Mike Simonetti Interview

In the February issue of SPIN is a small feature I wrote about "The Return of Disco." Originally hoping to touch upon its tentacular hold on the culture. Not enough space to run every form its taken in the 21st century though, much less many of the ideas proffered by my interview subjects, so I'm posting transcripts here. This is with Italians Do It Better mainman Mike Simonetti.

Were you a Jersey hard rock kid?

Growing up, I was a hardcore kid. I used to go to shows at CBs in the late 80s.

What do you remember about disco?

In the last 80s, I didn't really think about it. I was into hardcore and rap like Public Enemy. When I got to college, I started getting into funk and stuff. I got a job working at a nightclub, which got me into the dance music scene.

What struck you about it?

I spent all my time in the city. I liked going out to nightclubs. It was fun. I was underage. I used to just go to clubs and work at this club called Mars. Disco wasn't really cool in the late 80s. there was one party that Michael Alig threw, Disco 2000. It was a novelty. Disco and funk records were rare. It was hard to find a James Brown record. I foyu had disco records, but I didn't have any.

What did you remember about disco as a kid?

I thought disco was cheesy when I was a hardcore kid. When I got older, I started to realize where all the samples for all the rap music I listened to and all the house music, I worked at mostly house clubs. All the samples came from disco.

What did you get into?

Ummm,

Who were you attracted to?

When you get into any kind of new music, pre-internet, it's kind of tough. Before the internet, you'd get information from people you knew. You couldn't read about things. There's no encyclopedia for disco. Disco was cheesy back then but in the nightclub scene it wasn't, it was the basis of everything. Paradise Garage closed in '85 maybe? Disco wasn't really on anyone's radar. No one cared about it. the people who would play it. I'd hear DJs playing classic disco, not cheesy shit, deep stuff.

Mainly at the gay clubs. I used to be a promoter, Gay Nights played the disco. I guess that's how it's always been: All the good disco is gay.

Which is why it's so maligned in the US.

Totally.

A weird denial of sexuality.

That was the golden age of hip-hop, De La Soul, Black Sheep, that's what people wanted to hear that kind of stuff. No one cared about disco. I had a party in '89, early 90s, I just promoted it. it was a disco party, but no one really cared. People wanted to hear dancehall.

Did you go to the Loft?

Not back then. I had no idea it existed until much later.

You know about DJ Harvey?

No, not back then. At Mars we had in-house DJs, Bobby Converse, doing house music. Funkmaster Flex was a resident. Moby was another resident. He had long hair and played house. It was like that. Keoki became Dee-Lite’s DJ. This was way before any of it was popular. Club kids were big. I used to...a normal guy. It was crazy. No one played disco. If there were Loft parties. I was at the Loft a few months ago. Red Zone, The World, Palladium, that's where I was going. I had no idea they were legendary clubs.

Doing Troubleman, did you feel a split? Two separate worlds?

Yeah, there were a couple of dudes into hardcore and stuff. It wasn't really, I would wear Born Against tee shirts. I was into both. No one cared about anything like that. A lot of that crappy hardcore was very popular. The thing about New York, it's New York, you expect it to be into weird stuff if you go out and stuff.

Let's skip ahead. At what point are you becoming more a disco DJ? When does it start turning?

I started the label. I was putting out hardcore stuff. I was into rap and funk and stuff. As time grew on, I got into post-punk, Rough Trade stuff. I was into funk, I was into rap, I was into punk, when disco-punk came. Tons of groups like that. It was the perfect mixture of everything. Erase Errata, it was just sitting there. some weird all-girls band. As it was catching on, I was DJing more and more, rap, funk, but I didn't have many disco records. It wasn't the biggest thing in the world. No one wanted to hear them. They wanted to hear Donna Summer.

I started Contort Yourself, DJ post-punk till 2001. When 9/11 hit, Knitting Factory closed down, I stopped djing then. It happened really slow. I went from playing post-punk to…I got deeper into disco stuff and less into disco-punk and rap. Rap was getting shitty too at the time. by late 90s, I was just playing disco and house. I had a party at Nublu. It was fun.
At that point, Glass Candy, Chromatics, were more rock, glam.

Back then, I was putting out Glass Candy before Erase Errata. I put out a split seven inch. I called up Johnny and talked and talked and have been working together ever since. They were always a rock band. Glass Candy turned into a disco band because it was really hard for Johnny to find musicians to work with that could put up with his rigorous work ethic. He works really hard. He's always in the studio, he's always touring. That mixed with realizing how shitty disco-punk has become, Avril Lavigne doing shit. We both saw it coming. We got to get out of it.

He was always into, he's really into new rap stuff, synthy rap stuff. Some Glass Candy has similar synth lines to southern rap, the fucked-up shit. Chromatics was a straight rock band. I think Adam and the band moved up to Portland. Adam was one of the only dudes that oculd put up with the work. He's always down for being in the studio.

For Johnny, was it coming from Italo? Southern rap aspect?

I think it was both. You should ask Johnny. Knowing him for so long, he was into disco. Very glam, you know. Disco-glam more than anything. they're still glammy. Johnny won't consider it Italo, it's more Euro, spacy-disco thing.

And Italo?

Italo is kind of shitty. Most Italo sucks.

It's a mixture of both. Rap production sensibility, the minimal sounds, beat and one sample, very minimal, scrap and sparse. He's into the vocal aspect.

I'll ask him about the Italo aspects. What he vibes on.

A lot of people think we're an Italo label. Personally as a DJ, I'm into straight deep disco stuff, rocky disco, rock sounding. I've never really played Italo, I don't even like Italo. I like synthy disco especially, but not Italo. If you listen to Italo, it's like really shitty girl vocals, dude vocals. It's really cheesy, Italo is Italian pop music for the most part.

Why do you think it's returning?

I don’t know. It's weird because, I really don't know. I talked to Johnny about it, a lot of the people into disco and DJs these days are ex-punk rockers, ex-indie rockers. I think indie rock is kinda boring. It's not the same it used to be, where you can buy a seven inch. You can buy a 12" by some unknown guy. There's a lot of shitty dance music being made, but there always was, I guess. More and more 12"s are coming out. There is a revival. Disco-punk is mainstream, people are really into it. who knows? I don't know how I even feel about it.

I grew up going to nightclubs, so I've always been around dance music. I never danced at nightclubs. I used to hang out next to the DJ, I just did. I was a record collector and I wanted to see what he played. I didn't give a fuck about dancing. I liked hearing records. They didn't mind me hanging in the booth. Moby would play Liquid Liquid, cuz no one had that 12". That’s how I got into it. Johnny is a production guy, he’s into producing music. Italo, as much as the music sucks, some really good Italo has the best production. Claudio Simonetti has great production. Classic Italo. A bunch of other dudes, I don't know how they got into it. They don't know anything about hardcore! You talk to Todd Terje. They came up with dance music. If you go to Norway, you'll see it. it's a pretty weird place. It's so crazy what's coming out of there. It's its own world up there.

Morgan Geist Interview

In the February issue of SPIN is a small feature I wrote about "The Return of Disco." Originally hoping to touch upon its tentacular hold on the culture, from Oslo-humidified space disco to Italians Do It Better-brand icy disco, from Sally Shapiro to the thriving culture of disco-edits, touching upon such things as the secret history of disco and punk, as well as how edits have changed: from the epic narrative of the form in the golden age (see the Danny Krivit edit of Cymande's "Bra" for example) versus the internet-abetted present (see that Dirty edit of JJ Cale's "Ride Me High," which doesn't make it a disco track so much as squelch all the other rhythmic playfulness of the man's music down into one stolid (but still sleazy) beat).

Not enough inches at SPIN though, meaning the piece just focuses on Italo in the 21st century. I conducted heaps of interviews though, and will post them for most of this month. Here is one with Morgan Geist...

In your email you cautioned that your responses would be bitter.

This was a joke. Sort of. The bitterness extends far beyond disco and is a natural response to 13 years of owning a record label and being forced to deal with thieves, liars and egos to make ends meet.

Do you believe that there has been a "Return of Disco"?

Compared to when I started making records in 1994, disco has become acceptable as a reference point. You can admit you like disco now and people still think youre OK - maybe even cool or hip. But lets not forget that disco was about dancing, among other things. Try finding a disco night in NYC with lots of people dancing today. It doesnt really exist. Plus, the times have changed, for better or worse...the culture is totally different and the idea of a discotheque may not be viable any longer.

Do you feel left out of it in some way?

Well, I just dont think my feelings about disco music and various related music really align with any perceived“return. In other words, I dont think what I love about disco music and culture is compatible with what I imagine is the impetus for people talking about disco.

Speaking purely in terms of records, the underground dance music market today is fuelled almost exclusively by people doing disco bootlegs and disco edits (I'm speaking of disco in the broadest sense – from acoustic/organic disco all the way to electronic, Italo/Euro disco and danceable R&B and new wave). In my opinion, these re-edit and bootleg records are incredibly uncreative and lazy, not to mention arrogant – taking someone else's work to make 90%-100% of "your" new record. It's not even like hip-hop's early days, where you needed a skilled DJ or tape-editing skills. You can make these edits in seconds now on your laptop with little to no skill or ear. Some people think that's great, but I'm bored with the results. And I think if it were a true return, people would be able to accept the original disco records rather than people having to edit the original spirit out of the stuff. (Granted, sometimes a song does have a truly awful part or too-brief fantastic part, and an edit is necessary...this was indeed part of the original 12" culture way back when!)

It's ironic to me, since I began my own personal "return to disco" as a reaction to dance music's lazy abuse of the stuff in the '90s. Back then, people (including myself) were taking samples and loops of disco and putting huge kick drums underneath and filtering the loops and calling their own. I saw this as excruciatingly boring, uncreative and disrespectful to the incredible sources (to be sure, the first time I heard it I liked it...until I heard the original song where the loop came from). So I started Metro Area as a reaction to this stuff, to understand the energy and musicality and creative process behind those original, exciting disco records rather than just stealing chunks of them. Plus hell, I just couldn't get enough of the stuff...listening on the radio, dancing to it, buying records.

But now, almost 10 years after this reaction to filtered disco loops, I find it ironic that we're back to the same place that made me seek out real disco in the first place (minus the filters). A lot of these edits and re-works take out the "bad" parts of the originals, so there are no emotional dynamics left. People just loop the "best" part of the records...it's kind of whitewashing the whole thing, or making it safe for instant gratification culture. Head straight to the musical orgasm, and then repeat the orgasm over and over and over again until it is rendered meaningless and monotonous. I prefer to keep the foreplay in, the teasing in...even the awkwardness in! It's part of the whole experience. Otherwise the record or DJ set has no dynamics or contrast.

Why do you think the music was so maligned for so long yet is now experiencing a rennaissance of sorts?

Generation gaps. Fashion. Record dorks. Supply and demand. Sex.

Do you remember the disco craze when you were a kid?

I just remember the disco of the radio, and I remember disco clubs (speaking of whitewashed!) in my hometown of Wayne, NJ. The Strawberry Patch, Gasbar's...places that New Yorkers would have thrown up over.

What did you love about the music?

If the music appealed to me – regardless of the genre – there was something in it I loved. Simple as that. I could say the rhythms or melodies, but you could say that about Strauss or Public Enemy.

My first disco record was probably Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust" or, if you're being liberal with the definition, Human League. Maybe Deep Purple, actually...I think that qualifies as disco now, somehow.

Presuming that you grew up around "rock" people, was there a pleasure to be had from liking something despised like disco?

Oh yes. There was great pleasure in being told I listened to "fag music." I loved every minute of it, especially in my teens, when one is so confident in oneself and one isn't afraid of kids in Black Sabbath shirts beating the shit out of one.

When did you feel the tide began to turn to where the music was being re-examined?

Again, it's generational. At least in New York, I felt like Daniel Wang and his friends, and to a slightly lesser extent Darshan Jesrani and myself, were early re-examiners of our generation. But if you speak to people like Bobby Viteritti or David Mancuso or Francois K, they'd say we were very late to the game. It depends on your perspective.

Are you surprised by the turn?

Eh.

Or do you think it's mostly a crock of shit, said revival?

Yes and no, but mostly yes. Look at the stuff that's really popular: it's music that uses the idea of disco, the fashion or imagined nostalgia of disco, the WORD "disco," rather than disco itself. I could name 10 bands that have the word "disco" in their name and they all sound nothing like disco...the worst offenders are nearly rock, completely hyper-hetero, monotonous music, and the worst part is GIRLS seem to LOVE IT! I always thought women were smarter than men, but girls coming up to me requesting this stuff is making me second-guess that assessment.

I was talking with James Murphy of LCD Soundsytem about DJing. James and I are very different in terms of where we came from musically and what kind of music we make or like. But we have shared the same experience, over and over, of being booked to DJ by people who imagine they like what we'll play when in actuality they like the idea of what they think we would play. We get on and start to play disco records, and kids just stare at us like we we're fucking Martians and start requesting bands that have "disco" in the name (especially in France). Kids think they like or understand disco, or "electro" or whatever they are calling it, but it's actually their own perception of what disco is, not actually what disco is, or was. It's akin to me telling my 13-year-old sister that techno was created by black people in Detroit and her laughing, thinking I was making a joke. It wasn't a joke! But her perception of techno was formed by totally different cultural cues.

Every generation needs to make music their own, in their own way. I'm just as guilty, so I should shut the fuck up and enjoy life. I didn't go to any disco clubs, and I didn't really fully understand the music or cultural context until my mid-20s. So who am I to judge?

There were married couples looking domestic and bored with each other in the midst of their travels; there were small parties and large parties, and lone individuals dining solemnly or feasting boisterously, but all thinking, conversing, joking, or scowling as was their wont at home; and just as intelligently receptive of new impressions as their trunks upstairs. Hence forth they would be labeled as having passed through this and that place, and so would be their luggage. They would cherish this distinction of their persons, and preserve the gummed tickets on their port manteaus as documentary evidence, as the only permanent trace of their improving enterprise.

-Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

'Is it true,' she said, 'that England is like a dream?...She said this place London is like a cold dark dream sometimes. I want to wake up.'
'Well,' I answered annoyed, 'that is precisely how your beautiful island seems to me, quite unreal and like a dream.'
'But how can rivers and mountains and the sea be unreal?'
'And how can millions of people, their houses and their streets be unreal?'
'More easily,' she said, 'much more easily. Yes a big city must be like a dream.'
'No, this is the unreal and like a dream,' I thought.

-Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

Sometimes I can't help the feeling that I'm
Living a life of illusion
And oh, why can't we let it be
And see thru the hole in this wall of confusion
I just can't help the feeling I'm
Living a life of illusion

Pow! Right between the eyes
Oh, how nature loves her little surprises
Wow! It all seems so logical now
It's just one of her better disguises
And it comes with no warning
Nature loves her little surprises
Continual crisis

Hey, don't you know it's a waste of your day
Caught up in endless solutions
That have no meaning, just another hunch
Based upon jumping conclusions
Caught up in endless solutions
Backed up against a wall of confusion
Living a life of illusion.

-Joe Walsh, "Life of Illusion"

It was a strange and melancholy illusion, ordered half-consciously like all our illusions, which I suspect only to be visions of remote unattainable truth, seen dimly. This was, indeed, one of the lost, forgotten, unknown places of the earth; I had looked under its obscure surface; and I felt that when tomorrow I had left it forever, it would slip out of existence to live only in my memory till I myself passed into oblivion. I have that feeling about me now; perhaps it is that feeling which has incited me to tell you the story, to try and hand over to you, as it were, its very existence, its reality – the truth, disclosed in a moment of illusion.

-Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

beddha 5

beddha 4

beddha 3

beddha 2

beddha 1

utram bibis? aquam an undam?

betajing 4

People have continually asked --with a palpable sense of foreboding-- about the rise of China, as if two weeks spent living in dive bars might cast luminance through the carcinogenic pall. They ask about Anti-Americanism, as if I might be able to parse spoken Chinese as I walked down the back alleys of Shanghai.

Who knows how it is with "the Other." Lord knows that when discussing the matter with Europeans dealing with this wholly alien culture that they were in the midst of, they often opted to use insects as an analogy. Not so much the teeming numbers (though that can no doubt apply) but more the methodology of the Chinese glimpsed on the street: tireless, strong, dilligent.

Beware such metaphors though. Take the perception made by a Japanese soldier, Azuma Shiro, after the fall of the Chinese capital Nanking to Japanese forces in December of 1937, which led to the "Rape of Nanking" that winter. He noted, with palpable disgust in his observation: "They all walked in droves, like ants crawling on the ground. They looked like a bunch of homeless people, with ignorant expressions on their faces." No longer perceiving human beings, men convert into animals.

Misconcpetions abound on either side. Some of it is lost in translation. If you cannot voice the vowel just so, no taxi driver can possibly understand where you want to go or what street name you wish to say. And examples of "Chinglish" abound. Shopping one day for bootleg DVDs leads to a treasure trove of the always-excellent "Griterion Collection" series of foreign films. And who knew that Dolph Lundgren still made films?

Of course, reading the back cover blurbs gives pause. English misspellings are one thing, but certain sentiments get voiced too. Here's one that sums up what I fear is the standard perception of America, from a movie otherwise forgotten: "Oh actually, what am I saying? It'll be a bloody surprise if it ever comes out in North America properly, given the hypocritical, righteous atmosphere of self-delusion that currently permeates this society."

bhumibeta

Far from the gaze of Chairman Mao and Kris Kringle, I am now being watched by two other fatherly figures, that of the Buddha and His Majesty the King, Bhumibol Adulyadej. After being force-fed the benevolence of Mao, I was reticent to accept HM. Thai Airways Magazine devoted an entire issue to HM, setting off every cult of personality, anti-monarchy alarm in my head. He gazes up from the currency, and on every street corner stand frames gilded and strewn with banners. Surely it was but a mask of benevolence, no? I tried to keep doubt in my mind. That is, until I bought a double disc of his compositions. At 7-Eleven! Right next to the green jelly grass juice!

The pictorial evidence of his greatness is overwhelming: he held an audience with G.I. Elvis Presley, jammed with the likes of Stan Getz and Louis Armstrong. He's also an amateur photographer. I wish he were my king, in much the same way I wish Buddha were my savior. Reclining Buddha (also on his death bed) is far less gruesome than ol' Iron Nails.

Above is the most inspirational picture of the King I can find, one that will go straight to the desk shrine upon my return: pencil in hand, a bead of sweat running off his nose, wholly lost in thought.

betajing 3

Stemming from my experience on the Great Wall, extending infinitely both forward and back, yet wholly in the moment, I learn that Chinese language has neither past tense nor future tense. It too is totally in the present.

Another lesson in Chinese language: it behooves one not to use vocab builders like "Chinese government," "Tibet," "Falun Gong," much less names of Chinese officials, in any correspondence, lest suddenly "the Internet" no longer work. Myself, I got kicked out of a Gmail account and Blogger for much of my China connection due to such an indiscretion. And forget looking at BBC News (curiously, one could click on the New York Times, though my paranoia was in the red so that I didn't dare click on the "Choking on Growth" series of articles about China's Industrial Revolution growing pains). An acquaintance tells that during one big political event, access to Hotmail and Facebook countrywide was denied for months on end.

Mao's visage can be seen, resplendent and golden, at the gates of the Forbidden City and in clutches of yuan, yet the main face in China is that of Santa Claus. Clad in red, smugly benevolent and always watching you, he winks at you from every shop window, hinting at the thin veil between communism/capitalism. Or, as The Economist put it recently:

betajing 2

When we arrive at the bus depot in Beijing, we no doubt look like pigeons: fat, clueless, cooing. Make that giant piegons, as we tower over all on the sidewalk like the marks that we are. A man begins hassling us with that ever-friendly "Hello! Hello!" and before we know it, we're herded into the party van. It's the only vehicle that can accomodate us six-foot plus pale behemoths, raised on corn and beef. As we make our way out of the lead skies of Beijing and into the Chinese version of the 'burbs, meaning acres of greenhouses for growing strawberries, still intact hutongs, and coming soon gas stations, our driver talks about how slow he must drive with our body weight. Struggle upwards into the hills that soon become mountains, which while immense, turn out to be unnamed. That such mountainous objects can go sans word is but part of the China experience.

Finally, the haze clears and we can perceive vistas, as well as draw deeper breaths. A roadside host offers us perfumed green tea with chrysanthamum pedals that may be the most perfect drink I've tasted, before we get sold tee shirts and bottles of plum wine. Our host asks me if I believe in Jesus Christ, pressing his hands together in feigned prayer. I answer yes and he explains to me that it is how he feels about Mao. Try to remember what currency features JC's benevolent and fatherly gaze upon it. Our ride continues and we soon stumble out of the van, slightly woozy on plum wine as we start up a hill. Already breathless, the dirt turns to stone steps and then we find ourselves atop that motley assemblage of barricades that has cohered in lore into the Great Wall of China.

From such a vantage point, I grasp what infinity might actually be like, to be extending both forward and back beyond the realms of all sensory perceptions. Everything fails from such a precipice: body and breath and language and vision and touch and mortality. My words are like those invaders from the North: attempts to penetrate this barrier, to capture it or accurately describe it are doomed to failure, to total defeat. I can feel every single hand, each ascending with its load, one brick at a time. It is a weight I have never felt before. To say one feels like an ant in such a presence is far too presumptuous.

Much like the human haze that surrounds the imperial city, rendering its skyscrapers, stadiums, temples, and anthill building blocks unreal and disintegrated, so too does this fortress of absolute solitude enter the world of the imaginary and dream-prisoned the moment its walls are back out of sight, enshrouded once more in the distant fog of memory. Could I have really been there?

betajing

I cannot frame in words the sensation of being 36,500 feet over the North Pole, the temp hitting -81 degrees outside, nor can I properly convey the dread of waking up from pill-aided airplane slumber only to realize that there are eight more freaking hours to go before arriving in Beijing and there's no way I can watch The Bourne Ultimatum for a fourth time.

Beijing greets us with images of Yao Ming and Jackie Chan on every corridor. Everywhere you look, there hangs an Olympic veil. Kiosk ads namecheck it, the Olympic Stadium looms large off the highway, construction for other related buildings is everywhere, and even the shrubbery is sheared into the mascot's shape. Of course, that's what we're supposed to see. Someone whispers of poorer neighborhoods cordoned off from outsider eyes. Well, they needn't try so hard. So far, the trip has been but a circuit between the hotel and club.

Seeing Chinese punk bands is a curious affair. There's a prevailance of mimicry for the most part. I'm told that one of the bigger bands around has their Gang of Four act perfected to a tee. One band I catch considers themselves "post-rock" and I must admit, they have captured all the plodding stoic stolidity of Explosions in the Sky and Slint perfectly. The best part of them, aside from their matching frowns, is that the main guitarist rocks sweatpants onstage.

It's harder figuring if the air quality is worse inside the clubs, where everyone chains smokes, or outside, where smokestacks puff through the night and a simple walk down for some street food (oh, man) leads to shortness of breath. Equally hard to figure out is which is more awesome, broadcast Rockets games and inscrutable commercials featuring Yao (one has him blocking a bullet with his bare hands, which was meant for some giant elephant on the basketball court) or CCTV 6, which apparently runs nothing but kung-fu flicks 24/7.

betatitis b

Having just shot $400 worth of crap into my left arm, I'm just about ready for my trip. Tetanus! Diphtheria! Typhoid! Influenza! Hepatitis A! All sorts of dormant and weakened viruses stream through my blood right now. It just caps a week spent thinking about retroviruses, and that New Yorker article about reconstructing ancient viruses. As each needle got jammed into my shoulder, I took solace in the news that "our bodies are littered with the shards of such retroviruses, fragments of the chemical code," and the factoid that 8% of the human genome is made up of such scrap. Of course, I could feel it rise to 10% in me as I have since developed a sore shoulder and the sniffles.

It also makes me think of retroviruses in musical terms, as I've spent a great deal of time lately listening to disco edits, that phenom of finding obscure cuts, disassembling them, then tightening and brightening the track for the 21st century dancefloor (or chatboard, as that's where these seem most popular). Pilooski's dirty disco edits are a notable culprit, chopping up Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons so that it more resembles "The Rockafeller Skank" or else making the lone single from Jackson Jones, who sounds like the Caribbean version of Bryan Ferry, and make it feel extra woozy on "I Feel Good Put Your Pants On." Funny how such strands can float along, dead and dormant for decades, only to take root finally and proceed to blossom once more in a more fertile host. Vashti Bunyan is perhaps an even better example, but I'm not quite sick of either, by any means.

Wholly unrelated, a friend of mine produced this mash-up supreme:

beta on the newsstand

For that cold toilet seat in December, there are reviews of Ricardo Villalobos, White Magic, Sightings, Castanets, and Sunburned Hand of the Man in the new Spin and a slew of stuff for Paste.


Michael Hurley
Ancestral Swamp
Gnomonsong
****
Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan summed up America’s kookiest living songster best: “I've never encountered anybody in less of a hurry than Michael Hurley; he always seems a second or two behind, like he's not quite seeing or hearing the same things we are.” Covered by the likes of the Holy Modal Rounders, Violent Femmes, and Cat Power, the perpetually itinerant Hurley no doubt exists on another plane entirely. Over the course of five decades, Hurley’s languorous songs have lounged just outside of blues, country, and folk, and his first for Devendra Banhart’s Gnomonsong imprint is no different. Spacy and sloooow, nudged on by guests like Tara Jane O’Neil, a fiddle snores through “When I Get Back Home,” while the electric piano on “Lonesome Graveyard” is basically somnambulant. Within his rasped lyrics, cowboys, crapshooters, and little green fellows abound (what, no werewolves this time?), making for some of the weirdest nap dreams imaginable.


Fraser & DeBolt (with Ian Guenther)
s/t
Fallout
**1/2
Earlier this year, a hushed cover of “The Waltze of the Tennis Players” appeared on Philly folk singer Meg Baird’s debut (warranting her a “Four to Watch” slot). Written by the obscure Canadian duo of Ian Fraser & Daisy DeBolt, it brought attention to the neglected act’s self-titled major label debut, which saw release in 1971 and disappeared soon after. Reissued on CD by a dubious imprint (and taken from a vinyl copy), it reveals not just what Canadian country music might sound like, but that the couple is painfully artless as regards their singing voices. Fraser’s is a plank-thick drawl, DeBolt’s prone to yelps. Adding to the mix is the wheezing fiddle work of Ian Guenther, which on numbers like “Armstrong Tourest Rest Home” is teeth-gnashing. The off-kilter combination works well on the woozy “Waltze,” while their cover of “Don’t Let Me Down” is particularly ragged.


War/Dance
*** ½
“In our daily life, there must be music.” So speaks Dominic, a 14-year-old Patongo School student in northern Uganda, about to compete in the National Music Competition. On the surface, War/Dance seems like any other competition movie: students practice, learn about themselves, then perform on the big stage, though it’s doubtful such a trip to the capital city ever involve armed escort. Patongo, situated in a refugee camp, overflows with orphans and others displaced by boogiemen rebel fighters, solace found only in music and dance. The Fines were fortunate to capture the school’s first ever foray to the festival, as well as compelling children. Tears streaming down his face in extreme close-up, Dominic recounts how he too had to kill so as to not be killed by these rebels. While the nightmarish flashbacks need not such a heavy hand (the stories are harrowing enough), the film shows how music alleviates that daily violence.

Nanking
****
Despite The Ken Burns Effect on WWII, the story of what occurred in China’s then-capital city of Nanking won’t be familiar to most Westerners, in that it took place during the winter of 1937, two years before the invasion of Poland and four years before Pearl Harbor brought the war home. By the late thirties though, in alliance with Nazi Germany, Japan was already on the megalomaniac march, invading and toppling Shanghai before turning its bloodlust onto Nanking. This documentary (with parts read by Stephen Dorff, Mariel Hemingway, and Woody Harrelson) details how an all-out slaughter of the country’s poor populace was averted by strange bedfellows: both Christian missionaries and Nazi businessmen set up a neutral zone to stem the bloodshed of the innocent. This harrowing documentary captures the ultimate futility of such an effort (200K murdered, some 20K reported rapes in the first month alone) along with rare 16mm footage that won’t soon be forgotten.


Berlin Alexanderplatz
****
“(Rainer Werner) Fassbinder can only be described in contradictions…gentle and brutal, tender and cynical, self-sacrificing and egocentric.” So spoke Christian Braad Thomsen, longtime friend of the prolific, doomed Fassbinder, the enfant terrible of West German cinema from the late sixties until his death from an overdose in the early eighties. Of course, his untimely death was also one of exhaustion, as Fassbinder’s frenetic work pace --directing some 41 movies in 13 years-- would make the prolific Steven Soderburgh (not to mention most porno directors) seem lazy in comparison. His immense body of work revels in such contradictions some two decades on.

Berlin Alexanderplatz is one of Fassbinder’s final efforts, completed and aired on German television in 1980. It consumed Fassbinder’s creative attentions for the better part of a year, which is saying something, considering he could churn out upwards of five movies in that time span. Much more than that though, the early modernist book by Alfred Döblin about protagonist Franz Biberkopf resounded for a teenaged Fassbinder, who told interviewer Klaus Eder in 1980 that he could perceive himself within Franz, “a person who goes around for much too long trying to believe in goodness in this world…though he actually knows better.” So struck was young Fassbinder by this work that he took “Franz” as the name of his alter ego thereafter.

Set in the Weimar era in Berlin, after the end of World War I and before the rise of the Third Reich, we first meet Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht) as he’s released from prison after serving a four-year bid for beating his prostitute girlfriend to death in a violent rage. It’s an instance that haunts not just him but us as well, the gruesome scene repeated often, each time with a different voiceover narration. Staying true to Döblin’s novel, which in the spirit of contemporary tome Ulysses took snatches of words from other sources, we hear excerpts from the Book of Job, Ecclesiastics, the story of Abraham, livestock reports, sexual education manuals, and Longfellow drift past.

What no doubt interests Fassbinder more than the modernist appropriation though is how a man like Franz, a malevolent pimp turned kindhearted simp, traverses this terrain. Crippled by the unemployment rate, its citizens seem to have few options: the men are either petty thieves or pimps, the women are prostitutes. Struggling to stay honest, ex-con Franz vows: “Even if the world is full of meanness, full of filth, I swore to myself, I’m finished with it.” Through the earliest installments, he keeps his word, but after attempts to peddle neckties, newspapers, and Fascist literature for an honest living fails, soon finds himself drawn back into the underworld by his new best friend, a baleful stuttering pimp named Reinhold (Gottfried John).

Pushed out of a getaway car after a heist, Franz loses an arm, rendering him an invalid, though most citizens chalk him up as being yet another one of the Great War’s casualties. His sole salvation comes in the guise of the doll-like Mieze (Barbara Sukowa), a similarly wide-eyed girl almost goofy in her innocence, even if she takes up with gentlemen callers to pay the bills. Unable to work, Franz cannot help but to become a pimp once more. Things are irretrievably set in motion and it ultimately comes to pass that his fate is not escapable.

Clocking in at thirteen episodes, with an additional two-hour epilogue that verges on the hallucinatory, Berlin Alexanderplatz makes for nearly sixteen hours of Fassbinder. Safe to say that this set is not for initiates; even those familiar with the man’s oeuvre, be it classics of 70s European cinema like Effi Briest, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, or The Marriage of Maria Braun, will still have their work cut out for them here. The pacing is deliberate and slow, the format of the television mini-series giving Fassbinder ample time to let scenes unfurl at an excruciatingly slow pace. While an awkward moment in a Fassbinder film (and believe me, there are plenty in each film) might last for but one scene, in Alexanderplatz, they unfurl at upwards of a half-hour, as imminent and agonizing as a steamroller advancing. Tropes like action and plot advancement were never Fassbinder’s concern so much as the cruelty of mankind to one another, with love itself --to quote an early film-- being “colder than death.” It’s near absolute zero in Berlin Alexanderplatz.