heep see (special scopitone version)

Inspired by a DVD sent by David Serlin, who penned this loving tribute to the Scopitone in an early issue of Cabinet. Believe he sold me on such campy celluloid by deeming it "the Dead Sea Scrolls of music videos" or something similarly biblical.











(This one might be my favorite, as the woman has a set of furry panties that match her poodle.)

juan maclean interview pt. 2

Well, onto The Future Will Come. "Happy House" came before it. Where were you when you did “Happy House”? It has this domestic aspect to it...

You mean...why is it so happy?

Basically.

It’s because of you (points to girlfriend). That’s not true.

My girlfriend thinks it’s about her.

It’s such an ultimate girlfriend song. Actually, three people have told me that they have used it as their wedding song, which is really nice, actually.

“You’re so damn excellent” is such a weird way of saying whatever. Usually, it’s couched in something else.

It says something that people would have a really hard time expressing themselves. Especially if you’re a self-centered hipster. Like we are. You can’t be excited and honest about anything. But I really actually think that’s why it resonated with a lot of people, our peers. And that was…there was a conscious decision to do that, to approach the entire album in that way. In a way that Nancy and I both were like: “We’re going to do a vocal-oriented album, it became apparent that the one thing we had to write about was this very specific thing of personal romantic relationships and uhm…we made the decision to be as honest and sincere as possible, at the risk of sounding trite and especially operating in the hipster world and electronic dance music world where lyrics and vocals tend to be couched in irony or some kind of surface.

Dance music is always very physical and temporal, not emotional and monogamous in relationships. It’s anonymous. To be domesticated is just…

It was the experience…the hipster turning 30 finally kind of thing. But “Happy House” was done at the same time the whole album was done. It wasn’t done before. It’s funny because we had picked…it had been so long since I released anything. What could we put out that’s deeper, won’t be a single, that just gets me back on the radar. I had no idea. I loved the song but I had no idea it would resonate the way that it did, the dance twelve of the year in that world, basically.

And all the financial success that that brings.

That I could kick back the rest of my life, a million free downloads yet again. I didn’t know. It sidetracked things actually, well, you can’t put out an album right after that now. You have to let it play out. It was definitely the theme of the entire album though.

With anyone in mind?

It’s an amalgamation of previous relationships. And Nancy and I have known each other for so long, so well about these things that it was easy. We went to this wooded studio in Woodstock, New York to do the vocals. We would sit on a couch and write back and forth to each other and laugh. So much of it was about our experiences being musicians and living that kind of impermanent, nomadic lifestyle. And you’re not…just personality-wise you tend to be much harder to deal with, very self-absorbed and that kind of thing.
Nancy had a longtime boyfriend who lived in Belgium, Steph of Soulwax. And so…(forgets train of thought) A lot of it, but more so than even being impermanent, which for us is not necessarily true. Everyone around here at DFA is a little bit older and more into being at home. People are married and have kids. So everyone that tours here won’t go away for too long or bring their wives and girlfriends. For me, Nancy as well but for different reasons, it was just about being this type of person who seemed totally baffled by relationships and never having them work out for any long period of time. I feel like on my end of it, it was…some things are very specific for sure.

So what’s specific on the album then?

The ballad “Human Disaster” that’s a very specific thing about a specific person and a situation for sure.

The way it’s set up, it’s a crash and burn and having “Happy House” completes yet re-creates this cycle.

That was an intentional thing in sequencing. The way that we wrote the songs and what songs we picked, it was supposed to tell a story that we had written out.

It was like that Bergman film, Scenes of a Marriage.

That’s what the idea was. The conflict and coming together and that kind of thing. That’s why “Happy House” is at the end, to leave it “happy,” a Hollywood ending. That’s why “Tonight” is the last song on side one, a much more positive coming-together kind of thing. “Happy House” is the last song on side two.

Did you hear back from Dubtribe Soundsystem about it? Did their sample come first?

That was…I actually had all the rhythms written for that song and we wanted to have a piano on it and just lifted the piano from that song. “That goes perfectly on there.” I never tried to find or make any claim that it was anything other than that. It was funny, guys on blogs and messageboards love to point it out. Somehow, this whole culture…I can’t read that stuff it makes me so crazy, that whole culture, there’s this whole thing where people priding themselves on pointing out where you’ve stolen from and that it somehow discredits what you’ve done. Where in fact, since the beginning of pop music, that’s all anyone has done.

Half of Shakespeare is where he took things from and how he put them back together.

Sunshine, the male of Dubtribe, they were hippies. He got in touch with me and told me how much he loved the song. So I’m going to have him do a remix which is a big fuck you to all the guys on the blogs upset. Someone actually wrote me to say “I’m going to tell on you. I’m going to write to Dubtribe and tell them what you did.” And the funny thing about “Do it Now,” it’s literally the piano part (which they sampled) and then the rest of the track is “I Am Every Woman” by Chaka Khan. It’s just those two things put together. (Laughs)

It’s like that Saul Bellow quote: “You’re aloud to steal anything that you’re strong enough to carry out.”

Exactly. That whole culture of…it’s a very American thing, a male thing. It’s an upper-class, over-educated, too much time on their hands, of getting into that world of being an uber-critic. It’s just been a long time problem of hipsterdom. People are so terrified of actually standing for something, being a fan of something. It’s much easier to pan something. It’s the go-to thing for critics of our generation. It’s an easy default. When in doubt, go to the pan. Somehow being negative and critical of something, people think you know what you’re talking about.

Or you could only be enthusiastic about something if you’re a-historical.

This is dangerous territory for me to get into but Hercules and Love Affair, it was my favorite album of the year. But when Pitchfork picked “Blind” as their number one song of the year and much of their dealings with Hercules, it felt like this affirmative action sort of thing. Finally, we can show you we’re not homophobic. Seeee, we like gay stuff, too. That’s a huge element to their approval.

Or like when Pitchfork got into Clipse.

Trying too hard to show that you’re not racist or homophobic. When in that world, it’s always been…racism and homophobia are pillars of rock, of hipsterdom. Of people coming from this collegiate, upper middle-class world. Which is fine. That’s where people have come from. But it’s not fine when it plays out…they’re the first people to say “I’m no racist, I’m not homophobic, I’m not sexist.” But in all of the things that they do, all of those things seem to creep out.

With disco and people discovering disco, James Murphy and I always talked about how disco edits, the whole point is to take out “the gay part.” The gay flourishes are always taken out and you’re left with this very rock thing that’s easy for people to like. DJing, the more indie-rock the audience, they’re so turned off by anything gay. Like, really turned off.

It's like when I wrote about disco edits and talked about how straight and white it has become. No black people, no Puerto Ricans, no gay people, it took thirty years to get white-washed. Back to topic though, was Nancy as big a part on Less Than Human? She seems to be such a big part of LCD.

In thinking about that, she has sung on very little LCD stuff. Little yells here and there and then she plays keyboard in the live band. Nancy is on many songs of mine in the past. (tape cuts off)

Does the relationship play a big part in terms of…?

For sure. That’s where all of this stuff came from. It’s always the most intense emotional things that you’re writing about. You’re not writing about “It was sooo nice when we cuddled on the couch and watched TV.” It’s great but it doesn’t make for compelling songs. The times when I’m most compelled to write is when I’m nearly suicidal probably.

I’m in a relationship now and you have to re-examine your sexism. I’m more in touch with my sexist side as well as my feminist side as now I can see the other side.

I’ve always been into having girlfriends than being like “I’m this music guy on the road sleeping with different girls every night.” Which has made for much more interesting material and references. You figure all that stuff out and it becomes…yeah. That’s what so much…for both Nancy and I.

Is she in a relationship?

I feel like I shouldn’t say. She’s with me on this campaign.

What I like about this album is how, in the past you’ve had this polar thing between human-robot and this time around, the polarity is between men-women. It’s transferred to this other thing.

There’s still robots. I’m taking the position of a super-sexist robot, criticizing a girl for being a girl, falling for typical male tricks. Desire will be your undoing. He’ll treat you like the rest. The relationships remain dysfunctional. For me, it was a clearing out of everything, the last number of years. This is everything that has happened.

Do you work through the crappy bad relationships to purge it?

Well, you linger on the bad parts. Otherwise you keep doing the same things over and over again. It is cool to have this public domain for this art project where you can purge all these things. Now I’m pretty much perfect, I would say.

(To Juan's girlfriend) Do you agree?

(Laughs.)

I’m like the ultimate boyfriend now...But it’s hard living in the shadow of something like “Happy House.” Like James always living in the shadow of “Losing My Edge.” He goes: "I’ll never make a 12” as big as that."

juan maclean interview pt. 1

Here is the first part of the full transcript of my interview with John MacLean a/k/a/ The Juan MacLean. In this first part, we chat a bit about robots, Six Finger Satellite, and of course, the nadir of 80s television, Small Wonder.

Were you much of a sci-fi fan or a comic book fan growing up?

I was a big fan of sci-fi, but with a limited scope. I was not into the fantasy world-related stuff at all, but Philip K. Dick was always one of my favorite authors of all time. Obviously, his writing technically is sorta awful, but the ideas and themes of alienation were big. The cosmology was stuff that I really got into and the offshoots like Blade Runner. It ended up being enormously influential for me. Thematically, that movie has played out in so many of my songs. Setting these scenarios for some being that doesn’t know whether its human or android or not, the polarity between the two. I’ve always used that theme or allegory of robots and androids to represent my own feeling not exactly “human.”

That goes back a ways for you.

To the earliest days of my music career.

Was Six Finger Satellite your first band?

My first and only band. I feel like I’ve had such a charmed music career, two of them, that 6FS…I graduated from high school and with money I got for graduation, I was going to buy a motorcycle and take off. Instead I went and bought a guitar. I just want to be in a band, so I taught myself to play the guitar. Made the band and made 6FS.

Was it a RISD band?

Nonono. We were so far removed from those people on a social level. There wasn’t a single band. We made our first demo after being together for a year, a year of learning how to play basically. Sent a cassette to Sub Pop and they signed us. We were signed.

Did the robotoic aspect of it ever play out live?

Devo was a big influence. We had the uniforms and were very strict about not smiling or showing emotion on stage.

Was that aesthetic was your contribution?

That was my thing. Devo, PKD stuff, Kraftwerk was a huuuuuge one, pretending they were robots and singing about being robots.

Songs about factories...

The uniforms they had we copied. We had shirts with very strict regulations in the band. When you were on tour you had to be in uniform all the time. We had our uniforms with the 6 emblem, your name underneath and we would sell them as merchandise on the tour as well.

Now with YouTube, I keep finding weird Italo disco like The Droids and it seemed like there was this giant movement of robot-pop. Why is it always European though? Never American? Why doesn’t America like robots?

There’s a definite social and cultural aspect to it, because Americans are…there’s such a focus on individuality and personality and originality and those kinds of concepts in these bourgeouis notions where kids grow up being told that they’re better, everyone is above-average, everyone is in the 99% percentile. But this idea of being an automoton or robotic or you’re part of the factory or the machinations of everything else.

Is it anti-Communist? You can’t have that crop up...

Very much so. Whereas that’s a very European –especially German—thing. Efficiency and the factory and that kind of thing. It’s a sentiment that Americans can’t…it doesn’t resonate at all in our culture or in the arts. Literature tends to be about the opposite, about individuality.

America’s lone obsession is Small Wonder.

Never seen it. I never watch TV.

You should check it out, a girl robot that lives with a family. Just terrible.

For me to it’s always a way to hide behind the idea of robots, without having to see that you’re expressing these really human emotions.

Was it funny to be on Sub Pop?

Of course. We were signed to Sub Pop, the first non-NW region band to be on Sub Pop. It was Nirvana, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Tad, all those guys. The Xmas parties were quite humorous. All those guys in grunge attire and we would show up in uniform. Then we made a ten inch EP Machine Cuisine that was entirely electronic in ’93.

I remember putting it on and thinking it sounded like NIN.

(Laughs) That at the time, there was no context for that whatsoever. And we made it with Steve Albini. And there’s no guitar, drums, or live instrumentation.

With Juan, why did you want to re-enact it?

My first twelve-inch, there are some tangential references to Italodisco with “By the Time I Get to Venus” was very informed by the Boney M song “Nite Flight to Venus.” It’s where I took Venus from. That song was the template for the very first thing that I did. I was really into Italodisco at that time.

Boney M is a funny phenomenon to me: huge in European, but in America, they don’t even register.

It becomes this esoteric reference.

The robotic thing is a studio construct now though?

Live, not at all. Live has been an attempt…because 6FS was primarily a rock band and part of it was being antagonistic and willfully contrarian. Totally contrary. So when you’re in a rock band immersed in this post-rock indie rock, to bring out keyboards and dress up in these Fascistic uniforms and march around on-stage and pretend that you’re robots, it definitely got a rise out of people and was controversial. In dance music though, the opposite is true, especially if you want to re-create it live. It’s so horribly boring to see somebody start up a laptop or something and try to play live electronic music. So it seems like bringing this punk rock live chaotic element to it is much more interesting.

In the lag of time between 6FS and Daft Punk, what was it like to see their success, to see it come across?

It’s seems to be the theme of my entire music career. To be too far ahead. It is finally gratifying to actually be for once making the music that is of the day, right now. It actually feels a little alien in some ways. After awhile, you do get tired of having to wait 5-10 years for people to say “Wow, you guys were doing that.” And then they went and did it at it was HUGE! But Homework was a huuuge influence for me when it came out. It was fine because I had made Less Than Human and that’s when DFA was signing its deal with EMI right at the same time. The album sat there for a year waiting to be released while they negotiated the deal. In that time is when Human After All came out. It wound up getting released a month after Human After All. It was so hard to take. The name of it and everything.

Rather than being five years too early, you were five minutes too late.

Basically. A hair too late.

wax boetics

I saw Kieran Hebden at that Björk/ Dirty Projectors mash-up the other night, who reminded me of something I recently wrote for Wax Poetics #34: The Jazz Issue about funky Moog drummer (and Jaco backer) Bruce Ditmas. Since it's not available online (and good luck finding mp3s), the text is below:

The name "Bruce" tends to hang around my family tree: it’s my youngest uncle’s name, my mother’s second husband’s name, not to mention her favorite Super Bowl halftime performer. While mining a vein of odd records that wound up in an antiques mall in South Texas (including hand-painted synth records, Italo no-wave 12-inches, and French electroacoustic LPs with 3-D glasses attached, all with the original Wax Trax price tags still affixed), I naturally gravitated towards one in a glowing red sleeve with “Bruce Ditmas” and “Yellow” written in a kinked wire font. If the long-haired beardo in Cazals cast in yellow wasn’t enticing enough, then his array of gear was: drums, Moog drum, Mini-Moog synthesizer, ARP 2600 synthesizer, electric congas, cuica, percussion.

The Atlantic City-born Ditmas backed everyone from Judy Garland and Babs to Chet Baker and Lee Konitz, even appearing on Jaco Pastorius’s Jaco album from 1974. Around 1976-77, he began dabbling in electronics and drum machines in earnest, collaborating intently with abstract vocalist Joan La Barbara (the future Mrs. Morton Subotnick). On his own, Ditmas was no doubt digging the fault line between jazz chop-shop noodling and proto-techno klingklang, all in the shadow of Mt. Patrick Gleeson.

Released in 1977 by Wizard Records (responsible for another Ditmas record, a mesmeric flute album by Carl Stone, and two early La Barbara efforts), Bruce extends thanks to “Trevor and Kim’s foot” though true gratitude goes to guests La Barbara and ECM trumpeter Enrico Rava. Opening cut “Surprise Hotel” was written by Rava and is his lone appearance. It’s also the busiest most jazzbo cut, with La Barbara on “voice with instant flanger” (though “batshit chitter” is more sonically-correct). “L’Unita” --with its wiggle, gurgle, twitter, and spurt-- could be spliced into a half-dozen decent disco edits. As is, though as is it uncannily mixes well with Paul McCartney’s similarly navel-gazing synth doodle, “Temporary Secretary.”

On the second side is where Ditmas relaxes his jazz muscle and does deeper exploratory work. He references Fritz Lang on the minimal “Dr. Mabuse” while the sprawling “Aural Suspension” combines his analog wow with drum break butter. “Soweto” remains a singular concoction though: crawling through La Barbara’s Afro-alien mewl, Bruce slows what sounds like Ann Peebles’ rain blops until it feels like cough syrup.

Treehouse 002

Treehouse is back in effect! Once again, it's going down on a Wednesday --tomorrow to be exact-- at Frank's Lounge (upstairs) in Ft. Greene, near BAM at 660 Fulton St. It'll be myself, Eric and Piotr, along with special guest Thomas Bullock of Rub-N-Tug, A.R.E. Weapons, Laughing Light of Plenty, Map of Africa fame (Beta Blogheads will no doubt recall an epic conversation with the man from a year or so back). Hopefully, I'll be able to unpack my boxes in time to find some killer jams for the dancefloor. Regardless, Thom promises "to get a bit esoteric on the night, growing up from protoplasm to full-grown dancing ape."

beta moving

"Hey dude, I'm getting ready to box up a shit-ton of records and I saw on your splendid mp3 site that you have a picture of your movers carrying records downstairs. Any recommendations on what sort of boxes I should get for carting vinyl?"

"Uhhh...that pic is from Google, and those are beer crates."

"Oh."

Which is to say, mind the gap.

ol' dirty beta

Torn between which of these re-imagined Wu-Tang-as-Blue-Note-cats album covers are the dopest (check 'em all out here). But here are two of my favorites.

betody nelson

Before I forget to mention it, I wrote an essay in the recent domestic reissue of Serge Gainsbourg's classic of 'la decadanse,' Histoire de Melody Nelson. For having spent well over a decade swooning to such orch-pop perfection, it was something else to finally learn about the creative process for the album, as well as its inspiration, not to mention finally unpacking all of the man's trenchant lyrics. Order it from Light in the Attic direct.

heep see (special disco version)

Wait for the drum break on this.

patti smith interview

One afternoon, my phone rang and a voice on the other side announced: "Hello, this is Patti Smith." She was calling me for a brief interview for Nylon's 10th Anniversary, to discuss her favorite concert moment from the past ten years. Coincidentally, her's hewed very close to my own, witnessing My Bloody Valentine live.

I'm not going to get all Michael Stipe here and gush about how Patti Smith influenced me or what have you, but five years ago, when I first started writing about music, I received a fan letter from Patti Smith for this review. Radio Ethiopia aside, her own work as a rock writer and poet resonates with my own, and I can't quite put into words the encouragement I felt from her. Needless to say, it was an honor to interact with her again:

Patti Smith: I had never seen My Bloody Valentine in their own time when they first entered the scene. I was living in seclusion in Michigan so I missed that phase of MBV. When I heard their records sometime later, I loved them right away, from the very first second. And then I was lucky enough to meet, work and perform with Kevin, but I still hadn’t seen MBV.

Before they went on tour, they did a series of performances at the Roundhouse in London. I thought that these performances were the greatest things I had ever seen. The reason was because...MBV is such a beautiful projection of Kevin, who is both aware of his worth yet completely humble. And MBV, of course I listened to it with earplugs, but with earplugs it was beautifully assaultive that MBV demands sonically for you to surrender, but the universe in which you are surrendering to is benevolent, because it is not egotistical. There is no egotistical 'artist' in terms of frontal attack. It’s a sonic scape that if you find a way to surrender to it, you enter into a universe which is pure and intelligent. Of course, I would not recommend it without earplugs. Mother. Also because it’s so spiritually loud. I didn’t feel like I was compromising or losing anything because of the intensity of the experience was quite engulfing.

It was interesting for me. As a performer I find it difficult to sit still through other peoples' performances. I'm restless and agitated. It makes me want to work. It's not an egotistical thing, it just fills me with adrenaline and energy that makes me want to work. That’s what I loved about seeing them. I had no desires, to perform, work, anything, but be part of this organism.

It was a total surrender?

Yes. And surrender with return. By the end, I found that a beautiful thing happens when there is a direct communication between one and the experience, at the end, just as any kid or anyone there, you almost involuntarily lift both your hands above your head with your hands out and just receiving. Like a child, lifting up their hands to the sun. It's not a military thing, saluting Hitler, it's just pure. You're just open. You just raise your arms and raise your hands to both in affirmation: "Yes I am here!" and to receive. And it's all abstract, but I found the whole experience very beautiful. I didn't drink, I wasn't stoned, it was it's own drug. That is the ultimate experience to me, to feel as if you’ve had a blessed drug experience without ingesting anything.

I was lucky enough to see them upstate. I stood with my hands up the last twenty minutes or so.

Yeah! You do. It's not a thing where you feel dopey afterwords or feel self-conscious. It's a release. You don't feel any ego. The world of MBV is completely abstract, it's an organism. It's not some club with rules, it's just all feeling. I was right there with you and I was there, too. Especially for me as a performer, I have control over my own situation, I have a lot of control as a human being, I'm fairly in control and disciplined. To be able to submit to something so completely is rare for me. A very beautiful experience. It made me really happy, like a child.

I was very ecstatic.

It's really…I love this. It's not like a thing… it has nothing to do with peer pressure. The only question is whether one should wear earplugs. Kevin is well-aware that this is an assault, a sonic assault. It is not with malice, it just is any more than if you stand in the sun and get burnt. The sun isn't out to burn you, but it is strong.

To not be like Icarus.

Exactly. We all want to survive this experience.

To have rapture and come back from it.

Like John Coltrane. He would do a saxophone solo for 14 minutes, go out and talk to God, go through the stratosphere, but he always came home to us, to the people, to his responsibility. That's part of an artist's responsibility and a part of a human being’s responsibility unless you don't want to live anymore. If you want to be an earthling, you have to come back. Like Ismael in Moby Dick, you have to come back to tell the story.

It's really great to talk to you and have you put in words how I felt about the show.

I know Kevin quite well. And I think Kevin is just one of the most beautiful people I ever met. He's just on a…he is as his music. He is uncompromising yet benevolent. He's a beautiful person and experiencing his vision and his band's execution of that vision was one of them...you asked for my experience. The only thing that could compare to it was Tristan und Isolde at La Scala.

I total appreciate it. (tell her about writing me a fan letter)

Thanks for writing about Patty Waters. I don’t write that many messages, but just to show you…in 1970, I read a beautiful piece on a capella music in an anthology about rock'n'roll and I thought this piece was so beautiful that I found the number for the writer of that piece and called him up to thank him. And that writer was Lenny Kaye. You know, he became one of my best friends and we composed most of the songs on Horses. When I'm moved to thank somebody, it's because it really touches me. I was quite touched by your piece.

Thanks. It means the world to me. I knew you were a critic and poet as well, and it was really profound to get a response like that from you.

It was profound for me to see someone acknowledge Patty Waters. It wasn’t just for Patty Waters, I have some kin somewhere. You’re the only other person I’ve seen write about her. There we are, two MBV nerds, raising our hands to Kevin and Patty Waters.

To Kevin and Patty Waters then.

beta gets rabid (re-run)

The late Marilyn Chambers, demurely covering the dog dick in her armpit anus.

In remembrance of the passing of Ms. Chambers on Sunday, I dug up this old post I had written over at Imbidimts (my old blog) over three years ago.

I watched Videodrome a few months back, but it's taken forever to track down other Cronenberg movies (and of course, since I'm a good decade behind pop culture, I still haven't seen History of Violence either, which I thought for the longest time was an adaptation of this), and it was not until this week that I finally tracked down Rabid.

Rabid is Cronenberg's 1976 horror flick starring Marilyn Chambers as Rose, the motorcycle mama with an emergency experimental skin graft surgery that gives her a fresh flesh wound in her armpit, a moist red puncture that opens and puckers up (remind you of anything?) replete with an odd needle-tipped dripping wet red protuberance that slides out of it (sorta like a dog's hard-on), sucking at the new blood of her victims. Of course, the film meditates on a constant Cronenberg theme of technology meeting the ancient human flesh and what happens when the two mutually mutate.

Coming out from behind the green door to again try her hand beyond the world of one-handed flicks where she was its queen, it wasn't too long before Chambers went back to porn. Her gig as an Ivory Soap 'pure' poster girl are notorious now, and apparently all of her movies feature a brief instance where she happens upon a box of the stuff, though I can't be certain if there's such product placement is on set here. There is however an allusion to the actress originally up for the role of Rose, Sissy Spacek.

One wonders how such a casting would have completely altered the movie's trajectory. Rabid would simply be a movie with green foam capsules jizzing out of the mouths of the infected were it not for Chambers' porn star fuckability that sizzles every frame of the flick. Alternately a seductress and an innocent who feigns she doesn't understand her newfound vampirism, she struts through Montreal in her fur and zip-up boots, cruising the malls, park benches, apartment halls, and the darkened porno theatres for that most odd coupling she performs on her johns. We wait and watch, mesmerized, for the next appearance of that needle-dick to pop out of her armpit anus.

Such a mutation reflects that other groundbreaking porno, Deep Throat, where Linda Lovelace has a similar sexual mutation (the clit deep down her throat) that can only be satiated by subversive means. Note there is never physical penetration in either of these movies, suggesting a new way of stimulating sexual pleasure and release. Body consciousness, questioning the sensual stimulants, things that happen inside your body, both mentally, chemically, and physically, that's what Cronenberg cooks up. His horror is never a monster movie, per se, save that your own physical body is the monster. In an interview extra on Videodrome, he says that the psychological possibility of the body to become monstrous, that is the new horror.


Cronenberg has a way of extinguishing my sexual desires though, or at least reveling in the hideousness of the human body, even if it is also simultaneously worshipping the new flesh. Which I guess brings me to the events of a past night, one wasted Tuesday night in Brooklyn, slumped over somewhere feeling the effects of the 'combo platter,' so to speak, sipping at a whisky and going through my smokes so as to dull the quivering edge just a bit.

In walks three girls, dolled up and in denim hip-huggers, tight baby tees. My drinking buddy starts up a conversation with them, nevermind that his girlfriend is waiting for him uptown, and we come to find out that the girls all work at the Coyote Ugly. Guess the leather bras have be unlatched for more acceptable tops, but they are busting out at the seams still. The girl closest to me has razor slits all along the outer seam of her skin-tight jeans, thigh flesh like shut eyes every inch or so up her leg.

By this point, I cannot recollect how I wind up in a cab with all three girls while my friend stays behind at the bar, since doing shots and more drugs with three party girls is way more his idea of a fun weeknight than mine, but I am well on my way to their apartment, for God only knows what sort of encounter. My heart races, and I go to the bathroom for that last lick of a freeze, to re-instill some semblance of chemical order to my head. When I come out, the girls are all gathered around the TV, and we're soon watching The Brood. Any sort of nervous sexual tension is immediately replaced with straight nervous system tension as the movie goes on, and the thought of even touching one of the girls appalls me by movie's end.

About the only thing I can recollect about the end of that night comes at the movie's climax, when the husband pulls back his ex-wife's long skirt to reveal the horrific, palpitating alien queen formation that makes up her vagina and lower half. "Every man is afraid that this is what happens to their ex-girlfriends," I say. Needless to say, I am relieved to go home by myself.

andy coolquitt interview

In the new issue of Tokion, I conducted an interview with Texas/ New York artist Andy Coolquitt. For those with elephant memories, he was profiled in the Sunday Times Magazine last year for his 'art house' in East Austin, though my piece focused more on his recent work with light and his forays into abandoned 'crack houses.'

Was the house in E. Austin your first convergence of art and abode?

Andy Coolquitt: No. The installations were tending towards interior architecture for a couple of years before.

When you were a kid, did you behave similarly with your room? Or was there anything you saw that made you snap to the concept?

No, it was a culmination of growing up in a series of unimaginative architecture: the houses, the church, the mall, were all designed from the same sterile worldview that most professionals had at the time. To add to that, my family although very kind people, had no education/exposure to cultural life. I grew up in a working class, Baptist, mostly white suburb of Dallas. Which I still consider as my handicap! My parents were just simply not interested in visual culture.

Lisa (Cooley, gallery owner who represents Coolquitt) talked about the idea of friends, a community, and most of the NYT photos arrange themselves as so. Which came first?

The house was initially designed for multi-use, I had the idea of building the kitchen in a separate structure in the middle of the property, from the beginning. I didn't know exactly how it would develop but the idea of creating an alternative to institutional community was key: the place or the need for a place?


Lisa also talked about the notion of 'crack houses' and I'm hoping you will say a bit about it. Is it the energy of the places, the way refuse is made to serve a purpose again, the desperation of living and consumption, etc.?

I'm not interested in crackhouses per se, but for lack of a better term 'crack spaces.' These are spaces that are outdoors, usually in the center of most American cities, usually these sort of non-spaces, undeveloped and undevelop-able, that exist next to public architecture. in-between spaces, especially in the south where density isn't an issue, or sometimes just overgrown neglected residential lots.

I'm interested in the residue of a gathering of people the night before who came together to share the crack pipe. There is always this intensely lame attempt at creating a living room. The most common solution is a piece of cardboard placed on the ground or against a wall to create a primitive sofa. Often a log will be positioned for a bench, and sometimes it's simply the markings in the dirt left from people laying down, the shuffling of feet, or a small clearing of debris.

Almost always there are 3 or 4 and sometimes up to 20 spent crack lighters. I call them crack lighters as opposed to cigarette lighters because they are used to smoke crack: the fuel valves are always removed to allow for a larger flame, and sometimes the plastic tops are melted and warped from holding the flame too long. They are always just left there, casually placed in these living rooms adding touches of color. I read this as well, as an attempt at domestication, the idea of creating comfort through collection and object fetishization.

Texas: where are you from exactly? How deep do your family roots go there?

My parents and great-grandparents grew up in East Texas, farmers and sharecroppers. My parents were the first to move into the city (Dallas) after they graduated high school.

Thinking of 'iight' (his last gallery show in NYC) and the way you have your objects lean, emphasizing the imbalance and disorientation of the pieces, I was curious if you were familiar much with Houston's chopped and screwed music or Texas hip-hop (and its vernacular) in general? Maybe I'm just coming at it as a music person...

Yesyes! Great connection: leaning against wall, speaking the bare minimum with utmost clarity, rethinking minimalism as chopped and screwed! You are brilliant. I will investigate this.

Can you compare scavenging between NYC and Texas? Did you do much in Austin? It's such a regular activity up here, from scoring terrible paintings, or records or household objects or what have you off the street corner and putting it in your own home. I have at least three paintings this way, dishes, lamps, etc. I don't really remember it much in Texas though (save for dumpster diving behind photomats).

Yeah, scavenging is really different in the two cities. It is a constant activity in both places, but in NYC it takes less effort. With this newer body of work using painted metal pipes, NYC is def a better place for gathering. There's just so much cheap furniture that gets put out. And like you say, it is so regular.

I love it when an old man will stop what he's doing and help me strap a huge load of crap onto my bike. Every old man in Bushwick thinks he knows the perfect way to tie down scavenged furniture. I think New Yorkers love to see someone re-using their trash. I usually get approving nods and sometimes cheers when riding down the street with a full load strapped on.

Of course, in Texas it's a bit tricky, peoples' notions of private property and all. And it's much more racist. When I'm in black or Mexican neighborhoods, I'm always perceived as an outsider and these negotiations sometimes prohibit the process.

Treehouse 001

Kieran Hebden (a/k/a Four Tet) playing in the Treehouse.

First Treehouse party was a total smash. Much thanks and praise to the peeps who came out in the drizzle and danced their asses off. For those curious, the first two hours are up now (thanks to Moose at Chung King for making it happen). Alas, Four Tet's set, filled with heaps of new and unreleased bangers (including one he made with Burial that's about to drop on his own label), will not be going up. You just had to be there.

Treehouse 001

Announcing Treehouse, a monthly-ish party being thrown down with pals Eric and Piotr, which kicks off this Wednesday, April First (no foolin'), at this lovely neighborhood bar in Ft. Greene right next to BAM, Frank's Cocktail Lounge (660 Fulton St. @ S. Elliott Pl.). Oh, we also have a secret special guest who really is both secret and special. Admission is $5 and I commence playing Arthur Russell's "Treehouse" precisely at nine.

boredom beta

I can't say that at this point I'll ever get around to reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Time spent with Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, The Magus, 2666, and Stephen King's It was more than enough, thank you. But to read about Wallace's failed struggles with his last unfinished work, tackling "boredom," fascinates me regardless. As The New Yorker's story encapsulated this "Long Thing," left stacked in the garage while Wallace swung from the patio rafters, it was a failed attempt to capture that ennui that infuses our modern Western existence, a task once thought by Wallace that "properly handled, boredom can be an antidote to our national dependence on entertainment." The article has Wallace diving headlong into an IRS office in "flyover country," as what could be more boring than that?


And yet, he thinks that transcendence and godhead can somehow be gleaned out there: "Bliss --a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious-- lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom."


Which is well and good in a wholly intellectual and imaginary world, but as I myself have spent time in such an environment (back when I was a claims rep for a Social Security office in middle America) it's almost unbelievable to think that a grown-up could fantasize about answers lying in some branch office. When I was in those bureaucratic purgatories though, I too became obsessed with "boredom," its pervasive, paralyzing powers and sought to somehow capture the daily routine that devoured my every waking hour and made anxious my attempts to sleep and restore my energies for the next day of it. I would attempt to dredge up some moments from that time in my life here, but my mind has completely eradicated it from recall, pulverizing any trace of knowledge about such governmental Gordian knot policy and procedure such as the LSDP and the M.DOS maze navigated for each and every claim. Knowing what little I do about his bio, I do know that Wallace never had to submit to such drone work to support a family, to pay the bills, to finance his home. And in the end, neither did I, which is why I got the FUCK out. Which is why those people are there in the first place. Even as he immersed himself in the codings of the IRS, it remained a game, not a necessity.


And yet I attempted, in my earliest story-writing efforts, to try and get that boredom down, to leave in what gets left out of fiction, to where a paragraph could deaden your senses, to where time slowed, paralyzed by the drudgery of office work. Having to mete out when you took a coffee break, or a smoke break, to try and interstice that purgatory in some small way. I used to schedule bathroom breaks strategically, hiding in the stall and writing out bits of poetry, grocery lists, to-do lists, postcards, anything to try and fight the blinding glaze of tile floors, echoing hallways, perpetually-filtered air that never escapes its climate-controlled confines, heavily-tinted windows that make even a sunny day seem overcast when glimpsed from deep inside the filing cabinet catacombs. It soon became evident that rather than attempt such an alchemical art motion, instead I had to escape that environment completely, lest I lose my grip on sanity.


At the same time I'm reading about Wallace's struggles to glean art from the quotidian, I'm also reading a study of art visionary Robert Irwin. Irwin talks about eight months he spent on the island of Ibiza, pre-foam parties, in the mid-50s, when the islands were still uninhabited:

In the everyday world, you're just plugged into all the possibilities. Every time you get bored, you plug yourself in somewhere: you call somebody up, you pick up a magazine, a book, you go to a movie, anything. And all of that becomes your identity, the way in which you're alive. You identify yourself in terms of all that. Well, what was happening to me on the way to Ibiza was that I was pulling all those plugs out, one at a time...And boredom then becomes extremely painful. You really are bored and alone and vulnerable in the sense of having no outside supports in terms of your own being. But when you get them all pulled out, a little period goes by, and then it's absolutely serene, it's terrific.

At first glance, his "absolutely serene" seemingly echoes Wallace's sentiments about "instant bliss in every atom." And yet they differ crucially. An inspiration for Irwin in the realm of painting comes from a curious place, that of an Italian painter Giorgio Morandi who ostensibly did still-lifes of glass bottles and pitchers, over and over again. "What Giorgio Morandi did there was to take the same subject to the point of total boredom, to the point where there was no way you could seriously any long be involved with them as ideas or topics. I mean, through sheer repetition he entirely drained them of that kind of meaning."

Irwin talks about boredom as a discipline in and of itself, be it sitting out on an island or else in his studio for fifteen hours a day, letting his social network and marriage dissolve as he sought out the root of his investigations by staring at a line on a canvas:

Boredom is a very good tool. Because whenever you play creative games, what you normally do is you bring to the situation all your aspirations, all your assumptions, all your ambitions --all your stuff. And then you pile it up on your painting, reading into the painting all the things you want it to be...Boredom's a great way to break that. You do the same thing over and over and over again, until you're bored stiff with it. Then all your illusions, aspirations, everything drains off. And now what you see is what you get.

Re-reading the excerpted "Wiggle Room," a slog of a short story by Wallace that accompanies the article, it feels as if everything has been drained off of it and yet the illusions remain intact. Instead we have placards of characters spouting about the history of the words " boredom" and "interesting," tracing them back to old dictionaries, things that no drone in no office would ever utter, much less bother to learn about. It feels like Wallace, locked in an office, not in Ibiza. At the end of the excerpt, the main character looks at a portrait of his little baby boy and there's no trace of feeling to be gleaned from the page. There really is nothing left. But that's not boredom, that's death.

cheap beta

Not to get all Nic Cage Knowing, but...

It started innocently enough. Because of a theatrical screening of Cheap Trick: Live at Budokan, my friend and I realized that the most deadly drinking game could be played along with this concert. Every time guitarist Rick Nielsen pops up the brim on his ball cap during the concert, you have to drink. And seeing as how he pops it thirty-plus times in an hour, the B.A.C. levels soon turn deadly.

Recounting this drinking game for an acquaintance of ours (and wondering why in the world Nielsen was such a jittery freak on-stage), he tells a story about how he was friends with Rick Nielsen's son growing up, and that Nielsen's coke habit was painfully evident even to a youngster. Upon receiving a gift of a Chicago Cubs ball cap, our friend recounts that Nielsen disappeared in the bathroom so as to go "try on the Cubs cap," returning a good ten minutes later. While none of us do blow anymore, we coined the phrase "trying on a Cubs cap" to be the new code word for doing coke.

It fell away for awhile, at least until the day the Times ran this photo of Rod Blagojevich hiding his male pattern-ness with --what else?

And still, I didn't want to see the broader implications. But a throwaway line in the recent New Yorker article on David Foster Wallace's struggle with depression and suicide gave me pause:

Wallace joined the debate and glee clubs, and smoked a lot of pot with friends. One day, though, toward the end of his sophomore year, Costello walked into their dorm room to find Wallace sitting alone, slumped over, his gray Samsonite suitcase between his legs, a Chicago Cubs cap on his head. "I have to go home," he told Costello. "Something's wrong with me."

heep see

lead beta

This only applies if you are walking about New York City (foolishly believing that spring is just around the corner), but a story I wrote about Lead Belly obsessive John Reynolds (whose lifelong enamoring of the man recently resulted in Steidl's massive tome Lead Belly: A Life in Pictures) is in The Onion this week. While the hefty book is a tactile delight, another sweet aspect of doing this interview is that Reynolds graced me with a Danish Souper Bag, which is ideal for toting non-Lead Belly records around town.

BVNG

Rounding out a trilogy (of sorts) on the disco edit scene, this week in the Voice is a feature on the RVNG Intl. imprint. And since these things pretty much disappear the moment they come out, thought I'd share one of the edits that finds its way into my "Afro" sets the most, one by Mock & Toof of Shina Williams & His African Percussionists' "Agboju Logun," off of that loooong OOP Nigeria comp on Strut. Dig it:

Mock & Toof: Digit 3

fever beta

Within hours of listening to the delirium-inducing Fever Ray album, I came down with chills, aches, and a 102° temperature. Coincidence?

(Well, I guess it could be, as the Fever Ray cdr that my friend handed to me also had this Conny Plank-produced Whodini song called "Nasty Lady" tacked on at the end. And that song is the sickness, too.)