100 words on Roberto Bolaño

I get excited by the most obvious things when they are unexpected – an unexpected brush against flesh, an unexpected confrontation that becomes a rapid boil, an unexpected glimpse into someone’s dark interior, an unexpected sudden new arrival in whom I can admire obsessively in my own dark interior, and I have that in Roberto Bolaño, in his delirious obsessions with the poets he wants to become, his lurid sex contests in Mexico City bars, in his murders and hermits and freaks and heroes that populate his words. He is unafraid to be the unabashed fan and that made me one.

(for example, this dream about meeting a dead poet published in The New Yorker)

This next one is the first song on our new album

Tech note: I discovered that Rhapsody does work from my office when tracks are streaming through the website, but not through the Rhapsody player. Its still a little draggy between tracks, but it works. I don;t believe it had this feature when I first signed up for it, so maybe it is recasting itself in the shape of lala, which is the flavor of the month in digital music services.

I was going to listen to Pink Floyd's Meddle as research on a review for something else, but well, I've listened to enough Pink Floyd in my life, so before "One of These Days" could even get rolling, I hit on The Move from the similar albums list. The Move is one of those holes in my sonic knowledge that I just never got around to filling. I knew their nuggets-esque"I Can Hear the Grass Grow" and "Flowers in the Rain" but the flowery excess of their final LP Message from the Country (lala) which pushed to member Jeff Lynne to form Electric Light Orchestra is heretofore been experienced directly. Its indirect influence lives on in the amped up party rock of Cheap Trick, and well, maybe that's where it is best heard.

I haven't purposely listened to Cheap Trick since maybe junior high, mostly because they are generally around when their services are needed. But they will occupy a special place in my mind because they played a concert at Nicholls State, in the college town just down the road, and everyone I knew went. It was their collective first concert, and Cheap Trick was the defacto favorite band of everyone. Every girl I knew blossomed in a grey Cheap Trick t-shirt. Every learner's permit came with a copy of At Budokan (lala) for the dash. I didn't go; it hadn't occurred to me that one could actually go to concerts instead of just daydreaming about KISS specials on HBO. My first big stadium concert was Thompson Twins years later, which I'm afraid says a lot about me.

My late life Cheap Trick was Guided By Voices. I was smitten with them from the moment my friends' band Orange Pop Chicken added "I am a Scientist" to their adorable sets. Robert Pollard has a well-documented Cheap Trick and Who affection, and while Mag Earwhig (Rhapsody) is not my all-time favorite GBV record, it is their greatest stadium-in-my-head moment and "I Am a Tree" is up there with "Surrender" and "Baba O'Reilly" in the pantheon of perfectly huge rock songs, even if it has never been echoed off the upper deck of a football stadium. In Guided By Voices we find the dream of the thing competing healthily with the thing itself, fruitless and free! no symmetry! touch me and see!

5 things about Frank Stella

Frank Stella, "Severambia"

1. Frank Stella is one of those artists whose work I like, but that I recognize I like for the wrong reasons. I find his work emotionally evocative, saying difficult and complex things that no other artist seem to be saying. I believe these are the wrong reasons to like this work because I have read consistently, from his straight-talking mouth, that his art is purely about the visual experience and it stops there. What you see is what you see.
2. When I find some resonance in a work of art, it is not because I am ringing its bell but because it is ringing mine, so maybe Stella is on mission and I am using it incorrectly. And I could argue that there are many ways to ring a bell, but a professional bell-ringer would shake their head no and take the bell from my hands.
   
3. Part of the problem I have with his expressed intentions, free as he is to have them, is that I can't believe that anyone with such a bloodless view of painting would bother doing it for so long and so well, such as the free-standing mural "Severambia" above that I had the fortune of seeing in person during a trip to New York in 1995 (discussed here), he seems unwilling to give up any fleshy exposures in his armor. It is in those fleshy exposures that I look for art. Stella is calling me out to face that I like my own interpretation of art in deference to the art being interpreted. And for whatever reason - lack of self-confidence, lingering suspicion that I am a fraud or merely an idiot laboring under delusions - that stings. I just suddenly remembered something about Frank Stella being a Judo master, and I was going to remark that my own weight was used against me, but a quick search revealed that no, Yves Klein was the Judo master. Frank Stella races cars. I've simply been out performed by a highly-tuned and specific engine.
   
4. This afternoon I read an interview with him in The Believer, where like in every other interview I've read with him, he generally (in this case not directly because the subject is dead horse material in Stella literature) dismisses the magic I look for in painting as hokum, sticking to his guns that paint is just paint, canvas is just canvas and things are just things. Without knowing him personally, he strikes me as kind of a jerk.
5. And like with most jerks, they leave an insatiable itch in my joints that they are right. His take on the practice of painting is not a Socratic win but a raw conclusion from the data. The magic of art is just that - illusions and allusions to illusions, the viewer summoning the ethereal out of pigment on canvas smeared that way for reason that have nothing to do with us or are likely to be revealed to us is like an alchemist cackling in his cave about gold conjured from lead. Stella is even gracious enough to lay out why his art takes the form it does - he likes the way it looks, and in that I wholly agree with him, and I believe in the middle of that circle I had to traverses to come to this agreement lies The Truth, and I have just missed at every turn. Stella would probably say I'm just walking in circles, and I'd be forced to admit, yes, you are probably right. Jerk.
   

Review of OK Computer by Dai Griffiths

Radiohead's OK Computer by Dai Griffiths

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
I've always felt OK Computer was a new kind of album, one constructed of disparate containers gathered closely together, generating heat from proximity and similarity of content, rather than the stickier methods in which rock music gets crafted. The rattle inside OK Computer is not of bum-out sadness as folks often claim, but from the clink and slosh of things being pushed together on the shelf. It is in Thom Yorke's soaring falsetto and in Johnny Greenwood's atmospheric guitar that the findings about the human condition are lovingly and even devastatingly reported in their rather singular manner.



Dai Griffiths takes a similar atomized approach in his book on the album. He gathers the empirical data of run times, keys, instrumentation, factors in the media through which the album is delivered, even the nature of "album" into consideration to create a genome of this record. At times you feel it is being scanned like an alien abduction victim - I'm not completely sure how much Griffiths likes the record as much as he is devoted to unlocking its mysteries. I do not with to convey Griffiths as humorless or missing the point of what is still fundamentally a rock record, in fact his conversational tone softens the lists of info and ties the meditations together into a cohesive whole. I would not want to read similar analysis of something as bloody and sweaty as a Rolling Stones album, but with OK Computer, his approach is comforting, coaxing the brittle, paranoid and fragile traits of this record out into the open.


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Review of Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite

U2's Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
It was an interesting concept to run U2's least messianic record (or at least in the bottom three messianic U2 records) through the theological sieve like Catanzrite did, but it was executed successfully. The author works braids together discourses from Neuhaus, the U2 album, and a narrative about a couple duking it out on the mat of love and marriage in a way that recalls Kierkegaard's weighings-in on the relative merits and failings of love in Either/Or. His Christian viewpoint is the spoken undercurrent to this record, but restrained enough to keep a heretic like myself from rolling his eyes. It is also an engaging and extremely quick read, a trait for which I wish more philosophical texts would aim.

I got the feeling that Catanzarite could have inserted nearly any pop album of substance into this context and pulled out the bits and pieces that supported his theme, but it is readily apparent that this is the album that spoke to him and inspired this quasi-sermon. He claims in the first sentence that this is not a book about U2, and really, it isn't. Instead it is an intelligent, impassioned and convincing book about actual human adult love and is in that a manifestation of what art is supposed to be in the first place - a springboard for the greater topics of discussion.


View all my reviews.

Charlie Louvin, and A Quick Thompkins Square Primer

There is word on the street that country gospel legend Charlie Louvin (lala) will be playing here in Baton Rouge at The Red Dragon, a congenial overgrown house show situation for us congenial overgrown old folks, in early April. There is no website for The Dragon, but Chris Maxwell (email) is the dude to talk to. If it happens, this will be the Americana event of your life. This collection of murder ballads and disaster songs on Thompkins Square is rather spectacular - the songs don't come off as scrapings from the vault, nor are they over polished in the least. Thompkins Square does a really good job with this music.

I got acquainted with the rustic pleasures of Thompkins Square when I bought Harry Taussig's Fate is Only Once (lala)with leftover store credit at the local CD haunt. I bought it simply based on the cover, which looks too corny to not be legit, and Taussig's Fahey-light primitive guitar bore the fruit of this whim, which is further discussed in this piece I did on him and Alan Sparhawk for outsideleft.

My favorite record on the label, though, is the lovingly curated A Raga for Peter Walker, (lala) a compilation of songs by the forgotten fingerpicking master and younger acolytes like James Blackshaw, Jack Rose, Greg Davis, Thurston Moore and the mighty yet undersung Steffen Basho-Junhans. It is so easy to blow it with the reverence when guitarists pay tribute a guitarists' guitarist like Peter Walker - people are always on their best behavior on these kinds of records. Maybe its the presence of Walker himself and his relaxed complicated breezy stringwork that keeps everybody comfortable, or maybe all these same players have appeared on so many of these kinds of tributes that they finally did one they would want to hear. Maybe it's the daunting promise of raga in the title that cautioned the performers that the very nature of this record was pushing close to the line, and they wisely chose to chill out a little. Whatever the impetus, A Raga for Peter Walker is beyond lovely.

Joe Meek

The inspiration for playing of this collection of Joe Meek curiosities (lala) came from opposing directions: the reverb-tastic Excello records juke joint jive I was listening to yesterday while researching an article got me thinking about studios and sound, and that road invariably leads to Joe Meek and how he gave surf rock its liftoff velocity - The Tornado's "Telstar" in particular. The other was this post at the WFMU blog about demystifying the death of Beatles-lore figure Rory Storm (Ringo was the drummer for Rory Storm and His Hurricanes before being recruited by the Beatles) . The post contained this aside

but death-rock legends are legion, and the circumstances so often so lurid -- backstage Russian Roulette, plane crashes, murder-by-fan, on-stage electrocution, getting hit by a bus, on-stage murder-by-fan, infanticide, mariticide, murder-by-fan-club-president, Joe Meek --

leading to the story how Meek confiscated a shotgun from The Tornados' bassist and in the depths of depression (edited from the original, see comments) , killed his landlady and then himself. Sad. I have to wonder: is there something about the dogged pursuit of a sound that led to this collapse of reality, or those of Sly Stone, Axl Rose, or Phil Spector? I suppose I need to track down and read that The Legendary Joe Meek book now.

Musings about the tragedies of a man at the edge aside, his sci-fi pop epic I Hear a New World (lala) is a thing to behold. There are points where it is a little like the Chipmunks on mescaline, but if you are up for a rocket trip to that deep space nebulae located at the intersection of kitsch and divine inspiration, if you have ever daydreamed about go-go girls on Space Station X, you should check it out.

In my mind, the transmigration of souls sounds a lot like "The Bublight"

The Bublight - Joe Meek And Th...