Some Came Running

Dirty Work

Around the time I was putting up the first part of My Life In Pornography at Thought Catalog, I heard about the work of photographer Barbara Nitke, who was shooting stills on New-York-based adult film sets just a few years after I was production assistant on A Girl's Best Friend. Obviously I needed to look into this. I did, and I got Barbara's book, American Ecstasy, and I interviewed Barbara for Nerve. The not-safe-for-work article it here. 

Writing About Music

At left: Lithograph of the cover art for Acid Eaters, The Ramones, 1993, signed by the members of the group at the time. 

A couple of weeks ago I was discussing the state of my media collection with my wife, and how the ever-mounting stacks of stuff in certain areas of our apartment were making her feel kind of claustrophobic. The upshot of the exchange was that I needed to do not just some rearranging but even some culling. This year is the eighth year of our marriage and our cohabitation, and for too mong during this time I've, subconsciously or not, kept up a lot of living modes that I got used to during my long bachelorhood. I've never thought of myself as a "record collector." I don't keep track of serial numbers or keep my records in near-mint condition or anything like that; rather, for all of my life I've been a voracious appreciator of music. Or is it just that I've been a voracious consumer?  Either way, my habits in this respect have made me a challenge to live with. 

So I began clearing the shelves, or rather, the tops of my CD shelves, which had columns of discs of varying height on almost all of them (there are five in all in our living room). "Tribbles," an old girlfriend used to call them, many years back. That person could be amused by them, because she wasn't living with them. Anyway. The point of the clearing was to just have CDs filed on the shelves, not on top of them. It would not solve the claustrophobia-generating problem necessarily, but it would be a start. 

As I began this work I would look at single discs and ask the question "Do I really need this?" Which is different from "How often do I listen to this?" or "What is my sentimental attachment to it?" Not infrequently I'd come upon a title that I blew fifteen or so bucks on because I was intrigued by a description Scotch-taped below a display shelf at a local independent record store; I am a pretty easy lay in that respect. I would remember that on such culling project in the past, I would commit massive errors relative to my sustained enthusiasms. For instance, in 1992 or so I decreed, for reasons I recall only hazily but am nevertheless still highly embarassed by, that I was "over" free jazz. That was highly untrue. On the other hand—and this pretty accurately represents my current position—not every recording of a Peter Brotzmann set is necessarily going to yield a great disc. In any event, going through my discs revealed my past profligacy in ways that were no less unpleasant for having been entirely predictable. 

Around the same time I came upon that Tumblr, the one in which the wife goes through her husband's "Stupid Record Collection," and it gave me a bit of a chuckle, even while I agreed with whoever said that it wouldn't be considered nearly as funny as a guy examining his wife's stupid record collection. I began my professional career in writing as a rock critic, so aside from my acquisitive nature I've also got some investment in maintaining some kind of big-picture authoritative backing for my opinions/observations. My wife loves music too, but she hasn't got nearly as many records as I do. But I remember when she first met, she showed me the liner notes she wrote for a mix tape she had made for a mutual friend, and they were beautifully written and observant and witty and winning and enthusiastic. It made me feel both admiration and affinity. (I subsequently invited Claire to contribute DVD reviews to Premiere magazine, which she did for a while, and wonderfully.) So we've got that in common, although our tastes diverge in a lot of respects, and in ways some might consider predictable—Henry Cow, Zorn, and Zappa are all non-starters for her. Although she is not averse to early electric Miles, or some Wadada Leo Smith in a similar vein. People aren't as predictable as you think, or maybe like to think. But people also like to live a bit, in houses that aren't de facto storage bins for compact discs. Still, I thought that doing a Tumblr of my own, about My Own Stupid Record Collection, might be funny, an amusing counter the more celebrated one. I didn't realize that Tumblr, much bruited as a Lay Person's Blogging Tool, is really an unbelievable pain in the ass to manage. And also that I don't need to do MORE writing without monetary compensation right now. I got about 18 discs in, concluding that maybe I was keeping too many Acid Mothers Temple albums in my core collection, before bagging it.

In the meantime some folks were writing about music criticisms and gender issues, the loudest (there's no other word for it) such piece being by Tracy Moore at Jezebel, titled "Oh The Unbelievable Shit You Get Writing About Music As A Woman." She is correct: that sexist male rock enthusiasts make idiotic neanderthal assumptions about female music critics, then call them horrible names and pelt them with hateful invective when said critics pen assessments they disagree with, is entirely deplorable. Couldn't agree more. It's hard to read some of her examples without feeling some shame at being a man. After that, alas, Moore's polemic gives way to a lot of truculent, "nerd"-baiting, anti-intellectual truculence and shared-lifestyle-tagging, as in:  "Too often, we forget what records are for anyway — cleaning your house, getting ready on Saturday night, going out for drinks, FUCKING DANCING." That there might be a form of music that requests, or even demands, one's undivided attention seems entirely foreign to Moore, who concludes that because so much conventional criticism ignores her definitions of music's utility value, "criticism often deserves every punch in the softballs it gets."

Yup, it's cultural vegetables all over again, but this time the twist is that the cultural vegetables aren't even acknowledged as existing. Which is why I felt a little more sympathy for the complaint communicated by the music critic and historian Ted Gioia in a recent and much-bruited Huffington Post piece titled "Music Criticism Has Degenerated Into Lifestyle Reporting" than did Jody Rosen, who composed a feisty and persuasive counter to it for Vulture. (The exchange yielded a really scruptiously know-somethingish piece on "New Fogeyism" at Pop Matters; OF COURSE IT DID.) Rosen, correctly chiding Gioia for providing a dire assessment without recourse to specific examples of badness, argued that it's a big world out there, and while the crap may be more prominent and easy to find than the good stuff, or the serious stuff, whatever you want to call it, the good stuff's still out there. 

It is, and it's more unusual than it was back in the print-only days. As maddening as I found much of Tracy Moore's article, I owe, her, because following her plea for more writing that "approaches music innocently," she recommended Anna Minard's "Never Heard of 'Em" columns for The Stranger, in which the ostensibly music-ignorant Minard listens to, and assesses, canonical records foisted upon her by more knowledgable colleagues. Minard is a delightful writer: breezy, funny, with an assured voice that's rarely glib. Her perspectives on records that have kind of been written about to death is largely bracing. I didn't even mind her half-dis of an old favorite of mine, King Crimson's In The Court of the Crimson King, because her observations underscore the very real fact that much of that record's impact was temporal-context-specific (I'd cite Red as a more "timeless" Crimson effort). It helps that she has taste—the things she likes about Court are in fact (by my lights) its strongest feature), and quite often when she's looking into a "classic" album she's genuinely perceptive and appreciative of its salient qualities. Which is to say, in a different register, that she proves the nerds right. 

All of the above explains, albeit in a rambling and probably oblique way, why I decided to devote this week on Some Came Running to mostly music writing. That, and the fact that I had a few records that I wanted to write about, or had been asked to write about, and had no other immediately accessible outlet to write about them at. The ongoing debate about how much film critics ought to write about form, which was spurred by the pieces about music and music criticism cited above, has also been a spur. And also the fact that I don't think I'm gonna have the opportunity to write so much at length for no monetary compensation very much longer. Etcetera. But I also wanted to directly prove that the kind of criticism Ted Gioia thought was dead IS in fact still out there. And I suppose I did, to him a little bit, because after I coyly pointed out my review of Randy Ingram's Sky/Lift to Gioia on Twitter, he responded that it made him want to hear the record. On the other hand, this week the blog has had pretty much the worst "traffic" (so bad I'm putting the word in quotation marks, you see) of its almost-six-year life. What are you going to do?

Encounters With Great Recordings Of The Twentieth Century, #3: Art Bears, "Hopes and Fears;" Fred Frith, "Guitar Solos" (Release dates May 1978 and October 1974, respectively; date of acquisition, circa November 1978)

As I may have mentioned somewhere, or as you may have been able to infer somehow through my writing, as a teenager I was a fairly religious reader of the rock and roll magazine Creem. By religious I mean that I would read each issue cover to cover at least twice each month. Even the column by the British critic and sociologist Simon Frith, whose work I considered relatively dry—Creem was, you may recall, the magazine that published a Lester Bangs profile of Lou Reed titled "Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves."   That having been one of Bangs' more restrained pieces. Anyway, there was one column Frith wrote in the wake of the rise of the Sex Pistols and The Clash, about the reaction to punk from more established rock musicans of the progressive camp, both musically and politically. Specifically, musicians involved in the loose-knit organization Rock In Opposition. One of whom was Simon Frith's brother Fred Frith, who was at the time still a member of the group Henry Cow. Simon's lead sentence in the column was, and remains, one of the best of it's kind I ever read. It was: "The greatest guitar player in the world is my brother Fred." What a bold thing to say, and what a cool thing to be able to say. I wondered if it was true, or even arguable. But recordings of Fred Frith's music were thin on the ground in Lake Hopatcong, where I was living at the time. I was in my late teens, about to graduate high school and enter college at the time I read that article. I'd heard of Henry Cow and of Frith before. I remembered several years before reading an item in Melody Maker about the recording of the Henry Cow/Slapp Happy hybrid album In Praise Of Learning. I'd seen Frith name-checked on the back cover of Brian Eno's Another Green World. But I had not heard the man play guitar.

Some months later I entered college, and some months after that I read, in the Village Voice, a review of Hopes and Fears, an LP by a group called Art Bears—not "The" Art Bears, but merely, Art Bears, which will make sense later on in this piece—by Michael Bloom. Bloom was one of a handful of regular/occasional contributors to the Voice rock music section who championed what you'd call art rock (Jon Pareles and John Piccarella were the others) and his writing on the album I recall as being highly evocative. (The group, as it happens, was born out of a conflict within Henry Cow, at a point when Frith and drummer/lyricist Chris Cutler were interested in exploring song forms with vocalist Dagmar Krause, and other factions of the group more insistent on longer compositions and such. The band split up, but not before fulfilling gigging obligations and making a final instrumental album; all of the members of Cow as it was constituted at the time of the split contribute to the Art Bears' record.)  And by November of 1978 I had moved out of my parents' house and into an apartment in Paterson with a college roommate, had gotten myself a kind of punk-rock girlfriend who worked in the typesetting department of my college paper, to whom I had lost my virginity and everything, and one night I and the punk-rock girlfriend had gone to either the Rockaway Mall or the Garden State Plaza and visited the Sam Goody's record store and I found not only the very intriguing Hopes and Fears but also a copy of the Fred Frith solo album Guitar Solos, and I bought both. 

I was quite eager to hear them right away, so my punk-rock girlfriend, who also had HER OWN CAR, drove me back to the place in Paterson, where my roommate, a Beatles aficionado among other things, had a reasonably good stereo hooked up in the living room. I am not sure if he was in the place when we got there. Anyway, we got there, and the first record we put on was Hopes and Fears. And again, I did not hear Fred Frith play guitar. 

Rather, I heard the astringent voice of Dagmar Krause, accompanied by funereal woodwinds, singing, in strong tones with an occasional slight fluctuation that seemed pitched somewhere between deliberate vibrato and near-voice-crack, the opening lines to a song by Hann Eisler and Bertolt Brecht: "In such a country/and at such a time"—and then the voice, seemingly an alto exploring the outer end of her range, shifted to a plaintive falsetto—"there should be no/melancholy evenings/even high bridges/over the rivers/and the hours between the night and morning/and the long long winter time as well/all these are dangerous." She went on: "For in view of/all the misery/people just throw/in a few seconds' time/their unbearable lives away." The song is called "On Suicide." The next tune began with some highly-fucked up keyboard tones, an electirc organ with some serious contact trouble maybe, and ominous drumming, a stark piano figure; the chorus, such as it is, has Dagmar, ending each word with a repressed sob, stating, "There are no questions just demands/oh give me the order and I'll cross the border/I don't want to be where I am." On the next song, "Joan," there is finally some GUITAR: a soaring four-note riff with a martial drum figure behind, and Dagmar asking the question "Was I a witch?" Yes; the song is a musical contemplation of the Maid of Orleans. It is only on the fifth song on side one that we approach anything like "rock," and that is because the song, "In Two Minds," the text of which applies a Marxist and possibly Lacanian analysis to the topic of teen alienation and concurrent mental illness, or, more to the point, "mental illness" ("as parent secretly conspires with parent/to discredit conscience and reject all criticism/as a shameful sickness"), is in part a pastiche of/homage to The Who's "Baba O'Riley." It was a little after this point that my punk-rock girlfriend and I, who considered ourselves adventurous, open-minded listeners—because a big part of being punk rock was being adventurous, and having an open mind, we reckoned—determined that as intrigued as we were, we had no idea what the hell we were listening to. I think that my roommate, who had either been there the whole time or who had turned up shortly after we put the record on, had compared Krause's vocal stylings unfavorably to those of Yoko Ono. 

So maybe we'd better put on Guitar Solos, because on a record so titled, the artist making it is clearly out to show his stuff, and in a relatively direct way. And, we recall, the guitarist's brother has proclaimed the guitarist the greatest in the world. (Doesn't seem, on the evidence of Art Bears, on whose record he also played keyboards, like a very showy guy, though. In the experience of the American rock fan, shit-hot guitarists tended to dominate their combos with shit-hot guitar playing, c.f., Eddie Van Halen, and Frank Zappa even.) Certainly the minimal liner notes, which specified "all music heard as played," and, even more scintilatingly, "the middle part of 'No Birds' was played on two guitars simultaneously" promised a show of some kind of virtuosity. 

And the opening cut, "Hello Music," while decidedly offbeat and not all that "rocking," did not/does not disappoint. A two-bar two-chord vamp (later, on exploring a guitar myself, I figured out he wasn't really playing chords, just barring and unbarring a fret) followed by a four-note cascade at a VERY lively speed, followed by dashing runs with wryly discordant intervals and all manner of harmonics sneaking in on the sidelines. It was kind of hard to believe Frith was doing all this without overdubs—still hard—and again, I later found out that he'd modified his guitar in all sorts of unusual ways, adding for instance a neck pickup and using a stereo volume control. The guitar hence emitted sounds from all sorts of places at once, at different speeds. Combined with an exceptionally dextrous playing approach—as I believe I've said elsewhere, Frith plays guitar with his entire body, really; more than any other guitarist I've seen, he makes his instrument an extension of his being—he makes the six-string sound like it's a hundred-string. He ends this particular demo with a bright and cheerful traditional major chord, a punchline that's simultaneously sardonic and entirely devoid of cynicism. The rest of the album is somewhat less immediately jaw-dropping, except when it is even more  so. But Frith is concerned here with improvising first, and blowing your mind with technique maybe tenth. On the evening of the first hearing, it was an easier LP to relate to. Even the Beatlemaniac roommate allowed that Frith knew his way around the instrument.

These two records changed my life. They changed how I hear, they changed how I process music. I went back to Hopes and Fears many, many times and still do. I went from not quite understanding it to feeling a deep concordance with it, and it led me to much other great music. Its philosophy and aesthetic corresponds to my own, and when it doesn't, it challenges my own, and stretches it. I think that's what music, that's what art, are for. Guitar Solos remains a pleasure and a marvel, on the same plane of listening. I thank Fred Frith, who I continue to think of as the greatest guitarist in the world, and Chris Cutler, and Tim Hodgkinson, and Georgie Born, and the late Lindsay Cooper, for having made this music. 

Here's Cutler on the origin of the band name "Art Bears:" "I took the name Art Bears from a sentence in Jane Harrison's Art and Ritual......'even today, when individualism is rampant, art bears traces of its collective, social origin,' p 241. But not too much should be read into this." 

I've mentioned before that my late friend Lee Lipsenthal took to calling the Art Theater on East 8th Street "the Art Bears Theater." 

Sidney Lumet on film form, film critics, and a seeming paradox

No blues: Charlotte Rampling in Lumet's The Verdict, 1982

Q: You've talked about the irony of how some critics referred to Prince of the City as "realistic" whereas you deliberately made it in a more expressive style—in terms of the lenses you used, forced perspectives, making certain objects prominent in the frame. It's almost as if you did your job too well, because the viewer does get caught up in the emotional reality of the story.

A: Prince of the City is a highly stylized movie. And one of the reasons I'm glad it's not discussed from a stylistic point of view is, to me, it's bad style if people spot it. However, I'm not letting critics off the hook. You're a critic because you should be able to spot it. You know, you're not a critic just for your opinion. My elevator man has got an opinion. Theoretically, you know movies enough technically so that you can recognize what lenses are being used, so that you can recognize a color palette. The color palette in The Verdict is wonderful and so carefully worked out. You know the color blue appears only once in that movie? I couldn't get the sky out of the shot. And I looked for a way to change the lens, but I needed that lens for another reason. But that kind of control on a movie is what my work is about. 

And then I said, "Wow, I didn't notice that about The Verdict at all," and then Lumet punched me in the mouth and said "Go! And never darken my towels again!" and then...

But seriously, that's from my 2007 interview with Lumet, in the Fall edition of the DGA Quarterly for that year. The whole thing is available on line here. I put this up as my contribution to the Great "What Should A Film Critic Know" Debate Of 2014, of which this Criticwire survey response and this impassioned manifesto by Matt Zoller Seitz are major parts. 

For some reason I am also reminded of Martin Scorsese's recollection of Sergio Leone's reaction to Scorsese's The King of Comedy: "When it was shown at the first night of the Cannes Festival, I went backstage with Sergio Leone and he looked at me and said, 'Martin, that's your most mature film.' I don't know if it was his way of saying he didn't like it. I guess that comes to mind because over the years my friends and I have had a running joke about slow movies, where the camera doesn't move, as being 'mature.'" 

Chris Butler, "Easy Life"

Last fall I was pretty delighted to learn that some smart person at Universal Music Group had put together a compilation of the more or less entire recorded ouevre of The Waitresses, the tuneful, witty combo that originated in the imagination of  multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Chris Butler. I say "originated in the imagination" because, as it happens, The Waitresses really were at first an imaginary band—he and his fellow songwriter Liam Sternberg apparently came up with the group names "Waitresses" and "Jane Aire and the Belvederes" sitting in a Perkins Pancake House in Kent, Ohio, one evening in the late-ish '70s. The Waitresses' first hit, "I Know What Boys Like," was initially titled "Wait Here, I'll Be Right Back" (way funnier, if you ask me), and was made by Butler and a couple of colleagues from his then-real (or "real") band, Tin Huey, with genuine female person Patty Donahue on vocals. After that song caught on, Butler was compelled to form a genuine band around Donahue and the travails-of-smart-urban-women concept. "Jane Aire and the Belvederes" made some records too, but that's another story. 

Anyway, I was listening to the Waitresses comp, Just Desserts, and marveling at much of it, but specifically marveling at Chris Butler's way with narrative songs, and/or songs one could easily slot in to a narrative, an antic and/or poignant narrative. And I put up an observation on Twitter, as is my wont, saying that it was a shame or a crime that nobody in the great apparatus of showbiz has yet commissioned Chris Butler to write an honest-to-God stage musical. Which observation prompted an e-mail from Chris himself (we are friendly acquaintances, and go back aways; see here) saying "Funny you should mention that," or words to that effect. 

Easy Life, the album Chris sent me in the wake of our exchange, wasn't a commission, and as yet there's no actual stage musical of the same name. This song cycle with occasional and eventually crucial narration is sufficiently vivid and engaging enough that you can picture it as a stage production, a movie even. This is not to say it ought not be produced as such, only that the record itself is a coherent and cohesive experience, a highly pleasurable and ultimately very unsettling one. Call Easy Life a bildungsroman interrupted. Most, or many, novels of formation/education end with the hero learning something he'd rather not know, but rarely on this particular scale. The unabashedly autobiographical narrative begins with Chris adopting the persona of his college-age self, at first bemoaning the deplorable state of his living quarters—"I've got a broken window in my bathroom, not to be confused with the five other broken windows scattered around the house"—but then preparing to whistle a happy tune as he celebrates his "Easy Life:" "I love my classes, I've got smart, creative, passionate friends, I'm living off one electrical plug. I'm on food stamps! I'm acting in a play...and I'm in a band." Then the tune begins, with the sort of streamlined descending-ascending guitar riff that kicked off a bunch of the Waitresses' biggest numbers, with a head-nodding bassline and whomping drum beat behind. 

There's a catch—of course there's a catch—and you can't miss it. "I could stay here in Kent forever!" is how the-above quoted intro to "Easy Life" begins. The CD booklet places the beginning of the action of this song cycle as Thursday, April 30, 1970—the date of President Nixon's announcement of the "Cambodian Incursion." Protests of that action began at Kent State on the next day, and the Kent State massacre happened the following Monday, May 4. And Butler was there, at the university, although his story is...well, you really ought to hear it. 

The scenes and the songs that lead up to the trumatic event depict counter-culture collegiate life at its most typical and at its most atypical. This is Kent, Ohio, not Columbia or NYU, and the bars where the kids hang are rough, but not in ways you'd expect. In one song an undergrad expresses confusion at all the older guys sitting around drinking cranberry juice; the AA meeting just got out, one of them explains, but the fellows still need a place to hang. The protest culture gets a good, approving number devoted to it, even as the young Butler figures he knows enough about history to understand the cyclical nature of social unrest and how he has got its fallacies all sussed out. The Sexual Revolution proves to have solved pretty much nothing for confused horny young guys, or women, it turns out. All these things are conveyed in songs that are very catchy and only a little quirky, or when they're more than a little quirky (as in the slapstick Caligariesque "Box of Noise") have sufficiently strong narrative underpinnings to make them palatable to a listener who might not normally like this sort of thing. Tin Huey, defined its own sense of pop by covering "I'm A Believer," only doing it in the arrangement used by art rocker Robert Wyatt when HE covered it in the early '70s. The work with The Waitresses really expanded Butler's pop horizons, but by the band's second album, Bruiseology, he pushed the more outré elements of the music to a forefront that arguably confused whatever new fans the band had picked up by doing the theme for Square Pegs. With Easy Life Butler finds a really agreeable balance, or maybe it's just that this sort of thing is an ideal platform for what he does best. While the songs are all in a "rock" mode, Butler clearly delights in throwing an advanced harmony or unexpected chord into a pop ditty while still retaining its catchiness. And this is exactly what the composers of the Great American Songbook, Musical Theater Division, made their stock in trade. (A mainstream rock composer who did sort of the same thing was The Who's John Entwistle; his "My Wife," for instance, on Who's Next, does some invigorating sideways-nudging to the standard I-III-IV chord progression.) 

Easy Life holds together through its climax, which is at first mordantly funny, then tragically elegaic, and on to a deeply ironic finale, the album's only cover, of John Fogerty's "Fortunate Son." So it's fascinating to learn, via the liner notes, of the disparate sources of the album's songs, and different times they were recorded. The record revives "Heat Night," which was first widely heard on The Waitresses' debut album Wasn't Tomorrow Wonderful? I always felt that anarchic anthem was too testosterone driven, not to mention earnest, for the sardonic but empathetic mode of The Waitresses. Here, in a 1979 "demo" version recorded by Butler and his Tin Huey bandmates, it fits perfectly, a more metaphysically erotic evocation of the same thing Richard Hell was going for with his song "Down At The Rock And Roll Club," a defiant incantation of the transformative power of music. Easy Life finds its hero, a guy who went on to become the present artist, and a great one, stripped of his illusions and presumptions about a lot of things (including the transformative power of music, sort of), and its unspoken coda could not be clearer if Butler HAD articulated it. It's a phrase from Samuel Beckett, one that Butler DID put into Patty Donahue's mouth in the Waitresses song "Go On:" "I can't go on, I'll go on." 

Easy Life can, and ought to be, gotten via the artist's own Bandcamp site, here. 

Randy Ingram, "Sky/Lift"

A couple of months ago I got an e-mail from a friend who asked if I still reviewed jazz records. I kind of got mentally stuck at the "still;" soon I bemusedly responded that, no, not as such, I didn't, but I occasionally wrote about music on my blog, so, you know...

A couple of exchanges later it was determined that I should recieve the new album by the artist, Randy Ingram, a jazz pianist who leads a quartet on this outing. It arrived in the mail addressed to "Glenn Kenny, Arbiter of Taste," which made me laugh but is also the kind of joke that I'm apt to overthink, so in about 20 minutes I wasn't sure whether I ought to have been slightly insulted or not. The next thing that struck me was that I wasn't familiar with any of the names of the other musicians in the quartet (and I hadn't been with Ingram's, either): Mike Moreno on guitar, Matt Clohesy on bass, and Jochen Rueckert on bass.  I like to think that I'm fairly to pretty up-to-date on the younger players in the contemporary jazz world, or maybe it's just that I know a lot of the alumni of Anthony Braxton's band or the U.S.-based roster of the Portuguese label Clean Feed or whoever's regularly covered in The Wire or featured at ISSUE Project Room. These players would include Mary Halvorson, Peter Evans, Taylor Bo Hunum, Kris Davis, Ingrid Laubock, Drew Gresse, Chris Smith, Ralph Alessi, all the guys in Mostly Other People Do The Killing, and so on. Rather oddly, when I looked at the websites for the players on Ingram's record, I didn't see any kind of overlap between their gigging and recording worlds and those inhabited by any of the above listed players. None. Which could mean one, or both, of two things: I'm not as well-informed as I think I am, and/or that factions in contemporary jazz are a bit more segregated than you'd think. Not segregated in terms of gender or race but, I don't know, temperament? Philosophy?

Now might be a good time to get to the record itself. It is really exceptional. Ingram writes real compositions: not songs, not heads or themes that provide pretext for "blowing," but long melody lines, sometimes articulated by the leader and guitarist Moreno in tandem. The title track, which is the record's opener, feels a bit like a relay race for tones taken at half-speed; after a sprightly, tinkling opening from Ingram, a single long line is taken at a graceful but not sleepy pace by Ingram and Moreno, after which they chat amiably in fours before taking off on solo flights, Ingram first, Moreno second.   Ingram is a canny but not a tricksy pianist; if he's soloing, he won't necessarilly do  anything counterintuitive or stealthily-genius with his left hand while his right hand is making the statement; no, he'll throw in the accents and the intimations of a bass line, or maybe nudge his solo in the ribs with a dissonant elbow, or raise an eyebrow of counterpoint, but he's not into misdirection or prestidigitation as such. Similarly, his band, while not what you'd call "reined in," is solidly supportive but doesn't push him as such; rather, they keep the ground tidy, but not bland, for the compositions. The keywords here are coherence and clarity. Both the lead players favor a crisp, open tone. Moreno's hollow-body guitar work seems virtually effects-free, and when he goes for sustained notes you really hear his finger on the fret. Ingram gives every note he pulls from the piano a considered amount of weight; he's never overbearing or overload, nor does he ever let his tones approach a mode you could call impressionistic, let alone mushy. It is not for nothing that the maestro of modulation Fred Hersch is an admirer of Ingram's.

But Ingram has a way of surprising you when you think you've got him figured out. The nice thing is that the surprises don't jar—Sky/Lift is a very well-integrated listening experience—but do make you prick up your ears, which are then rewarded.  The album's fourth track, "Time Remembered" seems clearly a title with a double or even triple meaning, as Ingram's playing here is practically explosive, replete with spiky note clusters and dizzying runs that stop well short of maximum dissonance while still making the hairs on the back of the neck stick up, not least because of the way his interpolations push up against the tune's meter and tempo, a shifty bottom that threatens to turn into quicksand at times. After the careening theme of "St. Louis," it's back to more comfortable ground; both "The Sea" and "Late Romantic" are tunes that completely live up to their titles. The album's next curveball, and final tune, isn't really a  curveball at all, because why shouldn't a contemporary jazz musician have grown up hearing and loving rock and roll? "Nicky"is a homage to the classic rock session pianist Nicky Hopkins, whose lush rhythmic chording enhanced and/or defined recordings such as The Stones' Beggar's Banquet and Quicksilver's Shady Grove, and who played in one of Jerry Garcia's solo bands (which largely aspired to place jazz improvising techniques in a rock and soul context). Fans of Hopkins' work will likely break out grinning at the rolling intro and theme of the piece, which is quintessential Nicky. The playing on the rest of the tune is the most relaxed on the album; it's a very enjoyable way to go out.  

You can get the record via Amazon or through the label that puts it out, Sunnyside Records. 

Peter Hammill/Gary Lucas, "Other World"

I've been friendly with the guitarist and singer/songwriter Gary Lucas since the late 1980s, so I've followed, sometimes from a fair remove, sometimes pretty up close, his collaborations with the likes of Peter Stampfel, Jeff Buckley, Jon Langford, Dean Bowman (I wrote the liner notes for their underappreciated 2010 album Chase The Devil, and many others. I don't recall having been quite so excited to hear about one of Gary's collaborative projects as I was in late 2011, when at a lunch he told me that he would be soon working with the British musician Peter Hammill.  I think one reason the prospect delightedly agitated me to such an extent was because as much as I immediately thought "Oh, perfect!" when Gary mentioned Peter's name, there was also the fact that as much as I felt it was a conspiracy made in heaven, I also had absolutely no idea what it would sound like. When Gary worked with the artists I mentioned above, while I couldn't say the results were predictable—Gary's brief in life has never been to make predictable music—I always had a strong notion of the mode he'd fall into with each partner. With Stampfel he made eclectic, antic, irreverent slapstick roots music. With Langford, manic angry urban B-picture punk with an irrepressible smirk. With Bowman, implacable, earthshaking deep blues. With Buckley...well, the Buckley thing is a whole other thing, and I still feel a bristle of irritation in sympathy with Gary over the fact that a lot of people who go into mystic fits of ecstasy over "Grace" and "Mojo Pin" sometimes seem willfully unaware that those tunes belong as much to Gary as to Jeff. Like I said, it's another thing. To circle back to my point, I had, here, no idea what the result of a Lucas/Hammill summit would sound like. And that was exciting. (And it had a lot to do with the fact that Hammill himself, over the course of an almost impossibly prolific 45-year career, both solo and as a founder of the iconic art rock outfit Van Der Graaf Generator, has remained both entirely sui generis—once you hear his voice for the first time, you'll never mistake it for anyone else's—and steadfastly hard to pin down. Although his tunes do tend, largely, to take off from a darkly anthemic E minor, his instrumentation bounces from keyboard-heavy prog formations to punkish 1-2-3-4 guitar front lines to near-musique-concrete electro-acoustic combinations.)

The record that came out of their early 2012 sessions, Other World, is as fascinating and affecting and unexpected as I had hoped it to be. It's just Gary and Peter, no band, no bass and/or drums. No keyboards either. Both men play acoustic and electric guitars with a panoply of effects. While Gary is  a fine all-around songwriter himself, here Hammill handles all the lyrics and does all the singing. This is as it should be: if you're making a record with Peter Hammill, you want Peter Hammill singing. His mordant, vinegary, voice has a presentational theatricality that some find similar to David Bowie, but with Hammill there's no sense of a mask, no irony; it's almost as if he's taken to heart the adage from a film we're all fond of, "The only performance that makes it all the way is the one that acheives madness." Or exorcises it. Listen to Hammill's vocal contributions to Robert Fripp's 1979 Exposure; practically primal scream therapy.

Other World begins in a relatively sedate, understated mode with "Spinning Coins," maybe the most conventional song on the record, a largely acoustic ballad (showcasing Gary's ability to make a steel-string acoustic sound like a virtual orchestra) in which a love affair is decided in a coin toss, and Hammill, sounding relatively isolated, muses on the "outcomes of randomness" as Gary conjures up soundscapes, blue notes transmuted through echoes and delays and phasing into cosmic points of bleakness and awe. 

The themes of the songs are largely not unfamiliar in Hammill's ouevre. "Some Kind of Fracas" obliquely alludes to getting fucked over in the music biz, and "This Is Showbiz" and "The Kid" are ironical and stage-frighted portraits of the artist as a captive of his own "profession"—"applause can't sustain you alone."  Gary's finger-picked chords on "Showbiz" impart a sardonic jauntiness to the observations, something you don't get, say, on similarly inspired musings featured on such Hammill classics as Nadir's Big Chance or The Future Now. But Hammill's most stunning and disturbing lyrics are about the way, as a 65-year-old man, he lives now. "Reboot, and count to ten/God knows I hope this process isn't shot down," he sings, steadily, on "Reboot," which, when the lyric's over, turns into an aural light show of wow-and-flutter riffing, hooks and licks lost in space trying to find a groove. "What remains/What's left before me/is the pricking of the thumbs, the needles and pins/the thinning out begins/of kith and kin," he sings on "Kith and Kin." I like the juxtaposition of The Searchers and Shakespeare in those lines, a welcome bit of humor in an otherwise grim but clear-eyed observation that Gary ornaments with notes like droplets of tears.

So, no, this is not an "upbeat" recording. But it is a nourishing and exhilarating one—ostensibly psychedelic music with a bracingly sober perspective. Not a raging against the dying of the light but a stiff-backed and stubborn celebration of the light that still remains. Some reviewer—well, one reviewer, particularly, Clive Bell in The Wire, writing a deeply ambivalent but intelligent and attentive notice on the record—balked at on ostensible over-reliance on effects from Gary, but I can't say I was bothered. The man is a stone virtuoso of the guitar straight (if you doubt it just take down your copy of Beefheart's Doc At The Radar Station and play "Flavor Bud Living" and get back to me in the morning) and when he goes electric effects are a part of his arsenal; the manipulation of his guitar's sound is an extension of his playing, not a short cut for something he can't acheive with his own two hands. In any event, the effects are hardly used to slapdash ends. He creates halls of mirrors, has the srtings talk back to the singer, all sorts of things. The name of the record is Other World, but the point of the title is that it's a world spun off this one we all share, a creation of Hammill and Lucas' heads, hearts, hands, and voices (literal and metaphorical). It is a rich and disturbing one. I hope they get around to creating another some day soon. In the meantime, I can't say I've exhausted this one yet; the record is as rich and deep and constantly treasure-yielding as any I've heard in years. 

You can purchase the record via Amazon, or through the website for its parent label, Cherry Red. 

No, read MY review of "The Grand Budapest Hotel"

For RogerEbert.com, here. 

Also reviewed:

The hilarious 300: Rise of an Empire; the effective In Fear, and the unfortunate War of the Worlds: Goliath. 

Novak/Hitchcock/Truffaut/Quine

Kim Novak in Bell, Book and Candle, Richard Quine, 1957

In the still-vital book Hitchcock/Truffaut, made up mostly (and in the first edition, pretty much entirely) of interviews between the former critic and filmmaker François Truffaut and the director Alfred Hitchcock conducted in the summer of 1962—over fifty years ago, now—the older director discusses his 1957  1958 film Vertigo mostly in terms of disappointment. While the filmmaker who at the time was known as the "Master of Suspense" seems pleased with the daring of the movie's scenario—"To put it plainly, the man wants to go to bed with a woman who's dead; he is indulging in a form of necrophilia"—and is understandably proud of the way he pulled off an ostensibly impossible track-out/forward zoom shot—"it only cost us nineteen thousand dollars"—for most of his exchange with Truffaut he plays the skeptic while the younger filmmaker tries to reassure him of the movie's strength. It's hard to remember, reading this book now, just how much its very existence was an argument for what few in the mainstream of movie culture at the time believed, e.g., that Hitchcock was a great artist. While the through-line of the perception of the  greatness of Citizen Kane has been a largely consistent one, the world in which Truffaut interviewed Hitchcock is one that's a rather long way from a world in which Vertigo is proclaimed the greatest film of all time, or any such thing. 

Hitchcock had originally planned to put Vera Miles in the lead role of Vertigo, and the details of their relationship and falling out are, as they've been revealed over the years, pretty unpleasant, and don't reflect well on Hitchcock. Hitchcock's account to Truffaut is both plain and enigmatic: "[S]he became pregnant just before the part that was going to turn her into a star. After that I lost interest; I couldn't get the rhythm going with her again." 

Truffaut moves on: "I take it, from some of your interviews, that you weren't too happy with Kim Novak, but I thought she was perfect for the picture. There was a passive, animal quality about her that was exactly right for the part."

As it happens, one is now able to hear the actual tapes of the Hitchcock/Truffaut interviews through the agency of various archives, online and off. I have not audited the discussion of Vertigo, but I can't help imagining Hitchcock emitting a long exhalation, if not an outright sigh, before saying: "Miss Novak arrived on the set with all sorts of preconceived notions that I couldn't possibly go along with. You know, I don't like to argue with a performer on the set; there's no reason to bring the electricians in on our troubles. I went to Kim Novak's dressing room and told her about the dressed and hairdos that I had been planning for several months. I also explained that the story was of less importance to me than the over-all visual impact on the screen, once the picture is completed."

Truffaut counters with a "there, there" variant: "It seems to me these unpleasant formalities make you unfair in assessing the whole picture. I can assure you that those who admire Vertigo like Kim Novak in it. Very few American actresses are quite as carnal on the screen. When you see Judy walking on the street, the tawny hair and make-up convey an animal-like sensuality. That quality is accentuated, I suppose, by the fact that she wears no brassiere." 

While his erotic predilictions, both those that were obvious fifty years ago and have since been gone into in further detail, do not suggest that Hitchcock  was much of what we call "a breast man," he does perk up here, and responds, "That's right, she doesn't wear a brassiere. As a matter of fact, she's particularly proud of that."

Animal-like sensuality? Hell, for the whole exchange Hitchcock and Truffaut do sound as if they're discussing some exotic zoo exhibit. And Truffaut's demural concerning "unpleasant formalities?" It's called directing, guys. While his routine condemnation on account of that "cattle" quip is indeed unfair, it's kind of undeniable that Hitchcock didn't have much patience with fussy performers. Not just the females—Paul Newman drove him up the wall. And when he wanted to play Pygmalion, watch out. It's also revealing to see the ostensibly more "progressive" Truffaut so naturally sliding into the alienated patriarchal mode of perception. In the event you were ever wondering why The Feminine Mystique needed to be written, it's all here in a nutshell. (It came out in 1963.) And yet, who would argue, if we look at the work by itself, that both Hitchcock and Truffaut were among the greatest directors of women, and among the most consistent providers of substantial roles for women. (Even at their most ornamental, Hitchcock women are never cardboard cutouts.)

Do directors talk about actresses as if they're objects because they (the directors) are men, or because they are directors, people whose job is, in a sense, to make subjects out of objects? In a 1960 interview with the journalist Archer Winsten, the director Richard Quine, talking about his latest film, Strangers When We Meet, said of Novak, the female lead in that film, "She's tremendously sensitive." He was quick to add a caveat: "If she doesn't know what she's doing, she draws a blank. Like in Pal Joey, she's innocuous." "Innocuous" is maybe the worst word you can apply to a performer. Perhaps Quine had a special investment in trying to sound professional, objective, in charge; he and Novak were romantically involved at the time of Strangers' making.

My friend Farran Smith Nehme recently posted, on her blog, a short essay about the largely lacking-in-compassion, and, to my mind and hardly incidentally, anti-feminist reaction to Novak's appearance at last Sunday's Oscar ceremony, and in that piece she examines the boorish, opportunistic treatment of Novak by Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn. If Novak had anything like a knight in shining armor at the studio, it was Quine, a one-time comic actor who had a number of B-pictures to his name as a director when Cohn assigned him to handle Novak's first starring vehicle, 1954's Pushover. If one of Pushover's most special features is just how prominent Novak's bralessness registers in a film girdled by the Production Code (honestly, not since Sign of the Cross has their been a more jarringly out-of-its-time reveal), Quine's overall treatment of Novak signals an appreciation of the depths that  lurk beneath the breathtakingly alabaster surface. And in fact that is the theme of his next two films with Novak. In Bell, Book and Candle, Novak plays a character who can be rendered impotent by revealing her vulnerability. In Strangers When We Meet she plays a woman whose gorgeous looks back her into a neighborhood-sexpot corner that her gentle true nature inhibits her from clawing her way out of; all of her subsequent actions in the movie are determined by her impossible position. Of his four films with Novak, it's the final one, 1962's The Notorious Landlady, made after their romantic involvement ended, that iterates this dilemma as farce (Novak's character is suspected of a murder that of course she did not commit). 

This, I think, adds up to a cinematic paradox that is both glorious and tragic. That Harry Cohn's best/worst efforts notwithstanding, Kim Novak became a great screen actress, and that at her greatest, the subject of her work was the difficulty of being "Kim Novak." See also Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid, the most frenetic and confused and strangely exhilarating of meta-movie farces, and Aldrich's The Legend of Lylah Clare, the most vicious of meta-movie expressions of self-loathing.

Gravy/Oscar post-mortem

So. Here's where the gravy whose making I chronicled on Friday ended up, mostly. Turned out pretty well all told. (I did not take the picture; an appreciative guest did.)

What happened was, a couple of friends of My Lovely Wife and mine are talking about a move to the West Coast and Claire thought it would be nice to have them and another couple over for dinner before they flew the coop. So Claire offered a few potential dates and the consensus acceptances were for March 2. Once that was established we realized that March 2 was the night of the Oscars. Ooops! Our friends like movies but they're not big awards mavens so we weren't gonna suddenly morph the event into an Oscar party. 

Anyway, missing the Oscars was not without precedent: last year we didn't see the Oscars either, because we were vacationing in Iceland. The ceremonies were taking place the night before we were to fly home, I think. Because I write, professionally even, about movies and, to a lesser extent, the industry that produces them, watching the Oscars isn't something I frown upon, and in past years I've had fun (I think) watching and live-tweeting and all that. But, you know, I'm not DRIVEN to watch the Oscars. On our last night in Rekjavik I wondered idly if there wasn't some all-night bar or something where Icelanders were watching the Oscars—maybe that Big Lebowski-themed bar on the main drag?—with the five-hour time difference and all...and after a desultory exploration of my options, I just decided to sleep. 

Last night's dinner was awfully pleasant. I was particularly happy with the way I'd smoothed out the gravy, and the lasagna itself was as close to perfect as I've gotten it—moist but not wet, held together really well, and was super-tasty. I reiterated to my guests how my lasagna-baking is related to the bell-casting episode that ends Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, and that went over well. Eventually the conversation got around to music, and one of our guests asked another what he made of Bob Dylan's Chrysler commercial. After the does-he-really-need-the-money question was batted around a bit, I attempted to wax philosophical. I shrugged and said, "Dylan's in show business. Always has been. Show business people do commercials." To say that show business and art-making aren't mutually exclusive activities/endeavors is a huge understatement, and although it's an occupational hazard that one's show-business activities could have a deleterious effect on one's art, I'm not one to think that Dylan's Chrysler commercial destroys or even substantially recontextualizes "My Back Pages" or "Masters of War."

So anyway, we missed the first couple of hours of the ceremony and once we tuned in I thought, I'm not gonna join the Twitter commentators, because why start in the middle. I know that I've gone through patches during which I've come off like The Angriest Man and/or The Biggest Asshole on Twitter, but I think I've straightened out my act over the past year and a half or so, which still might be too soon for me to say this, but still: Man, people sure are cranky about this stuff. I mean, I understand why, I suppose, but I can't quite grasp how some people can build up a head of righteous indignation and/or feigned boredom with genuinely pissed-off undertone year after year over an event that is pure show business, and represents the most bullshit-suffused aspects of show business. Oh no, not "grotesque, runaway narcissism," right, because there's nothing at all "look at me" about live-tweeting the Oscars in and of itself. Jesus. Try coming up with some material, maybe. Or, like the guy in the movie version of Glengarry Glen Ross says, "You don't like it? LEAVE." 

See what I did there? No, I don't either, actually. But, as I've learned, the thing is, one needn't watch, and if one watches, one needn't say anything. As for myself, I won fifty bucks on a bet I was pretty stupid to make in the first place, so I can count myself as lucky. And I thought it was pretty goddamn delightful when 12 Years A Slave won Best Picture, because if there was any real justice that action alone would put the "Oscar blogging" cottage industry out of business. (If you weren't following, the conventional wisdom was that Slave was award-doomed because old, out-of-touch, Going My Way-preferring Academy members were too a-scared to even watch it, let alone vote it an award or three. Ooops. Also: Eat It, Toby Young!) And there are two sides to every story, as an exchange between two critics I greatly admire and also personally like a great deal, Richard Brody and Dave Kehr, demonstrated this morning. Linking to his own Oscar post-mortem (which is well worth reading despite its unfortunate reiteration of a Wolf of Wall Street four-hour-director's-cut myth) , Richard tweeted, "I hate to be a recapper of bad news, but the Oscars had a chillingly tamped-down and neutralized uniformity." To which Dave replied "Oscars may be bland but they do support an important archive and library." So there's that. Which isn't nothing.