August 18, 2005

Hey everybody, how’s it going?  Like Mayor Tommy Shanks before me, I’m doing pretty good myself.  Haven’t had a nightmare about squirrels in days (although I feared a relapse after seeing Charlie & the Chocolate Factory).  Leaving for Europe in a couple of days, so it’s time to tie up a few loose ends.

Speaking of the cinema, we want to encourage everybody to go see Junebug, which opens on August 3 in New York and Los Angeles, and elsewhere later.  It’s the feature film debut of Phil Morrison, who directed many of our rock videos, including “Sugarcube” and “Tom Courtenay.”  We scored the movie, and we couldn’t be prouder to be part of such a beautiful work.  For more information, check out the web site.

A lot of you—to be more precise, none of you—have been asking about the progress of Yo La Tengo, that plucky group of sixth through eighth grade girls who rampaged through Division 3 of this year’s Maplewood softball league (see Letters: May 2005).  To be frank, the season was a bit of a disappointment.  The schedule appeared to be being made up as they went along.  There were mutterings that this was all done to disturb the between-starts sideline throwing of star hurler Leila Rosenthal.  Perhaps that’s just raging paranoia, but undeniably it was all but impossible to keep track of their exploits, so let’s check the web site.  What the . . . ?!  0-3!?  That simply cannot be.  We were in attendance on opening day when Yo La Tengo vanquished The Law Office of Drew J. Bowman.  Calling John Sayles—it’s time for your next feature, Eight Girls Out.

Do I have another complaint?  I’m afraid to say I do.  I don’t want to point any fingers, but we’re getting an unusual amount of emails asking for information that’s easily available to anyone with a computer and a search engine.  Like the guy, once again not to point any fingers, who wanted information about our appearance in Urbino on August 7th.  I know we don’t have a link to the festival on our Schedule, and of course we should.  But still, how hard would it have been to look it up yourself?

Well, thank goodness Rob, I mean he, didn’t.  Because it got me to do a search of my own.  Going into it all I knew was the date and the city.  I discovered the festival’s name is Frequenze Disturbate, and performing another search was directed to their official site.  As I speak no Italian I took Google up on their generous offer to “Translate this page.”

First of all, you can see we’re in some esteemed company:

DINOSAUR JR – YO I HOLD IT – ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN – BLONDE REDHEAD

Scrolling down, there’s a bio of the band.  You’ll note that there’s a few words of Italian that apparently can’t be translated, and have to forgive misspelling of a famous singer’s name:

The Yo I hold It are one of the band piu’ important of world-wide the independent scene. One inexhaustible source of ideas that give the end of 80 years ‘ door ahead with succeeding its job through the lines of shadow of the rock intellectual. Music of this band, true and just beacon for the cult scene Indian rock, leaves from an exquisite search in within POP, going to touch the nervous angles and noisy facts of walls of feedback of matrix postpunk experience them, in a sonorous synthesis that does not have equal and possible imitatori. Recently the sound of the Yo I hold It e’ always turned piu’ towards a sound that it absorbs times and ways of the jazz and the free jazz as testifies the homage to Sun Ra of the recent EP Nuclear War. Ira Kaplan (guitar and voice), Georgia Hubley (battery and voice) and James McNew (low and voice) represents how much more better in these years has moved the American world underground; a band in a position to creating a various and innovative language that has conquered one large first formation of artists between all Micheal Stipe of the Rem. The Yo I hold recently have published It a triple collection that between unknown and bside it tells their history from 1985 to the 2003 (Prisoners Of Love – Matador/Self).

you go to the situated one: www.yolatengo.com

Feel free to ignore that last sentence, because you’re already here.  But I’m gone.  See you in Europe.

—Ira