beta is a mixtape (side 2)

I made two mixtapes recently, both concerned with jazz music. One was for a friend who knows little of the genre but wished to learn. Knowing that her inclination is towards indie-rock, I picked hummable selections (Thelonious Monk's "In Walked Bud"; Miles's "Freddie Freeloader"; Mingus's "Hora Decubitus"), a few interpretations of "Everything Happens to Me" and "Come Rain or Come Shine," and the sweetest song on an otherwise oddly-angled 'out' album, Eric Dolphy's "Something Sweet, Something Tender." Of course, the honoree accuses me of 'dumbing it down' for her.

The second mixtape was in response to a discussion with Mark Richardson, stemming from his recent Resonant Frequency column about "difficult" music and the rewards it can provide over the course of a lifetime. We bandy about some similar records, from John Coltrane's OM to Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica. I wonder what he thinks of other notoriously difficult listens, such as Royal Trux's Cerebus-headed junkie mess, Twin Infinitives, the Butthole Surfers' Hairway to Steven or Cecil Taylor's bustling, bristling Unit Structures.

To my shock, he admits a blindspot for the music of Taylor, saying that his taste in jazz had been in a holding pattern of sorts: Coltrane, Ayler, Jarrett, Bill Evans. Having spent more than a decade chipping away at such alien monoliths of Taylor, especially Structures and Conquistador!, I seek to remedy that with a mix of my favorite "New Thing" stuff on Blue Note: Taylor, Lee Morgan's shimmering Search for the New Land; Grachan Moncur's tilted and anxious Some Other Stuff; Tony Williams's assured mature debut Life Time, Jackie McLean's suspended Destination Out!; Bobby Hutcherson's woozy and drunken Dialogue.

And yet, the first CD of songs is the more arduous to assemble. All of my listening life, I've flown towards the abstract and obtuse; to compile something focused on songcraft is far more difficult for me. The first jazz CD I ever heard was Coltrane's OM. Mark commented in his column that he still hasn't gotten his head around it, and despite having it on the shelf for more than a decade, I can't say I've figured it out myself. My subsequent reaction hasn't grown far beyond my initial one, hearing that morass of voices, moans, bells, soul cries, and thinking, "This is Jazz?!?"

How did I learn to appreciate such difficult listening? What allowed me to bypass my gag reflex and choke it down for digestion and appreciation? there's no way I would've 'gotten' Trout Mask Replica the first two dozen times, no matter how many joints we smoked, yet there was always something to hook me, to draw me back. Looking back nearly 15 years now, it took me forever to figure out just what that gateway was. It vilifies me to concur now with Frank Zappa's question as to whether or not humor belongs in music, yet being able to laugh along with this audacious, unbearable, teeth-gnashing noise no doubt sprung me. It was worth suffering the pink fish head with the shuttlecock top hat cover of TMR knowing that at some point I would get to:
"Fast'n' Bulbous!"
"That's right, the Mascara Snake! Fast'n'bulbous."
"Bulbous also tapered."
"Right, but you've got to wait till..." cryptic still, ultimately unknowable, but fun to try and recite when the dialogue came around. And what's more knee-slapping than the serious groans of OM, the loosed howls, and the line about clarified butter? I still get the rat creeps from that Royal Trux album, and there's nothing inherently funny about an ocean of black bile and junk-sick, but I found the vomit sounds and stiff drum programming to be somewhat non-serious. The Butthole Surfers were noxious, fucked sounding, yet I would make the loogie-spitting sound on Psychic, Powerless, Another Man's Sac's "Lady Sniff" or the dialogue that opens "Sweatloaf." And it was impossible not to crack up at the creepy little boy voice that would crop up on Hairway and squeal "Oh Daddy, don't touch my little peeeeeenis."

beta is a mixtape (side 1)

By my count, I lost at least half-dozen editors last year. They all exacted a great toll (such as the firing of Chuck Eddy) but none was as devestating as the leaving of my third editor (and second editor of that calendar year) at City Pages, Lindsey Thomas. Which may sound odd to say, since I never met her and she was only my editor but for a few months before she moved to New York with her boyfriend, writer Keith Harris. It was his abdication that really affected me, as the move meant that he had hung it all up to attend law school here.

Harris (who I think I briefly met once) was a writer who simultaneously thrilled me with his clarity, wit, and insight and made me despair for the exact same reasons. Why would I even attempt to write about, say, Sleater-Kinney or Lil Wayne when Harris could bazooka me out of the pond? To have a mind like that arrive at the endgame of criticism was a clarion call of sorts, though it's nice to have a flash of him appear every once in awhile, as in this recent piece on Rob Sheffield's Love is a Mixtape.

I haven't gotten to read the Mixtape book yet, but look forward to such writing about music that connects to time/ space, to a listening that has emotional levity at its root. It's what I hope to accomplish with the paper I will be presenting at EMP this year in Seattle, about how overhearing a song in a Brooklyn bar conjures decade-old listening with my best friend from high school in San Antonio. And as I sit and listen to that song spin again, admiring how the turntable moves clockwise yet the spiral scratch moves counterclockwise, in the direction of the unconscious, I come to realize that my father and his best friend listened to the exact same song some thirty years previous...

mud flap beta

Assumer Guide about monkeys, bugs, bears, and mud flap mammas

The Charlie Louvin Baseball Fantasy Camp

Love TVP, love remixes, love Black Dice, detest this

my bluebeta nights

As I explained to someone recently, my days are being spent on My Blueberry Nights, my nights with a girl that baked me a blueberry cobbler. Together, we watch Wong Kar Wai's simultaneously opulent and constrained In the Mood for Love, swooning at the wallpaper hues, the purl of cigarette smoke, the mirror shots, Maggie Cheung's high-neck collars, Nat King Cole's eee-nun-cee-a-ted Portuguese.

There is constant traffic of people desperate to work on the film, to work with the man. Surely the list of stars is testament to that (Jude Law, Rachel Weisz, Ed Harris, Chan Marshall), as is the number of film students who are wide-eyed as they take out the man's office trash. One particularly jittery kid shows up, begging to work with Kar Wai. Such zealotry is a problem though, as recent production notes for the re-shoots recently wound up online. I guess it puts the kibosh on me starting a new blog wherein I scan the office's lunch order for Grand Sichuan and then post them online.

At dinner last night, I meet a fellow whose girlfriend basically runs Janus/ Criterion. How that two-faced Roman deity altered my life down in central Texas, with videos of Bergman, Kurosawa, Truffaut, Fellini expanding my perceptions. I recount going to my college job fair and swooning upon gazing on that stone visage hanging from one booth. How crestfallen I was to learn that it's also an investment banking firm.

Our dinner guest also tells me that Criterion tends to temper access to film fanatics. If certain persons let show their fandom, they never gain admittance. Having just received a newsletter announcing a two-disc version of Carol Reed's The Third Man, two of Jules Dassin's pre-blacklist movies (The Naked City and Brute Force) not to mention Jean-Pierre Melville's chilly and gray-blue Army of Shadows, it's all I can do to play it cool.

beta's mind is enlarged

I met Dennis Hopper last night, as part of a lecture series at NYU. When I mention a project I'm working on that I need to interview him for, his eyes widen and shine. For a man as renowned for madness, for willful trepanning his cerebellum with chemical "combo plates," his memory is surprisingly lucid, expansive.

Discourse on the night ranges:

• James Dean (they worked together on Giant and he recounts how Dean took a piss before 200 people so he wouldn't be so nervous in his scene with Elizabeth Taylor)
• Andy Warhol (he bought one of the first Campbell soup cans and a visit to Hopper's pop playground pad out in LA blew Warhol's mind much like how a visit to the Factory blew Hopper's mind)
• Dean Stockwell (the boy with green hair who wrote a screenplay to accompany Neil Young's After the Goldrush)
• Rod Serling (from his work on The Twilight Zone)
• Miles Davis (on the displaced junkie jazz scene that hung in LA and how if Miles hadn't turned his back on the crowd, jazz might still be America's dominant art form)
• Marcel Duchamp (he tells of a displaced Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Man Ray hanging out in Hollywood)
• David Lynch (he is the real deal, the quintessential scout leader)
• Bruce Conner (who bursts into tears when Hopper offered him a deal with Universal to make his films, crying ""What do you think I am?!" before storming out. Apparently Conner is in the hospital right now and very ill)

He talks about how stuntmen provided him with his education of physicality, as did Dean and his ability to project with his body. He doesn't dig Godard's movies but realized how the man enlarged his mind. In the studio system, "they built Europe on the lot. (Post-Godard) the world was a soundstage." Duchamp was revelatory, telling him in 1963 about the artist of the future, a person who will "just point his finger and say, 'it's art' and it'll be art." If only Rrose Selavie coulda watched some YouTube. If only The Last Movie could've been shot on digital, he now laments, perhaps to take its rightful place alongside Lynch's Inland Empire and Anthony Hopkins's forthcoming Slipstream.

***

Explosions in the Sky - The Flood That Was Remarkably Similar to the One that Hit Spiderland in 1991

Matt Valentine & Erika Elder were Too High To Reply to My Questions feature

VA HEAVYbreathing compilations of Hot Air

The Psychic Paramount Shouldn't Read The Book of Law whilst enrolled in the School of Rock

beta hits paper then walls

Panda Bear - "Comfy in Nautica"

High Priest - "Pitfalls"

PLUG Awards preview

little beta in slumberland

Per my Vashti Bunyan feature, Friday night finds me seated next to a fellow Voicer as well as Ric and Paulina in the creamy gilded majesty that is Carnegie Hall. This is my first trip to the vaunted, vaulted concert hall, and I'm pleased to find that they don't mind contraband such as water bottles, or in the case of what performer Devendra Banhart continually nips from throughout the night, lil brown jugs.

It's but one night of David Byrne's curation, banding together some of his favorite artists, all under the heading of "Welcome to Dreamland": Banhart, Adem, Coco Rosie, Sibelle, Vetiver, and Vashti Bunyan. All of these performers are of the genre that dare not speak its name, freak-folk. The night, despite a constant shuffling of players (up to 14 at one point), has a theme of sorts, in that all of the music from these six acts eschews forward movement, tending instead to hang indolently and linger, much like incense smoke, windchimes, or dudes crashing on your couch. Not for nothing is one song of the night called "Pillows." It's all carefully crafted music though, taking its time to unfurl or else wander off, the lack of dynamism and extroverted passion replaced by extremely affected personas.

The first to delve into the forbidden genre is Coco Rosie, who I've thankfully never had the occasion to hear before. Against distorted loops of My Little Pony cartoons (as well as some slo-mo Parisian B-girl mime), they soundclash cloying folkiness with two friends beatboxing. Whether the backdrop is harp and cello or else these mouthed break beats, they share subject matter with Khia: necks, backs, pussies, cracks. Why they continually play dress up in Bjork and Tom Waits's kooky wardrobe and creaky mannerisms is beyond me. They need to ditch all that fairy unicorn shit and get with some bubble crunk and quick.

I have stayed away from Devendra Banhart's music for a while now, as my harsh reaction to Cripple Crow warranted. Some 18 months on, I see nothing to dispel my notion that he is still the genre's spokesperson, meaning he still seeks to unseat Raffi with inane songs about spiders and birdies. Against such hammy affections, the plainspoken songs of Adem seem far too normalized to stand out.

The most propulsive set of the night belongs to Vetiver. Rather than rely on outsized personalities, the band just digs into a great bag of songs and does them justice in the new auspices. Drummer Otto Hauser and guitarist Kevin Barker in particular are content to lay back and augment the songs, never overspicing or drawing attention to their soft-spoken talents.

When Vashti Bunyan finally takes the stage and introduces songs into the mic, you still cannot make out a single word she says, it's rendered oh so softly. Whether she selects songs from Diamond Day or else Lookaftering, they alone attain the night's goal, mingling bliss with dreaminess.

beta's new gigs

Idolator's Assumer Guide
(feat. Deerhunter, Sophe Lux, Bunny Rabbit, the Shins)

New York Sun
(Vashti Bunyan)

The Stypod
(on Anne Briggs)

beta getting ready for the big game

With Super Bowl Sunday imminent, I've been reading Joan Didion's Miami to get myself all hyped up for the big event. Of course, her premise of Cubanos vs. Gringos reads more like a Negro League match-up than "The Big One" (Communists vs. Capitalists or Bears vs. Colts). A hundred pages in, there's a paragraph el exilio group, Omega 7, who were really men about town in New York City during the 1970s: bombing the TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport; Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center; the Venezuelan Mission to the UN on E. 51st; twice on Lexington Ave.; the Soviet Mission to the UN on E. 67th; the offices of El Diario on Hudson St.; a ticket office on 5th Ave.; a sporting goods store across the street from MSG. Who knew the 21st century was a slow decade for terrorism?

Elsewhere, Didion quotes a speech Ronald Reagan made during his weekly radio address about Nicaraguan freedom fighters: "The communist interior minister is engaging in a brutal campaign to bring the freedom fighters into discredit... communist operatives dress in freedom fighter uniforms, go into the countryside and murder and mutilate ordinary Nicaraguans." Didion frames it all another graph on, perceiving "not just a vulgarity of diction" but:

When someone speaks...of the "freedom fighter uniforms" in which the "communist operatives"... disguise themselves, that person is not arguing a case, but counting instead on the willingness of the listener to enter what Hannah Arendt called, in a discussion of propaganda, "the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world."

Not knowing about how routine terrorist bombings were a few years ago is one disquieting thing, but this argument about operatives playing dress-up stuck out because of something else. Well after reading the outcomes between Bears vs. Saints and Colts vs. Patriots from a few Sundays back, I turned to the front page of the Times, where an article stood out:

Gunmen who stormed the provincial governor’s office during a meeting between American and local officials were wearing what appeared to be American military uniforms in an effort to impersonate United States soldiers...officials said the gunmen disguised their intent with uniforms, American flak jackets, guns and a convoy of at least seven GMC sport utility vehicles, which are usually used by American officials in Iraq...The sport utility vehicles also held clues of the attackers’ elaborate efforts to pass as American. One had a sign on its back window warning drivers to stay back, in English and Arabic, the authorities said, a close copy of those used on some official American vehicles. They also said a bag of civilian American clothing, guns and body armor had been found in the vehicles.

The only real tip-off was that "the disguises were imperfect — officers at checkpoints saw that the men were bearded (emphasis added)."

Which is a sorta long-winding introduction to this article in New Yorker about 28-year-old Adam Gadahn, also known as "Azzam al-Amriki" (Azzam the American). Raised on a goat farm in rural California, he is now one of "Osama bin Laden's senior operatives." Of course, he is --in addition to being the first American charged with treason in fifty years-- on that rogues' gallery of 21st Century American icons like John Lindh Walker, the "dirty bomber" and "shoe bomber," citizens who have crossed some ideological threshhold, some line in the sand, growing beards and becoming the frightening spectre of an enemy that can now "pass as American."

The article reveals a few interesting bits on Gadahn though. One is that his father was Phil Pearlman, a hippie guitarist of underground renown, who had a clutch of his privately-pressed psych records re-emerge in the past few years. The Beat of the Earth and Relatively Clean Rivers were bootlegged on Radioactive, while The Electronic Hole (which appears to be the only title in print) seeped into a few NY record stores. After cutting such esoteria (his band was deemed "the west coast Velvet Underground"), Pearlman continued to "live the dream" by raising goats on his land. Of course, that also meant no running water and a trench that served as a toilet.

Relatively Clean Rivers - "Babylon"
Relatively Clean Rivers - "A Thousand Years"


Isolated, showering in the forest and shitting in a self-dug trench, Adam went to live with his grandparents, and as is often the case when hanging with septuagenarians, got into death metal. He even made his own handmade cassettes as Aphasia (some titles: Non-Relativistic Quantum Mechanics and Delirium: 7 Hallucinatory Interludes, Op.2). A self-scribed catalog descriptor goes: "The music can be described as an experimental symphonic ambient electronic industrial noise collage, depending upon the listener's point of view." You can hear what you want in this mess.

No article I've come across quite explains how a rabid fan of extreme/esoteric music turns into a religious zealot, but there are a few clues in the piece. Post-Metallica, one of Gadahn's tapes lashes out with a vengeance against sell-outs: "commercial death & thrash metal, and the rest of you losers! Die and burn in Hell!!!" The vitriol isn't so far removed a decade hence, when, as al-Amriki, he alludes to non-believers and "the dismal fate of thousands before you" or that quintessential imagery of the Crusades, where blood runs in the streets. Quite the fate for a sell-out.

A working theory for how an all-American boy who records music in his bedroom featuring "samples of death metal, classical music, and bleating goats" turns into "the American" is given by forensic psychiatrist/ CIA case officer Marc Sageman, who proffers his "bunch of guys" theory. Herein, a closed society provides "a sense of meaning that did not exist in the larger world...(where guys get) radicalized through a process akin to one-upsmanship, in which members try to outdo one another in demonstrations of religious zeal." A rather jock-ish theory to cover both underground music and radical Islam, bundling up such natural questing and questioning, as well as the search to "outdo one another." Nothing says enlightenment like being able to out-enlighten your neighbor.

Azzam reached a breaking point when someone driving an SUV in a parking lot yelled at him to "Worship Jesus." Let the backlash begin. He goes on to evoke Abu Jahal, a seventh century enemy of Islam deemed Father of Ignorance. "What, you don't know?" goes the punchline to the joke: "How many hipsters does it take to change a lightbulb?" Underground music only offers divisive exclusivity, zealotry. Why be satisfied with the Velvet Underground or Metallica or Jay-Z or the Shins, the slings and arrows of mainstream media when you can seek out Phil Pearlmen or Aphasia, when you can lash out at fake metal and wannabes and sell-outs, when you can instead perceive that someone isn't a true fan, isn't a true believer? Why see yourself when you can just see the opposing side instead and their ignorance, believing that they are your enemy? And if they dress like you, well...what isn't deceptive about a game in an entirely imaginary world?

tower of babeta

In the Shadow of No Tower
An "industry" piece.

In the winter of 1992, I made my first visit to New York. My body had never ventured that far north before, and it had never experienced such a chill. I became deliriously sick upon arrival, wholly unprepared for such weather (no scarf, no gloves, no wool cap). I was forced to wear the mitts of my young cousin, childlike gloves that barely reached past my thumb. Even now, there was no sensation to equal the brutality of that first wall of wind I felt smack against my body at every turn. Such bluster knifed through my wholly inadequate ski jacket. I was miserable out on the streets.

Most of my trip, I was stuck in the hotel room, weakly gazing out at the Empire State Building's luminance that filled the window. Down below, the Coke sign was but a tiny dance of red lights, the thoroughfare of Broadway like some glow worm. Only a few impressions linger: that New York is bizarrely familiar and mistakenly known after years of witnessing it on TV; that's not steam coming out of those manhole covers. I did nothing touristy, save for a few exceptions: Times Square (bought a porno rag), CBGB's (bought a tee), and Tower Records on 4th and B'Way (bought Lysol by the Melvins, Sebadoh's Smash Your Head on the Punk Rock, the Royal Trux album that has a pile of golden bones on the cover).

Upon my arrival in the city nine years on, I had easily jettisoned such landmarks as well as such purchases. Times Square was odious even then and I made the pilgrimmage to Other Music instead, across the street from Tower. What I bought there remains most holy: Cannibal Ox's The Cold Vein, the Parson Sound 2CD set, the Disco Not Disco comp (Arthur Russell's joyous tracks soundtracked those heady first months). Still, it was a curious sensation to have the other two institutions slip away last year, though kin more to the passing of your grandmother's neighbor than anything of real resonance. And yet, I knew that they weren't anything other than shadows of a time and place already passed even when I was a tourist. No show at CB's, I bought the namebrand. The titles at Tower could've been found at the Tower in Austin. It was just the pilgrimage itself, the buying of relics. I went exclusively for the ghosts, to hear the echoes of something already dead and cold in the earth.

betalice

Alice Coltrane
Alice Coltrane redux
Cougar

beta's labyrinth

What, me see a movie from the 21st century?

In Michael Hall's recent article on the reclusive, silent to the point of seeming retired Erykah Badu in this month's Texas Monthly, he notes a "giant, red, mazelike circle painted on the floor at her feet. 'Actually, it's not a maze,' (Badu) said. "A maze is designed to puzzle. It's a labyrinth -- there's one entrance and one way to the center. It kind of looks like a brain. It's very meditative.'"

Malcolm Gladwell's article on Enron in the New Yorker theorizes on whether or not the company's shareholder fraudulence was a puzzle or else a mystery, using national-security expert Gregory Treverton's distinction between the two: puzzles don't have enough information, mysteries too much. He uses the location of Osama bin Laden as an example of the former, the chaotic aftermath of ousting Saddam Hussein for the latter. Gladwell states "Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty," adding that they deal with a deluge of information and mis-information, to where facts themselves obfuscate and render the truth murky.

Not to just divulge whatever I've been reading while on the elliptical machine at the gym, running in place, but such mazes manifest themselves on the big screen as well. (No, I'm not talking Pan's Labyrinth, as I haven't seen it yet). Take for example a movie I watched the other night, Jules Dassin’s Night and the City, from 1950. It's a quintessential film noir by a director forced to flee Cold War Hollywood so as to avoid testifying and being blacklisted (got it, darkness). The main character in almost any film noir becomes the urban milieu itself, its skyscrapers, anonymous apartment buildings, and alleys a breeding ground for shadows, prurience, those malefic sides of humanity not glimpsed in daylight.

Night and the City is part of Dassin’s urban landscape triumvirate (along with New York City in Naked City (1948) and Paris for his masterpiece, 1955's Rififi). Here, his London is not just a shadowy, still shell-shocked locale, which essayist Paul Arthur describes as “post-war, pre-apocalyptic, and bereft of hope” but an “urban labyrinth” from which there is no escape for its character. Familiar to him at the film's outset, by the end, even these shadowy routes becomes unfamiliar, foreboding terrain. The known slides back into the unknown.

And it need not be exterior either. What Dassin and others had projected onto the outside world in the 50s had reverted towards the interior by the 70s. Labyrinths were as personal as intestines. Movies that were once puzzles began to shade towards being mysteries. I re-watch Nicolas Roeg’s masterpiece Bad Timing (my previous viewing), a psychological drama from 1979 between three people, rendered by Art Garfunkel, Theresa Russell, and Harvey Keitel. From the opening credits, Roeg's balletic editing overloads our senses with scenes out of order, impressionistic rather than linear. Whereas a film like The Naked City gives us little information in which to solve the murder, Bad Timing overloads us with clues. We must sort them out for ourselves. The audience gets displaced instantly, forced to forge its way, to order all of the sensations: Klimt's Kiss, ambulances, Russell's coma, East Europe checkpoints, shenai trance music, poppy red colors, excerpts from The Köln Concert, it all dizzies the head and gets you lost in it. Near the film's middle, we see that both Garfunkel and Keitel’s characters have framed portraits of a labyrinth hanging on their walls; they gaze at the design. Do they see themselves inside it?

Last night, a few friends convene on the Robert Altman Remembered series still playing at IFC Center to watch his unheralded 3 Women from 1977. Here too, three characters blend and bleed together, entangled and interconnected beneath the veneer of reality that shows them as separate. And boy is this Altman movie ever underappreciated: the print shown tonight is in complete disrepair. The opening credits looking more like a Stan Brakhage short, all dust, hair, and scratches both horizontal and vertical. The sound itself crackles like a dusty Joni Mitchell record. It’s so distracting that I almost miss the pan of the opening shot: it’s of the pregnant artist Willie’s latest mural. Of course, the first thing visible amid Altman’s impressionistic washes of rose and amethyst, almost a vision arising out of the desert sand, is…a labyrinth. To top it off, Björk is in attendance as well.

At this point, it all verges on information overload. It cripples any entry. What route do I want to take here? Am I concerned with Malcolm Gladwell's latest theory or else film noir landscapes? Erykah Badu or Björk? What thought doesn’t curl into cul-de-sac? Someone who has recently read my blog tells me that she doesn’t understand it at all. Well, neither do I. It almost makes me laugh, though I don’t ask if she sees me as a puzzle or a mystery.

Am I in the art of withholding information or giving a deluge of it instead? It only looks public and outward, this solipsistic art. And while I may not be writing much here of late, there is a great deal of writing going on. (Hall's article reveals that Badu has some 80 songs done, as well as a futuristic concept album that was later scrapped by her.) With new possibilities looming on the horizon yet not actualized just yet, I have spent a great amount of time in this new year taking true stories and fictionalizing them. Scarcely leaving the house for the most part.

It’s a curious act to render real experience into something less known. Events that I once knew to have happened now are vague. Even though I knew these people, I have little idea as to what will happen in this new framework and must work it out. I find myself getting lost in the once-familiar terrain of my life. Am I just choosing to see so many mazes in my work? Looking back at Gladwell's "Open Secrets" article, I realize that I had underlined a passage: "if you can't find the truth in a mystery...it's your fault as well."

Either way, I am hard at work. And it’s not for nothing that when I look up the word in question, I see the Middle English spelling for labyrinth is ‘laborintus.’

beta needs some vitamin water...

...but maybe not this bottle.

Sand

Tall Firs

The Clash box set

International Sad Hits

BiRDSEED by Beta

This is the cover of my latest chapbook.

Considering that Beta Blog was initiated earlier this year with a chapbook of poems from Texas, this bookends the year of 2006 for me rather succinctly. Guess I did get a few things done this year. While the Texas book covers 1993-2003, the work contained herein is from 2005. I mentioned it here casually and now it's an actuality.

BiRDSEED is culled from observations, unfinished poems, scribbled notes, shopping lists, overheard dialogue, and other small bits recorded in the calendar year of 2005, whether it be in Brooklyn, Costa Rica, Austria, or Texas. Back when I still had a caged bird singing, papers left lying around my room would accrue strewn birdseed on their surface and so that image informs the lines, words, and the pages themselves. The work is both scattered and compact. Anything can be a cage, be it a bedroom or a subway car or a helicopter or the body itself. Or as I joked to one friend about the work within: hard to crack, easy to swallow.

After the arduous task of editing and laying out the Texas book (ten years to craft, two years to tweak and fuss over, dozens of drafts, plus six months to ink, fold, and sew), BiRDSEED was intended to be a breezy affair. Less suffering oover the lines, things left as is. Of course, laying out the artwork this go-around proved insurmountable, so all praises due to Brooklyn's patron saint of the cover arts. Once again, every copy is individually handmade and wholly unique, from cover to stitching to the surprises contained within each book. Drop a line if you wish to peck at this.

beta out of "last pieces"

From year-end roundups:

Tim Hecker interview at eMusic

Oneida interview at Paper Thin Walls

from the desk of beta

Riff on "Popozão" at Riff Market

Various - Da Capo Best of Music Writing 2006

Various - The World is Gone

Clipse - Hell Hath No Fury

Black Forest/ Black Sea track

2 or 3 things you know about beta

A saucerful of secrets?

***

The Blue Velvet Blend probably goes great with homemade cherry pie. Even the other kind.

***

The last three movies I have watched: Lynch's Inland Empire, Godard's 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, and Mizoguchi's Ugetsu all dabbled in the spectre of hoing. Perhaps it's to offset either the weeping virgin glued to the tube in Empire or else the pristine, glamorous actress played by Laura Dern. One aspect of her persona is above such muck, yet another is down with the bleary-eyed, syphilitic Polish whores, grinding to "The Loco-Motion" and being real 'street' at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Prostitution is then the ideal role when lolling in the gutters of reality, the few with eyes and legs spread, looking up at the stars?

Said act ballasts the countermelodic couple in Mizoguchi's film, yet one extreme on the wheel of fate. As husband Tobei ascends as a samurai, Ohama the wife is abandoned, left to be raped by roving soldiers and to earn her gold in that manner. Only when Tobei sheds his role in society does a sense of balance (no mo hoing) return. Godard of course opines that it might be the only poetic job within capitalism. Desire becomes dollars, flipping mattress-backs into sawbucks. It's as writer Nick Tosches once posited, if you're going to be a whore, at least be a high-priced one.

Juliette Janson, Godard's waterbearer for all things feminine in 2 ou 3 Choses Que Je Sais d'Elle, absorbs such extremes, playing two roles that are on the verge of appearing as separate entities. She is herself; she is Paris: "I was the world, the world was me." She is both mother and whore, but neither twain quite resolves within her.

Her son recites a dream early on:

I was walking all alone at the edge of a cliff. The path was only wide enough for one person. Suddenly I saw two twins walking toward me. I wondered how they would get past. Suddenly one of the twins went towards the other and they became one person. And then I realized that these two people were North and South Vietnam being united.

Not bad for a sleepy four-year-old in 1966, but maybe it's just easier for men to mash such disparities together? Mom counters with her own unredeemable dillemas: "In my dreams I used to feel that I was being sucked into a huge hole. Now I feel I'm beng scattered in a thousand pieces."

Of course, Godard assumes his role as auteur, a D.H. Lawrence sort of puppeteer, his characters just acting as vessels for any and all of his musings. And yet another aspect of Inland Empire ties back into Her, when the creepy neighbor of the former haltingly tells Laura Dern a parable. A Boy walks out into The World and casts a shadow: "Evil," her heavy accent slithers around that evocation.

Among the myriad whispers and interior monologues within Her, be it Godard's voice-over, of Janson's musings as she traverses through a Parisian landscape that's like a face, perhaps recognizable as her own (as much a mirror as it was for Emerson), lies another version of that old tale. She ponders silently aloud: "Thought meshes with reality or calls it into question." Elsewhere, before or after, I don't know which, from either the blackness in front of or behind the screen (or maybe before and behind my own eyes), the narrator rasps: "Our thoughts are not the substance of reality, but its shadow."

beta's empire

David Lynch brews up some hot new disco polo tracks.

It's a style appropriated by everyone from Ghostface to Iñárritu: speak in non-sequiters until the devoted audience, caught up in self-mythology making, begins to believe that the shit makes sense. David Lynch has had such temples built, be they gates of hell in paper bags by a Denny's dumpster or geodesic hunting lodges, spots to get your Transcendental Meditation on, loci to just hummmmm and hmmmmmm yourself to...well, wherever it is you go where there's checkered tiles, Elvis, and blood-red plaits of curtains for eternity.

No doubt already aware that even the very act of watching celluloid flicker involves leaps of faith, wherein the mind must fill in the gaps so that the picture stabilizes, grasping at any and all images and sounds in an attempt to bundle it into coherence, Inland Empire, Lynch's 3-hour, "I bought my shit at Best Buy" DV movie simply laughs at our brains. Fat Buddha-like laughter, not exactly mocking, but it titters and clucks tongues in such a way that he seems to simply wish that his audience would simply be The Tibetan Book of the Dead: turn off the mind and just let the nonsense flow, unhindered by reason, logic, cause.

Shot in Lodz, Poland (in addition to the corner of Hollywood and Vine) with long strands of dialogue in Polish, in a way, Inland Empire is one giant Polack joke. Snatches of dialogue throughout seemingly diconnect from their scene and instead waft outwards to deal with the dunderheaded straw-grabbing taking place in the seats, commenting on the audience's jockeying for knowledge:

"You're lost in the marketplace, half-born..."

"...surrounded by screwball stories..."

"Before, after...I don't know what happened first, a mind-fuck on me."

"I'm watching everything go around me like in a dark theatre before they bring the lights up."

The rabbitheaded sitcom that Lynch sprinkles throughout the proceedings (originally a short film on its own) begins to look more and more like the heads of jackasses, voicing such mental flailing as the search for "clues," referencing green jackets and clocks, as if these hero props might hold the key to "figuring it all out." And if Lynch could bring out a baseball bat into the audience at every screening (not an unlikelihood considering how few times this is showing before going to DVD), he would no doubt be screaming --between dinging taters out of our kneecaps-- "Pabst Blue Ribbon! Hot blondes! Titties'n'beer! Quit rubbing your fucking beard and thinking about this shit! One thing I can't fucking stand is warm beards! Makes me fucking puke!"

Barring said lumber, he instead brings me to my knees by using a fucking Beck song at the climax. "Okayokayokay, I'll stop wondering about the plight of women in this movie and how many personas Laura Dern has taken on. Bring back Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson snuff films, anything, just pleasepleaseplease, turn off 'Black Tamborine'."

And much like any tough iconoclast (I'm thinking here of folk like Cecil Taylor, Deniro, Derek Bailey, Christopher Walken) or anyone whose spent his career bristling and being different, at a certain point, even that act becomes a tired riff. Just because you replace Roy Orbison with Little Eva, or insert Polacks to stand-in for scary midgets, Dennis Hopper, or laughing old people, it doesn't change the fact that Inland Empire is the least frightening, visually fuzzy and garish work. If anything, IE reminds me of something like Thomas Pynchon's V., taking on "the mystery of women" in the way that only a Polack can. Identities blur, places and times change, Dern is both alive and in death throes, women are weeping virgins and screwdriver-wielding whores, and it's not for us to wonder why.

The terror of the everyday, a theme Lynch revelled in for decades, be it on green lawns, in blue tomorrows, behind every restaurant dumpster, under every skirt, is replaced instead with the terror that arises only out of never knowing where you are. And if you don't know where you are, perhaps you don't know who you are either. It's something that Lynch sledgehammers home often through his characters. Sure, there are snatches of fine scenes and infinite theories at play, but with three incessant hours of hammering, how could you possibly miss the nailhead? And what's so frightening about blatant incomprehensibility?

beta backed up

Joanna Newsom - Ys

Jack Nitzsche - Hard Workin' Man: The Jack Nitzsche Story Vol.2

Tim Hecker - Harmony in Ultraviolet

...and if you're on the streets of NYC this week, I conducted an interview with Monkeytown's chef for The Onion.

betansch

Aside from a horrendous Devendra warble tacked onto an otherwise serviceable take of "Katie Cruel" and a song that messes with Texas (sounding suspicously like Dire Straits, though no doubt Knopfler is a Jansch idolator), Bert Jansch's The Black Swan is one of the finest full-lengths of his esteemed career, behind Jack Orion, LA Turnaround, and maybe two or three more. Of course, the press all went to kneel'n'bob before the other fogies, Neil and Bob, to where I almost got a bloody forehead pounding aginst the wall at one national magazine that just wouldn't let me do a feature on the legend, opting instead to run a 2,000 word "meditation" (read: masturbation) on "Sweet Child O'Mine" that makes Klosterman look like a visionary in comparison. In a way, I'm just grateful to see the man when he recently came over to play some shows stateside.

He was listening to jazz, country blues, modern blues and everything else. There were lots of people working in one area or another but nobody before Bert was actually putting them all together and blending them in that way...he just appeared fully formed.

I forget just where the concept of folk as collage music, parallel to the DJ, comes from (Christgau maybe, or a Dylanologist like Greil?), but finally witnessing Jansch play live at the Southpaw, his first show in New York in nigh on a decade, it becomes evident during his set. Not that he makes his acoustic guitar go scratchy-scratch like Tom Morello or anything gimmicky like that, but just how he elucidates synapses between genres and disparate folks, tying them all together across time, reveals such craft. His own style stems from Big Bill Broonzy and Davy Graham and before most numbers, he tells of how he came to embody a song and the person behind it, who taught him the chords, the words. Opener Alan Licht does a bit of a mash-up as well, coupling the most heinous version of Richard Thompson's "Calvary Cross" (when he sings) with one of the most vicious (when he plays the song's guitar solo with a screwdriver).

In the same way that, say, The Game, understands the continuum of his music and shouts-out those who went before him, Jansch spends a good deal of the evening with yarns of Jackson C. Frank, Anne Briggs, John Renbourn, and Incredible String Band. He covers Frank's "Blues Run the Game" and "Carnival," delivers a stunning version of a tune he learned from Anne Briggs, "Blackwater Side," a folk ballad that depicts a one-night stand, with Jansch adding the note that "It's meant to be sung by a woman." The most deceptive thing about Bert Jansch is how he tucks his caliber of guitar playing inside the songs. Yes, he's the "Hendrix of the Acoustic," as Neil Young said, as Jimmy Page verified by basing III and Zoso's folk weirdness on the man, yet it's always inside the song itself, never extraneous. I'd be hard-pressed to point to a killer guitar solo or a flashy run by Bert Jansch. As Colin Harper noted in Dazzling Stranger: Bert Jansch and the British Folk and Blues Revival: "(There's) a transcendant quality to the work implying that, at its heart, the work itself is the foreground and the creator a barely visible presence facilitating the construction of something magical."

Yes, it is a magical performance. Most surprising is when he tells a tale about his rendering of "Katie Cruel." It's a traditional standard that has been covered by the likes of Pete Seeger, not to mention an old bluegrass group of Jerry Garcia's, pre-Warlocks, pre-Dead. That he learned it from Beth Orton is a minor revelation, as it means his interpretation also stems from what is easily the definitive version of "Katie Cruel," Karen Dalton's kerosene-cured take on In My Own Time from 1971 (thankfully back in existence this year). It dashes my presumptive review in Paste Magazine wherein I figured he was just humoring the young'uns. Curious as to how such a song, existing across the strata of centuries, is so wholly embodied by a performer so as to be indistinguishable from it. How is Karen, not just from this late date, but at the exact moment that she first plucked it, not this Katie? Isn't "Katie’s Been Gone" from The Basement Tapes also about her? Don't they evoke her by her rightful name?

Not surprising though, as a similar thing occurred with folksinger Anne Briggs. For many ears, and generations of singers, Anne's takes of "Blackwater Side" and "Reynardine" are definitive, the others irretrievably indebted to her own stark takes. Which leads me to my other reason for being here in attendance on this night, which is to hopefully talk to Bert Jansch about his old running mate. It was he that helped craft Briggs's version of "Blackwater Side," and as I'm in the mi(d)st of a project involving her, his memories are crucial to my understanding of her. Ever since she scrapped a recording session in 1973, Anne Briggs has gone missing into the ether. I've searched in vain for the only article on her in recent memory, tracking her to a wee island in Scotland, in a piece that ran in MOJO, but its almost impossible to track. (Okay, I also don't want to pay $15 shipping for a copy from the UK.)

Weirder still is Anne Briggs's sudden appearance on some idyllictronica record from 2004. And even though it's only from two years back, that too is proving impossible to find. It's not even on Bit Torrent. To think that the even as the present quickens, it also hastens the recently-passed to disappear that much faster is a phenomenon seldom considered in the process of more and more consumption of music. Memory fades much like the woman herself, that spectral presence behind some of Jansch's most crucial works ("Wishing Well," "Go Your Way My Love"), that haunting voice resounding through the moors remains untenable, evoked only in the present, on a night when any moment in time can once again be picked out on a guitar. So when Mr. Jansch declines to speak with me on her, a most disheartening decision that leaves me clutching at the mysterious air surrounding her once more, even that feels strangely appropriate.