It’s about that time: Bands, if you can’t – or don’t want to – make it to SXSW this year, start getting your submissions ready for the third annual CXCW (Couch by Couchwest), March 10-16. Find submission details here.
If you’ll be in the Cleveland area on June 22 and would like to move from the couch to someone’s porch, the 5th annual Larchmere PorchFest is accepting submissions until May 1.
Wonderful CXCW alumnus Daniel Knox is playing a residency at the Hideout in Chicago, IL. For a highly interesting read, check out his pre-residency interview with ChicagoMusic.org.
Spacehog – yes, the “In the Meantime” band – are preparing to release their first new album in twelve years, As It Is On Earth. They have a fundraiser project for the album, with part of the proceeds going to the David Lynch Foundation.
On February 7, Patti Smith received the Katharine Hepburn Medal from Bryn Mawr College. The medal “recognizes women whose lives, work and contributions embody the intelligence, drive and independence” of the great feminist actress.
You know the best thing to do on Christmas day? Stay home and watch horror movies. May I suggest choosing titles from this fine holiday-centric list?
But if you need a weightier excuse for foregoing Christmas activities than a Bartlebian “I prefer not to”, the Wind-up Birds have a suggestion (and the song is available at a “name your price” rate).
Or, if you can’t find it in your heart to be festive this year because some cold, selfish lover stole that heart and then tossed it like so much discarded wrapping paper, Daniel Knox has set his warm baritone to work on a love-torn carol some of you may recall from that foreign land known as “The ’80s”.
It’s a simple yet sublime pleasure, and just thinking about it can make you feel a little calmer, a little more content. Imagine: You bring out one of the good rocks glasses (or your favorite mug or a special occasion tea cup) and pour a couple fingers of amber liquid (or something dark and strong or just some whole milk). You drop the needle on the jazz platter (or pull up a blues album on your mp3 player or dig out that mixtape from college). Ensconcing yourself in the coziest seat in the house, you crack the spine on a classic (or find your place in that sci-fi paperback or pull up a biography on your e-book reader). And then, you go away for a while. Ah, bliss.
In this series, some of NTSIB’s friends share beloved albums, books and drinks to recommend or inspire.
I am pleased to have the king of sardonic heart taking part in this series. Sardonic heart? you ask. Yes, because while Daniel Knox will make you laugh – if your humor is of a certain darker inclination – if you dig further down, you will find deep and jagged truths that might catch you on their barbs as they cling to your clothes with their familiarity. Yes, the world is broken, and we’re broken in it, but sit here a while, and we’ll share a grim laugh together.
Good Read: Ask The Dust by John Fante
The most prominent in a series of novels about Fante’s alter-ego Arturo Bandini. I love all of Fante’s work but I’ve read this book more times than I can remember. Bandini is pure ego and contradiction, cursing someone and admiring them in the same breath. His writing style is full of a rambling honesty that doesn’t hold back. Anyone who has ever tried to write or create something will recognize Bandini’s courage and doubt as their own.
“The Road To Los Angeles” makes a good companion to this, as does “Dreams From Bunker Hill” which Fante wrote blind and limbless from his deathbed.
There was a piece of shit movie made of “Ask The Dust” in 2006. Don’t even bother watching the trailer. It’s the worst.
Good Listen:
“Gondola No Uta” (from Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru) by Traditional.
I’ve always favored voices with character over ones with skill. I work as a projectionist and this song from the end of the film “Ikiru” always made me run out to the balcony to take it in whenever it showed. His voice is so small and on the verge of cracking, but I can’t imagine it sung better.
Good Drink:
I quit drinking a few years ago but not out of any great dramatic epiphany. I knew I was either bad at it or too good to keep going. But the best times I had were drinking alone and getting lost.
I used to drink the hell out of scotch but if I had to recommend a drink recipe to anyone it would be this:
wake up disoriented on a winter morning when you have nothing to do
take a box of DayQuill® gelcaps
follow this with a bottle of vodka
close your eyes
open them and you will be outside
now you are on a bus
sit on the back middle seat where it is warm and slightly elevated
feel the arms of the bus wrap around you as the city you live in passes both very fast and very slow all at once
show up someplace you haven’t been before.
Oh, I’ve been waiting for this one. The sardonic Mr. Daniel Knox is bringing his unsettling cabaret songs to the Beachland Ballroom this Wednesday, April 11, when he opens for the Traveling Ladies’ Cello Society, a.k.a., Rasputina.
I was taken by Knox’s rockbottom warble and dancehall piano (and kazoo – don’t forget the kazoo) when I first heard him play Couch by Couchwest back in 2011. He graced the stage again at CXCW this year with a magical rendering of his ethereally menacing “Ghostsong”.
Incidentally, in addition to great albums like Evryman for Himself, Disaster, etc., Daniel has a new single – “To Make You Stay” (with the return of Akron son Ralph Carney on saxophone) b/w “Blue Car” – available at Bandcamp.
Show details:
Wed, Apr 11 | 8:30 PM (7:30 PM door)
Rasputina
Daniel Knox
$15.00 adv / $17.00 dos
Ballroom | All Ages
You can also catch Daniel with Rasputina at these dates:
04.06.12 Buffalo, NY The Tralf Music Hall
04.07.12 Toronto, ON Lee’s Palace
04.09.12 Detroit, MI Magic Stick
04.10.12 Chicago, IL Double Door
04.12.12 Morgantown, WV 123 Pleasant St
04.13.12 Baltimore, MD Ottobar
04.14.12 Brooklyn, NY Knitting Factory
NTSIB friend and Couch by Couchwest (the internet-based answer to South by Southwest for the lazy and the poor) alumnus Daniel Knox and photographer John Atwood could use your help.
Atwood writes:
Songwriter/composer Daniel Knox and I were recently selected by the Byrd Hoffman Watermill Foundation to be artists in residence this fall at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center in Watermill, NY.
Through the course of the residency, Daniel will expand, develop, and complete a long-form piece of music written and arranged for piano, voice, horns, strings, and percussion, based on my photography.
The residency will culminate in a premiere performance of the final piece alongside an exhibition of the integral photographs at the 92YTribeca, New York, NY on 26 January 2012.
Your support will “help cover production expenses for the exhibition: framing, printing, and equipment rental, accompanying musicians, publicity materials and costs.”
Atwood’s photographs have graced the covers of Knox’s Disaster and Evryman for Himself albums, and this further step in their collaboration is an exciting one. Check out the Kickstarter video below, then visit the site to see how you can help.
You climb the metal fire escape on this frigid, Chicago night, a little uneasy. The steps sway and clang under your feet while layers of paint and rusted metal disintegrate under your hand. You are halfway up when you make the mistake of looking down to check your progress. A pause as you close your eyes, grip the railing with both hands and whisper, “Oh please oh please oh please…” A deep breath, and you continue on.
You reach the door and sniff back some rogue snot before turning the handle. You step in to find the inside just as dark and cold as the outside. Darker. Except for a soft spotlight trained on a man and a baby grand piano. The bear of a man is dressed all in black, and his hands play across the ivories more delicately than you’d have expected. He watches you, grinning. His face is pleasant enough, but something about the grin is slightly unsettling, as if it will spread into a giant Mr. Sardonicus rictus at any moment.
“Watch your step,” the man warns casually, just before you feel age-old wooden slats begin to give way under your foot.
You cautiously navigate your way across the room to the piano, thinking, however illogically, that if you can just grip this huge, heavy piece of furniture in the middle of the rotting floor, you’ll be safe. The man continues to grin as you listen to him play. He begins to sing. A full, sonorous voice that seems to come up from another time. It makes you think of thin, foreign men with severely pomaded hair and angular women with Louise Brooks haircuts. The man plays a beautiful song, and you begin to relax under the lilting melody. Until your mind begins to process the words…
When I come back to life, I’ll find you,
Push my thumbs into your eyes and blind you.
When you hear your name called out across a crowded street,
you’ll think of me and swear the ground was stolen from your feet.
He punctuates the verse with a high, ghostly, wordless howl-hum.
Your shoulders freeze. You glance back across the room and wonder how quickly you could make it back out the door and down the fire escape. You turn back as the man stands, still grinning, and motions you to follow him. You don’t know why you follow, but you go. Out a window you climb, onto a snowy stone balcony overlooking the city. Chicago is laid out for you in a jeweled grid, the snow making everything pristine. Clean. Wonderful. You try to remain on your guard, but the site dazzles you and your eyes widen and sweep the landscape like an excited child’s.
Beside you, the man begins to chuckle. Maybe he’s not so bad, you think. He’s shown you something beautiful you might never have seen had you let fear turn you back down that fire escape.
Then you feel a strong tug on the back of your jacket. As the snow-laden streets fly up to meet you, the man’s booming laughter echoing behind you, you realize he really was as bad as you thought.
Daniel Knox’s album Evryman For Himself, the second in a trilogy, releases May 10, 2011. The first album of the trilogy, Disaster, is available to stream, download and order on CD on Bandcamp. And, if you’re brave enough, he’s on tour.
