tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29902782724865553042024-02-19T16:23:13.662-08:00Imp of the PerverseAn orphanage for the obscure, the lost, and the downright unpopular in literature / music / cinema / whatever springs to mind... for readers / listeners / writers trying to chase the buzz you get from (better known) novelists & poets like - Jorge Luis Borges, Allen Ginsberg, Carson McCullers, Thomas Pynchon, WG Sebald, David Foster Wallace //
Musicians - Radiohead, Eno, Godspeed!, Low, Neu!, Jandek //
Film-makers - Almodovar, Kubrick, Lynch, Tarkovsky, Von TrierMichael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.comBlogger31125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2990278272486555304.post-71565127695427644692011-07-29T09:23:00.000-07:002011-07-29T09:31:01.303-07:00GRAPHIC NOVEL: Grant Morrison's lost masterpiece, Zenith (1986)[NB - This is an excerpt from a work in progress, in which GM occupies a longer sub-chapter, hence the abrupt opening here.]<br /><br /><br />The son of a socialist agitator and local hero, Grant Morrison was born in 1960, and grew up in Scotland with the mixed blessing that was an American submarine base nearby. For an activist, the nuclear-subs might be proof we were already living in Orwell’s “Airstrip One”, but the young Morrison couldn’t deny himself the pleasures of American culture that were sci-fi comics. In his recent history of the superhero genre (cum manifesto, cum autobiography), Morrison mocks his early imitations – hence the “space-Nazis” of the sub-heading – but his first great work was about just that. For the slow-witted, overly-credulous, or those who think their pets are telling them things, Morrison is always clear to make the distinction between events he chooses to find meaningful, and those we might dismiss or laugh off (as a defence against considering what a coincidence might be telling us, however trivial; that’s to say, what the part of our brain might be telling us, that it seized so readily on some chance configuration of events).<br /><br />In the early-80s, Morrison revived his adolescent space-Nazis as backstory for an allegory about the cynicism of the age, and the decline of the superhero genre. (If that makes the genre sound overly important, bear in mind Morrison understands it as a mirror of culture-wide fears and fantasies; it’s anything but mere entertainment for him, which means that its decline is in some sense, our decline.) “Zenith” himself was the son of two superheroes who acquired their powers during the Swinging Sixties, following various experiments to channel extra-dimensional beings into their bodies. Come the 80s, a real-life superhero had no higher ambition than to live like a vapid Yuppie, and use his powers (of flight, principally) to further a career in music. While the 1960s stage in Zenith’s backstory was mirrored in the “real-world” by US and Soviet experiments to create super-soldiers, the MK Ultra programme, and a long history of dosing troops with what we now think of as club-drugs (MDMA in WWI, LSD in Vietnam) a further stage was added in Morrison’s speculative history. Again, riffing on the Nazis well-documented mysticism, Morrison imagined the Ubermensch as a project hybridizing magic and science: creating the perfect human as a vessel for yet more powerful “dark gods” from a parallel dimension. <br /><br />Sadly, Zenith has become one of the great lost artefacts of late-20th century culture: out-of-print for years, like the second series of Twin Peaks, and simply because of legal wranglings. (If I was a little more paranoid, I’d say that’s how the Devil disguises himself these days: hiding inside faceless bureaucracy. Then again, it doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to say that the Forces of Conformity are literally at work when they tie up art in litigation…) <br /><br />What makes Morrison most interesting within the incestuous world of science-fiction (comics, novels, and films) is his candour about the procedures, contemporary relevance, and efficacy of ritual possession. Not how fun they are to pilfer, and put on the page for a sheen of mysticism, but how life-changing they can be to put into practice. As a prodigious young writer (employed at 18 by the local paper), Morrison had mastered the thousand tropes of myth, folklore, and science-fiction, but it was in his late-20s - after sketching himself a role-model in <i>Zenith</i> - that he became a practitioner. Call it “chaos magick”, or a fin-de-siecle update of much the same the occult gumbo practiced by Yeats, Bataille, and Breton, under the influence of Crowley, Madame Blavatsky, and Swedenborg. Morrison claimed to have broken the fourth wall, and that he and his characters were passing back and forth, possessing each other. But that's another story for another time...Michael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2990278272486555304.post-85597086415651885902011-07-26T08:08:00.001-07:002011-07-27T06:57:35.549-07:00The Psychedelic Furs, Book of Days (1989)For anyone born in the 80s or later (I’m a ’79-er myself), it’s possible you think of the Furs as an also-ran with an awful name. If you happen to know they were on a major label for their entire career, you’ll be even more surprised (or disappointed) to see one of their albums in this series. So what if an album by a major label band is out of print, and few (if any) songs from it appear on those compilations with the tacky names? Some soft-rock peddlers ran out of tunes five years after having a hit with “Pretty in Pink” (of all songs!) – who cares?<br /><br />More than most records I own – and I have a freakish memory for the circumstances in which I acquired most of them – <i>Book of Days</i> came into my possession in a most unlikely way. I was living in the neon-and-smog metropolis of Hong Kong, in the last year of Britain’s 99-year lease on the place, which makes me 16 and especially attuned to romantic despair. On the other side of the world, Britpop was peaking, but I was still months away from my first taste of clubbing in late-night expeditions to Camden, having snuck out of boarding school, which meant I was also months away from any kind of proximity to girls, under-age drinking, and waking up in strange places. <br /><br />One close, clinging day of drizzle and weak sun, I set off for a distant corner of Kowloon, aiming for the end of the line (that most portentous of places, on the map, but usually just a Croydon or Streatham, when you get there). In fact, I did find myself in an exceptionally Gothic-looking, industrial district of crumbling factories, broken windows, and pale skull-like faces staring from the gantries of factory windows, with loading-cranes overhead like a gallows’ arm. This being Hong Kong, former-industrial districts had no hope of being colonized by hipsters, or even being brightened up by graffiti, so I might as well have been in post-war Europe. This was where I found an old man sitting on the pavement, away from any other shops, or even stalls, selling vinyl-LPs out of an incredibly antiquated perambulator, with an umbrella perched over it (black and spiky as the Bat-sign). On the pavement itself were sun-bleached cassettes of Canto-Pop, and the records were 90% Chinese opera, but the three I found that weren’t 70s soft-rock (Bread, Mud, Rod Stewart) were: The Beatles’ Blue and Red albums, and the Psychedelic Furs’ <i>Book of Days</i>. <br /><br />Now. All I knew at the time was the Furs’ guitarist had taught Andrew Eldritch how to self-produce, back in their post-punk days. I was, in 1995, a massive fan of The Sisters of Mercy; happy to overlook echo-drenched vocals, and tinny drum-machines, for the sake of smart satirical lyrics from a druggy demi-monde, in which the only sane response to the Cold War and environmental devastation was to “Tune in, Turn on, Drop Out” (one of the Sisters’ many fine slogans, endorsing political cynicism and mind-opening drugs in equal measure). If you’d told me the Furs were imitation Bowie, and a step closer to 80s Cure or Bauhaus than the Sisters themselves, I’d have dropped the record in disgust; I didn’t yet get Bowie, and still have no tolerance for the latter pair. If, however, you’d told me that this particular record was the better produced, better sung, synth-free masterpiece the Sisters never made, I’d have tipped the decrepit old man double… or that it could almost be the template for Suede’s immaculate debut, and may well have been since the latter was produced by the Furs’ keyboard player. <br /><br />Half a lifetime later (!) I still listen to <i>Book of Days</i> (1989) about as often as, say, <i>The Queen Is Dead</i> (1986); another favourite from the 80s that got me through the grim 90s until British music got back on its feet. Starting out as a chart-friendly mishmash of PiL, and Bowie, before bringing chirpy keyboards to the fore as the Cure had done, on their third and fourth albums, the Furs’ fifth ranks with The Smiths’ <i>Hatful of Hollow</i> for lyrical miserabilism. The guitar-parts had always been melodic and sinuous – only occasionally dirty and distorted – but for their dark masterpiece, the Furs layered up lead-guitars that billowed and tore at each other (having been put through wah-wah and chorus pedals), plus prominent melodic bass that carried the songs. In the background – effectively creating a distant horizon, or twilight soundscape, were lower-mixed guitar and keyboard lines that crept into your unconscious; it seemed like it wasn’t there but, in fact, the saxophone that solo’d on so many of their earlier albums, was blended into the furious guitars, adding an extra screech at the limit of the guitars’ range. Having pushed the keyboards and sax away (as if sensing the 80s were over, although they’d always used them more tastefully than most), the Furs were amazingly prescient in their use of cello, paired with acoustic guitars, in a few places. What Nirvana did five years later (trying to break out of their own formulaic sound, and in the process devising a new formula for every chart-metaller from Therapy? to Slipknot) the Furs did in 1989, twice as well.<br /><br />Overall, it’s an immaculate album; definitely making my Top 50 (of more than 1,500, not including record-company freebies). Nonetheless, I’d write much the same piece on the strength of the title track alone. “Book of Days” is a level of Hellish despair never reached by Morrissey, Andrew Eldritch, John Lydon, Ian Curtis, or Justin Sullivan of New Model Army. Yes, it has a faint surrealism, or mysticism to it, but the core is unmistakeable, gut-wrenching social realism. (That’s to say, Butler’s lyrics – like all of the above – can overlap with, say, those of a Romantic like Robert Smith, but Smith, and uncounted others, either lacks the will or the ability to do social realism, and thereby reach greatness). Over guitars and drums dragging at a funereal pace, but still scraping the sky, Butler intones the life of a woman who never got away, although others have tried to, and in the first verse ‘she’s singing “Don’t forget me boys’, as they leave the unnamed, far Northern town, looking for opportunities in an era when Thatcher let British industry crumble. Two verses on, ‘…she’s thirty and she’s fading / there’s a wasted year for every train that passes’, and – believe me – she doesn’t magically get on the train at the end, either. Over the years, this has remained one of the most haunting songs I’ve ever heard; it sets the tone for most of the album; and much as I like miserabilist music, it’s hard to say whether I’d have gone back to it as often were it not for the alt-rock perfection of “House”, on the second side. <br /><br />For a rock song from the dire year of 1989, “House” is only approached (but not surpassed) by singles from The Stone Roses’ debut. After that, however, you’d have to wait for Suede’s debut (1993), or Radiohead’s <i>The Bends</i> (1995) to hear anything as catchy, but also sophisticated, in guitar-music. The very first ringing, chorused notes, instantly paint a vast, open, clear-skied soundscape; as soon as you hear the bassline though, ascending and descending the whole length of the fretboard, you know it’s a classic. What’s perverse is: a song that hit Number One on an industry chart for US radio-play somehow failed to become a hit; failed to even chart. Maybe the Furs’ fans were too keen on their synth-pop, or the band were perceived as old by the young fans of the Stone Roses, or actual house-music in its infancy. Somehow a song whose chorus was “we’ll shake this house” both did what it said… and resoundingly didn’t. Maybe the former-fans had heard the relentless misery of the album, and didn’t give the single a chance. For years, the album remained out of print, few of its songs made it onto the compilations, and it never appeared in the multi-packs of early Furs albums: a classic case of an album too early for its time… or the human mind unable to bear too much reality, as TS Eliot puts it.<br /><br />So – how did the Furs get here? Most people know the band for “Pretty in Pink” – the 80s mega-hit that inspired John Hughes’ film, and (I’d argue) is second only to the Pet Shop Boys’ “Rent” for crystallizing what it meant to live in Britain through that two-faced decade of Young Upwardly Mobile Persons (with all their fashion crimes), whose embrace of laissez-faire capitalism was directly articulated to the conditions of Increasingly Immobile Persons: the dole culture fostered by Margaret Thatcher. Having described the later Furs as critics of the era, it’s impressive to see that “Pretty in Pink” could still be their archetypal song, rather than something they felt they had to atone for; like, say, Talk Talk, who made the post-rock / avant-pop classic <i>Spirit of Eden</i> only after several years of synth-pop anthems had granted them artistic autonomy. <br /><br />A single line from “Pretty in Pink” – ‘…she lives in a hole in the side of our lives…’ – says it all; surreal, arresting, eloquent as McCartney’s ‘…wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door’, which AS Byatt described as having all the minimalist perfection of a Beckett play. Yes, “…Pink” is about a girl who ‘…loves to be one of the girls’, but as pop music there’s something very very wrong here; something rotten in Denmark. Musically, it’s what I define as great pop – i.e. it’s got a stronger verse than most 80s songs still in circulation on adult-oriented radio station, rather than just a bland space-filler before a catchy chorus (which seems to be the low benchmark for “good pop”). The greatness comes from the weird, dissonant guitars on the chorus, a kind of musical sneer or leer to match Richard Butler’s voice and lyrics, because “Pretty in Pink”, as he’s explained more than once, means “looks good naked” – as if this insecure girl ‘in the side of our lives’ might be a lovely person, but her real worth to men is only realized (to the wolfish male Id, voiced so well by Butler) when she gets undressed. <br /><br />Not that this is wholly cynical – plenty of pop, rock, metal, and hiphop songs effectively titillate the listener and leer at women even while they’re pretending to denounce male lust; it’s this double-think that lets people defend a lot of formulaic Horror films and Thrillers. In fact, Butler’s lyrics here are co-extensive with a huge body of work in which he shows himself attuned to that weird discovery all young men make: that it’s only something thin (like a dress, or a mask-like layer of make-up) that nudges the sisters and female friends they knew growing up into that parallel universe of unimagined erotic possibilities, but also unimagined risks (of male resentment, unwelcome attention, violence). Sincere, sharply observed lyrics always have that admixture of the sad and the beautiful, when it comes to the difference between men and women, and in the very best lyrics (and poetry) a dash of surrealism can capture (rather than distort) the mystical sense of what it means to be in one body (and not another) for the duration of an entire life.<br /><br />The Furs made a lot of good albums during an awful decade for music. Their first was self-important, and in an attempt to be solemn: slow, over-long and boring. Their second, <i>Talk Talk Talk</i> sneered at the bullshit and media-saturation of the 80s to show the class struggle and sexual tension beneath the “New Gold Dream”; yes, they repackaged Gang of Four and PiL as something more chart-friendly (still industrial-sounding, but less black), although at least they started in the right place. For their third and fourth synth-heavy albums (<i>Midnight to Midnight</i>, and <i>Mirror Moves</i>, they almost became the people they despised, although the always-clear, always engaging lyrics redeem the shiny happy music. After their lost fifth album, the Furs would meekly re-integrate keyboards, and tone down the drums. For a moment though… just for a moment, they saw the future. The one we didn’t want to see.<br /><br />PS - if any of that seemed pompous, you can re-calibrate your seriousness levels here: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/what-your-favorite-80s-band-says-about-youMichael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2990278272486555304.post-52546016022520077162011-07-22T09:19:00.000-07:002011-07-22T09:33:54.086-07:00POETRY: Jerome Rothenberg's White Sun, Black Sun (1960) - the lost poetry debut of the greatest anthologist of the centuryPerformance-poet, translator, editor, and arguably the most important anthology-creator of the 20th century, Jerome Rothenberg was born in 1931 in Brooklyn NY, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland. Whilst serving in the U.S. army, stationed in Germany after World War II, Rothenberg was effectively witness to a moment of cultural collapse comparable to that which provoked the Dadaists’ radical experiments with poetry, theatre, and related arts, from 1916 onwards. As his poem “The History of Dada as My Muse” – and indeed the entire collection That Dada Strain (1980) – attests, Rothenberg views Dada as a manifestation of some universal impulse to dismantle cultural forms, questioning their ideological assumptions, rather than as an expression of dissent that channelled its energies into artistic expression and thereby (paradoxically) affirmed bourgeois values. <br /><br />Rothenberg’s first publication was New Young German Poets (1959) for New Directions, a collection of translations that effectively introduced American readers to an emergent avant-garde who were ‘part of the generation that’s come of age over the ruins of Hitler’s psychotic Reich’ and were ‘opposing the inherited dead world with a modern, visionary language’. Here, we have the crux of Rothenberg’s subsequent work: a belief that ‘visionary language’, wherever found, will bring about cultural renewal, as well as a sense that there is a connection between Progress and genocide, parallels to which he later perceived in America’s mistreatment of tribal peoples. <br /><br />New Young German Poets was followed by a book of Rothenberg’s own poetry, <i>White Sun Black Sun</i> (1960), in many respects resembling the work of Paul Celan, with its stark images collocating death, destruction, and torture without quite arriving at any of these, nor distinguishing between emotive metaphors and actual events, so that each poem hovers between nightmare and collective memory. Among the eyes and blades of Rothenberg’s personal symbolism (hinting at the pain of being a witness), the recurrence of colours, especially white and red and black, defamiliarizes the psychical fall-out of the Nazi atrocities without limiting itself to them. Until the late-1960s, Rothenberg’s vision swings between two extremes: as abstract and distant as newsprint in one line, to contrast the visceral, bloody, immanent reality of the next. Never primarily a Holocaust writer, though, Rothenberg considered poetry an exploration of the unconscious, and looked outward to other cultures, or to the past, for poetic practices convergent with the function of religion to bring about re-integration of the human (and even “other-than-human”) community. Below is an excerpt from “Words” (lines 16 – 31):<br /><br /><br /> the sudden <br /> movement of our lips<br /> together <br /> with breath itself<br /> a language. <br /> Also a language<br /> rising from the earth<br /> or footsteps<br /> speaking<br /> like a dance <br /> our words a dance<br /> of breath of <br /> images the single<br /> image of a sun<br /> burning inside us <br /> as we speak <br /><br /><br />“Words” can be read as a statement of Jerome Rothenberg’s core-beliefs about poetry prior to Ethnopoetics, and in spite of its tendency to abstraction (atypical for Rothenberg during this period, when he had declared himself a “Deep Image” poet), “Words” exemplifies Rothenberg’s commitment to re-oralizing poetry and conveying the “presence” of language. To carve the poem up into several discrete statements would be to ignore the form as an extension of content. For Rothenberg, ‘our words [are] a dance / of breath of / images the single / image of a sun / burning inside us / as we speak’ (lines 26 – 31). Evidently, the poet wishes us to perceive the fluid movement, or procession, of ideas throughout the entire poem, hence there is no sharp separation between words and images, poetry and dance: they are all syntactically connected, encouraging readers or listeners to apprehend their complex dynamic inter-relation, without the poem disintegrating into a mass of fragments. <br /><br />To this end, Rothenberg introduced the concept of the “deep image” in 1960, a term first used in his Poems from the Floating World magazine, which presented ‘international poets outside the New Critical framework.’ The Deep Image school of poets was one of the major movements of the 1960s, bringing Jungian theories of the subconscious to the tenets of Imagism(e), which Ezra Pound had launched in 1912. In the words of Paul Christensen, Deep Image poets assume that ‘order lay in the depths of the mind, where individuality vanished into primitive holism’. Deep Image poetry is relevant here as a precursor to Ethnopoetics, which would differentiate itself from this mid-century American manifestation of primitivism by involving poets and anthropologists. Ethnopoetics would also focus on the orality of tribal and indigenous (formerly “primitive”) poetries, and the poetics extant in situ, rather than applying exogenous concepts and forms.<br /><br />In 1964, Rothenberg and other Deep Image poets began performing the songs and chants of various cultures at a series of readings dedicated to ‘primitive & archaic’ poetry, held at the Poets Hardware Theater in New York. By taking shamanism as a model for poetic practice from the mid-1960s onwards, Rothenberg demonstrates that poets may still be healers, if only in the limited sense that they articulate collective anxieties at times of cultural crisis.<br /><br />By the time Rothenberg formally instigated the Ethnopoetics project in 1968, he intended to address the violence of the mid-20th century (reflected in his early poetry) with a new creative principal: the model of the poet as shaman, visionary, and healer. This use of the shaman is the most thoroughly scrutinized aspect of Rothenberg’s poetry, the poetry of Ethnopoetics, and indeed it is one of the major topoi of 1960s and 1970s American poetry. Nonetheless, I intend to consider some extensions of (what is loosely termed) “shamanic practice” so as to sidestep the usual conclusions of criticism dwelling on the identification of avant-garde poets with these healers / madmen / seers. In Rothenberg’s poems “Cokboy” from Poland / 1931 (1974), various selections from A Seneca Journal (1978) and “Yaqui 1982” from That Dada Strain (1983), the cross-cultural visions and hybrid rituals suggest strategies for overcoming the limitations of normative conceptions of history, as well as cultural identity, rather than nostalgically invoking a figure from the past. <br /><br />Rothenberg acknowledges that for centuries American and Western European poets have been looking to tribal and indigenous peoples to understand their own culture (resulting in various “primitivisms”) but his own approach, after Dadaism, entails a more creative cross-breeding of cultural traditions. A specific culture’s “poetry” (as Rothenberg conceives it) is not a monolithic canon of texts that progressively accretes layers whilst retaining a solid core of classics, but instead a living corpus comprised by innumerable performances (of oral poetries) and readings (of literal ones).<br /><br />[This essay splices together the openings of Chapters 1 & 3 of the author's doctoral dissertation]Michael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2990278272486555304.post-73845946452973440382011-07-22T08:55:00.000-07:002011-07-22T09:06:22.051-07:00BOOK: Carson McCullers' lost masterpiece - Clock Without Hands (1961)Among the foremost writers of the American Deep South, Carson McCullers remains second only to William Faulkner, and has been compared to many of the finest writers in the English language. Generations of writers have re-discovered her, although curiously enough, for all the successive schools of literary criticism that have emerged, McCullers has never been claimed as a queer writer (say), which might have drawn more attention to what makes her so remarkable. Not that this is the best fit, by any means, since the predominant preoccupation of her stories, above race or “existential issues” are anxieties about gender and sexual identity, puberty, adolescence, and life as a heteronormative woman. To borrow a term from anthropology, we might say that McCullers excels in her exploration of liminality, although this may be a more abstract way of saying that McCullers' major concern seems to be with "passing" (a term of considerable importance in studies of race, and a comparable significance in queer- and gender-studies). Most critics have focused on representations of music, race, or freaks in her work, but none (that I am aware of) have suggested that these might be connected. As an unsuccessful musician, McCullers may have seen an analogy between “making the grade” and “passing (examinations)” and the performance of racial and/or sexual identity. The freak is one who cannot pass… and as such compelled to over-compensate. <br /><br />Biographically, McCullers presents a counterpoint to a better known heroine of the melancholy teen intellectual, Sylvia Plath. Both were recruited for the long-defunct Ms. magazine; McCullers’ first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was an instant success, displaying a sophistication surpassing many another novel, let alone début novels. What drew attention at the time was its depiction of race, but it would have been apparent to a readership acquainted with Beckett and Joyce that here too was an existential parable of enduring resonance. At the centre of the narrative is a mute, John Singer, who accommodates the projections of an array of characters, each comforted by his silence, and inspired. Among these are a black doctor campaigning for civil rights, and a gynandrous young girl much like McCullers herself, determined to become a famous composer – a plan disrupted by her younger brother’s accidental shooting. <br /><br />McCullers’ second novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye, confirmed her talent, but was not a huge leap. The protagonist hardly merits the word, having only ever made two or three conscious decisions in his entire life. There are echoes of Camus in the depiction of a mentally subnormal soldier who eventually commits a murder, but the novel is more interesting as an act of catharsis for its author, then entangled in an unhealthy relationship with a serviceman, himself a failed writer. <br /><br />The Member of the Wedding, McCullers’ third novel centres on another pubescent female identified by one reviewer as a cousin of Mick Kelly. Frances Jasmine, AKA F Jasmine, AKA Frankie – one novel for each section of the novel – is if anything a more complex figure. The three names signal that the novel is a rite of passage, an anthropological concept with which McCullers was probably acquainted from the work of Arnold Van Gennep. As the title suggests, the novel explores FJ’s desire to be a “member of the wedding” that is to say, to be the third party in the marriage of her older sister and her fiancé. The allegory should be self-evident, but what interests me is the use of grotesquerie in this novel, much more than its predecessors, to express sexual anxieties. Images of the protagonist crossing the threshold of the kitchen carrying a knife foreshadow later sexual violence, and the visit to the freakshow reflects a prepubescent discomfort with the body. If I have my timeline correct, McCullers was by this point paralysed, and her husband’s drinking problems worsening. In the novel, F Jasmine’s sexual initiation is with a soldier on leave; not only statutory rape, but almost actual rape. <br /><br />Grotesquerie is exaggerated to a fabular degree in the title story from McCullers’ best known work, the collection that followed. The Ballad of Sad Café stars a lesbian emotionally involved with a hunchback, and if it superficially lacks the pathos of earlier works, the author’s deliberate and almost callous emphasis on deformity reveals a growing contempt for humanity. Miss Amelia, the etymology of whose name – “limbless” – suggests both castration and psychical immobility – is not unsympathetic, but shown to be emotionally stunted. The fight resolves very little; it renders sexual violence comic rather than tragic, precluding notions about the nobility of suffering.<br /><br />McCullers’ greatest literary achievement – displaying all the techniques of the earlier works at once – is <i>Clock Without Hands</i>, a novel currently out-of-print, but surely not lost forever. Like <i>Absalom Absalom</i>, the novel maps the socio-historic process of integration and/or assimilation onto a homosexual seduction or coming-out narrative. In fact, the seduction is never achieved, and Jester is unable to prevent the lynching of a half-caste, the son of a man his own father failed to defend years before, in his first and last court case before his suicide. I'll say no more, since that should be intriguing enough - it's well worth tracking down.<br /><br />[updated from notes for a postgraduate seminar, from July 2005]Michael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2990278272486555304.post-32086285453597084532011-07-22T08:40:00.000-07:002011-07-22T08:41:34.538-07:00MUSIC: God’s Mama, God’s Mama (SM Press), 2010God’s Mama, God’s Mama (SM Press), 2010<br /><br />It’s tempting to use anaemic Reviewer’s Algebra for this – “Lydia Lunch fronts The Birthday Party”, say – because, God’s Honest Truth, it’s the sound of the vagina dentata gnashing. Where so many female vocalists in Really Heavy Bands play on the contrast with whispers, drawls, or the deliberately thin voice of their inner child, Sibyl Madrigal, a Texan performance poet, growls and snarls to match the post-punk / slowcore grind. Poe’s ‘Black Cat’, as read by Diamanda Galas, springs to mind. As a poet, though, Madrigal never loses sight of the imperative to be intelligible, and you’d almost wish she didn’t because this is a mixture of Swampland and Spiderland, Revisited, after the first two tracks. No criticism of the opening salvo, but they’re more explosive; Alex Ward’s chorus guitars on ‘Death on the NHS’ shriek like an incoming missile, before the verse guitars scrape metal on metal, PiL- or GO4-style.<br /><br />Taking a cue from Angela Carter, ‘Just Stephen’ puts the blood and guts back into fairy tales – then the lips and eyebrows for good measure. It’s Psycho merged with “There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe”, soundtracked by Slint. You might think you’ve heard this before – it’s second wave feminism, after all, and Mogwai nabbed the same riff – but small details like the mad matriarch’s injunction against “big naughty bad” and Stephen’s “wibbley-wobbley dance” are what make this. Next up, ‘Carpet Shark’ nails the sensation of a bad trip in two words. At the album’s centre, ‘Solid Shit’ could have been the band’s moment of indulgence at 2am in the studio – a catalogue of squelchy blues clichés – but the band have the technical ability to pull off a Zappa homage, and the lyric fits with the album’s confrontational mission. Similarly, ‘Goon Spy’ can nod to Shellac like they’re equals, rather than cribbing, because “This ain’t some kind of metaphor; this is real!” is an ideology, not a copyrighted catchphrase; plus, Albini hasn’t covered female voyeurism. Yet. <br /><br />On the second side, Madrigal proves herself relentlessly inventive in her iconoclasm. ‘Mad MacB’s Love Lament’ drops the witchiness for a hideous falsetto (Crone turned Maiden). It’s the deformed inner child of X-Factor contestants squealing for attention; the way Wire-readers hear chart-music; the song Lynch thought too horrible to have the Lady in the Radiator sing. We’ve already had one take on Bad Motherhood (‘Just Stephen’) but ‘Sow Souwester’ doesn’t even humanize this particular Earth Mother; over a freeform backing, Madrigal oinks and grunts the apotheosis of the sow-goddess. The album’s closer ‘We Come from Fish’ brings everything together: it’s a refutation of Creationism, a shamanic dive into the pre-conscious, a reclamation of hatewords (used by men and self-hating women, alike). Plus, it rocks as hard as Slint, Shellac, Codeine, Come; whoever you care to name. 20 years ago, Kim Gordon deadpanned: “England didn’t invent punk-rock; girls did.” It’s a provocative stance, and the girls of this decade’s post-punk revival have certainly lasted longer. God’s Mama point to the flaw: where are all the Women still making punk?<br /><br />[Not previously published]Michael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2990278272486555304.post-4306405348816023332011-07-22T08:35:00.000-07:002011-07-22T09:28:24.063-07:00MUSIC: The Triffids... and a meditation on obscurityThe Triffids, <i>Come Ride with Me: 10xCD BOX-SET</i> (Domino)<br /><br />Way back at the beginning of the Britpop era, the <i>Melody Maker</i> published a paperback of Great Lost Albums, in which Andrew Mueller asked rhetorically “Why REM, and not the Go-Betweens?” It’s a question I’ve pondered for many rival bands, because the answer is always a sad combination of market forces and the unglamorous X-Factor competition that naturally selects (or de-selects) all artists. A band like the Go-Bs might be too twee, or too loose, for mass appeal, whereas an REM would get in the back of the van, and learn how to play to tough crowds. (Of course, REM also had a great intuitive surrealist whose voice sounded sensual before his actual meanings crept up on you, whereas liking the Go-Bs required a taste for metaphors that walked the line of ridicule.)<br /><br />So – in a race between Australians only – “why The Go-Betweens AND The Bad Seeds, but not the Triffids?” Pitching their tent somewhere between the Twee and the Bad-Ass, The Triffids should have been contenders… and almost turned coming-from-the-most-remote-city-on-earth to their advantage. They had the literate lead-singer, with the heroin habit (David McComb); they had a future member of the Bad Seeds (Martyn P Casey); they had a female singer for duets and twee solos (Jill Birt); they had their own take on country rock… and they had string arrangements years before the Bad Seeds. Oh Yes, and they had that sine-qua-non of Antipodean pop: the male voice choir, sounding both spiritual and rugged. <br /><br />If the previous Best Of (_Australian Melodrama_ – worst artwork EVER) suggested The Triffids were unsure where they stood (but had the songs to guarantee cult status) the box-set explains it all: you’d be overwhelmed if you had this much material to choose from. Basically, this 211 (that’s Two-Hundred-and-Eleven) track box-set offers up a slightly re-sequenced Best Of; 4 CDs of early material, running to almost 5 hours; 3 live-shows from St Kilda (1984), LSE (1984), and Melbourne University (1988); and the Jack Brabham sessions. <br /><br />Perhaps most desirable here is CD2: _Early Singles and EPs_. Without being overtly twee, it’s where the banded sounded the closest to The Go-Betweens, or early Belle & Sebastian. Gradually, the darker songs creep in (‘Twisted Brain’ and ‘Left to Rot’), but so do the songs with simple violin arrangements, culminating in ‘Beautiful Waste’ (Track 13) where trumpets join the strings. By ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ (Track 15), where the Hammond swirls eerily as the drums pound, they’ve shown themselves almost the equal of the Bad Seeds, even managing to pull off a nine-minute cow-punk epic (‘Field of Glass’).<br /><br />The six early cassettes offer a glimpse of the Triffids in their wonky DIY phase: a little bit Half Japanese, a little bit Moldy Peaches; often, uncannily like Beat Happening before Beat Happening. Granted, they lack the laugh-out-loud jokes of the AFNY bands at their best, but it’s always endearing, like The Quadratics in Todd Solondz’ debut, _Welcome to the Doll’s House_, especially on Track 5 with its coconut percussion and everyone a beat behind everyone else, or a note below, yelping “grow old! Grow old! Philosophical stroll – if you can’t dig it, it’s your bad luck!” By their fifth cassette, The Triffids have written the first track to get a proper release (‘Farmers Never Visit Nightclubs’), and tightened up considerably, with prominent, chiming bass lines; plus, McComb’s geeky, adolescent lisp has all but vanished, as the singer flirts with a more yobbish persona, not unlike The Feelies (in the US) or The Television Personalities (in the UK). Still, they’re not faking anything, being aware of their own preposterousness when they sing: “surfer boy, surfer boy / in chains and leather” (Track 6) against chirpy keyboard lines and the first female vocals (hopelessly out-of-key). In fact, the punk stylings are gone as soon as they arrive, replaced by a dalliance with 60s pop pastiche. It’s here that the Triffids sound most Belle & Sebastian with a nice line in comic juxtapositions (“Now the orderly takes your elbow / now the angels want back their halo”).<br /><br />Moving on… it’s impressive just how tight and crisp-sounding the live albums are, compared to the foregoing five hours. For a ten-album box-set, there’s very little sense of the material being repetitive, and it’s great to be able hear the 1984 and 1988 sets back to back (the latter opening with ‘Wide Open Road’, with supreme confidence; it’s keyboard-heavy in lieu of a choir, but this makes it a desirable alternative rather than a weak compromise). To be brutally honest, the St Kilda set (April 1984) sucks – sound and song-choices both – but by October 1984 they’re playing some of their classics, and by 1988 they’re playing a set to rival the Best Of. The only mystery is why they repeatedly murder ‘I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You’, having learned nothing from 1984 to 1988. David McComb is a fine crooner in his own right, so why leave out all the grace notes and glide, belting it out one word at a time? To be fair, the Elvis-in-Hawaii arrangement (for the 1988 version) is a reverent fan’s joke, but it’s not a classic cover. In a similar vein, the retro-country and synth-schmaltz pastiches on the Jack Brabham sessions (CDs 9 & 10) occasionally fall flat as jokes, as they hadn't when the band actually were kids, but you get unlikely covers of Kraftwerk and Madonna, and it's worth digging around for tracks like 'Femme Fatale' or 'Into the Groove'. Look out for an interview hidden on CD5, as well.Michael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2990278272486555304.post-74424772798021998712011-07-22T08:31:00.001-07:002011-07-22T08:33:19.166-07:00MUSIC: Lost albums of the 2000sLost albums of the 2000s <br /><br />[a short survey of the not-very-obscure for www.Musosguide.com, anticipating the present project]<br /><br />As the sharks circle, it becomes apparent we’re going to need a bigger caveat for what constitutes a Great Lost Album… The 2000s was the decade when every serious music fan went online, and the idea of “Lost Music” changed radically – there’s always a troll out there ready to denounce you as a shameless bandwagon-jumper for buying Jandek CDs from Amazon (“…compact discs! I bought the first LP when Sterling was recording as The Units, back in 1978!”). Speaking of Jandek (famously touted by ubergeek Kurt Cobain, along with The Raincoats and Daniel Johnston), it’s likely he came out of hiding, and played his first live set of groaning, crashing freeform noise rock, precisely because of his Internet fanbase. So, maybe Glasgow Sunday (2004) is the first great “found album”? His metaphysical quest narrative, Manhattan Tuesday: Afternoon of Insensitivity (2007), replete with classical piano and minimal drones is also kinda stunning, establishing him as the one of the greatest improvisers around. <br /><br />Going back a bit, into the mists of time, the first dedicated fansite I ever saw was at university, in 1997, when green-on-black computers were dying out. That was for Slint, who reformed early in the decade, having made THEE cult album of the 1990s with the prog-metal reviving, post-rock foreshadowing Spiderland (1991). There’s a reason Slint fans were some of the first to exploit the internet: it’s smart, erudite, nocturnal music. Mainman Brian MacMahon broke silence with The For Carnation (2000), which superfan Stuart Braithwaite described as sounding “like Leonard Cohen in the jungle” – yeah, it’s that good. Thinking of slowcore / mathrock / the roots of postrock, check out The New Years: the Kadane Brothers’ post-Bedhead band, for the 2000s. Similarly, Early Day Miners are a great lost band; that’s to say, they’ve had a great career at the intersection of slowcore and post-rock, with very few people listening. Their best records are: Let Us Garlands Bring (2002), All Harm Ends Here (2004), and Offshore (2006), which extends their epic set-closer, originally on Garlands, into a 37 minute album.<br /><br />In a sense, the early years of many a fine band will be peppered with “lost albums”. Okkervil’s Will Sheff rudely claimed to “pay the rent” for Shearwater (his mate Jonathan Meiberg’s band) by indirectly advertising their existence. Check out Winged Life (2004), for an even-split between Meiberg and Sheff’s most accessible and upbeat alt-folk compositions, although it’s the Talk Talk-tinged Palo Santo (2006) and Rook (2008) that have taken Shearwater out of complete obscurity, and The Golden Archipelago (2010) already has some of the most beautiful songs of the NEXT decade on it, no matter how it’s produced. Assuming you HAVE heard of alt country poet laureate Jason Molina, the man behind Songs:Ohia / Magnolia Electric Co, it’s worth pointing out that J-Mo makes great limited edition albums in his sleep. Mi Sei Apparso Come Un Fantasmo (2001), a Neil Young meets Codeine reworking of some S:O classics, plus four unreleased songs, is worth tracking down, as are Pyramid Electric Co (2004), and Let Me Go Let Me Go Let Me Go (2007), the latter written and recorded in one day.<br /><br />Moving over to hiphop, it was startling to see the absence of Anticon / Big Dada artists in Pitchfork’s recent rundown of the decade. Where was cLOUDDEAD’s astonishing debut, described at the time as “Cypress Hill play Kid A”? (I’d say Digable Planets meet the Marx Brothers.) Surreal, experimental hiphop was taken to another level by the collective, led by Sole, himself responsible for the superb Selling Live Water (2002). Only in the last few years has Why? (one-third of The ’DEAD) become a minor indie star for US college students, who probably mistake him for a Silver Jews fan. With Subtle, DoseOne (another third of cLOUDDEAD) made a bizarre This Heat-does-hiphop concept trilogy something like The Neverending Story meets (Pink Floyd’s) The Wall. Sadly, it’s not great-great, but it’s part of an unparalleled career that continues with Themselves. More racially mixed, the Def Jux label arose in the 2000s, centred on CoFlow mainman El Producto, a corpulent ginger guy. His production for Cannibal Ox made The Cold Vein an instant classic, but his two solo albums to date have earned him the tag “the Trent Reznor of hiphop”. <br /><br />Assuming you’re all Pitchfork’d up, you probably do know about Meadowlands (2004) by The Wrens, which could easily have been a sad mid-life crisis of a record, nostalgicized by US college-rock fans turned journalists, and was narrowly pipped to album of the year by… oh some Nucks with strings. In fact, the Wrens had an even more despairing story of divorce, despair, debt that they managed to make sound engaging, if not emotionally generous – their twin-guitar and piano-attack probably helped, too. Thinking of bands fuelled by romantic misery, check out (Australian Red House Painters & Low fans) Art of Fighting. Centred on one of the more sickeningly gorgeous couples, it’s as if Jeff Buckley stopped showing off (oh, and hadn’t died; that too). Their first full-length, Wires (2002), is their best, although there IS a lost mini-album for obscurists: Empty Nights (1999).<br /><br />Hohum. What else? There’s a guy who works in a mental hospital, who keeps putting out records as Super XX Man. There Will Be Diamonds (2008) combines the charming naivety of Half Japanese and Daniel Johnston, with the gut-wrenching beauty of Galaxie 500 and Yo La Tengo in their prime. Nadja have started re-recording their CD-Rs of ambient-doom-metal (or extreme shoegaze); These Are Powers show there’s life-after-Liars for the sacked rhythm section who made They Threw Us in a Trench; Marnie Stern’s outstanding guitarisms (Sleater Who?) mean that her yet-more-obscure influences Ocrilim and Hella won’t remain lost forever… and so on. Here’s to a decade where no-one gets lost… they just take the time to develop without so much pressure.Michael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2990278272486555304.post-20801400306794947272011-07-22T08:27:00.001-07:002011-07-22T08:31:08.712-07:00MUSIC: Harmonia & Eno, Tracks and Traces ’76<b>Harmonia & Eno</b>, <i>Tracks and Traces ’76</i> (Groenland)<br /><br />For the uninitiated, <b>Harmonia</b> were one of those legendary collaborations from the fertile period of Krautrock without which no Electro, Techno, or Post-Rock, as we know them. Comprised of Michael Rother (from Neu!), and Moebius & Roedelius (better known as Cluster), the trio were re-united by Eno on a break between two of his best records, <i>Another Green World</i> (1975) and <i>Before and After Science</i> (1977). Any one branch of the family tree should prompt some intrigue, but taken together, you can see why this re-working of lost recordings (first released in 1997) was one of the most exciting discoveries for audiophiles, in recent years. It’s much more than pop trivia to note that Eno was (literally) on his way to work with Bowie, on <i>Low</i>; there’s a fairly useful metaphor in there, too. <br /><br />Okay. That’s the bit that writes itself. As anyone who’s tried to navigate Krautrock knows, with or without Julian Cope’s <i>Krautrocksampler</i> to hand, there’s a lot of unlistenable experimentation from the early years of Kluster, Neu!, and Kraftwerk, that sounds like the elevator music in a capricious spaceship designed by Douglas Adams. There’s also a lot of crossover with late-60s psychedelia made by German hippies whose commune-derived ideals meant that everyone got to “express themselves”. Fear not: there’s a melodic strength here, and a tastefulness in the choice of sounds that puts you in mind of some of the finest contemporary musicians, who can’t help but be captivating even when they’re at their most experimental and commercially suicidal (e.g. the offcuts from <i>Kid A / Amnesiac</i> that surfaced as B-Sides; Low on <i>Drums & Guns</i>; Sigur Ros on <i>Von</i>).<br /><br />Coming relatively late in the day – when sonic experimentation didn’t take hours of re-wiring custom-built machines, and therefore could be combined with musical improvisation while the excitement remained – the predominant sense is of a microbial zoo where strange new sounds shuffle and jitter about, like little biological machines on the cusp of sentience or personality. That’s to say, the tracks-as-lifeforms are never entirely mechanical in their precise, looped rhythms, because the minimal melodic variation suggests the little critters exploring; groping towards consciousness or meaning. In the years before computers (as we know them), Harmonia & Eno used a lot of analogue reverb and gating, so that distorted or fuzzed pulses could be clipped rather than bleeding together – that’s where the submerged sound comes from. Around this time, Kraftwerk were talking about the Man-Machine, which has had an immeasurable influence on popular music, but Harmonia & Eno seem to have kept any ideas about the Machine-Organism to themselves: it’s something that the likes of Aphex Twin, Autechre, Boards of Canada seem to re-discover periodically, without the need for rhetoric. This is the world under the microscope: another direction for instrumental music distinct from the soundscapes of ambient, the 100mph rush down the autobahn of ‘Krautrock’ and ‘Hallogallo’, and the emotional drama of post-rock.<br /> <br />For those who know the 1997 version, ‘Welcome’ is a stunning addition to the album that Krautrock completists already know contains some of the best work by all concerned. Taken from Rother’s tapes, it has both horizontal and vertical movement: his subtle slide-guitar raising the listener to the gentlest ecstasy. ‘Helicon 1’ by Mogwai had been a personal musical epiphany back in ’97, but so was ‘The Big Ship’ (from Eno’s <i>Another Green World</i>) when I heard it a year later – showing that the “post-rock dynamic” was neither new, nor incompatible with minimal electronica. Elsewhere on the album, ‘Almost’ is a masterpiece – an apex of beautiful songwriting for all concerned, although it feels most like Eno’s work. Starting out with the plaintive twitter of a mechanical bird, singing alone (vwi-vwi, vwi-vwi…! vwi-vwi, vwi-vwi…!) an almost subliminal electric piano echoes its rhythm, evoking its sadness at not being quite real. After a few bars, these are joined by a delicate, minimally processed piano played with classical grace, that promises a place where these machines can escape their destiny of mindless routines. <br /><br />Conceptually, something similar is going on in ‘Les Desmoiselles’, which contrasts an almost idiotically chugging steam engine rhythm, with more elegant synth melodies, as if to question the definition of good taste. There are some clues to the foursome’s awareness of how groundbreaking their music was in the title of the track (as in ‘Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon’, Picasso’s primitivist reworking of an impressionist classic, inspired by African carvings). For listeners who grew up in the 80s, incongruous synth-tones were par for the course, due to pre-sets on keyboards, and many have (thankfully) been selected out of the breeding pool, since then; in the hands of Harmonia & Eno, though, there’s always an underlying awareness of the need to work out what each new sound best expresses, after all: pre-sets didn’t exist.<br /><br />Closest to the whimsical side of 70s Eno is ‘Luneberg Heath’ (whose lyric runs “don’t get lost on / Lun-e-berg Heath…” over and over). The unidentified instrument here sound like a synthetic tuba, but the jolly idiocy of the riff allows for surprising emotional tweaks when it changes direction – think ‘NY Conversation’ from Lou Reed’s <i>Transformer</i> (a possible influence). Eno’s vocal has the subtle menace of his own ‘Dead Finks Don’t Talk’, ‘The Fat Lady of Limburg’, and various Roxy tracks – that bad-trip moment 70s songwriters do so well, when you’re about to plunge into Wonderland, or the clown’s about to peel off his face, but you have no idea how bad it’s going to be, beneath.<br /><br />Central to the album is the fifteen minute ‘Sometimes in Autumn’ – their space-rock outing. It’s musically and sonically similar to the longer soundscapes Pink Floyd had been making (the side-long ‘Echoes’, from <i>Meddle</i>; Wright’s instrumental segments within ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’), and opens with a sort of minimalist version of a Roger Waters bass-riff (those two-note thrums approximating a helicopter). None of the artists involved were quite so varied within one album, or within one track, as here; its inclusion makes you think of the range of styles thrown into Faust <i>IV</i> (home to the original ‘Krautrock’), although fortunately not the dire sonic collage that is <i>The Faust Tapes</i>.<br /><br />Yes, this is a collection of <i>Tracks and Traces</i>, meticulously edited in the late-90s, and again more recently, so that none of the musical ideas out-stay their welcome – in this respect, it’s not quite an album, and when the less melodically surprising tracks fade out, you feel like you’re moving along to the next case in the exhibit, whereas other albums by Cluster, Harmonia, or Cluster & Eno sustain a mood, and often a weird nervous energy, with their generally more urgent rhythms. It’s damning with faint praise to call this “the best collection of fugitive pieces by musical innovators you won’t regret buying” but that’s what it is. <br /><br />[previously published on DiS]Michael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2990278272486555304.post-35636955907921945152011-07-22T08:22:00.000-07:002011-07-22T08:24:55.325-07:00POETRY / CARTOONS: Silver Jews' frontman, and Actual Air author turns cartoonistDavid Berman, <i>The Portable February</i> (Drag City)<br /><br />Fending off the obvious questions – Why review David Berman’s cartoons? Why review cartoons at all…? – it saves plenty of time to be able to point to the article “Ten Years of <i>Actual Air</i>” in this month’s <i>Believer</i>. Ten years ago, the Silver Jews mainman published a poetry collection that ‘in poetry terms’ has sold triple platinum. So what? you might say, but as the author goes on to argue, “Who actually read Billy Corgan’s poems? Did you even know Jeff Tweedy put out a collection, at all?” Alternative-music consumers aren’t suckers when it comes to poetry, any more than Jewel’s fans. <br /><br />What makes <i>The Portable February</i> so intriguing is that it’s Berman’s first book since a genuine landmark in US poetry; it’s his first since embracing Judaism; his first since “outing” his own father as a corporate lobbyist of the most diabolical stripe; and it’s his first “release” of any kind since dissolving the Joos. If you’re prurient about Berman’s output since his suicide attempt, you’re looking in the wrong place, but if you’ve been following the saga closely, you may be legitimately curious about how he can possibly think that cartooning is a meaningful alternative to the Joos, and how this works as an extension of his medium-transcending poetics. <br /><br />So. Here are some notes I made on the book that I desperately wanted to be a sequel to <i>Actual Air</i>: <br /><br />AA = 40% (US poet-laureate-if-they-had-one) John Ashbery; 70% Kenneth Fearing; 60% Wallace Stevens; 40% Kenneth Patchen-the-poet <br />TPF = 10% Gary Larson; 30% David Shrigley; 20% Pepperland; 40% Hopi Indian petroglyphs; 60% Outsider Art, e.g. Bobby Baker’s Mental Illness Diaries; 60% Kenneth Patchen-the-great-lost-US-poet, in ultra-naïve illustrator mode. <br />Why use percentages? Isn’t this all a bit “Pitchfork Media gives Music 6.8”? (As The Onion put it…) <br /><br />When Berman’s in one-panel, Larson / Shrigley mode, he’s sometimes cringeworthy, e.g. Frankenstein’s monster, with CND button, marching in a protest, with placard that reads “US out of Transylvania”; OR, two caterpillars on a twig watching a butterfly, with a swastika on its wing, the one saying “it’s just a phase”. Hasn’t that cartoon about the butterflies already been done, by Larson or one of his imitators? (It’s a relief that the facing page to Frankenstein’s monster has a movie-theatre showing something called ‘Nightingales Imprisoned in Parallelograms © 1918’ – that’s the Berman we love.) The intriguing detail is the swastika – the joke works without it, but Berman dots them about TPF (as he did with the Joos’ artwork and lyrics), fascinated with the way that repetition nullifies but never eradicates the Nazi legacy, and/or his own neurotic tendency to see everywhere these (and other) signs of persecution / collective evil / human beings’ fondness for investing arbitrary symbols with enormous power. So, let’s assume TPF is meant to be taken holistically; it has rhythms as much as it has hooks (a tree – bird – star motif being one of the most common). Here’s <i>The Portable February</i> at its most quotable, sententious, self-contained: <br /><br />“We start out Life having won a race AND Wind up humbled by the void” <br />“I lay in bed & listened to my clock radio. They played a song called ‘Sara’ every night. The lyrics went: “drowning in a sea of love, where everyone would love to drown.” It seemed evil, for someone to want to drown.” (NB – prone figure seems to have his head detached) <br /><br />That’s almost it – you couldn’t put together all the text in TPF to make a single poem that might have made it into AA. That’s not to say that the two are entirely incomparable – you could (and probably should) come up with your own supply of fresh Bermania just by describing many of the squiggles – but as it happens, Berman is at his most interesting (and successful) when he deliberately departs from the syntax of the traditional 6–8 panel cartoon. Many of these are clever, even beautiful. Like a Joseph Cornell assemblage, disparate drawings or mini one-panel cartoons are slotted into unequal frames, some empty. There’s a suggestion of pseudo-scientific typologies; the three-dimensional collage that is a museum; the cognitive dissonance of stories about celebrities, murders, and the economy in the panels and photos of a newspaper’s lay-out. Implicitly, but undeniably, the puzzle to figure out Berman is the ongoing puzzle to figure out our own world, at a perceptual, pre-verbal level. <br /><br />So, Berman subverts assumptions of linearity, causality, and so on, in a way that reveals the plasticity of the mind & imagination as much as it explores social mores, or whatever a cartoonist’s supposed to do. He’s not doing this all the time – there are an awful lot of zero-skill squiggles, with negligible humour – but this is meta-cartooning (or the visual branch of metafiction). One of the most linear examples connects its panels by panning in and out, focusing on a different detail from one panel to the next; taking us down a corridor, then focusing on the plug-socket, showing two-scenes through its holes, choosing the distant house in the left over the bird-tree-star scene in the right, flying through its window, and so on. Another multi-panel cartoon relates the grisly (if ambiguous) consequences of an animal visiting the butchers, flying away like a ghost or superhero, and then posits “Be Your Own Kin”, which can only have the most tentative relation to the above. All very dream-like. <br /><br />Regrettably, the one thing I haven’t mentioned so far, that actually made me so excited about <i>The Natural Bridge</i> way back in 1995, and then AA, in 1999 (let alone TPF, in 2008) isn’t actually included here. “What is the Natural Bridge?” may be this writer’s rarest item of music-related ephemera, and certainly one of the more valuable in terms of developing a poetic sensibility. It’s hard to convey its charm, but it still makes me hope Berman will try harder if this is what he seriously means to do: <br /><br />**“What Is the Natural Bridge?”** <br /><br />It’s a contract between species (man brandishes paper at wild beast) <br />It’s science fiction without the science (tentacled creature brandishes tentacles) <br />It’s a rejected state capitol design (ah! So that’s what those futuristic buildings in TPF are) <br />It’s a promise between strangers (US flag, natch) <br />It’s made by your eye (two sides of a gorge with dotted line denoting bridge)<br />…and so on. <br /><br />The best thing TPF may do is to send you back to AA with a renewed appreciation for its poetics. It’s a lot less weird than first impressions suggest. ‘Governors on Sominex’ is a traditional poem inasmuch as it patterns its sententia in a rhythmed fashion, dispersed among the “purely visual” (albeit fantastic) images; these sententia take the form of semi-abstract images (“she was the light by which he travelled from this to that”), and reveal the always-tacit impulse to console the reader in the sad realization of life’s repetitiveness – formulated through the abstract “new ways of understanding to throw at the same days”, and so on. In a sense, Berman crystallizes the essence of song & poetry alike in these lines, but the quoted lines are only successful – i.e. convincing rather than cloying – because of his deft balance between the familiar and the fantastic, showing the push from Experience to Ideal, whilst gently nudging the reader to understanding by hinting at what he’s aiming for. <br /><br />Ultimately, TPF may not provide the deep immersion of <i>Actual Air</i>, which felt like spiritual consolation for Gnostics and Agnostics alike, in an exquisite expression of Whitmanian cultural democracy (mobilizing the symbols of your daily lives to approach metaphysical truths). In its best moments, though, and taken together, TPF approaches the inexhaustible allure of a melody; pleasurable in itself, and all the more reassuring for countering the compulsion to seek the New, to Use Once & Destroy, by pushing towards an openness of interpretation that may well be the characteristics of Art that makes it so threatening to Commerce: that you can come back to it, that it isn’t built with inherent vice, that its value is ‘made by your eye’.Michael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2990278272486555304.post-39065646721696824292011-07-22T08:16:00.000-07:002011-07-22T08:20:39.787-07:00GIG: The Lost Songs of Richey Manic, LiveManic Street Preachers @ The Roundhouse, Camden May 28, 2009<br /><br />It’s a strange ritual, the initiation by Electrical Audio, and only for the pure of heart. Shorn of overdubs, and naked but for your instrument, you confront a man known as “Whippet”, and in less than an hour you’re shown your true worth. Some have passed through into legend (<i>Spiderland</i>, <i>In Utero</i>, <i>After Murder Park</i>), others have been pure, but their weapons were wrong (Mogwai, GYBE!), and then… then there’s the rank failures, like <i>Razorblade Suitcase</i>. Whether it comes to be regarded as great or merely good, <i>Journal for Plague Lovers</i> was always going to be an important release. <br /><br />So. Leaving aside discussion of the lyrics of Richard James Edwards (as we’re calling him now), Manic Street Preachers have learned to play <i>Journal for Plague Lovers</i> live, under the tutelage of Steve Albini, and they’re going to do so tonight, in its entirety. You already know it’s the best album they’ve made – sonically – in years, and if you haven’t played it on shuffle with the rest of their opus, you should. Tonight’s show at The Roundhouse, Camden, could almost be a “Don’t Look Back” set, for an album that would have been legendary if anyone dared to believe Richey’s carefully guarded folder of lyrics would ever surface. <br /><br />Studying the set-dressing (lots of smoke; that banned album-cover, by Jenny Saville; nothing else), and listening closely to the wording of James Dean Bradfield’s introduction, you can tell this series of shows isn’t meant to be a wake, or an elegy, or a requiem for the dead. There’s no painful sense of Richey’s absence… and no attempts to assert his presence by making the stage a shrine. As friends and band-members, the Manics have worked through the rituals, the legal protocol, and even the ritual of authenticity (only half-jokingly) described above. This is the band, remember, who played without Richey, in 1994, so as to pay his hospital bills. Theatrical by design, not by nature.<br /><br />Anyhow: as a performance, you get the same sense that Journal is a muscular record, a well-poised record, a typology of thoroughly modern characters (‘Me and Stephen Hawking’, ‘Jackie Collins’ Existential Question’) that almost complete Edwards’ intellectual trajectory from the Political to the Personal – he wants to believe in the <i>“table for two / such a sweet delight…”</i> but can’t quite relate. This doesn’t make the record (and its lyrics) a failure; rather, it’s an exemplary struggle to share everyone else’s normality. ‘Marlon JD’ is greeted with the most furious pointing of fingers, and LED-displays on cameras glow like cigarette lighters during the acoustic numbers. <br /><br />Having only heard it three or four times though, the record stands up pretty damn well – in fact, it’s almost distracting to watch how efficiently JDB darts about the stage, trading his white Gibson for an acoustic, and introducing the string quartet, so that the performance feels seamless, unlike an actual Don’t Look Back gig. It occurs to me that this is what “Lifetime Achievements” are for – doing the duckwalk like Chuck Berry, spinning around on one foot, gabbling out all those lyrics – JDB should get some kind of Trooper of the Year award. If only Nicky hadn’t injured his back it wouldn’t look so much like James is over-compensating, or as Nicky puts it: <i>“up at 7am for an interview on breakfast television; running around, playing four guitars at once… Mister James Dean Bradfield: my ultimate guitar hero…!”</i><br /><br />A Greatest Hits set follows. It’s not yet apparent which of the new songs would have made the grade – ‘Peeled Apples’? ‘Virginia State Epileptic Colony’? – but that’s no criticism. ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ is up first, in a double gesture of confidence and historical importance: this is how good we were from the Word Go, and this is how unfazed we are, when it comes to matching past glories. ‘Your Love Is Not Enough’ follows – the only song, it seems, from the three later (and lesser?) albums – but sounds strong. Having focused so heavily on “Richey’s album” in the first set, the second set only has one song apiece from <i>Gold Against the Soul</i> (1993) and <i>The Holy Bible</i> (1995), those documents of his physical decline… and mental peak. After ‘No Surface’, ‘You Love Us’, and ‘Tsunami’, we get the defiant singles ‘La Tristessa Durera’ and ‘Faster’. Either song could have been the highlight, but the best are delivered as a fistful, with ‘If you tolerate this…’ (from <i>This Is My Truth…</i>) and ‘Little Baby Nothing’ (from <i>Generation Terrorists</i>).<br /><br />For my money, singles tend to be a guide to what you can leave off an album, or a Best Of… but maybe there are other things going on here. Yes, ‘Australia’ and ‘You Stole the Sun from My Heart’ boast choruses as dramatic and exuberantly sing-along as those earlier selections from <i>Everything Must Go</i> (1996) and <i>This Is My Truth…</i> (1998), but their emotion is weaker; these are songs of retreat… and, granted, retreat from something more devastating than many of us face so young, or can articulate, but they’re not songs about confronting the horror (“the horror…”), or wallowing in it. This isn’t an <i>ad hominem</i> criticism, or attack on Nicky (and James and Sean); just an explanation of why so many later Manics songs don’t have the same impact. Take that line from ‘If you tolerate this, then your children will be next’ – <i>“I’ve walked Las Ramblas / but not with real intent”</i>. Prior to <i>The Holy Bible</i>, Richey became a voyeur in the fleshpits of South-east Asia, indulging himself to understand humanity… Las Ramblas, on the other hand, is a European red light district, making the song both a critique of alienation (or the abstraction that allows us to tolerate so much), and an enactment of the process.<br /><br />Less anthemic, but, no less energetic, the final portion of the set has a historic feel to it: one of the earliest Manics songs, ‘Sorrow 16’, is dedicated to their first label, Heavenly, and then ‘Stop! In the Name of Love’ segues into ‘Motown Junk’. When the South Wales Quartet sidle onto the stage, you can tell we’re going to be played out with ‘Everything Must Go’ and ‘A Design for Life’, with strings that could have been scored by John Barry. Neither song has ever been a favourite, and both were unpleasantly ubiquitous in ’96 / ’97, but there’s nowhere to go, at a gig, and no better track to skip to. Listening in depth for the first time in years, there are no nuances to discover – these are still a pair of songs about compromised and debased idealism, with an irony that’s uncomfortable; i.e. everyone “gets” the irony of singing about selling-out & getting drunk, but do they get the complexity of the ideas that have been put on hold for the duration of these songs? Doesn’t irony grate because it makes it seem uncool to say any more… like Duh, of course?! Still, the Manics didn’t pursue that direction, and those songs were a necessary line in the sand: this is what lies outside the venue, and at the end of the night; the (impoverishment of) values that defines the world out there.<br /><br />[Unpublished review]Michael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2990278272486555304.post-24805978106597876512011-07-22T08:11:00.000-07:002011-07-22T08:13:53.512-07:00MUSIC: various minor releases & re-issuesCultural Amnesia, Enormous Savages (Klang Galerie)<br /><br />Ooh! A lost post-punk band whose handful of cassette-only releases (1981–1983) is now being made available. In theory, **Cultural Amnesia** should be of interest only to Coil completists, given that John Balance co-wrote three of the tracks, and the band are absent from all the Indexes on my music shelf. As it happens, this turns out to be a genuine discovery, from the period when British psychedelia and prog was being played with the energy of punk. Half the time, the vocals may be redundant – satirical sketches consisting of <i>“I am a banker / I have a car”</i> or pseudo-mysticism like <i>“I can tell you nothing that you do not know / I can show you nothing that I have not seen”</i>. As the band’s conceptual framework indicates, this might once have been a performance artist’s clever detournement of tribal fetishes and rituals, recreated in the First World – but after a few decades, such musical Desmoiselles d’Avignon have become emblematic of the avant-garde at its most static. So, ignore the lyrics, and check out a psych-rock band where the synths and rhythm section Drank the Lemonade, and the vocalist and guitarist Ate the Cake. Cultural Amnesia couldn’t reinvent music (and didn’t want to trick their audience with the novelty synth-sounds of the 80s) but they could at least change the ratios between rock’s components, growing hypertrophied mutant limbs to match their ambitions. If Camberwell Now are one of your Great Lost Bands of the Decade, this will reassure you that there are other fine lost bands out there.<br /><br /><br />De La Mancha, Atlas (Crying Bob)<br /><br />In no way Quixotic, nor Spanish, **De La Mancha** (from Denmark) claim to be the next big thing after Sigur Ros, and the artwork of their new album has a suitably glacial feel, to ensure journalists pick their metaphors accordingly – that would be <i>Atlas</i> (out now, on Crying Bob). With their grandiose claims, and misleading influences before, De La Mancha are more likely to remind you of Oasis, and indeed inhabit a stratospheric realm between (early) Oasis and Ride, with a smidgen of Elbow or Doves. The Sigur Ros resemblance is apparent occasionally – in ambient, trumpet-led instrumentals – but mostly it’s a slow-build to wall-of-sound / hurricane guitars. <br /><br /><br />Flatline Skyline, All Sound / No Vision (Mechanoise Labs)<br /><br />As far as contemporary comparisons go, this isn’t far off XinliSupreme or Tweaker (i.e. NIN-member, Charlie Clouser). Either way, it’s punishingly abrasive noise, with bursts of beauty. In their hydraulic-press rigidity, though, the rhythms hark back to Cabaret Voltaire, Coil, Throbbing Gristle; in between, the clean soundscapes that introduce many tracks (and continue beneath the grind) recall early Labradford. Nicely paired with Cultural Amnesia, it’s a sign that being on a micro-niche indie-labels never meant lacking in ambition, and perhaps these are the “genuine” indies, inasmuch as there’s no mirroring of major label formulae (with less gloss, or more attitude). <br /><br /><br />Greycoats, Setting Fire to the Great Unknown (Sneak Attack Media)<br /><br />Astonishing – the Minneapolis-based Greycoats namecheck Arcade Fire, Sigur Ros, Radiohead, and claim that their singer “recalls Morrissey”. Couldn’t they have just said, “We sound like U2. U2, U2, and more U2. Oh, and Coldplay, but that kinda goes without saying.” In no respect do they resemble Sigur Ros, or Radiohead (unless track 8, ‘Watchman’, is supposed to be their crib of ‘Street Spirit’). In the first three tracks, we get plenty of “Woah-oh!” of the kind Bono quit before The Joshua Tree, and even a lyrical echo of ancient U2 track ‘Two Hearts’. On the sleeve, the boys dress up in military regalia, and occasionally batter the snares in something like a tattoo. Having only made it through one Coldplay record, this sounds similarly smooth and digestive; only distinguishing itself by swapping some of the crescendos for white funk breakdowns.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Lord Gammonshire’s Guide to Everyday Sounds (Bitter Buttons)<br /><br />“File Under UNPOPULAR: Whimsical PROG” says the back-cover. How droll…! “For fans of Caravan, Stackridge, Vivian Stanshall, and others”, says the press release, with a daring degree of obscurantism that makes you realize there are some things worse than saying “prog” (which might at least imply the guitar work-outs of Yes, or the brain-scrambled weirdness of Gabriel-era Genesis). Sadly, theirs is far too accurate a description… Had [X + Y] who comprise Lord Gammonshire half the wit of Stanshall – whose Sir Henry at Rawlinson’s End is one of the greatest feats of British Surrealism – there’d be ample reason to wade through their quirky musical porridge, but sadly not.<br /><br /><br />Odawas, The Blue Depths (Jagjaguwar)<br /><br />At a time when the rhythmic and spiky synth music of the early-80s is being pillaged by popstrels and indie-bands alike, it’s good to see a few people recreating the smoother, organic sounds of the early-90s: Laurie Anderson (especially _Strange Angels_), Vangelis, the Pet Shop Boys (their album tracks rather than singles). As the title suggests (or sets mental alarm-bells clamouring) Odawas drift perilously close to providing a soundtrack for candle-and-crystal shops – there are songs here called ‘Song of the Humpbacked Angler’ and ‘Our Gentle Life’. What keeps you listening – and I do mean listening, rather than slipping into a coma, is the detail of the songs, the strength of the melodies, and the fact that these swooping, gliding, syrupy sounds have been painstakingly constructed, and not just played by using the “whalesong” pre-set on the keyboard, or turning the Decay dials to maximum. In keeping with the whimsical / magic realist feel of the song-titles, the vocals are very Jonathan Donahue (i.e. Mercury Rev); wandering wide-eyed beneath the waves in a way that says “gosh, look at the treasures of Poseidon…” whatever the actual lyrics might be about. With the Rev long since gone-ghastly, however, this could actually be the record 90s prog fans have been waiting for; Odawas have that extra hint of sadness that keeps them from cloying, their melodies playing out like sunbeams seen from a few fathoms down, where the darker waters are visible at the same time, and for all the colours on display, many of them will fade with the depth. It’s hard to say who’s going to make the first great synth record of the decade to focus on “glide” and “swoop” rather than “stab” and “batter”, but as an aquatic companion to SVIIB’s more aerial _Alpinisms_ or Ribbons’ alien worlds, this is a good sign of more directions to explore. <br /><br /><br />Proem, _Til there’s no breath_ (Non-Response)<br /><br />Damn, that’s a sinister album cover – the HR Giger-ish alien worlds kinda clash with dedications to (solo artist) **Proem**’s young family. Perhaps he decided to make this album of “Sleepcore / Dark Ambient / Drone” (as the sleeve says helpfully) as a remedy for new fathers? On the first few tracks, think: those moments in Lynch films when a flame fills the screen, and the ripping sound it makes flickering suddenly explodes around you. These are the sinister sounds of the kingdom of the insects… but by the second half, the horror and Gothery has subsided, and you’ve entered the serene territory of Stars of the Lid, or Labradford. <br /><br /><br />Holly Throsby, A Loud Call (Woo Me)<br /><br />These days, Will Oldham’s patronage is a valuable commodity… and a fair indication of potential stars in the making, who manage to retain their cult-status, more or less: Jason Molina, Devandra Banhart, and Joanna Newsom, have all benefited from an early blessing from the Bearded One. It’s no guarantee, of course, but it makes you raise an eyebrow, just as Holly Throsby’s list of support slots does (which includes Oldham, Banhart, Newsom, plus Mark Kozelek, Bill Callahan, Dave Pajo, Low, and many others). With her lulling, gentle strum, and mild-mannered vocals Throsby is pleasant enough, but most of the songs quickly drift into the background… well before the duet with Oldham that’s supposed to be such a selling point. Reminiscent of Oldham’s simplest songwriting (on _Master and Everyone_), ‘Would You?’ feels lazy (and a touch cynical); rather than develop the imagery or hint at some mystery, Throsby fills in the song’s gaps (Q: Would you have an affair? A: Nah, probably not…) with Oldham’s voice. All in all, the album feels like the work of a professional support act; the kind of self-effacing, pleasantness that guarantees repeat business, without any threat of taking centre-stage.Michael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2990278272486555304.post-80138312690435363482011-07-22T07:59:00.000-07:002011-07-22T08:05:44.759-07:00MUSIC: The Magnetic Fields, The Charm of the Highway Strip (1993)MUSIC: The Magnetic Fields, <i>The Charm of the Highway Strip</i> (1993)<br /><br />Given that so many of the artists tagged “Alt.Country” actually consider themselves Rock or Indie, and most grew up with Punk, Hardcore, and 70s Soft Rock, the question of authenticity goes out the window; in fact, you could almost say that Alt Country is Inauthentic Country. For those involved, you might as well use synths and drum-machines alongside your slide and fiddles (like Smog, or Sparklehorse), and in a sense you are being true to what it means to be "country", in the 21st century.<br /><br />Years before the question of tracing lines of influence ever bothered me, **The Magnetic Fields** already seemed to have made an Alt.Country classic, in the form of <i>The Charm of the Highway Strip</i> (1993). In many respects the most coherent concept album in The Magnetic Fields’ oeuvre, <i>Highway Strip</i> was the first album Stephin Merritt sang in his own voice, having delegated vocal duties to Susan Anway, on _Distant Plastic Trees_ (1989) and _The Wayward Bus_ (1991). Their, her stylized vocals underscored the irony of a chanteuse singing these ‘Gay & Loud’ songs (as Merritt called his publishing company). The seeds of Merritt’s interest in Folk and Country as a conceptual counterpoint to his Futurist electronica are apparent early on, though, in songs like ‘100,000 Fireflies’, which closes _Distant Plastic Trees_ – <br /><br />I have a mandolin – I play it all night long <br />It makes me want to want to kill myself <br />I also have a dobro, made in some mountain range <br />Sounds like a mountain range in love <br />But when I turn up the tone on my electric guitar, <br />I’m afraid of the dark without you close to me <br /><br />At the end of the song, Merritt hints that Country music’s a state of mind, and the country itself (the boondocks; Hicksville; Nowhere, Idaho) is just a metaphor for an unhappy couple’s solitude:<br /><br />You won’t be happy with me, but give me one more chance<br />You won’t be happy anyway <br />Why do we still live here, in this repulsive town? <br />All our friends are in New York. <br />Why do we keep shrieking, when we mean soft things? <br />We should be whispering all the time. <br /><br />Given that Merritt’s made “a career from being blue” (as he jokingly sings on _69 Love-Songs_) it’s no surprise that when he first chose to sing in his own voice, Merritt adopted a country-singer persona, even if he only kept it up for a whole album, on _Highway Strip_. It’s the music of misery, after all. If the irony weren’t glaringly obvious, consider the fact that he also released _Holiday_ in 1993, to represent his carefree electro-pop side, as on _The Wayward Bus_ (and in spite of its title taken from John Steinbeck – him again!) <br /><br />In fact, there’s a more sincere, and more sophisticated engagement with the traditions of Country Music than many in the Alt. Country genre. Released three years before David Lynch’s _Lost Highway_ (1996), Merritt’s album reflects a longstanding preoccupation in American culture that screenwriter Barry Gifford picked up on, when he sent the split-minded protagonists along the lost highway, and into the desert, to consult the vampiric figures feeding on them (respectively: providing them fast women… and the eyes of the crowd on them, until each addiction destroyed them). Like Gifford (himself a peripheral figure in the later years of the Beat Generation), Merritt would have been thinking of Hank Williams’ ‘Lost Highway’ when he wrote the opening track, ‘Lonely Highway’, and there’s a gradual build-up to a complex mythology, from that romantically exaggerated, but otherwise realist, setting. The opening-verse of Merritt’s opening-song sounds straight (i.e. literal), unless you assume there’s a camp pun on the name of the town / the name of a (male) lover:<br /><br />I’m never going back to Jackson <br />I couldn’t bear to show my face<br />I nearly killed you with my drinking<br />Wouldn’t be caught dead in that place<br /><br />So far, so Country, but then we get a stronger taste of Surrealism, in the second track. Remember, Surrealism drew on the richly metaphoric poetry of exotic cultures, in an age of European pillaging, but it also drew on the urban experience of images and ideas colliding in the metropolis: the weirdness (i.e. seemingly fated meaningfulness) of chance encounters; the unexpectedly poetic beauty of scientific neologisms like “magnetic fields” for André Breton & co. This is ‘Long Vermont Roads’ – <br /><br />Your eyes are long Vermont roads <br />With a tacky song on the radio <br />And your eyes are toothless young men in Tennessee <br />… <br />But after all those trains, and all those breakdown lanes <br />The roads don’t love you, and still they won’t pretend to <br /> <br />Country singers love their puns… but goddamnit do they hate faggots, which makes their forced analogies so appealing to pilfer, albeit affectionately, for a Noo Yawk Bohemian like Merritt. In that second verse, Merritt transforms “breakdown lanes” into another symbol – part metaphor, part synecdoche – after all, it’s the place you literally pull over, the hard-shoulder you cry on, when you’re driving away from your lover (and maybe it’s where you pick up hitchers for a good time, too). By the third song, we’re truly on the Lost Highway:<br /><br /> Some roads are only seen at night <br /> Ghost roads – nothing but neon signs <br /> But sometimes the neon gas gets free <br /> And turns into walking dead like me <br /><br />It’s possible, even likely, that Merritt was thinking of the vampire symbolism in Bret Easton Ellis’ _Rules of Attraction_ and _The Informers_ when he wrote many of these songs. Gifford’s vampire had its own duality (i.e. represented forms of addiction that were both literal and figural), and Ellis focused on the dealer-as-vampire (also, the emotionally-cold user-as-vampire), but either way the vampire is one of the most polymorphous and perverse of symbols, in a psyche that’s already supposed to be polymorphously perverse (sez Freud). By using vampires again in the next track, ‘I Have the Moon’, Merritt defamiliarizes hackneyed notions of eternal love:<br /><br /><br /> …we have walked in ancient times <br /> And we’ve been burned for many crimes <br /> We have ended many lives <br /> But we never really died… <br /><br />…all of which is gushingly sad, drawled out in Merritt’s world-weary tone, but reminds us all (as listeners) how many people we seem to have been, each time we embark on a new love, and each time we realize we’re those lovers – we’re going through the motions that put us on a path that stretches back to the beginning of time. Sometimes old songs – not just country songs – can do this for us young’uns, sick of contemporary schmaltz; they make you realize people felt the same things decades ago, people who <i>“were born and then they lived and then they died / seems so unfair, I want to cry”</i> (to quote Stephen Morrissey). From a heterosexual perspective, the song’s doubly moving, because it’s the first one in which the singer (or his persona) comes out at the end, revealing the vampire as a double metaphor of love that should never die (but flames up and shrieks when it does), and the homosexual inhabiting a nocturnal world, whose lover may not have come out:<br /><br /> I’d like to come and comfort you<br /> But I’d be blinded by the blue<br /> You have the sun, I have the moon<br /> You’re bound to die under the sun<br /> But I’ll be doomed to carry on<br /> You have become like other men<br /> But let me kiss you once again<br /> You have the sun, I have the moon<br /><br />The album isn’t all appropriations of Country music, to serve the interests of listeners (and a songwriter) supposedly excluded from the genre. Leaving aside the modern classics for hip young metrosexuals, Merritt digs up Arthur Miller’s Willie Loman, who every primary-school child knows is the symbol of aspirational but downtrodden America. In ‘Crowd of Drifters’ Merritt doesn’t specify the demons at any point, only that: <br /><br />Sometimes the road is too long <br />You meet all kinds of people<br />Some of them cast no shadows<br />They have no reflections<br />Take a look in your photobook<br />I’m not there anymore<br /><br />I was a travelling salesman<br />I got lost on the back roads<br />Fell in with a crowd of drifters<br />Sometimes the sun is too bright and<br />It burns you like acid…<br /><br />Without forcing the analogy, Merritt tricks the listener into hearing wage-slavery as spiritual death. Maybe the anonymous people on the road “cast no shadows” because they’re thin – emaciated by poor diets and broken sleep in Motel rooms – or they only come out at night. Maybe, their lack of ‘reflections’ may be a lack of capacity for self-reflexion, or a trope for their one-dimensional existence (no depth to their characters; no Ego or Id, only the Super-Ego piloting them along). <br /><br />Is the singer no longer “in your photobook” because he was never quite there, or his face has ceased to have any meaning, to be noticed? Has he been taken out in some frustrated gesture of banishment, and then forgotten – he was written off so long ago? There’s something delirious, sleep-deprived, early-morning dream-logic about the lack of resolution. The burning sun in the second verse, again, doesn’t force the vampire metaphor: it also captures the sting of the late-afternoon sun reflecting off fenders and hoods onto weary eyes. <br /><br />This guy doesn’t have nothing though: he has a car; he has that good old phallic symbol of autonomy and masculinity. Continuing his symbolic trajectory through American myth-history, Merritt introduces a female character in ‘Fear of Trains’ (track 7), a song that would be almost academic in its exhuming of white men’s guilt, if it weren’t for its jaunty train rhythm… although even that manages to be pointed; the use of trains being class-coded, a mark of social stratification, and an instrument of economic subjugation:<br /><br /> It was the Army train that took her Daddy from her<br /> It was the Bible train that took her Momma too<br /> And that high loud whistle made her horse run away<br /> But the straw that broke the camel’s back was you<br /> <br /> It was the Government train that took away her childhood<br /> It was the KKK that took away her past<br /> It was the white man’s will that hers be broken<br /> But that barefoot girl could run too fast<br /><br />In ‘When the Open Road Is Closing In’, the singer has simply become the road; realizing that the highway is the beginning and the endpoint of automation: curbing your life to a straight line, and making you one-dimensional in the process. The sequencing of the album isn’t strictly (reverse) chronological, but its penultimate track suggests that The Charm of the Highway Strip is only slightly removed from The Charm of the Railway Track, which came before. On the rails, the destination is a vanishing point that only the driver can see, while the passengers are looking at a procession of blurred images. On the Lonely Highway, every driver may be isolated in their metal shell, but the passengers on a train are often just as lonely among strangers, and lack the comforting illusion of autonomy. There’s not much to say about the final instrumental, but given the historic parallels between the events of 80 years ago, and the events of 2008 – 2009, a track entitled ‘Dust Bowl’ is a poignant message that where we’re coming from (historically) is often where we’re going.<br /><br />Finally, if there is as strong a connection to Bret Easton Ellis as I’ve suggested, Merritt must have loved the fact he got to put a “Merge” sign on the back of his minimalist sleeve – alluding simultaneously to Kraftwerk’s _Autobahn_ and the dark punning in Less Than Zero, not to mention subsequent novels about spiritual, cultural, and moral vacuity in contemporary America. In the novel, the narrator ponders Freeway etiquette (“people are afraid to merge”) without ever thinking of his insight as an epiphany. Like Ellis, Merritt more than once transforms ghosts and vampires from the stock figures of horror-movies (personifying guilty memories or predatory sexuality) into emblems of distinctly fin-de-siecle anxieties: ghostliness as emptiness, and the vampire as insatiable, unfeeling consumer, drained by the late-capitalist economy. Sounds like an Alt.Country album to me, and a classic one at that…<br /><br />[slightly edited from previous publication on DiS]Michael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2990278272486555304.post-49251967822443419992011-07-22T07:56:00.000-07:002011-07-22T08:09:35.518-07:00MUSIC: This Heat, Deceit (1981)Judged by its cover alone, <i>Deceit</i> (1981) is the great prophetic record of the era – the front depicts a scream beneath a mask that is a collage of: Mushroom-Cloud between-the-eyes; JFK & Khruschev shaking hands; Stars & Stripes across the tongue; Ron & Nancy on the forehead. These are the images still familiar in 2008. The lyric-sheet is scattered with the same clippings, and some more helpful captions. Much of this is identical to the collage ingredients for <i>OK Computer</i> (1997) and its singles: what to do in the event of a bomb, or when the siren sounds; where tactical nukes are deployed, worldwide; those oddly dehumanizing line-drawings of how to prepare your fall-out shelter. <i>Deceit</i> came out in 1981, though – a couple of years before Star Wars (the Strategic Defense Initiative); before Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein; before the first massacre of the Kurds. Ten years later, GW1; ten years further on, 9/11; then the War for Oil, then the Credit Crunch; and only this week can we see real hope of a decline in Republican war-mongering and financial mismanagement (the legacy of Milton Friedman, via Reagan & Thatcher). You know most of this; the point is, to get a sense of history… but also a sense of “prophecy” as a meaningful term in the context of avant-garde music.<br /><br />Back in 1979, punk in the sense of scuzzed-up glam or sped-up blues had already exhausted its capacity for subversion. Nonetheless, a door had clearly been opened for the experimentalism of post-punk (in a loose sense), and within that (or overlapping), a kind of proto-industrial music that has little to do with Ministry, NIN, or Front 242. Alongside Lydon’s definitive nail-in-the-coffin of the Pistols – <i>Metal Box</i> (1979) – <b>This Heat</b>’s debut was the sound of re-invention and refutation, both musical and ideological. Heavier than Throbbing Gristle or Cabaret Voltaire, the industrial analogies (at the time) require some contextualizing: industrial as a simile (metal on metal), industrial as a reflection of process (customized machines), industrial as an allusion to critiques of the “military industrial complex”. The best (or worst) was yet to come, however…<br /> <br /><i>Deceit</i> (1981) is prophetic, for a start, in that it’s glossolalic – it’s gibberish, it’s speaking in tongues, it’s too many ideas at once, and if you throw them at the wall, some of them are bound to stick, and look like a warning three decades later, if not like <i>Revelations</i>. Thing is, prophecy often attracts the wrong people, and gets ignored by the rest, when they assume it must refer to some specific event in the future (i.e. Kabbalism), rather than referring to the horror here and now, but visibly imminent to those who can see the historic patterns (…which is one aspect of Gnosticism). Track 5, ‘Cenotaph’ spells this out: “his-tory / his-tory / repeats itself / repeats itself // Poppy Day – remember poppies are red / and the fields are full of poppies” – it’s literally a song about decoding symbols, and not letting the signal become noise; it’s not a Fuck You to the jingoism and self-righteousness of the generation who “served” (as Sid, Siouxsie, and others claimed their Nazi regalia was meant to suggest), nor does this song disrespect the dead, but it does demand that we re-consider our values. The most recognizably “punk” track on the album, ‘SPQR’ (Track 4), identifies another repetition, and how we’re taught by rote to repeat the values, and sometimes the mistakes, of our parents – right back to the imperialism and centralized government of 2,000 years ago: “we’re all Romans / we know all about straight roads / every road leads home / home to Rome / <i>amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant</i>.”<br /><br />The devastating industrial freak-out, ‘Makeshift Swahili’ (Track 8), condenses most of these ideas into one song, although you wouldn’t know it at first from the Dalek-voice: “…makeshift she sings / in her native German / you try to understand / what she’s trying to say / she says ‘You’re only as good / as the words you understand / and you, you don’t understand / the words.’ / CHORUS: Tower of Babel!!! / Swaaaaaaahili!!! / It’s all Greek to me!” The middle-eight introduces a pretty guitar figure, and a second voice relates a fragment of history that might have been dropped in as a sample, years later: “ ‘we give you firewater / you give us your land’ / ‘white-man speak with forked tongues / but it’s too late now / to start complaining…’” The sinister drones resume almost immediately, and then the song explodes with an intensity surpassing punk at its most violent – Charles Hayward shrieking “Rhubarb! Rhubarb! Rhubarb!” Granted, this track may not be the most obvious demonstration of the genius of This Heat – Yes, Babel remains the best-known parable of the dangers of imperialism (if not globalization) collapsing under the weight of its ambition; there are also hints that language is power, and literacy was an instrument of subjugation, in the case of the Native Americans, rather than being the gift of enlightenment (see also, Gang of Four’s contemporaneous <i>Entertainment!</i>). These allusions operate according to the collage-principles of juxtaposition and partial-tearing to create new meanings – collage being the best known Dadaist strategy – but This Heat also employ sound-poetry and a kind of automatic-speaking akin to channelling and possession (these being associated with Dadaism’s loopier, more magic(k)al experiments, pre-WWI). Art-history lesson almost done, it remains to point out that when inter-war Surrealism re-visited Dadaism, it used the slogan “Surrealism in the service of the revolution”, and was firmly Marxist in its orientation. If 1970s English Progressive Rock was a debased surrealism in the service of trippiness, This Heat brought the revolutionary spirit back.<br /><br />What of the rest of the album? It’s a complex beast, whose intra-textualities are as numerous as the inter-textualities. The use of loops, drones, found-sounds, and unusual percussion (girders, dummy-heads) was so elaborate that you have to look to The Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ for a precursor, and as far ahead as Aphex Twin when describing the more danceable and abrasive tracks. A guitarist as evil – but subtle – as Charles Bullen wouldn’t be found until Dave Pajo (of Slint), and if you want a comparison for the first album, only <b>liars</b> have come close, with <i>Drum’s not Dead</i> (2006). Personally, I can hear the ghost of Nico channelled into This Heat’s weird mix of fucked-up lullabies (Track 1: ‘Sleep’), and drone-based proto-industrial nightmares. The drawing of parallels between the End of Rome & the Cold War Era is also very Nico, and the phrase “the sound of explosions” on ‘A New Kind of Water’ (Track 10) feels like a reference to Eno’s “bomb-noises” for Nico’s <i>The End</i>. (Eno also recorded Manzanera’s pre-Roxy band, Quiet Sun, who included one Charles Hayward, later of This Heat. Rhubarb Rhubarb.) <br /><br />Opening track ‘Sleep’ tells us we’re all unconscious, lulled by commercials (hence “softness is a thing called Comfort”), and these operate on us like Pavlov’s dogs (CHORUS: “stimulus and response”). ‘Triumph’ might be suggesting a parallel between Neighbourhood Watch (imported from the US in 1982 – a landmark in the history of surveillance), and the early years of Nazism, when Riefenstahl assembled her filmic montage <i>Triumph of the Will</i>. ‘SPQR’ is sung in the first person plural and refers to the supposedly democratic electorate as “unconscious collective” – Cold War propaganda and sci-fi alike often fantasized the enemy as an insectile hive-mind, but this song isn’t about an external enemy: the enemy is now internal. ‘Independence’ (Track 9) is, quite literally, the Declaration of Independence. Ask yourself, as a UK-citizen, have you ever read it? Do you know what it says? Could you imagine trying to implement its ideals now? Doesn’t its endorsement of revolution sound – well, “un-American” (as the Patriot Act defines “American”)? The climax is post-punk masterpiece and personal favourite, ‘A New Kind of Water’, which layers un-synchronized drums, bass, and a chiming guitar line – a distant siren that hasn’t yet been recognized as a warning signal. As the parts cycle, and change in volume, the notes interact differently. The initial chorus vocals are those of impotent, infantilized consumers (“we were told to expect more / and now that we’ve got more / we want more”). After that, the vocal delivery is soulless and hollow – Winston Smith at the end of <i>1984</i> – we have hope, it says: ‘a cure for cancer / we’ve got men on the job.’ Urgency increases… the drums begin to pound… you realize the apocalypse is here and you wish you were in Neverland (“fly away Peter / hideaway Paul…”). The title of the final track is written in Japanese characters, transliterated into Romaji (‘Hi Baku Shyo’), and then translated into English (‘Suffer Bomb Disease’). There are no words in this murky, marshy soundscape – maybe this is the world in which only cockroaches have survived. Maybe English-speakers are only tolerated as slaves of the victorious “Yellow Peril” (hence the Romaji-script). Then again, maybe the bomb has already dropped, and we became insects without realizing it. <br /><br />THIS HEAT: <br />This Heat (1979) 8 / 10<br /><br />‘24 Track Loop’ also available on <i>In the Beginning was Rhythm</i> (SoulJazz), revealing the dancier, dubbier side of post-punk.<br /><br />“Health & Efficiency EP” (12”: 1980; CD: 1998)<br />[Starts like Supergrass – “here’s a song about the sunshine! / dedicated to the sunshine!” – and then breaks down into a kind of punk/jazz instrumental] 8 / 10<br /><br />Deceit (1981) 9 / 10<br /><br />Made Available: BBC Sessions, 1977 (1996)<br />[Live versions of “best” / most song-like tracks from the first album, a version of ‘Makeshift’ some might prefer, and more noise-scapes] 8 / 10<br /><br />Repeat (1998)<br />[Extended version of ‘24 Track Loop’; percussive B-side to “Health” EP, 12”; various experiments from 1979] 6 / 10<br /><br />CAMBERWELL NOW: <br />‘Meridian’ EP (1982) / <i>The Ghost Trade</i> LP (1985) / ‘Greenfingers’ EP (1986)<br />[Collected as All’s Well that End’s Well (2006)] 8 / 10Michael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2990278272486555304.post-7408679294600838802011-07-22T07:26:00.000-07:002011-07-22T07:33:04.790-07:00MUSIC: The Whiskers, War of Currents (2009)Welcome to your new favourite band… kinda like your old favourite band.<br /><br />Okay, so that’s subjectivity raised to the n-th degree, but The Whiskers – who formed through the mediation of a Frog Eyes message board – often sound like a microscopically observed homage to not just one weird band, but the whole damn Axis of Krug, namely: Sunset Rubdown, Swan Lake, Frog Eyes, Blackout Beach, Destroyer… and even throws in some of their tourmates for good measure, like Xiu Xiu and Elfin Saddle. Perhaps in an effort to throw off the older influences, the new album builds its surreal ballads up from seesawing acoustic riffs stretched out to 6, 7, 8 minutes, and adds brass – entering Neutral Milk Hotel territory – but with a cast of vampires, ghosts, swans, and seamstresses sewing wings onto doomed lovers, the shadow of Spencer Krug is cast over much of it. <br /><br />Formed around Connecticut-based brothers Thom and Jim Stylinski, the Whiskers are a shifting, pan-American collective who make quirky chamber-pop or freak-folk. You could call it a Prog revival, if it’s understood that The Whiskers are far more accessible than that makes them sound, if not instantly likeable. Albums #1 & 2 (_The Whiskers_ & _The Distorted Historian_) took the Frog Eyes formula of lo-fi garage-prog with rapid-fire lyrics starring mythical figures, and substantially improved on it with f/x-heavy synths and programming that explodes in several directions at once. That might make the Whiskers sound like a completely different band, but it’s those unplayable, machine-generated sounds that replicate Frog Eyes’ dozen-ideas-a-second, while (paradoxically) having more emotional impact for being tight in a way Frog Eyes just aren’t. (Alternative comparison: If you ever wished Magnetic Fields would re-make their first two albums with Stephin Merritt on vocals, instead of Susan Amway… look no further). <br /><br />With their third album, _War of Currents_, The Whiskers have largely retired the synths, and taken a crack at the multi-segmented epic song, with the example of _In the Aeroplane Over the Sea_ or Sunset Rubdown’s _Dragonslayer_ behind them. In a nutshell: it’s a masterclass in epic songwriting, which only falls short of greatness in its reluctance to vary the (new) formula. Then again, unlike yer-akshel 70s progsters, The Whiskers never bore or jar by dropping in unnecessary movements; always unifying their songs with a strong riff or chord progression. <br /><br />Granted, there are other precedents for this 7 track, 42 minute album, but with songs like ‘The Seamstress’ you have to wonder whether they’re not attempting a deliberate patchwork of Krug-isms (in this case: ‘The Mending of the Gown’ spliced with ‘Shut Up, I am Dreaming of Places Where Lovers Have Wings’). When Krug sings about chameleons and leopards, morticians and magicians, you know he’s fretting and sometimes snarking about the nature of performance, even as he mythologizes it; when Stylinski adopts these (and adds a few of his own, like ornithopters and wing-walkers), for better or for worse, it feels as if you’re just getting the fantasy, without an obvious route back to the personal. (Not that he doesn’t have his own quotable moments: “you married on the ferris wheel / honeymooned in the haunted house / you were buried in the cemetery / I want to blow the winter out of the sea…”). <br />Elsewhere, the Stylinski brothers deliberately mimic the vocal interplay of Bejar / Mercer / Krug on the Swan Lake records (those three songwriter showdowns), and as if they’re worried no-one’s got the point, they even pull Dan (Destroyer) Bejar’s trick of quoting classic pop songs with completely different melodies (on ‘Birds of Paradise’: “bird-bird-bird / bird is the word / everybody’s heard / about the bird…”). Somehow, it always comes across as affectionate rather than lazy; fun rather than tired, so keep watching this space for genuine greatness. <br /><br />All three albums are available to download or order on CD at www.awkwardcore.com<br /><br />[Re-published here since the sad demise of the band... not completely unmourned]Michael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2990278272486555304.post-72141466552242884112011-07-22T07:20:00.000-07:002011-07-22T07:24:08.835-07:00MUSIC: EDM, pt. II - an album and gig reviewEarly Day Miners @ The Lexington, King’s Cross (Sunday Dec 6, 2009) <br /><br />EDM are heavy. Not ear-bleeding in their settings, or wall-of-sound in their lack of arrangement, but heavy in their emphasis on big, dynamic riffs and bass-grooves that sweep you up, without overpowering, or straying into the baroque of mathrock, metal, whatever. EDM share a musical language with shoegaze (currently being revived trashily, by the likes of No Age… and prettily, by School of Seven Bells). Unlike any of the above, EDM take what they need for the sake of a flowing, rushing layer within their sound; not a screen to disguise lack of tunes, or an amniotic haze, but a crucial component to songs whose words you can hear, and whose worlds you can inhabit. Any comparison to Radiohead is likely to sound like hyperbole or make you think Muse, but only a few recent songs, like ‘Arpeggi’, ‘Bodysnatchers’, and the live version of ‘Videotape’ come close to what EDM have been doing for years with this kind of surging, pulsing, organic music. (FYI: Mainman Dan Burton learned his craft as a producer from Daniel Lanois, who worked on all of U2’s best material.) Oh, and he can actually sing; not ostentatiously, but with a distinct resemblance to Peter Gabriel.<br /><br />Tonight, EDM play an even split between the gothically-tinged <i>All Harm Ends Here</i> (2004), the post-rock leaning <i>Offshore</i> (2006), and their new foray into (or towards) mainstream rock, <i>The Treatment</i>. Opening the set, there’s something ritualistic about the simple refrain of “all harm… ends here / old faith…for-given…” as if the song’s impression of a long march has brought us to a place of sanctuary. Confidently, EDM follow up with two of the best songs from the new album, ‘So slow’ and ‘Spaces’, which manage to fit in squalling wah-wah solos worthy of The Cure, without breaking the flow, as a lesser band would (filling in while they wait for the guitarist to finish). Mid-set, we get a run of older tracks, namely ‘Deserter’ and ‘Sans Revival’ from <i>Offshore</i> followed by ‘Offshore’ itself. Composed as a string of images with haiku-like precision, the songs draw a thematic link between the devastation of the Civil War, and America post-Hurricane Katrina. I’ve said it before, but ‘Sans Revival’ (more like a deferred chorus to ‘Deserter’) is one of my most-played (and most shivers down the spine as you try to harmonize) songs of the decade. It’s hard to quote EDM without making them sound like a defeated, or depressing band, but the lyrics describe the moment before escape, before resolution, before defiance they can best express with recourse to post-rock crescendos, or desolate drone-scapes that depict the vast chasms of human experience to either side of what we can say at all, or bring ourselves to say. <br /><br />Two more new songs follow: ‘In Too Deep’ and ‘How to Fall’, both underlining the band’s newfound commitment to strong choruses the audience can yell along to, and impressionistic lyrics that work through repetition. The former might refer to someone drowning before they even hit the beach at Normandy, and the latter refers to a prizefighter who’d rather be beaten than be fake, but with repetition your understanding alternates between image and symbol, suggesting: emotional pain in a relationship, commitment to art over commerce. Switch back: someone’s dying here, someone’s taking real punishment. Already, all of these new songs are as vital as the best of the old, and yet the old are made new – like the closing number from <i>All Harm</i>, personifying urban decay as a vampire “drain[ing] all life away”; re-arranged here as if it’s something from the second-side of Joy Division’s timeless <i>Closer</i>. That’s to say, the electric organ setting should be cheap and ersatz, but instead these shrill drones rise up like castle-walls, like a fortress that (this time) keeps feeling outside, because feeling means pain.<br /><br />And yet. Andyet-andyet-andyet… they’re so damn hopeful! EDM know they’re not fashionable, and they’ve been ignored for years, or dismissed for reviving the sounds of yesteryear (slowcore, shoegaze, whatever) when they’re actually refining ideas, effects, and studio techniques the “originals” didn’t necessarily use to the fullest. A line of people queue to say thanks for coming all the way from the Midwest (from Bloomington, Indiana) and I’m one of the more hesitant wellwishers because… actually, I don’t figure out what I wanted to say until afterwards, on the nightbus home, which is that I’m grateful they're doing this, but I also feel sad for all my friends who beat their heads against the same brick wall, and this has been one of the handful of gigs I’ve seen – ever – that was captivating and urgent and life-affirming at every last moment.Michael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2990278272486555304.post-9902030250777184332011-07-22T07:08:00.001-07:002011-07-22T09:30:04.998-07:00MUSIC: Early Day Miners - one of America's greatest unknown bandsFor almost a decade, Daniel Burton has led Early Day Miners, who still feel like one of the best kept secrets in contemporary American independent music. To say that Burton approaches songwriting like a Great American Novelist is not to say that, like Lou Reed, he has a large cast of sleazy but cartoonish characters, as his way of keeping it real. No, Burton melds landscape and history in a way that can only be compared to William Faulkner or Cormac MacCarthy. In fact, the <i>Offshore</i> from 2006 was a personal album of the year, joint with <i>Ys</i> by Joanna Newsom, but impossible to choose between because it seemed like its darker, masculine counterpart – an elegy in the midst of destruction.<br /><br />So why haven’t you heard of them? Ultimately, Early Day Miners may take a long time to gain the recognition they deserve – their determination and integrity is pure punk-rock, but the sound and songs may not be so palatable to indie-fans who assume that integrity = trashiness. Think Bedhead without the irony… but Codeine without the depressive inertia; Dave Pajo (of Slint and Papa M) playing as all his different incarnations, at the same time; Talk Talk (circa <i>Spirit of Eden</i>, and <i>Laughing Stock</i>), if the playing had the heaviness and precision of US-hardcore. Then again, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to mention the decidedly unhip ‘Brothers in Arms’ (the song) by Dire Straits, or 1990s Peter Gabriel without the schmaltziness of the lyrics – literally, the core of each, beneath the “blues” and “world-music” signifiers. So, let’s just say this is the one independent band who won’t compromise by not sounding accomplished… <br /><br />Way back when, Burton was apprenticed to Daniel Lanois, probably best known to DiS-readers as the producer who ensured that U2’s mid-80s left-turn into Americana would result in some actual classics (<i>The Unforgettable Fire</i> and <i>The Joshua Tree</i>), rather than excruciating pastiche. Burton could have had a career making Grammy-winning platinum albums, but instead kept his skills for the underground, and cult indie bands, including Okkervil River and Songs:Ohia; effectively, making him one of the most important people on the other side of the glass since Steve Albini.<br /><br /><i>Placer Found</i> (2000)<br /><br />“moving north through the snow / to the destination / but still a-ways to go…” (‘Placer Found’)<br /><br />More of a state of the soul than a collection of discreet songs, _Placer Found_ remains a remarkable debut, and might easily have been named after its final track, ‘Desert Cantos’. Like Codeine (on <i>The White Birch</i>) and Low (on <i>The Curtain Hits the Cast</i>), EDM capture the mood of a place, and if they seem to be entering similar sonic territory, then that’s not to say they haven’t found their own musical idiom, to match a set of lyrics that sketch the tranquillity and loneliness of the Midwestern states. With its powerful but restrained drumming, hushed vocals, and delicate lead-guitar lines, <i>Placer Found</i> is slowcore reaching towards post-rock; in fact, the 12 minute closer is just that (think Mogwai’s ‘You Don’t Know Jesus’ at halfspeed). <br /><br />Elsewhere, clear drones underlie the buoyant and trebly guitar lines of ‘Longwall’ and the meandering figures of ‘In These Hills’, both of which resemble the spare instrumentals sketched by Aerial M / Papa M (i.e. Dave Pajo, formerly of Slint, with whom Burton would later collaborate). Certainly, ‘Placer Found’ sounds like the best material from Pajo’s first full-length collection of songs, <i>Whatever, Mortal</i>, and linking the main nodes in the map of slowcore, you could easily persuade a hopeful Slint fan that ‘Stanwix’ is a lost track from <i>Spiderland</i>, or The For Carnation, as Burton whispers about a family coming together to sit, say Grace, and eat, over impossibly slow music that seems about to break into rock, when the cymbals first crash, but instead yield up a gorgeously lazy slide-guitar solo, that gradually subsides, and almost mews like a cat in its final few bars. <br /><br /><br /><i>Let Us Garlands Bring</i> (2002)<br /><br />Burton had already established himself as an intelligent observer of place, but his second album was richer in detail, as well as being his most personal in its emotional candour. Verses unfold like haiku, with each cluster of images linking Place – Season – Feeling. The emotions are often: a private pain, an indeterminable sense of “something wrong”, or the loss of a “forgotten faith”. In a sense, you don’t need these abstract cues: breath by breath, Burton exhales his soul into the concrete features of the world, losing himself among billboards and powerlines, rivers that are “rusted” (‘Centralia’) or “blinding white”, until he has a “vacant soul” (both from ‘Santa Carolina’). See below, though, for a longer examination of ‘Offshore’ – an eight-minute masterpiece of songwriting (equalled only by Sun Kil Moon’s ‘Carry Me Ohio’) that was later expanded into a 38-minute album. (8/10)<br /><br /><br /><i>Jefferson at Rest</i> (2003)<br /><br />Slightly lacking in focus, EDM’s third album may not have found a new direction, and resisted any of the tricks (or, more simply, the long tracks) that made its predecessors more dramatic. Nonetheless, every one of its songs is a beautifully crafted thing, with or without any post-rock climax. In other words, it’s an album that succeeds in conveying its intended impression: of peace, and perhaps even fulfilment of the historic promise to grant liberty to all in America, even if it’s impossible to erase the shame. It may help to know that Burton’s father is a history lecturer, and the previous album had ended with ‘Light in August’ (named after a William Faulkner novel), hinting that the references aren’t scenery – monuments you pass, in transit – but signs the past is alive inside the present; that’s ‘Jefferson at Rest’, after all, not “Jefferson: dead”. Then again, it’s equally true to say that some of the signs of human habitation you pass lack any connection to history – as much a home as the shell of a hermit-crab – not because these are the people excluded, but those who don’t even have a connection to the past through so much as a corrugated iron church. See the second song: <i>“factory worklights / miles of windblown acreage / wind like a siren / howling through home-steads / wash---ed a---way // gravel roads trailing / move to the river / far across the border / oil light portraiture / all--- fall--- down…”</i><br /><br />Considerations of how this fits with “slowcore criteria” aside, it makes most sense to describe Burton’s music (especially on _Jefferson_) as a kind of emotional minimalism, not to be mistaken for the oppressive sound of many slowcore bands – the relentless beatings of misfortune that contrast, yet explain, the crippling depression of Codeine’s lyrics; the suffocating atmosphere of Cat Power’s first three records; the inner fantasies of revenge soundtracked by Low on their own first three (with the bass like blood pulsing in your skull). In fact, Antony Hegarty’s immaculate new album, scored by Nico Muhly, provides the best comparison to the closing track of _Jefferson at Rest_, where Burton sings clear but quiet vocals over a guitar-line so discreet as to be ambient, with an identical second vocal, almost imperceptible, much lower in the mix beneath it than one would ordinarily set the levels when double-tracking – pulling at it, rather than boosting it. Demonstrating much the same economy as the best Low lyrics, Burton sings: <i>“Community is on the rise; / you left me out, / in my mind. / You’re distant; / far behind.”</i> Long, peaceful drones, almost indistinguishable from actual voices, begin at this point, and then the main vocal resumes: <i>“What can we do / to bring us together? / To make us whole…? / What can we do / to bring us together?”</i> What indeed? That false-vocal hints at the beginning of speech, infinitely protracted… eternally about to say the right words, which may in fact be any words, so long as they’re spoken at all. <br /><br /><br /><i>All Harm Ends Here</i> (2005)<br /><br /><i>“escape is simple / just leave”</i> (‘We Know in Part’)<br /><br />Aiming to write some of his most conventional rock-songs, whilst retaining the (characteristically slowcore) “power-in-restraint” of previous albums, Burton managed to deliver his most captivating set from start-to-finish. The songs are darker than ever, yet it’s not an oppressively bleak record (hence, “escape is simple / just leave”), and a closer listen to the record dispels any sense of self-pity, or the failed rockstar’s tendency to heighten their tragedy as if only that would constitute great art… all of which makes this a great comfort to anyone weary of rock’s histrionics. As Burton continues to sing/murmur, on ‘We Know in Part’, it’s possible to find a “secret world” if you listen closely. The guitars may snarl on ‘All Harm’, which picks up the tempo (okay, only as much as a Bedhead / New Years track), and the low-mixed lead guitar is overdriven to scratch and growl, but the mantra he’s singing is actually: “all harm--- / ends here--- / old faith--- / forgiv---en”. In a sense, then, this is a record about internalizing the lessons of the dark years, and moving on. Curiously, having established himself as one of the foremost realists among all lyricists – and Confessionalism isn’t the same as Realism, however sincere – a couple of songs (and the instrumental ‘The Purest Red’) allude to a vampire that seems to personify urban decay. Previously, the rusted and cracked human environment that Burton depicted had seemed always on the brink of being reclaimed by nature – that a decrepit factory is no more permanent and no more complex than an animal’s nest or burrow – but on this record, he discovers the malice lurking in the city, hence the subtle move toward more Gothic imagery, and a hint of Joy Division. <br /><br /><br /><i>Offshore</i> (2006)<br /><br />The fifth album by Early Day Miners, <i>Offshore</i>, slipped out in August 2006, to no fanfare, and very few reviews. For listeners already aware of the high plateau they’d been occupying for several years, there was every expectation of another fine record, but no indications that this would be a record to rank alongside Joy Division’s <i>Closer</i> (1980), Songs: Ohia’s <i>Ghost Tropic</i> (2000) or Sigur Ros’ <i>( )</i> (2002); all of them records that transcend the idea of the album as a-collection-of-songs-by-some-people-in-a-room-somewhere, and instead come across as an experience in its own right. <br /><br />Anyone familiar with the song ‘Offshore’ from the 2002 album will realize that most of the 2006 album’s lyrical content is taken from there, albeit spread across two tracks, now, and the climax of the earlier song is re-worked for two massive post-rock numbers. Writing and recording _Let Us Garlands Bring_ in 2001, Burton had been unable to respond immediately to the events of September 11th, but found that the song Early Day Miners had been closing their sets with for years had an added resonance after the massive betrayal of the people of New Orleans by the Bush regime. The lyrics below are no longer personal memories, but fragments of an oral history… or an urban archaeology, washed up after the floodwaters retreat: <br /><br /><i>“Twisted trail of fire / I’m losing you to your desire / in rooms---, with--- ocean views // A family in peril / broken and destroyed within / er---ased in warm--- concrete // Rusted oak and dragonflies / a masquerade ball / a Mardi Gras mask, a cheap façade / white--- heat and misery…”</i> (‘Return of the Native’)<br /><br />Returning to those albums by other artists for a minute though (_Closer_, _Ghost Tropic_, and _( )_ ), there’s both a musical and a lyrical continuity here, if you think of portentous lyrics like <i>“here are the young men / the weight on their shoulders”</i> (Ian Curtis), the imagism of <i>“the ocean’s deep nerves”</i> (Jason Molina), and Jonssi’s distended vocables democratically inviting you to find exactly as much solace as you need, the perfect words that should have been said. As you’d expect from those comparisons, and the EDM reviews above, the bass and drums are worthy of Hook & Morris, the guitar and organ drones are layered into a detailed soundscape receding into the infinite distance, the guitars are expressive even when the strings are just being stretched and scraped, or the guitarists are manipulating feedback (as in the first three minutes of ‘Hymn Beneath the Palisades’ before the delayed-guitars start squawling, and then the main riff arrives, almost at the five minute mark.)<br /><br />Unlike those three albums, on which the darkness increases track-by-track, as they deliberately lengthen, and settle into ever more sombre riffs (or protracted guitar freak-outs) _Offshore_ has a curious symmetry to its sequencing. Book-ended by a pair of 9-minute post-rock masterpieces that charge along like a train seen from a distance (track 1) and a train bearing the listener toward a dark and skyscraping city, the lyrical content of the album amounts to two poems of desolation sung by male and female voices (tracks 2 & 4). Each of these “poems” roughly follows the melody that’s the album’s leitmotif, although each without a chorus. It’s a sign of the album’s integrity – demanding to be experienced as a single suite – that the tracks are cut-off so that they can’t be played individually without a jarring break, and the third track (between the two “poems”) is almost entirely a chorus:<br /><br /> Give up<br /> Giv-ing in<br /> Run-ning hand in hand<br /><br /> A-way from Destruction<br /> In-to your Desertion<br />Give in-to Temptation<br /> Se-ver all Relation <br /><br /> (‘Sans Revival’)<br /><br />Here, at last, is hope. Is this the hope of a deserter from the US Civil War… or a contemporary immigrant, escaping one of the world’s countless wars (many of them precipitated by US intervention)? Is this the hope that led them to places like New Orleans, where they may yet be victims of “geographic racism” (i.e. the selective neglect of poor quarters, or the siting of environmental hazards near ghettoes). Is this, then, the hope that dissolves all historical distinctions when it’s You (plural) against the world? <br /><br />[slightly edited from a previous publication on DiS]Michael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2990278272486555304.post-23431392939014339832011-07-22T07:00:00.000-07:002011-07-22T07:03:46.040-07:00MUSIC: Marnie Stern, This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is ThatMarnie Stern, <i>This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That</i> (Kill Rock Stars)<br /><br />This review will try to avoid hyperbole about “technical ability” and “intellectual agility”, but the fact is: no other album springs to mind that makes so many declarative statements about desire and interior states with such nuance, and unique imagery expanding on them. As the title suggests, <i>This Is It...</i> is an album about the infinite inter-connectedness of everything… or, in one (much misunderstood) word, Love. Across twelve songs, Marnie Stern elaborates at least three inter-related themes, or perhaps one theme that’s the single face of a four-dimensional hyper-cube: that the perfect lover could only come from the future, or seem like they have done, because the present is a condition of painful alienation; that said-lover would take her out of time, extending the moment of connection indefinitely; that the only way to get the message across is to fill every second with notes. Call it psycho-geometry if you want, but Marnie’s lyrics insist on returning to reality rather than escaping into the domain of numbers, as if it’s the trite metaphors of popular culture (she’s implying) that are a betrayal of reality. Opening track ‘Prime’ aligns her with the “defenders of the real”, after all.<br /><br />Thing is, this is all so much funnier and sweeter and – yes – more feminine than the exegesis above might make it sound; the “future lover” is a complex version of Tim Wheeler’s ‘Girl from Mars’ (or Frank Black’s), but sung about in a way that’s no less wide-eyed and this-must-be-love-because-you-make-me-feel-like-a-teenager. Take ‘Roads? Where We’re Going We Don’t Need Roads’; yep, that’s the Doc at the end of _Back to the Future_, just like “point of no return” (in ‘Prime’) is probably a nod to _BTTF III_, and “road to nowhere” a hit from Marnie’s early-teens. That’s not to say these are shallow references – one listen tells you Marnie’s on the same road as David Byrne, and committed to “the sounds of the future”. ‘Roads?’ opens with a bold statement: “I present two sides: my hopelessness and my faith / my ego and my heart”. By the end, Marnie’s using her ultra-fast vocal-lines as texture, but never so much that individual lines can’t be heard, and even parsed should you wish to.<br /><br />Elsewhere, the multiple references to “dimensions” act as a bridge between lyrics about the domain of numbers, and lyrics about the Ego and Id, as well as referring to the paralinguistic function of the music itself: to go beyond the limits of what words can say. The numerous “pyramids” could be metonymic of human achievements so enduring they seem to stand outside time; impressions of the World of Eternal Forms in our own; symbolic, too, of the triads that compose regular chords, somehow extended into a third (sonic) dimension by multi-tracking; and perhaps also representative (at a stretch) of the Ego & Ids of a pair of lovers interlocking as the vertices of a pyramid. (In case all this sounds loopy, bear in mind what Marnie told DiS: that practicing for hours, and playing fast, is how she escapes time, and finds fulfilment because, hey, life is hard and often lonely.) <br /><br />Musically, this isn’t a huge leap forward from the debut, but at least four stand-out tracks rock HARD, even anthemically, rather than just FAST, to fit more notes in that suggest new textures. Comparisons to Van Halen, Mick Barr, and those fictive time-travellers Wyld Stallyns (!) are warranted, but also Tom Verlaine and Robert Fripp who know about restraint and emotion. In places Marnie wants the guitars to sound brittle, inorganic and crystalline, but elsewhere like a rush of neurotransmitters on a molecular level – y’know: a feeling. I’ll say it again: ‘The Crippled Jazzer’ sounds like the best track Sleater-Kinney never wrote, with Led Zep / ‘When the Levee Breaks’ drums, and a lead guitar that’s almost a fife. ‘Vault’ multi-tracks the final chorus to glorious effect: “will this lonely life get any better?” The only moment that sounds cloying – sorry – is on ‘Steely’, where the vocal-effects exaggerate what’s already the inner child squealing: “I’m hoping it’s true / I’m hoping for you!” This is the one song that tells us “she got what she wanted”, and describes “him” at the end (“there’s a party in his mind / and he hopes it never stops…”). An un-effected (more mature-sounding) Marnie appears for a single line, which is reassuring – the song becomes a dialogue between inner voices, rather than an expression of fragility-beneath-it-all at the album’s midpoint. Nonetheless, there’s an odd undertone to that final line – what does happen when the party stops? Is this fun or mania? The song doesn’t answer. Later, the synaesthetic attempt to assign sounds to numbers in ‘Clone Cycle’ is a lightning rod for Marnie fans – love it or hate it? – the structure’s always on the verge of disintegrating into a silly (King Crimson / Yes) version of 1970s prog (e.g. the guitars like a trumpet fanfare halfway through), but at least it’s never boring.<br /><br />Admittedly, Marnie’s shred-guitar style might not win you over straight off, making this one of those occasional gambles you have to take, that proves more rewarding with each listen. <i>Vespertine</i> and <i>Ys</i> emphasised melodic complexity, impressionistically, and yet stand above a decade of alternative music with their depictions of New Love as New World; everything enriched because of the central “You” or “Him” (they’re also about making love, in symbolic language, which is much rarer than it sounds, when most else is euphemistic). Less physical but no less daringly personal, <i>This Is It...</i> is about getting inside someone’s head, and making sense of what’s in your own. <br /><br />[Previously unpublished]Michael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2990278272486555304.post-45024946598400096732011-07-22T06:42:00.000-07:002011-07-22T06:47:03.134-07:00MUSIC: Super XX Man, There’ll be DiamondsSuper XX Man, Volume XII: There’ll be Diamonds <br />(Tender Loving Empire), Oct. 21 <br /><br />How do you feel about music by severely mentally ill people? No, really – I’m genuinely curious, and opening it up for discussion / recommendations / rants / whatever; personally, I don’t think there’s intrinsic added value, and the pros (catharsis; therapy; raising issues, or at least “voicing” a muted group) tend to counter-balance the cons (a lack of musicality, often; a lack of depth to said “issues”; a sense of exploitation or voyeurism, maybe). That’s to say, it doesn’t seem negligent or timid to end up just-not-listening to any more than a few tracks by Daniel Johnson, or anyone on <i>Songs in the Key of Z</i>. <br /><br /><b>Super XX Man</b> actually works in a psychiatric institution, and this happens to be very important to what he writes, hence the first three songs on his twelfth album are entitled ‘Medication’, ‘Psychotic Break’, and ‘Crazy People’. The foregoing discussion is relevant, because his music recalls plenty of familiar figures from the canons of Outsider Music, or Lo-Fi by functional people who nonetheless sound like they’ve been close to the edge: Jad Fair, John Darnielle; maybe a less-produced Mark Everett or Jason Lytle. Super XX Man – but let’s call him Scott – inadvertently raises the question of what we can learn from supposedly “authentic” Outsider Music, because he isn’t restricted to performing his own OCD or Bipolar I (say). One song appropriates “rubber duckie, you’re the one / you make bath-time lot’s of fun”, and changes it in the second verse to “medication, you’re the one / you make my life-time lots of fun”. Cute, and appropriate (look up Kay Redfield Jamieson, on the way depression makes you regress), but it’s not a trick he over-uses, thankfully. The second track (‘Psychotic Break’) is prime Galaxie 500, bringing in the reverb to cast a glow over the imagery, whilst the lyrical premise suggests that the song could have been expanded into something like ‘Names’ by Cat Power, in which she goes through the casualties in her own life. <br /><br />We could play the Sounds-like Game track-by-track, but suffice it to say – anyone Scott resembles at any given moment he can usually equal, and his voice (closest to FM Cornog, AKA East River Pipe) is far less grating than Jad, John, Jason. Half the time, mental illness isn’t mentioned but, after that opening triad, it always frames the quiet epiphanies. For one, ‘Downtown Chapel’ is – quite simply – the most heart-breakingly beautiful lo-fi song I’ve heard all year, when most of what Scott does is gently intone “The downtown chapel is mine / the downtown chapel is mine / the downtown chap-el… is my everything”. It’s his sanctuary, but it’s also a part of him, and every part “is” him, as he enumerates them in the lyrics. The last part of the song is a kind of improvised prayer, and as you listen, you find yourself wishing good things for the singer, or anyone like the narrator: that he gets married in that chapel, maybe, or it remains “his” for a long time, if it’s the best or only family he ever has. Listening to this on shuffle, a lump went straight to my throat, and stayed there all through a repeat of “rubber duckie, you’re the one…” <br /><br />There are other great – No, gorgeous – moments on almost every track. ‘Crazy People’ should be a manifesto or anthem for Mad-Pride; it’s catchy and jubilant right through, also like Galaxie 500, and asserts that “they get – more from life than me”, but even the lighter numbers will be lifted by a harmony, somewhere. The closing track is basically The Mountain Goats play ‘Then he Kissed Me’ – how great is that? The album-title and title-track (‘There’ll be Diamonds’) makes me wonder if Scott’s heard Jandek (especially ‘Nancy Sings’ AKA ‘Birthday’ – one of the finest songs ever written, also on a Rough Trade compilation), which tells you that whatever you lack (be it a job, a partner, stability; all the lacks of mental illness) you always have the rain, and sometimes it rains diamonds, and in those odd moments of bipolar disorder’s euphoria “the rain will come / to kiss your hair”. This deserves to mean a lot to a lot of people, and whether you have right now, or have had someone with mental illness in your life, we all need those insights into what you’ve got left when you’ve got nothing. <br /><br />[slightly edited from previous publication on DiS]Michael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2990278272486555304.post-14721219419931346032011-07-22T06:31:00.000-07:002011-07-22T06:41:59.399-07:00MUSIC: On the Other Side of the Sunset (Rubdown): "Dreamland" EP by Moonface (2010)Running to just over twenty minutes (and therefore ineligible for any charts), the ‘Dreamland EP’ by Spencer Krug (trading under the name “Moonface”) is an appropriately sensuous suite in roughly three movements, with the marimba providing a gentle, lilting, south Pacific undulation; each note like sunlight on a wavelet. Played as a lead instrument, the milk-bottle toned marimba almost inevitably reminds you of Tubular Bells (or the Theme to The Exorcist, prog-haters), but if that doesn’t persuade you, think ‘Ten Day Interval’ by Tortoise. <br /><br />Somewhere in the second movement, ‘Dreamland’ becomes a quest narrative like ‘Nightingale Song’ from the last SunRub record, and even without the full band, Spencer’s lyrical flow matches that sense of being on a journey through tropical dreamscapes, unstoppable because you’re fulfilling some mythic destiny; uninhibited by gravity or logic, because your meat-sack of a body’s lying back at home, literally paralysed: <br /><br />I venture into a dreamland where the waves have come alive<br />& I watch them chase the people down the beach<br />But they are bound to the water<br />Like creatures on a leash <br /><br />I have ridden on these waves<br />I have crashed into the shore<br />I have rolled along the floor<br />I will be there in no time at all...<br /><br />What’s intriguing is how much Spencer’s following in the footsteps of Surrealism. Re-visiting <i>The Magnetic Fields</i> (as in, the seminal surrealist text from 1919, which is still very readable, FYI), it becomes apparent that surrealism isn’t just a generational discovery, it’s a personal one. Already fascinated by madness, psychoanalysis, and a kind of proto-Situationism (i.e. behaving like a twat in public to twist the collective melon of the bourgeoisie), André Breton started a series of experiments, and then a whole movement, to reproduce the poetic inspiration he had as he was drowsing over his books, one night. Almost a century later, Spencer clearly doesn’t want to be a rock-star cliché, which rules out hard drugs for inspiration, just as laudanum and absinthe were somewhat passé in Breton’s day. Like <i>The Magnetic Fields</i> there’s an evident sense of loss (in Breton’s case, for his nihilist friend, who OD’d on opium), although the “plot” of Dreamland is slightly more complex than cherchez la femme. Here’s the second movement:<br /><br /> I was hanging out in the tower<br /> The tower overlooked the sea<br /> I saw him check the girl for fever<br /> By pushing all his fingers through her skin<br /> He’s just reading her mind…<br /> I venture into a dreamland where I can say this & you’ll believe <br /><br /> I’ve been here before…<br /> I know your face from the last time I dreamt I was losing control<br /> I was lying around with chameleons—I was hanging around with bitches<br /> I heard that there’s a war on & I’m sure that they’re not with us<br /> No no no no no... <br /><br />In a few short lines the experience of being detached from your body, and outside time, as sensations from your limbs retreat, falling asleep, is collapsed together with the idea of ritual healing as a guided meditation, bringing the patient through their fever, and back into their body. It’s possible the ‘chameleons’ are like the ‘vampires’ and ‘handsome vultures’ elsewhere in the SunRub world – all those two-faced hangers-on – just as Spencer’s sung elsewhere about ‘actors’ and ‘leopards’ to figure out what it means to be a trained musician turned performer, but I don’t want to close off all the meanings; it’s up to you to venture in, and it’s well worth your while. Even at the end, when the singer’s re-surfacing from sleep, what might be banal details (‘I am making hissing sounds with my mouth’) don’t get diminished by the obvious explanations, but show how the mind plays on them to multiply meanings, and there’s some appropriately eeeevil white noise accompanying. Plus, ‘I am waiting for the fairies to kill the lights and chew the walls’ – disturborific. <br /><br /> I venture into a dreamland, where I am living on the edge<br /> Where I am living I am living I am living right on the edge <br /><br /> The courtyard & the café are black<br /> I am wearing 3 or 4 black coats<br /> It’s dark on the stairs but it could be darker<br /> I am waiting for the fairies to kill the lights and chew the walls <br /><br /> They take too long, they take too long<br /> On my way back down the stairs they are gone<br /> I have waited for their song<br /> & now they’re feral & transformed<br /> Into animals that scatter from the sun <br /><br /> I am making hissing sounds with my mouth... <br /><br />Long story short: this isn’t intriguing because of the avant-garde echoes; more like a reminder of how moving and accessible Surrealism can be, whenever it arises. As it happens, Spencer’s influences (or fellow-travellers) may be closer to home. Spencer’s a fan of Phil Elverum (Microphones / Mt Eerie) whose splendid last album, Wind’s Poem, featured a devastatingly sad and beautiful trip to Twin Peaks, combining marimba, a sample of the theme tune, and a slinky bassline, into the best thing Elverum’s ever done. It’s easy to reduce Lynch’s creation to a sustained nightmare about the child abuse (and subsequent drug abuse) lurking behind the white picket fences, but Elverum sings from the perspective of those primal forces living in the Black Lodge, “always trying to climb out of the hole / buried… in space” – trying to push through to our world. Isn’t that what art, with or without overt surrealism, should be doing? Recreating that sense of adventure, and dread, by playing on the possibility that there isn’t always a rational explanation; that what you’re after, you may never find, and what’s after you may not be escapable, because it doesn’t play by the rules…Michael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2990278272486555304.post-39452684994883079132011-07-22T06:21:00.000-07:002011-07-22T09:30:35.318-07:00MOVIE: The Fall (2008, dir. Tarsem Singh)The Fall, dir. Tarsem Singh (Oct. 3rd 2008)<br /><br />By any standards, The Fall is among the most ambitious films ever made, and may well be the most visually stunning, to rival works by Fellini, Tarkovsky, Jodorowsky, or Kenneth Anger. If Tarsem sounds familiar, it's because he made a cult horror/thriller 8 years back, called The Cell, in which J-Lo ventures into the mind of a psychopath whose perversity is matched only by the baroque architecture of the world in which he’s God/Emperor/Devil. The Cell wouldn’t have been memorable without a visual style film that conveyed the omnipotence the plot demanded; in a sense, The Fall raises that to an unprecedented omnipresence or omniscience. That’s to say, the locations include many of the most astonishing architectural achievements in the world (the largest maze, the most multi-layered castle), and many of the most beautiful sights in nature (the highest lake, the tallest dunes, a butterfly-shaped reef…). Tarsem’s strict no-CGI policy, however, means that all the actors’ reactions are as real as they can be… and so are yours. I’ll return to this point, below… <br /><br />Plot-wise, The Fall is simplicity itself: a hospitalized silent-movie stuntman entertains a 6-year old girl with an improvized story. His motives are dubious – he needs a favour – but he’s also lonely, and we can see that his desire to entertain must come from somewhere other than self-love; as such, we’re rooting for him to be redeemed. The five heroes of his quest-story are sworn enemies of “Governor Odious”, for reasons ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous (revenge for being enslaved… rivalry as entomologists). <br /><br />What’s conceptually exciting is the subtlety with which we’re shown the relationship between vision, imagination, and language (both linguistic and paralinguistic communication). For a start, there’s the double barrier that is a child’s limited knowledge of the world, and of English. Continually, we see aspects of the story (as imagined) follow from optical illusions, visual phenomena, but also homophonous puns. Much of the humour – and I do mean laugh-out-loud humour – derives from the split between (adult) narration and (childish) imagination: one of the heroes is “Charles Darwin”, but – understanding only that he’s “British” – the girl pictures him as a cleanshaven, effete fellow wearing long-johns, a bowler hat, and fur-coat dyed like a ladybird. That’s one joke spoiled, but there are many more, and funny enough to make this a crossover hit for families. That said, they’re also jokes that reveal the operation of the subconscious (as Freud proposed); providing gratification by relieving the mind of the pressure to resolve the contradictions of language. In Tarsem’s world, all is possible, and all associations are true. Even where there’s no grand point to make, innumerable details attest to the presence of the miraculous within the everyday (one definition of Magic Realism), and most of these aren’t remarked upon – they’re just slipped into scenes. The silhouette of the steam train, cast onto the river below; the keyhole acting as a pinhole camera, so that a horse & buggy are cast onto a wall, inverted. <br /><br />Why is Tarsem’s method so important? Isn’t he just being bloody-minded and stubborn? Consider Indiana Jones IV – could you ever suspend disbelief? Didn’t you feel unconvinced by the collapsing temple CG’d around the actors, because it was meant to be bigger than anything you’d ever seen before, with no regard to what might be impressive and credible? Didn’t you feel insulted that the monsters were bigger in Return of the King than those in The Two Towers, as if we wouldn’t notice the plot wasn’t much better? The narrative of The Fall, however, was part-improvized by a 6 year old, with Tarsem matching the locations to a genuinely unfettered imagination; much of the remainder was selected from what best engaged her. These are pragmatic arguments against Hollywood’s relentless inflation, and over-reliance on focus-groups, but there’s an ideological or even metaphysical point here, too: the viewer is being given back their own innate ability to see the world as marvellous, using only the tools of their own imagination, rather than fostering a loathsome dependence on The Industry to dole out experiences that make false claims to be the telos and eschaton of sensation.<br /><br />The film concludes with a comedy montage that I found curiously affecting. Like Reggio’s Powisqaatsi, you can happily call this a love-poem to our planet (without the pessimism of Koyaanisqaatsi), but the final montage of stunts from black & white silent-movies suggests that this was always a love-poem to cinema & cinematography, too. The combination of the montage and the plot’s final scene (I won’t spoil it) underscores the power of fantasy to cut through a life tarnished by death and exploitation – not to excuse it, of course, but to cut through it. So go see: this is the world at its best, and storytelling (paradoxically) at its purest. <br /><br />[slightly edited from a previous posting on www.drownedinsound.com]Michael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2990278272486555304.post-42476252532279973172010-03-11T06:59:00.000-08:002010-03-11T07:43:59.671-08:00A pair of sketches<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj__LRYVbFB0CphE0IyNxtn9C14TiD799rP9QxjMR9eGcr_sAXY1Xbx468gAfUFNPHBs6WCUpwtE5bxj-vVKOwWqB_KMtQ8zmCwMBc5664ya42ZRwCxeQzA99HJ_gUtSV6WtwP6l4xDtQXj/s1600-h/DSC01747.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj__LRYVbFB0CphE0IyNxtn9C14TiD799rP9QxjMR9eGcr_sAXY1Xbx468gAfUFNPHBs6WCUpwtE5bxj-vVKOwWqB_KMtQ8zmCwMBc5664ya42ZRwCxeQzA99HJ_gUtSV6WtwP6l4xDtQXj/s320/DSC01747.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5447402215257262418" /></a><br />Finally, it’s a matter of letting the mind relax, an appropriation of automatism replicating the process of discovering the world anew, Yes, but also replicating the fantasy that is a fantasy is a fantasy, that childhood was always better, brighter, more immediate when it’s only memory that makes it so… memory and those moments of neural flow and rush when we know we are immortal, that we were once the one… <br /><br />…who stayed up late in the library, who read the logs of all the ships, all stored in their pigeonholes, each log being a ship, each ship a dozen or more lives, a double-dozen set of eyes on the seas that they sailed – the sea that was a tongue; the sea beneath a sky full of eyes; the sea they sailed without a following wind for the voyage was ever downwards, [not along] – those ships’ logs read night after night before climbing the thickly carpeted stairs that ceased to be steps, but undulations, more like villi, exercising a slow peristalsis upwards, up the spiralling passageway, to dreams; dreams of ever more impossible places – and possible too – but for the faces that traded places, slipped round the back, perhaps, and saw all retreating as the body strode breast-forward.<br /><br />Dreaming and waking and unable to wait, always for the next dream, though surely the greater dream was [of] having come into consciousness, only the blur of days before the present continuum (the blur of days on the beach where all the lost things washed up… on the hillside with the strange yellow fungus that exhaled as you passed) a clue that you might have come from an elsewhere, an elsewhen, even, at a different pace to the Now, the dragging, drudging, sluggardly Now. Some you, you surmised, had fallen, ill-equipped, ill-served by being dropped, into this world, as that pipistrelle fell, the one fallen from the eaves of the house at dusk, panting concussed on the path where you almost stepped on it – but didn’t – and held it, fearless of rabies or lice, and saw the tarsals stretched absurdly, the veined webbing stretched over your own hand, entire, and its snubnosed long-eared but not far off human face looking into yours, all of which told you your own shape’s provisional – isn’t it? – no more or less equipped to see the total shape of the world than the great [sky] whale, the dark leviathan that swims the skies overhead, and the stars are mere barnacles in its hide. <br /><br />Better to turn your attention from the possible boundaries of the universe to that other shape seen through the windows at dusk, gliding across the little bridges among the ponds, the same shape you saw on the edge of the viaduct, spine-curved and feet-dangling in space – the shape of a question-mark hanging in space – who alone might understand that intuition: there is a way, a sure way, to make all learning, all time, all being, all knowing bleed together, and unbleed…<br /><br />{drafted 22/02/2010}<br /><br />All of them came, in time, to that place between worlds, the place to which they were beckoned, by the man cut in two, by the pane of glass (Breton tells us), or summoned by a letter that accordioned from the envelope, then origami’d out with side-flaps and with under-folds, hinged portions, expanding across the table you laid it on, and rose step-wise, as you propped those grey sheets on the desklamp, on the birdcage, up the bookcase, into a ziggurat of paper; all of it the colour of slate or of granite, though its grey was the colour of ink on paper, tightly-written in words that were not words but were hieroglyphs in the shapes of animals or animal-men whose costumes – No, whose costumes and poses – were concepts, all executed in such fine detail, in hair-fine detail, a hundred thousand characters, and all of them around you, holding a city in the left hand, a curved dagger in the dexter, moons caught in their antlers, or a spear through their neighbour, to signify the conjugation of a verb, or the negation of a mood, and still the folds unfurled, until you stepped out, into that courtyard of letters, to read the words beneath your feet, and the words on the step-pyramid rising to the clouds, and saw the words were not meanings, or not meanings alone, but the patterned emplacement of words, as the eye detects them, in ripples on the surface, were a kinaesthetic form of stories and decrees, and songs that when sung could demolish a city, if taken back to the world, intact, but you won’t, you only remember in snatches that otherworld where the letter lay unopened on the desk by the jade Buddha paperweight, and the trophies from schooldays that you’ve started to doubt, because they seemed so long and so dull, in the school by the lake – <br /><br />A part of you is back there, though, and a part of you is asking, how can there have been bonfires in the dunes in the Autumn? How can there have been prizes for best lantern in the festival? Why was it you who won the annual race to navigate the cellar-maze? How did you win that medal for the star-charts in the observatory, naming the stars as the ancients named them, and naming the stars as the ancients before them? What kind of school was that, where the inscription on the chapel read Absentes Adsunt; what did it mean that “the absent are here” (or there)? What was the story of that much older chapel, the ruins of a chapel, with just one wall left standing, the one with the rose window, you climbed each Founders’ Day, up the cracks between stones, to bring back an egg, or a feather, or a chick, from the rooks that nest there? You did, after all, you won, you were the one who stood on that stone-shelf, and felt the zephyrs shoving you, you don’t belong, just get down, but you didn’t, you held firm, you saw the fields and the rivers, and the roads that were rivers, and the rivers as roads, but don’t know how you descended, how you could, having been there. No, you know now, that world is only as unreal as the next, where the words form steps that lead down, and lead down, and the destination is darkness, yet the patterns are stable, all the characters you see, all the grey of these steps is formed from rows and rows of animal-men and animal-women with eyes down their spines, and tusks in their mouths, but all posed the same, all in ranks, and all of them prayerful, all bowed or inclined to that greater darkness, with knives at their flanks and quivers of arrows, topped with letters in alphabets living and dead, and yet-to-come or conjectural, and all facing the same way, to that darkness that isn’t darkness, but pure ink, a whole lake, a liquid core to the universe, the ink you scoop up, the ink you reflect in, a hollow-eyed face in the ink you will use to write worlds on your return. {24/02/2010}Michael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2990278272486555304.post-69731908963114716942010-02-12T04:27:00.000-08:002010-02-12T04:34:36.119-08:00The Best Revenge (excerpt#1)<em>A Selection of Opuscules from 1999-2002</em><br /><br /><strong>Next time there better be mistakes</strong><br /><br />This, the Best of All Possible Worlds is once again under threat of being upgraded:<br />Early projections show, next time round, the Byzantine empire may even cross the Pelopennese<br />The Earth’s spin will be reversed, giving the East a turn at allegorising Progress (or Death)<br />Plus, they’re thinking, in 1969 (version 2.0), instead of a moon-shot, maybe a moon-catapult?<br />Which is why we’ve been slipping protest-song lyric-sheets, for the march, under your wiper-blades<br />Only to see them transmuted by the grey magic of urban reality into traffic tickets & fliers<br />For Sister Ataraxia’s psychic hotline, malapropistically offering relief from ‘boils, ulcer and goat’<br /><br />But that won’t stop us. Our militant wing know not the day nor the hour when they will be called up<br />Only that they will be compelled to take the bus-route less travelled, and perhaps dawdle, killing time<br />Browsing through paperbacks under a sign they only think is ironic, Please Steal These Books<br />Until the slow-motion instant arrives for them to be mutely gawping bystanders<br />When the great pre-climactic car-chase of Western Civilisation goes past, trailing CGI sparks<br />Two-dimensional characters firing celluloid bullets into redly glistening, left upper-arm fleshwounds<br />The method actor insists he does himself, between takes (sending a runner for bagels and O neg)<br /><br />The Propaganda Machine has been suspending dangerously high levels of disbelief, expecting us <br />To swallow that in the world of romance-for-all, the height of charm will be an inventive disease<br />And on the planet that supported two species of intelligent life each sulked in the opposite hemisphere<br />Refusing to speak until the other had been formally introduced by a third, or made its own gambit.<br />They say the asteroid the size of Texas that KO’d the dinosaurs… was a hoax:<br />Around the 100,000 year mark they just got bored, and fucked off into extinction<br />They say You’ll love this world: you’ll have three new senses to enjoy it with: chimble, fitch and roon <br /><br />So, trust everyone. It’s the caraway seed of truth they’re not counting on, getting between your teeth<br />Spat out in moments of lucidity. A perfect lie would defy all the laws of metaphysics.<br />Everyone’s a potential envoy from MONAD: the door-to-door salesman with his new range of sunsets <br />A sweater knotted around the neck – even the wearing of slacks – these are no guarantee<br />I, myself, was recruited through subliminal messages in the mottoes of an un-pulled Christmas cracker<br />Our demands? That’s for them to find out. And us. But we’ll know them when they’ve been met<br />Our manifesto? No-one makes the Earth their bitch. Not on my watch.<br /><br />So watch out for the man whose breath doesn’t mist on a January morning (our man on the outside)<br />The clue might come from the faulty syntax of an Ivy League white witch refusing to acknowledge <br />The moon’s an arbitrary symbol; any natural phenomenon exhibiting cyclicality would have done.<br />Sometimes history feels like a breadcrumb trail leading us back to truth but have patience<br />A single fortune cookie could spell out the destiny of nations; even if sometimes it seems<br />The people with their fingers on the shiny red button still wear mittens tied together with string<br />We’re over the dropzone people. Look sharp. This time there will be mistakes. That’s how we like it.<br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Soon</strong> <br /><br />He’d talk sometimes about the Secret Alphabet<br />In much the same voice you apologise<br />When the name cried out in sleep really does turn out to be a chiropractor<br />Or maybe the 5th form teacher who gave you all that bad advice about <br />‘chicks’<br />And let you pass notes but only in quatrains<br /><br />The only person I know to lose it to the Placebo effect<br />Someone told him, see, to quit sucking pencils<br /> “You’ll get lead poisoning”<br />Except I think he’s happier now<br />Playing wargames with all the thoughts sucked out of pencils<br />Like a kid whose imaginary friend went on holiday, kayaking in the <br />Camargue<br />For whom the cans are cowboys and the jars are injuns<br /><br />Me, I picture him brokering a treaty<br />For strategic art limitation<br />Between the predatory superpowers of mind<br /> And then I think of the pauses between our Q & A<br />The same as a long distance phone-call to somewhere like Tekakwitha<br />Except without the wires<br /> And maybe that means we’re both of us<br />At the antipodes of trust<br /><br />Always were<br /><br /><br /><strong>The Big C</strong> <br /><br />His greatest fear was he’d die in a slow news week<br />What he ever did that was newsworthy no-one found out<br />And this was the crippling fear that kept him from doing pretty much anything at all<br />Besides filing patents for 1000-digit primes he was sure would come in useful <br />someday<br />And glazing the acorns, one-by-one, with home-brewed squirrel-repellent <br />(patent pending)<br /><br />We didn’t want his maiden aunt to know about the body being mislaid<br />Hence the casket was filled with his magnum opus<br />The Encyclopaedia Esoterica (A through Q)<br />Begun after he quit his hobby soap-carving, at the license-plate factory<br />If you know what I mean<br /><br />He used to tease his autistic kid brother, but we knew he loved him, really<br />That’s him, there between the priest and the bellhop<br />Got all forlorn if you mentioned the people who slipped through the <br />Sidewalk Cracks of Life<br />And one time, I hear, freaked out at the sight of an Organ Grinder<br />But he’s a good kid (on days with U in them)<br /><br />He claimed to have recurring dreams about AirFields, and RainForests <br />(the brother, that is)<br />No-one could explain Heaven to him<br />So this is what we made up: that his big brother rode away to Kingdom Come <br />on a Stalking Horse<br />And sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty<br />Except, y’know, not actually on his hand<br /><br />You heard about the stripper who turned up to the wake? No? <br />There isn’t a punchline to this.<br />She looked just like Hillary Clinton, after the arraignment <br />(Stoic but sexy)<br />Said he paid in advance just wanted the pallbearers to have a good time <br />(which we did)<br />We being Me, his two brothers, and some homeless guy we persuaded with canapés<br />Toasting him with sparkling wine from some place hasn’t even heard of <br />human rights.<br /><br /><br /><strong>Revenant</strong> <br /><br />I think it’s fair to say: <br />Every bottom-feeder dreams of being a shark<br /><br />My thoughts are with them tonight<br />Spiralling through concentric biomorphs of green and purple<br />To the sunken village, mud-drifts at every door<br />The church that was never de-consecrated, though that hardly means the gudgeons <br />can claim sanctuary from the pike<br /><br />You said, that day we went swimming in what was once the sky<br />above the village, now a reservoir:<br /><br />“The dam isn’t generating hydroelectric power at all.<br /> I think They’ve found a way to use the potential difference <br /> between a House and a Home.<br /><br />“This is just the start. When they figure out how to <br /> usefully convert pets into strays, or crucifixes into toothpicks,<br /> prayermats into placemats, Beat Poetry into ad-campaigns<br />… I’ll be getting the Hell out of Dodge.”<br /><br />Then:<br />“Ooh! I can see the spire between my toes!”<br /><br />When we first met, she was Wessex’s leading cerealogist, under 25.<br />Only reluctantly admitted to the cabal of bearded skywatchers<br />by virtue of a hippie name and ‘helpless-female’ claim, to know<br /><br /> “…next to nothing about theodolites, really.”<br /><br />There was never anything between us.<br /><br /><br />That’s to say: Dean Moriarty came between us.<br />And if I couldn’t mean as much to her as Carl Solomon to Allen, how could I <br />mean anything to her?<br />This is why it surprised me to see her down as the guest-speaker<br />at the Bedford Square Y. If I sidled in at the back, maybe I’d hear her<br />asking an audience, not one of them under colostomy-bag age:<br /><br />“Just consider, for a second, the possibility your earliest memory<br /> might be your last memory from your last life.”<br /><br />Except on closer inspection, the guest-speaker wasn’t ‘Teazle P – ’<br />but ‘Tamzil P – ’ and somehow I don’t picture a Tamzil <br />pinching someone’s nipple for complete attention; breathing garlicky:<br /><br />“Make love tooth and nail. <br />That’s an order.<br />Love’s not Love that’s not tooth and nail.”<br /><br /><br /><br /><em>Time more profitably spent transcribing birdsong</em><br /><br />Time collapses in on itself at the singularity of these reunions, the half-decade between then and now<br />That could have been forever, compressing the present infinitesimally, leaving the imprint of eternity<br />The present itself only what we choose to remember of the future at any given moment<br />As a die shows all faces at every moment, but only one is chosen to be seen and to matter<br /><br />And if all perception is recognition then nothing is ever lost, but then nothing was ever found<br />That has not been picked up, dusted off, and set to wait (one-eyed) on the dry-stone wall along the churchward-wending lane (like the gills, or scales of the great slow creature that is a Wessex village)<br />All will be claimed in time. Though most languish in indifference, content with the assurance that<br />A priori knowledge is, of course, impossible (we’ve had people working on this a while now)<br /><br />But how else to explain the lichen we saw spelling out your name?<br />Or the dot matrix when you peer closely at anything just out of reach; these clues we choose to ignore<br />Not least the fact we can summon anything into being simply by not asking for it<br />So summon them, the way you summon sleep, falling into a world where flying means treading air<br />As if it were water – which I need not tell you means Exile, an intimation of ending<br /><br />Though dreams themselves are our first intimation the First Law of Thermodynamics <br />(for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction) might be breached<br />And to be lucid in life, as in dream, is to know when, and what you’re dreaming<br />Meaning: we can imagine our cake and eat it; burning candles and all, if so required<br />So that every transgression was prefigured the day we crossed the tracks into the pathless woods<br />Adult prohibitions no more authoritative then than aphorisms about sidewalk cracks<br /><br />And if the shadowplay of inanimate objects (un-nannied by Reason) forms the shapes of your fears<br />Or the heat-expanded timbers of the settling house creaking in quick succession seem steps towards<br />The corollary of the thought This might be your billionth and last breath but it isn’t<br />The next insight might be the first tug at peeling wallpaper revealing another room beneath<br />Just as the expanse of mist over the field was the cumulative breath-cloud of an entire herd that night<br />Martyring yourself to solitude (though allegory has been known to X-dress as actuality before)<br /><br />Namely, the time we invited three different sides of our personality to a party to smirk and watch<br />Which one flirts with which, and who’s surprised when the fourth arrives un-announced<br />This being the party when someone (I swear) expressed admiration for our host’s antique head<br />Though I’m not sure if there was a punchline to the joke: Her first word was Dada; her second, Fluxus<br />Or even if it was a joke, suggesting now, just how tiresome it must have been before Babel, or in Eden<br /><br />When, pace Aristotle, A actually was A (not that the snake was ever a snake, nor the apple an apple)<br />When the faces words showed to their speaker were just the same for the listener, back in pre-hystery<br />Though you can bet Pandora would have been Pandorus if the originary myth of Hope were re-written <br />As the originary myth of Humour, as it is in the alternate universe that fell into its own singularity<br />(where it shivers curled up smaller than a quark) eliciting an APB for Theoretical Meta-physicists <br /><br />Excepting those, even now, interrogating the Samoan tribesman of anthropological legend, who states:<br />“There is something that walks amongst the trees… but we never talk about it,” shedding some light on older advice: in the teeth of the desert, look for the tracks the wind won’t blow away<br />Words accompanied by the same sensation as when we check the ¼-profile face in the photograph<br />To see that it hasn’t turned to ours: neither relief, nor certainty, only the double anxiety the suspicion<br />Must have proceeded from somewhere, and where if not the focal point of that gaze, out of frame…?<br /><br />That impossible point, unseen, only the photographed can know but don’t look too long<br />Lest the compulsion to mind-read lure you into contemplating the ontology of a mimesis<br />Horrific as that other silence that is not the absence of sound koans don’t tell you about<br />Breeding in the narrow places between words <br />we only thought we knew<br /><br /><br /><br /><em>Sketches of demons, for a novel</em> (2007)<br /><br />Vanishing Ratios: Case Studies <br /><br />“……the one with twisted limbs – <br /><br />“……whose eyes are mirrors, or smoked glass – <br /><br />“……and I heard her called ‘She who eats last, and only what is left, and everything that is left; she from whom all shadows flee – <br /><br />“……whose hands have fused at the little fingers, and wrists, to become a bowl –<br /><br />“……who cries white tears, cheeks streaked and crusted. In the corner of the dark house, where they wait – <br /><br />“……the gardener who tends the flowers and weeds alike, and never chases away the animals – <br /><br />“……whose shadows dance at her feet; you’d think they were her animals; you’d think two suns, or three, had swooped down to light her way – <br /><br /> […]<br /><br />“……who keeps on nursing the child, what used to be the child, long after it’s dead – <br /><br />“……with flies, flies crawling in and out of his mouth, his ears, his nostrils, and what should be his eyes – <br /><br />“……who speaks in all the voices of all the people you ever loved, and lets you hear what they thought all along, what they really thought –<br /><br />“……in the pupil of each of her eyes, your face, a skull – <br /><br />“……whose shit has bones in it, and also license plates, credit cards, lamp-posts, horseshoes, trees, whales, bicycles, entomologists, paper umbrellas, paparazzi, gondolas, stowaways, false-teeth, air-raid sirens, traffic lights, mistletoe, helicopters – <br /><br />“……the one who promises, in a tone that brooks no doubt – <br /><br />“ ‘…In the next life you will change places. She will be you, and you will be she, and when we meet again (in this place between lives), all of this will make sense.”Michael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2990278272486555304.post-67560706930024934772010-02-09T03:22:00.000-08:002010-02-09T03:33:41.949-08:00Trauma and ForeplayJean-Paul Sartre is at his desk, trying to concentrate. He’s more than a little hung-over, having spent the night with the Surrealists, and hangovers are more than a little problematic when you suffer from wall-eye. Imagine room-spin, when your eyes are determined to go in different directions. You can’t can you? Imagine a cake where the candles are human fingers – take a bite. You can imagine that, can’t you? (The fingers are still moving.) One of these days, Sartre is convinced, he’s going to throw up on the back of his own head. Ugh – the Surrealists… They were celebrating the return of Breton from the Tropics, passing around a bottle that had a worm in it; fat and wrinkled like a flaccid member on a cold day. Drinking worm juice – the sort of childish prankery one might expect from the Surrealists, but No – this turns out to be a drink Breton bought on his travels, from Mexico, of all places. As it did a lap of the table, and came round to him, Sartre had refused it, but then the taunting started, and if there’s one thing he can’t stand, it’s being taunted. That’s why women covet his manhood. They seduce him as a trophy – the great philosopher – and there’s that little smile as they think they’re being so charitable, les poutaines, and then he becomes enraged, swells hard, and gives them what for. After that, they’re begging for another ride, and this is when he discards them. What do you do, though, when it’s a ring of sweaty, roseate, moustachioed male faces, chanting, taunting – <em>Drink it! Drink it!</em> – eh? What then? No-one had tried the weird cactus, Breton brought back from Mexico, and there it was, sitting on the table. Slamming down the bottle, Sartre gobbled the chunk of dried cactus – bitter and tough as chewing on a workman’s vest. A workman in the sewers, too… Still, he swallowed it whole, swigged some of the firewater to wash it down, and that shut the Surrealists up.<br /><br /> Right now, he’s trying to remember the title for the book, he thought up last night. His great work of phenomenology, developing the concept of Dasein, although when he tried to explain it to Breton, after the third glass of pastis, the Surrealists had mocked his drunken stutter, and applauded him for inventing <em>Dadasein: the condition of being Dada! Bravo Sartre – that is why we let you hang out with us!</em> they said – as if he should be grateful of their company! ANYHOW. The title was supposed to be a sort of play on <em>Etre et Avoir</em>… <em>Something and Something else</em>, you know; a pair of words that were vaguely homophonous… but what? <em>Being and Believing</em>? From somewhere over his right shoulder, near the bookshelf, a voice: <br /><br /> “<em>Trauma and Foreplay</em>”<br /><br /> Sacre bleu! Sitting on the bust of Hegel, a cheroot in its fore-pincer, is a crab. <br /><br /> “What, after all, is life, if not Trauma and Foreplay?”<br /><br /> This, it turns out, is the last sensible thing the crab says. Also, it’s not a crab, but a lobster, un hommard, although for some reason the name escapes Sartre at this particular moment – <br /><br />“………Then again, I get so easily distracted when the dustmotes are sending me messages; we’re all of us stickered on the flypaper of the mind, don’t you think? This very city we’re in – right here and now – is carpeted with fishscales, if you look close. You wouldn’t know it to look at it, and these people I call my friends are just miserably burning bushes all bleating for attention in the wilderness. ‘Oh, oh, please worship me! Build me a pyramid where I can hatch my monkeys!’ I tell you… little Johnny Sartre, crying to his mother because his sister’s votary candle is so much more shimmery it’s sure to send her prayer to the Big Beard first. Let me tell you, you couldn’t go faster if you had crystal spurs and a chariot drawn by voles. This, good sir, is the doyen of Hysteria. Watch her well, her lust is like the wavelets that aren’t whipped by the wind, but reach up for the stars, so baubley pretty you just want to kiss them to supernova.” <br /><br /> Sartre asks: "Are you really here, Monsieur Crustace? Is <em>Trauma & Foreplay</em> what you think I should be writing about? You are so wise! Of course – it is bad faith to think that life is a matter of Sex & Violence; our human condition is always interstitial! We are always between sex-acts, even in the throes of coition, whether the “act” is penetration or orgasmo-culmination; always witnesses, even as the shells burst around us! Are you here to help me write my book…?<br /><br /> “Depends on the little pet living in my mouth, doesn’t it? Can he be housebroken, or is it the glue-factory for Little Johnny Duck-Tooth? I am, in truth, wherever a brain may be found, wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper, and crawling with termites. Take heed: Dusk is falling on the plains of rabies. A trilby’d figure walks abroad with his head like a bone-bubble…”<br /><br /> The crab pauses to take a drag on the cheroot. Sartre notices, a little alarmed, that smoke emerges from under the articulated plates of the crab’s tale. Other little ones are positioned elsewhere on the shelves, inspecting the spines, and tapping on Hegel’s head for clues. Sartre is disappointed. Is the crab only willing to divulge drivel? On and on it rambles, about <em>roses not being quite so pretty, when you see them drooling; bragging about his eyes on stalks, and how they allow him to see the mauve gases that steam from the windows of knocking shops – all the unspent sexuality, and the tiny chorus of sperminal souls relieved not to have been snapped up by The Great Egg, this time</em>… After a few hours, it becomes easier to ignore the crab, and his scuttling enfants, but neither do they show any signs of fading away, or leaving, and always manage to scatter, when he swats at them. The one who talks remains poised atop Mt. Hegel, the whole while; just when his drone seems due to pass into irrelevance, a fragment of sense piques the philosopher’s curiosity. “Have you shared the cigarettes of the dying?” says the crab, at which Sartre looks up, then hearing only more inanities, curses – <em>Damn them! Damn them all! I’m going to destroy the Surrealists if it’s the last thing I do!!!</em>Michael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2990278272486555304.post-91216443437347599792010-01-26T03:10:00.000-08:002010-01-26T03:14:08.660-08:00The HomunculusThe homunculus is crawling on the floor of the study, crawling toward the bookshelves perhaps, for books to chew on, crawling over well-waxed (albeit warped) boards. The homunculus has no particular purpose, and presently turns its attention to the desk, where the Father is working. The homunculus pulls itself up with webbed fingers, hooked over the desk’s handles, handles that clatter clangily; the homunculus, head awobble; the homunculus, lips all drooly. The homunculus is raised, one-handed, to sit on the Father’s lap, and utters neither squeak nor mewl, but flaps uncomprehending, veiny eyelids – as if to scoop up the words on paper, unless those tremors are external signs of inner cogitations: pondering the words trickling from pen, the pen’s mining of colour from the page. Meaning will be arrived at, in time. The homunculus reaches, web-fingered, for the page, and is gently raised from the Father’s lap, and then lowered to the floor, where it finds its feet, literally (plucking at toes), and then figuratively (waddling off). The homunculus has been walking some months now, but has yet to manage a sound that cannot be attributed to gastric processes. This homunculus isn’t the first attempt, and may not be the last; the materials were crude. It is capable of spindly-limbed locomotion, but the mouth is only a narrow slot, no teeth or tongue evident. The sound it makes, attempting to swallow, is gruesome. The homunculus is one year old.<br /><br />~<br /><br />The latest homunculus has been more successful; the ingredients were refined, transplanted swiftly, the utterances delivered with more confidence and fluency, having reconstructed the ancient accent, to reflect its musicality – its likely cadence and tonal glide. The homunculus has a clipped fringe, clipped too short, to correct mis-clippings when it wriggled beneath the sheers. The homunculus huffs when forming words; its hands twist-about, like birds adjusting their wings before settling in the nest. This only happens when no-one is watching, no-one who might slap it, to keep still. The homunculus is practising its name; its name the name of a general who subdued the lands of the East, and ceased the bloodfeuds of a dozen nations, their star now fallen. The homunculus understands more than it can express back, but not yet why it should or might do so. Does it, then, understand?<br />~<br /><br />The whore behind glass twists expanses of pink flesh in a lazy parody of pre-orgasmic nerve-tingles. Her success with customers is largely dependent on a mathematical function of sobriety offset by remaining cash; expertise vis-à-vis seduction is comparatively insignificant. Her wink at potential customers is too fast when she does wink; it seems, instead, more of a spasm. The homunculus is the recipient of the wink; or at least, the present homunculus. The homunculus is surrounded by a group of male humans, who can be presumed to be indifferent to the presence of a homunculus in their midst, unless any of them happen to be homunculi, which cannot be ruled out. Does it feel special, for having been winked at? Chosen? The homunculus bloodless. The homunculus static. The homunculus, reflected, framed by the same frame that is the view of the whore. The homunculus superimposed on the whore. The homunculus shuddering.<br />~<br /><br />The resemblance to a Rorschach test is striking; the symmetry of the involutions within the oval outline, for a start. Almost as if this image is a Rorschach test (or a maze – mazes are a familiar test, too), the shapes of words triggered by the symmetrical pattern, animate the lips of the face regarding the jar. The cross-section through the cerebrum reveals all the major structures are intact. Previous jars do not contain quite so elegant – or symmetrical – specimens. The homunculus is being shown its predecessors. There is an unoccupied container at the end of the row; “…you were more successful than anticipated…”<br /><br />~<br /><br />The girl has been waiting 25 years, a quarter-century, a generation, a mediaeval lifetime… and all for this? The girl is cold, her hair slightly curled from the damp; not details that factored in her imaginings. The girl has been shuffled between tutors, and elocution-specialists, and teachers, and has performed what is expected of her, and has watched the ways of others (others with girl-shapes, at least); watched how they pair off, and has come at last to her own moment of purpose: on a bridge, nightbreeze in hair & dress. Opposite her is the homunculus – the 8th or 10th in line (she lost track of his rambling biographical account & witticisms & anecdotes, and wasn’t exactly listening, though she nodded politely; just remarked that she’d never met someone with predecessors – a number after his name), and while it seems antiquated, pretentious even, she gives his pedigree the benefit of the doubt, and says Yes with lips, and Yes with hands, and Yes to herself inwardly; Yes, this is the end of her own waiting, for better or for worse; Yes. <br /><br /><br />[Scribbled wild-eyed & frantic on a stack of beer-mats, cross-legged & cackling on the floor of a pub in Amsterdam, during the Holland vs. Russia match, Summer 2008.]Michael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2990278272486555304.post-24797558657834447242010-01-25T02:03:00.000-08:002010-01-25T02:06:14.206-08:00VR: How to break a HomeHow do we continue to live in the houses where someone has been Possessed? How do we trust the words safely sandwiched in the books neatly ranked on the shelf not to be replaced with your own name, when you idly open the book, and a hundred thousand others, in the <em><strong>Directory of Those Lost to Mediocrity and Missed Opportunity (Vol. I: Ab – Al)</strong></em>? What was it the Little One said, tugging at your sleeve? When will the mirrors start to bleed? Look closely – can you be sure the ceiling isn’t crawling with white spiders and millipedes; all those jittering pointillist pixels that superimpose themselves on any blank space we permit ourselves to examine? The knives in the drawer have already started to sing, to chorus, to be used. Yes, there is the ticking, ticking madness of the world we learn to fill from birth, but no-one sells greetings-cards consoling you for the madness of inviting strangers into your home, barely old enough to Trick or Treat, who want you to <em>Sign Here</em>, and <em>Initial the 2nd page and 3rd through 9th pages Here</em>, to drain your television’s grey-glassed fishtank – drain it of the tangerine-skinned people with moonstone smiles, and their lemon-yellow sofa, and replace it with a view of the sallow-skinned child in the second bedroom, upstairs right now, turning the television from an instrument for Seeing-Afar into an instrument for constant self-surveillance, and this, then, is the new madness: that you can never now un-imagine the time when the television ceased to take us far away, making all its bleatings and twitterings about the Beauty or Tragedy or enviable Normality of “There & Elsewhere” into Lies, damned Lies, when what it shows us (beneath cheap set-dressing, the Older One could have knocked up in Drama Class) is the same old room with the same old carriage-clock / porcelain birds / magazine rack / sofa paid-for by instalments – an irregular oblong carved out of space that has an Outside and an Inside, but neither is meaningful except as the antithesis of the other, making you question what you really paid for, what the mortgage is for, why you persist in these payments by instalments that by their very nature are a bridge from youth to balding / spreading middle-age. When will the child’s muteness break, and name the Unnameable thing? When will you stop seeing them on the landing, frozen, un-answering, and observe how their eyes follow you, as you move from side-to-side (choosing which way to pass), but observing also how their eyes seem to draw back in the sockets, retreating in fear from – You? Or is it the long and spreading shadow that merely attached itself to you, and now climbs the walls of the corridor behind your back? When will the trances stop, and why that time – <em>that one time; one time only; really, please believe me</em> – why did you slap him so hard across the face, to <em>Stop Playing</em>? This, then, is how a home is broken. <br /><br />[After reading Marguerite Young; not so much a new influence, as a reminder of an old voice, it's almost reassuring to re-visit.]Michael ATMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17938779286799578247noreply@blogger.com0