Jody Stephens, Chris Bell, Alex Chilton, and Andy Hummel

Big Star was around for only four years (1971–4), but their influence was absolutely huge. No Big Star, no Elliott Smith, no Wilco—and that’s just for starters. (The Replacements, Yo La Tengo, and Cheap Trick, to name just a few others, all owe massive debts. And Peter Buck once said of R.E.M.: “We’ve sort of flirted with greatness, but we’ve yet to make a record as good as Revolver or Highway 61 Revisited or Exile on Main Street or Big Star’s Third.“) Just as Iggy Pop and Yoko Ono were proto-punk, Big Star was proto-alternative, proto-indie.

I first learned about Big Star when I heard Elliott Smith cover one of their songs, “Thirteen,” in Jem Cohen’s short film “Lucky Three”:

Big Star recorded only three albums. The first two were #1 Record (1972), after which Bell quit, and Radio City (1973–4), after which Hummel quit. (Here’s a 2001 interview with Hummel about his time with Big Star).

from #1 Record:

from Radio City:

With Hummel and Bell gone, Chilton and Stephens continued on to record Third/Sister Lovers (1974), which their label refused to release, causing even them to call it quits. (It was later released after the first two albums started finding an audience.)

(You can buy all three records + more in one fell swoop, thanks to this 4-CD box set put out a few years ago by the invaluable Rhino.)

Chris Bell was killed in a car accident in 1978. Alex Chilton and Jody Stephens made another go of it in 1993, reforming Big Star with newcomers Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow (both from The Posies). (You might know Stringfellow from his work with R.E.M. and The Minus 5.) This new lineup recorded one album, In Space (2005).

Alex Chilton died of a heart attack earlier this year, on 17 March. (He ignored warning signs and didn’t go to the hospital because he didn’t have health insurance. Good one, USA.) (Do check out that article—it’s a very moving tribute to Chilton.)

Now Hummel’s gone, too. Here’s the last video I could find of him performing, alongside Stephens and others, at a SXSW tribute to Chilton (Stephens is on drums, Hummel is on bass guitar on the far right):

And some footage from a panel, also at this year’s SXSW:

Long live Andy Hummel, long live Chris Bell, long live Alex Chilton. (And best of luck to Jody Stephens!)

Long live Big Star!

Neither age nor beauty before money.

On the left we have Jan Bruegel the Elder’s (Flemish, 1568–1625) A Woodland with Travelers (detail). On the right is a design by John Gall, art director at Vintage.

There are many details in the Bruegel painting, which Edward Mullany and I recently found in the Metropolitan Museum in NYC. The Gall cover provides an immediate effect, disembodiment being one of the first things to come to mind-craziness, a person out of their head. In terms of story, this cover is much more related to the book wherein a group of psychologists gather at a pancake restaurant and kvetch as the main character experiences a unique episode of floating to the ceiling. It’s pop, it’s simple, it seems the better choice, but is it?

“Gall says that one of the most challenging tasks is to take a beautiful cover and redesign it so that the book can sell. One example is The Verificationist written by Donald Antrim.”  - from a Carnegie Mellon lecture

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Donald Antrim, John Gall, The Verificationist ]]> http://bigother.com/2010/07/29/which-would-you-buy/feed/ 6 greggerke http://www.design.cmu.edu/files/verificationist_450x289mk.jpg http://bigother.com/2010/07/29/when-you-are-giving-a-reading-and-look-out-into-the-audience-picture-this/ http://bigother.com/2010/07/29/when-you-are-giving-a-reading-and-look-out-into-the-audience-picture-this/#comments Thu, 29 Jul 2010 04:56:22 +0000 Tim Jones-Yelvington http://bigother.com/?p=10902 ]]>

…has been my favorite new band for the past year or so. Below I’ll embed some of their videos in the hope that I can make you like them, too.

This is the first Moriarty song that I heard: “Private Lily,” from their debut album, Gee Whiz But This Is a Lonesome Town (2007, Naïve Records):

And here’s the second one that I heard, “Jimmy”:

Moriarty is a French band. Supposedly they derived their name from Dean Moriarty, not Professor James. À la the Ramones, the band members all claim Moriarty as their surname—Rosemary Moriarty, Tom Moriarty, Arthur Moriarty, etc.

Oshkosh Bend (album version) + a live version:

“Motel”:

For some reason, their old-timey shtick doesn’t irritate me the way so much retro-hipness does. And why is that? I’d argue that in this case, it isn’t mere affectation. Moriarty plays great music well; the rest is part of their identity, sure—but it’s secondary.

[Over the past year in Chicago, I've noticed a resurgence in popularity in the singing saw. (I just saw someone playing one on a steet corner the other night.) With all due respect, this always raises my dander, because in each case the act seems 95% novelty: "How queer! A saw that makes musickal sounds!" It's been the Guy Maddin fan's instrument of choice ever since the theremin fad grew old.]

I haven’t seen Moriarty drag out a singing saw yet, but I imagine that even if they did, they’d play it well.

(I suppose it also doesn’t hurt that they’re French.)

More music! A cover of Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence” (presented by La Blogotheque):

And another version of “Enjoy the Silence” (from France’s TV5Monde, with terrible editing—but it’s a spirited performance, and there’s a short interview at the end):

“Private Lily” on TVMonde5, also jarringly edited—but it’s a great performance:

“Cottonflower”:

“Fire Day”:

A cover of Tom Waits’s “Chocolate Jesus”:

“Animals Can’t Laugh”:

…And there’s more than that up at YouTube, if you’re interested.

Another pleasure: you’ll find there also dozens of covers of “Jimmy,” which I gather has become something of a hit in Europe (as it deserves to become elsewhere):

Happy listening!

Subscribers will be entered in a drawing to win one of several prize packages that include some of the best in current and forthcoming independent lit, including issues of Annalemma, Another Chicago Magazine, Sententia, Pank and Hobart and much-anticipated and or acclaimed books by Lindsay Hunter and Big Other’s own Davis Schneiderman. (Details).

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As John Madera and others have already mentioned in excellent posts and reviews here on Big Other and elsewhere, the first issue of Artifice is one of the single best lit mag issues released this year, maybe ever, and that is not hyperbolic. They are one of the few publications not just publishing work for the sake of it, but to cultivate an aesthetic and expand the boundaries of and conversation about contemporary lit.

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The Post-Post-Modern Things: Björk, Kathy Acker, and the Astral-Disappearing Act (1-2/53)

The Post-Post-Modern Things: Björk, Kathy Acker, and the Astral-Disappearing Act (3-6/53)

7. And so become blinded by the arrival of Kathy Acker, deceased “punk” novelist whose three decades of work “puts in its place a universe of shameless, playful freakery,”[1] a writer who matches “guts with theory, anger, and compassion.”[2] Her major works include Blood and Guts in High School (1978), Great Expectations (1982), Don Quixote (1986), Empire of the Senseless (1988), and Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996), all of which use anti-authoritarian narrative tactics to decompress the motorcrash of contemporary aesthetics.  Acker has been labeled an outlaw, freak, fraud, and thief; she has been both condemned and lauded for the graphic sexuality and violence of her novels, the extreme dislocation of traditional emotion from language as a way of assaulting the ersatz “rationality” of the multinational capital machine.

8. And journalists shall know Björk through the cogs of this machine.  Evelyn McDonnell’s biopic, Army of She: Icelandic, Iconoclastic, Irrepressible Björk—for instance—discusses the author’s conversion from Björk skeptic to adoring fan as a spider might suffer the little insects to come unto her.  The “original” iteration of her complete text, for which McDonnell freely admits she collected no new information or interviews, is “a new hyped new media new technology with a cute marketing name that makes e-fficient, e-conomic use of that ubiquitous electronic-age, neologism-friendly, monosyllabic prefix—ladies and gentleman, an e-book.”[3] Before going on to detail her Björkian encounters, McDonnell positions her homage in e-book form as both “retro” and “techno,” or, as she makes clear, the e-book is a product to be viewed through the same collapsed lenses through which she views her subject.  This “defining” characteristic of Björk in Army of She, coupled with the production of the e-book and McDonnell’s analysis of Björk’s music—all push toward that delicious synthesis of seemingly incompatible elements that cause many critics to bite into Björk’s “hybridity” as a mechanism to transcend the sour, internal contradictions of pre-sorted musical categories.  Thus, Björk’s Homogenic, in the hands of the press, becomes noted as an amalgamation of what McDonell calls “three networks (strings, voice, and beats)” that are merged to create, “organic, living wholes.”[4] As a cultural product, the “syntheses” offered by Björk’s music (within this dialectical context), speak to Walter Benjamin’s famous distinction between the “attitude” of a text as opposed to its “position” within its contemporaneous relations of production.[5] If Björk’s work distinguishes itself by combinations that scuttle the expectations of the mainstream press, if “the esoteric combinations of instruments, from a dulcimer to a black box to an entire string orchestra”[6] offer “alternatives” to the predictable regularity of much popular music, then the implications (of Björk’s press coverage) offer that her music, much like Benjamin’s sense of the “position” of a work within the system of production, 1) changes the “functional connection” between listener and artist, 2) proves that “hybridity” and “innovation” are the keys to making music that “matters,” and 3) shows that wild and innocent Björk, existing simultaneously at both center and margin, throws a technological spanner in the machine works of the electronic age.  With such a paint-by-numbers postmodern program uploaded by the self-fulfilling deities of cultural studies, dare we even ask if the press has pushed the wrong buttons on their easy-to-use, digitized personal assistants?

9. In some ways, both Björk and “radical” “experimental” writer Kathy Acker are cut from this same poststructuralist polymer fabrication.  Björk and her crew of producers and re-mixers “sample.”  Acker “plagiarizes.”  Both work with the “raw” materials of culture distorted to points beyond their original articulation.  In each case, juxtapositions of unlikely materials serve as the harbinger of the production philosophy.  Critics often tackle Acker as the “tattooed feminist punk linguist who writes possibly the most subversive novels in contemporary American fiction,”[7] the post-William Burroughs warrior woman slicing patriarchy to the bone with razor thrusts of her double-edged sexual perversions and cogent but “fucked-up” worldview.

10.Despite any recourse to ideas of Hegelian synthesis offered by the popular image of Björk and/or her own statements sampled in support of such strange mergers, the notion of a unified and intrinsic “self” located in the soul of each artist becomes suspect by virtue of her production.  Note the erotic copulation of robotic Björks in the “All is Full of Love” video (Homogenic); the Betty Boop-like swagger of the cartoon Björk in the “I miss you” video (Post), the “accurate copy/a blueprint/of the pleasure in me” from “Pagan Poetry,” the urge to “explode this body/off me” in the lyric to “Pluto,” the polar bear “disease” shaken off her bald head in the “Hunter” video, ad infinitum, once again….

11. From Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School (1978): “The plants in her room cast strange, beautiful shadows over the other shadows.  It was a clean, dreamlike room.  He fucked her in her asshole cause the infection made her cunt hurt too much to fuck there, though she didn’t tell him it hurt badly there, too, cause she wanted to fuck love more than she felt pain.”[8] Raped by her father (like so many of Acker’s heroines), Janey, the 10-year old protagonist of the novel, burdened with a nasty case of Pelvic Inflammatory Disease, enters into attempted dialogue with this hyper-sexualized, phallocentric world that abuses her through discursive appropriations that collocate the defining absences of her world into a mélange of ventriloquist quasi-prose—poems in Persian, a book report on The Scarlet Letter, an encounter with French writer Jean Genet, dream maps and picture books, the Chase Manhattan Bank of North America, Erica Jong—all made to speak through the voice of the disassociated woman-child Janey.

[2] Back Cover Blurb, Bodies of Work: Essays (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997).

[3] Evelyn McDonnell, Army of She: Icelandic, Iconoclastic, Irrepressible Björk (New York: Atrandom.com, 2001), 4.

[4] McDonnell, 64.

[5] See Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken,  1978), 220-238.

[6] Bunbury.

[7] Greg Lewis Peters, “Dominance and Subversion: The Horizontal Sublime and Erotic Empowerment in the Works of Kathy Acker,” in State of the Fantastic: Studies in American Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Nicholas Ruddick (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992), 149.

[8] Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School (New York: Grove Wiedenfeld, 1989), 21.

learn more about Maximum Balloon

Have you donated to the tour? These great writers are rolling up and down the west coast in the next few weeks. Dates after the break.

San Diego:
Saturday, July 31 8pm – 11pm
Vermin on the Mount
with Aaron Burch, Lisa Fugard, Amelia Gray, Jess Jollett, Lindsay Hunter, Enriqu Limón, Adam Novy & Andy Roe
Sushi Performance & Visual Arts
390 Eleventh Ave FREE!

Los Angeles:
Sunday, August 1st 9-11pm
Vermin on the Mount Six-Year Anniversary
with Jillian Lauren, Aaron Burch, Amelia Gray, Lindsay Hunter & Adam Novy
The Mountain Bar
473 Gin Ling Way FREE!

San Francisco:
Tuesday, August 3rd 9pm
The High Emission Book Tour
with Aaron Burch, Amelia Gray, Lindsay Hunter and Reynard Seifert
Amnesia Bar
853 Valencia St. FREE!

San Francisco:
Wednesday, August 4th 7:30pm
Random Hookup: Corium + Hobart
with Aaron Burch, Lauren Becker, Amelia Gray, Andrea Kneeland, Greg Gerke, and Adam Novy
The Knockout
3223 Mission at Valencia St FREE!

Sacramento:
Thursday, August 5
Burch & Gray with Flatmancrooked PubQuiz
with Aaron Burch and Amelia Gray
Pangaea Cafe, 7pm FREE!

Tucson:
Wednesday, August 11
Powhaus Productions Presents Lit!
Rialto Theatre, 7pm
with Spork Press
318 E. Congress St. $3

In the rare same-publisher / double-release, Jason Jordan’s CLOUD AND OTHER STORIES & POWERING THE DEVIL’S CIRCUS [ REDUX ] are both available right this very minute. The beauty covers are from Steven Seighman & the publisher is Six Gallery Press. Go forth & dig in, especially if you like your lit curvy & powerful & toppling over on itself.

Many critics have noted that Daniel Day-Lewis‘s performance in There Will Be Blood (2007) drew heavily from his fellow Irishman John Huston‘s turn in Chinatown (1974). See, for instance, here, here, here, and here. Or just compare for yourself:

…But that is only one level of mimicry. Paul Thomas Anderson’s feature itself is loosely based, structurally, on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Now, I’m not claiming that Anderson consciously aped Kubrick’s masterpiece. And I don’t want to suggest that the films share identical or even similar plots (although there are some points of comparison). Rather, it is the manner in which There Will Be Blood presents its respective story that it borrows from 2001.

1. The Dawn of Daniel Plainview

2001 opens with a lengthy dialogue-free section, “The Dawn of Man,” during which we witness a tribe of timid, herbivorous apes encounter a large black monolith. This encounter pushes the apes forward in their evolution, prompting them toward tool use and hunting. (My reading of this section is that encountering the very unnatural monolith in the middle of nature reveals to the apes the concept of artificiality.)

There Will Be Blood similarly opens (albeit in 1902) with a lengthy dialogue-free section, during which we watch the film’s protagonist, Daniel Plainview, discover the technology that will fuel the entirety of the film (in this case, Oil!).

The prologues of both films feature numerous shots of the sun rising and setting over arid, barren landscapes, and haunting, drone-based music:

2001: György Ligeti: Requiem (“Kyrie” section)

TWBB: Johnny Greenwood: Popcorn Superhet Receiver (excerpts):

On this point, at least one critic has noted:

[T]he starkly ominous orchestral score, by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, [...] at no point seems conventionally to gel with the action: Blood is as daringly counter-intuitive as Stanley Kubrick was in his use of composers such as Penderecki in The Shining. Indeed, having made several Altman-esque works, Anderson has now made one that in some ways feels as close to a posthumous Kubrick epic as is imaginable. “We’re all children of Kubrick, aren’t we?” Anderson admits over the phone. “Is there anything you can do that he hasn’t done?”

Another critic made this connection, regarding the respective scores, more explicitly:

[ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY:] Paul, you have a dedication at the end of this movie to one of your heroes, Robert Altman. But this is one of your least Altmanesque films. A lot of it is one character out in the desert, with long silences suddenly giving way to screeching strings. It reminded me of 2001: A Space Odyssey, where Stanley Kubrick had the silence of space and then suddenly ”The Blue Danube” or one of the more dissonant pieces he used.

ANDERSON: Well, it’s so hard to do anything that doesn’t owe some kind of debt to what Stanley Kubrick did with music in movies. Inevitably, you’re going to end up doing something that he’s probably already done before. It can all seem like we’re falling behind whatever he came up with. ”Singin’ in the Rain” in Clockwork Orange — that was the first time I became so aware of music in movies. So no matter how hard you try to do something new, you’re always following behind. The whole opening 20 minutes was meant to be silent. I always had a dream about trying to make a movie that had no dialogue in it, that was just music and pictures. I still haven’t done it yet, but I tried to get close in the beginning.

(Anderson met Kubrick on the set of Eyes Wide Shut, introduced by their mutual acquaintance Tom Cruise. And for another comparison of Anderson’s work with Kubrick’s, check out this analysis of some of the inspirations behind Punch-Drunk Love.)

2. Sunday Magnetic Anomaly One

2001 then jumps millennia ahead (the largest time elision in cinema), to show us how humans have developed into a space-faring people. Dr. Heywood Floyd leads a team of scientists out onto the surface of the moon, where another black monolith has been excavated. The monolith emits a piercing tone, deafening the team.

There Will Be Blood similarly jumps ahead (albeit only nine years) into a dialogue-based section. Daniel Plainview and his adopted son H.W. travel about buying up land so they can begin oil drilling (excavation). Plainvew’s empire starts to grow. Toward the end of this section, an accidental explosion deafens H.W.

3. Drilling Mission

2001 next picks up 18 months later. We join doctors David Bowman and Frank Poole en route to Jupiter, accompanied by other scientists (in suspended hibernation) and the sophisticated HAL 9000 computer. HAL, reasoning that his human companions are incapable of accomplishing their mission, murders all but Dave, who in turn disconnects HAL.

There Will Be Blood resumes at some indeterminate time after the drilling accident. Plainview encounters his half-brother, Henry, and much of this section involves the growing tensions between him, Plainview, and H.W. Plainview (after sending H.W. away) eventually discovers that Henry is an impostor, and murders him.

4. Milkshake and Beyond the Infinite

2001: Arriving alone at Jupiter, Dave travels through the Star Gate, eventually ending up in an ornately decorated bedroom. There he ages rapidly, becoming a decrepit old man. Lying on his deathbed, he encounters another black monolith, which allows him to reborn as the Star-Child.

There Will Be Blood jumps from 1911–2 to 1927. Daniel Plainview is now an alcoholic old man, living a solitary life in an ornate mansion. (As in 2001, a jarring effect is achieved by the drastic change in time and location.) This section of the film presents two main plot points: Plainview discredits and disowns H.W., sending him away; he then settles a personal score with his longtime nemesis, the preacher Eli Sunday, whom he murders with a bowling pin.

Again, I don’t know whether Paul Thomas Anderson thought consciously about Kubrick while adapting Upton Sinclair’s source novel to the screen, but I think the influence is clearly there.

I would also argue that the comparison enriches Anderson’s film, and not only because it shows off his awareness of great cinema. (I’m not a huge fan of his work, but I like There Will Be Blood well enough, and think that it benefits from less overtly imitating other films the way that Anderson’s previous films tended to.) And it’s smart to steal overarching structures. Anderson surely faced many challenges in only partially and loosely adapting Sinclair’s massive epic. It makes sense that he would base his film on a different, reliable structure.

Furthermore, whereas 2001 is focused on humanity’s millennia-long improvement (not for nothing is Thus Spake Zarathustra repeatedly invoked)—celebrating how the development of advanced technology may prove our species’ eventual salvation—There Will Be Blood takes a much smaller, more pessimistic approach. Daniel Plainview is the antithesis of 2001‘s naive but earnest scientists—HAL made flesh, perhaps (but lacking in even HAL’s humanity). Like Milton’s Lucifer, who desperately mines the earth in his struggle against Heaven, the advancement of technology enables Plainview only to cheat, murder, and despoil the landscape. As he confesses to Henry:

I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people. [...] There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money that I can get away from everyone.

(It’s no coincidence that Anderson was compelled to adapt Oil! in the midst of the Iraq War. And he was sadly very right to have his protagonist bellow in triumph, at the very end of the film: “I am the Third Revelation! I am who the Lord has chosen!”)

There Will Be Blood, then, held in this plain view, becomes a dull, darkening mirror to 2001‘s ennobling, burning star core.

(Happy re-viewing!)