Recession Films

Put Inside Llewyn Davis in the category. Win Win is another.

That Old Steinbeck America

From a letter written in 1959.

Adlai, do you remember two kinds of Christmases? There is one kind in a house where there is little and a present represents not only love but sacrifice. The one single package is opened with a kind of slow wonder, almost reverence. Once I gave my youngest boy, who loves all living things, a dwarf, peach-faced parrot for Christmas. He removed the paper and then retreated a little shyly and looked at the little bird for a long time. And finally he said in a whisper, "Now who would have ever thought that I would have a peach-faced parrot?"

Thanksgiving, 1980

"The last tour,"he explained, "we played 122 shows, and the band played real hard every single night, you know. Every single night in every town, the band played very hard. And people, I think they just remembered. They remembered, and this time everybody told their friends, 'You just gotta come down to the show.'"

"Where do you reach for the energy to do it?" I asked him. "You're playing nearly four hours, sometimes three nights in a row. Occasionally, you have to be tired."

"The audience brings a lot, even when you think you have nothing left within you. You know, tonight is tonight, and what you do tonight, you don't make up for tomorrow, and you don't ride on what you did last night. I always keep in my mind that you only have one chance. Some guy bought his ticket, and there's a promise made between the musician and the audience. When they support each other, that's a special thing. It goes real deep, and most people take it too lightly. If you break the pact or take it too lightly, nothing else makes sense. It's at the heart of everything; I'm not sure how.

"I've got a lot of energy just naturally. But when I get onstage and I'm running on empty. I just think of the promise to the guy or girl who's down there, a promise that's made from hundreds or thousands of miles away. It's no different than if you stood with this person and shook his hand."

 http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/bruce-springsteen-the-boss-is-back-19801127#ixzz2niTzveHM 

American Dream (December, '13)

Saw a graffiti poster plastered on a brick wall: The American Dream is only for those who are sleeping.
I was on my way to exercise the stock options of my former employment.

Cigarette & Fresca (1967)

Gunfight at Carnegie Hall

I'm going pinko commie today with this Phil Ochs-outlaw post as well as the David Simon speech.

Gunfight At Carnegie Hall is Phil Ochs' final album, comprising songs recorded at the infamous, gold-suited, bomb-threat shortened first set at Carnegie Hall in New York City on March 27, 1970, though it contains less than half of the actual concert. The shows recorded that day served to surprise Ochs' fans, from his gold lamé Nudie suit modeled after Elvis Presley's to his covers of Presley, Conway Twitty,Buddy Holly and Merle Haggard songs, to his own re-arranged songs. Some fans loved it, but some attendees at the show were unhappy with the music he was playing, wanting only to hear "old" Ochs. Before he had a chance to convince them, the concert was cut short by a telephone bomb threat. Some angry fans — who had paid for a full concert — confronted Phil at a between-show dinner, and he took their names, promising to get them into the second show for free. But the box office was locked — Ochs smashed the glass, severely cutting his thumb. Breaking into the lockbox was the last straw. While they let Ochs perform the second show, he was immediately afterwards banned from performing at the venue permanently. He appeared onstage at the second show with a bandaged hand, telling the audience the story.

On the Gunfight album, before performing a medley of Buddy Holly songs, Ochs gives an introduction where he describes Holly's influence on the songs he would become famous for, like "I Ain't Marching Anymore". Ochs says that these songs were "just as much Phil Ochs as anything else." When some of the audience shout and boo after this set, Ochs admonishes them to "not be like Spiro Agnew," saying that their prejudice against certain forms of music was bigotry: "You can be a bigot from all sides. You can be a bigot against Blacks; you can be a bigot against music." Many in the audience cheer this sentiment.

The second show, starting at midnight, went on for over three hours -when Carnegie Hall cut the power to the mics while Ochs was performing a medley of Elvis songs, Ochs shouted out and the remaining audience started chanting "We want power!" until the mics were turned back on. (Though the Gunfight album is composed of performances from the first show, the chant from the second show is included.) Many loyal fans remained to the very end of the concert, cheering and dancing, enjoying this chance to share what was felt to be an historic moment with Ochs.

Ochs begged his then-label, A&M to release an album of his gold-suited Carnegie Hall concerts in late 1970. They refused, and it languished for four years in the vaults until the label relented, releasing fifty minutes of material, mostly the covers (four of sixteen originals performed were released, compared to five of seven covers). The album's release, however, came with a catch. It was only released in Canada, and Americans had to wait twenty-plus years to see an American release. It appeared on compact disc in the late 1980s. There is no talk of a complete release of either show, though an additional cover, Chuck Berry's "School Days" appeared on the 1997 British anthology, American Troubadour and an acoustic version of "Crucifixion" was released on the 1976 compilation Chords Of Fame and later on the 1997 box set Farewells & Fantasies. Bootleg copies, however, of the entire second show have been known to be traded among fans. Ochs had been drinking between sets, and his voice was not in as good shape as it had been for the first show, though the between-song patter gives many insights into his frame of mind and the motives behind Greatest Hits and the subsequent gold-suited shows.

Treme Is Still On The Air (I'm the Only One Watching)

And David Simon still cares about his country.

And kind of interesting in this last recession to see the economy shrug and start to throw white middle-class people into the same boat, so that they became vulnerable to the drug war, say from methamphetamine, or they became unable to qualify for college loans. And all of a sudden a certain faith in the economic engine and the economic authority of Wall Street and market logic started to fall away from people. And they realised it's not just about race, it's about something even more terrifying. It's about class. Are you at the top of the wave or are you at the bottom?

It Don't Worry Me

A comprehensive take on Robert Altman's all-encompassing free-wheeling pageant to bi-centennial America, Nashville.

If Robert Altman’s radically freewheeling, multicharacter country-music extravaganza didn’t revolutionize filmmaking as some of its partisans predicted it would, it did capture as no other film has ever done the full complexity of America, rich with contradictions, rife with neurosis, and convulsed by the celebrity madness of ambition and envy. Nor does the film seem dated forty years later. If anything, the America that Nashville doled out with stunning prescience in 1975 has become only more so in the subsequent four decades—more addled, its politicians more outrageous, its fundamentalists more strident, its divas more delusional, the lines separating news, politics, and entertainment more blurred than ever. Indeed, political campaigns would turn so farcical in the wake of Nashville that Altman’s brilliantly oblique take on the subject—the campaign truck of the unseen independent candidate Hal Phillip Walker (invented and recorded by the real-life Mississippian Thomas Hal Phillips), blaring its way through the film—was more effective than any direct hit.

Dazzling in its cacophony, the multiple strands of private and public lives weaving in and out of a tapestry of sound, Nashville brings together all that we now think of as Altmanesque—a wry embrace of the flora and fauna, the flotsam and jetsam of America that is gently satiric without being judgmental. It was in some ways the culmination of an experimental style the director had been developing pretty much on his own, in spite of and against the grain of traditional Hollywood filmmaking: with the multiple irreverences of M*A*S*H (1970), the crazy quilt of bird people and cops and hippie-dippies in Brewster McCloud (1970), The Long Goodbye (1973),California Split (1974). But they were all small-scale enterprises compared to the epic ambition of Nashville.

The movie begins slowly for a reason and in a way that no film would dare today. Virtually the whole town shows up at the airport for the arrival of Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), Nashville’s sweetheart returning after a prolonged recovery in a burn unit. A high school band is there, the drum majorettes twirling rifles for batons, the media, the groupies, and Henry Gibson as Haven Hamilton, king to Barbara’s queen. Threading through the crowd, almost every major character is introduced, but anonymously, without any indication of their importance. A roving camera will be following one character, then, eavesdropping on another, will make a U-turn to follow someone else. Jeff Goldblum rides through on a three-wheeled motorcycle, like some creature from mythology. Shelley Duvall, a groupie in from California with an indiscriminate appetite for male musicians, assaults folksinger Keith Carradine. In the airport coffee shop, ships passing in the night include a melancholy Keenan Wynn (his wife is dying) and an amateur magician (Goldblum), served by an aspiring country singer (Gwen Welles) and her pal, Robert DoQui’s streetwise Wade.

The film could have no successors except Altman’s own films—it was simply too complicated, too ambitious, too original in its improvisatory style, its huge cast, in other words, too inimitable. Think of it: twenty-four main characters—singers, musicians, wannabes, hangers-on—orbiting around the Grand Ole Opry and its satellite clubs, wandering into one another’s lives and limelight; twenty-four actors, free to work up their own material but staying in character through long crowd scenes, never knowing whether the camera was on them or not, never knowing whether what they sang or said would end up in the final cut. One of the factors allowing for the film’s fluidity of movement, its purposeful instability, both literal and metaphorical, was the innovative multitrack sound system, the brainchild of whiz kid USC graduate and documentarian Jim Webb, who had developed the technique filming golf competitions. Having rehearsed on the smaller cast of California Split, Altman and Webb had each main actor equipped with a mike, something that had never been done on this scale.

Screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury, one of the unsung heroes of the film, was Altman’s “front man.” She had visited Nashville twice to collect material, which she shaped into a 140-page script—turned down as insufficient by the producer who had commissioned the film (David Picker of United Artists) but too wordy for Altman, who had his gifted assistant director Alan Rudolph distill it into the blueprint the director wanted. If little of the script’s original dialogue would survive the actors’ improvisations, still Tewkesbury remained a key figure in the ongoing process. Of their collaboration, Rudolph said, “Joan would go in and find the language, the nuance of a character.”

Because of Altman’s way of working, of absorbing other people’s contributions into his own artistic pageantry, we may never be able to fully appreciate what Tewkesbury brought to the table. She was especially interested in the women and their conflicted ambitions (she herself had left her husband and child behind to work with Altman, first as script girl on 1971’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller). With a background in theater and dance that began with a stage mother, she had performed with, directed, and hung out with actors for most of her life—which served her well as a writer. She understood the symbiotic relationship between stars and the backup men and women who support and manage their careers. And from her perceptive take on the musicians she’d come to spy on, she grasped the particular fragility of women country singers, trying to keep their dignity in a world run by men. One can see her sympathetic hand in the breathtaking balance between defiance and humiliation maintained in the striptease performed by Welles’s Sueleen, and in the ferocious power duel between Blakley’s Barbara Jean and her husband-manager, played by Allen Garfield. Tewkesbury would step in when things got too sticky or one-sided and, working with the women, gently nudge the dialogue, the emotion of the scene, toward a more expansive sense of the women’s point of view.

According to Jan Stuart, in his superbly illuminating book The Nashville Chronicles, “One finds a heady fusion of the director’s and the screenwriter’s sensibilities: his acerbity and her wariness, his cynicism and her empathy, his his-ness and her her-ness.” Rudolph, for his part, would attend to the supernumeraries, providing even the most obscure walk-on with a backstory. These would be nurses, doctors, legionnaires, people off the street for crowd scenes, since Altman, always at loggerheads with the unions, refused to hire extras. And riding the whirlwind would be the man himself, Altman, in the high-wire performance of his career.

As daring as it was, though, Nashville didn’t come out of nowhere; it was instead the crowning glory of a journey toward greater and greater freedom from conventional narrative cinema, a journey on which he’d brought his audience, along with his growing repertory of favorite players. As the elder-statesman rebel of the New Hollywood, a decade older than Scorsese, Coppola, De Palma, et al., Altman had been experimenting with his own brand of eccentric artistry for years. The Kansas City native had worked his way up to feature films since the early fifties, first via industrial movies, then television work (Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Maverick, The Millionaire, Combat!, and various other series), and then finally the game-changing M*A*S*H. Released in 1970, M*A*S*H wasn’t the first counterculture success—Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, andEasy Rider in the sixties had paved the way—but Altman’s insolent flip-off to the military establishment blew a hole through the patriotic myths to which Old Hollywood still clung, though with slowly corroding fervor. (In the same year, Catch-22 satirized the idiocies of the military, but its absurdist vision paled beside the seat-of-the-pants spontaneity of M*A*S*H.) While Altman’s cast of nonstars were screaming obscenities over the PA system, splattering blood, carving up bodies, and turning war into an irreverent cartoon—a reference to the war in Vietnam that couldn’t be named—on the same Fox back lot, two more-traditional war films were being shot: Patton, with the erect and pristine George C. Scott, and a depiction of the American Army defending Pearl Harbor against the Japanese attack, Tora! Tora! Tora!.

With the success of M*A*S*H, Altman earned several years of goodwill in Hollywood and the financing for such idiosyncratic, nonmainstream films as Brewster McCloud, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us (1974), The Long Goodbye, and California Split, establishing a template for the messy, layered, detail-packed, malaise-ridden aesthetic that became his trademark. Plot was sacrificed for atmosphere; if the “system,” the “establishment,” was inherently capitalistic, these films were anticapitalistic: they engaged with the fringe, and the fringe was slackers or eccentrics or antiheroes who didn’t undergo redemptive epiphanies, didn’t participate in a “narrative arc.” His sympathy with the lost, the confused, the off-kilter, led reviewers to overstate the role of ideology, seeing the films as parables of capitalism gone sour or the demise of the “American dream.” But the films are far less portentous and doom-laden than such epithets suggest, less political than anarchic. At least in Nashville, the need to go on (“Keep a’ Goin’,” says the song) triumphs over death, buoyancy over despair.

In a fittingly clamorous debut, Nashville opened to a barrage of wild enthusiasm and an acerbic—if less intense—push-back, most of which revolved around Pauline Kael’s “prereview” in the New Yorker. After David Picker’s withdrawal, Jerry Weintraub had come in as producer and Paramount as distributor, but Paramount was dawdling. In a shrewd maneuver, Altman invited Kael, his most impassioned critical ally, to an early screening. The film wasn’t even in its final cut when Kael jumped the gun with a dithyramb (“Coming: Nashville”) intended to drum up media excitement and pressure its hesitant distributor into setting an opening date. The critic was at her most deliriously oxymoronic: “Is there such a thing as an orgy for movie lovers—but an orgy without excess?” she asked rhetorically, before telling us how we should expect to feel: “You don’t get drunk on images, you’re not overpowered—you get elated.” (It was Kael who said, apocryphally, that the movie would change the nature of filmmaking.)

Inevitably, there was grumbling and resentment from the critical fraternity: Pauline had inserted herself into the marketing of the film in such a way that it became almost impossible to respond to the movie without responding to her review. Most reactions were positive, some ecstatic:Newsweek gave it a cover spread and, quoting “I Hear America Singing,” from Leaves of Grass,called it Whitmanesque. I myself likened it to “a Chaucerian musical pilgrimage whose Canterbury is Nashville.” And when names like Joyce, Chekhov, and Fellini were tossed around, the backlash was inevitable.

Vincent Canby of the New York Times wrote a parody of the exciting new possibilities of the early review (one could do it from the rushes, or how about the screenplay?). The most damning pan—because the most detailed and eloquent—came from William Pechter in Commentary. He reacted to the “barrage of media hype” and took issue with the much ballyhooed virtuoso accomplishment of juggling the lives of twenty-four main characters. His more pertinent complaint, because it echoed a persistent criticism of Altman by his naysayers, had to do with the treatment of country music and musicians, and Altman’s supposed condescension to both. While most people outside of Nashville understood why Altman had chosen not to use real musicians and their songs (the cost would have been prohibitive and, more important, it would have seriously limited the imaginative ends of the film), his detractors reacted against what they thought was Altman’s hipper-than-thou, morally superior tone toward the denizens of the city.

But the tone is too varied, the mosaic too rich, to support such an argument. Along with works by Ronee Blakley, the only actual singer-songwriter in the company, were ones written by various cast members, ranging from the silly, the simpleminded, and the deliberately risible to the charming and the moving, sometimes all at once—in sum, a pretty good facsimile of the dirges and ballads to which they pay playful homage. There is, to my Southern ear, something appealingly raw and primal in country music that Nashville captures, along with the transparency of its archetypes of love-’em-and-leave-’em cowboys, philandering husbands, been-everywhere-but-wanna-stay-in-Dixie chauvinists, divas yearning for a lost paradise.

Take the brilliant opening scene, where Haven Hamilton is recording a swelling hymn to the bicentennial, written by Henry Gibson himself. Decked out in a gold-spangled costume and a toupee, he is sitting on his throne, encased in glass, his emasculated Ivy League son and his mistress sitting in attendance, and twice he interrupts the spell he has so carefully cast: first to banish from the studio the BBC reporter played by Geraldine Chaplin, then to brutally lash out at the pianist “Frog” (Richard Baskin, who arranged and supervised the music for the entire film). It’s a funny and terrifying scene, establishing the whole pecking order of the film and the steely grip of this little tyrant who presides over the kingdom of country music. “We must have been doing something right for the last two hundred years,” he sings, and the song exerts a mixed fascination: it’s jingoistic (we sophisticates could never admit to such patriotic fervor), yet something in us—the child saluting the flag, the solitary yearning for community—is moved.

As for his supposed condescension, it’s true that Altman often makes us feel that he and his cast occupy a privileged world from which we—the uncool—have been excluded, but Nashvilleactually offers one of his most democratic communities, its “inner circle” infinitely elastic. In fact, the wide range of behavior on display from the movie’s assortment of soldiers and hippies, kooks and nuts, bigots, losers, exhibitionists, con men, and naïfs allows no such easy conclusions. The genius is in the casting and in Altman’s passion for actors themselves. The advantage of using nonstars, and of encouraging them to work up their own material, is that there are no well-worn grooves for them to fall into, no Good Person with whom we can easily identify, no fixed moral perch from which to look down.

A surly, counterculture Keith Carradine looks at Scott Glenn’s soldier and says, “Kill anybody this week?” But the sweet-faced Army man will emerge as far more sympathetic than the narcissistic singer. The most offensive in terms of easy audience targets are Geraldine Chaplin’s BBC reporter, obnoxious but useful as she pushes her way into every group, and, more subtly, Michael Murphy’s supercilious PR man. But both represent variations of Altman himself. Two prominent black characters—the outspoken jailbird from Detroit played by Robert DoQui and Timothy Brown’s church-bred conservative—make an intriguing study in contrasts. Even religion is respected and honored in all its variety, as in the lovely Sunday scene with the four churches, to which various characters go according to their faith.

To the charge voiced by some critics that there are “no main characters,” the film would offer a defiant and triumphant “Definitely not!” The drama is cumulative and collective, yet the characters are never less than distinctive. They come from all over the country, freewheeling and autonomous, unlike the puppets in Fellini’s 8½, always hopping to the director’s dance.

Referring in particular to the song-driven Opry House sequence, Jan Stuart points out that Hollywood musicals of the wartime decade were a major influence. Altman and Tewkesbury both felt that the Nashville of the seventies was like the Hollywood of the forties, a place, in Stuart’s words, “where young people of talent got off the bus with little but a month’s rent and dreams of stardom.” Real stars intermingle with bit players sometimes, as in The Player (1992), with no more apparent purpose than to dance the Hollywood hustle. But at other times—as inNashville—their presence helps illuminate a sharply etched but shifting class system.

The “real” Elliott Gould and Julie Christie are the drop-ins in Nashville—but they’re the outsiders in this particular world. Here, the social hierarchy begins with the singers, then those who can get passes to sit on the stage, and so on down the line. The music in the film is almost continuous, while characters on the sidelines or in the penumbra of the spotlight act out their own vignettes of drama in counterpoint. But there are moments when the emotional merry-go-round pauses, and your heart stops as well, as the film enters a deeper register, of loss, regret, yearning, ambivalence. I’m thinking of the great scene at the Exit/In when Carradine is singing “I’m Easy” and we watch, in turn, the three women who are attracted to him, the camera gradually settling on Lily Tomlin. An odd couple, this exquisitely sane middle-class housewife and the bad-boy troubadour, but the sense of desire is palpable, as Tomlin’s lips part ever so slightly. No less delicate is the following scene of postcoital intimacy. The charming rapport of Tomlin teaching Carradine sign language is disrupted when, at her parting, he must switch to indifference, yet she manages to come out of it with her self-respect intact. Or the complicated counterpoint between Keenan Wynn, a constant shadow of sorrow on his face as his wife dies of cancer, and his flake of a niece, the groupie played by Duvall.

Even the revelations are kept under wraps until they have their moment: Karen Black as the sultry singer who replaces the ailing Barbara Jean; Barbara Harris as Albuquerque, the rag doll who ducks and flops her way through the whole movie only to fire on all cylinders in the majestic finale.

They, too, are but an expression of the music that undergirds the whole film. Individuals may fall by the wayside, but the music continues. I think Altman is, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the great poets of failure. His real attraction is to that secret underside of the American dream: humiliation, embarrassment, loss of status, and the abiding anxiety the fear of these produces. There’s also, as critic Andrew Sarris pointed out, a religious pattern of sacrifice, the ritualized deaths to be found not just in Nashville but in most of Altman’s preceding films. And yet the life force expressed in the music provides the final sense of triumph, and it’s this communal resilience that makes the ending so powerful. One star is felled, shot by an assassin, and another emerges. The queen is dead; long live the queen!

The movie proved too unconventional to earn an Academy Award itself, but it was at least nominated, along with Jaws, Dog Day Afternoon, Barry Lyndon, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, with the last winning. Its only Oscar went to Keith Carradine, for best original song, “I’m Easy” (it was Carradine’s two songs, sung on the set of Thieves Like Us, that inspired Altman to build his next film’s soundtrack around the cast’s own songs). But both the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics voted Nashville best film and Altman best director. Both also picked Lily Tomlin as best supporting actress, and the National Society chose Henry Gibson for support.

With an unflagging determination to “keep a’ goin’,” Altman went on to make roughly a film a year, surviving many a dud, managing to find some project or other in the leanest years, until slowing up slightly in his seventies. Astonishingly, his last film, A Prairie Home Companion,opened in 2006, when he was eighty-one. He died that November. There were ups and downs, a political satire miniseries (Tanner ’88) that was followed up sixteen years later, and some skillful adaptations of plays, of which the most remarkable may be the Nixon monologue Secret Honor (1984). Countering the traditional arc of promising, then cresting, then sliding into decline, Altman’s later upswings may be, along with Nashville, the finest films he ever made: Short Cuts(1993), his brilliant, emotionally varied adaptation of some Raymond Carver short stories, andGosford Park (2001), Altman’s (and screenwriter Julian Fellowes’s) unique take on the upstairs-downstairs Agatha Christie mansion murder mystery.

Altman was larger-than-life, a man whose many parts required the expression that a giant canvas provided. He was a world-class seducer, wooing anyone who entered the swinging precincts of his Lion’s Gate studio on Westwood Boulevard into the fold as an Altmanite. He was also an ornery, difficult man, taking most of the credit for himself (though the fluidity and spontaneity of the filmmaking made apportioning credit difficult), getting others to do the dirty work of letting people go. But let it be said that he was a director who loved women, on and off the set, and women were the continuing beneficiaries of his creative interest. Over the course of his long career, many of the women in his films were nominated for Academy Awards—Sally Kellerman, Julie Christie, Ronee Blakley, Lily Tomlin, Helen Mirren, and Maggie Smith. If there were fewer prizes than there should have been, it’s because Altman’s style of filmmaking, the ensemble, militates against the awards he and his cast so richly deserved. Yet to fail to acknowledge the brilliance on display by his groups would be an equal lapse in judgment. Just think of the uniformly dazzling ensemble of Short Cuts, which includes Tomlin, Andie MacDowell, Julianne Moore, Jennifer Jason Leigh. And what about the women who, had it not been for Altman’s eye, would never have been captured by a camera at all: Duvall, Annie Ross (the torch singer in Short Cuts), and the marvelous Blakley? Karen Black, superb as a transsexual in Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), struck many as the highlight ofNashville. For others, it was Barbara Harris. For me, it’s the gorgeous, mysterious, ever-shifting dynamic of the ensemble that is the star of the film, and every actress (and actor) in this American masterpiece deserves a special place in ensemble heaven.

Molly Haskell is an author and film critic living in New York. She has taught film at Columbia University, and her most recent books are Frankly My Dear: “Gone with the Wind” Revisited andMy Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation.

A Farewell

I read this while sitting on the third floor of the Loews Hotel working the AFM on a late Friday afternoon. It's a touching remembrance.

I'm gonna go back and listen to all his albums. Hudson River Wind Meditations.

Phish - Halloween - 10/31/13

Eat a Peach, Rock of Ages, Thriller, OK Computer, Europe '72, On The Road.

Monday Night Football -- Bears/Pack

At Lambeau. Finish off the G Black wedding weekend. Josh McCown looked impressive -- saw the field, made solid decisions, limited turnovers, played with confidence. That 4th quarter drive was crushing. 4th and one on our 30, and Forte slips a tackle in the backfield. Wore out the Packers. 9 minute drive to seal the game with several third down conversions. Bears football.

Of course, it helps that Rodgers went out after the first quarter.

Times Have Changed.

"Times...maybe. Not me." Took in Pat Garrett at the Cinefamily last night. It's always a question which cut it will be, as at least five different cuts exist. This one was one of two 'preview' cuts shown on 35mm before the final theatrical cut. No Pat Garrett's wife, and no Knockin' on Heaven's Door, just the instrumental. I prefer it. Weariness, and whiskey. Tiredness and death. With no place to go.

Here's a piece on Lou Reed about times changing.

Echoes

2001: A Space Odyssey. 

Halloween Album

This two-week fall Phish tour is all leading up to Halloween/A.C. run. Rumors abound about Eat A Peach as of tonight, for a day or so it was Rock of Ages, Europe '72, or Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (yuck! no way). From the beginning of tour I was feeling Thriller as it's the 30th anniversary since the album was released and Phish played their first show.

After the Sunday night Hampton show the band's sound had me wishing for --

1) Thriller (ultimate dance party)
2) Meddle (they're take on Echoes to end the set more than anything else/Trey' guitar sound during Hampton Tweezer)
3) Kid A. (no fuckin' way)

Still hope it's one of those. Though Thriller doesn't seem right anymore. If I could bet, it's Physical Graffiti all along. Classic rock, double album. They've played The Beatles, The Who, The Rolling Stones, so Led Zeppelin is next.

The expectations is so much fun. And you can tell they've been practicing, the sound bleeding into their nightly shows. Two nights away.

Tuesday Night

Went to watch the Colfax Kings at Pan Pacific Park gymnasium. A zippy point guard and a lanky forward. They break out to an early lead, but with 10 minutes left in the first half, they start to tire. The gap is closed at half.  Some baskets and ball control in the second half. Free throw shooting becomes key.
Two players fouled out making it 3-on-5 with over 3:30 to go in the second. It was tense. But they pulled it out. With grit. Final score -- 39-34.
(A strange rule that was disclosed with :12 on the clock. No player can score over 20 pts.)

Canter's to follow-it-up.

Got Head

Kurt Ville's Mix Tape

He put this together while recording/mixing Waking on a Pretty Daze. Dazed listening. 

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - No Second Thoughts
Gary Numan - Are 'friends' Electric?
David Byrne - My Big Hands (Fall Through The Cracks)
Randy Newman - Baltimore
Tim Buckley - Home To Stay
The Byrds - Ballad of Easy Rider
The Byrds - Truckstop Girl
The Flamin Groovies - Whiskey Woman
Rowland Howard and Nikki Sudden – A Quick Thing
Syd Barret - Opel
Pink Floyd - Green Is The Colour
Aphrodite's Child - Take Your Time
Bill Fay - Warwick Town
Big Star - Stroke It Noel
Michael Chapman - You Say
Miles Davis - Here Come De Honey Man
David Bowie - Art Decade
Depeche Mode - Everything Counts
Prince - Something In The Water (Does Not Compute)
Lou Reed - Charley's Girl
Royal Trux - Waterpark
The Rolling Stones - 100 Years Ago
Aphrodite's Child - Valley Of Sadness
Ween - Lullabye

here is a "mix-tape" that i had been sort-of-conceiving for some time before i actually made it. i would say i made it mainly to pump myself up. and then my bandmates, extended bandmates, producer, etc… but also to get all my friends that were involved (at least subliminally) on my wave-length when i needed it most...
by the time the violators and i got back from a 7 week euro/uk tour, sometime in the summer of 2012, it was time to get back into the studio and the bulk of the "wakin" album done. we had already recorded a good chunk of the almost-title-track "wakin on a pretty day" before we left, and a few other songs. (another one called "feel my pain," a stripped-down, ominous folk number, exceptionally meticulous in it's finger-picked arrangement, has since become a favorite of mine for all it’s rawness... hear it soon on the new ep!)
anyway...
i remember the night before driving up to woodstock to start recording again and laughing to myself that it was so important i get the right sequence down on this ultimate vinyl-mix (and cd... and cassette!) when i probably had plenty of fine-tuning needed on my own songs, but hey...
i would jam alot of these mix-tape tunes on the road over n over all the time. from a discman (not kidding) into this miniature battery-powered vox amp that john agnello gave me as a christmas present. usually in hotel rooms in the wee hrs, post-gig...
i remember playing "a quick thing" by rowland howard and nikki sudden in many-a-south-american-hotel-room (over and over) for instance, and getting so deep into it, positively spaced out. cuz that song's as real as it gets, mind you! (ps i love nikki sudden but it's all about the rowland howard here as is per uzsch with mr. howard)
i don't want to dissect all my favorite music for everyone. but i sent this mix to my friends involved in my record for the purpose of loose/good vibes. and then i sent it to some other friends and loved ones. some of whom complimented it, and of course i was flattered cuz i did work hard on it like a total dork, hah... i didn't just throw it together.
i don't wanna say all this stuff influenced my record in any obvious way.
but subliminally? most def.
cuz that's life. always influenced by your surroundings.
some top faves (besides "a quick thing") :
bill fay "warwick town"
the byrds "truckstop girl"
flamin groovies "whiskey woman"
"...and all of the rest."
-kv

October Baseball

Jim Leyland is old school. He smokes Marlboro Reds in the dugout.

Pearl Jam Has A New Album... (aka embodying a classic rock Version of Themselves, or Middle Aged Contentedness)

And I still have yet to listen to it. That's the strongest indication of my expectations for Lightning Bolt, and where I think the band is at in their career. (Update: Listening to it on a Monday afternoon in a Savannah coffee shop)

Some have asked if I was the ghost writer of this review of the album. I wish I was. Every point is spot on. On the other hand, they are going on tour without an opening band. An Evening with Pearl Jam. A polished, classic rock-arena rock band that will play all the 'hits' and then some. It's 2013, not 2000. Lightning Bolt not Binaural.

I'm going to one show at the L.A. Sports Arena. The Sunday night show. It'll be fun. No more, no less.

Hail, Hail to Ryan Leas (clearly, a long time passionate fan) for his essay/review. Couldn't have expressed my own sentiments better...

Titles say a lot in Pearl Jam’s discography. Not in the sense that they do with any artist — you know, cluing you into what they’re writing about — but in the sense that the structure of their titles hints at what version of Pearl Jam you’re about to get. For the longest time, they favored short, enigmatic, often single word titles for their albums, sometimes making up their own borrowing them from obscure medical texts (Vitalogy) or bending a familiar form into an abstract summation of the LP in question (Ten, Vs., No Code, Yield). Unless you count the greatest hits collection Rearviewmirror or a smattering of official live releases, the longest album title they’d had thus far wasBackspacer, at a whopping ten letters. That is, until Lightning Bolt, which at fourteen letters is practically a Fiona Apple couplet of a Pearl Jam album name. Not only that, but its words are plain and everyday in a way that none of their album titles have been. There was mystery in No Code and Riot Act. Not so much in Lightning Bolt. It just sounds like any old rock album name, but also a slight one, a record without a defining characteristic or larger resonance. Compared to the opacity of prior releases, it’s a generic name coming off as downright banal.

Though that all might make Lightning Bolt sound like it’s a turning point, it’s more like an end result. The line in the sand was really 2006′s Pearl Jam, the move of self-titling a clear reset button for the band but also so unsettling for fans that they still regularly refer to it as Avocado. That nickname was derived from the self-titled album’s cover, and Pearl Jam’s cover art too has seemed symbolic. Backspacer was plenty slick musically, but maybe the main reason it felt compressed and distant was the cartoons on the cover, as if this set of songs were animated retreads through Pearl Jam’s history, “Amongst the Waves” a less humanized Yield, acoustic ballads like “Just Breathe” and “The End” coloring too cleanly within those lines when this band had written such heart-rending stuff as “Fatal.” I approached Lightning Bolt with similar trepidation. Its cover, its singles’ covers, the video for “Mind Your Manners” — they all had that same cartoon thing going on (given, in a more graphic art style that was not dissimilar from how they’d often rendered tour posters or official bootleg covers in the past). Between the straightforward title and the cover, I went in afraid that it’d be another outing of Pearl Jam performing their vision of “Pearl Jam rocking out again.”

So what kind of Pearl Jam album is Lightning Bolt? To a certain extent, my expectations were accurate. It is very much of a piece with their last two releases, another record where they eschew the art-rock flirtations of ’94-’02 (Vitalogy-Riot Act) and continue to embody a classic rock version of themselves. They’re still more or less interested in sticking to a back-to-basics sound with only the occasional gesture towards experimentation or expanding their sound. The good news is that it works better than it did with either Pearl Jam or Backspacer. WhenLightning Bolt is on, it’s some of their best material in the last ten years, its highlights rivaled only by the very best songs on the self-titled album. One pleasant surprise is that it’s dustier than Backspacer, not to the ramshackle and beleaguered levels of Riot Act, but with music that feels a bit more lived in. Another pleasant but double-edged surprise is its departure from its predecessor in quality. Where Backspacer was an exceedingly consistent experience of mid-level Pearl Jam material, Lightning Bolt whiplashes you between its highs and lows, all that good stuff refused the ability to cohere into a unified whole by a few weak links that wreck the album’s pacing.

The album starts off strong, “Getaway” ranking amongst their very best openers and easily amongst the best latter-day Pearl Jam songs. Like the other best moments on Lightning Bolt, it marries the impulses of post-Riot Act Pearl Jam perfectly. Vedder is singing clearer and more melodically, which allows the band to rock when they want, but to do it in a catchy way. Ultimately, this works to their benefit, a nuanced take that suggests their maturity more so than any attempt to still thrash around. Lead single “Mind Your Manners” is sort of guilty of the latter, being the seemingly now-obligatory Vitalogy call-back they do every now and then. It’s likeable, though I’d rather it didn’t take the place of “Whipping” on a setlist.

For me, the unquestionable high of the album is the run that starts with the title track and concludes with “Swallowed Whole.” Both are moments where Pearl Jam writes a Pearl Jam rock song totally effortlessly. “Lightning Bolt” is an early contender with “Getaway” for album standout, and “Swallowed Whole” is, like “Sad” thirteen years before it, a clear signifier of Vedder’s youthful obsession with R.E.M. With some much murkier production, its jangle-rock would be a direct descendent of Murmur. As “Lightning Bolt” and “Swallowed Whole” are two of the best straight-up Pearl Jam rock songs we’ve gotten in a while, they bookend the only two instances of “weird Pearl Jam” on Lightning Bolt. The emphatic groove of the verses in “Infallible” is built around the most interesting sound on the album (guitarist Stone Gossard told me it was some sort of synthesized percussion noise that was then produced to the point where it sort of sounds like a guitar or organ layered with effects). These verses wrap around it in tight, constricted rhythms, peeling open into one of the best choruses on the album. It’s followed by “Pendulum,” which isn’t quite like anything else in Pearl Jam’s catalog. Its spiritual concerns and exoticism seem reminiscent of No Code, but its textures are more twilit, making it perhaps a slightly clearer-eyed cousin to songs like “Of the Girl,” “Nothing As it Seems,” or even “You Are.” We could use more Pearl Jam songs like it.

As much as there’s all this to love on Lightning Bolt, its lesser moments threaten to scuttle the whole experience. I still can’t decide how I ultimately feel about the already-divisive “Sirens.” There are parts that are gorgeous, especially the band making rare use of guitars in a more atmospheric way they’d do well to revisit. Like many fans, there are also parts of it that make me cringe. It’s later when things really go off the rails, though. Right after “Swallowed Whole” closes out the album’s peak, the band goes into “Let the Records Play,” another in the lineage of Backspacer track “Johnny Guitar”: a more workmanlike rock title promises a more workmanlike rock song. In this case, “Let the Records Play” is exactly like it sounds: a borderline cheesy bar-band blues-rock that’s saved only by a decently catchy chorus. After that things slow way down for a full-band rendition of “Sleeping By Myself,” a song that’d previously been released on Vedder’s solo album Ukelele Songs. It’s not bad, but also feels tangential. Closer “Future Days” is also somewhat superfluous, ending Lightning Bolt way too similarly to how “The End” finished Backspacer. The best moment of the troubled final act of Lightning Bolt is “Yellow Moon,” a gorgeous mash-up of Vedder’s Into the Wild work and a classic mid-tempo Pearl Jam song. It has a much clearer identity than “Future Days,” and it refers back to a strain of Vedder’s songwriting I’d still like to see explored more thoroughly.

After spending a decent amount of time with Lightning Bolt, this is more or less where I stand on it: It’s good, sometimes great. I think I’ll revisit it more than the last two, probably much more. But there’s something in the way — it hasn’t really dug into me, and I haven’t really dug into it in the same way I once did with their music. While there are few problems with the music itself, when putting it in context of having followed Avocado and Backspacer, it can raise concerns about where we might be headed with the band.

A certain version of Pearl Jam ended with Riot Act. Since their third record, 1994′s Vitalogy, the band had continuously eschewed their mainstream success in favor of leaning more deliberately alternative, messing with their sound, and, speaking objectively about my favorites albums of theirs, simply making music that sounded uglier. I’m in a certain (but vocal) pseudo-minority of the fanbase that finds Yield, the middle of this process, to be a hidden masterpiece. I’m in a considerably smaller part of the fanbase that loves Riot Act. Sure, that album is all dulled burnt orange hues and wearied midnight wanderings, but even as many fans bemoaned the grayscale of Vedder’s delivery on it (pretty rightfully, though I’d argue it works for many of those songs) ironically it felt like the last moment Pearl Jam really gave us something. Each successive record has felt like some attempt at course correction, or a facsimile of what Pearl Jam imagined people expected them to be. Even when that approach works — as it does on most of Lightning Bolt — it still feels somehow removed from the band we’ve known and loved. They sounded best when they were striving and not always succeeding, their art-rock detours always more interesting than their middle-age rewrites of “Spin the Black Circle.”

The reason I bring this up is because, combined with Backspacer, Lightning Bolt suggests we’re in the midst of a previously unseen version of the band: happy Pearl Jam. As far as these last three straightforward albums go,Avocado still had an anger about it, much of it informed by frustrations with the Bush administration and the ongoing war in Iraq. Its engagement was vital even if its music was at times stale. By the time Backspacer rolled around, though, the band could find hope outside of themselves as well as closer to home. It was the early, fleetingly halcyon days of the Obama administration; many of them were married and having kids. Pearl Jam entered the scene enraged in a specifically youthful way, an approach that appropriately fizzled out and gave way to a mid-career era of questioning and, eventually, somberness. They eventually grew out of that, too. Not only on a personal life level, but as a band — they’re reportedly functioning better than ever, more comfortable with how they work and with each other.

You don’t ever want to begrudge an artist some bit of solace when they’ve found it. We’re just at a point where it’s hard to know — for fans or for the band themselves — what we should expect out of Pearl Jam. This is an artist whose entire being was derived from discomfort in one form or another. Even as the band spent the ’90s going through twists and turns trying to define what sort of band they’d be in the commercial landscape, that searching was the artistic focus. They had grown up out of their early angst, but were still far from being at peace, and I’d argue this era in the band’s life produced their best work. There are many moments on Lightning Bolt that refer to mortality, but the stakes don’t seem like they’re there anymore, even when in reality they’re there quite a bit more as the band members close in on 50. Look, of course we want the band to be in a happy place in their lives. They’ve given us fans more than enough, and they’ve more than earned that for themselves. What’s disconcerting is that even as strong as much of Lightning Bolt is, it’s starting to sound like Pearl Jam on autopilot. All the guitars are still reliably distorted, but its with the crunch of slightly overcooked pizza crust, no longer the abrasiveness of sledgehammers hitting glass upon asphalt. The struggle in Pearl Jam’s music has been mollified.

The end result is an album that sounds brighter than those blurry mid-era Pearl Jam albums, and that can be seen as an improvement in some ways, I suppose. But its lightness can also translate to weightlessness, and Pearl Jam’s never really been an artist that has exploited weightlessness. Quite the opposite, really. Like all their titles before, Lightning Bolt tells you something about the music therein, though it now blatantly announces where others alluded — this album is about punchiness when it rocks, and seeks immediacy in its ballads, even if that means they wind up sounding like the mellow acoustic material any rock band could crank out. That’s fine. Pearl Jam have achieved what they set out to do here, and they’ve got a solid album on their hands. It’s just that I can’t help but still long for the days when the notion of Pearl Jam writing about mortality meant that the music would sound searching, too. Maybe a little messy. I still long for the days when Pearl Jam summed up their albums with a single cipher, but imbued them with the gravity of thousands more.

Gravity

During the ride I was 'wowed.' Then it ended. And let's not forget the 3-D tears.

Enough Said

"You know what you should have done...you just didn't do it." Nicole H. is more sympathetic and humble to modern men, then she is to her female protagonists. (From a story standpoint, Catherine Keener needed one more scene. The movie was a bit loose.)

And James Gandolfini's final three movies -- Killing Them Softly, Not Fade Away, and Enough Said. He has the finest moments in all three. He was Tony Soprano. Then returned to being an actor. I miss him now more after seeing these three films.

If a Record Takes More Than a Week to Make, Somebody's Fucking Up

Steve Albini's call-to-arms letter to Nirvana back in 1993 before the making of In Utero.

Kurt, Dave and Chris:

First let me apologize for taking a couple of days to put this outline together. When I spoke to Kurt I was in the middle of making a Fugazi album, but I thought I would have a day or so between records to sort everything out. My schedule changed unexpectedly, and this is the first moment I've had to go through it all. Apology apology.

I think the very best thing you could do at this point is exactly what you are talking about doing: bang a record out in a couple of days, with high quality but minimal "production" and no interference from the front office bulletheads. If that is indeed what you want to do, I would love to be involved.

If, instead, you might find yourselves in the position of being temporarily indulged by the record company, only to have them yank the chain at some point (hassling you to rework songs/sequences/production, calling-in hired guns to "sweeten" your record, turning the whole thing over to some remix jockey, whatever...) then you're in for a bummer and I want no part of it.

I'm only interested in working on records that legitimately reflect the band's own perception of their music and existance. If you will commit yourselves to that as a tenet of the recording methodology, then I will bust my ass for you. I'll work circles around you. I'll rap your head with a ratchet...

I have worked on hundreds of records (some great, some good, some horrible, a lot in the courtyard), and I have seen a direct correlation between the quality of the end result and the mood of the band throughout the process. If the record takes a long time, and everyone gets bummed and scrutinizes every step, then the recordings bear little resemblance to the live band, and the end result is seldom flattering. Making punk records is definitely a case where more "work" does notimply a better end result. Clearly you have learned this yourselves and appreciate the logic.

About my methodology and philosophy:

#1: Most contemporary engineers and producers see a record as a "project," and the band as only one element of the project. Further, they consider the recordings to be a controlled layering of specific sounds, each of which is under complete control from the moment the note is conceived through the final six. If the band gets pushed around in the process of making a record, so be it; as long as the "project" meets with the approval of the fellow in control.

My approach is exactly the opposite.

I consider the band the most important thing, as the creative entity that spawned both the band's personality and style and as the social entity that exists 24 hours out of each day. I do not consider it my place to tell you what to do or how to play. I'm quite willing to let my opinions be heard (if I think the band is making beautiful progress or a heaving mistake, I consider it part of my job to tell them) but if the band decides to pursue something, I'll see that it gets done.

I like to leave room for accidents or chaos. Making a seamless record, where every note and syllable is in place and every bass drum is identical, is no trick. Any idiot with the patience and the budget to allow such foolishness can do it. I prefer to work on records that aspire to greater things, like originality, personality and enthusiasm. If every element of the music and dynamics of a band is controlled by click tracks, computers, automated mixes, gates, samplers and sequencers, then the record may not be incompetent, but it certainly won't be exceptional. It will also bear very little relationship to the live band, which is what all this hooey is supposed to be about.

#2: I do not consider recording and mixing to be unrelated tasks which can be performed by specialists with no continuous involvement. 99 percent of the sound of a record should be established while the basic take is recorded. Your experiences are specific to your records; but in my experience, remixing has never solved any problems that actually existed, only imaginary ones. I do not like remixing other engineer's recordings, and I do not like recording things for somebody else to remix. I have never been satisfied with either version of that methodology. Remixing is for talentless pussies who don't know how to tune a drum or point a microphone.

#3: I do not have a fixed gospel of stock sounds and recording techniques that I apply blindly to every band in every situation. You are a different band from any other band and deserve at least the respect of having your own tastes and concerns addressed. For example, I love the sound of a boomy drum kit (say a Gretach or Camco) wide open in a big room, especially with a Bonhammy double-headed bass drum and a really painful snare drum. I also love the puke-inducing low end that comes off an old Fender Bassman or Ampeg guitar amp and the totally blown sound of an SVT with broken-in tubes. I also know that those sounds are inappropriate for some songs, and trying to force them is a waste of time. Predicating the recordings on my tastes is as stupid as designing a car around the upholstery. You guys need to decide and then articulate to me what you want to sound like so we don't come at the record from different directions.

#4: Where we record the record is not as important as how it is recorded. If you have a studio you'd like to use, no hag. Otherwise, I can make suggestions. I have a nice 24-track studio in my house (Fugazi were just there, you can ask them how they rate it), and I'm familiar with most of the studios in the Midwest, the East coast and a dozen or so in the UK.

I would be a little concerned about having you at my house for the duration of the whole recording and mixing process if only because you're celebrities, and I wouldn't want word getting out in the neighborhood and you guys having to put up with a lot of fan-style bullshit; it would be a fine place to mix the record though, and you can't beat the vitties.

If you want to leave the details of studio selection, lodgings, etc. up to me, I'm quite happy to sort all that stuff out. If you guys want to sort it out, just lay down the law.

My first choice for an outside recording studio would be a place called Pachyderm in Cannon Falls, Minnesota. It's a great facility with outstanding acoustics and a totally comfy architect's wet dream mansion where the band lives during the recordings. This makes everything more efficient. Since everybody is there, things get done and decisions get made a lot faster than if people are out and about in a city someplace. There's also all the posh shit like a sauna and swimming pool and fireplaces and trout stream and 50 acres and like that. I've made a bunch of records there and I've always enjoyed the place. It's also quite inexpensive, considering how great a facility it is.

The only bummer about Pachyderm is that the owners and manager are not technicians, and they don't have a tech on call. I've worked there enough that I can fix just about anything that can go wrong, short of a serious electronic collapse, but I've got a guy that I work with a lot (Bob Weston) who's real good with electronics (circuit design, trouble shooting and building shit on the spot), so if we choose to do it there, he'll probably come along in my payroll, since he'd be cheap insurance if a power supply blows up or a serious failure occurs in the dead of winter 50 miles from the closest tech. He's a recording engineer also, so he can be doing some of the more mundane stuff (cataloging tapes, packing stuff up, fetching supplies) while we're chopping away at the record proper.

Some day I'm going to talk the Jesus Lizard into going up there and we'll have us a real time. Oh yeah, and it's the same Neve console the AC/DC album Back in Black was recorded and mixed on, so you know its just got to have the rock.

#5: Dough. I explained this to Kurt but I thought I'd better reiterate it here. I do not want and will not take a royalty on any record I record. No points. Period. I think paying a royalty to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible. The band write the songs. The band play the music. It's the band's fans who buy the records. The band is responsible for whether it's a great record or a horrible record. Royalties belong to the band.

I would like to be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it's worth. The record company will expect me to ask for a point or a point and a half. If we assume three million sales, that works out to 400,000 dollars or so. There's no fucking way I would ever take that much money. I wouldn't be able to sleep.

I have to be comfortable with the amount of money you pay me, but it's your money, and I insist that you be comfortable with it as well. Kurt suggested paying me a chunk which I would consider full payment, and then if you really thought I deserved more, paying me another chunk after you'd had a chance to live with the album for a while. That would be fine, but probably more organizational trouble than it's worth.

Whatever. I trust you guys to be fair to me and I know you must be familiar with what a regular industry goon would want. I will let you make the final decision about what I'm going to be paid. How much you choose to pay me will not affect my enthusiasm for the record.

Some people in my position would expect an increase in business after being associated with your band. I, however, already have more work than I can handle, and frankly, the kind of people such superficialities will attract are not people I want to work with. Please don't consider that an issue.

That's it.

Please call me to go over any of this if it's unclear.

(Signed)

If a record takes more than a week to make, somebody's fucking up. Oi!

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction

To my Joan Didion.

INTERVIEWER

You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you why.

JOAN DIDION

It's hostile in that you're trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It's hostile to try to wrench around someone else's mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

INTERVIEWER

Are you conscious of the reader as you write? Do you write listening to the reader listening to you?

DIDION

Obviously I listen to a reader, but the only reader I hear is me. I am always writing to myself. So very possibly I'm committing an aggressive and hostile act toward myself.

Highland Park

Paul Brickman, the director of Risky Business, is interviewed. He became a recluse from Hollywood after his debut film at the age of 34.

You filmed in some favored Chicago movie locations, like Lake Shore Drive and the John Hancock Center, but also some suburban spots that seem to have personal significance.

I shot a lot of scenes in Highland Park, so there are a lot of personal spots. The exterior of Joel’s house is three minutes from the house where I grew up. Shelton’s Ravinia Grill, where Joel and his friends talk about their futures, is where I used to hang out after walking home from school in the eighth grade. We’d go there and throw French fries at each other. Part of the car chase sequence with Guido, the killer pimp, goes by the Highland Park Movie Theater where I saw movies as a kid. I remember for the “love on a real train” scene, I was stuck on how to make that work. So John Avnet and I went to an Italian restaurant in Chicago one night that had the worst service I’ve ever had in my life. We were there for about three and a half hours. And we came up with this concept that the train car would come off the tracks and fly over the Chicago skyline. [Laughs] We shot it, but failed to execute it. It came across as pornographic.

Thomas Pynchon Loves Tacos

And Beer. I don' know why I felt the desire to post this. Maybe I like the idea of him eating at a local SoCal taco stand in a red-hunting jacket, more than his actual inaccessible books.

Snake and Jake's Christmas Lounge

Nestled on a shady street uptown. Invisible. I remember that some of the time this place wouldn't even get going 'til after 2am. Go there on a late Sunday night to find other derelicts and dreamers. More like an opium den for drunks.

Nightcap. Bloody Mary. And drifting onto the sidewalk in the morning haze.

William Tyler / Out West (A Tour Diary)

I’m sitting in a hotel bar in Cincinnati, listening to the menacing and comfortably familiar electric sitar of Dave Stewart on Tom Petty’s “Don’t Come Around Here No More”. It’s a little hard to fathom that I was on these same highways a month ago, driving from Nashville to Columbus to begin my three-week cross-country trek. As I type this, my computer auto corrects ” cross” to “crisis “. Nice.

When I returned the rental car this Monday, the odometer read 13000 miles. It had been 5000 when my dad and I rented it. It was a gray Camry, new car smell, satellite radio, proud and clean and anonymous and hardly aware of the intense trans continental journey I was about to subject it to.

The continental divide is the latitudinal point that decides where the rivers’ paths are guided: to the Atlantic or to the Pacific. I would cross this twice on the tour. Fuck man, 8000 miles on a rental? That’s more than most people drive in a year. My carbon footprint is like Godzilla. The only way to neutralize it is to walk everywhere and just eat parsley out of my backyard for the rest of the year.

I spent a year daydreaming about the end of oil, the sprawl of America, the lure of the sleeping seemingly dead places off the interstate and hidden on the ‘blue highways’. Ghost towns of old or towns that were fast becoming ghost towns. James Kunstler and Richard Heinberg and Mike Davis were my mental tour guides and all of them would be horrified at how environmentally unsustainable my trek was. But hey, I’m a working musician. We’re not quite dinosaurs yet but we are still fighting for relevance just as much in this insane world, still having to justify our existence. Those big old town cars that Detroit used to crank out back when we had cheap gas are just like the rock stars of thirty (shit, twenty!) years ago who figured the party would never end and people would still want to pay for “art” forever. Anyway I saw my trip as a cross between Lewis and Clark, National Lampoon’s Vacation, and Two Lane Blacktop.

People ask me all the time how I reckon with the magnitude of this country.  I always compare the size and scope and population to our relevant colleagues and peers: China, Russia, India, Brazil…It’s useless to try to compare the USA to anything but those guys. We’ve got too much land and too many people. We are a country of illusions/ delusions. Never gonna run out of land, never gonna run out of sky, never gonna run out of soil, never gonna run out of trees, never gonna run out of people. Ever since World War 2 ended the people here have craved some sort of unifying edifice to keep the linear thinking going: the interstate, the sprawl of fast food chains, billboards, rest-stops.

True Fact: Anywhere in America right now, you can turn on your radio and find Rush Limbaugh or the Eagles playing. I’ve been testing this thesis for almost a year.

I was on a three-week tour that would take me through the two most populated states in the country, California and Texas, and the least populated, Wyoming. Someone in Salt Lake City told me that there were only two escalators in the entire state of Wyoming. That was really comforting to me for some reason.

My tour was beginning two days after Mercury came out of retrograde. I am convinced that before I had awareness of the existence of Mercury in Retrograde, it had no effect on the events in my life. I learned about Mercury in Retrograde in the middle of a similar cross-continental tour five years ago and as soon as we were made aware of it everything started breaking: flat tires, frayed nerves. I don’t agree that ignorance is bliss but it’s a lot less complicated.

You get west of Kansas City and everything begins to open up from the sky to the possibilities of space to the distances between towns. This is the part of the West that people used to just pass through on their way to California or Oregon until the government got savvy in the 1860s and started essentially giving the land away to prospective settlers. Wind, wheat, corn, time to reflect are all in abundance. There is the tyranny of big spaces out here, you can imagine how humbling and terrifying it would have been to the covered wagon rovers but in a car with satellite radio and the promise of gas stations every few miles it is possible to zone out in way that is calm and deliberate.

I’ve tried listening to the news. Too cerebral, never anything uplifting, and being informed on tour is kind of like holding an unlit cigarette in your hand for an 8-hour plane flight. No use. A lot of the oldies stations, too familiar. Getting stuck on the “Deep Tracks” station and lots of country oldies. Listened to a rodeo on scratchy AM radio driving across Nebraska. That was a nice surprise.

My dad on driving through Wyoming: “Now I understand Dick Cheney.”  Does Cheney own both escalators in Wyoming?
Salt Lake City reminds me of the towns you would build in the computer game Sim City, where you could just arbitrarily lump buildings next to each other. It’s clean but ersatz, almost like North Korea on a blind date with Reader’s Digest. It’s tucked into the dip of the mountains with a skyline that cries with beauty. You understand pretty quickly how Brigham Young and company must have been stoked to find this place and basically said, “Fuck it, we aren’t going any further, this place is nice.”

My gig in Salt Lake City coincided with Pioneer Day, essentially the Mormon Fourth of July. It commemorates the day that Brigham Young and his first band of settlers got to the spot the city now inhabits. Not the best night for a solo guitar gig. All was going well even with the sparse crowd but I mistook the fireworks show going off downtown for my amp breaking. Which it did anyway later in the show.

As the sun set over Boise, warming the ground level stare with something almost tragic, I was talking with one of the locals about the ‘anxiety of congestion’. He had grown up on the East coast and the endless stretch of populated places was the main thing he had wanted to get away from when he found his way out west. I could understand this. Out here it’s eight hours between cities and there is something very calming about that. The isolation doesn’t seem that lonely, although playing a show to one person in the crowd that night did. words/ william tyler /