the memory palace » new york

The Sisters Fox

admin — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 01:52:08 +0000

The harp bit at the beginning and end is In California from the new Joanna Newsom triple record. Then three pieces from Max Richter’s 24 Postcards in Full Color and Song for Jesse from Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ soundtrack to The Assassination of Jesse James by Yada Yada Yada.

There’s plenty of great stuff written about the Fox sisters, including a book-length take (Talking to the Dead, by Barbara Weisberg) which appears to be all that. I’ll recommend a dynamite book called Occult America: The Secret History of how Mysticism Shaped Our Nation, which despite its hyperventilating, Dan Browny spoooooooky conspiracy title, is great and readable and scholarly at the same time. Great context. And, this is sort of an standing order: go to the NYTimes’ pre-1981 archive. There are some vintage stories about the Fox Sisters there.

The Moon in the Sun

admin — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 05:19:48 +0000

Acoustic guitar bit in the beginning is “Saint Cloud” by Six Organs of Admittance. Next up (and again at the end) is “Snookered” by Dan Deacon–a favorite song of 2009, if you care about that sort of thing. Also, “Harmonics” by Fridge.

You can read the original articles in their entirety in several places online. (Why not go to the museum of hoaxes website to find it? it’s a fun site). The articles, incidentally, are wonderful. Really a work of genius of a particularly lovely sort.

Plummeting Approval

admin — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 06:41:21 +0000

We roll through a couple of movie score pieces (“piano 1″ from Jon Brion’s Synecdoche, New York soundtrack, “Tissue,” from Thomas Newman’s Little Children soundtrack). Then you’ve got “Temporary Loan” by Edith Frost (from her Calling Over Time record–which is so good, by the way), “Every Day a Sunrise, a Summer,” by Telegraph Melts, and The Hold Steady covering Springsteen’s Atlantic City on a benefit album from an an international organization called WarChild that works on child soldier issues.

Accounts of Sam’s life vary pretty wildly and can be pretty tricky to sort out. One of the best accounts (it’s gotta be the most comprehensive), it seems, is Paul E. Johnson’s book, Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper.

The World Within the World

admin — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:14:34 +0000

We’ve got three pieces from Jon Brion’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind soundtrack. Since discovering it, I now worry that I’m going to get lazy and only use pieces from Jon Brion soundtracks because it turns out that they’re pretty great. The other song is Quartet for Four Tubas by some guy named P. Holmes (which sounds like a terrible hip hop name) and is played by The British Tuba Quartet. Which sounds like it would be a terrible piece of music but is actually kind of wonderful.

Oh My!

admin — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 01:22:23 +0000

The music is the third track on Panda Bear’s Young Prayer record.

Most of the details in this one come from Pretty-Much-the-Greatest-Book-Ever, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, by Robert Caro. If you read only one thirty five year old, thousand-some-odd page biography of an urban planner this year, make it that one.