Willinois’ Finest
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Monthly Archives: December 2006
T-Shirts! Mugs! Buttons!
All those emails we’ve gotten have been answered. As you may have noticed earlier in the week, we’ve added a Merch tab to the site. Now you can get Axes & Alleys stuff manufactured in Chinese and Indonesian sweat shops. Not to worry though, by purchasing Axes & Alleys products you’ll be instructing those third-world denizens in the lessons of capitalism. They’re cheap, they’re sexy, and one of our readers already got laid reading one.
Ask Montezuma What This Shirt Means
Space Penguin!
A&A Logo Tee
On Numbers
Seventeen is perhaps an easy number to ignore. Stuck forever between eighteen and sixteen, seventeen is often overlooked, even by numerologists. Seventeen may not be as popular as one, eight, a million or three, but the number we call seventeen has a rich history and a deep impact upon our society, perhaps greater even than that of fifty-two.
The seventeenth number ever discovered, seventeen is known in France as dix-sept. Like many other prime numbers, seventeen is divisible only by itself and one, though in base-six math seventeen is represented by “25,” which, in base-ten, is not a prime number.
The originators of mathematics, the Sumerians, were the first to develop seventeen, which they called sebešer and represented in cuneiform as a symbol. It would take over three millennia before it would transform into the Roman “XVII.” After the development of Islamic culture, XVII was replaced by the standard Arabic numeral 17.
Throughout history, kings, popes, emperors and the heads of major corporations have used the number seventeen. Even celebrities such as Madonna, Howard Hughes and Bruce Vilanche have, in the course of counting, utilized the number seventeen. Important works such as The Bible feature many chapters known by the numerical designation “Seventeen.” The foundation of American government, a document called The Constitution, even features a section called “The Seventeenth Amendment.” It is the seventeenth of the many amendments to this important and historic document.
Of course, seventeen is not just a stuffy number consigned to old, musty documents. Indeed seventeen is still a vital and important number that continues to permeate the popular culture of modern society. There is a glossy, quiz and makeup tip filled magazine which carries the name Seventeen on its masthead. Ohio powerpop band Manda and the Marbles released, in 2005, a song titled “Seventeen.” First-ranked NASCAR™ driver Matt Kenseth’s DeWalt logo-covered car bears the number seventeen and basketball star John Havlicek proudly wore a Boston basket ball team shirt on which was embroidered the number seventeen.
Of all the 1,207 numbers that exist today, seventeen is perhaps one of the most underrated and yet one of the most intriguing and important. Like twelve or seventy-eight, seventeen is one of the numbers that people enjoy. Seventeen is cool.
A Musical Revue Review
Serena-Maneesh, Dirty On Purpose, Bardo Lake, and Woven Hand
Greenpoint, Brooklyn – At the behest of a friend, I headed out to the Warsaw in the Polish National home to check out Serena-Maneesh. They were the last act of the night, reasingly drew my attention throughout the show. That and, even as a heterosexual male, New Bass Player was the evocation of rail-thin, modern hotness. While playing beautifully, he worked the crowd admirably. I’m surprised no woman in the audience was overcome with faintness. WhileI had mixed responses to Serena-Maneesh, there’s definite growth potential and I look forward to more from them as they mature.
A pleasant surprise was Brooklyn quartet Dirty On Purpose, who preceded Serena-Maneesh. Members DJ Bourdreau, Joe Jurewicz, George Wilson, and Doug Marvin were joined in their performance by Ann Brewster (from Sea Ray) on cello and a young slip of a girl named Holly on backup vocals. While certainly of interest to a much-castigated and moody trendnik set, Dirty On Purpose is a fun, heavily-melodic act worth seeing.
I’m happy that the Dirty boys have a nice give-andtake between the genders in their live set, and will be adding them to my listening repertoire of bands such as Yellowish, Elysian Fields, and Stars. The song they’re promoting heavily on the internet right now is “No Radio” and the live version is far beyond the recorded one. Covers are usually a crowd favourite, but their fast-paced, lazy-vocals rendition of Real Life’s “Send Me an Angel” didn’t seem to send the audience into much of a tizzy. Still, the crowd was bopping its way through the rest of the eight song set.
Nevertheless, their version of “Send Me an Angel” is worth bootlegging, especially Holly’s wonderful melisma towards the end of the tune. While Ann Brewster’s cello couldn’t be heard on this song due to a mix of interfering tones from the bass and a lack of throughput on the PA, she was an integral addition to the other songs in the set, something the rest of the band very much appreciated.
Reviewlets:
Woven Hand
Woven Hand is David Eugene Edwards playing acoustic, electric, mandolin and sampler. A very powerful male voice, his work on this project is unimpressive. Parts of some songs would have a place in television shows such as Deadwood or Jeremiah, but his reliance on drones made from vocal and string samples and much-too-lengthy stretches of pedal tones make for an uninteresting live performance.
Bardo Pond
Michael Gibbons, John Gibbons, Isobel Sollenberger, Clint Takeda, and Ed Farnsworth give me glimpses of what should be my type of music, but never get there. The noise aesthetic is controversial, but can be enjoyable. This was not such an instance. Singer Isobel has an attractive voice, but needs to get her diaphragm in gear to provide the power her Morrison-like vocals hint at. Some moments of great rhythm, guitar passages reminiscent of Meat Puppets, but keyboards which mainly sound like seagulls on barge day and prolonged sonic laziness made me pray that this Keith Jarrett show without the musicality would end soon.
For More Information on These Musical Acts, Feel Free to Research Them on Your Local Interconnected Network of Computers. See the Uniform Resource Locator Codes Below.
Serena-Maneesh
Dirty on Purpose
Bardo Pond
Woven Hand
Gage Industries
