Photo by Ed Dittenhoefer, Ithaca Times
Any time Yo La Tengo comes to town it’s worth noting, but this is one of those special, Wexner Center-specific shows since Ira & Georgia & James will be soundtracking the live documentary The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller while Oscar-nominated director Sam Green narrates. I’ll have a full-length story about the endeavor in this week’s Other Paper, but here’s an Ira Kaplan quote about the film that I liked but didn’t make it into print in its fullest form:
It’s inspiring. (Buckminster Fuller’s) heyday would be the 1960s. It’s such a endlessly fascinating time for me. I was very young, so I have memories of it. It’s a time of so much turmoil and so many things going so horribly wrong. The Vietnam War, rioting in the cities, political leaders being assassinated. When you think of the things that pass for problems in 2012, they just pale compared to what was going on in the ’60s. And yet it was a time of such optimism. “We can create a better world.” I feel like that’s gone, too, and that seems like a real paradox. While the better world has been created, to such an extent, we’ve lost so much of the belief that it’s possible to do it, even though the evidence is to the contrary.
Tickets are still available for both the 7 and 9pm screenings.
In other YLT news, Kaplan said the band has a new album “in the proverbial can” and is scheduled for a January release. Artwork is currently being finalized.
I won’t lie. 
It’s a rock n’ roll cliché and a PR flack’s dream: Guy breaks up with girl, drinks heavily, pisses off all his friends, eventually sobers up and retreats to his parents’ house to record an album on a four-track. But man does this cliché jangle with some of the best in-the-red pop songs I’ve heard in a while. Stuart McLamb’s Chapel Hill band signed to Merge in October and is slated to have a new release in August, and after seeing the full band (now a 7-piece) put on a terrific show at the Wexner Center in the fall, McLamb’s next outing could be even better with a little help from his friends.
Every aspect of Andrew Bird just keeps getting better—his voice; his gorgeous, multi-layered violin arrangements; his whistling. It makes for a backdrop so compelling that he can sing about proto-Sanskrit Minoans, porto-centric Lisboans, Greek Cypriots and Hobis-hots and have you nodding your head in agreement instead of scratching it in confusion.
Hospice is one of only a few albums this year that completely transports me whenever I give it my full attention. (
