Snore & Guzzle Radio Hour # 17

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This edition of the Snore & Guzzle radio hour is dedicated exclusively to my favorite female Brazilian vocalist — perhaps my favorite female vocalist period — Nara Leão. The mix focuses on the decade of the 60s, but also bleeds into the early 70s. I tried to sequence a representative cross-section of selections across her 30 some odd albums. These albums are exceedingly difficult to come by in North America, and it’s rare to come across any of them in a record shop. For whatever reason, Nara’s music was neglected in the tropicalia renaissance. However, she would not be particularly disappointed by these circumstances. Although she in many ways inspired the tropicalia movement, she never committed herself politically or culturally. Musically, she straddles the more traditional bossa nova with the latter progressive psych-leaning era of tropicalia.

I predict that this music will see a rebirth in the coming decade. There’s something classic about her style, relevant in her philosophy, and enspiriting in her compositions that I think people will find undeniably compelling. It is just a matter of getting the stuff out there.

Below you will find a number of snapshots I took of a booklet I designed to house an article about a small family farm in western New York…

Snore & Guzzle Radio Hour # 16

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NEWSFLASH: There will be a brief intermission from Snore & Guzzle updates in the month of November. The show will resume come December 1st. There’s a groundswell of activity in the substrate, but these projects are a wee more labor-intensive than the standard; thus the delay. Here’s what is going on just beneath the surface. I’m writing a non-fiction piece about Delmore Schwartz + Lou Reed + Saul Bellow. I’m assembling a profile and extended interview with Norman Greenbaum. I’m starting to compile the materials for a graphic arts project involving classroom charts. I’m in the midst of working on a visual music micro-cinema program involving the films of the Whitney Brothers and musical accompaniment by Adam Forkner, to be staged in Portland, Oregon. These projects will start to see some light over the next couple months.

THIS MONTH: While there are no major updates, I did create the next installment in the series of podcasts. This brings us up to Snore & Guzzle Radio Hour # 16, in a finite series of 24. The Radio Hour this month is a pair of flushed cheeks. These are sounds good for ushering in hibernation, songs that hold hands with bourbon sipping, ember-gazing, quilt-wrapping and chapped lips. One of the big inspirations this month was a quote from a music review for Broadcast’s most recent album. Of the record, the critic said that it was, “Like a nursery rhyme trapped in amber.” There is much more to be found in the graphic I designed to accompany this set of music. See above.

LASTLY: As something of a ruse, I thought I would experiment with posting to Tumblr via a mobile phone, mostly as a way to get a summer’s worth of photos off the thing. I’ve been having fun with the device, and below is a selection of the results. If you want to see a continuous string of this stuff, check in at Faff&Natter on tumblr. I think of this as a little pet-project of Snore & Guzzle, to be managed on a much more micro level than this site.

~Michael R. Neault

A shrewdness of apes
A dule of doves
A skulk of foxes
A charm of goldfinches
A husk of hares
A smack of jellyfish
A rhumba of rattlesnakes
A dazzle of zebras
A euphoria of updates from Snore & Guzzle!

So many new things, where to start?

I made a poster for Camera Obscura, who is playing a show for Croquet Booking in November. If you’re anywhere near the area, I strongly encourage you to check it out. Here’s a preview of the poster…

And a detail view…

I captured a slew of stills from films I’ve been watching: An Angel At My Table, The Perfect Human, 7362, Aleph, Hamfat Asar. Here’s a taste:

And more can be seen on the stills page.

Here’s a story. One time there was a beautiful diner in Portland, Oregon. And within that diner there was a wholly unbecoming sign advertising “cocktails.” A few people determined to rectify the situation with… well, something we’ll call, pro bono graphic design. A replacement sign was made with the collaboration of Sarah Hudson and Marcus Smith and deployed with the cooperation of Sarah Herbolsheimer. If you like, you can see the new sign in action at Zell’s Diner. Or, you can also take a look right now:

Of course, the latest gossip has been documented in SOCIETY.

Lastly, and most importantly. I’ve just posted an article about a small, family-run farm in Western New York. I’m hesitant to say too much about this piece, because I’m hoping it will speak for itself. I think I’ll quote Wendell Berry to cut the ribbon on this one:

A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes.

The article is entitled, The Sun in the Apricots: The Story of Hurd Orchards, and you can read it by following the link.

~Michael Neault, October, 2009

Hallelujah, Snore & Guzzle Updates!!!

1. New Podcast — This one is dedicated to a bookstore in Sarasota, Florida. Content includes: Danish psyche, visionary new classical, 50s child pop, Indian brass band music, Italian rock & roll, Nambian dance music and a Japanese cover song of a certain American rap song, done in a bossa-nova style.

2. New Film Stills — Snaps from Hausu, The Great Moment, Buffalo 66, Fat City, Ace in the Hole and Palm Beach Story.

3. New Gossip Column — Considering the mêlée that was this past month, it’s little wonder the Society Page is nine days late in being posted.

4. Lastly, the rest of this post contains a set of photographs that I shot in Seatac, Washington, while visiting a reclusive, visionary filmmaker named Bruce.

Now You’re Hypnotized

 
Now you’re hypnotized?

Like all the best things in life, there’s a story behind this. If you look at the first photograph in this set, you’ll find a picture of a black piece of foamcore, with the interior cut out and decorated with four small figurines inside, set behind a plexi-glass window, like a diorama. On the exterior, there is a ghoulish face cut out of brown paper and the phrase, “Now You’re Hypnotized” written on the paper. This is Bruce Bickford’s so-called business card. Note the blatant absence of contact information exhibited here.

If you want to communicate with Bruce, you gotta go see him.

Bruce Bickford is a visionary, reclusive animator who has been holed up in suburban Washington state for the past couple decades. He’s been amassing an inventory of fantastic stop-motion and line animation and specializes in micro-miniature figures and creatures that endlessly metamorphosize into themselves. Sadly, his films lack any real distribution. However, he has a handful of devoted admirers who are trying to help him out. I visited Bruce along with Peter Burr, who has been one of these people, and issued some of Bruce’s work on his animation compendium DVD, Cartune Xprez.

Bruce’s workshop and archive is like no other. His office chair is a tiny trampoline. His archive is populated by thousands upon thousands of tiny clay figures, some no larger than the nail on your pinky. The workshop is inhabited by countless scraps and cut-outs of unidentifiable origins. Bruce himself is willowy and soft-spoken. He’s cat-like in his focus. If you’re paying attention to him, he seems distracted. But if you turn your attention elsewhere, he’s suddenly interested in you.

Bruce’s tale has been told before, in a number of articles, and even in a feature length documentary called Monster Road, so I won’t rehash it here. But I found his archive and workshop so inspiring that I wanted to share the experience here. Enjoy. Click any image for slide-show mode.

This is an essay about a somewhat unlikely family heirloom. Monthly updates are located at the foot of this post. Click photos for larger image.

~Michael Neault, June 21, 2009

It’s been about seven years since I last washed this t-shirt. It does not smell as alarming as you might expect. The scent is rich and 3-dimensional. It reminds me of copper, damp wood and salt. It is the scent of decomposition, but not rot, just something that is getting close to being dirt.

This is a multi-colored striped shirt that my father bought in 1979. I’m guessing that it’s from a generic department store, but I can’t say for certain. The tag has long since dissolved. 1979 was two years before I was born. The shirt was acquired by me 15 years later when I salvaged it from the rag bucket. My Dad was using it as a smock for painting. Apricot, umber, maroon, green, white. That’s the color pattern on the shirt.

Paint besplatters the chest. There is a run in the shoulder-blade section that looks like a run in a stocking. I was eating an unusually ripe strawberry while driving in the car the other day and spilled juice on the belly of the shirt. I was irrationally upset with myself about the new stain.

One of my Dad’s talents is that he is capable of drawing – freehand – a perfect circle. I was never quite sure how he did it, but they were mathematically perfect circles. I once measured the diameter, and it was indeed a perfect circle.

This t-shirt is vulnerably thin. It is wispy, more like the skim of a shirt than a shirt itself. If you hold it up to the light, you can see right through it. I am afraid that if I run it through the laundry and dryer it will simply disintegrate and I’ll have to pull it off the lint-trap. I know that you can wash things by hand and have seen people do it. I even like the idea of using a washboard for actually washing clothing. But for some reason, I resist washing it by hand. Maybe I just want someone else to wash it for me.

Because the t-shirt was so raggedy, I was not allowed to wear it to high school. In fact, the shirt was confiscated so that I would not wear it. My parents did not approve of clothing that was messy, mingy or tatty. The t-shirt was all of the above. There was a drawer in my parent’s room that held all of the confiscated clothes.

Granted, my high school sartorial choices left something to be desired. I liked old battered clothing. But for the most part, this clothing was far too big for me to wear. It gave me the semblance of being a teenage hobo.

At a thrift store in Western, New York, my friend Abby and I discovered something interesting in the children’s section. We found an entire row of kid’s striped tees. We both delighted in their miniature size and bought almost the whole shelf. Abby wants to turn them into a quilt. I like seeing them stacked in a tidy pile. Shortly after buying them, we took snapshots in my parents backyard by hanging them up on an impromptu clothesline strung up on our old home-made jungle gym. I shot the photos using a hand-me-down Pentax 35mm camera. Both my Dad and I were convinced that it was broken and then one day I shot a roll of film with it and all the photos came out just fine.

In college, I worked at a copy center and used my dad’s striped t-shirt for one of my design projects. It ended up as the cover of a journal I once put together. For the cover, I made a xeroxed transparency of a flock of pterodactyls. In order to do this, I ran the same sheet of paper through a copying machine over and over at varying levels of zoom. Once I got a copy I was happy with I transferred it to transparency paper. Then, I took the transparency over to the color copying machine, superimposed it over the striped t-shirt and made copies directly off the glass.

Pablo Picasso wore striped long sleeve t-shirts. Lou Reed wore black and white striped t-shirts. Jonathan Richman wears all sorts of striped tees. These three connections are interwoven like a braid: Reed was Richman’s unofficial mentor and Richman once wrote a song about Pablo Picasso.

There is a picture of my Dad wearing the shirt in 1982. He is wearing navy blue boat shorts and putting me on the back of our big german shepard, whose name was Benny. Benny was hit by a car a year later, but my Dad and I would live at least 27 more years. My Dad can still draw a perfect circle. It’s a little shakier, but it’s more or less perfect.

My dad’s name is Donald and he has not one, but two middle names. Joseph and Henri. He always signed his name, DH Neault with an authoritative illegibility in what I thought was a very grown up way. As an adolescent, I could never reproduce the adultness of his signature. None of my family knew that he had two middle names until some confusion arose when he was reapplying for his passport. Apparently everyone in his family would automatically have the middle name of Joseph.

He used to instruct me that it was best to sign my name on paperwork in a trademark fashion. I was much more interested in designing it different each and every time. Recently, I’ve established a more or less signature style on receipts and checks and things. And I just realized the other day that I now sign my name in a very similar fashion to his.

I like wearing the t-shirt when it is exceptionally hot or humid outside. And I especially like walking around outside at night with the t-shirt. It feels like I am wearing nothing at all and it is only when the wind blows and I feel it brush against my skin am I reminded that I am wearing a t-shirt that is 30 years old.

When I am done wearing the shirt, I take care in folding it meticulously before I put it back on the shelf. It is so thin that when I return it to the wardrobe among the other shirts, it feels like I am returning a piece of paper to its book. I don’t think my Dad is aware that I wear this shirt on occasion. I don’t think that he would approve, but I also do not think that he would disapprove.

Monthly Updates

- New gossip column
- New design work
- New mp3s posted
- New film stills