markrichardson.org

One more Takagi Masakatsu piece, also from Journal for People. I’ve never been on ice skates.

Great Pitchfork Festival this past weekend. One of many highlights for me was Lightning Bolt. I’d never seen them live before, and I knew it would be slightly different than most of their shows because they played onstage instead on the floor with the crowd. But the energy was awe-inspiring. This video is from that documentary on them from a few years back.

I’m fascinated by the imagery of a Lightning Bolt performance: the mask, the microphone in the mouth like a ball gag, the headphones, Brian Gibson barely moving while Brian Chippendale goes insane on the drums, the people crowded around and the sense of risk from having performers and audience so close together.

Talking to a few people at the Festival this weekend, I was trying to get at why Chippendale’s masks are so compelling to me. Plenty of bands have used this sort of theatricality, from Kiss to Slipnot on down, but somehow it works differently for me in this context. Part of it is that Lightning Bolt live signifies danger in a way that these other bands don’t: the stack of amps might fall over, Chippendale looks like he could hurt himself or someone else because his playing is so physical, in a moshing crowd, someone could be injured at any time. So the presence of a scary dude horror-movie mask in this content actually kind of seems “real,” somehow, like it fits in with something that is happening right now at this moment in this space, rather than just pointing to some external media that we’ve all internalized (Chainsaw Massacre, etc.)

There is also the specific construction of his masks. The fact that they are torn and pieces of fabric are flying around suggests that some a dangerously unstable person made it. You think of Hannibal Lecter in that protective mask in Silence of the Lambs, and the mask is precisely constructed and clinical to go along with his deeply crafted and deliberate sense of evil (not to mention that someone else put it on him). Michael Myers and Jason, their masks are off-the-rack things used for play (Halloween, hockey), which speaks to their damaged childhoods, maybe. A mask like Chippendale’s seems like the work of someone who wanted to make something more orderly and symmetrical but was too fucked up to pull it off. So he winds up with this ragged thing that he jerks over his head before doing his evil thing for reasons we can’t understand. This is probably a very personal interpretation that makes no sense at all.

Point being: Lightning Bolt rules. 

This is from multimedia artist Takagi Masakatsu’s CD/DVD Journal for People, on Carpark. I wrote a column about his work a few years ago, but his videos weren’t on YouTube then. Several good ones still aren’t. All are worth a look.

agrammar:

So Natalie Merchant has this new album, on which she sets poems (by people like Christina Rossetti) to music (involving people like Wynton Marsalis). Not sure what to say about that.

Funny, though, because her band was setting poems by Wilfred Owen to music 30 years ago, only back then they were giant waver weirdos on a Horrors of War kick. Honest: their reputation wound up elsewhere, but when they started off, in the early 80s, in upstate New York, 10,000 Maniacs were pretty weird. Every now and then I wind up getting re-attached to the particular weirdness collected in their first recordings, which pull wildly and happily from dub reggae, new-wave, west-African guitar, post-punk, and Merchant’s college course schedule. (You can practically figure out which classes she’s taking from the lyrics.)

And during most of these moments of re-attachment, I realize more and more that the late Rob Buck was a seriously great and ahead-of-the-game guitar player. He is also the reason I feel weird playing a Les Paul without hiking it all the way up to my chest.

This new-wave noisemaking is “My Mother, the War,” as played during an early-80s TV appearance in the UK. (“Death of Manolete” and “Katrina’s Fair” were pretty good, too.)

Always loved this song & I’ll still rep for Hope Chest and The Wishing Chair. Natalie Merchant getting into it here.

If you grew up in Michigan in a family that cares about sports, Ernie Harwell’s voice counts as music. I was talking and emailing with friends today and we remembered how any time you were outside doing yard work or sitting on a porch or throwing a ball around, the Tigers game would be on somewhere, coming through a transistor radio. His play-by-play was very much part of the atmosphere. I liked listening to the Tigers on the radio, but it was more that Ernie Harwell was just there, like the sound of the furnace in the basement or something. RIP.

My friend Josh made this, sweet video & a good song.

joshlowman:

Just finished this music video for Oakland’s Man/Miracle.
Shot by Josh Lowman and Rinee Shah. 
Edited by Lee Gardner.