Some Came Running

Back to the well

Ricardo Montalban in Battleground.

For some reason, I thought that it might be fun over the Christmas holiday to give myself more work. With little to nothing going on in terms of “real” work during this period, I figured I’d go on a sort of cinema vacation: revisit a group of films just for the hell of it. Actually, only partially for the hell of it; I thought, the better to revive the enthusiasms that led me to write about motion pictures in the first place, I’d revisit pictures that were essential to the formation of my sensibility. A rather mordant sensibility, it turns out. What’s up with that? I was crazy about movies for a very long time before I even began to conceive of forming a critical apparatus with which to deal with them, but I knew from almost right off the bat (the first movie I remember watching in its entirety was The Haunting) what I wanted from movies. I did not go to cinema in search of beings akin to me (God forbid that, in fact), but I was not looking for a non-mindful form of  “escape;” rather, I wanted intoxicants, narcotics. This is one reason why, whenever I am compiling some kind of “greatest ever” movies list in private, I sometimes have to remind myself about, say, Rules of the Game. A great work of art but not one that affected me in the same way as The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, if you get what I’m saying.

This was not a hard rule regarding my selection, though. As you’ll see, there was a Current Events Pretext for picking one film, and the World War II movie popped into my head via a stray social media remark from my friend Tom Carson. As for the others, though, they were/are each in some way parts of my personal pantheon, other people’s work that nevertheless hangs in The Museum Of Me. Would spending time with them invigorate my enthusiasm for The Work? Interesting question. Below are the observations I made on each of them.

King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack [and Willis O’Brien], 1933)

The movie seems a lot less innocent the older it, and I, get. Not that this is a source of great concern to me; in a sense I find its relentless malevolent lurid sensationalism kind of admirable, and I understand why some of the Surrealists did too. It’s also funny in the way the diegesis begins with a heap of delightful idiomatic sassy Pre-Code dialogue (“I go out and sweat blood to make a swell picture,” etc.) and then a long central section of the movie leading up to Kong’s rout of Skull Island seems to have literally nothing on the soundtrack but harsh screams and animal noises and the crackle of Kong breaking that dead dinosaur’s jaw. And yes, of course the movie is a complete mess of racialism. I wondered, idly, as I watched, the extent to which the completely African-American-free depiction of Manhattan was actually calculated. Also noteworthy was how the giant animatronic Kong head used in close-ups is an entirely different character from Willis O’Brien’s clearly more beloved full-body model Kong.

The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin, 1940)

I picked this because why not, given all the chatter about The Interview and the comparisons (specious, it can confidently be said even if one hasn’t seen The Interview, which I haven’t) and all that. Ron Rosenbaum hates this movie, considering it both arrogant and a squandered opportunity. By the same token, as much of a genius as Chaplin was, I imagine he’d have to be even more of a genius and something of a saint in order, by 1938, to perceive Hitler in a position of utter detachment from his own (Chaplin’s, that is) ego. (Note this observation from around the same year, in the Spectator, cited in David Robinson’s biography of Chaplin: “In Herr Hitler the angel [i.e. Chaplin] has become a devil. The soleless boots have become Reitstiefel; the shapeless trousers, riding breeches; the cane, a riding crop; the bowler, a forage cap. The Tramp has become a storm trooper; only the moustache is the same.”)

It is almost impossible for anyone alive today to imagine a pre-Holocaust Hitler, but that is, for better or worse, the Hitler Chaplin was addressing with his film, and that combined with Chaplin’s ego-driven indignation at the effrontery of this character are large parts of what make the film fall flat, seen today. Another problem is that while Chaplin was great at parables he’s not that good with satire (“kill off the Jews…wipe out the brunettes,” ugh) and, as smart as he was, he wasn’t quite what you call an intellectual. His ambition, which in this film includes the desire (slight, admittedly) to be seen as one, wreak havoc with his better artistic instincts here; a sinking feeling intrudes as one endures the painfully unfunny Great War prologue. Interestingly enough, the movie only begins to find its footing when Paulette Goddard shows up. There is no other film about which this can be said, I think. (Not to disrespect Miss Goddard, mind you.) Roberto Rossellini called Chaplin’s much-maligned 1957 A King In New York “the film of a free man,” this, too, is the film of a free man, albeit a free man flailing.  Certain of its infelicities are kind of fascination: Chaplin’s Mack Sennett-derived conception of storm troopers has some interesting side effects, one of them being that Billy Gilbert makes more sense here than he does in His Girl Friday. For all that…I do find the movie’s closing speech strangely stirring, and I felt (that is, registered) Chaplin’s desire to be sincere in an almost awkward way as I took these notes from it:  “The power they took from the people will return to the people…you are not machines…you have the love of humanity in your hearts…don’t fight for slavery…the power to create happiness…”

Battleground (William Wellman, 1949)

This sketch of the siege of Bastogne is a great stealth Christmas film, and also a marvelous kind of “hang out film” despite the context being one that you’d never want to hang out in. Atmospheric, quiet, almost no “plot.” Equal measures of lyricism (Montalban’s character, Rodrigues, has never seen snow before), warmth, and dread. Even the seemingly manufactured-for-uplift coda (sounding what Paul Fussell called the “one optimistic and morale-sustaining voice” of the Hollywood WWII film) is handled in a downbeat, matter-of-fact fashion. There are remarkable performances from all the members of what Jeanine Basinger dubbed “the universal platoon.”

Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)

In its levels of detail and immersion, possibly the most convincingly novelistic movie ever made. How did they do all that action stuff in that rain (real or manufactured as it might have been)?

Diabolique (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955)

All things considered, maybe I shoulda watched The Murderer Lives At Number 21, a much earlier Clouzot picture I haven’t seen before. Not that this was bad, not at all, but it didn’t hit me in the way I was hoping. And anyway, the whole point of this exercise was to watch stuff I HAD seen before.  Despite it coming after Wages of Fear, Diabolique has stretches in which if feels way less assured. A good deal of the French Provincial stuff is really kind of cringe inducing, e.g. the innkeeper’s histrionics when the clanging of the pipes is making it impossible for him to hear his radio show. Jesus. The point’s supposed to be one of suspense: is he going to get so mad that he’s gonna go upstairs and see S. Signoret and V. Clouzot with a dead guy in the filled tub? Instead Clouzot lets Nöel Roquevert make a full-fledged “comedy” routine out of it.  Hitchcock would have never allowed such a thing, which is one reason Hitchcock’s a consistently/demonstrably better director than Clouzot. Still. There’s some pretty strong stuff here. What are you gonna do.

Belle de jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967)

I believe J. Hoberman has called this “a perfect film” and he is indeed correct. Not only is there nothing wrong with it, there’s everything right with it. So much is going on, and yet all of it seems effortless, comfortable in mastery and drollery. The choppiness of the cuts in the opening “dream” sequence is bracing (and reminiscent of the dedication ceremony scene in L’age d’or somehow) but also weirdly sets the film’s fluidity of tone. Also noteworthy:  the way Buñuel both sends up and respects the prerogatives of the “women’s picture” and/or melodrama. It’s kind of staggering, too, especially given Buñuel’s admitted delight in indulging his own kinks/fetishes here, how non-“masculine” or macho the film is. In a sense the auteur is like Flaubert, and not just in a “Madame Bovary, ç’est moi” way. Part of it is his refusal to be heavy-handed, as in the way he cuts from a client of Severine’s discovering “you like the rough stuff” to a shot of Mme Anais and her girls playing gin rummy. (I don’t imagine you will find anything even vaguely equivalent to this transition in the film of Fifty Shades of Derp.) I love how the buzzing box brandished by the nonsense-speaking Asian client is treated as a throwaway, as is the robbery committed by Francisco Rabal and Pierre Clementi that introduces those two knucklehead characters. The picture is also full of weirdly numinous dialogue: brothel maid Pallas saying “I even dream about you sometimes” or Rabal’s “I’d slit my father’s throat for less.” Also: the elaborate dolly-then-zoom in the duel dream sequence. Clementi’s steel teeth. God, this movie.

A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)

If Dr. Strangelove is Stanley Kubrick on Mad Magazine, Clockwork is Stanley Kubrick on Zap! Comix, or something like that. Almost all of Kubrick’s films have a cartoonish element, but I think there’s three of them that qualify as full-on comic books of a sort: Strangelove, Clockwork, and Lolita. Right, I know what you’re thinking: my putting Lolita on that list is as quirky and brilliant and provocative as Robin Wood saying, “But Scarface belongs with the comedies.” Wait, you’re not thinking that? Anyway. The first fifteen minutes of the movie are just one in-your-face violation of taste and propriety and morality after another, and there’s no point in denying the extent to which Kubrick enjoys the spectacle. In John Baxter’s bio of the director, actor Adrienne Corri, who was a social friend of Kubrick’s, recalled lobbying for the part of the victim of the brutal rape in the movie’s first section (I don’t recall that either Corri or Baxter clarifies why on earth any sentient being would actively lobby for that part, but hey) and having Kubrick respond “But Corri, what if I don’t like the tits?” Do not hold it against me for noticing that the, um, tits displayed throughout the film are all highly likable. In point of fact maybe they’re the only outright attractive features in the film. There’s so much here that’s dispiriting, puzzling; there’s an amazing amount of bravura, too-bravura, filmmaking done in the service of a vision so narrow and monochromatic that it’s almost…hell, I don’t know what it is. Things I flashed on: The frost-breath of Alex as he invites Billy and his gang to fight. The pan as the would-be victim of Billy’s gang runs off stage. The Pythonesque stylings of the chief prison guard played by Michael Bates. The shot of the lightning, very Universal Pictures…and Alex’s voiceover reflection during a Ludovico session “it’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on a screen,” which may just be what the whole damn film is really only about anyway. 

Elke Sommer in Lisa and the Devil.

Lisa and the Devil (Mario Bava, 1973)

I loved Bava’s images—a coach floating through a menacing forest in slow-motion, Barbara Steele’s haughty-cheekboned grinning/grimacing face bearing the punctures of a medieval torture device—before I knew who the man even was. So of course I became a rabid fan once I did know. This 1973 vision existed for years only in a risible, mutilated version that still had plenty of oneiric mojo. As with so many International Co-Production Genre Pictures there’s a realm of compromise in which even the undiluted vision dwells, one in which the viewer is obliged to accept a lollipop-snarfing Telly Savalas as the embodiment of death and/or evil. His interpretation of the responsibility is largely…interesting, but I can’t get past the nagging feeling that he’s just not taking his job very seriously. Such is the puzzlement faced by not just this Bava fan, I think. On the other hand: one cannot deny the treatment of space that’s as acute in its way as Antonioni’s, the way Bava shoots the lovely Elke Sommer as if she’s a mannequin throughout, the way the labyrinthine plotting recalls both The Old Dark House and Castle of Blood, the late revelation that between Alida Valli’s final moments here and the climax of Black Sabbath’s “A Drop Of Water” sequence, it had to be Bava who inspired Ernest Dickerson to concoct the rolling-walk show with Spike Lee…and so on. Always just a magnificent experience, Lisa is.

I did not, I have to admit, come away from all this consumption with a sense of the World Remade Anew. I mean, I suppose it’s nice for me that I have such “interesting” taste, or at least taste that satisfies certain aspects of Cinephile Conventional Wisdom on the one hand and deviates from that in “interesting” ways which are still, you know, acceptable, but so what. There are a lot of people out there with taste. I was reading a piece by David Ehrlich in Slate the other day about the irresistible rise of Jennifer Aniston’s Best Actress Academy Award nomination odds; in that piece he describes the process by which things came to this apparently sorry pass, and refers to Deadline Hollywood’s Pete Hammond, who apparently got this ball rolling, as “a humanoid pull-quote machine whom the studios pass around like the office stapler.” A funny line, and possibly not an inaccurate characterization, but for some reason I flashed back to 2009, when Robin Wood died, and an Internet “columnist” wrote something vaguely disparaging about Wood’s affection for Rio Bravo, and who chimed in with a comment in defense of Wood, a comment that showed a pretty thorough conversance with the critic’s work? Well, Pete Hammond, whose current line of work doesn’t call for such appreciation, when you come right down to it. And yet, there it was. A few weeks ago I was in the midst of reading a pretty thick tome about a relatively esoteric branch of African-American music, which I had with me at a screening; the book was noticed by a guy who’s pretty well-known on the screening circuit and who’s something of a figure of fun to younger and/or more gainfully employed/socially adept writers, and God knows I’ve had occasion to have ungenerous jest at his expense. “I’d like to check that book out,” he said, after he had wrested its title from me, who displayed I suppose considerable awkward unease at having to conduct a conversation with him. “That music meant a lot to me when I was younger.” 

I remember, in Money, Martin Amis’s John Self proclaiming “’Confidence’ I now regard as a psychopathic state. Confidence, it’s a cry for help. I mean, you look at all that out there, and what you feel is confidence?” And I also remember, not in Money, the phrase “there but for the grace of God go I.” All of this was buzzing in my head after I watched my eight films, and before the events in Paris. That’s where I ended up after going back to the well. 

"Monster Island Dance Party:" An Observation By Artificial Intelligence

A little background: I've alluded to my band, Artificial Intelligence, on this blog before, most expansively here; in the wake of the engagement described in the linked post, the personnel determined that, as they say in the movie, it would be fun to either make a record or play out again, or both. 

Three years and change after that, we made a record. The aforementioned personnel are:

Daniel Burwasser, drums; Ron Goldberg, keyboards and samples; Douglas Harvey, the electric bass; myself, Glenn Kenny, vocals and low-grade guitar; and Thomas Santamassino, guitar. The rhythm tracks were recorded at BC Studios in Brooklyn by the great Martin Bisi in the winter of 2011; the vocals were recorded in the same venue, by Mr. Bisi, in November of 2012. The overdubs were recorded by Ron Goldberg at his homes at various sessions between 2011 and 2014. The records was mixed in February of 2014 by Martin Bisi, with Ron and myself sitting in on all sessions, Mssrs. Harvey and Santamassino advising on separate sessions. 

The recording, which if released in album form will be titled Revisionist History, was produced by Ron Goldberg with Martin Bisi. The band entity can best be credited as the Associate Producer. The reason for the title is that all the material on the recording was originally composed and played out in the early 1980s. We have not yet determined a release date, or even a definitive release form for the recording, which consists of eight songs. I wanted to present the above track as a kind of "sneak preview" of the record, and also leech some interest off of the release of the latest Godzilla picture, no duh. Hope you enjoy the song and the admittedly rudimentary slideshow "video." 

A brief note on the advantages of maintained weight loss

So in the early evening yesterday I'm walking west on 49th Street in the Times Square area and I inadvertently cut into the path of a group of African American teen males  coming the other way. "Watch it, Bruce Willis," one of them says, chortling. "Nah, motherfucker looks more like Nic Cage," another one says, after passing. And all I can think is, well, beats the hell out of Victor Fucking Buono. 

Dear Kent Osborne,

40 IS a bitch. Man, don’t I know it! I think it was Martin Amis who said—and I’m paraphrasing here—that turning 40 is the most fucked up thing ever for a guy, because it means, for all intents and purposes, that the first half of your life is over, and like, what have you got to show for it, right? You are never going to get that first half back, it’s all downhill from here, you’ve stopped growing, physically, and you’re actually starting to putrefy. You’re on your way to death. Things start going away, right away. In this film about you, Uncle Kent, you start having some problems with your sight—you’ve got to look at certain stuff on paper first farther away, then nearer to you, in order to read. Wow, I’m relatively lucky—I didn’t start getting eye issues when I turned 40, and I still don’t have ‘em, but man, beyond that…well, I gotta admit I was a little surprised and shaken at how much the story told about you in the film Uncle Kent had in common with what I was going through when I turned that age.

The affinities started hitting me pretty early on, as I watched you hunching over your work easel, doing that animation stuff—you apparently work as an animator, whereas I work as a writer, they’re both kinda solitary occupations. And then there was how you live by yourself, and how you drink a lot, and how you smoke a lot of pot, and how you hang out a lot with your cat. See, here’s you, with your cat.

And here’s me, a long time ago, back in my 40s, with my cat.

And my stupid fanboy Akira t-shirt. And my double chin. And my nose hair. Sorry about that. Gosh, how embarrassing.

Now I was never that much of a pot person—until this one period where I got so anxiety-ridden and insomniac that I started smoking it very intently…but I’m getting ahead of myself here—but I definitely had this routine back then of working and drinking and just sort of wallowing in loneliness. And you’re clearly not taking very good care of yourself in other respects. “Check” on that, for me, when I was your age, too. You live in L.A. , so you have a car, and you’re letting that go to shit; I haven’t owned a car in a while (an advantage of a certain mode of urban living, I’d say), but I dare say if I had, well, what’s happening to your car would have happened to mine.

And there’s even more, and here’s where it gets kinda weird!

"Tomorrow," and "Tomorrow," and "Tomorrow"

Partaking in the grand tradition of internet oversharing, I reveal why My Lovely Wife cannot be persuaded to ever sit through the great Make Way For Tomorrow, not even in its spiffy new 1080p Blu-ray edition. I intend to make a fresh appeal when my in-laws come to visit for Christmas—trauma for the whole family! My Foreign Blu-ray Disc Report is at The Daily Notebook. 

Encounters With Great Recordings Of The Twentieth Century, #1: Pere Ubu, "The Modern Dance" (Release date, January 1978, date of acquisition, some time around January 1978)

For Chris Wells.

Many were the times during my childhood and adolescence when, due to my consumption and enjoyment of certain particular pieces of popular or, I should more accurately say, in some cases, semi-popular music, my parents were forced to conclude that I had gone completely off the rails, and/or was gay. Listening to the Beatles' "Within You, Without You" on some kinda outdoor hi-fi setup over in a corner of the backyard one summer night in '67, I overheard one of the adults hanging out with my folks at the patio proper exclaim, "Sounds like Chinese funeral music," and saw my mom kind of shrug and roll her eyes and make this "what are we gonna do?" gesture. One afternoon a few years later, I brought home a copy of David Bowie's Aladdin Sane, which my mom politely requested to take a gander at; and when she opened the gatefold sleeve (see right) and got a load of the air-brushing at Bowie's crotch cleavage, she had her very first stroke.

But it was when I first played Pere Ubu's debut LP, The Modern Dance, on the Radio Shack stereo system of my family's home in Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey, some time in the winter of early 1978, that the determination was made by certain of my kin that I had finally and definitively lost my mind for good.

It was an album whose prospect I found highly intriguing, despite being rather suspect of the album's front cover artwork, which didn't look particularly punk rock or even post punk rock to me, as in, what's with the dude in the ballet slippers. I had not heard the Cleveland, Ohio-based bands independently released singles but I knew their work was rated highly by Robert Christgau, whose Consumer Guide I had been avidly obeying via the pages of Creem from 1974 on, at least until I found a Jersey drugstore that sold The Village Voice. There was also the matter of the band's name, which to me was redolent of Surrealism and French cinema, two of my major enthusiasms at the time. So having found this sort-of major label debut (the record was on Blank, a "New Wave" offshoot of Mercury contrived by Cliff Burnstein, later a cofounder of the very heavy management firm Q Prime) in the racks of a Sam Goody's either in the Rockaway Townsquare Mall or Garden State Plaza, I don't remember which, I was extremely eager to get an earful of its sound, which the aforementioned album artwork and minimal sleeve notes (band members' names in alphabetical order, no listing of instruments played or by whom) gave very little clue about. Pretty much no sooner did the needle lock into the groove than I was greeted with a high-pitched electronic shriek, implacable in its insistence, not coming up right into your face per se but calmly, inasmuch as it could be calm, asserting itself as a fact, the same way your dentist's drill does. Alongside the shriek was a semi-mechanical sounding tapping or clicking. And for several seconds it's just that—the shriek and the tapping. And it seems, the first time you hear it, like an eternity. 

In fact it is only about three seconds before the electric bass guitar comes in, plucking bent doubled notes that just hang there before the electric guitar comes in with a kind of mutant Chuck Berry chording and then the whole band kicks in and chugs away—the shriek having dropped out—on the monumental riff of what is "Non-alignment Pact." All right then—rock and roll! Only then the singer starts in, with the shriek returning to buttress his fat-toned near-hysterical whinging about heads of state and whatnot. Even ignorant of any visual reference for Ubu lead singer David Thomas, he sounds like you'd imagine the grown-up Norman, a.k.a. "Chubsy Ubsy," of Hal Roach's Our Gang shorts, would have had he grown up, done a few substances, nursed a particular emotional petulance, and founded a band. By the end of this particular number, Thomas works himself up into such a frenzy over, one eventually learns from parsing the lyrics, his alienation form the fairer sex, that he actually sounds as if he's barking his frustration. The other people in the house weren't the only ones shuddering at this; I have to admit I did, too. The remainder of side one proved similarly...odd. The title track boasted another killer riff, this one propelled by that least punk-rockish of instruments, an electric piano; but the bizarre radio wave and conversational-snippets noise below its surface, the percussive hammer hitting a railway tie, and finally, the bizarre middle-eight (such as it was) with a noisy push-me/pull-you slide guitar solo by Tom Herman whose halts and returns were so abrupt that I had to inspect the vinyl several times to make sure it wasn't actually skipping; what was that all about? Then the bizarre horn work of the next track blending in with the atonal-seeming "scatting" of the singer; the horn in question, I later learned, was called a "musette" and was played by either...or maybe by both...Thomas or Allen Ravenstine, whose rudimentary, patch-cord operated EML synthesizers were responsible for the shrieks and hiccups and patches of white, white noise that never left the songs alone. It all came to a climax of sorts on the album's second-to-last cut, which seemed to be an extremely well-recorded chronicle of the singer breaking a bunch of glass ashtrays in the studio while drunkenly mouth-farting while the guitarist tried to piece together a lick and the other band members (Tony Maimone and Scott Krauss were the bassist and drummer, respectively) did...stuff. This "song" was entitled "Sentimental Journey." That thing that everybody's parents once said at some point about the rock and roll, e.g., "This isn't music, it's noise?" That pronouncement literally comes true with this particular piece.

Or at least it seemed to at the time. Even given the ostensible extremes of the stuff I'd been scarfing down in the summer and fall of '77—Ramones, Clash, Iggy and the Stooges (Raw Power but not Fun House, which might have given me a clue re Ubu and noise),Richard Hell and the Voidoids—and even given all that Velvet Underground stuff I had gotten into a few years prior to that, there was nothing that could have prepared me for this. As it happens, my memory of my particular circumstances of first hearing this record are a little blurry; I always associate it with my high school years, but the album's release date puts me in what I sometimes laughingly refer to as my second semester of college. I was attending William Paterson College as an English lit major; I had tried to get into SVU, on account of my best friend was gonna go there, but my parents balked at the cost and the fact that I would have to live in the city. They were going through a rather protracted breakup at the time, one that wouldn't become definitive until several years later, speaking of push-me/pull-you, and one of the end results of this that had the most impact on me (aside from the financial insecurity that eventually dictated that I go to a state school within commuting distance) was the fact that I was never entirely sure which "adult" authority figure was going to be living at our house at what time. So I don't precisely recall whether The Modern Dance gave my mother her third or fourth stroke, or if it caused my dad to give me that look that said "What are the genetic circumstances that led to my fathering an extraterrestrial being?" I do know that after the first audit, I tended to play it only when there was nobody else in the house. For in spite of the fact that it actually even weirded me out a little bit, I was kind of obsessed with it. 

I played it for some of my buddies, most of whom were high school pals. We had formed a band in the late spring/early summer of '77, a very suburban quasi-"punk" outfit we called The Bad Taste Delegation. We covered half of side two of The Ramones' Leave Home on the one hand, and Loudon Wainwright III's "Dead Skunk" on the other. Most of its members were talented multi-instrumentalists largely known to the remainder of the student population as "band fags," and they were largely into "real" music, which largely meant Chicago. Our bass player was such a maven that he once won a block of tickets to a Madison Square Garden show by that band by correctly guessing, from the opening chord, the title track of Chicago singer/songwriter Robert Lamm's three-copy-selling solo album Skinny Boy on some FM radio contest. The guys were, how do you say, mildly intrigued by my musical tastes. "This Costello guy's got some pretty good songs," one of their number would allow. And then wonder, "How can this John Cale come up with something as great as 'Mr Wilson,' and then do this other...shit?" And so on. In any event, The Modern Dance in general and "Sentimental Journey" in particular took the cake for these fellows. "You're not going to believe the thing that Kenny's cooked up now..." And hardly anybody really could credit it.

Even today, the record doesn't exactly sound...cozy. "Non-alignment Pact" turns up in the background of a record-store-set scene in the last third of Olivier Assayas' 1986 Disorder, and it's welcome and bracing to hear and it sort of "fits in" with the rest of the New Wave music on the soundtrack (and given the film's storyline, it also evokes the ghost of Peter Laughner, the songwriter/guitarist who was an Ubu founder and who died of alcoholism/acute pancreatitis in 1977 at the age of 24), but it still sounds distinctive, its irritation factor is still there, there's little that's quaint about it. As much as the music cohered for me over months and then years of listening (and to be quite frank, seven times out of ten when I'm revisiting the record at this stage of my life, I will skip "Sentimental Journey"), there is still something a little scary about The Modern Dance. It would be less than a year before Ubu would release its second LP, the even more monumental Dub Housing, as a U.K.-only Chrysalis issue, Blank Records seemingly having imploded in the wake of Modern Dance's release. By that time I had moved out of my family house and into a place in about the poorest part of Paterson, gotten something like a proper girlfriend, purchased and enjoyed Art Bears' Hopes and Fears and Fred Frith's Guitar Solos, among other seminal works, and taken several further steps leading me from childhood into the fierce order of virility. In March of 1979 I would see Ubu live for the first time, on a bill with The Feelies at Hurrah's. That show was where I first would lay eyes on Robert Christgau, who had written of The Modern Dance, "Ubu's music is nowhere near as willful as it sounds at first. Riffs emerge from the cacophony, David Thomas's shrieking suits the heterodox passion of the lyrics, and the synthesizer noise begins to cohere after a while." My buddy Ron and I couldn't believe that my girlfriend Nicole had actually fallen asleep, her head resting on a speaker cabinet, during Ubu's set—but shows went on very late back in that day. By this time the music was making nothing but sense to me. I was beginning to feel as if I had found a place. I was somewhat mistaken, but not entirely.

Good weekend

Saw two "thons" this weekend. The first, and more cinephilically congenial, was up in Suffern, held by my friends at the Lafayette Theatre...

...for the occasion, a three-day fest of which I was able to be present at two, Lafayette burgomeister Nelson Page displayed a couple of rare and fantastic one-sheets, above. Saturday we saw a lovely print of Bride of Frankenstein, a film that molded me as much as Psycho did (and who among us can't say the same thing, really?), and an even better print of Erle Kenton's House of Dracula, a quite hilariously dreadful piece of work that bears certain affinities with SIodmak on the one hand (the "Moonlight Sonata"-goes-faux-Antheil scene) and with Wood, Jr. on the other ("Say, look—it's Frankenstein's monster!" etc.).

What I've learned, plasma display repair division

So. As regular readers of this blog know, as of the middle of July my 50-inch plasma display went on the fritz, and it took almost four goddamn months to get it fixed. And right after I got it fixed, it seemed to go on the fritz again. This was not permanent, although it was worrying, and now whenever I turn the television on I'm worried that instead of getting a picture I'm going to see the symptoms that first tipped me off to the fact that there was something wrong. Yes, no picture being one of them. I thought, though, now that I'm in a relatively not-as-insecure about being-able-to-watch-stuff space, I'd share some of my experience so that you, dear reader, may be able to avoid the hassle and expense I went through.

1) Get The Fullest Warranty Available. I did not do this. If I had had, say, a three-year warranty, this shit would have been covered. Instead, I paid through the nose. Not that such warranties are cheap, or look cheap; that's why people don't necessarily opt for them. My advice therefore would be that when you're contemplating the purchase of such an item, leave room in your budget itself for an extended warranty—a couple of hundred bucks or so. You'll thank me, specifically, for it later.

2) A Good Surge Protector Is Not Enough. I have one, it wasn't cheap. Now, this relates to what precisely the problem was with my set to begin with, so let me backtrack a little. One afternoon in July, as I settled in to watch Atom Egoyan's Chloe, because I love Art Cinema so much, I was zipping through the Sony trailers and all of a sudden the picture went out, and the blue power light at the front of the set started blinking. In short order I discovered that this problem was isolated to the first HDMI input of three on the display. So I shunted my HDMI inputs around—putting the one from my amp/receiver into HDMI 2, and the one from the cable box into HDMI FRONT—and calmly started looking into my paperwork on the set, where to call for service, etc. In short order the same thing happened with HDMI 2—no picture or sound, flashing blue power light—and HDMI FRONT. I didn't even bother with the component video ins because what's the frigging point anyway (in due time I found they were not responding either). Anyway, I called Hitachi and they gave me the numbers of two authorized repair centers. The first guy I spoke to confirmed what I had suspected, based on my online research—my power supply board had somehow burned out. "I know that set well," the fellow said. "You have to understand, these big screen displays, essentially they're like big computers. Their circuitry is pretty much the same." However. The gentleman asked me if I had a surge protector. Yes, I did. "I don't mean a power strip," he said. Yes, I knew that. Okay. And did I have my cable box plugged in to the same surge protector as the plasma display. I did. Well. Apparently, this was a bad thing. A cable box—particularly a cable box coming from my very own cable supplier, apparently—behaves in electric and electronic ways that can wreak havoc on the aformentioned computer-like circuitry of a plasma display. Who knew? I sure as fuck didn't, or else I never would have plugged the two units into the same surge protector, right?

3) Know Your Rights. I didn't, and still don't, but you do hear all sorts of things. Such as, that it's federal law for a company to maintain a readily available stock of parts for these items in the event that they need fixing, rather than keeping them in fucking Japan from whence they are apparently never sent and where even were they sent they'd be likely to be held up in customs any goddamn way. Had I confirmed this, you can bet your bottom dollar, or whatever other cliché obscure anachronistic item you care to cite, that I woulda been yelling and screaming at the Better Business Bureau for some time. As it was, I certainly gave an earful to the poor folks at Hitachi customer service, every now and then telling them that I really didn't want to write an article for publication in a major magazine entitled "My Hitachi Plasma Repair Nightmare." They really didn't know quite what to make of that. In any event, the end result of my bitching is that I didn't have to pay for the eventually rebuilt part and I wouldn't have had to pay for the new power board had it ever shown up. Not that the labor wasn't expensive. 

It's also important for you to pay attention during the process. If your problem gets assigned a case number by the company or by the service center, write it down and keep it at hand; it'll make your calls for updates go that much more smoothly. Try to take detailed notes of each call so you'll know where you left off and what was promised or implied. Get the name of the representative who you spoke to. If one of them had been particularly helpful or sympathetic, ask for them the next time you call. And so on.

4) Check Everything. When the new power board had been put in, the repair guy and I looked at it for over ten minutes—and yes, the Blu-ray disc WAS Mars Attacks—and we were all like, "Okay." And he left. And a day or so later the picture went out and the blue light started flashing as I began watching the new Blu-ray of The Exorcist. And I almost had a stroke. And I went to the back of the set to power it down. And I saw that the TV repairman HAD PLUGGED THE DISPLAY INTO THE POWER STRIP THAT I HAD PUT THE PLUG FOR THE CABLE BOX INTO, AND NOT THE SURGE PROTECTOR THAT NOW NO LONGER HAD THE CABLE BOX PLUGGED INTO IT. And I almost had a stroke again. I plugged the plasma into the surge protector, did the HDMI input step-up again, and watched the set through the weekend, waiting fir the remaining two inputs to fail. (I was somehow reminded of the first time HAL sends Dave outside the space ship to fix something in 2001: A Space Odyssey.) And they didn't. I had scheduled a return visit from the TV repair place, and this time they were gonna lug the set back to their facility to figure out just what the fuck the deal was, but since the other inputs hadn't failed the whole weekend through, on the morning of the appointment I thought I'd retry HDMI 1 and see what would happen. And watched the entirety of Forbidden Planet without incident. AND it looked great. So. That's where we stand now. A new Blu-ray Consumer Guide is in the works. 

My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.

Damn, I'm good.

At the first hint of autumnal weather, the call goes up in the Kenny household for beef and Guinness stew, a concoction of slow-cooked goodness that, along with lasagna, is one of my specialties. So, today I took some "me" time...or I should say "us" time, as the concoction is most avidly enjoyed by My Lovely Wife (who is indeed the person who puts up the call as the weather goes autumnal), and whipped up a batch. 

It's such a simple thing to make that I'm almost embarrassed to boast about it. You chop up a buncha veggies—I'm big on carrots and potatoes, obviously, have grown to enjoy onions in a stew more and thus slice a fairly big one into eighths, and for some extra texture and nutritional value throw in parsnip slices—brown two-and-a-half pounds of meat, throw it all in a crock pot, and pour two cans of Guinness stout over it. Season a bit, throw a buncha thyme sprigs on top, put a lid on the pot, set on low, and forget it for eight hours. Go to the gym, read some Bleak House, listen to some Art Tatum, Cecil Taylor, Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh, or do all of the above. People who've given up drinking sometimes fret about cooking with alcohol, as the booze-burnoff isn't always 100% assured. This is one of those recipes where it's guaranteed; the resultant stew is entirely suitable for children and the alcohol-allergic. And is kind of unbelievably delicious and tender. This was a particularly hearty and satisfying batch.

Sometimes people say to me, "Glenn, you're such a dick; but your wife seems, indeed, really lovely. How the hell does she live with you?" The above would seem to be a portion of the answer.