This weekend, in Baltimore, there was a festival of ten-minute plays. There were around twelve plays, around that length, for a bill of entertainment running around two hours. The work was, on the whole, pretty strong, with only one or two pieces that had one anticipating the end to their brief running time. A lot of people I don't associate with strong work really excelled, doing work that was darker than the more frivolous work they usually produce: A near-twenty-minute-monologue, about the inevitability of human extinction due to exponential population growth, was written by a guy who largely makes puppet-show music videos for self-consciously "fun" bands. Dina Kelberman did a pretty piece that ran through her normal themes, but for a more sustained length than usual, and with more visual panache. One actor involved said that the whole festival felt like it marked a highwater point for a certain set of Baltimore energies.
But the two threads, running through the majority of plays, from a variety of different playwrights- (although pretty much all would be in their mid-to-late-twenties) were the apocalypse, and characters not doing what to do in their lives. "The apocalypse" is a broad term, and one some involved would question- one playwright, Evan Moritz, described his piece as being about "the housing collapse," although it starred two characters scrounging for food. Others were more blatant than such ambiguities. Other plays were about apathy, or inability to make decisions, which, when taken in conjunction with the apocalypse thing, paints a pretty bleak picture of where the Baltimore mindset is at.
What's funny is I walked away from the festival going "OK: Don't write about the apocalypse anymore," despite the fact that, in embracing such darkness in material, the artists represented in the festival turned out some of the best, most mature work I've seen from them. And then, with that resolution in mind, I myself no longer knew what to do, what to discuss.
Because talking about such things has produced some phenomenal work, particularly in this decade. Kevin Huizenga has ruminated on total collapse from a number of different angles. The book I'm reading right now, Margaret Atwood's Oryx And Crake, is from still another angle, and she has other books in her bibliography also working as investigations of such territory. In some ways, this post is a follow-up to my last post, about the feelings caused by reading The Men Who Stare At Goats the same day I saw Up, and the fun-romp nature of the latter, but Up is Pixar's follow-up to the artistic high point of Wall-E.
And then, in the middle of all these thoughts, I stumbled across this horrible thing: A song called "Making Love," designed to explain to children why they shouldn't be scared by the sounds coming from their parents bedroom. It's horrifying, nauseating, and so aesthetically revolting that I am made to bandy about the term "pure evil." I recommend clicking on that link, to experience the horror.
So I called up my good friend Alex Tripp, to tell him about that song, and discuss the movie Up. In the course of that phone call, he informed me of something I hadn't heard about: Robert Zemeckis' plans to make a sequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, to be done entirely in 3-D CGI motion capture- Along the lines of his Polar Express or Beowulf. This pretty much made my head spin, giving me something I couldn't wrap my mind around: A movie that would so fully miss the appeal of seeing humans and cartoons interact with each other, because all would be animated. Another big chunk of the appeal of Roger Rabbit was the way cartoon characters associated with different animation studios/corporate monoliths interacted, but I don't think there's any chance of that being recreated, let alone with the new era of CGI characters sprouted from Dreamworks and Pixar.
Basically: These were ideas I couldn't understand, that seemed so wrong on the face of it that some neuron shouted "EVIL" and "THE END OF ALL THINGS." That I really wanted to talk about, but couldn't, because I'd sought to remove such end-times terms from my artistic vocabulary.
The only solace to be found, really, is in craft: If seeing things so disagreeable makes me feel that way, then the only response left would be to make things more aesthetically pleasurable. I was already thinking about such things: I haven't made a video in a year, and feel the urge to do so, with these novels done, and then I found this blog which made me realize how good even crappy movies can look, in a way that made me want to venture towards it.
But that's still not really having anything to say, just realizing that I would want to execute it on a very high level. That's barely a thought at all, and I'm left again thinking of how I don't know what to do. An existential crisis brought on by a song called "Making Love," and the idea of a sequel to Roger Rabbit.
The only inspiring thing is this Lazy Magnet box set. Lazy Magnet, Jeremy Harris of Providence, made one amazing record, Is Music Even Good, that Corleone put out. But he's also made a ton of CD-Rs and self-released cassettes, and he just put out a box set, collecting much of that material made from 2004-2009, with liner notes by him with an intro by CF. It's pretty inspiring, on the whole. It's not as singular an achievement as his actual record is, but it's a different kind of achievement, a document of a restless creative force. In the liner notes he highlights a specific song, "Species Wide Mass Suicide" (which appears on the Corleone release) as being one of the best songs he's ever written. I will refrain from quoting the lyrics to simply state that it feels the pressure to create, hard, and that song is indeed a high point of a record I think is an actual masterpiece.
Thursday, June 04, 2009
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Oh, man is not made for the cognitive dissonance that comes about from the day I had. Whereas last year's new Pixar movie was attended, in my life, by listening to an interview with CF that left me feeling deeply inspired, today I watched Up and read Jon Ronson's The Men Who Stare At Goats- which goes back and forth between the sort-of-amusing and conspiracy theories that leave you feeling awful.
Up is pretty much great. It starts sad, to give emotional underpinnings, and then starts moving fast. It ends up containing genuinely funny material. It feels like less of a curiosity than Wall-E did, more like a normal movie, but well-crafted and strongly executed in a way that I doubt any other summer blockbuster would be. In some ways, it might be more satisfying than Wall-E: Wall-E is sort of more deeply sad, to a point where it even creates a sad ending that it then avoids in a swerve. Up has emotion underpinning it, but moves according to "fun romp" tradition, and allows for a more cartoony world. Lots of fun.
The Men Who Stare At Goats is not terribly well-written: It's all over the place in its subject matter, in a way where it does this paradoxical thing where it ends up not being convincing of things you already know to be true. Certain things are covered in such a cursory or haphazard manner where characters start to seem made up even though they clearly are real. But then there's the conspiracy theory stuff, which doesn't really jibe with what the rest of the book is about, but still feels like evidence of a really horrible evil... I don't know know. It's written so poorly that the whole thing feels like it's only going to convince utter crackpots, despite being about real and interesting things. The book, ostensibly, is about the CIA's use of new age and psychic practices, remote viewing and such. The CIA used remote viewing during the cold war to try to monitor the soviets- but that's not really talked about so much as some tangential figure who went on Coast To Coast AM and ended up inspiring the Heaven's Gate cult to kill themselves.
They really should not have been consumed in the same day, two things each lying on the extremes of my interest in cultural consumption. The universal humanity and humor of Up, that makes you want to engage in the world and being understandable, contrasting against the way a book of conspiracy theories puts one's thought into a spiral of half-digested information as concentric circles around a void of sheer terror. Go see Up.
Up is pretty much great. It starts sad, to give emotional underpinnings, and then starts moving fast. It ends up containing genuinely funny material. It feels like less of a curiosity than Wall-E did, more like a normal movie, but well-crafted and strongly executed in a way that I doubt any other summer blockbuster would be. In some ways, it might be more satisfying than Wall-E: Wall-E is sort of more deeply sad, to a point where it even creates a sad ending that it then avoids in a swerve. Up has emotion underpinning it, but moves according to "fun romp" tradition, and allows for a more cartoony world. Lots of fun.
The Men Who Stare At Goats is not terribly well-written: It's all over the place in its subject matter, in a way where it does this paradoxical thing where it ends up not being convincing of things you already know to be true. Certain things are covered in such a cursory or haphazard manner where characters start to seem made up even though they clearly are real. But then there's the conspiracy theory stuff, which doesn't really jibe with what the rest of the book is about, but still feels like evidence of a really horrible evil... I don't know know. It's written so poorly that the whole thing feels like it's only going to convince utter crackpots, despite being about real and interesting things. The book, ostensibly, is about the CIA's use of new age and psychic practices, remote viewing and such. The CIA used remote viewing during the cold war to try to monitor the soviets- but that's not really talked about so much as some tangential figure who went on Coast To Coast AM and ended up inspiring the Heaven's Gate cult to kill themselves.
They really should not have been consumed in the same day, two things each lying on the extremes of my interest in cultural consumption. The universal humanity and humor of Up, that makes you want to engage in the world and being understandable, contrasting against the way a book of conspiracy theories puts one's thought into a spiral of half-digested information as concentric circles around a void of sheer terror. Go see Up.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
I recently checked out Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives from the library. It has since been returned, with only its first section read, and I am left to wonder why that book found the praise it did. Certainly, some of the praise- the comparisons to Marquez and Borges- feels like it comes from a place of racist oversimplifying. The Marquez comparisons have more to do with the amount each received by their respective generations, and most longer reviews (not the kind of thing to run on book-jackets) would grant that Bolano has nothing to do with magic realism. The book-jacket statement that "This is the sort of novel that Borges would have written" feels like it has only the most specious involvement with Borges, or novels. Here is a novel about writers (Borges talked about books) running around having sex with each other (That's what a novel is, right?).
As near as I can tell, the book is successful for how easy it is to read: It's compulsively readable, tales of the soap-operas of youth. But there's a lot of it: At over 500 pages, it feels like "You like books? Here's 500 pages of stuff to read; that's a book, isn't it, by definition?" It disregards content. But then, the content- about poets- allows for lots of name-dropping and reference points. It feels like preaching to the converted, or pandering, for a book to be so much about books and authors, but some people love being pandered to.
Granted, I only read the first section of the book, written in the form of a journal, but any skimming I did did not point to seismic shifts in terms of subject matter.
Meanwhile, I recently found myself employed at a job that had a comic book store within easy walking distance of it. I found myself there on lunch breaks, combing through quarter boxes. That is where I found Bernie Mireault's The Jam Urban Adventure Color Special, from 1987. That's a pretty good comic, for what it is: 1980s alternative comics in a superhero mold, roughly comparable to a bunch of comics from that era, but maybe nothing modern. The closest thing would be Madman, I guess, but these days that comic mostly stumbles on, with none of the weird vigor (or density of plotting) seen in this comic.
There was a Jam/Madman crossover comic in the nineties, that I've never read, and after that for a while Mireault was doing some backup strips in Madman. Those backup strips felt pretty markedly less ambitious: Silent comics, marked by (I think) a six-panel grid and some (I think) painted coloring. That was about a guy called Dr. Robot, who ran around in a big robot. He also did a comic around the same time called High Hat, which was about a guy in a top hat smoking joints. I guess he gave up, at least in terms of writing. They're alright to look at, I suppose, and maybe that was how he was pushing himself, towards painted color that felt designed for either glossy stock or computer monitors.
This Jam comic has flatter colors, that fit nicely with the brighter than newsprint paper. I think it looks great, and it reads well, a little clearer than the black and white issue of The Jam from a year later found in the same quarter box. The coloring really focuses the compositions, while still allowing for hyperactive layouts or delineations of architecture. A really cool comic.
Poking around the internet, though, I see pages from newer, yet unpublished work, and it, in black and white, doesn't look that good at all, actually: It has that sort of generic black and white boom comic look, inspired by underground comic's sense of style and texture, but with this frozen stiffness of Jack Chick tracts, or seventies Marvel comics. There's this grey-toned slickness that removes detail, rather than gives it room to breathe. It looks really bad. Oh well.
As near as I can tell, the book is successful for how easy it is to read: It's compulsively readable, tales of the soap-operas of youth. But there's a lot of it: At over 500 pages, it feels like "You like books? Here's 500 pages of stuff to read; that's a book, isn't it, by definition?" It disregards content. But then, the content- about poets- allows for lots of name-dropping and reference points. It feels like preaching to the converted, or pandering, for a book to be so much about books and authors, but some people love being pandered to.
Granted, I only read the first section of the book, written in the form of a journal, but any skimming I did did not point to seismic shifts in terms of subject matter.
Meanwhile, I recently found myself employed at a job that had a comic book store within easy walking distance of it. I found myself there on lunch breaks, combing through quarter boxes. That is where I found Bernie Mireault's The Jam Urban Adventure Color Special, from 1987. That's a pretty good comic, for what it is: 1980s alternative comics in a superhero mold, roughly comparable to a bunch of comics from that era, but maybe nothing modern. The closest thing would be Madman, I guess, but these days that comic mostly stumbles on, with none of the weird vigor (or density of plotting) seen in this comic.
There was a Jam/Madman crossover comic in the nineties, that I've never read, and after that for a while Mireault was doing some backup strips in Madman. Those backup strips felt pretty markedly less ambitious: Silent comics, marked by (I think) a six-panel grid and some (I think) painted coloring. That was about a guy called Dr. Robot, who ran around in a big robot. He also did a comic around the same time called High Hat, which was about a guy in a top hat smoking joints. I guess he gave up, at least in terms of writing. They're alright to look at, I suppose, and maybe that was how he was pushing himself, towards painted color that felt designed for either glossy stock or computer monitors.
This Jam comic has flatter colors, that fit nicely with the brighter than newsprint paper. I think it looks great, and it reads well, a little clearer than the black and white issue of The Jam from a year later found in the same quarter box. The coloring really focuses the compositions, while still allowing for hyperactive layouts or delineations of architecture. A really cool comic.
Poking around the internet, though, I see pages from newer, yet unpublished work, and it, in black and white, doesn't look that good at all, actually: It has that sort of generic black and white boom comic look, inspired by underground comic's sense of style and texture, but with this frozen stiffness of Jack Chick tracts, or seventies Marvel comics. There's this grey-toned slickness that removes detail, rather than gives it room to breathe. It looks really bad. Oh well.
Monday, April 27, 2009
For the past several years I have been engaged with what would like to refer to itself as "the counterculture," loosely stated, a variety of people involved with "the arts" on a DIY basis. This group defines itself at least partly in its opposition to certain mainstream ideas, and places a great deal of its self-worth in its support of others in their community.
A large part of this group sort of prides itself on having "no rules," but the other has some certain guiding principles. I am interested in coming up with a list of said principles, specifically because I don't think there's really any kind of self-governance enforcing such codes, and a lot of people are shittier than they probably should be. (These rules can be picked and chosen from, and certainly a number of them are designed to implicate myself.)
So, okay, rules:
-Produce work, of some sort. Especially if you are going to offer criticism.
(Alternately, some would offer "don't criticize at all," but fuck those people. Their work, by and large, is awful, and so they have fear.)
-Don't produce bad work out of some misplaced desire for wealth (I would add "or the acceptance of your peers")
-No more coming to shows claiming to have no money with alcohol clearly in your possession as evidence of what you spent the last bit of your money on, with the implication being "I am going to trash your house, and you should feel grateful that I am here at all, as an audience member."
-No charging people admission cost when they have no money.
-Don't secretly have a trust fund.
-While attending shows, try to pay attention to work being presented, rather than attend to socialize. Except for art openings, because that's what that is for.
-No conspicuous consumption.
-Try to have as little a sense of entitlement as possible, besides what's outline in the Crass song "Do They Owe Us A Living," which I know from the Soft Pink Truth cover.
-Don't eat fast food, processed food. Try to avoid certain additives to the best of your ability.
-Don't shop at chain stores; steal from them if need be.
-Don't steal from your friends.
-Walk, ride a bike, or take public transit rather than use a car whenever possible. In event of tours, vegetable oil is the preferred fuel.
-Recycle.
-Compost.
-Grow your own vegetables.
-Don't eat meat.
-Don't smoke: it encourages tobacco companies. (I don't think anyone treats this as a rule, the coolness of smoking really wins out for most people.)
-Don't do hard drugs: All cocaine has been brought into the U.S. by way of deeply-fucked channels.
-Don't frown upon those that do drugs.-Don't be racist, sexist, or homophobic. Others would say, maybe just implicitly, "or be religious" but I think that's fucked up.
-Here I would say "vote," others would say "don't vote."
-Be politically active in some way above and beyond voting.
-Try not to spend a ton of time on the internet, especially w/r/t social networking sites.
-And while I wish "don't have a cell phone" was a rule, I know it isn't, anymore.
-I also wish "when choosing culture to consume, prefer things you expect to be good over kitschy crap" was a rule but it really isn't.
-"Don't watch TV" is the rule instead, which I consider generally unfair and simplistic.
-"Don't download music illegally" is a not a rule at all, but hey, why not consider it?
Anybody else with rules to add, please use the comments thread. I'm probably taking a lot of things for granted.
I'm not even interested in subculture, really, so much as I am in general self-governance and trying not to be an awful person. (I personally eat meat, and processed food, and like those things. I am working on trying to compost and grow my own vegetables, though, and it was nighttime gardening, combined with a conversation about people not paying for shows but showing up at beer, that brought this post on.)
Until next time, be a hippie, and also a punk.
A large part of this group sort of prides itself on having "no rules," but the other has some certain guiding principles. I am interested in coming up with a list of said principles, specifically because I don't think there's really any kind of self-governance enforcing such codes, and a lot of people are shittier than they probably should be. (These rules can be picked and chosen from, and certainly a number of them are designed to implicate myself.)
So, okay, rules:
-Produce work, of some sort. Especially if you are going to offer criticism.
(Alternately, some would offer "don't criticize at all," but fuck those people. Their work, by and large, is awful, and so they have fear.)
-Don't produce bad work out of some misplaced desire for wealth (I would add "or the acceptance of your peers")
-No more coming to shows claiming to have no money with alcohol clearly in your possession as evidence of what you spent the last bit of your money on, with the implication being "I am going to trash your house, and you should feel grateful that I am here at all, as an audience member."
-No charging people admission cost when they have no money.
-Don't secretly have a trust fund.
-While attending shows, try to pay attention to work being presented, rather than attend to socialize. Except for art openings, because that's what that is for.
-No conspicuous consumption.
-Try to have as little a sense of entitlement as possible, besides what's outline in the Crass song "Do They Owe Us A Living," which I know from the Soft Pink Truth cover.
-Don't eat fast food, processed food. Try to avoid certain additives to the best of your ability.
-Don't shop at chain stores; steal from them if need be.
-Don't steal from your friends.
-Walk, ride a bike, or take public transit rather than use a car whenever possible. In event of tours, vegetable oil is the preferred fuel.
-Recycle.
-Compost.
-Grow your own vegetables.
-Don't eat meat.
-Don't smoke: it encourages tobacco companies. (I don't think anyone treats this as a rule, the coolness of smoking really wins out for most people.)
-Don't do hard drugs: All cocaine has been brought into the U.S. by way of deeply-fucked channels.
-Don't frown upon those that do drugs.-Don't be racist, sexist, or homophobic. Others would say, maybe just implicitly, "or be religious" but I think that's fucked up.
-Here I would say "vote," others would say "don't vote."
-Be politically active in some way above and beyond voting.
-Try not to spend a ton of time on the internet, especially w/r/t social networking sites.
-And while I wish "don't have a cell phone" was a rule, I know it isn't, anymore.
-I also wish "when choosing culture to consume, prefer things you expect to be good over kitschy crap" was a rule but it really isn't.
-"Don't watch TV" is the rule instead, which I consider generally unfair and simplistic.
-"Don't download music illegally" is a not a rule at all, but hey, why not consider it?
Anybody else with rules to add, please use the comments thread. I'm probably taking a lot of things for granted.
I'm not even interested in subculture, really, so much as I am in general self-governance and trying not to be an awful person. (I personally eat meat, and processed food, and like those things. I am working on trying to compost and grow my own vegetables, though, and it was nighttime gardening, combined with a conversation about people not paying for shows but showing up at beer, that brought this post on.)
Until next time, be a hippie, and also a punk.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Rest in peace, respect is due: to both Jack Cardiff and J.G. Ballard. The former, the cinematographer for Powell And Pressburger, whose technicolor Black Narcissus work is a real mindblower, and the latter, whose spirit combined with life experience to form a worldview I can't quite relate to but nonetheless evoked a specific something of the twentieth century.
Sunday, April 05, 2009
If memory serves, this time last year I was hoping that Free Kitten's Inherit would sound like the Magik Markers album Boss. I think this hope was buoyed by them both coming out on Ecstatic Peace and having female singers. Now I am listening to the new Magik Markers record, Balf Quarry, on Drag City, and thinking it sounds like Free Kitten. This paragraph is inscrutable to all but a certain kind of nerd.
Other records to come out this year so far to be disappointing compared to an artist's older work include pretty much everyone that's not Black Dice. (And I guess despite my problems with the new Animal Collective record, it's still an interesting evolution and a little bit cooler than Strawberry Jam was.) Apparently there is going to be a new Lightning Bolt record coming out in a couple of months.
The reviews for the new Swan Lake album, Enemy Mine, are interesting to read for how a press release can skew critical thought. The argument being made is that it's a more cohesive record than their previous album, Beast Moans. Swan Lake is a band with three different songwriters, each with distinctive voices. On the new record, their tics are ever more pronounced: Dan Bejar does this theatrical style of singing which gets in the way of melody, which has been a problem for me on probably every Destroyer record released this decade. He doesn't do this on New Pornographers records, and he didn't do it on Beast Moans. Carey Mercer's songs on that record were little drips into the murk of recording. On Enemy Mine, his vocals are mixed as high as they are on Frog Eyes records, and are just as unlistenable for them. The Spencer Krug songs are the only ones that aren't distastefully obnoxious, and end up sort of operating on a last-Wolf-Parade-album layer of being basically bland. But I was maybe the only one who liked Beast Moans.
The new Akron/Family record has its moments, like a noisy instrumental called MBF, and it doesn't have anything as ugh-this-sounds-like-Phish-or-something as the last album's "I've Got Some Friends," but it doesn't seem like the peaks are as high as that record either. Maybe I should listen to it more. But the initial song has this bass sound that really makes it seem like jam-band lite jazz. What a weird case that band is: I saw them after their Angels Of Light split came out. Sure, that is still their best record. But they blew me away, totally transcendent, in the basement of the Eagles Hall in Olympia, Washington. Approaching religious experience, sure. And my interactions with them really painted them as world-class dudes. To this day, I have no reason to believe they're not world-class dudes: They are good friends with the Lexie Mountain Boys, and one member quit the band to live in a buddhist monastery. But they've become increasingly jammy, and the last tour schedule was really disconcertingly lame: A few dates in hippified zones like San Francisco, Austin, and Denver, each, and no shows anywhere on the east coast besides New York. Total jam band niche audience style, like they would rather play Bonnaroo than do the sort of shows that impress the hell out of everyone in attendance. They're not on Young God anymore, and maybe not even acting as Michael Gira's Angels Of Light backing band. I would still like to see them again, on a tour with Fire On Fire and Lexie Mountain Boys, playing in places that would be appropriate. God, this new record really is boring on the whole.
Oh yeah, Fire On Fire: Their first official album came out in the last days of last year, but I don't think it's available in stores, maybe only through the Young God website? That album's fine. Normally I like Big Blood more, but these are good songs, and I can't help but feel like they're fighting the good fight of what once was the toast of the underground.
Speaking of "freak folks," or "new weird americans" (were those things synonymous or not?) I wonder what the next record will be like from the guy who once called himself Wooden Wand? The last album was done under the name James Jackson Toth, and released on Rykodisc (through Slim Moon, former runner of 5RC, who rereleased the awesome Harem Of The Sundrum and The Witness Figg), and sounded like Tom Petty. The new one's coming out on Ecstatic Peace, (who put out the also pretty great James And The Quiet) under the name WAND, and I have no idea what it will sound like. Probably it will continue down on this road of blandness-as-artistic-maturity. (See also the Mirah record that came out this year, and remark to yourself that holy shit it's been ten years since You Think It's Like This But Really It's Like This. Maybe she was always kind of bland, but it was also charming and interesting, then.)
Other records to come out this year so far to be disappointing compared to an artist's older work include pretty much everyone that's not Black Dice. (And I guess despite my problems with the new Animal Collective record, it's still an interesting evolution and a little bit cooler than Strawberry Jam was.) Apparently there is going to be a new Lightning Bolt record coming out in a couple of months.
The reviews for the new Swan Lake album, Enemy Mine, are interesting to read for how a press release can skew critical thought. The argument being made is that it's a more cohesive record than their previous album, Beast Moans. Swan Lake is a band with three different songwriters, each with distinctive voices. On the new record, their tics are ever more pronounced: Dan Bejar does this theatrical style of singing which gets in the way of melody, which has been a problem for me on probably every Destroyer record released this decade. He doesn't do this on New Pornographers records, and he didn't do it on Beast Moans. Carey Mercer's songs on that record were little drips into the murk of recording. On Enemy Mine, his vocals are mixed as high as they are on Frog Eyes records, and are just as unlistenable for them. The Spencer Krug songs are the only ones that aren't distastefully obnoxious, and end up sort of operating on a last-Wolf-Parade-album layer of being basically bland. But I was maybe the only one who liked Beast Moans.
The new Akron/Family record has its moments, like a noisy instrumental called MBF, and it doesn't have anything as ugh-this-sounds-like-Phish-or-something as the last album's "I've Got Some Friends," but it doesn't seem like the peaks are as high as that record either. Maybe I should listen to it more. But the initial song has this bass sound that really makes it seem like jam-band lite jazz. What a weird case that band is: I saw them after their Angels Of Light split came out. Sure, that is still their best record. But they blew me away, totally transcendent, in the basement of the Eagles Hall in Olympia, Washington. Approaching religious experience, sure. And my interactions with them really painted them as world-class dudes. To this day, I have no reason to believe they're not world-class dudes: They are good friends with the Lexie Mountain Boys, and one member quit the band to live in a buddhist monastery. But they've become increasingly jammy, and the last tour schedule was really disconcertingly lame: A few dates in hippified zones like San Francisco, Austin, and Denver, each, and no shows anywhere on the east coast besides New York. Total jam band niche audience style, like they would rather play Bonnaroo than do the sort of shows that impress the hell out of everyone in attendance. They're not on Young God anymore, and maybe not even acting as Michael Gira's Angels Of Light backing band. I would still like to see them again, on a tour with Fire On Fire and Lexie Mountain Boys, playing in places that would be appropriate. God, this new record really is boring on the whole.
Oh yeah, Fire On Fire: Their first official album came out in the last days of last year, but I don't think it's available in stores, maybe only through the Young God website? That album's fine. Normally I like Big Blood more, but these are good songs, and I can't help but feel like they're fighting the good fight of what once was the toast of the underground.
Speaking of "freak folks," or "new weird americans" (were those things synonymous or not?) I wonder what the next record will be like from the guy who once called himself Wooden Wand? The last album was done under the name James Jackson Toth, and released on Rykodisc (through Slim Moon, former runner of 5RC, who rereleased the awesome Harem Of The Sundrum and The Witness Figg), and sounded like Tom Petty. The new one's coming out on Ecstatic Peace, (who put out the also pretty great James And The Quiet) under the name WAND, and I have no idea what it will sound like. Probably it will continue down on this road of blandness-as-artistic-maturity. (See also the Mirah record that came out this year, and remark to yourself that holy shit it's been ten years since You Think It's Like This But Really It's Like This. Maybe she was always kind of bland, but it was also charming and interesting, then.)
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Oh great news: Criterion is releasing Last Year At Marienbad on DVD this June. I wonder if they're utilizing the new prints that toured just recently? Anyway, this movie is amazing, far superior to Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour, and probably my favorite film of the French new wave. It's great that more people will be able to see it in a decent form. (It's also going to be on Blu-Ray disc, which no one I know has, but I'm vaguely aware has superior image quality.)
Monday, March 16, 2009
There are certain signifiers that are everywhere these days, designated at this moment in time as arbiters of quality. By themselves, however, they're meaningless, and it seems as if in a few years time it will be these things that will again be rebelled against.
In comedy, there is this certain presentational style, of young males with shaggy hair, that can be vaguely associated with indie rock, that seems to short-circuit and circumvent the quality standards of reasonable snobs. I've talked about this in the past when talking about how the HBO show Flight Of The Conchords isn't funny at all, and I feel the same thing applies to the MTV sketch show Human Giant and approximately half of the cast of Saturday Night Live. (I also dislike the American version of The Office, which a lot of people like, and feels like it might fit this mold as well.) It feels like a mutation of the idea of "alternative comedy," like no one noticed that no one on The Comedians Of Comedy tour was traditionally attractive. What's disconcerting about it is how it misreads the idea of "taste" and makes it into something class-based. (That might be where the whole thing comes from, but it's really to be avoided.) Tim And Eric deliberately avoids this stuff, and while their show has its own weaknesses, it really makes it feel like its own voice.
In comics, it seems like the old model, where people gave far too much credence to mediocre auto-bio comics, has been largely abandoned, but these days I really feel like silkscreen covers make more of an impression than they should. The comics of Juliacks are really cool and distinct, but man: There is a zine rack at Atomic Books, made up of stuff that would be super-compelling when I saw it at The Olympia Comics Expo, that on closer inspection is not as powerful as things I want to give my dollar to. When you see a whole heap of the stuff it really makes you just want to pay attention to cool drawing again.
(Speaking of cool drawing, let me go on a tangent. My friend has a portable hard drive with a bunch of downloaded comics on it. He was talking shit on "comics made by graphic designers," which I then discovered, when looking at what was on his hard drive, that he was specifically talking about the work of this guy Jonathan Hickman, which I think he'd obtained accidentally. But holy shit is that stuff awful, deeply dull to look at. Comics made on Illustrator, like Achewood, but without the flair for dialogue, just that flat talking-head presentational style. Also on the hard drive were issues of the Geoff-Darrow-drawn Hard Boiled and the complete run of Sam Kieth's The Maxx. I am all for people trying to find their own voices but it's weird to look at those, back to back, and ask yourself why you would ever make the choice to read the Hickman comic, let alone make comics in such a deeply dull way. No one making mini-comics is making those mistakes, and they're not doing that weird over-rendering color thing that mainstream comics do, so they're a little smarter. I think that both of these trends are the autotune of comics, and will just make everything from this era badly dated in ten years time.)
In music, the signifiers are much the same as they've always been: Acoustic instruments still indicate sincerity- but the one that's really bothered me is the way keyboards and 4/4 house kick drums are supposed to make an audience dance. It feels fascistic as a death march to me. I should also point out that currently lo-fi production feels really "in" in a way that is totally fucking with critical perception, and that I feel really bad for any critic who ranked The Vivian Girls (who, according to all gossip I have heard, are awful people) on their best-of-2008 list. That's sort of interesting, because I sort of feel like a lot of these things have to do with the feeling of money implied by the decisions being made, and they're using traditionally "poor" sound. But maybe it's only appealing at this point in time because it's not actually "poor" in terms of money involved, since it's cheaper to just record on computer, rather than an analog four-track. I'm not trying to do a thing where I half-remember The Psychic Soviet, so I'll cut short this line of reasoning. This post is very negative, but it's meant to serve as prophecy that in time everyone will see past such artifice.
In comedy, there is this certain presentational style, of young males with shaggy hair, that can be vaguely associated with indie rock, that seems to short-circuit and circumvent the quality standards of reasonable snobs. I've talked about this in the past when talking about how the HBO show Flight Of The Conchords isn't funny at all, and I feel the same thing applies to the MTV sketch show Human Giant and approximately half of the cast of Saturday Night Live. (I also dislike the American version of The Office, which a lot of people like, and feels like it might fit this mold as well.) It feels like a mutation of the idea of "alternative comedy," like no one noticed that no one on The Comedians Of Comedy tour was traditionally attractive. What's disconcerting about it is how it misreads the idea of "taste" and makes it into something class-based. (That might be where the whole thing comes from, but it's really to be avoided.) Tim And Eric deliberately avoids this stuff, and while their show has its own weaknesses, it really makes it feel like its own voice.
In comics, it seems like the old model, where people gave far too much credence to mediocre auto-bio comics, has been largely abandoned, but these days I really feel like silkscreen covers make more of an impression than they should. The comics of Juliacks are really cool and distinct, but man: There is a zine rack at Atomic Books, made up of stuff that would be super-compelling when I saw it at The Olympia Comics Expo, that on closer inspection is not as powerful as things I want to give my dollar to. When you see a whole heap of the stuff it really makes you just want to pay attention to cool drawing again.
(Speaking of cool drawing, let me go on a tangent. My friend has a portable hard drive with a bunch of downloaded comics on it. He was talking shit on "comics made by graphic designers," which I then discovered, when looking at what was on his hard drive, that he was specifically talking about the work of this guy Jonathan Hickman, which I think he'd obtained accidentally. But holy shit is that stuff awful, deeply dull to look at. Comics made on Illustrator, like Achewood, but without the flair for dialogue, just that flat talking-head presentational style. Also on the hard drive were issues of the Geoff-Darrow-drawn Hard Boiled and the complete run of Sam Kieth's The Maxx. I am all for people trying to find their own voices but it's weird to look at those, back to back, and ask yourself why you would ever make the choice to read the Hickman comic, let alone make comics in such a deeply dull way. No one making mini-comics is making those mistakes, and they're not doing that weird over-rendering color thing that mainstream comics do, so they're a little smarter. I think that both of these trends are the autotune of comics, and will just make everything from this era badly dated in ten years time.)
In music, the signifiers are much the same as they've always been: Acoustic instruments still indicate sincerity- but the one that's really bothered me is the way keyboards and 4/4 house kick drums are supposed to make an audience dance. It feels fascistic as a death march to me. I should also point out that currently lo-fi production feels really "in" in a way that is totally fucking with critical perception, and that I feel really bad for any critic who ranked The Vivian Girls (who, according to all gossip I have heard, are awful people) on their best-of-2008 list. That's sort of interesting, because I sort of feel like a lot of these things have to do with the feeling of money implied by the decisions being made, and they're using traditionally "poor" sound. But maybe it's only appealing at this point in time because it's not actually "poor" in terms of money involved, since it's cheaper to just record on computer, rather than an analog four-track. I'm not trying to do a thing where I half-remember The Psychic Soviet, so I'll cut short this line of reasoning. This post is very negative, but it's meant to serve as prophecy that in time everyone will see past such artifice.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Oh boy, a perusal of WFMU playlists indicates the availability of the Big Blood and The Bleedin' Hearts CD-R, teased a year ago by the song "Oh Country." This has a cover of Syd Barrett's Terrapin. What an exciting band. They constitute half of Fire On Fire, whose record The Orchard was released this past December through Young God Records. I believe it's only available through their website, making it about as easy to find as Big Blood's The Grove that came out last year on Don't Trust The Ruin. I am hoping to set up a show for either of these bands the next time they travel.
Baltimore's Erin Womack just received a grant from the state of Maryland to get money to be an artist. Good for her. We run in some of the same circles, and recently I was talking to some of our shared acquaintances about the resemblance of her drawing style to that of Christopher Forgues, and one of these people had actually talked to Erin about her influences, and found out that a big one was the film The Color Of Pomegranates. Which I hadn't seen, or even heard of, but it turns out is actually considered a classic of world and Russian cinema. I am in the middle of watching it. And while it doesn't explain the similarities to CF's line it's pretty interesting in its own right, part of a specific strain of cinema that feels more connected to high art, with Last Year At Marienbad a possible comparison point. It's almost pure imagery at this point, with no signs of a narrative arriving at any point in the future, but still compelling and beautiful to look at if one can handle the pace. I look forward to finishing it.
It's inspiring to me for the distinctive way the images are framed, the way the human figures frequently stand small in deliberate tableaus, the way in which the camera must have been fairly far away or shooting with a wide-angle lens to capture the corners of the room. But that's for me as a video-maker. What it shares with Erin's comics is the way images are juxtaposed together, repetitions of imagery with no real narrative accumulation, with written or spoken language appearing sparsely and largely as counterpoint, and the ornate nature of the images in terms of landscape and costume.
I should maybe thank her for indirectly inspiring me to look into it, the same way I should talk to Jimmy Joe Roche about how his namechecking of Daisies in an interview with Arthur magazine led to my seeing that film. That issue of Arthur had the band Celebration on the cover, who I saw perform this past Friday night, with my friend Ami Dang. Ami herself won a similar grant from the state of Maryland, and I am supposed to collaborate with her in the future on a video project, in a thing that will probably end up with faint traces of the influences of both Daisies and The Color Of Pomegranates.
Baltimore's Erin Womack just received a grant from the state of Maryland to get money to be an artist. Good for her. We run in some of the same circles, and recently I was talking to some of our shared acquaintances about the resemblance of her drawing style to that of Christopher Forgues, and one of these people had actually talked to Erin about her influences, and found out that a big one was the film The Color Of Pomegranates. Which I hadn't seen, or even heard of, but it turns out is actually considered a classic of world and Russian cinema. I am in the middle of watching it. And while it doesn't explain the similarities to CF's line it's pretty interesting in its own right, part of a specific strain of cinema that feels more connected to high art, with Last Year At Marienbad a possible comparison point. It's almost pure imagery at this point, with no signs of a narrative arriving at any point in the future, but still compelling and beautiful to look at if one can handle the pace. I look forward to finishing it.
It's inspiring to me for the distinctive way the images are framed, the way the human figures frequently stand small in deliberate tableaus, the way in which the camera must have been fairly far away or shooting with a wide-angle lens to capture the corners of the room. But that's for me as a video-maker. What it shares with Erin's comics is the way images are juxtaposed together, repetitions of imagery with no real narrative accumulation, with written or spoken language appearing sparsely and largely as counterpoint, and the ornate nature of the images in terms of landscape and costume.
I should maybe thank her for indirectly inspiring me to look into it, the same way I should talk to Jimmy Joe Roche about how his namechecking of Daisies in an interview with Arthur magazine led to my seeing that film. That issue of Arthur had the band Celebration on the cover, who I saw perform this past Friday night, with my friend Ami Dang. Ami herself won a similar grant from the state of Maryland, and I am supposed to collaborate with her in the future on a video project, in a thing that will probably end up with faint traces of the influences of both Daisies and The Color Of Pomegranates.
Monday, February 16, 2009
The new Animal Collective album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, is getting acclaim far and wide, at least in the music-criticism outlets that I've seen. Response to it has been more mixed in terms of people I talk to: Some might wish for a less-poppy record. I think the vocals are mixed too smoothly and are occasionally too high in the mix. But this complaint, as I voiced it, feels related to what I'm hearing from a lot of other people. Here in Baltimore, the small segment of people I talk to is put off by the lyrics, finding them silly and unrelatable.
Which I think says more about the faults of them then it does about the faults of the band. The lyrics are really straightforward, yes, but it still feels like a progression of a spirit of openness. But there's an audience of sort of inarticulate jammers that just want to get high and make music that Animal Collective has cultivated over the length of a few albums, that they themselves were for a while there, that is now left alienated by songs about wanting to provide for children. I think there's a segment of the Animal Collective fanbase that's being presented with a future that makes them deeply uncomfortable.
Recently, I have been thinking a lot about how art influences its audience. It seems like it is only musicians that are afforded the chance to say things like "Pavement were a really big influence on me," although this could be because they are most likely to be interviewed and asked about such things. I guess there are a great number of people blogging about comics who will admit that Grant Morrison's The Invisibles was an influence on their adolescence. Music is not so directly narrative, and so is usually talked about in terms of stylistic influence, despite the fact that people project narratives on to music as a means of relating to it.
This becomes interesting in the wake of hip-hop being the main force in pop culture for the last ten or so years. People have grown up with those narratives. What's odd to me is that it's a thing that youth can relate to so fully. Not because of racial issues, but because of confidence issues: I associate youth and adolescence primarily with insecurity, and find it hard to picture someone in the middle of all that attaching themselves to "Swagger Like Us," unless it serves as some kind of shield. Which is fine, except for the fact that there then is this narrative embedded within it, which people follow, and then -this is a complicated metaphor I don't want to mix- become embedded in the metal of it. And I think there then becomes this detached/debauched/anti-spiritual world that seems ever-more-lacking in innocence.
(There also rises, in response to this, a weird indie-gone-mainstream twee culture that's not particularly interesting either. Although I think that Animal Collective is still too sonically weird to be placed into that category as much as something off the Garden State soundtrack.)
At this point in the blog so far I have no real idea of how to connect these two different ideas and culture, and am hoping that by writing further I can make a thesis connecting these two things.
I would like to think that the last few Animal Collective records are just a little further along in the narrative that a lot of noise records are at. Consider for a moment that Hollindagain and Here Comes The Indian are, sort of, noise records, that they were touring with Black Dice around these times, and this was just shortly after Black Dice had stopped being a hardcore band that was punching their audience in the face. This could be the moment, then, after total freedom tears apart the city in a whirlwind and people now need to live on, and raise the next generation in the sun. There's also a narrative arc to the whole career of The Boredoms that sort of leads to this conclusion as well.
That moment where people can't move on to the next stage in the narrative is kind of always a little bit of a bummer though. I guess we should be thankful that the underground allows for that sort of that growth in reverence for people who've been around for a while, whereas the mainstream offering up tales of nihilism keeps on refreshing itself before alternate messages can proliferate. The sonic conservativism that often accompanies such personal progress is kind of a bummer, but I don't think that charge can really be levied at Animal Collective, who have enough background in folk music that that could've been moved into a duller direction if they had been those kinds of dudes.
Which I think says more about the faults of them then it does about the faults of the band. The lyrics are really straightforward, yes, but it still feels like a progression of a spirit of openness. But there's an audience of sort of inarticulate jammers that just want to get high and make music that Animal Collective has cultivated over the length of a few albums, that they themselves were for a while there, that is now left alienated by songs about wanting to provide for children. I think there's a segment of the Animal Collective fanbase that's being presented with a future that makes them deeply uncomfortable.
Recently, I have been thinking a lot about how art influences its audience. It seems like it is only musicians that are afforded the chance to say things like "Pavement were a really big influence on me," although this could be because they are most likely to be interviewed and asked about such things. I guess there are a great number of people blogging about comics who will admit that Grant Morrison's The Invisibles was an influence on their adolescence. Music is not so directly narrative, and so is usually talked about in terms of stylistic influence, despite the fact that people project narratives on to music as a means of relating to it.
This becomes interesting in the wake of hip-hop being the main force in pop culture for the last ten or so years. People have grown up with those narratives. What's odd to me is that it's a thing that youth can relate to so fully. Not because of racial issues, but because of confidence issues: I associate youth and adolescence primarily with insecurity, and find it hard to picture someone in the middle of all that attaching themselves to "Swagger Like Us," unless it serves as some kind of shield. Which is fine, except for the fact that there then is this narrative embedded within it, which people follow, and then -this is a complicated metaphor I don't want to mix- become embedded in the metal of it. And I think there then becomes this detached/debauched/anti-spiritual world that seems ever-more-lacking in innocence.
(There also rises, in response to this, a weird indie-gone-mainstream twee culture that's not particularly interesting either. Although I think that Animal Collective is still too sonically weird to be placed into that category as much as something off the Garden State soundtrack.)
At this point in the blog so far I have no real idea of how to connect these two different ideas and culture, and am hoping that by writing further I can make a thesis connecting these two things.
I would like to think that the last few Animal Collective records are just a little further along in the narrative that a lot of noise records are at. Consider for a moment that Hollindagain and Here Comes The Indian are, sort of, noise records, that they were touring with Black Dice around these times, and this was just shortly after Black Dice had stopped being a hardcore band that was punching their audience in the face. This could be the moment, then, after total freedom tears apart the city in a whirlwind and people now need to live on, and raise the next generation in the sun. There's also a narrative arc to the whole career of The Boredoms that sort of leads to this conclusion as well.
That moment where people can't move on to the next stage in the narrative is kind of always a little bit of a bummer though. I guess we should be thankful that the underground allows for that sort of that growth in reverence for people who've been around for a while, whereas the mainstream offering up tales of nihilism keeps on refreshing itself before alternate messages can proliferate. The sonic conservativism that often accompanies such personal progress is kind of a bummer, but I don't think that charge can really be levied at Animal Collective, who have enough background in folk music that that could've been moved into a duller direction if they had been those kinds of dudes.
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
The most recent episode of The Simpsons was a Heavenly Creatures parody starring Lisa. This is weird, right? Not because it's an obscure thing to reference for a half-hour's time, although the highly-specific nature of how it went about it's parody highlighted that element: Remakes of particular shots, multiple references to Josh Groban in place of the film's Mario Lanza. That all felt bizarre and tedious, but maybe no more than any other extended parody to grace a whole episode of an animated program. (It was also strangely emotionless for a Lisa-centric episode of The Simpsons, at least to a viewer primarily familiar with the first few, good, seasons.)
But what a weird way to evolve an archetype over a series of years, when depending on coming up with plotlines. The original idea of a smart little girl, who tries hard and wants approval, then becomes a vegetarian, then a buddhist, and then is placed in an intense friendship with a lesbian subtext. This is one for the culture studies majors in the room.
Everyone else is directed to this Youtube video of a child high on drugs from the dentist.
But what a weird way to evolve an archetype over a series of years, when depending on coming up with plotlines. The original idea of a smart little girl, who tries hard and wants approval, then becomes a vegetarian, then a buddhist, and then is placed in an intense friendship with a lesbian subtext. This is one for the culture studies majors in the room.
Everyone else is directed to this Youtube video of a child high on drugs from the dentist.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Oh, hey, my friend Griffin (who I met briefly in Olympia, then hung out with a lot more in Baltimore) got written up in Vice Magazine's blog. They kind of make him seem like a drug-addled asshole when he is one of the nicest guys ever. I think I am hosting/performing comedy at his birthday in March. He came to my first comedy thing and brought me some pizza and a sandwich because I had been feeding him for a few days before he played a show and got paid. He laughed really distinctively and it was awesome. Way to go Griffin.
While I am linking to other people's blogs, I have had to tell some other friends recently about why the blog Hipster Runoff is awful. Luckily, Nick Sylvester just articulated it really well for me.
While I am linking to other people's blogs, I have had to tell some other friends recently about why the blog Hipster Runoff is awful. Luckily, Nick Sylvester just articulated it really well for me.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
This feels related to the post about The Silver Jews not being a band anymore, even though a completely different set of factors contributed to its happening: Kevin Huizenga will no longer be putting out his comic "Or Else." This has more to do with the feasibility of the comics pamphlet in a graphic novel world, but that format gave Kevin the chance to do whatever he wanted. Which, in the cases of issues 2 through 4, meant completely self-contained experimental books, priced cheap. He'll still be putting out minicomics, and his Fantagraphics/Ignatz thing Ganges (which is eight dollars per rigidly formatted issue), but the loss of a vehicle for him to do weird stuff is pretty sad. Or Else 4 in particular was pretty influential for how free-wheeling it was on its way to its end. Kevin is a great cartoonist, who has more range than you would expect from just looking at his more acclaimed work.
I imagine that his "Rumbling" story that began serialization in issue 5 will see publication when its finished.
What's funny is that while this bothers me, because Kevin uses Or Else to do whatever he wants, I still wish that Anders Nilsen would stop fucking around with the serialization of Big Questions and just put out a completed book, as each issue of that series becomes ever more expensive. That comic is done, and just being put out on this Chris Ware-informed release schedule of once-a-year, rather than in installments of whenever an issue's worth of comics is completed.
And again, I appreciate the value of the single-issue comic, and hope that, when Rumbling (or whatever Kevin's "graphic novel" ends up being) comes out, it is in a cheap format.
I imagine that his "Rumbling" story that began serialization in issue 5 will see publication when its finished.
What's funny is that while this bothers me, because Kevin uses Or Else to do whatever he wants, I still wish that Anders Nilsen would stop fucking around with the serialization of Big Questions and just put out a completed book, as each issue of that series becomes ever more expensive. That comic is done, and just being put out on this Chris Ware-informed release schedule of once-a-year, rather than in installments of whenever an issue's worth of comics is completed.
And again, I appreciate the value of the single-issue comic, and hope that, when Rumbling (or whatever Kevin's "graphic novel" ends up being) comes out, it is in a cheap format.
Friday, January 23, 2009
The Silver Jews are soon to no longer be a band. This is fine, of course: Their last three records weren't as good as the three that preceded them, David Berman's book of poetry was of a high enough caliber to convince me that pretty much anything else he does will be interesting. (He's now looking into screenwriting, although I've also heard rumors of a novel.)
But, attached to this news, in his posts on the Drag City messageboard, was the revelation that his secret shame was his father, a fairly evil dude named Richard Berman, who worked for corporations under a variety of fronts to spread misinformation and try to break unions and keep the minimum wage low. Somehow this seems like an important enough thing to note, to tell other people to investigate. Trying to put the work of father and son into a narrative of two forces working against each other seems kind of wrong-headed even as it seems deeply appropriate. It makes more sense than talking about Silver Jews records in a context of Berman's drug abuse and suicidal depression, and it makes that stuff seem less cliched.
To restate: The Silver Jews are about an abiding melancholy, taking comfort in simple pleasures, and acting in resistance to an abstracted them of the rich and powerful. This is done through observation, feeling, and poetry. Sometimes the abstract is forsaken for direct appeals. Meanwhile, Berman And Company lies on behalf of the powerful and their lack of empathy. Old stories, old feelings. The appeal of simple pleasures can seem like not quite enough in the face of all that myth, and so maybe then is where the depression comes in, in not being able to transform all that you've inherited, and to aim for self-destruction instead.
Transform and transcend. So the Silver Jews are no longer a band. They're now a body of work. I wish David Berman luck, and do not want to tar him with a mark like "hero." Let us all keep on living, and try to observe as honestly as we can and feel as deeply as we can bear.
But, attached to this news, in his posts on the Drag City messageboard, was the revelation that his secret shame was his father, a fairly evil dude named Richard Berman, who worked for corporations under a variety of fronts to spread misinformation and try to break unions and keep the minimum wage low. Somehow this seems like an important enough thing to note, to tell other people to investigate. Trying to put the work of father and son into a narrative of two forces working against each other seems kind of wrong-headed even as it seems deeply appropriate. It makes more sense than talking about Silver Jews records in a context of Berman's drug abuse and suicidal depression, and it makes that stuff seem less cliched.
To restate: The Silver Jews are about an abiding melancholy, taking comfort in simple pleasures, and acting in resistance to an abstracted them of the rich and powerful. This is done through observation, feeling, and poetry. Sometimes the abstract is forsaken for direct appeals. Meanwhile, Berman And Company lies on behalf of the powerful and their lack of empathy. Old stories, old feelings. The appeal of simple pleasures can seem like not quite enough in the face of all that myth, and so maybe then is where the depression comes in, in not being able to transform all that you've inherited, and to aim for self-destruction instead.
Transform and transcend. So the Silver Jews are no longer a band. They're now a body of work. I wish David Berman luck, and do not want to tar him with a mark like "hero." Let us all keep on living, and try to observe as honestly as we can and feel as deeply as we can bear.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
This guy draws pretty cool.
I just gave my second go at the comedy thing. Again it went well, and again the out-of-towners for whom this is their life went over really poorly in a way that made me doubt how much of my success was due to being funny and how much was due to having an audience of friends and sympathizers. I got more applause when taking to the stage than actual laughter for any specific joke, but that's no complaint, really.
I just gave my second go at the comedy thing. Again it went well, and again the out-of-towners for whom this is their life went over really poorly in a way that made me doubt how much of my success was due to being funny and how much was due to having an audience of friends and sympathizers. I got more applause when taking to the stage than actual laughter for any specific joke, but that's no complaint, really.
Sunday, January 04, 2009
It is 2009, everybody, and while we all sit glowing in the monitor light of best-of-the-year lists, somewhere in the shadows lurks the idea of the best-of-the-decade list, and with it canon-building. Now is the time to revisit work from 2000 to 2002 to see how it has aged. I maintain my belief that this has been sort of an odd decade for records, with so many bands' central appeal being based on general aesthetic, and expect a "best-of" list to select records based on what was the best example of that: Remember that Reveille was the best Deerhoof record, and remember they were one of the best bands this decade had to offer. Also, I think a lot of unassuming singer-songwriter records tend to hold up rather well. Again: The best Mountain Goats record was All Hail West Texas. Hopefully a lot of Animal Collective records, with their individual style, will coexist with each other without cancelling the others out.
As for cinema: I guess now would be the time to campaign for Punch-Drunk Love as a better film than There Will Be Blood.
My official stance remains that canons are useless, but the idea of best-of-the-decade lists is interesting as a corrective to the weird trends of fashion. But those trends still dictate nostalgia, and that's what we've got to be on guard against.
As for cinema: I guess now would be the time to campaign for Punch-Drunk Love as a better film than There Will Be Blood.
My official stance remains that canons are useless, but the idea of best-of-the-decade lists is interesting as a corrective to the weird trends of fashion. But those trends still dictate nostalgia, and that's what we've got to be on guard against.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
I read, in an interview with Renee French (maybe this one with Tom Spurgeon? That's got other bits to recommend it) that she doesn't think of herself as good with comics pacing, and that's why her current approach does the thing a couple Chester Brown books do, of having only a couple panels to a page. But, looking at this Marbles In My Underpants collection of her early work, I find a couple comics that I think are impeccably paced, as an accumulation of horrors and force.
These are comics drawn in Renee's old style, marked not just by the presence of a six-panel grid, but by being in stark black and white. Currently, she draws using black colored pencil, rather than ink, and it allows for more shading and tone. It feels like her drawing got softer, from the harsh voids of crosshatched black, around the same time her stories got a little friendlier. They also got quieter, with a few silent comics giving way to comics where what dialogue that is available is not present in word balloons.
(She also has a style of plain tiny, simplified line drawings on display in her book Micrographica and a minicomic I saw the last time I went to Atomic Books. And Corny's Fetish, which closes Marbles In My Underpants, uses greytones in addition to line drawings.) (Both tiny line-drawings and gorgeous pieces of shaded pencil work are on display at Renee's blog.
But those stories done in plain black and white have their own momentum to them. I am particularly fond of the serial "Silktown" and the short "Mitch And The Mole." These comics are all over the place in terms of their plotting, weird cascades of cruelty and fetishism that keep the reader off-balance, with this sort of detached tone- It's empathetic for some characters, but there's enough details that make you think "what the hell is going on here" both in the strange distance of the dialogue and little details to panel composition, like a loaf of bread leaning against the outside of a bathtub, followed by a panel showing the table with a jar of peanut butter on it on the bathtub's opposite side. "Mitch And The Mole" sort of wavers its grid- it's there as a standard, but the panels adjacent to each other are not the same size, and what panel is bigger than the other see-saws from right-to-left with each tier. Um, not consistently, but the overall effect aids in the disorientation.
But "Silktown" is the comic I really wanted to talk about. It pretty much opens the book, and throws down a tough gauntlet to get past of fairly shocking material. Everything about this comic feels horrific, and each scene plays out fairly slowly. Some are scenes of conversation, with little details lingered on- a chocolate eclair, a dangling chain to turn on a lightbulb- while others are scenes of fast-paced violence, but the drawings freeze them and linger on them- reaction shots of people in pain or suffering trauma. It's beautiful to look at, for its textures, but its textures are also repellent, sweating and boiling on the page. It feels like a Richard Corben comic if Richard Corben were a woman, drawing David Lynch-style suburbia rather than barbarian worlds. It also kind of feels like Brian Chippendale's Maggots, actually, in terms of how it dedicates equal amounts of interest to acts of violence and more common movement. (Also cock.) But there's more depth of field here, and that allows for more shifts in the vistas being depicted.
Marbles In My Underpants rules. It's not a complete overview of the comics done in this style, and some of the selections I would replace, and it's out of print, and the cover makes it look like it contains some kind of Slave-Labor-style goth comics, but if you see it, get it. It's got other comics- like The Ninth Gland, which is pretty great too, despite having a kind of broken pace that does make it hard to read- from later in her career, so you can see how her artistry shifts, and see that the things that I highlight about "Silktown" aren't even really what makes her a compelling artist.
These are comics drawn in Renee's old style, marked not just by the presence of a six-panel grid, but by being in stark black and white. Currently, she draws using black colored pencil, rather than ink, and it allows for more shading and tone. It feels like her drawing got softer, from the harsh voids of crosshatched black, around the same time her stories got a little friendlier. They also got quieter, with a few silent comics giving way to comics where what dialogue that is available is not present in word balloons.
(She also has a style of plain tiny, simplified line drawings on display in her book Micrographica and a minicomic I saw the last time I went to Atomic Books. And Corny's Fetish, which closes Marbles In My Underpants, uses greytones in addition to line drawings.) (Both tiny line-drawings and gorgeous pieces of shaded pencil work are on display at Renee's blog.
But those stories done in plain black and white have their own momentum to them. I am particularly fond of the serial "Silktown" and the short "Mitch And The Mole." These comics are all over the place in terms of their plotting, weird cascades of cruelty and fetishism that keep the reader off-balance, with this sort of detached tone- It's empathetic for some characters, but there's enough details that make you think "what the hell is going on here" both in the strange distance of the dialogue and little details to panel composition, like a loaf of bread leaning against the outside of a bathtub, followed by a panel showing the table with a jar of peanut butter on it on the bathtub's opposite side. "Mitch And The Mole" sort of wavers its grid- it's there as a standard, but the panels adjacent to each other are not the same size, and what panel is bigger than the other see-saws from right-to-left with each tier. Um, not consistently, but the overall effect aids in the disorientation.
But "Silktown" is the comic I really wanted to talk about. It pretty much opens the book, and throws down a tough gauntlet to get past of fairly shocking material. Everything about this comic feels horrific, and each scene plays out fairly slowly. Some are scenes of conversation, with little details lingered on- a chocolate eclair, a dangling chain to turn on a lightbulb- while others are scenes of fast-paced violence, but the drawings freeze them and linger on them- reaction shots of people in pain or suffering trauma. It's beautiful to look at, for its textures, but its textures are also repellent, sweating and boiling on the page. It feels like a Richard Corben comic if Richard Corben were a woman, drawing David Lynch-style suburbia rather than barbarian worlds. It also kind of feels like Brian Chippendale's Maggots, actually, in terms of how it dedicates equal amounts of interest to acts of violence and more common movement. (Also cock.) But there's more depth of field here, and that allows for more shifts in the vistas being depicted.
Marbles In My Underpants rules. It's not a complete overview of the comics done in this style, and some of the selections I would replace, and it's out of print, and the cover makes it look like it contains some kind of Slave-Labor-style goth comics, but if you see it, get it. It's got other comics- like The Ninth Gland, which is pretty great too, despite having a kind of broken pace that does make it hard to read- from later in her career, so you can see how her artistry shifts, and see that the things that I highlight about "Silktown" aren't even really what makes her a compelling artist.
Monday, December 15, 2008
More best-of-2008 listmaking mania:
Best comics:
I really didn't read very many comics this year. I didn't read anything from Japan (besides Hanakuma's Tokyo Zombie which was mediocre) or Europe. There were a lot of comics I would have liked to read if money were no issue. The Rory Hayes collection, Where Demented Wented, looked particularly appealing: Outsider horror comics including a porn comic drawn before the cartoonist lost his virginity? Sounds great! On the other side of the coin is Lynda Barry's What It Is, which I am strongly considering buying my mom for Christmas. Then there's Kramers Ergot 7, which is the book I would most want for Christmas.`But there are still some critical standards at work, as there are still a lot of comics I read and didn't like at all, and even more that I know my interests enough to know probably would not crack a list.
For me, the best comics of 2008 were written and drawn by Dash Shaw. His Bottomless Belly Button graphic novel was astounding, mining similar territory as a number of indie movies, but with more technical skill and greater emotional resonance. I don't feel the need to mention Margot At The Wedding on a best films list because of the superiority of The Bottomless Belly Button. If you kind of like comics, but haven't read it, do so. As far as "graphic novels" go, it's the book to beat. The fact that it was produced by someone just out of college is deeply inspiring. Meanwhile, Bodyworld was a webcomic I read every week, as it went online. A new type of serialization for a comics culture where solo-artist anthologies aren't really economically feasible, that also works for a diffuse community: In the absence of talking about comics at a comic book store, to tell my animator friends about how good this comic is over AIM, e-mails, and blogs, is quite fitting. Put them at the number one and two slots of a list. I didn't read his short story contributions to Mome or Meathaus, or his Bottomless zine Picturebox put out. (Actually, I think I read a Mome story or two, but I didn't spend much time with them.) I did read his Cold Heat minicomic, and while it was cool as a display of another format for him to play with, it still didn't display the strengths of Cold Heat that I'm really into that I will have to wait until next year to read and talk about.
Kevin Huizenga put out two of the best comic book pamphlets I read this year. Ganges 2 I talked about when it came out, but Fight Or Run is a really weird and fun little book, about nothing but formalism as fodder for laughs. I am astounded at how much better that stuff reads in a collection than scattered in little segments elsewhere. It almost argues for the death of the single-artist anthology, to have a guy like Huizenga working for a slew of different publishers, putting out books as focused suites of work. I didn't like Or Else 5 very much at all- I thought the pacing of the centerpiece story was really off, and the other material only intermittently worked for me.
The two best superhero comics would be All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely and Omega The Unknown by Jonathan Lethem and Farel Dalrymple with Paul Hornschemeier and Gary Panter. All-Star Superman is not really my favorite Morrison comic, but the issues that came out this year were really solid and entertaining, and a lot of the problems of reading a serialized comic with ads has been fixed by subsequent collection. Hey, speaking of which, maybe they actually give Gary Panter a drawing credit in the collection of Omega The Unknown? Just fun comics to read as they come out. (I also liked the issues of Casanova that came out this year, although I had some complaints about the ending, and only three came out.) That Gary Panter cover burned this kind of disposable intensity, and the near-wordless final issue was an amazing coda that felt near-otherworldly to read. Dreamy comics have a certain pull to them.
Taking up a number seven spot, as well as being the best of its format, would be the Core Of Caligula minicomic by CF. What a compelling thing that was, and really dense for its short size, enough to be satisfying. It's odd worldview and seeming spirituality make it not seem slight.
Speaking of Panter and minicomics, I would've liked to read the $15 8-page Jimbo minicomic that came out this year, too, by the way, or the Dal-Tokyo collection that was slated to come out but got delayed either until next year or is off the Fantagraphic schedule completely. That big monograph was pretty cool, although not a comic. The Shary Boyle and Ben Jones artbooks that came out this year are also probably pretty good. None of these comics listed are reprints of older material, but classic comic strips are really interesting to me, and I liked Heavy Liquid and Scud The Disposable Assassin both the last time I read them. (I actually really want that Scud collection. Talk all the shit you want about people making comics to get into Hollywood, but The Sarah Silverman Program rules, and Rob Schrab will never be allowed to actually make movies like those comics, which are such a perfect crystallization of 1990s culture currents that it's a shame he had to wrap it up this year in a supposedly pretty lackluster fashion.)
Top three film of the year, in order, despite appealing to me for completely different reasons: Synecdoche New York, Wall-E, and The Dark Knight. Would've liked to have seen Rachel Getting Married, Wendy And Lucy, Burn After Reading, The Wrestler, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, a half-dozen mainstream comedies, etc. but that's what DVD releases and the last weeks of the year are for. The possibility that any of those films are as ambitious as the films in my top three is so slim that I have no problem saying those were the best of the year. (Although My Winnipeg might be, and I want to see that too.) Synecdoche, New York is pretty much what I want movies and art to be, just a completely moving/devastating experience, a smart person going further and getting near the top of their game, which happens to be the outer reaches of what most people would find pleasurable. Wall-E is amazing filmmaking, with great animation, and is deeply inspiring to me as someone who studied those things in school, as well as something saying so many things I believe in and agree with in a language children can understand. The Dark Knight has an incredibly forceful and tense middle that is magnetic to watch, thinks in ways the comics it's based on never got around to, and is a fascinating document of what a blockbuster action movie in this modern era is.
Best comics:
I really didn't read very many comics this year. I didn't read anything from Japan (besides Hanakuma's Tokyo Zombie which was mediocre) or Europe. There were a lot of comics I would have liked to read if money were no issue. The Rory Hayes collection, Where Demented Wented, looked particularly appealing: Outsider horror comics including a porn comic drawn before the cartoonist lost his virginity? Sounds great! On the other side of the coin is Lynda Barry's What It Is, which I am strongly considering buying my mom for Christmas. Then there's Kramers Ergot 7, which is the book I would most want for Christmas.`But there are still some critical standards at work, as there are still a lot of comics I read and didn't like at all, and even more that I know my interests enough to know probably would not crack a list.
For me, the best comics of 2008 were written and drawn by Dash Shaw. His Bottomless Belly Button graphic novel was astounding, mining similar territory as a number of indie movies, but with more technical skill and greater emotional resonance. I don't feel the need to mention Margot At The Wedding on a best films list because of the superiority of The Bottomless Belly Button. If you kind of like comics, but haven't read it, do so. As far as "graphic novels" go, it's the book to beat. The fact that it was produced by someone just out of college is deeply inspiring. Meanwhile, Bodyworld was a webcomic I read every week, as it went online. A new type of serialization for a comics culture where solo-artist anthologies aren't really economically feasible, that also works for a diffuse community: In the absence of talking about comics at a comic book store, to tell my animator friends about how good this comic is over AIM, e-mails, and blogs, is quite fitting. Put them at the number one and two slots of a list. I didn't read his short story contributions to Mome or Meathaus, or his Bottomless zine Picturebox put out. (Actually, I think I read a Mome story or two, but I didn't spend much time with them.) I did read his Cold Heat minicomic, and while it was cool as a display of another format for him to play with, it still didn't display the strengths of Cold Heat that I'm really into that I will have to wait until next year to read and talk about.
Kevin Huizenga put out two of the best comic book pamphlets I read this year. Ganges 2 I talked about when it came out, but Fight Or Run is a really weird and fun little book, about nothing but formalism as fodder for laughs. I am astounded at how much better that stuff reads in a collection than scattered in little segments elsewhere. It almost argues for the death of the single-artist anthology, to have a guy like Huizenga working for a slew of different publishers, putting out books as focused suites of work. I didn't like Or Else 5 very much at all- I thought the pacing of the centerpiece story was really off, and the other material only intermittently worked for me.
The two best superhero comics would be All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely and Omega The Unknown by Jonathan Lethem and Farel Dalrymple with Paul Hornschemeier and Gary Panter. All-Star Superman is not really my favorite Morrison comic, but the issues that came out this year were really solid and entertaining, and a lot of the problems of reading a serialized comic with ads has been fixed by subsequent collection. Hey, speaking of which, maybe they actually give Gary Panter a drawing credit in the collection of Omega The Unknown? Just fun comics to read as they come out. (I also liked the issues of Casanova that came out this year, although I had some complaints about the ending, and only three came out.) That Gary Panter cover burned this kind of disposable intensity, and the near-wordless final issue was an amazing coda that felt near-otherworldly to read. Dreamy comics have a certain pull to them.
Taking up a number seven spot, as well as being the best of its format, would be the Core Of Caligula minicomic by CF. What a compelling thing that was, and really dense for its short size, enough to be satisfying. It's odd worldview and seeming spirituality make it not seem slight.
Speaking of Panter and minicomics, I would've liked to read the $15 8-page Jimbo minicomic that came out this year, too, by the way, or the Dal-Tokyo collection that was slated to come out but got delayed either until next year or is off the Fantagraphic schedule completely. That big monograph was pretty cool, although not a comic. The Shary Boyle and Ben Jones artbooks that came out this year are also probably pretty good. None of these comics listed are reprints of older material, but classic comic strips are really interesting to me, and I liked Heavy Liquid and Scud The Disposable Assassin both the last time I read them. (I actually really want that Scud collection. Talk all the shit you want about people making comics to get into Hollywood, but The Sarah Silverman Program rules, and Rob Schrab will never be allowed to actually make movies like those comics, which are such a perfect crystallization of 1990s culture currents that it's a shame he had to wrap it up this year in a supposedly pretty lackluster fashion.)
Top three film of the year, in order, despite appealing to me for completely different reasons: Synecdoche New York, Wall-E, and The Dark Knight. Would've liked to have seen Rachel Getting Married, Wendy And Lucy, Burn After Reading, The Wrestler, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, a half-dozen mainstream comedies, etc. but that's what DVD releases and the last weeks of the year are for. The possibility that any of those films are as ambitious as the films in my top three is so slim that I have no problem saying those were the best of the year. (Although My Winnipeg might be, and I want to see that too.) Synecdoche, New York is pretty much what I want movies and art to be, just a completely moving/devastating experience, a smart person going further and getting near the top of their game, which happens to be the outer reaches of what most people would find pleasurable. Wall-E is amazing filmmaking, with great animation, and is deeply inspiring to me as someone who studied those things in school, as well as something saying so many things I believe in and agree with in a language children can understand. The Dark Knight has an incredibly forceful and tense middle that is magnetic to watch, thinks in ways the comics it's based on never got around to, and is a fascinating document of what a blockbuster action movie in this modern era is.
Monday, December 08, 2008
Cool bands to see if they come to your town, whose split cassette I would've liked to buy if I had money on me:
Skoal Kodiak
Knife World
Unreleased song to find on Youtube and blow your mind:
Ol' Dirty Bastard's version of Build Me Up Buttercup. Sure, it's excerpted for a Rhymefest song, but this has ODB rapping verses
Cool tape by a cartoonist that works like a comic:
Anti-Matter Alma Mater by Matthew Thurber. From his "book-on-tape" label Potlatch, I Gather, comes this radio-play style soundtrack to an art installation I found really compelling.
Skoal Kodiak
Knife World
Unreleased song to find on Youtube and blow your mind:
Ol' Dirty Bastard's version of Build Me Up Buttercup. Sure, it's excerpted for a Rhymefest song, but this has ODB rapping verses
Cool tape by a cartoonist that works like a comic:
Anti-Matter Alma Mater by Matthew Thurber. From his "book-on-tape" label Potlatch, I Gather, comes this radio-play style soundtrack to an art installation I found really compelling.
Thursday, December 04, 2008
I tracked down a copy of Powell And Pressburger's A Matter Of Life And Death. I love a handful of Michael Powell movies, and got really obsessed with seeing more of them earlier this year, and this was the one classic that was unavailable on DVD. Sammy Harkham loves it, and his post about it is fairly exciting. I am really grateful for that blog entry I linked to, because I feel like it gave me some reference point and grounding about what, specifically, was good and compelling about the film. I kind of feel like it falls apart as it goes on. The ending trial in heaven is one of the most ridiculous things I've seen, in a way that I can only feel really conflicted about at this time of my life.
I also saw Orson Welles' Chimes At Midnight at the Baltimore library fairly recently, shown on rare VHS because the film print was too damaged. That was also fairly disappointing: The bad audio, along with the fast-paced Shakespeare dialogue, made for a tricky combination, and I am not that familiar with the plays in question to know exactly what Welles was doing here.
And yet, both of these films are worth seeing, should they come your way. Until then, why not watch the Orson Welles movies The Trial and F For Fake, and Michael Powell's Peeping Tom and Black Narcissus?
I also saw Orson Welles' Chimes At Midnight at the Baltimore library fairly recently, shown on rare VHS because the film print was too damaged. That was also fairly disappointing: The bad audio, along with the fast-paced Shakespeare dialogue, made for a tricky combination, and I am not that familiar with the plays in question to know exactly what Welles was doing here.
And yet, both of these films are worth seeing, should they come your way. Until then, why not watch the Orson Welles movies The Trial and F For Fake, and Michael Powell's Peeping Tom and Black Narcissus?
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