We have come to another Friday, here in the middle of October. First round of the baseball playoffs are done - things worked out pretty much as I expected, or hoped - I wish Houston had beaten KC, but I don't mind KC; the other three series all went the way I hoped. (And mostly expected - Dodgers are notorious chokers; Cards were ripe for a fall.) So now? I continue to think Toronto will win out in the AL. NL is harder - Cubs are a better balanced team, but the Mets have al that front line pitching, and a kind of drive to win... One must always steer around the Cubs' history - but that's mostly a product of organizational ineptitude, that makes it so they only get a half-chance every decade or two - post-season appearances are rare enough that their failings are just normal. So - with a real good team (not the first real good team they're fielded), they are as likely to win as anyone. So all right - Cubs and Blue Jays it is; Jays win it all.
And I can't not mention the 7th inning of that Toronto/Texas game. How do you describe that? So Martin throws the ball back to the pitcher,but it hits Choo's bat - the umpire calls time, but the the runner on third comes home. The Umps talk - they realize the ball was alive, they should not have called time, so the run scores. The Jays go wild and play under protest - the fans start showering the field with garbage. The inning plays out. Bottom of the 7th, a simple grounder to Andrus, he kicks it. A simple grounder to first and Moreland bounces it to Andrus. 2 up, 2 errors, 2 on. A bunt, Beltre fields it, routine toss to third, where Andrus drops it. 3 up 3 errors 3 on. Then - a force at home, and a hard slide, and a long debate about whether the batter should be called out because of the slide. (He wasn't.) Then Donaldson hits a simple pop up/soft liner to second but Odor misses it - but Choo throws out the runner at second, run in, 2 out, runners at the corners. Joey Bats comes up. The ball goes a mile - the bat goes half a mile - the crowd goes wild. After the celebrations start to settle down, Encarnacion comes up - trying to calm the crowd, who are still throwing shit around... The pitcher comes in to whine. Benches clear. Game resumes. Inning ends, pitcher get Tulo on a pop up, and comes in and gives him a friendly butt pat - benches clear!
It is a beautiful thing. Being a Blue Jays supporter (in the absence of the Sox, obviously), I am inclined to point and laugh - except Texas is kind of the other fall back team when the Sox aren't around, especially with Cole Hamels, who I like as well. I feel sorry for them - especially Hamels - he must have thought he'd just woken up and the last 2 months were just a dream - he was still on the Phillies! kicking the ball around the infield.... But still. Attempts to gin up "controversy" about Bautista's bat flip are amusing - that home run in that situation - what is he supposed to do? There's nothing on earth he could do that isn't "styling" right there - he puts his head down and runs the bases, it's every bit as much as act as throwing the bat. Now - that said - ca you blame the pitchers? especially Hamels, who can't exactly say, if the manager left me in there - if the other guy hadn't served up a meatball.. They are doing what pitchers do - batters celebrate; pitchers whine; both are right and proper parts of the ritual of a big post season home run. And I suppose we should always keep a few old fogie sportswriters around to wring their hands and shake their hoary heads and write think pieces about culture.... But the rest of us can just sit back and enjoy it.
All right - and some music....
1. Loren Connors - Airs No. 18
2. Pavement - Newark Wilder
3. Liars - Too Much, Too Much
4. The Rolling Stones - Let It Loose
5. Franz Ferdinand - Treason! Animals
6. Modest Mouse - Ocean Breathes Salty
7. The M's - Good Morning, Good Morning
8. Blondie - Rapture
9. Spoon - Goodnight Laura
10. PJ Harvey - Down by the Water
Video - we do need some Blondie today.
Friday, October 16, 2015
Friday, October 09, 2015
Can You Help Me Occupy My Brain
Happy October, and time for another band of the month - and who better for Halloween's month than Black Sabbath? I have to admit up front, this is a very front loaded Band of the month - their later material has its attractions, but they never came close to the first 3 - maybe even 2 - records. Later - they were a more than decent metal band; Ozzy had a more than decent solo career - but that's it. Not my favorite type of music - not the best of the style.
But at the beginning - that's different. They are heavy metal, they are inventing the stuff - whatever counts as the shift from hard rock to metal, it's in those first three records. There were other bands playing heavy music in 69-70, but they still sound different. Heavier, rawer. Heavier than what a lot of metal would become - there's a lot of melody in later metal - just listen to Ozzy Osbourne's solo stuff. Who do you blame that, or Def Leppard, or Motley Crue on? Deep Purple maybe? I don't know. Not Sabbath, anyway. It's Black Sabbath haunting the hard music I like, though - and I like a lot of it - and almost all of it Sabbath inspired. Butthole Surfers - Melvins - Boris - Earth - SunnO))) - groups dear to my heart, and groups rooted very firmly in early Sabbath. I don't know where the sound came from - maybe they were just trying to play hard blues, like Cream or Fleetwood Mac, and didn't have the chops - or had to work harder at it, and slowed it down, atomized it - cause that's what it feels like. The riffs, the sounds, isolated, set adrift like zombies wandering through a foggy moor - something like that. (No - less a foggy moor than a post-apocalyptic factory, where all the people are gone - or turned into zombies - but the machinery is still running. Actually, that's probably just a documentary of their early lives. Birmingham, you know.) It is so extreme - so slow, so dominated by the low sounds, the falling bends Iommi likes to play (think Iron Man) - they seem to be coming from Mars.
They were very good. They got whacked by the critics in real time, but things aren't always apparent in real time. (I've said before - the punks redeemed a lot of these bands: changed the way you could hear them. I heard Sabbath in high school, and didn't much care - I heard them after I became a punk fan and loved it.) They were good. The riffs on the first few records are absolutely stellar - Black Sabbath - NIB - War Pigs - Paranoid - Hand of Doom - Iron Man - Children of the Grave - guitar lines as memorable and cool as they come. And the rest worked too - the clobbering, relentless rhythms; even the lyrics - not as poetry, but as raw slices of id and anger at the world, are all first rate. Better than the Zep, I am afraid, and almost as funny. They set the standard for all the hard rock to follow - a standard for heavy metal everyone else fell short of. Most punk falls short of it too (even as punk - Paranoid might as well be punk.) The best punk and best metal takes off from it.
And they make a nice Halloween band. The first time I heard War Pigs I had nightmares for weeks. That is how it should be - you hope someone with their taste in movies would be able to deliver on it. They are certainly a reminder that the best horror movies are made by good Catholic boys, too - they master the imagery as well as Bava or Argento or the like. The music feels like a horror film - those slow, hammering riffs, Ozzy's tuneless yelp - and they looked the part. I had a poster of them back in college - not sure where I got it - someone might have told me it was Led Zeppelin, though I knew better than that... had it on the wall - 4 guys in black, wearing big crosses around their neck, all that hair, standing out in a field somewhere (I think it was the gatefold art from Paranoid - not sure; it has long since disappeared) - it was very neat...
And so - 10 songs, all from the first three records, not that I can even pretend to know more than a couple songs from after that... But that's all right. They were great at the beginning; they may have behaved badly after that, but they kept plowing along, making music, and not bad music, for decades after that. I can respect that.
1. War Pigs
2. Paranoid
3. Wasp/Behind the Wall of Sleep/NIB
4. Black Sabbath
5. Iron Man
6. After Forever
7. Planet Caravan
8. Children of the Grave
9. Hand of Doom
10. Sweet Leaf
Video - I may have posted this before, I don't know - this is a live TV gig from 1970 - hair, leather, hammering riffs and drums - clean and sharp and marvelous, with most of their best songs from the first two records, sounding better than the records do (at least the crappy CD versions I have.):
Children of the Grave in 1974 - they're in California, and the wardrobe seems to reflect it - oh, the 70s!
War Pigs, when it was Walpurgis, more horror film than politics at this point, filmed in Germany, in front of a cowd of what look like random bystanders... The riffs are all there, though, and good go, isn't this a riff. Later, they play Iron Man in a boxing ring...
And finally - Black Sabbath - 2013. I can't say they've aged with dignity - at least Ozzy (Tony Iommi seems like he's aged pretty well) - but they can still bring it. I've heard Ozzy talk plenty the last 20 odd years, and never understood a word he said - but he's clear as day, singing. It's like it all comes back, up there on stage... God bless you all!
But at the beginning - that's different. They are heavy metal, they are inventing the stuff - whatever counts as the shift from hard rock to metal, it's in those first three records. There were other bands playing heavy music in 69-70, but they still sound different. Heavier, rawer. Heavier than what a lot of metal would become - there's a lot of melody in later metal - just listen to Ozzy Osbourne's solo stuff. Who do you blame that, or Def Leppard, or Motley Crue on? Deep Purple maybe? I don't know. Not Sabbath, anyway. It's Black Sabbath haunting the hard music I like, though - and I like a lot of it - and almost all of it Sabbath inspired. Butthole Surfers - Melvins - Boris - Earth - SunnO))) - groups dear to my heart, and groups rooted very firmly in early Sabbath. I don't know where the sound came from - maybe they were just trying to play hard blues, like Cream or Fleetwood Mac, and didn't have the chops - or had to work harder at it, and slowed it down, atomized it - cause that's what it feels like. The riffs, the sounds, isolated, set adrift like zombies wandering through a foggy moor - something like that. (No - less a foggy moor than a post-apocalyptic factory, where all the people are gone - or turned into zombies - but the machinery is still running. Actually, that's probably just a documentary of their early lives. Birmingham, you know.) It is so extreme - so slow, so dominated by the low sounds, the falling bends Iommi likes to play (think Iron Man) - they seem to be coming from Mars.
They were very good. They got whacked by the critics in real time, but things aren't always apparent in real time. (I've said before - the punks redeemed a lot of these bands: changed the way you could hear them. I heard Sabbath in high school, and didn't much care - I heard them after I became a punk fan and loved it.) They were good. The riffs on the first few records are absolutely stellar - Black Sabbath - NIB - War Pigs - Paranoid - Hand of Doom - Iron Man - Children of the Grave - guitar lines as memorable and cool as they come. And the rest worked too - the clobbering, relentless rhythms; even the lyrics - not as poetry, but as raw slices of id and anger at the world, are all first rate. Better than the Zep, I am afraid, and almost as funny. They set the standard for all the hard rock to follow - a standard for heavy metal everyone else fell short of. Most punk falls short of it too (even as punk - Paranoid might as well be punk.) The best punk and best metal takes off from it.
And they make a nice Halloween band. The first time I heard War Pigs I had nightmares for weeks. That is how it should be - you hope someone with their taste in movies would be able to deliver on it. They are certainly a reminder that the best horror movies are made by good Catholic boys, too - they master the imagery as well as Bava or Argento or the like. The music feels like a horror film - those slow, hammering riffs, Ozzy's tuneless yelp - and they looked the part. I had a poster of them back in college - not sure where I got it - someone might have told me it was Led Zeppelin, though I knew better than that... had it on the wall - 4 guys in black, wearing big crosses around their neck, all that hair, standing out in a field somewhere (I think it was the gatefold art from Paranoid - not sure; it has long since disappeared) - it was very neat...
And so - 10 songs, all from the first three records, not that I can even pretend to know more than a couple songs from after that... But that's all right. They were great at the beginning; they may have behaved badly after that, but they kept plowing along, making music, and not bad music, for decades after that. I can respect that.
1. War Pigs
2. Paranoid
3. Wasp/Behind the Wall of Sleep/NIB
4. Black Sabbath
5. Iron Man
6. After Forever
7. Planet Caravan
8. Children of the Grave
9. Hand of Doom
10. Sweet Leaf
Video - I may have posted this before, I don't know - this is a live TV gig from 1970 - hair, leather, hammering riffs and drums - clean and sharp and marvelous, with most of their best songs from the first two records, sounding better than the records do (at least the crappy CD versions I have.):
Children of the Grave in 1974 - they're in California, and the wardrobe seems to reflect it - oh, the 70s!
War Pigs, when it was Walpurgis, more horror film than politics at this point, filmed in Germany, in front of a cowd of what look like random bystanders... The riffs are all there, though, and good go, isn't this a riff. Later, they play Iron Man in a boxing ring...
And finally - Black Sabbath - 2013. I can't say they've aged with dignity - at least Ozzy (Tony Iommi seems like he's aged pretty well) - but they can still bring it. I've heard Ozzy talk plenty the last 20 odd years, and never understood a word he said - but he's clear as day, singing. It's like it all comes back, up there on stage... God bless you all!
Monday, October 05, 2015
Baseball Postseason and Post Mortem
Another year in the books. The local nine have protected their traditional (3 out of 4) last place position, though it took losing 4 in a row at the end of the year. Still - a richly deserved last place most of the year. I may have picked the Crimson Hose to finish first, but it was not the most optimistic prediction - their complete collapse in the early months was surprising only in that they did it by not hitting a lick. That was surprising (the horrible pitching was not) - and didn't last. They shed the old timers and let the kids play and started winning; they brought up young pitchers and seemed to straighten out a couple of their awful starters, and got a whole lot better - coming almost all the way back to .500 before the dip at the end. They purged the front office that built those 3 out of 4 last place teams. It bodes well for the future, though maybe not well enough to be too excited - yet. They have no bullpen; they still have a bunch of #3 starters (if they are lucky) and some kids who could be better than that. They are still paying Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval a lot of money to eat and sulk and hit .250. So - we shall see. But hope springs eternal, and there are reasons to hope here. They have some fine young players - Betts and Bogaerts are very good now, the rest of the opitfield showed real ssigns, Swihart and Vazquez are promising young catchers. They have some solid old timers (Ortiz and Pedroia when he's on the field), good parts (Brock Holt and maybe Travis Shaw.) They have a couple very nice looking young starters who showed stuff in the majors, in Rodriguez and Owens. Porcello didn't look half bad once he got healthy. Miley and Kelly showed the occasional sign. So - they probably need a #1 starter, and they need a lot of bullpen help - and they need to either lose Hanley and Panda or have them come back - which is not impossible - vets tend to revert to the mean, so they are quite capable of getting better... so - a fun offseason is in store, and then we can try again.
For now though - well - all right. So how bad did I do guessing? Sox? nope. The Blue Jays did indeed slug their way to some wins, then added David Price and became world beaters. I'll take it. I was deeply wrong about the Yankees, to my sorrow. (Sorry Sam.) I was completely wrong about the Central - lord. Royals played very well this year - though I'm still not sure how they got what they did from their starters. Bullpens help, of course. And out west - probably should just delete those predictions - Sox, Tigers and Seattle? One of those teams did not finish last! Actually - looking at the records of those teams - notice how bunched the AL was this year. Oakland'
s the only team to lose 90 games - Toronto and KC the only ones to win 90... Maybe I have an excuse there. I had the Texas teams 4 and 5 instead of 1 and 2 - but basically, they got the breaks and performed -t he Houston pitching was better sooner than they expected - I'm certainly glad to see them win.
Predictions? I certainly hope the Astros beat the Yankees - Keuchel has been fantastic all year, so there is hope. Tanaka has also been good - it's a good matchup. Then? Blue Jays beat the wld card team - I think that's safe. KC will probably win the other series, but Texas has Hamels, who has been there before - they've been very hot down the stretch as well - they were outscored through the beginning of September, but turned that around. KC has the team and the pen, but are their starters good enough? In the end - the winner there should fall to the Jays - they look like an awful good team. Hammering the ball, running out 3 or 4 first rate starters - if form holds, they are the real deal.
And NL? So I thought Washington was the easiest pick int he majors back in April? they should have been. That was without Bryce Harper turning into Mike Trout, and Max Scherzer throwing 162 consecutive no-hitters. Let us use the work Choke. I thought the Mets were close to respectability - like Houston, their starters got better a little faster than expected - and Cespedes reminded them how to hit. They did well. (Look at all the teams who finished with a rush - Blue Jays, Texas, NY - all came on like gang-busters in the second half.) In the Central - I got those right! I underestimated the Cubs - but about the only thing I got right this year was assuming SL and Pittsburgh would pick up where they left off. And the Cubs just did what everyone else expected. Out west? Bought the San Diego hype - sorry. But the Dodgers did what they were supposed to do.
Playoffs? I can't pick between the Pirates and Cubs - Cole and Arrieta - it's a strange case: the 2nd and 3rd best teams in baseball playing a one game playoff to face - the best team in baseball - all in the same division! Yeah. Pirates and Cubs are the teams I want to see come out of the NL - but one will be gone day one. Dodgers and Mets? no idea, though the Dodgers have been excellent chokers in recent years. Cards vs wild card? Again - best two teams left in the playoffs, playing the short series. Sad. Whoever wins it would seem like the favorites,but it might be the Cubs... I;m not going out on that limb.
I know what I want: Blue Jays beating the Pirates. Cubs if they must. It's got a pretty good chance, right? Meanwhile, there are some very interesting matchups. I'm sure the TV guys are salivating over a subway series. Me - that would be the most horrible thing imaginable - unless the Mets win. That - ah. I am, after all, a yankee hater second... NY/LA would go over well. I imagine a Missouri series would have its fans - and would be a showcase for the joys of solid, fundamental baseball - those two teams do play a good game. At the other extreme - Cubs vs Houston might be a true sign of the apocalypse - and I suspect if Pittsburg and Houston get there, Fox execs will be on suicide watch. Anyway - go Toronto!
And finally - I might as well offer up my season awards:
MVP - AL: Mike Trout was as good as ever - I suspect Josh Donaldson will win it, having better counting stats and playing on a better team. That would not be unfair: I think I would vote for him myself.
NL: If anyone votes for anyone other than Harper at the top, they should lose their credentials. (I picked Standon before the season - I might have been right, if he had gotten through the year unscathed. Though probably not: Harper was immense.)
CY Young: AL - the usual suspects pitched well, but Price and Keuchel put some separation up - I would vote for Keuchel, and he will probably win. He has the most wins - he has the best WAR - he pitched his team to the post-season. He deserves it.
NL: There's a pretty nice collection of candidates there - though wins and all the other numbers narrow it down to Greinke vs. Arrieta. (The supporting numbers keep Kershaw and Scherzer and de Grom in the hunt - but they aren't better than the guys with wins this year, so let the wins separate them.) If Arrieta wins, it won't be a travesty. If Greinke wins, it will be well deserved. If I had a vote - crap: Greinke, I guess. Let his battingbe the tie breaker - he hit 2 home runs; he slugged .343 - better than 2 of the Royals' regular starting lineup; 2 points behind Jacoby Ellsbury! It's worth half a run above replacement! Go Zach!
For now though - well - all right. So how bad did I do guessing? Sox? nope. The Blue Jays did indeed slug their way to some wins, then added David Price and became world beaters. I'll take it. I was deeply wrong about the Yankees, to my sorrow. (Sorry Sam.) I was completely wrong about the Central - lord. Royals played very well this year - though I'm still not sure how they got what they did from their starters. Bullpens help, of course. And out west - probably should just delete those predictions - Sox, Tigers and Seattle? One of those teams did not finish last! Actually - looking at the records of those teams - notice how bunched the AL was this year. Oakland'
s the only team to lose 90 games - Toronto and KC the only ones to win 90... Maybe I have an excuse there. I had the Texas teams 4 and 5 instead of 1 and 2 - but basically, they got the breaks and performed -t he Houston pitching was better sooner than they expected - I'm certainly glad to see them win.
Predictions? I certainly hope the Astros beat the Yankees - Keuchel has been fantastic all year, so there is hope. Tanaka has also been good - it's a good matchup. Then? Blue Jays beat the wld card team - I think that's safe. KC will probably win the other series, but Texas has Hamels, who has been there before - they've been very hot down the stretch as well - they were outscored through the beginning of September, but turned that around. KC has the team and the pen, but are their starters good enough? In the end - the winner there should fall to the Jays - they look like an awful good team. Hammering the ball, running out 3 or 4 first rate starters - if form holds, they are the real deal.
And NL? So I thought Washington was the easiest pick int he majors back in April? they should have been. That was without Bryce Harper turning into Mike Trout, and Max Scherzer throwing 162 consecutive no-hitters. Let us use the work Choke. I thought the Mets were close to respectability - like Houston, their starters got better a little faster than expected - and Cespedes reminded them how to hit. They did well. (Look at all the teams who finished with a rush - Blue Jays, Texas, NY - all came on like gang-busters in the second half.) In the Central - I got those right! I underestimated the Cubs - but about the only thing I got right this year was assuming SL and Pittsburgh would pick up where they left off. And the Cubs just did what everyone else expected. Out west? Bought the San Diego hype - sorry. But the Dodgers did what they were supposed to do.
Playoffs? I can't pick between the Pirates and Cubs - Cole and Arrieta - it's a strange case: the 2nd and 3rd best teams in baseball playing a one game playoff to face - the best team in baseball - all in the same division! Yeah. Pirates and Cubs are the teams I want to see come out of the NL - but one will be gone day one. Dodgers and Mets? no idea, though the Dodgers have been excellent chokers in recent years. Cards vs wild card? Again - best two teams left in the playoffs, playing the short series. Sad. Whoever wins it would seem like the favorites,but it might be the Cubs... I;m not going out on that limb.
I know what I want: Blue Jays beating the Pirates. Cubs if they must. It's got a pretty good chance, right? Meanwhile, there are some very interesting matchups. I'm sure the TV guys are salivating over a subway series. Me - that would be the most horrible thing imaginable - unless the Mets win. That - ah. I am, after all, a yankee hater second... NY/LA would go over well. I imagine a Missouri series would have its fans - and would be a showcase for the joys of solid, fundamental baseball - those two teams do play a good game. At the other extreme - Cubs vs Houston might be a true sign of the apocalypse - and I suspect if Pittsburg and Houston get there, Fox execs will be on suicide watch. Anyway - go Toronto!
And finally - I might as well offer up my season awards:
MVP - AL: Mike Trout was as good as ever - I suspect Josh Donaldson will win it, having better counting stats and playing on a better team. That would not be unfair: I think I would vote for him myself.
NL: If anyone votes for anyone other than Harper at the top, they should lose their credentials. (I picked Standon before the season - I might have been right, if he had gotten through the year unscathed. Though probably not: Harper was immense.)
CY Young: AL - the usual suspects pitched well, but Price and Keuchel put some separation up - I would vote for Keuchel, and he will probably win. He has the most wins - he has the best WAR - he pitched his team to the post-season. He deserves it.
NL: There's a pretty nice collection of candidates there - though wins and all the other numbers narrow it down to Greinke vs. Arrieta. (The supporting numbers keep Kershaw and Scherzer and de Grom in the hunt - but they aren't better than the guys with wins this year, so let the wins separate them.) If Arrieta wins, it won't be a travesty. If Greinke wins, it will be well deserved. If I had a vote - crap: Greinke, I guess. Let his battingbe the tie breaker - he hit 2 home runs; he slugged .343 - better than 2 of the Royals' regular starting lineup; 2 points behind Jacoby Ellsbury! It's worth half a run above replacement! Go Zach!
Friday, October 02, 2015
Friday Music and fewer Guns Please
Friday. Another week, another mass killing here in the good old USA. The knee jerk reaction is, get rid of the guns. Living in a time when crime rates are falling, murder rates falling, violence is falling, mass shootings stick out all the more - it's hard to put them down to whatever societal malaise causes crime. I don't know what it is. But they would be a lot harder to pull off if getting guns was harder. And - at the risk of venturing into mind-reading - if guns weren't treated quite so fetishistically, if they weren't linked so much to the idea of power and virility and freedom - you might have fewer sexually insecure losers going on shooting sprees. So - yeah: get rid of them. Or take "get rid of them" as the starting point and make the gun defenders come up with a better plan. Some plan at all...
And - I don't trust too much psychological profiling in cases like this, but you can't get around this fact: more or less all of these massacres are perpetrated by men. Seem to be mostly white guys at that, though that's not anywhere near as hard a rule (like this one, perpetrated by a mixed race guy). But male - that's pretty much a rule.
All right. No more about that for now. Let's have some music.
1. Jay Farrar - New Multitudes
2. Television - Beauty Trip
3. Velvet Underground - Some Kinda Love (live - Quine tapes)
4. The Strokes - Killing Lies
5. Nick Cave and Bad Seeds - Hiding All Away (live)
6. Pavement - Zurich is Stained
7. Husker Du - I Don't Want to Know if You Are Lonely
8. Six Organs of Admittance - Bar-Nasha
9. Butthole Surfers - American Woman
10. Egg Hunt - We All Fall Down
and some video. Lots of New York rock on there - here is the least of them, though still pretty good - The Strokes:
Maybe not the Velvets,but the next best thing, when it comes to New York rockers. Richard Lloyd gets a nice solo here:
And we should not neglect the great midwest - Husker Du:
And - I don't trust too much psychological profiling in cases like this, but you can't get around this fact: more or less all of these massacres are perpetrated by men. Seem to be mostly white guys at that, though that's not anywhere near as hard a rule (like this one, perpetrated by a mixed race guy). But male - that's pretty much a rule.
All right. No more about that for now. Let's have some music.
1. Jay Farrar - New Multitudes
2. Television - Beauty Trip
3. Velvet Underground - Some Kinda Love (live - Quine tapes)
4. The Strokes - Killing Lies
5. Nick Cave and Bad Seeds - Hiding All Away (live)
6. Pavement - Zurich is Stained
7. Husker Du - I Don't Want to Know if You Are Lonely
8. Six Organs of Admittance - Bar-Nasha
9. Butthole Surfers - American Woman
10. Egg Hunt - We All Fall Down
and some video. Lots of New York rock on there - here is the least of them, though still pretty good - The Strokes:
Maybe not the Velvets,but the next best thing, when it comes to New York rockers. Richard Lloyd gets a nice solo here:
And we should not neglect the great midwest - Husker Du:
Friday, September 25, 2015
Loos, 1915
Today, September 25, is the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Loos. It's an important battle - the largest fought by the British in 1915; the first use of gas by the British in the war; and the first significant use of New Army troops in the war. It was, for the most part, a disaster. The Brits had a huge numerical superiority, but their preliminaries did not dislodge the Germans, who mowed them down, as machine guns will - the Germans then brought up reserves and drove back subsequent attacks. They kept fighting for a few more days - dragged it on for weeks - but nothing really changed. (That's the basic description of every battle of WWI - bloody and disastrous initial attack, that maybe made some progress - reinforcements and counter-attacks that negate whatever advantages were gained - weeks of both sides trying it again - nothing different at the end.) (You can read all the details here, matter of factly - with casualty numbers at the end.)
Loos was very badly handled. It was the first big British attack, and it was fraught with trouble. There weren't enough shells - so the artillery barrage didn't really suppress the German lines, even the front lines. didn't break the wire. didn't support the initial waves of attack. (This would become a major scandal - it would help to bring down the British commanding general, John French, leading to Douglas Haig taking his place.) The gas (the "accessory") didn't do much good - the Brits released it from canisters, hoping the winds would carry it into the German lines. The wind wasn't blowing; it hung over the battlefield and sometimes drifted back into the British lines. It probably could have been worse - Robert Graves says that the gas-company had the wrong spanners, and couldn't get the canisters open - only a few of them went off, though of course they did the Brits more harm than the Germans. The Germans were ready (says Graves) - and managed to do what the gas company couldn't - scored a couple direct hits on the unopened canisters, releasing their contents to add to the confusion... All this mess was compounded by French's misuse of reserves - by supply problems (Graves writes about a New Army division that made notable advances, only to have to retreat when they ran out of rations) - and by general and complete confusion.
I know the battle best through Robert Graves' account in Goodbye to All That. It's a masterpiece of understated fury. Graves was at the left of the line, part of the attack on the town of La Bassée, a diversion from the main assault in theory. He described the attack as a complete fiasco - even before the battle, with drunken subalterns and staff officers abusing their commanders. Everyone expects disaster - a "glorious balls-up". And it is. Not enough artillery; the gas attack goes all wrong; when the attack gets going, the communication lines are broken, so no one behind the lines knows what is happening, no orders come up, no information goes back. The fighting itself is pure confusion - men go forward, are shot, and come back, or lay in shell holes sniping at the Germans to no effect. There is heroism - almost all of it involving men risking their lives to save their comrades. Or a fatally wounded man choking himself to stop crying so no one else will be killed to try saving him.
He had no love for the higher officers, Graves. He tells us how the colonel went to the rear with the wounded, "with a slight cut on the hand." (The junior officer who chewed his hand to stop himself from screaming, meanwhile, was hit 17 times. Lieutenants and captains take the brunt of the damage and acquit themselves well in Graves' account.) He ends his story of the battle with a very nasty (but typically understated) story of two second lieutenants who survived the brunt of the fighting. (2 of 3 officers in their battalion to emerge from the battle unwounded.) They reported to their commander, who they found eating a meat pie; he took their report, and sent them on their way (without offering any of the pie), with an admonition to make sure that men remembered to button their shoulder straps. Graves adds that the colonel was heard to complain “that he only had two blankets and that it was a deucedly cold night.” At least another officer, having heard the story, gets some payback, by helping himself to the meat pie without being invited...
It's an extraordinary passage, and well worth seeking out. (The book, of course, is itself extraordinary, and well worth the read.) It gets at so much of what was wrong in the war - the pointlessness of the tactics; the endless screw ups, undermining the already bad plans; the absurdity of the class structure and command structure that kept haunting the war effort. (He tells the story of the son of a prominent Jamaican planter who got appointed a first lieutenant by the governor of Jamaica. The boy (a kid, 18 or so) was hopelessly incompetent, but outranked most of the other officers. He was appointed to the mortal battalion, since he was otherwise useless - at first, mortars were useless too, but they were starting to become valuable by the end of 1915. When the battle started, the kid ("Jamaica" as Graves call shim) did all right, working the mortars - but in the middle of the battle, a captain, the only man in the battalion to treat him well, was mortally wounded - and "Jamaica" fell to pieces. Abandoned the mortars - leaving one German machine gun unscathed, machine gun that proceeded to cut down attackers in swaths. And more - "Jamaica" and his wounded captain blocked the trenches, so men couldn't move top and from the battle - another disaster. But all too typical, given the men in positions of authority because of who they knew, rather than what they knew...) Grave's account is, in miniature, as clear eyed a picture of what the hwole war was like as you can get.
Loos was very badly handled. It was the first big British attack, and it was fraught with trouble. There weren't enough shells - so the artillery barrage didn't really suppress the German lines, even the front lines. didn't break the wire. didn't support the initial waves of attack. (This would become a major scandal - it would help to bring down the British commanding general, John French, leading to Douglas Haig taking his place.) The gas (the "accessory") didn't do much good - the Brits released it from canisters, hoping the winds would carry it into the German lines. The wind wasn't blowing; it hung over the battlefield and sometimes drifted back into the British lines. It probably could have been worse - Robert Graves says that the gas-company had the wrong spanners, and couldn't get the canisters open - only a few of them went off, though of course they did the Brits more harm than the Germans. The Germans were ready (says Graves) - and managed to do what the gas company couldn't - scored a couple direct hits on the unopened canisters, releasing their contents to add to the confusion... All this mess was compounded by French's misuse of reserves - by supply problems (Graves writes about a New Army division that made notable advances, only to have to retreat when they ran out of rations) - and by general and complete confusion.
I know the battle best through Robert Graves' account in Goodbye to All That. It's a masterpiece of understated fury. Graves was at the left of the line, part of the attack on the town of La Bassée, a diversion from the main assault in theory. He described the attack as a complete fiasco - even before the battle, with drunken subalterns and staff officers abusing their commanders. Everyone expects disaster - a "glorious balls-up". And it is. Not enough artillery; the gas attack goes all wrong; when the attack gets going, the communication lines are broken, so no one behind the lines knows what is happening, no orders come up, no information goes back. The fighting itself is pure confusion - men go forward, are shot, and come back, or lay in shell holes sniping at the Germans to no effect. There is heroism - almost all of it involving men risking their lives to save their comrades. Or a fatally wounded man choking himself to stop crying so no one else will be killed to try saving him.
He had no love for the higher officers, Graves. He tells us how the colonel went to the rear with the wounded, "with a slight cut on the hand." (The junior officer who chewed his hand to stop himself from screaming, meanwhile, was hit 17 times. Lieutenants and captains take the brunt of the damage and acquit themselves well in Graves' account.) He ends his story of the battle with a very nasty (but typically understated) story of two second lieutenants who survived the brunt of the fighting. (2 of 3 officers in their battalion to emerge from the battle unwounded.) They reported to their commander, who they found eating a meat pie; he took their report, and sent them on their way (without offering any of the pie), with an admonition to make sure that men remembered to button their shoulder straps. Graves adds that the colonel was heard to complain “that he only had two blankets and that it was a deucedly cold night.” At least another officer, having heard the story, gets some payback, by helping himself to the meat pie without being invited...
It's an extraordinary passage, and well worth seeking out. (The book, of course, is itself extraordinary, and well worth the read.) It gets at so much of what was wrong in the war - the pointlessness of the tactics; the endless screw ups, undermining the already bad plans; the absurdity of the class structure and command structure that kept haunting the war effort. (He tells the story of the son of a prominent Jamaican planter who got appointed a first lieutenant by the governor of Jamaica. The boy (a kid, 18 or so) was hopelessly incompetent, but outranked most of the other officers. He was appointed to the mortal battalion, since he was otherwise useless - at first, mortars were useless too, but they were starting to become valuable by the end of 1915. When the battle started, the kid ("Jamaica" as Graves call shim) did all right, working the mortars - but in the middle of the battle, a captain, the only man in the battalion to treat him well, was mortally wounded - and "Jamaica" fell to pieces. Abandoned the mortars - leaving one German machine gun unscathed, machine gun that proceeded to cut down attackers in swaths. And more - "Jamaica" and his wounded captain blocked the trenches, so men couldn't move top and from the battle - another disaster. But all too typical, given the men in positions of authority because of who they knew, rather than what they knew...) Grave's account is, in miniature, as clear eyed a picture of what the hwole war was like as you can get.
End of the Week Music Plus
Welcome back Friday, glad to see you, as always.
This is not going to be a huge post - music, mainly. Saw the Feelies again last week - they were, as always, spectacular. Took me back 30 years. It is strange - nothing has changed, they might be older, but they look and act the same, and sound more or less the same - one of their essential qualities, that: everything sounds as though you've heard it a thousand times before, and everything sounds absolutely new. I notice it in the guitar parts - they can play riffs exactly as they always played them, but they still sound somehow completely new. It's in the tone, it's in the twists around the edges of the notes, in the details. Seeing them live is still a euphoric experience.
And - anything else? The 100th anniversary of the Battle of Loos is today - first use of poison gas by the British in WWI. With disastrous results. I hope to have a longer post up this weekend - Loos is the centerpiece of Robert Grave's writing about WWI in Goodbye to All That - a particularly scathing account of a badly run battle. I can't say "particularly" badly run battle (though it was), because most WWI battles were complete fuck ups for almost all concerned.
For now though, just some random music to hold you over.
1. Louis Armstrong & Hot Five - You're Next
2. Ric Ocasek - Crashland Consequences
3. Wire - 99.9
4. James White and the Blacks - Bleached Black
5. Outkast - ?
6. The Rolling Stones - Let It Loose
7. Wire - I Am The Fly
8. Radiohead - I Might Be Wrong
9. Melt Banana - Mind Thief
10. Husker Du - Divide and Conquer
Video? start with a clip from last week's Feelies show, because, there's a clip from last week's Feelies show:
And since iTunes wants Wire - here's I am the Fly, from the Peel sessions:
And if you need more Wire than that (and who doesn't?) here's a full show from Rockpalast, 1979:
This is not going to be a huge post - music, mainly. Saw the Feelies again last week - they were, as always, spectacular. Took me back 30 years. It is strange - nothing has changed, they might be older, but they look and act the same, and sound more or less the same - one of their essential qualities, that: everything sounds as though you've heard it a thousand times before, and everything sounds absolutely new. I notice it in the guitar parts - they can play riffs exactly as they always played them, but they still sound somehow completely new. It's in the tone, it's in the twists around the edges of the notes, in the details. Seeing them live is still a euphoric experience.
And - anything else? The 100th anniversary of the Battle of Loos is today - first use of poison gas by the British in WWI. With disastrous results. I hope to have a longer post up this weekend - Loos is the centerpiece of Robert Grave's writing about WWI in Goodbye to All That - a particularly scathing account of a badly run battle. I can't say "particularly" badly run battle (though it was), because most WWI battles were complete fuck ups for almost all concerned.
For now though, just some random music to hold you over.
1. Louis Armstrong & Hot Five - You're Next
2. Ric Ocasek - Crashland Consequences
3. Wire - 99.9
4. James White and the Blacks - Bleached Black
5. Outkast - ?
6. The Rolling Stones - Let It Loose
7. Wire - I Am The Fly
8. Radiohead - I Might Be Wrong
9. Melt Banana - Mind Thief
10. Husker Du - Divide and Conquer
Video? start with a clip from last week's Feelies show, because, there's a clip from last week's Feelies show:
And since iTunes wants Wire - here's I am the Fly, from the Peel sessions:
And if you need more Wire than that (and who doesn't?) here's a full show from Rockpalast, 1979:
Friday, September 18, 2015
Radio Burnin Up Above
Iggy Iggy Iggy Iggy.... This month's band of the month will be Iggy Pop and the Stooges. It will also be short (at least comparatively). Not that there isn't plenty to say about Detroit's finest, but you don't have to say it all.
They are simple and direct and powerful always. They get called the fathers of punk, though not very many punk bands live up to them. They have a savvy about them, though - which punks did too, let's be fair - an ability to slip sideways into those long grooves of Fun House. They never fail to rock, and they rock all over the place, at least on those first 2 records - they manage to be calculated and completely raw, musically adventurous and brutal at once. They are almost alone out there.
And Iggy - the Stooges made three records and then he went off on his own, and something was lost. Not his doing exactly - he made a lot of good (to great) music on his own - and Iggy himself was always a beast. But he spent decades seeming wildly out of place with his surroundings - way cooler and scarier and better than anyone around him, spending a lot of time playing with journeymen. Even when he played with people who were great artists in their own right, Bowie and Lou Reed, say, he was different, off kilter - too much, even for David Bowie. Too wild, too cool - as a performer - just beyond everyone else. He's not the only rock and roller to put on an extreme show - but he's one of the few who is both awe inspiring and a bit terrifying who never comes off as even remotely desperate. He is in control, no matter how out of control he is.
But still: after those Stooges records - it's all a bit less. Which is credit to the Asheton brothers, as much as anything - I can't say they're particularly great musicians, but they are dead on to what they are doing. They had a sound, and they nailed it - fuzzy guitar, the wah wah solos, the plain, relentless drumming - it's a sound that fits Iggy's voice, growling and punching along, distilling that garage sound to its perfect form. It is relentless and punchy and I can listen to them forever. Ron's guitar sound - that's something brought to perfection right there.
All right - here are my Ten favorite songs from Iggy's long and illustrious career. The songs are still pretty good in the late 70s - but the x sound misses the Ashetons. All right - here goes:
1. 1970
2. 1969
3. TV Eye
4. I Wanna Be Your Dog
5. Loose
6. Search and Destroy
7. Lust for Life
8. Passenger
9. Mexican Guy - even in their late incarnations, they can be funny and very funky
10. No Fun
Video: I wish there was more of them in their heyday - what there is is pretty mindblowing. Here's 1970, in 1970 -
And a short documentary, that works in most of the old footage (Iggy and his peanut butter!), along with some interviews from the time of their comeback: "we never failed to make an impression"
Lust for Life, later:
Full concert from 2003:
Searching and Destroying at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with James Williamson:
Finally, since I'm going to see them tonight, here are the Feelies covering Real Cool Time, Bill and Glenn trading solo, though Bill gets the better of them, for once:
And finally, a tribute to the power of the internet - here is a cute girl covering The Passenger on the Polish Voice:
They are simple and direct and powerful always. They get called the fathers of punk, though not very many punk bands live up to them. They have a savvy about them, though - which punks did too, let's be fair - an ability to slip sideways into those long grooves of Fun House. They never fail to rock, and they rock all over the place, at least on those first 2 records - they manage to be calculated and completely raw, musically adventurous and brutal at once. They are almost alone out there.
And Iggy - the Stooges made three records and then he went off on his own, and something was lost. Not his doing exactly - he made a lot of good (to great) music on his own - and Iggy himself was always a beast. But he spent decades seeming wildly out of place with his surroundings - way cooler and scarier and better than anyone around him, spending a lot of time playing with journeymen. Even when he played with people who were great artists in their own right, Bowie and Lou Reed, say, he was different, off kilter - too much, even for David Bowie. Too wild, too cool - as a performer - just beyond everyone else. He's not the only rock and roller to put on an extreme show - but he's one of the few who is both awe inspiring and a bit terrifying who never comes off as even remotely desperate. He is in control, no matter how out of control he is.
But still: after those Stooges records - it's all a bit less. Which is credit to the Asheton brothers, as much as anything - I can't say they're particularly great musicians, but they are dead on to what they are doing. They had a sound, and they nailed it - fuzzy guitar, the wah wah solos, the plain, relentless drumming - it's a sound that fits Iggy's voice, growling and punching along, distilling that garage sound to its perfect form. It is relentless and punchy and I can listen to them forever. Ron's guitar sound - that's something brought to perfection right there.
All right - here are my Ten favorite songs from Iggy's long and illustrious career. The songs are still pretty good in the late 70s - but the x sound misses the Ashetons. All right - here goes:
1. 1970
2. 1969
3. TV Eye
4. I Wanna Be Your Dog
5. Loose
6. Search and Destroy
7. Lust for Life
8. Passenger
9. Mexican Guy - even in their late incarnations, they can be funny and very funky
10. No Fun
Video: I wish there was more of them in their heyday - what there is is pretty mindblowing. Here's 1970, in 1970 -
And a short documentary, that works in most of the old footage (Iggy and his peanut butter!), along with some interviews from the time of their comeback: "we never failed to make an impression"
Lust for Life, later:
Full concert from 2003:
Searching and Destroying at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with James Williamson:
Finally, since I'm going to see them tonight, here are the Feelies covering Real Cool Time, Bill and Glenn trading solo, though Bill gets the better of them, for once:
And finally, a tribute to the power of the internet - here is a cute girl covering The Passenger on the Polish Voice:
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Ivan's Childhood
[Also cross posted at Wonders in the Dark as part of their ongoing Childhood films countdown.]
Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan’s Childhood begins with the sound of a cuckoo, and a shot of a boy standing behind a tree, looking up at us through cobweb. It ends with the same boy chasing a little girl along a beach, the two of them circling a dead black tree, that seems to keep forcing itself into the image. Both are dreams: the boy, Ivan, is in the middle of a war, dreaming of the world before the war, his childhood. He is still a child in the present of the film, but his childhood is long gone.
Ivan’s Childhood, like Germany Year Zero, is a war film about childhood that is also a childhood film about war, using each side of the equation to heighten the emotion of the other. Ivan is already a hardened veteran when Ivan’s Childhood begins - orphaned, a partisan, now working for the regular army as a scout. That is where he is when the film’s story begins - but that is not how the film begins. It begins with the dream, Ivan walking, running, flying, through fields and forests, coming to rest at his mother’s feet, drinking from a bucket of water. It begins with the childhood he has lost, before waking him to the war he is living in. But it is a very thin line between waking and dreaming. The difference may mean everything to Ivan, but it is very permeable for Tarkovsky’s filmmaking. In Ivan’s dream, Tarkovsky’s camera soars and swirls, almost gleefully defying gravity and rules of space. But when Ivan wakes in a ruined windmill and goes out, the camera remains as vertiginous as in the dream, swinging around, taking extreme angles, cutting up his experiences into flashes of imagery. Real life is immediately established as being as disorienting and strange as any dream.
As we come to know Ivan, we see that he thinks of himself as an adult, the equal of anyone around him - but he is still a child. In the banal outside world, he tries to be an adult, but he isn't, and he remains at the mercy of the men around him. They try to force him to be a child, to go to school, to find surrogate parents, none of which he he thinks he needs. And Tarkovsky's filmmaking emphasizes Ivan’s subjectivity, both awake and in dreams, in ways that show just how close he is to his lost childhood. Dreams and childhood push into his life, haunting him. Ivan isn't always sure which is which - he worries that he is talking in his sleep, his dreams and memories escaping into the world where he wants to be treated as an adult. And apart from the dreams, we see that Ivan has a kind of psychic bond to the world around him. Much of the film is set in a house serving as headquarters for Lt. Galtsev's unit, a house where 8 Russians, none over 19, were held before being shot by the Germans. Their last message is written on the wall - “Avenge us” they say. Tarkovsky emphasizes this graffiti throughout the film - and Ivan, when left alone in the room, is swept up into the story of those executed children. He hears them; feels them; sees them (and his mother, and himself). He seems to slip between his present and the past, theirs and his own, increasingly acting out their story. They are palpable ghosts for him.
It’s not just how Ivan sees the world, but how Tarkovsky sees the world that keeps the boundaries between reality and visions permeable. The camera work remains fluid and inventive throughout; the editing disruptive, jumping across time and space without connections. Things appear out of context, and Tarkovsky takes his time to reveal the context. For example, the first sight we have of Lt. Galtsev - a hand sticking up out of a blackness. A hand coming out of the ground? Out of the swamp Ivan had been wading through? No - eventually we see it is just a man, sleeping. But Tarkovsky delays the revelation. Similar imagery continues - isolated body parts (of the living or the dead); slippage between reality, flashbacks, visions and dreams; and the nature shots - vertiginous rows of trees, people moving through them; the earth disappearing under their feet. Some of this harkens back to other films - especially to Cranes Are Flying, another crucial Soviet war film. Tarkovsky’s camera work owes a lot to that film - the camera flying, spinning, moving, dancing, all of it in luscious black and white. As well as specific scenes and moments - particularly the scenes in a wooded swamp, referring to the death of the hero of Cranes Are Flying.
There are thematic parallels as well - the way human beings are swallowed by nature; the god’s eye views and worm’s eye views of the world. But we can see some of Tarkovsky’s obsessions appearing as well. Bells - pervasive natural imagery, the elements (earth water air and fire) - flying - memories, visions, dreams - and images and words on walls, seeming to come off the walls, into the minds of the characters in the film.
And in the end, Tarkovsky blurs all the lines of the film - between reality and visions, between Ivan's subjectivity and others, between all the times of the film. The final sequence takes place at the end of the war, the Soviets going throught he ruins of Germany - Galtsev, the only survivor, going through old Nazi records, looking at the fate of their prisoners. He finds Ivan's record - and it is as if he can follow the records into Ivan's memories and dreams. He imagines/sees/feels Ivan’s death - rather, the film shows it, but shows it as if Galtsev were experiencing it. And Tarkovsky moves from the vision of Ivan’s death to another dream, children on a beach, Ivan and his mother again - in a way here that links Galtsev to Ivan's mother, making identical gestures, reality and dream combining:
And so we end, with Ivan playing on the beach, running, laughing, with a little girl - though still haunted by the image of the war, that gaunt stark tree in the middle of the beach. (That reminds me, maybe incongruously, but maybe not, of the hanging tree in Budd Boetticher’s Ride Lonesome.) The kids play, but around that tree, that seems to keep intruding into the frame, and finally swallows them up.
Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan’s Childhood begins with the sound of a cuckoo, and a shot of a boy standing behind a tree, looking up at us through cobweb. It ends with the same boy chasing a little girl along a beach, the two of them circling a dead black tree, that seems to keep forcing itself into the image. Both are dreams: the boy, Ivan, is in the middle of a war, dreaming of the world before the war, his childhood. He is still a child in the present of the film, but his childhood is long gone.
Ivan’s Childhood, like Germany Year Zero, is a war film about childhood that is also a childhood film about war, using each side of the equation to heighten the emotion of the other. Ivan is already a hardened veteran when Ivan’s Childhood begins - orphaned, a partisan, now working for the regular army as a scout. That is where he is when the film’s story begins - but that is not how the film begins. It begins with the dream, Ivan walking, running, flying, through fields and forests, coming to rest at his mother’s feet, drinking from a bucket of water. It begins with the childhood he has lost, before waking him to the war he is living in. But it is a very thin line between waking and dreaming. The difference may mean everything to Ivan, but it is very permeable for Tarkovsky’s filmmaking. In Ivan’s dream, Tarkovsky’s camera soars and swirls, almost gleefully defying gravity and rules of space. But when Ivan wakes in a ruined windmill and goes out, the camera remains as vertiginous as in the dream, swinging around, taking extreme angles, cutting up his experiences into flashes of imagery. Real life is immediately established as being as disorienting and strange as any dream.
As we come to know Ivan, we see that he thinks of himself as an adult, the equal of anyone around him - but he is still a child. In the banal outside world, he tries to be an adult, but he isn't, and he remains at the mercy of the men around him. They try to force him to be a child, to go to school, to find surrogate parents, none of which he he thinks he needs. And Tarkovsky's filmmaking emphasizes Ivan’s subjectivity, both awake and in dreams, in ways that show just how close he is to his lost childhood. Dreams and childhood push into his life, haunting him. Ivan isn't always sure which is which - he worries that he is talking in his sleep, his dreams and memories escaping into the world where he wants to be treated as an adult. And apart from the dreams, we see that Ivan has a kind of psychic bond to the world around him. Much of the film is set in a house serving as headquarters for Lt. Galtsev's unit, a house where 8 Russians, none over 19, were held before being shot by the Germans. Their last message is written on the wall - “Avenge us” they say. Tarkovsky emphasizes this graffiti throughout the film - and Ivan, when left alone in the room, is swept up into the story of those executed children. He hears them; feels them; sees them (and his mother, and himself). He seems to slip between his present and the past, theirs and his own, increasingly acting out their story. They are palpable ghosts for him.
It’s not just how Ivan sees the world, but how Tarkovsky sees the world that keeps the boundaries between reality and visions permeable. The camera work remains fluid and inventive throughout; the editing disruptive, jumping across time and space without connections. Things appear out of context, and Tarkovsky takes his time to reveal the context. For example, the first sight we have of Lt. Galtsev - a hand sticking up out of a blackness. A hand coming out of the ground? Out of the swamp Ivan had been wading through? No - eventually we see it is just a man, sleeping. But Tarkovsky delays the revelation. Similar imagery continues - isolated body parts (of the living or the dead); slippage between reality, flashbacks, visions and dreams; and the nature shots - vertiginous rows of trees, people moving through them; the earth disappearing under their feet. Some of this harkens back to other films - especially to Cranes Are Flying, another crucial Soviet war film. Tarkovsky’s camera work owes a lot to that film - the camera flying, spinning, moving, dancing, all of it in luscious black and white. As well as specific scenes and moments - particularly the scenes in a wooded swamp, referring to the death of the hero of Cranes Are Flying.
There are thematic parallels as well - the way human beings are swallowed by nature; the god’s eye views and worm’s eye views of the world. But we can see some of Tarkovsky’s obsessions appearing as well. Bells - pervasive natural imagery, the elements (earth water air and fire) - flying - memories, visions, dreams - and images and words on walls, seeming to come off the walls, into the minds of the characters in the film.
And in the end, Tarkovsky blurs all the lines of the film - between reality and visions, between Ivan's subjectivity and others, between all the times of the film. The final sequence takes place at the end of the war, the Soviets going throught he ruins of Germany - Galtsev, the only survivor, going through old Nazi records, looking at the fate of their prisoners. He finds Ivan's record - and it is as if he can follow the records into Ivan's memories and dreams. He imagines/sees/feels Ivan’s death - rather, the film shows it, but shows it as if Galtsev were experiencing it. And Tarkovsky moves from the vision of Ivan’s death to another dream, children on a beach, Ivan and his mother again - in a way here that links Galtsev to Ivan's mother, making identical gestures, reality and dream combining:
And so we end, with Ivan playing on the beach, running, laughing, with a little girl - though still haunted by the image of the war, that gaunt stark tree in the middle of the beach. (That reminds me, maybe incongruously, but maybe not, of the hanging tree in Budd Boetticher’s Ride Lonesome.) The kids play, but around that tree, that seems to keep intruding into the frame, and finally swallows them up.
Germany Year Zero
[Cross posted from Wonders in the Dark as part of their Childhood films countdown. I neglected to post here when I posted it there - the holiday weekend and all, traveling, things were hectic... I wish I were taking this WWII class just now - I took it a couple years ago.... Childhood in WWII films would make a good paper; this and my other post for WITD would almost make a paper between them.]
War films often use children as protagonists - we've seen several in this countdown already (Come and See, Empire of the Sun, The Tin Drum, among others), with more to come surely. There are many reasons for this - I think those reasons add up to to the fact that the plight of children, of childhood, in wartime brings the horror of war into very sharp focus. Children in war films may be victims, they may be corrupted, may become (or be) evil, or at least hard-boiled, they may not seem to understand the nature of war, may not seem to treat it as completely real - but however they act, or are affected by the war, they reveal its nature through what it makes them. Children are new people - they are pliable, in the process of being formed - and what war turns them into shows us what war is. (And this, in turn, is why so many great films about childhood seem to be war films - because childhood is about becoming what you will be, and war heightens that, the way childhood heighten the effects of war. And maybe because childhood isn't necessarily as innocent, pleasant, secure as we wish it were - children in war become hyperbolic versions of childhood in any difficult situation.) Beyond this, children in war films draw the viewer in - child protagonists are often in the position of the viewer, having to learn about their world as they move through it. And maybe most of all - whatever a child might do in a war film, we know the child did not cause the ear. Children are always acted on by the war, no matter how active they are - adults in warfare raise questions of responsibility that children can sidestep.
In Roberto Rossellini's Germany Year Zero, his protagonist, Edmund, does all these things. He is innocent - but he is corrupted, even before the film started (with his Nazi education), and is led to more and more compromised actions that culminate in murder. He is formed by the war, and by the horrific aftermath of the war - learning from it, made what he is by it. And he is our guide to the world of the film, Berlin after the war. This is quite literal - the camera often follows him through the streets, watching him in his environment, showing us the city and what happens there. He guides us through many encounters, vignettes of suffering and cruelty, in the streets and at home. At the same time, though, he is not just guide but quester - searching for food, searching (quite explicitly - Rossellini's symbolism and ideas aren't subtle here) for meaning, what the war meant, what he is, what life means for himself and others. He is both Virgil and Dante in the inferno of ruined Berlin - and one of the damned souls as well, a ghost in a ghost of a city.
There is no question that it is hell, and these are the damned. Rossellini doesn't dwell on Germany's role in the war, but the tone of the film, and the overall gist of the story doesn't leave much doubt about it - the people of Berlin are in hell, a hell on earth, and one they created, and one they damned themselves to. This is a relentlessly pessimistic film. Everyone Edmund encounters is a kind of monster. His father is weak and useless, full of self pity, if basically a decent man; his brother hides from the Allies, a burden to his family, who then whines at them for doing what they have to to help him. His sister, actually, might be the one truly admirable person in the film - willing to do what she can to help her father and brother, unwilling to condemn Edmund for what he does to help them, constantly trying to get Karl-Heinz to take responsibility, all while waiting in vain for her own lover, who is held in a prison camp somewhere. And those are the good guys - their neighbors are selfish bullies who steal and condemn and pass the blame. Edmund meets a former teacher who is a particularly overdetermined monster - a pedophile who seems to live with a ring of pedophiles, an unrepentant Nazi, still preaching its ethos of the strong living at the expense of the weak (while ducking work on some kind of health exemption) and living off the black market. The other kids Edmund encounters are hard-bitten thieves and gangsters. The people in the streets are selfish and dangerous - they fight over a dead horse in the street; old women chase Edmund away from a job he gets, claiming he's too young, though really doing it to get more for themselves. Even the Allies are shown as careless jerks, taking pictures at Hitler's bunker and buying Nazi memorobilia. (Nothing new about nitwits taking selfies at Auschwitz.) There isn't much relief from it, and even good deeds come wrapped in cynicism - a doctor who does a good deed; Christl's relative kindness; Edmund's sister, and Edmund himself, up toa point...
Only up to a point. As things go from bad to worse for Edmund and his family, he begins to consider desperate measures. His father is sick, and after a brief stay in a hospital, he comes home, to find the family in very dire straights. There is no more power in the house; they have no money, no food - they are in trouble. The old man's self-pity is getting the best of him - he tells Edmund he'd be better off dead; when he comes home he says he has been "condemned to live." Well - not for long. Edmund, still scrambling for food or a way out of this, had been talking to the teacher again - Henning spouted Nazi platitudes about letting the weak die so the strong can live, and Edmund took it to heart. He acts: he poisons the old man, hoping that would let the other three get on with their lives. It immediately backfires - the minute he gives his father the poison the police arrive and Karl Heinz decides to do the right thing. (I told you Rossellini wasn't being subtle.) In fact, Karl-Heinz is very quickly released (as his father and sister had told him would happen), but it is too late - the father is dead, and Edmund realizes he killed his father for nothing. It's too much - he runs - retracing many of his steps from earlier in the film, but especially going back to Henning - who drives him away in horror, refusing to take responsibility for what he said.
That (as Rossellini says in the introduction to the film on the Criterion disk) is the key idea of the film - it is about bad education. Edmund is trained by Nazism, grows up in it, internalizing its values - but when he acts on those values, his elders deny responsibility. The symbolism behind this, of the German people creating Nazism willingly, and then trying to pretend it wasn’t them, is clear enough as well. Germans do not come off well. The father, who seems to have disliked Nazism, clearly never had the courage or strength to do anything about it. His sons embrace it unambiguously. Henning is the other side - an unrepentant Nazi, but one who ducks and dodges - avoiding work, avoiding responsibility, dispensing bad advice and running away from it. Getting a former student to peddle Hitler records to soldiers for him (which I suppose is better than the other fate he had in mind for Edmund.) He’s a thoroughly loathsome creature.
And yet, the film is not just about damnation. Alongside Edmund's story runs his brother's story - in some ways, Karl Heinz is the hidden center of the film. He is the source of the family's trouble, being on the run - they have to feed him, and he not only costs them a ration card, but he is the most employable member of the family and does nothing. He is hard to take - preaching at his sister and Edmund for the things they do to feed him (self-righteously refusing to eat the food Edmund brings back from his nighttime adventure, all while reclining on a cot.) But one of the most interesting aspects of the film is the way it balances his story against Edmund's. The ironies of their stories are not subtle, the way Karl-Heinz does the right thing at exactly the time Edmund does the worst possible thing - but the construction is more sophisticated than the obvious irony might indicate. Karl-Heinz’s story unfolds in the background - Rossellini watches Edmund, but in a way the real battle is fought over Karl-Heinz - his struggle and his decision is the decisive one. Except it isn’t. The film plays as though we think Edmund’s story is the real one, but the real story that is his brother's - except it isn’t, Edmund's is the real center.
Both brothers act at the same time - Edmund to poison his father; Karl-Heinz to surrender to the Allies - and their actions cancel each other out. Karl-Heinz gives himself up to save his father; Edmund kills his father to save his brother - but when he does, Karl-Heinz no longer needs saving, and when Karl-Heinz acts his father is beyond saving. The final sting of the story comes from the fact that Karl-Heinz could in fact save the family - had he done so at any other time, he would have, but he waited just a bit too long. And, consistent with Rossellini's theme, he waited because of his education - he took to heart what he learned from the Nazis, the need to fight to the death, the lack of mercy to expect from the Allies (probably justified, if he'd been caught by the Russians) - and held until it was too late. And Edmund is doomed.
The final section of the film is devastating. Edmunds walks through the city, retracing many of his travels from earlier in the film. He goes to Henning, who drives him out; he looks for the kids, Joe and Christl, but they chase him away; he wanders the streets, increasingly isolated - he tries to play soccer with some kids, but they won't have him; he hears music, and stands outside a church - but as others go toward the music, he turns away, alone.
And goes on, drawn on to death. But never quite shedding his place as a child. He tries to play, hopscotch, soccer - right up to the end, he is sliding down a bar he finds in a ruined house. But he also can't escape his place as a killer, as the product of a monstrous system who has become monstrous himself...
War films often use children as protagonists - we've seen several in this countdown already (Come and See, Empire of the Sun, The Tin Drum, among others), with more to come surely. There are many reasons for this - I think those reasons add up to to the fact that the plight of children, of childhood, in wartime brings the horror of war into very sharp focus. Children in war films may be victims, they may be corrupted, may become (or be) evil, or at least hard-boiled, they may not seem to understand the nature of war, may not seem to treat it as completely real - but however they act, or are affected by the war, they reveal its nature through what it makes them. Children are new people - they are pliable, in the process of being formed - and what war turns them into shows us what war is. (And this, in turn, is why so many great films about childhood seem to be war films - because childhood is about becoming what you will be, and war heightens that, the way childhood heighten the effects of war. And maybe because childhood isn't necessarily as innocent, pleasant, secure as we wish it were - children in war become hyperbolic versions of childhood in any difficult situation.) Beyond this, children in war films draw the viewer in - child protagonists are often in the position of the viewer, having to learn about their world as they move through it. And maybe most of all - whatever a child might do in a war film, we know the child did not cause the ear. Children are always acted on by the war, no matter how active they are - adults in warfare raise questions of responsibility that children can sidestep.
In Roberto Rossellini's Germany Year Zero, his protagonist, Edmund, does all these things. He is innocent - but he is corrupted, even before the film started (with his Nazi education), and is led to more and more compromised actions that culminate in murder. He is formed by the war, and by the horrific aftermath of the war - learning from it, made what he is by it. And he is our guide to the world of the film, Berlin after the war. This is quite literal - the camera often follows him through the streets, watching him in his environment, showing us the city and what happens there. He guides us through many encounters, vignettes of suffering and cruelty, in the streets and at home. At the same time, though, he is not just guide but quester - searching for food, searching (quite explicitly - Rossellini's symbolism and ideas aren't subtle here) for meaning, what the war meant, what he is, what life means for himself and others. He is both Virgil and Dante in the inferno of ruined Berlin - and one of the damned souls as well, a ghost in a ghost of a city.
There is no question that it is hell, and these are the damned. Rossellini doesn't dwell on Germany's role in the war, but the tone of the film, and the overall gist of the story doesn't leave much doubt about it - the people of Berlin are in hell, a hell on earth, and one they created, and one they damned themselves to. This is a relentlessly pessimistic film. Everyone Edmund encounters is a kind of monster. His father is weak and useless, full of self pity, if basically a decent man; his brother hides from the Allies, a burden to his family, who then whines at them for doing what they have to to help him. His sister, actually, might be the one truly admirable person in the film - willing to do what she can to help her father and brother, unwilling to condemn Edmund for what he does to help them, constantly trying to get Karl-Heinz to take responsibility, all while waiting in vain for her own lover, who is held in a prison camp somewhere. And those are the good guys - their neighbors are selfish bullies who steal and condemn and pass the blame. Edmund meets a former teacher who is a particularly overdetermined monster - a pedophile who seems to live with a ring of pedophiles, an unrepentant Nazi, still preaching its ethos of the strong living at the expense of the weak (while ducking work on some kind of health exemption) and living off the black market. The other kids Edmund encounters are hard-bitten thieves and gangsters. The people in the streets are selfish and dangerous - they fight over a dead horse in the street; old women chase Edmund away from a job he gets, claiming he's too young, though really doing it to get more for themselves. Even the Allies are shown as careless jerks, taking pictures at Hitler's bunker and buying Nazi memorobilia. (Nothing new about nitwits taking selfies at Auschwitz.) There isn't much relief from it, and even good deeds come wrapped in cynicism - a doctor who does a good deed; Christl's relative kindness; Edmund's sister, and Edmund himself, up toa point...
Only up to a point. As things go from bad to worse for Edmund and his family, he begins to consider desperate measures. His father is sick, and after a brief stay in a hospital, he comes home, to find the family in very dire straights. There is no more power in the house; they have no money, no food - they are in trouble. The old man's self-pity is getting the best of him - he tells Edmund he'd be better off dead; when he comes home he says he has been "condemned to live." Well - not for long. Edmund, still scrambling for food or a way out of this, had been talking to the teacher again - Henning spouted Nazi platitudes about letting the weak die so the strong can live, and Edmund took it to heart. He acts: he poisons the old man, hoping that would let the other three get on with their lives. It immediately backfires - the minute he gives his father the poison the police arrive and Karl Heinz decides to do the right thing. (I told you Rossellini wasn't being subtle.) In fact, Karl-Heinz is very quickly released (as his father and sister had told him would happen), but it is too late - the father is dead, and Edmund realizes he killed his father for nothing. It's too much - he runs - retracing many of his steps from earlier in the film, but especially going back to Henning - who drives him away in horror, refusing to take responsibility for what he said.
That (as Rossellini says in the introduction to the film on the Criterion disk) is the key idea of the film - it is about bad education. Edmund is trained by Nazism, grows up in it, internalizing its values - but when he acts on those values, his elders deny responsibility. The symbolism behind this, of the German people creating Nazism willingly, and then trying to pretend it wasn’t them, is clear enough as well. Germans do not come off well. The father, who seems to have disliked Nazism, clearly never had the courage or strength to do anything about it. His sons embrace it unambiguously. Henning is the other side - an unrepentant Nazi, but one who ducks and dodges - avoiding work, avoiding responsibility, dispensing bad advice and running away from it. Getting a former student to peddle Hitler records to soldiers for him (which I suppose is better than the other fate he had in mind for Edmund.) He’s a thoroughly loathsome creature.
And yet, the film is not just about damnation. Alongside Edmund's story runs his brother's story - in some ways, Karl Heinz is the hidden center of the film. He is the source of the family's trouble, being on the run - they have to feed him, and he not only costs them a ration card, but he is the most employable member of the family and does nothing. He is hard to take - preaching at his sister and Edmund for the things they do to feed him (self-righteously refusing to eat the food Edmund brings back from his nighttime adventure, all while reclining on a cot.) But one of the most interesting aspects of the film is the way it balances his story against Edmund's. The ironies of their stories are not subtle, the way Karl-Heinz does the right thing at exactly the time Edmund does the worst possible thing - but the construction is more sophisticated than the obvious irony might indicate. Karl-Heinz’s story unfolds in the background - Rossellini watches Edmund, but in a way the real battle is fought over Karl-Heinz - his struggle and his decision is the decisive one. Except it isn’t. The film plays as though we think Edmund’s story is the real one, but the real story that is his brother's - except it isn’t, Edmund's is the real center.
Both brothers act at the same time - Edmund to poison his father; Karl-Heinz to surrender to the Allies - and their actions cancel each other out. Karl-Heinz gives himself up to save his father; Edmund kills his father to save his brother - but when he does, Karl-Heinz no longer needs saving, and when Karl-Heinz acts his father is beyond saving. The final sting of the story comes from the fact that Karl-Heinz could in fact save the family - had he done so at any other time, he would have, but he waited just a bit too long. And, consistent with Rossellini's theme, he waited because of his education - he took to heart what he learned from the Nazis, the need to fight to the death, the lack of mercy to expect from the Allies (probably justified, if he'd been caught by the Russians) - and held until it was too late. And Edmund is doomed.
The final section of the film is devastating. Edmunds walks through the city, retracing many of his travels from earlier in the film. He goes to Henning, who drives him out; he looks for the kids, Joe and Christl, but they chase him away; he wanders the streets, increasingly isolated - he tries to play soccer with some kids, but they won't have him; he hears music, and stands outside a church - but as others go toward the music, he turns away, alone.
And goes on, drawn on to death. But never quite shedding his place as a child. He tries to play, hopscotch, soccer - right up to the end, he is sliding down a bar he finds in a ruined house. But he also can't escape his place as a killer, as the product of a monstrous system who has become monstrous himself...
Friday, September 11, 2015
Music and Sports
Another Friday. Another second Friday of the month, but I don't have anything ready. Hectic week - labor day in Maine, soccer game Tuesday (US vs Brasil, with predictable results). So no Band of the Month quite yet.
Maybe some brief comments on the anniversary. Apparently, someone found some hazardous chemicals in the basement of a convenience store in the Fenway this week. The cops moved in and closed down the area as they investigated. The stuff turned out to be an unauthorized fish oil lab - nothing sinister, just someone cutting corners. Since this was in the Fenway, the Red Sox sent out an advisory through their social media channels - I saw it - and saw that the first comment under it was some wag asking if they found a store of Don Orsillo merchandise.* Another commenter duly weighted in on Taking Threats Seriously and Don't You Remember 9/11? - at least the other commentators snickered at the poor fellow. Yes - it is time to get out from under the bed.
*Don Orsillo - for those of you who are not New Englanders - Orsillo is the Red Sox TV announcer. He was fired this year (his contract not renewed) after 15 years in the booth. He is very popular - and the fans have made their opinions known. And the Red Sox (an organization that usually manages its public presentation pretty well, but are not shy about going full Stalin if they need to), may or may not have gone full Stalin on the fans - confiscating pro-Orsillo signs at the gates. Thus - jokes about the Sox calling in Hazmat teams to confiscate Orsillo merch. Pretty good jokes, actually - gave me a chuckle.
All right. Random songs! hopefully next week we will get a band post (though I have enough coming up to mess that up too... we'll see.)
1. Nick Cave & Bad Seeds - As I Sat Sadly by Her Side
2. White Stripes - A Martyr for my Love for You
3. The Carter Family - Lulu Walls
4. Van Halen - Atomic Punk
5. Derek Bailey - What it Is
6. Yo La Tengo - The Whole of the Law
7. The Who - Trilby's Piano
8. Meat Puppets - Love Mountain
9. Times New Viking - No Room to Live
10. METZ - Wet Blanket
And Video? How about some muddy, but occasionally very nice footage of Van Halen live in 1977?
Some Jack and Meg:
And let's do METZ...
Maybe some brief comments on the anniversary. Apparently, someone found some hazardous chemicals in the basement of a convenience store in the Fenway this week. The cops moved in and closed down the area as they investigated. The stuff turned out to be an unauthorized fish oil lab - nothing sinister, just someone cutting corners. Since this was in the Fenway, the Red Sox sent out an advisory through their social media channels - I saw it - and saw that the first comment under it was some wag asking if they found a store of Don Orsillo merchandise.* Another commenter duly weighted in on Taking Threats Seriously and Don't You Remember 9/11? - at least the other commentators snickered at the poor fellow. Yes - it is time to get out from under the bed.
*Don Orsillo - for those of you who are not New Englanders - Orsillo is the Red Sox TV announcer. He was fired this year (his contract not renewed) after 15 years in the booth. He is very popular - and the fans have made their opinions known. And the Red Sox (an organization that usually manages its public presentation pretty well, but are not shy about going full Stalin if they need to), may or may not have gone full Stalin on the fans - confiscating pro-Orsillo signs at the gates. Thus - jokes about the Sox calling in Hazmat teams to confiscate Orsillo merch. Pretty good jokes, actually - gave me a chuckle.
All right. Random songs! hopefully next week we will get a band post (though I have enough coming up to mess that up too... we'll see.)
1. Nick Cave & Bad Seeds - As I Sat Sadly by Her Side
2. White Stripes - A Martyr for my Love for You
3. The Carter Family - Lulu Walls
4. Van Halen - Atomic Punk
5. Derek Bailey - What it Is
6. Yo La Tengo - The Whole of the Law
7. The Who - Trilby's Piano
8. Meat Puppets - Love Mountain
9. Times New Viking - No Room to Live
10. METZ - Wet Blanket
And Video? How about some muddy, but occasionally very nice footage of Van Halen live in 1977?
Some Jack and Meg:
And let's do METZ...
Friday, September 04, 2015
Friday in the World
Hello September. Maybe the world will get less stupid coming up - is August really the month of madness? (Via Slacktivist.) Might be - Donald Trump? This Kim Davis nitwit? I see she's off to jail, since she still won't issue marriage licenses, or allow others in the office to issue them instead. And since she is elected, she apparently can't be removed from office - it's jail for contempt for her!
Well - she deserves it. She is a disgrace. Her personal history is bad enough - the 4 marriages, apparently ending up with a fellow religious nut - but even so, she shows a particularly poor understanding of religion. First, those 4 marriages - if you don't recognize divorce, only the first one counts, getting saved isn't going to change that, so unless she goes back to #1, she is committing adultery.... And then there's her job - she talks about the right to exercise her religion - but what does any of this have to do wit her religion? No one is asking her to marry a woman - exercising her religion does not include stopping other people from exercising theirs. A pretty fundamental principal of religious freedom there. And finally - if she were sincere about her religious beliefs - she would have to resign. How could she not resign? If she is so worried that she will go to hell if she somehow facilitates someone else doing something she thinks is a sin - how can she serve in the government at all? By holding the job, drawing the paycheck, she endorses the laws of the land - whether she practices them or not. Any notion of god that forces her to not issue marriage licenses is going to hold her responsible for every single same sex marriage in the country. So all this posturing isn't going to fool a truly jealous god.
It makes one wonder if she might have a different motive, hm?
I've lost most sympathy for this kind of crap. You don't have to be a bigot to be a Christian. Though these days, way too much of Christianity seems to be invested in displaying bigotry. It's all politics - the bigotry drives the rest, people like this Davis call themselves Christians to cover for their vicious politics. She has nothing to do with religious freedom or religion - treating her actions as the sincere (if deluded) beliefs of a true believer is unjustified. She is a political bully, a bigot, a self-promoting thug, wrapping her nastiness in religion to confuse the punters. Though - I know: the punters aren't confused. That brand of Christianity is political from A to Z and it's an authoritarian, racist, violent politics.
I know: too much negativity. Here's a commentary on Kim Davis, dating from the early 70s. The fact that these loons end up reenacting Monty Python, 40 years after the fact - ought to tell us something:
Before getting to the musical part of the program, a somewhat more comical piece of nitwittery: the complaints about Obama renaming Mount McKinley as Denali. This is very amusing, mainly because that's what most people have been calling the mountain for many years - Alaska renamed it some time ago (more accurately: Alaska officially restored the original name some time ago), the Ultimate Arbiter of Truth in America, the Large Corporation, has long since accepted Denali as the name - I mean, Car Companies. This was just Obama making it official federally, bypassing the long standing efforts by Ohio congressmen to block the change. I doubt anyone cares outside the Ohio congressional delegation - though that hasn't stopped the professional Obama haters from milking it for copy. (Kinda like I'm doing here!) This particular claim, that Denali means "Black Power" - it's things like that... An obvious put on, that people (apparently) spread around as if they mean it? You can't tell the rat-fuckers from the Poes sometimes.
enough. Music:
1. Erase Errata - Fault List
2. Slapp Happy/Henry Cow - Giants
3. Pink Floyd - empty Spaces
4. The Flaming Lips - Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell
5. Liars - Who is the Hunter
6. Chambers Brothers - Time Has Come Today
7. Modest Mouse - Little Motel
8. Billie Holiday - Billie's Blues
9. Badfinger - Day After Day
10. Lou Reed & Metallica - Mistress Dread
Video? Loutallica!
And time has come today, hasn't it?
And Badfinger, because - I am obliged to post any Badfinger that comes up, I think.
Well - she deserves it. She is a disgrace. Her personal history is bad enough - the 4 marriages, apparently ending up with a fellow religious nut - but even so, she shows a particularly poor understanding of religion. First, those 4 marriages - if you don't recognize divorce, only the first one counts, getting saved isn't going to change that, so unless she goes back to #1, she is committing adultery.... And then there's her job - she talks about the right to exercise her religion - but what does any of this have to do wit her religion? No one is asking her to marry a woman - exercising her religion does not include stopping other people from exercising theirs. A pretty fundamental principal of religious freedom there. And finally - if she were sincere about her religious beliefs - she would have to resign. How could she not resign? If she is so worried that she will go to hell if she somehow facilitates someone else doing something she thinks is a sin - how can she serve in the government at all? By holding the job, drawing the paycheck, she endorses the laws of the land - whether she practices them or not. Any notion of god that forces her to not issue marriage licenses is going to hold her responsible for every single same sex marriage in the country. So all this posturing isn't going to fool a truly jealous god.
It makes one wonder if she might have a different motive, hm?
I've lost most sympathy for this kind of crap. You don't have to be a bigot to be a Christian. Though these days, way too much of Christianity seems to be invested in displaying bigotry. It's all politics - the bigotry drives the rest, people like this Davis call themselves Christians to cover for their vicious politics. She has nothing to do with religious freedom or religion - treating her actions as the sincere (if deluded) beliefs of a true believer is unjustified. She is a political bully, a bigot, a self-promoting thug, wrapping her nastiness in religion to confuse the punters. Though - I know: the punters aren't confused. That brand of Christianity is political from A to Z and it's an authoritarian, racist, violent politics.
I know: too much negativity. Here's a commentary on Kim Davis, dating from the early 70s. The fact that these loons end up reenacting Monty Python, 40 years after the fact - ought to tell us something:
Before getting to the musical part of the program, a somewhat more comical piece of nitwittery: the complaints about Obama renaming Mount McKinley as Denali. This is very amusing, mainly because that's what most people have been calling the mountain for many years - Alaska renamed it some time ago (more accurately: Alaska officially restored the original name some time ago), the Ultimate Arbiter of Truth in America, the Large Corporation, has long since accepted Denali as the name - I mean, Car Companies. This was just Obama making it official federally, bypassing the long standing efforts by Ohio congressmen to block the change. I doubt anyone cares outside the Ohio congressional delegation - though that hasn't stopped the professional Obama haters from milking it for copy. (Kinda like I'm doing here!) This particular claim, that Denali means "Black Power" - it's things like that... An obvious put on, that people (apparently) spread around as if they mean it? You can't tell the rat-fuckers from the Poes sometimes.
enough. Music:
1. Erase Errata - Fault List
2. Slapp Happy/Henry Cow - Giants
3. Pink Floyd - empty Spaces
4. The Flaming Lips - Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell
5. Liars - Who is the Hunter
6. Chambers Brothers - Time Has Come Today
7. Modest Mouse - Little Motel
8. Billie Holiday - Billie's Blues
9. Badfinger - Day After Day
10. Lou Reed & Metallica - Mistress Dread
Video? Loutallica!
And time has come today, hasn't it?
And Badfinger, because - I am obliged to post any Badfinger that comes up, I think.
Friday, August 28, 2015
Friday Music Quickie
I am starting to run late this morning, so here is a simple random ten to keep the blog alive. I may be back later with something else - politics? film? who knows. For now, here's music:
1. PJ Harvey - Written on the Forehead
2. Eric Dolphy - Bird's Mother
3. Boris - Laser Beam
4. The Who - Young Man's Blues (live at Leeds)
5. Deerhoof = Panda Panda Panda
6. David Bowie - Starman
7. Sleater Kinney - Hollywood Ending
8. Wire - Mr. Suit
9. Yoko Ono - Open Your Box
10. Elvis Costello - Alison (live)
Video? The Who at the Isle of Wight to start off:
More drumming brilliance, Greg Saunier and Deerhoof:
And end with Elvis:
1. PJ Harvey - Written on the Forehead
2. Eric Dolphy - Bird's Mother
3. Boris - Laser Beam
4. The Who - Young Man's Blues (live at Leeds)
5. Deerhoof = Panda Panda Panda
6. David Bowie - Starman
7. Sleater Kinney - Hollywood Ending
8. Wire - Mr. Suit
9. Yoko Ono - Open Your Box
10. Elvis Costello - Alison (live)
Video? The Who at the Isle of Wight to start off:
More drumming brilliance, Greg Saunier and Deerhoof:
And end with Elvis:
Friday, August 21, 2015
Lazy Summer Day
Another Friday. Another hot, sticky week, so I have gotten nothing of importance done, certainly nothing to post. I don't have much to talk about today - the world outside is as stupid as ever, with Donald Trump still showing up on every news source; Josh Duggar caught with his pants down again... though the Red Sox have been winning,a nd have unloaded Ben Cherington (and his 3 last place finishes in 4 years)...
And right now it is pouring outside - which might cool things down, if we're lucky. Maybe. Gotta hope.
Anyway - some music from the iRandomizer:
1. Bobby Darin - Happy
2. Franz Ferdinand - Stand on the Horizon
3. Peter Laughner - Lullaby
4. Madvillain - Rhinestone Cowboy
5. Mogwai - We're No Here
6. Gordon Lightfoot - Go-go Round
7. AC/DC - Ride On
8. Boredoms - Bo Go
9. Dead Moon - Dead Moon Night
10. The Carter Family - Bury me Under the Weeping Willow Tree
That was particularly random... Video? Dead Moon sounds like a good place to start:
or - Roseanne Cash, singing Bury Me Beneath the Weeping Willow Tree:
And - nothing live with Bon Scott on it, but some nice footage of old Bon, accompanying AC/DC's foray into slow blues:
And right now it is pouring outside - which might cool things down, if we're lucky. Maybe. Gotta hope.
Anyway - some music from the iRandomizer:
1. Bobby Darin - Happy
2. Franz Ferdinand - Stand on the Horizon
3. Peter Laughner - Lullaby
4. Madvillain - Rhinestone Cowboy
5. Mogwai - We're No Here
6. Gordon Lightfoot - Go-go Round
7. AC/DC - Ride On
8. Boredoms - Bo Go
9. Dead Moon - Dead Moon Night
10. The Carter Family - Bury me Under the Weeping Willow Tree
That was particularly random... Video? Dead Moon sounds like a good place to start:
or - Roseanne Cash, singing Bury Me Beneath the Weeping Willow Tree:
And - nothing live with Bon Scott on it, but some nice footage of old Bon, accompanying AC/DC's foray into slow blues:
Friday, August 14, 2015
That Used to be My Favorite Song
I don't know if it is just August, or if I have hit a snag, but I am having a hard time coming up with a subject for this month's Band of the Month. Probably mostly August and sloth, but I can see the shoals a-comin'. Not that there aren't plenty of bands left to write about (and list off songs) - but it might be harder to run out those 2000 word essays I am sometimes guilty of. And - I am starting to get to bands that, well, I think I need to do more work on before I write about. I may be forced to start researching these posts.
So far, I have had 3 criteria for this series: 1) bands I love, or have loved, or something like that; 2) bands that have some autobiographical significance - though this is starting to run out - quite a few of the recent bands have just been favorites, without a huge amount of biographical importance; 3) Bands that I have listened to pretty extensively, if not exhaustively - though a lot of them are pretty close to exhaustively, at least for their regular official releases. Now - 1 is not a problem - still lots of bands I like out there, love even - some quite devotedly. 2 might be harder to continue with - I got most of the extra-musical stuff done the first year. But it's 3 that's starting to pose problems. Maybe I should put up a 4) Bands that have put out a significant amount of music, that I am familiar with all the way through. Because when I look at the bands I haven't written about yet, that I want to - I notice a couple things. On the one side, bands that haven't got a very big library of material - Joy Division, Television, Gang of Four, Mission of Burma, say. And on the other side, bands that have a huge mass of material that I have not listened to comprehensively. I have a fair amount of Bob Dylan records, say, but there is such a mass of it... David Bowie; Neil Young; Captain Beefheart; Frank Zappa; the Kinks - I have a reasonable amount of most of them, but way less than half their total output. It is a problem. Other than Johnny Cash and a couple acts I dropped in the middle of their careers (Bruce Springsteen; U2) I have, or at least have heard, more or less everything (at least the official everything) of the bands I've listed. To do that with Dylan or Young to the Kinks is going to cost me a pretty penny and lots of time. It poses a problem.
Not an insurmountable problem. I rather look forward to spending some time trying to fill out my collection of Kinks or David Bowie records. (Dylan is daunting.) And there are bands that fit the criteria pretty well, and I am shameless enough to do a top ten off a greatest hits record if I have to... Material is forthcoming. But this is a good time to mark the likelihood that I might shift the focus of this series a bit, from bands to other sets of music. I started it partly as a way to add a little substance to my weekly music posts - something I tried fitfully through the years (like this one about a particularly nice Television song), but only managed to do with this series. It is something we may see more of though. Other types of lists (by decades or years or genres or what have you) - or whatever I do to accommodate bands that have problems fitting into the top 10 format. There are quite a few of those - from bands that only managed a couple records (a top 10 Sex Pistols songs list?) to bands that don't work through conventional songs. I have listened to a lot of more experimental bands in the last 10-15 years - Earth and Acid Mothers Temple and Godspeed You Black Emperor and so on - that... work differently. Even some more conventional bands feel that way to me - Sonic Youth and Six Organs of Admittance and the Melvins and Boris - seem harder to make a top 10 of then, you know, Bob Dylan.
All right. So - sorry for the meta whatever post this month. We should be back top our regularly scheduled whatever next month.
And since I couldn't settle on a band to write about, and indeed began to brood about same - let's go the opposite direction. If I am stymied in writing about Dylan or Bowie (who are on my mind) because I am missing too much of their music - let's make a virtue of it: and write about the best songs I have totally in isolation. That is: songs I have in iTunes, rated 5 stars (and then listed in order) - that are the only song I own by the artist. Which yields an unusual set of material, actually. Peter Gabriel? I like Peter Gabriel! I like lots of Peter Gabriel songs - but this is the only one I have bothered to acquire in any form. There are a couple of those - the Eels, The Brothers Johnson - I should have more of their stuff. It's not impossible I do, somewhere in some box somewhere, a greatest hits record or some such - when I started using iTunes I stuck a lot of single songs on it. Who knows. That is certainly the case with the Hoodoo Gurus - there's a compilation somewhere in the stacks... I was worried there might be some cringy songs on here - there are - Kansas? I can imagine some pushback against the Starland Vocal Band - though at least I avoided Coldplay. A close thing, too - I like Clocks, a fact that grieves me sore.... Still: this is not a guilty pleasures kind of post. I have also steered away from outright novelty songs - Right Said Fred (song or band), that sort of thing.... And so, without further ado - here it is: best 10 songs on my computer by artists I only have one song by on my computer:
1. Hoodoo Gurus - Bittersweet [Somewhere in the past I took the rest of the record this comes from off the computer; I considered eliminating them because of this - I own more - but... no, I'll stick with the letter of the law - this is the only song on the computer, so it goes... And indeed, it should be here, since this as good a justification for this post as any: a song that is seriously perfect, by a band that is mostly forgettable. No - that's not right: I remember the rest of their material as very pleasant pop rock in the same vein as this - but this transcends the rest of it. Alex Chilton would be proud of this song. It deserves a list to top.]
2. Peter Gabriel - Games without Frontiers
3. Brothers Johnson - Strawberry Letter 23
4. Eddie Money - Two Tickets to Paradise [this is pretty much the perfect song for this list: Eddie Money is awful; this is a surprisingly good song, and the guitar solo is, of course, brilliant.]
5. Mamas & the Papas - California Dreamin' [I think I must be dreamin' I have heard Monday Monday on my iPod - apparently it's not there.]
6. The Eels - Novacaine for the Soul [I should listen to them more]
7. Roger Miller - King of the Road [sort of novelty, but who doesn't love Roger Miller?]
8. Blind Melon - No Rain [another perfect fit for this - I have never heard any other Blind Melon songs - has anyone, ever? But I do like this.]
9. Kansas - Carry on My Wayward Son [a bit surprising that Dust in the Wind, at least, has never crept onto the machine, but just as well really.]
10. Starland Vocal Band - Afternoon Delight [definitely a novelty, but it's a hell of a novelty]
Video? 4 aging Australians who have probably played this song 2-300 times a year for the past 25 years, and still hit it dead square. There is nobility in that, something positively moving.
it's a knockout.... I am rather surprised I don't have any more Peter Gabriel (or Genesis, in any form) - I'm not a huge fan, but he (and they) have made some good stuff, something I should have. I have this anyway:
As for the Brothers Johnson, I think I do have a greatest hits record buried somewhere - I might have to find that... Since I haven't put it on the computer, I can include this song in this post, and it is Ace,
Trailors for sale or rent, rooms to let 50 cents... Roger Miller performing on TV, with the kids squealing like he's a Beatle:
And I will end with Kansas - I think Steve Walsh wanted people to know he was working out.
So far, I have had 3 criteria for this series: 1) bands I love, or have loved, or something like that; 2) bands that have some autobiographical significance - though this is starting to run out - quite a few of the recent bands have just been favorites, without a huge amount of biographical importance; 3) Bands that I have listened to pretty extensively, if not exhaustively - though a lot of them are pretty close to exhaustively, at least for their regular official releases. Now - 1 is not a problem - still lots of bands I like out there, love even - some quite devotedly. 2 might be harder to continue with - I got most of the extra-musical stuff done the first year. But it's 3 that's starting to pose problems. Maybe I should put up a 4) Bands that have put out a significant amount of music, that I am familiar with all the way through. Because when I look at the bands I haven't written about yet, that I want to - I notice a couple things. On the one side, bands that haven't got a very big library of material - Joy Division, Television, Gang of Four, Mission of Burma, say. And on the other side, bands that have a huge mass of material that I have not listened to comprehensively. I have a fair amount of Bob Dylan records, say, but there is such a mass of it... David Bowie; Neil Young; Captain Beefheart; Frank Zappa; the Kinks - I have a reasonable amount of most of them, but way less than half their total output. It is a problem. Other than Johnny Cash and a couple acts I dropped in the middle of their careers (Bruce Springsteen; U2) I have, or at least have heard, more or less everything (at least the official everything) of the bands I've listed. To do that with Dylan or Young to the Kinks is going to cost me a pretty penny and lots of time. It poses a problem.
Not an insurmountable problem. I rather look forward to spending some time trying to fill out my collection of Kinks or David Bowie records. (Dylan is daunting.) And there are bands that fit the criteria pretty well, and I am shameless enough to do a top ten off a greatest hits record if I have to... Material is forthcoming. But this is a good time to mark the likelihood that I might shift the focus of this series a bit, from bands to other sets of music. I started it partly as a way to add a little substance to my weekly music posts - something I tried fitfully through the years (like this one about a particularly nice Television song), but only managed to do with this series. It is something we may see more of though. Other types of lists (by decades or years or genres or what have you) - or whatever I do to accommodate bands that have problems fitting into the top 10 format. There are quite a few of those - from bands that only managed a couple records (a top 10 Sex Pistols songs list?) to bands that don't work through conventional songs. I have listened to a lot of more experimental bands in the last 10-15 years - Earth and Acid Mothers Temple and Godspeed You Black Emperor and so on - that... work differently. Even some more conventional bands feel that way to me - Sonic Youth and Six Organs of Admittance and the Melvins and Boris - seem harder to make a top 10 of then, you know, Bob Dylan.
All right. So - sorry for the meta whatever post this month. We should be back top our regularly scheduled whatever next month.
And since I couldn't settle on a band to write about, and indeed began to brood about same - let's go the opposite direction. If I am stymied in writing about Dylan or Bowie (who are on my mind) because I am missing too much of their music - let's make a virtue of it: and write about the best songs I have totally in isolation. That is: songs I have in iTunes, rated 5 stars (and then listed in order) - that are the only song I own by the artist. Which yields an unusual set of material, actually. Peter Gabriel? I like Peter Gabriel! I like lots of Peter Gabriel songs - but this is the only one I have bothered to acquire in any form. There are a couple of those - the Eels, The Brothers Johnson - I should have more of their stuff. It's not impossible I do, somewhere in some box somewhere, a greatest hits record or some such - when I started using iTunes I stuck a lot of single songs on it. Who knows. That is certainly the case with the Hoodoo Gurus - there's a compilation somewhere in the stacks... I was worried there might be some cringy songs on here - there are - Kansas? I can imagine some pushback against the Starland Vocal Band - though at least I avoided Coldplay. A close thing, too - I like Clocks, a fact that grieves me sore.... Still: this is not a guilty pleasures kind of post. I have also steered away from outright novelty songs - Right Said Fred (song or band), that sort of thing.... And so, without further ado - here it is: best 10 songs on my computer by artists I only have one song by on my computer:
1. Hoodoo Gurus - Bittersweet [Somewhere in the past I took the rest of the record this comes from off the computer; I considered eliminating them because of this - I own more - but... no, I'll stick with the letter of the law - this is the only song on the computer, so it goes... And indeed, it should be here, since this as good a justification for this post as any: a song that is seriously perfect, by a band that is mostly forgettable. No - that's not right: I remember the rest of their material as very pleasant pop rock in the same vein as this - but this transcends the rest of it. Alex Chilton would be proud of this song. It deserves a list to top.]
2. Peter Gabriel - Games without Frontiers
3. Brothers Johnson - Strawberry Letter 23
4. Eddie Money - Two Tickets to Paradise [this is pretty much the perfect song for this list: Eddie Money is awful; this is a surprisingly good song, and the guitar solo is, of course, brilliant.]
5. Mamas & the Papas - California Dreamin' [I think I must be dreamin' I have heard Monday Monday on my iPod - apparently it's not there.]
6. The Eels - Novacaine for the Soul [I should listen to them more]
7. Roger Miller - King of the Road [sort of novelty, but who doesn't love Roger Miller?]
8. Blind Melon - No Rain [another perfect fit for this - I have never heard any other Blind Melon songs - has anyone, ever? But I do like this.]
9. Kansas - Carry on My Wayward Son [a bit surprising that Dust in the Wind, at least, has never crept onto the machine, but just as well really.]
10. Starland Vocal Band - Afternoon Delight [definitely a novelty, but it's a hell of a novelty]
Video? 4 aging Australians who have probably played this song 2-300 times a year for the past 25 years, and still hit it dead square. There is nobility in that, something positively moving.
it's a knockout.... I am rather surprised I don't have any more Peter Gabriel (or Genesis, in any form) - I'm not a huge fan, but he (and they) have made some good stuff, something I should have. I have this anyway:
As for the Brothers Johnson, I think I do have a greatest hits record buried somewhere - I might have to find that... Since I haven't put it on the computer, I can include this song in this post, and it is Ace,
Trailors for sale or rent, rooms to let 50 cents... Roger Miller performing on TV, with the kids squealing like he's a Beatle:
And I will end with Kansas - I think Steve Walsh wanted people to know he was working out.
Friday, August 07, 2015
Dog Days of Music
High summer has been here, though we're probably starting to get past the worst of it. New England having gotten off very lightly this year - the world outside is melting and we are getting nothing worse than a week or so of moderate heat. We did get a neat hail storm the other day, even neater for being done and the sun back out in half an hour or so. Still - I think I will keep it simple this week - just see what iTunes can produce. Nothing worth noting going on in the world (Republican debate? why do I care? I don't watch Fox news, and don't care who they give a show to - and is this about anything more lofty than getting a slot of Fox?) Anyhoo...
1. Bruce Springsteen - Jungleland
2. 13th Floor Elevators - Everybody Needs Somebody to Love
3. My Bloody Valentine - (When you Wake) You're Still in a Dream
4. Badfinger - No Matter What
5. Dungen - Finns Det Nagon Mojlighet
6. Bruce Springsteen - Atlantic City
7. The Red Krayola - Yik Yak
8. Raconteurs - The Switch and the Spur
9. Earth - Like Gold and Faceted
10. Cream - Badge
Video: Broooce!
Maybe some Badfinger:
and - though both are sound only - we can't let 2 sets of Texas geniuses come up witdhout posting something, can we? Red Krayola -
and 13th Floor Elevators, live:
1. Bruce Springsteen - Jungleland
2. 13th Floor Elevators - Everybody Needs Somebody to Love
3. My Bloody Valentine - (When you Wake) You're Still in a Dream
4. Badfinger - No Matter What
5. Dungen - Finns Det Nagon Mojlighet
6. Bruce Springsteen - Atlantic City
7. The Red Krayola - Yik Yak
8. Raconteurs - The Switch and the Spur
9. Earth - Like Gold and Faceted
10. Cream - Badge
Video: Broooce!
Maybe some Badfinger:
and - though both are sound only - we can't let 2 sets of Texas geniuses come up witdhout posting something, can we? Red Krayola -
and 13th Floor Elevators, live:
Wednesday, August 05, 2015
Summer time Film Going
It has been a long time since I have managed to do this - I need to get back into the habit. I could blame my Russian class int he spring, and have been inclined to blame the heat lately - but there is no excuse. Time to write! Time to write about films - since the end of June, these are.
Starting with the most recent films I saw, two extraordinary documentaries about the evil than men do and the good they would do. Both utterly heart breaking films:
Don't Think I have Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll - 12/15 - Documentary about Cambodia's rock and roll scene of the 60s and 70s, and also Cambodia's history through its pop music, Sinn Sisimouth on. Start with Cambodia's independence - France let them go without a drawn out war - and continues through the 50s and 60s, as they tried to find a place to survive in an increasingly perilous world. Follows the music - the influences from outside - Afro-cuban, French, later British, American soul, American rock - showing how these outside styles influenced their music, and how the music itself evolved. The European and American music fed into Cambodian styles, especially gtheir singing styles and melodies, to create something really cool. There's quite a lot of detail, digging into the artists, the development of the music, the business and so on. This story is poised against the political history - Cambodia's attempts to thread a neutral path between its enemies - which can't hold. You see the dangers gathering - you see the bad decisions by Cambodians (Sihanouk's flirtations with both sides, the coup that overthrew him, his flirtation with the Khmer Rouge), the casual villainy of the United States, the opportunism of the Chinese and Vietnamese - leading to the final horror of the Khmer Rouge takeover. And the killing fields - which wiped out not just the music, but many of the musicians. Seeing them bac to back, you can't help notice the parallels with Look of Silence - in Cambodia, communists killed anti-communists; in Indonesia, anti-communists killed communists - though the actual targets of both seem eerily similar - artists, intellectuals, small time labor leaders, teachers.... At the end - the film does justice to those who survived - letting them speak, of the joys of their youth and the horrors of the 70s - and is a fine tribute to them all.
Look of Silence - 13/15 - This is the follow up to one of the films of the decade, The Act of Killing - again examining the anti-communist bloodbath of the 1960s in Indonesia. This time, Joshua Oppenheimer approaches the killings from the victim's side, particular one Adi, the brother of a man killed in the massacre in 1965. Adi was born later, 1968 - he grew up without the direct memory of the killings, though unable to escape their effects. He is an eye doctor, and uses this as a hook to talk to many of the people involved in killing his brother - he meets them and tries to get them to apologize, not heavy handedly - just telling them who he is, and asking if they have regrets. These interviews are the spine of the film. There are several of them. A thin old man who talks about drinking blood to not go crazy, and asks why Adi wants to talk about politics. The leader of the paramilitary, who brags about the killings until Adi mentions his brother, then tries hard to avoid the responsibility. (Oh, the army ordered us! he says.) There's a politician who as much as threatens that they will do it again if Adi keeps asking questions. Then another old man with his daughter - she talks about being proud of her father, but then the old man tells his version of the story of drinking blood to not go mad, and she cracks. Indeed - she is the one person on the side of the killers who does so - she apologizes, begs forgiveness, tries to reconcile. Adi talks to his own uncle, who was in the army, a guard at the prison camp - who tries to avoid responsibility for his part And finally, Adi confronts the widow of another of the leaders, a man who had been seen bragging about it on archive footage, showing off a book about it and bragging about killing Ramli (Adi's brother) by name. Ramli died hard - running away, being recaptured, being stabbed repeatedly without dying, finally being castrated and bleeding to death. Adi asks his widow and children about it, and they deny ever knowing about it - he shows them the book, with a drawing of Ramli being taken away from his family and they deny ever seeing the book. So Oppenheimer plays the clips from earlier, showing the man talking about it, showing the book to his wife and others. The man's sons get defensive and even turn on Oppenheimer. These visits are interwoven with scenes with Adi's family - his parents (father ancient, blind, crippled, mostly deaf, thinking he is 17, forgetting everything else - his mother, also old though not that old, and seeming to have forgotten nothing - and his children, growing up learning the stories of the killings, that still praise them as defeating evil communists. The film ends, finally, with Adi and his parents visiting another survivor - the father is lost, he doesn't know where he is; the mother falls into the man's arms weeping.
In the end, this is less formally thrilling than The Act of Killing, but even more gut wrenching. And it is a picture of the sheerest courage - Adi's interviews with his brother's killers might be the bravest thing I have ever seen on film. More than once, you know that all that is standing between Adi and death is a Danish film crew and an American with a camera. (An impression borne out in Oppenheimer's description of the measures they took to ensure their safety.) In a way, this film works like a sane, pacifist version of The Emperor's Naked Army Marches on - Adi confronts people who did heinous things, trying, over and over, to get them to acknowledge what they did, and that it was heinous - without any luck. But he does so peacefully, gently even, calm and direct in the face of the past - as quiet as Kenzo Okuzaki is ferocious. Paired, especially, Oppenheimer's films rank with the very best documentaries.
The Tribe - 11/15 - A fairly standard Young Gangster film made interesting by 2 things - all the characters are deaf, and perform it all in sign language without translations; and it contains a total of 34 shots (per IMDB; I counted 28 myself, but probably missed a handful.) Those are both gimmicks, but they work. The film is a tour de force, with those long takes and silence, and the visual punch of the sign language - performed with great elan, and very well made. Clear story telling, visually engaging, and so on. The formal properties are superb: the silence, the editing, the camera movements, the use of sound, the choreography - bands of kids moving back and forth - as well as the silent filmmaking chops. The story - is old hat, probably old hat 100 years ago (one kid in a gang falls for one of the girls and gets crosswise the rest of the gang, with lethal results), but traditional genres are traditional for reasons; this one doesn't do anything new with the story, but plenty new (or newish), and all very well with the form. And old hat or not, it is engaging - a very good film.
Do I Sound Gay? - 10/15 - Documentary about the "gay voice" - where it comes from, what it is, and so on - interesting, if not revelatory. Follows the writer/director, David Thorpe, as he examines his own voice, and takes steps to change it - there is plenty of interesting material around this. Old clips of comedians with "sissy" voices - Paul Lynde, Rip Taylor, Charles Nelson Reilly, Liberace - as a potential model; interviews with speech therapists, on the gendering of speech and so on; discussions of performance, and how - and why - sounding gay is sometimes perceived as worse than being gay. (A revealing Louis CK joke to that affect...) There is a lot of interesting material here, maybe too much - lots of questions and observations are raised, but they aren't always followed through that deeply.
Tangerine - 12/15 - Christmas eve in LA, with 2 trans prostitutes, Alexandra and Sin-Dee Rella. Sindee is just out of jail, and Alexandra tells her that her pimp/lover has been cheating, with a woman - so Sindee goes on the war path to find her. She tracks her down, and drags her back to confront Chester the pimp, while the film follows two other characters, Alexandra, and an Armenia cabbie named Razmik, who is having a very bad day. Annoying fares, 2 drunks puking in his cab, and finally what he thinks is a ladyboy prostitute who doesn't have anything between her legs - but he hooks up with Alexandra, and things get better. That night, Alexandra has a gig singing in a club - though only Sindee and Chester's white fish show up. And then they all converge on the donut shop (Sindee, the white girl, Chester, Alexandra, Razmik, Razmik's mother in law and his wife) to have it out. All of it adds up to a remarkable film. Shot on iPhones, taking full advantage of their size and flexibility, a really fine looking film. It's carried by the performances though - the leads (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor) are fantastic - charismatic, funny, surprising. A very fine film.
Mr. Holmes - 9/15 - An entertaining and sometimes almost moving story about a very old Sherlock Holmes, losing his memory, going to Japan to get "Prickly Ash" - a plant with magical powers he hopes. He is hosted by a Japanaese man who seems to adulate him, but turns out to have lost his father because Holmes told the man to stay in England. Back in England, Holmes' health declines, and especially his memory - but he teaches his housekeeper's son bee keeping, and tries to remember a story that caused him to retire. The film jumps around between these time frames - the present in the country, the story he is trying to remember, and his time in Japan - and all come to their climax together. Roger is stung almost to death, but by wasps (one last piece of fairly obvious detection for the old man), and he remembers the story - a woman who lost two still born children loses her mind and he doesn't prevent her suicide... (Sorry for spoiling it, in case anyone is reading this... but I've spoiled better films already haven't I?) Anyway - it is sentimental nonsense - I've been reading Sherlock Holmes stories this summer and he failed rather often to save people, and while he always strove to avenge them, it doesn't seem likely to break him... But that aside - apart from the sentimentality, Ian McKellan and the kid playing Roger (Milo Parker) are fantastic. I'm sure Laura Linney would be too, if she had anything to do. But they are great and worth seeing the film for.
Amy - 11/15 - Biography of Amy Winehouse that does justice to her, as an artist as well as a fuckup. Starts with Amy in home movies, ae 14 or so, belting out happy birtthday, and then marches through her life - singing professionally at 16, making a record around 20, winning prizes, with a kind of jazzy sound - going more pop in 2006 with a huge record - then everything coming apart. Though we also see that it was always apart - she was already a pothead at 16, etc. Her nemesis is her boyfriend and eventual husband, one Blake Fielder, a flashy club kid who takes up with her, lives an amour fou, then dumps her; when she becomes a huge star he comes back, and they sink into crack, heroin and so on (along with booze) - and - 5 years of decline as it happened, until she died. And so? I didn't think much about Amy Winehouse when she was alive - the film does a fine job of demonstrating what the fuss was about. She had a stunning set of pipes, and more talent for song writing than I had any idea of. The film dwells on her songs - maybe leaning a bit toward milking the autobiographical content from them, but still showing them clearly, showing her songwriting skills. They are good songs. I'm still not totally convinced - she's a fine singer, a master of old styles, but all of it comes off a bit to derivative, too polite - she's too much Tony Bennett, not enough Frank Sinatra. But that's a matter of degrees - and she died at 27 and was basically done as an artist at 22 - if she'd had half a chance to survive a while, she might have lived up to the raw talent. Unfortunately, her doom seems pre-ordained: she was screwed up young and stayed screwed up, and surrounded by people who wren't going to let her troubles get in the way of her paycheck. Blake might be the most obvious monster, but you feel a hint or so of sympathy for him - he's in the same state she's in, after all. But her father and her manager come off as just about as crass and oblivious to her condition - they are riding the gravy train and trying to get everything out of it they can, as if they knew she wasn't long for the world, and they wee going to make their bank before she went. The kid never had a chance.
Big Game - 8/15 - Fake 80s style action comedy - the president's plane is shot down in Finland by Walter Palmer - wait, no - but - terrorists, or big game hunters - something. But on the ground, the president (played by Samuel L Jackson, who would make a fine president) is found by a 13 year old on some kind of coming of age mission to kill him an animal in the woods. The kid proceeds to save the day. Yay! It is all amusing, sometimes very nifty - though also usually simplistic and sometimes rather dumb. It's an homage to the 80s, in a way that seems half serious and half comical - since a lot of the films it riffs on were half serious half comic the math get confusing - but it's more than enjoyable enough on its own terms.
Testament of Youth - 9/15 - This is a handsome, inteligent adaptation of Vera Brittain's memoir of WWI. Brittain's book is a bit of a brute - very long and full of horrors, being about WWI - the film is not very long, and though it has its share of horrors it doesn't really do justice to the book. It starts well, this new film, but falls apart in the second half - which is probably an inevitable by product of the story. The book covers WWI and its aftermath - an in conventional terms (and this is a very conventional film), her story is very front-loaded. All the drama happens up front - she studies for Oxford - she meets Roland Leighton, a young poet on his way to Oxford - she gets into Oxford! - the war starts and all the boys go off to war - she goes to Oxford, but decides she can't be in school while men are dying in the Belgian mud, so she becomes a VAD (a volunteer nurse) - and then Roland dies in the Belgian mud. All that is by the end of 1915: there are still 3 years of war to go; 3 more close friends to die; and then it's back to Oxford and time to End War Forever. The effect is noticeable in the book (which I read for the class I've mentioned before, The Great War in Film and Literature) - it is a definite slog through the middle parts, a long march of death and pain - but Brittain knows it, and makes that part of the story. It is a story of endurance, survival - and survivor's guilt (in spades) - and maybe ultimately redemption and return to life, sort of. She makes it work by making the endurance part of her subject - treating her experiences like stations of the cross in her education: the Mediterrainean, Edward's wounding, Victor's death, her time in France and Hope Milroy, Edward's death and so on. And she makes it work by always maintaining a double perspective on the material, from beginning to end. Her voice writing in 1933 is always present, always important - along with her sense of her immediate reactions to events. (Often achieved with primary sources - letters and poems written at the time, incorporated whole into the memoir.) This film is pretty good, actually, through the first part, the dramatic part, the love story - but completely lost once Roland is gone. It never figures out how to get through the rest of the war, so reduces the main events to a couple scenes, and drops much of the material that gives the book its emotional punch: the sense of the length of the war; Vera's friendship with an older nurse, Hope Milroy; her brother's increasing bitterness as the war progresses. It speeds past things that have great resonance for Vera - her survivor's guilt, particularly, which is made worse when she leaves the VAD to take care of her mother; this happens in the film without any weight. It's probably hopeless, really - there's no way to make a conventional film out of the material without butchering the material, and this is a very conventional film. Though to be fair - even as a mini-series, it ran into trouble - it could cover the material, but they also dropped Brittain's narration, and that flattened out the material. It's a problem - that love story at the beginning makes it a tempting story to film - the rest of the story makes it very likely to come short...
Still - I wish they could have done better. The cast is very good - Alicia Vikander is especially good, Kit Harrington holds his own, and the rest of the cast is fine. But Vikander, particularly, doesn't get enough to do - Vera Brittain's character is flattened out along with the story - the politics (and it is a very political book - feminist and pacifist, and quite pointedly so in both) is mostly gone, certainly made polite. She registers suffering - she doesn't register the anger that is obvious in the book...
Starting with the most recent films I saw, two extraordinary documentaries about the evil than men do and the good they would do. Both utterly heart breaking films:
Don't Think I have Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll - 12/15 - Documentary about Cambodia's rock and roll scene of the 60s and 70s, and also Cambodia's history through its pop music, Sinn Sisimouth on. Start with Cambodia's independence - France let them go without a drawn out war - and continues through the 50s and 60s, as they tried to find a place to survive in an increasingly perilous world. Follows the music - the influences from outside - Afro-cuban, French, later British, American soul, American rock - showing how these outside styles influenced their music, and how the music itself evolved. The European and American music fed into Cambodian styles, especially gtheir singing styles and melodies, to create something really cool. There's quite a lot of detail, digging into the artists, the development of the music, the business and so on. This story is poised against the political history - Cambodia's attempts to thread a neutral path between its enemies - which can't hold. You see the dangers gathering - you see the bad decisions by Cambodians (Sihanouk's flirtations with both sides, the coup that overthrew him, his flirtation with the Khmer Rouge), the casual villainy of the United States, the opportunism of the Chinese and Vietnamese - leading to the final horror of the Khmer Rouge takeover. And the killing fields - which wiped out not just the music, but many of the musicians. Seeing them bac to back, you can't help notice the parallels with Look of Silence - in Cambodia, communists killed anti-communists; in Indonesia, anti-communists killed communists - though the actual targets of both seem eerily similar - artists, intellectuals, small time labor leaders, teachers.... At the end - the film does justice to those who survived - letting them speak, of the joys of their youth and the horrors of the 70s - and is a fine tribute to them all.
Look of Silence - 13/15 - This is the follow up to one of the films of the decade, The Act of Killing - again examining the anti-communist bloodbath of the 1960s in Indonesia. This time, Joshua Oppenheimer approaches the killings from the victim's side, particular one Adi, the brother of a man killed in the massacre in 1965. Adi was born later, 1968 - he grew up without the direct memory of the killings, though unable to escape their effects. He is an eye doctor, and uses this as a hook to talk to many of the people involved in killing his brother - he meets them and tries to get them to apologize, not heavy handedly - just telling them who he is, and asking if they have regrets. These interviews are the spine of the film. There are several of them. A thin old man who talks about drinking blood to not go crazy, and asks why Adi wants to talk about politics. The leader of the paramilitary, who brags about the killings until Adi mentions his brother, then tries hard to avoid the responsibility. (Oh, the army ordered us! he says.) There's a politician who as much as threatens that they will do it again if Adi keeps asking questions. Then another old man with his daughter - she talks about being proud of her father, but then the old man tells his version of the story of drinking blood to not go mad, and she cracks. Indeed - she is the one person on the side of the killers who does so - she apologizes, begs forgiveness, tries to reconcile. Adi talks to his own uncle, who was in the army, a guard at the prison camp - who tries to avoid responsibility for his part And finally, Adi confronts the widow of another of the leaders, a man who had been seen bragging about it on archive footage, showing off a book about it and bragging about killing Ramli (Adi's brother) by name. Ramli died hard - running away, being recaptured, being stabbed repeatedly without dying, finally being castrated and bleeding to death. Adi asks his widow and children about it, and they deny ever knowing about it - he shows them the book, with a drawing of Ramli being taken away from his family and they deny ever seeing the book. So Oppenheimer plays the clips from earlier, showing the man talking about it, showing the book to his wife and others. The man's sons get defensive and even turn on Oppenheimer. These visits are interwoven with scenes with Adi's family - his parents (father ancient, blind, crippled, mostly deaf, thinking he is 17, forgetting everything else - his mother, also old though not that old, and seeming to have forgotten nothing - and his children, growing up learning the stories of the killings, that still praise them as defeating evil communists. The film ends, finally, with Adi and his parents visiting another survivor - the father is lost, he doesn't know where he is; the mother falls into the man's arms weeping.
In the end, this is less formally thrilling than The Act of Killing, but even more gut wrenching. And it is a picture of the sheerest courage - Adi's interviews with his brother's killers might be the bravest thing I have ever seen on film. More than once, you know that all that is standing between Adi and death is a Danish film crew and an American with a camera. (An impression borne out in Oppenheimer's description of the measures they took to ensure their safety.) In a way, this film works like a sane, pacifist version of The Emperor's Naked Army Marches on - Adi confronts people who did heinous things, trying, over and over, to get them to acknowledge what they did, and that it was heinous - without any luck. But he does so peacefully, gently even, calm and direct in the face of the past - as quiet as Kenzo Okuzaki is ferocious. Paired, especially, Oppenheimer's films rank with the very best documentaries.
The Tribe - 11/15 - A fairly standard Young Gangster film made interesting by 2 things - all the characters are deaf, and perform it all in sign language without translations; and it contains a total of 34 shots (per IMDB; I counted 28 myself, but probably missed a handful.) Those are both gimmicks, but they work. The film is a tour de force, with those long takes and silence, and the visual punch of the sign language - performed with great elan, and very well made. Clear story telling, visually engaging, and so on. The formal properties are superb: the silence, the editing, the camera movements, the use of sound, the choreography - bands of kids moving back and forth - as well as the silent filmmaking chops. The story - is old hat, probably old hat 100 years ago (one kid in a gang falls for one of the girls and gets crosswise the rest of the gang, with lethal results), but traditional genres are traditional for reasons; this one doesn't do anything new with the story, but plenty new (or newish), and all very well with the form. And old hat or not, it is engaging - a very good film.
Do I Sound Gay? - 10/15 - Documentary about the "gay voice" - where it comes from, what it is, and so on - interesting, if not revelatory. Follows the writer/director, David Thorpe, as he examines his own voice, and takes steps to change it - there is plenty of interesting material around this. Old clips of comedians with "sissy" voices - Paul Lynde, Rip Taylor, Charles Nelson Reilly, Liberace - as a potential model; interviews with speech therapists, on the gendering of speech and so on; discussions of performance, and how - and why - sounding gay is sometimes perceived as worse than being gay. (A revealing Louis CK joke to that affect...) There is a lot of interesting material here, maybe too much - lots of questions and observations are raised, but they aren't always followed through that deeply.
Tangerine - 12/15 - Christmas eve in LA, with 2 trans prostitutes, Alexandra and Sin-Dee Rella. Sindee is just out of jail, and Alexandra tells her that her pimp/lover has been cheating, with a woman - so Sindee goes on the war path to find her. She tracks her down, and drags her back to confront Chester the pimp, while the film follows two other characters, Alexandra, and an Armenia cabbie named Razmik, who is having a very bad day. Annoying fares, 2 drunks puking in his cab, and finally what he thinks is a ladyboy prostitute who doesn't have anything between her legs - but he hooks up with Alexandra, and things get better. That night, Alexandra has a gig singing in a club - though only Sindee and Chester's white fish show up. And then they all converge on the donut shop (Sindee, the white girl, Chester, Alexandra, Razmik, Razmik's mother in law and his wife) to have it out. All of it adds up to a remarkable film. Shot on iPhones, taking full advantage of their size and flexibility, a really fine looking film. It's carried by the performances though - the leads (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor) are fantastic - charismatic, funny, surprising. A very fine film.
Mr. Holmes - 9/15 - An entertaining and sometimes almost moving story about a very old Sherlock Holmes, losing his memory, going to Japan to get "Prickly Ash" - a plant with magical powers he hopes. He is hosted by a Japanaese man who seems to adulate him, but turns out to have lost his father because Holmes told the man to stay in England. Back in England, Holmes' health declines, and especially his memory - but he teaches his housekeeper's son bee keeping, and tries to remember a story that caused him to retire. The film jumps around between these time frames - the present in the country, the story he is trying to remember, and his time in Japan - and all come to their climax together. Roger is stung almost to death, but by wasps (one last piece of fairly obvious detection for the old man), and he remembers the story - a woman who lost two still born children loses her mind and he doesn't prevent her suicide... (Sorry for spoiling it, in case anyone is reading this... but I've spoiled better films already haven't I?) Anyway - it is sentimental nonsense - I've been reading Sherlock Holmes stories this summer and he failed rather often to save people, and while he always strove to avenge them, it doesn't seem likely to break him... But that aside - apart from the sentimentality, Ian McKellan and the kid playing Roger (Milo Parker) are fantastic. I'm sure Laura Linney would be too, if she had anything to do. But they are great and worth seeing the film for.
Amy - 11/15 - Biography of Amy Winehouse that does justice to her, as an artist as well as a fuckup. Starts with Amy in home movies, ae 14 or so, belting out happy birtthday, and then marches through her life - singing professionally at 16, making a record around 20, winning prizes, with a kind of jazzy sound - going more pop in 2006 with a huge record - then everything coming apart. Though we also see that it was always apart - she was already a pothead at 16, etc. Her nemesis is her boyfriend and eventual husband, one Blake Fielder, a flashy club kid who takes up with her, lives an amour fou, then dumps her; when she becomes a huge star he comes back, and they sink into crack, heroin and so on (along with booze) - and - 5 years of decline as it happened, until she died. And so? I didn't think much about Amy Winehouse when she was alive - the film does a fine job of demonstrating what the fuss was about. She had a stunning set of pipes, and more talent for song writing than I had any idea of. The film dwells on her songs - maybe leaning a bit toward milking the autobiographical content from them, but still showing them clearly, showing her songwriting skills. They are good songs. I'm still not totally convinced - she's a fine singer, a master of old styles, but all of it comes off a bit to derivative, too polite - she's too much Tony Bennett, not enough Frank Sinatra. But that's a matter of degrees - and she died at 27 and was basically done as an artist at 22 - if she'd had half a chance to survive a while, she might have lived up to the raw talent. Unfortunately, her doom seems pre-ordained: she was screwed up young and stayed screwed up, and surrounded by people who wren't going to let her troubles get in the way of her paycheck. Blake might be the most obvious monster, but you feel a hint or so of sympathy for him - he's in the same state she's in, after all. But her father and her manager come off as just about as crass and oblivious to her condition - they are riding the gravy train and trying to get everything out of it they can, as if they knew she wasn't long for the world, and they wee going to make their bank before she went. The kid never had a chance.
Big Game - 8/15 - Fake 80s style action comedy - the president's plane is shot down in Finland by Walter Palmer - wait, no - but - terrorists, or big game hunters - something. But on the ground, the president (played by Samuel L Jackson, who would make a fine president) is found by a 13 year old on some kind of coming of age mission to kill him an animal in the woods. The kid proceeds to save the day. Yay! It is all amusing, sometimes very nifty - though also usually simplistic and sometimes rather dumb. It's an homage to the 80s, in a way that seems half serious and half comical - since a lot of the films it riffs on were half serious half comic the math get confusing - but it's more than enjoyable enough on its own terms.
Testament of Youth - 9/15 - This is a handsome, inteligent adaptation of Vera Brittain's memoir of WWI. Brittain's book is a bit of a brute - very long and full of horrors, being about WWI - the film is not very long, and though it has its share of horrors it doesn't really do justice to the book. It starts well, this new film, but falls apart in the second half - which is probably an inevitable by product of the story. The book covers WWI and its aftermath - an in conventional terms (and this is a very conventional film), her story is very front-loaded. All the drama happens up front - she studies for Oxford - she meets Roland Leighton, a young poet on his way to Oxford - she gets into Oxford! - the war starts and all the boys go off to war - she goes to Oxford, but decides she can't be in school while men are dying in the Belgian mud, so she becomes a VAD (a volunteer nurse) - and then Roland dies in the Belgian mud. All that is by the end of 1915: there are still 3 years of war to go; 3 more close friends to die; and then it's back to Oxford and time to End War Forever. The effect is noticeable in the book (which I read for the class I've mentioned before, The Great War in Film and Literature) - it is a definite slog through the middle parts, a long march of death and pain - but Brittain knows it, and makes that part of the story. It is a story of endurance, survival - and survivor's guilt (in spades) - and maybe ultimately redemption and return to life, sort of. She makes it work by making the endurance part of her subject - treating her experiences like stations of the cross in her education: the Mediterrainean, Edward's wounding, Victor's death, her time in France and Hope Milroy, Edward's death and so on. And she makes it work by always maintaining a double perspective on the material, from beginning to end. Her voice writing in 1933 is always present, always important - along with her sense of her immediate reactions to events. (Often achieved with primary sources - letters and poems written at the time, incorporated whole into the memoir.) This film is pretty good, actually, through the first part, the dramatic part, the love story - but completely lost once Roland is gone. It never figures out how to get through the rest of the war, so reduces the main events to a couple scenes, and drops much of the material that gives the book its emotional punch: the sense of the length of the war; Vera's friendship with an older nurse, Hope Milroy; her brother's increasing bitterness as the war progresses. It speeds past things that have great resonance for Vera - her survivor's guilt, particularly, which is made worse when she leaves the VAD to take care of her mother; this happens in the film without any weight. It's probably hopeless, really - there's no way to make a conventional film out of the material without butchering the material, and this is a very conventional film. Though to be fair - even as a mini-series, it ran into trouble - it could cover the material, but they also dropped Brittain's narration, and that flattened out the material. It's a problem - that love story at the beginning makes it a tempting story to film - the rest of the story makes it very likely to come short...
Still - I wish they could have done better. The cast is very good - Alicia Vikander is especially good, Kit Harrington holds his own, and the rest of the cast is fine. But Vikander, particularly, doesn't get enough to do - Vera Brittain's character is flattened out along with the story - the politics (and it is a very political book - feminist and pacifist, and quite pointedly so in both) is mostly gone, certainly made polite. She registers suffering - she doesn't register the anger that is obvious in the book...
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