Category: Multimedia

What Rocks Us: Edith Frost

wru_frost.jpgEdith Frost:
“If it Weren’t for the Words”
from It’s a Game
Drag City DC301

We start out with Chicago-by-way-of-Austin-and-NYC singer/songwriter Edith Frost. This song has been a WLUW staple for the last couple months, and the whole album is a mellow Sunday-morning classic must-have. I could name drop all the albums she’s appeared on, but I’ll let the song speak for itself. If you ever get a chance to watch Thrill Jockey’s Looking for a Thrill video, be sure to check out her story, it’s the best on the DVD.

This post is hidden from unregistered members and not available to the internet at large. It will only be available for one week (Friday to Thursday). Right-click to download, don’t overload our bandwidth by playing it online. If this is your song and you’re angry we’re posting it, please let us know and we’ll gladly remove it, but first consider that this is free exposure to a very small group of real music fans who frequently buy records.

The Annoying Thing

annoyingthing1.jpg Imagine hearing a song you’ve never heard before, and falling in love with it, then finding out it’s the very song that you’d been reading hateful internet posts about for more than a year. Oh, how it hurts to be tricked into digging Kelly Clarkson…

In the toy department in the BHV department store in Paris, I came across a goofy little plush gremlin wearing an old-school motorcycle helmet. I picked him up and squeezed him, and was rewarded with a Sean-Stevens-style onomatopædic two-stroke engine sound. I almost died laughing, and listened another dozen times, but I was too cheap to pay €30 for the thing. When I got home, I looked it up on the internet and found it was the “Annoying Thing”, the basis of the “Crazy Frog” Axel-F-ringtone CD that topped the British charts last year. Cy will never let me live this down, but if you remove it from it’s pop-culture context, it’s pretty damn funny.

Paris

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We got back from Paris yesterday, here are our photos of Paris in general (or just check out the scooter-related photos)

Things I noticed:

  • Scooters and motorcycles are everywhere, even as the temperature hovered around the freezing point. (Lap aprons are very common on motorcycles and scooters.) Basically, the whole town sounds like you’re at a scooter rally, all day and all night.
  • Scooters easily outnumber motorcycles 3-1. Most motorcycles we saw were small-displacement and Asian, the few bigger ones we saw were usually Ducatis or BMWs.
  • It’s impossible to walk a block on any street in Paris without seeing several scooters parked on the sidewalk. Nirvana for American scooterists, but probably no fun for most pedestrians.
  • Piaggio definitely dominates the market, even over Peugeot. Modern Vespas (ETs and GTs) and Piaggios (X9s and Libertys) are everywhere, and P-series scooters were far more common than i expected, maybe 1 out of 20 scooters was a P or PK-series. There were a good number of Peugeots, but mostly older beaters, I saw only a couple Speedfights. In Ireland a couple years ago, Gilera Runners dominated the market, but we only saw one in Paris. Kymco and Aprilia also had a decent share of the market. Chinese and Taiwanese scooters were common, but I saw few Hondas or Yamahas, and no “retro” Asian scooters other than one Honda Joker (called the “Shadow” there?).
  • Most scooters, even the relatively expensive Vespas, were healthily thrashed, parked against walls and each other with stickers and dents galore. They’re transportation there, not fetish objects.
  • We did see several nicely-maintained vintage Vespas that were clearly owned by lifestyle scooterists, mostly smallframes like the one above.
  • As far as 4-wheeled vehicles, I couldn’t believe the number of Smart Cars, they’re cleaning up there. Minis (both old and new) were common, and all manner of tiny Citröens, Peugeots, and Renaults were everywhere. VW and Audi were probably the biggest importers. All the cars were tiny: the streets are narrow, traffic and parking is a nightmare, and gas is expensive. One of the biggest popular cars was a 2-door version of the Toyota Rav-4. Like the scooters, the cars mostly looked like they’d had a hard life.

I’ll post more later about the two scooter shops we visited.

Vespa Turbo

Nitro sent me this video. It appears to be from last year, from Denmark, and it appears to maybe be an early 60s Vespa (note the Hella taillight). I know sweet nuthin’ about turbocharging, but whatever they did to this engine, it sounds freakin’ sweet.

The Vespas

Surely with bands out there called “The Scooters,” “Scooter,” (two!) “Lambretta,” and “The Lambrettas,” you just knew there’s a band called The Vespas. And you’d be right, you can find them in Detroit. They claim to sound like the Pixies/Breeders/Cure, but i think they’re a bit more grungy/punky than that, more like Screaming Trees (and there’s nothing wrong with sounding like Screaming Trees). Their logo appears to be an inverted (aka French) bloaty mod target, but other than that, they seem pretty cool, and they’re worth a listen.