I was inspired to start this blog by my friend Shira Leuchter, who has one of her own called In the Sky and On the Road in which she writes about fashion and architecture and other such things. It looked like it might be fun.
On this page I’ll be waxing poetic on, as the subtitle above says, music and design, as well as art and other. It will be opinionated and self-obsessed, and hopefully occasionally funny and enlightening.
The title, Boats Made of Ocean, comes from a song by one of my favorite bands, Television.
Television were a first-wave punk band who weren’t at first glance a punk band. They were poetic and insanely melodic when others were abrasive and jarring. To this day they are regarded as one of he most technically proficient bands not just in punk but in all of pop music, which is stunning, considering their home is a genre known for housing barely competent players. (Sid Vicious, I’m looking at you.)
In the mid-1970's, Television quite literally built the stage on which punk was born, at CBGB’s in New York City. The bar was founded as a spot for bluegrass and country music singers to ply their trades, but Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd (the guitarists of Television) convinced it’s owner to allow them to play there on slow nights in return for building him a stage to replace the broken and tattered existing one. He agreed and a few weeks later Television shared that stage with The Ramones and history was in the making. The audiences for Verlaine’s shows became the bar’s bread and butter and country music dropped to the wayside and punk was born.
Anyway, the title of this blog comes from the song “See No Evil,” off of their brilliant debut, Marquee Moon. The lyric goes thusly:
I get ideas
I get a notion
I want a nice little boat
Made out of ocean
For whatever reason that lyric has always stuck in my head as being especially beautiful and interesting. It reminds me of being a teenager and depressed and just wanting the whole shit world to end and the hurt to just go away, but not in an emo sort of way. This will not be an emo blog.
And there it is, the first entry out of the way. To be honest, I’m not sure what kind of blog this will be. I’ll figure that out as I go.
I do know, though, that I picked up the excellent new Elvis Costello & The Imposters album, Momofuku, a couple of days ago, so I’ll be writing about that shortly...
On this page I’ll be waxing poetic on, as the subtitle above says, music and design, as well as art and other. It will be opinionated and self-obsessed, and hopefully occasionally funny and enlightening.
The title, Boats Made of Ocean, comes from a song by one of my favorite bands, Television.
Television were a first-wave punk band who weren’t at first glance a punk band. They were poetic and insanely melodic when others were abrasive and jarring. To this day they are regarded as one of he most technically proficient bands not just in punk but in all of pop music, which is stunning, considering their home is a genre known for housing barely competent players. (Sid Vicious, I’m looking at you.)
In the mid-1970's, Television quite literally built the stage on which punk was born, at CBGB’s in New York City. The bar was founded as a spot for bluegrass and country music singers to ply their trades, but Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd (the guitarists of Television) convinced it’s owner to allow them to play there on slow nights in return for building him a stage to replace the broken and tattered existing one. He agreed and a few weeks later Television shared that stage with The Ramones and history was in the making. The audiences for Verlaine’s shows became the bar’s bread and butter and country music dropped to the wayside and punk was born.
Anyway, the title of this blog comes from the song “See No Evil,” off of their brilliant debut, Marquee Moon. The lyric goes thusly:
I get ideas
I get a notion
I want a nice little boat
Made out of ocean
For whatever reason that lyric has always stuck in my head as being especially beautiful and interesting. It reminds me of being a teenager and depressed and just wanting the whole shit world to end and the hurt to just go away, but not in an emo sort of way. This will not be an emo blog.
And there it is, the first entry out of the way. To be honest, I’m not sure what kind of blog this will be. I’ll figure that out as I go.
I do know, though, that I picked up the excellent new Elvis Costello & The Imposters album, Momofuku, a couple of days ago, so I’ll be writing about that shortly...
1 comment:
hey jodester,
isn't keeping a blog both engaging and useful? speaking of blogs, you still owe me and brendan a diner breakfast and i still owe you a print. let's make this happen in the next just-under-two-weeks because after that i am gone for almost six months.
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