Goodbye Andrew Sarris (1928-2012)

as a young man, with the great one....

as an older man, with his wife, the very talented film writer Molly Haskell...

in late life, at the machine...

More than any other writer, he's responsible for shaping how I think and care about film.

RIP

Live Review from the Vinyl District- Mike Watt with J Mascis, Murph and other special guests at Le Poisson Rouge, NYC 5/2/12

Watt & J throwing down. Photo by Nate S. Rhodes

live review here



The Chester Records picks of the week: the reliable old vs young dichotomy; or the get off my lawn, it don't mean a thing, youth is wasted on the young, hope I die before I get old edition (Wilco and Trash Talk)

some stereotypes:

a poster for Wilco, a band old people like

the angry youth of Trash Talk in repose

go here for the words

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.

Judging a record by its sleeve: Black Flag's MY WAR LP as an hommage to Richard Meltzer, an examination of Raymond Pettibon and a celebration of the scene, maaaaannnnnn....



In the early 70s, Richard Meltzer began his slow journey away from rock criticism by submitting reviews that only dealt with the record's packaging, filling column space not with the dreary prose that his editors had come to expect and actually demand, but instead fixating in his canny and dyspeptic way on the minutiae of what had become almost integral in the atmosphere of the "business" of rock music, i.e. something that's unquestionably important yet almost never gets talked about. Because if "it" wasn't important, the "it" being the album cover, than they'd certainly all look the same. Important to whom, you might be asking? That's a big question, but for the purposes of this argument, the ogre of "financial interests", most definitely. Now, it's easily evidenced that album covers don't look the same. But "feel" the same? Oh yeah, at least a significant portion, and I'm not talking about the sensation of holding them in your hands, natch. When album covers begin to feel the same, what's that say about the music inside? Now, the roomy tract you're currently reading isn't going to follow Meltzer's paradigm very closely, but I wanted to mention him now because we'll return to him later. For the time being though, let's talk about Raymond Pettibon, the artist responsible for the cover of MY WAR.

Raymond Pettibon

In my eyes, one of the most interesting angles in the whole underground music milieu is the Who, What, and Why of the scene participant's various non-musical interests. Pettibon’s contribution is frankly one of the most appropriate alliances (in terms of style and subject matter) between music and visual art formed in the "punk" movement, yet this connection can prove rather elusive to easy synopsis. He is essentially an artist of discomfort, and his art is suffused with negativity and a profound preoccupation with bleakness and despair that made its adoption by the counterculture of the Reagan-era almost inevitable (and it surely helped that Pettibon was Black Flag guitarist and SST owner Greg Ginn's brother). However, the large bulk of his art from this period features so much depth and bitter intelligence that I can't help but think it was lost on the majority of those who felt it was "theirs". Or to put it another way, I can't shake the suspicion that so many were stoked over the shock value while sidestepping the critique that often concerned their contemporaneous social environs. But maybe I'm judging to harshly. One of the unique aspects of the punk/indie scene's extra-musical influences is how diverse they were. This fact often takes people with even a fair knowledge of this era's music by surprise. The lack of overt documentation on the specifics of what was happening in film, writing, and visual art within this subculture can lead some individuals to conclude that John Hughes films and Bret Easton Ellis novels were primary exponents of the period's underground rumblings.

To be blunt: Au contraire. Legitimate non musical contemporaries were definitely making contributions to the cultural landscape. The written word was represented by such disparate entities as Kathy Acker, the cyberpunk sci-fi of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Lewis Shriner, the late works of William S. Burroughs, musician littérateurs like Nick Cave, Lydia Lunch, Billy Childish, Chris D. and an inked-up baldy whose birth name was Henry Garfield; film was infested by Cinema of Transgression figures like Nick Zedd, Beth B. and Richard Kern, along with other names like Dave Markey and John Moritsugu; and visual art saw the paintings (and performance works) of Joe Coleman, the woodcuts of Billy Childish, the scrawl of Savage Pencil, the cross-media gestalt of Gary Panter, and of course a venerable gaggle of commix artists venting spleen and acting snide or aloof, probably the most successful example being a guy you may have heard of named Matt Groening. Raymond Pettibon falls into this sticky constellation, his personal aesthetic radiating like hijacked James Thurber one panels that have all the humor sucked out of them only to be injected with trepidation, existential dread and flashes of misery. Of course, punks and other non-conformists of this era (read: bohemians) also grabbed from history, and it's rather startling just how intense this plundering was. Contrast this to the hippies, where the distrust of older generations meant that only very specific artifacts were allowed entry into their playground (some Beats, some Huxley, and some Hesse, for example) and you can see just how non-rigid the '80s subculture really was. Lit kicks were satiated from sources as various as those Beats, hardboiled detective fiction, pulp sci-fi like Phil K. Dick and Samuel R. Delaney, post-mod word-fuckers like Pynchon, weird smut like Pauline Reage and De Sade in appropriately tough translation, pimp pulp from Iceberg Slim, Hubert Selby's sustained scream from the New York streets, Bukowski's fly in the ointment aesthetic, French absinthe poets and their sexually transgressing country folk like Jean Genet and certainly Georges Bataille. The pilfering of visual art was just as widespread: Dada and Surrealism, the less celebrated works of Warhol and his Pop-Art brethren, Chris Burden's bonkers performance pieces (amongst other things, he was shot in the arm from five feet away and nailed to the back of a Volkswagen; now THAT'S an example of the utilization of shock value that I fully endorse), and the equally berserk activities of the Vienna Actionists. But looking at film provides the most enlightenment into '80s bohemia's rabid selection. The explosion of home video viewing and the proliferation of midnight movie showings really boosted the situation. A hypothetic book on the subject could be broken down into the following chapters and would in no way be exhaustive: the blunt strangeness of Tod Browning's FREAKS, the early surrealist revolts of Luis Bunuel, Nick Ray's REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, oddball Hollywood and independent sleepers like Samuel Fuller's THE NAKED KISS and Leonard Kastle's THE HONEYMOON KILLERS, the films of Jean-Luc Godard (particularly the more difficult work like WEEKEND and SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the Psychotronic phenomenon from Ed Wood to H. G. Lewis to Andy Milligan, the gut-punch horror films of George Romero, Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven, idiosyncratic midnight movies like Lynch's ERASERHEAD and Jodorowsky's EL TOPO, controversial works by established commercial directors such as Kubrick's A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and Scorsese's TAXI DRIVER, the films of John Waters and Russ Meyer, early Cronenberg, Andy Warhol's directorial efforts and those he produced with Paul Morrissey, and the avant-garde work of Warhol's contemporaries, particularly Jack Smith’s FLAMING CREATURES and Stan Brakhage's sublime autopsy film THE ACT OF SEEING WITH ONE'S OWN EYES. In addition to the simple availability of all this stuff were the long gaps in the emergence of contemporary work that could speak to this alienated and self-marginalizing audience. Sure, in addition to those mentioned a bit earlier there was Derek Jarman and ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL. Yes, there was a spate of non-fiction films that documented the scene. Alex Cox’s REPO MAN obviously deserves mention along with other unusual “Hollywood” films like Dennis Hopper's loopy OUT OF THE BLUE and Tim Hunter's THE RIVER'S EDGE. We can throw in “message-porn” like CAFÉ FLESH and the druggy/arty sci-fi of LIQUID SKY. But before long it starts to be slim pickings, in part because the distribution networks were more grassroots in this era. What's this have to do with Ray Pettibon and his cover for "My War"? Well, nothing. And yet everything. NOTHING because the last three paragraphs were essentially just a riff (I love jazz), an indulgence (so does Pettibon), a way of fleshing out some of the cultural terrain of a period where everything wasn't available at the click of a mouse, and people were forced to bring dimension to their way of life through constant digging and the passing around of artifacts while the culture at large looked in the other direction. It was so much more than mail ordering records. And EVERYTHING because context is essential; Did you know Pettibon also made films?

VHS cover to Pettibon's CITIZEN TANIA

He's been in bands, too (he's in one now, in fact). And his art for many years was collected into little low-budget pamphlets that could be ordered direct from SST. These small books could be used in a variety of ways; carried in backpacks and stared at in cars while waiting for something (nothing) to happen or strategically placed in the living space to ultimately trigger a reaction. Upscale trendies aren't the only people with coffee tables, you know. If there is a certainty in this universe, it is that PUNKS LOVE COFFEE, and I'm just as positive that one of Pettibon's chapbooks would look flat-out amazing next to a piping mug of shitty instant brew. But really, my digressions do at least provide emphasis that this specific movement generally disdained art that had any real relationship to fine-art aesthetics or any high (or middle) brow acceptability. Take photography for example: The main thrust of it within this scene was divided between stern documentation (Glen E. Freidman, SST's Naomi Pedersen, Jenny Lens, Cynthia Connelly, and later shutterbugs like Michael Levine and Charles Peterson for example) and the eventually stultifying application of collage art (more Dada influence) as statement (we could maybe call this the Maximum Rock 'N' Roll aesthetic). Art photography seems rare in the annals of the era, the only names really springing to mind being Robert Mapplethorpe, Joel-Peter Witkin, maybe Larry Clark (later of KIDS directorial fame) and possibly Robert Frank if we're being extremely inclusive. This isn't to infer that documentary photography lacked an artistic dimension (no way) or that the occasional collage didn't achieve its effect. I'm just trying to ram home the point of just how anti-establishment this movement was (and still kinda is, because I tend to look at the period between the counterculture's re-ignition around 1977 and the present day as one long and warped continuum) in relation to its defining principles. If the public at large is generally thinking glamour shot sheen or Ansel Adams (glamour shot mountains) in relation to photography, then it's no surprise that the post-'77 scene so thoroughly embraced a basically vérité approach. To extend this idea: When an ink on paper piece by Pettibon commands $66,000 at auction, it's impossible to think this won't somehow change how his art is perceived. In this case, his work had certainly developed but suffered no commoditization (i.e. sell out); it is simply the case that museum culture reigned him in as one of their numerous outsiders. But dig what happens when this occurs: the joy that's inspired by the strange reactions and dismissive tut-tuting over a freaky album cover is replaced with the feeling that smartly dressed people with too much fucking money have co-opted another goddamned thing.

Sour grapes over losing exclusive bragging rights to the fandom of some record/film/book/etc is generally not very attractive, and I tend to take a more pragmatic approach and cheer when some little niche artist/writer/band that I love finds a wider audience. But sometimes it's hard to not feel the sting. Like when an old SST mail order catalog falls out from an LP sleeve onto the carpet, for instance. I pick it up to ogle the listing for once affordable Pettibon chapbooks, and that leads me to look across the room at the thick and glossy paperback of his awe-inspiring later work that set me back $80. Damn right I feel the sting. But that's okay, because when that baby sits on my coffee table it looks just beautiful.

One of the positive things that Pettibon's integration into the art-world has inspired is a more accurate view into what it is exactly that he does. If I had a buck for every time I clarified to someone between 1988 and 1995 (an arbitrary cut off point, sure) that Pettibon wasn't a cartoonist or comic (or commix) artist, I'd buy you lunch. No, not you, YOU. It'd be cheap eats, but still. Pettibon was sometimes mistakenly lumped in with such u-ground comic scribes as Charles Burns, Dan Clowes, Wayno, Kaz, Los Bros Hernandez, and Peter Bagge, but what this wild-assed group did was basically adapt their working methods into a piece that could help an album sleeve or CD cover stand out from the majority while basking in the good vibes (and personal checks from record labels) that mutual appreciation inspires. The use of Pettibon's work is essentially different. The impression is that he worked on his own and his pieces were later adapted (and rather notoriously debased with scissors) to gig flyers and album covers. On one hand he's identifiable as an artist in isolation, yet he designed the Black Flag bars, which lends him the aura of collaboration. The work of the comic artists always felt more capitalistic than that: Clowes was quite blasé about it in interviews and Burns and Bagge submitted work for some really rotten mainstream albums. In the '90s there was an explosion of artist collaborators like Frank Kozik and Coop who seem more in league with Pettibon, but here the difference is less one of function and more one of effect. Both Kozik and Coop were all about the reinterpretation and subversion of iconography, the former turning established and seemingly benign images like cartoon characters into drugged out sex kittens or creepy street urchins, and the later ramping-up old standbys like salivating sex-crazed wolves, making the object of their lust-drenched blood-shot eyes the buxom and scantily clad women descended from hot rod culture that radiated like a twisted manifestation of R. Crumb's gargantuan libido.

A nutshell example of Coop's style

This duo was one of the prime examples of the ‘90s’ sub-cultural fascination with being politically incorrect, or more accurately they filled a need by some to adopt a deliberate stance that prized a type of apolitical hedonism. In addition, Kozik and Coop were essentially about surfaces and are basically formalist. They both actually sort of defy the punk ethos that anybody can play. One look at their work shows that a high level of discipline and trad-art skill was employed, even when the deluge of silk-screened show posters, magazine covers and limited edition record sleeves began to take on an almost Warhol-like assembly line feel. There was actually a bit of grumbling about Pettibon during this era, even from Kozik himself, the main thrust being that his stark, often minimalist work possessed a lazy, sloppy aura that a more precision-tuned artist like Kozik found unappealing. I took this in stride then and now, but still feel that it's similar to the attitude that The Ramones weren't any good due to their music's lack of solos. But the ultimate proof in the pudding regarding the difference between Pettibon and Kozik/Coop/etc is one of impact. Again, the more formalist approach of the later group never really gets beyond the level of eye candy, which is cool enough, but there was just so much of it on CDs and posters and the covers/pages of YOUR FLESH that it seemed the scene eventually OD-ed on the stuff.

It was everywhere for a while, then it suddenly wasn't. In contrast, Pettibon was never really that prolific, and an even better point would be that his work is so wrapped up in his personality and ideology that he never had a single imitator. And Pettibon's art has a depth that really lingers. The effect of a piece viewed once can last years, and other examples can put a damper on my day (in the best way possible) even if they are already quite familiar. Pettibon may not be the cause célèbre he once was, and his audience may now include wealthy art investors who don't give two squirts about the aesthetic worth of the So Cal punk rock scene that helped thrust him into prominence, but his presence is certainly still vital.

So there we have it. And in an attempt to not sound like a panting sycophant, I'll refrain from giving too much credit to the SST crew for their adoption of Pettibon's work as a visual signifier. The blood relationship between Pettibon (pseudonym from the French, petit bon, and meaning "good little one": thanks Wikipedia) and Ginn makes downplaying rather easy, plus the rather offhand way that some of the SST crew approached Pettibon's art doesn't smack of a reverential mindset to the man's stuff. I'll stop short of describing the appropriation as trying to just shock and instead opine into what I think was really being attempted: the desire to stand out in a field that was beginning to look and feel the same. You can apply this idea to the band's hairstyles and clothing choices as well. Countercultural conformity was starting to run rampant, and Black Flag really defined themselves as not belonging to any camp, and if there is any artwork from that era that promulgates alienation and the ideals of being a loner, it's Pettibon's. But in contrast to how the Minutemen used his work, Black Flag's collaboration, while certainly subversive, still seems significantly less profound. To relate this back to Meltzer, the whole punk rock impulse, and the west coast division of it in particular, actually got him inspired again by the potential of basic, dirty rock 'n' roll as a vessel of defiance and distorted beauty.

Meltzer reading publicly a few months back via Kevin Sampsell's blog

The contrarian streak never left him, but he hosted a radio show for a while ("Hepcats from Hell"), penned a whole bunch of rock related junk for small press publications throughout the '80s, talked some sweetly foul mouthed shit about Bill Graham's Mom on stage as the emcee for the Sex Pistols' final gig at San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom, fronted the blink-and-you-missed-it punk band Vom with the future Angry Samoans, and inspired D. Boon to proclaim from the stage: "This song goes out to Richard Meltzer, he was our hero!". Righteous and individualist tactics like submitting cover art-centric record reviews to publications whose modus operandi was nothing more than insuring their print pages secured record company advertising was just one thing that made him so heroic. And that heroism manifested itself in the way SST operated (at least early on), which in turn impacted my teenaged consciousness as I ominously eyeballed the covers of MY WAR, SLIP IT IN and LOOSE NUT in a sterile mall record store, where they frankly stood out like radioactive artifacts in an ocean of insubstantiality. I can only hope that some impressionable upstart might stumble upon this modest bout of theorizing and get gobsmacked by the mighty inksmanship of Raymond Pettibon, and in turn elect to spend his life asking questions instead of dully and dutifully accepting the answers. We can only pass the torch one person at a time, right?



Great moments in portraiture Part 1





These books, they mean quite a lot to me.

And of course the list is far from complete. No Coover, no Hawkes, no Moody, no Woolf, no Ishmael Reed, no Stein, no Vollman, no F. Scott, no Delillo, no Jones/Baraka, no Hawthorne. That's just for starters. Plus, I left out those tomes that present a beautiful unwieldiness which push them toward being perpetually unfinished: Proust, Jan Potocki, Robert Burton (though unlike everything else below, THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY ain't fiction). And where's Borges? You get the point. But one thrilling aspect of literature is how great books are never really finished anyway, since their greatness always encourages the desire to start again for a deeper understanding and appreciation. So that being the case, this list will remain unfinished as well.

1- William Gaddis THE RECOGNITIONS- a novel that examines human kind's propensity/need for fakery. It's sprawling, dense, frustrating, exhilarating and painfully, wonderfully human. And also very funny.

2-     Thomas Pynchon GRAVITY'S RAINBOW- epic and surreal, with uncompromising flowing language, outlandish characters, and talking dogs. Labyrinthine and acidic, weird and dark. What might seem like an elephantine mix of indulgence and lack of discipline is really just the blunt reality that the author’s smarter than you. Smarter than me, too. My advice? Just lay back and soak it all up. I’m trying to decide what sounds better: comically bleak or bleakly comic

3-     James Joyce ULYSSES- the heavyweight champion of modernism; once the code is broken, his characters and situations are drenched in truth and beauty. As rewarding as it is complex.

4-     William Faulkner AS I LAY DYING- much like Joyce,
he's unconcerned with making it easy (though this one is easier to swallow than THE SOUND AND THE FURY, which I also adore), and his situations can build to gut-wrenching levels, but that's part of what makes it so powerful and lasting, along with his lack of sentimentality and the prickly dimension that he brings to his characters and subjects.

5- Herman Melville MOBY DICK- really the beginning of modernism in America. It has a very agreeable poetic sensibility that is actually far more at home in the middle of the 20th century than at the time of its writing, and Herm is as relevant now (as is Nat Hawthorne, for that matter) as he’s ever been. To love Melville is to love language.

6-     Flannery O'Conner WISE BLOOD- what a freak-show. Southern Gothic on bad acid. Oh, the strychnine. Some of the most compelling bleakness I've read. There exists a very credible film version of this work, but if you haven’t seen it, please do yrself a favor and read the book first. The difference in quality is palpable.                                                                                                                                        

7- William H. Gass THE TUNNEL- sometimes I'm a bit hesitant to tell people that I'm drawn to novels where the characters are so bitter, dysfunctional and steeped in failure, not so much out of any concern for what folks will think of me personally, but simply because it potentially amplifies the inadequacy of the phrase “reading for enjoyment”. You mean you actually like reading a 600+ page doorstop with a main character that’s a gargantuan asshole? Yep, you betcha! This has one of the most unlikable protagonists of any book I've read, but it also presents this character trying to write his way to terms with all his pain (and the pain he's caused others) in a manner that's quite riveting. Oh, that manner: the language!!!

8-     William Gaddis JR- a lengthy expertly rendered critique of capitalism that is maddening, a little bit frightening, and often very humorous. That humor is really the key to Gaddis’ authorial presence, I think, since this book, his second, is markedly different from THE RECOGNITIONS. His first is a huge mixture of classic and modernist influence stuffed to the gills and ready to explode all over yr desk and reading room and consciousness. JR is far more obsessed with an intertwining sprawl of narrative and dialogue. An acquaintance once complained to me that Gaddis’ characters had diarrhea of the mouth, that they rarely listened to each other and that their words didn’t feel “real”. My compound retort was a) I don’t read for “real” and b) regarding the ratio of talking to listening, have you been to a bar lately? When Gaddis’ characters get a few drinks in them they often start spilling out gorgeous verbiage in a way that’s all too familiar to yrs truly. I first read this roughly six years ago and I couldn't believe how contemporary it felt.

9-     James Joyce PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN- Everything I've read by Joyce has left a big impression. Stephen Dedalus is one of the earliest and greatest examples of the downtrodden hero, a phenomenon that became quite common in fiction, some would say too much so, later in the century. Lots of folks dig Holden Caulfield, and yeah I dig him too, but ol’ Stephen Hero appealed to me more as a young man (ahem) due to his old nature, shouldering the weight of history and art with solemnity, profundity and a lack of pretense. Caulfield is surely cool, but Dedalus is complicated and fascinating.

10- Jack Kerouac BIG SUR- can be a big drag for those who are deeply attached to the transcendental gusto of the early novels. This is a book for more mature sensibilities, for people who are familiar with disappointment and disillusionment. He was drinking himself to death while writing this one. I’m tempted to sandwich this baby into a massive re-read with Malcolm Lowry’s UNDER THE VOLCANO and the works of Fred Exley, but Christmas is coming and I’m worried I might succumb to the titanic despondency and suffer a self-inflicted wound to the brainpan. Oh, I jest. Maybe. The power of literature is strong. Whoever finds my decomposing carcass has to take care of my cat, okay?

11- Herman Melville PIERRE, OR THE AMBIGUITIES- a dismal commercial failure while being an estimable and complex artistic endeavor, it's a sustained rumination on folly (both social and artistic) and the problems that arise from human interaction and desire. Ambiguity is constant in Melville's mature work, and this thorny masterpiece is the best example of the author’s need for unresolved situations and unanswered questions.

12- Mark Twain THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN- maybe the best story (if not the best writing, though it should go without saying that his words are also great) in all American fiction.

13- John Barth LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE- short works by one the great postmodernists. The title story is an exquisite commentary on self-doubt and the strain of artistic aspiration (and the dread of failure that often accompanies it). Everything here possesses an estimable knowledge of literature and how to carry its themes into a contemporary framework. Old and new at the same time.

14- William H. Gass OMENSETTER'S LUCK- his first novel. Comes off a bit like Faulkner if he were a part of the post-WWII post-grad scene. When taken in unison with the short story collection IN THE HEART OF THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY and the slim and still brilliant mash-up of structure and visuals and of course (always) language that is WILLIE MASTERS' LONESOME WIFE, it’s damned startling just how explosive this now esteemed man of letters was out of the starting gate. Maybe the most neglected American fictioneer of the second half of the last century. And he’s still going strong.

15- James Joyce DUBLINERS- there have been thousands of short story collections since this pup was published and very few before. But the worth of these stories is far greater than just that of originality and influence; it's also the depth of feeling and the scope of human emotion that's contained within.

16-  Stanley Elkin THE MAGIC KINGDOM- about a busload of terminally ill kids who are taken on a trip to Disneyworld. And it's hilarious. Elkin is the combination of two wonderful things: a Jewish wise-ass and comma addiction.

17-  William S. Burroughs THE NAKED LUNCH- it's been over ten years since I've read this, so it makes the list due to the sheer impact that it had on my developing mind. A book that encompasses sci-fi, experimental lit, beat sensibilities, weird smut, and a thick dose of 20th century pessimism. It only takes a hard cold look at the present tense to understand that Burroughs was far less paranoid than his detractors often claimed and far more prescient than even his biggest boosters thought.

18- Henry James RODERICK HUDSON- I have some major gaps in my knowledge of James, but this is my favorite out of what I've read. The short novel's title character is a sculptor who becomes consumed by an unhealthy attraction to a young princess. But what it's really about, for me, is James' beautiful sentences. He comes up with page after page of words that positively beg to be read aloud. I've discussed James with people who totally dismiss him because he writes slow novels about rich people, but I can't get with that dismissal at all. In my estimation, it's not about what it's about (though this can surely add to the experience). It's about how it's written, how it sounds coming of the (mind’s) tongue.

19-  David Foster Wallace THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM- out of everything listed here, this book has the most to say to me from a purely generational standpoint. It's a bit like early Pynchon, steeped in post-modern influence and absurd situations that place it in direct opposition to the brigade of realist fiction. Wallace's stuff has a looseness (a punk sensibility, perhaps) that differentiates it from his pomo antecedents: where those books positively, proudly drip with higher-learning, Wallace comes off like a disheveled spiky-haired smart-ass who can (and will) ace the test without even trying, so he just shrugs it off as no big deal. All the while, he's laying dangerous land-mines in his pages that seem to spell certain disaster, only to ultimately prove an essential ingredient in the fabric of the (master)work.

20- William Gaddis A FROLIC OF HIS OWN- Kerouac compared Burroughs to Swift, and yeah, I can see it, DO see it in fact, but the most Swiftian writer (besides Swift) that I (and maybe Sven Birkerts) can think of is Mr. Gaddis. As formidable as his prose can be purely from a standpoint of language construction (and this uncompromising style is what gets him described as simply a difficult writer by hit-and-run magazine blurbists), the emotional heft of his work is caustic satire, and the guy is absolute bulls-eye.

The planet just got a little less interesting

RIP Harvey Pekar

Spotlight on Scientist Rock: Minutemen's THE PUNCH LINE (SST 004)

By this late date, I’ve become so familiar with the music of the Minutemen that it's almost part of my DNA. I can still recall quite vividly the first time I played THE PUNCH LINE, dropping needle to vinyl in my basement bedroom and preparing to flail my flabby frame to whatever my modest speakers spat out. This was a common ritual in those anything-but-halcyon high school days; however this occasion culminated with a different result. By the end of side one, I wasn’t all sweaty and puffy but was rather standing completely still, inspecting the album jacket in my hands like it was a piece of Mayan pottery that I'd inexplicably found under my bed during an all too infrequent cleaning session. Instead of flipping the record over, I replayed the first side again, and then a third time. It was a memorable afternoon, to say the least. At that point, I'd heard maybe a dozen or so punk records and a handful of homemade comps from friends where the music of assorted bands basically blended all together like the ingredients in a well-prepared fruit salad. Yum. When something stuck out, I elected to investigate further. First, I scored a copy of the justifiably legendary THE BLASTING CONCEPT compilation LP (SST 13), the contents of which felt like the sonic equivalent of being wailed on by a bunch of thuggish rouges, only to then be helped up, dusted off, and sent home with a playful ass slap. This led me directly to THE PUNCH LINE. One quality that still excites me about the record is how goddamned up-to-the-moment it sounds, specifically because the band's music was so extremely personal and, dare I say it, original. The "Ohh" word is best avoided as a rule when writing/talking about music (because there will almost always be someone ready to pounce and decry claims of originality with scenarios of influence, sometimes overstated and occasionally IMO imagined, though I’m getting submerged in a whole other bucket of guppies), but in this instance I feel it's acceptable to let it slip, mostly due to how it connects with the example of bassist Mike Watt's professed love of Modernist writers like Joyce and Faulkner.

The whole broad scope of Modernism (and 20th Century art in general) was flat-out ass-kicked by old man Ezra's challenge to "Make it new", and the still utterly unique music of these Pedro proles confirms to my ears that they really understood how to pull off that difficult task. In a nutshell, the only way to really, effectively make it new is to soak up and learn from the whole vast avalanche of worthwhile antecedents, and then after appropriate consideration distilling it into a potent brew that can make the receiver feel drunk (but not too drunk) with the liberating possibilities afforded by the freshness of this particular path. History so often repeats itself because too many hambones haven’t done their homework.

If all this sounds somewhat hyperbolic and worshipful, please allow me clarify. Regarding worship; if the story of this band is unfamiliar to you, I'll state that they were not a not a group that were knelt down to, at least not in the bright light of day. They were modest, positive, encouraging guys who in no way attempted to elevate themselves over their fan base, and were in fact vocally uncomfortable with the idea of musician as deity. If any band can be said to have brought the true essence of the punk rock ideal hurling into the indie-rock era and beyond, it was Boon Watt and Hurley. A book about the whole indie-rock explosion was thoughtfully titled from one of Minutemen's blunt lyrics: "Our band could be your life", a direct, level-headed mantra that sits in sharp contrast with some of the "Mascis is God" (new new Claptonism) or "Sonic Youth are geniuses" (new new Beatleism) remarks that I heard in smoky dorm-rooms and during car rides, so I hope you absorb the point that my verbiage is less designed for pedestal placing and is intended instead like the enthusiastic kudos you'd give to family or close friends when you discover that they've managed some particularly righteous feat. As for hyperbolic, I'll surrender guilty as charged, since the success and appeal of Minutemen is intrinsically linked to a workmanlike, kinda ordinary, no-big deal anti-swagger. Get in the studio, get onto tape, get outta there and get heard, and get back to being dudes. Indeed a large friction does exist between the reality of this band and my attempts to give them their due within the context of art and history and the struggle of moving onward (forward!) in the intertwining lives we're handed (i.e. SHIT THAT MATTERS), but if you just (re)consider that basement bedroom remembrance and how it's still hanging on tight after over twenty years of existence (fuggin’ nostalgia, it’ll get you every time), I hope that friction isn't difficult to swallow.

In one sense, I’m a bit disappointed that THE PUNCH LINE is no longer available as a standalone work, being currently in print as part of POST MERSH VOL. 1, the first of three collections that do an important job of showcasing the majority of the band’s pre DOUBLE NICKELS ON THE DIME output (though the greatest Minutemen comp will probably always be the gargantuan MY FIRST BELLS cassette (SST 32), an exhaustive road-trip readymade that smartly pulled together nearly everything these guy’s recorded pre-NICKELS and that I somehow stupidly and sadly allowed to slip through my fingers. I blame it on the format: convenient enough to fit in yr shirt pocket, but far easier to lose. It’s probably under the passenger side seat of a grey Chevy Chevette in some skanky junkyard at this very moment. Blah). Minutemen’s original releases are very distinct. While their sound was in constant flux they were also strict and thoughtful documentarians of their music and no-nonsense operators in the studio, the result being LPs and EPs that when lined up and played in something resembling chronological sequence present a thread of artistic progress that’s the equal of any rock band ever. And if you think THAT is hyperbole I simply ask you to shine a light on their betters. That said I don’t want to carp too loudly over how digitization can distort the beauty of a band’s evolution. Who’s to say that my approach to their sound is any more worthy than a sixteen year old skate rat pumping the band on IPod shuffle, anyway? Still, my passion for historical clarity burns.

THE PUNCH LINE is very much a punk rock record, eighteen songs in roughly fifteen minutes spinning at 45 RPM, and the overall hefty brevity is comparable to other get-it-over-and-done-with punk slabs from the same time period such as Circle Jerks’ GROUP SEX and Angry Samoans’ BACK FROM SAMOA (all three from Cali, I’ll add). The weight and shape of the sonics are quite different, of course, since Minutemen were squeezing out compact shards of what’s essentially a brutal and hyper punk/funk that continues to stand apart due to its solid minimalist tendencies, its sheer urgency, and its ultimate lack of egoist flash. They didn’t sound like anybody else, then or now, but this feat was achieved, as detailed above, through the absorption and consideration of precedent and the inspiration of their contemporaries. For instance, the music’s hooky minimalism took cues from the UK art-punk of Wire and marched in solidarity into the 1980s alongside fellow Californians Urinals (who’s “Ack Ack Ack” was covered by the ‘men). Certainly urgency and the avoidance of show-off moves aren’t uncommon traits in punk rock, but on this LP these qualities combine with the stridently political lyrical focus to attain a rare power. Where the words of so many punk bands are their least admirable quality (particularly as the ‘80s marched on), they were integral to what Minutemen were doing. They could say more with one song title than some bands could with an entire lyrical arsenal. THE PUNCH LINE shows them plumbing into the Beat-style word-smithing that later came to dominate their sound (moving away from the tyranny of the rhyme, but not forgetting that they were writing lyrics for instance), but at this early point they were still quite happy to embrace an edgy and well-considered didacticism, and you can feel as the record roars that the trio were fiercely proud to be political (a quality they never lost, in fact). And the ingrained influence of countless hours of pre-punk hard-rock listening (Blue Oyster Cult being the example the band most often championed) provides the record with both an amazing instrumental dexterity (attained through constant practice) and an unfailing balance between tight and loose, which for my ears is crucial due to the funk angle of the music (I’ll confess that when funk gets too tight it almost always loses me). Yet the dominance of punk in the total stew insures that they never succumb to hard rock’s excesses.

The idiosyncratic (though never obscure) nature of the Minutemen sound has gained them a strong following in the long term, but back in the ‘80s it caused many to hold the band at arm’s length: I often heard it spoken that they weren’t appropriately “punk” or “heavy” enough. I thought that sorta talk was crazy (natch), and I’m glad that hearing it has become less frequent than sightings of DRI muscle shirts. Faux Pas! The second hand vinyl of THE PUNCH LINE can’t be too hard to find or expensive when found, so if I’ve stirred yr interest, please don’t hesitate. It’s a very specific part of the Minutemen picture, and I contend that grappling with it alone will bring a sweet reward.