Back on the Horse; Bubba Ho-Tep; etc.

Haven’t written in awhile, but I have a lot of little ideas that I’ll hopefully get posted soon.  Listening to a lot of new music, seeing new movies, thinking new thoughts, etc. And on vacation, so I should actually have time to write.

Just watched the movie Bubba Ho-Tep from 2003 with Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis–an absolutely stellar cast that didn’t fail to please.  In fact, I would say that Campbell’s performance as Elvis Presley is one of the best I’ve seen in awhile, a lot like something out of a Coen Brothers movie, something that Steve Buscemi or John Goodman do, but carried out over an entire film, into the lead.  So in that way it’s a lot like none other than Jeff Bridges legendary portrayal of The Dude.  The characters are similar too.

The film is heavily plot and script driven.  It has a low budget, but that is all that it really needs. It is a horror/sci-fi/fantasy-type film, so the special effects are important to the proceedings, but they never eclipse the actors, plot, or character development.  In fact, the special effects are quite artful–not minimal, but not overwrought either–might be ‘cheesy’ in another film, but not here.  In this way, the whole film reminds me a lot of Donnie Darko in plot, form, execution, etc.  It even shares some thematic elements–mortality, religion, alienation (social and otherwise).

Of course, it’s bringing together a lot of elements that are near and dear to me, that I go over a lot in my own thinking–the Elvis myth, 50s and 60s nostalgia, death, and religion–but it works with these elements impeccably well.  (This is going to sound strange to anyone who has not seen the film, but) for me, the film’s small obsessions with piss, shit, penis cancer, soul-sucking, and Egyptian religious practices all elevated the film out of the indie-movie netherworld of empty thematic gesture into the sparsely populated subset of post-structuralist (in this case, post-Freudian) filmic provocations–Barton Fink, Donnie Darko, Big Lebowski, Repo Man, etc.  Of course, these are cult films too, and that’s Bubba’s problem, if it has one: it’s a cult film.  But like the best cult films, it forces us to ponder what exactly a cult film is, what the term means, what the genre contains.  My contention with these sorts of films is that they’ve always contained the kernels of a more expansive filmmaking practice beyond the modernist avant-garde or empty post-modern gesture, a sort of film that really even goes beyond form, which is what the best post-structuralist art is supposed to do anyway.  It’s especially pleasant when that kind of provocation happens in a movie that’s also about Elvis.

811 Bolling Ave.’s Top 10, December 3, 2006

From the Red House Painters song, “Have You Forgotten?”:

When we were kids, we hated things our parents did

We’d listen low to Casey Kasem’s radio show.

Top 10 Singles:

1. Derek and the Dominoes, “Layla”

2. Clipse, “Dirty Money”

3. Clipse, “Mr. Me Too”

4. John Fahey, “Layla”

5. Jarvis Cocker, “Cunts Are Still Running the World”

6. The Exploding Hearts, ” Shattered (You Left Me)”

7. Ghostface Killah, “Kilo”

8. James Brown, “Lost Someone” (Live at the Apollo, 1962 version)

9. James Brown, “Cold Sweat, pts. 1 & 2″

10. The Mountain Goats, “This Year”

Top 10 Albums:

1. Clipse, “Hell Hath No Fury”
2. James Brown, “Live at the Apollo, 1962″

3. James Brown, “Foundations of Funk”

4. James Brown, “Make It Funky: The Big Payback”

5. Sly and the Family Stone, “There’s a Riot Goin’ On”

6. Sam Cooke, “The Man Who Invented Soul (Disc 4)”

7. Derek and the Dominoes, “Layla”

8. Animal Collective, “Sung Tongs”

9. Animal Collective, “Feels”

10. John Fahey, “Let Go”

A Message to My Readers and the Beatles, “Love”

I’ve been working on a lot of ideas lately for the blog, not the least of which is a wholesale change in format, e.g. changing the whole presentation, adding some widgets, and starting to write some longer essays/articles that I will then break up into individual posts over the course of a week or so.  I’m motivated to make these changes for two reasons:

1)    The blog is not necessarily ugly right now, but it is boring.  I.e. I don’t think my thoughts are entertaining enough to satisfy the public toot court.

2)    One of the main reasons why I started this blog and why I want to get into mainstream (i.e. non-academic) criticism and rockwrite is my disdain for sites like pitchfork and mags like Rolling Stone whose reviews are really just advertisements and whose entire format and worldview is instructed by an impoverished postmodern mode of listening, seeing, reading, critiquing, etc. Music, visual culture, and the world do not move in daily and weekly cycles of news, change, and innovation, and they therefore should not be covered in that way.  To do so harms the art, the writer, the listening audience.  So enough with it! Eventually . . .

For the time being, I’m going to keep on trying to post content on a fairly regular basis and hopefully I’ll get these changes done over the break.

Today I’m going to write a bit on the new Beatles’ Love album, mixed and re-mixed by George Martin and his son, whatever-his-name-is.  I have a downloaded copy and I’ve listened through a couple times.  I agree with pitchfork (shame on me) and Macca too apparently (quoted in the pitchfork article) that the disc is really kind of underwhelming.  The alternative versions and mixes are interesting, fun, and exciting, but not really revelatory.  In fact, besides the orchestral version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” it’s difficult for me to tell exactly which songs are presented here in radically different versions.  Obviously, there are a lot of little differences, and a lot of little details missing, but besides the “Guitar” version it’s hard to say, without the liner notes, what’s totally new.

Again, going along with the fork, this stuff isn’t revolutionary in the least.  Jason Forrest, Girl Talk, Dangermouse, etc. have all done more interesting stuff with the same or different or similar or more exciting material.  The problems are two-fold.  One, the fact that this was produced for the Cirque du Soleil means that Martin and co. opted for a lot of longer song-pieces and throughout the disc were beholden to the later logic of performance.  This just makes things boring.  The producers can’t really go out on a limb with the material.  Also, what makes things like these work are great breakbeats, and while the Beatles had a bunch of exciting ones for their time, they don’t have enough to really sustain an hour-long megamix.  (James Brown would, of course.  For a short demo, listen to Steinski’s “Lesson 2”.) One thing that is cool close to the breakbeat department, though, is that focusing on the rhythm section on some of these tracks brought out new dimensions in some of Macca’s brilliant bass playing that I always knew were there, but which too often go underrecognized.  Still waiting on him waking up from this twenty-year artistic coma.

All in all though, I think the Love album is an aberration.  Hopefully, musicos won’t get too hung up on other projects like this because they kind of stink.  They stink, and if you ask me they pose a danger.  I compare them to the process of ‘arranging’ classical music that Adorno describes in his essay “The Fetish Character of Music and The Regression of Listening.” They rearrange the amazingly challenging parts of pop songs that should be consumed as wholes into easily digestible bits.  They take the pieces out of their performance context and their context of listening.  “I Am the Walrus” is meant to be listened to high, by itself, as a single.  That’s how the Beatles released it and that’s the way it should stay, in its official version.   Now this is not to say that I’m totally opposed to recontextualization of any kind.  I think that’s great.  I dig a good mash-up and have enjoyed albums like Girl Talk, Forrest, and The Grey Album.  But what those artists were up to was a lot different than what Martin and co. are up to here—flattening out the Beatles catalogue to be danced all over by the Cirque.  Dangermouse is recontextualizing the Beatles to be danced all over by a new generation of democratic, egalitarian hip-hop memorymakers, and this is de-absorptive, liberatory, dialectical, estranging.  He runs the nostalgia danger, certainly, but the nostalgia danger is, for Martin, an absorptive, reactionary modus operandi.  What I fear it could add up to is a false alternative history of the Beatles’ or Dylan’s or whoever’s back catalogues, the greatest artistic accomplishments of the twentieth-century that are already in danger of being mis-remembered by my generation.