More scrapbooking

A few weeks ago I posted some old pieces that I had dug up among the yellowing stacks deep in my closet. These were from 1998 and 1999, when I began writing for New York Press. (I continued until 2002.) I made the mistake of re-burying most of those clips before making scans, and it may take me another 10 years to dig them out again.

But for the time being I’ve got another small pile of digital newsprint for you, Dear Reader. And there is some good stuff in here.

From 1998:

• “Kaiser Rock, Kaiser Roll,” my first feature for the Press, about Scotland’s great Beat obsessives, the Kaisers, with a classic Mike Wartella illustration.
  
• A review of the Nuggets reissue. This also has a Wartella image, but for a Marilyn Manson review that ran alongside it.
  
• Leon Parker live review.
• Apocalyptica CD review.
• Review of the Figgs’ Couldn’t Get High..., the album they made after being dumped by Capitol. In a feature several months later I called it my favorite of the year.
• “Crazy Japanese Music”: Review of Keiji Haino’s three-day residency at Tonic, as well as a disappointing High Rise show at the Mercury Lounge. 

From 1999:

• Review of Beth Orton’s second album, Central Reservation, which says pretty much everything I have to say about Beth Orton.
• Vince Martin live review.
• R.L. Burnside at the Cooler.
• Live review of T-Model Ford, another of Fat Possum’s crusty old blues guys, who in the days before Fiery Furnaces and Andrew Bird were that label’s bread and butter. (Burnside died in 2005 but the octogenarian T-Model is, amazingly, still making records.)
  
• Review of a concert called “All the Percussion Music of Iannis Xenakis (Almost)” by Steven Schick’s Red Fish Blue Fish.
  
• Another contemporary/avant/“classical”/“new music” review, of the Flux Quartet. This was a historic performance of Morton Feldman’s Second String Quartet, which lasted more than 6 hours, forcing the musicians to face unusual “anxieties about bladder control.”
  
  
  

Favorite quote, from the Flux Quartet review:

“Is this what music is really all about — sitting by yourself in silence, watching other people move their bodies? Then I would think about sex and food. Over and over again. So is this what it’s all about? Sitting by myself watching somebody make music while I dream about sex and food?”

More to come, maybe.