Janet Frame died today. She was one of New Zealand's greatest writers. Everyone should read her three-volume autobiography - so go and grab To The Is-Land from the library and get started. If you're afraid of words that aren't scrolling down an iridescent screen, rent the dvd of An Angel At My Table.
Janet Frame almost never became a writer, because she was very nearly given a lobotomy. A friend of hers - a psychiatrist - arranged for the publication of her first book, which was the only thing that saved her.
Here's a link. It's an essay written by Sara Paretsky, one of the better mystery writers around these days (she created V.I. Warshawski). It's about the state of freedom of speech in the USA since the passing of the amusingly-name Patriot Act.
It made me doubly glad that I live in a country where I can say what I believe out loud without being banged up in jail.
To be honest I think it's much cooler that Keisha Castle-Hughes got the Best Actress nomination than the eleven that Lord of the Rings got. Partly because I think that as a movie Rider kicks the Lord's ring in every way, and partly because Whale Rider is a low-budget all-NZ movie without a big studio pushing it which got there entirely on its own steam.
If you haven't seen Whale Rider then run out right now and see it. No excuses, you scurvy dog!
I was listening to Berlin by Lou Reed last night, and something occured to me about the sound of the album, so I checked its credits. Sure enough, the producer is Bob Ezrin, who handled most of Alice Cooper's '70s output, and the band is partly the same as on Alice's solo albums from that period (guitarist Dick Wagner was even an uncredited session muso on some of the Alice Cooper band's stuff). At times Berlin sounds so much like Welcome To My Nightmare it's scary.
Nightmare is one those albums that was Important In My Youth, and Berlin is very familiar to me from a tape I lost when I left my walkman in a phone booth (annoyed grunt). But I never linked them before. They're both concept albums - the doomed relationship of Berlin is quite properly much more coherent than the fever dream of Nightmare - and they both share a bombastic atmosphere that producer Bob Ezrin would later bring to Pink Floyd's The Wall.
Welcome To My Nightmare is drawn from horror movies and horror comics, but periodically edges into real-life horror. Berlin is rooted firmly in the real world, but its horrors are sometimes exaggerated to the extent that they become a little cartoonish. Both deal with domestic violence in a way that's deadly serious yet has an undertone of black humour.
The success of Welcome To My Nightmare made Alice Cooper's solo career viable after his split from a very popular cult band (also called Alice Cooper, which confuses many people). The failure of Berlin almost killed Lou Reed's solo career, which seemed ready to eclipse his own cult band The Velvet Underground after the smash hit of Transformer.
Welcome To My Nightmare and Berlin have both been remastered for CD in recent years. They're worth a listen. Berlin might drive you to the bathroom with the razor blades if you're in the wrong mood, but Nightmare is delirious fun and might prove a good antidote.
If Lord of the Rings wins the Best Picture Oscar I'll eat lasagne. That's a promise.
Somebody with access to explosives and the knowhow to use them please go to Little George Street and find the car whose alarm has been deafening people in this building for the last few hours without respite, and blow it into a million pieces. Then kindly hunt down the person who owned it, and blow that motherfucker up too.
This has been a scream of frustration courtesy of Peugot.
Just had the weird experience of hearing that someone who's been on the same mailing list as me for the last few years has died. I'll let him have his say.
"As far as people choosing their own epitaph--I recently chose someone's epitaph for them by accident. My wife's older brother died recently of AIDS. He'd been quite the drug user, particularly back in the wild days of Haight Ashbury where he hung out with Bob Dyland, among others. Well, my wife and her sister were on the phone trying to pick an epitaph for their brother.
Unfortunately, no one in the family had liked him very much because he had been an addict (among other vices) and had done considerable harm to various family members. In a moment of sarcasm I suggested that the only logical thing to carve on his headstone was, of course, "Everyone must get stoned." Both sisters laughed hysterically and now, somewhere near Fergus Falls, Minnesota, my late brother-in-law lies under a headstone with his name, birth date, and favorite Dylan lyric. In pace requiscat."
- John Hall, 1996
Horror movies just don't do it anymore. When was the last time a movie scared you - I mean REALLY scared you? Movies just don't give me that "Oh my god I'm going to have an accident" kind of feeling anymore. Maybe I'm just desensitized - but I doubt it.
So thank god for video games, where I can still get my viscera stirred. Resident Evil did it first, despite its cheesy B-movie plot and dreadful voice acting. The monsters were mostly shambling zombies but a combination of spooky music, clever camera angles and the possibility that A ZOMBIE MIGHT JUMP OUT AT ANY MOMENT made this one good and scary for me - and I gather outright unbearably terrifying for some.
Then along came Silent Hill. The voice acting still wasn't up to much, but the visuals were more atmospheric, the music was scarier, the monsters were downright disturbing, and the fear wasn't so much that something might go "BOO!" as it was an unsettling feeling that you shouldn't open that door in front of you... The plot made no sense but delved into disturbing sibject matter with great relish.
Several sequels (some superior) and a few ripoffs (mostly worthless - Evil Dead: Hail To the King, anyone?) later, we have Project Zero, aka Fatal Frame.
You play a psychic Japanese girl looking for her brother in a mansion haunted by some truly terrifying spirirts. You're armed only with a camera, which works on a neat twist of the old "stealing souls in a photo" ruse.
Quite frankly, this game is almost too scary to play. The sound FX and particularly the music are brilliantly creepy, the relatively slow walking & running speed of your character as well as her near-defenceless status, and evocative camera angles are all pluses. I think the thing that gets me the most is when you're near a ghost, you can feel your character's heartbeat through the dual shok controls - this is far more effective than I expected.
When I'm straightening up after play, I find myself listening to Check Your Head by the Beastie Boys. Very calming.
If you haven't seen Psych Out, run along to Aro St Video and pick up the video for a little LSD and Devil Jack.
Susan Strasberg stars as a deaf runaway teenager in 1968 who goes to Haight Ashbury to look for her wacko brother. She encounters Jack Nicholson and Dean Stockwell as zonked-out psychedelic band members who play terrible ripoffs of songs like Purple Haze while sharing bills with the Strawberry Alarm Clock; Nicholson plays guitar without moving his fingers, which Hendrix never managed. Indie filmmaker Henry Jaglom turns up as an artist armed with a buzz-saw while on a bad trip. Dick Clark produced, and the result is a weirdly compelling mix of celebration and condemnation of the drug culture.
Highlights were headband-wearing pseudo-mystic Stockwell's mock-profundities, Nicholson behaving like a real jerk, a totally fucked up Bruce Dern, and a solid performance from Strasberg holding it all together. The non-stop psychedelic cinematography by Laszlo Kovacs is stunning. The club scenes look terrific, and utilize plenty of oil projectors and patterned swirling lights. The trip scenes are good for a few laughs. Director Richard Rush went on to make the excellent The Stunt Man, which has my favourite Peter O'Toole performance and good turns from Steve Railsback and the ever-reliable Barbara Hershey, and which was every bit as much a Weird Hippy Shit movie as Psych Out, only in a more interesting way (and in the '80s!).
It's on a double feature with Roger Corman's famous LSD experience flick The Trip, which was written by Nicholson and also stars Strasberg and Dern, with Peter Fonda taking the lead and his future Easy Rider compadre Dennis Hooper. I haven't watched that one yet; I'm waiting 'til I'm, er, in the mood.
Right now I'm listening to Miles Davis live at Newport from 1958. It's with the same band that would record Kind of Blue the following year, but doesn't feature any of that album's modal improvisations, instead mostly utilizing songs by folks like Thelonius Monk, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. It's nice.
Here's a link for y'all: www.ladyday.net
It's an unofficial Billie Holday website. And if you check out this specifically, you can download a ten minute short film called Symphony In Black with Duke Ellington and Billie. She's not much of an actor, but it's a thrill to see her perform.
If you get a chance, you should read her autobiography, Lady Sing the Blues. The easiest to find is the tragic edition with Diana Ross on the cover, from the movie she starred in as Billie. The book is an "as told to such & such" and it reads as if it's her speaking voice. It came out the year before she died, right around the same time as the album Lady in Satin, where Billie sounded so much older than her 43 years, her voice cracked and rusted but more powerful than ever.
I've been told to blog more, and this is the best I can come up with right now. Been listening to A Love Supreme by John Coltrane a lot, still haven't got my head around it yet. I think I'll put it on right now.
Yeah that's better.
It's supposed to be Coltrane 's most spiritual album, intended as a gift for God. Coltrane was apparently a universalist; he said not long before his death "I believe in all religions." So which God he meant when he said in the liner notes "All praise to God" again and again, I'm unsure. But I believe it, man.
There's a bit towards the end of Acknowledgement when Trane takes the sax away from his lips and briefly chants into the microphone, "A love supreme, a love supreme," gentle but intense. The bass line throughout kind of chants the whole thing.
I'm not religious at all - doesn't make sense to me, sorry - but there's something going on here. As the Pixies had it, "There's something about this song, this is a song about something there."
Right now Trane's tenor sax is ascending in the chant line, and now he's chanting it himself, sounds to me like he was chanting while he was blowing. I know next to nothing about jazz, but this is amazing. This and Kind of Blue by Miles Davis and Lady of Satin by Lady Day belong in every record collection, man.
Jazz seems to me to be a form of just about the purest expression. I sometimes try to express myself through words, but words nail down meaning a bit too hard sometimes. Music seems to me to be as powerful a way of communicating feeling and experience as any there is - perhaps even more so than painting - and a great musician who can flow on the fly, like Trane or Monk or like Billie remaking a slapper of an oldie into her own image so that it surpasses the literal meaning of the tin-pan words and gets right to the heart of the matter - to the diaphragm really, that always seems to be where you feel it as much as sing from it -
Well there's nothing like it. I've never seen a truly great musician improvising live, I've only come across it second-hand in recordings. Imagine being there when Hendrix unleashed. I've listened to one particular live recording of Jimi live at Winterland a thousand times, sometimes when severely altered, and every time it's blown my mind in some fashion, the feeling that these aren't just notes and squalls of feedback they're a communication of experience, but how much more intense would it have been to be physically present when he was taking us through that? Guess I'll never know.
Okay ENOUGH.
What artist had one single song covered by Elkie Brooks, Ike & Tina Turner, Guns 'N' Roses, John Farnham, Etta James and Tori Amos?
Clue: the original came out in '75.
Guesses in comments please.
Returning to an earlier topic, I recently got my grubby hands on Past, Present & Future, a sort of best of Rob Zombie. Pay attention, because here's a lesson in giving fans their money's worth.
We don't just get the best of Rob Zombie here (and not just 'cause there are some choice cuts missing). Most of the singles are represented, along with two new tracks, as well as almost every non-album track Zombie has recorded, mostly done for soundtrack albums; his collaborations with Alice Cooper and Howard Stern; the Ramones tribute album track Blitzkrieg Bop; and two previously unreleased tracks, Two Lane Blacktop and Girl On Fire.
The only non-album tracks missing - as far as I'm aware - are the Beavis & Butthead Experience track I Am Hell, and the great collaboration with surf band The Ghastly Ones, Halloween (She So Mean).
Not only that, but there's a second disc - a dvd with ten Zombie videos on it, mostly directed by the Zombie himself. Which is what you REALLY want. Thrill to the dead-on Cabinet of Dr Caligari parody that is Living Dead Girl! Headbang along with red demons on Dragula! Marvel at the Clockwork Orange-influenced Never Gonna Stop (Red Red Kroovy) being nearly identical to Shihad's earlier Pacifier video!
As far as I'm concerned, Zombie was the only good thing to happen to metal in the '90s. That whole genre is only of nostalgic interest to me nowadays; even Iron Maiden's first-class recent efforts have mostly made me go "Wow, they sound just like when I was 14, only a bit better!" Kinda like discovering a lost episode of Dangermouse or something.
Zombie is different. He combines heavy riffing, gravelly double-tracked vocals and semi-industrial dance beats, with the result being an infectious brew with the grunt of metal & the hook of pop. Add to that a trash/horror/sleaze sensibility similar to Alice Cooper's and genuine intelligence and you've got Mr Zombie's spookshow.
So guess what I'm mostly listening to today.
Drops me off and then he goes
Leaves me on this mystery plane
But he'll be back for me again
A ha ha ha ha ha!
Thank god for The Cramps.