The Face Knife

While I am not currently nor have ever been a cinematographer, I’m enough of a fellow traveler to realize that the term “black and white” covers a wider variety of sins than the impression one would get from reading most reviews of contemporary non-color films, such as George Clooney’s civics lesson Good Night and Good Luck. The confusion tends to come from the mistaken impression that the film was shot so that the historical footage (most of it TV) would blend in seemlessly with the rest of the film, but even a casual observer should be able to tell that the styles are worlds apart, and in any case, most of that historical footage is shown as being mediated even within the movie itself - either projected on a screen or framed in a TV, so that it as much a different world for the characters within the film as it is for the viewers.

The cinematographer could have shot the film in a grainy, old-timey TV look, but instead the low-key lighting and hard shadows of film noir have been used, and one must wonder why that choice among all the types of Black and White photography available to the post-modern DP. The answer is very simple;
Good Night and Good Luck is a film noir.

Granted, there’s no hard-bitten dame but aside from that the movie brims with film noir signifiers - narration, incessant smoking, sealed envelopes, Scotch in the office, a suicide, a boss who might be playing both sides. And the milieu is - well, is there any venue more god-fosaken and savage than power politics?

Our fearless detectives Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly are adrift in a world where moral values are transposed like a television changing channels, and while they seem to score a blow for truth it is immediately recuperated by the forces of darkness. Good night, indeed.

Hillary Brown’s Review of R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet on Flagpole is inspiring, not the least for introducing my non-Italianate ass to the concept of sprezzatura, defined as an “artful artlessness,” which I immediately want to claim as my own by twisting it into dumb, genealogically suspect puns like “spazzatura” or “sprezzatourist” or “spechgesangatura.” Because that’s how I roll.

Brown brings the ultra-unfashionable Harold Bloom into the mix, by big-upping his concept of “canonical strangeness” - briefly, the idea that what makes great art is the batshit weirdness of it, in form or subject. I want to expand on this, by addressing how, according to Bloom, a work acquires this “canonically strange” properties. As I see it, there are two possibilities: the creator is uniquely disturbed (which, you know, guarantees strangeness, but probably isn’t very helpful for the creator) or, the application of a “strong misreading” to a past canonically strange work. A strong misreading is a deliberate (though it may be unconscious) twisting of the aims and forms of the work of an admired forebear - Bloom calls this “the anxiety of influence.”

Personally, I’ve always thought that “originality” was the result of incompetent plagiarism, (that’s an enabling fiction for me) so I’ve got some love for New Haven’s self-proclaimed Falstaff. Therefore, I’m going to apply this theory to Trapped in the Closet, and assert that it’s (among a great deal of other things, which maybe we’ll explore in future pieces), a strong misreading of Arthur Schnitzler’s/Max Ophul’s La Ronde.

Trapped in the Closet is an exploration of sexual mores across social spheres, like La Ronde. Both films have a quite prominent narrator figure who actually appears on camera. Yet while La Ronde’s abiding metaphor is a merry-go-round, a closed circle, so far the relationships in Trapped in the Closet has been radically rhizomatic, a much more contemporary viewpoint. The chart I am preparing, TK, will illustrate this, and I hope it will be the first of many ways of looking at this project.

Often, when you’ve been a fan of an artist for a long time, their new albums fail to excite and buying them or seeing the artist in concert becomes more of a duty than a joy. Many times, you’ll go to a show resigned to the fact that you’re going to hear mostly songs from the latest record rather than well-loved favorites. I’ve been a fan of Stephen Malkmus since his days with Pavement, and I’ve never been as excited to hear his recent work live as I was with his newest CD, Face the Truth. More playful that his previous two solo efforts, Face the Truth finds Malkmus spreading out, indulging some of his silliest tendencies as well as his guitar virtuosity.

Last night’s show was the loosest I’ve ever seen Malkmus. Usually, he tends to get disinterested in a song he’s playing if he thinks he screws up, and that only happened once during the show last night, during “Freeze the Saints.” His concentration seemed intent throughout the rest of the evening, except for perhaps a meandering middle section to “No More Shoes.” Highlights of the set included album opener “Pencil Rot,” which was fierce with a full band sound, “Water and a Seat” from his last album Pig Lib, and everyone’s favorite, Jenny and the Ess-Dog. It seemed to me to be a pretty short set, even though Malkmus played two new, unreleased songs.

The evening was marred only when he let his drummer take guitar and the mic for the last song of the encore, a bar-band sounding number that devolved into noisy numbskullery lacking none of the artisty and wit of the masters of noise, like Sonic Youth, or openers PAIK, who I want to mention for a minute.

PAIK, or as I like to call them, Frodo Pond, played an opening set of incredibly loud and repitious psychedelic sludge instrumentals. I’m a sucker for that kind of stuff, and it was exactly what I needed to clear out the cobwebs of depression that had been clouding my mind since that morning. The best psychedelic live shows (for instance, Spiritualized), transcend time through volume, repetition and lights shows. The earsplitting volume and blinding lights of PAIK’s peak robbed me of my senses, and I was forced to stand eyes closed and fingers in ears, light still flashing across my retinas and sound still filling up my ears and shaking my pants (and my beer). It was an invigorating and exhausting experience. There’s something about the combination of distortion, feedback and repitition that I really think has some sort of a physiological affect on me - ever since I was a teen (prior to any sort of drug experiences), that kind of sound made my brain feel whole and smooth and round. I don’t know if I’m describing the feeling right, but it really is some sort of transcedence. Thank you PAIK!

Stephen Malkmus will play Battery Park in a free(?) show with Yo La Tengo and Laura Cantrell on July 4

Sometimes I fear there’s something a little wrong with me. While New Order played the Joy Division classic “Love Will Tear Us Apart” all I could think of was how strange it was that that song had become an audience sing-along, a slightly gloomy old chestnut, and that this crowd of aging Long Islanders was communally singing a song about isolation, a song about the inevitable and terrible estrangement intimacy inspires when it starts to deteroriate. Can you really sing “There’s a taste in my mouth/as desperation takes hold” with a big fucking grin on your face, and then turn and high-five your neighbor? I suppose you can, and hooray, that’s the magic of Pop music. It takes pure, romantic poetry and turns it into a party. Sorry to sound precious but fuck, that’s an intense song about intense feelings. I don’t think listening it to should be an occasion to remenisce about how great WLIR was when you were growing up in Hicksville in the 80s. * That’s a song that MEANS something. Somehow, if that song was to be played live, I would want it to absolutely FLATTEN the audience.

But New Order has grown beyond that, 25 years beyond, and they were clearly enjoying themselves playing live. Bernard Sumner danced like a big goofy sissy and a muscle-shirted Peter Hook struck rock star poses at the lip of the stage, as the crowd sang along to “Regret,” True Faith,” “Temptation,” and three other Joy Division tunes besides the one that flipped the switch in my brain from enjoying the music to thinking about what it all MEANS. Damn you Pop and your conundrums. You are a fickle mistress.

I think I’m in the minority of preferring the guitar-heavy version of New Order, and they had a lot of that on offer this concert. For most of it, there was some heavy ax-slinging, but during the final encore of “Blue Monday” Hook played these goofy drumpads that made laser noises whenever he slapped them. It was a good end to the set - it was fun and silly and over the top and nothing like Joy Division.

Openers Dragonette were the awful 80s prom band from my nightmares, where I’m forced to be John Cusacks ill-groomed sidekick in perpetuity. Speaking of which, Matthew Perpetua of Fluxblog DJ’d between sets, and he played “Theme from Sparta FC” by the Fall for me, which was ever so nice of him. Matthew, the 40-ish volunteer firefighter types in front of me loved “U Got the Look,” so you should always play that.

* not that I’m so pure about how I use my music. For instance, I regularly exercise to the Jesus and Mary Chain. Surely Jim and William Reid’s hairdos are rotating in their graves.

The only way yesterday could have gotten more twee is if I were wearing mittens and holding hands with Jonathan Richman. Whimsy’s fuzzy fingered fist held sway over a dreary, rainy day in New York City as I took in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and after the film headed to Pete’s Candy Store to catch a performance by Au Revoir Simone, to which we were very, very early. After some grumbling precipitated by intensely uncomfortable humidity and a woman with an acoustic guitar performing “Where is My Mind?” (which followed up “Luka,” of course) we settled in to the womb-like atmosphere of the stage area of the horribly laid-out Pete’s, to catch relaxing sets by goofy raconteur Ethan Lipton and shoegazy Hula.

The stage at Pete’s is TINY, reminding me of the video for Tom Waits’s “I don’t want to grow up”, though Ethan Lipton’s Orchestra had little trouble fitting in, as it consisted solely of a Ukelele player. Lipton kept admirably straightfaced throughout his often very funny songs - I can only imagine that his heavy mustache held a functional as well as aesthetic purpose, the weight of hair keeping his mouth from curling into a smile. His best songs were about running away with a woman at a Ren Faire, who turned out to be a one-eyed, toothless, one-legged whore, and the one where he told us about his magic trick called “Happy!” I wouldn’t necessarily recommend anyone buy one of his CDs, because I suspect there’s only a limited number of times one can appreciateand enjoy a song about how Whitney Houston corrupted “sweet Bobby Brown,” but it made for a relaxing evening…

Which got even more relaxing once Hula took the stage and played their druggy rock to an enthusiastic crowd. You really couldn’t get more early 90s than Hula - short name, girl bass player with a short haircut, jazzmaster and reverb, and I’m a sucker for that shoe-gazy stuff. The lead singer had an un-twee appearance - he looked more like a linebacker than badminton hero, and he had a deeper voice that didn’t verge into the histrionics one would expect. The bass player could not stop smiling - she was adorable, just like…

Au Revoir Simone, about whom the nastiest thing I could possibly say was that they took a long, long time to set up their battery of keyboards and fabulous music machines, were of course their willowly, pretty selves. I’d only heard one song they played prior to this set, so I have no idea what the names were, but they most effective numbers sounded like a more skeletal human league and featured some surprising and effective compositional turns, like Heather playing drum pads during the coda of one song. Their lyrics, from what I could tell, seem a lot about learning to love yourself, which we all know is the greatest love of all, and Whitney Houston, can’t you learn your own lesson and leave poor Bobby Brown alone?