Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Missed Connections / Fleet Foxes' Helplessness Blues / Spot That Patriot

This recent "Missed Connection" from Craigslist raises many profound questions about life and art. Let's read and ponder:

"we were dancig at brothes downton and u wer geting all freeky!!! then u sed u had 2 leeve bc ur frends were leeving and i sed can i cal u? but al u sed was aprill is the coolest month and i sed yeh!! i love aprill 2 bad its almost over. girl we shud go and dance agian we were prety hot 2gether. so send me an emale and let me now wut we were talking abut when we wer dancig 2 flow rider. just so u rememmber i was wareing a ed hardey shirt that luked like this:"

First off, are there really women at Brother's who are familiar with Eliot's The Waste Land, or was her reference to the famous opening line a complete accident? If her reference was deliberate, did she accidentally or deliberately misquote it? Or did the bro (in the midst of a Jager-fueled frenzy) simply hear "coolest" instead of "cruellest?"

We're going to give the woman the benefit of the doubt here and assume that she quoted Eliot correctly and meant it as a witty rejection of the bro's advances, as in "'April is the cruellest month', and you're never gettin' any of this pussy."

Chip: "I have so often dreamed of grinding on a woman who's well-versed in Eliot."


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Presumably a significant percentage of scenesters turned against the Fleet Foxes after their quick rise to stardom, but perhaps it's just too hard to hate glorious harmonies and fantastic beards, because the Foxes' new album Helplessness Blues (out today) is garnering rave reviews. Even Pitchfork bestows a very high 8.8 (down just slightly from the 9.0 they gave to the Foxes' self-titled debut full-length). Pitchfork praises the band's "vivid imagery of men striking matches on suitcase latches and penny-laden fountains.".

Richard: "I was hoping for an entire album of men-striking-matches imagery, but there's still plenty."

We're also pleased by the album's instrumentation, which includes zithers and Tibetan singing bowls ("Mr. Wescott took a tuner into the storeroom of a New Age shop and tried more than 300 bowls until he got the correct tones"--NY-Times).

We'll see you at Love Garden and we're looking forward to reveling in some harmonies. We'll leave you with this theory, from the NY-Times, of why vocal harmonies are so hip right now:

"Along with Panda Bear’s “Person Pitch” in 2007, Grizzly Bear’s “Veckatimest” in 2009 and Dirty Projectors’ “Bitte Orca” in 2010 [the Fleet Foxes self-titled album] heralded indie rock’s infatuation with extravagant vocal harmonies, an abstracted flashback to the days of street-corner doo-wop that feels appropriate to tough economic times, in its implicit low overhead and reliance on community."

Chip: "I guess I never quite thought of it this way: harmonies are hip because they are cheap."

Richard: "I'll bet some Foxes-style vocal harmonies would sound real sweet at the Church of Malt Liquor, echoing off the walls of the hole in the ground. Which local band is up to the challenge?"

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The UDK website offers a photo gallery of KU students celebrating the death of Osama Bin Laden. Check it out here and see how many local patriots you can identify in this photo at the Chi Omega Fountain:

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