Music for Piano and Strings by Morton Feldman, by the Smith quartet and John Tilbury

April 22nd 2010 I took the train to London to see Tilbury and the Smith quartet play Piano and String Quartet; it was my first and so far only Feldman live experience. That same night I lay in bed wanting to relive the experience and I put on the Aki Takahashi & Kronos Quartet version of the piece, probably the most widespread recording around.

I had to turn it off right away – it suddenly sounded rushed and abrupt. Obviously I’d heard the track before, but only now it struck me. Legend has it that Aki & co. picked up the pace to fit the piece within the 80-minute running time of a CD. Well that simply would not do, I decided, so I sadly put Piano and String Quartet on indefinite hiatus… until now!

Now, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this piece to anyone, even if you’ve never heard Feldman before. Works like Rothko Chapel or Why Patterns? are usually cited as more accessible, but really you can just jump right in here. And Tilbury’s is the definitive interpretation as far as I’m concerned.  This here recording is from 2006 (at the HCMF) and they did have the DVD for sale when I saw them but heyyyy.

Oh and there’s also For John Cage, which I haven’t digested yet but how bad could it be, really?

ONE

Oar by Skip Spence

While being diagnosed with schizophrenia in a mental hospital, Skip Spence was writing the songs for his only solo album, Oar, without which he would’ve remained just another nameless¹ 60′s dude who fucked up his life with drugs.

Multitalented Skip plays all the instruments on Oar, about which you can read plenty of cool trivia on wiki – for instance, that it was at the time the poorest-selling album in the Columbia catalogue. It’s since had a cult revival, and it’s plain to hear why. Toeing the line between inspired and deranged, the songwriting is exciting and consummate, and the performances are one of a kind. This is the real deal, folks.

TWO

Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age

If there’s a case to be made for psych/prog music being timeless, and not just limited to the 60′s and 70′s, Broadcast would be the first that comes to mind. So many great tunes fleshed out using new takes on old tricks, with the main attraction being Trish Keenan’s beautiful voice, reminiscent of bands like Curved Air or Renaissance.

2009′s collaborative Witch Cults was to be their last release, and it’s a slight departure from their other more song-oriented material (like this). It’s a 45-minute trip that’s best enjoyed in one sitting… preferably in the dark.

THREE

¹ OK maybe I’m not being totally fair, he did play a seminal role in Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape which are bands I guess some people used to listen to? (back to text)

Now, Voyager (1942)

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Yeah I’m mighty proud with myself for spotting this, hah. To see more (and better) observations like this, go to Homages, Ripoffs and Coincidences.

The Flaming Lips have a new EP featuring an *ahem* 6-hour song called “Found a Star on the Ground”. It’s actually pretty good furniture music, give it a whirl. Part one is here.

David Thomas Broughton (remember him?) has a new bandcamp page for live recordings. Since live music happens to be his Thing, checking it out is a no-brainer!

TO SEE

Bootleg posters from Ghana. These are all pure gold dear lord.

I’ve already quoted passages from the book on this blog so I’ll resist the urge to do it again. Jest is infinitely [sic] quotable, but in the end it’s a book that takes you over page by page and leaves you a changed person when you’re done. It’s a cliche to say this book changed my life, but I do feel it’s left me more perceptive to displays of irony, trust, or dependence (be it on stuff, people, or a state of mind). Oh and I really love footnotes now.

Now, how come it’s so effective? I think the main reason is that the book is both heavy and easy at the same time. Yes it’s long and complex and fractured and at times obtuse – at the same time, it’s incredibly reader-friendly: DFW wants you to “get it” and he’ll always reward your efforts. He’s able to do it by being a fantastically talented author Writing About What He Knows, deeply invested in all the stories and characters in the book.

There are a few guides out there on how to approach Infinite Jest. Me, I have just two pointers for anyone interested to pick it up:

1. don’t put it down. I took a break to read something else when I was about 20% into IJ, and it wasn’t that easy to pick up the threads from where I left off.
2. if possible, read it on a Kindle. It makes it so much easier and more pleasant – not lugging a 1000-page mammoth around, plus dictionary and physical bookmarks. No need to make it harder than it needs to be, although I’ll admit pics like these are super awesome and romantic:

Ryan Gosling is a fucking artist, I think we can all agree. He plays the nameless driver without a past or a future, ever on the outside looking in. Yes his day job is stunt driving for the movies, but that’s just the first clue. The real key is in his knowing smirks and detached glances when faced with his cinematic fate – like he’s outside himself, sitting right next to you and sharing your gut feeling as to what’s coming.

Director Nicolas Winding Refn is his first partner in crime¹. Again, stuff like symbols (the broken engine, the scorpion) are just superficial devices. It’s the use of framing and music², the jumps in continuity, the uncanny moments of serenity or violence that serve to elevate Gosling’s driver above the classic filmic plane – without resorting to old self-referential tricks like breaking the fourth wall. And through all this, Refn and Gosling’s main ally remains the script.

The script is incredibly light on dialogue, allowing for a primarily cinematic discourse. It’s why the more films you’ve seen from the past 50 years, the more films Drive will remind you of – anywhere from A Fistful of Dollars to Blue Valentine. It’s the sparseness of dialogue that allows Refn and his excellently picked cast to overstep the neo-noir and action movie cliches and archetypes which the story is based on³.  Unlike other genre-benders like the Coens or Tarantino, Refn is clever without talking clever, which makes him the clevererest in the end.

If in the future there’ll be more action thrillers where people act like people, I think we’ll have Refn, Gosling &co to partly thank. If not, we can always come back to Drive – I know I will.

¹ Wikipedia tells us Refn was handpicked by Gosling for the film. Hard to imagine a better pairing for Drive (back to text)
² Don’t get me started with the music, the film’s soundtrack deserves a post of its own and it’s a major travesty that I’m wasting your time with bullshit cinema faux-theories when we should all be just basking in the Drive OST’s majesty (back to text)
³ So it’s no surprise that one of the lesser parts of the film is a comparatively wordy exchange between Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman (fantastic casting choices both otherwise) (back to text)

TO WATCH

Red Fang have the awesomest music videos I’ve seen in a long time. I had to choose between this one and ‘Wires’, and I finally went for ‘Prehistoric Dog’ because I’m a sucker for Monty Python and the Holy Grail references.

TO HEAR

Mary Timony – The Golden Dove – 2002 – indie / noise pop – link

Mary Timony is a very talented musical lady who’s played in lots of different outfits, the most recent of which being Wild Flag. The Golden Dove is maybe the best showcase for her idiosyncratic songwriting and arrangements.

TO SEE

Director Band Logos. I thought these are super cool. The only trouble is there’s still so many they haven’t done yet! My favourites right now would be the Bunuel and Jodorowsky.

Chilean Steel

Com&Com's post-ironic manifesto (click to enlarge)

This post is about what I understand by post-irony¹ and why it’s a Thing.

Our world is drenched in incongruous coincidences, the pillars of irony. We’re confronted all the time with contradictions too big to handle with a straight face, so we resort to jaded irony. To me, one of the most unsettling examples of this is the way we enjoy ads.

It used to be that irony was a tool for witty, more-or-less subtle art. I think this hasn’t been the case anymore since about the 80s. Today’s mainstream is so thoroughly ironic, the only way to use irony subversively is by piling it on to absurd degrees – a prime example of this is B E Ellis‘ American Psycho. While I do (unironically) love this book, partly for its placement at a sort of cultural dead-end, I do think there’s another more constructive way to look at things. Like this:

Post-irony as I see it, is an attitude of earnestess towards things that might generally be treated ironically. In Twin Peaks, agents Cole and Cooper are men of ample life experience and humor², yet they retain their sense of wonder. It’s something that looks effortless but comes at a price – the struggle between sincerity and cynicism in Twin Peaks is a driving conflict of the show.

My post-ironic Bible is David Foster Wallace‘s Infinite Jest. Here’s a pretty good excerpt:

It’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn’t happy. The worst-feeling thing that happened today was at lunch when Michael Pemulis told Mario he had an idea for setting up a Dial-a-Prayer telephone service for atheists in which the atheist dials the number and the line just rings and rings and no one answers. It was a joke and a good one, and Mario got it; what was unpleasant was that Mario was the only one at the big table whose laugh was a happy laugh; everybody else sort of looked down like they were laughing at somebody with a disability.

Now, we can’t all be like Mario and live in a state of perpetual innocence, but we can try and be more like cherry-pie-loving Gordon Cole and less like axe-murdering-Genesis-fan Patrick Bateman… it won’t be easy, but post-irony is here to help us!

PS. While researching the topic I came upon this post on the Infinite Tasks of Philosophy blog, which puts it way better than I ever could.

Also check out postirony.com, a community of snooty art students some of whom are responsible for the rainbow-colored manifesto at the top.

¹ There are many different interpretations of what is considered post-ironic, just look at the urban dictionary entry. The first 2 are closer to what I’m referring to, but the rest are just different forms of good old irony. (back to text)
² Take Gordon’s hangover cure from the start of the clip for an example of his feel for playful irony. (back to text)

The world of the present is a world in which the rich lateral dramas of local manners have been replaced by a single vertical drama, the drama of regional specificity succumbing to a commercial generality.

[J Franzen - Perchance to Dream]

QUICK: watch1 watch2 read1 hear1 hear2

Hello friend! I’m starting a new regular feature on the blog which, unlike certain past failed enterprises, I’m going to stick to, pinky promise.

I want to stop adding to the oodles of bite-size linklets on facebook etc, and just post the worthwhile stuff in weekly lumps right here¹. Yes I said weekly.

TO WATCH

Louis CK is, amongst other things, the only bona-fide auteur in American television.² Everyone’s buzzing that the hour-long³ episode set in Afghanistan is a lock for an Emmy, but for me the season finale really took the show to new heights. With an episode that’s part utterly kafkaesque and part super duper bittersweet you really get the feeling that his show can do things that nothing else on TV can.

So while you’re waiting for Louie to finish downloading, why not watch the man talk about George Carlin for 10 minutes.

This’ll be the last time I bring up Deerhoof for a while, I promise. See the lineup of Greg-John-Satomi run through a blistering 15-song set in 40 minutes, simply amazing. Great sound&video courtesy to Grrrnd Zero in France.

TO READ

Jonathan Franzen‘s essay Perchance to Dream, available here in pdf. Once you get past anachronisms like Virtual Reality (remember when that was a thing?) this 15-year old article is quite relevant – stuff like this should ring a bell:

virtual communities whose most striking feature is that interaction within them is entirely optional – terminable the instant the experience ceases to gratify the user

This isn’t just another gloomy anti-technology rant, it’s about identity, experience, community, stuff that matters. Read it.

TO HEAR

True Widow – As High As …⁴ – 2011 – shoegaze/stoner – link

and the long-awaited あざらし – 血肉⁵ – 2011 – punk/noise rock – link

¹ I am aware that this blog is far more embarrassing than oh say my FB profile but I’m starting to think of this as a good thing. (back to text)
² that is a show creator who writes & directs every single episode, not to mention starring in, editing, and co-producing the show.(back to text)
³ meaning a little over 40 minutes for a basic cable show like Louie (back to text)
⁴ … The Highest Heavens And From The Center To The Circumference Of The Earth …yeah. (back to text)
⁵ Azarashi – Blood and Flesh (back to text)

In his review of Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind, Roger Ebert wrote:

To appreciate a film like “Written on the Wind” probably takes more sophistication than to understand one of Ingmar Bergman’s masterpieces, because Bergman’s themes are visible and underlined, while with Sirk the style conceals the message.

In that spirit, I saw Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959) and Bergman’s Winter Light (1962). Now, the two films have very little in common. One is a colorful, rich* Hollywood melodrama, and the other is a bleak, black&white Swedish “art” film. One trait they do share is the mastery of execution.

Is Imitation a less personal film than Winter Light?** Well they hardly come more personal than Winter: Bergman manifests himself as Tomas, the pastor experiencing a crisis of faith. The handful of other characters serve as beacons in his search, and Bergman is wholly invested in their plights as well as Tomas’, as that is the only way his pursuit can remain true.

Meanwhile, Sirk is as detached from his characters as possible: not only does he avoid identification with any one part, he further alienates his characters by giving them absurdly soapy lines in excessively melodramatic scenes – magnified through extreme directorial choices. The story arc isn’t merely dramatic in the classical sense: emotions are running high within 10 minutes into the film, and they don’t let up until the 15-minute cryathon at the end.

In making his final Hollywood picture, Douglas Sirk addresses a multitude of actual issues, dressed up in an artificial style lending them a larger-than-life quality. It raises feminist and racial points in an ironically subversive manner, not only making them acceptable (and entertaining) for 50′s American audiences, but at the same time compelling viewers of any era to instinctively look beyond the imitation.

Another way too look at it is in terms of “manipulation”, which we all hate about Hollywood, yes? While Imitation is certainly guilty of ferociously pulling at our heartstrings, Winter Light is completely sincere in dealing with the protagonist-author’s white, male, high-spirited crisis. However, a “sophisticated” viewer will be as detached from the puppets on-screen in Imitation as the one pulling the strings, and with that Sirk is as revealing of his own concerns as Bergman. So from this perspective, you’d have to agree with Ebert: Sirk’s human element takes more effort to appreciate, but is no less rewarding than Bergman’s.

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*rich in pretty much all senses of the word

**I’m bypassing the issue of production here – an auteur like Bergman would have infinitely more personal control over the film-making process than the director of a major Hollywood motion picture. Perhaps this too makes Sirk’s method all the more impressive.

As she remembers things Jim was, besides a great filmic mind and her true heart’s friend, the world’s best hailer of Boston cabs, known to have less hailed than conjured cabs in spots where Boston cabs by all that’s right just aren’t, a hailer of Boston cabs in places like Veedersburg, Indiana and Powell, Wyoming, something in the authority of the lifted arm’s height, the oncoming taxi undergoing a sort of parallax as it bore down over tumbleweed streets, appearing under Incandenza’s upraised palm as if awaiting benediction. He was a tall and physically slow-moving man with a great love of taxis. And they loved him back.

I’m still only one fifth into Infinite Jest but I’m really tempted to make it the main focus of my life right now. If I only had the time…