bemp

This here is a copy of the paper I presented at the Experience Music Project in Seattle, Washington this past weekend.

"Is Anybody Going to San Antone?"
Doug Sahm, the Sir Douglas Quintet, and Memories of Home

Howdy, my name is Andy Beta and I'm a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, New York. My paper concerns a sixties pop song that evokes my hometown of San Antonio, Texas. I haven’t lived there in well over a decade, yet the city is never far from my mind.

Take for instance my neighborhood bar, a watering hole called Daddy’s, but a few doors down from me in Brooklyn. This place evokes the Texas I always remember. Mounted deer heads and horseshoes hang from the rustic wood walls, reminding me of them old ranch houses that you might find up in the Hill Country of South Texas. And yet, there’s few bars in Texas that pretend to be a ranch house. Instead, they hang knots of neon beer signs and banks of TVs, their light glistening off the dark polished wood. Patrons mingle about giant cardboard cutouts of NASCAR racers or big-titted bikini models peddling Coors Light.

One night, I walked into Daddy’s and heard a song I probably hadn’t heard in close to ten years. “The Sir Douglas Quintet is back,” a familiar southern drawl announces, thanking their fans and “all the beautiful vibrations.” “Mendocino” was spinning overhead, by a band also hailing from my hometown, the Sir Douglas Quintet. It’s a song wherein the frontman of the group, a fellow named Douglas Wayne Sahm sings about teenyboppers that blow his mind, going so far as to liken one to a “groove.” Who calls someone a “groove”? It was the band’s second national hit.

It wasn’t the first taste of fame for Sahm though. Born to German and Irish immigrant parents in San Antonio, he was a prodigy on fiddle, mandolin, and steel guitar. At the age of five, Doug began playing honky-tonks backing touring country acts. He even played behind ol’ Hank Williams but two weeks before he died in the backseat of a car. As a ‘tween, he could walk across a neighboring field to a club and check out T-Bone Walker, Bobby “Blue” Bland, or James Brown on any given night. But his momma made him turn down the Grand Ole Opry so that he could attend high school in San Antonio.

Doug Sahm cut honky tonk and R&B in his teens, trying in vain to convince a local producer named Heuy P. Meaux to record him. Appropriately dubbed “The Crazy Cajun,” Meaux had a string of local hits and couldn’t be bothered. It was only when Beatlemania descended like locusts across America’s musical landscape, wiping out all that came before, that Meaux (after holing up in a hotel room with every Beatles single he could find and a couple bottles of Thunderbird wine) decided to clad Sahm and a few other boys from San Antone in British suits ‘n’ boots, and call ‘em Sir Douglas Quintet, so that these vatos might pass for limeys.

The Sir Douglas Quintet’s first hit came in 1965, a greasy and quintessential cut of garage rock called “She’s About a Mover.” A melding of the Beatles’s “She’s a Woman” and Ray Charles’s “What I Say” onto a Cajun two-step beat, the music as rendered by Sir Douglas Quintet is pure Texas: rattlesnake hip-shake, ballpark organ blat, Huevos Rancheros with refried beans, a sound as blue and smoky as a broke-down jalopy.

With a Top 20 single to their name, Sir Douglas Quintet gigged Hullabaloo and Shindig, saw the world, wound up out west to make it with sweet things that “blow your mind every morning,” as their follow-up hit, “Mendocino,” states. And yet for all that globetrotting and evocation of California sun, “Mendocino” remains the epochal South Texas single. In under three minutes, it blends garage-rock with soul, country & western with cojunto, blues with oompah bands, with every ethnic culture of South Texas present: white, black, brown, red.

It dawns on me that in nearly 40 years, there hasn’t been a more-enduring band to hail from San Antonio than the Sir Douglas Quintet. And there’s no greater native son than Sahm. Who else could get Bob Dylan to be in his backing band? Ask Elvis Costello, who stole both Sahm’s singing style and that needling organ tone for his own band. Sure, there’s the Butthole Surfers, but folks in San Francisco, Austin, and Athens can lay (partial) claim to them. And the lead singer from that faux-grunge band Candlebox, he was from SA, but he doesn’t count.

Is that why I knew “Mendocino” all these years, as a matter of hometown pride? That’s why my best friend from high school and I played his copy of Mendocino to death. That whole album became second nature to us: we’d take a break from making music (okay, making noise), draw on some Mexi-dirt, crack a cold one, and we’d spin that sucker all night long, relishing with pride when that one number came on, near the end of side one. “At the Crossroads,” it was, where Doug Sahm belts out: “But you just can’t live in Texas, if you don’t have a lot of soul.”

Slouched on my bar stool in Brooklyn, I catch myself singing that line now. I no longer live in Texas though. In fact, I don’t even own the record. My best friend did. And even though we still sometimes bump each other on the streets of Brooklyn, we don’t speak anymore. We’ve grown apart, things changed, we’re not the same people anymore. And yet as “Mendocino” plays on, I’m right back in his living room, the air still hazy with smoke. Maybe I didn’t have enough soul. Maybe neither one of us had enough soul, and that’s why we’re no longer in our hometown, but thousands of miles away.

But when Doug sang those lines back in 1969, he wasn’t in Texas neither. After touring through Europe in ‘65, Sahm got busted in the Corpus Christi airport with some grass and --Texas laws being draconian (just ask Roky Erickson, who opted for a mental asylum rather than do jail time)-- was soon exiled. He went thousands of miles away too, to sing about Mendocino, a little coastal enclave north of San Francisco, off the Pacific Coast Highway. The album itself was recorded at Columbus Recording in San Francisco and in North Hollywood.

And yet he never stopped thinking about Texas. In an article from Texas Monthly in 1974, author Gregory Curtis details a friend who has also left Texas, yet cannot escape its pull. “You can’t just leave Texas the way you can just leave Idaho,” the friend slurs one night, the latest Doug Sahm platter cranked up on the stereo. He turns to drunkenly address it: “I don’t need goddamn Doug Sahm to tell me about leaving Texas,” he said, “but he sure as hell knows what it’s like.”

He sure as hell does. There’s a palpable sense of estrangement and mal du pays throughout that album. One song has the title: “Lawd, I’m just a country boy in this great big freaky city.” And in much the same way that he took what the Beatles and Ray Charles had recorded as the basis for his first hit single, so too does he co-opt Otis Redding to fit his own situation:

I left home in Texas, headed for the Frisco Bay
Encountered a lot of hard times, through changes all the way.
Now I'm up in Sausalito wondering where I ought to be.
And I wonder what happened to the man inside,
the real old Texas Me.

Here he is, smack-dab in the middle of hippie paradise, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, yet he misses dives like Farmer’s Poolhall on the east side of SA and redneck backwaters like Port Arthur. Severed from his roots, he begins to question just who he is. As his surroundings have changed, so has his interior landscape. “I have always snapped that environment shows in music,” Doug stated on the liner notes for one of his records. Things aren’t the same out there, and neither is he. It saddens him to realize that, despite how desperately he wants to hang onto that “Texas me,” inevitably he can’t.

And yet he always dreams of a change that will revert time back, a return to how things used to be. And then I glean something else in “Mendocino.” Sure, it is outwardly about a barely-legal chick, but there’s also an undertow to it too, a desperate prayer beneath its come-on: “Stay here with me,” Doug Sahm pleads. “Please don’t go.” It’s this futile fight for a paradise lost, a past now made untenable.

It’s what I want to tell my old friend when I pass him on the street, when I run into him in Brooklyn, so far from our hometown. I too want to believe in Doug Sahm’s plea at the end of “At the Crossroads”: “Some day a change will come and you will be beside me one more time.” I want those intervening years to disappear, the distance between here and ‘home’ to be eradicated, to be back in that little room of San Antone, where we’d play music and spin them old records, oblivious to the paradise of that time together. I want to just hear “all the beautiful vibrations,” Augie Meyer’s incessant, asthmatic Vox organ, and that eternal bit of sunny Tex-Mex pop, “Mendocino.”

And then it hits me, right there on my barstool in Brooklyn, why I always felt that I knew this song. It wasn’t because my best friend and I learned of it ourselves. It wasn’t on oldies radio when I was growing up. The reason I knew “Mendocino” was because my father used to sing it to me! That’s how I knew it! He’s the one that grew up on it, he’s the one that heard it blaring out over the radio in the summer of ’69.

My father always talked about that song. That’s why, when I was thumbing through my best friend’s record collection, I picked it out. Because I had never heard it before. My father would reminisce to me about his own time back in high school, when he and his best friend, a fellow named Leonard, would deerhunt, do farm chores, drive tractors, all the while the radio was cranked up to resound across the plowed fields. To hear him describe it, that was the greatest summer of his life, that summer of 1969 when “Mendocino” dominated the airwaves in South Texas. That was their song, he would recall. And yet I never had that testimony corroborated by Leonard himself. In fact, I never even met his best friend, as they hadn’t been on speaking terms my entire life.

It’s come full circle: a poppy Tex-Mex 45 about teenyboppers, the quintessential South Texas single, a tune that has soundtracked two generations of friendships, also hints at the shifting sands of paradise, an ebullient pop song that reveals that all things come to an end. No matter how many times Sahm pleas “I love you so, please don’t go,” however many times my father evoked that magical summer, or however many times I hear it in my head now, there’s no holding onto people. They don’t stay put in Mendocino, they don’t remain “in a love house by the river,” they don’t remain in San Antone or wherever home may be.

And I want to talk to my father about this now, but we no longer speak ourselves and haven’t for a good number of years. Thousands of miles from home, the song from my hometown long since replaced in that jukebox, I just shake my head to think that this all transpired in my mind for the duration of a side of a 45, at a bar called Daddy’s.

heep see

Texas Monthly

This month features a portrait of a (real) Texas Ranger who has the most-awesome name ever: Clete Buckaloo.

Kevin Drumm
Sheer Hellish Miasma
Editions Mego

This was my first review ever for Pitchfork Media. I cringe to re-read my early flailings there, my insistence on running a metaphor (a blizzard broadsided New York right when I was listening to the album daily) deep into the tundra. My first paragraph joked about a Rhino reissue in twenty years time, opining titles like Brain Scratch Avalanche and Demonic Wasabi Colonic. Go hyperbole! Guess we didn't even have to wait five years for it to re-surface, though. It's a slight relief to be back so soon in that (as was often the case at PFK) I never got a real copy of the album before it went out of print (kids loved them some Chicagoan post-rock/ power-electronics/ black metal hybrids, no doubt). It even comes with a bonus track.

"Blue" Gene Tyranny
Out of the Blue
Unseen Worlds

I had the privilege a few years back to trade emails with Robert Scheff, a man who revels in his own pen name and injects it into his own titles, much like a certain writer who posts here. It was for a set of liner notes to this archival release, Formations. It intrigued me to learn that Scheff was also from my hometown of San Antonio. Yet while I spent many a high school day getting burnt on the grounds of the McNay Art Museum, Scheff and Phil Krumm spent their high school days staging world premieres of John Cage pieces a the McNay (also pieces by La Monte Young, Yoko Ono, and Richard Maxfield).
Not familiar with either Blue's operatic works nor those he made in conjunction with Bob Ashley, Out of the Blue is a winsome, disarming listen. A friend and I agree on the wonkiness of the instrumental here (he hears Herbie Hancock, while I hear Zappa), but the sprawling recitative works (see title track) balance stoned letter-writing rambles with minute cosmic epiphanies. And I can't help that when the letter notes the bar that changed hands again, recalling how Blue and his companion used to get stoned and sing along to the songs on the jukebox, that said dive bar might in fact be SA's legendary Tacoland.

Philip Cohran and the Artistic Heritage Ensemble
The Malcolm X Memorial
Katalyst

You can see a third of trumpeter Kelan Phil Cohran's progeny perform on the streets of New York as Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. This is the second album of paternas Cohran to get reissued, after the astounding On the Beach. A live performance mourning and celebrating the death of X, its four movements embody each persona of the man, from his birth as "Malcolm Little" to his pimp name, "Detroit Red," through his rebirth as "Malcolm X" on into his final metamorphosis (post-Mecca) as "El Hajj Malik el Shabazz." Each transformation is rendered in the music, starting out as bluesy, moving into jazz, before becoming chant-heavy and tribal. Dig their marching band outfits as well as the only pic I've ever seen of future Miles Davis guitarist Pete Cosey sans-shades.


The Mouse That Roared dir. Jack Arnold
Five years before Peter Sellers achieved comedic godhead as a trinity of characters (or is that warhead at Trinity?) in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying an Love the Bomb, he debuted in this slight comedy playing three roles as well (Grand Duchess Gloriana XII, Prime Minister Count Rupert Mountjoy, fool Tully Bascombe), across from the cardboard flat of actress Jean Seberg. In much the same way that Strangelove was eerily prophetic though, so too is the act of war declared on America in this film. Sellers proclaims: "They forgive everything! No sooner is the aggressor defeated then they pour in food, machines, clothing, technical aid and lots and lots of money for the relief of foreign enemies."

Black Dice
"Manoman"

Thankfully, the recent Optimo mix Walkabout (which --in the terminology of an Aussie-- is killuh) made me go back to this all-but-ignored 12" from the Dice. First audition felt way too slight and spacious, as opposed to the density of the band to that point. Filed it away. Rather than skull-crush, they pulled back, creating something as weird, yet less tethered to weight, than anything else they've done to date. Keep thinking Residents, but that's not quite right either. Regardless, they're going to remain misunderstood for another decade at least.

Drag City cover art
I know I've been dealing with different PR folks over at the esteemed Drag City as of late, but what gives with the heinous cover art? Did they go the way of the Voice's art staff? Both the PG Six and Bill Callahan boast the ugliest cover art of the year, making it way too easy to dismiss the finely-honed folk-pop within. It's great fodder for the Assumer Guide though.

Battles
"Atlas"

Here's hoping some visionary music director at The Palace in Auburn Hills or the Staples Center realizes that this is the second coming of Gary Glitter's "Rock'n'Roll Part II" and begins to blast this blistering stomp of gibberish during the next time-out to get the crowd of Oompa Loompas hyped.

vonnegeta

...think back to that fateful day, ensconced in my room as the cold front blew through, fearing for my life as I finished Cat's Cradle, believing the world had indeed turned to ice...

Such news isn't depressing though, but indeed a relief. Kurt Vonnegut's website today has a picture of a birdcage, its door opened, its occupant escaped. I go back to the fine interview my editor JC Gabel conducted for Stop Smiling last year, when Vonnegut stated:

I've said everything I want to say, and I'm embarrassed to have lived this long. I so envy Joseph Heller and George Plimpton and all these other friends of mine who are pushing up daisies...That's what I want to do. I think I'd do a swell job.

Hoping that he gets to that work as swiftly as possible, there remains work for us as well. Elsewhere, Vonnegut tells that art is a state of becoming, as necessary as food and sex. He recounts a challenge he gave out on the lecture circuit:

Write a poem tonight. Make it as good as you possibly can...Don't tell anybody what you're doing. Don't show it to anybody. When you're satisfied it's as good as you can make it, tear it up in small pieces and scatter those pieces between widely separated trash receptacles and you will find out you have received your full reward for having done it.

betahunter

Deerhunter

I didn't write about going to Pitchfork's party during SXSW. And I probably wouldn't have gotten in at all if I hadn't hunted down my good friend Mark Richardson, who had to claw his own way back into the venue. The line to enter into the Pitchfork party at Emo's stretched in one direction up Sixth Street, down Red River in the other.

I couldn't think of the last time I had been at Emo's, but it had to have been nearly seven years ago. Thankfully, little had changed (meaning that the Wilma and Betty lesbian bondage montage still adorned the interior wall). Back before they expanded into four separate locations on Sixth Street (with the surreal Emo's Las Vegas in the works), Emo's was the locus of innumerable transcendental concerts for me in the nineties.

I can recall that fateful night back in high school, on a whim driving up to Austin well below the legal drinking age and experiencing the Jesus Lizard. My HS friends and I knew Goat already, quaking slightly at the thought of seeing such a band in the flesh. Even the openers were monstrous. Some scuzzy band Johan Kugelberg mentioned in SPIN called the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion; the sight of drummer Russell Simins hammering his kickdrum into the floor was frightening, but that was nothing compared to Spencer's climactic squall of the theremin. None of it could compare to when the Jesus Lizard finally crept on, though. David Yow was shirtless, looking as if he'd been drinking Boone's down by the river all day. Duane Dennison's aluminum guitar glimmered like cougar teeth under the stage light. With neither signal nor count, the Jesus Lizard pounced on our throats with "Boilermaker," the crowd now a blender of sweat, feverish bodies, ecstatic screams. Somewhere in the miasma of the night, David Yow's orange-sized testicles got whipped out, pressed against the microphone. Did anyone hear it?

Drinking in daylight with Mark and Scott Plagenhoef, I conjured up the wasted nights I had spent at Emo's in my past, experiencing Stereolab, Fastbacks, Brainiac, Unwound, Palace...but what meant the most was seeing my friends play there, toiling haplessly in obscurity, never to make it out alive. There was no hope. Sure, people can boast of seeing the bands named above, witnessing these bands in the era before the internet, before such instantaneous networking made word of mouth spread like Hill Country brush fires, but who was going to invoke Gut, Glorium, Multitude of the Slothful, American Psycho Band, Big Horny Hustler, Brownie Points? Austin bands that killed it/ fucked up/ sucked ass/ blew ears and minds on any given night at Emo's, only to be lost irretrievably down the memory hole.

It's hard to argue for who had the most hype coming into the Pitchfork Fest. Was it Girl Talk? Pipettes? Marnie Stern? Peter, Bjorn, and John? I went to see Deerhunter, after the incessant gushing about their "insane live shows." Standing in a venue where such a presentation was necessary just to avoid getting blown off the plywood, to the point of being a given, I wonder where the insanity is during Deerhunter's rather pedestrian performance. Am I at the same show as my editors and peers, who get glassy-eyed by set's end and proceed to hosanna about them online?

Perhaps not. But as I get this Deerhunter assignment, I find the disc more enjoyable, though nothing brilliant. It's a good start, nothing less or more. Hopefully it augurs well their next few years, allowing them to really do something, but for now, they remain just this pretty good rock band. Why do they deserve such a shitstorm of praise following them everywhere?

During my phone interview, I ask singer Bradford Cox about what it means for Deerhunter to be deemed 'insane.'

Cox asks me upfront: "When you saw us were you let down?"

“Sorta. I mean, I didn't see what anyone was talking about.”

"That’s because you're a rational, sane person," he laughed. "You wanna know the secret? You're probably a nice dude, that's what it is. It's your problem, not mine, buddy. You're too nice, rational, and smart. Let me tell you why. If you wanna know what this 'insane live show' boils down to is: people have never seen a skinny person before get on stage and not be shy about it. I don't have to do anything. I just have a weird appearance."

Such is hype.

Should you be in the market for obscure but crucial female folksingers, might I recommend the recent reissue of firebrand Anne Briggs, and her penultimate album from 1971, The Time Has Come. I wrote the liner notes, which was a total honor.

glitcheta

Snap, Crackle, Pop: Pole, The Field, and Panda Bear (NY Sun)

Singles Going Steady: Remixes by Carl Craig, Ricardo Villalobos, EYE from Boredoms (Village Voice)

Stars of the Lid (making Calgon joke at PTW)

Religious Knives (making Italo-zombie soundtrack joke at PTW)

beta gets wet

Shohei Imamura's The Pornographers is one of my all-time favorite films: voyeuristic, savage, frame-expanding, kinky, caustic in its wit, brilliant. And yet it's been almost impossible to glean anything else from the man's four-decade long oeuvre. Even going to Kim's Video shakes loose but a few late-period movies: The Eel, Black Rain, Vengeance is Mine. Even his Palmes D'Or-winning The Ballad of Narayama is nearly impossible to hunt down.

And yet, my elation at BAM's massive retrospective on the man (subtitled: Pimps, Prostitutes, and Pigs) is tempered by the fact that the nearly two dozen films run for a single day at most, and mostly while I am down in Texas for SXSW, meaning I miss a good four-fifths of them. The good news is that with Criterion's forthcoming release of Vengeance, it hopefully presages a deluge akin to that of the young girl from his 2001 film, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge.

While 1987's The Pimp continues Imamura's rib-elbowing rails on nationalism, misogyny, and Japan's bestial sexuality (often within a single scene), the next year brought his devastating Black Rain to the screen. A demure slow-burn shot in black and white, it looks as if it could be a counterpart to Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff or something, totally out of time.

Black Rain is about those that survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Though survive isn't quite the word. The movie begins placidly, though we understand what is forthcoming, what is inevitable when the clock hits 8:16. A girl sits on a boat; her uncle boards a commuter train, ready for work. There's a fluffy parachute making its way down, ever so gently. And then the horror is upon us, in charred bodies, dangling eyes, skin shriveled into alien drapery on skeletal forms, kin rendered unrecognizable, somehow still walking but already dead. The fires of an earthly hell roar around them. The river clogs with bodily flotsam. In the audience, we suddenly remember all too well that it is us who have wrought this upon our fellow humanity. Or wait, do we just forget, doomed to repeat such atrocities elsewhere?

Imamura focuses intently on the nature surrounding his protagonists. We watch as rice grows tall in the paddies, how the tiny carp in the pond grows to over a meter in length by movie's end. And yet, the people who plant and the people who fish these carp are withering on the inside, sores and lumps become evident on their faces. But then of course, we forget that they already died within the first five minutes of the film; it just takes awhile for the flesh to finally come to pass. And even that's not the worst of the girl's fate, in that despite this imminent mortality, she is still defeated by petty human traits such as rumor, innuendo, pride. Nature abounds, humanity abates.

Hopeless cul-de-sac though the human condition may seem, Imamura posits hope in the last film of the series, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge. No doubt, it's not his finest work, but the film's gimmick is a gut-buster. A young Japanese girl must perform a wicked act (either shoplifting or torrid sex with a stranger) in order to let loose a torrent of water. Not water sports, but sprinkler against the window-type splashing, snaking garden hose gushing, flood the basement and replenish the ponds and streams. Okay, it's a dam-buster.

Surrounded by sexual manuals from a thousand years ago, be it the Kama Sutra or Ovid's Amores, a sage man laments those too learned to partake in their most lascivious desires, noting that the ruling classes have always been about food and sex, that base desires continually rule humanity. The movie has little else to offer aside from such refreshing spritzes, but the lesson resounds regardless. Her warm water brings the carp near, draws the birds in from overhead, sweetens the sweets. Imamura, hinting at such truths all along in his other films, finally gushes with the truth: woman is goddess, is bounty, is eternal, replenishing the earth where it might otherwise shrivel and die.

beta pays his landlady

Assumer Guide on Jandek, Air, Gruff Rhys, and the Eternals

Assumer Guide on Gui Boratto, Adult., RTX, and Slim Thug

Palace Brothers - There is No-One What Will Take Care of You

Bonnie "Prince" Billy - The Letting Go

Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Panda Bear - "Bros" single review
(making horny Tian Tian panda bear joke)

Dungen - "Gör Det Nu" single review
(making global warming joke)

Valet - "Blood is Clean" single review
(making a touched by the babysitter joke)

bxbw

You weren't invited, but then again, neither was I.

Idolator's SXSW Outlaw Field Reports:

SXSW Report 1
SXSW Report 2
SXSW Report 3
SXSW Report 4
SXSW Report 5
SXSW Report 6
SXSW Report 7

I did buy you a stuffed jackalope though.

bxbw

Before I know it, I will be down in Texas for SXSW. It will be curious to return as a tourist to my old haunts. No doubt I will be daytripping down to partake in delicacies such as brisket on a saltine. Apparently some bands are playing as well.

beta commedia

My Philosophy 3101 fails me now as I search in vain for who noted that laughter signifies the death of an emotion. And I'm not sure what's so funny about a job that places me outside of a comedy club every night for the past week, assembling a script for a slew of unknown comics talking about such staples as how white people walk, masturbating in the shower, taking a dump, Bar Mitzvahs, O.J., vaginas, beating children, smoking weed, fat chicks. The halls here are lined with photos of the famous ones: Chappelle, Seinfeld, Lewis Black, Sarah Silverman. Me, I get to meet that one guy who appeared on Seinfeld, selling Jerry a van, despite protests that Jerry's "not a van guy." He then digs a hole in Central Park and cries in it. Such is comedy.

Making people laugh is a grim task, buoying the drunken masses in the face of senseless life. When uncomfortable, a kneejerk reaction to fend off disquiet, social awkwardness, the ever-encroaching silence, is to make 'em laugh. Tonight, watching Lewis Black, I realize that while topics rarely change (bodily functions, the President), what sets the brilliant ones apart is tone, timing. Certain words get emphasis, jokes are spaced to resound through the faux-smoke of the comedy club setting for greatest effect, Black's voice --smoky as brisket-- is his instrument.

During the jazz age, music and comedy hewed closer together. Not sure what the wedge was between the two crafts, perhaps music's tackling of serious topics, emo howls, and not seeing what was side-splitting about such cry-baby shit. Listening to a late-period Joe Tex record the other day, he reminds me less of James Brown, more of Redd Foxx, but both were on the chitlin circuit. Musicians and comedians performed in the same clubs; emphasised the shared craft of ostinatos and improvisation on a familiar themes/ topics; smoked and shot similar substances. Aside from rare events like David Cross opening for the Strokes or this upcoming SXSW clusterfuck, these twains rarely tangle now, despite a mutual appreciation of swapped discs on tour buses. The show's writer likes it that way. He tells me of opening up for the Charlie Daniels Band in the deep south. Nothing goes over better than a Jew from Jew York.

Speaking of Jews, I finally found a copy of Lenny Bruce's How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, a book I hadn't seen in ages. In high school, I bought some tee shirt with Lenny's visage on it, spewing a stream of asterisk-denoted filth and for whatever reason, felt a sympathy for the man. Aside from routines like "How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties" ("That Bojangles, CHRIST, could he tapdance!") or a junkie movie producer who greenlights a project about the well-adjusted narcotics user and his family, I know little about Lenny's material, consumed instead with the biography that shades his humor, that anticipates certain doom, that suicidal dance through moral minefields (Christ, could Lenny tapdance) that finally caught up with him. At a Sonic Youth in-store, I had the band sign the shirt, effectively ruining said garment.

Every comic that walks in here has to be "on," and it must exact a great psychic toll to always have a response. At least it feels that way until someone stumbles in on the verge of tears, having just heard that a comic friend of hers committed suicide. We scramble to google this unknown name, realize we recognize the face. At least until a bullet was put through it in selfish despair. No matter how we want to halt the whole procession, to mourn, we're laughing a few hours later about a 12-foot Animatronic Jesus and buttfucking, our diaphragms clenched. And so passes another emotion.

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?