I mean, check out that guest book. People sign it like there’s no tomorrow. Like that limey who’s not even here to look at my blog. No, he wants to tell me some shit about googlewhacks, for chrissake. I gotta google for him to whack. (Actually, I thought that was sorta cool and have a great reverence for the British people.)
As for explanations, I won’t whine about my personal life. I’ll just say one thing: I’ve been obsessing over this fucking blog entry, or rather the series of blog entries I’m about to commit to the electronic ether. I’ve been sitting around with an ever accumulating pile of sheets torn from a small army of yellow legal pads, classifying, agonizing, hewing away at things I love. All for this stupid blog.
Remember that 35 thing? You know—where I was gonna laud 35 things that have made my life worth living? Well… you’d be surprised how hard it is to narrow a list of that shit down to just 35 items. Early on, I even excluded my favorite material to jerk off to. I want to keep that special and private, because photographic images from my own colonoscopy, for example, have great spiritual significance to me, and it would cheapen them and render them less arousing to describe them.
So I limited myself to material drawn from various creative media, since, as you’ve probably figured out if you’ve read very much of this blog, I waste a lotta time on print, music, film, and the visual arts.
Even within this very limited set of categories, they are not my 35 favorite items, and they will not be presented in any significant order. If I’d tried to approach my material this way, I’d still be writing on Judgment Day—completely oblivious to a simultaneous Ragnarok, Armageddon. Mass Ascension on Divine Spaceships and a Cubs World Series victory or what ever other form(s) It took. Existence as we know it would end, and I’d still be sitting here, weeping insanely into a mound of yellow sheets. (Of paper, I mean. Not on my bed. I am not a bed wetter. Really.)
One last procedural note: there are other things I’d like to write about and other things I’d like to do with my life, for that matter I’m gonna do this in installments of seven items per entry. I’ll try to do them weekly, maybe biweekly. We’ll see. Also, in the interest of moving this shit along, I’m only going to provide brief notes for 5-6 of them. I’ll write at more length about 1-2 per installment.
That’s it. Let’s get down to the first set. The very loosely unifying topic of this first installment is self-love, I guess. Here goes:
The Reputation-
are a power pop band here in Chicago. They haven’t broken into mainstream radio. Yet. Give ‘em time. But they have achieved a reasonable amount of recognition on the indie circuit, especially locally.
The actions of the group are dictated by one Elizabeth Elmore, an amply talented, possibly megalomaniacal singer, songwriter and musician (guitar and keyboard). Liz is an ambitious, intense mastermind. (She probably hates being called Liz, but I feel like I know her well enough to take some liberties. I’m probably wrong, and she’d hand me my balls in a sling if she ever read this. But she won’t, and I’m willing to live dangerously where she’s concerned. She deserves no less.) She’s also a remarkably motivated woman, who juggles her music with a career in law.
I’m fascinated by Liz and her music—I’ll admit it. A larger-than-life persona has she. Not iconic, like say, Robert Johnson is iconic, but she is big—maybe even approaching Morrissey or Gary Numan, who are more analogous not just in emotional stature, but in their unabashed self-pity and grandiosity.
Liz—or the musical persona she puts forward—seems to lack much in the way of a sense of humor. I’ve seen her play live a number of times, and though she frequently mingles with fans after a performance, I’ve always been afraid to approach her. (Yes, granite jawed Steve Forceman, flees from Liz’s biting wit and terrible gaze.) But clearly, she ain’t unapproachable, and that’s to her credit, given the wall that many performers—even less established local type acts—build between themselves and their admirers.
I’ve seen her (them, sorry) live whenever I can, and I’ve listened to their first self-titled release more than I care to reveal. A lot. Though after one or two listenings, the group’s second release, To Force a Fate, has been relegated to my second string pile—meaning I may never listen to it again, unless I’m desperate for new material to absorb. That first album, though, is brilliant.
Music wise, Liz and her band are pretty great. They’ve got chops to spare, and don’t just caress you with pretty little songs. No, titanic passion is the rule of the day here, and you better believe they kick out some noise—especially live, where they’ll really pummel you. For a pop mainstream type pop band. Because one of the things I’m trying to say is that, noise aside, it is pop. Good pop.
Liz has always had the hooks. And they’re great hooks. You better believe she’s got a way with melody and song structure. She’ll have you humming along with her stuff in no time, even when, as is frequently the case at the live shows, things get pumped up a little close to 11. It’s still kinda noisy music! How great is that?
I don’t mean to give you the impression that they’re Sabbath or the Stooges, but they’re not afraid to be loud, or use feedback and shit like that. (Check out the ludicrously indulgent noise breakdown just before the climax of “For the Win.”) The truly excellent musical reference website The All Music Guide suggests that Liz’s previous band Sarge is similar to the Go-Go's and Sleater-Kinney, to name only a few from the list. I might go so far to say that if Sonic Youth and Olivia Newton-John had a love child, it’d be The Reputation, which may sound ludicrously extreme on either side, but if you average things out… Well, Liz is weird, and confused about what she wants musically, I’d guess, but that’s half the fun of being her fan.
The other half might be that first record. The Reputation opens with “Either Coast,” a sunny interpretation of that perennial rock n roll favorite, the car song. If it’s good enough for Chuck Berry, Liz figures it’s good enough for her. And with all the Deuce Coupes, Roadrunners, Pink Cadillacs and Thunderbirds out there, Liz is in fine company. You can bid farewell to your youth in your car, like Neil Young did in his old hearse, or start a revolution from the driver’s seat, like Public Enemy did in their 98 Oldsmobile.
Even if you’re just out cruising, it’s American glory, but Liz is onto something bigger than that. Like Bob Seger before her—another deeply analogous figure, if not a conscious influence—Liz is on the run. She’s fleeing all the pain in the ass and /or heart shit we all have to deal with everyday. But where Seger is focused on the poignancy of the situation, Liz is more concerned with the joy of escape, and she presents it to you expertly, with chugging guitars and pure beautiful swooping vocals.
It’s a masterful opener, introducing not just the infectious energy of the band, but the larger-than-life, operatically “confessional” Liz persona, which will quickly blossom in the second track, a rumination on weekend singles bar pathos. This one has a pretty melody that comes across as queasy, thanks to a slightly atonal lead guitar. It’s a fine bit of onimonapoetia that sets you right in the middle of the experience. This song also contains my favorite Reputation couplet: “a certain inept licentiousness/ an artless gluttony for squalidness and heated promises…” Try saying that one 3 times fast.
And I’m afraid we need to pause here to consider a characteristic of Liz’s lyrics: their literary aspirations. I don’t mean to be an asshole or unfair, though I may have crossed that line somewhere a few paragraphs back, but when confronted with language like the above quote, it’s hard not to picture Liz pulling out her dictionary and looking for something cool that rhymes with “promises.” At least for me.
Really though, the problem isn’t that the vocabulary is especially difficult. It’s more Liz’s use of it—the constructions—that frequently make the lyrics feel a little, uh, pretentious for a rock song. Not to mention muddled. A few examples from other tracks on the album: “Won’t waste my mind on things that can’t remain/ Same latent flaw keeps coursing through my veins…” (from “The Uselessness of Friends”—sounds suspiciously like those old United Negro College Fund, don’t it? ) From “Misery by Design, (a song that reveals Liz’s downright frightening hostility toward former lovers, a subject that I’ll touch on again in a minute): “ground the things we set aloft and burned them through a wasted premise: ‘we…’”
I’m a great believer in the value of nonsensical but suggestive imagery in rock. Despite my objections toward literary pomposity, I do like lyrics that take themselves seriously. As Run-DMC once pointed out, though, “It’s tricky to rock a rhyme that’s right on time…” Unfortunately, when they go in this direction, Liz’s aren’t. I like her best when she’s straightforward—just tells you the story. She can be damned powerful, if ever emotionally one-sided. Somehow, at these moments, her feelings seem more real—less contrived. Take “For the Win,” say, where she’s at the top of her game.
The worst song of all in this respect is “The Truth. “The first time I saw the Reputation, this one was my favorite number because of its downright punk rock potency and downright lovely melody. Then I found out what the lyrics were. I’ll spare you the quotes and just tell you that it’s some gibberish about Liz puking up the bad stuff inside her. I’m convinced that she wrote it as an exercise for her shrink, thought it was cool, and ran out and recorded it right away. One can only hope that, on later reflection, she was embarrassed, but given the fact that she still plays the song at shows, that seems unlikely.
An enormous chunk of the first record’s appeal is in its glorious marriage of a bit of punk noise to a bit of pop glory. On the second record, the balance has been lost, and that’s why it’s such a bummer. I understand that Liz wants some much-deserved recognition—and I don’t mean just a local nod, but an embrace by national chain record stores and radio stations. (She’s even been given a few nods by the national press—a blurb in Rolling Stone, even an interview in Playboy. Neither of which seems to’ve amounted to much, but is pretty impressive, you gotta admit.) Somewhere inside To Force a Fate, there’s still a vague edge, but you really have to dig, and who has the time for that when there’s still real passion in some of the new music out there? I won’t point the sellout finger here, but I will say that it’s unfortunate that Liz has chosen to pursue said recognition by watering her music down to something very close to AOR pap.
Given the assurance of the first release, the second one feels like a conscious cop out. It gives the (I believe mistaken) impression that Liz is so desperate for a hit record that she’ll go to almost any lengths musically to achieve it. (Almost, I say. She’s not as desperate as that other, already much-maligned Chicago Liz—Phair, I mean, whom the AMG also lists as a similar artist.) If, as a simple fan, I could tell Liz one thing, I would express my honest regret that she’s steering her ship this way, because I think it’s dangerously close to scuttling itself on some reef of mediocrity. (Not like that last metaphor, which was so laughably pompous and muddled that I had to leave it in. ) I loved the first record. The second one’s like mayonnaise on cardboard, and I hope it’s not an indication of where The Reputation is headed, cuz I don’t think I’ll be willing to follow.
(If I could say something else to Liz, I would plea with her to email me if she reads this. Despite my criticisms, which come from nothing but love by the way, she machine guns me. No other way to say it. I’m completely enamored. Though not in a creepy way, Liz.)
In one area, at least, Liz still refuses to compromise. If you so much as step on her toes, Liz has got a song for you, and you better believe that it’ll squash you into a sniveling blop of jelly. Man, I’d hate to have her pissed at me. I’d probably change my name, cosmetically alter my face and flee to Mexico. Liz doesn’t fuck around. Fortunately, in performance, the vitriol of these lyrics is undercut by over demonstrative look-I-took singing-lessons type diction, or the whole thing would be downright terrifying.
In her lyrics, Liz has never been about the other schlub, who’s usually a two-dimensional (one hopes) sketch of a lover. She’s about self –and generally self-pity at that—though she will hit an occasional rest stop for some self-aggrandizement. In part, at least, by goring you with a dismissal of your “simpering diatribes” (And again with the pompous lyrics! She’s beginning to sound like the pop toonz of Tantric enthusiast Sting for crissakes!)
If you think it sounds like Liz is less than compassionate, you’re right. But that’s OK. Hey, sometimes you need to wallow in narcissism, and when you do, Liz is there for you, offering emotional comfort food—a sort of pizza of the soul. But don’t, for a second, believe that she’s doing it out of sympathy. I hate to say it, but I don’t think Liz gives a crap one about you or me—except insofar as we might buy her records and give her fame. From her scramblings for mainstream success to her egotistical tantrums, Liz is in it for the win. And if you want a piece of that catharsis, you’re gonna have to come to her.
The Reputation is a deeply dorky record that embraces the values of contemporary pop music: the worship of me myself and I—my perspective, my pain. Its exponents are like the characters in Rashomon—deeply committed to their own self-serving view of “the facts.” But man, is it addictive. If you want my advice, I say go out and buy it now. (But avoid the second record like unprotected sex with a Siberian yak.) Handle with care. If its operatically staged emotion doesn’t pulverize you, you’ll thank me.
OK, so briefly now, six other things that have made my life more worth living:
Rashomon-
Nice segueway, right? Not a very obscure film by any means, so I hope I’m not gonna bore you by adding my own thoughts on Akira Kurosawa’s 1951 film commented on the individual’s tendency toward immersion in self. Just like ol’ Liz, the characters in this film see events exclusively, willfully from their own point-of-view. Somehow, each character’s recounting of a rape and murder is radically different. Invariably, in the telling, the speaker’s culpability decreases proportionally to a dramatic increase in the moral justification of his or her behavior. Unlike The Reputation’s music the film looks at this trick of perspective from the outside. In this way, we can see this “trick” in its unfettered, loathsome glory. Kurosawa maintains that it’s really a willfully compounded lie we tell ourselves. Reiterated enough times, the lie becomes truth, allowing us to maintain our often deceptive images of ourselves as “good people.”
At this point, the film probably sounds like an absolute bummer. For all its bleakness, Rashomon ends with a small, hopeful human moment. What’s more, it’s a profoundly beautiful film—beautifully shot, written, edited and acted. If you haven’t seen it, and it’s sounded over hyped to you, it isn’t. It really is one of the greatest films of all time.
Dante’s Inferno-
Think Rashomon sounds cynical? Moralistic? Misanthropic? Malmoogious? Well Alighieri, next to the Divine Comedy, it’s like an episode of Little House on the Prairie. Sure, Dante’s colossal paean to the glory of God ends beautifully, ecstatically, but along the way, it has some pretty vicious things to say about human nature. Its judgments are exceedingly harsh. And in part, bizarrely enough, it’s a rejection of compassion for the damned—a fixation on the well-being of the self—that wins the salvation of an individual soul. It’s about your personal relationship to God, and there’s little room for the distractions provided by other people—especially those who’ve lost their own way in the dark forest Dante wanders into at the poem’s opening.
Disagree with my assessment? Well, consider this:
Dante’s passage through Hell is meant to represent a refinement of the soul, a purging of all that is sinful or for that matter worldly. One of the qualities that has to be jettisoned the tendency to look at the suffering in the world around you and ask why. In doing so, you are questioning God’s wisdom.
There’s a moment in the Inferno that beautifully bears this idea out. Dante is horrified in the fourth circle of Hell to find that those who sought to see the future have had their heads turned around 180 degrees. They are always looking behind them as they wander about. Dante weeps, and Virgil scolds him saying:
Still like the other fools? There is no place
for pity here. Who is more arrogant
within his soul, who is more impious
than one who dares to sorrow at God’s judgment?
-Canto XX, lines 26-30
Not very evangelical, is it? (Maybe that’s a good thing. If I have to deal with one more frickin’ Jehovah’s witness proselytizing at my door, I’m gonna have an aneurysm and enter the kingdom of God or Satan early—probably headed to the latter, ‘cause I’ve been pretty lax in building a relationship to God.) That being said, the comedy blows me away, and it does reveal the love of God, (who apparently doesn’t want you to follow His example in terms of sympathy for your fellow souls).
I’ve been reading the John Ciardi translation. A poet in his own right, Ciardi’s gone to great lengths to maintain the spirit of the original. (Or at least that’s what he says.) He’s also provided ample notes and appendixes to clarify references and place the poem in context. It’s eminently readable, but beautiful, varying language within the text to suit the matters at hand—which I guess Dante was all about as well. I’ve been very grateful for it. It’s reminded me of the pleasures of reading.
Coffin Joe in At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul-
Yep—there’s scant hope or mercy to be found if you’re an unrepentant sinner. And yet, some people go out of their way to thumb their noses at God. (At least in the narrative arts.) What’s up with that? Are these people just two-dimensional caricatures—sorta like the villains lurking in Saturday morning cartoons, who feel compelled to remind us that they’re evil! Evil! EVIL!!!???
Well, apparently some of ‘em are, or we wouldn’t have Saturday morning cartoon villains, right? (Unless you don’t consider these to be artifacts of “the narrative arts,” which, let’s face it, is a pretty shaky concept when you get down to it. One person’s art is another person’s twaddle, making the establishment of artistic criteria into a sorta esthetic Rashomon. You’re sure you saw art lining the complete works of Stanley Kubrick like a esthetic corona, whereas I saw nothing—except maybe in isolated bits of A Clockwork Orange and 2001. Meanwhile, you don’t understand how I can appreciate the writing of Thomas Pynchon, which, to you, is a buncha of pretentious, muddled crap.
But then, I’ve gotten off-topic, haven’t I? Must be the peyote. Back to all these weighty questions about this hostility and/or contempt some people feel toward God, whether or not it’s based on evil, how it’s been represented in the “narrative arts, “etc., etc. Well, I don’t buy the evil thing. I believe actions can be evil, but not people.
I do believe in the conscious decision to indulge in evil behavior and in the idea that this choice is frequently linked to an abiding anger or disgust that the person in question feels for the basic nature of things, which may or may not be God, according to your own belief system. And certainly, this is often the shtick in the “narrative arts.” Here we find a legion of disgruntled misanthropes engaging in antisocial and sometimes downright immoral behavior. There’s Ahab. And Gladys Kravitz. (What bug crawled up her ass, anyway?) And the Joker. And J-Lo. And Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? And Iago. And Goneril and Regan. And Claudius. (Obviously Shakespeare was preoccupied by these questions of human evil.)
And then there’s Coffin Joe.
Coffin Joe, whose name is Za du Caixao in Portuguese, is the onscreen doppelganger of Brazilian director/screenwriter/actor Jose Mojica Marins, and he is one bad mother fucker. We first meet Za in the excellent film At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul. (I’m going to stick to this first film, of a lengthy series, by the way. Otherwise I’ll never finish this crapbunglin thing. ) Za’s an undertaker, and the physical horror’s he’s witnessed while plying his trade seem to’ve scuttled any sense of ultimate meaning he might once have harbored. And man, is he brassed of at God.
Well, actually, maybe his problem has less to do with anger toward the Creator, (though it’s definitely a contributing factor,) than it does with a deep, abiding disdain for all human life. It comes across as a sort of nihilism—the kind that’s particularly intoxicating to lapsed Catholics, which one assumes Za is, given the images that preoccupy him . However, while on the surface, Za’s preoccupations come across as a sort of petty rebellion—the shattering of some taboos in a thrill-seeking teenaged sorta way—he definitely takes it further than that.
Pretty soon, he’s blaspheming into the faces of his devout neighbors. He thinks God is a phony, he says, a coward, and quite possibly non-existent. The townsfolk are terrified and begin avoiding him, especially after he acts out violently toward one of them who challenges him. His pride grows in step with his bitterness and cynicism. And we all know that pride is the sin that got ol’ Lucifer tossed out of heaven like some cosmic drunk in the hands of a cosmic bouncer.
Anyway, Za embraces absolute cynicism—and though he doesn’t acknowledge its existence—evil. He takes what he wants—let the dignity, the desires—even the lives—of others get hanged.
And one thing Za really wants is a son. And not just any son. He wants to sire the little fella with his ideal woman, a local, terribly hot young girl. There are some obstacles facing Za however. For one thing, he’s married to a basically good woman. She’s gotta go, and with the help of an extra large tarantula, go she does. But there are still some kinks in Za’s plans, like the fact that his beloved, while not married is happily engaged to Za’s best friend. And she more or less loathes Za. So it becomes necessary for him to really do some work.
At this point, Za’s passing beyond cruelty and callousness and into sadism. He’s getting off on the pain of others, and this change pretty much confirms his transformation into an agent of pure evil, triggering a gypsy curse that stirs the dead, who carry Za down to his ultimate fate.
So what do we have here? Well, we’ve established that Za’s contempt for God becomes so vicious that it boils over into hatred for His/Its/Whatever’s creations. Is this simple Catholic schoolboy rebellion or cheap horror movie titillation? I guess I think there’s something deeper at work here—otherwise, Za’s misadventures would be nothing more than bathetic, and draw nothing more than laughs in the watching. They do draw laughs, its true, but they are uneasy laughs.
Still, what does it mean? For better or worst, this film is one more expression of self, the individual, (and it’s worth noting again that Za is Marins both physically and fictionally). Except here, the aggrandizement of self is, I think a front.—one that is harvested from Za’s own fear of death. Looking into a howling Nothing, he tries to put a brave face on it by denying It, thumbing his nose at It. But in the end, Za flinches and he is consumed. Like every one of us will be, sooner or later. Pop culture it may be—silly? in places, but as with so many of these obsessive meditations on I, the tragedy and the horror do register in the end—at least to me. (Cf. Gary Numan, Liz Elmore and an army of others, though I do have my limits. E.g.: contemporary fiction, i.e., Russell Banks.)
So take it or leave it, I’d advise you to march right down to your local specialty video store—or find one on the internet—and delve into the strange world of Coffin Joe. But as the great Neil Young once said: “Take my advice: Don’t listen to me.”
Ingmar Bergman-
Generally speaking, I find it difficult to single out “favorites.” Mood has so much to do with what grabs me at any given moment, and whether the matter in question is food or colors or sexual positions, there always seems to be some valid possibilities I overlook at these same moments. And though I’m a person who’s had to learn to function with a lot of self-doubt, with great certainty, I can tell you that Ingmar Bergman is, by far, my favorite filmmaker.
Maybe it’s self-doubt that makes the whole thing work. Certainly that’s one of Bergman’s defining traits, and the connection here is deeply personal. Coming to Bergman’s films is, for me, like coming home, in a sense. His characters seethe with pain, weakness, love and anger—with an almost insufferable humanity. In spite of what you may have heard though, his films do, ,often achieve great warmth. Check out Fanny & Alexander or Wild Strawberries for obvious examples. but all of his films are shot through with the same sense of closeness. It’s a bleak, but welcoming universe, where I feel safe, understood.
Again, Berman’s films are all about self, but here it is the self looking both inward and out—a self that first of all is most concerned with its discovery of true self, ugly as it may be, and then placing this in relation to its often painful surroundings. in this way, Bergman faces the same void Za de Caixao looks into, but instead of cursing it, cowering from it, Bergman’s characters reach out into it, all the while aware of their own flawed nature and hope that some other being, whose flaws also they can also see quite clearly, may touch their hand with something like warmth. (And in Bergman, hands and faces become colossal with emotional significance—to an unsurpassed degree.
My reaction to Bergman’s work doesn’t appear be to universal. In college, after reading his excellent autobiography The Magic Lantern, I descended on some classmates waving the book like a Baptist preacher, and said, “Holy crap! Didn’t he describe childhood perfectly? Wasn’t it exactly what yours was like?” They looked at me with a rich mixture of pity, fear and amusement. “Uh, no,” they said.
If you’re interested, I’d say read the book—it’s that rare autobiography that transcends fan interest and becomes something like literature. (If not literature.) More importantly, see the films. But don’t rush to The 7th Seal . It’s not bad, but despite its reputation, there are better Bergman films. I’d say go to Wild Strawberries or Through a Glass Darkly I first, though if you’re feeling really adventurous, try Persona. It’s great, but may be difficult, if you’re not into Bergman already.
Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, Volume 2- To fully describe the difference these two discs have made in my life would be a monumental task. I’ll have to limit myself to something really short then, though it seems criminal to do so.
This disc contains several pieces of ambient electronic music, produced by one guy, Richard D. James, in his own home. Theoretically, it’s meant to lurk in the background, while you live your life. It doesn’t, because like Bergman, James finds something profound in introspection.
In some of my most troubled moments, this music has helped me find peace. To you, it may sound like new age in some places and like dissonant noise in others. I don’t care much for labels, so I’ll leave it at this: However he works, in this set, harshly or gently, James creates beauty. It’s a fine pair of discs, highly recommended.
So that’s it for this go around. I hope you’ll forgive me if I sign off sort of abruptly, as I’m burnt out from writing this shit. I hope anyone who read it dug some of it. And that you are well. Signing off now, but more installments are on the way…
