oil and future Andrew Birds have to travel the country on mule, playing acoustic instruments to tiny camps of raiders. Come to think of it, a multi-instrumentalist and pitch-perfect whistler like Andrew Bird would have a big advantage over his contemporaries in that scenario.

One thing I don't like about being in Chicago is that it's kind of like going back to high school forever:

The city's world-class orchestra could not afford to tarnish its reputation, or that of Chicago as a major cultural center, by settling for someone second-rate.

Whew--Riccardo Muti, saving us from a Gold Coast riot.

Just to put things in perspective: one of the best orchestras in the world is in Cleveland. Which has its fans, but: chill. These things are as important as far as they go, and part of a very large whole. In fact, it's a shame that pop/indie/hip-hop doesn't work this way. Can't the Pritzkers kick in lots of millions so we can install the RZA, Parts + Labor, TVOTR, Yelle, and other folks at cultural institutions around the city? If we're going to keep up with all the other hep world cities, we have to plan for the Future.

Andrew Patner reports on the news without taking up the burden of civic self-esteem. 

Somewhere a fairy is losing its wings:

'American Idol' performances take back seat to image

HOLLYWOOD—What we learned from this week's " American Idol" results show isn't pretty. The performances of any given week don't matter on this season's "Idol." This is not, at this juncture, a singing competition. Nor does this season reward the virtues usually associated with champions: courage, determination, a strong sense of self.

Carly Smithson's booting Wednesday night is not simply unjust; it threatens to undermine the very premise of "American Idol."

To paraphrase Robert Christgau, it's like Taylor Hicks never unhappened. I didn't know, reading this, whether to be sad that it exists at all, or that it is, on its merits, wrong.

And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God... the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure.

Related: I'm going to show this picture to my grandchildren when they ask about the time the fire rained on the virtuous and the wicked and grandma got turned into a pillar of salt.

Superchunk for Obama. Now, if Portastatic went for Hillary, that would be an interesting artistic statement.

News that Liz Phair has "super cheap" new demos recorded, as well as the deluxe rerelease of Exile in Guyville, has people talking about a return to relevance after her years in the pop wilderness. I think Robert Christgau had the final word on her sell-out--"You want her to express herself? She just did."

Anyway, indie's a matter of degree. Way back when she was allegedly more relevant, not everyone agreed she was so. In 1994, Reader critic Bill Wyman hosted a hilarious letters roundtable on the Chicago indie scene, inspired by Steve Albini's assertion that Phair was "a fucking chore to listen to" and part of a trio of "pandering sluts" that also included contemporaries Urge Overkill and the Smashing Pumpkins. "Artists who survive on hype are often critic's pets. They don't, however, make timeless, classic music that survives trends and inspires generations of fans and other artists. There are artists in Chicago doing just that, but you don't write about them." Much vitriol ensued. As someone who was 13 and way far away from Chicago during the Guyville era, it's like straight Margaret Mead to me.

Sayeth Phair: "Of course, I'm gonna bust my ass marketing anything I do. It all comes in a whole big package. There are musical lifers who don't see it that way, to whom it's a sacred art form. But I've always been a slut in that sense..... This is also a business, and business is creative too. Damn straight I'm manipulating my career and the media. I don't mind treading the fine line between doing something interesting and valuable for society and totally just exploiting my popularity. I'm 27, I'm ready to cut my teeth on something. If it wasn't this, I'd be blasting into offices somewhere else wanting to get to the top of the corporation. It's ambition. Total, simple ambition."

I highly recommend the biographical site Wild and Unwise, particularly the chapters College and Girlysound, which capture the postcollegiate urban boho atmosphere Phair emerged out of. The fame of the subject aside, it's an amazing time capsule of a certain class at a certain time: "In San Francisco it was all kernels of ideas, but nothing ever happened."

FWIW, I still maintain that Whip-Smart is her best album (though as a member of the unfair sex I will defer to the feminist significance of Exile), perhaps because it fits in with the urban pastoral music I love, from "Penny Lane" to the Kinks to Pavement to Prefuse 73. I realize I am alone in this, but I do think it's a pretty album.

Tangential update: Is the insipidity of blog commenting killing the art of the letter to the editor? I hope not.

Update II: I should mention that Wild and Unwise has interesting passages on her guitar style. LeRoy Bach: "People never talk about her guitar playing. But she's brilliant on guitar. The work that she puts into this shit is not discussed like someone else's work method might be discussed." IMO the biggest problem with her newer records is that the big production takes the musical burden off her sui generis guitar sound, and the result is less surprising and suspenseful, so to speak.

I was 19 years old when I met the people in the AACM. It was just dumb luck that I almost literally stumbled upon Muhal, Pete Cosey, people like that. I was walking on 87th and Bennett and I saw a band rehearsing in this children’s center. I poked my head in, and that was how I met them. They had their Monday night band, and then after the initial period of “Who is this guy?” they let me play.

If you liked Peter Margasak's profile of musician, author, and academic George Lewis, author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, you'll also enjoy this conversation between Lewis and Jeff Parker from BOMB.

I got shortlisted for my submission in Coudal's "Cover Me" contest, a collection of odd, unexpected, and weird covers. The criteria is vague, but I think I've got a chance, even though I'd seed Steve and Edie's cover of "Black Hole Sun" first. One of my favorite (in a wholly nonironic way) covers of all time made it--Husker Du covering the Byrds' "Eight Miles High." Richard Thompson's cover of "Oops I Did It Again" is also pretty good.

I made a second, unofficial submission, unofficial because it's not actually weird: the Strokes covering maybe my favorite Guided By Voices song, "A Salty Salute." It's a valuable experiment: what would GBV sound like if they'd been an actual arena-rock band? (Do the Collapse doesn't count.)

The best GBV cover is of course by the Breeders.

The date of the earliest recorded sound has been pushed back--in 1860, 28 years before Edison captured Handel on wax, a French typesetter named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville got a snippet of "Au Clair de la Lune," and almost a century and a half later mankind tracked it down and figured out how to play it back.

What does this have to do with Chicago? Two of the people behind the Scott find are Richard Martin and Meagan Hennessey, the good folks at Archeophone Records in Champaign, a record label that specializes in finding and recording old music; Peter Margasak profiled them in 2006.

What entrance song should new Cubs closer Kerry Wood use? Nothing says "I care" like power pop.

I personally would choose "Diamonds in the Mine" by Leonard Cohen, because I think people have ceased to be intimidated by nu-metal. Or perhaps just have Glenn Branca on call all the time with two guitars welded together. I bet you could pick up a quarter point on your ERA just by giving people the fantods with that stuff.

Coudal flags an amazing picture of the city from 36,000 feet. On the subject of photography, the recent article by Phillip Gourevitch and Errol Morris on Sabrina Hartman, who took many of the infamous Abu Ghraib photos, is a must-read. On the subject of Liz Phair (see title), Chicagoist has an entertaining thread on whether or not she's a good guitarist. If she is, much of the credit is owed to Brad Wood, whose murky, indie-Daniel-Lanois sound pushes her early work over the top; you may have noticed that This American Life has been using bits and pieces from Exile in Guyville as occasional music for years. To be contrarian I'd say she's a better singer than guitarist--like a lot of smart singer-songwriters with limited voices, she pays a lot of attention to emphasis and timing and manages to be just as expressive, or more so, than people who can actually sing.

Then again I'm the only person in the world who thinks her best album is Whip-Smart ("Shane," "Nashville," the title track), so take it for what it's worth.

Parts & Labor is playing the AV-aerie on Wednesday night (2000 W. Fulton #310. 773-276-3600 or 866-468-3401, $8). You should go. I caught them on their last trip through and it was one of the best shows I've ever been to.¹ I thought for awhile about how best to describe them to an unfamiliar audience, and this is what I came up with:

* If 21st century urban metropolises listened to music, it would probably sound like Parts & Labor.

* Imagine if Richard Thompson fronted a hardcore band.

* New Day Rising-era Husker Du with technologically-advanced DIY instruments.

* Their music is louder, noisier, and paradoxically-but-not-actually prettier than pretty much anything else going right now.

This is "The Gold We're Digging," the best song off of Mapmaker. You can listen to it here. Their Web site might destroy your monitor.

1. They have replaced their drummer and added a new guitarist, so I don't know how that will effect things. This is a picture of their new guitarist, Sara Lipstate of Noveller; as you can see, she is playing what looks like a cross between a violin, a guitar, and an ironing board, so I think she will fit in. Their old drummer edits Paper Thin Walls and is currently working on a book about It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.

Michael Miner is skeptical about the Tribune's new chief innovation officer, Lee Abrams, based on the wild and crazy memo he sent to the company's staff. And I poked some fun about the idea of news as the new rock. But the more I read the more I think it could be a brilliant hire, and one made at the right time.

His memo might sound bonkers, but he's very, very smart, having started early as a media-management prodigy. His first audience research was done by exit-polling audience members outside a south-side club after his own band's gig; while still in his teens, he started a mimeographed radio newsletter, and conducted DIY focus groups by hitchhiking and paying attention to what the drivers listened to.

At 19 he cofounded Burkhart/Abrams, a now-famous consulting group that pioneered the AOR format, in particular the now-infamous "Superstars" subformat. Basically, he took the adventurous musical tastes of underground radio and applied the business principles of the moribund top-40 format (same link as above):

"We were stuck with these underground deejays who thought they knew more than the listeners," he says. "They were elitists. They wouldn't play Led Zeppelin because they had already 'sold out.' We wanted deejays who were in Top 40 and had that discipline. But these were people who would go home and listen to Pink Floyd and Genesis. They would bring the discipline and the idea of being part of a plan, but they brought more passion than the underground deejays because they were playing Top 40 now, and this was the first time they could play all this cool music and get paid for it. No more Donny Osmond and Bobby Sherman. They were going to get to play Frank Zappa."

Abrams made his audience research he'd started as a kid infinitely more sophisticated, and the AOR format exploded--his work is why radio sounded like it did from the 1970s through the rise of "urban" (i.e. hip-hop and R&B) stations.

So, yeah, he got passed by culture and ended up in a bit of a professional funk; the last gasp of AOR was pretty much the grunge years. But he rebounded impressively with XM Radio, which has been a considerable success based on similar business principles. It's got a host of big names and reliable quality, but musically it's more interesting than anything outside of college radio. Like his first big success, it combines the depth of indie radio with the consistency and professionalism of corporate radio. Reading between the lines, it seems like it was a shot at redemption for the damage he's been accused of doing to FM (the homogenzation of which Abrams blames on the misuse of techniques he pioneered).

And--this is important--he's a content guy. Even critics like Ben Fong-Torres, the longtime editor of Rolling Stone ("I blame him for the death of FM free form progressive rock radio, a death which is still mourned by music lovers around the country and probably beyond, wherever people have memories of radio in its finest hour") acknowledge his encyclopedic knowledge and real love of music. Abrams is one of the prime movers behind Bob Dylan's wonderful Theme Time Radio Hour, which is a good sign.

Given all this, it makes sense that Abrams would leave XM for the Tribune Company. Presuming to put myself in his head, I'd be willing to bet he sees the state of news and information as being similar to radio in the late 60s. Newspapers, TV, and news radio are spinning their wheels for a restless audience, and meanwhile there's a tremendous amount of talent on the Internet that editors and executives (hello, Cyrus Freidheim) claim to fear. Abrams built his career mainstreaming and monetizing that kind of talent. The Tribune needs to keep playing to a mass audience while leveraging such talent, and he's got a good resume for that.

Plus, at XM he seems to have learned the importance of good technology and the benefits of an audience with deeper, more specific tastes--a sort of mainstreamed long tail. TribCo has a ton of resources that they've never been able to integrate very well, and some of the same principles might give them more value from their existing resources.

His cultural touchstones are straight boomer culture, kind of like Sam Zell's, and the Tribune could stand to be a little less focused on that group if it's going to keep up with demographic change (the real growth in the radio industry of late has been in Latino-oriented stations) and compete with the Sun-Times in the city. But if the principles trickle down to the staff--and maybe if the staff gets younger--they'd still be just as effective in different contexts. R0XX0R. By the way, you can read Abrams's blog here.

TV news never changes. Update: The mockumentary Ace's High (Pt. 1; Pt. 2 ) is brilliant (h/t Kiki).

I appreciate that the Trib uncovered Buddy Guy's love of White Castle, but:

"'I couldn't afford to go [any]where,'" says the legendary blues guitarist."

This is Buddy Guy. You don't rewrite Buddy Guy's double negatives.

Via Gapers Block, which has more instances of the Trib's bowdlerizing.

Sort of related to Jeff Tweedy and migraines: Miles Raymer has a column about special-needs kids and loud crazy indie rock, more specifically why it's a good idea to expose autistic kids to the Black Lips, and this jumped out at me:

Listening to a live band, Scholl says, is “a calming experience for some of them, especially the autistic kids. They really like the loud music.” Autistics can become overstimulated easily, in part because they have difficulty not perceiving all the tiny details that make up the big picture other people see. It’s possible that loud music works like a sonic version of the “squeeze machine” developed by autistic author Temple Grandin, creating a single profound sensation that damps down all that mental noise.

If you haven't already, give it a read. And if you're unfamiliar with her work, Temple Grandin is a fascinating thinker.

For a lot of that record I was just trying not to be too drugged out and as a result I was suffering from enormous migraine type throbbing pain. Quite a bit of that came out on “A Ghost Is Born.” There is a lot of material that mirrored my condition. In particular there’s a piece of music — “Less Than You Think” — that ends with a 12-minute drone that was an attempt to express the slow painful rise and dissipation of migraine in music. I don’t know why anyone would need to have that expressed to them musically. But it was all I had.

Jeff Tweedy discusses his lifelong problem with migraines, their similarity to panic attacks, and their influence on A Ghost Is Born on the NYT's Migraine blog. Via Jonah Lehrer's wonderful The Frontal Cortex.

One of the things the Poetry Foundation has seen fit to do with its buckets of money is support UbuWeb, a long-running and incredibly comprehensive repository of avant-garde art weirdness. The latest UbuWeb podcast, produced by the foundation, features the Western Roundtable on Modern Art, a seven-hour fest featuring Frank Lloyd Wright, Darius Milhaud, Marcel Duchamp, and others (via the inimitable Coudal). If that's not enough you can listen to UbuWeb Radio (courtesy of the Center for Literary Computing at West Virginia University).

Perhaps more exciting: a recording of Chicago '82: A Dip in the Lake, a historic new music festival that was previously only available on cassette from Belgium. For the performance, John Cage created a score (not performed?) called A Dip in the Lake, using a Chicago street map and environmental sounds from various city intersections. You can see a copy of the score here; from 2001-2003, Robert Pleshar "realized" the work, which is also available on UbuWeb.

Forgive the fanboy in me, but: wow. Shot, as far as I can tell, at the French Village Drive In (theater) in Belleville.

* The Lyric Opera's sexed-up, critically acclaimed Julius Caesar (a Bollywood-style dance number?) features the first female conductor in the company's history, French harpsicordist Emmanuelle Haim.  My date to see it isn't for a couple weeks, but from the opening-night WFMT broadcast on Friday, it sounds like a hit.

* Blair Kamin had a great piece this weekend on the architectural renaissance along the Edens. "Why three towers? Because . . . you can start getting income from the first tower while you're still building the other two."

* Crain's checks in on the business of booze tasting in Chicago.

* The secret of the MRSA superbug's success? Weird bacterial sex. Science writer Maryn McKenna has a blog about MRSA.

* Microsoft is building a $500 million data center the size of eight football fields in Northlake. As the Web gets bigger and milliseconds of loading time become a competitive advantage (think of how fast Google searches load), the speed of light is actually a constraint, so the physical location of these data centers becomes increasingly important.

* In related news, if some guy tries to sell you a Dell server out of a van, don't buy it.

Selling out isn't just for indie bands anymore. Now everyone's doing it, as Rick Perlstein points out in his review of The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America.

"[Daniel] Brook, citing the social critic Brendan Koerner, calls college debt America's new 'ambition tax.' Inspired by Brook, I coined some other new taxes bequeathed to us by the demons a triumphant Goldwaterism has set lose. There is, for instance, the 'idealism tax.' In 1980, a University of Chicago student paid a $5,100 tuition--and, if her heart called her to teach in a Chicago public school, earn two and a half times that: not impractical. Now the relevant numbers are $31,500 and $38,500. Brook's stuff on teachers and even mayors priced out of the cities they serve is devastating."

And it's not just those of us who have the poor judgment to go to private schools. 

"Put simply, in a society where to fail in business is to make economic survival impossible, fewer and fewer are willing to take the chance. Where are entrepreneurs better off? Dreaded Old Europe, according to the quite conservative Financial Times: 'With its low [real estate] costs and generous welfare net, Berlin is an entrepreneurs' heaven, where barriers to entry are low and failure rarely entails personal ruin.' Brook claims, counterintuitively, that America's self-employment rate is lower than it has been in decades. What if you do give it a go? '[T]he holes in the American safety net, health care chief among them, make entrepreneurship and family life mutually exclusive.'"

I read last night that Finland supports the arts, on a per capita basis, 200 times as much as the United States. In lieu of that kind of support, or of the indirect support of a social safety net (music fans are aware of the devastation that occurs when an uninsured musician gets sick), it doesn't surprise me at all that bands are taking advertising dollars. Publications, television, and radio--even public radio--have been ad-supported for years, and they arguably have more inherent conflict with the model. In the absence of a more progressive tax structure, it's a substitute for higher taxes on business, and I find it hard to begrudge bands for selling their work instead of selling their dreams. As a wise man once put it, "It's not selling out, it's buying in."

PS: Universal health care is not the solution, because it causes terrorism (h/t Talking Points Memo).

It wouldn't interest me so much that Taylor Hicks's show at the House of Blues on Thursday is sold out if Kevin Federline hadn't had to give tickets away at the same venue last year. The real genius of American Idol was not merely to create compelling television and find the occasional legit talent but to give us, the American viewing public, some investment in the product so even if it sucks we'll shell out $31.50 (!) to hold up our end of the bargain. 

When my grandchildren ask me to describe the era in which I came of age, I'm going to show them this picture: