I AM A MEDIA MAXI-PAD ABSORBING THE CONTINUAL FLOW OF POP CULTURE.
THIS JOURNAL DOCUMENTS MY INTAKE OF ONE BOOK, ZINE, CD OR DVD A DAY. RATINGS ARE: ***** = Godhead, **** = Great, *** = Good, ** = Fair, * = Why Bother?
I'm a big fan of Jonathan Lethem's writing, both fiction and non-fiction. We like similar things (Marvel comics, John Ford Westerns, Philip K. Dick, indie rock) and in a perfect world would probably be friends on Facebook. Though most acclaimed for his 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel Motherless Brooklyn (his take on the detective mystery, which featured a sleuth afflicted with Tourette's syndrome and reflected his love of stretching genres "to their limits and beyond") and the semi-autobiographical coming-of-age bestseller The Fortress of Solitude - which according to Wikipedia helped seal his rep among critics as "a master craftsmen of language" and led to the MacArthur Foundation awarding him a coveted "genius grant" in 2005 - I've so far only taken the back way into his books (I guess I'm working up the courage to tackle the "heavy stuff"); thus, I've read only his shorter, smaller, peripheral works like personal fave Chronic City, the short story collection Men and Cartoons, his non-fiction essays in The Disappointment Artist, and (with co-author Karl Rusnuk and artists Paul Hornschemeir, Farel Dalrymple, and Gary Panter) his revival of the Marvel comic series Omega the Unknown.
Lethem's sixth novel, You Don't Love Me Yet - a slim, 224-page light-hearted romantic comedy-style story of struggling rock bands (struggling even to come up with a name for themselves) and conceptual artists living in L.A. - continues my strategy of tackling the shorter works before attempting to scale Lethem's literary mountains. You Don't Love Me Yet received mixed reviews at the time of its release in 2007, which Lethem attributed to his novel's intentionally "silly and light tone."
Cover girl Lucinda Hoekke
The story follows the fortunes of Lucinda Hoekke, a hard-drinking 29-year-old former coffee shop wage slave who now divides her time between answering the "Complaint Line" at her pretentious ex-boyfriend Falmouth's "performance art gallery" and playing bass in an indie rock group so unfocused they can't even decide on a name. The other members of the band include skinny vegan lead singer Matthew (yet another former beau of Lucinda's who kidnaps a depressed kangaroo from the zoo where he works in order to save it from boredom); Denise, the dedicated drummer who works at the "No Shame" sex shop (which makes me think of Audrey Tattou's elusive boy-toy in Amelie); and Bedwin, the feckless foursome's shy genius composer and lead guitarist, who is obsessed with Alex Chilton's cult '70s band Big Star and Fritz Lang's film Human Desire (1952), which he watches repeatedly. (I most related to Bedwin, not due to the genius angle - far from it! - but because of our similar reclusive social lives; I too find nothing better than staying home listening to Big Star and watching old movies. What else is there? Especially now with Me TV and This TV as home viewing options!)
Lucinda falls for a regular caller she names "The Complainer," whose reflections about love, sex and life amuse her. She eventually hooks up with the anonymous caller, whose name is Carl Voglesong (though Lucinda re-christians him Carl Birdkiller) and incorporates his catchphrases and stories as song lyrics for her band. His musings about having "Monster eyes" becomes, in turn, both the band's signature song and, inevitably, the band's short-lived name. And Lucinda soon becomes obsessed with Carl the Complainer, to the point where she moves in with him, while Carl soon invades her space, forcing his way into the band as its proverbial "fifth Beatle" by right of his Lucinda-lifted lyrics. Carl the Complainer has become Carl the Copyright Claimer.
Monster Eyes's successful performance at Falmouth's loft party (christened "Aparty") leads Fancher Autumnbreast (a legendary John Peel-ish alternative DJ) to book the band to perform live on his popular music radio program. But Carl disrupts their radio broadcast,with unforeseen romantic and musical consequences.
This leads into the touchy area of when imitation moves beyond flattery into the murky realm of plagiarism, which Lethem apparently believes is always a fine line for artists. (Rod Serling famously said that as a young writer, he was always subconsciously parroting Hemingway, claiming all his early stories seemed to open with variations of "It was hot.")
According to National Public Radio's Linda Kulper, this gray area that surrounds "intellectual property rights" and the artist's creative process is keeping with the focus of Lethem's February 2007 Harper's essay, "The Ecstasy of Influence" (subtitled "A Plagiarism" and later to provide the title of his 2011 non-fiction essay collection), in which he posits that imitation is not just the greatest form of flattery but "lies at the core of the creative process." So much so that Lethem announced he would "give away" the movie rights to any parties interested in You Don't Love Me Yet. (And, hey, this would make quite a good film; I can see a number of cast members of Lena Dunham's HBO series Girls fitting the bill - perhaps Christopher Abbott as the sexy Matthew and Adam Driver as the arty-farty Falmouth - and Zach Galifianakis as chubby Carl the Complainer.)
To illustrate his point, Lethem even cleverly "repurposed" John Donne's famous "No man is an island" lines from "Meditation XVII" in his essay:
All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man
dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a
better language; and every chapter must be so translated. . . . —John Donne
Another case in point, Lethem adds:
In a courtroom scene from The Simpsons that has since entered into the television canon, an argument over the ownership of the animated characters Itchy and Scratchy rapidly escalates into an existential debate on the very nature of cartoons. “Animation is built on plagiarism!” declares the show’s hot-tempered cartoon-producer-within-a-cartoon, Roger Meyers Jr. “You take away our right to steal ideas, where are they going to come from?” If nostalgic cartoonists had never borrowed from Fritz the Cat, there would be no Ren & Stimpy Show; without the Rankin/Bass and Charlie Brown Christmas specials, there would be no South Park; and without The Flintstones — more or less The Honeymooners in cartoon loincloths — The Simpsons would cease to exist.
He goes on to name-check a Who's Who of Pop Cultural Appropriators, from William Burroughs (inventor of the cut-up text technique) to Bob "Love and Theft" Dylan. His own influences for "genre poaching" include everyone from Angela Carter, Robert Altman, and Raymond Chandler to and Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, and H. P. Lovecraft (to name but a few).
Lethem's web site (www.jonathanlethem.com) further champions the principle of "fair use," the author stating that all artists should look for ways "to make material free and available for reuse."
As Hannah Gerber observed (appropriately enough in the New York Observer), "For better and for worse, Mr. Lethem is part of a vanguard of Gen-X writers whose M.O. is to put a literary gloss on their pop culture enthusiasms."
Works for me! I truly enjoyed You Don't Love Me Yet. In fact, I loved it!
"The note that this man is carrying across a club room is in the form of a proposed wager, bu it's the kind of wager that comes without precedent. It stands alone in the annals of bet-making as the strangest game of chance ever offered by one man to another. In just a moment, we'll see the terms of the wager and what young Mr. Tennyson does about it. And in the process, we'll witness all parties spin a wheel of chance in a very bizarre casino called the Twilight Zone."
Me TV has been airing Rod Serling's original The Twilight Zone series in glorious black-and-white weekdays at 11 p.m. and back-to-back episodes at 11 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. Sunday nights. Last night I saw that "The Silence" (a Season 2 episode originally broadcast on April 28, 1961) was airing and made sure I recorded it.
Jamie Tennyson's lips are sealed in "The Silence"
This is probably my favorite episode of The Twilight Zone and the one I remember best - because it totally creeped me out! This despite being one of only a handful of TZ episodes that contained no fantasy or science fiction elements.
And what an all-star cast: veteran film star Franchot Tone, Jonathan Harris (later to find fame as Dr. Zachary Smith on TV's sci-fi kitsch series Lost In Space), and Liam Sullivan (who was a memorable LSD guru - and obvious Timothy Leary stand-in - on the 1968 Dragnet episode "The Big Prophet").
The story concerns a talkative member of a gentleman's club named Jamie Tennyson (Liam Sullivan) whose constant chatter so annoys Col. Archie Taylor (Franchot Tone) that the Colonel offers him $500,000 if he can remain silent for one year, living in a glass enclosure in the club's basement. Tennyson accepts the "vow of silence" wager - but at what cost? And while both Tone and Sullivan are good actors, are their characters both acting in good faith?
Rod Serling's teleplay, loosely based on Anton Chekhov's short story "The Bet," is one of the classic Twilight Zone episodes, one whose ending (as one YouTube reviewer perfectly phrased it) will leave one speechless.
Silence is Golden?
According to IMDB.com, Franchot Tone filmed the episode's club sequences in the early part of production before suffering a face-injury, leaving the left side of his face was swollen. But the producers opted not to hire a new actor or redo Tone's scenes; instead, they resumed filming but only having exposed the right side of the actor's injured face to the camera, causing Tone's character to be denied eye contact while mocking Sullivan's - in effect making made his character a more complex one.
And Rod Serling's parting words?
"Mr. Jamie Tennyson, who almost won a bet, but who discovered somewhat belatedly that gambling can be a most unproductive pursuit...[For] somewhere beyond him a wheel was turned and his number came up black thirteen. If you don't believe it, ask the croupier, the very special one who handles roulette - in the Twilight Zone."
Following is a sample clip from Liam Sullivan's tour de force acid guru performance from the Dragnet episode "The Big Prophet" (originally broadcast january 11, 1968); in this clip, Sullivan gets a few head nods in during Joe Friday (Jack Webb)'s "Alcohol Vs. Marijuana & LSD" monologue:
"Marijuana is the flame, heroin is the fuse, LSD is the bomb!"
And here we have the great Jonathan Harris exhibiting the kind of emoting for which he became famous on Lost In Space:
And here's an ultra-hip Jonathan Harris "freaking out" and dancing on Lost In Space.
Me TV is one of life's great joys for Baby Boomers like me, my girlfriend Amy and my overgrown-child pal Dave Cawley (to mention but a few fans!). Forget MTV - pfffft! - I want my M(e)TV!
See also: Programs on Me TV (from 12 O'Clock High to Wild Wild West)
I picked up these two paperback volumes of the Chaland Anthology series for $5 apiece at the Daedalus Books & Music warehouse outlet on Monday because, well, the ligne claire-style artwork - while admittedly derivative ofBelgian artist Herge (Georges Remi), who pioneered the Franco-Belgian "clear-line" (or "Atomic") style in his Tintin comics - was so beautiful. The stories themselves are not so beautiful, being almost an afterthought, though one at least tackles topical fare by setting Freddy Lombard's adventures against the backdrop of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution that was put down by Soviet tanks ("Holiday in Budapest").
I had never heard of the artist who created these works, Yves Chaland, but later learned he was born the same year as me, 1957, and would have been my contemporary if not for a tragic car accident in 1990 that cut short his promising career at age 33. Besides Freddy Lombard, Chaland also created the characters Bob Fish, Adolphus Claar, and Le Jeune Albert (Young Albert) in the 1980s for the weekly comics journal Spirou.
The Adventures of Freddy Lombard were the only works by Chaland
to be released in English and were published here in two compilation albums -
Vol. 1 containing the first three adventures ("The Will of Godfrey of
Bouillon," "The Elephant's Graveyard," "Comet To Carthage"), and the Vol. 2 containing the last two ("Holiday in Budapest," "F.52") - by Humanoids/DC
Comics. They were initially released in hardback in 2003 and later in
softback editions in 2004 and 2005.
Shop and compare: Freddy vs. Tintin
Yes, Freddy is an blatantly obvious Tintin clone. But unlike Herge's Tintin adventures, Chaland's Freddy Lombard stories are much more adult in nature, much looser in terms of narrative arc (stories tend to fizzle out at the end), and feature three morally sketchy characters - the beautiful Dina, the muscular Sweep (whose balding pate reminds me of Carl Anderson's mute comic character Henry or perhaps Harold of Purple Crayon fame), and the titular Tintin-esque Freddy Lombard (who sports a blond tuft of hair in place of Tintin's signature carrot-top but still favors "plus four"-style pantaloons) - who aren't exactly "good Scouts."
The Heroic Trio: Sweep, Freddy and Dina
The backstory is that they are Gypsy-esque slackers who sponge off the largess of Freddy's uncle as they travel the Continent and beyond, always struggling to find employment and make ends meet.
As an example of Chaland's mature approach to the Lombard adventures, look no further than "Holiday in Budapest" (a title right up there with the Dead Kennedys' "Holiday in Cambodia" for ironic effect) and the sexual tones of its subplot involving Sweep and horny Russian operative Svetlana. In the strip shown below, the first panel showing Sweep's head entering Svetlana's coat like a train entering a tunnel (itself a very sexual image!) is truly fantastic; I would frame this one panel as picture on my wall, as this is the one image most evocative of Chaland's style.
Svetlana wants Sweep to flex his love muscle.
Svetlana: "Where are my lovely young cheeks of bygone days?"
Svetlana calls Sweep her "Caucasian stallion," which must be a reference to the then-Soviet Union's Caucasus region because Sweep is, for some reason (printer's error?) actually inked with brown skin in this adventure (which is kind of confusing).
Some of the stories veer into downright creepiness, especially Chaland's final story "F.52," which features a "retarded child" and a married couple who may be either kidnappers or pedophiles.
"Ha! ha! She's a unicorn!" Notify the Better Parenting Council!
"This kid is retarded. Look at me, I'm normal!"
"F.52"'s oddball characters and dialogue make me think it could have sprung from the pages of Daniel Clowes' Eightball, especially in its cruel depiction of the retarded girl and her sadistic "parents" (wards? kidnappers?) on the flight.
And Freddy isn't always the protagonist in these narratives (I'd be hard-pressed to call him a "hero" - certainly not in the Joseph Campbell sense of the term) (now both Tintin and Snowy would qualify as Campbell heroes!), sometimes taking a backseat to his muscular pal Sweep and the even-keeled Dina.
Chaland's natives are restless - and sterotypical
The two examples cited above are from the Chaland Anthology #2, which I liked better than the stories in Chaland Anthology #1 and which includes over 30 pages of bonus material, including covers, short stories, and concept sketches.
But if you thought Herge's Tintin au Congo (Tintin in the Congo) was politically incorrect, your mouth will drop in Volume #1's tale "The Elephant's Graveyard," which features Sub-Saharan Africa natives drawn in a borderline-racist big-lipped style.
At least Herge's long-suppressed Congo adventure was written in the 1930s when the Congo was still under Belgium's (cruel and exploitative) colonial rule and must be viewed in the context of its times; there's no such "plausible deniability" excuse for Chaland's 1980s depictions of Africans.
"The Elephant's Graveyard" is actually the second part of two interconnected stories (the first concerns the trio's trip to Africa to track down some rare glass photographic plates for an eccentric collector). (OK, did I mention how sketchy the narrative arcs are?)
Still, despite the confusing storylines and sometimes questionable taste, there's no denying the visual appeal of this artist and his characters. Tintin still rules the Franco-Belgian comics roost as far as I'm concerned, but the "Tintin-grown-up" adventures of Freddy and his pals are well-worth a look, too.
In parting, here's a very good overview of the Chaland aesthetic from Read About Comics:
If I had to sum up the Freddy Lombard stories as quickly as possible, it would be “what if Tintin grew up?” Like the lead character in Hergé’s famed Tintin graphic novels, Freddy Lombard travels the globe with action and adventure close behind… but there’s a more adult sort of sensibility to Chaland’s stories. Maybe it’s Freddy’s attitude of slumming his way through life, all the while still ending up in fantastic situations and adventures. Chaland’s anti-hero still brings a great deal of tension to his stories, though. The final album, F.52, was so tense that I found myself breathlessly turning the pages at 2am, unable to put the book down even though I really could have used the sleep.
As good as Chaland’s stories got the further he went along, it’s the art that had originally caught my eye. Chaland’s clean lines will once more evoke the name of Hergé. There’s a certain amount of menace that I found in Chaland, though, that I don’t remember in my friend’s Tintin albums. Maybe it’s the stories themselves, but Chaland is able to make just about any situation menacing, from a trip into the jungle to tanks rolling through Budapest. Everything is painstakingly drawn, and it’s easy to see why Chaland’s often referred to as an “artist’s artist”; the number of people who were picking the Chaland Anthology line in French who couldn’t read a single word says something about the power of Chaland’s gorgeous inks. As an added sidenote, the rich colors in these albums (especially the reds and purples) are really gorgeous, bringing an added dimension to the work.
* Film Snob (n): reference term for the sort of movie obsessive for whom the actual enjoyment of motion pictures is but a side dish to the accumulation of arcane knowledge about them.
Of all the books I picked up during a recent book-hoarding spree at the Daedalus Books & Music warehouse outlet in Columbia, MD, none was more prized than this snarky little tome by the same author of my equally-prized The Rock Snob's Dictionary. (Visit snobsite.com - "the online site of cultural snobbism" - to see these titles as well as the similary-spirited The Food Snob's Dictionary and The Wine Snob's Dictionary.) Yes, I am a film snob and yes, I too once toiled in a video store where film snobs (and film geeks, like Quentin Tarantino) are weaned.
The Film Snob knows "insiderist arcana"!
The film snob is a sub-niche of Hipsterdom ruled by "proprietary knowingness," in which the pleasure one takes from watching movies "derives not from the sensory pleasure of watching them, but also from knowing more about them than you do, and from jealously guarding this knowledge from the cheesy, Julia Roberts-loving masses." It is this refusal to educate or share their "insiderist arcana" with the Stupid and Ineducable Masses, the authors argue, that sets the film snob apart from the film buff - the latter described as "the effervescent, Scorcese-style enthusiast who delights in introducing novitiates to The Bicycle Thief [sic] and Powell-Pressburger movies."
Though it's organized alphabetically, like a dictionary, and doesn't have to be read start-to-finish, I am enjoying it so much, that I probably will read it that way. One thing is does do is close the knowledge gap and level the playing field so that, in the words of the author, "No longer must you suffer silently as some clerk in a 'Tod Browning's Freaks" T-shirt bombards you with baffling allusions to 'wire-fu' pictures, 'Todd-AO process,' and 'Sam Raimi.'"
I love the introductory essay by the authors, especially the following section (in which one could substitute "AV Librarian" for "surly video store clerk"):
Who Is the Film Snob?
The archetypal Film Snob is familiar to anyone who has walked through the doors of an independent video store and encountered a surly clerk - hostile of mien, short on patience, apt to chastise you for not intuiting that Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket is in the James L. Brooks section "because Brooks was the movie's executive producer!" Perhaps this clerk has a shelfful of his own recommendations on display - David Cronenberg's Scanners, the complete filmography of Steve Zahn, the Italian women-in-prison pic Women of Devil's Island, and, oh, The Human Tornado, the second of the raunch Dolemite features that starred the blaxploitation comic Rudy Ray Moore in the 1970s. As you walk up to the counter with your copy of Ron Howard's A Beautiful
Mind, this clerk heaves an audible, exasperated sigh, dutifully but
contemptuously processing the transaction and sending you on your way
with your wretched cinematic piffle.
Before video players and pay-cable movie channels, the ranks of such Snobs were thin. Film buffs enlisted in campus film societies or went to repertory cinemas for their old-movie and foreign-film fixes, or simply watched whatever faded offerings were indifferently shoved on TV via the Late Show, the Million Dollar Movie, or some other grim rubric. [For me, it was WBFF Fox 45, which screened all the Bergman and Fellini movies late at night - because they were "European" and hence "mature-themed" - in the 1970s!] Diehard cineasts who wished to watch one film over and over again really had to work at it, attending the same theater for several consecutive days, or gaining access to a projector by joining their school's AV club (and thereby consigning themselves to leper status socially). But the rise of VCRs and such services as HBO and Cinemax in the late 1970s and early '80s effected a huge change, enabling multiple viewing and wholesale absorption of a film's content and technique. Youngsters who sat impatiently through HBO's airings of Peter Bogdanovich's wilderness-period film Saint Jack (1979) because the cable guide promised "nudity" and "situations" soon found themselves contemplating Bogdanovich's camera angles, Ben Gazzara's line readings, and cinematographer Robby Muller's lighting. Lo, Film Snobs were being born."
Typical entries:
Cahiers du Cinema. The singlegreatest force in invitingridicule of French intellectuals as absurdist twits. Founded in 1951, the still-extant Paris-based monthly first attracted American attention when, in 1954, it published Francois Truffaut's AUTEUR THEORY. Subsequent issues built mytholgies around such red-blooded Americans as DON SIEGEL, SAMUEL FULLER, and NICHOLAS RAY, puttingfar more thought into analysis of these directors' B pictures than the directors had put into making them. Cahiers du Cinema also abetted the French mania for Jerry Lewis, deeming him "le Roi du Crazy."
Facets Video. Comprehensively stocked video shop in Film Snob–choked Chicago, renowned for its array of foreign titles and Francophile pretensions; it prefers to be known as a “videotheque,” not a store, and its adjunct theater—which offers “cinechats” with such visiting directors as GUY MADDIN and PETER GREENAWAY—is called a “cinematheque.” Arguably the only video shop with a self-imposed mandate to turn impressionable children into Film Snobs, Facets offers a Future Filmmaker Membership that allows kids to borrow such titles as City Lights and Silas Marner for free.
Film Comment. Smug, aggressively elitist bimonthly magazie published by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Where Snobs go to read (or write) dithery articles about BOLLYWOOD and despairing critiques of popular cinema.
Movies vs. Films (Know the Difference!):
It's a MOVIE if it makes the cover of Premiere.
It's a film if it makes the cover of Cahiers du Cinema.
It's a MOVIE if it's black-and-white because it's old.
It's a FILM if it's black-and-white because it's Jarmuschy.
It's a MOVIE if it has T&A in it.
It's a FILM if it has penises in it.
When Billy Crystal gets the urge to direct, he makes a MOVIE.
When Clint Eastwood gets the urge to direct, he makes a FILM.
It's a MOVIE if its makers slipped lots of amusing stuff into the end-credits so you'd stay behind to watch them.
It's a FILM if it's end-credits are normal, boring end-credits, but everyone around you stays to watch them anyway.
Bruce Willis, a MOVIE guy, gained FILM credibility by being in Pulp Fiction. Steve Buscemi, a FILM guy, gained MOVIE credibility by being in Armageddon.
It's a MOVIE if there are black people in it, unless the black person is Forest Whitaker or Jeffrey Wright.
It's a FILM if it there are Asian people in it, unless the Asian person is Jackie Chan or Jet Li.
A John Grisham novel becomes a crappy MOVIE.
A Garbriel Garcia Marquez novel becomes a crappy FILM.
It's a MOVIE if its male lead is hurled through plate glass.
It's a FILM if its male lead has sexual urgings for young boys, his sister, or his mother.
The Coen brothers are MOVIE buffs who make FILMS.
It's a MOVIE if it's preceded by a trailer for the latest Jerry Bruckheimer epic.
It's a FILM if it's preceded by an announcement from a pear-shaped, balding man down in front who identifies himself as "Michael, the programming director."
It's a FILM if it's from the Indian subcontinent, even if the people in the Indian subcontinent think it's a MOVIE.
Tom Waits will never, ever star in a MOVIE.
Tom Hanks will never, ever star in a FILM.
Surprisingly, no mention of Rainer Werner Fassbinder is to be found here. Hmmmm.
I have been a fan of Jonatham Lethem ever since I read his 2009 novel Chronic City, which starred the one-of-a-kind brilliant eccentric Perkus Tooth (who in turn reminded me of a one-of-a-kind brilliant eccentric librarian I worked with). Set in Upper East Side Manhattan, Chronic City unraveled a tale of a circle of friends
that included a faded child-star actor (Chase Insteadman) whose astronaut girlfriend is lost in space, a cultural critic squatter (Perkus Tooth), a hack ghost-writer of
autobiographies (Oona Laszlo), and a city official blowhard (Richard Abneg), joined together by their love of smoking pot and online bidding for chalices.
I subsequently picked up a collection of his non-fiction essays, The Disappointment Artist(2006), which Lethem described as "a series of covert and not-so-covert autobiographical pieces." I was impressed by his love of Western pop culture - especially the films of John Ford ("Defending The Searchers") and John Cassevetes ("Two or Three Things I Dunno About Cassevetes") and the science fiction worlds of Philip K. Dick ("You Don't Know Dick") - and realized we had a lot in common in that regard.
Like Michael Chabon, Lethem's work is also clearly influenced by his love of comics (hey, he wrote a novel called Fortress of Solitude!) and nowhere is this more obvious than in the nine stories collected in Men and Cartoons. This short story collection is written in a variety of styles and, while I prefer his narrative fiction ("Vivian Relf," "The Glasses," "Planet Big Zero") more than his sci-fi fantasies (the Dick and Haruki Murakami-flavored "Access Fantasy" and "The Dystopianist"), the pieces informed by his love of Marvel and DC comics - the geeks who dressed up as superheroes in "The Vision" and the actual all-too-human titular superhero in "Super Goat Man" whose powers do him no good (he rescues a paper clip!) - are the ones that stick with me most.
THE VISION: Described as "a story about drunken neighborhood parlor games, boys who dress up as superheroes, and the perils of snide curiosity," this story name-checks both The Vision and The Scarlet Witch, two superheroes originating in Marvel Comics. The Vision was actually created by the writer-artist team of Joe Simon (Superman) and Jack "King" Kirby back in 1940 when the "Golden Age" Marvel line was known as Timely Comics, but later resurfaced in the late '60s in Roy Thomas and John Buscema's The Avengers and continued in different permutations up through the present. The Vision's wife was the Scarlet Witch and the short story makes interesting use of their union in its story about a superhero-worshipping nerd who grows up and finds companionship in the world of fantasy role-playing.
ACCESS FANTASY: Described as "part social satire, weird detective story," this one reminded me most of the Philip K. Dick influence, though it's not among my favorites. In fact, I found it taxing and predictable, though I liked its vision of a world in which people are divided into privileged apartment dwellers and "Road Warrior" commuters trapped in endless traffic jams. The commuters all have VCRs in their cars and watch tapes advertising apartment complexes; in one, the narrator thinks he spots a murder (this reminds me of Decker spotting the Replicant Zhora out of the corner of a Polaroid he enhances in Blade Runner - which of course was Riddley Scott's adaptation of Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"). He meets up with an attractive model and together they go around as flesh-and-blood billboard advertisements for beer and pens. Until they knock on one door too many.
THE SPRAY: Another sci-fi rumination described as "a simple story about how people in love deal with their past." In the future, police use a spray at crime scenes to see what's missing - the items people lost during break-ins, supposedly the things they value most. The spray turns an empty space where a TV set was, for example, into a salmon-colored representation of the missing boob tube - one you can put your hand through, because it's an illusion. But it's a simple matter of time before a playful couple try it on themselves to see what they're really missing, which turns out not to be material possessions but their former lovers. Awkward!
VIVIAN RELF: This is rightly described on the book jacket as a "tour de force about loss" - even though it's loss of a connection about disconnection. Doran Close meets a girl named Vivian Relf at a party and both parties are convinced they've met before, but they haven't. In fact, they have nothing in common except that they keep running into each other as the years progress. For the narrator, each "strangely haunting" encounter becomes a missed opportunity that comes to define his life. Brilliant.
PLANET BIG ZERO: The narrator's boyhood friend grows up to be an aimless slacker who comes back t o visit and rekindle their friendship. The narrator tries to reconnect by featuring his friend in his weekly comic Planet Big Zero, to disastrous results. You can't go home again. Even in comic strip panels.
THE GLASSES: My favorite. Reminds me of work! A simple story about two opticians playing Good Cop/Bad Cop with a dissatisfied (worst-case complainer) customer. A battle of wills in which an angry man who insists there are scratches on his lenses sits with his hands at his sides for as long as it takes ("I got all the time in the world!") while observed by the doubting opticians ("We've got forever. We'll wait it out") who insist he's scratching the glasses with his hands. Kafka could have written this one! Truth is stranger than fiction and this at times surreal situation is exactly the kind of stuff that goes on in real life, albeit it touched with only a slight exaggeration that lands it in the realm of fiction.
THE DYSTOPIANIST, THINKING OF HIS RIVAL, IS INTERRUPTED BY A KNOCK AT THE DOOR: My least favorite story, this "Borgesian tale that features suicidal sheep" won a Pushcart Prize when first published in Conjunctions. A little too long-winded for me, though the talking sheep angle made me think back to Murakami's Wild Sheep Chase.
SUPER GOAT MAN: Described as a "savagely funny expose of the failures of the sixties' baby boomers, and of their children," the story tracks the career of a minor comic book superhero named Super Goat Man. Super Goat Man battled minor villains like Vest Man and False Dave until the day he gave it all up to live in a hippie commune and fight the system through non-heroic social activism. He eventually ends up getting a chair at an East Coast college teaching something called "Dissidence and Desire: Marginal Heroics in American Life 1955-1975." But the narrator has always resented him and the era he represented, cruelly and jealously rebuking him at the end when it's revealed that his wife once had an affair with the horn-rimmed, cloven-hoofed hero.
THE NATIONAL ANTHEM: Name-checks James Carr's "The Dark End of the Street" as an adulterous couple's theme song for their shared extramarital deceptions. Made me think of the great version of this song by Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers.
Bob Dylan's "Ninety Miles an Hour (Down a Dead End Street)" also gets mentioned. It's an amusing story, nothing more.
All in all, this collection of Lethem's short stories highlights his ability to write in a variety of styles, with his love of sci-fi, hard-boiled detectives and comic books more than evident. Still, I like it when his stories stick to the real world, which is why "Vivian Relf" and "The Glasses" were the most rewarding to me, although "The Vision" and "Super Goat Man" certainly are memorable musings about the influence of fantasy-based pop culture on Baby Boomer geeks like myself.
Your Golden Childhood: The Best of Little Golden Records Vol. 1
(MicroWerks, 2009)
1. MIGHTY MOUSE THEME (Here I Come to Save the Day!) - Mighty Mouse (Tom Morrison) and The Terrytooners featuring Mike Stewart
2. CLEMENTINE -The Sandpipers
3. PETER COTTONTAIL (Year Round Version) - The Sandpipers featuring Anne Lloyd
4. YANKEE DOODLE DANDY - Bert Parks
5. I LIKE PEOPLE (The Friendly Song) - Jimmy Durante
6. TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLGAME - The Sandpipers featuring Anne Lloyd with Mitch Miller's Orchestra
7. THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD - The Sandpipers featuring Anne Lloyd and Mike Stewart
8. GIVE A LITTLE WHISTLE - Cliff Edwards with Mitch Miller's Orchestra
9. CAROUSEL WALTZ - Mitch Miller's Orchestra Conducted by Jimmy Carroll
10. SONG WAGON - Roy Rogers, Dale Evans & The Ranch Hands
11. TUBBY THE TUBA - Paul Tripp
12. HI-LILI, HI-LO - Shari Lewis, Lamb Chop & Friends
13. THE BALLAD OF THE ALAMO - Mike Stewart
14. PUFF THE MAGIC DRAGON - The Golden Singers
Dr. Spock was right, everything in life depends on how you were weaned. As a result, my musical tastes were determined early on by sucking on the teat of Little Golden Records, starting in the late '50s and continuing through my lost early '60s Youth. Whether we Baby Boomers like it or not, these melodies and jingles - "Bumble Bee, Bumble Bye," "Icka Backa Soda Cracker," "Piddly Patter Patter" et. al. - are deeply embedded in our minds, like some Manchurian Candidate hypnotic implant.
Those little yellow 78s (and later 45s and LPs) - branded "unbreakable" and heralding a vast library of "new and gay and charming" stories, songs and music - had never previously been available on CD until now, so when I spotted this disc at Daedulus Books & Music recently, I had to pick it up. It's great that Golden Records are finally getting their artistic due because, in addition to their pop cultural value, these platters of yore featured some truly talented - albeit unheralded - singers and musicians.
Little Golden Records: Kid-safe and unbreakable!
Unfortunately, most of their names were shrouded in mystery or ignominity - kind of like all those "fake" in-name-only '60s groups that were really the studio creations of behind-the-scenes record producers; "bands" like The Cuff Links, The Grass Roots and Edison Lighthouse never existed until the record companies had a hit on their hands, and only then would they draft cookie-cutter musicians to hit the road and promote the records - often sending multiple versions of the same group to different geographic regions.
(In fact, Edison Lighthouse - a studio concoction of Brit bubblegum writer/producer Tony Macauley - featured singer Tony Burrows, who holds the distinction of singing on hits by four different fake bands in the same year: Edison Lighthouse's "Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes," White Plains' "My Baby Loves Lovin'," the Brotherhood of Man's "United We Stand," and the Pipkins "Gimme Dat Ding." Burrows is also in the record books as the only person to appear on BBC Television's Top Of The Pops fronting three different acts in one show: Edison Lighthouse, White Plains, and Brotherhood of Man. Now that's multi-tasking!)
But now the slighted have been righted! Thanks to the folks at Shout! Factory's reissue label Micro Werks, we Boomers can now truly name that tune - and who was singing it. Sure, it's not definitive, but it's at least something. At the least it gives these so-called "kiddie records" - long forgotten and tossed in with the other toys in the attic - the name recognition they deserve.
Golden Records were originally an audio offshoot of the New York publishing house Simon & Shuster where, under the direction of Arthur Shimkin, they became the first label to be devoted exclusively to children's music. Taking advantage of the prestigious Simon & Shuster imprint, Shimkin was able to lure some name talent to his label - Jimmy Durante, Danny Kaye, puppeteer Shari Lewis, major league baseball's Mel Allen, Cliff "Jiminy Cricket" Edwards, and Roy Rogers and Dale Evans - all of whom appear on Volume 1 of Micro Werks' Your Golden Childhood.
The celebrity guest stars came and went, but the musical production team was consistent throughout. The Sandpipers (aka The Golden Sandpipers, The Sandpiper Chorus, The Sandpiper Chorus and Orchestra, The Sandpiper Singers) were pretty much the in-house band at Little Golden Records, most often under the direction of schockmeister Mitchell "Sing Along with Mitch" Miller (who sometimes played oboe on the recordings) and Terrytoons/Lantz veteran Jim Timmens.
These Sandpipers are a different group from the folk singing group who had a Top 10 hit in 1966 with "Guantanamera" - or "One Ton of Mayo" as I used to call it! No, these 'pipers were were Mike Stewart, Ralph Nyland, Dick Byron, and Bob Miller.
Besides Mike Stewart, other semi-regular lead singers at the label included Sally Sweetland, Mary Jane Sutherland, Peter Hanley, Anne Lloyd, Rosemary Clooney's sister Betty Clooney (an Easter specialist who sang "Eggbert the Easter Egg" and "Bunny Bunny Bunny"). Mae Questrel (best known as the "boop-boop-be-doop" voice of Betty Boop) even sang on a 1951 Golden Record 78 called "Little Audrey Says" b/w "Let's Go Shopping" that I would die to have!
Jimmy Carroll was the arranger for Golden Records. When Miller went on to great success at Columbia (much to Frank Sinatra's dismay - Frankie never forgave Miller for making him record "Mama Will Bark" with Dagmar!), Jim Timmens conducted most of the early 60's Golden records with a group either called the Sandpipers, the Glow-Tones, or the Golden Singers/Chorus. Blogger Mike Evanier writes that they are distinctive by "the Timmens sound he used for Terrytoons and some Lantz TV stuff. Listen for lots of woodwinds and a mellower tone."
******************
And here they are!
1. MIGHTY MOUSE THEME (Here I Come to Save the Day!) Mighty Mouse (Tom Morrison) and The Terrytooners featuring Mike Stewart
We start off with the best tune, the theme song from my favorite childhood cartoon, Mighty Mouse, which was later made famous in Andy Kaufmann's stand-up routine. Try to resist bellowing out "Here I come to save the day!" - you just can't do it! Mighty Mouse frequently spoofed operatic singing, and nowhere was it more perfectly employed than in this melodramatic "save the day" riff.
In the early '60s, Terrytoons helped produce an album of original Mighty Mouse stories for Peter Pan Records that starred the studio's head writer Tom Morrison, who would voice Mighty Mouse from 1958 through 1971. Here Morrison is backed by the "Terrytooners" featuring Mike Stewart, but I suspect this is really The Sandpipers under yet another alias.
2. CLEMENTINE The Sandpipers
In a canyon in a valley, excavating for a mine Dwelt a miner, 49-er, and his daughter Clementine
Huckleberry loved to howl "Clementine"
"My Darling Clementine" is one of the most storied of American folk ballads, its melody lending itself to everything from pop cover versions by Bobby Darin and Jan & Dean (#65, 1959) to a cricket team chant (England's Barmy Army), even turning up on the theme song of Kim Il-sung's (off-off-off-Broadway) North Korean musical The Flower Girl (1972). Of course, I grew up associating this song with Huckleberry Hound (voiced by Daws Butler), whose tone-deaf and off-key renditions of "Oh My Darling, Clementine" were a running gag on his Hanna-Barbera TV cartoon show.
Usually credited to either Percy Montrose or Barker Bradford, it tells the story a bereaved lover singing about his darling, the daughter of a miner in the 1849 California Gold Rush. He loses her in a drowning accident, though he consoles himself towards the end of the song with Clementine's "little sister." (The verse about the little sister was often left out of folk song books intended for children, presumably because it seemed morally questionable!) 3. PETER COTTONTAIL (Year Round Version) The Sandpipers featuring Anne Lloyd
The reigning Golden Records diva was Anne Lloyd (best known for songs like "The Muffin Man" and the Patti Page hit "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?").
But the reigning kiddie diva was Anne Lloyd (best known for songs like "The Muffin Man" and the Patti Page hit "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?").
Here comes Peter Cottontail hopping down the
What a great - and strange - song this is. It's basically a Childe Ballad masquerading as a kiddie tune, and it wouldn't be at all out of place on Nick Cave's Murder Ballads or Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music. Perhaps the greatest of all Little Golden Records "Easter" releases- and another golden "million seller"- here is the colorful cover of "PETER COTTONTAIL" (R57) with the rare lavender background color behind the romping rabbit! The "Easter Version" is on Side "A", and on the "B" side- the "Year-Round" version! Performed by Anne Lloyd, The Sandpipers with Mitch Miller & Orchestra. Featured on many other golden releases over the many years- this single jacket has also been featured with a blue background.
4. YANKEE DOODLE DANDY Bert Parks
Before he became the host of the Miss American Pageant, Bert Parks was a singer of patriotic tunes.
5. I LIKE PEOPLE (The Friendly Song) Jimmy Durante
6. TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLGAME The Sandpipers featuring Anne Lloyd with Mitch Miller's Orchestra
Little Golden Record S-107, "Take Me Out To The Ball Game" was sung by NY Yankees' Phil Rizzuto, and Tommy Henrich,and Brooklyn Dodgers' Ralph Branca and Roy Campanella. The recording was orchestrated by the great Mitch Miller and the Sandpipers. The full record also includes a rarely heard recording of "The Umpire" and Yankee legendary announcer Mel Allen narrating the children's favorite, "Casey at the Bat". All three recordings can now only be heard at Cooperstown in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
7. THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD The Sandpipers featuring Anne Lloyd and Mike Stewart 8. GIVE A LITTLE WHISTLE Cliff Edwards with Mitch Miller's Orchestra
9.CAROUSEL WALTZ - Mitch Miller's Orchestra Conducted by Jimmy Carroll
10. SONG WAGON Roy Rogers, Dale Evans & The Ranch Hands
Roy Rogers had a really good singing voice. I remember picking up a compilation Golden Recor called "Doggie Songs" and my fave tune on it was Roy with the Sandpipers extolling the virtues of "Daniel the Cocker Spaniel."
12. HI-LILI, HI-LO Shari Lewis, Lamb Chop & Friends
13. THE BALLAD OF THE ALAMO Mike Stewart
14. PUFF THE MAGIC DRAGON The Golden Singers
Aside from Mike Stewart, other semi-regular singers at the label included Sally Sweetland, Mary Jane Sutherland and Peter Hanley.
Anne Lloyd (best known for songs like "The Muffin Man" and the Patti Page hit "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?") was the reigning diva at Little Golden Records.
Rosemary Clooney's sister Betty Clooney sang on some sides backed by Miller and The Sandpipers, like "Eggbert the Easter Egg" and "Bunny Bunny Bunny." And Mae Questrel (the voice of Betty Boop) even sang on a 1951 Golden Record 78 called "Little Audrey Says" b/w "Let's Go Shopping" that I would die to have!
Hot on the heels on this release, the Little Golden Records folks have released a contemporary celebrities remix called Golden Records: The Magic Continues - Celebrity Series, Vol. 1, featuring 20 classic digitally restored original recording '50s and '60s recordings combined with the voices of Alicia Silverstone, Susan Sarandon, Ed Asner, Cheryl Hines, Didi Conn, and others.
Bah! I'll take the originals, thank you very much!
The Little Golden Records were orchestrated by Mitch Miller and featured the Sandpiper Singers. As their popularity increased mor stars of the times became involved including Roy Roger and Dale Evans, Art Carney, Shari Lewis, Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Captain Kangaroo, and many others.
The early numbered records had a regular title and a Disney. There is no real way to tell a first edition other than by dating. The original sleeves of records 1-12 were 6 3/4 in x 8 in. and opened to show a description. There was a yellow 78 rpm record in a slot on the right. These records were released in 1948 and showed a bout 3/4 of the yellow circle showing information about the record.
The sleeve format changed in 1949. They measured 7 1/2in x 6 3/4 in and the opening for the record was at the top. Record color was still yellow and they were 78's. Yellow circle on the sleeve describing the record was still present but lines were added. The picutures on the sleeves were basic with a solid background with several characters or pictures from the little golden book on them.
The original titles had just a number, the Disney Title had a D before the number.
Between 1949 and 1950's the record sleeve graphics were improved and covered most of the sleeve. Between 1950-1951 an 'R' was added to the numbers of the regular series and the Disney series 'RD'. In 1952 the yellow label on the sleeve was replaced with a 3in logo and in 1954 it was reduced to a quarter size.
In 1956, Extended play records were released and contained Three Little Golden Records on one record. The prefix was 'EP' and Golden Mother Goose was the first produced and numbered EP317. They were yellow 45 rpms, and were quickly changed to black. In 1956 the records were sold as yellow 78's and black 45's. The 45s normally had a banner down the right side saying it was a 45. The 78's were 6 in and the 45's 7 in.
After 1959, number prefixes were no longer used for regular records. The EPs still contain the number prefix. The prefixes started being dropped around number 471 and were completely gone by 490. The last numbered Little Golden Record was #777 Row, Row, Row your Boat in 1964. After this time they were no longer called Little Golden Records.
The Players: Paul Haig - Guitar & Vocals Malcolm Ross - Guitar, Violin David Weddell - Bass Ronnie Torrance - Drums
My score of the week was finding this used copy of Josef K's entire recorded history for $5 at Soundgarden. I remembered reading about Josef K in Simon Reynolds' book Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 in his chapter on Scottish postpunk bands, and I liked the song "Sense of Guilt," which Reynolds included on the import companion CD compilation to his book ("Sense of Guilt" also appeared on the 1987 Josef K reissue album Young and Stupid).
So I took a chance - and I'm glad I did, because this is one of the great lost Scottish postpunk bands of that era. Josef K were an Edinburgh band on the otherwise Glasgow-based Postcard Records label ("The Sound of Young Scotland!"), though one that didn't make it as big as their roster mates Orange Juice or Aztec Camera. But they should have, as anyone listening to this CD will agree. The Josef K sound is cold, nervous and angular, awash with trebly, spasmotic guitars, synth pops, electronic drums and effects, over which singer Paul Haig's voice (or "existentialist croon" in Reynolds' words) alternates between Ian Curtis droning and skittish Tom Verlaine/David Byrne bleating.
And on a personal level, listening to this CD was like getting a musical snapshot of a particular sound I remembered well from 1980, when postpunk perched perilously on the precipice of pretension and preciousness. (As Positive Noise's Ross Middleton once quipped, “There is only one thing worse than being pretentious and that’s not being pretentious!”) They remind me not only of Joy Division, Bauhaus, Television, Talking Heads, Gang of Four and all those other reigning leaders of the smartypants indierock intelligentsia who wore long trenchcoats and/or overly serious demeanors (as if suffering from acid reflux), but even Baltimore's "New Wave" players of the time like Null Set, The Accused and N.E.M.B. (Non Erotic Male Bonding). (God knows I can certainly imagine Mark Renner of Boys In the River loving these guys, though he always was a Skids man first and foremost!)
In the wake of punk's collapse, it seemed that bands nixed the fast and furious for the nuanced and nerdy - creating music that had charms to sooth the proverbial savage breast. Frontmen started name-checking books and art, and guitars seemed get less aggro and more nervous and angular, screetchily cutting sharp corners as if strummed by architects instead of brutes. Reynolds describes Josef K's distinctive guitar sounds as follows:
Inspired by Talking Heads 77 and the brittle clangor of Subway Sect, Josef K tried to get their guitars to sound as "toppy" as they could. Says Ross, "It was just a matter of avoiding distortion and turning the treble up full. We liked playing really fast rhythms, and you needed a really sharp sound for those to work. Using distortion meant you'd lose the effect." Coiled and keen, barbed and wired, Ross's and Haig's guitars caroomed off the fastfunk groove churned up bassist Davy Weddell and drummer Ronnie Torrance. "In the very early days, it was just me playing guitar with Ronnie drumming up in his attic," says Haig. "Ronnie'ed always follow my rhythm guitar and we carried that on into Josef K. He'd never listen to the bass, like drummers are supposed to." The resulting "strange chemistry" between Torrance's all-out exuberance nd the abrasive flurry of the guitars gave Josef K their frenetic momentum.
Some fans see Josef K as yet another example of a great Scots band who (like early Orange Juice, The Fire Engines, and The Monochrome Set) set the template for Franz Ferdinand - in fact, FF are thanked profusely in the liner notes for their efforts in helping Entomology see the light of day. In fact, Josef K was actually discovered by Orange Juice's Steven Daly, who quit OJ for a while to start his own label, Absolute. In Edinburgh he met Malcolm Ross, who was then playing guitar in a group called TV Art (Ross: "We were called TV Art just 'cos we wanted to get the word 'Art' in there, and 'TV' for the modernity"), and convinced him to change their name to that of the protagonist in Franz Kafka's The Trial. Name-dropping an existential literature classic obviously appealed to Ross, who admitted, “We liked to read European literature and go to art exhibitions."
Indeed, books seemed to shape Josef K as much as music, and Reynolds cites not only the obvious Kafka influence but also Camus, Hesse, Doestoyevsky, and Knut Hamsun. They weren't alone, as Edinburgh became the home of a fledgling postpunk literatti scene.
"There was a certain period in Edinburgh when all the New Wave bands were into reading," Haig told Reynolds. "Davy Henderson from The Fire Engines, Ross Middleton from Positive Noise, Richard Jobson from the Skids, you'd always see them with a book in their pocket." As for himself, Haig admitted "Reading gave me so many ideas for lyrics. In those days I never thought about politics for one second, I was only trying to project thoughts about the human condition. Orange Juice were into a different kind of literature. Edwyn would be reading Catcher in the Rye while we'd be reading The Trial. That explains a lot about the difference between the bands!"
Josef K. would go on to form an alliance with Orange Juice, with the bands supporting each other on tours and sharing a similarity in sound and mission.
Like Orange Juice, Josef K had a a clean image (sharp, monochrome syuits from thrift stores) and a clean sound. Both groups shared a penchant for the cerebral side of American punk, groups such as Television, Pere Ubu, Talking Heads, the Voidoids...And, like Orange Juice and Aztec Camera, Josef K were considered (in Mark E. Smith's term) "New Puritans" - which was kind of like the "straight-edge hardcore" of its time. They frowned on drugs, drinking, and laddishness (though speed was OK, as it had Mod street cred!). - (Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again)
Mod's aesthetic of being alert and in control was also attractive for its fashion. "I was interested in the original mod movement," Rossi said. "That was an influence on us wearing suits."
But both Haig and Ross also shared a love for Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground, the obligatory signposts for intelligent American art-rock.
"I first met Paul at secondary school aged twelve," Malcolm Ross recalled in Rip It Up. "All four of us were at Fir Hill. But me and Paul only became friends when we were leaving school. It was punk that made us into a tight clique. We were aware of each other before because we were all Lou Reed fans."
Haig claims he had a musical ephiphany at age 12 when he first heard “Walk on the Wild Side” on the wireless. "I sat next to my parent’s radiogram and I thought ‘this is the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard.’ I went out and got the Velvets albums. I was also into Bowie very early on, from ‘Space Oddity.’ There was one fantastic music press cover story, Melody Maker probably - ‘Lou Bops Bowie Out’. They had a row in a restaurant and Reed punched Bowie. ”
But another obvious reference point for the young Scots was Joy Division. Josef K's second Postcard single "It's Kinda Funny" (May 1980) was a allegedly a response to Ian Curtis' suicide; indeed, its funereal, plodding bass and drum intro practically screams Joy Division.
Josef K's place in Postpunk History: It's Kinda Blurry
Ian Curtis' demise wasn't the only celebrity death to fascinate Haig, who wrote "Final Request" about the tragically short life of Marilyn Monroe ("All those pills you took, can never ease the pain").
Etymology's 22-tracks represent the first time anything Josef K-related has been released across the Pond, with half of the tracks taken from Sorry for Laughing (a 1980 album that initially didn't make it past the test-pressing phase) and The Only Fun in Town (a 1981 album that featured some re-recordings of Sorry for Laughing material), while the remainder includes their early Postcard singles ("Radio Drill Time," "It's Kind of Funny"), a 1981 BBC session for John Peel - and a surprising cover of Alice Cooper's "Applebush" (from 1969's Pretties for You LP)!
It would be redundant for me to review this disc track by track, because Stephen Trousse's Pitchfork review (12-15-2006) has already captured it so perfectly:
Somebody must have been telling lies about Josef K, because in the quarter-century since they splintered they've been so diversely mythologized, lionized, and revered you might believe there were actually four or five groups on Scotland's early 80s postpunk scene who just happened to share the same name. For starters there was the Postcard version, label boss Alan Horne's vision of the group as the neat Edinburgh spirit to spike the sparkling Glasgow pop of Orange Juice. Then there's Paul Morley's account (reprised in his sleevenotes here): If OJ were a New York band who formed in Glasgow, then JK were a Manchester band who'd been dislocated to Edinburgh-- troubled heirs of Joy Division, stylish peers of Magazine. Then, of course, there's the sharp-suited puritans you might read about in the works of Kevin Pearce, the mod missing link between the crooning Vic Godard and the shambling June Brides. And that's just a step away from the twee indie-pop slant: Josef K as the jagged romantics who essentially invented the Wedding Present. And more recently there's been the Franz Ferdinand angle: Josef K as the band who dreamt up the smartly spiky pop that married the stark expressionism of CBGBs to a suave Frank Sinatra sigh before the Strokes were even struck.
Domino have profited greatly from the success of this last invocation, so it's to their credit that they've issued this terrific 22-track introduction to Josef K-- remarkably, the first time the group's work has been properly available in the U.S. It takes us from the 1980s Postcard single "Radio Drill Time" through generous selections from the abandoned album Sorry for Laughing and the actual debut The Only Fun in Town, before concluding with their parting 1981 Peel Sessions and a strangely successful cover of Alice Cooper's "Applebush". In part, it's the misfiring brevity of their career-- barely two years from debut to farewell-- that encourages the proliferation of Josef K myth. Disbanded in their prime before they grew stale or flat, they still feel pregnant with promise, tantalizingly unfinished; like an actor cut down in youth, they've remained an irresistible lure to the imagination of pop romantics ever since.
On the two Postcard singles released in winter 1980 you can hear a young group trying to struggle out of the shadow of Joy Division, away from the post-punk abyss of Ian Curtis's suicide earlier that year. "Radio Drill Time" is an urgent, slightly gauche stab at a Martin Hannett soundworld, all martial drums, a reverbed scree of guitars, and startling electronic bleeps, with the usual suspects of JD iconography -- trance, radios, motorways -- rounded up one last time; as Paul Haig wails nervily, "it's the wrong place to start." "It's Kind of Funny", issued just two months later, shows real progress and the beginnings of a distinctive Josef K voice: Haig now croons swoonily of existential futility-- Sinatra meets Sartre via the Subway Sect-- while Malcolm Ross and the band hit on a groove like Tom Verlaine slashing through "Pale Blue Eyes".
But the real draw here are the six selections from Sorry For Laughing -- the debut album that should have been released at the start of 1981 as the momentum of The Sound of Young Scotland hype built to a head, but was instead mysteriously shelved, apparently after thousands of copies had already been produced. You could easily believe this was one of Horne's gloriously perverse, self-defeating bids for pop immortality-- an instant great lost classic (and a steady income stream from supposedly rare test pressings). More prosaically, it's possible that the group were intimidated by the furious energy and intensity brewing within fellow Edinburghers the Fire Engines and felt their recordings now seemed too prim, poised, and proper in comparison. As it survives, the album sees the group expanding into a kind of postpunk art rock: "Heads Watch" is a kissing cousin of Magazine's "Shot by Both Sides" while "Variations on a Scene" unfurls into a low-slung and slinky arrangement for piano, flute, and arcade game electronics. But it also suggests a possible New Pop future for the group, producing the kind of kosmische kabaret that kindred spirits the Associates were to take briefly and brilliantly to the top of the charts (as it happened, the closest we would get to this ideal was Propaganda's stately synth-pop cover of "Sorry For Laughing" in 1985).
The eventual debut, The Only Fun in Town, was recorded in six days in a Belgian studio in an attempt to capture their live clangor but released in July 81 to abysmal reviews from their most ardent fans: Morley wrote in the NME: "I am appalled…Josef K have cheapened themselves and cheated the world". Heard now TOFiT is certainly no disaster-- there's an unhinged vigor to "Fun'n'Frenzy" and "16 Years" that has proved incredibly influential over two decades of British indie-- but there's an inescapable falling off in intrigue, with all the mystery, wit, and languor reduced to bright, brittle blasts of alienation.
This most abstemious of groups was to split within the year, after a taste of the promotional treadmill beat any remaining idealism out of them: Haig to an intermittently fascinating solo career on the dark side of the croon, Ross to a more commercial incarnation of Orange Juice, and Weddell and Torrance to join a youthful Momus in the Happy Family.
Post-split, Ross not only joined Orange Juice, but and also spent some time with Aztec Camera, while Haig's solo career branched off into disco-funk experimentaion; he eventually ended up working with artists like Alan Rankine, The Associates' Billy Mackenzie, Cabaret Voltaire, and Mantronix.
Along with Fire Engines, Orange Juice, The Associates, Altered Images, Scars, Simple Minds, Aztec Camera, and Cocteau Twins, Josef K were truly standouts of the "Sounds of Young Scotland" postpunk era. And though they lasted a scant two years from start to finish, there was nothing watered down in their driving sound, which Allmusicguide's Andy Kellman likened to "brief, spastic shards of over-caffeinated post-punk with skittish vocals on the verge of spinning out of control."
"Having virtually no ancestors (bar a trace of Television and the VU), Josef K fittingly left no progeny (unless you count the June Brides)," Reynolds reflects, considering Josef K's standing in postpunk history. "But these reissues will ensure that JK will "forever drone."
Or as Trousseau concludes, "The cover and insecty title of this anthology alludes to the source of the group's name in Kafka, but also carries an elusive allusion to Manny Farber inventing Termite Art back in 1962: "the concentration on nailing down one moment without glamorizing it …forgetting this accomplishment as soon as it has been passed; the feeling that all is expendable, that it can be chopped up and flung down in a different arrangement without ruin."Entomology is exemplary termite art: A brief moment and a handful of songs that have burrowed industriously through the soil of the last twenty years, while so many white elephants have fallen ponderously away, and now finally come triumphantly to light.
I'm a big fan of Jonathan Lethem's writing, both fiction and non-fiction. We like similar things (Marvel comics, John Ford Westerns, Philip K. Dick, indie rock) and in a perfect world would probably be friends on Facebook. Though most acclaimed for his 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel Motherless Brooklyn (his take on the detective mystery, which featured a sleuth afflicted with Tourette's syndrome and reflected his love of stretching genres "to their limits and beyond") and the semi-autobiographical coming-of-age bestseller The Fortress of Solitude - which according to Wikipedia helped seal his rep among critics as "a master craftsmen of language" and led to the MacArthur Foundation awarding him a coveted "genius grant" in 2005 - I've so far only taken the back way into his books (I guess I'm working up the courage to tackle the "heavy stuff"); thus, I've read only his shorter, smaller, peripheral works like personal fave Chronic City, the short story collection Men and Cartoons, his non-fiction essays in The Disappointment Artist, and (with co-author Karl Rusnuk and artists Paul Hornschemeir, Farel Dalrymple, and Gary Panter) his revival of the Marvel comic series Omega the Unknown.
