March 11 2024
Constance Debré in Frieze, speaking about her phenomenal book, Love Me Tender. "The fact that there is nothing psychological in the book is one of the most important things for me. I think that all we have are facts. The problem with many books written in the first person in France is that there is no hesitation. The writer is the narrator, and they have no doubt about themselves. Do you know who you are? I don’t know who I am." Imagine a story about emotions told only in facts, which is partly what Love Me Tender is. Or a story about facts told only in emotions, which is apparently what newspapers are.
Think about how much Saturday Night Live affected our feelings about the saxophone and how much the Charlie Brown theme changed how we hear the piano. When I listen to Water Damage's new album, In E, it makes me think that I misunderstood what basses and guitars and violins and drum sets do. I thought they described points and lines but Water Damage suggest that they are all brushes and useful only insofar as they can spread as much paint as possible, ideally in five slow coats.
RIP an actual king: David Bordwell. There is so much of his film writing available on his site that I am once again asking you to please rethink your digital apocalypse attitudes. Some of the opportunities afforded by the digital archive are an immense improvement over the analog vault! Not everything is so simple!
Here, chosen almost at random, is the beginning of one Bordwell entry on Godard:
He was a sketchy fellow, to put it mildly. Childhood episodes of theft were followed by larceny as an adult, when he stole his grandfather’s Renoir and swiped cash from the Cahiers du cinéma till. Notorious for taking funding for projects that were never made, he once contracted for $500,000 to create a film on the Museum of Modern Art. He declined to visit the museum and instead shot the footage from stills at home. When The Old Place was finished, he agreed to introduce it in Manhattan. Hours before he was about to fly out (on the Concorde) he canceled, using anti-American cinephilia as his excuse: “I will return to New York when the films of Kiarostami are playing on Broadway.”
This two-hour talk with Ross Allen and Adrian Sherwood is possibly so good because they seem to have seen it as "just some talking and records on the radio," and without the frame of some kind of comprehensive survey they've managed to provide just that. Hearing Sherwood talk about falling in love with "gimmicky records" like Andy Capp's "The Law" as a kid lit me up. I was a teenager once, listening to Sherwood's work with Dub Syndicate and Mark Stewart, records that made extensive use of what could fairly be thought of as gimmicks — blasts of radio, illogical overdosing of plate reverb, chaotic tape edits — and it made me think twice about what a studio could do.
Here is a clip of Young Marble Giants playing "Wurlitzer Jukebox" live on the BBC in 1980. I think about this band all the time, because of how fully they make the music school approach obsolete. Here is a full 45-minute set from November of 1980, in black and white. If you have the option of thinking about what your instrument could do rather than learning what it has done, you might end up with your own Young Marble Giants. I always forget a little bit what instruments they played, beyond the fact that they had no drummer. There should be more bands without drummers!
Time Is Away don't do much on Spotify but they've made this Portals playlist, which is a quick way to get to know their vibes: a placid surface with just a glimpse of bodies floating beneath the surface.
I have not played bass for months. Or, I had not, until this morning, when I picked up the bass and played something I had been working on last year. I was surprised that my fingers had forgotten the shape of the feeling and then reassured that the shape came back. For possibly the first time in my life, the thought occurred to me that I could lose all of this knowledge, that my muscles and spirit might simply decide to look elsewhere. And what if that's fine? I don't remember how to use certain machines I used in different restaurant jobs. Maybe this skill is no more useful than that one.
If you want to confront the unwholesome fact that there was once time and money and willingness to make baroque and incompetent concept videos, I point you to Ryuichi Sakamoto and Thomas Dolby starring in the 1985 video for the Dolby song called "Field Work." I miss it. I do not think it is necessary for spectacle to be constrained by logic—we have enough propaganda!
Zero Fucks Given and Nostalghia: both dependent on natural light.
Woodleigh Research Facility was the late Andrew Weatherall's project with longtime creative partner Nina Walsh. (This is an interview with both of them.) That Bandcamp is a great trove of what feels like dance track raw materials, often more interesting than final tracks, sometimes just by dint of them being really long. I had no idea any of this existed until a few months ago. Someone scanned and uploaded this Jockey Slut 2020 tribute to Andrew Weatherall, which is sort of like a mini biography. And this is up for argument (by definition, since it is a non-existent category) but his remix of My Blood Valentine's "Soon" may be the greatest remix of all time.
