A solo droner and some smart punkers - The Chester Records picks of the week (Zomes and Wire)

Asa Osborne is Zomes. Photo by Cynthia Connolly

enthusiasm for the above and below here

Wire. Nice beret, sport.

Ten From the '90s Part Ten (1999) - Superchunk's COME PICK ME UP (Merge)

There weren’t many things that remained with me through the entirety of the 1990s, but Superchunk was one of them. As I exited my teen years and continued into that second and in some ways more difficult next wave of maturity (once arrived at adulthood, one must come to terms with it), gaining experience and perspective all the while and shedding folly and nonsense in favor of assorted cold hard realities, the music of this modest Chapel Hill NC quartet was a constant soundtrack. Every time I fell hard the band was there to ease the experience. Every time I attained a momentary high or streak of good favor, there they were, helping to accentuate those minutes and days into the permanence of memories. It may sound like blatant romanticizing, but damn it if it doesn’t feel isn’t true. Superchunk’s steady stream of albums and singles were both foreground and background music to my first serious relationships with the opposite sex, they assisted as a salve and a guide in my growth as a writer, aiding me somewhat surreptitiously in throwing off the self-doubt inherent to fluctuating levels of self-esteem (if these plain-living dudes and a chick can pull it all off so well, just why in the hell can’t I?), and the tumultuously melodic strains of their work has remained soundly in my possession up to this very second as the lingering reminder of a slowly decaying broken friendship. In addition, the band serves as a pointer to the difference between the amorphous nature of Personal Favorites and the often stark hardness of more or less canonical and essentially communally shared All Time Bests. Claiming that Superchunk is anything close to the greatest rock band in history will likely inspire mostly strange looks and cold stares, if not some outright mocking laughter, and those few in agreement are the makings of a tight, passionate posse. Some of those looks would probably come from the band members themselves. Self deprecating almost to a fault, they make no bones about their self assessment falling far short of anything even remotely resembling a big deal. If praised in person as a great or important band, the members would no doubt politely disagree (and indeed they have), deflecting the honor to maybe suggest that their overexcited booster spend a little more time listening to some other people’s records, following that up with direct recommendations. Now it takes a certain base level of ego and an at least tenuous handle on the volatile nature of that horny interior beast (and the often even crazier collective monster that can be the band ego) to release eleven full length albums worth of titanium hard and massively melodic post-hardcore contemporary rock that never ceased to evolve over roughly fifteen years. But there is a big difference between self-effacing confidence in action and the blustery arrogance of talking a lot and making people wait five years or more for an album.

Laura Ballance's artwork for the FOOLISH LP

With all this in mind, the new millennium has seen a major slowing down of Superchunkian activities, though that shouldn’t infer that the members haven’t been individually busy; vocalist/guitarist Mac McCaughan has his excellent and always evolving solo project Portastatic along with the full time job that is co-running Merge Records along with ‘chunk bassist Laura Ballance (who is hopefully keeping up with her excellent skills as a painter), and drummer Jon Wurster took on the status of an in demand free-agent sticksman, playing with a batch of worthy names and landing what looks like the permanent drum spot in the Mountain Goats. The guy also finds time for performance comedy as half of a comedy team with WFMU’s Tom Scharpling. I’ll confess to having no idea what guitarist Jim Wilbur does with his non-‘chunk time. I could maybe investigate, but I dunno. I’m sure it’s something of substance. Many things even.

Mountain Goats with Jon Wurster

The point is what was once a copious stream of Superchunk records big and small (they have three superb collections of singles, one a 2CD set) had slowed over the course of the last decade into little more than an uncertain trickle, a comp track here, a live date there, a seven inch in 2007, and in the gaps was the increasing nagging feeling that Superchunk might’ve reached the end of their fantastic ride. And if that had been the case, well how could I complain? But it turns out it wasn’t the end, for 2010 saw the release of MAJESTY SHREDDING, the twelfth LP and first of new material since ‘01s HERE’S TO SHUTTING UP. And it’s a dilly. I rocked it, am still rocking it in fact, and every time I do it makes me feel like a benevolent millionaire. But there is this small thing. It seems that the gap of activity really allowed the band time to reflect back on their collected work and then assess exactly where on that timeline they achieved their apex.

Mac playing with Portastatic

From the evidence of SHREDDING, it seems obvious the group’s perceived pinnacle was in the mid-‘90s. This is more than just supposition on my part. In at least a few interviews band members have stated that the music moved a bit too far away from its strongest elements in a desire to experiment and keep things fresh. And overall that determination is cool by me, for the mid-‘90s were the period where Superchunk did some of their most glorious throwing down, bringing pogo frenzy and shout-along choruses to stages all across the globe. I must admit however, that I ultimately don’t agree it was the locale of the bands’ best work. For me the absolute tip-top of the Superchunk spectrum is contained in the grooves of 1999’s COME PICK ME UP, a record that finds them heavily testing the boundaries of their sound with the aid of producer Jim O’Rourke, thirteen highly toiled over tracks that paint me as a bit of odd duck in ‘chunk fandom terms. For while there is surely a devoted core of band partisans that love the late period, the most vocal emoting from the bleachers seems to champion the groups’ earlier material, with special pockets of devotion for each of the bands’ first four albums, and an underlying attitude that Superchunk then began releasing discs that while too good to ignore were not up to the quality of the ’88-’94 period. Well, that’s just faulty theorizing. What began on 1995’s HERE’S WHERE THE STRINGS COME IN was effectively a restatement of purpose, a reevaluation and deepening of their songwriting dynamic coupled with the maturity of the lyrical focus, with a gradually increasing flirtation with an added instrumental palate thrown in for good measure. The writing was already on the wall with ‘94’s FOOLISH, which many people pick as their favorite Superchunk LP (and in fact it’s my pick for second), but the remodeling really began in earnest with STRINGS, and the ball was seriously ran with on ‘97’s INDOOR LIVING, which for a long time was the least of the bands’ records in my estimation (Not anymore. Suffice to say it’s a grower. The dubious honor goes these days to the first self-titled LP). If they were running with the ball on LIVING, it was with COME PICK ME UP that they found clear daylight to the end zone. Right from the processed drum opening and the keyboard effects at the ending of the brief and euphoric first track “So Convinced”, it’s clear something very different is happening with the band.

Jim O'Rourke

On their previous couple records when they integrated additional sonic elements it normally came later in the sequence and generally served as accenting; it was a fine additive but there was no denying that (at least to me) it felt a little tacked on. “So Convinced” makes it clear that they were grabbing the bull by both horns in their desire to embrace new ideas. But the choice of Jim O’Rourke as producer should’ve been a dead giveaway. This was before his most famous work with Wilco, but the guy was already a studio wizard of long standing. Across the course of the whole album, O’Rourke steadily transforms Superchunk’s established sound into previously uncharted territory while never bastardizing it. The lessons learned from The Buzzcocks (adherence to melodic riffs), Husker Du and hardcore (density, simplicity and focus) are still here, but this time they’re stretched almost to the brink in thrilling fashion. O’Rourke does so many little things that in the end add up to a wallop: on “Hello Hawk” when the guitars drop out and Mac sings the first chorus, he’s joined with a majestic accompanying whistle that’s just electrifying. This minute but powerful touch is followed up directly with a swell of strings, an additive that is conveyed to feel rather synthetic, perhaps like the work of a Mellotron but is in fact the contribution of real players Suzanne Roberts and Chicago free-improv vet Fred Lonberg-Holm. “Cursed Mirror” features a pleasantly strumming acoustic guitar darting in and out of the mix. “Pink Clouds” ends with a display of R&B-ish saxophone vamping from Windy City jazz titan Ken Vandermark that would be ridiculous of it weren’t so expertly executed. “Smarter Hearts” finds Mac’s excellent vocals multi-tracked to wonderful effect.

vampin' saxman Ken Vandermark

And all over the place O’Rourke really messes with two of the bands’ default positions, that of guitar roar and workmanlike, dead-solid bass. In contrast, much of the six-string action is occasionally thin or placed at a distance in the mix, where it attains an edgy, buzzy beauty that’s very specific to their discography (there are hints of it on HERE’S TO SHUTTING UP as well), as is Ballance’s bass playing, which feels much more focused on non-traditional melodic ideas and sonic shading in addition to her usual well employed rhythmic role. And this element helps to clarify that the overall success of the album rests not on O’Rourke’s shoulders, but should indeed be credited to Superchunk for bringing a set of such progressively realized songs to this session, and again for their willingness to document them in such a risky fashion. Whether it’s the flashes of Mac’s yearning falsetto elevating from the position of his well-seasoned rasp and bark, or his and Wilber’s guitars expertly intertwining and dueling, or the borderline scientific precision of Wurster’s drumming landing solidly between heaviness and finesse, or everyone’s contribution to the acerbic melancholy of the record’s final track “You Can Always Count On Me (In the Worst Way)”, this is simply a fabulous document, and maybe one that’s essence is ultimately nonreplicable, being one of those mixtures of chance and good fortune that frustrate attempts at recreation, the results instead falling into the diminishing rewards of formula. Lastly, a few thoughts are due regarding the record’s superb vocal/lyrical landscape. One of Superchunk’s grandest tricks was how their lyrics broached topics of very commonplace human feelings, reactions to the predominant lows and fleeting highs that life deals out, and how this gushing purge combined with the blitz of well calibrated musical motion, forming a dependable tension and release between thoughts and sound over the course of their development. The twist is that ‘chunk’s vocals were mixed largely equal to every other instrument in the band, so that while much of Mac’s shouting could be heard loud and clear, at other times, often very crucial ones, his voice was swallowed up in the abandon with the result that precise language was up for grabs. Go to the lyric sheet? Well, you get bupkus, for Superchunk doesn’t indulge in printed lyrics (and remember that for much of the ‘90s the consulting tool that is the internet was a luxury). What resulted were fans making approximate determinations as to what was being sung, and if that couldn’t be sussed out well then fuck it, just yell along and get carried up in the spirit of the whole thing. This is simultaneously a shared and personal experience (and one of the most vital attributes of small-scale rock music through its history); the listener absorbs and responds to a shared explicitness in the music and then adapts the strands of implicitness to their own ends, filling in the gaps with unique shards of individual experience. There are Superchunk lyrics that I gave up trying to decipher over fifteen years ago, replacing them not always with what I think is there, but with what I feel sounds best. And sometimes I just shout along. Rarely have I ever consulted a website in curiosity, not wanting to be disappointed. Well, in contrast to this state of affairs, COME PICK ME UP’s stanzas are for the most part very easily made out, and that fact might just be due to their rank as some of the finest lines Mac’s ever penned. Perhaps this turn of events was self-realization, the result of band discussion, or guidance from the hand of O’Rourke. Maybe it was a combination of all three. What I know for sure is when his words combine with the music, the finished whole absolutely soars. And as my listening tally settles into the triple digits, it doesn’t just sound like a favorite. It feels like the best.

Superchunk

The Auteur Files #11: Adventures in the Criterion Collection Part Three; Or, Yr Humble Reporter Searches for an Auteur Amidst the Laffs While Dodging and Digesting the Overstated Missives of the Young Technocinephiles -- Rob Reiner's (Or is it???) THIS IS SPINAL TAP (Criterion Spine #12)



Ah, the things a person can find on the internet. A headlight for a 2001 Chevy Metro (price $65 with shipping), video clips of late monologist and comedian Brother Theodore, numerous recipes for peach cobbler, how sideburns attained their appellation (it’s a “corruption of the original burnsides, named after American Civil War general Ambrose Burnside, a man known for his unusual facial hairstyle that connected thick sideburns by way of a moustache but left the chin clean-shaven”, so sayeth Wikipedia), an audio recording of poet Lorine Niedecker made in her home in 1970 by fellow poet Cid Corman, video images of a drunken David Hasselhoff, free online courses in the international language of Esperanto, and the roster of the 2010-11 Washington Wizards Basketball Team. Hell, if so inclined, an inquisitive web-surfer can even find pictures of naked people! Also in abundance are less specifically definable tendencies such as unchecked snark and the bold statement: here’s an excellent example of the latter; “First of all, let's just clarify something: THIS IS SPINAL TAP is the funniest film ever made”. Now it would be easy to assume that quote originated from some obscure corner of the Web via Randy’s Extremely Awesome Movie Site (fictitious, at least I think so) or from an Ain’t It Cool News-styled knockoff (unfortunately very much real), but no. It comes from writer Ben Falk via the BBC. Regardless from whence it originates however, the quote is a great example of a subset of the Bold Statement, namely Fanboy Hyperbole. This is a rather innocuous, playful example of the phenomenon, but it’s still indicative of an approach taken by many when stumping for the superiority of films that are almost always of fairly recent vintage. Ben Falk may well think to the core of his soul that THIS IS SPINAL TAP is the funniest movie ever, but I have a sneaking suspicion that he lacks strong film knowledge from before the year of his birth. But I could be wrong in that assumption, so let’s instead focus on the year of TAP’s release, 1984. Those twelve months found Martin Brest’s BEVERLY HILLS COP and Joe Dante’s GREMLINS also hitting big screens, so it becomes clear that TAP has some serious competition, and that’s just limiting the field to Hollywood motion pictures. If Ben Falk had stated instead that “First of all let’s clarify that THIS IS SPINAL TAP is, along with BEVERLY HILLS COP and GREMLINS, one of the three funniest Hollywood films of 1984” I’d jump on board right quick. This statement might lack overzealous, forced pizzazz, but it holds its own springboard for ascending points of interest. Perhaps the starting point is that all three of the titles referenced above are in some way hybrid films, COP being action-comedy, GREMLINS horror-comedy and TAP a spoof in the form of a fake documentary. TAP wasn’t the first Mockumentary, but it probably is the first to really endure in the public eye, Woody Allen’s ZELIG being infrequently discussed and Jim McBride’s DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY being basically, sadly forgotten.



TAP essentially signifies the beginnings of Christopher Guest’s long comedic career, and for many TAP is identified as a Guest film even though it’s directed by Rob Reiner, who also appears in the film as documentarian Marty DiBergi. Even though I’m an unabashed Auteurist, I can’t credit Reiner as the dominant artistic personality on TAP in large part due to my belief that he lacks any sort of definable personality through his long filmography. He’s helmed overrated romantic comedies (WHEN HARRY MET SALLY), overlong dramas (A FEW GOOD MEN), a light comedy/period fantasy that seems crafted to be nearly impossible to dislike (which is perhaps why I hold a somewhat indifferent attitude towards it) (THE PRINCESS BRIDE) and a movie I wouldn’t watch if tempted with a sawbuck (THE BUCKET LIST). But with that said I don’t designate default authorship to Guest. While TAP has surface connections to Guest’s mature directorial work, there are larger overriding differences, and within TAP itself Guest’s contribution doesn’t really rise above any of the other main players in the ensemble. If I were to award an auteur to THIS IS SPINAL TAP it wouldn’t be a person but rather a medium: that of television. TAP’s relationship to TV is suitably multifaceted. On one hand the movie feels strongly connected to the tradition of Norman Lear-sponsored satire such as MARY HARTMAN, MARY HARTMAN (a spoof of soap operas) and FERNWOOD 2NITE (the same of talk shows) and it’s not at all difficult to envision TAP shaved down to an hour episode of an episodic spoof of public-TV styled documentary programs. On the other hand, TAP also often feels like an inflated skit from Saturday Night Live, which isn’t surprising since Shearer, Guest and McKean are all former cast members of the program (true, McKean didn’t join until 94-95, but Shearer and Guest were part of SNL the year TAP was released). From there, the cavalcade of TV-centric performers (Paul Shaffer, Fran Drescher, Howard Hesseman, Ed Begley Jr. and Fred Willard) is sweet icing on my thesis-cake. The first film that undeniably belongs to Christopher Guest is WAITING FOR GUFFMAN, released in 1997, but 1989 is just as important in charting his artistic development. That’s the year Guest’s directorial debut THE BIG PICTURE, a Hollywood satire ala Blake Edwards’ S.O.B. or Robert Altman’s THE PLAYER hit screens and promptly sank without a trace.

I haven’t seen it and must confess I’m not eager to, not because I suspect it’s bad necessarily, but instead due to the numerous indications that Guest’s mature sensibility is basically absent from the production. But the 1989 event that had the arguably biggest effect on Guest wasn’t the failure of his first film but the appearance of Michael Moore’s ROGER & ME, a movie that helped redefine the boundaries of documentary, introducing comedic elements that flew in the face of the form’s sober-sided tradition. Moore’s breakthrough continued to be refined not only in his own films but in such docs as Jeff Feuerzeig’s THE BAND THAT WOULD BE KING, Terry Zwigoff’s CRUMB and most recently and most germane to the subject(s) at hand Sacha Gervasi’s ANVIL! THE STORY OF ANVIL (more on this one shortly).

This sea change really amplifies the difference between THIS IS SPINAL TAP and Guest’s later work, and spotlights the double meaning of “mock” in Mockumentary. TAP lambasts (mocks) the unflinching sobriety of the form, a determined seriousness that never relents, even when the subject proves unworthy of such elevated treatment. Guest’s directorial efforts instead imitate (mock) the post-ROGER template, where if a subject proves dysfunctional or unintentionally hilarious, well that’s just gravy for the mill. Guest’s films aren’t spoofs of genre but instead appropriations of the form, the better for intensely packed exposition and inspired riffs of improvisation. TAP does feature improv, but it’s very much the product of a collective troupe in the tradition of SNL or SCTV. Guest’s films, BEST IN SHOW being my personal favorite, also utilize groups of talented comedic actors but all feel guided by the hand of one dominant authorial voice. When TAP pads itself out with definably movie-like elements, most notably the introduction of the girlfriend Jeanine, it loses some of its steam, a problem Guest’s films avoid in their finer-tuned construction. But enough about THIS IS SPINAL TAP’s auteurist pedigree, it’s in the end a very successful comedy that’s fully deserving of its designation as a cult classic, though I can’t help but feel the appearance of ANVIL! has stolen some of TAP’s panache, its barbed lampoonery suffering in the face of the really real. Ultimately, THIS IS SPINAL TAP distinguishes itself as a very good if dated and mildly flawed film, certainly not the “funniest film ever made”, but then I can’t imagine anyone with firsthand knowledge of Chaplin, Keaton, W.C. Fields, the Brothers Marx, Preston Sturges, Jerry Lewis or Jacques Tati ever making such a claim.

Meet the Auteur



Beard envy - The Chester Records picks of the week



some words on a couple of  new ones from Will Oldham aka Bonnie 'Prince' Billy here



The Auteur Files #10: Adventures in the Criterion Collecton Part Two; Or, The Trials and Tribulations of a Smooth Operator -- Julian Duvivier's PÉPÉ LE MOKO (Criterion Spine #172)

In the 1930’s, Bonnie & Clyde were folk heroes. They robbed and murdered people, but in the desperate climate of the Great Depression the duo were championed by many members of the disaffected American populace. Gangsters like John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd also fed the public’s hunger for outlaws, and Hollywood exploited this phenomenon by producing such films as LITTLE CAESAR, THE PUBLIC ENEMY and SCARFACE. These motion pictures presented riveting protagonists with morals that were deficient or even completely vacant, lacking true human dimension and doomed by their respective movie’s denouements. Always vibrant and sometimes sympathetic, these characters were still depicted as aberrant in their tragic fates and not at all the type of people you'd actually want to meet outside a movie theater. This mode of storytelling is still well established in the cinema, but anyone with even a mild knowledge of film history knows that the presentation of the criminal, or of the outlaw in a friendlier fictive terminology, has broadened considerably. The emphasis has shifted from simply bold and perhaps sympathetic to romantic and larger than life, with THE GODFATHER films, Michael Mann’s THIEF, and Anton Corbijn’s recent THE AMERICAN being just a minute sample of this development. The characters might still be doomed, but hey, aren’t we all?

Julian Duvivier’s 1937 classic PÉPÉ LE MOKO is often synopsized as an example of French poetic-realism that inspired a better known American remake (ALGEIRS), but it’s also an early and effective shift away from the tendency to present the criminal as simply pathological. The iconic Jean Gabin stars as the titular character, and his role unsurprisingly portrays an operator as smooth and complex as he is outside the law and potentially volatile. Not only does he have intense good-looks and magnetic charisma (you know, the women want him and the men want to be him), but he also possesses a moral code, a sense of honor and a propensity for sincere human emotion (love inspires him to sing! TO DANCE!). Surviving in the stronghold of the Algerian casbah largely through the loyalty of its denizens, Pépé engages in an extended exercise of cat and mouse with his counterpart, an opposite number from the respectable side of the law Inspecteur Slimane, their activity seeming likely to extend until one of the two characters either retire or expire. Except the introduction of a femme fatale (naturally) in the guise of slumming rich girl Gaby complicates matters, for she represents the freedom of Paris and increasingly positions the casbah as Pépé’s exotic prison. If you’re suspicious or disdainful of the romanticisation of the gangster, please keep in mind that the guts of this film take place under the rather distasteful (though undeniably lavish) environment of French colonialism.

I’m not insinuating that Pépé be absolved of his status as thief and cutthroat, only that his failings in the film are presented as human deficiencies which are ultimately preferable to the sly subtext of systematic repression. A better claim against the film could be made over its representation of women: not only is Gaby Gould the kind of shallow broad that’s always leading a likeably fallible dude to his demise, but Inès, Pépé’s spurned former lover, deteriorates by movie’s end into a fatally jealous slattern. No, Duvivier’s film is assuredly not perfect, and while it undoubtedly forecasts the complex shading of the 20th Century criminal, it also lacks the ever-contemporary quality of well rounded human portraiture (this means women as well as men, the rich as well as poor) of his counterpart Jean Renoir. However, very much in PÉPÉ LE MOKO’s favor is a vivid directorial style.

In its early minutes comes an extended voiceover combining with a smooth avalanche of visual information that concisely and electrically details the exoticism of locale. Duvivier’s arsenal includes sharp tight camera movements, controlled edits and wild cross-cutting, painterly wide-shots of the casbah, an excellent use of shadow and a non heavy-handed employment of symbolism. The man’s flair is rather choice in a nutshell, holding elements that later helped define Neo-realism and film-noir, if in the end proving too artificial for the former and too bright for the latter. No, its strongest stylistic connection concerns the Nouvelle Vague.

For me, a key scene in PÉPÉ LE MOKO concerns an old woman reflecting upon her youth as a vocalist, playing one of her records on a wind up Victrola and singing along with deep emotion. It is the sort of beautifully indulgent scene that would fit perfectly in one of Godard’s early films, except for the tears. This distinction is quite important. Duvivier’s scene welcomes sentiment; the New Wave so often favored detachment. And while Pépé’s walk to his poetic fate comes as no surprise, it’s telling that in the end it is he that decides his fate. Not a tragic figure, but just one of countless doomed individuals with blood on their hands….

Julian Duvivier



Some words with sound and some sound without words - The Chester Records picks of the week

Daniel Higgs

Twig Harper

Thoughts on the collab between Twig Harper & Daniel Higgs and the everyday greatness of John Coltrane here

The Auteur Files #9: Adventures in the Criterion Collection Part One; Or, Happy Birthday, Orson Welles! (5/6/1915) -- The Corinth Version of MR. ARKADIN (Criterion Spine #322)

Please excuse the enthusiastic intensity found below, but Orson Welles always gets me worked up into a lather of appreciative prose; if you take it in the spirit of those prophets from the long gone days of the CAHIERS DU CINEMA and their American counterpart Andrew Sarris, that would be just great. This post begins a hopefully permanent fixture in the wrinkles of this here modest blog, a documentation and examination of The Criterion Collection's immeasurable service to film lovers everywhere (or at least those non-U.S. residents with Region Free disc players and deep pockets), approached from the powerful authority of a random list generator. Eclipse titles are happily included in the spirit of titanic, insurmountable endeavor; films and filmmakers I love, like, don't know and approach with varying levels of antipathy. I've already completed three future posts with more to follow, so they should be coming with a fair amount of frequency. The only exception will be the Criterion titles released by Jean-Luc Godard, whose filmography I want to approach seperately and in chronological order. There will continue to be other non-Criterion enteries into the Auteur Files (I am preparing one on TAXI DRIVER for instance), but this addition should help counter-balance the dominant musical focus of this space. If I could just get cracking on literature and visual art themed entries, this place might shape up into the playground I desire it to be....

Orson Welles’ MR. ARKADIN exists in three different permutations, but the CORINTH VERSION alone holds enough beauty and vision to fortify at least a dozen films. So overloaded with creativity and content that it necessitates its superb, brutal style of editing, the movie from first frame to last feels like it’s running a high fever. There are moments when the play of angles, light and shadow combines with a preoccupation with the architecture of buildings and rooms to feel positively Germanic. The story is a collusion of hyper-hardboiled potboiler and sleazy soap-opera melodrama, on one hand unexceptional, on the other stretched to incredulity. Voices are dubbed, fake beards are donned, flea circuses are trotted out, and a plane falls from the sky.

As with any truly great artist, the restrictions of budget cannot contain the possibilities of imagination: compromise when necessary, but keep filming keep moving keep working. What we get, at least in this version, is an enthralling complexity of voiceovers, flashbacks, ellipses and montage telling the tale of one greedy low-rent schmuck, a self-interested patsy straight out of a fatalistic dog-eared dime-store paperback, trying to find truth in a sea of lies, with the obvious fakery of Welles’ getup amplifying the falsehoods to the brink of absurdity. Absurdity? You want absurdity? Herein are flashes of both Kafka and Beckett intertwined with Jim Thompson’s lurid pulpiness. Also; a drunken woman floundering erratically around in a seesawing boat, a vessel that seems to be caustically mocking her state of inebriation, and two additions to the canon of great cinematic parties, one Goya-masked the other maze-like, both ranking up there with the revelry found in LA DOLCE VITA, LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, POINT BLANK, THE GODFATHER PART II and EYES WIDE SHUT.

I can rhapsodize on how Welles expertly arranges bodies in the frame, creating a kinetic symmetry that’s intensified by the relentless cutting and the captivatingly frustrating soundtrack (dubbing has never sounded, felt, so purposely/purposefully messy), or I can instead simply wax enthusiastic over sunglasses, masquerade masks, or the ominous stubble on the jowls of a dying man. In the midst of Welles’ typically grandiose intentions, it is the small gesture, the minor flourish, the succession of cumulative afterthoughts that ultimately elevate this tawdry bit of Shakespearian noir gone soap-operatically bonkers up to the level of sublime. And as the progression of its frames’ increasingly diagonal perspective unfolds it becomes bluntly obvious: Welles was incapable of making a bad film, even when faced with the disdain, hostility or disinterest of a business machine that as the decades unwound grew increasingly at odds with the slippery modernity of his genius. MR. ARKADIN was made in Europe, on the lam and on the cheap, but when a salty, brassy broad gets overcome with the bizarre ritualism of a religious parade and utters in exasperation “What gives with these crazy Ku Kluxers?” it feels boldly out of place for a film of this vintage, the sort of line that never would have made it past the first draft of a Hollywood script of the period, and this drives home a clear point that too few people understand: that Exile can offer up its own brand of Freedom, providing the liberating possibility to reference the diseased ideology of the Klan, to proffer a snapshot of a nude body washed up on the beach, or to call a junky a junky.

Of course, the story of post-KANE Orson Welles is still very much informed by the woeful disappointments of an artist beset by conflict (both internal and external) and bad luck, but thankfully there exists the indefatigable quality of timelessness, and as in Griffith and Chaplin and Murnau and Hitchcock and Hawks and Ford, this will ensure that his work never suffers a loss of relevance. This leads us to a well-established observation. Specifically, that the mark of the truly great artist is how they’re always modern; so many contemporary films can seem absolutely old fashioned when compared to the work of Welles. While it’s been said that the invention of the motion picture gave Modernism its own art form, and that to call any filmmaker Modernist is essentially redundant, I still feel it bears mentioning that more than any other classic director to make the acquaintance of my experience, Welles’ personality, his aesthetic and his behavior appears locked in a vice-like grip with the principles of Modernist art.

Maybe it’s just the aura and allure of failure riding roughshod…but, no. For other than Godard I can think of no film director so consumed with the haunting history of literature and so determined to refresh and redefine it in the proximity of the present, and as a writer and actor Welles was active in a variety of mediums (the stage the page the radio speaker) but when tackling the parameters of the moving film strip inherently understood what made it an art form, never sacrificing the visual for the text or the performance, knowing that the momentum of mise-en-scène, editing and sound well-ordered would breathe life into the words and their delivery. Entire shelves of books have been written in an attempt to hatchet away at the reputation, the legend of Orson Welles, and for a while those distortions were largely successful. But the tide has been turning for some time now as more and more eyes engage with the work and soak up the scholarship that surrounds it. MR. ARKADIN’s CORINTH VERSION is a huge part of this slow reversal of fortune, the yin to TOUCH OF EVIL’s yang, the sort of thrillingly elusive object that, like its auteur, is persistently resistant to being pinned down. And therein lays yet another substantial part of its greatness.

Bamboo shoots, board wax, a bag full of brownies - The Chester Records pick of the week

Pointed remarks on Panda Bear and The Trashmen here

A woman seen and most assuredly well heard: Poly Styrene RIP

By the time I’d found out about her, Poly Styrene was already long established as one of the all time great punks. As a member of X-Ray Spex, she was an integral part of barrier breakdowns concerning music and  gender, and the quality of her efforts spanned far beyond the realm of the early punk scene to inspire legions of rock women. I’ll never forget the first time I heard Bikini Kill’s early self-released cassette; the emphatic jolt I received, particularly from “This Is Not a Test” and “Double Dare Ya”, was immediately recognizable as the same rush of adrenalin I experienced when discovering “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!”, and the overt influence was instantly apparent. It was one of the numerous cheap-o punk compilations that littered the racks back in the late ‘80s that provided me with my inaugural taste of X-Ray Spex’s raging debut, and what is still clear as crystal in my memory is how that track stood out amongst the other high quality contributions to communicate a direct, righteous vision. They instantaneously shot to the top of my personal Brit-punk class, joining such names as The Damned, Buzzcocks, Alternative TV and Wire. What’s historically significant is that within the solid base of personalities that contributed to “Bondage”’s success, the liberating wail of Poly and the harried reed honking of Lora Logic’s saxophone led the way. Upon Logic’s early departure to form the amazing post-punk cornerstone Essential Logic, the focus of X-Ray Spex’s delivery changed somewhat, shifting from the liberating explosiveness of that introductory blast to present a mixture of alienation and fascination with rampant consumerism that still sounded defiantly punk (and this atmosphere of self-criticism of life in the marketplace is a big part of what differentiated Styrene’s artistic personality from Kathleen Hanna, Tobi Vail and Co's tumultuous and very necessary feminist anger). The group’s debut LP, 1978’s “Germ Free Adolescents”, is mostly culled from numerous singles, but it coheres into a powerful musical statement, expressing an advanced, throttling sensibility that included knowledgeable detours into prickly, near poppish territory. I bought a used copy of the record in the ‘early ‘90s and for roughly a decade it was a frequent visitor to my turntable. Lacking Logic’s contribution to the debut 7”, it was rapidly obvious that Poly was now the dominant creative force in the band; while the rhythm section of Paul Dean (bass) and BP Hurding (drums) are spot on in terms of inspired simplicity and Jak Airport’s stellar guitar is as solid and yet fleet as a duckpin bowling ball, the motivating creativity of the unit clearly belongs to Sytrene. Logic’s replacement on sax Rudi Thomson really assisted the band in standing out in a sea of three chord wonders, but once the strength of his instrument’s unique properties became familiar it shifted  from its early leadership role.

The show unmistakably belonged to Poly, and if that sounds out of touch with the tenets of punk, I’ll add that the truly exceptional examples of the style rarely followed the form’s perceived rules. And if Poly Styrene had self-contained her abilities into agreement with some illegitimate concept of band equality, she wouldn’t be the icon she is today. And the magnificence of that status was terrifically broad. She was one of the most triumphantly galvanizing examples of the punk vocalist as vessel of forward momentum, and yet her understanding of pop dynamics heralded her as a real breath of fresh air, at times almost like Debbie Harry’s smarter, snottier, more original younger sister. This fact helped distinguish her iconic status; she was human and approachable as one of us, not a person whose persona promoted admiration from a distance. A couple years into the new millennium I augmented my by then well loved copy of “Germ Free” with Sanctuary Records’ expanded 2CD set “The Anthology”, desiring to hear its addition of stray singles tracks and demo material, and it was a wise acquisition. The package did radiate that mixture of exhaustive documentation and chilly consumer desires that cloaked legions of historical releases from the CD era, but in this case the mercantile aura actually felt somewhat in keeping with the conceptual strategy of the band. Yes, the three additional single sides are a pip to hear (particularly “I Am a Cliché”, “Bondage”’s flip side), though I would’ve sequenced the first disc differently, opening with the debut 45 and then presenting the album, leaving its original integrity intact, and from there sticking the three other previously released cuts before the demo material. The disc’s roughly chronological strictness is legitimate, but it’s frankly not how most listeners absorbed the group, and it completely ignores the fact that X-Ray Spex were one of the few punk bands in the original wave that had enough high quality material to manage an album, much less a classic one. Since copyright is a weird and confounding beast, there is the possibility that while the label owned the right to release the music it was legally unable to place the tracks in the order of “Germ Free” or even reference that album, so I shan’t protest too loudly. Fuck it, I won’t protest at all. How unpunk of me. The unreleased demo stuff is worth the effort, mostly for the rough mixes with vocals, if ultimately non-earth shattering; here’s a case where the demos really feel that way, particularly the instrumental tracks, which prove just how vital Styrene was to the band’s success. The non-vocal take of “I Can’t Do Anything” could certainly inspire the belting out of some truly bonkers karaoke replete with Poly’s deliciously oddball lyrics  (“but I hit him back, with myyyy pet rrrrat”) and a frothy sea of the rolling letter r. The real treat however comes on disc two in the form of the blistering aural residue from their second ever live gig, eight tracks (technically seven, “Bondage” is reprised) that include a false start, a peculiar mix (bass at times way out front), and a sloppiness distinct from the loose yet always on the money quality of the studio work.

X-Ray Spex in the Lora Logic-era

But it stands as a riveting and exceedingly rare example of what a (highly idiosyncratic) punk band sounded like in live performance in ’77. Styrene had yet to fully flower, but she was in no way tentative, and if Logic at this point was the band’s most developed musical property, well that was only temporary. The package culminates with three tracks from a reunion release, 1995’s CONSCIOUS CONSUMER, and the difference is striking. If in ’77 and ‘8 X-Ray Spex were a beacon of elevated competence, nearly two decades later they were quite pro in execution. This is to be expected. As people play they get more adept, and that Poly and Co weren’t trying to approximate their early sound was admirable. There was a lyrical adjustment as well. One of the largest themes of the early lyrics was what we buy and how it shapes our attitudes, and it was mostly a critique of an outside, often public thing (to me, it seemed an ongoing debate over the idea of individualism as something that could actually be tangible, visible). By ’95 her thoughts on the effects of consumer practice had developed into what we put inside our bodies: “Cigarettes”, “Junk Food Junkie”, “Peace Meal”. And with this came a shift in the lyrics to the more tried-and-true mode of punk rock belief sharing. I can’t deny that on one hand I find this ideological solidification less appealing than the ragged searching and questioning of the early stuff, but again it’s better to see change in action than simple carbon copying. If those three songs didn’t add up to a sum that inspired me to purchase the entire album, that’s ultimately no big deal, and it’s certainly less of an issue than the band faking it/going through the motions, which would’ve been a betrayal of their early work. But it shouldn’t have been a surprise that Styrene would favor growth over stale simulation. For back in 1980, after her dropout from and the breakup of X-Ray Spex, she released her first solo LP TRANSLUCENCE, a document that shed all surface evidence of her still smoldering punk past.

I first heard this record courtesy of an older fellow record hound shortly after buying “Germ Free Adolescents”, and the difference was bewildering. How could this punk paradigm have switched so quickly to relaxed, at times borderline mellow, exotic pop? I thanked my pal for the listen (she played it for me twice), but I’ll confess to not searching for my own copy. It was quite a few miles away from where my musical sweet-spot was located at the time, frankly. And I’ll add that I never once saw the thing in used bins. This might be due to its release on United Artists, and this might also be why, at least to my knowledge it’s only been legally reissued once circa 1990. A few months after hearing, another friend asked me if I thought the album was bad, and after some brief hemming and hawing I had to admit that I had no freaking idea. Asking me that question at that point in time was like asking me if Stan Kenton’s CITY OF GLASS or Miles Davis’s WE WANT MILES were bad. I mean “was” “it” “bad”? And “how” “why”, etfuckingcetera. Shit. I just wasn’t prepared to process something so far outside my interest in blues, trad rock, punk, and a smidgen of jazz. Now for the record, Kenton; no, Miles: yes, and TRANSLUCENCE: no. While Poly’s debut solo stab will likely never enter my steady listening diet, I feel secure in describing it as a largely successful (if occasionally problematic) and enjoyable statement of artistic development. I grabbed a download of it a few years ago and have spent some quality time coming to grips with its documentation of sincere difference. It’s curiously one of the few examples of a record where I prefer the presence of a lilting, airy flute (not my fave instrument) to saxophone motion, but that’s mainly due to some Late Night Talk Show/Saturday Night Live Band style soloing on “Sky Diver”, a brief misstep. The overall sound of TRANSLUCENCE has been called a predecessor to Everything But The Girl, and while I have hardly listened to EBTG, I’ll agree that’s extant. But the record seems perfectly well suited for playing at non-obtrusive volume while reclining on a sandy, sunny beach under an enormous umbrella, sipping something sweet and strong from a coconut cup while reading a battered copy of Peter Matthiessen’s FAR TORTUGA. At least to my ears, it’s far more in keeping with calm, casual absorption then assertive listening, and hell, under the spell of my hypothetical seaside scenario maybe that janky sax would go down nice and easy. Shiver me timbers. That my feelings regarding TRANSLUCENCE register as something less than my love of Poly’s punk-era self are no reason for concern. Frankly, the need for the evolution of artists to remain close to any one person or group’s set of expectations is a spurious one. If a performer betrays previous work in an attempt for money, fame or legitimacy, that’s obviously different (but not any particularly big crime, either). However, if the growth is natural, as is the case with Styrene, then it should be accepted and even encouraged. Not that her work, at least in my case, was ever that far afield. She always felt in touch with punk while often swimming in different, less disruptive waters.

As noted above, the reason for this text is a sad one. Poly Styrene is gone, stricken by breast cancer. First Ari Up and now Poly. No other way to describe it; a flat-out drag. These days it’s basically impossible to check into Pitchfork without getting the skinny on the latest achievements of a bevy of talented women unencumbered by the odious interference of male-centric attitudes: Cat Power, Vivian Girls, Joanna Newsom, Best Coast, MIA, Wild Flag, on and on. But it wasn’t always that way. Once upon a time smart rock women were notable exceptions in the stream of things, and I hope my thoughts here have accurately communicated that Poly Styrene was one of the greatest of those exceptions. There will certainly be an outpouring of repetition on blogs and elsewhere in enthusiastic tribute to her greatness, but this is a case where the echo chamber is welcome and deserved. Some things just can’t be overstated. In ending, while I just said that Poly Styrene is gone, this is of course true only physically. Maybe I state the obvious, but as long as people are pumping their fists to “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!”, having moments of self-realization through “Identity” or spending a tranquil hour on the couch with TRANSLUCENCE, our heroine is still here in spirit. So please do you, me, the disaffected masses and Poly a big solid. Plug in, turn up, and keep listening.