Art-rock great Robert Wyatt rhapsodizes on Miles, Mingus, and more in our latest 5-10-15-20 feature. Photo by Alfie Wyatt.
Great piece here, worth reading.
Mark Richardson
I'm the editor-in-chief of Pitchfork and I wrote Zaireeka, a book in the 33 1/3 series about the Flaming Lips album.
Resonant Frequency | Reviews | Highlight Reel | invisible music | twitter | email | "Ask"
Resonant Frequency | Reviews | Highlight Reel | invisible music | twitter | email | "Ask"
Reblogged from seanfennessey|31 notes
Crash course in how to write an interesting lede for an album review by Lindsay Zoladz. (via seanfennessey)
It’s true. Taking notes.
“
As a child I feared the day the world would be taken over by robots; these days I am seized by a much more potent fear that I am becoming one. Digital interfaces invade our imagination in strange, tangible ways, and with each day I spend in front of my computer screen, the red Gchat dots representing my friends and co-workers start to look more and more like HAL. Have you ever caught yourself trying to open a new tab in your brain? Was the Wikipedia blackout of 2012 as important a cultural moment as the New York City blackout of ‘77? Do androids dream of electric sheep, or do you not have an app for that yet?
”
Kraftwerk doing “Pocket Calculator” in 1981. Ralf is a good dancer; the other guys, not so much. I hope to catch them at this MOMA thing. I saw them at the 930 Club in 2005 and that is my go-to answer for the best show I’ve ever seen. I also interviewed Ralf in 2009. I was on Skype, wearing headphones, sitting on the floor of a new apartment in Riverside, Calif., which did not yet have furniture. He was talking to me on a speaker phone as he sat in an office in London. Technology!
Ralf: I think it was more like an awakening in the late 60s of the whole living situation— the German word is einfach musik. Everyday music, like— it’s more like discovering the tape recorder for us. Like, the world of sound: Everyday life has a sound, and that’s also why our studio is called Kling Klang studio because “kling” is the verb and “klang” is the noun for “sound.” So it means “sounding sound.” That’s really what Kraftwerk is about. Sound sources are all around us, and we work with anything, from pocket calculators to computers, from voices, human voices, from machines, from body sounds to fantasy to synthetic sounds to speech from human voice to speech synthesis from anything, if possible. We don’t want to limit ourselves to any specific sound like that was before when we were brought up in classical music. Then it had be strings, it had to be piano, blah blah blah. We wanted to go beyond, to find a new silence and from there to progress to continue walking into the world of sound.
I was at a place in my life in where I would still pick up The Best American Poetry just to see what was good. In the 1994 edition, published in 1995, there was a series of three poems by a guy named Tom Andrews. The series was called “Cinema Verite” and the poems took the form of short film scripts.
At that time, in addition to poetry, I was also very interested in screenwriting. I read books on it, talked to friends about it, collaborated with people. It was the post-Sex, Lies, & Videotape wave of independent film, and the way you might say “I’m starting a blog” now, you’d say “I’m working on a screenplay” then.
So these “Cinema Verite” poems were great—funny, sharp, original. Or at least they seemed that way to me. And in the author’s bio in the back, it said that Tom Andrews was working on an entire book in the series. So from that point forward, every few months, I’d look for the book in the poetry section in bookstores. Never saw it, but it took me a long time to give up. Years, for sure—just became a habit to look for that Tom Andrews book.
I still think of the below poem pretty regularly because I think it says something about what our lives have become in the digital era, but of course it was written well before the digital era. It also makes me chuckle.
Thinking of it today and googling, I discovered that Tom Andrews died in 2001. He never did finish that book. But there’s a volume of his Collected Poems that might have others from this series. Guess I’ll order it on Amazon.
___
Cinema Verite: The Death of Alfred, Lord Tennyson by Tom Andrews
The camera pans a gorgeous snow-filled landscape: rolling hills, large black trees, a frozen river. The snow falls and falls. The camera stops to find Tennyson, in an armchair, in the middle of a snowy field.
TENNYSON:
It’s snowing. The snow is like…the snow is like crushed aspirin,
like bits of paper…no, it’s like gauze bandages, clean teeth, shoelaces, headlights…no,
I’m getting too old for this, it’s like a huge T-shirt that’s been chewed on by a dog,
it’s like semen, confetti, chalk, sea shells, woodsmoke, ash, soap, trillium, solitude, daydreaming…Oh hell,
you can see for yourself! That’s what I hate about film!
He dies.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
39 plays
Round about 1997 I bought a cassette called Neckthrust One by Mixmaster Mike, who was a member of the SF DJ crew Invisibl Skratch Pikliz. During this time, I was very into the scratch DJ scene in the Bay Area. Hand to god, in 1997 I thought to myself, “The Beastie Boys should hook up with these guys,” and then, in 1998, it happened and Mixmaster Mike has been the Beastie Boys’ DJ ever since. You won’t believe I really thought that. And since you don’t know me, you shouldn’t. But I did. I know the truth and that’s all that matters. The fact that the Beastie Boys have never been any good since then is immaterial.
Anyway. Mixmaster Mike. Neckthrust One. I listened to it often. I had a cassette deck and a walkman and, a couple of years later, a car with a tape deck. And this was in all three, often. Mike did most of it live to tape with two turntables and a mixer.
This passage has an instrumental bit—>Lord Finesse’s “You Know What I’m About” —> Snoop Dogg’s “Pump Pump”. I didn’t know what the Lord Finesse song was for years. This was before Google. There was not a search engine for me to find it. Later I learned that LF had many brilliant tracks to his name. I also learned that his voice was pitched way up here, as was Snoop’s, I’m guessing +5 or so on Mike’s decks. And I much later learned the the Lord Finesse track sampled the theme from “Scooby Doo”. And there’s an organ bit in the Snoop song that connects it. This cassette rip could be better, but maybe you’ll enjoy it.
Here’s one of those things:
I am a fan of both Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog’s 1982 film about a rubber baron who tries to drag a ship over a mountain in the Amazon jungle, and Burden of Dreams, Les Blank’s 1982 film about the making of Fitzcarraldo. If I’m honest, I like the documentary even more than the film it’s about, which might have something to do with why I read so little fiction these days. Anyway, Burden of Dreams is a strange documentary because it basically tells a story very similar to Fitzcarraldo, but a “real life” version, in which Herzog actually has a ship dragged over a mountain in the jungle for his film about a guy who drags a ship over a mountain in the jungle. Both the filmmaker and the fictional character are portrayed as grandiose dreamers attempting the impossible. So you see both these movies, time passes, and you kind of forget which scenes happened in the fiction film and which scenes happened in the documentary. Someone brings up something about one or the other movie and you can’t remember which was which.
So then years later I hear this song called “Virgin With a Memory” by Destroyer and it opens with him asking himself “Was it the movie or the making of Fitzcarraldo where someone learned to love again?” He must have had this precise cognitive experience and thought enough of it to insert it into a song. Something very comforting about this to me, to know that I share these small glitches of consciousness with someone else in the world. Plus, great melody.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen either, but I don’t believe anyone “learns to love again” in either of those movies, that’s just Bejar being funny, as usual.
This is the last scene in the generally-pretty-bad 1982 film The Last American Virgin. The movie is typical teen comedy fare, falling somewhere between Porky’s and Fast Times. It’s mostly about some high school dudes trying to get laid. But the tone is unstable and it has some weirdly dark elements. The story centers around the friendship of two guys, one of whom is “cool” and good looking and the other of whom is kind of geeky but “nice.” At one point, they both find themselves interested in a pretty girl who just transferred to their school. The Cool Guy has sex with her and impregnates her and, after that, he wants nothing to do with her. The Nice Guy goes to her, wants to help, and then sells his possessions and borrows money in order to pay for her to have an abortion. She has the abortion, it is traumatic, but he helps her through it. And after a short time, there is a hint that she is now interested in him as boyfriend material. So she invites him to her 18th birthday, and him showing up to this party begins the final scene of the film. In his hand, he has a locket that he bought her as a gift.
Guess I should say “spoiler alert” here, but I really doubt that you want to see this movie.
So Nice Guy shows up, is looking for her, and then he goes into the kitchen, where he finds what he thought was his new girlfriend making out with the Cool Guy, who slept with her and then abandoned her after she discovered she was pregnant. And Nice Guy is devastated. And he drives into the night, crying. James Ingram’s “Just Once” is on the radio. The credits roll.
I saw this movie on HBO when I was around 13. I was lonely and had no confidence and I took it as an article of faith that no girl would ever be interested in me. At that time, if I were to sit down and think about why anyone would want to go on a date with me, the only answer I could possibly come up with is that I was a “nice guy.” And I knew, even then, that being a nice guy carried little weight. So when I saw this movie at age 13, you had better believe that when the credits came I thought “Yes, this is exactly what life really is. Here on the screen is the perfect articulation of why people like me are doomed.” So I could wallow in this self-pitying fantasy. The comfort in being sad. Nothing to be proud of, but hey—I was just hitting puberty.
More recently, I learned that there is a minor area of study in feminist theory called Nice Guy Syndrome. As far as I can tell, and I haven’t done a lot of research here, since this is just a Tumblr post, this entire idea has to do with Nice Guys feeling like women owe them something for being Nice. Seems closely connected to the ending of this movie. And it basically reduces the emotional exchange between partners in a prospective relationship to something purely transactional. I do this, I get this, basically. And obviously, yes, this idea that Nice Guys are owed anything is bunk. A passive-aggressive way of denying humanity. But it’s complicated.
For me, there is still something, deep down, some kind of shameful imprinting, that, as a dude who grew up seeing his own desires and insecurities reflected back to him in movies like this, looks for the kind of perceived injustice that this film ham-handedly presents during its final scene. I am aware of it, I know it’s off-base, presents a wrong-headed version of the world, but it’s still there, just the tiniest bit. Maybe I will never shake it.
I thought of Nice Guy Syndrome when I was listening to the new album by (sorry!) Lana Del Rey. The main character in most of her songs likes the Bad Boys, guys who are terrible for her but she can’t help herself. They have what seem, from the songs, to have few redeemable qualities. But LDR’s narrators find them irresistible.
I could be off here, but I wonder if some of the hostility directed at LDR is a result of the Nice Guy Syndrome on display here in this final scene. That a lot of men get particularly upset by the idea of women making what seem to them to be bad choices, which choices also happen to not include them. And maybe, maybe it’s what Liz Phair was railing against today, as confused as I found her piece (sorry, but “If she’s pissing everyone off she must be doing something right” is a Newt Gingrich line.)
“I would argue that the uncomfortable feelings she elicits are simply the by-product of watching a woman wanting and taking like a man,” Phair said.
Is that connected to this idea?
Also very much enjoyed the exchange between Marc, Kasia, and Judy.
Judy Berman: Please submit to my fun/painful zine/book project, and also reblog.
Reblogged from judyxberman|80 notes
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
It’s Complicated: Feminists Write About the Misogynist Art We Love
ed. Judy Berman and Niina Pollari
“Listening to the Sex Pistols, trying to figure out if ‘Bodies’ was really an antiabortion song, I discovered that it was something even worse. It was an outburst of loathing…
Reblogging this a second time because I think this is a really exciting idea, and also because, if you will indulge me for just a moment here, I have some very specific hopes for it. This topic, being drawn to things that we, on some level, find repellent, is very interesting to me. Something I feel is rarely done well is to engage with those feelings in an honest way, even if it means embarrassing yourself or admitting something painful. All of us who are writing about art and ideas in a personal way inevitably insert ourselves into the story. And it’s almost impossible to do so without trying to make ourselves look good. I speak from experience here. Even when we’re being self-deprecating, in almost all cases, deep down, we want to be liked. But grappling with art that we find repellent, it seems to me, inevitably involves finding something unlikable in ourselves. And that’s where things start to get interesting. It’s a spin on that idea from Tolstoy: the likable qualities we project are all the same, but when you take into account our most loathsome desires, that’s when we start to feel the differences. And I think that, for writers, there’s real power in finding and exploring places we’re afraid to go. The fact that these places frighten most writers away gives them extra power.
Dave Hickey, “A Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz,” from Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy.
“
In-crowd innuendo was not Liberace’s game; like a black man in black-face, he took it to the limit and revealed the impertinence of his pseudo-masquerade. He would come striding on stage in a costume that was, in his description, “just one tuck short of drag.” He would stop under the big light, do a runway turn, and invite the audience to “Hey, look me over!” Then, flinging his arms upward in a fountain gesture, like a demented Polish-Italian diva, he would shoot his hip, wink, and squeal, “I hope ya’ like it! You paid for it!” And the audience members would signify their approval and their complicity by their applause. They not only liked the dress, they were happy to have bought it for him. So, unlike Coward, whose veiled naughtiness remained opaque to those not “in the know,” Liberace’s closet was as democratically invisible as the emperor’s new clothes, and just as revolutionary. Everybody got it. But nobody said it.
”
Reblogged from pitchfork|66 notes