My brother gave us the Air Guitar Nation DVD for Christmas, which chronicles the USA's first entry into the Air Guitar World Championships in Oulu, Finland in 2003.  The documentary centers on US rivals Dan "Bjorn Turoque" Crane and David "C-Diddy" Jung, the latter shown here:

C. Diddy Air Guitar Nation Performance

Need I mention that the movie is a blast?  My daughter is so taken with it that she has signed up to do air guitar for her elementary school talent show.  I helped her pick out a song last night, then edited out some slow bits to get it down to under three minutes.  She asked me to post the song here, so here it is: she'll be rocking out to Buckethead's "Brewer in the Air"--

Brewer in the Air

Buckethead

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Why do I have to be a VOX member to leave a comment?  Blogger supports anonymous comments.

I don't know; SixApart, the parent company of VOX, made it that way.  This setup is similar to several other closed communities, such as MOG, iMeem, and Multiply.  I would prefer support for anonymous comments, with some spam guards, of course.

Can I download your mp3 files?

Yes, if you can find the URL for the file.  Subscribing to the blog's RSS feed in Google Reader will help you out on that front.

I subscribe to the RSS feed, but I don't see the whole post, just the first few lines.

The default feed URL is http://burlveneer.vox.com/library/posts/atom.xml, which only supplies the first few lines of each entry.  You can get the full entries by subscribing to http://burlveneer.vox.com/library/posts/atom-full.xml.  I don't remember where I learned that, but it works.

Why won't your YouTube videos play inside Google Reader?

I don't know, I wish they did.  The ones I get in feeds from Blogger do; maybe that's one of the "synergies" of Google Reader, YouTube, and Blogger all being owned by the same company.

What about other blog readers?

I only use Google Reader, so that's the only one I can answer questions about.

Why don't you link to my blog/website in the sidebar?

The VOX blog template gives you up to five links; that's it.  The template is not editable beyond a few predefined customizations.  Pretty lame, I know.

So why do you use VOX?

VOX has one great feature the other blog platforms don't: seamless, integrated music file hosting and playback.  I don't have to worry about finding a third-party host for my mp3 files and then linking a player to them for each post, and then worry about a monthly bandwidth allotment on the host.  VOX takes care of all of that, so I can spend my time blogging and not managing files.

Feel free to add more questions in the comments.  (After registering, of course!)

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As in, I'm catching up on my blog by posting about Neko Case, and her fabulous concert at Ithaca's historic State Theatre last Saturday.  She was personable and funny, the glorious voice on her records is no mere studio construction, her band was perfectly unobtrusive, and she played all the songs I wanted to hear.  (And has anyone noticed she's gorgeous?  Haha!)  She also played what looked like a four-string Gibson SG, which didn't sound like a bass; an electric ukulele?  No, it's a tenor guitar, 33.3% easier to play than a regular six-string guitar, on account of having 33.3% fewer strings.  It sounded fine to me.  Here's a 2007 performance of "Hold On, Hold On" from somewhere or other:

Neko Case - Hold On, Hold On

Okay, that sounds pretty (alt)country, and I was just ragging on (alt)country, but I think Neko's music is to (alt)country as a good novel is to a joke greeting card.  She's the female Scott Walker of (alt)country.  And she's coming back to Ithaca soon, with the New Pornographers, whom I dislike on principle: their name sucks, and the fact that it's a music-critic in-joke makes it suck all the more.  But Neko Case........

Concert goers who arrived at the 8:00 starting time were punished with a solo set by Eric Bachmann.  Mrs. V. and I decided to spend that time in the lobby, which was not enough to fully esacpe the caterwauling but was at least bearable.  Not that I have anything against folkish music that is lifeless, repetitive, unimaginative, unmelodic, and tonally harsh; I just don't want to listen to it.  Whatever happened to Tal Bachman?  Him I liked.

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On a high from finding so much long-lost music, I scoured my brain for more to look for, and came up with 54.40.  Everything about 54.40's first record, the six-song EP Selection, fascinated me from the moment I found it in the campus radio station record library my freshman year (1982).  First there was the cover art: lots of gothic black and unhealthy green, a design combining modernity (the lettering, the electric light in the picture) with antiquity (the decrepit brick building), and even the cover stock itself, that thin, supple white cardboard with the ultra-glossy finish that only came from Canada.  Then there was the label: MO=DA=MU, from Vancouver.  That seemed so magickal and mysterious, though I now know it's simply a shortening of Modern Dance Music.  The music revealed a band who knew their Factory Records, from the Joy Division-ish "snare drum in a big cavern" of "Yank"--

10-Yank

54-40

...to the horn-driven mutant funk of A Certain Ratio on "He's Got"--

11-He's Got

54-40

When 54.40's first full-length LP, Set the Fire, came out in 1984, I was taken aback by the cover photo of the band: dressed in "all those plaid shirts, assorted vintage hats and 1930's depression-era attire" (as label co-founder Allen Moy writes in the notes to the CD reissue), they did not look like the gloomy rockers of Selection.  And alas, they no longer were, as was borne out in the grooves of the record.  They had adopted the bland, vaguely rootsy indie rock style that they still churn out today (in the vein of my musical nemeses, R.E.M.), and thus ended my 54.40 fandom.  They're doing quite well* without me, though, so it's all my loss.

Anyway, I never did get Selection, but it was reissued on CD along with Set the Fire as The Sound of Truth: The Independent Collection (with the earlier tracks from Selection placed last for some reason, hence the high track numbers on my files), so I just got a copy of that.  I still don't like Set the Fire, but Selection sounds as fresh as ever, or as fresh as Manchester-derivative post-punk ever sounded.  I only wish Sony Canada had included the original cover art bigger than a two-inch square black-and-white copy; check out the hideousness they put on the front:

Sound of Truth (The Independent Collection)

54-40

Oh well, it's the music that matters, and 40% of the music on this disc is great.

Update: oops, forgot something: that cover looks like a David Allan Coe cover, fercryinoutloud!  And I don't care if it came out first.

Recommended for Airplay

David Allan Coe

* in Canada

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I don't much care for country music, or its fraternal twin, so-called "alt" country (if the singer does hard drugs it's "alt" country, if not it's just plain country).  But with talk of Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt bringing their acoustic show to town, I remembered that I heard a Lyle Lovett song once that I liked, and years later I would even come to identify with it.  So it fills me with perverse glee to listen once again to "God Will" from Lyle's first album:

Lyle Lovett - God Will

Lyle Lovett

Lyle Lovett has the gift of making country music inoffensive; he usually does it by making it merely boring, but "God Will" is a true gem. 

The first time I heard John Hiatt was hearing incessant radio commercials for his album Slugline when I was in high school.  I thought maybe the commercials were a radio station joke, because in all the clips from the album they played he sounded, well, retarded.  I guess that's what passes for "soul" in white guys.  I did actually come to like some of John Hiatt's later work, particularly the Slow Turning album, but I don't really have any urge to hear it again.

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I've been using Google Reader to subscribe to RSS feeds right and left, because if the information is out there I want to know it as soon as it gets there, dammit!  And yesterday it paid off: reading my feeds at home, finally, after a gruelling two-day return journey from Indiana, the Ithaca Times arts blog announced a last-minute show at No Radio Records by Chicago band Mahjongg, that very evening!  And I read the announcement in time to go!  And the show was fantastic!  They answered my question, "Where, oh where, are the bands using electronics in a rock context?  And playing some extra drums?"  Mahjongg is one of them!  Five guys playing three sets of drums (with MIDI pads), analog and digital synths, bass and guitar (sometimes) made a glorious rhythmic racket in the tradition of my favorite 80s Sheffield bands, Hula and Cabaret Voltaire.  They sound like a cross between Polyrock and the Cabs on "Aluminum" (and even adopt the violent imagery that was a favorite of CV):

Mahjongg - Aluminum

I was impressed enough to buy their new CD, Kontpab, and I love it!  Don't just take my word for it, you can listen to the whole thing on the K Records website.  Oh, please let this be the start of a new trend...

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My grandmother died yesterday at age 96; she was my last living grandparent.  The blog will be silent for a few days while we travel to Indiana for the funeral.  I think no song speaks of the power of love to transcend death better than Andy Pratt's 1976 elegy to his father, "Can't Stop My Love."

Andy Pratt - Can't Stop My Love

Andy Pratt

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Instead of more long-lost but now-found music, I'm going to follow up the past two posts of pretend Killing Joke with some real Killing Joke.  After the gothic beauty and mainstream appeal of 1985's Night Time, Killing Joke went into decline.  But in 1990 they came back with a vengeance with Extremities, Dirt, and Various Repressed Emotions, adding Martyn Atkins--the industrial drummer--to the line-up.  My first knowledge of the new album was seeing the video for "Money Is Not Our God" at the old 9:30 Club, and it just seethed with energy.  Jaz Coleman's snarl at the beginning is practically blood-curdling; try not to notice how much he looks like Eugene Levy:

Killing Joke - Money is not our god

"Success defined by acquisition STINKS!"

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Yesterday I wrote about my continuing search for music by 1919; today I found it!  The Killing Joke followers' 1983 mini-LP Machine (which I used to own, but sold on ebay in the 90s) was just posted last week on the Sickness Abounds blog, or as blogger Metalminx writes it, ╬ §ĬÇҜИ ΛБΘЏИЧ ╬.  1919 were known to Killing Joke; Metalminx writes:

KJ and 1919 played quite a few gigs together, so one can only speculate. 1919 also played supporting Danse Society and Playdead, while Southern Death Cult and New Model Army supported 1919. It was just a big happy family.

I've been meaning to post some Danse Society and Play Dead here for some time, but I like both bands' catalogs so much I haven't been able to narrow my selection down to even five tracks, let alone one or two.  So in the meantime, here's 1919's "Slave"--

Slave

1919

Coming up: more long-lost treasures!

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One of the great lost records of my 80s music experience is an album by the Headhunters.  It was one of those records that we had at the campus radio station, and I played several cuts from it, but I never found a copy for myself.  I have a 12" single by them, "Wipe Out the Funk," but not the album.  It was a hard album to search for, too, because any search for Headhunters is flooded with Herbie Hancock results (either the album of that name, or records by the band from that album, who recorded sans Herbie as Headhunters).  To compound the problem, I didn't remember the title of the album I wanted.  But continued Googling paid off last month: there it was (entitled Industrial Warfare, released in 1983) in an archived entry on one of my favorite sharity blogs, Phoenix Hairpins.  So now I have a virtual copy, and it's so great to hear it again.  The Headhunters were clearly influenced by Killing Joke, and they even do them one better on a couple of tracks, such as the album opener, "Bright and Bloody"--

01 Bright And Bloody

Headhunters

The Headhunters only released one LP and three singles, which Phoenix Hairpins has collected here.  My search for another Killing Joke-inspired band from the 80s, 1919, continues.  Killing Joke are, amazingly, still active, though their last album was kind of a mess.  With all the 80s revival bands imitating Gang of Four, The Cure, Duran Duran, and Joy Division, surely the field is ripe for a Killing Joke pretender or three.  I'm waiting...

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