Sweet November

Speaking of having a busy time coming up, I’m going to take a little break from the blog – just for a week and a half or so. I’ll be back at the beginning of November, possibly with a vengeance. In the meantime, thanks for coming.

I Fear the Cardinals of St. Louis

Go Tigers! Not having had cable TV for years, I don’t get to watch World Series games much any more, and I doubt that I’ll get a chance to see any of this series, what with a busy week coming up, but nonetheless my thoughts & hopes are with Detroit. (Pretty grim start, losing badly to the Cardinals last night, but hey, they lost the first game of the Division Series to the hated Yankees, too, and that all turned out just fine.)

The Tigers-Cards matchup echoes the 1968 World Series, which the media has been quick to play up. So we’ll mark the cosmic recurrence with Barbara Manning’s tribute to pitcher Denny McLain, who won 31 games for the Tigers in that 1968 season but later disgraced himself. As the song goes, “He was the last man to win 30 games / Now he hangs his head in the Hall of Shame.”

• SF Seals, “The Ballad of Denny McLain”

Barbara Manning’s mid-1990s band was the San Francisco Seals, named of course after the farm team from which Joe DiMaggio came. This song is from the three-song Baseball Trilogy EP, which also included a crackerjack cover of “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio” and a Manning original, “Dock Ellis,” about the Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher who threw a no-hitter while tripping on acid (info here). Baseball Trilogy is out of print, alas, but you can buy other Manning stuff here.

Sheesh

A few nights ago I was on a panel about arts writing. One of the other panelists was a woman who produces her own monthly theatre newsletter and also reviews plays for CBC Radio. She’s been doing her newsletter for many years, and she pointed out (or maybe it was the third panelist, who was clearly a good friend of hers, who pointed it out) that she didn’t just sit back and wait for mainstream media to offer her a forum, but rather took the initiative and created her own forum, and built her credibility and reputation up from scratch.

I in turn pointed out that while her newsletter exists only in hard-copy form, it’s never been easier to employ her strategy than it is right now, what with free online blogging platforms, etc.

And her thoughts on the Internet? “I don’t want to have anything to do with it. There’s a lot of junk on there and I don’t want to be associated with it.”

Nice.

My Little Black Ache with the Little White Specks

I’ve recently discovered this fine band Bishop Allen. And yes, releasing that sentence into the blogosphere is a little like showing up at a tent revival and saying, “Hey, do y’all know about this guy Jesus?” But sometimes I just end up playing catch-up. Gary recommended the band to me, on the occasion of one of the bandmembers appearing in this indie movie Mutual Appreciation, which played in TO for a few days last week but which I missed.

Bishop Allen is releasing an EP a month in 2006. Shades of the Wedding Present’s single-a-month project back in 1992, but rather more ambitious, since the Bishop Allen records have at least four songs each, and from what I gather most of them are originals. But it’s the Charm School album, released back in 2003, that has the attention of my ears & heart. The band flirts with cutesiness with wacky backing vocals (and alarmingly, the opening rap on the quasi-cover of “Eve of Destruction” did call to mind the Barenaked Ladies), but the simple, rhythmic bounce of the songs carries the day. And I find the minimalist sound & the noodly guitar style (as opposed to the usual thick chords) incredibly refreshing.

My favourite song on the record is “Little Black Ache,” which evokes the Nightcrawlers’ Nuggets-era stone-cold classic “The Little Black Egg” in more than name only. “Little Black Ache” is its own song with its own lyrics, but in tempo, structure, chord progression, etc., it’s also a pretty clear homage. Call it another quasi-cover, I guess. (“The Little Black Egg” has been much-tackled; just off the top of my head I can think of versions by the Cars, Evan Dando, and the Minus 5, and I saw Calexico do it live a few years ago.)

• Bishop Allen, “Little Black Ache”
• The Nightcrawlers, “The Little Black Egg”

(Buy Charm School here and a Nightcrawlers comp here.)

The Lives of Alex McAulay

Or, Vegetarian Meat continued.

“If you play the albums chronologically they cover the growth of us as people from here to there, and in there is a tale for everybody in case they want to know what they can do to survive the scenes.... you should be able to relate and not feel alone. I think it’s important that people don’t feel alone.”

Lou Reed on the Velvet Underground

The main dude in Vegetarian Meat was named Alex McAulay, and sometime after Let’s Pet came out he reportedly had some kind of crackup & was briefly institutionalized. After that, he made a handful of solo records under the name Charles Douglas. My favourite of them is The Lives of Charles Douglas (1999, I think); I especially love the mood of these two songs.

• Charles Douglas, “Ganapathee”
• Charles Douglas, “Under the Command”

It’s hard to capture loneliness without fetishizing or kitschifying it – something that old anthem “How Soon Is Now” always struggled with, I think, just as a lot of Morrissey/the Smiths’ other work did – but these songs do it. I’ll admit that ostensibly they’re not even necessarily or solely about feeling lonesome, but to my ears that’s the central, inescapable feeling that breathes the songs in & out. And they also capture the strangely comforting peace & pleasure that real loneliness carries, the sweet taste within the cold green medicine.

I would dearly like to think that the “track” in question in “Under the Command” is one by the Velvet Underground, and that McAulay is singing to Velvets drummer Moe Tucker. This is not completely insane conjecture; the influence in the music is clear, and Tucker produced The Lives of Charles Douglas. But who knows.

McAulay had his likably goofy moments too.

• Charles Douglas, “Monkey Island”

(“Monkey Island” is from The Burden of Genius, reissued on 31 Flavours. Buy it here, and buy The Lives of Charles Douglas here.)

And wait: courtesy of Dave, there’s an update. McAulay is apparently now a grad student and a novelist! He’s published two mass-market thrillers with the MTV Books imprint, and he has a website here and a blog here.

Vegetarian Meat

My friend Dave put out a fanzine called Filler from the mid 1990s through the early 2000s. One of the things he got sent was a promo cassette of Let’s Pet, a debut album from a band/duo called Vegetarian Meat. Horrible name, yeah, and the press release that came with the tape, clearly band-penned, was a wince-worthy Gonzo Lite attempt involving, I think, a fantastical anecdote about a run-in with a cop.

So we sneered, and passed the tape around like a hot potato, and joked that sooner or later one of us would end up listening to the thing. And one day Dave did end up listening to it, putting it on out of idle curiosity while he was developing photos in his darkroom. And what do you know, he said, it’s actually really good.

And when I listened to it I thought it was really good, too. It had a lugubrious stoner vibe sometimes, and it snapped you to attention with its pep-rally chords at others. It was always tuneful, and always had a light touch, with spaces between the sounds. It was bratty & funny, but dryly so, not novelty-song so. (From the song “Trip”: “Whenever we get together, we always fool around, she was my girlfriend on a 10th-grade trip to Germany.”) It was varied in tempo & mood, but still of a piece sonically & thematically. You felt like the singer was expelling raw autobiography (“Whenever we get together…”), but he had some distance on himself, too, or at least he seemed to with his occasional vocal goofing and the wry keyboards & arrangements.

Great album, in short. But yeah, the band name was bad, and check out the album cover:











Yikes.

Dave wrote appreciatevely about Vegetarian Meat in Filler, but Let’s Pet never took off, not even in a minor indie-rock way. These days the album seems to be long out of print; it came out in 1995, and the used copy I bought in NYC that summer was one of two copies that I ever saw anytime, anywhere. (The other one was on sale for $2 at Vortex a few years later.) So I’m taking the unusual step of posting a full four tracks from the record, with the usual assurance – directed toward anyone connected with the band who happens upon this – that I’ll take these down lickety-split upon request.

• Vegetarian Meat, “The New Policy”
• Vegetarian Meat, “Not You”
• Vegetarian Meat, “Bypass the Telephone”
• Vegetarian Meat, “Sway”

To be continued, sort of.

Random Shapes & Tangents

I reviewed – a tad timidly – Siobhan Roberts’ book King of Infinite Space for the Star on the weekend. It’s a quasi-bio of late U of T geometer Donald Coxeter, who was, as they say, a legend in his field. Link here.

• Billy Preston, “Will It Go Round in Circles”

I rediscoverd this song lately (went back to it after Preston’s recent death) and can’t get enough of its sly swing. “Got a story ain’t got no moral, let the bad guy win every once in a while.” Love that line.

• The Waitresses, “Square Pegs”

I think I was just a little too young or something for Square Pegs when it was on TV. I was always mildly disoriented & unsettled when I watched it, as if I wasn’t quite sure where the jokes were. I was very excited when one episode had Doors drummer John Densmore on it, though.

• Aphex Twin, “Dodeccaheedron”

Paul Glennon’s short-story collection The Dodecahedron (note correct number of vowels & consonants in title) has just earned a well-deserved Governor General’s Award nomination. Hope more people check it out. Aphex Twin’s “Dodeccaheedron” (note incorrect number of vowels & consonants in title) is an ice-metallic, hallucinatory Arcticscape.

• Shrimp Boat, “Triangle Song”

I’ve always liked Shrimp Boat, but never loved them. What I’ve heard of them, at least, which admittedly is not all or even much of the total. This song is unlike the Shrimp Boat I know, meatier & rawer, but I like it.

(Buy the Billy Preston here, the Waitresses here, the Aphex Twin here, and the Shrimp Boat here. And if you liked the Hugh Masekela song in the previous post (how could you not?) you should buy it here.)

I once knew an Irish guy who referred to dancing as “throwing crazy shapes.”

The Last King of Scotland

I saw The Last King of Scotland and felt like writing a proper all formal-style movie review. There might be some light spoilage if you haven’t seen the film. Oh, and one thing unmentioned below is that one of my best friends is in the movie as an extra – he lived in Uganda when it was filmed – and he’s clearly visible at several points in a press conference scene, so that was a little thrill to see. Also unmentioned is all the great African pop & funk on the soundtrack, including this old fave.

• Hugh Masekela, “Grazing in the Grass”

The Last King of Scotland

Writers and filmmakers have a special fondness for the neutral bystander who’s drawn into the orbit of power; it allows the audience a glimpse of outsized ambition, or even evil, from a semi-comfortable distance. (Think of the Jack Burden character in Robert Penn Warren’s recently refilmed novel All the King’s Men.) That’s certainly the setup in The Last King of Scotland, a film about the reign of an African dictator as seen by a young Scottish man who joins the strongman’s inner circle.

The dictator here is a real-life one: Idi Amin, who ruled Uganda from 1971 to 1979 – years of repression, economic ruin, the exile of tens of thousands of citizens, and the murder of hundreds of thousands more. As played – brilliantly – by Forest Whitaker, Amin is a fascinating character, wearing a mask of good-natured, fun-loving charm overtop petulance and monstrous rage. With every ripple of his expression, Whitaker reveals waves of powerlust and paranoia, insecurity and sentimentality. The Last King of Scotland owes much of its power to his performance.

But although the milieu is historical and the film bears an “inspired by true events” tag, its central conceit is actually a fictional one. Based on a novel by Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland imagines a young Scottish doctor, Nicholas Garrigan, who comes to Uganda seeking experience and adventure and, through a series of coincidences, ends up serving as Amin’s personal physician and advisor. Garrigan is allegedly a composite of several real people, but the one most often cited as the direct inspiration, Bob Astles, seems to have little to do with the man in the movie.

We meet Garrigan in a series of brief, brutally expository opening scenes, so single-minded in simply conveying information that they might as well have been replaced by a scrolling summary a la Star Wars. The shaggy-haired Scot graduates from med school, ponders with dread a life spent in co-practice with his domineering doctor father, and sets out for Africa more or less at random. (He spins a globe and tells himself he’ll go where his finger lands, but when it lands on “Canada” he gives it a second try.)

Once in Uganda, though, director Kevin Macdonald shows better pacing and command. Best known for the excellent mountain-climbing documentary Touching the Void, Macdonald is making his fiction-film debut here, and he filmed on location in Uganda. His sometimes-jittery camera captures both the beauty of the landscape and a sense of heat-addled anxiety, which allows Macdonald to build narrative momentum nicely without entirely sacrificing atmosphere.

Settled in Uganda, Garrigan begins practicing at a small rural hospital staffed by one other doctor, and he also begins a campaign to seduce the other doctor’s wife, the idealistic but emotionally frazzled Sarah (Gillian Anderson). Curious about this General Amin who’s just seized power, Garrigan drags Sarah to a rally at the nearby village, and on their way home they’re stopped by soliders looking for a doctor. It seems Amin has sprained a hand and needs some quick treatment. Amin is entranced by the young doctor’s pluck and, well, Scottishness, and soon enough Garrigan is installed in Kampala as one of the dictator’s most trusted aides. (A lover of Scot culture, Amin named his children Campbell and Mackenzie and once proclaimed himself the last king of Scotland.)

The problem with all this is that the Garrigan character at the centre of the film is completely hollow. The blame for this lies both in the script and in star James McAvoy’s performance. From the start, McAvoy plays the doctor as a dim-witted, smirking jackass; yes, he’s supposed to be sheltered and naïve, but it’s simply impossible to credit the extent of his shallowness and stupidity. He’s a young Scot in a strange country that’s just been taken over in a military coup, and soldiers are strutting around brandishing submachine guns, yet he shows no hint of unease – at that rally, he merrily woo-woos as if he’s at a rock & roll show. In another even more unbelievable scene, as Garrigan is treaing Amin for the first time, in a burst of irritation he grabs the dictator’s handgun and shoots a bellowing cow, despite the fact that several of Amin’s bodyguards are pointing rifles at him at the time.

Garrigan is so removed from reality that the central dynamic of the film never coalesces. He’s supposed to be seduced by power, but he lacks the brainpower and moral agency to actually be seduced. Instead he just falls into Amin’s inner circle, obliviously enjoys the high life for a little while (lots of poolside scenes and big-collared 1970s outfits), and gradually – very gradually – realizes that he’s working for a brutish madman. A subplot about Garrigan’s affair with one of Amin’s wives (warmly played by Kerry Washington) is contrived, but it’s obvious why it was included – it does at least lend a little moral urgency to Garrigan’s situation.

To Macdonald’s credit, the last third of the movie is tense and suspenseful, and the script cleverly works the real-life 1976 hostage standoff at Uganda’s Entebbe airport into the climax. There are also a couple of brutally violent scenes that, while they may be hard to watch for some, are appropriate in finally bringing Amin’s madness home to Garrigan.

But the resolution of it all is still less than satisfying. At the end of the film, Garrigan is rescued by an altrusitic Ugandan doctor desperate to help his nation – an episode that only makes us wish we’d been following that guy around for the past two hours. Instead, The Last King of Scotland positions Uganda’s national tragedy as the road to redemption for one dumbass white man.

30

Get Yer New American Land Edition Here

“The record company, Rosie, just gave me a big advance!”

So Bruce Springsteen’s label & management have cooked up a nice little scheme. They’ve released a new “American Land Edition” of Springsteen’s Pete Seeger tribute, We Shall Overcome, just in case listeners would like to revisit a work that has faded into rock & roll history since its original release back in, um, April. But for Springsteen devotees who actually bought the record in the spring, don’t worry, you haven’t been forgotten – the new “edition” has a few “bonus tracks” that weren’t on the first. Just for you.

I’m trying to wrap my head around possible rationales for this, and I can only come up with one. Fewer and fewer people care about Springsteen these days (especially a record of Springsteen doing Seeger covers, though at least it’s not one of his stultifying all-acoustic affairs), so in the face of declining market share, the thing to do is target the small group of people who really care, and try to get them to buy the same record twice.

Sadly, there’s some precedent for this kind of thing. You may remember Tracks, the mostly-terrific four-CD set of career-spanning studio outtakes that Springsteen released back in 1998. Great collection, well worth the box-set sticker price, but probably only of interest to hardcore Springsteen fans. And predictably, the much larger group of non-hardcore Springsteen fans didn’t buy it. At which point the label wisely decided to reach out to the non-hardcore market by distilling the box set down to a single-disc compilation, 18 Tracks. But the label also wanted to make some more money from the hardcores, so three of those 18 Tracks were previously unreleased, not to be found elsewhere.

I know, I know, this kind of thing is common and it sounds naïve to be complaining about it. There’s a long history of greatest-hits comps from all kinds of artists that include a throwaway new track or two, for instance. And this is a free country and a free market and if you don’t think something’s worthwhile you don’t have to buy it, etc etc.

But isn’t it galling that the more you care about an artist, the more the label sees that passion as leverage it can use to extract a disproportionate amount of your money? And isn’t it curious that an artist who’s renowned for his supposed empathy for and connection to his fans is apparently so blasé about exploiting the most loyal of them?

Concert Review Haikus + Animal Hospital

Yo La Tengo, Phoenix, October 2

epic songs from new
record really come into
focus for first time


Beirut, Horseshoe, October 4

transcendence cannot
be forced, although the trying
is enjoyable


And then there’s the one-man band Animal Hospital, the opening opening act at the Beirut show, which stymies the haiku format. They were (he was) totally new to me, but impressed me enough that I bought the self-titled CD. Reminded me of Canadian acts like Glissandro 70 and Final Fantasy, with the looping repetition of easy-on-the-ears musical phrases complicated by waves of light noise and structural trauma – at times ambient & minimal, at times confrontational. He only did a very short set, but it all worked surprisingly well in a live setting, and the record is worth checking out too.

• Animal Hospital, “Para Larva”

The other opening band for Beirut was the local Saffron Sect, and while they were utterly, shamelessly derivative – a little Byrds, a lot of old-style Britfolk – they were lots of fun, too, at least at times. (No less derivative than the wave of neo-garage bands, I suppose; it’s just that the derivations seem so much more dated.) The singer was a ringer for Roger McGuinn, and they used a lot of flute, a little too much even for me, and I’m a big supporter of flute use. I felt no need to buy the record (just as I feel no need to have the neo-garage bands in my life), but you can learn more about them here.

I’ll refrain from commenting on why? (the Yo La Tengo opener, which I’d never heard of before the show), because although I liked them enough I was talking to friends & wasn’t paying them much attention. Happens.

Rocktober

So my Popstrology song – the song that was #1 on the charts the week I was born and therefore has apparently determined my temperament & the course of my life in many hidden ways – is the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” That’s pretty cool; I can live with that. I hated “Hey Jude” for a long time, but grew to love it a few years ago, during my most recent Beatles obsession (they come back every once in a while, like a recurring illness). The song would be nothing without that long coda, of course, which is also true of another classic rock anthem, Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla.” To continue with the biomedical motif, the codas in both cases are a kind of infestation that quickly becomes more vibrant & virile than the host body.

However.

If I’m going to read anything into the alignment of the musical stars at the time of my birth, I’d much rather celebrate the fact that on the day I was born the Velvet Underground rolled into one of their regular Cleveland haunts, just a few hours from where I was squalling and kicking, and rocked.

Evidence survives.

• The Velvet Underground, “Foggy Notion” (live at La Cave, Cleveland, October 1968)

I would even like to think that some of these fellows were in the audience that night. There is no evidence for it that I know of, but on the other hand it’s not unlikely or implausible either.

• Rocket from the Tombs, “Foggy Notion” (live at Piccadilly Inn, Cleveland, July 1975)

(Jeez, I think the Rockets’ version is the first song I’ve posted here twice. Oh, well. Buy the Velvets box set Peel Slowly and See here and The Day the Earth Met the Rocket from the Tombs here.)

Toronto Fog

There is very little for me to add about the Toronto Nuit Blanche festivities – which have been well documented – except to say that it was a super-fun evening lit up with flashes of adventure and fellowship. True, many of the individual pieces were so-so, but my expectations were pretty low, and anyway no expert on visual or conceptual art am I. This, to me, was one of those rare cases where the line “It isn’t really about the quality of the work, it’s about the experience” actually rang true.

I only stayed out until 1 a.m. – not very hardcore, I know, but my feet were tired – and thus I do have some inevitable regrets. I missed all of Zone C, for instance, and also I wish I’d hung around this thing for an hour or two instead of just a few minutes, listening to the ambient noise that the musicians were generating, which I was really, really digging. More on that here.

My favourite thing was the “fog sculpture,” which was most people’s favourite thing. A simple idea, really – a few fog-generating machines hissing away in a park – but the actual sensory experience of it was unpredictable & dramatic. (As opposed to some pieces, like this one: I’d argue that there’s very little difference between actually seeing this & just having it described to you in 10 seconds.)

And so:

• Mercury Rev, “Nite and Fog”

Was thinking about Mercury Rev lately after reading this review. I love the first four Rev records dearly, especially Boces and Deserter’s Songs, and I’m curious to check out a couple rarities that I don’t have on this new comp. But I must say, after Deserter’s the band kind of lost the plot for me. The two albums since then just seem bombastic & so damn plodding, the string arrangements gloopy & boggy. There was some pretension on the earlier records, sure, but I swear the band used to sound fleeter of foot somehow.

Still, there are exceptions. I like “In a Funny Way” a lot. And “Nite and Fog” has a nice melody and is also, well, uncannily relevant to the Nuit Blanche theme.

If you must, you can buy All Is Dream, which has “Nite and Fog,” here. But really you’d be better off with Boces or Deserter’s Songs.

And here’s a lovely Rev rarity; I believe it’s an outtake from See You on the Other Side.

• Mercury Rev, “Cartwheel”