robert wyatt

This summer, I had the extreme honor of talking to Robert Wyatt. While I have never been more cowed by an interview subject, Wyatt proved to be one of the breeziest interview subjects ever, effortlessly talking about everything from bebop to his recent enrollment in AA. While I still hold out hope that this entire interview might appear in print somewhere, I'm posting it here, as two previous pieces on Wyatt (for Paste Magazine and the Village Voice) were so brief so as to barely touch on the myriad of topics that came up over the course of our half-hour chat.

AB: What were you listening to just then?

RW: Oh, it’s this cdr of bebop. Someone at the shop, a record of 40s bebop, Charlie Christian, Charlie Parker. Charlie Christian with Benny Goodman I hadn’t heard. It’s one of the greatest losses. There was something special there, one of the great originals. He should’ve been famous, that poor lad. He changed everything suddenly. I think he’s more influential than any of them. More people play like Charlie Christian than like anyone else.

AB: Playing electric and whatnot.

RW: Yeah, that fluid flowing legato thing, most beboppers weren’t doing that yet.

AB: You’ve been a jazz fan for awhile. Do you draw more from it as you go along, get older?

RW: It’s a funny thing. It means all kinds of things to me as I get older. The actual music I listen is exactly the same really. When I was a teenager, more or less. If anything, I like more of it than I did then. I like the journeyman beboppers. Paul Haines said once, “I’m not an innovator, I’m just a participator.” I used to be really snooty about that when I was young. I wanted innovators. Now I’m quite happy by participators as well. It’s a different thing, it’s nostalgic, you know. Back then it was like, “God, what’s going to happen next?”
It’s funny in a way, I’m a complete retard. Arrested development at eighteen, only the body grew older.

AB: With each album, there’s more of a pronounced jazz feel to it.

RW: It’s partially because the musicians I liked working with on the whole. I was talking with Carla Bley about this. All kinds of people can play music, but on the whole, in the old days, classical musicians couldn’t really swing, and rock musicians couldn’t understand chords, so you were only left with jazz musicians. I got a sort of little gang now I really like working with, they’re so fast and they’re so good. I do keep my edge, I do know a few rock guitarists, who grace us with their presence on a few tracks.

AB: I wanted to ask about your frequent collaborators, conspirators: Eno, Paul Weller, Annie Whitehead. What is the key to having such longevity with these people?

RW: Well, I don’t know. Partially because the pressure of a group isn’t on me. Take a group like that Big Brother television programme where people are just locked together and eventually the differences emerge to a point where the center cannot hold. Whereas with a specific project like a record, you have people on it who wouldn’t normally go on the road with you necessarily or even play together. You can have an imaginary band. It’s just a few days in the studio and they don’t mind doing it. it’s more like I’m really slow and it takes me ages to work out what to do. I’ve spent the whole 60s as a kind of apprentice, thinking “What the fuck?” I’m incredibly slow tune writer. I grow like some tree, or like a glacier, a foot a year or something. I leave it lying around, (wonder) “What would be a good chord to have next?” And then I listen to a Gil Evans record and I think, “Oh, I know!”

AB: Steal one of his chords.

RW: So that’s how it goes. Alfie helps out a bit.

AB: It seems you’re working a bit quicker these days.

RW: Yeah, actually you’re right! I really got straight back into the saddle for this. It’s partly knowing these particular musicians, very encouraging. First of all Phil Manzanerra and his studio. Annie Whitehead is just an angel, she just gives a bit of warmth and critical chords. I haven’t got to invent who does it so much anymore. I just got to invent the actual music. I don’t write it all, I get tunes from other people, put them together.

AB: Speaking of inventing these things, I see credits for Enotron, Karenotron, Monicatron…

RW: I got the idea from mellotrons. I used mellotrons quite a lot in the 60s. I did a lot of keyboard stuff. I never had one. When I found one in the studio, I used it. the first Matching Mole record I plastered it with it with mellotron. I heard that Jack Bruce (don’t know if it’s true), made one with his own voice. and I thought, what a brilliant idea, a choir. The last record, with Karen, I got her to do a scale, singing every note and then stuck it onto the keyboard. I got a Karen keyboard. I tried it on myself and it wasn’t so good. It doesn’t work for everybody. Brian Eno did one for us and Monica Vasconcelos did one. I got those three at the moment.

AB: It seems on Comicopera you drew a lot from other people.

RW: I always thought the thing is to make the best record you possibly can. If you can come up with tunes that you yourself would like to listen to, that’s good, then use them. But the most important thing to me is that it’s tunes that I really like. I used to do standards like Round About Midnight. Sometimes I find musicians write songs and I think why don’t musicians do other musician’s songs. That’s why I did some Karen ones on the last record. I really like Mrs. Garbarek. I once had this idea of getting “The Daughters of the Revolution,” having Mike Mantler’s daughter, Jan Garbarek’s daughter, and Paul Haines’s daughter, Emily Haines. I really like all three of them. I never did that.

AB: You can always switch to A&R.

RW: My favorite bit of the record is putting it together and getting people to do things they otherwise may not do. And I accompany them.

AB: You make connections that otherwise wouldn’t get made.

RW: It sounds like very paternalist you know. I really like that connection. It’s not to do with daughters, I’ve known Carla Bley and Mike Mantler thirty years. It’s a great thrill for me to know their daughter. I'm working with Karen, who was the same age as when I worked with Carla. I always liked Jan Garbarek. I was a bit drunk at some concert he had done in London and said something about covering one of (Anja’s) tunes and he said, “Do it, do it.”

AB: I liked one of her records that Mark Hollis worked on.

RW: That’s how I met her. I loved doing that. In fact, I couldn’t do it any more as I’m on the wagon. I joined AA. I just got sooo drunk. He made me do a hundred takes. He used some of the last ones, the four o’clock in the morning ones. It was a really funny song. I liked it. I thought the whole record was really good.

AB: I think Mark Hollis works slower than you do. Let’s talk about Comicopera. Why that dramatic three-act structure?

RW: First just the aesthetic thing. I find the blank canvas of a CD with the potential to be 80 minutes daunting. You have the choice of making a record of listenable length or using the space up. It’s quite rare to have a CD by a musician that can keep your interest going for that long. Even Mozart operas are about 35 minutes long. There’s got to be a variety. The last record I broke it up into two halves. This one I’m doing three. I really like the old LP of 20 minutes sides, like Rock Bottom and all that.

AB: Rock Bottom has this symmetry for sure.

RW: It helps me when I have a blank canvas, to think like that. Twenty minutes is a good listening length. Really this is three twenty minute things. It was gonna be put out on vinyl and do what Rahsaan Roland Kirk, one blank side. The dramatic structure as well was simply because there were different songs on there. They’re not all singer-songwriter me-me-me things in the sense that there are quite different characters on it. There’s someone who’s idea of happiness is going on a successful bombing run. There’s a nihilist who feels alone cuz he doesn’t have religion. There’s a woman telling a man off. There’s hatred, there’s Italian quasi-mystical. There’s Lorca, his surrealist imagery, and of course there’s the Che Guevara revolutionary type. There’s all bits of me, but not really one person. They’re different characters. When you got different characters in a sort of sequence and there’s music and singing, it’s kinda like an opera. But it’s not a serious opera.

AB: It’s a retroactive move.

RW: Yeah, in the first section I didn’t write any of the words, by Anja and Alfie. They’re all about fractured relationships or bereavement, people not getting along or being panicked, losing touch with somebody you thought you were close to. That’s Lost in Noise. The second lot is more where I come in, popping about England and being bemused by little country towns and boring council meetings. The whole thing is relieved by the carnival and hearing steel pans and music. That’s me sort of musing about England. It ended with the bomber. There’s lots of romantic pictures of accurately painted airplanes flying over beautiful landscapes. It’s quite funny, where it’s flying over is beautiful, but if you look back behind…
After that, it’s that kind of thing, I wish to distance myself from that with the slogan, “Not in my name.” songs didn’t seem to be in English. That’s the end, I’m done here. The rest is all…Something Susan Sontag said quite late on, the question is not just compassion, but to really empathize with the Other. Of course, speaking a foreign language helps you do it. I got Italian songs, some Spanish stuff.

AB: What kind of difficulties do you have singing in those languages?

RW: Italian, a lot. I sang phonetically. The Spanish is …I have sung half a dozen songs in Spanish. There’s so many different accents. I’m sure I got my Cuban, my Chilean all mottled up. With Italian and Japanese names, I can never remember them. It all goes in a blur for me.

AB: Do you still feel alienated from Anglo-American culture?

RW: On the contrary, I think what exasperates me is United States culture is that it could potentially be the most extraordinarily wonderful civilization. All it would have to do is…it’s funny, people call me Anti-America, which is completely mad. I was brought up on…I couldn’t imagine my life without American culture, Duke Ellington to Basquiat and everything in between, Norman Mailer. That’s where the strength of the United States lies. It’s such an overwhelming contribution to human culture, that reconfiguration of people from different worlds, from Africa, Russia, English and so. It’s not necessarily to just go around bombing and killing. These wars are so silly. The trouble is we fought a serious one, or our parents did. And that was justified. But we’re killing all these poor soldiers, sending them out to every place in the world, kill every brown person that they see.

AB: America is so isolated.

RW: It is an enormous country. Spiritually, you don’t feel the rightwing mainstream American culture is internationalist at all. All of that provincial, puritanical streak going through that.

AB: There’s no attempt to identify with the "Other."

RW: Half the population knows that. Once the Roman Empire collapsed, they were just wonderful. They were assholes, but they were great. When they gave up colonialism, there was this wonderful culture. not that American leaders have more confidence in the staggering beauty of what they already got, let that conquer the world.

AB: There’s not enough money in that.

RW: You have people all over the world listening to American records. It’s only like a caricature, not in this superior sense, just this exasperation, really. Brian Eno just came back from SF, he said it was wonderful there. Americans are really thinking and talking about what the fuck they’re doing in relationship to the rest of the world. He doesn’t find it England. It’s still pushed under the carpet, let’s talk about something else. You know what I mean? He’d much prefer…

AB: It’s better to be out in the open.

RW: It’s real animation. Questioning going on there. He really enjoyed very much, felt very stimulated by it. the problem is not the people.

AB: When’s the last time you came over?

RW: 1968. no, we went back in 1971. We did a little jazz tour, shared a bill with Miles Davis. That was something. That was the last time. very good memories of New York, the first all day-all night city I’d be to. I’d never seen gays in full leather gear. It was all so new to me. The only thing that puzzled me was the white people I met weren’t interested in black music as English kids were. A paradox. The American thing was more folk-based. In England, the entire English rock scene is based on black American music. From traditional jazz right up to American GIs bringing over jazz and soul music. It was the main event in England. Every single rock musician I know until the 70s was absolutely rooted in black music. BB King records, Mingus, Jimmy Smith, that was the absolute bedrock. I was surprised that it wasn’t the case in America. I went through a golden era, Ellington and Coltrane, they’ll last centuries. I'm sure so. The United States will be a great golden globe, I’m waiting for it to happen.

AB: Let’s hope we both get to see it. Back to Comicopera, there’s a song about the lovers misunderstanding each other. I was wondering what you saw as the connection as the lovers as well as the bombardier and the bombed.

RW: You got it. this is what I thought the LP did, the trajectory of personal conflicts onto the world stage, that’s exactly right. It starts off with Alfie. She wrote this to get me to stop drinking, as I was drinking behind her back. That’s why I couldn’t sing the first verse. In the end, I used the line “I’m never gonna change a thing, love you just as you are,” a plea. I’m just gonna try and love you.

AB: When did you start AA?

RW: Nearly three months. It’s amazing for me. I’ve had a few lapses. It’s a complete revolution in my lifestyle, since my mid-20s. it’s hard. The next hard one is cigarettes. I can’t do it all at once. I don’t know why people bother with illegal drugs, you can get out of your brain and kill yourself on quite legal ones. (laughs)

little red beta

HOLY MAO!

I'M GOING TO CHINA!

la betée

I wrote about film artist (for lack of a more umbrella term) Chris Marker for The Fanzine, joining the esteemed company of my friends Mike and Nick.

And yet, there's so much to excise about Chris Marker.

Like how screening Sans Soleil for a few friends leads them --within the first ten minutes-- to emulate the napping commuters in Japan, everyone fast asleep. It's perhaps the best reaction to hope for though, in much the same way that when learning to meditate, to relax both mind and body, the natural inclination is to slip into slumber. The profundity of the thoughts pouring in all at once, the true nature of reality revealed is overwhelming and shutdown is what most circuit-breakers do anyway.

Or that Marker's true progeny are not film school wannabes (which is where La Jetée remained for so many years, commercially unavailable) at all. Marker documented repressed cultures, be they Korea, Cuba, Chile, even Israel for much of the sixties and seventies, and taught workers and those who didn't have access to mainstream media to use film as a means to an end. His true disciples are in fact "terrorists" who use the Internet and video clips to disseminate their message, to make their minority voices be heard.


Or that his favorite animals are the owl and the pussycat. In some ways it makes sense, in an Athenian and Egyptian sort of way, but when I re-watched John Cassavetes's The Killing of a Chinese Bookie last week, something new struck me. It's a scene where one of the nightclub's dancers stands on stage in a see-through negligee, reciting a few lines about "The Owl and the Pussycat." Her nipples protrude through, wide as owl eyes, her bush similarly dark, and then it all makes sense to me. The Owl, the Pussycat, the female face taken out of the continuum of time and elevated to something eternal, goddess-like. The image of a woman's visage is crucial for Marker. In writing about the close-ups of Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, he perceived that in "the grain of the skin, the tear, the drool, the hair, the glint of the eye" lay the metaphysical struggle of the soul to attain grace through suffering. That's what my dirty mind realized anyway.

beta blown

In the midst of intense interview sessions with Black Dice for an upcoming feature article, meaning long talks with both the band as well as folks enamored with them, including Doug Aitken and Richard Phillips. Talking with Aaron Warren one night, he played me their new video, which nearly made me squirt Hollandia out of my nose, it was so hilarious, fucked up, and profound. If their similarly fucked artbook Gore didn't cement the trend, they have evolved into junk culture scavengers of the highest order, rendering the subconsciously saturated and over-familiar (daytime TV, cartoons, and Time-Life infomercials) into something disorienting and new. I cannot recommend Load Blown enough.

Additionally, I talked to 60s-era Blue Note drummer Joe Chambers for a forthcoming interview in Stop Smiling Magazine. Joe drummed and composed for players like Bobby Hutcherson, Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Andrew Hill, and Max Roach. He discussed playing with Eric Dolphy around the time he recorded Out to Lunch, how Last Year at Marienbad blew his mind, how community changes in black neighborhoods destroyed jazz music, and dismissed his singular compositions of that era as pretentious.

If that's not enough tape to transcribe, I also just conducted an interview with Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance, whose albums almost always underwhelm me musically, but whose forthcoming Shelter From the Ash is quite solid. We talked about such uplifting subjects as Kris Kristofferson, Paul Virilio, Vietnam vets, and dying in Pompeii-esque dreams.

betakemitsu

Finally got around to reviewing this Teshigahara boxset for my "VHS or Beta" column over at Idolator. Tried in vain to seek out the soundtrack for Woman of the Dunes, so as to post it here (it's on Volume 4 of the Film Music of Toru Takemitsu CD set that came out a few years back), but I guess the whole OiNK bust didn't help (not that I use bit torrents, but I often ask friends who do to do my dirty work for me).

Anyhow, since it's not about Britney Spears (though I asked Gawker graphics department to Photoshop Britney's face onto the nekkid woman of said dunes to guarantee five-digit hits), I doubt it'll get many reads. Perhaps to make it easier to digest, I cut out two paragraphs of background on Teshigahara, writer Kobo Abe, as well as the other (fatally-flawed) movies of the set. Putting them here instead:

Teshigahara is an intriguing figure in Japanese cinema. He was the son of Sofu Teshigahara, who founded a flower arrangement school and art discipline, Sogetsu. It’s one thing to rebel against a father who wants you to be a shoe salesman, but quite another to buck against one who invented an entire aesthetic. Still, Teshigahara avoided the family business and began to dabble in surrealistic painting, indebted to the likes of Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali, and Antonio Gaudi (he would make a documentary about Gaudi in 1984) before moving into film. He worked outside of the studio system (a rarity in those days), setting up his own production company, making documentaries about woodblock artists and heavyweight champions before adapting the books of Abe for the screen.

The pair's first collaboration is the confounding Pitfall (1962). Part ghost story, part murder-mystery, part documentary exposé, part allegory, it’s a morass (it's not everyday that a young boy eyewitnesses four brutal deaths and then gets to eat all the candy he could ever want) held together by Takemitsu’s outbursts of prepared piano, harpsichord, and scrapes that resound as if from the bottom of a cistern. For 1966’s film The Face of Another, Takemitsu juxtaposes a stately Viennese waltz with eerie swells of glass harmonica. It can’t quite make the story of a man who has a face transplant work, though. John Updike once called Abe’s no-exit situations “cheap suspense” and a good source of “readerly exasperation,” and these two films are prime examples of it, feeling more like over-extended episodes from The Twilight Zone, pregnant with an inescapable dread.

beta on the newstand

Going all Web 0.0, I am on the newsstand this month, with my lengthy --and now ancient-- exchange with Vashti Bunyan (which Pitchfork turned down for being too obscure), published in the inaugural stateside issue of Ptolemaic Terrascope. The October issue of Paste has me weighing in on The Darjeeling Limited, Ace in the Hole, Days of Heaven, as well as small features on both Luc Sante and Robert Wyatt.

I also placed a review in Vibe about The Complete On the Corner Sessions boxset. While I'm thrilled to be working with Bad Boy (read: Sean-Jon), edits from higher up were slightly off. "The last of Columbia's vault plundering box sets shows how Miles did away with jazz players and critics altogether with a fillip of his middle finger" turned into "the latest of Columbia's vault-plundering box sets shows how Miles enthusiastically flipped the bird to jazz players and critics altogether" (emphasis added). The closing thought also got switched up: "It's impossible to fathom teen pop, techno, or Timbaland without its innovations: Loop-based, edit-heavy, yet open-eared, even a jazz master like Miles became a slave to the beat." Now it ends: "Davis and his crew are all there, hiding in plain sight." At least buy it for the "77 Best Weezy Songs of 2007."

And while you're at it, the Panda Bear interview in The Believer is a swell-read, as are the small pieces about Eden Ahbez and Aldous Huxley in the new Stop Smiling (Holly-wuud! Issue).

canucketa

Am told that in the more upscale Anglophone parts surrounding the McGill campus, you can spot them, but I don't spy an iPod once during my week in Montreal. The city itself is so bereft of noise pollution (the whumph! of Nerf maces don't count) I have no need to even pull mine out. Instead I can feel my skull de-pressurize, no longer battered on all sides by truck brakes and indie rock deadlines.

Sans earbuds in the populace, it means conversations and interactions beyond the norm, but in a city where girls will do something as crazy as make eye contact with strangers, that is almost a given. Where such a dearth of ayo technology is most noticeable is in the shop soundtracks. Rather than being subjected to employee iPod shuffles that put The Grey Album next to Nirvana next to Madonna next to Sufjan Stevens next to Journey that ruin almost any bar/ coffee shop/ boutique experience in Gotham, instead it seems that full albums still rule Montreal. (Radio rules as well: my first night, I hear not just cuts from the On the Corner box set, but also Alice Coltrane and a noise that could only be Pierre Henry's brainwave-melting Cortical Arts III.)

Not saying it's all great. When you go and get a crepe and "Two Tickets to Paradise" blares out from the kitchen, it means that if you sit to manger, you'll soon be subjected to the rest of Eddie Money's hits, which doesn't include the follow-up "Two Pickets to Tittsburgh." Better to let the cold drizzle fall on that folded-up Nutella goodness. And while sipping coffee to the somnambulent strains of Cat Power's The Greatest offsets the effect of the caffeine, almost every girl seated there rocks that Chan-look, so I give it a pass.

In the course of a single day I hear:
Serge Gainsbourg Comic Strip at an internet café
Ali Farka Touré Red Green at a soup spot
Albert Ayler (one of the weird later vocal albums) at a used bookstore
and Joe Tex at another café, which basically means that I want to move there.

beta week ever

Sunday - Animal Collective
Discussion at the bar about a friend's music project (which apparently sounds like Junior Boys) reveals that Phil Collins has become the most crucial artist of the 80s. It dovetails nicely with my pet theory that the most influential Beach Boys album for the 80s generation is not Pet Sounds but rather whatever one had "Kokomo" on it. That's the one that everyone grew up on, believing the band to be The Suck, until Napster (or maybe watching Forrest Gump) proved otherwise.

Still not proceeding just yet to Webster Hall (so as to avoid $8 beers) we muse that surely there's another artist from the 80s who is secretly crucial. Paul Simon's Graceland? Maybe, but you can't just go on the fact that there are more NYC media-centric thinkpieces on Vampire Weekend than actual VW songs, so Simon is out.

Then it happens. "Bowm-bowm-bowm-doo-doo-doo-doo" comes on over the bar speakers, the opening moments of TVOTR's "Ambulance." And then it all makes perfect sense, as we stagger towards the Animal Collective: Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy" is the skeleton key for all of Brooklyn rock.

Monday - Control press screening
Most of my thoughts are covered here. Forget to mention that the gent who plays Hooky here is also Maxwell in Across the Universe (he's a dead-ringer for the next Kurt Cobain bio pic, too). As the VHS or Beta piece states, I find Closer to be physically affecting and I wonder what other music out there causes a similar reaction in folks. One friend says "The Marble Index." Anyone else?

Tuesday - War/ Dance press screening
Out in December, I believe, so as to angle for Oscar consideration in Best Documentary. A story about three teens in a northern Uganda refugee camp who travel to that country's National Music Competition. Thankfully, the film isn't pedantic in unpacking the struggle. In fact, the depiction of these rebels as inscrutable bogeymen who kill in the night actually works in this context.

Back to Graceland, and a quote from the New Yorker profile on artist Kara Walker, about the inclination towards "the vision of 'tribal art' as a tool to be used by more sophisticated Western artists...the message...was that people of color don't exist unless whites say they do." Seeing the film's subjects (one an orphaned child, one bade to commit atrocities already, another who wails at the overgrown marker of her father's otherwise unmarked grave) as they perform and dance, it's self-deceiving to continually paint African music as this naif ebullience, as if it conjures some longed-for, uncomplicated humanity. To reduce the irreducible innovations of musicians like King Sunny Ade or Fela and make it heel to Ivy League quandaries is infuriating. But then again, so is the film's use of eerie ambient washes and b-rolls of thunder to storytell some of these children's waking-nightmare stories. Just hearing a 14-year-old talk about having to bludgeon some peasants to death with a hoe and then bury the hacked chunks in a shallow grave doesn't need any editing room pizazz.

Wednesday - Damon & Naomi/ Boris
Damon and Naomi's strongest suit is curation, from the Exact Change imprint to International Sad Hits Vol. 1 to slowing down both George Harrison and Caetano Veloso on their last album of sloooooow ballads. Within These Walls is no different, although its curatorial aspect lies in how they match Damon's twelve-string and Naomi's keyboard to their collaborators: Espers' cellist to Bhob Rainey's microtonal horn (he looks as if he just left a Supertramp recording session with Ornette's toy horn) to Michio Kurihara's understated plasma leads. With his big hair and furious strumming, Damon at one point actually achieves the sound of Tim Buckley's Starsailor.

Thursday - Mix Tape reading
See three short stories read aloud centering on pop song appearance in the story: Spinanes, the Human League, and the Ramones. Bummed not so much for not knowing how to participate in future readings (I am) but in missing the reading that involves the main character getting a BJ whilst dressed as Harry from Harry and the Hendersons.


Friday - Wordless Music series
Wordless, my ass. Beirut bleated a week or so back, as does Sandro Perri tonight. Is this what Arthur Russell wrought, a non-singing made into singing via loops and sparse effects?

The church is packed and hell-hot. Are there really that many Columbia students into neo-classical music by one-time Bjork collaborators? Muhly is sneaky, performing a piece entitled "Mother Tongue." His soprano recites strings of numbers and every phone number and address she can think of. Swear that amid "962560773" and 43102458465" I can hear subliminal messages like "104.5 KZEP" and that most baleful string of numbers, "90210," throughout.

WIll Oldham comes out to sing a few songs with Valgeir's arrangements. Is that what all the kids are here for, "Bonnie" Prince Billie? As the overlong schvitz/recital finally wraps, the secret is revealed: Sigur Ros is gonna come out and do an acoustic set. So that's why the church is packed with believers? Okay, so I don't speak Hopelandic, but seriously, does anyone in the crowd realize that they've just been listening to twelve minutes of Adult Contemporary?

Saturday- Arcade Fire/ LCD Soundsystem
Most! Important! Concert! Ever!
It is here that I coin a new word: "Whipster." It's sorta like a "Blipster," except you're white. The island acrawl with them, it proves that this is definitely the Whipster Generation.

betanimal

I know I wasn't alone in my underwhelming response to the latest Animal Collective, but as the band in the past has proved fully capable of boring me live --even in the throes of true fandom-- surely the inverse seemed possible, too. While their last NY show had the now-trio grappling with a new set (wholly excluding SJ), for their homecoming last night, they had fully come to terms with (gasp) audience expectations.

It was downright anachronistic, as AC actually delivered the hits, those known sounds, and most-startling of all, total satisfaction. I can't think of a time, in the dozen shows I'd ever witnessed, ever recognizing more than a quarter of their set, yet they both drew heavily from the current album and from previous highs, delivering throbbing versions of "Who Could Win a Rabbit?" and "Leaf House." Album cuts that previously left me shrugging (like "#1" and "Fireworks") were both bass-bludgeoning and high-freq tingly all at once, meaning they sounded like big glittery techno tracks.

I may have been alone in these feelings though, especially in light of the Brooklyn Vegan bitch-fest, where the bass was a complaint, as was the setlist, as was the exclusion of certain songs, as was the set length, as was the beer prices, as was the parking, as was the...all of it boiling down to a pissing contest between the seniority of fans who took stemmy bong hits to Person Pitch when it leaked in January versus those who stole Jam in July, between those who graduated this spring versus those who already moved to the Williamsburg campus last September.

Regardless, what came across on disc as sonically-thin and stagnant, revealed innumerable onion layers live. Through the night, I could glean African pygmy chants, Kompakt's Pop Ambient series, Franco-picked Congolese, dub, Tropicalia, and happy house (well, two of the three dudes did work at Other Music) in these songs, yet none of it ever seemed willful or didactic; instead everything gleefully hit at once. Perhaps the night was put best by a text message my friend received mid-concert:

3====D~

betales

Against my better judgment, I sat through Across the Universe, knowing full well that my personal mythology that these songs soundtrack would withstand whatever was flung onto the silver screen, but I really didn't expect such revulsion at the finished product. How can an already-delusional generation grow any higher on its own fumes?
About the only thing I can be grateful for is that they didn't concoct a Yoko Ono character that lets out a scream and ruins "the dream" for everybody else. To this day, there's no finer way to pick a fight in mixed company (short of admitting that you can't stand Neutral Milk Hotel) than to state that you love Yoko Ono's music or consider what she did 'music' (speaking of, there's an illuminating and slightly daft interview with Ms. Ono in the now-revitalized Arthur Magazine). And yet, for those who take the Beatles myth as gospel, Yoko is crucial. Cast her as Kali or Mary Magdalene or the Wicked Witch, but she is the underlying reality to that Fab Four religion and the vitriol against her remains undiminished. Just read the comments that accompany her devastating "Cut Piece," which anticipates such anonymous (and festering) hatred within the very piece.

beta mix tapes

For whatever reason, over the years peeps have been cowed when it comes to cooking up mixes for me. I love the act of making them, from track flow to wtf? pic to the withholding of info until the mix has been auditioned. Yet rarely if ever do I get them in return. Which I don't understand, as I have considerable gaps in my musical knowledge (which perhaps is otherwise formidable?) and love the handmade intimacy of a mix like anyone else. Thankfully my recent birthday was excuse enough for two to be made in my honor (by music critics, natch) and I've enjoyed them a great deal, both musically and in pondering why each song was selected so as to contribute to the aesthetic whole.



The first one I received has written in purple crayon: "Betasm: Sexy Inna Drink" surrounding a pic of a naked man swimming near a waterfall. Not sure what that's all about, but it features a slew of older stuff: Yellowman, Stetsasonic, Coasters, Comus, Del-Vikings, Lora Logic, Linda Perhacs, as well as new indie rock stuff that --if it dropped through the mail slot-- I might've just trashed on sight: Dirty Projectors, Vampire Weekend, Marnie Stern, Big A little a.

My favorite song here is by High Places, a winning slice of bedroom exotica, if something made in my own neighborhood can be deemed "exotic." There's a tinge of African highlife to the guitar tones throughout (DP, VW, LL, then made explicit on the Franco song), though the languid touch arising from Mother Africa is replaced here by Brooklynites who perhaps down too much espresso (or forget their anti-anxiety meds). Brittle, bumpy, yet strangely assuaging, the adenoidal indie songs here work in small doses, making for a mix of little pleasures.


The second disc has writ across it "Dance to the Beta/ 'Who is Cerrone?'/ Hopeful Rarities," though a better subtitle might be "The Secret Life of Stevie in Disco," in that there number disco versions of Stevie Wonder songs (a stellar cover of "Love Having You Around" by First Choice), a track by his ex-wife, Syreeta ("Can't Shake Your Love"), and innumerable instances of jittery electric keyboard skittering atop the deep funk. The mix deals strictly in disco edits and edicts, the texture of prototype synths slowly giving way to hand percussion textures as the mix progresses. Some of it I knew well, like a Dinosaur L number, as well as The Winners "Get Ready for the Future," from that crucial David Mancuso Presents The Loft comp from '99 (which first introduced me to the world of Arthur Russell).

Much of the mix is revelatory though: Fern Kinney's "Baby Let Me Kiss You"; Two Man Sound's "Que Tal America"; Kirk Franklin's "Looking For You (Track Bandits Edit)." That Franklin cut is so ridiculously potent that it first converted me over to Judaism, then made me go all "Jews for Jesus." I then found myself watching Creflo Dollar last Sunday, but if Kanye can blipster over to Keane, then why not the other way around?

heep see

As Ratatouille helped me realize, America loves rats. I all but forgot how much I loved them myself as a child, until this clip helped me remember my favorite game, "Who Can Spank Chuck E.?":

***
Second acts in life are tough. Take my first job out of college, selling cell phones in the mall, before becoming an internationally-renowned music critic (where, in the last days of the Voice, I did indeed play "Who Can Spank Chuck Eddy?"). But even I was shocked to see the renaissance of Pol Pot on Today. Apparently, the Cambodian dictator had been keeping a low profile as a cell phone salesman before the UK's most zealous crate digger Simon Cowell re-discovered the Khmer Rouge superstar (as well as his old partner, Nuon Chea) and brought him onto Britain's Got Talent:

***
OJ, struggling now with his third act, surely had enough time to watch Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob Le Flambeur and realize that heists at casinos are bad news, even if you employ an electroacoustic composer as safe-cracker:

heep see

Perhaps to flush Chris Crocker's peroxide out of my eyes, I found myself instead watching old Bobbie Gentry appearances on The Smothers Brothers Show and on The Johnny Cash Show, singing "Ode to Billie Joe" and her other hits. On the notes to the recent Jim Ford reissue Sounds of Our Time, he takes credit for co-writing "Ode," which sounds like idle boasting. But as the man can also boast of being that offay hick on the back cover of There's A Riot Goin' On, he may be right. At the very least, Gentry also covers his "Niki Hoeky." While I'm marveling Bobbie's candy-colored polyester pantsuits and 'do throughout, dig her shy alternation between standing and steppin' on "Fancy."

Since YouTube is all about rabbit holes (and office cubicles) I couldn't help posting these Delaney & Bonnie clips, even though one will appear at Idolator later today. Christgau once estimated that D&B "nail such pieties as the joy of music-making and the pleasure of the groove," which you'll see here. And dig Delaney's Mexican tuxedo (though Northerners will call it a Canadian tuxedo)! An appraisal of D&B is part of my new column over there, VHS or Beta?, wherein I talk about movies and their soundtracks. Hopefully, I will soon get to topics like Toru Takemistu & Hiroshi Teshigahara, Scorsese's Taxi Driver, Forbidden Planet, The Andromeda Strain, Performance, Cassavetes's Faces, and Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.

heep see

The Naked Kiss dir. Samuel Fuller

Leave it to punch-drunk Fuller to film my favorite opening sequence in forever. Godard deemed it "cinema-fist" and your eyes immediately open to the sight of a call girl wailing on her audience and her john, sending the camera reeling. She kicks the ass-whup up a notch when he yanks off her wig then puts on her face over the opening credits. It's pretty much down hill from there, at least until the doe-eyed crippled children's choir comes in to cut their latest hit. Tearjerker seems too placid an action to apply to Fuller; it's instead kin to taking a pair of needlenose pliers to the tear ducts.

La Jetee/ Sans Soleil dir. Chris Marker

I liked that when I screened 1983's Sans Soleil for some friends, half of them fell asleep within the first half-hour, their slumbering forms mirroring those of the commuters captured early on in the film. Perhaps being asleep is the best way to process the dreamlike logic that Marker follows, or, as his narrator puts it: "Not understanding adds to the pleasure." Between this and the recent picture book of his photography, 2007 has given us the most tenable grasp of the man in a good number of decades. How it makes me long to see his 48 other films of his that are impossible to track down save as bootlegs (Le Joli mai is on the way to me as I type). Already, he wanes just like his beloved Cheshire Cat.


The Lady Vanishes dir. Alfred Hitchcock

Marker's mid-movie meditation on Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and that Sisyphean search for perfect memory led me back to the man. I've been grappling the past couple days about why I loved Hitchcock so much as a child. At first I thought it had something to do with the Alfred Hitchcock Presents Nick at Nite reruns that I saw as a child, that iconic silhouette and weird lumbering music intro to his show, his droll, black liquorice humor. That didn't seem quite right though, and then I remembered that I had a complete set of Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators juvenile detective novel series. Could he have been responsible for both reading and movie-watching? And is there any director working today to have that sort of ubiquity to where he is a fictional brand-name, much less a recognizable portrait? Scorsese's Dead End Kids? Wes Anderson's Effete Wilting Flowers?

Despite that childhood fascination with Hitchcock, I have barely built on it as an adult. And I had definitely never seen any of Hitchcock's UK work. With its toy-like opening, The Lady Vanishes evoked the miniatures of childhood, but it still almost lost my roommate and me in the first half-hour, displaying his peculiar brand of humor that makes the movie seem like the grandmother to 1955's The Trouble with Harry. By the last third though, it swerves into some crackling espionage.

Lola dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Will I be able to stand the nine hours plus change of the forthcoming DVD set of Berlin Alexanderplatz? As I seem to be drawn to women who work far too much, surely I can get with a man who his friends deem died of overwork, releasing some sixty films in thirty years.

While a staple of my Existential college courses, I hadn't revisited Fassbinder since then. I have Despair (still unavailable on DVD) and am curious to revisit that, but watched Lola first, a part of Fassbinder's BRD Trilogy. His theatre roots and obsessing over Douglas Sirk comes through in his gels, the characters wading through rooms and courtyards drenched in amber and plum, character faces awash in clammy blues and flustered, almost feverish pinks. What startles me in the commentary (yet explains how he worked so fast) is that Fassbinder insisted on first takes and also emphasised not explaining character motivations to his actors. He believed that just as we move through this farce of a life not quite sure what we're doing or why, so should his actors.

beta's night in paris

So I came this close (imagine me squeezing my sore thumb and pointy finger together) to being flown to Paris for a cover story on Wes Anderson. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but who wants to go to Paris in August, much less interview Wes Anderson, whose most brilliant and penetrating work remains a self-mocking two-minute spot for American Express?

Regardless, I rewatched what I deemed my favorite movie of his, Rushmore, as research, only to be reminded that I find Anderson's very act of storytelling to be loathsome. Cute, over-stylized, precious, detail-obsessed to the point of being emotionally circumscribed, I remain unable to put my thumb exactly on what shuts me down whenever someone in mixed company gushes about how The Royal Tennenbaums changed their life. Call it the "IAAOTS" effect.

As consolation prize for not taking that transatlantic trip, I instead went to an afternoon screening of The Darjeeling Limited. The story of three brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman) on a continental train through India, it won't soon get mistaken for Jean Renoir's The River, much less A Passage to India, but Anderson has never been about outer landscapes. And for all his hinting at inner landscape (dashed when his characters suddenly state exactly how they're feeling), he hasn't been really about that topography either.

Yet Darjeeling surprisingly is his most emotionally resonant effort, despite his seeming intention to dash that at almost every turn with his over-reliance on soundtrack (synched to sloooow-mooootion movements), meticulous set dec, and too-clever dialogue. Which he does, opting out of a low-key soundtrack of music cues from Satyajit Ray and Ravi Shankar so as to inject some klassic Kinks and Stones back into the characters' iPods. Even the movie's most emotional and hard-fought scene in India threatens to get dashed completely when Anderson inserts a slapstick flashback. And aside from perhaps a contractual obligation to Ms. Natalie Portman (for getting buck-ass naked for her one scene in a Paris hotel, which was then edited from the film), I still cannot fathom why you have to watch it as a separate mini-movie before the real movie even starts.

When the movie excels is when Anderson slackens the reigns and allows things like gesture and silence to accrue between the brothers. “Maybe we could express ourselves more fully without words” is the suggestion made by Owen Wilson's character. Thankfully, it's then followed. Acting through a thick swaddling of gauze and padding throughout, Wilson at one point unfurls this mask, revealing some truly hideous gashes. Staring into the mirror, unable to deny the truth of his injuries, he then carefully re-wraps his open wounds and mumbles "I've got some more healing to do." The psychoanalysts at US Weekly are gonna have a field day with that scene.

Invoking paparazzi (what's beta blog coming to?), a painter friend recently went out to LA, where he found himself not only at the dinner table with that other Paris, but subjected to the surreal strobe light gauntlet of flashing bulbs as they then made their way to some party. "So what's she really like?" I asked. He remarked that she was in complete control of the circus, expertly playing her part. So as to not post both a video link to YouTube and Celebs.com in one entry, you can look for his potato-head popping up here. He says that the clip does not adequately convey the hallucinatory gauntlet of popping bulbs that accompanied their every step, making for a strange trip down the block.

thumbeta

I can't think of a more debilitating injury (and dose of poetic justice) to have befall me than a bum thumb, which is what I've been dealing with the past couple of weeks. When I went to see my doctor, Dr. Webb, MD, s/he diagnosed it as either gout, arthritis, skiier's thumb, or an inflamed tendon. I opted for the latter.

Regardless, I was wholly without use of my right hand for a good two weeks, making the mere act of holding a pen in my hand feel like it was a marshmellow roasting over an open campfire. Some activities greatly affected: meal preparation, going to the gym, washing dishes, journaling, text-messaging, thumb-wrestling, opening doors, pulling on clothes, pulling off clothes, hitting deadlines, flossing. Oh right, and blogging.

fly beta

Perhaps due to Luc Sante's essay on Buddy Bolden and his tune "Funky Butt" collected in Kill Your Darlings, I re-read Michael Ondaatje's distilled, disquieting book Coming Through Slaughter. Tangentially about Bolden, the legendary New Orleans cornetist who went mad within his music mid-parade, Ondaatje conjures a phantom, in that the only proof of Bolden's existence is to be found on Folkways Records, wherein contemporaries whistle songs of his. In a book filled with billowing, phantasmal imagery, a passage shook me. Bolden has lacerated the face of a colleague and since disappeared. A friend looking for him tracks down the victim, motionless in a dope din:

He found Pickett in the room of flies. The air damp and thick. He had to practically sweep the flies off his face and hair.
...
He did this. Pickett clapped his hands near his face so the flies left it for a moment and then settled back.

That vision suddenly parallels something else I've recently reviewed, a DVD entitled The Pink Floyd & Syd Barrett Story. Of course, most of said DVD is bereft of Syd, instead showing members of Pink Floyd talking about how they wrote "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" (about as appealing as listening to Wynton Marsalis performing Bolden numbers like "Funky Butt" and "If You Don't Shake, Don't Get No Cake," I reckon). At one point, one of Syd's drummers says that there were "no flies on Syd," meaning that he may've just been acting crazy. He then has an epiphany on-camera, realizing that Syd drew flies on the cover of Barrett! Ah, drummers.


The film struggles with the problem of how do you make a documentary of a disappearer? There are quick snatches of the band making the "Oik! Oik!" "Doy! Doy!" noises of "Pow R. Toch" live at the UFO Club, but it lasts just a few seconds. There is also home movie footage of Syd disintegrating and reveling in the clutches of his first LSD trip, fistfuls of mushrooms in his loosening grip. Even when there is a scrap of footage of Syd flecking at his guitar, in his black hole eyes, he's already vanished. Past that, we are given lots of visual metaphors for mental illness: empty rooms, shaky handheld cameras down hallways, slo-mo scans of both.

Empty rooms figure prominently in Coming Through Slaughter as well:

In the room there is the air
and there is the corner
and there is the corner and there is the corner
and there is the corner.

If you don't shake, don't get no cake.

...
Recent reads that extend the metaphors: a story about the death of Disco D, and the death of honeybees.

luc sante

You may not be anticipating it yet, but the forthcoming collection of essays from Luc Sante is killer (which is apt, since it is entitled Kill All Your Darlings and of course, this was the man whose book Evidence looks at old bloody crime scenes with fresh eyes). Reading Low Life was revelatory, if revelatory can mean eternally bummed by the realization that the New York that I now reside in is by far the safest, cleanest, least suicidal, weakest, and most boring it's ever been in its history.

I wrote a brief feature on Sante for a forthcoming issue of Paste Magazine, but wound up using little of our email discussion. And so here's the bulk of our exchange.

I get curious. Usually I have some fairly nebulous questions--nebulous in that they're not articulated and also that they're not particularly rectilinear. That is, I'm not going to find the answer clearly stated, or in any one particular place. Very often they have to do with the emotional gestalt of a particular time and place. I'm always launching the time machine. For some reason, the historical timeline is my underlying reference. I'm the only person I know who arranges his books in chronological order.

Writing about specific people sharpens the focus, since I can see such things through their eyes. Of the subjects covered in the book, some (Rimbaud, Dylan, Magritte, Evans) are obsessions that go back to adolescence, while others (Hugo, Mapplethorpe) I learned about as a consequence of the assignment. But with pieces as big as the last two, the subjects aren't chosen idly. I knew enough about them to have nagging questions that prompted me to want to know more.

I'm writing a book about Paris. It was my agent's idea, but it's perfect: a true lifelong obsession. I won't really know what it's about or where it's going until I'm finished--I'm sort of an idiot savant, never knowing what it is I mean until I've gotten to the end of the sentence. It's not a history, really, and it's sure not a travelogue or an explanation. I'm slapping together a lot of old obsessions (the serial novel, the Commune, the underworld, Surrealism, movies, the Situationists) with some things that are relatively new to me. It does have something to do with Utopia.

I'm obsessed with the past (see above), in particular the 19th and 20th centuries. I'm interested in the present, but when I stopped being young, some time ago, I dropped out of the loop. Right now I am doing some catching up--most of the people I talk to frequently are somewhat younger than me, which helps.

Times Square is a theme attraction, the LES is a theme attraction, etc. I think of the term "dive bar," which seems to refer to bars that wish to project an ambience that resembles that of the popular idea of deadfalls from the past. It's calculated. The bars I frequented in NYC in the past were dives, period. They'd been that way for years and nobody planned it or ever thought of doing so, and you can still find bars like that in certain less favored cities. The change since 2000 seems incremental. A momentum began in the middle '80s and has just been proceeding along the same road. Money and congestion are the primary motifs. On the other hand, I'm really unable to find much specifically post-9/11 change to speak of, beyond the stuff that affects the whole western world.

On things feeling old: I may be living in a different world than you, I don't know. Smoking is busy reappearing among a lot of people I know, for example. Giuliani, on the other hand--well, he is running for prez, so not irrelevant these days, but there's also the fact that I haven't personally experienced any of Bloomberg. Things do quicken up, but that has the hidden benefit of allowing things and people to make multiple stage appearances over time, instead of splashing and fizzling.

Who am I catching up on? Well, primarily all the French stuff I mentioned in my last message. Especially Rivette (me and 200 other people, that is). I'm reviewing the Original Scroll of Kerouac's On the Road (last read the book itself in 9th grade) and I'm really caught up in it, a bit to my surprise. The songs in heaviest rotation at my house are Mos Def's "Crime and Medicine" and Sizzla's "Don't Be Sad" (yeah, I know, I always get to things late). And very belatedly I've discovered the Go-Betweens.

bbqeta

Finally made it to Hill Country, yet another attempt by Yanks to recreate the singular experience of southern barbecue. While a BBQ joint in Brooklyn attempted such a thing (Fette Sau on Metropolitan Ave.), the layer of gristle comprising my beef rib and the sarsaparilla bottled a few blocks away, not to mention the "Southern Pride" convection oven that served as their "smoker," was an abject failure, Hill Country does mimic the green green grass of home. It helps that they base it on the venerated Kreuz Market in Lockhart, Texas, which means that the mark is set so high that even falling well short still counts as a success of sorts. Seriously, how do you compete with a place that posts a manifesto like this at the door?


As I approach the Flatiron hotbed, I must admit the scent of smoke is comforting. And the pits in use here are cute indeed (even if they are 1/150th the size of deployed at Kreuz). Piled atop a saltine cracker, the Hill Country-smoked "moist" brisket is about as evocative of my uncle's smoke pit as I can find in the 212 area code.

My dining companion then asks: "But do they serve a Kreuz Margarita at Kreuz?" Hunh? "Do they really make mixed drinks with Big Red?" What? A guava mojito arrives in a mason jar, much like the booze did at Fette Sau. Not to gripe, but I feel that I should break some news: Southerners Don't Drink Out of Mason Jars! We don't. Most restaurants down in Texas instead pretend that they are chic New York establishments. So it goes.

Everything needs a gimmick these days to work though, be it concerts or restaurants or trend articles. New York Magazine has to proclaim "BBQ is the New Hamburger!" You probably couldn't swing a restaurant investor unless you have such a gimmick (all the food is pink!), much less convince an editor to run a story unless you make parse it as a new trend. As my companion and I lament such hooks and ploys, imagining a future of more trite and blatant gimmicks, she casts an eerie prediction: "Soon, we'll all be living in a world of wrestlers."

beta's trip

My original title for this piece was "Rather Ripped Van Winkle," which perpetuated both the dreamy weirdness of that band playing the entire album live while also reinforcing the act of getting blotto'd that informed both the album itself (see Byron Coley liners expose "Silver Rocket," "Devil's Daughter" and "Joni" as hooch slang) and my teen listening habits.

It's a gimmick of course, and it's doubtful McCarren Pool would have been such a sardine can without the premise of recreating something canonical like Daydream Nation. Otherwise, who would go to hear songs from "Rather Ripped"? Seems a shame that Rock the Bells couldn't swing something similar with Public Enemy (reforming that same night on Randall's Island) and arrange for the performance of It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, seeing that Chuck and Flavor Flav were but a few miles north of the Greenpoint Necklace. A friend and I have already decided that this should be the next album re-created live, alongside Drive Like Jehu's Yank Crime and Pharcyde's Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde.

So, was Daydream Nation good, you might ask? Bad? Such distinctions seem wholly irrelevant when discussing something as subjective as Sonic Youth's lexicon, to the point where it is an integral aspect of my musical chemistry. I mean, was puberty good/ bad? Was it Superbad? The only thing I kept wishing for was that Kim would've changed the lyrics to "Eliminator Jr." so that it went: "Take a walk through McCarren Park? SHIT YEAH!"