In the Days of My Youth...

It is the second Friday of the month, and so time to focus on another band. (Second Friday seems more promising than first, I think... to maintain this habit.) Let me take you back, now, to the summer of 1980. (We've been there before, briefly.) I remember it well - staying up all night - 3, 4, 5 in the morning - reading books and listening to the radio. AOR! In it's heyday! I imagine I was driving the rest of the house crazy, staying up half the night with the radio on, but what can you do? That summer told: it formed my tastes, in music and books - it is a fact that most of what I ended up liking then, I like now.

My youthful musical trek was not always smooth - I was at the mercy of the radio, and lived in the boonies, and mostly stuck with AM until well into high school. I started paying attention to music about 1974 and 75. I mean, that’s about when I started paying attention to songs, started seeking out groups and types of music, and talking about it with my friends at school. I started listening to the top 40 in the summer of 1975. Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds were high on the charts. Jive Talkin’ hit number 1. I listened to the top 40 every week, and I started to have favorites: Elton John; Steve Miller; David Bowie put out Golden Years and Fame that summer; I discovered and liked rock bands - Aerosmith, BTO, Kiss - most of all, Kiss. Not just Kiss - one of my cousins had three records, Frampton Comes Alive, Aerosmith’s Rocks, and BTO’s Not Fragile - I would visit, we would play air guitar to Do You Feel Like We Do? and all was well. But for most of the middle of the 70s, it was all about Kiss.

This post, though, is not about Kiss. The thing is, even when I was young and stupid, I was restless and curious. At the beginning I did not make many distinctions about music - I liked and disliked everything I heard as if it existed in a vacuum. That changed as my tastes developed, and probably not in a good way at first. I tended to fall into the habits of an isolated adolescent white boy - I got to be a rock snob; my tastes became more rigid, I second guessed myself. (Though not before I bought an Abba record, and Saturday Night Fever.) So as much as I might love The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald or Someone Saved My Life Tonight, I would think they were a bit below me. Though I didn’t stop liking them - even at 15, I had a bit of a sense of irony, and that let me listen to what I wanted, when I needed it.

But I didn’t stop looking for music and finding new things. And when I was young, I was inclined to look at every new discovery as a kind of step to a higher level of consciousness. I would move from Elton John and the Bee Gees to Aerosmith and Kiss and think, I have done it - I have finally discovered what real rock and roll sounds like! And a year or so later, I would discover Styx and maybe Queen and say the same thing. And so I moved, from BTO and Frampton to Kiss to the Eagles (poor me) then Styx, then groups like Styx (Journey, REO, Kansas, Queen - that kind of crap), which brought me up to the edges of the province of straight up classic rock. And by the summer of 1980, that’s where I was.

And thus: I found a radio station that played real AOR: The Beatles and the Stones and the Who and the Doors, Sabbath and Springsteen and the Kinks and Pink Floyd and anything else the guardians of Rock And Roll thought met the grade. (Which at times could include the likes Lou Reed and Zappa and even, though I only discovered this a long time later, Captain Beefheart. But those are acts you will have to wait for, in this series, since I am following, roughly, my discovery of music.) One might go on. Some of these bands we will meet again: today, we are going to the band that was the center of the universe when I was 17 (not for me alone I suspect). The main course - the piece de resistance - the stuff of white boys’ dreams:



That, thought I, then, that, is what Rock and Roll Should Sound Like. That was hardly a unique opinion - most of the other guys at school would have agreed. The radio station certainly agreed - they played the hell out of Led Zeppelin. I somehow acquired, along here, Led Zeppelin II and IV on 8 track, and eventually, The Song Remains The Same on vinyl - but thanks to the radio, I didn't need them. I knew the first record and Houses of the Holy and most of Physical Graffiti as well as I knew the ones I had - most of those records got played all the way through every month somewhere on the radio... (III got short shrift; and the later ones were often politely ignored.) I would stay up to 3 in the morning, and hear a Zep song an hour. And usually put down the book (Pride and Prejudice! Lord Jim! I was preparing for an AP English class...) and play air guitar for the duration...

Sad, sad. I should be clear though - the station I listened to did play a lot of bands - they played deep cuts. I got a real musical education, at least in rock of the 60s and 70s, everything from Zep and Sabbath to Jackson Browne and Supertramp, over that summer and the next year. And in fact, things got better in 81 - they started playing new wave type stuff as well (or I found a different, even better radio station, that made no distinctions...) - I heard U2 and the Ramones and Elvis Costello and the B-52s, etc, before I got out of high school - which, in the woods of Maine, was an accomplishment. But all of it, for that year or so, revolved around the Zep.

And then I went to college, and it didn't revolve around them anymore. The radio stations in Boston played contemporary music, contemporary rock - my music-loving friends were mainly Bruce-o-philes (he should be next month's story) - and my freshman year there was a bit of a Satanic Panic, which I mostly ignored, but it made groups like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath somewhat frowned on... (Though I had a Sabbath poster on the wall; I think I pretended it was Led Zeppelin, since they offended the christians a bit less... but still; I wish I could find that poster. I didn't really care much about Sabbath back then; now, I think their version of hard rock has aged a lot better than Led Zeppelin's; I know I'd rather hear Paranoid than Heartbreaker.) And over the years, I found more bands, that repeated the old process - "this is it! I have finally discovered what real rock and roll sounds like!" - though I admit, after the summer of 1980, I never quite abandoned what went before. My new discoveries (and there are a lot of them: we have three or four pretty major revisions in what I listened to coming through the years) after that were added to what I already liked.

And somewhere in the mid-80s, sometime after I started listening to punk in earnest, I started hearing those AOR bands, the cock rock bands, with a different set of ears. (I mentioned this way back in 2004, writing about Johnny Ramone.) I noticed the riffs, I paid attention to Bonzo, I stopped feeling guilty - or "ironic" - about loving guitar solos. I also noticed, maybe, just how ridiculous their lyrics were; how annoying Robert Plant's voice was; how obnoxious their misogyny was; and how cavalierly they treated the people who wrote their actual songs... But - with eyes open - I still thought they kicked ass. And still do.

In fact, right now, I probably like them almost as much as I ever did, at least since that first flush of discovery. Though I like them differently. In 1980, I liked what you would expect - Stairway to Heaven and Dazed and Confused of course, and the first 2 records, and the harder stuff on the 4th, the long solos, the blues, the boogies.... Oh, I liked the ballads and such, but they were complimentary. But now? I suppose there is no denying: when push comes to shove, Led Zeppelin is basically a duo: John Bonham and Jimmy Page. It's the riffs, it's the drums - even on the ballads, it's the beats, its the riffs. It is awe inspiring, how on a song like All of My Love, a ballad - with Bonzo and Jimmy both so strung out they could barely stand - the band just swings like a motherfucker. They could go up their asses - and these days, I have no patience for a lot of their bluesy boogie workouts, the endless and pointless extensions of Whole Lotta Love and the like, the theremin passages... These days, I make no apologies for preferring the ballads, and have come to really like their later stuff - when Jones and Plant were doing most of the work, and they had almost turned into a prog band. With a drummer who knew how to rock... In the end - they are not like the Beatles; making a top 10 Zeppelin songs is not going to make me agonize and wring my hands, I won't be able to come up with another 20 songs that could be on this list - one or two maybe (How Many More Times, Good Times, Bad Times, Achilles Last Stand, the Immigrant Song - that's about it, probably...), no more. But still, these days, I might listen to the songs on this list as much as anything I have.

Here they are: my 10 favorite Led Zeppelin tracks:

1. Thank You (the live one on the BBC sessions particularly sends me; it’s a real song; and Jimmy really lets it rip. Bless them.)
2. Dazed and Confused - what I said about not liking the indulgent noisy songs doesn't apply universally. It’s the guitar; even the half hour versions of this are almost listenable. The early, short versions, though, are pretty hard to beat.
3. Stairway to Heaven - boring, but what can you say?
4. Ramble On - seeing them play it on the recent live DVD brought it back - the truth is that for most of the last 15 years or so, I've mostly been listening to things like that BBC collection, or HOw the West Was Won, the live stuff that came out after the fact... and those records don't have Ramble On, so I forgot. Now I remember.
5. When the Levee Breaks - it’s the drums, man.
6. All of My Love - there's more to the end of the Zep's run than they get credit for. The last couple records, the songs get good - the words aren’t stupid; the melodies are more than just excuses to jam; Plant has learned to sing. And however fucked up they were, Page and Bonham are always stunning. And so detailed - Page’s work is scary perfect.
7. Fool in the Rain - ditto
8. Communication Breakdown - a faster version of God Save the Queen?
9. Kashmir - riffs; drums
10. Over the Hills and Far Away - live, especially

That's enough - this post has started to approach Dazed and Confused length itself... Let's do some video. Let's start with half of Zep and the Foo Fighters... (though Dave should have written the lyrics down somewhere.)



Try Page and Plant doing Thank You, in the mid-90s:



And - Dazed and Confused, done right on Danish TV; violin bow and all, they get it in in under 10 minutes:



and finally - isolated drum track for Fool in the Rain. Because - because.

July director of the Month - Shohei Imamura

Well, it is not July anymore, but that isn't going to stop me: it's time for another Director of the Month. (And it's going up as July's director - August's will come at the end of the month.) This month, we are back on track with my countdown of the greatest Japanese directors (as I see it) - we are up to #3 - Shohei Imamura.

Imamura is one of my favorites, in the sense that favorites sometimes get separated from the best. He just makes me happy. I saw Pigs and Batteships as part of a series of classic Japanese films, and it was revelatory. Even then, before I was all that committed a Japanophile, I had an idea about Japanese films - as either gorgeous, serious art works, or lively, exciting genre works, that also worked as art - Kurosawa and Kobayashi, say. Or as perfectly rowdy genre works, sword fighters, gangsters and anime, that kind of thing. Imamura was none of those things. Pigs & Battleships is sort of a yakuza film, but it had none of the usual tropes of a Yakuza film, none of that sentimental manliness you get in so much Japanese genre work (even the highbrow ones). Imamura was certainly not making melodrama, like you saw in Mizoguchi. He was transgressive and funny, but it didn't come off as someone trying to freak the squares. (I'd seen a couple Oshima films, and I got that impression - of trying to be "transgressive" or something of the sort.) It was different. Funny, direct, unapologetically contemptuous of gangsters and Americans, while being more sympathetic to the low lives trying to be gangsters without every letting them off the hook (just look at how the hero ends up in that film). And saving its real respect and affection for the women, and especially the women who decided to get jobs and earn their keep. (A factor you see more of in his other films of the period, but it's there in Pigs and Battleships too.) And finally - fucking hell, what a spectacular looking film! all those cranes and angles and camera moves, the deep focus, the complicated, detailed sets and framings, the staging and composition and lighting - I was floored, and am now, every time I look at one of his films. Imamura came out of nowhere - someone I hadn't just not seen, but never heard of, knew nothing about, and found to be better than almost anything I had ever seen, so much better I could barely make sense of it.



A couple years later I saw the rest of his films, one of the first complete retrospectives I saw, and I got the full measure of his thematic interests. His cool tough women, his political edge, and, I suppose most of all, the full measure of just what magnificently baroque frames and sequences he could put on a screen. The full measure of his artistry - his willingness to use everything he has: composition, editing, tricks - freeze frames and shock cuts and breaking the fourth wall, intertextual references and jokes, all the resources of the 60s, the new wave (as an international phenomenon, all the filmmaking devices it added to world cinema) - which reach a kind of giddy apotheosis in The Pornographers and A Man Vanishes. But all his 60s films take fullest advantage of the new ways of working in films. He is awe inspiring. He is almost as thrilling as Ozu sometimes, for the sheer formal brilliance of it all.

He is. And I suppose, for all my adoration of Ozu, Imamura almost comes closer to my heart because I did discover him almost blind - I was told by all the literature what a great filmmaker Ozu was before I had seen any of his films. Ditto Mizoguchi, ditto Kurosawa, ditto even Oshima or Naruse or what have you. Imamura, I heard, was someone who was supposed to be an important Japanese new wave director, like Teshigahara and Oshima - but who, when I saw him, knocked me over on the spot. He was mine... that's what I wanted films to look like. I still do.

All right. Here then, let me rank the 10 best of his works. I have written a fair amount about these in the past on this blog. I will try not to be too redundant...

1. The Pornographers - A small time pornographer and procuror with a lover whose dead husband has become a fish and a daughter with a scar and a son with a mother fixation. Plus Yakuza and faithless friends and some delicious parodies of Euro art films, and the most astonishing cinematography ever. Every angle, every composition, every cut is startling and thrilling, and usually funny as hell...



2. The Insect Woman - Story of a poor girl surviving after WWII, going through jobs, drifting into prostitution, where she proceeds to take over the business, find a patron, lose both, but keep going. Her daughter meanwhile becomes a farmer, just as tough as mom. This is probably the quintessential Imamura, the one that presents his main themes in their clearest form - tough women, whose suffering and misery is never in the service of weaker, but somehow more important men; they exist for themselves, and win or lose through perseverance and work, nothing else; and through it all, the value of work, endurance, and - well - work. All this is told in episodic fashion, handsomely shot, experimentally editing. Told in self-contained sequences that usually end in freeze frames, jump ahead years at a time, without making transitions clear. Tends to be organized around parallels - repetitive, rather than dialectic: she sleeps with her father - her daughter does; she works for Midori, then Midori works for her; she steals from the madame, then becomes the madame, just as cruel and selfish, and suffers the same fate; her daughter, like her, gets taken in by Karasawa, an old rake - though the kid escapes. Scenes as well as situations are repeated, like the madame/Tome meeting in a police station, then Tome/her maid meeting in the same place. A very great film.



3. Pigs and Battleships - Yakuza, whores, and sailors, pigs and battleships. A boy wants to be a big gangster; his girl has an abortion then tries to convince him to leave and get a job. He pulls one last heist and dies of course. She calls him a fool, runs out on the American who wants to buy her, and gets a job in Kawasaki. The story itself is dense and complicated, though - the main plot line follows Kinta, or Kinta and Haruko (complicated already since it is about both of them, his chance to leave, her chance to leave, which aren't the same), but with strong subplots - Tetsu, the sick gangster; the disposition of the hogs - all of it with a host of characters coming and going, scheming among one another. Not quite a "network narrative" but almost complicated enough, with all the plot lines runnning more or less simultaneously, and all interconnected. And the look - the deep focus, the complex, articulated spaces that run through all of Imamura's films, give a kind of visual equivalent to this kind of plotting.

4. Intentions of Murder - A sickly musician rapes a pudgy mousy woman, who after thinking of suicide, spends most of the movie moping about her misfortunes without (apparently) acting. In the end the musician tries to get her to run away, she thinks about poisoning him, but instead he just dies; though there are photos of the two of them together, she simply denies the affair to her husband, and gets what she wants. That's not quite doing it justice. The family life is complicated - she's married to a librarian, who hasn't managed to get around to registering her as his wife, or their son as her son, so she has almost no rights. She's bullied by him and his family, though in fact, for all her passivity and supposed weakness, she is smarter than the lot of them. (We get it early: she corrects her husband's math, while doing the books; during the film she starts giving lessons in weaving, and by the end is making more money than the rest of them.) It ends up with one of Imamura's best jokes: having eluded the musician and a blackmailing librarian, she sues to have her son registered in her name, and wins - the family huffing and puffing about how stupid she is to sue them, she protesting that she never thought it would reach the courts - a great joke, as she has just gotten exactly what she wanted, and tops it off by moving to their silk farm, where she knits and raises the worms... It's the happiest ending in any Imamura film, by far. As for style - it's as magnificent as the rest of Imamura's work; for some reason too, it's always struck me as providing an excellent illustration of the definition of metaphor and metonymy - it uses Trains symbolically, in both ways: metaphorically as a figure of Sex; metonymically as a figure of Escape. Not sure why that seems to important, but there it is...



5. A Man Vanishes - A documentary of sorts about a man who disappears (a rather common occurance in 1960s Japan, I think). Imamura investigates and soon hooks up with the man's fiancé, who searches (along with an actor) for traces of the missing man, though she also starts falling in love with the actor.... Imamura films, often with hidden cameras, but also stages scenes, reenacts scenes, and so on. I wrote it up a few years back - it really is a remarkable film.

6. Vengeance is Mine - Ken Ogata as a killer; he kills a professor, takes on her identity, then kills a lawyer, an inn-keeper and her mother, as well as a co-worker. All this flips back and forth in time, starting with his arrest, moving to his killings, then his childhood and background, wife and father, then the recent past, the inn, the lawyers, his frauds, and so on. Though this film (like most of Imamura's later films) stays closer to the male lead, he is surrounded by tough women: the wife, who falls for his dad; mom, who for all her religion refuses to die; the lusty inn-keeper, and even more than her, her old mother, just out of jail for murder herself. All this quite wonderful looking, and handled with Imamura;s customary panache, which might hit its peak in the scenes where he jumps between time frames in the same shot...

7. Black Rain - A somewhat restrained film for Imamura, telling the story of a family living in the aftermath of Hiroshima. Starts with the bomb - the uncle was on a train, the aunt in her house - their niece was out of town, saw the bomb, went back through the rain, then crossed the town with the others.... 5 years later - they live in the country (they have money), but the niece can't get a husband, her uncle is ill, her grandmother thinks she's her daughter... The uncle is sick, but survives - while everyone around them dies. A friend dies, two more friends die, right after each other (funerals marked by a wipe), then the aunt, finally the girl. The plot is driven by the girl's search for a husband, which is complicated by her war experience - one man turns her down, despite a doctor's certificate; another says he doesn't care about her health, but his family is not so casual; there is also a war vet, who carves Buddhas and attacks cars as if they were American tanks, likes her and might have married her if she didn't die.... Over all, this is much more classical than anything else Imamura did - slower paced, with spare composition and staging, though as always, composed carefully in depth. This increased classicism is accompanied by a few Imamura touches - the knockabout comedy with the veteran; a couple bursts of anti-naturalism: the vet acting out his experiences; and the end... Uncle and girl are at a pond: she sees visions of jumping fish - he says, 5 minutes to go, we have to get back to the house - sure, he means, before they announce the time on the radio (clocks are a motif, ticking off the hours until everyone dies), but it's the end of the film as well...

8 Eijenaika - Set at the end of the Tokogawa regime, and as the government crumbles, all hell breaks loose among the froth and scum. It is another brilliant film - full of mixed motives, complicated relationships, complex shots - windows giving onto deep focus worlds, glimpses of things, of whole worlds, going on in the background, and sometimes the foreground, of a shot, unrelated tot he story. Of his later, color films, it's probably the closest in tone to the 60s films, especially Pigs and Battleships - comic, chaotic, another network narrative - with politics and history running through it all the way...

9. Endless Desire - Imamura's first completely characteristic film, a black comic neo-noir about 4 war buddies convening, 10 years later, to dig up buried treasure (a drum of morphine.) 4 were supposed to meet - 5 show up - one of them no one remembers, another says she is the sister of the leader of the group. They are a typical comically diverse crew - a businessman, a teacher that everyone bullies, a thug, a pharmacist, and the woman. They go to the slums of Osaka, rent a place where they can start their tunnel, but have to take a local kid into their confidence. They agree to reconvene in a month, but all of them show up early to start digging on their own. From there, things unravel in the usual way; they all start killing one another, dying absurdly, and so on - the woman manipulates one and all, but ends up falling in the river.... It's very funny, dark and bitter, an excellent entry into this kind of film, and already starting to take on the cinematographic brilliance that would be Imamura's trademark in the 60s.

10. Profound Desire of the Gods - Imamura's last film in the 1960s, his first color film, this is Imamura at his most mythic. It is set on a remote island in the Ryukyus, and mostly follows a family, the Futoris. They are inbred and brutal, but mythical: they were always the head of the religions of the island, and sometimes take the legends of brother and sister gods founding islands a bit too literally. Myth abounds - the nature photography, the brother digging a pit to make a boulder fall over, the retarded girl, the priestess, the old man... The film starts with the Futoris as outcasts, since Nekichi (the older brother) dynamited fish and (maybe) banged his sister - he's digging the pit, trying to keep the women under control... An engineer arrives on the island and hires the younger brother, they look for water, they start mowing down a sacred forest, but here Nekichi and the women (and the island headman) start sabotaging the engineer's work... The engineer, as one would expect in an Imamura film, gets pulled into the Futoris' doings, being seduced by the women (he resists the mother, but not the daughter), and even helping Nekichi dig his pit; while the younger brother is pulled into the modern world. Well - it all ends in Myth, with brother and sister sailing away to found a new race and all, though that doesn't quite go to plan. All told - it's a gorgeous film, and sometimes very highly praised, though I have to admit that I don't quite buy it. There's a bit of a shift here - it's full of Imamura's usual obsessions, his usual tough women - but it's changed a bit. He starts to mythologize his characters, those tough, earth women. The earlier ones are tough, independent, characters, and always protagonists in their stories - in control or fighting like hell to be in control. Here, they are transformed into a retarded sex fiend and a plot device: Nekichi's sister/lover, Ryugen's priestess/lover. They become symbols, not characters. For me, it turns a bit sour - it seems misogynist in ways, as it takes character types who had been fully characters, agents, and makes them symbols, only there as a foil to the men. It's a tendency that pops up a bit more in his later films - in general his later films follow men more than women... Fortunately, in the better ones (the ones listed above), the women remain interesting and independent characters - but it's not such a given anymore.

I don't want to end on a down note, though. Because Profound Desire of the Gods is, mythology or not, still a great film - and there are still a lot of damned fine movies to go in Imamura's career. Second Brother, Stolen Desire, The Eel, Dr. Akagi are all outstanding - there's plenty to admire in all of them. And finally - he was an extraordinary documentarian. The box set of A Man Vanishes contains several of his television documentaries, along with that masterpiece - an important body of work.

Welcome to August Friday 10

Well - I managed to blow two blog deadlines this week - both a new director of the month for July, and a band of the month for August. I shoudl cite (though not blame) Wonders in the Dark's upcoming Western poll, as that consumed my attention at the beginning of the week (and for much of the last month or so) - but not really... The director is done, and will be up as soon as it is seemly (to not step on this post - or more truthfully, to not get stepped on by this post.) The Band of the month - it was a bad idea to call that the first Friday of the month - not if I am going to turn the director posts into something at the end of every month. So second Friday! that's the plan!

And today? nothing much. I did see a concert last week - a bunch of kids playing in Cambridge - the son of some friends of mine played his first "real" gig, in a real club - that was fun... Otherwise? We're random today:

1. Arthur "Big Daddy" Crupup - My Baby Left Me
2. REM - A Perfect Circle
3. Atoms for Peace - Unless
4. David Sylvain - The Good Son
5. Wire - Clay
6. Danielson - This Day is a Loaf
7. Tragically Hip - We'll Go Too
8. Scissor Sisters - She's My Man
9. Yo La Tengo - Return to Hot Chicken
10. Sigur Rus - Rafstraumur

So for Video? Why not David Sylvain?



And - in the spirit of randomness - this is what came up on top in YouTube when I searched for Rafstraumur... wait - what? maybe for the Scissor Sisters, but this came up for Sigur Rus?



Not that anyone really regrets KC and the Sunshine Band... anyway, I guess that will put an end to any artiness I might be pushing. I suppose the Scissor Sisters wouldn't go wrong right now...



And finally - leave you with an iphone picture of the show I saw, nice and blurry.

Doghouse Riley

The worst thing about the internet is that it vastly expands the number of people whose suffering can crack you. Doghouse Riley has died - Douglas Case by name, was a blogger out of Indiana who has been a must read for years. He was always funny and sharp, on politics, bikes, Indiana-ness, education, you name it - I followed him to his blog from Roy Edroso's place, where he was funny and sharp, and stood out amidst one of the funniest and sharpest comments sections on the net... It is something how someone I never knew, never interacted with as anything other than a reader, can seem that important to you - but reading about his passing felt to me like a board to the back of the head. You maybe have become used to it with famous professionals, the Roger Eberts of the world, but the internet expands the pool so much....

Of course the best thing about the internet is that I know about so many people out there, that I will never meet, or interact with as anything but a reader, and who will still have made my life better. He was a joy to read, his blog absolutely essential. I will miss him.

Friday 10 in the Rain

Well, we've gone from a week of blistering heat to 60s and raining again, where we were at the beginning of the month. You get whiplash watching the thermometer this summer; and have had precious few really nice days to enjoy lately. Tomorrow is supposed to be hot again, though normal hot, 80s - I guess that sort of thing will have to do.

Music! next week, you'll get another band countdawn - this week, it's just the randomizer:

1. The Beatles - Good Day Sunshine
2. Acid Mother's Temple - Occie Lady
3. Badfinger - Take it All
4. Deerhoof - Lightning Rod, Run
5. Jackie Mittoo - Get up and Get it
6. Loren Connors - The Cart Ride
7. Bruce Springsteen - The Price You Pay
8. Decembrists - The Crane Wife 1, 2 and 3 (live)
9. PJ Harvey - Catherine
10. Decembrists - Leslie Anne Levine

Video? iTunes has certainly been clear about it's desire for something from the Decembrists - here's the Crane Wife live:



And PJ Harvey, I think:

Woe of RSS

I am in a terrible state of anxiety. I read blogs through RSS, not quite exclusively - but it's where I start for almost everything. Having Google Reader go away at the beginning of the month was a terrible blow - but for the most part, I made a simple enough transition to The Old Reader, and went on my way. I'm not entirely sold on it - it has some quirks I could do without, or that I haven't entirely figured out how to work around - but mostly, it's a nice replacement. Quick, stable, usable... no complaints.

But suddenly - they are down. From the looks of it, they moved their databases to a new set of servers - and things went pear shaped. They were offline a while over the weekend (irritating, but that's life) - but now, they have gone down, server issues, and have been down a while now. I am left without an RSS feed!

I tried out Bloglines before Google reader went away - it has some nice features, but it was noticeably slower than the Old Reader, and always acted a bit odd, so I went to the old reader instead.... and now, trying to go back, use it for a day, I see why I picked the old reader. Slow! weird stuff with logging in! took forever to bring up the last month's worth of feeds (since I haven't used it) - but then didn't mark them read right when I did. Oy. What a pain.

It's depressing how set in my ways I become sometimes. And a reminder of one of my hobby horses - that while the hardware keeps getting better and better and better, software does not. Software may add capabilities that it never had before - the way everything has integrated sound, pictures, video over the last 15 years or so... But I don't see the basics ever getting better - or even maintaining their quality. All this trouble with RSS has not made anything better - none of the alternatives are better than Reader was when I started using it, whenever that was. (08 or 09, somewhere in there, I think; though I don't know - I've been doing this a hell of a long time, and I lose track of how long it has been since I have changed some habit or other... I could probably figure it out by looking at how long it's been since I updated my blogroll...) It's more dramatic, I suppose, with things like word processors - I have expressed my opinions of MS Word from nearly the incipience of this humble blog - Word 5.1, back in 1991, ran better than anything I have on this machine now. Computers get more and more powerful - the hardware supports more and more things (from faster connections to cameras and sound to etc.), which find their way into programs - but while you can stick a video in a word document, here in 2013, MS Word itself does not run any faster than it did in 1991, nor has it added any word processing features that were not there in 1991. Indeed, the current version of word is markedly inferior to word 5.1, even in terms of features. Slower; less customizable; uglier and more confusing (those fucking ribbons!); not very compatible with older versions of word (and as might be apparent from these comments I have word documents reaching back to 1990; I have some word perfect and .rtf documents from 89....) Files have gotten bigger and bigger through the years, even for just text, though I'm not sure how much of that is real and how much is due to new disk formats. Etc.! I could go on... It is very frustrating - I use Word more than anything, this side of the internet - and am a lot more fussy about it than I am about browsers, and the latest version of Word (Office 2011 for Mac) is junk. Better, by a damned sight, than Office 2010 for Windows, which I'm saddled with at work, but that is no accomplishment - though even there - I never minded office 03. I skipped 07; I loath 2010. Here - one of the results of last year's (really bad) technical disaster was that I bought a MacAir (a device that delights me as much as anything I have used in years, I have to admit) - I wanted to get Office on that, but could not find my 2011 DVD (if I even had such a thing) - so I loaded 2008 on it. Office and Word 08 is actually a pretty good piece of software - certainly better than 11.

All right... Rant off! I am calm. I am annoyed - I have my habits for reading the internet, and don't like them disrupted, but it will be all right. Serenity now!

I think at this point, I am obligated to post a picture of a cat, attempting to help set up a mini-iPad:

Friday Fun in the Sun

Summer is here with a vengeance I guess. Been hot all week, but today is supposed to be the worst - creeping up around 100 - oh good. I am out on my balcony typing this - it was almost comfortable out here yesterday at this time; today, already, it is sticky and a bit gross. Nothing I can do about it, I suppose. I think the worst of it is supposed to be over after today.

Anyway - for music? random is good.

1. DNA - 5:30
2. Jefferson Airplane - Go to Her
3. Radiohead - Codex
4. Liars - No. 1 Against the Rush
5. Ghost - Givers Chant
6. DNA - Forgery [2 DNA songs come up? randomness is sometimes very random.]
7. Wu-tang Clan - Sucker MCs
8. REM - Radio Free Europe [calling out in transit...]
9. Merle Haggard - Swinging Doors
10. Ryan Adams - Answering Bell

Video - a live DNA set seems in order:



And, oh - making their national television debut...

54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner

Another anniversary - via Lawyers, Guns and Money, I'm reminded that today is the anniversary of the assault on Fort Wagner by the 54th Massachusetts, made famous by St. Gauden, Charles Ives and Glory...

A Different Kind of Civil War Post

I have been writing mostly about battles, but I have been reading a wider variety of things. I recently finished reading Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering, about the process of coping with death in the Civil War. There was lots of death to cope with.



I was thinking about that last week. THe weekend of the 4th, my brothers and I went up to Bucksport and Ellsworth on a day trip; wandered around Fort Knox for a while, then went to Ellsworth, looking for our great-grandfather's grave. Our grandmother came from Ellsworth, though she moved away, and we hadn't been back all that often - but we knew some of her people were buried up there, so took a look.

We found it, the old man's grave; we then looked around for more ancestors, further back. This was more a shot in the dark - though the family hailed from that part of Maine, we did not know if they were from Ellsworth proper or somewhere else. In the end, we did find more: our great-great-grandparents' gravestone, to be precise:



Old Henry had an American flag next to him, and is listed as a veteran of the Civil War. He was not alone. There were quite a few graves of soldiers in the Civil War up there, most of them serving, like Henry, in the 1st Volunteers - a unit that, in fact, only served for 3 months. But Henry, and probably quite a few others, reenlisted in other units - quite a few of them (up in that part of the state, near Bangor, along the Penobscot) in what would become known as the 1st Maine Heavy Artillery Regiment. There's definitely a story there - the Heavy Artillery regiments had a strange history. They were posted in the Washington defenses for most of the war; they were very large, and they had a very comfortable duty, in the capitol, where they undoubtedly felt they were quite safe. But then Ulysses S Grant came east, and he saw thousands of men, trained and equipped and ready to be used, and he set about to use them. He came east with the power to take what he wanted, even if it made politicians nervous (and they were very jittery about the capitol), so he stripped the capitol's defenses, and assigned these units to regular infantry brigades and divisions and corps (and some of them were quite as big as a veteran infantry brigade all my themselves) and marched them off to Virginia with the rest of the army.

Walking around in the cemetery, not far from the Lunt family plot, I saw another one, the Higgins family plot. They too had a son in the 1st Maine Heavy Artillery. He was not so lucky (my great great grandfather survived, else I would have a different great great grandfather.) John P. died May 19, 1864, aged 17 years, 2 months, killed at Spotsylvania (probably Harris' Farm, right at the end of the battle.)



But what was really striking was on the other side of the stele:



That's lists three Higgins children, dying within a week of one another in March 1864, ae. 12, 10 and 2 - 2 months before John P. would die at Spotsylvania.

I know that sort of thing was more common in the 19th century - diseases could be deadly, whole families could die in a week like that - but it was worse during the Civil War. Especially in the south, where there was often serious shortages of food, medicine and so on - but in the north too. But here, too - one is struck by the weight of these deaths, by the weight of death itself in the war. That's the subject of Faust's book - the ways the country dealt with the shocking death totals. And it is hard to imagine how a family could deal with this - to lose three children within a week; then lose an older son 2 months later to battle. And imagining the mother's position - because John P. wasn't alone in the 1st Me. Heavy Artillery - his father was a captain. There may have been other brothers as well (I think a couple older sons did survive the war) - any of them could die at any time. What it must have been like...

All right. The regiment itself, I should say, left its mark on the war. They lost heavily at Spotsylvania, but even after that battle, they were still very large by Civil War standards - at Petersburg, in mid-June, they still had around 900 men. (400 or so would have been more typical...) And on June 18th, they were ordered to attack - next year, when it is time for the anniversary of these battles, I might go into detail... The Petersburg campaign was a blend of one of Grant's greatest moments, and the latest in a line of disastrous performances by the command structure of the Army of the Potomac. For now, leave it this way - by the time the 1st Maine Heavy Artillery was sent in to charge that June afternoon, it was too late - Lee's men were waiting, dug in to their eyeballs. THe rest of their brigade knew it - Bruce Catton reports one of them shouting "Lie down, you damned fools, you can't take them forts!" But the 1st Maine didn;t listen. They went in - they lost 632 men out of 900 or so.

One of them my great great grandfather, wounded. But he lived, served out the war, was mustered out, and went home, and had a family, and 10 years later my great grandmother was born...

Friday Random Ten

Vacation over, things are back to normal, with no countdowns or lists to post, and no anniversaries, so here we go, ten songs, randomized:

1. John Cale - Woman
2. The Carter Family - I Will Never Marry
3. Tool - Pushit
4. Missy Elliot - Dats What I'm Talkin about
5. Richard and Linda Thompson - Smitty's Glass Eye
6. Destroyer - European Oils
7. Richard Thompson - I Still Dream
8. Mercury Rev - Secret for a Song
9. Cream - Politician
10. Beatles - Long, Long, Long

And today, from YouTube, we receive - Mercury Rev, a typically lovely song:



And - let's say - some latter day John Cale - just a video, but neat:

Cash Top Ten

It being the first Friday of the month, this week's music post goes to another countdown. Today's artist is Johnny Cash. I know I said last month that I would try to move forward through music I listened to, roughly in order - Cash doesn't quite fit that. I knew about Johnny Cash all my life, but started to really love him only later about the end of college. He's going here for a couple reasons though - first, on the 4th of July weekend, you need something American, and there are few things more American than Johnny Cash. Second - because, like the Beatles, I did listen to him all my life. And third, because of my mother. For whatever it is worth - Cash is the one real link in popular music between me and my parents' generation. This is something that has changed, I think, since the 70s. Us kids born in the 60s did not listen to the same music our parents did. Not as kids, anyway. Most of us, I imagine, at some point picked up on things our parents liked - whether that was classical or jazz or country or folk or old pop songs, whatever they listened to - but we did not listen to it growing up, and our parents did not listen to what we listened to.

I've made this speech before. Things are different now. As a kid, I did not know anyone's parents who listened to anything newer than Elvis - nor did I know any kids who listened to pop music from before Elvis. Now - I know plenty of kids who listen to Elvis and Frank Sinatra and the Beatles and The Ramones. Lots of adults who will listen to new music, stuff their kids like. That's all new... Except for country. Everyone listened to that (everyone I knew). We all watched Hee Haw; we all listened to country radio; and almost every family had a bunch of Johnny Cash records around. Some people, like my mother, only got the gospel records - others got everything - either way. We all listened to it; we all liked it.

Now as it happened, in the 70s, going through adolescence, discovering music I liked, for myself - I turned away from Johnny Cash. Some of my cousins were big country fans - I remember going up to visit summers, and preaching the wonders of Kiss and Styx, and converting them, lock stock and barrel, to cheesy metal and cheesy sorta-prog. And then, as I moved on (as I saw it) to Led Zeppelin and the Beatles, being horrified that they were still Kiss and Styx fans, a couple years later. One trembles looking back at the folly of one's youth. But getting back to Cash - he was sort of forgotten in the late 70s, early 80s - something grown ups listened to (at least in the places I grew up); someone who put out a gospel record every now and then that all the church goers might buy. But nothing there for me.

That was never likely to last. Once in a while you'd hear one of those old songs, and who could help liking them? or he'd record something new - a bunch of Springsteen songs, and a more than credible version of them. I suppose, for the public, he came back for real when he teamed up with Rick Rubin - for me, it was in the wake of the Springsteen album (Johnny 99). I paid attention to him - got a greatest hits album and remembered it all, and never stopped. When he did team up with Rubin, he puts out a string of fine records, with real bands or stripped down arrangements - it was the same thing he did in the 60s. And his past came back - the days when he was rockabilly; the days he worked with Dylan; the days (those live prison records, particularly), when he had a tight, rocking band behind him, and could negotiate everything from the coldest murder songs to the sweetest gospel. He still could do that stuff, and once he got back to doing it without a lot of fluff, he picked up where he had always been.

And so: probably the one pop musician my mother liked as much as I do, the chronicler of the nation, a man who knew thousands of songs and could make any of them sound like he wrote it about himself, and one of the Great Voices, Johnny Cash:

1. Folsom Prison Blues
2. I Walk the Line
3. If I Were a Carpenter
4. Ring of Fire
5. San Quentin
6. Five Feet High and Rising
7. Tennessee Stud
8. The Long Black Veil - that chuckle on the live version...
9. Jackson
10. Get Rhythm

Only 10 songs? well, that is the pain I have given myself. Video?



Ring of Fire:



Walk the Line:



And with June, singing Jackson:



And finally, because I grew up listening to it - Daddy Sang Bass:

Fourth of July

Happy Fourth of July, everyone.

Lots of history happened today - besides what happened 237 years ago.... 150 years ago, Vicksburg fell, and "The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea." At Gettysburg, the armies counted their losses and Lee prepared to leave. There was another year and a half of killing to go, but by this day, the military situation was pretty well settled.

Anyway - here today, things are rather less bellicose; the only casualties today are going to be swordfish steaks and hamburgers. Summer has arrived finally, hot ad humid, and going to stay that way a while... and now? I will leave you with a bit of Jimi, because, why not?

Gettysburg Continued

Today, I'm going to write a bit more about the military aspects of Gettysburg, the battle itself, the campaign, the strategy, and about the generals. About Lee, I suppose, in particular.

Gettysburg was one of Lee's worst battles. He was beaten - but more than that, the battle was fought in disjointed and unimaginative way, his generals failed him, or maybe his command structure failed him, and by the third day he'd run out of ideas and fallen back on the old stand by, the frontal assault, which went the way most frontal assaults went in the Civil War. But along with the Southern failures, one of the most important things at Gettysburg was that the Army of the Potomac finally had a general in charge who wasn't a fool, didn't panic, and could count. I've written before about Lee's luck in his opponents - McClellan couldn't count and saw disaster behind every bush; Pope and Burnside were plain incompetents; Hooker froze up when the shooting started. But Meade was different - not brilliant or particularly inspiring, but he read the situation, never panicked, didn't lose, and more importantly, didn't decide he'd lost before the fighting as finished. Put in all his men, that sort of thing.

The battle itself could have gone either way. It's true that neither side was looking for a fight at Gettysburg, but events fell to have the armies fight there, and both sides grasped what they found. Lee's army had the early luck on the battlefield - the positions of the troops before the battle favored them, and they got 2/3 of their army onto the field on the first day, 2 armt corps, Hill's and Ewell's, while the Union had somewhat less than a third of their army, 2 corps (though smaller corps than the Confederates), the I and XI. Hill's men came first, ran into the I corps, and got shot up pretty bad - but Ewell arrived, and the rest of Hill's men, and Ewell's men, in particular, got around the flanks of the XI corps, and caved them in. So all of Hill's men took on the I corps and drove them back with very big losses. (Somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 of the I corps lost the first day.) Meanwhile, the rest of the Union army came up, but not very fast - some of them, Henry Slocum's XII corps particularly, took their time about it. (That was another war-long trait of the Army of the Potomac - they did not always act with grew urgency; they seem to have picked up McClellan's tendencies, probably because he trained the whole army and almost all of its high officers, and show very little of the ability to move troops that Grant and Sherman had, or Lee and Jackson and Hill, on the other side.) But Slocum's performance the first day was actually rather anomalous at Gettysburg; Union officers showed great initiative throughout the battle. It started with John Buford, whose cavalry made a stand in the morning of the first day, and John Reynolds, who committed to the battle, and continued with Winfield Scott Hancock, who Meade sent to assess the situation, and who decided to make the stand here. (Hancock would end up being the central figure of the battle, in a lot of ways; his II corps held the center of the Union line, and Meade gave him a lot of the direct control of the battle lines, as the battle went on.) When Hancock arrived the first day, the army was in trouble - the I and XI were the only troops on the field, they had both been wrecked, the rebels were there in numbers - but the Union had strong positions south of town, it was getting dark, and the rebels were disorganized from the fighting, so things petered out. And everyone waited for the next day.

By July 2, most of both armies were on the field; the Union held a line of hills southeast of Gettysburg, the Confederates held a line of hills northwest of the town. The north, though, had the option of waiting - Lee, on hostile territory, would have to either take the fight to the Union or try to go somewhere else. Longstreet wanted to do the latter - march around the Army of the Potomac, try to lure them into a position where they would have to attack. But Lee decided to fight. And here - you wonder how much his previous good luck hurt him. Compare this battle to Chancellorsville - there, the battle took a major turn on May 2, when Jackson caved in the Union right flank, a complete success that ran out of time in the woods. The next day the rebels took up the attack again and drove back the Union, but only after a day of full on fighting (the second bloodiest day of the war). And by the end, the Union was established in strong defensive positions, with half the army uninvolved so far - but Joe Hooker was beaten. At Gettysburg, the same thing would happen - part of the Union arm driven in the first day, then a bloody toe to toe fight on the second day, that left the Army of the Potomac in a strong defensive position - but Meade was not beaten. He still held the high ground - he kept fighting. But on both the second and third days, Lee mounted major attacks against strong defensive positions, as if he took it for granted the Army of the Potomac would either lose the battle, or march away. And it didn't happen.

As it happened, the rebels had their share of luck on the second day. Lee decided to have Longstreet attack the Union left - Longstreet wasn't enthusiastic about it, and took his time. (And none of them did a very good job of determining the ground ahead, the union positions, and so on.) Preparations dragged on - and then Lee got lucky again. Daniel Sickles, commanding the III corps on the left flank of the Union line, decided his ground wasn't strong enough - so he moved his men a mile or so forward to a new line, longer than his original line, separated from the II corps on his right, and without any natural end to his line on the left, and leaving the two bigs hills on his left empty. All this happened just about the time the rebels attacked - so on they came, and the Yankees had to try to save the day. The III corps was shot to hell (wrecked, as much as the I and XI were - all three disappeared as units by the end of the year). The V corps came to their rescue, and got hammered as well, as did units from the II corps. The rebels almost took Little Round Top, a hill on the very left end of the union line, that would have given them a devastating position against the union line - Governeur Warren and Joshua Chamberlain became famous saving the place, Strong Vincent and Patrick O'Rorke and Stephen Weed could have become famous, but they were all killed fighting there... The battle stretched on into the night, with the confederates putting in more troops, the latecomers tending to hit the places thinnned out to save the left, so the Union had to scramble to meet those threats. Hancock was in charge of most of this battle - he met the threat as well as you could. (The First Minnesota regiment saving the day, there at the end.) And when this was done, the rebels attacked on the far right, on Culp's hill, where the union lines had been thinned out to deal with the threat on their left... But these troops were dug in deep and held, and darkness came and the battle stopped for the night.

So we come to the third day: this is the famous one, Pickett's Charge - 15,000 men marching across a mile of farmland into their doom. Right. People like to romanticize it, but the union soldiers had no illusions - they knew this was Fredericksburg turned around. (The way Fredericksburg was Malvern Hill turned around. Next year, they would all be topped by Cold Harbor. Frontal assaults against strong defensive positions were pretty much murder in the Civil War, though generals didn't seem to notice...) It is hard to imagine this attack working under the best circumstances - but add to that the fact that it was launched with a lack of coordination and consideration worthy of a McClellan or Burnside. Pickett was the centerpiece of the attack - he was Longstreet's third division commander (the other two divisions had fought the day before.) Pickett was supported by two of A.P. Hill's divisions - the divisions that had been shot to hell on the first day of the battle. Both lost heavily; both were under new division commanders. Longstreet was in overall command of the attack, but he didn't do much to coordinate with Hill's men. Neither did Hill (since it was Longstreet's attack). Nor did Lee. Hill's men were just told to go in on Pickett's left. They did, but they started behind him, separated from him, at a different angle, without much connection. The results? After a huge artillery barrage, that used up all their long range ammunition (while the Yankee gunners mostly waited) the confederates went forward - and were murdered. There were masses of guns on their right, that blasted Pickett's division lengthwise. There were masses of guns on the left that blasted the hell out of Hill's men. Union soldiers got out on both flanks and cut them down from the side. Hill's two divisions got half way to the Union lines and that was about it - they were just blasted apart. Pickett's men did better - partly because the artillery in the II corps, in front of them, had kept up the fight with the rebel artillery earlier, and used up all their long range ammunition, partly because they had a slightly clearer path, and probably because they hadn't been shot up two days before. Some of Pickett's men reached the Union lines, got into hand to hand fighting there, chased off a couple regiments, but they got there alone, the union line didn't break, and they never had a chance. In after years, the romanticists would cal this the "high water mark" of the Confederacy, but mostly this was just a pointless hopeless attack that killed an appalling number of men, to no purpose. (If there was a high water mark of the Confederacy, it was the day before on Little Round Top.) And that, more or less, was the battle of Gettysburg.

Gettysburg Beginning

150 years ago today, the battle of Gettysburg began. It started almost by accident - Lee had brought his army north, looking to case trouble, feed his troops, maybe threaten Washington, get the union nervous enough to pull troops away from somewhere else, Vicksburg maybe (fat chance of that happening, though), and eventually get in a fight and try to win, in the north, creating all the more confusion and panic - he had to hope. Marching north strung out his army, strung out the Union army, so both sides were looking for one another, trying to force the other to attack it, really. And Gettysburg was a road hub, and thus a convenient point for Lee's army to assemble. S they started to converge, but the Federals were there - a division of infantry found a division of cavalry blocking the roads to town, and got into a shooting match with them. Lee did not want a full on fight - but the division commander at the front started one anyway. With the cavalry - then infantry started to arrive, and Henry Heth (the division commander) continued to attack. The Union soldiers drove him back; most of the I Corps of the Army of the Potomac came up, opposed by half of A.P. Hill's corps - there was a hard fight in the morning, then it died down - but then Richard Ewell's confederate corps arrived, and attacked on the right of the union lines. By the time the day ended, the South had won a major victory - 2/3 of Lee's army made it up (Hill and Ewell), against about a third of the Union army (the I and XI corps), and the sheer weight of numbers won the day. Casualties were appalling - Hill's corps particularly was shot to pieces, losing far more men killed and wounded than the Yankees, though prisoners evened the total losses out. The Union retreated south of Gettysburg and dug in on a line of hills and waited for the rest of the army. The two sides would go at it for two more days before they were done....

It is the most famous battle of the war, far and away - the biggest battle, the most decisive Union victory, and on northern soil, which gave it additional importance and fame. And of course, it would be the site of Lincoln's greatest speech, in the fall of 1863. It was a crucial battle - and it provided three days of high drama - Warren and Chamberlain on Little Round Top, Pickett's Charge, etc. - stories and images to hang legends on. Now, it might not have been the most important battle of July 1863 - Vicksburg had a good deal more strategic importance - but happening so close to Washington, on northern soil, and, you can say, given the level of risk had Lee won...

So let us remember it today, remember the carnage of the battle, remember the heroism of the men who fought. We can note too that this was probably the last time the Confederates could have won the war - if they had smashed the Army of the Potomac, if they could have taken or seriously threatened Washington, they would have forced a peace. After this, all they could hope for is to run out the clock - still possible, but a hard way to win. I imagine Lee had that in mind, along with everything else - the hope that one big victory in the north could throw everything off, enough to give the south a chance. That didn't happen - it was a very long shot, probably longer than he thought - but it could have been, and wasn't because the union army won.

I will be back to this subject in the next couple days. I know there is a lot more to the Civil War than battles, but I can't help finding the military history endlessly fascinating. Have since I was a boy. So - in the next day or so, I shall belabor you, my readers, with more military details and more opinions on the generals and such... But for now - hold the whole thing in your mind.

And I'll note again Bob Bateman's series at Charles Pierce's blog - a fine place for a variety of stories, from a soldier's perspective.

Friday Weekly Musical Interlude

Friday is here. Today's post will be simple - a random 10. Next week, I hope to get a Gettysburg anniversary post up (maybe more than one: I find I have no difficulty gassing about the big battles of the Civil War)... and another musical top ten. I should write something about politics - it's been a very political month. From Obama's Nixonian side and the continuing adventures of Edward Snowden, boy spy, and Glenn Greenwald's troubles with "journalists" like David Gregory.... to the Supreme Court's inexplicable burst of decency in overturning DOMA - inexplicable, because everything else they did last week diminished the freedom and power of human beings in our great country, most perniciously, gutting the Voting Rights Act - putting an end to Reconstruction Part II... to the local entertainment of a special Senatorial election here in the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts (God save it!, as Charles Pierce would say)... If I get a moment between the hard work of vacation (picking strawberries and eating them; grilling hamburgers and the occasional tuna steak; hanging around beaches and pleasant hillsides; witnessing parades or visiting historical sites; killing mosquitoes and complaining about the humidity) I may try to devote a page or two to some of those subjects...

But not today. Today, let us just enjoy a few musical numbers as selected by the randomizing algorithms of iTunes:

1. Gang of Four - 5.45
2. Minor Threat - Out of Step
3. TV on the Radio - Keep Your Heart
4. Meat Puppets - Vultures
5. Paul McCartney - Too Many People
6. Jonsi - Tornado
7. Keiji Haino - A Secret
8. Neko Case - Dirty Knife
9. Pink Floyd - Fearless
10. Radiohead - Morning Mr. Magpie

Video? It's almost Canada day, so here's a Canadian! Neko Case, live:



And something a little different - Government Mule, covering the Floyd:

June Director - Kon Ichikawa

I missed last month's installment of the Director of the Month through a mix of travel, car trouble and monitor trouble. It's a risk in the summer - I spend a lot more time on the wander, and things can drop for a while, especially things that require me to sit in front of a computer for some length of time. We sometimes get nice weather here! This month, though, I am ready (maybe because it rained for half the month, so it was easy to sit in front of the computer), well before the end of the month.

This month, I am going to reverse myself a bit - instead of continuing to count down my favorite Japanese directors, I am going to drop back a bit, to #7 - Kon Ichikawa. He's fairly well known in the states, but doesn't quite seem to have the cachet of the really highly regarded Japanese directors, nor the narrower, but usually more passionate following of people like Oshima and Imamura. But he's not far from any of them. If he stays below the best - it might be because he doesn't seem to commit to things. He is an great aesthete, and a fascinating experimenter, but he has less of the strong identity of the other great Japanese directors. Though it's easy to overstate that - I mentioned before that his eclecticism reminds me of Oshima - and that he shares with Oshima a kind of consistent tone, cool irony in everything. He reminds me, also, of Stanley Kubrick - his irony, distance, analytical, almost clinical style; they share a sense of cruelty, that never quite abandons the characters, an undercurrent of disgust and sympathy.

Though how much of that is Ichikawa and how much was Natto Wada? She was his wife, and his screenwriter, almost from the beginning up through the mid-60s - which is roughly when his films started to lose their way. (At least that is the conventional story - in fact, he still made a fair number of quite solid films after this). Their collaborations, in any case, have the strongest taste of his most characteristic - or most effective - style, that tone I mean. However those collaborations worked, his films are marked throughout the period by that sharp ironic style, and his utter mastery of composition and construction. He was, over all, a master.

Top ten:

1. Fires on the Plain - one of the greatest war movies of all time - I have written it up at length before. I'll add here that it makes a kind of perfect double bill with the Burmese Harp - that film is optimistic and sympathetic to everyone, a film about hope and redemption. This - is not.

2. The Burmese Harp - A lovely, moving film about soldiers going home. It is sometimes criticized for avoiding the Japanese responsibility for the war - but like Fires on the Plains, it is explicitly about the experience of the men on the ground. That is an important tradition - the war is hell on soldiers story, like All Quiet on the Western Front or the Red Badge of Courage. This tradition ignores culpability and portrays everyone as suffering. In this case the suffering is real - the problems are hinted at but not treated - the resolution, the assertion of human possibility is very powerful and convincing. And in any case, we have Fires on the Plains to tell the other side.

3. Kagi - Hitchcock style thriller from a Tanazaki book. An old man spies on his younger wife and a younger doctor who's engaged to their younger still daughter. Plots schemes and betrayals ending with the crowd of them poisoned by the maid, who the cops release, thinking she is trying to protect the mistress from accusations of suicide. The story is nasty piece of work, perverse and strange and observed with an odd mix of distance and ironic identification, a trademark of both Tanizaki and Ichikawa. There's no wonder he kept returning to Tanizaki. As is also common through most of his career, Ichikawa uses cinema to full advantage - the screen is all chopped up, divided, full of blank spaces and odd relationships among the characters; the film generally is full of odd features - an opening monologue addressed to the audience, freeze frames of the main characters, like in a cop show showing the comings and goings of villains - ending with a voiceover by the dead Nakadai - "why? why was I poisoned? I didn't do anything." Great stuff.

4. Makioka Sisters - another Tanizaki adaptation, lavish and gorgeous - the point of which is made at the end. The film is about 4 sisters: one married to a banker, the next to a businessman, the third looking for a husband, the fourth a terror who runs off with a lover. At the end, sinter #2 visits her and says, in proper Japanese fashion, "the seasons come and go, but nothing really changes, does it?" - well,I don't know if she knows better, but the film, and I'd bet the book, is dedicated to refuting that bromide at every point. It is a film about the end of the world. Inside the film, everything is changed: the family is broken up, they all atomize to their individual desires, they accept the end of their dynasty - and outside the film, it ends in 1938, with the world is tottering on the edge of the end. The film itself is ravishingly beautiful, cool and distanced, funny, sharply, and sometimes disruptively edited. Ichikawa's style is on display - overwhelming graphicism, the symbolic and aesthetic use of color and composition, the tendency to favor a series of static compositions, with very little camera movement, and what there is is not used to create the kind of fluid temporalized space Mizoguchi specialized it. There are 180 degree cuts - there are lapses in and out of flashbacks, there is use of sound to link and dissociate images - there are graphic matches, there are games with black and white and color, there is clever use of text.... All of it is sharp and clear. It's a masterpiece, in the old fashioned sense of the word.

5. The Wanderers - 3 Toseinin, wandering thugs, in 1844, having adventures. Mostly they get involved in local feuds and serve as temporary muscle - resulting in wild fights where people try to look mean without hurting each other, though sometimes these get ugly. Ichikawa shows these fights in all their splendor - men hacking away at each other with swords and sticks and farm implements, slipping and sliding, falling into holes, the whole thing. The fight scenes are ridiculous, brutal, sometimes gruesome... Eventually the three of them get involved in a more coherent plot - one of them is compelled to kill his father, then disowned by the boss who made him do it; the three of them, plus a farmgirl the patricide “seduced” then convinced to run away with him head out for home, though things go about as one could expect. They sell the girl to an inn (though promising to redeem her in three months); one gets tetanus; the other two fight over which of two gangsters they will betray, in the course of which one falls over a cliff. The end. It’s a harsh, funny, totally unsentimental film - you can, sort of, feel sorry for the poor devils, but you can’t forget they are in it because they are idiots, though it’s hard to see how anyone else around them isn’t also an idiot.

6. An Actors Revenge - A famous female impersonator exacts revenge on the men who ruined his family. Theatrical and extravagant, the kind of film that just explodes when you see it on a big screen. Gorgeous strange staging, odd structure, a weird perversity, a wildly unconventional and artificial way of depicting things - fights all flashes of swords, a dead person shown as a still photo.... One of the films where Ichikawa lets out all the stylistic stops - and since he was always something of a showoff - this one is pretty stunning to look at.

7. Mr. Pu - Sketch comedy that turns dark, adapted from a manga. Lots of Chaplin; also lots of its manga roots - episodic, built around isolated incidents and sketches. Broadly speaking, follows the ruin of a modest teacher. He's his by a politicians car; he's humiliated by his students; he's demoted - he's lured to a rally by some of the students, and when the rally turns violent, he's hit in the head, photographed, and everything goes to hell. It is very dark - another characteristic of Ichikawa's comedies, in particular. Here, everyone suffers - Mr. Pu's friend is fired, the politician is arrested, the students suffer, the girl Mr. Pu liked takes up with another man, but her mother forbids her from marrying him - they shout and insult both father and teacher. In the end, the girl tries to commit suicide, but fails (the cops fol her), and Mr. Pu gets a job and goes to work. It is a fascinating film, full of vignettes from early 50s Tokyo - unemployment, clinics, schools, intellectuals in all their absurdity - it's really quite extraordinary.

8. Tokyo Olympiad - Documentary about the 1964 games - starts with a shot of the sun filling the screen - cuts to a wrecking ball knocking down a wall - interesting. Focuses on the effort of sports - the athletes preparing, working, waiting - the spectators - the mechanics of the sport - tending to ignore the competition, except in a couple instances; the volleyball finals,say, which Japan won. Some great moments, reaching a kind of peak with the marathon - an Ethiopian running all alone at the front, an English runner kicking in to pass a Japanese at the finish line for 2nd - and the other runners struggling, suffering, creeping in or not making it. Fairly marvellous film - a bit disconcerting to see a film about the Olympics giving 2 seconds to basketball though.

9. I Am Two - Surprisingly wonderful little film, narrated from the POV of a 2 year old. Begins with the child's birth - narrated - shadows and shapes that only later made sense - accompanied by rather marvellous visuals, out fo focus colors and lights, filmed through gauze (out of focus and a kind of fuzz effect) - slowly taking form - the face of a woman, saying the baby is smiling - still ringed with the same fuzzy effect - and here we get the first of many little pricks at the sentimentality of the material - the narration says "I was trying out my muscles - I used some muscles on my face and she thought I was smiling." - it continues from there. The story is loose enough, but not entirely loose - part 1 establishes the household, the relationship between father and mother, their social standing and so on (with nods to Ozu along the way - I WAS BORN BUT... especially) - part ii has them move in with his mother - the grandmother and wife struggle over petty things, but come to understand and like one another - then the old woman dies, leaving the other 2 1/2 alone.... All this is nicely observed, handsomely shot - it is funny and sweet, sometimes delightfully whimsical (there are two or three wonderful bits of animation), but also full of the sharpness Ichikawa is known for. The premise of the child's narration is plenty cute, and there's plenty of cute in it - but it is also usually unsentimental, undercutting the pretensions or worries of the adults - and once in a while, Ichikawa uses the premise to great effect. A serious discussion of life and death, heaven and hell, is ended by the child saying he has to use the potty - that is perfectly characteristic of Ichikawa/Wada...

10. Kokero - Soseki novel - a young man befriends a professor who doesn't have a job - there are psychological quirks invoved - eventually the man tells how he stole his best friend's girl, causing the other man to kill himself - he has hated himself since. Ends with the old villain killing himself - right as the Meiji emporer dies. It's got political subtext, but I can't totally parse it - but the death of fathers, the sense of compromise and betrayal all seem aiemd at a comment on the end of the Maiji era, and perhaps its failure.

Pre-Gettysburg Post

As we work up to Gettysburg - a few links, and a bit of an essay.

Charles Pierce is running an Anniversary Series, written by Robert Bateman, covering a bunch of things in the run up to the battle - well worth checking out.

This piece by Tony Horwitz, discussing the cost of the war, and the shifts in our assessment of it, is getting some attention. I found it through Ta-Nehisi Coates; I've seen other comments, such as P. Z. Myers'.

Myers takes the anti-war position, the uselessness of war in general, the waste of this one in particular, and the refusal to try to romanticize it. There's a lot to be said for that position - war is hell, and this one was an extremely nasty one. Even wars fought against unambiguous evil, wars that lead to better things, carry mind-boggling costs; and the Civil War's horror was compounded by the fact that, whatever good came out of it, much of it was lost in the aftermath. Slaves were freed, but it took barely a decade for Blacks to be disenfranchised again, for apartheid to be reestablished, for the people who led the rebellion to return to positions of respect and leadership. It's hard to look at the next century without wondering if the war was worth it.

But Coates, as always, keeps bringing us back to the broader context of the war. Reminds us - "we" did not go to war: the South seceded and started the war, attacking the United States. Talking about whether it was worth it is somewhat beside the point when someone else attacks you. He reminds us where it came from - the war did not start for Africans and their descendants in the Americas in 1860 - it started in 1660, and went on from there. He reminds us what the war actually accomplished: that it was legal (for instance) to sell your own children in 1860; not in 1866. And those things - it is true, the North did not fight the war to end slavery at first - but the South certainly fought the war to preserve - and really, to expand - slavery. Fighting for the union at some point probably inevitably would mean fighting for emancipation, because fighting against the union certainly meant fighting for more slavery. And - to speak of the costs of the war, they are appalling, but again - the USA did not choose those costs, the CSA did. And - Coates repeats - the costs of the war represent the shifting of the cost of slavery from African Americans to all Americans. What else could have been done? Coates also puts paid to the idea that we could have ended slavery without the war: the costs would have been prohibitive, and the South wasn't going to do it that way anyway.

And - Coates and Horwitz both point out that the notion of asking if the Civil War was worth the cost was never free of politics - a question originating partly in the aftermath of WWI (which made everyone question the costs of war, but didn't actually seem to stop anyone from starting new ones), but also from the Southern perspective. There's no getting around the fact that the South won the peace - stopping Reconstruction, rolling back what rights were won by African Americans, and even rewriting the story of the war, to make it less about slavery, more about different interpretations of the 10th amendment - and all a terrible misunderstanding.

And so it goes. Coming up on this, the largest battle of the Civil War, it is fitting to ask about the costs, about what was gained and lost. And to do that, and do it fairly, we probably need to learn to hold more than one thing in our minds. The horrors of the war, the evils of warfare, are not something we should ever let out of sight. But we should also not let out of sight the horrors of slavery and the direct connection between that and the war. And we should not forget that the war did accomplish that one great thing, or two great things - preserving the union, and freeing the slaves. Though that too - doesn't undo the fact that the country backed off from the implications of what it did in 1865, it reimposed a harsh form of racism that lasted another century in its open and virulent form, and continues to poison the country today.

Solstice Random Ten

Friday - happy first day of summer! this week, I'll keep to a quick random ten:

1. Yo La Tengo - Last Days of Disco
2. The Pogues - Rainy Night in Soho
3. The Nashville Teens - Widdicombe Fair
4. U2 - I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
5. Tom Waits - The Last Rose of Summer
6. Wire - Moreover
7. Panda Bear - Comfy in Nautica
8. Flaming Lips - See the Leaves
9. Red Crayola - Victory Garden
10. Klaus Nomi - Total Eclipse

Video? Who doesn't love Klaus Nomi?



or Yo La Tengo? (especially augmented with parts of Sonic Youth.)



And off the list - being summer and all - here's Galaxie 500, Summertime:

June Film Roundup

Been about a month since the last round-up, so time for another. NOthing fancy, just capsules:

Stories We Tell - 12/15 - story of Sarah Polley and her family. They had a secret: was she really her father's daughter? they treat it as a joke, she pokes around, and finally, almost out of the blue, she finds her biological father. When this, in turn, threatens to come out in public, she has to work it out with her family - and ends up filming it. The film approaches the story through all the people around the story - she uses interviews with her family and people they knew, home movies, fake home movies (presented as real home movies, until the end, when she reveals the crew filming them), and, given a central place, her father's account of his marriage, and their family. The title tells you what the film is: it's about the stories we tell, how we construct the meaning of our lives, and how everyone around you has their own version, and how they are all, somehow, to some extent, brought together. Life itself as a kind of collaborative improvisation. Very clever and moving film.

Deceptive Practices: Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay - 10/15 - very enjoyable documentary about Ricky Jay - his mentors, his connection to the past of magicians, as well as plenty of magic. Might be lightweight in the end, never really digging into the material, but since it consists mostly of Jay talking, it is inherently fascinating and very entertaining, because, in the end, he is.

Frances Ha - 11/15 - Noah Baumbach's latest, co-written with Greta Gerwig. GG is Frances, who lives in NY, is a dancer, though only an apprentice, shares an apt with her best friend, has a boyfriend - and proceeds to shed these impedimenta... She breaks up with the boyfriend rather than move in with him; her friend decides to move to Tribeca, gets engaged, moves to Japan; the dancing business slowly fades. Frances, meanwhile, drifts around New York - spends some time with a pair of rich brats (one beds a string of women, though not her; the other has an odd passive aggressive friendship with her ("undatable")), until the money runs out. She lives with another dancer for a while, who doesn't like her - though Frances manages to get a weekend in Paris out of it. Goes back to her old school for the summer, and then, I suppose, finally, faces the facts a bit... All through - she is flighty and friendly and a bit weird, and not very good at anything, but cheerful and deluded and inclined to lie to cover up her inadequacy, until the end. She takes a plain office job, she manages to stage a piece of choreography, she gets an actual apartment of her own. It is a nice little film, entirely built around Gerwig, and carried by Gerwig, who is, after all, a nearly infinitely charming actress when she gets the chance.

Before Midnight - 11/15 - Linklater, Hawke and Delpy are back, 9 years after the last one. Now, Jesse and Celine are together, with twins, live in Paris, but spending the summer in Greece. Starts with Jesse taking his son to the airport, to fly home - the boy's fate, and Jesse's relationship to him and his mother, becomes the plot engine of the film. They drive back to the place they are staying, have a nice dinner party with friends, who are as talkative as they are - then are sent on a romantic night alone at the hotel. But things unravel.... This one is different from the previous two. Not just that they start the film as a couple; the film is not about this couple, by themselves - from the start, they are plunged into the world. It starts with Jesse and his son; then the family; then with their friends - through the first half of the film, they are constantly surrounded by other people. They are alone in the second half - but not really alone. The boy calls; they start arguing, about the boy, the ex-wife, the twins, jobs and cities and where to live - they are, now, as a couple, completely entangled with the rest of the world, with all those other people, and can't get out of it for love or money.... It is, then, another fine movie, part of a very impressive series of films - so impressive, I'm tempted to note, that Julie Delpy has a parallel franchise of her own running on more or less exactly the same theme... Indeed, this one feels a bit more like Two Days in New York than the other Linklater films - fraught relationships and inescapable relatives....

Post Tenebras Lux - 12/15 - New Carlos Reygadas film, and for me, his best to date. (Though I haven't seen Silent Light, one of those films that got a fleeting screening somewhere and was gone, and seems, somehow, not quite right to watch on DVD.) Very fragmentary, hallucinatory film. The story, roughly, is about a rich family living in the country - man, beautiful wife, 2 adorable kids, a bunch of dogs. They have their troubles - he is addicted to porn, and some other hints of the couple's malaise come out; the man, in particular, interacts with the workers around him in ways that hint at trouble - he acts friendly, but is condescending, and carries a streak of violence and exploitation with him... The family heads off on vacation, but leaves something behind, so he goes back alone, to a Major Plot Point.... Talking about it that way doesn't come close to describing it, of course. The film consists of scenes arranged without obvious connections, isoolated from one another, though usually fairly stable inside them - long takes, usually with a mobile camera; lush scenery - jungles, rain, exteriors shot with a doctored lens that looks like vaseline, though apparently it isn't. We see the family together at different points in their lives; we see the workers in their town, mostly "Seven" who cuts down trees, does handiwork, and runs a kind of AA program; we see a family reunion of appalling rich people, kids playing rugby, and an orgy in a steam bath with things like the Duchamps room and the Hegel room. Throughout, much is made of class differences, class and race; there are many animals of all kinds, and trees, and landscapes and weather; there is, as well, of course, sin and redemption. It flirts, I suppose, with the worst kinds of Art Film Smugness - but it's too beautiful to succumb to it, and stays too close, most of the time, to something solid - the earth, and faces and bodies, and light. I liked it: I don't trust Reygadas, and had to talk myself into seeing this - but was caught up in it. It felt, somehow, like other films - Lisandro Alonso at times; Raoul Ruiz at times - I can't say it's as good as either, but it works.

An Oversimplification of her Beauty - 10/15 - interesting essay, love story, something, directed by Terance Nance. All of it loops around an incident - a young man who likes a young woman, expects to see her one night, but she calls and says she can't come over - "how would you feel?" The story loops around this, expanding the set up, his bad day, his history of love affairs, and so on... And loops around a short film (Called How Would U Feel) that he made of it. A girl he half loves, a friend, an ambiguous relationship; where will it go? With this as an anchor for his musings on his life, his other lovers, also lost, and on his career, his art, and art, memory, what have you.... It is very clever, and might end up being too clever - it does seem to get stuck in that initial conceit, and though the expansion on it is also very well done, it bogs down... Still: a very interesting film, an essay film, of the kind people did on video 25 years ago. A very interesting debut.

Friday Random Music

Pouring rain again; a strange couple weeks here. Not the weather itself so much as the fact that it seems to have settled in - we had a big bad heat wave a couple weeks ago, then it started raining and has barely stopped since. This time of year, in this part of the world, you rather expect to run through three or four seasons a week. You seldom get the chance to get tired of any particular tie of weather.

Anyway - onward: after last week's more ambitious effort, I'm afraid I'm back to more modest devices. Though I like the idea of a big countdown a month - there will be more coming. (Which means I am going to owe you all at least three relatively big posts at the end of this month - a director, a favorite band - and a very big sesquicentennial around the first of the month... All that around a holiday week? I'd better get it done now....)

iTunes says -

1. Radiohead - Dollars & Cents
2. Mudhoney - Crooked and Wide
3. Interpol - The Heinrich Maneuver
4. Times New Viking - I Smell Bubblegum
5. Minutemen - Storm in My House
6. The Residents - Numb Eron
7. Ryan Adams - Tina Toledo's Street Walkin' Blues
8. Blue Oyster Cult - Joan Crawford
9. Pere Ubu - Rounder
10. Social Distortion - Sick Boys

Video? "Policemen are hiding behind the skirts of little girls"...



The Art of Walking, with Pere Ubu:

Beatles Top Ten

I have a new scheme in mind for music Fridays - once a month (we'll make it the first Friday of the month, for simplicity's sake), I will post a list - the 10 best songs by one of my favorite bands. Simple enough, though setting out to do it raises all kinds of new questions - never mind the difficulty of picking just 10 Beatles songs - what order should I post these lists in? Count down the bands? or count up the bands, starting at #1? or alphabetically? or, look for monthly themes? I don't know. I know I can't do some kind of countdown - it's enough trouble coming up with an arbitrary order for songs - for bands? No - that's too much anxiety for one post - I need a different scheme.

I think instead I will try for a loose kind of autobiography - what I listened to over the years. The bands I loved, and love, in the order (roughly) that I came to love them so. This has many merits - it allows me to acknowledge the changes in my tastes, and to hold on to some of the values I've held more at other times. Though my musical tastes haven't changed all that much, at least not since late high school - or rather I should say, while there have been a couple rather dramatic swerves in emphasis over the years, I have never quite abandoned the things I used to like. Rather - hearing new, different (more different than new, since much of it was discovering things that had been around for decades) music sometimes added substantial new types of music to what I liked, I didn't really stop liking what I liked before. Does that make sense? I don't know. Maybe it will make sense as I make my way through this series.

And so to start - starting at the beginning means we are going to start at the top. At the top because to this day, I don't think any band can really measure up to the Beatles, and at the beginning because, even when I was very young and did not listen to the radio on purpose, the Beatles were the one rock group that was an inescapable part of my experience. Ads were on TV all through the 60s when I was too young to know anything about it - I liked them, could sing bunches of their songs ("I wanna hold your ha-a-a-a-and, I wanna hold your hand...."), my parents marveled that such things could exist, but still thought little tykes singing Beatles songs were terribly cute. In the 70s, when I started to listen to the radio deliberately, on my own, the Beatles weren't around - but Paul McCartney and Wings were (and John Lennon, Ringo Starr - some George Harrison), and I suppose like a lot of kids, I was amazed to discover that was the same guy who did Hey Jude... but still, it didn't take that much time to get to know the Beatles as such, and like them - and realize that they were the real deal, that the more you heard of them, the more amazing they got. And by the time I was a more or less complete music lover (which, in its earliest days, meant, I'm a bit sorry to say, a confirmed Kiss fan), I loved the Beatles - and continued to do so through every stage of my education and development as a fan, every step of which, somehow, made them seem a bit deeper and better, and usually, to have gotten there first. So - they are the place to start, I guess. Here goes - I give you - my 10 favorite Beatles songs:

1. A Day in the Life
2. Norwegian Wood
3. Hey Jude
4. Revolution
5. Dear Prudence
6. Tomorrow Never Knows
7. Everybody’s Got Something to Hide But Me and My Monkey
8. A Hard Day’s Night
9. Help!
10. She Said She Said

A completely hopeless exercise, obviously, but there it is. And video? IN the studio...



And on TV...