Stuck writers dig the tradition of music magazines such as Down Beat playing tracks for famous musicians “blindfolded” to extract un-scripted gut reactions. Most of our musician friends are better described as “notorious” and some of them are shy– so for now, we’re slumming it and playing tracks for each other. In our inaugural Needle Drop, Scot Hacker and transient Stuck writer Benoit Baald traded tracks and riffed on them live via iChat. We’ve included the tracks here so you can play along — spoilers at the end of each section.
Road to Ruin: A Sufjan Stevens-Inspired Soundtrack to Bad Urban Planning
Becoming the favorite banjo-playing Episcopalian geography expert and Halloween costume inspiration of NPR listeners apparently wasn’t ambitious enough for Sufjan Stevens. Today at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival—whose lineup also includes firebrand harpist Zeena Parkins— Stevens will present “The BQE,†a symphonic testament to that fount of poetic inspiration, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. But why stop there? In what follows, I’ll list some of my own favorite urban planning disasters, with accompanying theme music for each.
As a fan of absurdly overconceived projects, I’m glad to see Brooklyn-based Stevens providing a soundtrack to one of his borough’s least-loved eyesores. The traffic-clogged BQE is a soul-numbing, neighborhood-dividing monument to master planner Robert Moses’ unchecked ego. But since it exposes the tension that comes with having a sense of place, it seems like an ideal subject for Stevens. Maybe his take on Moses will even surpass Alex Timbers’ surreal play “Boozy,†which portrayed Moses’ arch-nemesis—urban gadfly and community activist Jane Jacobs, a hero of mine—as a femme fatale time traveler who stalks Moses with an angry gang of rolling pin-wielding housewives.
Sufjan Stevens’ mannered chamber-folk divides the indie world into Sufists who hail his genius, and anti-Sufists who want to slap him silly. He’s too clever by half and could use an editor, as on The Avalanche. But I’d challenge the haters to write a song as moving as “Casimir Pulaski Day†or a rocker as fierce as “In the Words of the Governor,†Stevens’ Polvo-meets-White Stripes barnburner featured in The Believer’s summer 2007 CD compilation. The preview snippet of “BQE†below doesn’t suggest Stevens is the new Steve Reich, but I’ll give the piece a chance. Did I mention that “BQE” has hula-hoopers?
After the click-through, I’ll provide music for some equally soul-numbing missteps in urban planning. If you have your own stretch of paradise that’s been paved for a parking lot, tell us about it, and give us some music to get through the madness.
Sufjan Stevens, “In the Words of the Governor”:
[audio:http://stuckbetweenstations.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/04-in-the-words-of-the-governor-1.mp3]Sufjan Stevens, “BQE, Part 6”:
Continue reading Road to Ruin: A Sufjan Stevens-Inspired Soundtrack to Bad Urban Planning