Cheated

Speaking of Johnny Rotten, I finally got around to watching The Filth and the Fury the other night. I saw The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle ("The Film that Incriminates its Audience!") years ago, in the days of midnight movies, and loved it. I knew, of course, that it wasn't the whole story—but for years it was the only version available.

It's astonishing how recontextualization can change the effect of even iconic images. Watching the footage of the Pistols' last gig in San Francisco—the encore of "No Fun," where the band hammers relentlessly at those two chords while Lydon crouches at the front of the stage, staring down the audience with those gawdawful spooky eyes of his—this footage that has stood as a fearsome exemplar of Lydon's anger and negativity, and of his genius as a confrontational anti-frontman—watching it now, I swear to God the poor bastard looks like he's about to cry.

Here's this kid, barely out of his teens, half a world away from home, who knows he's losing the only friend he's got to opiates and treachery; he's sick with guilt. That feral crouch looks like a posture of defeat. It's heartbreaking, and that's an adjective I never thought I'd associate with the Sex Pistols.

(Roger Ebert's review is fascinating: he actually wrote the screenplay for the never-completed Pistols film Who Killed Bambi?, which was to have been directed by... Russ Meyer?)

This Is Who We Are

"So, Lance, baby, let's do lunch tomorrow. Jim and Darren have put together a script for a Millennium reunion movie and I just know you're gonna love it!"

"No can do, Tony—there's an order in for ten salad bowls and a serving platter, and I've gotta get 'em out by Friday."

(found on Fraction's forum)

When the Work Was New (It Was Easier To Do)

I've been digging through a box of old cassettes recently, and find myself again listening to the Golden Palominos—specifically, to their middle period, after the free-jazz phase but before the ambient funk of This Is How It Feels and their eventual transmogrification into, essentially, the backing soundscape for spoken-word artist Nicole Blackman: that is, to the albums Visions of Excess and Blast of Silence.

Forgotten heroes, these guys and gals. With the rhythm section of studio drummer Anton Fier and bassist/impresario Bill Laswell as the only constant, the Palominos were a master class, a revolving door, a songwriters' camp, a busman's holiday for musicians from a baffling array of sub-genres—legends and up-and-comers alike. And on these two albums, at least, it sounded like everybody was having fun (although the project would take on a doomier vibe in years to come, particularly when Blackman came on board). At the time, the band's sound was dismissed by some as downtown arena rock—Aerosmith for the avant-garde: similar charges were lobbed at PiL's generically-titled Album (which, according to the format in which you bought it, is also known as Cassette or Compact Disc), which was produced and arranged by Laswell. But the Palominos, everyone agrees, were Anton Fier's baby.

And what a baby! A project where Jack Bruce and Johnny Rotten could rub shoulders, and it could all sound of a piece, could all sound like a band—not like a collection of unrelated cameos (cf. the last few Santana albums).

Just look at some of the names here: Richard Thompson, Lydia Kavanagh, Jody Harris , Lori Carson, Bootsy Collins, Nicky Skopelitis, Michael Stipe, Arto Lindsay, Sneaky Pete Kleinow, Don Dixon, T-Bone Burnett, Peter Blegvad, Robert Kidney, Amanda Kramer, Henry Kaiser, Bob Mould, Matthew Sweet, Syd Straw, and Bernie Worrell, among others: the collective résumé is nothing short of astonishing.

There are chops a-plenty on display, but this is no muso wankfest: it's all in service to the songs—mostly autumnal pop and rock that manages to sound both snarly and melancholy: originals written collectively by whoever happened to be in the room at the time, plus oddball covers by the likes of Little Feat and Moby Grape, even Ennio Morricone. Loose but expert: casual but not sloppy. Wonderful stuff. And the moment for work like this will, I think, not come again any time soon.

Swede Child O' Mine

Music, again: give a listen to the Best Band in the World.

Dig that crazy nyckelharpa and then tell me that Daddy can't rock no more, you bastards. Come on and try, if you think you're hard enough. Come on!

The Harrow

With this invention, Franz Kafka's dreamlife comes a step closer to reality.

(found third-hand via Die Puny Humans)

Is it terribly, terribly awful of me...

...that when I glanced at the photograph in this story, my first thought was, "Geez, Woody Allen has really let himself go"?

Yesterday, When I Was Young

There's a recent Barbelith topic on hitting your thirties and falling out of touch with the pop music scene: and out of all the blather and self-defensiveness contained therein, the pride of Shrewsbury, E. Randy Dupre was (as ever) the Voice of Reason. Leave Youth culture to the youth, he suggested, and spend some time educating yourself in all the great music you missed the first time around. And so I've been doing, for the last few years, discovering the pleasures of great neglected Pop.

Consequently my love for Dusty Springfield has grown to embarrassing levels, I fear. Couple weeks ago I drove down to the video store in the fine twilight, and was cruising slowly into the parking lot, windows wide, stereo up, the strings and accordion gathering steam under Dusty's burnished wail: now understand I was in a ballcap and shades and hoodie, here—my usual workaday uniform, and not something about which I am in the least self-conscious—and driving a station wagon.

And what was the song that had me lost in rapture?

I ran so fast that time and youth at last ran out
I never stopped to think what life was all about
And every conversation I can now recall
concerned itself with me, and nothing else at all

The absurdity of my situation only struck me when I passed a little know of baggy-jeaned sk8ter types, also in ballcaps and hoodies, and me palpably an Old Fart, apparently aping the fashions of Da Yoof and listening to what is indisputably Old People Music (it is such by design, as is apparent from that lyric). Their smirky heads turned blockily towards me, and I felt briefly like an idiot.

I must have seemed extremely punchable: indeed, had I suspected for a moment that I was listening to this music in some ironic Tarantinoesque space-age-bachelor-pad hipster-flipster way, I'd have been tempted to take a shot myself.

And, you know, even ten years ago I'd have never believed myself capable of falling so in love with a song written by Charles Aznavour: that guy was joke, wasn't he? a cartoon froggie who popped up now and then on Carson, a real-life Pepe LePew, a faded pop holdover from the old days, before the development of the concept of "taste." Or so I thought.

But goddamit, I know what I know, and it's something that a teenager, all jacked-up on adrenaline and aggression, is not yet equipped to understand: that some of this music is really fucking good—that 1960s AngloPop (as opposed to British Invasion, which tended more towards the rock-ist side of things: AngloPop flew in largely under the radar, with the British Invasion vanguard providing covering fire. The distinction between the two genres can be hazy when one gets to the twee fringe of the rock side, i.e., Freddy and the Dreamers or the Dave Clark Five, but a rough rule of division, with many exceptions of course, is that bands = rock, while singers = pop) is astonishingly well-crafted and emotive music, beautifully-arranged and produced.

Seriously. Dusty Springfield's stuff holds up as well as Sinatra's best Columbia work—in fact I would argue it's even better, because (a) it covers a greater stylistic range—Dusty sounded just as comfortable on rock and soul-style material (see Dusty In Memphis for evidence) as well as the big productions, while Sinatra's takes on "the kid's stuff" were always awkward and slightly bizarre: "Ring-a-ding-ding, Mrs. Robinson"—huh? And while Sinatra may have thought, as he said, that George Harrison's "Something" was the greatest love song of the 20th Century, he was unable to convey that connection to the material in a convincing way—some element of the song's essence simply eluded him. Which leads to point (b), namely that Sinatra was already Old, and far more open to the charge of being Old People's Music, when Dusty was in her heyday. He was Old People's Music then, and only Ancient People listen to him now unironically. Well, that's harsh: but I can listen to Dusty without protective irony, and feel like I'm getting quality product. And (c) she lacks Sinatra's odious false bravado, all the baggage of personality that made Sinatra Sinatra and thus easily hatable. Dusty was cool, God rest her soul.

Although it is Petula Clark's "Downtown" that is the Greatest Record Ever Made, bar none. As explained elsewhere Petula has a knighthood, and Dusty didn't. Harsh, I know. But you've got to draw the line somewhere.

Not Building a Wall, But Making a Brick

In a kind of superstitious awe, and needing any help I can get with my NaNoWriMo project, I have downloaded a rather nifty little application called Desktop Oblique: it's a little widget wot randomly displays one of Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies every time you start up Windows, or on demand... and logs the results.

Friday, 01 November, 2002,7:42:21 PM
Is the information correct?
Decide that no, it's not: my protagonist is mistaken, and it's not the End of the World after all. The story is to explore what in his past and his makeup made him think it was in the first place.

Saturday, 02 November, 2002,9:54:39 AM
Use 'unqualified' people
The protagonist's neighbor offers an unprofessional psychiatric opinion.

Saturday, 02 November, 2002,4:50:57 PM
Accept advice
I talk to D: the family of the story is gving me some trouble. There really needs to be an older daughter as well as the infant, to make the dynamic work. Working her in will mean going back and doing a lot of jiggering. D reminds me that all the backwriting counts towards my word total.

Saturday, 02 November, 2002,5:10:35 PM
Be extravagant
Decide finally to add the older daughter after all.

Saturday, 02 November, 2002,7:20:54 PM
You don't have to be ashamed of using your own ideas
Get fed up and change all the names. Jim Gaffney is now Thomas Vigil: baby Linda is now Tess: the late Mrs. Vigil, who was Mira, is now Laura, while Mira becomes the older daughter.

Saturday, 02 November, 2002,7:24:57 PM
Simply a matter of work
Write. And write. And write. And write. And write.

Sunday, 03 November, 2002,6:11:17 AM
Faced with a choice, do both
Should Mira go to Manhattan to see the movie, or go to the Turner's dinner party?

Monday, 04 November, 2002,5:48:55 AM
Disciplined self-indulgence
Vigil's profession (composer of advertising jingles) gives me a legitimate means to write a thousand words on American popular music and culture, in a manner that actually deepens the themes of the book!

Monday, 04 November, 2002,7:30:24 AM
Turn it upside down
Decide that maybe Vigil should not literally go hiking the Appalachian Trail—that it should just be a metaphor for a difficult thing undertaken and failed.

Monday, 04 November, 2002,7:32:27 PM
The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten
When the downtown hipster finds himself widowed...

The suit is matte black, a three-season worsted wool undertaker suit: the shirt is black, too—its slight sheen cutting interesting texture patterns against the lapel and the knubbly raw silk tie, also black. Tom Vigil is in mourning, of course: he has never articulated, even to himself, his promise to wear only black for the rest of his life, but he holds to it—all day, every day. Everything that he might wear, everything in his closet and drawers, everything on his hooks and pegs, his T-shirts, his jeans, his barn jacket and topcoat, even his boxers are black.

Vigil's inclination to mourning has not been as drastic for him as it would be for most people: for him it was simply a matter of gradually, over the last thirteen months, winnowing out of his wardrobe those items which were not already black. Because Vigil is a musician, and has lived his entire adult life in and/or around New York City, those items were relatively few. And now they are none.

Monday, 04 November, 2002,7:45:05 PM
Make a sudden, destructive unpredictable action; incorporate

"We've talked about it before."
"Yeah. yeah, I guess we have."
"Please. I think we've... This has been a good marriage."
"Yes. Mostly. Yes it has."
"Fifteen years. That's a good run. And I don't—you can't say we've failed. I don't think we have. But we don't have to keep doing this to ourselves. To each other."

And so on.

The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even

Speak to me and all shall be revealed.

In Feet First

5:30 AM:
Up early to start my NaNoWriMo project, with no prep work, no plotting, no outlining, just me and the pre-dawn silence and a gulletful of stark terror. I hit 400 words and freeze. I've got nothing, nothing. That 400 words seems too long, and desperately padded. I'm doomed. DOOMED.

1:00 PM:
Slow day at work: decide I'll try and write a little in the afternoon. Go to record store on lunch and and treat myself to some new instrumental music to write by—Peter Gabriel's Long Walk Home (the soundtrack for Philip Noyce's film The Rabbit-Proof Fence, which still has no US distribution) and GodspeedYouBlackEmperor!'s two-CD Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven. Get back to my desk and discover my headphones are monstrously fucked-up. No music for the afternoon. Doomed. Karmically doomed.

6:30 PM:
Look again at those horrible 400 words. Vast expanse of white space and no chink in it. On a whim, consult Oblique Strategies.

My card reads —Is the information accurate?—

Wheels spin. Gears grind. I take a quick trip to the supermarket for milk and coffee, barely registering my surroundings. Get home, brew a pot of coffee: and then I find the hole in the paper and leap through.

11:29 PM

He stood in the stillness, holding her, two heartbeats in a far corner of a boxy stillness. There was only the hum of the distant refrigerator in all that space, its low bass rumble (sixty hertz, Gaffney thought) with a high flutey overtone: a harmonic. The whole house as gigantic sounding-chamber, set ringing like a wine-glass by the growl of the compressor motor.

And then he heard something else—a sweet, high pinging, steady as a beating drum. It was distant and metallic. He thought it might be the neighbors' wind chimes; but the trees were motionless. Then another sound answered, a lower, gonging pulse. And then a cymbal-like clang of bronze, from much nearer this time.

And as the sound grew, Gaffney realized that is was the sound of bells—of church bells. Though it was nearly midnight, somebody was ringing the bells, every bell in every church.

Holding Linda high across his shoulder, Gaffney went into the kitchen. He picked up the telephone, and was somehow not surprised to discover that the line was dead.

He hung up the phone and walked back to the nursery. Gaffney laid his daughter gently back in her crib, pulled the blankets up around her, and then went looking for weapons...

2,100 words before bedtime, and the well has no bottom in sight.