Crystal Castles were a surprisingly satisfying find, at a time when I knew there was something I liked about chiptunes, but was disappointed by the standard fare I’d found in digging. In hindsight, that’s because they weren’t really an 8-bit band at all. Despite their use of gameboy sound-effects, despite her voice being modulated to a point of synthetic in-humanity, Alice Glass punk-rocked out like an 8-bit boss. Her live performances were the spitting, smashing stuff of legend. Unlike their contemporaries, Crystal Castles weren’t defined by their choice of nerd genre. They were really something else.
“Don’t worry, dear Pamela, I’ll do my scientific best to command your fleet.”
Black MothSuperRainbow. It’s either the very best or the very worst band name that ever was–it’s been seven years now and I’m still not sure. In the end I always forget to care. Tobbaco’s weird little band and its oddly melodic songs are so beautiful he gets a pass. Call it whatever you want. Or just skip words altogether. More and more I’m finding that’s the way.
holo pleasures is a tiny little album of surprisingly large internal proportions. Each song clocks in at around two minutes, for a grand total of 12 minutes of magic. It’s so simple it sneaks up on you, and suddenly it’s hugging you from behind.
It is quiet and succinct and the opposite of flash.
what makes that thing swing
to and fro up there? _____the wind, that’s all
but what is it, hanging there?
an officer, a gentleman,
a doctor, a lawyer,
a professor, an engineer?
and why did he do it? _____it’s our fault, all our fault
we humbled him
belittled him
we… _____MADE HIM UNDERSTAND
that he was just a man
like us
like them
like you
like me!
but how’d ya do it, mister? hey mister!
how’d ya get up on
that flagpole there?
with a ladder?
through ambition?
or was it a bank loan
that got you there?
no, you’re wrong _____it was love
even gentlemen have a heart.
The Rules of Attraction. Good sweet god damn, this movie. I watch it every once in a while, whenever I remember it exists, and it never fails to leave a knot of pure emotive appreciation in my throat. Originally a novella by Brett Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho, this film adaptation does what so many adaptations fail to do: it improves the original in ways specific to its new medium. What a concept!
The cinematography and directing are incredible, the actors pitch-perfectly cast (James Vanderbeek, of Dawson’s Creek fame, is darkly incredible, no joke, and Shannyn Sossamon makes me want to fall in love again, immediately, without wasting any more time), the philosophical themes of the book are unrolled and explored, and the music… Oh my, the music. Ellis wrote a haunting horror story, one of modern humanity’s aimless disaffection; a grim march of helpless, deterministic self-destruction — themes which Avery addresses immediately, physically, and all at once in the opening moments of the movie. Mm.
I’m gushing, and I know it, but I can’t help myself. There’s just so much good to say about this work. I’m a real bastard about movies, about Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer and the sloppy shit they and their ilk slap together to pander to the slack-jawed, mouth-breathing, lowest common denominator of humanity. They don’t make films; they make money. What makes me such a bitter asshole about it, is that their monstrosities marginalize those with real capacity. Film can be powerful, and emotional, and illuminating, and sad. It can be art. It can be this.
Let it roll over you in gentle waves. Hit play and forget about it. Try to listen, then get distracted and do something else. Whatever you do, however you do it–
So there was this bar in Taipei called Roxy Rocker, and downstairs at this bar they had a little glass room full of vinyls you could pull out and spin, and then a big lounge with the bar itself and a DJ in a booth who took written requests. Sometimes they played them, sometimes they didn’t. It was great.
One of the DJs there was a beautiful, Nirvana-plaid-wearing Taiwanese girl, with big headphones and a perpetually sleepy look. After all the bland, “我愛你,” chest beating, big hair blowing, music-video-ready nothing that passed for popular music in Taiwan, finding a local who knew that good shit I was getting out of Brooklyn at the time was a trip. She played Animal Collective one night, long before Merriweather Post Pavilion blew them up, and I fell instantly, madly in love.
It was through her I found this track. That sexy bass line drew me dancing to her booth, where it was deafeningly loud, so I asked her what the song was via hand motions and scrap paper. Later, when I stumbled back up there wasted to give her my number, I didn’t have the Chinese, the time, or the native capacity to explain all that I was trying to hand to her. I couldn’t take the top off my head and show her the radiating prism of light that was my secret world. She never called, because obviously, but it hurt all the same.
There’s so much that could have been, so many universes, so many futures, dreamed up in instants then torn apart and scattered to the winds. So many reasons we don’t connect, so many reasons things don’t happen. You can’t take it personally. You cannot take it personally. Do not take your rejections personally. I know it hurts, but, stop, just — stop. Fuck. Let’s dance like wild things.
I hate, genuinely hate, the polished swaying plastic bullshit that is pop country. Toby Keith et. al, evoke a visceral reaction in me, and that reaction is puke. That being said, I don’t hate “country music”– That would be silly. Any artistic medium can be done right, and if you dig diligently, there’s always someone to love. For “country music,” for me, that’s Townes Van Zandt.
“[He]’s the best songwriter in the world, and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.”
-Steve Earle
A dark, drunk place at four in the morning in the red-light district of Taipei. Everyone else was staggering home when Julie suggested a morning train to Fu Long beach instead. We shared headphones, smoked cigarettes, and listened to Band of Horses while waiting at Main Station for dawn and the slow train north.
Heartbreak was a fresh and foreign substance; it hadn’t been long since it happened, and the detonation of my life was still a shock. The sleepless night slurred into day, and that train ride became a surreal journey. It felt like something secret was unfolding, something that normally lived at depth was somehow nearing the surface, and if it were missed or forgotten it would be my own fault. I thought to myself at the time: I should remember this.
I bought a bottle of whiskey when we got there, but once I had it I didn’t want it. We fell asleep hungover on the beach and got sunburned, swam a little bit, then in the afternoon caught the train back. The warm sunlight through the windows, the sound of this song, the weight of her head on my shoulder, the tight pain in my chest. That’s it. The train thumped beneath us and nothing else happened, except that sorrow and exhaustion had made the colors and sounds and sensations so shockingly vivid I have them still today. I was dreaming and wide awake and alive.
Speaking of Leadbelly, here is one of the weirdest, most awesomely awkward live recordings I’ve ever seen. The crowd, the way they hold their drinks, the fact that he only sings the chorus and hums, the stare he levels at his wife, and the end where he grips her face and the white guy behind him grabs (slaps?) his head. Man, what the fuck?
The story is that two white guys, the Lomax brothers, found Leadbelly in a prison somewhere, doing time for stabbing a white man, in the south, in the 20s. He was playing this song, and they dropped everything they were doing to race back with equipment. He was recorded there in that prison, by these two white fellows, and the rest is history. Decades later, Kurt Cobain is covering “where did you sleep last night,” and Van Morrison is traveling around the world with the guy’s picture, singing obscure lyrics about “hugo ledbetter.” Great musician. Great song. Weird, weird, fucking video.
I like to imagine Leadbelly’s ghost, drifting down from music heaven to check out an old favorite venue, and finding himself at a Fuck Buttons show. He sees these two hipsters standing across from each other, swaying rhythmically as they twist knobs on plastic boxes and sing into voice modulators. The look on his face is fantastic. It tickles me to think that someday, in our collective dotage, we’ll all find the world just as incomprehensible.
“It doesn’t work!” I yell at the phone.
“Just tug the clicker-skunk, grandpa, god.”
“I AM tugging the skunk,” I scream.
“Well, did you twist the tail?”
“AHHH! It’s spraying everywhere!” I cry.
“And? Did the channel change?”
“Oh…” I sob, hugging the squirming, spraying animal tight to my chest, “Yes, it changed…”
They’ve got a good sound, these guys, sculpted and restrained; for some reason it’s making me kind of emotional. That must be a good sign. So enough with Fleetwood Mac and their advice, I’m with Ultimate Painting: break the chain, even if it hurts like hell. See what happens. Sometimes you’ve just gotta.
Well, in case I had any doubts as to the verity of your asshole nature last night, all I had to do upon waking this afternoon was to look in the mirror and see the huge hickey you left for my me, right in the middle of my neck. Thank you. I’m sure my students will appreciate this visual lesson in western culture. If you truly are a writer, at least you can be assured you have the asshole part of it down. After all, whoever heard of a nice writer?
i don’t know what i became
but every day it felt the same
and every time my legs went lame
the only voice i heard was blame
shame had got me leaning over
puking out my guts a boulder
at my back to push it up a lonely hill
sisyphus don’t make a fist
just push it to the top and spill
my drink upon the burning bush
then drag my boy aloft to kill
a sacrifice to vengeful gods
or angry priests at heads of mobs
and in the corner jesus sobs,
“lob your stones in my direction”
none believe since his rejection
of the fiction of human condition
wishing in one hand and shitting
in the other jesus, brother
i’ll sit down compose and grieve
wipe your nose upon my sleeve
and you can have another
jesus christ you best believe
that you can have another
Begin here if you have the time to see it through. You will not be disappointed. Lester Bangs was a journalist third, a writer second, and an artist first. His work is what finally convinced me that criticism is in fact a viable art form, despite its tertiary existence on the backs of its subjects. I’ve got little patience for the Pitchforks of the world, the great taste-makers who glory in the tear-down, making money on the sneering dismissals of people’s dreams. We love to rubber-neck, and someone exposing themselves and their bedroom creations to ridicule is great sport. But I wouldn’t attend a public execution, and I don’t want to read that shit.
What I care to read, what Lester Bangs ultimately wrote, are love songs. His review of Astral Weeks is an ode to Van Morrison, and more than that, it is a mustering of all the art he had at his disposal, through the manic slurring mix of uppers and downers, in a bedroom act of bravery all his own, to say thank you. He was grateful. Well me too, Lester. And I agree, Astral Weeks is a beauty wrought in a fire Morrison never even tried to touch again. Not even close. If you don’t have time for the review, forgive me, but I’m skipping to the end:
“On the other hand, it might also be pointed out that desolation, hurt, and anguish are hardly the only things in life, or in Astral Weeks. They’re just the things, perhaps, that we can most easily grasp and explicate, which I suppose shows about what level our souls have evolved to. I said I wouldn’t reduce the other songs on this album by trying to explain them, and I won’t. But that doesn’t mean that, all thing considered, a juxtaposition of poets might not be in order.
If I ventured in the slipstream Between the viaducts of your dreams Where the mobile steel rims crack And the ditch and the backroads stop Could you find me Would you kiss my eyes And lay me down In silence easy To be born again Van Morrison
– My heart of silk is filled with lights, with lost bells, with lilies and bees. I will go very far, farther than those hills, farther than the seas, close to the stars, to beg Christ the Lord to give back the soul I had of old, when I was a child, ripened with legends, with a feathered cap and a wooden sword. Federico Garcia Lorca”
Open relationships and polyamory… My, oh my. Always it starts out in this perfectly reasonable theoretical realm, a logic without reproach, and always also it seems to end with at least one partner crying in the fetal position. I wish it weren’t so, but that’s been my observational experience. Jealousy is this biologically hard-wired drive, a competitive evolutionary advantage, passed down and built upon by our successful ancestors. It exists, no denying it.
But one can also argue that monogamy itself is suspect, that friction fades and sex changes over time in a relationship, that expecting one person to fulfill every important role in your life (to be the consummate lover, your best friend, your intellectual equal, to share your sense of humor, hobbies, tastes, everything) is both unrealistic and an unfair standard to hold a human being up to. We set ourselves up for disappointment, and our partners up for failure, when we compare our lives to the unfinished happy endings of movies. Most happy endings are simply stories that didn’t go on long enough. If you watched past the credits you’d eventually see a fight over dinner about habits, mundane garbage, toenail clippings. Half of all marriages end in divorce, and that doesn’t mean the people who stay coupled together are optimally happy that way–or even happy at all.
And yet, to move beyond monogamy to a pluralistic, monogamish approach to modern sexuality, one had better prepare to stare down jealousy. It’s in us, at a genetic level, and our evolution hasn’t yet caught up to our capacity for abstract reasoning. It does seem to vary, person to person, and insecurity has its greasy fingers in there, but in every case I’ve seen, it’s eventually become a big-ball-of-pain type problem. I know success stories exist; I haven’t met them.
All I’ve got in closing is a shrug, and an apology if it seems I’ve tried to speak for anyone, or offered any judgement. For all my misgivings, all the pain I’ve seen it cause, the reward is potentially worth the risk. I guess the only wisdom I have to pass on, from my observations to any brave explorers, is be open and honest with yourself and your partners, and take your lumps as they come. Because they will come. Good luck to you all, my earnest and intrepid sexual adventurers. I hope it works out. I really do.
And if you do find yourself crying in the fetal position, I’ll be right here, with music. You’re always welcome to curl up and join me.
Samuel Herring is my very favorite live performer. The man is an unabashed entertainer, but not as you might imagine entertainment; he’s a gut-wrenching, heartbroken, operatic performer looking to include his audience in his desperate attempts to heal. The man cares, a lot, and he isn’t afraid of looking stupid, or sounding stupid, or putting himself out there in his songs. He just sings and dances and does his operatic thing, while his tight-as-fuck backing band of keys and kit and bass drop amazing synth lines behind him. That is how you feed your broken heart to living art: throw yourself off the cliff with no fear, no safety net, and soar.
Balance
“And I can sit and talk Because I was just like you So arrogant and brave Impetuous and blue
But trust me as a friend And I’ll do all that I can do And I’d do anything for you Because I want to see you through”
Vireo’s Eye
“Our love was not lost in style You were strong, I was a child
We… we’re not kings here We’re not kings here We’re just strangers”
As I wander deeper into the world of producers and the products of modern music-making technology, I’m gaining more and more respect for the folks who work this craft. The best of them are audiophiles, true, but they’re also full on musicians, making their own sounds and capable of playing their songs at shows with live bands. These sounds can be anything, from classical piano notes, to a drumstick on a desk, to the sound of hands rustling grass. It’s a musicality that’s fundamentally nerdy as all hell, and like anything good and geeky, has many subtle moving pieces when you zoom in close. Back away though, and the layers begin to blur into a sum greater than its fading parts. For being such absolute nerd-faces, Emancipator and his ilk’s hip-hop for acid heads is not nerdy at all.
handkerchief tied to stick 