RANDOM FILM NOTES REDISCOVERED

I enjoyed Ridley Scott's Aliens prequel Prometheus, proposed as a first step in the franchise that would establish the beginnings of this sci-fi saga up to the point where we first meet the fabulous action-babe Ripley. Scott's return to the franchise, and to space operas in general, was a joy to behold, with great acting, stunning special effects, a fascinating premise and, yes, a general feeling of creepiness as the hoary warnings against corporate greed and attending evil are made tangible yet again. Not a perfect film, but the scale and power of the storytelling, albeit incomprehensible at times, made it an entertainment worth revisiting. Not so much for the follow-up effort, Alien:Covenant, again directed by Scott. Where Prometheus added some new twists to the Alien mythos, this new effort offers intriguing little ; it is a make – work project. We do discover the origins of the Xenomorph and are expected to marvel at their many manifestations , different kinds, shapes, purposes. But there is something dispirited about this film. There is no spectacle to speak of, no real wow factor, conditions not improved by the pacing, which is strangely led footed. Especially surprising for a director of Scott's caliber: an inconsistent director for quality, even his worse films had a great veneer and, most of , all moved well. Covenant shuffles
along.

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The movies that DC Comics have made so far in their efforts to establish their franchises in contrast to that of their competition, Marvel Comics. The uniform negative responses, to be sure, have their points that deserve to be discussed, but the wave of hate seems more a product of the internet's tendency to encourage an echo chamber effect; nervous fans, not sure of what they actually desire from a movie, suspend their critical faculties and dive head long into the noisy bull run of nay saying . Objections are over stated, insults are hurled, feelings are hurt. And still, I like what DC and Warner Brothers have done, for the most part. Not to get off on a longish defense of particular films, I will assert here that Zack Snyder is one of the few directors who gets the dynamism and flair of the graphic novel and produces resolutely beautiful and exciting action sequences, however dark and grim they may be . And, of course,, "Man of Steel" is a masterpiece, in my view. You can find my longer defense of that film elsewhere on this blog. The fact that “Wonder Woman” is presently at 94 percent critic approval on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes makes me smile. Director Patty Jenkins directs with a sure, firm and confident hand, efficiently and effectively establishing the WW mythology as it relates to a re-imagined Greek mythology, the origin story of the young girl who would become the eventual superhero, and the first adventure of Wonder Woman in full costume, in the WW 1 trenches, fighting with the British against the Germans, searching for her foe Ares,the God of War. It works remarkably well, I think. A wonderful cast featuring wonderful work from Chris Pine and Robin Wright. Gal Gadot as WW, a controversial casting when first announced, is excellent here. Athletic, naive, ironic, fierce in combat sequences and sweetly ironic in the comic parts, she turns in a star-making performance.

Active

FAST JABS:STONES, BYRDS, NEIL YOUNG'S "AFTER THE GOLDRUSH"

 

I’ve been a defender of the Stones’ late career work, admitting right off that nothing they can do will equal their best efforts of decades passed. However, the albums of more recent years have more quality than many cynics have let on. At this point, I have to evolve from my former stance that the Rolling Stones represent far less the idea that senior citizen rock musicians can still make credible rock and roll that can reflect a world view that took many decades to form. Instead, they have become an example of an institution completely irrelevant to anything that matters musically, socially, ironically. 

As more is being revealed to an aging audience and to a younger audience curious about the sort of dereliction their parents and grandparents might have indulged in youth, word is getting out that Jagger lived more on the edge than has been let on. He is portrayed as a pansexual satyr with a budget to afford his taste. This amounts to more of the old news that any dedicated listener already knows. Just as “Angry” are merely newer versions of the same riffs they deployed for decades. 

The upcoming album, Hackney Diamonds, is due to be released on October 20th, but the fact that the first single from it, "Angry"  resembles a tribute band more than anything else makes the impending release of the full album less exciting. I'm feeling just a bit of dread anticipating these elders coming around one more time, wondering how they can again make their usual riffs and tropes interesting once more.Although it does seem that they’ve had to remember how to be the Rolling Stones. In their attempt to remain relevant 23 years into the 21st century, they look kind of pathetic.

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"Eight Miles High by the Byrds, released in 1966, a brief but combustible mixture of Imagist lyrics, unusual time signatures that alternate between 5/4 and 4/4, jazz and raga overtones and guitarist Roger (née Jim) McGuinn's transcendent, Coltrane inspired solos. It's been argued that McGuinn was far out of his depth technically as he attempted the register-leaping dramatics of Coltrane's free-jazz period, but that pretty much misses the point and misses what the Byrds guitarist actually accomplished: on the twelve string Rickenbacker electric, the solo merges the open-ended flow of experimental jazz improvisation with an effective use of Ravi Shanker's raga-foundationed excursions.

It is rhythmically complex and unpredictable, and musically achieves that expansionist orientation of the most interesting rock music at the time. It may pale compared against the virtuoso furies embodied in 'Trane and Archie Shepp's work, but it is a masterpiece of rock guitar work, an experimental improvisation that set a standard for how far “out” a guitar solo could proceed beyond its blues foundation.

There were countless early experiments in mixing rock with other genres, specifically raga and jazz, and not a little hunt and peck improvisation happening during this period, the most successful efforts being the extended Bloomfield excursions on East West, Larry Coryell's invention of fusion method in the Free Spirits band, and some others, but "Eight Miles High" was a radio hit of a sort, ranking at 14 in the Billboard 100. It was banned from some stations because of the (too) obvious association with drugs, but where I was in Detroit, the tune was played much of the time on \ local AM and FM outlets. It was a surprise at the time, a song entirely unique and ahead of its time that stands as one of the artistically successful attempts at what would come to be termed fusion.

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Neil Young's sci-fi junkie lament "After the Goldrush" gets a harmonized rendition in this 1974 release. The lead vocal by Irene Hume reveals a slightly husky voice that characterizes the solo and chorus arrangement, with an appealing result that makes you think of a choir of Melanies. The power of Young's song is that it makes the whole idea of being a drug addict hallucinating in a bomb crater after a presumably nuclear apocalypse seem attractive, the perfect vehicle with which to compose stark imagery and espouse by implication what a waste the entirety of human history has been.

The undercurrent of this was that the only thing the narrator wanted from this life was love and bright, shining truth, which this catastrophe rudely made impossible. There was a vein of songwriting from Lou Reed, Joni Mitchell and the Rolling Stones that intentionally or not made drug use, addiction and just flat out being fucked- up an attractive , even morally superior state to be in; I can't speak to your experience, but I detect this song as being something of a scolding from Young to the parents of the angry young kids. "See what you made them do?!!"

Poetry and song lyrics make nothing happen, remember, that is nothing besides make listeners so inclined to feel momentarily nostalgic or even a bit guilty with how things turned out after the youthful years are spent. It allows for a momentary wallow before the citizenry presses on with family , bills, jobs they can't stand, which is another way of saying that Young's lyrics, intended as a warning and a message of spiritual importance, changed nothing in ways that counter culture utopians desired. Sing it, David Byrne, same as it ever was… .

The song is what it was always fated to be, a go-to song for a Classic Rock radio programmer. Prelude's syrupy harmonies bring a theme of ecological disaster and pharmed-out despair to the Starbucks, piped on, barely audible over the chatter and grinding of outside traffic. A perfect radio hit for the time, pleasant melody, depressed lyrics, alluring vocal craft.

IT'S ALL ABOUT CHOICES

 

Given the choice between listening to rock critics wax endlessly on garage-centric one-shot wonders who emerged from Decatur suburbs and wine critics swanning about a particular pour’s pretensions, bouquet, garish aftertaste, or the quality of the buzz it might give you, I would have to select the rock snobs, dreary as they might be or become after a duration.Rock and roll began as a legitimate grassroots alternative to the ossified white pop that had a stranglehold on post-forties pop music. Despite rock criticism’s sloven tendency toward self-fellatio, something honest, original, and artful might come through all that energy, anger, and quirkiness.Wine is merely a form of hooch. The sum of my aesthetic toward its qualitative states was whether it made me gag or went down the gullet without a fight. Art, subtlety, and self-expression had nothing to do with it. Wine was for getting a buzz, getting plastered, getting terrifically fucked up. In that sense, wine appreciation is democratic because alcoholism isn’t a respecter of race, class, gender, or sums of money one might have. The salient difference between the two is that rock and roll is something that sounds good when it is good, sober. Wine, after you quit drinking and stay sober, is just something you learn to live without and wonder how the fuck you spent so many years being wrong for so long about what a great thing spirits were to one’s quality of life.

Typing Lesson 3

Another typing lesson begins, by which I mean that it's not really a typing lesson I'm talking about, but rather an exercise to become re-acquainted with the habit of mind and task to sit at the keyboard and fill a computer screen full of words that form coherent sentences. So far, this is coherent, but it's also directionless, the point exactly of these alleged typing lessons. This places me in the odd spot of reading what I've composed so far--” composed” sounds too fine a word to apply to what I'm doing, as it suggests forethought and creation based on an actual idea, preferably new, rather than a stringing together of tropes sticky with too much varnish--as if I were the critic surveying the mess with a caustic and condemning eye. So far, so good, so far as grammatical and syntactical work goes. The question of purpose remains, however, and the sad fact of this very moment is that I need to log off and go elsewhere into the city and so leave this impractical chattering with myself in abeyance. Another potential masterpiece thwarted. But quickly, the aim of this paragraph, if any? It's a  warm up exercise for a thousand- word diatribe I will intensely cast forth anon. Stay tuned and hug your cat.

Typing lesson 2

 

Here we are again, gathered in a paragraph next to a black and white photograph of a combination check-cashing service and liquor store in the testier blocks of the beach area, writing words to a digital page only for the sake of doing something sublimely inane when inspiration is in brief supply and a sentence is only as powerful as the fingers that rattled off the nonsense. Gathered together for no good purpose, but who is the commander who informs us what the good purpose is? Here we are again in the same room at the same desk with the same plastic coffee can filled halfway with bad pennies no one has loved. In the days of my youth, we used to drive from Michigan to Martinsville, Virginia to visit our southern cousins on my mom’s side of the family. In the recollection, I remember a house in a wooded area that was mountainous to an extent, and behind my grandmother’s abode was a canyon and railroad tracks that were still active on the transportation schedules. I remember seeing boxcars and passenger cars racing past at the bottom of the ravine, a blur partially obscured by thick bramble, bushes, tree branches in full leafy glory. Cut to a drive back home to a Detroit suburb, a straight, flat highway that is wide, occasionally curving around bends and ducking under bridges, a flat stretch without end under a steel grey sky and clouds the color of white cotton that soaked up a streak of black coffee. The radio was blaring news of the war and the newspaper strike between pitchmen screaming about smashing prices and the opening bars of a Doors song before Mom turned off the radio and Dad began to sing “I Love Paris” as he tapped a beat on the steering wheel and a big grin and an interstellar glint came to his eye. The stained clouds gave the cars their burden, a hard rain and punishing wind blew cascades of water across the road that looked like small California waves. My brother and sister next to me in the back seat while I claimed my spot by the rear window. Farmhouses, abandoned tractors hurried by, factories hid behind thick groves of pine trees. Mom lit another cigarette. My sister coughed and my brother farted, a wild, rasping, snorting sound. “I love Paris in the evening…when it’s raining…” my father sang. My mother’s face was obscured by grey smoke, but she began to sing along with him. Their harmony was grating and monotonous and the highway was straight and the sky was large and filled with clouds and fleeting streaks of lightning in the distance terrorizing farm animals or the counterman at a desolate gas station and snack bar just off the expressway exit.

ROBBIE ROBERTSON, RIP: Lead guitarist and songwriter for The Band

 

Robbie Robertson was a rare bird, and it’s not likely we’ll see a comparable talent again in most of our lifetimes. As a writer, he drew from a deep and flavorful stream of musical styles–field holler work songs, country blues, gospel, old-time jazz with hints of ragtime syncopation, country and western, classic rhythm and blues, and rock and roll–and shared with his splendid Band members the ability to cogently blend the styles into an unaffected, appealing organic sound. It’s been said before, but his best songs seemed beyond era, as Robertson could have written them one hundred years ago or two weeks ago. 

They were timeless, evocative, and put one in the center of what was a vividly and deftly portrayed idea of the American South, no less so than Faulkner or Carson McCullers. His lyrics, as well, were dually colloquial and surreal, presented in different guises of melancholy, a yearning for an idealized past, or which displayed an absurdist wit. The Weight is the prize example of Robertson’s talents–a rolling piano figure never far from gospel roots, the narrative details the oddness of small-town life and provides details that suggest hallucinations of religious fervor, incest, hidden insanity. It has the power of a storyboard from which a great novel or grand motion picture can be made. One can set up a half dozen songs by the late songwriter and notice a sublime variety of situations and emotional conflict, and notice Robertson's sure-handed use of first-person narrative, in a tone where someone was speaking about the contradictory elements of their life and how, somehow, the same said narrator was applying their shoulder to the wheel all the same despite the crushing circumstances that present little likelihood of abating. 

Aspirations, love, better fortunes, happier and more fulfilling years past, Robertson's tales were of the people who fell between the cracks when good times turned ill; often enough it seemed the only reason anyone of the frequently tragic figures in the songs carry on in the grim landscape not through hope or the illusion thereof, but from memory, a nostalgia for days when existence had meaning and a personal refusal to finally die a cipher in the bleak landscape. Robertson was an artist of great and delicate talents that was a large part of why The Band is one of the greatest bands of the rock and roll era. An aspect of Robertson's years ago, that his interest was in characters who were from small towns but who had full lives and palpable experiences, speaking in their unique voices in unpretentious language that suggested full histories without an excess of grandstanding detail. His songs were monologues of a sort and were economical in the way people tend to be when recollecting the joys or heartbreaks of the lives they've lived. Robertson had a brilliance for a character sketch ; even his wordiest songs are spare, free of mood killing literary language. He could take himself out of the narrative and let his passion and concern for Southern lives come across in masterfully understated testimonials:in his best songs are a slate of first-person narrative ambiguities that can be seen as an ongoing sequence of monologues as cleanly expressed and moving as the voices rising from  beneath the tombstones in Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology. 

His art is, of course, supplemented to no end by the superb contributions of his band mates--Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, Rick Danko, Levon Helm-- and their astounding ability to incorporate so many hard-to-assimiliate musical genres in material that made a merging of gospel, old school blues, country music and ragtime into a natural and organic expression of musical emotion are the sort of things we can study for years to come, and there will likely remain debates as to the size of the contributions the other members made to the songwriting, but for the meantime I am content to acknowledge the profundity of Robertson's contributions

Some August Beach Reading

Costello is wonderful at the heightened awareness in the ways he presents his details, his comic touches, A beautiful agent who still receives alimony checks from her smitten ex-husband carries on a correspondence with him via the memo line of the checks, where he continually writes "come back to me". She writes "No, never" each time, deposits the check, knowing that her ex will see the reply when he receives the canceled checks. The book is full of these fine touches. We have a sense that it's the small things, the small frustrations as much as the larger disasters that conspire against our happiness. A fine book. First, this author isn't to be confused with another fiction writer named Mark Costello, who is the author of two brilliant collections of short stories called The Murphy Stories and Middle Murphy. Those books, a series of related tales involving the title character, is a sort of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for a generation growing up in Illinois, and it is one of the most beautifully written sagas of dysfunction, alcoholism, and despair I've ever come across. This Costello does things with the language that take up where prime period John Cheever or John Updike left off and offer up a virtuoso prose only a handful of lyric writers achieve; it is the brilliance and beauty of the writing that makes the unrelieved depressive atmosphere of the two books transcend their grimness. The prose in these two books demonstrates the sloppier pretender Rick Moody cannot help but seem. Buy these books and experience a devastating joy.

The other mark Costello, a younger writer, has equal genius but a different approach to the world, and his novel Big If is perfect, and what makes it works is that Costello accomplishes the dual difficulty of handing us a small town/suburban comedy the likes of John Cheever would have admired. The other is with the rich detailing of the other secret service agents who work with Vi Asplund. There is something of a domestic comedy seamlessly interwoven with a skewed Washington thriller, with the elements of each spilling over and coloring the underlying foundations of both. In the first part of the novel, we have an atheist Republican insurance investigator who has a habit of crossing out the "God" in the "In God We Trust" inscription on all his paper money, replacing the offending word with "us". Vi, years later, winds up in a job where "in us we trust" is the operating rational, as she and her fellow agents strive to protect their protected from the happenstance of crowds, acting out on intricate theories and assumptions that can only be tested in the field. 

The Other Side of the Mountain by Michael Bernanos 

Easily one of the strangest and most spellbinding novels I've read in a lifetime of reading the same said books, this short novella begins as a sea adventure, a young man who signs on to a ship's crew as a cabin boy. Things ago awry before long once the trip commences, and the tale soon turns into a horror story, depraved to the least of all hope. The ship sinks, and the boy and the ship's cook wind up marooned on an uncharted island, where nothing is where it seems. It turns into a horror fantasy at this point, the island being a malevolent intelligence, a throbbing, menacing organism. The story becomes about humanity can persevere and have its virtues surmount the evil in its presence, known and metaphysical. It's hard for me to imagine that Damon Lindelof and J.J.Abrams didn't have this tense, lyric and succinct thriller in mind when he was developing their Lost television series. This book continues to make me ponder its moral perplexity. 

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. A healthy man goes to visit a friend who is in a mountain-based sanitarium and winds up staying in the sanitarium for seven years. During the years that follow, we witness a character's spiritual and philosophical change and come to a sense of life that eludes the overly cerebral. Thomas Mann is a magnificent writer, and this is easily one of the truly great novels of the 20th century.

Crackpots by Sara PritchardBrief, beautifully written book about an awkward young girl being raised by an eccentric family. Note that there is no child abuse or other hot button stuff engineered in to make the book appeal to the Oprah book clubs, just a humorous and bittersweet novel of a girl, beset with any number of glum circumstances and embarrassments, maturing to a resilient adult with soft irony that gets her through the day. Pritchard is especially fine as prose stylist.

Comments from the listening booth

 

The harmonies of the fabled Tremeloes stood out in a crowded field of 60s Brit Pop bands who were notable for their vocal arrangements. As we see here, the harmonies decorate, embellish, and enhance the fetching melody with colors , textures and tones of of the tongue that could have been easily transposed, I would guess, to regular instruments. Solo voice subtly joined by a chorus, combined harmonies seamlessly sliding up the scale rather than abruptly switching keyes. I overstate the case, perhaps, but I've always found their performance of this tune stunning.

Brit-pop in the 60s was a wonderland of sterling harmonies and the Hollies, Graham Nash edition, were champions at musical hooks and vocal synchronization. This punchy little masterpiece grabbed me right away back when I was but a whelp, especially the chorus, a vocal traffic jam of different melody lines stacked atop one another, going in different directions, clashing and dissonant and structurally effective, the brief miasma brought together again with Nash's high note at the end.

Neil Young's sci-fi junkie lament 'After the Goldrush" gets a harmonized rendition in this 1974 release. The lead vocal by Irene Hume reveals a slightly husky voice that characterizes the solo and chorus arrangement, with an appealing result that makes you think of a choir of Melanies . A perfect radio hit for the time, pleasant melody, depressed lyrics, alluring vocal craft.

John Lennonhad a grudge against bandmate Paul , a resentment he dutifully burnished until it was shiny like an acrylic turd, a brown and gleeming chuck of ill will. Of course
he wrote a song about it , laying everything out except Sir McCartney's name. As an issue of disrespect, it's in a class by itself, but the howler of this whole enterprise centers around the most quoted lyric, "...the only thing you did was yesterday..." The longer view of the Beatles reveals PM's contributions to the creative surges was, in fact, profound, at which point it makes me consider the idea that McCartney would likely have been a pop star of some sort without Lennon. Lennon, always a raw dog who improved vastly as a tunesmith , singer and lyricist due to his association with McCartney, would likely have had a rougher go of it.

HORTON PLAZA AS IT WAS

 

In future years, the younger folks might be nostalgic as they reminisce about the supposed fun and convenience of Horton Plaza before it eventually became a dead mall now being repurposed. The truth of the matter is that even in its prime, it was an alienated space, full of architectural distractions, detours, and dead ends that seemed designed to magnify your unease and increase your desire to escape your sense of uselessness by exhausting your credit limit and begging creditors for an increase in your credit line. I worked there for several years as a bookseller and made my number one spot to see new movies, and over time you couldn't help by note the waning numbers of people coming to the Plaza, the number of stores advertising off-Holiday Sales with things up to 70 percent off, the closing of stores and the draping of butcher paper over the display windows with a sad sign promising a new retailer coming in soon, watching the calendar pages fly away and noting again the stores were still vacant and that more stores had joined them, that Horton Plaza had become an empty series of angular paths, walkways, bridges to more locked up storefronts, a structural case of architectural schizophrenia where all the eaves, overhangs, arches and such unusual twists cast deep and despairing shadows over the dead concrete few have reason to walk. Let's add here that Horton Plaza is having the finishing touches on a very extensive and expensive reconstruction, with the leviathan being converted to a space intended to attract tech companies with a smaller contingent of retail shops and eateries to placate tourists and dedicated downtowners. How that plays out is up in the air, as there are no facts about the future. I try to be optimistic about the future of the center, but failing to find a workable and effective method to house the many homeless currently on the city streets, I can't help but think that we're setting ourselves up for a bitter and expensive failure.

TURN DOWN THAT CRAP

 Irony isn't dead. In  fact, it's a living yet intangible part of the odd vibes that abound after the disasters of the worst human assumptions being acted upon. It very much feels like some smirking ghost at the side of the road laughing at us while we scratch our heads wondering what the hell happened to our best laid plans. Occasionally, it takes decades for some ironies to become revealed, noticed, observed, as in what, I think, was some of a barely noted reversal of mainstream attitudes about the right and wrong ways of making music. In the very  early Sixties, around the time of the British Invasion , I remember all sorts of cartoons and jokes about citizens and music fans attempting to commit suicide when they were exposed to the vocals styles of Jagger, Dylan, or a good number of gruff, nasally singers in the pop world. I remember the Rolling Stones appearance on the old Hollywood Palace variety show on ABC in 1964.

Hosted by Dean Martin, who was either entirely drunk and on his fourth sheet to the wind or doing a brilliant impersonation of a stumbling sot, The Stones performed their songs for the first time to an American tv audience , an historic event enhanced by Martin's slurred insults to the British band. There was a trampoline act at mid show, I remember, a circus act that had a leotard clad family doing impressive tricks of the bouncing variety. When they were done, Martin came on stage again and announced that the elder man in the troupe was the father of the Rolling Stones and had been trying to kill himself with this trampoline act for years. That was a real gasser. Why the hate, and the answer was obvious. The Stones were reintroducing America to a native art, black music, that it had all but forgotten about and found the renditions by the Rolling Stones of classic blues and soul songs alien, offensive, immoral and dangerous.  T'werent good singing and offensive to the idea of music! It wasn't even music. 

Somewhere along the line all the stoned hippies and rebellious teens grew up, got jobs, had families, and in effect became both their parents and THE MAN , and the same gag now substitutes MOR performers like Dion, Michael Bolton, Michael McDonald, and some others for the old guard. The folks can certainly sing , sing, but the kind of music they make is antithetical to the true liberating and expressive poetry of what REAL music is . Authenticity as the criteria for judgement (an ever vague and elusive concept) has advanced over technical competence and romantically "pretty" offerings. I have had this debate on both sides over the decades, first with my parents, aunts, and uncles and school teachers defending Dylan's music and especially his singing, and through the decades, arguing with young people that boy bands, pop tunesters like Dion, and slow jam funk were criminally commercial junk that was without conviction or soul .

I AM TIRED OF DRYING THE CAT BY HAND

Barry Alfonso In Santee, “drying the cat by hand” means taking a single woman out to dinner, saying flattering things to her, picking up the check and then giving her the phone number of your brother-in-law, I understand.

Ted Burke It has been said that “drying the cat” means mispronouncing the names of jazz musicians like Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman in a Telegraph Avenue methadone clinic. “Drying the Cat By Hand” is a variation heard in the Tenderloin and up to North Beach, meaning that you announce to Amiri Baraka that Boots Randolph played better sax than Coltrane or Shorter.

Barry Alfonso I've also heard that it is a derivation of the old blues expression “shave 'em dry," meaning to cut off the head of a glass of beer with a straight razor before attacking someone in the solar plexus over a Stetson hat.

Ted Burke I've heard tell of that as well, and it makes me wonder if that is related to the practice of ordering a shot and beer and a dry towel twisted into a rat tail and snapped cruelly to the back of the drinker's bare neck by everyone in the bar named either "Earl" or "Ondine".

Barry Alfonso A lot of this has been lost and confused over the years, I suspect—a “dry cat” used to be slang for a guy with a flat top and bad dandruff. It was a custom to rub scalps like that for luck before a dice game or before rubbing spices into a jerk chicken leg, or both. It also relates to martinis and obscene gestures while sinking a putt.

Ted Burke There was the habit among dairy farmers of rubbing their bovines with mewing kittens for no real reason; "drying the cow" became "drying the cat" over time, an understandable conflation, and the implication of the phrase is that one is standing around irritating another living creature for no good reason. But since when does anyone need a good reason to irritate someone?

6 hours ago ·

Barry Alfonso That's right! Now I remember. Will Rogers did a bit about this and in fact got arrested in Tulsa for demonstrating how it was done. There's a famous photo of Junior Samples from Hee Haw "drying the cat by hand" behind Stringbean's back when he thought the cameras were off.

6 hours ago ·

Ted Burke *Absolutely! This in turn inspired Pynchon's famous opening line of his magnum opus 'The Crying of Litter Box 29". "A dry cat came screamng across the sky..."

5 hours ago ·

Barry Alfonso Right, that was a literary in-joke for many years standing. Hemingway took a swing at Frank Yerby after he wrote that Papa had been drying the cat with both hands for years...

5 hours ago ·

Ted Burke On a related note, Norman Mailer misunderstood Russell Kirk when he announced that what really wanted was a "cat dried by hand". Mailer took this to be a translation of Parsian street slang used among working girls meaning that the person who uttered the phrase was in desperate need of being buggered, but that lacked the needed ticket for admission.Mailer told Kirk that he had his ticket "right here" and demanded Kirk "give up the cat." William Buckley was amused by the whole thing and had Mailer on his TV show several times.

Barry Alfonso Well, I do remember Gore Vidal giving Buckley the hairy eyeball on TV during the '68 Democratic convention and saying, "You really are drying the cat by hand a little hard tonight, old boy" while Buckley let something slip that Al Gore was a monster on the congas at a nephew's confirmation party . Seems that the band turned out to be GWAR who suddenly became a Santana cover band. Nothing was the same from then on, though the quality of the monotony hadn't changed a bit.

Typing lesson

 

Some years ago, that is, many years ago when I started this blog, I had the intention of writing an annual report on the state of my sobriety as each anniversary came and went. Something like a report card, a progress report, a mild and very generalized confession of mistakes, bad ideas, bad acts and the attempts to repair whatever damage I caused by making decisions on my wants (not needs) and try to extract a lesson that might be learned from the past year's rash action. That was the idea, but when it came down to it, even though I love to write, and I love to talk and that I love to refer to myself quite a bit in the paragraphs I construct, confession isn't my game, memoirs are not my jam. In the grand scheme of things, my self referencing needs to be anchored to topics that interest me or are the absolute center of my reason to push on another day--literature, films, movies, sex, the Good Fight against Bad People, poetry, always poetry. Maybe when I get to be 73 I'll be moved to spill the beans on a life that's been interfered with by an odd combination of bad self-esteem and arrogance of the first rank. I just turned 71 yesterday, and today I am supposedly celebrating 36 years of continuous sobriety, so that gives me a couple of turns around the sun to evolve into my next form, a humble narcissist, with the product being a long and adjective choked recollection of all the small incidents that leads us up to the current period, sometime in the future, when either everything or nothing is changed.

RECOVERY OF A BASER NATURE

 So in the nineties I was in a men's intimacy group, a number of sober guys who wanted to share personal matters, issues, confliction, and compulsions with other sober men on level much deeper and more personal than what offer

up at a standard AA meeting. So this fellow, an alcohol treatment counselor ironically, had just finished a very long monologue on his sexual hangups, with a good number of side trips  through other subjects that managed to be both greasy and banal, and when he stopped talking, the rest of us rose from our seats, chairs, the two sofas that were crammed in this studio apartment . So this fellow from South Oakland , whose apartment it happened to be, had TV set hooked up to a VHS player, and a lone, unmarked cassette laying on top of it. 

"Let's  TAKE A BREAK AND RELAX, FELLAS." So the guy from South Oakland grabbed the cassette and shoved into the video player. So then the from treatment with the curated sexual hangups looked up to the screen. So then you could nearly hear his jaw drop. Imagine a rusty creak, a loud , rasping scrape of severely oxidized metal. 

Porn stars flashed on the tv screen, wherein guys in seventies porn mustaches were putting their engorged presences anywhere the actresses would allow. Mod Squad music, cheesey fuzz- tone guitars and Farfisa fantasias, poured from the TV's tinny speaker. 

"Yeah" Mr.South Oakland muttered,"Get that, hit that, fug, this is the stuff..." The room filled  with cigar smoke and reeked of coffee left on the burner too long as both porn movies and comatose confessions of sexual impropriety filled the room.

Pablomatic for the people

 

Gadfly Patrick Marlborough offered something of a defense of Australian quasi-comedian Hannah Gadsby's critical and creaky post-feminist takedown of Picasso with a piece claiming to detail what Americans are missing about her show. It's because Americans are unfamiliar with the Australian vernacular, goes the article's claim. You might expect a brief linguistics lecture to be offered here, since it couldn't be anything as obvious that maybe Gadsby isn't really all that funny. 

It's clear from the outset that Gadsby's has no love for the artist, and is committed to debunking his myth and exposing his misogyny with a late comer's vigor. (I seem to remember quite a few books and magazine articles about Picasso over the decades that hanged him in effigy for being a brute and all-purpose lout, but no matter). If enough people “miss” what an artist is trying to do or attempting to tell us / teach us/ lecture us about, and if it takes a nervously apologetic essay in a major online platform to direct us to the wisdom that was waiting for us, it's a safe bet the artist flubbed the chance to do anything interesting at. 

It's impossible for every misunderstood artist to be an anonymous genius. The odds are not good for even most of them to be any good as visual artists.  The more I think about, it seems to be the case that most artists striving to make big statements in abstract fashion are rather muddle-headed fools who have the talent, none of the less, to secure grant money to fund their projects and pay their rent. Her worst sin, it appears, is the smug obviousness of what she's up to with Picasso. Naming this project with the anemic and obvious pun “Pablo-Matic” previews a level of banality that is ironically break—taking. Is this comedy? Criticism? Post-feminist grave digging? Is this any sort of attempt to get us to see Picasso differently through a specifically focused lens? It is none of these things. Worse, it's none of the things in any interesting way. It's a slight shrug of the shoulder, a flat punchline, a cocked head, a side glance, another shrug, another try at irony.  All gesture, no ideas. 

Succession ends it.

 

At last, we come to the absolute end of HBO's family / business drama Succession and for that, ending all storylines after the series' fourth season, is a favor that cannot be understated. Showtime's business fiction Billions, coming soon for a seventh season, has gone from a guilty pleasure where a viewer of average income can observe fictional billionaires behaving as biblical swine would, which is badly, immorally, narcissistic. But what should have stopped at a fourth or perhaps a fifth season has sped by, all the signs that it was time to start wrapping things up. The show concerns how powerful people in high-level law enforcement offices and in high stakes financial companies gain, lose and regain advantage in scenarios that have lost any sort of aspect of the thrill of it all. So, here comes season 7. With any luck, it will be the final year, albeit two seasons too late. The show was already a live action cartoon, an enjoyable one, but the plot points it's staked out for its next go round will be the kind of chronic sensationalism Showtime habitually extends beyond the entertainment value. 

For Succession, it's obvious that they've preferred tragedy to mean-spirited slapstick, and it is clear that the character arcs set out by the writers have led us through these four seasons to a situation that is painfully, obviously without resolution: what I'll say is that despite the wealth of these characters, it's a sure bet among viewers that it won't end well by the time one makes their way to the movie length final episode of Season 4. This is a collective tragedy, not an individual one, the fatal flaw being that the three main siblings have spent all the seasons trying to please a cruel father, even after Logan’s problem-causing death. Either they were trying to curry favor with him while he lived and secure control of the corporate structure after his eventual parting, or they were setting out to act in ways they thought Logan would approve of after his death rattle. Even with nominal control of the corporation as the deal was pending with GoJo, they could not act as Logan did, which was brutally and unapologetically decisive. Ken, Shiv and Roman were full of destructive ambivalence that prevented the trio from acting as a unified team of legacy owners or as individual agents able to devise strategy, implement plans, effectively see situations clearly, for what they were and not as they wished they were. I have a fondness for watching talented actors portray well-developed jerks, and I genuinely appreciated how skillfully the writers and show runners crafted a world of wealth, power, and outrageous privilege, populated by self-obsessed characters oblivious to the realities of everyday life. The exploration of themes such as generational cycles of abuse and the pervasive grip of collective narcissism was striking, particularly in the intensely articulated squabbles between the siblings and the peripheral characters. It became evident that they were attributing their problems to a world that they believed existed solely to cater to their corrosive whims and caprices.

What struck me as remarkable was the fact that none of the main characters ever walked the streets of the cities they inhabited, nor did they drive cars. Instead, they flew to different cities and countries on private jets, were chauffeured in tinted limousines to hotels, residences, or corporate offices, all while remaining completely detached from the local population. The way they treated each other was abhorrent, obscene, rude, brutal, and at times even psychotic. It was uncomfortable to witness, yet undeniably presented in a splendid and occasionally brilliant manner, revealing the depths of their pettiness and vanity and showcasing their irredeemable nature. In a very contemporary sense, this series can be considered a tragedy. It lacks a hero with a fatal flaw or a central character who possesses good intentions for the world but believes themselves to be the sole savior of the universe. Instead, it is saturated with excessive and toxic pride, embodied by a group of deluded and inept individuals. The presence of hubris is an essential aspect of the tragedy genre, and it becomes evident that the Universe, in some way, senses the disruption caused by the hubris and acts to restore balance. This often leads to a tragic end for the protagonist, who meets their fate through circumstances they have themselves created.

SHORT NOTES ON OLD ALBUMS: Larry Coryell, Michael Urbaniak, Dave Holland , Miles Davis, Sonny Stitt, The Who

This is a concert video of the late jazz guitar master Larry Coryell and the amazing Polish jazz-fusion violinist, originally released on VHS I believe, that hasn't been released as a stand-alone disc. I pray someone will secure the rights and make it available. Coryell was a member of the original Super Guitar Trio with John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucia, and though his playing was frequently brilliant, he was often hobbled with flubs and miscues; it became obvious that LC's dependence on drugs and hooch lessened his skills, and he was replaced by the ever able Al diMeola. Coryell got clean and sober in 1981 and this effort, recorded in 1982, shows the difference. It's a remarkable performance, thanks in major portions to Urbaniak, whose skills as an improviser are second to none; his unstitched combining of styles ranging from Grapelli through Ponty and his mastery of idiom, technique and tonal nuance gives LC the colorful contrast. Urbaniak's impromptus are swift and melodic and, as with Coryell, seem without end in the configurations his long lines of notes form.  He has a bass player's instincts as well, and supports  Coryell's ultra-virtuoso fantasias. Coryell at this time seems like a man with something to prove, and here he demonstrates his point in spades.

__________________

By the 90s, I was listening to jazz almost exclusively, in addition to works by old rock heroes who were still recording at the time. It was a great decade for forward reaching jazz. A favorite was Dave Holland's album Extensions, 1990, highlighting the limitless improvisational talents of the assembled band, Steve Coleman (sax), Kevin Eubanks (guitar), Marvin Smith (drums) and Holland on bass. The compositions, two a piece by Coleman, Eubanks, and Holland, are vibrant and tonally rich launching points for extending forays and exchanges of ideas. Coleman is especially superb with his ability to offer packed choruses and place the lines in directions you don't expect. Eubanks is a revelation, as I had only known him until this record as the leader of Jay Leno's TV band, where he seemed a willing sort to be the sidekick. He is a fiery guitarist, however, and serves up an unexpectedly fierce and fusiony onslaught of well amped and distorted ideas. The work of Holland Smith throughout has a malleable and organic pulse that makes this session swing, rock, soar and sooth all at once. A remarkable record.

___________________

Trumpeter Miles Davis is known as a man with great taste to highlight the work of great sax players in his bands--Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Sam Rivers, Sonny Rollins. Add Sonny Stitt. Often derided as a knock-off of Charlie Parker, an grossly unfair charge, Stitt is shown here as lyrically expressive, technically sublime and engagingly melodic improviser for establishes his ideas of bebop chromaticism to the music's superb body of energy. Davis, in fine form here with his brief statements, quick , surgically inserted note clusters and his pure, nearly vibratoless tone --not to mention his genius use of space between his solos--has made it a working habit to pare his own minimalist expressiveness against busier second voices like Coltrane and later John McLaughlin. With his band, with peerless support from alto and tenor saxophones, Wynton Kelly, piano, Paul Chambers, bass, and Jimmy Cobb, drums--we have Stitt in that position. His choruses are choice, crowded but not crowding. Recorded sometime during the 1960s, according to some vague notes on the CD.

___________

The Who's first two-record rock opera Tommy,1969, is a masterpiece of managing to tell a delicately elliptical story through multiple voices and still rock proudly. It's Pete Townshend at this peak as a songwriter, as he puts forth selections in a variety of deftly handled styles. The feeling that this work is for all time was cemented in 1992 when the LaJolla Playhouse debuted The Who's Tommy as a live action theater production. Imagined and directed by eccentric director Des McAnuff, the production was engagingly flashy , and effective, but the smartest decision was to not flesh out, to "fill in" the vaguer gaps on the album's narrative with yet more narrative in the form of voice over or in spoken, not sung dialogue. They essential produced the album everyone was familiar. The musical arrangements matched the instrumentation of the original release, which added to the excitement of the live experience. So what else for the genius of Pete Townshend to follow? Oddly, strangely, he and the Who brought us Quadrophrenia, a double disc that was everything Tommy wasn't, which was humorless, musically monotonous, self-serious, muddled in concept and story telling, grandiose, pretentious. I seem to be a chorus of one with this. Here's a longish rant about that album from a few years ago , also on this blog.

a note on "Tarantula"

 

Dylan is a word slinger to be, maybe a genuine poet during some parts of his oeuvre. Still, he is not a writer, not as we know the word, a craftsman, an artist, a professional who makes sentences that start somewhere and set the tone for the sentence that follows. That is, writers, write things that make sense in some respect, as in you understand clearly the thing being described, or that you understand it more abstractly and realize that the writer is undertaking a task that tries to deal with several things--philosophical notions, contradictory arguments, overlapping historical data --and bringing a coherent framework to understand complex matters, or at least come away with a sense of what the writer is getting at.

Even Dylan's wildest lyrics, from Desolation Row to his more recent brilliance noteworthy Rough and Rowdy Ways: surreal or nonsensical as the stanzas may be, the line limits and the need to rhyme imposed restrictions on Dylan's musings. He needed to wrap up his investigations into his more obscure imaginings. He gave you something to talk about. Tarantula was written on the road, in hotel rooms, on tour, rattled off in high doses of speed, and maybe other drugs too inane to bother talking about, and it indeed reads like it, snub-nosed Burroughs, Kerouac without the jivey swing. Some parts make you laugh, some good lines abound. Yet, it suffers in that readers wanted their hero, the poet of their generation, to write a genuinely good of poetry or some such thing, with true believers tying themselves in self-revealing knots to defend the book that is interesting as an artifact to the historical fact of Dylan's fame and influence and not much else. There is a part I like, effective as poetry, a bit of self-awareness that shows that Dylan realizes that his persona is false, a conspiracy between himself and the major media, and that he might have to account for the construction somewhere in the future of the whole matter.

Tarantula, an experimental prose poetry collection Dylan wrote between 1965 and 1966, wasn’t intended for publication, but its existence became an underground legend, and bootleg editions began to circulate. Tarantula was finally printed in 1971. The book wasn’t a coherent thesis but rather reflected Dylan’s method and influences, which characterized his most baroque and lyrics, similar in style to the “cut up” technique fashioned by William Burroughs in his novels Naked Lunch and The Wild Boys: a major transgression against grammar and punctuation and notions of continuity, rough-hewn character sketches, in jokes, odd conflations of vernaculars that constitute Dylan’s most hallucinogenic writing. Although there are some striking and evocative tributes to Aretha Franklin, it remains a head scratcher even for the most faithful of his flock. This lane-changing collection of idiomatic invention and deconstruction is, if nothing else, an odd and sometimes exhilarating landmark in on the Dylan bookshelf.

ANOTHER BURKE , ANOTHER SARCASTIC VOICE

Honestly, I love critics who are smart and love the sound of their prose so much that they soak their subject in overripe, purplish grandiloquence, which makes getting to their usually inane insights a fun adventure in well-managed if excessively mannered evaluations of popular culture. The present example is the photograph accompanying his piece, a review of an Elvis Presley album by a G.C. Burke, no relation, in the May 1957 issue of High-Fidelity magazine. (My thanks to music writer Mark Miller, who posted this intriguing specimen in a Facebook group dedicated to music journalism.)

Perhaps not so oddly, I feel some kinship with Mr. Burke and wonder if he’s a distant and likely belated relation. I read John Simon for years in New York Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and The National Review, and often marveled at how a man of such obvious erudition and flawless prose ability could be so magnificently elegant in expressing amazingly pedestrian opinions of books, plays, films, and movies. His vitriol couldn’t elevate his sour takes on the arts from the routinely knee-jerk reaction. I wager that Simon’s vocabulary and acerbic virtuosity buffaloed his readers and editors with the flashy pyrotechnics of his word-slinging; what I thought of as Simon’s conspicuous ineptitude as a critic of cultural expression was summarily overlooked.

Burke obviously wants to consider himself a public intellectual, a mission much greater than being a mere record reviewer, and here attempts to pigeonhole the ill-making cultural habits of the times that are spoiling the rest of us. Sophistry itself, this amateur sociology and such, but what fun it is to read a smart person use every weapon in his arsenal to swat a fly. But again, honestly, quite honestly, quite vainly, G.C. Burke’s makes me think that those of us sharing the last Irish-borne surname share a genetic fascination for padded hyperbole. (Forgive me my indulgence if I’ve elevated myself to the likes of Edmund and Kenneth Burke, genius scribblers both.) Obviously, it would seem, that I’m inspired to indulge my verbal excesses after reading G.C. Burke’s energized dalliance with the philosophical broadside. Perhaps I can find a collection of his further thrashings of pop musicians of his time and become insufferable myself.

Nina Simone Deserved Better

 

Watched the controversial film Nina , a 2016 production written and directed by Cynthia Mort and starring Zoe Saldaña as the brilliant and troubled pianist/vocalist/songwriter and civil rights activist Nina Simone. The main bit of controversy was the casting for the title role, emphasizing that Saldana is "too pretty" and too light skinned to portray the iconic Simone, a nearly forgotten artist who has had interest in her career revived due to a fine recent documentary, Nina Simone:What Happened? .The charges seem trivial, but the game Saldana underwent the indignity of having to appear, literally, in black face to have her resemble the dark-skinned Simone more closely. She looks ridiculous, as if she were showing up for a minstrel show audition. The film itself is an impressionist mess, going back and forth in time, rummaging distractedly through events in Simone's whirlwind life, never really finding a set of experiences a tangible, sympathetic character might emerge. No one really seems to believe in what they're doing, which is a shame. Simone deserved a much better telling of her story.

Birthdays are fatal

Last February, comedian Lauren Vinopal proposed in Slate that we lower the critical mass of stress and anxiety of our time by abolishing birthdays. You know the drill, I gather, that the ritualized marking of another year of life is a "trigger" for many, too many because it serves as a brutal reminder of how little we've accomplished in our time so far on the planet. And getting older and closer to your last birthday instead of your first one adds another burden to one's sense of the failure they think they've been in the time they've been allotted so far. Ah, triggers, nasty things to be avoided, lest our feelings get hurt, and psychic wounds drive us to further paranoid isolation. Avoiding stressful ideas, words, issues in daily affairs seems a dubious cure, though. Any one of a million things can be "triggers" for increased depression, anxiety and, yes, suicide. 

Obsessed avoidance of triggers just appears to create more triggers, an odd self-fulfilling prophecy. Existence can be said as one sustained trigger, a never-ending stimulant on the nerves that alerts you to the need that there are matters in the world around you that need to be contended with. However, banning birthdays to alleviate these wretched conditions won't help anyone who truly suffers; life is one massive trigger, as such, for creating situations the emotionally fragile will react poorly to. Holidays, movies, comic books, 24 hour news channels, porn, drugs, alcohol, New Age sophistry, white supremacists, featherbedding politicians, fashion models, tall buildings, improperly set tableware, smooth jazz, raging bebop, classical music, anything on Nickelodeon… 

Where do we start on this project to rid society of properties that make living inside our skins and inside our heads a riot of emotions, with all kinds of metaphorical chairs being thrown across the brain pan? Or better, when do we stop demanding that problematic elements within the consumer culture be banned, canceled or more severely chastised and repudiated and instead summon the political will to provide Americans with a substantially improved and easily accessible health care system that includes a range of mental health provisions that can help the psychologically troubled to live fuller lives?  You would assume that the obvious answer is an easy one, though a difficult one and ongoing, to help fellow citizens live in society, not shield them from it.