Don’t Stay Up Too Late.

Harry Chapin, Sniper And Other Love Songs

File Between: Jim Croce and David Ackles

Comments: My most significant emotion about Harry Chapin for the last seveal years has been regret that I included “Taxi” in my Hundred Songs Of The Seventies, mostly because I’m never in the mood to listen to it and always skip it when it comes up on the playlist. So this record started out with a strike against it in the form of totally unjustified irritation with a song from a completely different album. And it only partly won me over. You really have to be in a specific headspace to allow the Chapin magic to work on you — the kind of headspace where clumsy rhymes and great whacking obvious metaphors don’t bother you, what matters is the conviction and the imagery — but as I get older and more fastidious about the kinds of lyrics I won’t roll my eyes at, I’m less and less willing to move into that headspace. His band is good — I especially liked the gestures towards rocking out on “Burning Herself” and “Woman Child” — but his song structures are so ungainly that I kept being reminded of a specific form of late 60s/early 70s cultural expression, the Narrative Poem For Children, with its ugly, rubbery illustrations (the inside-sleeve illustrations here partake of the same Gormenghastian aesthetic) and conviction that Structure was a Hidebound Tradition of the Past, and Freeform is Where It’s At, right kids? And I totally hated the nine-minute title track. The Boomtown Rats did it better with “I Don’t Like Mondays,” and they didn’t need to make their killer whine about how nobody listened.

A Keeper? That said, there’s enough loveliness and actual lyrical heft here to make up for the bits I didn’t care for. Chapin is one of the great weirdo singer/songwriters of the period, and it’s a shame that most people only know him for “Cat’s In The Cradle.”

Vinyl Rip: Barefoot Boy

Fantagraphics · 2009

If it were ten years ago, I’d have been the first in line to buy this the morning it was released. A whole book by Al Columbia? Are you shitting me? After all these years?

But it’s not ten years ago, it’s now, and I’ve only checked it out of the library and will be returning it Monday morning. It’s not that it’s bad, that it’s a disappointment, or even that Al Columbia is not still the supreme twisted genius he’s always been; I’ve just reached a critical-mass point in my comics consumption where I can’t afford to buy handsome hardcovers I’m not going to be returning to again and again.

And sadly, despite the fucked-up gorgeousness of the images Fanta has scanned, blown up, and lovingly curated in this book, I’ve read through it once and won’t need it again. I’m a narrative guy, and while there are snatches and hints of narrative here, bleeding through the unfinished artwork and close-cropped panels, it’s not enough to satisfy me.

But I did enjoy what I got. The title characters are the boy and girl on the cover, and Columbia makes them the Hansel and Gretel of his own private funhouse nightmares, old black-and-white Disney or Fleischer cartoons gone horribly awry. Dismemberment, eyes being gouged out, and the slick slice of razor against flesh are only a few of the repeated horrors committed upon Pim and Francie in varying states of cartooniness, a method which I’m sure a worthwhile critic could work up into a symbolism if they cared to try, but to my jaundiced eye reads more like the plain fact that this material was all drawn over a period of decades and a man’s style is bound to change. It hardly matters, anyway: the book follows its own sinister dream logic, bouncing from zombie apocalypses to flesh-eating flowers to multi-limbed serial killers to horrific swing-dancing accidents with the manic glee of a Winsor McCay under psychiatric evaluation.

It wouldn’t be an Al Columbia book if it wasn’t incredibly frustrating: what’s been published is clearly only a fragment of a vast body of material he’s been working on off and on for years (the number of repeated images, sometimes only slightly tweaked, reveals the depth of his obssessive perfectionism), and the tantalizing glimpse of further panels just beyond the border of the page makes you wonder what this book might look like if he had followed through on what was clearly at one point a fully-fleshed narrative with its own mythology and characterization.

But on the other hand this nightmare collage may be more effective. Pim and Francie die horribly in many ways throughout the collection, and the reset button at the turn of each page follows the kind of logic that only dreams, of all the major narrative forms, ever achieve. The artwork is stunningly beautiful — his tight, slick brushwork and sense of composition is second to none — and the grisly imagery suitably depraved; I just can’t help feeling that it’s all going to dissipate inconsequentially the moment I wake up.

I honestly don’t remember what impulse suggested that I download a bunch of old documentaries. I think I might have been looking at Wikipedia’s list of the films that have been selected for preservation in the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. I guess I was still trying to get examples of as many wide-ranging genres as possible, before I started focusing deep on my immediate interests. But I’ve had these three films grouped together for a while now, and I really wanted to watch the first one, so here goes.

01. Jazz On A Summer’s Day
(USA) Aram Avakian & Bert Stern · 1960

It did not disappoint: I spent the entire hour-and-a-half running time with either a big dopey grin or a look of revelatory awe on my face. If you haven’t seen this movie, you should. Even if you don’t (think you) like jazz, even if documentaries bore you, even if you hate the past and want to think only of the future — you should see this film.

It’s not a documentary in the way we usually think of documentaries today: talking heads, arguments being advanced, a narrator with one of those “trustworthy” voices. It’s rather an impressionistic concert film (I’ll go ahead and say way better than Woodstock, even though I haven’t seen Woodstock) showing what it might have been like to attend the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, especially if you wandered into town or down to the shore for much of the afternoon. And it’s beautifully, even gorgeously, shot. Bert Sterns, the principal cameraman, was a fashion photographer, and it shows; his eye for composition, light, and color make this an exquisite document of a (somewhat) vanished era. (Mad Men fans, take note. Except also get ready for your fantasy of a past when everyone always looked elegant everywhere to crumble.)

The music is, predictably, awesome. Anita O’Day’s performance here was one of the highlights of her career, and of the acts I know well, Thelonious Monk, Dinah Washington, Louis Armstrong (with Jack Teagarden!) and Mahalia Jackson range from good to breathtaking. (Plus a rock & roll interlude with Big Maybelle and Chuck Berry! I danced in my seat.) But I’m even happier to have been introduced to people I didn’t previously know, especially Chico Hamilton’s minimalist rhythm piece (with guitar work from John Pisano that invents post-rock forty years early).

In addition to gorging myself on the imagery and delighting in the music, I enjoyed the movie as a sociological document. The cameras take in the audiences nearly as much as at the performers, and we get to people-watch among the crowds who came to Rhode Island to listen to jazz (and blues). The older, whiter audiences that came out for the day fade into a younger, hipper, multiracial audience for the after-sunset crowd, and the way Sterns captures all kinds of moods from boredom to reverence to gotta-dance excitement with his camera made me wish that more documentaries today would just let images of people speak for themselves. It’s not Jazz On A Summer’s Day isn’t manipulative — it’s as much a misrepresentation of reality as any concert film (e.g. it pretends everything happened in one day when the footage was shot over a period of weeks), and the emotional crescendo it takes towards the end (particularly if you know your music history) is as artfully edited as anything by Hitchcock or Kubrick.

But if you like movies, if you like music, if you like people, or even if you just like pretty pictures, you should see this film.

02. High School
(USA) Frederick Wiseman · 1968

But it may be that what planted the seeds of interest in old documentaries in my mind was a Battleship Pretension episode on which guest Matt Champagne talked about the films of Frederick Wiseman. Wiseman is (very limitedly) famous as one of the few “pure” documentarians, a man who advances no argument and doesn’t even exist as far as the camera is concerned. He simply shoots and edits; no voiceovers, no interviews, no breaking the fourth wall.

This movie was his second full-length documentary (his first examined the workings of a mental institution), and it’s immersive as hell. In fact I had a hard time watching it at points: the consistent focus on school staff as conflict managers (few of whom are any good at it) only needed a joke or two to be as uncomfortably hilarious as The Office. But actually, the television show it reminds me of most is Friday Night Lights — the handheld camera work, the fascinating characters, the attention to small gestures and overlooked detail in high school life.

But there’s no Coach or Tami Taylor here. The adults are serving time just as much as the kids, and at best are trying to mold their sullen, whining charges into an adulthood thirty years out of date. (There’s no Tim Riggins here either; these kids are gawky and underdeveloped and miserably inarticulate, like real high schoolers.) I’ve read a little bit of what people online have said about this movie, and the unrelieved atmosphere of oppression that they see doesn’t match what I saw: the school is as dull and institutional as any school, but the teachers are just as human as the students — and the worst of the bullying couneslors is shown in a classroom setting to be smart and challenging, even if he doesn’t apply the lessons of the labor movement to his charges.

As a snapshot of its time (soundtrack: “On The Dock Of The Bay,” “Simon Says,” “The Dangling Conversation“), it’s less interesting than as a study in the universal boredom, conflict, and fumblings toward adulthood that mark educational institutions everywhere. High schools are terrible, as Wiseman clearly acknowledges — but what’s the alternative?

03. Cronique d’un été (Chronicle Of A Summer)
(France) Edgar Morin & Jean Rouch · 1960

An experiment in cinema verité in which the participants sit around discussing philosophies of life, the impossibility of the modern industrial world, and the futility of ideology — could anything be more resoundingly, yawn-inducingly French?

About halfway through, though, two things happen to electrify the languid, pause-filled conversation. First, the introduction of Marilù, an Italian immigrant whose beautiful, expressive face and willingness to get emotional about her interior world makes the film — even in the shitty VHS-to-VHS transfer which was all I could find — spring to life. Then there’s the sudden realization that Marceline, the woman whose clumsy man-on-the-street interviews began the whole thing, is both a racist and a Holocaust survivor.

It still never approaches anything like the emotional pornography of modern reality television, but in its willingness to go meta — the second-to-last scene is a discussion among the participants as to how “real” they thought the previous hour of the film was (and the final scene is a conversation between the filmmakers about how well they thought it all worked) — it holds a fascination for anyone interested in process and the way that narratives can be created out of very little substance, not to mention the way that the same “story” can be read in multiple ways by different people.

And the scenes which weren’t just people sitting around in apartments talking over omnipresent cigarettes and wine bottles — the long sequence going through factory worker Angelo’s day, for example, or the interlude in vacation spot St. Tropez — had the usual verité appeal of allowing a peek into lives not our own. It was a pleasant wind-down from the more immediately engaging American documentaries; I’m not sure that I’d ever want to see it again (at least not in this transfer), but I’d certainly say it deserves to be more widely known by students of film.

Oh, goddamn, am I a student of film now?

Hyperion · 2010

I like to think of myself as a man without a purview, but some things are glaringly outside it. I’m uncomfortable, that is to say, reading a teen novel when my own teenage years are so far behind me that I don’t even think of them nostalgically; I barely recognize that dude.

So part of why I’m reading this and talking about it is to interrogate that discomfort. The other part is plain inertia: I have this book because when a fourteen-year-old came up to the desk and asked me if the library had a copy I checked and said no, then looked it up and thought we probably should, so I Suggested A Title For Purchase and was automatically put on hold for it, and in due season the book came in, and I’ve had it for a week and haven’t even looked at it really, and this is weird because I’m not used to being nervous around books.
I think it’s the same impulse that has kept me stepping cautiously around teen-pop for most of my adult life: I’m afraid of being mistaken for (or mistakenly becoming) the creepy middle-aged guy who’s really really into teenage girl stuff. This is no doubt my own pathology, and has to do with the overt sexualization of teenage girlhood in too much of the discourse I’ve immersed myself in over the years. Not that teenage girls aren’t sexual beings — they’re postpubescent mammals after all — but that that, even in aversion, shouldn’t be my first thought about them. I feel like a creep even talking about this; and perhaps I should point out that it’s all low-level back-of-the-mind stuff, not the kind of foregrounded thoughts which can be laughed at and dismissed.But there’s also the fact that when I was a kid (he said crotchetily) there wasn’t any of this Teen Fiction nonsense, there were kids’ books and grownup books and once I passed thirteen I read grownup books except for occasional return trips to Narnia or Middle-Earth. I’m just plain not used to the form. (Like, you can say shit as much as you want but fuck is always and forever f*ck? What the fuck kind of style guide is that?) And based on this experiment I doubt I’ll be reading much more.

It’s not that it was bad. Parts of it were; mostly stylistic issues (for someone who writes so incoherently I have extremely high standards for the kind of prose I’ll deign to read) and an ignorance of computers so complete that the suicide-assistant website at the heart of its conceit might as well be coded by magic. Two examples will suffice.

The following sentence appears in the early chapters: “News you can use, Dad: losers aren’t cool.” The person who thinks it is not immediately engulfed in shame.

And in an important plot point, not only does an off-the-shelf desktop unit apparently enable fingerprint identification through the touchscreen monitor, but a website accessible by people everywhere in the world at all income levels (not that there’s ever any sense that anyone in the story is anything but middle-class) requires fingerprint identification for access.

But after I got my grumpy old-man nitpicking out of the way, the emotional contours of the story caught me and rolled me swiftly to the end. It helps, perhaps, that I’ve had my own struggles with depression, suicidal fantasies, etc. (But my primary way of coping was only obliquely touched on in the book; in fact, the suicidal protagonist scolds at one point, “you don’t joke about suicide.” Bull and shit.) It also helps that Peters has a good eye for the contours of difficult relationships and the way that adolescent self-dramatization can easily feel suffocating, like there is no reality possible except the one you’ve willed yourself into believing. I’m not sure I ever entirely believed the motivations of any of the main characters, but I’m an agnostic here; my high school experience was different enough from the U.S. norm that I generally assume that other people’s reports are accurate even when they spark no recognition in me.

And then there were things that the book did superbly. One of them was an awesome parody of bodicey romance novels, the kind of deep satire that proves the parodist knows and probably loves what she’s mocking. Another was the black humor of the suicide-assistance website’s lists of possible suicide options, ranking them by effectiveness, time, availability, and pain, Consumer Reports-style; and in fact our protagonist’s slowly dawning realization that the website is populated by the same egotists and morons as the rest of the Internet is one of the truest things in the book. Finally, there was the only (surprisingly touching) healthy relationship in the book, between a (spoilers) cancer-surviving boy and his single mother, who relate to each other in a wholly recognizable combination of sarcasm and sentiment.

Was it a good book? I dunno. I don’t know the field well enough to be able to compare it against anything. (The one thing it ain’t is, as the inside flap copy claims, edgy. Publisha please. I’ve written darker shit in my sleep, and I hate dark shit.) I didn’t hate it, as I thought I might a few chapters in. And hell if it convinces even one teen reader not to do something stupid before it’s too late, it’ll have done more good in the world than I ever have. Compared to that what’s my aesthetic judgment worth?

Some Bizarre · 1983

Well. There’s a reason I only knew Cabaret Voltaire’s singles.I’m not going to say this album is bad; I’d need to spend more time with it to do that, and I don’t really have the patience for that. I’d rather just listen to the songs that struck me on a loop and see what I get out of them:

“Just Fascination” is my second-favorite CV song (after “Sensoria,” natch), and its gloomy, twitchy disco sounds great here as the most alive thing on an album of smeared, stuttering synths and cryptic intonations.

“Animation” features Stephen Mallinder affecting a German accent among the most dancefloor-friendly productions on the album.

“Why Kill Time (When You Can Kill Yourself)” sounds almost exactly like the Human League before the girls came on, only with a funkier bass.

“Haiti” is a lovely, moody soundscape that I have to imagine has been posted all over the Internet (just not the corners I frequent) over the past several weeks, quite possibly the best thing on the record.
“Diskono” is a pretty good Kraftwerk tribute.

And the rest of the album almost put me to sleep on the freeway before I fished my dinner out of my bag and drank Coke to stay alive. (Repetitive music + not enough sleep + afternoon sun + stop & go traffic = danger, kids.) I hated the last couple of songs on the album, but whether that was because I was in a mood to hate anything or because they were truly unpleasant I haven’t had the moral courage to decide by revisiting them.

On the whole, I believe I’ll stick with the singles (and “Haiti”). 1983 was too long ago, Cabaret Voltaire’s self-importance too impregnable, for me to return often to these slabs of their work for pleasure. In the middle of a mix (especially the kinds of mixes I tend to make) they’re fantastically broody, a gothic interlude between splashes of Fun: but run all together like this . . . I know, my real problem is with the album as a format. You don’t have to tell me twice.