wendy and lucy (2008)

Sure as your fate and hard as your luck

Judging on the strength of two recent movies I caught and rather enjoyed, the barren ignorelands of Oregon seems to be pretty fertile ground for American independent cinema. Gus Van Sant has often set his films in his hometown of Portland, and Paranoid Park (2007), when I caught it only at the tail end of last year, struck me as an extraordinary portrait of a suburban street culture inhabited by skater punks and throwaway mall urchins. Kelly Reichardt’s equally splendid film Wendy and Lucy taps into the same vein of youthful disenfranchisement that Paranoid Park mines so thoroughly, but quite differently and with a more understated air of stoicism that is perhaps even more enthralling than Van Sant’s mercurial reels.

Michelle Williams plays the titular Wendy, taking her dog companion Lucy on an arduous road trip from Indiana to Alaska, where apparently the young woman would be able to find gainful employment. Shit happens on their stopover at a small town in Oregon. Wendy’s meager travel budget is carefully calculated and yet she fails to account for dog food, an understandable neglect that bred petty mischief in the form of shoplifting. One thing leads to another, and Wendy loses her dog.

I have no idea how much Wendy’s (and/or Lucy’s) hard-luck tale is intended to be a parable for the everyman’s economic malaise but it is clear Reichardt assails these contemporary concerns with her own, uniquely austere vision of bummed-out cinematographic realism (an overly clunky label/description, I know): long shots cast over the township’s affectless landscapes, foggy nightfalls take on a spectral quality, and automobiles run inexplicably into ruins. Keeping with the film’s neorealist edge is William’s restrained performance, accurately capturing the vulnerability and dogged persistence of her character. The compendium of bleakness and unexplained circumstances at the heart of Wendy and Lucy is held together by the recognizable devotion of Wendy towards her canine pal in spite of her feckless means of existence. The final heartbreak comes in the form of a classic drifter’s escape, as Wendy hobo-hops onto the boxcar of a freight train with a glimmer of lukewarm hope, riding towards everywhere.

silence kit #12

TV On The Radio
Return To Cookie Mountain [Interscope, 2006]

When Scott Walker released The Drift in 2006, I wasn’t paying too much attention to it. I was pretty turned off by the music’s bleakness, its lack of humor. Music journalists were shitting all over themselves about the percussionist on Walker’s record hitting a slab of meat for beats or something, but I wasn’t getting into it. Maybe I was enjoying myself too much then, and that life was still relatively good. I think that’s probably it. Everybody gets occasionally deceived by an instance of fragile happiness.

But I also recall Christmas that year to be utterly depressing, for various reasons I won’t want to go into too much. Only then did I got around and listen to the Scott Walker record. Things in those dark and brooding songs start to slowly surface and make sense. But mostly I listened to a lot more of TV On The Radio. Return To Cookie Mountain had came out a few months earlier that year. (I was listening to the leaked version instead, by the way, the one with the song sequence all jumbled up and kicking off with the rocket-propelled “Wolf Like Me” – it is clearly the better version.)

Personal miserabilia aside, perhaps paranoid imagination (well, mine at least) is the common denominator here, and TV On The Radio has Walker well beaten. Credit is due to the industrial wall of sound David Andrew Sitek engineered for Cookie Mountain. The sense of punishing claustrophobia Sitek builds around Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone’s vocals is deceptively simple and yet so radically insidious, providing the ideal soundboard to take in the group’s divergent ideas – from the atmospheric swamp blues of “I Was A Lover” to the communicable funk of “Let The Devil In”, practically anything goes. The end effects of Cookie Mountain’s alien sound design are startling and vivid, or downright spooky at times, none more so than the lonesome whistle summoning a barbershop quartet from hell on “A Method” while Adebimpe and Malone harmonize on some truly wicked shit: “I'm a storm-faced cloud, hanging in dystrophy/ I'm a cold-base clown laughing at enemies”. What the two sing about aren’t particularly clear but the songs and their enigmatic glow most certainly create a portrait of a sickly epoch (barricaded lust, disintegrating worlds, meaningless wars) that feels uncomfortably close to the bone.

book-filled future that should have been now

Jazz in its truest fanatic form is supposed to be this wild and really intense thing, or so I’m told. Then there is someone like Dave Brubeck, a celebrated jazz musician with a demeanor that seems to be saying he’s a cool, unflappable and sophisticated dude always. Polite sounding and deceptively bland, the Dave Brubeck Quartet might well be the least fashionable thing to get all hyped up about these days, so overrated that it’s underrated. I’m talking about their 1959 album Time Out of course, probably the most treasured of cool jazz artifacts that I have been listening to lot lately (perhaps strangely), an album made famous by the adult contemporary radio staple “Take Five” and also an album most interesting for the cabinet of freakish non-jazz curiosities Brubeck works into in its lean 39 minutes. Unconventional time signatures, rocky blues shifting in and out of waltz themes, seasoned jazz musicians decking their improvisations around a Turkish folk rhythm: the quartet sounded just like a bunch of easygoing guys who are able to snuff out any cynicism on the part of the listening public with their serendipitous mix of methodical musical forms. Seriously intense musicians still, yes definitely, but of the fun and bubbly variety. "Three To Get Ready" is probably my most favorite, its central melody gracefully swinging away like fingers tapping across dusty bookshelves and always playfully promising unexpected treats, or distractions.

a sentimental education

My Maudlin Career, the newest one from Camera Obscura, comes off as a pretty optimistic album (especially for when the sheepdog moods hit) but don’t get hoodwinked by the songs’ bright personality and beguiling trajectories. My Maudlin Career echoes the retro paunchiness of the Scottish band's last, Let’s Get Out Of This Country (2006), in almost perfect symmetry, its bubblegum pop tunefulness washed over a heap of bleary-eyed sentimentalities. Yet even the saccharine sheen of the mascara-smeared balladry of “You Told A Lie” and “Other Towns And Cities” packs an acidic punch, not surprising when you consider how Tracyanne Campbell seems to write most of her songs from the perspective of one who got the fuzzy end of the lollipop in hamstrung relationships. Lead single “French Navy”, all tenterhooks, twee tongues and tall tales, may be the best single the band have cut since “Eighties Fan”. The title track isn’t that far behind in that regard: wistfulness, sarcasm and melodrama wrapped up in an enchantingly flushed arrangement, odd sonic elements (lugubrious organ melodies, fuzzy background guitars) of "My Maudlin Career" ushering in a girl-group meltdown in quite unsentimental terms, it must be said.

favorite nuclear squadrons

There has yet to be a movie made about nuclear brinksmanship that quite equals Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, released back in the sixties, but if eventually someone does (maybe a propaganda work, to be commissioned by the North Korean leaders), the filmmaker would do well to consult the latest Black Dice album Repo for soundtrack assistance: the waves of paranoid load-blown dissonance; the terse handiwork of industrialized subterranean sounds; raw, roughened electro-textured twitches rubbing up against a seabed of itchy-bitsy radio-sampled histrionics distorted beyond recognition (or actually, the other way around instead). Going nuclear, in other words; writing on The Guardian, Creation Records founder Alan McGee calls Repo "a grand statement of visceral intent". All aboard the Black Dice bandwagon then.

Also: I am pretty excited about the upcoming Dirty Projectors LP Bitte Orca, their first on Domino Records. I am sure some of you guys would have heard the brilliant lead single "Stillness Is The Move", which is as appropriate an anthem for today's token recessionists as any, and some of the other Bitte Orca songs are just as good. I've never been the biggest fan of their totally messed-up previous concept albums, including the critically acclaimed Rise Above in which frontperson Dave Longstreth imagines himself rewriting Black Flag's seminal Damaged, but this new one has the band going into a more pop direction. Judging by the track record of kindred bands like Black Dice, Animal Collective and Gang Gang Dance that have done the same recently, I can't say it's a bad thing for Longstreth.

silence kit #11

Yo La Tengo
Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out [Matador, 2000]

Not too long ago The Onion AV Club listed 25 albums “that work best when listened from start to finish”, from which my first reaction was that the selections veered, not expectedly, toward several what you might deem as concept albums: The Who’s Quadrophenia; XTC’s Skylarking; Randy Newman’s Good Old Boys, just to name three. But getting deeper into it, I thought the list should be a bit more about songs rather than song cycles – specifically, or simply put, the relationship or thematic tie between songs, and how they benefit more from being sequenced next to each other than when listened to divorced from the album’s context. (Of course I’m making shit sense here too.)

To me, Yo La Tengo’s 2000 studio masterpiece And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out (my personal favorite of the band’s output) fits the bill perfectly, an album of willowy summer-sad songs wheeled together into a long, swooning interlude of intimacy (77 minutes in all). While their nineties-indie classics (more on those next time) had the more expansive vibes, Yo La Tengo opened the 2000s with a newfound soft-and-bouncy flourish, favoring whispery keyboard affects over loud guitar feedbacks. The dreamy gaswork atmospherics of “Everyday” set the agenda brilliantly and many of the subsequent songs (“Saturday”, “From Black To Blue”) follow its reticent patterns right through to the 18-minute drone-fest finale “Night Falls On Hoboken”, domestic climes and old-time feelings unfolding in centegenarian pace.

And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out has largely been interpreted as the album that scrounges hazily through every nook and cranny of Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley’s marriage (which is maybe why it is best listened to from start to finish), and sure enough, as with most relationships, there are moments of peace and maddening bliss (watching them perform “Our Way To Fall” live gave me fucking goosebumps every time) balanced with some facsimile of discontentment and strife (“The Crying Of Lot G” employs a Thomas Pynchon book title to explore marital paranoia). While I am not sure how much Ira is referring to Whit Stillman’s underrated film on “Last Days Of Disco”, perhaps no other pop song captures the edge-of-illusion essence of unaccountable nostalgia better than this one tune.

mixtape (april 2009)

Unity concepts of the rational doomsayer
Sam Prekop “Practice Twice”
Nina Simone “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out”
Atlas Sound “Dovers Jam”
Pavement “Grave Architecture”
Camera Obscura “My Maudlin Career”
Calexico “Trigger”
Iron & Wine “Love and Some Verses”
Devendra Banhart “At The Hop”
M. Ward “Shangri-La”
Beach House “Turtle Island”
Grizzly Bear “Cheerleader”
Big Star “O My Soul”
Yo La Tengo “Paul Is Dead”
Dum Dum Girls “Jail La La”
Matthew Sweet “Sick Of Myself”
Andrew Bird “Fitz And The Dizzyspells”

Walking Spanish: I am sure I have shared with some of you, in conversations probably, how much I love the smartass Tom Waits reference in Joshua Ferris’ very readable novel Then We Came To The End, where folks being laid off becomes “walking Spanish down the hall”. On a related note, I am currently, officially, out of work this week, though I must say that the realities and circumstances surrounding the decision to leave I had made some six weeks ago have not truly resonated with me yet. In better times, I might have felt in some way liberated from the drudgery of dispassionate work, and looking forward to some time off for holidaying, long-term decomposing and what not. But these are different times of course. These days, I don’t need to remind anyone (i.e. myself) that there is rich cause for apprehension instead. The economy, as you might have heard, is way down in a hole. Employment opportunities in my line of work have actually been rather limited even before the shit hits the fan, plus I’ve got this worrying tendency to strike out at job interviews as naturally as A-Roid taking bad swings at breaking balls. (Speaking of Rodriguez, below is my prediction for the MLB 2009 season, with the teams in bold making the playoffs but I end my predictions there because, as they say, it’s crapshoots from that point – if I don’t find a proper job soon, the silver lining is that I would have plenty of time for baseball.) I put together this current mixtape in that murky, lack-of-sustained-confidence kind of mood I was in, the whole thing took a while to really “click” (not until I added Nina Simone, because I am really starting to relate to the sentiments of the song in so many ways; the Atlas Sound live recording that follows is so insanely good), and perhaps that is not so surprising.

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