(the real Continental Op's latest dispatch)
For decades, Don Cherry's "Malkauns" was a favorite track of mine before I learned that the title is taken from a well-known and widely performed Indian raga; and therefore the entire piece is essentially a performance of the raga just the way any other track called "Raga Malkauns" by an Indian classical musician is. But now that I know this, I don't like the piece any less.
samples here:
http://www.amazon.com/Malkauns/dp/B001NU6EVK
and here:
http://www.last.fm/music/Don+Cherry/_/Malkauns
You're on your own as to locating and downloading an mp3 that has the whole thing.
So today I went over to the fabulous multimedia lending library to try to locate versions of the raga as done by Indian musicians -- ideally, to try to find one that sounds like what might have inspired Don Cherry and Charlie Haden so that I could hear the connection, how they got from A to B and came up with what they did.
As you can see at this link to the library's online catalogue, they have many recordings of the raga, but most of them are in the archive/storage and weren't available out in the bins:
http://www.lamediatheque.be/med/rech_n.php?intervenant=&morceau=&titre=malkauns&ref=
I did however find 4 recordings of Raga Malkauns on the premises (one of them included in the apparently encyclopedic "The Raga Guide: A Survey of 74 Hindustani Ragas", a book accompanied by 4 CDs). To my Occidental ear, none of the versions seem to bear any relation to each other or to the Don Cherry track -- except of course that they happen to use the same scale.
There's one exception however: the version by Zia Mohiuddin Dagar and his brother Zia Fariduddin Dagar, which lasts SIXTY-NINE MINUTES and is available on YouTube!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W_AYI0n_Kg
If you listen to this all the way through, by the time you get to the end you can hypothesize that the drone that one of them often uses in the lowest register might have provided the original impetus for what Charlie Haden does on the bass on the Don Cherry version. And also by the end, the notes of the scale are ingrained enough in your brain that you also have a sense of how Don Cherry came up with the trumpet part. For instance, if you play the notes of the scale in your brain, and imagine them played on trumpet, you can produce an inferior but similar version of Don Cherry's improvising.
btw, my discovering Z.M. Dagar is something of a revelation -- this is seriously trippy stuff. When he's playing both with his brother and with other people, he's not accompanied by any percussion, and each of his CDs includes a performance of only one raga. 70 minutes' worth of the same raga, the same drone. And therefore, often the first 40 minutes (the opening "Alap" section) is little more than drone with ornamentation, and then finally he introduces a pulse (in the concluding Jor and Jhala sections) -- except that the pulse is conveyed only via string instruments (the vina and accompanying tamburas).
I'm sorry to say this, but once you hear Z.M. Dagar's stuff, you hear how avant-garde minimalist guys like Phill Niblock and Glenn Branca have a long way to go, and Jim O'Rourke and Loren Mazzacane Connors should just pack it in altogether. On the other hand, the stuff that John Fahey was doing at the end of his career really is as good as Z.M. Dagar (e.g. check out the samples of the first four tracks of this:
http://www.allmusic.com/album/sea-changes-and-coelacanths-a-young-persons-guide-to-john-fahey-mw0000566552
If I understand the Indian musical system correctly, a raga is a scale (not necessarily the same notes ascending as those descending), the musician improvises on the scale, and then the resulting "piece" is simply given the title of the raga. So that in the end, any pieces called "Raga Yaman" might not sound any more similar to each other than, among Western composers, any two pieces called "String Quartet in C major" do.
But still, this seems very strange to me when I read liner notes of Indian music CDs and then attempt a cultural transposition and come up with examples like these:
1. "Beethoven's 5th Symphony is surely the most compelling and insistent performance of C minor in recorded musical history."
2. "John Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme' stands as what is likely the most moving rendition of the Dorian mode, especially in D."
3. "Charlie Parker's compositions 'Constellation' and 'Anthropology' belong to the harmonic system known as 'Rhythm Changes', whose pieces are traditionally performed in the milieu of urban clubs late at night, between the hours of midnight and 2 a.m."----john w.
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Monday, October 29, 2012
See The World
R.I.P. D.S.W.
An Aquarian Sound mass heavy as the head of Ganesh,
an extensive, expansive momentum of massive sound:
the one known as David S. Ware is now gone, dead,
Surrendered to the hereafter he honored
eternally, constantly, heralded
with ecstasy-tortured strains & screams & banshee shrieks
like shimmering shards of shattering glass,
dangerous points, slices and edges to draw blood
by a man of renal, real pain who between the walls
he tore down deafeningly in the Samson Agonistic mode
along etheric sonic Corridors and Parallels
now abandons the planet, leaving silence to be filled:
Go See the World and find spaces of silence
filled with painful blinding light now without his sound
while with memory of the muse of a man
we mourn his joy and join his Flight of i.
--John Wojtowicz
Friday, September 21, 2012
Irwinomic Pressures, Hoganpolitan Release
Couple more re-prints:
Catherine Irwin's new solo album, Little Heater, starts out with her as a maybe wayward but non-waify personal pilgrim, with some bruised resolution to walk on down the tracks. Then she becomes a tough-soled backwoods backstreet visionary, a nature-loving evangelist: "We must save the liars, we must save the liars! For there is much/Truth in them." Also, we must save the whores, the thieves, and "the pirates' hearts", though not the rest of them apparently, which in hindsight may be a foretaste of gory glory divine, though only glimpsd in those "kerosene lights", as she eventually (spoilers ahead) looks back: "Ah rose through those valleys unscathed, but Ah couldn't take the heights....when 'Do What Thou Wilt' was the whole of the law." (The ancient motto goes good with the tune and inflections---Appalachians are descendents of the Elizabethans, don't you know). Ends up eternally wistful, having killed the loved one who killed the dream, but not dead enough, on "Banks of the Ohio", the only cover.
Sound unbearable? It doesn't *sound* unbearable, far from it. After all those steadily progressing quality-vs.- quantity Freakwater albums, plus one prev. solo set, she masterfully guides and trusts the scaled-down pre-bluegrass mountain sounds through isolation and stealthy company (a few strings like creek branches, a steel guitar here, banjo thar, harmonies finding their sea legs soon enough). Also finding her own way through syllables, chords and good ol' tunes in the moment, or so it surely seems. The only thing is, the seriously punk-to-roots humor of her deadpan ways is now pretty much reduced to "is she kidding with that?", and once or twice at most. Unless it can be heard in the quiet audacity of the whole thing, which might be an allegory of what happens to all religion. Does also seem fully, personally inhabited though. Track by track, it mostly still works--so far, but the lack of humor makes me wonder. Will make my Nashville Scene Top Ten; probably Pazz & Jop too. At this point, Little Heater seems at least strong and scary as Dylan's new Tempest often means to be, and sometimes is. Dylan's Halloween-masked narrator (sounding old as heck, yet manipulatively so) crows, " I pay in blood, but not my own." Irwin's vagabond sounds younger, but also like she's paid at a much higher exchange rate.
(PS: Little Heater "features a range of guests including Bonnie 'Prince' Billy on vocals, members of Ida on vocals and various instruments, and Marc Orleans on pedal steel", says press sheet).
Meanwhile, Kelly Hogan's I Like to Keep Myself in Pain starts with the same Irwin song Irwin starts Little Heater with: "Dusty Groove." Which may be what the protagonist feels like, and mebbe she's dusting the walls in the hall as she bumps off 'em, but she's got some concealed, wary agility down in the groove, and pushes herself out into some Loretta Lynn-worthy precision--"Sleeves rolled down/Even in an evening gown", resolutions crumpled in her fist--gliding into understated flamboyance, train of thinking out loud about seeing stars in the love wars or anyway the battered homefront. "Underneath the sweater/Ten fingers are red/Ah bequeath this gold map of the stars to the living dead." Still, the overall vibe of this set is like late 60s crossover bait, radio hits and shoulda-beens, from the age of Lynn and Bacharach and Jim Webb and Randy Newman, when Dusty Springfield was covering Ran' songs(if he wrote "Just One Kiss", or was it Nilsson--anyway, their neck of the woods and Vine). But as we have seen ,Hogan wisely reserves the right to take it further than most reasonable radio-bait would have. The other great example (yes, there must be two): while "Daddy's Little Girl" reminds me that Newman sincerely offered "Lonely At The Top" to Frank Sinatra, it also sounds like one he would have written for himself (maybe Stephen Merritt wrote it, sounds more adept than recent Newman). Sung by Frank, or somebody who thinks he is, providing a grand, somewhat brain-leaky perspective, a tribute to himself. She does best when she's got something like this, tilting the Hoganpolitan shimmer and sheen, quickly training us to watch for the little psych-pop glints. Even the few merely retro tracks are spot-on. Rec'd to fans of recent Lambert, Pistol Annies, Chely Wright, Lee Ann Womack (thinking esp. of the way Womack did Mark Ribot's "Meds," on Buddy Miller's Majesty of the Silver Strings, where Womack didn't have to deal w the guitar noodles, unlike Patti Griffin and Emmylou on other tracks. (Miller's an effective accompanist, but when he gets between Ribot and Frisell, yow.)
Update: As press sheet points out, Hogan's own compact studio combo incl. " R&B legends Booker T. Jones and James Gadson (Bill Withers, Beck) as well as talented young lions Gabe Roth (of Daptone Records, the Dap-Kings) and Scott Ligon." (I listening to her and Irwin's albums before reading the credits.) As for the writing, turns out "Daddy's Little Girl" is actually by.M. Ward, of all people (no offense, just never heard anything by him nearly this awesome, to put it mildly. I'll have to further educate myself). The S.Merritt, or at any rate, Mag Fields contribution is the tamest thing here. The bravura "Pass On By", waving away the spotlight right on cue, is by Margaret Ann Rich, triumphantly standing by her tempestuous Charlie, the total cost for which included Lord knows what, but she surely paid some of it in most of his best material. The domestic science-times-rocket or slow train to stardom bit is featured in most if not all of the songs on this album, but it's good anyway. Another Nash Scene Top Ten entry----Don Allred
KELLY HOGAN I Like To Keep Myself In Pain Track Listing
DUSTY GROOVE (Catherine Irwin)
WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS (Jack Pendarvis/Andrew Bird)
I LIKE TO KEEP MYSELF in PAIN (Robyn Hitchcock)
HAUNTED (Jon Langford)
DADDY'S LITTLE GIRL (M. Ward)
GOLDEN (Kelly Hogan)
WAYS of THIS WORLD (Vic Chesnutt)
SLUMBER'S SYMPATHY (Gabriel Roth)
PLANT WHITE ROSES (Magnetic Fields)
SLEEPER AWAKE (John Wesley Harding)
THE GREEN WILLOW VALLEY (Handsome Family)
WHENEVER YOU'RE OUT of MY SIGHT (Robbie Fulks)
PASS ON BY (Margaret Ann Rich)
Catherine Irwin's new solo album, Little Heater, starts out with her as a maybe wayward but non-waify personal pilgrim, with some bruised resolution to walk on down the tracks. Then she becomes a tough-soled backwoods backstreet visionary, a nature-loving evangelist: "We must save the liars, we must save the liars! For there is much/Truth in them." Also, we must save the whores, the thieves, and "the pirates' hearts", though not the rest of them apparently, which in hindsight may be a foretaste of gory glory divine, though only glimpsd in those "kerosene lights", as she eventually (spoilers ahead) looks back: "Ah rose through those valleys unscathed, but Ah couldn't take the heights....when 'Do What Thou Wilt' was the whole of the law." (The ancient motto goes good with the tune and inflections---Appalachians are descendents of the Elizabethans, don't you know). Ends up eternally wistful, having killed the loved one who killed the dream, but not dead enough, on "Banks of the Ohio", the only cover.
Sound unbearable? It doesn't *sound* unbearable, far from it. After all those steadily progressing quality-vs.- quantity Freakwater albums, plus one prev. solo set, she masterfully guides and trusts the scaled-down pre-bluegrass mountain sounds through isolation and stealthy company (a few strings like creek branches, a steel guitar here, banjo thar, harmonies finding their sea legs soon enough). Also finding her own way through syllables, chords and good ol' tunes in the moment, or so it surely seems. The only thing is, the seriously punk-to-roots humor of her deadpan ways is now pretty much reduced to "is she kidding with that?", and once or twice at most. Unless it can be heard in the quiet audacity of the whole thing, which might be an allegory of what happens to all religion. Does also seem fully, personally inhabited though. Track by track, it mostly still works--so far, but the lack of humor makes me wonder. Will make my Nashville Scene Top Ten; probably Pazz & Jop too. At this point, Little Heater seems at least strong and scary as Dylan's new Tempest often means to be, and sometimes is. Dylan's Halloween-masked narrator (sounding old as heck, yet manipulatively so) crows, " I pay in blood, but not my own." Irwin's vagabond sounds younger, but also like she's paid at a much higher exchange rate.
(PS: Little Heater "features a range of guests including Bonnie 'Prince' Billy on vocals, members of Ida on vocals and various instruments, and Marc Orleans on pedal steel", says press sheet).
Meanwhile, Kelly Hogan's I Like to Keep Myself in Pain starts with the same Irwin song Irwin starts Little Heater with: "Dusty Groove." Which may be what the protagonist feels like, and mebbe she's dusting the walls in the hall as she bumps off 'em, but she's got some concealed, wary agility down in the groove, and pushes herself out into some Loretta Lynn-worthy precision--"Sleeves rolled down/Even in an evening gown", resolutions crumpled in her fist--gliding into understated flamboyance, train of thinking out loud about seeing stars in the love wars or anyway the battered homefront. "Underneath the sweater/Ten fingers are red/Ah bequeath this gold map of the stars to the living dead." Still, the overall vibe of this set is like late 60s crossover bait, radio hits and shoulda-beens, from the age of Lynn and Bacharach and Jim Webb and Randy Newman, when Dusty Springfield was covering Ran' songs(if he wrote "Just One Kiss", or was it Nilsson--anyway, their neck of the woods and Vine). But as we have seen ,Hogan wisely reserves the right to take it further than most reasonable radio-bait would have. The other great example (yes, there must be two): while "Daddy's Little Girl" reminds me that Newman sincerely offered "Lonely At The Top" to Frank Sinatra, it also sounds like one he would have written for himself (maybe Stephen Merritt wrote it, sounds more adept than recent Newman). Sung by Frank, or somebody who thinks he is, providing a grand, somewhat brain-leaky perspective, a tribute to himself. She does best when she's got something like this, tilting the Hoganpolitan shimmer and sheen, quickly training us to watch for the little psych-pop glints. Even the few merely retro tracks are spot-on. Rec'd to fans of recent Lambert, Pistol Annies, Chely Wright, Lee Ann Womack (thinking esp. of the way Womack did Mark Ribot's "Meds," on Buddy Miller's Majesty of the Silver Strings, where Womack didn't have to deal w the guitar noodles, unlike Patti Griffin and Emmylou on other tracks. (Miller's an effective accompanist, but when he gets between Ribot and Frisell, yow.)
Update: As press sheet points out, Hogan's own compact studio combo incl. " R&B legends Booker T. Jones and James Gadson (Bill Withers, Beck) as well as talented young lions Gabe Roth (of Daptone Records, the Dap-Kings) and Scott Ligon." (I listening to her and Irwin's albums before reading the credits.) As for the writing, turns out "Daddy's Little Girl" is actually by.M. Ward, of all people (no offense, just never heard anything by him nearly this awesome, to put it mildly. I'll have to further educate myself). The S.Merritt, or at any rate, Mag Fields contribution is the tamest thing here. The bravura "Pass On By", waving away the spotlight right on cue, is by Margaret Ann Rich, triumphantly standing by her tempestuous Charlie, the total cost for which included Lord knows what, but she surely paid some of it in most of his best material. The domestic science-times-rocket or slow train to stardom bit is featured in most if not all of the songs on this album, but it's good anyway. Another Nash Scene Top Ten entry----Don Allred
KELLY HOGAN I Like To Keep Myself In Pain Track Listing
DUSTY GROOVE (Catherine Irwin)
WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS (Jack Pendarvis/Andrew Bird)
I LIKE TO KEEP MYSELF in PAIN (Robyn Hitchcock)
HAUNTED (Jon Langford)
DADDY'S LITTLE GIRL (M. Ward)
GOLDEN (Kelly Hogan)
WAYS of THIS WORLD (Vic Chesnutt)
SLUMBER'S SYMPATHY (Gabriel Roth)
PLANT WHITE ROSES (Magnetic Fields)
SLEEPER AWAKE (John Wesley Harding)
THE GREEN WILLOW VALLEY (Handsome Family)
WHENEVER YOU'RE OUT of MY SIGHT (Robbie Fulks)
PASS ON BY (Margaret Ann Rich)
Monday, March 19, 2012
Friday, March 09, 2012
Can't Stop Won't Stop
In progress, regress, keep on truckin. Unca Ned & me from ILX:
More country criticism perhaps but I encourage folks here to check out these two threads over at Rod Dreher's blog at _The American Conservative_, both the various linked articles, his own thoughts and especially the many comments. (You're also going to figure out who I am on there pretty easily, I admit, given I mention a certain xhuxk at one point.) An interesting amount of stuff to chew on.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/2012/03/08/conservative-culture-of-country-music/
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/2012/03/08/country-music-catechesis/
I'd especially recommend this comment, which I suspect few here will find surprising but which is nonetheless expressed very well and concisely:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/2012/03/08/conservative-culture-of-country-music/#comment-105520
― Ned Raggett, Thursday, March 8, 2012 12:28 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
More country criticism perhaps but I encourage folks here to check out these two threads over at Rod Dreher's blog at _The American Conservative_, both the various linked articles, his own thoughts and especially the many comments. (You're also going to figure out who I am on there pretty easily, I admit, given I mention a certain xhuxk at one point.) An interesting amount of stuff to chew on.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/2012/03/08/conservative-culture-of-country-music/
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/2012/03/08/country-music-catechesis/
I'd especially recommend this comment, which I suspect few here will find surprising but which is nonetheless expressed very well and concisely:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/2012/03/08/conservative-culture-of-country-music/#comment-105520
― Ned Raggett, Thursday, March 8, 2012 12:28 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
skipping over the posters like a stone, I agree with the libertarian-to-liberal insofar as he hears the conservative-traditional older person confronted with differences in younger generations of own family, but also, country does adapt, necessarily. Even in acting, working, playing the same way, eventually it gets heard differently, even hears itself differently as time change and memories accumulate, adapting as they pile in together. It always adapts in someway, even in reacting against changes in other forms of pop music. Pop and art and/or folk processes.
― dow, Friday, March 9, 2012 12:54 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
― dow, Friday, March 9, 2012 12:54 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
So tension of adaptation (grappling with marriage sharing rocks w whiskey, for inst) a great country sobject
― dow, Friday, March 9, 2012 2:10 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
don allred
― dow, Friday, March 9, 2012 2:10 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
don allred
Monday, March 05, 2012
On Mike Kelley's "The Uncanny" (uncut)
As
a special tribute to Mike Kelley, who last month checked out way ahead
of schedule, we're posting the full, unedited version of John W.'s
review of Kelley's 'Uncanny' exhibition in Vienna from 2004. (2017 update added at end!)
The Uncanny Exhibition of Mike Kelley
I. The Main Exhibit
"The
Uncanny", Mike Kelley's exhibition at MUMOK, is utterly brilliant, with
something to delight everyone from John Waters to Walter Benjamin.
Sizewise, it would fill a floor of the Whitney and then some, and
offers a motley and maniacally assembled collection of statues,
ventriloquist's dummies, mannequins, reliquaries, anatomical models and
so on. In part it's intended to suggest the "Wunderkammer", or
"cabinets of wonder", which originated in the Renaissance and were
popular through the end of the 19th century.
The
exhibition, whose themes come from Freud's 1919 essay on the uncanny,
is actually a "re-configuration and extension" of a show that Kelley
assembled in Arnhem (the Netherlands) in 1993, but with one crucial
difference which I'll explain below. This new version appeared at the
Tate Liverpool earlier this year and now — since Kelley reportedly
conceived the exhibition during several past visits here — it has "come
home" to Vienna. Also, as a complement to the exhibition, the movie
theater up the street from me is presenting a series of films selected
by Kelley — basics like "Frankenstein", "Freaks", "Eraserhead", "Dead
Ringers", and the like.
Roughly
half of "The Uncanny" comprises works by contemporary artists, with the
other half constituting objects found and collected by Kelley. The
press materials claim that he himself is not actually credited as an
artist for any of these objects, although in view of the way that
they've been assembled and displayed, this is a slippery point. A few
years ago Luc Sante mentioned to me that once in an interview he had
posited a link between "postmodernism" and "shopping" — with DJ'ing and
curating being prime examples — and much of this exhibit appears to be
the result of Kelley's gleeful and canny shopping sprees at various flea
markets and thrift shops.
My
previous exposure to Mike Kelley's work was rather limited, e.g. the
cover to Sonic Youth's "Dirty" and a few isolated pieces. As a result, I
assumed that one aspect of "the uncanny" being explored here was sexual
ambiguity: specifically, the way that, in childhood, certain otherwise
ordinary objects can be (mis)taken to have a sexual meaning and even
cause sexual arousal. I suspect that, if one were to take a group of
first- and second-graders on a tour of the exhibition (and NOT
fifth-graders, who by then know what the game is about and would titter
and hoot at many of the displays) and then quiz them 10 or 20 years
later, a significant portion of them will in the meantime have developed
tastes for amputees, rubber raincoats, and anatomically correct male
mannequins.
On
the day after the opening there was a podium discussion with the
artist. At the Q&A session that followed, I asked the artist
whether the ambiguity of strangeness-vs.-sexual-content was intentional.
He denied that the exhibit had anything to do with childhood
sexuality. (And incidentally, when another member of the audience then
asked about the significance behind the couple dozen rubber squeeze toys
on display in a glass case, he explained that he simply happened to
collect them as noisemakers for his band, Destroy All Monsters, and that
they are "outside what I consider appropriate to the rest of the
show".)
Still, there are certainly many childhood Sexual Tales of Terror to be seen:
For
the guys, there's the installation by Kristian Burford, whose point of
departure is that old horror story from sleepaway camp: "During the
later period of Christopher's residence at boarding school he learnt
that if the hand of a sleeping boy were to be submerged in tepid water,
the boy would be made to wet his bed. This has provided him with the
subject for a short video," which is shown on a TV set "in a chamber
that once served as his mother's sewing room." Inside the tent-like
room, itself suggesting a canopy bed, a full-size and decently endowed
male mannequin lies with the tips of his fingers dangling into a bowl of
water. It's hard to say whether he is in modified fetal position or a
state of erotic languor — after all, he's on his mother's spare bed.
The artist manages to turn the museumgoer's voyeurism back on itself,
since in order to view the lushly furnished piece, it's necessary to
peek through holes in the surrounding drapes.
The
girls are offered their own Sexual Tale of Terror in the form of Ron
Mueck's hyperrealistic sculpture, "Ghost" (which, among several other
webpages, can be seen at:
www.doffay.com/external_mueck.htm
). It depicts an adolescent girl in a bathing suit, still not yet at
ease with her own beauty. Here's one version of the way the scene plays
out in real life: this month in phys.ed. they're doing the swimming
unit. When the co-ed group files out to the pool, the Nice Guy in class
says to her, "Hey, I never realized before what nice long legs you
have." The girl answers, "No I don't. I hate my legs." He replies,
"That's not true! You have NICE legs." Turning her head and holding
back the tears, she says, "Please don't ever say anything about my legs
again," and immediately resolves to start another diet as soon as she
gets home. The punchline is that Mueck succeeds in turning the viewer's
pathos back on itself: when you see the piece up close, in its full
seven-foot-high scale, the temptation is to say, "Gee, she really _does_
look rather homely after all."
More
horrors can be found in Christo's "3 Nudes on a Bed" (wrapped, of
course, and guaranteed to induce claustrophobia) and Paul McCarthy's
"Garden Dead Men" (castration anxiety — although this is not to overlook
several dozen other items such as mummies, severed heads, limbs without
bodies, and vice versa).
As
for artistic intent: the first 30 or so minutes of the podium
discussion between Kelley and John Welchman (an art professor and critic
who has collaborated with Kelley on books and other documentation)
consisted of a sober and quite recondite examination of the history of
polychromatic figurative sculpture and its recent revival. It's useful
to know that this is the focus of the show, since Kelley is deliberately
concentrating on "what gets repressed from the culture and erased from
art history" (e.g. several centuries' worth of statues found in Roman
Catholic churches). However, the FORM-related criterion in turn goes a
long way to explain the CONTENT of the show, since the renewed interest
in polychromatic figurative sculpture happened to come at a time when
certain topics also emerged: hence, we get none of George Segal's staid
white monochromatic businessmen, but do get Nancy Grossman's bondage
mask.
At
the end of this very erudite public discussion I asked the woman
sitting next to me, who was reporting on the show for the Süddeutsche
Zeitung, whether Kelley and Welchman had been talking about the same
show that I saw. She admitted that she was wondering the same thing
herself, and then asked me why the people who attended the opening
didn't seem to find anything there funny. She was right: I had
observed that about half of the hundreds of people looked on in mild
appreciation, while the other half exhibited a poker-faced cluelessness.
I myself was bursting into belly laughs for days afterwards at not
only the pieces themselves, but the various juxtapositions:
—
In a glass case, we see plastic models of the death masks of Napoleon,
Lincoln, and Beethoven; placed in a privileged position ABOVE them on
the wall, however, is an anonymous "Death Mask of an Executed Robber and
Murderer, circa 1900" (Luc Sante, call your office).
—
The four aforementioned masks are positioned across from a "Portrait of
Dennis Thompson" by Cynthia "Plaster Caster" Albritton, the ultimate
groupie.
—
In the main gallery a typical parish-church statue (read: tacky) of the
Blessed Virgin Mary herself, with outstretched arms, faces a contented
yet inscrutable stuffed baboon.
—
Sitting unobtrusively off in one corner is a robot model of Andy
Warhol: when he was invited to a TV show to plug his book, "The
Philosophy of Andy Warhol", he chose not to appear live and instead
commissioned someone to construct this model, which was also equipped
with a tape recording of him reading excerpts from the book. (And note
that (i) he was thus hearkening back to his Czechoslovakian roots, since
the word "robot" was first coined by Karel Capek in 1923; and (ii) this
same idea would later be taken up by Kraftwerk, who have gone on entire
concert tours by sending robots in place of themselves.)
—
Ironically, in a gallery full of human figures, the only piece
involving human language is a life-size Erector-set-style robot by
Jonathan Borofsky, which continually pronounces the word "chatter" in a
mechanical voice.
—
And towering over the entire main room of the exhibition is
"Übermensch", a sculpture by Jake & Dinos Chapman, which consists of
granite-grey plastic crags, on top of which is precariously perched a
cartoonish life-size figure of Stephen Hawking.
II. The "Harems"
As
I mentioned above, compared with the original 1993 conception, there is
one crucial new addition to this version of the exhibition. At the
very end, after viewing the main room, a passageway, and a smaller
gallery, one enters the chamber containing "The Harems", whose title is a
term taken from classic psychological literature, where it is used to
describe the fetishistic activity of the collector.
In
this room, Mike Kelley has gathered several of his own personal
collections, including horror and monster bubblegum cards (several
series), marbles, soup spoons, shot glasses, business cards, a
half-dozen unbent wire hangers which had been used to break into cars,
and the aforementioned squeeze toys. At the podium discussion, Kelley
explained that "When you grow up in America, you're surrounded by things
like this" and that this aspect might not come across to a European.
Covering
the four walls of the room are the homemade flannel banners used at
Catholic Mass (e.g. "He is arisen!", "Are you ready for Jesus?",
accompanied by appropriate symbols such as chalice, host, lamb, etc.).
The banners not only imply sacred space, as do the various saints'
statues and relics elsewhere in the exhibit, but immediately negate this
sacred aspect through their status as banal "folk art".
Placed
in the four corners of the room are video monitors which play back DVDs
of Kelley's other collections: comic books (from back when they were
still in the 12- and 15-cent price range), postcards (several thousand
of them), pinups (with hardcore porn stills far outnumbered by fashion
shots and cosmetics ads) and, best of all, HIS RECORD COLLECTION.
The
viewer not only gets to see the covers of all 3000-plus LPs of it, but
hears a one-second sample from each one. Entire decades of your life
will pass before your eyes. The added bonus, however, is that in
addition to the historical and autobiographical, there's a hermeneutic
level: when you hear 12 consecutive blasts of James Brown and
Parliament/Funkadelic samples, you're also hearing what amounts to a
cut-up and condensed history of hiphop. Likewise, when 15 snippets of
Donna Summer and/or Giorgio Moroder go by, it becomes a mini-survey of
house and techno.
My
friend Joe Herter, a Friend of Dorothy who, like Kelley, grew up in
Detroit and studied at the University of Michigan, insists that "In
life, there are two kinds of people — those who are size queens, and
those who wish they could be size queens!" If that's the case, Mike
Kelley's is not much bigger than mine: he has more James Brown, I have
more Parliament & Funkadelic; he has more Sun Ra on vinyl, I have
more Ornette. Though with that said, props are due: he's got every
record released on JCOA, along with most of Arista Freedom — not to
mention all the 90s metal I never want to hear again (NiN, Ministry),
exotica like Yma Sumac (are 5 really necessary?) and scads of African
folk records from before the days of "world music", when they
constituted a form of anthropological documentation.
I
myself propose the dichotomy that in life there are "list-makers", and
there are those who consider listmaking to be an unfathomable mental
aberration. And the various anti-listmakers and anti-collectionists
will simply fume and froth at "the Harems" (Melissa Pierson, call your
office) or, at best, view it with the condescension that a pathological
condition deserves. Kelley openly states that he considers collecting
to be a form of compulsion, but I suggest that "the Harems" itself
carries additional aspects of the Uncanny:
"The
most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of
individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the
final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them." (Walter
Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library")
"For
what else is [a] collection but a disorder to which habit has
accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?"
(Ibid.)
I
would go one step further than Benjamin and propose that the
uncanniness of a collection lies in its illusion of TOTALITY. This is
the same principle by which the I Ching posits that there are only 64
possible situations in the universe; the Tarot has it covered with 72
cards. To the mind of the 10-year-old collector, having the entire
American League laid out in front of you is something greater than the
Britannica and the O.E.D. put together.
Moreover,
still another aspect of the Uncanny is that of infinity (for example,
in the realization that in order to collect the entire set,
theoretically you really might have to buy an infinite number of packs
of cards, or at least every single one ever manufactured), and likewise,
of the process by which something is assigned an imputed economic value
(the entire set seems to immediately take on a value at least one order
of magnitude greater than the price of the packs of cards that make it
up). And lastly, there is a kind of stochastic uncanniness here, in the
illusion that assembling (any?) 3000 albums can somehow sum up an
entire musical culture.
While
the mania of the collector, within the context of the exhibition, is
meant to suggest repetition compulsion, I think that Kelley is also
unintentionally drawing on another aspect of the Detroit myth. After
all, to a stoned Surrealist, the assembled array of business cards
suggests an aerial view of finished cars outside a Michigan factory. To
quote Kodwo Eshun quoting Juan Atkins (one of the three Detroit bruthas
responsible for creating techno): "Berry Gordy built the Motown sound
on the same principles as the conveyor belt system of Ford ... Today the
plants don't work that way. They use computers and robots to build the
cars ... I'm probably more interested in Ford's robots than Berry
Gordy's music." So all at once, the Detroit auto industry suggests
repetition AND robots AND the noise so beloved by not only the Stooges
and MC5, but Mike Kelley's own noise band, Destroy All Monsters.
I
myself experienced two different senses of the uncanny on separate
viewings of "the Harems". One standing case displays a couple dozen
announcement flyers of the sort that can be found in any college-town
coffee shop or laundromat: "Apartment to Share", "Tutoring in
Japanese", "Actor Needed to Play Pier Paolo Pasolini" (yikes). The
first time that I visited the show, I was struck by their collective
uncanny quality, since one has to look very closely to spot any clues as
to time or place (all but 2 or 3 don't list any year whatsoever; only 2
or 3 indicate UCLA as a location). Kelley cited Edward Hopper as an
influence on the exhibition, and the flyers suggest an informational
analogue to the visual aspect of a Hopper painting: life somewhere in
America, in some unspecified decade in some unspecified college town.
On my second visit, however, I took a much closer look and discovered
announcements for EVENTS THAT I HAD ACTUALLY ATTENDED — specifically,
concerts by Sun Ra, James Newton, and Cassandra Wilson at Koncepts
Cultural Gallery in Oakland (and to make it even weirder, I was wearing
one of my Sun Ra T-shirts when I noticed this).
Most
importantly, however, the inclusion of "the Harems" means that there
are two very different ways of reading the exhibition. At the podium
discussion I mentioned to Kelley that, since the visitor generally
reaches "the Harems" only after he/she has seen the entire exhibition,
it seems to be a culmination of the entire thing, and is thereby a
commentary on the processes of valorization and canonization with regard
to the works on display elsewhere in the show. Kelley demurred, and
apparently considers "the Harems" to be almost an afterthought.
Nevertheless, one interpretation is that, in a show which is so
concerned with representations of the human body, this final sanctum of
fetishes and cultural memorabilia amounts to the "brain" of the whole
operation.
III. Final Comments
After
the opening I thought about the notable absence of camp at the
exhibition (with the exception of Cindy Sherman, who is of course camp
by definition). Kelley's reason for this, given at the podium
discussion, is that camp is simply not uncanny. But moreover, I
maintain that a camp item always has quotes around it, whereas with the
show's chockablock arrangement of artworks and non-artworks, EVERYTHING
is in quotes vis-à-vis everything else. And there are no camp-style
inside jokes here, because Kelley genuinely likes all this stuff; we all
do.
And
commendably, aside from the pinups of cosmetic ads, there are no brand
names to be seen anywhere: given the trash-culture orientation of the
show, this is an achievement in itself. Kelley explains, "Mass media
has no psychology -- it's [only] a psychology of money."
Lastly,
there's the issue of where Uncle Sigmund fits in with all of this. For
those of you outside Austria, I need to emphasize that, as I was once
told, "Freud is not taken seriously here — he was FROM here," i.e. he
had to go elsewhere in order to be taken seriously. A couple of years
ago, the Sunday book section of the main Vienna newspaper published an
article about Freud; the lead to the article basically read, "After
nearly a century, Freud's ideas are being seriously contested, while in
Austria they never achieved acceptance in the first place" (i.e. "see?
we were right all along"). His concepts are not common currency here,
and the entire psychotherapeutic culture in the U.S. which derives from
Freud exists in a far different form, if at all (and believe me, living
in Austria while the term "passive-aggressive" is entirely unknown is
like living among a tribe of Eskimos who don't have any words for snow).
Nevertheless,
I imagine that Kelley's exhibition would be utter catnip for a number
of Central European writers who appeared around or just after Freud —
e.g. Rilke, Musil (cf. Törless), Gombrowicz, and especially Bruno Schulz
(cf. his "Treatise on Mannequins"). And meanwhile it's one trashy,
trippy delight for the amateur semiotician in all of us.
--John Wojtowicz
(for the ‘04 Andy’s Robot Mix of this piece, see the link posted below in “Jukebox Reflections (Passing By)"
Sunday, March 04, 2012
Music's Everywhere
Mad Men's signature Falling Man is now amidst the bare mists of a billboard, which is atop a relatively low building on 30th Street. It looks practically eye-level, as photographed by the NY Times' David W. Dunlap. http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/a-season-premiere-a-falling-man-and-memories-of-911/ Understandably, some see this as an exploitation of 9/11, ditto the animated sequence heralding each
M M episode. But the animated Falling Man also resembles his comrade in Vertigo's opening, though the Vertigo guy is a cut-out, voided by his panic attacks, going nowhere fast. Meanwhile, Don Draper plummets through good luck and bad, the card-like panes of his building's suites winking by. (Once again, he's born as boondocks misfit Dick Whitman,"too smart for your own good"/given a chance to escape by North Korean incoming/a way into the Good Life via Roger Sterling's black-out drunk hire/overachieving sex/etc./etc.) Draper lands bull's eye, in his easy chair and the afterglow of another crisis, cigarette ready for skywriting. He's back and his back's to us. Like, Miles is in concert, don't bother to knock. Dig? don allred
M M episode. But the animated Falling Man also resembles his comrade in Vertigo's opening, though the Vertigo guy is a cut-out, voided by his panic attacks, going nowhere fast. Meanwhile, Don Draper plummets through good luck and bad, the card-like panes of his building's suites winking by. (Once again, he's born as boondocks misfit Dick Whitman,"too smart for your own good"/given a chance to escape by North Korean incoming/a way into the Good Life via Roger Sterling's black-out drunk hire/overachieving sex/etc./etc.) Draper lands bull's eye, in his easy chair and the afterglow of another crisis, cigarette ready for skywriting. He's back and his back's to us. Like, Miles is in concert, don't bother to knock. Dig? don allred
Friday, March 02, 2012
Hotel War Be There Now And Be Here Then
The following, recently exhumed, had its truncated remains displayed in '09 (print-only, the only mercy). Hopefully, the reduced result might still have led some to check out Hotel War. But they deserve the restored corpus, and so do you (though you may not agree).
"I got my 45/I got my mind right/I got it all inside/They took it all away!" Columbus OH trio Hotel War's new single, "45," tracks metal moments of real life, erupting into yesterday's news. The vengence-seekers of "45" are shells of their pre-victimized selves, re-running final solutions through every black-and-white, security-cam verse. But the chorus eternally rolls into a well-timed and textured, smokin' hole, which preserves and holds the "45" guys, though hollow-pointed be their naked "I"s! don allred
"I got my 45/I got my mind right/I got it all inside/They took it all away!" Columbus OH trio Hotel War's new single, "45," tracks metal moments of real life, erupting into yesterday's news. The vengence-seekers of "45" are shells of their pre-victimized selves, re-running final solutions through every black-and-white, security-cam verse. But the chorus eternally rolls into a well-timed and textured, smokin' hole, which preserves and holds the "45" guys, though hollow-pointed be their naked "I"s! don allred
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Loan Me A Shadow
"Somebody loan me a dime/So I can call my old-time/Used-to-be." Boz Scaggs sings Lowell Fulson's "Loan Me A Dime," while rising and falling in the bosom of blues orchestration, which is well-fed as a family funeral guest. This is from the late 60s, more or less the same era as what I (with little exposure) regarded as the fat times of his fulsome Marin County homegrown elevator easy listening hippie make-out music (as I may have described it in terminal zine prose). But as this song begins, his almost halting eloquence always accosts me, has me floating on the sidewalk several minutes later, when Duane Allman shows up, and the whole platoon moves from the pathos of the blues into its boldness, with no disturbance of the winter vibe. Somebody loans Scaggs a dime, he knows now he can fix things up with his baby, or maybe he buys a cup of coffee (then also a dime, in some quarters). Anyway, he's energized, but not overstating his case, at least not before the phone call, or whatever the next pitch might be. No big resolution of the story arc, but he's resolved, and going somewhere. Young John Lee Hooker can do that alone-together thing with his guitar, and his foot, as the rest of the '50s go off to a party: young old dude lying in the alley, muttering and gathering his strength, until he's ready to stalk some shadows .And there's no overcrowding in JLH's '72 version of "T.B. Sheets," here credited to Hooker as well as Van Morrison It's on Never Get Out Of These Blues Alive, a roomy house party (with a couple of mornings way after mornings after). Guests include Morrison, Elvin Bishop, and in this case, Michael White's electric violin, wings over the bed, in the ceiling. All in Hooker's head, his ears, his chest, his room. Population one, and the sign's still up. don allred
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
jukebox reflection (passing by)
Good, intense thoughts about Whitney Houston orbiting The Singles Jukebox nowadays, check it out. Here I am from the comments (awaiting moderation, might not make it through)
Thursday, February 09, 2012
Renaldo and Clara: Can This Marriage Be Saved?
Renaldo and Clara is currently streaming in its midwinter, mid-'70s, sufficiently sharp and spacey or spacy entirety, Rolling Thunder 'cross the YouTube. I haven't heard the Bootleg Series Rolling Thunder, don't know how it compares with the movie's music (the old Hard Rain live LP has some good R Thunder performances). The flick's three hours-thirty-odd minutes, but very episodic, no prob with breaks. Though maybe such a bounty of episodes, jumping between live music and skits (or scenes, as some deserve to be called), got on nerves, especially those of reviewers, who were no doubt even more bombarded by Rolling Thunder hype than were us common readers of Rolling Stone, for major instance.
(And some might well have said, Never mind the Rolling Thunder, when you can hear the rising tide of Punk, or at least feel the need.)
Nevertheless, those with patience got and get mostly really good, already speculative re-arrangements of songs from early 60s to recent past, and the whole thing is also a continuation of the troubled relationship dynamic re Blood On The Tracks--not a rolling cinematic break-up album, but scenes (before and after a voice-over of tourmate Anne Waldman's "Fast Talking Woman"), with restless women,sometimes impulsive, sometimes ready to bargain, yet wry, sly, not buyin' any alibis (this time!), and somewhat befuddled men, the latter (and mebbe the former) inching towards middle-aged crazy (this might have gotten on nerves too).
Meanwhile, the already middle-aged men, like Ronnie Hawkins, Allen Ginsberg and Ramblin' Jack (ditto a certain well-seasoned, singing, guitar-playing gypsy hostess) thrive in the spotlight. Lonesome campfire cowpoke Ramblin' Jack has no problem fronting a big old electric band (a generation before his album A Stranger Here, where he's equally at home with the likes of Van Dyke Parks and David Hidalgo). Ginsberg recites from "Kaddish," one of his best long poems, in a hospitable mash-up with the tweaked beat of live "Love Minus Zero/No Limit", as Sarah D. delivers the word to a cabbie: time to throw Harry Dean Stanton a lifeline over the wall. He gets out, keeps doing great "Who Mee?" attempts at being casually on the lam, either before or after Dylan trades him Baez for a getaway horse. She settles down with Harry, explaining that the ever-budding Renaldo is like a jumpy burro, rolling stone etc.
(There's also that time that Baez and Sara-Clara gang up on the legendary Renaldo, brought to ground and tangled up in Rolling Bob. Finally, all he's got for an answer is a little [like,"Well-- Touché"] smile. Nice teeth.)
Folkie nostalgia, the middle-aged macho implications of then-recent Outlaw Country (before and after a Dylan & staff-targeted Columbia Records office guy blasting Willie's "Time of the Preacher"), even a tinge of Southern Rock, Scarlet Rivera's pre-Starbucks violin, visits to a Rez and urban New Jersey (African-Americans on the street discuss and sometimes argue about Hurricane Carter, who's also interviewed), Kerouac's grave and elsewhere in the neighborhood, flukey ambition---it's all mulch fiction of Dylan's turf, which is surprisingly juicy in (hindsight of) the Age of Punk and Disco after all (Gins also quite comfortably reading to the beat of the latter, and maybe the former, have to check again [so much slips through here]).
Only the late performance of "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" seems ( though measured, so perhaps deliberately?) overdone, in terms of bellowing the chorus, despite previously unnoticed, maybe recently added details of sensitive piety (sung by McGuinn, natch) in the verses. Doctrinal implications now ride with the usually universalist-seeming chorus, in context of possibly re-written verses, the whole song strapped to pale horse delivery, approaching sheer white light arena amplitude(compare this rendition to the much more agreeably affecting performance on the '74 BD&TB tour's wonderful Before The Flood). Hindsight here also re-affirms (and re-invigorates) the impression that the Endless Tour, preceded by cash and interest re-infusions via treks and slogs with The Band, Rolling Thunder, TP & Heartbreakers and the Grateful Dead (expectations thus pressure of GD also led to glimpse of Endless Tour's rhythmic re-alignment, according to Chronicles) all have something to do with road as solution/counterworld to/for relationship and other ongoing crises/ impasses.(Not to mention Carnegie Hall, 1964: "It's Halloween, I got my Bob Dylan mask on." Now more than ever, fearlessly blasting through melting whiteface, icing on the cake.) Plus, this last part of the film also portends certain signposts just up ahead, especially when Ginsberg recites from Gospel, re the women taking up His body and bathing it---Dyl's all ears.
(One of the single best scenes in I'm Not There is [Don't Look Back times] R and C-inspired: David Cross Ginsberg escorts Cate Blanchett Dylan to a sculpture garden incl. towering crucifix image: "Play some of your old stuff!" she-he yells up up the tonnage.)
Great sound and pungent 70s visuals. BD had already made the Scorsese connection after all, and maybe thinkin' (studies of) Cassavetes, director of antsy Dylan docs Pennebaker natch, and hoping for success like that of Altman's Nashville, or Led Zep's Song Remains The Same? RaC's droller moments keep its Rolling Thunder rolling between those last two. Altman and Dylan even have Ronee Blakley's good work in common, so whaddaya want? Why was it panned so deep, so decidedly, decisively (til it came ba-ack, via YouTube, at least) derisively, even young and youngish plain ol cranky about it? Maybe because you couldn't hit Pause or Stop and come back to it three hours or three days later in '78. But more to it than that, or maybe less, in another way. Your thoughts? don allred
2015 update from something written for somewhere else:
I was just thinking today of how few white music stars have written songs criticizing the way police and prosecutors treat black people. "Hurricane" was one star taking up the cause of another, as was pointed out at the time of its release---but that's yet more baggage pulled along with "This is the story of the Hurricane," the continuing through-line: even if he's got the means and acquires big name support, and the case gets thrown out---so, try, try again, if you've decided that you must make an example of him. The song covers the part of the process that had already happened by 1975, and of course he ended up spending decades in prison, despite the Madison Square Garden benefit, despite much long-term grassroots support thereafter. Not to say he was an angel, not to say he was even innocent, necessarily---but when the rest of the prosecution's case(s) fell apart, they went back to the race card: if nothing else, he was *motivated* to avenge the recent death of another black man, by killing whites. This argument was thrown out of court, and---despite any headline-grabbing aspect of Dylan's motives, despite the rich male sneering at "Miss Patty Valentine," other stuff---the song's point seemed sharper than ever. "The trial was a pig circus" that kept coming back to town, and "he never had a chance"---to avoid the re-tries, not for a long, long time.
(And the section of Dylan’s ”Hurricane”-ear travelling documentary-sketch mix Renaldo and Clara, in which black citizens of Newark comment on and argue about the Carter case on the street---I’ve never seen anything else like that in a movie*. (Dylan’s earlier “George Jackson”, with its highly- unusual-for-1971 mix of black-associated gospel voices and white-associated steel guitar (long before the Sacred Steel movement was known by most), and “Sometimes I think this whole world/Is one big prison yard/Some of us are prisoners/The rest of us are guards” seems much less problematic than some of “Hurricane”’s lyrics. But still.)
*I did see it in a movie house, where conversations went on, sometimes spreading across the aisle, during showings of some 80s Spike Lee movies. (This was basically a respectable grind house, where you could see year-old A-list films for 99 cents a show, twice a night for a week, and people got hooked---well played, former chain theater.)
Oh yeah, and in Scorsese's No Direction Home, maybe originally in Don't Look Back, as neatly-dressed student-looking kids leaving the venue suddenly stop, getting the opposing drift of articulate others, maybe classmates. being interviewed for the documentary....
2021:
I've started to wonder if the whiny-to-yowly, curiously laidback yet carefully detailed (in word and delivery), insolent-as-indolent (punk) "Joey," which eventually follows "Hurricane" on Desire, isn't a self-parody as partial disavowal of his righteous white protest bard mode---also screwing with us, daring us to decide about both songs' mixed motives, mixed messages, a la Andy Kaufman, and El Cohen, on occasion.
Getting back to movies, the gangsterous, sketchy trail of rising, falling Red Hook son "Joey" might (also?) be a take-off on the personal cinematic preoccupations of the aforementioned Scorsese, otherwise Robertson's Last Waltz bard-in-waiting---Mr. D.'s star turns did come off nicely in TLW, whatever his control issues, and he deigned to accept the full attentions of Marty much later on, of course. which worked out great. (What if Scorsese had had RaC input?!)
Albums That Never Were has added a proposed Renaldo and Clara soundtrack (single disc): http://albumsthatneverwere.blogspot.com/2020/12/bob-dylan-renaldo-clara-soundtrack.html (original post may have gone the way of the Web Sheriff by now, like much else on this site, but as always, check way down in the comments for a new link, and if that one doesn't work, dig deeper in there...)
As always, the Wizard tells you how he chose, what he did to selections (just a little buffing, adjusting volume level for consistency etc.), and the backstory, with details about the movie and tour I didn't know (says BD tried another cut, more of a 70s concert film, but w some of the other material retained, but also got bad response---was this the version I saw? With *even more* improv etc. in first release?) also mentions the most recently released Scorsese-Dylan project, which I've yet to see: ( D's apparently now-former friend Claudia Levy, who still has some warm memories, and whose late husband Jacques wrote songs w D featured in the shows, which he ran, was distressed to find J replaced by a fictional figure in Scosese's doc/RaC homage, which may be one of the elements that "raised eyebrows," as mentioned here [great interview w her in this series, which covers every Rolling Thunder show: https://dylanlive.substack.com/p/jacques-levys-wife-explains-the-late]) :
. In 2019, famed director Martin Scorsese reedited the original footage from 1975 into a completely new documentary, Rolling Thunder: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese. Finally, fans were able to see remastered and crystal-clear performances from the legendary first leg of The Rolling Thunder Revue, thanks to Scorsese’s curation. But, in true Dylan form, not all in the documentary was what it appeared to be, as several interviewees and narrative events raised numerous eyebrows.
Now, in the wake of Dylan's (on the face of it) hugely lucrative song catalogue deal, and re JL's co(?)-writing 7 of 9 songs on Desire----several of which figure significantly in Renaldo and Clara---Levy survivors are suing "Dylan Defendants"---more about that, and many other aspects of Desire and Rolling Thunder can be found in perceptive, informative discussions (from various POVs) on this I Love Music thread:
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Top Tens and some that maybe shoulda been
Don Allred's P&J 2011 plus:
main comments https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2012/01/dirty-water-sandwich-some-p-comments.html & below, but almost listed Boston Spaceship's Let It Beard: shameless Midwestern Anglophilia from Bob Pollard & crew, frontloaded with a few throat-clearing gob-duds (get 'em out of the way, thanks Bob) and then steadily stirring up a trenchant tempest in ye beardmug, spinning me toward Mott The Hoople's Brain Capers (complement complement complement) Trombone Shorty has been known to imply or me to infer that jazz is just part of his job, and he can handle it, period. But the jazz on For True has more immediately gratifying purple and gold candy skull brainiac head rush than the pop tracks, as nicely flashy and guest starry as those can be (big deal) Another killer EP in the guise of a good album (sure are a lot of those).
Hey why wasn't this on there? (more than a certain number of well-known covers makes me uncertain)| 1 | (various artists), Dirty Water 2: More Birth of Punk Attitude Year Zero | Points: 10 |
| 2 | Lydia Loveless, Indestructible Machine Bloodshot | Points: 10 |
| 3 | David Murray Cuban Ensemble, Play Nat King Cole en Espanol Motéma | Points: 10 |
| 4 | (various artists), Live From the Old Town School Old Town School Recordings | Points: 10 |
| 5 | Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, Telesterion Rodriguez Lopez Productions | Points: 10 |
| 6 | tUnE-yArDs, w h o k i l l 4AD | Points: 10 |
| 7 | (various artists), Golden Beirut: New Sounds From Lebanon Out Here | Points: 10 |
| 8 | (various artists), Note of Hope: A Celebration of Woody Guthrie 429 | Points: 10 |
| 9 | Emperor X, Western Teleport Bar/None | Points: 10 |
| 10 | Jay-Z and Kanye West, Watch the Throne Def Jam/Roc-a-Fella/Roc Nation | Points: 10 |
Singles | ||
| 1 | Sonny Rollins (ft Ornette Coleman), "Sonnymoon for Two" Emarcy | |
| 2 | Buddy Miller (ft. Lee Ann Womack), "Meds" New West | |
| 3 | John Doe, "Moonbeam" Yep Roc | |
| 4 | DJ Shadow, "Give Back the Nights" Roc-a-Fella | |
| 5 | Tom Waits, "Hell Broke Luce" Anti | |
| 6 | Lady Gaga (ft. Clarence Clemons), "The Edge of Glory" Interscope | |
| 7 | Wolves in the Throne Room, "Woodland Cathedral" Southern Lord | |
| 8 | John Doe, "Peggy Sue Got Married" Hear | |
| 9 | They Might Be Giants, "The Lady and the Tiger" Idlewild | |
| 10 | Adele, "Rolling in the Deep" Columbia/XL | |
The Jolly Boys, Great Expectation The Jolly Boys are one of the first and last leading bands playing mento, the 50s style sometimes marketed as "Jamaican calypso", and while it does have the sassy, party hearty social commentary of calypso (not always to the liking of politicians, police and thieves), the Jolly Boys' mento rolls the chunky, butt-thumping agility of homely percussion, banjos and guitars (a rougher cousin of the pre-Beatles and their budding generation's early skiffle influences). The social commentary's mostly first person on this album, well-chosen covers provide,explicit and implied narrative, via Albert Minott's eloquent growl. Winehouse's "Rehab" is the centerpiece, pumping into Iggy Pop's "Nightclubbing","You Can't Always Get What You Want", and increasingly less obvious choices, as "Ring of Fire"," Hanging on the Telephone", "Blue Monday", " Perfect Day" and "The Passenger" get swept and bounced along. They don't sound so old, but old enough to know themselves, their hopes, fears and appetites pretty well. Hell, even "Riders in the Storm" seems to fit, I think. Some good originals and Jamaican covers too.
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--(name withheld) Saturday, 18 February 2012 (Yesterday)