It’s always a little infuriating to be reading a perfectly well-made essay only to find, buried partway in, an egregious error which casts doubt on the authority of everything that’s gone before.
Take Alex Ross’s piece in the New Yorker about Tolkien and Wagner (and by extension Howard Shore and Wagner) ... there are any number of things to ponder here: the question of whether or not Tolkien was influenced by the Ring (Ross makes a good case), and what was lost and gained in the translation. But then
The experience of film — and, in particular, of music in film — has probably had a prejudicial effect on the way people view live opera. They expect images to set the tone and music to match — “Mickey-Mousing,” Walt Disney’s composers called it. Howard Shore, in The Lord of the Rings, practices the art of Mickey-Mousing at an exalted level.
is just so ...
wrong. “Mickey-Mousing” has nothing to do with the use of music to cue emotional responses in film. It’s not about matching
tone, it’s about synchronizing
action; about the use of musical events as surrogate foley events (think of the pizzicato low strings matched to Mickey’s footsteps in the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” segment of
Fantasia). And given the general
opprobrium with which the term is used in discussions of film music, it’s highly unlikely that it actually emerged from the Disney studio, especially since the use of the term is reserved for
non-animated films (one describes a musical gesture as “mickey-mousing” as a polite alternative to saying “Dude, that makes your movie look like a cartoon”).
(OK, here’s a nifty link I discovered in the course of googling around the word “mickey-mousing,” an article reading a score by Eisler against his and Adorno’s strictures about “hyperexplicity” in Composing for the Films. And yes, it does make me want to hear the soundtrack, if only for the sake of the novachord ... and it also yields this cheery quote from Eisler/Adorno :
In this way a symphony today will often sound like the music for main and credit titles: - It is as if a traveller, meeting a lion in the jungle, would expect his roar to be followed by the mystic words flashed on the sky - “M.G.M. presents.”
which follows predictably in the path of Adorno’s usual mourning of popular culture's coarsening of discourse, but which sweetly complicates Ross’s argument (that music in film is led by picture, but image in opera is led by music), sixty years ago already.)
Why does Ross feel this digression into misremembered film history necessary? Was he 3/4 of an inch short on his column budget? I think it’s more of a mammal thing, a territorial pissing: gratuitous erudition as dominance display ... particularly annoying when, as in this case, the learning being exhibited is just flat-out wrong. The intrusion of semi-relevant factoids conjures up an image of a bubbling-over cauldron of knowledge — See, I could go anywhere with this! I fling extensibility in all directions! This is my knowledge, worship it ye mortals and despair. — which is expected to enhance the authoritativeness of the central argument. Of course, if the factoids are simply incorrect, or incoherent, or inappropriately linked, this all goes very wrong very quickly.
So Friday night I went to Vale’s Party Like It’s Nineteen Seventy-Nine event.
A celebration of sorts commemorating 20 years of Re/Search (or twenty-five years of Search & Destroy, or last shot before too many people are dead, or something), the “Night of Industrial Mayhem” was pendant to Saturday night’s “Pranks Festival” (which was to feature a panel discussion with Cazazza, Biafra, et al. rehearsing the Re/Search Pranks book <<snore>> or discussing the power of silly art gestures against the war machine or whatever). We won’t be hearing about that evening in this venue because I had the good sense to stay at home and read 8-year-old poetics listserv archives instead.
Rolled up about five minutes after the scheduled start time, paid my way in (the promised “discount admission for people wearing all black” seeming kind of pointless as we were in “sliding-scale” land to begin with ... what the hell, I dress like this anyway ...) and found myself in a shiny white-painted gallery space (we all made nice high-contrast images against it, I guess) with an initially sparse crowd of threequarters-old people. One wall’s worth of folding tables displayed the assorted Re/Search Pubs wares and an extremely modest offerage of alcobeverages; a shorter table across the entrance featured piles of Industrial Nation zines, one opened up to an SRL feature in a vain attempt to fool the long-gafiated revenants in attendance that the zine was not thoroughly encrusted in “the other industrial music.” That table’s presence would suggest that there was some sort of effort to sell dealers’ tables, but there were no other offerings in sight, so anyone hoping to pick up that Bay of Pigs 7-inch or complete their run of Unsound went home with their pockets still ajingle. Spattered around the walls were some large blow-ups of pages from Pranks and some photos of late-70s detourned billboards; given that one was around the first time and did not require much of a refresher course, the content was absorbable in approximately 5 minutes ...
... leaving roughly an hour and a quarter to wander around while the crew figured out how to get sound from the first band’s on-stage mini mixer to the main board. At least the lights were up and glaring (and the floor was clean, a welcome failure of period detail), so I could sit against a wall and read for awhile. A word about the atmosphere: I’m used to feeling kinda alienated at gigs (mostly because I’m kinda alien), but this was just weird. Usually there’s clumps of people who came together, either pairs on dates or groups of co-drinkers, with a few oddballs like me scattered around, and other people who wander in alone but know people in the clumps and hook up with them ... and then the occasional misguided folks who are there to cruise. But Friday ... Friday the room was full of people wandering around with that kinda feral look, checking out everybody walking through the door, trying to get second glimpses of people across the room or overhear conversations without being obvious about it ... a mass of people who all felt like they should have known everybody else, trying to figure out who everybody else was, trying to match up these middle-aged faces and bodies with faded, drug-smeared memories of 19-year-old art students before they were recognized by someone they didn’t recognize ... getting-laid cruising is sorry enough to watch, but do-you-know-who-I-was cruising turns out to be worse, especially when you’re stuck with participating in it to a certain degree yourself. (Even if “don’t I know you?” winds up being actually appropriate.) <<Sudden wash of relief that I couldn’t afford to go to my 25th high school reunion.>>
... which went on for longer than could possibly have been useful, given the size of the crowd, but at last Michael Peppe climbed up on stage to open things up ... a brief, pointless acapella rendition of “Institutionalized” (why?) followed by much dicking around with “sound problems” (Peppe does an excellent “mic cutting out” routine which butted up nicely against the previous hour’s dick-aroundage) while introducing ... the Sixxteens. A trio, with some Rolands and a Casio, a guitar that gets pulled out for one song, and some miscellaneous crap below my sightline. And I’ll admit they have the sound of 1979 nailed pretty good ... interlocking one-finger-per-hand riffs from the two keyboards, mostly kinda upbeat in a Units fashion but sometimes slower and a little more Dark Dayish, with whooshes and squeals from the miscellaneous, crooning tired-of-living half-time vocals from the guy, yelps and robotic armjerkings from the girl ... but the clothes ... the main guy’s in a white shirt with a ascot, with a pompadour, the girl’s wearing thriftshop spangly white evening dress and raccoon eyes ... it’s like they’ve tried to learn the look from old fanzines. And hell, I’ve never seen these people for sure (unlike everybody else in the room) ... why are they here? Halfway thru the set another oldtimer wanders past and tiptoes up to my ear:
“He’s got his Winston Tong impression down, eh?”
I bend over and ask, “So there’s no reason I should know who the hell these people are, is there?”
“Oh God no,” she laughs, “they’re all young.”
Don’t let me sound too negative (even if I do) – as I said, it was an excellent version of 1979 (Tuxedomania! An Incredible Simulation), it hit various nodes of what was going on then (somebody pointed out a Pink Section cop at one point, aside from the previously-mentioned) and did them well, and if I were to hear them at the Hemlock some night I’d probably get some pleasure out of it ... after all, some of the best stuff locally these days is drawing on the same period (Erase Errata, Burmese (at least the Whitehouse covers), Numbers ...). But there’s that old difference between influence and pastiche, between mixing what somebody did 20 years ago with what you do and mixing what somebody did 20 years ago with what somebody else did 20 years ago. At some point – a point you really want to avoid – it’s just Sha Na Na. And since we were all there to hear, not them, but people who really were there a quarter century ago, it’s redundant Sha Na Na.
Not to mention longwinded; in spite of the late start, they’re determined to do every song they know, which means we hear every idea they have at least twice before they get off the stage, leaving lots of time for people to repeat question the to each other, “Why are they here?” My best guess didn’t really formulate itself until the second act of the evening took the floor (off the stage, just like the youngsters do it). Monique Marquisa De Magdalena, The Artist Formerly Known as JoJo Planteen, stalked out in fishnet hose, vinyl high-heel boots and pink pageboy wig, came up to the mic and, to a background of 303 beatz, started to rant (if you weren’t here BITD, imagine early spoken-word Lydia Lunch and you’ll have the cadences) about how she was Back and Everybody Will Love Her. Eventually she’s joined by two henna’d girls half her age in black tees and camo pants (ok, one’s in a KMFDM tee which kinda blows the period cool, or any kinda cool really). They lay down a picnic spread in the middle of the floor and sit around mock-pouring from an empty vodka bottle into cocktail glasses, lolling and laughing silently while MMdM intersperses continued ranting (I am not making this up). Eventually the party’s over, MMdM sets up the mic at the far end of the clear area from the stage, back to the audience, and continues ranting “I have a plan ... War is Good ...” ad infinitum while the -ettes do parade-ground marches back and forth across the space, eventually attacking one another and rolling around on the ground (prompting someone in the audience to yell “Catfight!” in a Joey Styles voice); pity they can’t stop laughing while they’re “acting” here. Once the combatants have been reduced to quivering messes in the corners, we have a new number and MMdM starts writhing around on the floor whilst ranting, in classic slimy-reptile stripper style. “Is she intentionally giving the guy with the camera all these crotch shots?” the guy next to me wonders. “I dunno,” I said, “is he documenting the performance or is he part of it?” (This question, if I may say so myself, was the deepest part of the set and it wasn’t even in the script.) At one point, she flops herself down in a prostrate position at the edge of the crowd, her butt cheeks missing a beer bottle by an inch or so as she thrusts them backward; the beer’s owner reaches out, lifts the beer delicately with her fingertips, and sets it down out of the way, drawing a ripple of laughter from the crowd immediately behind her (hey, art’s ok and all, but don’t mess with my beer!). This move is the funniest part of the set and it definitely wasn’t even in the script. One more number (this time to a tape of vintage disco in a boombox) and we’re off.
I know I should be more respectful and shit – after all, she actually was there BITD – but, but ... couldn’t she have gotten at least marginally better at it in 20 years?
It’s at this point that I start to formulate my theory about what’s actually going on this evening. We’d been joking earlier about what a “pranked” version of the evening might have looked like – clowns and festive bunting played a big part in some of the theories – and I wondered if maybe the flatulence of the evening thus far was part of the concept. Thinking about all those evenings back then ... this seemed so far like a more accurate simulacrum than I had expected. First, spend an hour watching people try to get the PA to work. Check. Then an utterly redundant band plays a set roughly twice as long as it needs to be, heedlessly compressing the time available to the band you came to see. Check. Then some excruciatingly simplistic second-year SFAI performance art student’s project. Check.1 It all fit! Here, Re/Search was telling the new generation ... you want to mythologize our youth instead of having your own? Fine, here’s the crap that went along with it. Certainly this cast Sixxteen in a new light: they weren’t actually “doing” Pink Section and then “doing” Tuxedomoon etc. in sequence; they were “doing” some long-forgotten, six-month-late band who had been trying to be Greg Kihn in 1978, who were now “doing” what they thought they were hearing/seeing after a couple visits to the Mab. So it actually was an amazing simulation – of a mediocre simulation. (“It’s not imitation anything – it’s real plastic!” – Voice Farm, 1980)
Not sure I bought any of that myself but it gave me something to talk about until the meat of the evening finally started ...
... with what I guess you’d call the “supergroup” of the evening, Winston Tong backed by Bond and Joseph from Factrix, and LX Rudis of the Units and various later projects. And man, was the evening suddenly worthwhile. They did, oh, four or five numbers, somehow managing to sound exactly like the sum of their parts; which meant, since this lineup never existed before, we were hearing things that were comfortably in gamut for what we came for – but it was a combination that was also new and vital. The songs were built on frameworks that sounded like Tong’s later era material, but considerably tougher given the backup: Jacobs’ bass a thick mass spending most of its time roiling in the deep end, a thick sound but propulsively rhythmic; Bergland pulling all his patented gestures – the shrieking birds and psychedelic crocheting, the squirming serpent-wrestling ... it was such a pleasure to see these guys playing together again! At one point about halfway through the two of them were off to the left hand side of the stage, facing each other, locked in this riff, all the overtones clotting up over them so you couldn’t tell who was doing what it was just this thrashing fuzzball reeling around over the synth and wrapping itself around the vocals, and their whole posture and attitude to each other saying “Oh. Yeah.” LX’s synths were better than I’d hoped, meshed with the beatbox providing the rhythmic armature, with smears and bleeps filling in holes. This was a full sounding band, top of the spectrum to the bottom, second to second, there was something going on; and there was a sense of authority onstage, like the one you’d see in a late Swans show, of people doing their job professionally – “professional” not in the sense of the slickness of a studio whore, but in the sense of a master carpenter finishing his 10,000th joint: utter control, no slips, no extra effort. For what was for all appearances a pickup band, this was fucking amazing. I couldn’t tell early on if the material was new or not as I couldn’t hear the vocals from the back of the room; if they were old songs they were utterly reworked anyway ... they finished with what I finally realized was “No Tears,” only Winston’s barking delivery of the chorus carrying on in what had become a brawling chaos. New material or old, these guys really need to record this set before they go their own ways again. Have I made it clear enough that my ass was well and truly kicked?
[update: I've been informed that Cole was off the side of the stage I couldn’t see tweaking electronics for most of that too.]
And when that was over, Winston handed the mic off to Cole Palme and we had (with LX still on stage) a one-song, 5-minute Factrix reunion. What am I supposed to say? It was too short, I’d have been happier with an hour, but they sounded just like Factrix. What more do you need to know?
Yeah, I’ve been slack. Wandering off for three weeks at a time, nice people link to me and then I don’t write ... I promise to do better, suddenly the other pressure’s off and I’ve got loads to jabber about. You poor wretches.
To hold you while I’m gathering references, here’s a little tidbit to bat around like a catnip mouse: a missive from the smaller Langford to the larger Langford on the occasion of the Mekons’ first recording session:
I am now a VIRGIN — making plenty records not making plenty money — still who cares — gotta do something t’pass the time guv. We spent the 5 thou in used greenbacks down the boozer last night and we were well into the two thou equipment advance just in carry-out heinekens [...]
More where that came from (scroll to the bottom).
Yes, I’ve been rooting around in the damn fanzines again ... some nifty tidbits to come when I can face up to all that typing ...
Sad how long it takes to overcome first impressions (or at least some of them) ... when I first brought Beth Gibbons/Rustin Man’s Out of Season home it just flickered by me. What misled me first, to the point of annoyance, was the feeling that she was singing not so much torch songs as an idea of “torch songs” -- especially on moments like “Romance”’s apparent attempt to channel Billie Holiday by brute force, and the feeling that the whole concept had really, really been done better on Pinkie Maclure’s devastating and utterly neglected From Memorial Crossing a couple years ago (and do, please, go buy that one first).
Partially the problem is that they take the dangerous tack of backloading the best songs toward the end of the album, when wankers like me have already made their call and are paying attention to other things by the time the good stuff hits. But it also still seems like a patchwork, the gestures feeling somehow recycled from here or there, not just the tatty fake jazz but even better tracks like “Resolve,” which feels like it’s wandered in from a late sixties folkette record (like, oh, Joni’s Clouds), to “Drake” (which mind you I like, it’s the one that really got me to sit up this afternoon and take notice) ... maybe it’s just my bent hearing but the production here seems a direct tribute to the high points of Curt Boettcher’s late 60s work;1 all billowy faux-latin swinging rhythm with “producer’s touches” dropping in and out of the mix. An appropriately frothy counterpoint to the noirish Badalamentality2 of “Funny Time of Year” (which steamrollers in directly behind it) and “Tom the Model.”
And “Rustin Man” actually does live up to what you’d expect from the personnel, the blasted collision of Portishead and Talk Talk I initially hoped for. So I guess finally I’ve gotten the point ... (“Why Miss CD, without my preconceptions you're ... listenable!”)
