Been a Long Lonely Lonely Time

Today for our Friday music post, something a bit different - just got two DVDs - Celebration Day, the film of the 2007 Led Zeppelin reunion concert, and Color Me Obsessed, a doc about the Replacements. And they have, shall we say, cast my mind back a piece....

They are both pretty good films, for what they are - though this being music day, I do feel compelled to write about the music more than then filmmaking. And especially because they were both pretty important bands, for me - obviously important in the world at large, too, Zep openly, The Mats rather in secret.... but to me... I could probably call Led Zeppelin the beginning of my - mature, call it - tastes in music. I was a typical small town white kid in the 70s, and liked about what you would expect - from top 40 like Elton John to popular rock, like Kiss and Aerosmith, to more sophisticated versions of that, call it Queen, Styx - to, finally, plain old AOR. And while that included the Beatles and the Kinks and the Stones, bands you heard often enough on all kinds of radio stations, since they made singles too - it was defined, for me, and I imagine for pretty much everyone, by the Zep. You did not hear Led Zeppelin on singles stations. They were pretty much the definition of Album Oriented Rock.... I am not saying anything here that people do not know; but that does not make it less true. For me, they signified moving from being a pop fan (however much rock you liked) to being a rock fan. In practice, that usually meant switching to a different radio station. And that brought with it a completely new set of music - as well as a noticeably different format. Longer runs of songs between commercials - less talk - no news... You know. AOR, FM radio, 1979 edition. And this was most definitely tied directly to the radio. I didn't have money to buy a lot of records; I didn't really hang around with other kids listening to their records; I got my music from the radio. We kids talked about music - but if you wanted to hear it, most of the time you had to hear it on the radio.

I don't know how typical that is. Maybe most kids like me bought more records - maybe they traded tapes - I don't know. I imagine, kids living in cities and suburbs had very different options - more radio stations, record stores, concerts, within their reach... But I was well away from that. It was radio. And - for pretty significant periods of my youth, it was me sitting in my room half the night reading a book and listening to the radio, me alone, me and the music. And so - listening to Zep on the radio might have been an experience shared by millions of kids - but it was an experience I had completely by myself. And so - those songs got inside me, somehow, in my head, where they rattle and echo ever since. Not just Led Zeppelin, of course - and by the time I got to college, other bands were starting to be more important to me, and that went on... But for a year or so - my last year or two of high school - they were the best band in the world to me, the absolute center of the rock and roll universe. (Though maybe not the musical universe. I remember when John Bonham died, a terrible thing; but when John Lennon died, I was in shock, for days... But that's - a complicated equation. The music universe and the rock universe aren't necessarily the same things; and THE music universe and MY music universe weren't necessarily the same thing either - the Beatles were the world; Zep was my world, for a while.)

Okay... so how's the film? Not bad, for a bunch of old farts. Not up to their old standards, but how could it be? They are well rehearsed, they have chosen a very fine set list - they look fabulous... Robert Plante and John Paul Jones don't look a day over 45, either of them... Jimmy Page, on the other hand - looks like someone's granddad, pretending to be a rock star. But frankly, that just makes him cooler - with his white hair, thinning a bit, his little paunch - god knows how those other two do it, but he seems more or less willing to just look like his age. And when he wants the stage, he takes it... But still: in the end - it's a good show, but - missing something - no question what. Maybe, the fact that they are as tight, well rehearsed, enthusiastic, as they are just points up the utter indispensability of John Bonham. I think, when you get down to it, the fact is - they were, from start to finish, a duo, plus singer and bass player. Jones and Plante are very good at what they do - but they were always secondary. The band was a duet between Page and Bonham, plus a backup band... and Jason is not John. And so here - you get a very nice record (and video), but you don't get much point in listening to this instead of something like How The West Was Won.

Okay - that was long and autobiographical and barely mentioned the DVD - but wait 'til I get started on the Replacements! The film - Color Me Obsessed - is an interesting one. A documentary about a band that contains none of the band's music, no footage of them, and very little imagery of them at all. No appearances by anyone in the band, either. Instead - interviews, with fans, other musicians and people around the Minneapolis scene (up to and including Greg Norton and Grant Hart - no Bob Mould, though), journalists, from Robert Christgau to David Carr to Jim DeRogatis, the odd record company stooge, the occasional wife. It's an interesting choice - it is disappointing not to hear or see the Mats, I mean - don't you want that? but it's not a bad way to approach the Replacements. They were kind of a secret - they still are kind of a secret - wildly influential, but in ways that let people talk more about other bands... Though even in real time, they were harder, I think, to get a handle on than their peers. Someone mentions it in the film - that with Husker Du, they had a clear idea what kind of band they wanted to be; with the Mats - they never had any ideas. They slipped under the radar... So - talking about them, instead of seeing them - gets at something. Though I'd still love to see some good clean footage of them...

Digging around the web, I found an interview with the director - who says, every interview in the film started with the question, "Why the Replacements?" Well, I suppose like everyone in the doc, I could tell my Replacements story. I came to them late - after college - after Tim. There's autobiography in that - I grew up in the boonies, where AOR was the cutting edge, where Elvis Costello and U2 came off as exotic oddities - then went to college closer to civilization, though still in the suburbs. But I did what you are supposed to do in college, especially fi you come from the woods of Maine - I heard bunches of new bands, bunches of old bands that never got played up there, listened to a lot more depth of the bands I did like... Listened to records, as well as the radio, as it happened. Especially records I didn't hear on the radio - I got obsessed with Live At Leeds for a while there; some of us would listen to The River, all four sides, three times a week... But I heard new stuff as well - I had a buddy who liked X and XTC and Elvis Costello (as well as being a Springsteen freak) - I started taking newer stuff seriously. Nothing particularly radical - I mean - U2, The Pretenders, Prince - but still... not all Jimmy Page wanking, like high school.

But it stopped. I don't know why, maybe there were too many reasons. The X and XTC buddy dropped out; maybe the radio got more conservative, or maybe the music scene got more conservative (I don't rule either out: the turn of the decade, even on fairly mainstream radio stations, I heard the standard new wave bands, Talking Heads, B-52s, Elvis Costello; The Ramones and the Clash getting airplay on mainstream rock stations; U2, The Pretenders, The Police; you'd hear The Damned, Soft Cell, Romeo Void, Gang of Four... by '84 or so the new stuff was dull and derivative - Simple Minds? The Call? Tears for Fears? The Alarm? - not all bad, I guess, but nothing there that would wake you up the way U2 or The Pretenders or London Calling woke me up earlier... There were still songs on the radio I loved as much as ever - but they were usually by groups I already liked, usually discovered in the first year or two of college: U2, Prince, REM...) Maybe it was me - college wasn't a high point, I tended to stagnate while I was there. Did I grow complacent?

Whatever it was, it changed when I left college - I went to grad school, in the big city, and there I started seeing fanzines and underground rock papers, that mentioned bands I had not heard of - and I paid attention. I started looking for college radio or anything else that went away from the normal stuff on the radio, and heard some of them. Somewhere along the line I got wind of The Replacements - I remember a college newspaper running a cartoon using them to beat up REM, and I think I remember some kind of big time magazine (Time?) running a story about punks on major labels, covering Tim and Candy Apple Gray. (And Three Way Tie for Last - though I guess that wasn't actually on a major label, so I might be making this up). The point is - it gave me a target, and when Tim came out, I got it....

Or maybe I heard it on the radio - I think Hold My Life played a bit.... It doesn't matter, I bought it soon enough. What matters is - when I heard them - Hold My Life, specifically - I was floored. There have been some other songs that had that kind of effect on me - not many, though, few as quickly or completely. (I Will Follow; South Central Rain; Slipping (Into Something); Walk on the Wild Side? London Calling?... there aren't a lot...) With the Replacements - they sounded like nothing I had ever heard before. Or - maybe they sounded exactly like what I loved already. They had that quality - to sound like rock and roll distilled to its essence, but like they were inventing it on the spot. I don't know. I still feel it when I listen to Tim - the qualities, the songs, the rough way they are played, the way Westerburg sings - it has a kind of immediacy you don't get anywhere else. Except the other Mats records. (I quickly bought Let It Be, and was blown away a second time.) But that record, Tim, especially - Hold My Life, Bastards of the Young, Little Mascara, Left of the Dial, Kiss Me on the Bus, Here Comes a Regular - I am hard pressed to explain, though it comes to being the best written songs for an awful long time either side of it, and given performances that have an almost inexplainable directness. Loose, almost careless sounding, but still, somehow, precise, sharp, completely committed.... I don't know.

I know that for a year or two, probably roughly from the time I got my hands on Tim to the time - christ - til the time I got Pleased to Meet Me - they were my favorite band in the world. The center of my rock and roll universe. They were what I wanted rock music to sound like. It certainly helped that I saw them, right at the end, a couple weeks before Westerberg broke his arm and they cancelled their tour and a couple months before they fired poor Bob Stinson from his own band... They were as advertised - an odd mix of drunken shenanigans, half serious covers, snarky noise, and those fucking incredible songs, given strange, sloppy, but usually completely committed readings. They were funny and mind-blowingly brilliant at once. They ended up playing Mississippi Queen until the cops escorted them off the stage at closing time. My god, they were great.

And - like poor Led Zeppelin before them, I was not faithful to them. I had some money in my pockets and started buying records and found plenty of other music to love - Husker Du and the like - though most profoundly, the Velvet Underground and Joy Division, whose records I bought up that summer and listened to rather obsessively. And then I saw The Feelies. And then Pleased to Meet Me came out, and I saw them again, and despite a stunning rendition of Within Your Reach (immediately becoming one of my all time favorite songs), they were - just a band this time. Great as that record is - they were just a band. And by now I was fairly immersed in the contemporary music scene - going to shows, buying records - finding the Meat Puppets and Butthole Surfers and a whole bunch of local bands, and later the Pixies and Jane's Addiction and then Public Enemy and BDP and NWA... and filling in all the old stuff, and finding that these bands - The Stooges - Pere Ubu - The Byrds - Hank Williams and Johnny Cash - as well as the Velvets, Joy Division and the like - that was what I really liked - that is what I meant, all along. And the Replacements - didn't keep up. While I was listening to more and more music, they were putting out more and more mediocre material. I saw them a third time, at a theater even - and remember nothing at all about it, not even what record they were supporting (Don't Tell a Soul? maybe...)

And there you have it. You can probably blame the movie for this long piece - the film is reflective and personal, about music's impact on the listener, the fan.... And it took me back there, 25 years, to hearing them, seeing them.... and, by extension, 30+ years to sitting in my room listening to Ramble On... Nostalgia, nostalgia. And reminders that for a while, both of these bands were completely transformative for me. I still love them - I may be more likely, if push comes to shove, to listen to Fairport Convention or Can - or to the Minutemen or The Feelies or the Meat Puppets, here, today, 2012 - but I don't think, without the passion I felt for Zep and the Mats, that I would have ever have heard of those other bands.

This could be me, right down to the stereo on the milk crates...

Film Notes Catchup (Early Autumn Edition)

All right - it has been forever since I have written anything like a film post. Other than a post on the Master and For Ellen, I haven't mentioned any new films since - August? Since August... So - I don't know. We are into December - I might as well do some catching up. These are just captures - it would be nice to write something longer about some of the more important or interesting or just controversial films - but this will do for now. (Though this post does cover the best non-Anderson film of the year....) This one takes us through somewhere in October.

Restless City - 10/15 - Handsome and sober film about a young Senagalese man in NYC - he meets a girl, but she's a whore - he's beholden to her pimp, and things get worse. It's a great looking film (Bradford Young, who also shot Pariah, is building a neat body of work) but the script is very weak - and the filmmaking itself seems thin. It's all montage, all images - nice, but it has to paper over the story. I think it tries to do so to get around the derivative script - but not quite lively enough. Lots of better films have gotten there first, from Green Fish to Mona Lisa to take your pick. Full of flashes of better films - Breathless or Fallen Angels or Goodbye South Goodbye and so on.

Two Days in New York - 10/15 - Follow up on Julie Delpy's 2 Days in Paris, same principal, this time her family comes to NY to meet her new boyfriend, played by Chris Rock, in the person of Mingus, a writer and DJ. They are a bit uneasy about their relationship, though mostly happy. The French invasion ruins that. The relatives misbehave, Marion has a show and sells her soul, to the most terrifying person in New York, perhaps.... But it all works out.

Cosmopolis - 10/15 - continuing the run of New York films.... Here, Robert Pattinson is very very rich; he heads out across town in his limo to get a haircut, accompanied by his bodyguard, Kevin Durand doing Christopher Walken. He then interacts with a series of people - a nervous employee, his wife, Juliette Binoche who knows of a Rothko he could buy, a computer nerd, another employee, his doctor, his "ideas" woman, a female bodyguard he fucks, a man he goes to a club with, a friend talking about a dead Sufi rapper, Mathieu Amalric throwing pies... he finally makes it to the barber, takes a gun, then gets shot at from an abandoned building and goes in and has a somewhat frought conversation with a schmuck played by the song of a former commissioner of baseball... All this is very arch - DeLillo's style comes through - Cronenberg likes that style, no denying it, the clipped, not quite meaningless language - "I do not understand this" - the cycling ideas... I can't say it's all that good a film, but it was certainly intriguing.

Oslo: August 31 - 12/15 - superb film based on Feu Follet, The Fire Within, the novel and the film by Louis Malle. IN this version, in Oslo, we follow a young man in drug rehab who goes out on leave, to interview for a job. He visits friends, and tells the first one he is thinking of suicide... The interview breaks down in the middle, because of the rehab - he tries to meet his sister, but she never shows, and after meeting a different friend, then trying and failing to call a girlfriend in New York, he goes to a party.... and starts drinking, and once he starts.... he steals money, buys heroin, goes clubbing with another friend and some girls, up all night, but in the morning, as they go for a swim, he walks away from them. Home, his family's home (being sold - empty), and - what Chekhov said about guns applies to heroin too... It's a very strong film - standard euro-Indie look, but with care to the acting and words, and pieces that do what some art does - he sits in a cafe and we hear what he hears, as he attends in turn to the people around him - snippets of conversation... details of the city... people moving about. It is observational and beautiful - and his despair, his apparent decision to end the day in suicide focuses him and us on this world, which is given life in proportion to his own fading. The best non-Anderson film of the year.

Lawless - 8/15 - John Hillcoat directing anotherNick Cave script, this one set in prohibition Virginia. The Bondurant brothers, Howard, Forrest and Jack, are moonshiners - running their wares around Franklin county VA. Well - the law comes in - a special deputy from Chicago (Guy Pearce, looking like Jeffrey Combs in The Frighteners), whose main purpose is to get everyone a kickback. The brothers refuse, though everyone else gives in - trouble and violence results. It's all very archtypical, as one would expect from Cave, but disjointed - a series of episodes: they confront the deputy - the deputy beats up Jack - two men cut Forrest's throat, and he is saved by the girl - Jack starts running shine to the next town and sells it to Oldman's big time gangster - he courts the preachers daughter - a guy gets tarred and feathered - the law finds their stills and blows them up, along with a harmless crippled kid. So they go hunting for blood. It's got its points, but not enough.

Compliance - 11/15 - Rather harrowing fictionalized account of a real incident... At a fast food place, a cop calls and tells the manager that one of her employees stole money from a customer's purse. Over the phone, he convinces the manager to bring the girl in, search her bag and so on - then asks her to strip search her. He manipulates the two of them into all this (using classic manipulation techniques - getting the victim to supply info and exploiting it.) The manager goes along - and it keeps getting worse. The caller pushes the manager to do more and more troubling things - like getting a man to guard the girl; then getting the men molest her.... so it goes, until one employee makes a scene. The horror of it plays alongside the sheer awfulness of the workplace - everyone overworked, underpaid, everybody hassling everybody else...Everyone goes along with what happens in palpable fear of losing their jobs.

Paranorman - 9/15 - Norman talks to dead people and watches zombie movies - his parents disapprove, the kids pick on him, except for the fat kid, Neil. Then Norman is visited by his uncle - who has just died. He passes his mission on to Norman, sending poor Norman on a quest - out to the uncle's house for a book, then off to dig up a witch or something.... soon the dead are up and about and zombies are ready to face off against the inevitable armed mob - but Norman figures things out.... It is witty, sometimes handsome looking, and clever enough, especially where it goes at the end - but nothing really special.

Another Friday Music Post

Once again, Friday comes to rescue this humble blog from inactivity. Well, not complete inactivity, if you are interested in 1860s small clothes, but still... Maybe December will offer more time than I have had lately - or more inspiration... Until the holidays rear up once more, that is... so it goes.

So today it's back, once more, to the ol' shuffle, to see what fate has in store for us:

1. The Attack - Magic in the Air [rather cool bit of 60s brit pop, off another Mojo collection - those things are a pretty nice source for some of the more obscure corners of the musical past...]
2. Naked City - Batman
3. Times New Viking - No Time, No Hope [in which a brand of 60s brit pop and American garage is revived for the 21st century, to good effect...]
4. Sonny Sharrock - The Past Adventures of Zydeco Honey Cup
5. Edith Piaf - Polichinelle
6. Richard Hell & The Voidoids - Love Comes in Spurts
7. The Raconteurs - Yellow Sun
8. Waterboys - The Big Music
9. U2 - I Fall Down
10. Iron & Wine - Flightless Bird, American Mouth

That, overall, is a particularly neat playlist... So for Video? We can start with a video made for Batman, giving you your John Zorn fix for the day:



And in a different direction - here's a longer piece, very young Waterboys live on German TV - with The Big Music in the middle there...

Drawers in the Civil War

Today in Civil War remembrance, via Lawyers, Guns & Money, comes this - a discussion of underwear in the Civil War. Unlike Mr. Loomis, at LGM, I quite like reading about battles and tactics and generals and the like, and arguing about them when I get the chance - but I admit, that stuff can be rather trivial. Sometimes the things that look trivial - guns and ammo and trains and hats and machines of every stripe - really aren't: and underwear certainly counts. It's easier to track down information on the kinds of rifles people used, or the hats they wore, than the kind of drawers they wore - but it's all just about as interesting. And important - look at some of the things you might learn from that article: how underwear was made, what it consisted of, things like that - but also,standards of hygiene; how much a private got paid and how much women were paid for sewing piecework; 19th century laundry techniques - and a reminder about the gendered division of labor there; how to kill lice... It's fascinating stuff....

Giving Thanks for Friday Music

Another Friday - Thanksgiving week is usually a complicated one, and this one has been no exception. Started last weekend moving stuff from one storage unit to another - a story in itself. (How does U-Haul survive, without knowing how to cash checks properly?) And then vacation, and all the usual temptations to sleep all day and play games all night... And some food shopping and food prep and all the rest, until the happy day arrives and you eat yourself into a coma and then sleep for 12 hours. Unless you have a retail job, and have to get up to be at work at midnight to cater to the stupidest ritual the country knows... that ain't me, thank god.

And so this Friday, what shall we do for music? Well - thank you songs are always in order....

1. ABBA - Thank you for the Music
2. Big Star - Thank You Friends
3. Fairport Convention - Now Be Thankful
4. George Harrison - Thanks for the Pepperoni
5. Mogwai - Thank You Space Expert
6. Neil Diamond - Thank The Lord for the Nighttime
7. Sam & Dave - I Thank You
8. DM Stith - Thanksgiving Moon
9. Soft Machine - Thank You Pierrot Lumiere
10. Xiu Xiu - Thanks Japan!

And video: Sam and Dave is certainly indicated:



And Fairport Convention, live:



And of course, a cat, thankful for that piece of string.

Friday Songs

Well, Friday again... another odd week, full of distractions and anticipations that have kept me from writing anything here. What can you do. Next week is Thanksgiving - coming this early I think is confusing me... All these excuses.

What's left is iTunes and its shuffle and 10 songs for all to ponder:

1. Rocket from the Tombs - Amphetamine [from Rocket Redux, Cheetah singing...]
2. Liars - No Barrier Fun
3. Liars - Pure Unevil [randomizer fail!]
4. Bishop Allen - News from Your Bed
5. The Who - Substiitute (BBC Sessions version)
6. Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - What Must Be Done
7. Mercury Rev - Secret for a Song
8. White Heaven - Out [featuring Michio Kurihara, guitar hero]
9. Bruce Springsteen - Growin' Up
10. Little Feat - I've Been the One

Start with Wilco, reworking chunks of Amphetamine (rather like Peter Laughner reworked big chunks of Heroin in the first place):



And you can't go wrong with Bruce - a buddy of mine had a bootleg of grownin' up back in the early 80s that we wore out, for good reasons. Here's a 1980 version...

Armistice Day Poem

As of this February, with the death of Florence Green, there are no more surviving veterans from the Great War. Still - I think it is best to honor the general in the particular - and honor all veterans by remembering the end of this war. It's a good date for it - WWI is more or less impossible to see as anything but disaster - no one wanted it, no one benefited by it - and nothing was resolved by it, its ending spawning another, bigger war between worse governments, 20 years along. No one is tempted to romanticize it, and forget that the fundamental fact of war is that it is hell.

I will turn to Ezra Pound, to provide additional commentary on the war - this from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, written just after the war...

IV.

These fought, in any case,
and some believing, pro domo, in any case . . .
Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later . . .

some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some "pro patria, non dulce non et decor". .

walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;

usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
Fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.

V.

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

Music Friday With New Scott Walker

Randomly selected.... though a nice day for the singer songwriters, especially some of our more adventurous singer songwriters...

1. Matthew Sweet - Baltimore [doing his best Big Star impersonation]
2. Sleater-Kinney - #1 Must Have
3. Grinderman - Kitchenette
4. The Strokes - 15 Minutes
5. Jacques Brel - J'Arrive
6. Gordon Lightfoot - Cotton Jenny
7. Matching Mole - Signed Curtain ["this is the first verse..."]
8. Fleet Foxes - Heard them Stirring
9. Nick Cave & Bad Seeds - Let the Bells Ring
10. Bill Frisell - Billy the Kind: Mexican Dance and Finale

Video? let's start somewhere else - the first track off the new Scott Walker record, due out in December - oh happy day!



And - how about a cover (John Wesley Harding and Rick Moody) of Matching Mole? "Lyrical complexity"... (less a joke than you think, though; lots of sting in the tail here.)

Re-Election

I admit, last night was an anxious one. Even with the polls pretty clear about who was going to win, there is a reason we hold elections and don't just let Nate Silver and David Brooks decide who will be the next president in the New York Times cafeteria (or wherever they might meet.) And watching the results come in in some of the states, the likes of Virginia, with the rural places reporting first and the big urban centers coming in last - is a recipe for worry....

But it worked out in the end. And seems to have worked out more or less exactly as predicted. Maybe a state here or there might skew a bit off from the polls, but basically, the predictions were dead on. It's a relief. I will add - I actually felt a twinge of sympathy for Romney and company last night, the much mocked Karl Rove even: everyone started calling Ohio with Romney within a couple thousand votes - I was watching MSNBC and they were hammering the Romney people and Rove himself for refusing to concede, but I don't know why they should. Sure, everyone can see where it will end up - but it hasn't gotten there yet - let the votes be counted... Elections are, in fact, decided by the voters, not by the TV anchors; campaigns shouldn't be run for the convenience of the networks. The fact that you could have called the election the night before, and gotten it exactly right doesn't change that...

All right. This is not a time for long policy statements and so on - just a quick note. My main feeling when this one ended was relief - none of the elation and sense of history that surrounded the 2008 election. But watching it, especially toward the end, as the senate races wrapped up and Warren and Duckworth and Murphy won, McCaskill, Kaine, Angus King (even) - Baldwin (which might have been the last one I saw before I went to bed) - it felt as if, in a small, modest way, you could see the country getting better. Little things - I think it was Murphy in Connecticut, leading off his victory speech with a simple statement that health care is a right. At some point, good liberal policies should become conventional wisdom - should move into the realm of things that are taken for granted. And just - the fact of talking about health care (for example) as a right, not as a hope - changes the country for the better.

So - it is a relief, and, in a lot of ways, a sign, even more than the 08 election, that we might actually have a chance to get back on track. It's a little bit more like an election on the policies, a little less the plain rejection of a miserable failure that 2008 was.

Election Week

I haven't written much about politics here in a while... I haven't written much of anything here lately, but still. I went through this the last time I managed a political post - the political discourse has not grown more edifying in the last three months... I will be happy when this thing is over, providing the Democrats win. I will be very happy to never see another New Hampshire political ad or photoshopped political ad on Facebook again...

That last was a joke. The countries Tumblrs won't shut down on Wednesday - I have seen 4 years of photoshopped bullshit from my tea party cousins, and expect to see another 4 years of it. If the election is close, I expect they will finally, and permanently outnumber cat pictures on Facebook. I despair. I know I am a hypocrite on this subject, for I am as inclined to "like" the Democratic pictures as argue or mock the Republican ones - but... At some point, you ought to be able to say what you want, and say it in words - so far, that seems to favor the lefties... scratch a tea partier, and you get - more Fox News catch phrases and - fantasy... That might be selection bias, for me - my lefty friends might be a bit more literate than my righty friends - but I don't think that's all there is.

There is no point in pretending the sides are equal. The Republicans have not offered any kind of political program with any value to the country in a long time. Their stated policies are all just ways to strip the nation for the benefit of the rich. (Here's Robert Reich on the subject.) Since 2008, they have done nothing to try to fix the economy - they have devoted themselves to stopping Obama from doing anything to fix the economy, and succeeded enough that they have been able to run on the idea that Obama hasn't fixed the economy. It is striking - every issue that comes up, every problem where there are a range of possible ways to deal with the issue, you find that the Democrats basically cover that range, and the Republicans chant slogans and vote to stop whatever comes along. Health care reform? all the debate was on the left (or "left" - the democratic party, I mean, an awful lot of which is not "left" by any real measure) - the GOP just campaigned against whatever was proposed. The economy? the republicans have nothing except cutting taxes, pretending to care about the deficit, and periodically trying to sabotage the whole affair... democrats, as usual, cover the whole range of potentially useful options, from full on Keynsianism to serious efforts to address the debt and deficit. ("Serious" in this instance means, methods that might actually reduce the debt and deficit - I don't mean to imply they would do the economy any good.) Foreign policy? Obama has basically just assumed the Republican positions on this, though this administration has been competent, unlike the last one... I don't see much from the Republicans except criticism for getting involved in Libya and more criticism for not getting involved in Syria. Lots of howling to bomb Iran, though if Obama actually did bomb Iran, they would change sides in a hell of a hurry.

No. There is nothing on the right, no reason to vote Republican at all, even for most of the people I know who are Republicans - at least the ones who have been Republicans all their lives. The most confusing part of the crap I see on Facebook (particularly) is how many of the people posting it will get nothing whatsoever from the GOP. I don't have a lot of rich friends or relatives. And the better off they are, the more liberal they tend to be - though I don't think any of us are at a point where a Romney president would help us, personally. But to look at the people who are pretty marginal, economically, but are enthusiastically Republican anyway - confuses me. I don't know why they vote the way they do - I don't know what they think they are going to get from it. And - I am completely certain they can't explain how Romney is going to fix the economy where Obama failed.

So here we are. All right. One more day. The signs look good, for the most part - Obama is ahead in almost all the important swing states... though you can see already, the Republicans will do all they can to keep the vote down, to make things muddy, and - maybe not openly steal the election - but - guide it in the direction they want... We'll see. I do trust the democrats a bit more these days to fight to the last ditch for every vote - which they did not do in 2000, to the country's sorrow... But... The truth is - I am less afraid of Romney winning than of losing the House and Senate. In the highly unlikely instance of Romney winning and the democrats taking congress - I think we might learn just exactly how unprincipled old Willard is. I don't think he has ever uttered a word in public he meant, maybe not that he believed, except maybe "vote for me" - if he had to deal with congress - who knows... That is not likely, of course: if he wins, the GOP will probably also win the House at least - and unless the democrats adopt the same None Shall Pass attitude the GOP have had the past few years, we could be in for a bad stretch. But... Again - the polls point the other way. Hope hope hope....

But I will end on the opposite of hope. In my darker moments, I think that the 2010 elections were the end of democracy in America. No electorate that understood the economic issues or the politics of the time would have voted in a huge Republican landslide just then - and the republicans who took over were completely committed to nothing more than getting a republican elected president in 2012. Thing have not improved, and even if we win tomorrow, I don't think things are likely to change. The disrouce has not grown more elevated....

So - all right. I will stop. I will vote. We shall see.

Friday Ten, Late Night Edition

Friday is almost over, but there is still time for a random ten! It has been an all too eventful week - hurricane Sandy (not too bad up here), Ezra Pound - plus a funeral, for a friend's mother... eventful. But I think I should post something before I go to bed... habits are good to stick to.

1. Spirit - Animal Zoo (nice start, one of my all time favorites...)
2. Modest Mouse - Lounge
3. Tool - The Pot
4. Keiji Haino - See That My Grave is Kept Clean
5. Wake Ooloo - Age of Reason
6. Devendra Banhart - Carmencita
7. PJ Harvey & John Parish - The Chair
8. Ohio Players - Alone
9. Richard & Linda Thomson - Jet Plane in a Rocking Chair
10. Ghost - Holy High

All right - I am too lazy to look for video tonight - so here's a picture of a tree that didn't come down during the hurricane - though it was certainly shedding branches thorough...

Re-Animator

All right, it's Halloween, and I will never forgive myself if I go the whole month of October without a single post about horror movies. Though this will not be anything like the last couple years, where I actually put some work into it - and dealt with true masterpieces of the genre... I am eye deep in Ezra Pound (not to mention a hurricane, though that didn't do us much harm in Boston), and haven't spent much time on anything else - but still....

Instead - here is an old favorite - one of the high points of the comic-horror sex and gore mashups of the 80s, Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator. Which provided many a drunken evening of pleasure back in the day... There's not a huge amount that needs to be said about it - it's a mix of a Frankenstein remake and a zombie film (mashing up horror sub-genres as well as everything else) - and a success on almost every score. It is genuinely funny, full of oh so quotable lines ("trysting with a bubble headed co-ed - you're not even a second rate scientist!"), and very dark comedy... I wouldn't call it exactly frightening, but it is certainly creepy often enough... and if it isn't quite the meditation on the limits of man and science and knowledge and the boundary between life and death that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was, or even the fairly moving bildungsroman the Universal Frankensteins are - it is a not unintelligent examination of hubris and sexual passion and love and loss, in among the grue and the jokes.... A very fine film to celebrate the season with.

Friday Random Ten

Another hectic week, so not much more than a bare list can I offer you - songs, etc.

Though it is Mahalia Jackson's birthday - that's worth linking to...

And no?

1. Captain Beefheart - Too Much Time
2. Paul McCartney - The Back Seat of My Car
3. Jimi Hendrix - Manic Depression
4. Swell Maps - HS Art
5. Yo La Tengo - Alyda
6. Pink Floyd - Time
7. Three - Domino Days
8. Stephen Malkmus - Hopscotch Willie
9. ...and You will Know Us by the Trail of Dead - Worlds Apart
10. Camper Van Beethoven - Devil Song

Well - happy birthday to Mahalia Jackson - some beat up video, but good clear sound, for ancient TV....



And - as we are coming up on halloween, even though this is just audio - some Camper Van seems right... there's a devil in the closet.



Though for seasonal videos - this might prove more timely, if the weather is all it's hyped up to be:

Friday Top Ten Again

Here we are, Friday again, getting well into October, the world is full of stuff - closing in on the Presidential elections, baseball post-season in full career, NBA about to start, it's getting cooler, it's Halloween season, it's - all this, and all I come up with is another Random Friday 10! And the odd compilation of lists... one of these days I am going to embark on a similar project, all on my own, for music... Not sure the point, other than the declaration of loyalties... But not yet....

Today it's all on iTunes:

1. John Cale - You know More than I Know
2. Dungen - Barnen Undrar
3. John Lee Hooker - Whiskey & Wimmin
4. Beastie Boys - Shadrach
5. Brian Jonestown Massacre - Sue
6. George Harrison - Apple Scruffs
7. Roger & The Gypsies - Pass the Hatchet
8. The Seeds - Sad and Alone
9. Keiji Haino/Tatsuya Yoshida - Canal Street
10. Dave Brubeck Quarter - Kathy's Waltz

And video - Beasties on Soul Train?



And - not the song above, but still - Keiji Haino and Tatsuya Yoshida, plus Damo Suzuki and Helena Espvall and Seiichi Yamamoto doing what they do....

1950s Voting

And, the Wonders in the Dark yearly poll has finished another decade - the 1950s - a very impressive stretch of films. Here are my votes - I think - this is what I made for myself anyway. Plenty of these choices are capricious enough that I could very well have changed them between composition and hitting "post" over there...

PICTURE: Early Summer
DIRECTOR (Single Film): I think I will say Ozu, for Early Summer - though it is a very tight competition. But this film - overwhelms me when I see it. The precision of the construction of space, the mastery of story telling, the use of movement, the jokes and games he plays with the construction of the story - it is surprising and thrilling from start to finish.
DIRECTOR (Decade): Ozu, slam dunk.
LEAD ACTOR (Single Film): James Stewart, Vertigo
LEAD ACTOR (Overall): Toshiro Mifune
LEAD ACTRESS (Single film): Kinoyu Tanaka, probably in Life of Oharu
LEAD ACTRESS (Overall): I think this would be between Hideko Takamine (especially in all those Naruse films) and Setsuko Hara - probably Hara, but Takamine is a force.
SUPPORTING ACTOR (single): Takasahi Shimura, Seven Samurai
SUPPORTING ACTRESS (single): Thelma Ritter, Pickup on South Street
SHORT: Duck Amuck - pretty much top of the heap.
SCORE (Single): Bernard Herrmann, Vertigo - one of the all time greats
SCORE (Overall): Herrmann - he's in the running over and over...
CINEMATOGRAPHY (Single): Sergei Urevsevski, Cranes are Flying - as I said at the time, this is one of great tour de force moments in cinema...
CINEMATOGRAPHY (Overall): Russell Metty - all those Sirk films can't be denied.

Plus bonus picks::
Script: Sweet Smell of Success, I think, is going to have to win - damn, that's a clever piece of work. I'll do a quick run down, though, of the best of the decade - it's hard to separate script from film (the film, for me, tends to obliterate and encompass all the arts that go into it - separating them out is a bit artificial - in this case, it probably means something like the 5 I would most like to read, something like that...) I am, however, somewhat arbitrarily, going to eliminate the films that make the overall top 20...
2. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
3. Ace in the Hole
4. Good Morning
5. Beat the Devil

Editing: Ozu - this is, I think, the key to all his work. His construction of his films. He doesn't get credit, he's not as flashy as some, but he makes so much happen with the way one shot connects to another... Early Summer, in particular, is a film, like M and the Mabuses, and 20s Eisenstein, where I remember cuts and transitions, that give me chills.

1. Early Summer
2. Seven Samurai
3. Vertigo
4. Ugetsu Monagatari
5. Tokyo Story
6. Touch of Evil
7. Pather Panchali
8. Rear Window
9. The Searchers
10. Fires on the Plain
11. Late Chrysanthemums
12. Sweet Smell of Success
13. Night of the Hunter
14. Rebel Without a Cause
15. Imitation of Life
16. Sansho The Bailiff
17. A Man Escaped
18. Ordet
19. Rashomon
20. Life of Oharu

1959:

This is a very tough year for picks. It might lack the films at the very top (like Vertigo vs. A Touch of Evil, last year), but they just keep going.

PICTURE: Fires on the Plain
DIRECTOR: This one is painful - I am tempted to indulge myself in a tie, since I do not want to choose. Ozu at his most Tati-esque, playing all kinds of games with depth and space? or Sirk at his most Sirkian, playing all kinds of games with color and space and set design... I will not choose.
LEAD ACTOR: Cary Grant, North by Northwest - though it pains me not to vote for Lemmon or Curtis, or Funekoshi, or Leaud, or Nakadai, or John Wayne....
LEAD ACTRESS: Marilyn Monroe, Some Like it Hot
SUPPORTING ACTOR: James Mason, North by Northwest
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Juanita Moore
SHORT: Pull My Daisy, almost by default.
SCORE: I shall be a bit perverse and go off the nominations to Toshiro Mayazumi, for Good Morning - it's a strange score on an Ozu film, but it works, contributing, I'd say, to that Tati-esque feel of the film... I should probably say, this is probably not Mayazumi's last appearance on one of my ballots. We're getting into Imamura territory now, and he's integral to those films.
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Metty, Imitation of Life

Plus bonus pick:
Script: Good Morning, Ozu and Noda

1. Fires on the Plain
2. Imitation of Life
3. Some Like it Hot
4. 400 Blows
5. Good Morning
6. North by Northwest
7. Pickpocket
8. World of Apu
9. The Key
10. Shadows

1958:

PICTURE: Vertigo
DIRECTOR: Hitchcock
LEAD ACTOR: Stewart
LEAD ACTRESS: Kim Novak
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Joseph Calleia, Touch of Evil
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Kinuyo Tanaka, Equinox Flower (this is one where she actually gets to be happy! it's a gift.)
SHORT: A Movie, Bruce Conner
SCORE: Vertigo, obviously
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Robert Burks, Vertigo (though Shinsaku Himeda tempts me - he'll win most of the 60s, I suspect, whatever the competition - that fish ain't on top of my blog for nothing.)

Plus bonus pick:
Script: Giants and Toys. This is not an easy year for scripts - the films at the top seem to me to be there more because of their direction, photography, set designs, and acting than usual - whether those things are elevating less deserving scripts or obscuring the virtues of the scripts, I don't know. I just know I don't quite know what to make of Vertigo or Touch of Evil, or even Some Came Running... So - Giants and Toys is some kind of masterpiece, and since Masumura is a filmmaker I really like, but I doubt he'll be in the running for any top spots - I'll put in a plug for him here.


1. Vertigo
2. Touch of Evil
3. Some Came Running
4. Summer Clouds
5. Ashes and Diamonds
6. Endless Desire
7. Mon Oncle
8. Equinox Flower
9. Giants and Toys
10. Cairo Station

1957:

PICTURE: Sweet Smell of Success
DIRECTOR: Mikhail Kalatazov, Cranes Are Flying
LEAD ACTOR: Burt Lancaster, Sweet Smell of Success
LEAD ACTRESS: Tatiana Samoilova, Cranes Are Flying
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Niall McGinnis, Night of the Demon
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Isuzu Yamada, Tokyo Twilight
SHORT: What's Opera, Doc?
SCORE: Elmer Bernstein, Sweet Smell of Success
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Sergei Urevsevski, Cranes are Flying - this being one of the over the top extravaganzas of all time, after all - whether it adds up as art or not (and mostly it does), it has to be gazed on and marveled at.

Plus bonus picks::
Script: Sweet Smell of Success - this is another outsized tour de force; it's rather a shame it is so good - I have somehow managed not to get anything from Will Success Spoil Rock Hudson? on this ballot - it should be somewhere - it makes a good companion to Sweet Smell of Success - less self-important, less vicious, obviously less moving, but almost as sharp... "Wow - contains 'fallout'!"

1. Sweet Smell of Success
2. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter
3. Cranes Are Flying
4. Tokyo Twilight
5. Throne of Blood
6. Seventh Seal
7. The Tall T
8. Paths of Glory
9. The Lower Depths
10. Full Up Train

1956:

PICTURE: The Searchers
DIRECTOR: Sirk, There's Always Tomorrow
LEAD ACTOR: James Mason, Bigger than Life
LEAD ACTRESS: Barbara Stanwyck, There's Always Tomorrow
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Lee Marvin. Seven Men From Now (my taste for hamming comes out, I admit it)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Dorothy Malone, Written on the Wind
SHORT: I'm going off ballot for The Phantom Ship, a glorious cut-out animation from Japan I managed to see somehow...
SCORE: Steiner, The Searchers
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Russell Metty, Written on the Wind

Plus bonus picks:
Script: A Man Escaped

1. The Searchers
2. Written on the Wind
3. A Man Escaped
4. The Burmese Harp
5. The Killing
6. There's Always Tomorrow
7. Flowing
8. Early Spring
9. Seven Men from Now
10. Aparajito

1955:

PICTURE: Pather Panchali
DIRECTOR: Dreyer, Ordet
LEAD ACTOR: Robert Mitchum, Night of the Hunter
LEAD ACTRESS: Hideko Takamine, Floating Clouds
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Sal Mineo, Rebel Without a Cause
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Lillian Gish, Night of the Hunter
SHORT: Night and Fog
SCORE: Ravi Shankar, Pather Panchali
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Stanley Cortez, Night of the Hunter

Bonus pick:
Script: James Agee, Night of the Hunter

1. Pather Panchali
2. Night of the Hunter
3. Rebel Without a Cause
4. Ordet
5. The Man from Laramie
6. Floating Clouds
7. Rififi
8. All That Heaven Allows
9. Smiles of a Summer Night
10. Cobweb

1954:

PICTURE: Seven Samurai
DIRECTOR: Kurosawa
LEAD ACTOR: James Stewart, Rear Window
LEAD ACTRESS: Haruko Sugimura, Late Chrysanthemums
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Takashi Shimura
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Kinuyo Tanaka, Sansho Dayu
SHORT: Duck Dodgers in the 24th 1/2 Century
SCORE: Gojira
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Kazuo Miyagawa, Sansho the Bailiff

Plus bonus picks::
Script: Late Cshrysanthemums
Editing: LC - or SS

1. Seven Samurai
2. Rear Window
3. Late Chrysanthemums
4. Sansho the Bailiff
5. Sound of the Mountain
6. Twenty Four Eyes
7. A Billionaire
8. Magnificent Obsession
9. Voyage to Italy
10. The Maggie or Godzilla

1953:

PICTURE: Ugetsu Monogatari
DIRECTOR: Mizoguchi
LEAD ACTOR: Richard Widmark, Pickup on South Street
LEAD ACTRESS: Chieko Hagasiyama
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Lee Marvin
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Thelma Ritter
SHORT: Duck Amuck
SCORE: Ugetsu Monogatari
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Kazuo Miyagawa, Ugetsu

Plus bonus picks::
Script: Beat the Devil ("I'm going upstairs to read my bible")

The top two films here are as close as they can be...

1. Ugetsu Monagatori
2. Tokyo Story
3. Beat the Devil
4. Little Fugitive
5. M Hulot's Holiday
6. Mr Pu
7. The Naked Spur
8. The Big Heat
9. Pickup on South Street
10. 5000 Fingers of Dr. T

1952:

PICTURE: Mother [I guess I can work a Naruse into the top spot! This year is more wide open, with a bunch of very good films, so the choice is just a bit more arbitrary than most, and that makes a fine opportunity to spread the wealth.]
DIRECTOR: Welles, Othello
LEAD ACTOR: Takashi Shimura, Ikiru
LEAD ACTRESS: Kinoyu Tanaka, um - pick em. Say Life of Oharu, for balance's sake.
SUPPORTING ACTOR: this is harder than it look - Michael MacLiammoir is superb, but I think I have to go with Arthur Kennedy in Bend on the River...
SUPPORTING ACTRESS:Gloria Grahame, Bad and the Beautiful
SHORT: Water, Water Every Hare
SCORE: Tiomkin, High Noon
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Othello

Plus bonus picks::
Script: Ikiru

1. Mother
2. Life of Oharu
3. Ikiru
4. Othello
5. Singin' in the Rain
6. Le Plaisir
7. Lightning
8. Bend on the River
9. Flavor of Green Tea over Rice
10. The Bad and the Beautiful


1951:

PICTURE: Early Summer
DIRECTOR: Ozu
LEAD ACTOR: Kirk Douglas, Ace in the Hole
LEAD ACTRESS: Setsuko Hara, Repast (competing with herself, but since the other is a bit more of an ensemble, I think this takes the prize.)
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Karl Malden, Streetcar
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Kim Hunter, Streetcar
SHORT: Rabbit Fire (these films are so deeply buried in my head, how can I not vote for them?)
SCORE: North, Streetcar Named Desire
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Claude Renoir, The River

Plus bonus picks::
Script: here, I would have to choose - the efficient perfection of Ozu/Noda? or the bitterness of Ace in the Hole? All things considered - has to be Early Summer
Editing: again, the Ozu of course - there are 3 or 4 cuts in this film that floor me as completely as anything in any film anywhere. And every cut (in just about every Ozu film) is so perfect... there's nothing like it.

1. Early Summer
2. The African Queen
3. Repast
4. An American In Paris
5. Ace in the hole
6. Strangers on a Train
7. The Lavender Hill Mob
8. Man in the White Suit
9. Diary of a COuntry Priest
10. The River

1950:

PICTURE: Rashomon
DIRECTOR: Kurosawa
LEAD ACTOR: Sterling Hayden
LEAD ACTRESS: Barbara Stanwyck, The Furies
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Dan Duryea
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Danielle Darrieux
SHORT: Rabbit of Seville
SCORE: (Rashomon?)
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Miyagawa, Rashomon

Plus bonus picks:
Script: Winchester 73

1. Rashomon
2. Asphalt Jungle
3. Winchester 73
4. Sunset Boulevard
5. Flowers of St. Francis
6. La Ronde
7. Orpheus
8. The Furies
9. In a Lonely Place
10. Three Came Home

Very Quick Baseball Post

To follow up - I am rather unhappy to have guessed all the first round right. (Lots of waffling re. St. Louis/Washington, but the Nats are who I wanted to win, the Cards were who I expected...) It knocked out the teams I was rooting for - after the Rangers went out in the wild card game... I suppose it makes it easier to pick, without the strong rooting interests - and it happens that my preferences are the same in both. I think the Tigers will take out the Yankees - I see they are on their way, and greatly aided by Derek Jeter's injury... In the National League - I still fear the Cardinals, but I think the Giants are going to win. I certainly hope they do.

And in the World Series? I think the National League team is going to win - though I will probably be pulling for the Tigers if they make it... And, obvious,y, against the Yankees if it's them.

Finally - last week someone on facebook made a comment about why people call a team their team - it's not like they are owned by taxpayers. But in fact - most of those parks, some of which cost as much as a team might, are owned - or at least paid for - by the taxpayers. Though I mention it here because the teams still alive are, in fact, the least offensive in those regard: Giants and Yankees paid for their parks outright; the Cards paid for 88% of theirs; Tigers 37%. The rest were much more publicly funded. I suppose if the pattern holds, it will be Yankees and Giants, and the Giants winning, since the Yankees did get some public money for the parking (or something like that.) Still - an interesting aside.

Professor Arthur Chipping's Back to School Quiz

Time for another of Dennis Cozzalio's quizzes - PROFESSOR ARTHUR CHIPPING’S MADDENINGLY DETAILED, PURPOSEFULLY VAGUE, FITFULLY OUT-OF-FOCUS BACK TO SCHOOL MOVIE QUIZ this time. I am, as usual, dreadfully late in this assignment - I offer as my only excuse that I am back to school in the atom world, and have been eye deep in William Butler Yeats this past week... so there is that. Still - sooner or later we'll get there!

1) What is the biggest issue for you in the digital vs. film debate?

A: I am not sure, though I think it is probably the question of which films will make the jump. And - the oft-overlooked question of whether digital films will be worth anything in X years. I am haunted by the erosion of digital storage - I have spent quite a bit of time this year digging through photos, for instance - and it makes you wonder. I have 2 video cameras, both mini-DV cameras - both of them still work fine as cameras, but the motors have died on the tape drives. And so - I have a box full of mini-DV tapes full of video that is as inaccessible to me as if they had been thrown in the trash. Meanwhile, a couple weeks ago my brother found a tintype in an old desk our grandmother used to have. Also, a sheet of paper covered in drawings she made in 1936. Digital is very useful, no question - once you get these things on a computer, and as long as you can keep files and software in synch (the latest version of Word has trouble opening files from - pre-2000? more or less...), all is well - but - unless you keep updating everything you have to the latest formats, it fades, in ways that a piece of paper in an envelope stuffed into a desk drawer will not fade, in 100, 120, 130 years. (We have one at home dated 1887, I believe...) And - film is obviously a more volatile format that paper, but it is still an object and it is there, even when the tools to make it work are not. (I refer you to the recently discovered color film from 1902 - an object that no one could use until someone created a projector to play it. I suppose, as long as you have means to reverse engineer the machines and software to run digital files, not much will be lost... but do I trust that?)

2) Without more than one minute’s consideration, name three great faces from the movies

A: Deitrich - Keaton - Karloff

3) The movie you think could be interesting if remade as a movie musical

A: How about Playtime?

4) The last movie you saw theatrically/on DVD, Blu-ray, streaming

A: Theater - Keep the Lights On...; DVD - Good Morning; Streaming - I haven't streamed a film in a while - other than shorts, for the Wonders in the Dark polls...

5) Favorite movie about work

A: This is a good question - there should be more movies about work. Some candidates? Fallen Angels - Blue Collar - Office Space... Fallen Angels is probably the winner, though - those Takashi Kinoshiro parts do something right.

6) The movie you loved as a child that did not hold up when seen through adult eyes

A: truth is, I didn't see enough films as a child to make any judgements like this. The ones I liked, I still like, even if they do seem less than they used to - Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, something like that. Still holds up fine.

7) Favorite “road” movie

A: Pierrot le Fou, probably. Obviously there are an awful lot of these, all with their own special appeal - O Brother Where Art Thou? Week End? It Happened One Night? etc. But Pierrot is probably the best of the bunch.

8) Does Clint Eastwood’s appearance at the Republican National Convention change or confirm your perspective on him as a filmmaker/movie icon? Is that appearance relevant to his legacy as a filmmaker?

A: It doesn't seem to have much to do with him as a filmmaker. It's almost like a different person - he's always been at least three people - celebrity, filmmaker, actor - the actor and celebrity sometimes seem to blur, just like the filmmaker and actor sometimes seem to blur - but the filmmaker and celebrity have almost nothing to do with one another - and that appearance was completely as a celebrity.

9) Longest-lasting movie or movie-related obsession

A: I don't know; they don't tend to go away...

10) Favorite artifact of movie exploitation

A: My junk obsessions don't run toward movies, really - they run to toys and books and such I liked when I was a kid. I suppose that's normal, and not being a movie watcher as a kid will do that. I do have a nice Marlene Dietrich picture, advertising a retrospective from 20+ years ago...

11) Have you ever fallen asleep in a movie theater? If so, when and why?

A: I don't believe so; it has been a close thing a few times, though I would have to think long and hard to remember those times.

12) Favorite performance by an athlete in a movie

A: It's kind of a tough question - given the week's events, I should say Alex Karras in Blazing Saddles - which is a good answer anyway. Though I have a soft spot for Terry Crews in Idiocracy (and his cool cameo in Inland Empire...)

13) Second favorite Rainer Werner Fassbinder movie

A: I think it is probably The Marriage of Maria Braun, these days...

14) Favorite film of 1931

A: Favorite film period: M. Quite possibly the best year in cinematic history

15) Second favorite Raoul Walsh movie

A: Thief of Baghdad?

16) Favorite film of 1951

A: Early Summer

17) Second favorite Wong Kar-wai movie

A: Happy Together? these days, I think that would be the answer...

18) Favorite film of 1971

A: McCabe and Mrs. Miller - so far my favorites from all three of these years are in my all time top 5.

19) Second favorite Henri-Georges Clouzot movie

A: Mysteries of Picasso

20) Favorite film of 1991

A: A Brighter Summer Day

21) Second favorite John Sturges movie

A: The Magnificent Seven

22) Favorite celebrity biopic

A: Does Che count? Carlos? I'm also incline to say Superstar...

23) Name a good script idea which was let down either by the director or circumstances of production

A: This sort of thing happens all the time - good scripts that just don't do anything... I don't know if that's what you have in mind though - I'm thinking films like Five Year Engagement - clever, well written, well acted, but with nothing to look at. You could close your eyes and get as much out of it...

24) Heaven’s Gate-- yes or no?

A: Haven't seen it; reserve judgment

25) Favorite pairing of movie sex symbols

A: Happy Together? might be, you know...

26) One word that you could say which would instantly evoke images and memories of your favorite movie. (Naming the movie is optional—might be more fun to see if we can guess what it is from the word itself)

A: Well, two - Ich Musst!

27) Name one moment which to you demarcates a significant change, for better or worse, on the landscape of the movies over the last 20 years.

A: Closing of the Harvard Square cinema last summer? it's emblematic of the past 20 years, I know that - this one might be more disturbing, because the theatrical landscape had stabilized - lots of places closed in the 90s, but things had stayed the same for the last 10 years or so. This closing is very ominous... the loss of all those theaters - mostly small, a lot of them either specialist theaters or art cinemas - changes things profoundly. It's hard to see what you want on film - though DVDs have done a pretty good job of supplying the films, you lose all the benefits of theatrical shows, and, obviously, of Film.

28) Favorite pre-Code talkie

A: Duck Soup or Trouble in Paradise

29) Oldest film in your personal collection (Thanks, Peter Nellhaus)

A: Oldest meaning, first one made? That's Fantomas. Oldest meaning, had the longest? VHS of Blue Velvet, I think....

30) Longest film in your personal collection. (Thanks, Brian Darr)

A: That also might be Fantomas, if it counts as one movie. Histoires du Cinema, if it doesn't (and the Godard counts as one movie.) World on A Wire is up there too...

31) Have your movie collection habits changed in the past 10 years? If so, how?

A: I buy a lot more now than I did 10 years ago. The answer to 27 above is probably related.

32) Wackiest, most unlikely “directed by” credit you can name

A: There are probably better answers, but the latter half of David Gordon Green's career would have been very hard to predict (even imagine) from the first half...

33) Best documentary you’ve seen in 2012 (made in 2012 or any other year)

A: I am faced with the shocking fact that I have seen exactly one documentary in a movie theater all year, and I saw it just last weekend - How to Survive a Plague.

34) What’s your favorite “(this star) was almost cast in (this movie)” anecdote?

A: Cary Grant in Bicycle Thieves?

35) Program three nights of double bills at a revival theater that might best illuminate your love of the movies

A: It's a Wonderful Life/Early Summer
Playtime/Nashville
Celine and Julie Go Boating/Inland Empire (gonna be a long night, that one)

36) You have been granted permission to invite any three people, alive or dead, to your house to watch the Oscars. Who are they?

A: James Joyce, Frank Capra and Jean-Luc Godard?

37) Favorite Mr. Chips. (Careful...)

A: Um -

Music For Friday

Randomly selected through the miracle of iTunes!

1. Public Enemy - DOn't Believe the Hype
2. Liars - Brats [from an actual new record I bought this year - very rare breed, these days, I am sorry to say]
3. Mission of Burma - Fame and Fortune
4. Pavement - Transport is Arranged
5. PJ Harvey - No Girl So Sweet [surprised how long it's been since I listened to this record... listened to it a lot back in the late 90s for a while...]
6. Minutemen - Cohesion
7. The Pogues - Wild Cats of Kilkenny
8. Fugazi - Styrofoam
9. Dr. Nerve - Three Curiously insubstantial Duets
10. Yo La Tengo - Everyday

and video? Public Enemy live on MTV? sounds good...



And why not another 80s icon (well, they were for me), still at it in 2012?

Perryville, Kentucky

To day is the 150th anniversary today of the Battle of Perryville - the western theater's answer to Antietam, in some ways. Just as Antietam halted the Rebel's movements into Maryland, Perryville stopped their adventuring in Kentucky, an invasion that could have caused almost as much mischief if things had gone a bit better. It's an odd battle - the Union army outnumbered the confederates 3 to 1, but during the battle itself, only about a third of the Union men got involved, the rest all within reach of the battle, but not involved. The results were a savage stalemate, both sides gunning down about a fourth of the other with little actual result. At the end of it, Bragg and the confederates left, to rejoin Kirby Smith, also in Kentucky, with as many men again - but rather than renew the fight on roughly equal terms (which they could have), Bragg chose to retreat. It would not be the first time he would fight a battle, sort of win, but abandon the field at the end - something similar happened at Stones River...

I've gone on a bit about generalship in some of these battles - Bragg is a reminder that it wasn't just the north that had trouble finding adequate commanders. In fact, in a lot of ways (going well beyond generalship, actually) the eastern and western theaters of the war are opposite one another. In the east, Lee and Jackson, and a host of strong underlings fought a series of incompetents, or competents who lost their nerve at the crucial moment (Fighting Joe Hooker comes to mind.) There were good generals in the Army of the Potomac, but they were always somehow just off - tangled up in the politics of the army (Porter and Franklin might have been good men, but were infected with McClellanism from the start); brave, but in over their heads (Sumner, particularly); or they took a couple years to rise to positions of true authority (Sedgewick, Reynolds, Meade, Hancock - the best, really, of the corps level officers). And even when they did get better generalship at the corps level, there were always men who had no business being there - Dan Sickles the most notable and unfortunate example.

In the west it was almost the opposite. Grant and Thomas were in important positions almost from the start - though both tended to stall for months at a time. Sherman and Sheridan and MacPherson all rose to some authority in 1862 - and even more dubious characters, like Rosecrans, had good moments. And the South - may have had talent, but it was always flawed. Bragg was as good an organizer as McClellan, but was hated almost as much as McClellan was loved - and though unlike McClellan he was willing to fight, like McClellan, he tended to back off before the fight was over. He made enemies quickly and kept them throughout the war - but none of the generals under him ever did anything to show they deserved his position. And they maintained a mediocre record throughout the war. (There were outstanding cavalry men in the west, fighting for the south - but the Forests and Wheelers and Shelby's never rose to command the larger armies, and weren't able to do much more than cause trouble for the north. Getting th best men in command was not a southern strength in the west.)

And, as usual when generals underperformed in war, the men in the ranks paid the price. The west featured some of the bloodiest toe to toe fighting in the war - Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga were all bloodbaths, at least relative to the size of the forces - all of them concentrated straight up fights that sooner or later involved head on attacks on strong positions.... That described Shiloh - you can put Corinth in that category too - and of course at the end of the war, you would get the carnage of Franklin and Nashville as well. Bad, unimaginative generalship got lots of men killed - though to be fair, inspired, audacious generalship got lots of people killed as well - Lee had as bloody a record as you could ask.

And so - 150 years ago - they fought at Perryville, fought to draw, with one side never committing their significant manpower advantages, and the other side moving off, then retreating after reuniting with another army.... and Kentucky was safe for the Union, and whatever chance the south might have had to force the north to negotiate or convince the European powers to stick their noses in, was gone. And the war went on.

A Friday Music Post this Friday.

This should probably be something else - I have a new toy:



It is a great joy, and a distraction - still can't get my yahoo mail working on it. Hours, days of distraction! Fun fun.... actually, I have a couple new toys - rather more than I should, if I'm honest - it's been an eventful summer on the technology front. Therein may lie a post...

But not today - today is Friday, and today is a day for music. And - being distracted by the iPhone is as good an excuse as any for sticking tot he basics, as usual.

1. Bill Frisell - Ron Carter
2. Young Marble Giants - Brand New Life
3. Television - Torn Curtain
4. Carter Family - Church in the Wildwood
5. Madvillain - Do Not Fire!
6. Descendents - Wendy (live)
7. Fugazi - Merchandise
8. The Slits - So Tough
9. fIREHOSE - 4.29.92
10. Elton John - Tower of Babel

and video? Quietly lovely Carter family song, though with the usual cool stuff going on with the instruments - guitar and autoharp always seem to be trying to jump straight to the 60s...



Or maybe the Slits?

Baseball Postseason

This has been an odd year - I must have known something, not posting my usual beginning of the year predictions. I would have done something insane, like picked the Red Sox to finish out of the cellar - I got lucky there! In any case, it is a shame that the sox have been so awful - I pay less attention, and the game punished me by mounting what really is a fantastic year. Washington winning their division - A's and O's in the playoffs (A's winning the division, by sweeping the Rangers on the last series - amazing!) And individual brilliance everywhere - a Triple Crown winner? who might not win MVP (and probably doesn't deserve to win MVP?) A knuckle balling Cy Young? a bunch of 20 game winners, in both leagues? Mike Trout and Bryce Harper? Yes.

And here in Boston, we get Bobby V handing the division to the Yankees and bitching his coaches. What a guy. The front office seems to have noticed his failures, a couple months too late, so off he goes. Go Liverpool!

Enough of that - the rest of the baseball world deserves some attention. So let's go on record with some post-season predictions:

AL: So Texas and Baltimore play the play in game. All right - I like this system. I like how it expands the playoffs, and makes winning the division that much more important, at the same time - that is how you should do this sort of thing! Anyway - I think Texas has to be considered the better bet - though - same record; the Orioles have even played up to their record lately (though still 11 games ahead of their pythagorean record.) Rangers should win, though. They should be the best team in the league - they have been coasting for awhile.

Now then - after that - who plays who? Apparently, division rivals aren't protected anymore - so Detroit will play Oakland, and the wild card will play the Yankees. That still makes predictions a bit tentative - but that's what they should be anyway. I get another shot at this in a week or so anyway, if I care... So:

Detroit-Oakland: I think Detroit will win this. Too much pitching at the top; too much Cabrera and Fielder.

NY-Wild Card: I think Texas will take the Yankees out without much trouble. I'm less confidant in the O's. I think if Texas beats Baltimore tomorrow night, they will make it to the world series, and probably win - which puts them in a very odd position tomorrow I guess... If Baltimore wins tomorrow, I suspect Detroit will be in the series.

NL: I hate to admit it, but suspect St. Louis will beat the Braves - I hope not, though. I don't hate SL now that LaRussa is gone, but....

San Francisco vs. Cincinnati: Cincy has a very nice team there, but I suspect San Francisco will take them out. Better track record and all that.

Washington vs. Wild Card: Nats should win this, though I always fear the worst with St. Louis around.

In the end - logic says Washington, I think - they have the most balanced team of the bunch. But it's hard to know what will happen with teams that have just arrived at the top - sometimes they do well (Tampa in 2008?) - often, they crack (Tampa in the world series in 2008? Detroit 06?) Still - the truth is, there aren't any bad options really - other than the Yankees, and especially a Yankees St. Louis world series. The Yanks, thankfully, have played the part of the bloated has been for most of the last decade and I expect they will again. I certainly know the world series I want: Washington - Texas! Washington vs. (Ron) Washington!! Nationals vs. Senators!!! How can you not?

As for individuals, a topic that might be even more fascinating this year than the pennant races:

AL MVP: I vote Trout over Cabrera, though - there's not much to pick. The triple crown is a big deal - very cool - but the fact is, it's a pretty arbitrary set of numbers. Trout has had almost the same year at the bat as Cabrera - batting leadoff, so he has the runs scored and stolen bases in place of Cabrera's HR and RBI. Which comes close to being a wash - but then, Mike Trout is having what appears to be a very good year with the glove - Cabrera is a first baseman playing third base like a first baseman. And - while that might actually help the team, letting them get that much more offense into the lineup - Trout's defense is helping his team directly, by, you know, catching the ball and stuff. There will be those, meanwhile, who will say, Cabrera got his team to the playoffs, Trout did not - they forget - the Angels had a better record than the Tigers, in a tougher division - I vote Trout.

AL ROY: I wonder who should win this? is Trout having the best rookie season ever?

AL Cy Young: This comes down to an interesting choice - Weaver has 20 wins, is at or close to the top in ERA and WHIP - but has pitched 50 fewer innings than Justin Verlander - who has very similar numbers, a little lower - in 50 more innings. Verlander has to win.

NL MVP: This is also a pretty good contest, Posey vs. Braun I think. Braun's got somewhat better counting stats, but Posey is close, and he's a catcher - and he's in the playoffs, on a team that is notoriously short of offense - so - he probably should win, though there's no disgrace in Braun winning.

NL ROY: He was supposed to be the greatest thing to hit baseball since, at least, A Rod - instead, he turned out to be the second best outfielder below drinking age. But Bryce Harper seems like a pretty clear choice.

NL Cy Young: Gotta be Dickey - top 3 in wins, ERA, WHIP, top in Ks and IP? Easy choice.

And there you go.

Rainy Friday Music

Watch September come to an end in a nasty rainy day. Great, just great. Well, it is a Friday, and one has ones rituals, so here goes....

1. Pere Ubu - Stormy Weather [well, that was appropriate!]
2. Jackie-O-Motherfucker - Newcastle, UK Oct 29
3. Miho Hatori - Barracuda
4. Koushik - Be With
5. Soft Machine - Why Am I So Short?
6. Carter Family - There'll be Joy Joy Joy
7. Yo La Tengo - Superstar Watcher
8. X - Back 2 the Base
9. Don Byron - Frailich Jamboree
10. Paul McCartney - Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey

Well, they are defying my efforts to find videos for the day - though it looks like we can turn up some Soft Machine, which can't be bad:



And I suppose Sir Paul is a good thing - especially the weather the way it is... live a little, get around...

The Master and Such

The Master arrives, like all the PT Anderson films before it, on waves of hype and praise and some complaint - I suppose I could review it, but the world abounds in reviews, and I have other things on the mind, so I think I will just make a list of things that caught my attention...

1) My first impression of the film is of how perfect Joaquin Phoenix looks for 1950 USA. That lean, hard body, skinny, strong, but with no definition - I look at old pictures of my father and uncles in the 40s and 50s and they look exactly like that. It goes a long way toward selling the character. Freddy looks right. Now, his behavior, his movements, ways of standing, and so on, are mannered, sometimes to the extreme - though I doubt they are as extreme as they look to 2012's eyes - but his body, face (and hair, clothes, and so on) are uncanny. He looks like 1950 come to life.

2) I saw two films last weekend, The Master and For Ellen. I liked For Ellen - a carefully observed character study, a quiet acting tour de force for Paul Dano - a nice little film, though that's all. (It's enough, of course, though perhaps underwhelming against the competition. Like all those perfectly acceptable little indie films in the spring that disappeared on contact with Moonrise Kingdom.) But reading through the reviews, I find For Ellen described as "poetic" - probably more than once. And this is something that bothers me.

I am taking a class on poetry just now, Modern Poetry at that, so it is in my head. I've written about it here before - I have theories, which I confess are a bit idiosyncratic. I think, for example, that film resembles poetry more than any other written form - I think its basic structure, the compilation of shots, as discreet units, arranged in a sequence, and building meaning out of their sequence, their arrangement, and out of a host of connections from shot to shot, sequence to sequence - is a process that is much closer to poetry than to prose. Film is poetic by its nature. But I think its poetry lies in its construction - poetry itself is defined, I think, by the heightened language - and by the structures patterns of language. By line breaks I am tempted to say.... And if a poem itself can be more poetic by being more explicit about its ambition, and its derangement of language, then so can a film, by highlighting its construction, its derangement of images. And so - how is The Master not poetic?

Why do people call For Ellen "poetic" but not The Master? I suppose it's obvious - it's the slow pace; it's those long the long held closeups of faces, of people alone, mostly Dano alone, thinking, waiting, holding the screen. It's the inserted symbolic shots - the sky, trees, the roads, motels, and so on. Those are the things that signify poetry in films. The Terence Malick stuff, I suppose. The lyricism, the contemplation.

But there's a lot more to poetry than lyricism. We are reading Ezra Pound just now in that class, and soon will be reading T. S. Eliot, and when you read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock or the Wasteland, or you read Hugh Selwyn Mauberley - what do they have to do with films like For Ellen? And how are they not almost perfect prefigurations of a film like The Master? Look at what it is - a film that follows a man, his passage through life, through a period of time - but impressionistically, discontinuously. It is large and sprawling, but so is Whitman - so are Pound and Eliot - Milton, Dante. And look at how it works - dense, allusive, built around patterns, rhymes and rhythms, condensed to hard, specific images, arranged to play off the images around them. How is it not poetic?

As it clips along, Freddy on a beach, Freddy at sea, Freddy insane, Freddy trying to work in a store, Freddy fucking a store model, after half poisoning her with his concoction of photography chemicals and whatnot), Freddy fighting with a complacent bourgeois, Freddy among the migrant workers, Freddy running across a field, Freddy on the waterfront - the scenes come, without connective tissue to the last, a device you will find, I say, in Pound and company, in Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, to name a name. Not just as ellipse - but with even sequential moments (as Freddy's fight with the workers, and flight from them across the field), the scenes can be constructed as if they were completely unconnected. And it continues, and like poetry, it builds patterns across scenes - runs multiple patterns: as simple as the way Jonny Greenwood's music seems to run separately from the scenes - layered over them rather than sculpted to match them. It's in the ways individual images can overpower the flow of images - Freddy running across a field; Freddy trashing a jail cell - or just Freddy's way of standing, walking, the way he seems placed against the grain of every scene he's in. It shifts tone, between scenes, within scenes. It repeats images - moments, images, memories? or just the way an alcoholics' life falls into dreadful repetition - though the film never announces anything like that, anything like a clear meaning to the images it gives you.

3) I love it without loving it. I am in awe of it, without feeling the overpowering sense of its rightness I feel, for example, with Moonrise Kingdom. Is P.T. Anderson the equal of Wes Anderson as a filmmaker? He might be, to tell the truth - but Wes is more to my tastes. But - it's hard to ignore the coincidence of the names (I can ignore the coincidence of the two Paul Andersons, however) - but it really comes down to the fact that they have separated themselves from the other (American) filmmakers of their generation. No others match them - some may get there (Kelly Riechardt? Ira Sachs? etc.) - but none have yet. But the two Andersons have, I say, lifted themselves into the ranks of their forebears - Scorsese, Lynch, The Coens. They are in the ranks of the best world wide, the filmmakers whose works I wait for years between - Costa, Denis, Kurosawa, Apitchipong, older filmmakers like Hou and Kiarostami. I don't think it's an unjustified comparison. It took me a while to get there with PT (while I was with Wes from the go) - but this and There Will Be Blood seem to me to deliver what they promise, and what he has been promising - utter mastery of the medium, put in service of stories that show you things in the world you might miss. So yes: I can't say I have taken the measure of this film, not by a half, but I think I can say it is a great one.

Friday, End of Summer

Start, via Lawyer's Guns and Money, with Sandy Denny, and Who Knows Where the Time Goes:



And - because why would I resist? Nina Simone:



I don't have that song on my computer - I was wondering why; I thought I owned all those Fairport Convention records - I have certainly listened to it enough... ah - technology: I have Unhalfbricking only on vinyl - who knows where the time goes indeed?

And so? because time is fleeting this Friday morning, we turn to simplicity, the Random Ten:

1. G.O.N.G - Mystic Sister
2. Keiji Haino - I DOn't Want to Know
3. Badfinger - I Can Love You
4. Kinks - Sittin' on my Sofa
5. Meat Puppets - Rotten Shame
6. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Red Eyes and Tears
7. Neil Diamond - Sweet Caroline
8. The Fall - Telephone Thing
9. The Beatles - The End [guitar solos!]
10. Johnny Cash - Delia's Gone

And one more video - in memory of the Boston Red Sox, a team well on its way to something very wintry and grim....

Antietam 150

150 years ago today, the battle of Antietam was fought. I wrote about it two years ago - tried writing about it last year, though I didn't post anything - saving it for this year, partly... This is a big anniversary. (For me anyway - I wasn't around for the 100th anniversary, and won't be around for the 200th (unless I am a very old man indeed) - so 150 is it...) Antietam was a fascinating battle, and very important - probably the most important of the war. It's importance goes beyond its military and strategic significance (though those were big) - it is as important politically - the occasion of the definition of the war. The Emancipation Proclamation changed the nature of the war, made it into a revolution of sorts - and it came as a result of Antietam. The war itself changed shape, from something consisting of a series of battles, with both sides hoping to capture the enemy’s flag and win outright, to something like a total war - where the two sides would build and fight and cut each other up.

In military terms, Antietam was important enough. The South could have won the war in the fall of 1862 - by gaining foreign recognition; by swinging Northern elections far enough to break the Republicans' control of the war. Antietam put that to an end (along with Perryville and Corinth in the west.) I spent more time 2 years ago writing about the Union failure at Antietam - Lee's army was wrecked - it could have been finished off, as far as any army could be finished off in the Civil War. That was harder to do than anyone thought; both sides were constantly hoping for a modern Cannae, but it was almost impossible to do it in the 1860s. Killing power had grown, but communication power lagged, and the fact was that both sides were usually wrecked in every battle - one more than the other maybe - but most of the time, when one side chose to leave, the other side had less choice than they thought about whether to let them go. The logistics of the day made it very difficult to sustain battle. (In a couple years, if I keep posting these anniversary posts, we'll get back to that when we get to Grant in Virginia. A bloody mess, but something new, a genuinely sustained campaign... we're a long ways from that in 1862.) But at Antietam, while much of McClellan's army was shot to hell, all of Lee's army was - McClellan had two complete army corps that saw virtually no action. They could have broken the confederates - if they had captured the only ford across the Potomac, they could have finished them off. But they left it where it ended...

And yet - it is a turning point of the war. That's an overused phrase - one that can mean a bunch of different things. You can classify different battles as turning points. Like - Which battles determined who WOULD win the war? Which determined who COULD win the war? Which determined that the side that should win the war, really and truly WOULD? (This is different in subtle ways from #1.) And I suppose, finally - which battles determined what the war was going to be ABOUT?

1) is Vicksburg, basically - that cut the Confederacy in half, forced the east to fend for itself, gave the North access to invade the South from many angles... after that, the north was going to win, as long as it remained a war. (Though there wereways for the politics to play out differently - thus #3.)

2) is Gettysburg, more than anything else - especially alongside Vicksburg. Before Gettysburg, you can imagine the South forcing some kind of peace on the battlefield. Forcing negotiations, something like that - after Gettysburg, that wasn't going to happen. The SOuth might survive to force a peace, but they weren't going to win it.

3) this, I think, is Atlanta - because that was the point where there were no longer any ways for the south to survive. This is different than the other two - you see this a lot in the literature - that even in 1864, the south could still survive. It’s true. What Vicksburg and Gettysburg did was make sure the south could not win the War - but they could still win politically. They could still survive, hang on, create political crisis in the North, etc. But after Atlanta - they could not win. They could still fight it out - costing a lot of people their lives and causing immense suffering and despair - but they were going to lose.

4) and so we're back to Antietam. This stopped the South's best chance, probably, at forcing foreign intervention, some kind of armistice - but more importantly, this is where the war was defined. The freedom of the slaves, the remaking of the republic, into something - to be honest - closer to the ideals of the declaration of independence, to the dream of America, instead of its rather nasty reality. But also (as a consequence) into a total war - a war for the definition of the nation. It’s about the Birth of a Nation - this is pretty much where it was born. The irony of Griffith's title shouldn’t fool us - he was right, that the nation was born out of this war - born out of the freeing of the slaves. And this is where the North accepted that. For the South, from the start, the war was about slavery - don't let 150 years of revisionism fool you. They were fighting for slavery, from the beginning to the end; the North tried to fight for union first, and only came to accept it as a fight for slavery later. Here, basically, or 5 days from now, with the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation. A direct result of Antietam - which makes it quite justified in saying, it's the day the Nation was saved - maybe the day the nation was born. A better nation (though it would take another 100 years to make it stick...)

Friday Random Ten

I am still a bit off my stride here - I hope that improves. Expect another Civil War post coming soon, with Antietam's 150th anniversary 3 days away. And - I guess the rest is up to me. Right now? it's time to fire up shuffle and see what we see:

1. Richard Thompson - Never Again [always a good place to start, Richard Thompson, especially with Linda singing]
2. REM - Hollow Man [decent sounding late REM]
3. Meat Puppets - Nail it Down
4. Mudhoney - If I think (live)
5. ELO - Strange Magic
6. Mono - Halcyon (Beautiful Days)
7. Low - Murderer
8. Tool - Third Eye [long live Bill Hicks!]
9. Smashing Pumpkins - Tristessa
10. Ghost - Oblit 1961 [wait - why does iTunes think this is "reggae"? Ghost is a lot of things, but reggae is not one of them]

Video? What can we find? how about some ELO?



And - speaking of strange magic, here's Tool:



And I suppose - Bill Hicks may be in order here:



"send in Vanilla Ice..."

Friday Songs

Home again this Friday, back from my travels, up into the north country...



...a good time had by all. And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming (such as it is):

1. Melvins Lite - Holy Barbarian [one of the very few records I have bought this year... sad, I suppose... good record though; Melvins are reliable]
2. The Mars Volta - Cicatrix (live)
3. Doctor Nerve - Take Your Ears as the Bones of their Queen
4. Minor Threat - Salad Days
5. Stooges - No Fun
6. DNA - Calling to Phone
7. Pere Ubu -Sentimental Journey
8. The Who - Summertime Blues (Live at Leeds)
9. U2 - 40 [after dwelling in the more challenging corners of my music collection, we suddenly seem to have shifted to much more familiar grounds]
10. Burning Spear - Marcus Garvey

And for video? How about some vintage Stooges footage?



And I suppose - contemporary Pere Ubu footage: