Bury Me Not

That bird is a bat

2008-02-13T21:50:00.003-06:00

One night in the fall of 1993, I came home late after drinking with friends. Home was a shared house that I had only just moved into that day or maybe the day before, and I’m pretty sure I was the only one there that night – most of my roommates hadn’t even moved in yet.

I was puttering around in my room and close to crashing when I noticed a shadowy motion just off to the side, at about eye level. Good God, I thought, is there a bird in here? Oh, man – that’s a bat.

I leapt out of my room and shut the door. Reckoning that I’d trapped the little beast in there, I decided to ~~hide under some coats~~ have a bowl of cereal while, um, figuring out what to do about the bat. (I’ve been a late-night cereal-eater all my life.)

So I was standing in the kitchen, munching Shreddies, when I heard a disturbance in the air out in the living room. I leaned my head in. There it was again, that fluttering shadow, and Jesus, now it was coming right at me.

Propelled by nothing more than a base instinct to put something between me and the bat (OK, we can probably simplify all that as “mindless fear”), I abandoned my Shreddies and made it back into my room, pushed the door shut, leaned against it, panting. Reality seemed to be sliding around on me. Hadn’t I shut the door before? How the hell did it get out there? Were there two of them?

While I paced for a few seconds, I could hear the thing flapping around out there in the living room with what sounded like increasing vehemence, and the whooshing started to mix in with strange knocking sounds. Was it bumping up against the door? Then there was silence, and then a flurry of low bumping and rustling, and then I watched the bat crawl under the door and rise up and come at me.

The next hour or so resembled a French farce, but with a foul-faced flying rodent instead of an ingénue in a nightgown. Doors were slammed; rooms were fled from and returned to; corners were peered around apprehensively. It all ended with me barricaded inside my room, still-packed boxes shoved flush against the bottom of the door, a towel stuffed into the seam at the top. Every light in my room blazed. I fell asleep on my futon, fully clothed, still a little drunk, clutching a plunger in an outstretched arm.

Mahjongg, “Those Birds Are Bats”

Mahjongg (great name) are new to me; they’re on good old K Records and they’re apparently from Missouri. This song is pretty atypical of Kontpab (bad name), the album it sits on, most of which has a chunky electro vibe that vibrates back & forth between hypnotic polyrhythms and grooveless clatter.

But “Those Birds Are Bats” (great title) is more like No Age or Times New Viking in its MO: galloping, tuneful exuberance shrouded in a haze of hiss. (The shrouding presumably serves the strategic purpose of giving the track a more evocative, mysterious patina than just some regular old pop song. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – hey, it works.)

You can buy the album here and it appears that for now, at least, you can stream the whole thing here.

Trip, Wind, Dude

2008-02-10T23:23:00.003-06:00

As an evocation of the partly trancelike and partly nerve-churning properties of an hourlong back-country drive through sideways snow & occasional whiteout & bullying, shrieking winds, this one by Black Dice is pretty good. Probably wasn’t intended that way, but still.

Black Dice, “Trip Dude Delay” (buy Miles of Smiles here)

Characters and words

2008-02-10T23:07:00.000-06:00

From Thomas Jones’ review of James Woods’ How Fiction Works (which is new in the U.K, forthcoming in North America):

Characters, as well as readers, are surely entitled to perceptions, thoughts and feelings that they are unable to put into words. But because words are the medium of fiction, the writer uses the best words available to him to convey to the reader the character's state of mind.

As Henry James put it in the Preface to the New York Edition of What Maisie Knew, a novel Wood singles out for praise: 'Small children have many more perceptions than they have terms to translate them; their vision is at any moment much richer, their apprehension even constantly stronger, than their prompt, their at all producible, vocabulary.'

The most powerful siren song

2008-02-03T20:02:00.000-06:00

Deborah Eisenberg, in an interview in Tin House #34:

For a long time when I’m working on something, I can’t look at what my hand has produced the day or week or month before, because it’s just hideously phony. You’d think that phoniness would be something that’s achieved with work – that the natural would precede the artificial – but it’s actually the opposite for most writers, I think. There are famous exceptions, of course. But generally, unphoniness is what you achieve with work. The first impulse is always a cliché, or something that’s inaccurate. It’s a kind of inaccuracy that is the most powerful siren song, because although it’s very difficult even to approximate something it is actually possible. And you’re so proud of yourself for having approximated it, you think, Well, that’s pretty good.

I love LA!

2008-02-03T09:30:00.000-06:00

My favourite songs so far of this young year are Erykah Badu’s “The Healer” (produced by Madlib), Xiu Xiu’s cover of “Under Pressure” (with Michael Gira), and this thing by Sarah Silverman (with special guest).

We don’t know how, we don’t know when

2008-02-01T15:17:00.001-06:00

Scout Niblett, “Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death” (buy I Am here)

Doesn’t get much simpler than this – a ragged drumbeat, a melodic warble, a couple tiny scraps of lyric about Death. I’m ready to ride it straight into the ground, a mile down to some spooky damp cavern half-lit by green-glowing moss.

Jens Lekman covers the song for a comp for his label, and he does the death masque as a ballroom promenade – puts his suave croon out front, dresses up the tune all pretty, the backbeat a syncopated wiggle, the keyboards blowing bubbles. There’s even a choir in there. Not that I don’t like it – I do – but there’s something more inviting about the cold comfort of the original, the green moss against the rock in the dark.

Jens Lekman, “Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death” (buy SC100 here)

Black ants & space months

2008-01-20T10:27:00.001-06:00

I was really big on Stereolab at first: loved the thick keyboard whooshes, the autobahn rhythms, the blend of disparate collector-geek influences into one purposeful sound. Was all over their first few records, saw them live a couple times and dug them, etc. And then I basically lost interest. In their struggle to differentiate one album from the next, they seemed to get lighter & lighter, more abstracted, fussier. (Plus I figured I’d heard enough ba-ba-ba.) There just didn’t seem to be much need to check out Latest Stereolab Album X instead of sticking with the ones I already had.

Recently, though, I watched a documentary about Robert Moog that included some live Stereolab footage, and that revived some of my long-ago excitement. Lately I’ve been digging out some of their more “recent” stuff (by which I mean from over the past decade or so), wondering how much I’ve missed out.

Still listening & still deciding – I think I’m a long way away from being a full-on convert or anything – but a couple tracks that have jumped out so far are the two openers on their 2001 record, Sound-Dust. “Black Ants” is a little snatch of a song, and it could easily & perhaps fairly be dismissed as sci-fi kitsch, but to me it has a genuinely unsettling vibe that you don’t hear much in Stereolab. “Space Moth” is a multiparter: I find the intro spindly & skippable and the middle section solid if unspectacular. But things really get going a little past the five-minute mark, when the bass discovers some swing and the horns chip in with some accents.

Stereolab, “Black Ants in Sound-Dust” and “Space Moth” (buy Sound-Dust here)

Spill all over you

2008-01-13T22:01:00.000-06:00

The Field, “A Paw in the Face” (buy From Here We Go Sublime here)

I was late getting onto this album by The Field, aka Axel Willner, a man from Sweden. Had I been less late, the record would have been a strong contender for my top-of-the-year list a few weeks back.

Like a lot of electronica, this stuff hypnotizes via pattern repetition. But in this track especially, the patterns vary subtly from bar to bar, and the variations are almost predictable but just off-schedule enough to be tantalizing. Here and throughout the record, rapid successions of discrete notes, from registers higher and lower, blend into a gestalt that’s contemplative, even soothing. More than others of its ilk (said the dilettante), “A Paw in the Face” evokes Reich & Riley and still holds up itself.

His Name Is Alive, “Write My Name in the Groove” (buy Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth here)

From a 2001 album that I just got into, in which the jazz- and gospel-loving art rockers tackle the contemporary R&B ballad. (Not just with this song – pretty much over the whole album, though there are also a couple of more oldtimey Billie Holiday homages.) I love this song, mostly because that lovely melody in the title lyric calls to mind TLC, which is a shortcut to my heart. The singer sells it well, and that’s some real nice drum work, too.

The album has a few other great things – including a torchy ballad called “Are We Still Married” – but you could argue that overall, it’s a little too dry & reverent for its own good.

Dreiserama

2008-01-08T21:58:00.000-06:00

As you read “The Bulwark” (Doubleday), Theodore Dreiser’s posthumous novel, you go through all the familiar experience of first groaning over the commonplace characters and the shoddy clichés of the style, then gradually finding yourself won by the candor and humanity of the author, then finally being moved by a powerful dramatic pathos which Dreiser has somehow built up.

– Edmund Wilson, as found in Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s

I don’t know The Bulwark, but that pretty much captures the Dreiser I have read.

The olfactory sense is the sense that most strongly evokes memories of the past

2008-01-06T20:34:00.000-06:00

Sparks, “Perfume” (buy Hello Young Lovers here)

I don’t know much about Sparks, so when S started playing this one a lot – and as its genius quickly overcame my disinterest in the band – I assumed it was some gem from deep in their back catalogue, the era of “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us” or something. Turns out it’s from a 2006 (!) album, but I don’t feel too eggfaced. Lyrically the song has a fashion motif, with brand-name-dropping to boot, but musically it sure doesn’t chase any current vogue. In this age of mountain-man beards or armored glint, Sparks come to the party in black tie.

The song’s cheerfully opportunistic, though – some rawk guitar here, a limpid music-roll piano line there, strings when needed, a spoken-word bridge when needed. (Well, a spoken-word bridge might never be needed, but it’s usually fun.) The disparate elements form a whole that’s perfectly seamless, and that’s because of two things: those impossibly debonair vocals and the simple, insistent forward motion of the rhythm section.

(I was also surprised to learn that the brothers in Sparks were L.A. boys originally, so deeply had I associated them with England. Clearly I have much to learn.)

I drank the wine they had left on my table

2008-01-05T11:19:00.000-06:00

The Saints, “Just Like Fire Would” (buy All Fools Day here)

In which a band previously most noted for punk anthems (and previously discussed in this space by Gary Butler) goes for a slightly more reflective sound. I always imagine Chris Bailey singing this one from the corner of a trashed hotel suite, the air stale & foul, empty bottles clanking as he stirs. As if he’s always wanted to be a classic rock & roller, a god of arenas, a wearer of big scarves & round sunglasses & tight pants, a champion of debauch. His bleary vocals are a little at odds with the arrangement’s more fussy touches, like the strings and the horn line, but still, it all sounds suitably weary & decadent. And yet uplifting, too.

Truth and consequences

2008-01-05T10:34:00.000-06:00

Although my own reading tends to favour fiction over non-, one pet peeve I’ve always had is the notion – usually put forth by novelists – that made-up stories offer access to some kind of “greater truth,” one that’s missing from mere reportage. Sure, fiction can be more vivid, more compelling, more satisfying than real life – but to claim some inside track on “the truth” is nothing more than presumptuous self-flattery.

So I was gratified to read Mark Bowden’s recent Atlantic Monthly article on The Wire, the streets-of-Baltimore TV show created by former newspaper reporter David Simon. At one point, Bowden writes:

Every reporter knows the sensation of having a story “ruined” by some new and surprising piece of information. Just when you think you have the thing figured out, you learn something that shatters your carefully wrought vision. Being surprised is the essence of good reporting. But it’s also the moment when a dishonest writer is tempted to fudge, for the sake of commercial success—and a more honest writer like Simon, whose passion is political and personal, is tempted to shift his energies to fiction.

Which is precisely what he’s done. Simon is the reporter who knows enough about Baltimore to have his story all figured out, but instead of risking the coherence of his vision by doing what reporters do, heading back out day after day to observe, to ask more questions, to take more notes, he has stopped reporting and started inventing. He says, I have figured this thing out. He offers up his undisturbed vision, leaving out the things that don’t fit, adding things that emphasize its fundamentals, and then using the trappings of realism to dress it up and bring it to life onscreen.

The essential difference between writing nonfiction and writing fiction is that the artist owns his vision, while the journalist can never really claim one, or at least not a complete one—because the real world is infinitely complex and ever changing. Art frees you from the infuriating unfinishedness of the real world. For this reason, the very clarity of well-wrought fiction can sometimes make it feel more real than reality. As a film producer once told me, “It’s important not to let the facts get in the way of the truth.”

Fiction can explain things that journalism cannot. It allows you to enter the lives and motivations of characters with far more intimacy than is typically possible in nonfiction. In the case of The Wire, fiction allows you to wander around inside a violent, criminal subculture, and inside an entrenched official bureaucracy, in a way that most reporters can only dream about. And it frees you from concerns about libel and cruelty. It frees you to be unfair.

This is so well put and convincing that it almost seems as if Bowden is arguing that reading/writing fiction is flat-out morally inferior. I certainly don’t believe that, and I don’t think he’s trying to say it, either. But it is worth keeping in mind that although fiction offers us many wonderful things, it has no monopoly on insight into the world, and that the authority it claims is an illusion.

An illusion we accept willingly and eagerly, of course. I still think The Wire has all kinds of insight into the world and that it’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen on a screen. The fifth and final season, which focuses on the newsroom of a Baltimore newspaper, kicks off tomorrow night, and since I have no cable and will be seeing it at some undefined future point, I’m writhing impatiently.

What a job, what a job

2007-12-18T00:20:00.000-06:00

And now, because nobody demanded it, a bunch of my fave singles/songs of the year. In more or less random order. Notes when I feel like it. And now I’m going to check out some of the other year-end lists for word on all the great stuff out there that I’m undoubtedly behind on.

A couple notes: (1) I won’t bother repeating any songs from my list of fave albums, even though every one of those should by rights have one or more songs here. (2) There will be no “Umbrella” on this list. I do love the girl R&B stuff, but I really don’t get this Rihanna thing. Some cool beats here & there, but for me her vocals just flatten & dull everything.

Anyway:

Devin the Dude with Andre 3000 & Snoop Dogg, “What a Job”
Man, this one has me hooked. Maybe the order isn’t totally random.

The Cave Singers, “Seeds of Night”
I came to this one late in the year, and thanks only to S, but this would also be a strong #1 of 2007 candidate.

CocoRosie, “Rainbowarriors”
Sappy fer sure, but it works for me.

Lavender Diamond, “Open Your Heart”
I know they’re American, but it sounds like some great lost Britpop, sun glinting through raindrops.

Feist, “1 2 3 4” and “I Feel It All”
At least half of the album puts me to sleep, but I absolutely love these two, and even overplay and iPod commercials haven’t killed them. Yet.

Caribou, “Melody Day” and Miracle Fortress, “Have You Seen in Your Dreams”
I could swear each of these quotes fleetingly from other Canadian songs – the Hidden Cameras’ “Ban Marriage” and the Stars’ “Elevator Love Letter,” respectively. But each one is its own compelling thing too.

Bishop Allen, “clickclickclickclick” and Page France, “Here’s a Telephone”
Saw both of them live this year. The Bishop Allen show in particular was one of the more enjoyable concert experiences I had in 2007.

Eve, “Tambourine” and Lil Mama, “Lip Gloss”
This is the girl R&B I like.

Kanye West, “Stronger” and Pharoahe Monch, “Body Baby”
I don’t think I dig the Pharoahe Monch song just because of the conventional rock & roll trappings – I think it’s just because of its ferocious energy.

Grinderman, “No Pussy Blues”
I like Nick Cave best when he’s funny. Well, he’s always kind of funny. But I like him best when he’s this kind of funny. Like that really long song from a couple albums back, “Babe I’m on Fire.”

Springsteen, “Radio Nowhere”
Liked the single a lot – it wasn’t reinventing rock and roll or anything, but it sure didn’t sound like typical E Street Band stuff. Then I listened to the album a couple times, and it sounded like pretty typical E Street Band stuff.

Matthew Dear, “Pom Pom”
Pneumatic.

Devendra Banhart, “Lover”
Funk it up, Devendra!

Of Montreal, “The Past Is a Grotesque Animal”
Couple other songs on the album could be on this list too, but the Krautrock vibe puts it over.

Eluvium, “Amreik”
On repeated listens, the album got a bit too dinner-classics for me. But this one still gets me.

The Shout Out Louds, “Tonight I Have to Leave It”
Or “In Between Fridays I’m in Love Just Like Heaven.”

Round up the usual suspects

2007-12-16T19:56:00.000-06:00

Since everyone else is doing it (OK, almost everyone), here are my fave albums of the year, and I’ll even throw in a few mp3s. These are alphabetical by artist. Later I’ll try to do a singles/songs list too.

Black Moth Super Rainbow, Dandelion Gum
Some genius stuff here, really energetic & creative. Although it’s recorded fairly cleanly, with each sound element discrete & identifiable, to me it still sounds almost oppressively fecund, like some teeming dusky jungle. But once you’re in you don’t want to come out.

Coltrane Motion, Songs About Music
Wrote about it here.

Holy Fuck, LP
Plus their self-titled EP from early this year, which was mostly rendered obsolete by this new full-length.

LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver
Not to mention the various alternate-version B-sides and the rereleased also-very-cool 45:33.

M.I.A., Kala

Plants and Animals, with/avec
Can an EP be on my album list? Sure. Wrote about it here. Looking forward to the full-length.

Spoon, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
While it’s obviously highly enjoyable, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga at first seemed a tad disposable. But it really came into focus a few months in; the little strangenesses reward close listening, while the pop and funk affectations make Spoon more purely pleasurable than most of their contemporaries. If this were, er, a ranked list, this one would be at or near the top.

Times New Viking Present the Paisley Reich
Here and here.

Vampire Weekend, “blue CDR” demos
Here. Saw them live a few months ago and again last week and was struck by the difference in crowd size. The buzz is building, I guess. Accordingly, the second time they seemed more confident, and they duly withheld “Oxford Comma” (the “hit”) until the end of the set proper. But dudes, if you’re going to be touring a lot, you gotta have some more songs. Learn some covers or something! (I never fully trust a band that never does any covers. But that’s my baggage.)

White Rainbow, Prism of Eternal Now
The latter ambient-roomtone tracks are perhaps a bit too minimal for my taste, but the stoner jams more than make up for them.

Among those bubbling under are records by Shocking Pinks, Deerhunter, Burial, Oh No, Tinariwen, and lots of others. Also it was great to see new reissues of Pylon’s Gyrate and Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On. And a new Savage Republic that I only found out about recently and have not even gotten to yet. And I’m looking forward to checking out Miles Davis’s Complete On the Corner Sessions in the hopefully not-too-distant future.

Black Moth Super Rainbow, “When the Sun Grows on Your Tongue” (buy here)
Holy Fuck, “Frenchy’s” (buy here)
White Rainbow, “Mystic Prism” (buy here)

The mud above and the stars below

2007-12-15T11:49:00.000-06:00

In a bookstore last night they were playing Tom Verlaine’s first solo album in its entirety, which was making me happy indeed. This song in particular is on my Anywhere Anytime list.*

Tom Verlaine, “Red Leaves” (buy here)

Great guitar work, which is to be expected – the steady chug in the left channel alongside the jazzier flecks in the right. And the chorus, while pretty minimal, is still damn pleasurable. I’d argue that the background coo helps out disproportionately, but then I tend to like background coos disproportionately. The shameless rock-star tricks at the end – the key change and then the double-time drumming – also work on me like sugar.

Man, I’ve just listened to this like 10 times in a row. You should too.

* (It’s true, and it’s a real list. On my iPod. Called “Anywhere Anytime.”)

The Mist

2007-11-29T15:39:00.000-06:00

(HERE BE SPOILERS, BIG SPOILERS)

I’m not sure what I finally think of The Mist, Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novella. Its premise is pure B-movie: a bunch of folks are holed up in a small-town supermarket as an otherworldly mist – one filled with ugly, terrifying, and very deadly creatures – creeps across the world. Sounds damn good to me, and I liked the King novella a lot when I read it many, many years ago. The movie, though, has some great stuff and some really not-good stuff.

The setup is strong, and it leads to some brilliantly horrific scenes, like one in a darkened pharmacy overrun by – well, overrun by things you don’t want to run into. There’s also a great bit when several characters are trapped in a car and some barely-seen behemoth stomps by; Darabont captures not just terror, but convincing strains of awe and wonder, and at times like that the film is almost Spielbergian.

Almost. As soon as that thought bubbled up in the theatre, I became keenly aware that Spielberg would be doing this with much more visual style.

(One side note. While the film is remarkably faithful to King’s novella, I do give Darabont points for one very wise change. In the novella but not the film, the male and female leads have a quick hookup. I guess there’s no sex like Trapped in a Supermarket by Giant Bugs from Another Dimension sex.)

On the downside, you have to sit through a lot of clunky dialogue – most of it lifted directly from King, from what I remember – and some ridiculous hammery from Marcia Gay Harden, playing the supermarket’s resident religious loonie. Seriously, they should take away her Oscar for this one. Holy shit.

You also have to endure some half-hearted attempts to dress up the pulp thrills with thematic resonance, such as in a painfully expository scene in which the characters discuss the thin facade of civilization that masks humankind’s essential savagery.

Just to be clear, I’m not complaining that The Mist actually has some ambitions – I’m all for thematic resonance, even for pulp thrills. It’s the half-heartedness I object to: if King/Darabont really want to say something, surely they could say something that hasn’t already been said, and more eloquently, a hundred times?

For example, one angle that seemed underexploited to me was that the mist forces the characters to engage with nature – even a gruesome burlesque of nature – in a way that almost nobody has to any more. Which could have led to a more nuanced exploration of what place values and meaning have in a purely “natural” world that runs on the laws of the jungle. The humans wonder what the mist means – hence the religious loonie’s prominence in the plot – and what their own lives mean in a mistified world. But the giant spiders that prowl around out there don’t think about what it all means – they just want to eat something and avoid getting eaten by something else.

And then there’s the ending, which was radically reworked along the journey from text to film and which is, as everyone agrees, a holy-fuck moment. Let’s just say that a small band of weary survivors runs out of gas – literally – and makes a very dramatic decision about what to do with themselves. But if they had just held on for five more minutes….

I’m pretty sure the King novella ends on the word hope (it’s amazing what you remember of something you read when you were 16), and the necessity of keeping on keeping on is one of its main themes. I suppose the movie’s ending offers the same message – but this time delivered as a very stern lecture.

I consider myself more or less an atheist at this point in my life. Nathan points out here that faith in a guiding almighty is not a matter of choice, that you don’t choose whether or not to believe, and I wholeheartedly agree, since I would love to believe but can’t seem to any more. And that’s not because the world is a horrible place or evil goes unpunished or any of that stuff. There are no reasons per se. I just look around in my, er, soul for belief and find none.

OK, getting off track, sorry about that. So: I consider myself more or less an atheist at this point in my life. But one holdover of my Catholic upbringing is a gut superstition that it is not your place to decide when your time is up. That is decided for you.

That said, the controversial decision made by the characters late in the film still seems like an eminently reasonable one to me. And I really don’t know what Darabont was trying to get at by immediately (immediately!) showing us that it was the wrong decision. Was he trying to send a choose-life message? Or did he just consider it a sardonic O. Henry/Twilight Zone twist, albeit an exceptionally cruel one? Me, I was just left scratching my head; the ending didn’t so much tilt the movie’s tone as obliterate it, leaving nothing but empty bafflement.

(Finally, on a lighter note, one thing has always totally undermined King’s novella for me, and likewise this movie: I almost laughed out loud every time the word “mist” was used. “There’s something in the mist!” “I’d like to know more about this mist.” “We have to try and get out of the mist!” Bear in mind that the “mist” in question is a classic pea-souper that covers everything and allows no visibility for more than a couple of feet. So what human would look at it and call it anything but “fog”? However, no one in the novella/movie is allowed to use the f-word at all – because John Carpenter already had dibs on “The Fog.”)

Flowers & organs & plants & animals

2007-11-22T20:45:00.000-06:00

Plants and Animals, “Guru/Sinnerman” (buy digitally here)

This has jam-band trappings, I suppose, but it just sounds like great jazz to me. The repeating vamp/pulse of the bassline holds things steady while guitars & bongos orbit in crazy looping flares. And then, holy bonus, it morphs into “Sinnerman”! No one can do it like Nina Simone, but still, I’m usually inclined to be charitable with other versions – God bless ’em for trying and all that. This one holds up nicely; I like the distended phrasing on the vocals. (The whole thing also reminds me very much of Hendrix’s “Third Stone from the Sun,” another song I dearly love.)

Plants and Animals are apparently from Montreal, and this is from a four-song EP called with/avec that’s definitely worth seeking out. One song, “Who’s Lola?” comes off like a veritable mini-suite a la The Who 1967. Another one, “Faerie Dance,” is beguilingly pretty, and I have to give them props for having the stones to call a song “Faerie Dance” without, well, being Marc Bolan.

What with/avec also really reminds me of is this:

Six Organs of Admittance, “School of the Flower” (buy here)

See what I mean? The arpeggiated little guitar riff maintains coherence the same way the bassline does in “Guru/Sinnerman,” allowing everything else to twist & howl at will and setting up great furnace-roar electric guitar work.

School of the Flower was probably my fave album of whatever that year was – 2005, I guess. Alas, I find the two Six Organs records since, including the brand-new one, pleasant enough but not that interesting or inviting. To my ears Flower had a sonic variety and a loose, associative quality that they haven’t recaptured; the stuff since then seems dry and schematic in comparison. In fact, it’s with/avec that sounds like the Six Organs album I’ve been waiting on for a couple years.

The hum is coming from H.E.R.

2007-11-21T20:00:00.000-06:00

I’ve always dug what I’ve heard of the band Birdbrain – jittery horn-based rhythms being welcome in my life – so I checked out with interest this new band H.E.R., which contains two Birdbrain overlaps, singer Yvette Perez and trombonist Peter Zummo. (His Zummo with an X CD has been a mainstay on my stereo over the past year as well.)

The H.E.R. album is called Songs About the Mysteries of Housework and Nature, so clearly there are thematic ambitions here. I will leave it to other listeners to discuss those, save to say that the record conveys a distinct & effective atmosphere of anxiety.

Musically, it’s slower in tempo than the Birdbrain stuff I’ve heard, more contemplative, though still with an uneasy roil. Some of the tracks are, frankly, a little ethereal and chilly for my taste. But on others the tonal interplay of the vocals, trombone, and keyboards is fascinating – all those elements sinking into & rising up out of each other like shifting, sucking waves of quicksand. Looks calm and nearly motionless from afar but up close it’s dangerous. You lean over to listen closer and then you’re sinking too.

H.E.R., “Unruly Place” (buy here)

Plus two related listens, one short and one long:

Birdbrain, “Sea Cow” (buy I Fly here)

Peter Zummo, “Sung, Played, Heard” (buy Experimenting with Household Chemicals here)

Now we’re dreaming

2007-11-20T22:20:00.000-06:00

Masonic, “Way Gone By”

I like this one because although it starts out pretty straight – skating-rink organ, Beach Boys sighs in the background – the band seems to get bored, stops to take stock at around the 1:30 mark. They resume cautiously, stepping slow, and then at 2:06 some unseen pair of hands picks up the song and gives it a shake, and they all slide around and try to right themselves, the drummer coming down hard, the keyboardist and the guitar player rattled, the singer sitting down and dizzy but still singing.

It’s not crazy avant-garde or anything – it’s still very pretty & chirpy – but you know.

The album is Things I Am Guilty Of and I believe it officially comes out today. Band website here.

No Country for Old Men

2007-11-11T16:21:00.000-06:00

I haven’t felt much urgency about the Coen brothers for a few years: I thought The Man Who Wasn’t There and The Ladykillers were both duds (though I loved the gospel music in the latter), and I never even got around to seeing Intolerable Differences. But I was still excited about No Country for Old Men; I haven’t read the Cormac McCarthy novel, but from what I knew of it, it seemed like just the kind of thing the Coens could work well with.

Well, now I’ve seen the movie, and (a) I loved it, (b) I already want to see it again, and (c) I still suspect that it was a failure. Only the Coens can make me feel this way. The first time I saw The Big Lebowski I thought it was a mess; only on subsequent viewings did I come to see it as a masterwork. And I still flip-flop on Barton Fink; sometimes I think it’s tedious, sometimes I think it’s top-shelf Coens.

(MAJOR SPOILERS RE NO COUNTRY AHEAD)

No Country for Old Men takes place in 1980. Llewelyn (Josh Brolin), an underemployed welder, is out hunting in the Texas desert and comes across a fresh massacre – dead drug dealers, a truck full of their merchandise, and a satchel stuffed with $2-million. Being an inscrutable, morally ambiguous, old-school tough guy, he of course takes the money and runs, and soon enough Mexican drug dealers, an American fixer, and the local sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) are all after him. So is a patient, slow-moving, dead-eyed psycho named Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who, it’s established early on, would just as soon kill you as look at you. Ostensibly working for a druglord, Chigurh soon goes renegade and pursues the money for himself, though it’s hard to imagine what use he has for it, since he’s presented from start to finish as essentially an inhuman bogeyman.

Whatever problems anyone might have with the movie, I don’t think you can dispute that this is bravura filmmaking. The wide shots of Texas scrubland are beautiful and nerve-wracking. The pacing is genius, with contemplative stretches taut with tension and then suddenly lit by flares of violence. And during some of the suspense scenes – the best are the ones in which Chigurh stalks Llewelyn in various motels – the editing/storyboarding plays us expertly without pandering.

The movie also benefits from a certain hammy sensibility that McCarthy and the Coens apparently share. This is evident in dialogue that’s often pure cornpone: “Where’d you get that?” asks Llewelyn’s wife when she sees the money satchel. “At the getting place,” he replies. And when the sheriff’s deputy describes a crime scene as a mess, the sheriff says, “If it ain’t, it’ll do until the real mess gets here.” Also shamelessly theatrical is Chigurh’s weapon of choice: a compressed-air-powered cattle-killing machine that’s good for blowing off door locks and punching holes in human skulls. These little corny touches are cool with me; they all somehow work within the universe the movie creates for itself.

And there’s nothing hammy about the photography or direction: as the chase continues and the bodies pile up, the camera registers it all with a careful, dispassionate gaze, observing and missing nothing. (Except for a snatch of mariachi music in a scene in Mexico, there’s not one note of music on the soundtrack until the closing credits.)

For me, the trouble starts in the last quarter of the movie, when the storytelling suddenly gets diffuse. Until now, the movie has shown you what’s happening with great patience and care, even if the meaning behind what’s happening isn’t always clear. But suddenly, major events are treated as afterthoughts, the pivotal character (Llewelyn) is unceremoniously dispensed with offscreen in a blink-and-you-miss-it moment, and it’s not always clear what’s even happening. I don’t mind elliptical, and I like movies that leave room for ambiguity, but it does seem like a jarring turn in a movie that’s been so methodical for its first 90 minutes.

Also in the last half-hour, the Tommy Lee Jones character is meant to emerge as the moral centre of a film that previously didn’t have one. But for me, at least, that doesn’t take – they haven’t done enough with him for his character to carry that weight. If anything, in his early scenes the sheriff seems complacent, albeit kindly and trustworthy. And even the meaty scenes Jones gets late in the film somehow don’t connect, or at least they didn’t for me.

Indeed, if they did, I suspect you wouldn’t have some critics complaining about the apparent nihilism in No Country for Old Men. I don’t buy that myself: the sheriff’s closing musings are clearly supposed to represent a howl at the meaninglessness and cruelty of the world. Switch tragedy for comedy, and it’s the flipside of the Cowboy’s speech at the end of The Big Lebowski about “the way the whole durned human comedy keeps on perpetuating itself.”

But if, as the movie moves toward its close, we’re supposed to start caring instead of just observing, why does the movie itself seem to care about its characters less?

On the other hand, it may be that that’s the real genius of No Country for Old Men: as we (theoretically) start to care, to move beyond being titillated and awaken our own sense of morality and wonder how it can possibly fit into this blood-soaked world the Coens are showing us, the camera itself suddenly gets queasy, turning away, unwilling to look on so coldly as Llewelyn meets his fate (and his wife meets hers).

Even if that was the aim, though, I’m still not convinced they pulled it off, again because of the failure of the sheriff character to resonate. But who knows – I still look forward to seeing it all again in the not-too-distant future.

I exist on the best terms I can

2007-10-27T18:11:00.000-05:00

I loved Joy Division in high school and I’ve gone back to their stuff intermittently ever since. For an adolescent, the mystique of Ian Curtis’s suicide at the age of 23 had a lot of appeal (less so these days, though I still find the whole package – music, lyrics, singing – very compelling). I suppose at first I assumed that Curtis was your typical Romantic figure, an aesthete who couldn’t look away from the darkness, who in the end was simply not built for this intolerable world.

Later, I learned that he actually had some very specific problems: worsening epilepsy and a love triangle that had him guiltily bouncing back and forth between his wife, Deborah (with whom he had an infant daughter), and a Belgian fan, Anik. Those problems are the dramatic basis of Control, Anton Corbijn’s new Curtis biopic, which I found totally enthralling.

I also loved the previous Joy Division-as-characters film, Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People, and found surprisingly little redundancy or overlap between the two movies. In the earlier one, you see Joy Division from the cheap seats, so to speak – the band are side players in the story of Factory Records owner Tony Wilson, so there seems to be little to their personalities beyond an aggressive ambition and a fondness for rock and roll decadence. I imagine that for unfamiliar viewers, Curtis’s suicide in the film must seem out-of-nowhere and baffling; after the death, the Tony Wilson character says something to the effect that “I want to make it clear that it wasn’t all doom and gloom with Ian.” But if you went into the film knowing nothing about him, it would never occur to you (until the contextless suicide) that there was any doom and gloom.

Which is cool with me – the movie is just one view of Curtis, one in which the suicide does not define the singer or the songs. It’s telling that 24 Hour Party People has a scene with the band onstage doing a pisstake of “Louie Louie,” but among the many musical numbers in Control there’s nothing so offhand or lighthearted.

Winterbottom’s view would seem to be the minority one, though – for most, any consideration of Joy Division’s records must be informed by the fate of Ian Curtis. And that seems to break down one of two ways. Either Curtis’s grim lyrics reflect something intrinsic about his sensibility, an innate existential ennui that made his suicide inevitable, or else they’re allegorical representations of the specific problems – the illness, the marriage – that eventually overwhelmed him.

There’s no question which side Control is on. The film begins with a voice-over of a few lines from “Heart and Soul” –

Existence, well what does it matter?
I exist on the best terms I can
The past is now part of my future
The present is well out of hand

– and proceeds to sketch the contours of Curtis’s life and then fill in the shading. The marriage, the band, the epilepsy, the affair are all established fairly economically, and then in the latter third of the film the confusion and pain of the love triangle are simply dwelled on, in one long scene after another. All in a tone of grimy everyday realism, filmed in black and white. (By which I don’t mean to imply, by the way, that the movie is anything but gorgeous to look at.) When Corbijn cuts from a scene of Deborah and Ian fighting to one of Joy Division playing “Isolation” (“I’m ashamed of the things I’ve been put through, I’m ashamed of the person I am”) while Anik watches with increasing fretfulness, the message is clear.

Which I don’t have a problem with. Control just tells Curtis’s story from another angle. If it doesn’t tell the whole story of what was going on inside his brain – as Simon Reynolds notes, it ignores his fascination with rock stars dying young, his implicit understanding that death can be a career move – it’s still a powerful and very sad experience.

(Despite its realistic tone, by the way, Control also genuflects to the Joy Division mythos several times. Winterbottom’s movie explicitly took the Liberty Valance approach – “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend” – but it’s worth noting that both Control and 24 Hour Party People take pains to show us that Curtis watched Werner Herzog’s film Stroszek before killing himself, which is apparently true, and both show Tony Wilson signing the band’s contract in his own blood, which is apparently not.)

Anyway, I suspect that many fans will claim to find Corbijn’s version of events “reductive” or something, simply because they find the idea that existential ennui was at the core of Curtis’s being too attractive or intriguing to give up. And there will be some fans who don’t really want to think about Curtis as a person at all. Take Chris Ott, who wrote a book about the Joy Division album Unknown Pleasures (and who’s becoming kind of a bête noire for me – see here – as I come across more of his ramblings). On his blog, Ott writes of Control:

It is a blithe, Christian film that affords an even more casual means to pity or mourn or pretend to empathize with Ian Curtis, and as such it buries him, once and for all. The grand myth he became, the figure Factory made him—that he in all likelihood wanted Factory to make him—is cheapened if not undone by this ordinary, linear treatment.

Yes, God forbid we should admit that there was actually a human being in there. At this point I’m gritting my teeth and reminding myself that name-calling is not productive.

Um, anyway.

I suggested that there are two ways to view Ian Curtis’s lyrics: as the expression of a tortured soul or of specific everyday problems. But there’s a third way, too: as a simple aesthetic pose.

After all, all kinds of bands both before and after Joy Division have purveyed dark imagery that didn’t necessarily reflect genuine inner torment. (Like, um, the entire Goth movement.) And we should remember too that said dark imagery is especially attractive to young people, and that Curtis was barely out of his teens, for God’s sake, when Joy Division got going.

You might argue that Curtis’s suicide automatically invalidates that interpretation. As Tony Wilson reportedly recalled:

I asked [Anik] “what do you think of the new album”, she goes “I’m terrified'” I said “what are you terrified of?”. She replies “Don’t you understand? He means it” and I go “no he doesn't mean it, it’s art.” And guess what, he fucking meant it.

But isn’t it possible that he didn’t mean it? That Closer was not a musical suicide note? That Curtis was an everyday life-loving bloke who simply had an adolescent’s infatuation with gloom and explored that in his art, and who – in a completely unrelated development – gave in to despair after his life started spiraling out of control? It’s admittedly hard to argue that “She’s Lost Control” and “Love Will Tear Us Apart” aren’t autobiographical in some way, but do “Isolation” and “Heart and Soul” have to be as well?

I should say that I’m playing devil’s advocate here – I actually highly doubt that Joy Division’s songs were completely unrelated to what was going on in Curtis’s mind. But I also want to say that I wouldn’t give a fuck if they were. You don’t need a suicide backstory to be unsettled and mesmerized by Unknown Pleasures and Closer. They’re powerful statements of modern industrial anxiety, which would be true even if Curtis had in fact retired to a civil service job in the suburbs and gardened for 25 years and raised throngs of children and grandchildren.

I’m also not saying that we should have no interest in Curtis himself. Control gives us one look at him, 24 Hour Party People another. Both are convincing, to me anyway, and undoubtedly neither tells the whole story. What could? But what I particularly appreciate is that neither movie treats him as a symbol or an icon; each of them reminds us that Ian Curtis was just a young guy from Manchester with some problems. Which is itself plenty enough of a “grand myth.”

***

Here are a couple bootleg classics. The first is from the unreleased “Warsaw” album (which has more raw energy than any of the official records, if not as much majesty or overall power) and the second is from a legendary show at the Paradiso in Amsterdam.

Joy Division, “Failures”
Joy Division, “Disorder” (live)

(Buy some official Joy Division stuff here.)

Over the transom

2007-09-16T12:29:00.000-05:00

Even a small-timer like me gets all kinds of unsolicited e-mails urging mp3s upon me, more than I can keep up with. Most of what gets sent ain’t my cuppa tea, but lately a few things that have crossed my desktop have also caught my ear.

Murder Mystery, “Love Astronaut”
Murder Mystery, “What My Baby Said”

The album is Are You Ready for the Heartache Cause Here It Comes and you can buy it here. The band is from NYC (info here), but to me this sounds like pure Midwestern power pop, openhearted & guileless.

Clarification: guileless in that they’re having fun and they’re just hoping you will too. But guileless doesn’t mean they’re not savvy. Boy, are they savvy. They know when to accentuate the drumbeat and add tambourine shakes, when to swivel the spotlight over to the bassline, when to bring in the female backing vocals and when to keep them down to one word per line. Mostly it’s about canny use of negative space.

Reminds me of a really good action movie (a rare rare bird, I know). You watch it and you see that they’re following certain conventions and you spot the tricks they’re using on you, but that doesn’t make the tricks any less pleasurable, just more so.

Oh, and at its best the record’s stratagems are supported by solid hooks. Don’t take my word for it.

Cagey House, “Alarm Decisions”
Cagey House, “Mrs. Otisphere”

Don’t know much about this outfit, but there’s some info here. These are from an album of short instrumental electronic pieces called Model City, and that sounds about right. Except for the occasional bass pulse or groan of reverb, there are no dark corners here: everything is disorientingly bright. As billed, it has kind of a noir feel, but it’s noir for the future, one of those visions of the future where the hallways are all pure white and everyone wears identical jumpsuits.

That sounds like I’m down on this, but I’m not at all. There’s a lot going on there musically, and I find it really compelling.

The Superfantastics, “Tonight Tonite”

This one especially has been on repeat in my heart lately. The Superfantastics are from Halifax and I’m curious to hear the album – which, I know, I know, has been out for months, just like this song.

The band name & song title suggest sugar rush, and sure, the elements of twee guitar pop are in place, but here they’re played understated. Everything chugs along in lockstep, softly crackling, tugging the diffident vocals along, and it sounds great, melancholy but not a downer.

And then there’s that great fakeout with the “happiest time of the year” line, which rises up all uplifting & makes me think of nothing so much as a McCartney or Lennon Xmas song. But then things drop again – “I don’t see anyone smiling” – and keep chugging along.

Oh, and props to the the guitar solo, too. I’ve always liked that particular sound, and that minimalist style.

I got no patience for anyone

2007-09-12T21:24:00.000-05:00

How about a double shot from our New Zealand friends tonight? The Tall Dwarfs song is shrill, rickety, practically twitching out of its own skin. The Chills one is hushed, smooth, like it has a warm duvet thrown over it. Both of them are premised on misanthropy, and who’s not down with that?

In “Wet Blanket,” though, the bile is really just a conceit, a hook on which to hang standard love-song pleas & laments: “I've got nothing to say to anyone, but we can really talk, us two.... You’re so so so beautiful, why aren’t you mine?” And the lonely listeners can still wrap themselves in the keyboard shimmer and the plump bass notes.

There’s not much comfort in “Nothing’s Going to Happen,” but there are thrills, and there’s a righteous, urgent irritation that belies the defeatism of the title. The singer dodges our gaze & spits at a world where children are cooped by the “clumsy dark oafs who train them.” (Those first three words are, of course, over-the-top insulting, but for me it’s the offhandedly disdainful verb “train” that really makes it.)

Tall Dwarfs, “Nothing’s Going to Happen” (buy the great Hello Cruel World here)
The Chills, “Wet Blanket” (buy the great Brave Words here)

You say you want a revolution

2007-09-03T12:12:00.000-05:00

From American Studies by Mark Merlis:

After the end of history, the workers would go to concert halls and listen to American tone poems with titles like The Corn-Husking. They would go home to nutritious meals – things made in a pressure cooker, to preserve the natural colors and save the vitamins. After dinner they would retire to living rooms furnished in blond wood, like Tom’s last ghastly apartment. There they might read a newspaper devoid of rape or gossip or publicity stunts. Or they might, if it was summer and still light, go out to the common space and play with the children – play some nonviolent, cooperative game like volleyball. At last they would go to bed and have intercourse with their odorless wives. Healthy and simple intercourse: as their lives were without frustrations, there would be nothing to be worked out, worked off, in bed. Nor in their dreams; what dreams would they need?

United 93 and the cowardly German

2007-08-11T13:19:00.000-05:00

The other day I finally saw Paul Greengrass’s United 93, the story of the passenegers who attacked the 9/11 hijackers in the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. (Sixteen months after it came out, I know, but hey, whatever you people come here for, it isn’t timeliness, is it?) I found the picture amazing: beautifully shot, gripping & harrowing, sensitive but not sentimental, sad & moving, etc. etc. Yep, it’s one of those movies that compels you to just throw adjectives at it.

But one thing really, really bothered me.

In the movie, several passengers spearhead the revolt against the hijackers: Todd Beamer, Jeremy Glick, Tom Burnett, flight attendant Sandy Bradshaw. This is all based on the public record, of course, as derived from cellphone calls made from within the plane before it crashed. The movie presents most of the other passengers as more passive participants or observers.

But one person in the film, a man with a clear German accent, repeatedly counsels the other passengers to co-operate with the hijackers instead of resisting. At one point, as the passengers are preparing to attack, the German panics and appears to try and warn the hijackers, before the Americans subdue him.

This was startling in the context of the movie, but the filmmakers had made so much public noise about their fidelity to what we know of the day’s events, and their sensitivity to the victims and their families, that I just assumed there must have been some factual basis for these scenes.

Nope.

There was indeed a German passenger on flight 93, Christian Adams, but there’s no indication whatsoever that he tried to undermine the passenger revolt.

I’m sorry, but WTF? This is gross and offensive on many levels.

I supose you could argue that it’s highly unlikely that all passengers were, ahem, on board with the plan to rise up and retake the plane. So dramatically, it would make sense to have one or more of them behaving as the Adams character did. But why would Paul Greengrass et al pick the flight’s only German to be their token coward?

There are really only two likely possibilities:

1. It’s an attempt at some kind of political resonance, using the German to subtly make the point that unlike the U.S., Europe has been lamentably slow to grasp the geopolitical realities of the post-9/11 age.

2. It’s simply safer. The film was made for an American audience, so if you’re going to suggest that one of the passengers was in fact less than heroic, make him one of the furriners.

Either of those rationales is pretty disgusting. Even more so when you consider that if the movie’s token coward had been one of the Americans, at least his indentity could have been slightly more “hidden.” But by making him instantly recognizable as Adams, Greengrass has completely smeared an actual person, with no basis for doing so. And this from a filmmaker who marched up and down for months proclaiming that the victims’ memories and their families were his primary concern. He didn’t specifically say the American victims, but I guess we now know that’s what he meant.

I gotta tell you, I’ve seen a lot of movies, and I can’t think of another case where such a relatively little thing has so completely soured an otherwise amazing film for me.