Contrast

Like Gatsby, To the Wonder (2012, Terrence Malick) sucks because its dramatic stakes eventually amount to nothing more than the fact that among a triangle of ridiculously beautiful mannequins, infidelity occurs for a slight moment, yet they all go on the same as they were when first introduced.

The difference with Malick though, is that he is showing us the limits of people and how unlimited the beauty of nature is, whereas Gatsby thinks it's showing us how unlimited the capacity for people to party and fall in love is, and ignores nature in favor of booze, baubles, and Babylon.

Although, while Malick's visual bravura is breathtaking, it is reducible to wide angle Steadicam subjective roving gliding movements mostly through nature, with some shots of beautiful people looking off into the distance, and a random menagerie of North American wildlife.

To the Wonder is unusually lacking in plot structured through dramatic turns; very much like The Tree of Life (2011, Malick). And, for a Malick film, it doesn't have as many attention pulling symphonic score excerpts. But, this new mini-Malick is like seeing Werckmeister Harmonies after you've already seen Satantango. It's like listening to a new 7" of your favorite band. And I think Malick is editing three more movies he's already shot, so I think To the Wonder will definitely be re-evaluated by many viewers after those films have been released.

To the Wonder feels like 60s Bresson with less plot.

Olga Kurylenko and Bartlesville, Oklahoma are the subject of Malick's gaze. And, having spent the latter years of my high school days very close to this area, I am impressed by the natural grotesque local flavor that shows up in the film--mostly through extras casting. Kurylenko is in a Sirkian woman's picture: she has love and a house to keep, but what the fuck can she do in Hicksville with no stimulus or fulfillment?

Sea turtles and a field of buffalo are among the cute critters Malick photographs in To the Wonder. I wish I could have delved in depth more critically, but at least I've been able to start.

--Dregs

The Dream of the 90s Is Still Alive

Michael Bay makes big American movies. Is this the first time he's made a movie that didn't cost over $100 million?

Pain & Gain (2013, Michael Bay) is an action-packed morality tale about the consequences of using crime to attain the American dream. The protagonist, Daniel (Mark Wahlberg), is a victim of the early 1990s pop culture wasteland who foolishly recruits two other stooges to take on Miami as if he were Scarface. The layers of pop culture self-reference stack high, beginning with Marky Mark himself heading the ensemble.

But what Bay handles best is borrowing seemingly doofus drips from twenty years ago and finding that they are perfectly interchangeable with Americans today.

The dregs of mainstream society on display here are the same characters used ironically to entertain in Spring Breakers (2012, Harmony Korine). Image-obsessed, mass market cultured consumers with an amoral understanding of violence and laws really know how to run amok this summer. But, Bay's anything but pretentious. He drives the story and knows how to deliver high octane escalating conflict that adheres to the wham o meter.

People aren't so much beautiful in Pain & Gain as they are idealized conceptions of cool American symbols; so, mostly beefcakes and strippers. Miami looks like a music video or million dollar commercial. Bay uses a mix of film and video capturing evocative images within his vast canvas that never becomes static. The Digital Domain people must have had something to do with the many slo-mo shots: something like 1,000 frames per second and often projectile spittle that floats in air.

Plot wise, this comedy of errors keeps getting unbelievably worse. And, I think that as an American, I was kind of proud that we're such a big obnoxious badass of a country, but also glad that I could point my finger at all the people in this movie and say hey, "at least I don't have it as bad as they do."

Dwayne Johnson is thoroughly hilarious in his comedic turn as a highly moralized ex-con Christian coke head bodybuilder who nearly involuntarily whoops people's asses.

Ed Harris is fun though too, cast on-type.

I really think the theme of this movie coalesced, unlike any other Michael Bay movie I've ever seen. Or, not so much the theme, but the way the visual representation of this simple true crime tale makes it so tangible. It's like looking up close at the ugliest, sexiest, balance of American culture.

I think the line in the movie went something like: "America started as thirteen scrawny colonies, but now it's the buffest nation in the world." Tongue in cheek, Bay's commitment to action earned my respect today. I don't know how long my admiration for him can hold up, but every once in a while, I always know who I go to when I want to see the biggest, loudest, simplest forms of entertainment Hollywood has to offer.

--Dregs

Blaster Al Ackerman: An Obituary

"Book in hand, I began to creep toward him. 'Wanna see something pretty?' I called softly."
[from "The Puffin Book", in Corn & Smoke: stories, performances, things, Shattered Wig Press, 2006.]

It started somewhere in 1994, I think. Out of school, working the kinds of jobs a pillow-soft high school graduate can get, ping-ponging between passed out on the curb, puking out the window, and white-knuckle sobriety. I was, obviously, the kind of adolescent who had as a constituative part of his self-identity something called 'being a poet'.

Part of this meant writing poems, and sending them off, to try to validate myself through publication. Being a corn dog in Denver, essentially completely without any connection whatsoever to culture, finding places to send my mediocre efforts to was a DIY affair. I had to buy Factsheet Five or The Poet's Market and work only thus dimly illuminated, with SASE and cover letter and three to five selected pieces, over and over again. (First thing you learn is you always got to buy an issue before you submit.) They list the editors in The Poet's Market, so your cover letter can sound professional—or whatever the analogue for professionalism is in the deliberately self-marginalizing, endlessly self-regarding, pseudo-mystical world of poetry. When I started submitting things to the Shattered Wig Review, their listed editor was Fred Engels. I didn't get it. I failed the test.

I wrote a couple letters to Fred Engels—I bought issues, I submitted stuff. And, page by page, issue by issue, the Wig changed my life. Mainly by way of regular and large doses of the writing of "Blaster" Al Ackerman. Weird little poems—often with faint, unplaceable whiffs of something irretrievably sad—hilarious and nightmarish stories, brilliant and unsettling cartoons. I started chasing him through the small press underground.

You Hear That
you were giving me a ride someplace
that didn't pan out, the movies I think
but that closet's too dribbly to go to the movie
you hear that
Words mean nothing to such a game of wetness and
that's why cats faint as they learn who made us
if not he who made the big purple heads
is like a wet dream of thought now willed
that can make a new being made of elements
which cannot be identified, only spent.
You hear that?
Words mean nothing to such a thing
These transitional expressions really can not be real
Now it seems to have disappeared
No, wait. It seems to be coming back again, a little
But it's becoming broken like a fruitcake
It's dreaming all the while like the blackness of sleep
But what is this? You say sleep is black as night
And yet it seems possessed by nothing but imagination
That is the way sleep goes and we are a lot like Dryden
We cannot be correct
We haven't time
[from JMB]

The most reliable source for the Blaster Al I liked best was John M. Bennett's Lost and Found Times, where Ackerman regularly had a few pages to detail his methodical and playful poem-making practices: "Ack's Hacks". One month he might take a John M. Bennett piece and a Steven Spender piece, rip each down the middle, and splice them together, left halves by Bennett, right halves by Spender. Another month he'd use what I remember he called the "World of Wastebasket": wad up and partially smooth out somebody's poem, and use the words you can see as a word bank for your own poem.

I adored the results, with their roiling mix of perspectives and rhythms, their weird, unpredictable lexical combinations—and a kind of surrealism that went ineffably deeper than unusual image-juxtaposition or unexpected placement—their humor and sadness. I also adored the window into their creation, the frank joy and attention to detail, the constant demonstration that "being a poet" is always dumped and trumped by "working to write a poem". Issue after issue of Shattered Wig Review and Lost and Found Times—and others!—taught by example that "inspiration" is nothing at all, that the poet-persona never matters as against an ass in a chair, doing the work, that doing the work was best done with humor and honesty as the watchwords, tempering the arrogance of making something with the humility in admitting where it came from and the determination to make it as good—and as well—as possible.

I found pretty much the whole world in these poems and stories. There was ugliness, horror, and immense confusion; weird rhythms of recurrence; humor that lacerated and healed by turns; references to genre from romance to hard-boiled to science fiction to newsletter to shaggy-dog story to rambling guy in a bar. Maybe sometime somewhere somebody will top The Crab as an exemplar of the personal essay; I'm not holding my breath. Sense was not always on display on the surface—perhaps the Doctor's most notable concession to consensus reality (and certainly his deepest subversion of same; one of the most consistent pleasures in this intensely pleasurable work is the slippage between name and thing and thing and thing—half his narrators spend half their time asking, and needing to ask, and not really getting straight answers to, questions like:

"Do you mean a bat like in baseball or like in 'any of numerous flying mammals of the order Chiroptera, having membranous wings and navigating by night by echolocation?'"²

² I won't leave you hanging. The answer: "I mean 'bat' as in Batman or Devil Bat."
[from] "The White Bat" (widely reprinted))

Somewhere Ackerman noted¹:

so much of what I do is gibberish, but looking at the world, it's hard to say that gibberish isn't the central art form of our time

"Sideshow Days with Your Pop"
[from: Shattered Wig Review 18, Summer, 1999.]

When I found Feh! Press' brilliant Omnibus, the lessons only amplified, clarified, purified. Blaster introduced one piece with this:¹

These are words scribbled hastily in the margins of a life, by a man too often taken in drink, some written sitting behind the wheel of a car, waiting for someone to finish their physical therapy appointment

¹ This quote is from memory. Forgive my citational incompetence, please: I write these words without access to my full library.

This, then, was how to go about writing. His treatise on the "Tacky Little Pamphlet" was how to go about distributing that writing: you'd write some stuff, you'd stuff it all onto some papers, you'd leave them around, in magazine racks, or at the laundromat, or stuffed into envelopes and mailed to random addresses. This I did.

"Stamp: Can I Touch Your Leg?"
[from: Shattered Wig Review 18, Summer, 1999.]

Eventually, I sent a thing or two to Blaster Al himself. He always write back—his grand scrawl "Get This to:" on the envelope, usually a hand-drawn stamp: there was never any mistaking an envelope from Blaster Al Ackerman. I lost all this correspondence moves and moves ago, I think, but I have retained the kindness and generosity he showed to a nobody from nowhere, some dumb kid just trying to figure out how and what and why to write. He once sent a draft version of an as-then-unpublished story called "Floaters". It was so good, and meant so much to me, that I carried it through six weeks of travelling, Portland to Rome to Barcelona to London to NYC to Georgia to Chicago to Austin to Denver to Portland, nothing but a backpack and not much room for books.

C.S. shifts around in the golf cart, trying to ease his legs. How can there be so many strange and unexplained things in the world, he has no idea. Recently, he has read an article in Playboy about men who are turned on by wearing lobster claws and watching boa constrictors swallow alarm clocks. They are called Dadaists.

[from] "Floaters"

The good Doctor died last week sometime. I found out on Twitter. The link was to this, excellent, remembrance: Dear Blaster. Among the regrets this instanced: I had written him in years. I had not bothered to write this appreciation.

Al Ackerman was a great man. His work was varied and brilliant, and anyone free of dogmas about the inferiority of humor or prejudices about underground writing will find a lot to learn from, and laugh at, and linger over. If you care more about what he nice, I can assure you he was. There is much evidence on this point, and it all agrees with me. The evidence of his genius is even more abundant.

• Shattered Wig Review Catalog
• Direct links to Blaster Al publications
• Lost and Found Times

His democratic willingness to engage with just about anybody isn't there, anymore—but if a legitimate titan of underground writing could take time from his medical transportation gig to answer his mail, so can you...and so can I. Good things may come of it!

Back in front of my building, three men were out on the stoop—two of them were having a beer-pissing contest, the third was refereeing from the top step. The referee, I saw, was gross old Mr. Barsh, the building super, who never fixes anything.

Book in hand, I began to creep toward him. "Wanna see something pretty?" I called softly.
[from "The Puffin Book", in Corn & Smoke: stories, performances, things, Shattered Wig Press, 2006.]

In between work and mail and life, and fighting for what dignity and decency we can manage, we can write, or draw, or sing, or otherwise make stuff. Blaster Al did.

I want to close with a couple long sections from my favorite Blaster Al chapbook. They include the powerful repetitions, the humor, the sadness, the horror, the confusion I associate with the best of his work. It's the whole world, in other words—the best words: the words of Al Ackerman. The world is a poorer place without him.

--Fat

[from: Let Me Eat Massive Pieces of Clay, Shattered Wig Press, 1992.]

from DEATH DEAT DEPARTURE
                    Are you sick? drunk?
Well it's good to know that for a few days
Voices come alternately from both sides
Though under normal circumstances the saying that never comes true
Starts to smell after a few years--so that each day, after that, was
     akin to a large doll's face burping outside the window
Whew: that face was the size of a parking lot, and all onions, near which stood a man named Canarse Park
Now forget that

                    Congratulations!
That was no church! That was rodomontade,
Or the moss-hell "false memory"
Of lofting the teeming BALTIC AVENUE DRUGSTORE
To relocate it more nearly above locations that never change when
Proofs of dark, roam and percolate
Nourishing the urge to understand bur not hear about any
Plans to overrun or swarm about in large numbers but still, in the shredded-silver
REFLECTION that goes tearing along overhead
Topped with a drawing (chedderchrome) of mayonnaise congealing on
The lip of the drinking glass the Coca Cola and Jim Beam is in:
It was ten-of-seven
When Hawk realized he
Was unshaven and
Driving a van he had
Never seen toward
UNREALIZED POTENTIAL MORE FULLY UNREALIZED
.......................................................................
Now forget that

If Terry Richardson Remade Badlands...

Harmony Korine creates high concept product for the international arthouse circuit. Spring Breakers (2013, Harmony Korine) is atypical for him because it is unlike the intimate cockroach surviving devastating disaster of nature structure he commanded in Gummo (1997, Korine), or the narratives where he transports us to tag along with obscure communes, Mister Lonely (2007, Korine) and Trash Humpers (2009, Korine); because, in his newest film he ventures for the first time away from his commitment to realism.

Gummo is presented almost as a documentary. Trash Humpers is presented as a home movie. And, while portioning out his aesthetic with equal measures of both, Korine goes all out in favor of a superbly realized stream of images--mostly shot with a shutter over-cranked to the point of tableau--and sounds, to arrive at what I am unfortunately struggling to decide describing as either like a music video, a commercial, or post-Eisensteinian montage. But undoubtedly, Spring Breakers is presented as a dream fantasy.

Music videos and commercials rely on image and sound because they're so short. They also typically feature many cuts. But, whereas they can project a wide array of disparate and unrelated shots, Spring Breakers feels more like a theme; or, like a book of photography.

Spring Breakers is A-list teensploitation. We get no plot or character. The girls are one dimensional: they like partying (sex, drugs, and violence) in bikinis and believe spring break is about finding themselves. The only plot turns are who gets robbed and who leaves spring break. Maybe I'd expected more. But, this is acceptable for the teensploitation genre. The goal of teensploitation is to get teens to spend money on a movie that promises sex and other R rated antics. So, why I would still commend the plot structure of Spring Breakers is because it places the reality of the dangerous crimes being perpetrated in the background, and basically eschews any moral consequences in favor of following each girl's pursuit of their ideal endless spring break.

And the girls' continuous grounding in reckless high-stakes adventure is what sets the movie apart. No one ever interrupts their roadtrip; well, at least no moral laws do. The obsession with the fleeting spring break is all that matters. While the girls travel to Florida, spring break ends. However, they stay and refuse to quit living the spring break lifestyle. And inexplicably, so does the film. The film places all the vice and danger so close you can touch it, and says if you want it, you can have it all and for life.

The setting is magnificently realized. Korine's primary ingredients are several party scenes full of girls in bikinis and topless (Is this a record for number of nipples?), girls making out with girls, girls in ski masks, pistols, machine guns, blunts, lines of cocaine, hard liquor by the liter, beer bongs of the syphon variety, beer bongs of the trumpet variety, and cool cars. And the bulk of the film is precisely about shuffling out these images. The aesthetic is fetishistic taboo. Again, like Gummo, Korine delights in beautifully photographing filthy squalor.

One shot that occurs shortly after the midpoint, that nears sublime, is an image of a girl in a bikini on the beach holding up a beer bong with its trumpet end blown out by the overhead sun behind it--it looks truly sacred.

Every aspect of the film has been punched by a rainbow. Even the dreary lecture halls are no match for the dayglo candy colored beams emanating from the girls' laptop screens; the Christian church of course, happens to be one with colorful stained glass vignettes of the gospels.

James Franco as Alien is over the top, but doesn't turn the film into camp. He's hilarious, but subordinate to the dangerous warpath of the girls.

The centerpiece of the film is a climactic, character-defining sequence set to the extant, prominently mixed "Everytime," by Britney Spears, from her 2003 album, In the Zone. And here's where I'll end it: I didn't think the use of the song was ironic; I bought into it; I bought into the whole plastic shallow sexy sentimental invigorating sweep of Britney, spring break, uninhibited youth and the whole enchilada. For real. Sometime last year I heard about this and decided it was the biggest thing I would look forward to in 2013--and it is every bit what I'd hoped for and more. This proves Harmony Korine is never ironic or condescending about his characters. When he decides he's found an interesting story, he comes up with art.

--Dregs

The Ladies of Salem

To apply a broad label grouping Rob Zombie's influences, House of 1000 Corpses (2003, Rob Zombie) is very similar to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper) with its faux-final girl structure amid a backwoods cannibal family's home; The Devil's Rejects (2005, Zombie) feels a lot like The Hills Have Eyes (1977, Wes Craven) in that wholesome-valued type tourists are abducted by sadistic murderers in a Southwestern desert.

However, the Halloween films showed Zombie transitioning into a more cohesive visionary, in the sense that he turned more serious--Halloween II (2009, Zombie) is cold, and the violence isn't playful. And that film also benefits from Zombie's addition of a subjective dream in Myers' head that runs along with the actual chronological progression of the narrative. For those are his strengths (so far): visualizing fucked up rock n' roll/classic horror inspired set pieces, and, a straightforward plot of terror encroaching upon a final girl.

The Lords of Salem (2012, Zombie) is an onslaught of images for the sake of shock, violence, sex, satanic ritual, metal, and art--the pictures on display at this exhibition are fun, provocative, and inspired by classic Golden Age European horror. Rob Zombie respects vintage horror.

Plot is minimal. Sheri Moon Zombie stars as Heidi Hawthorne, a local DJ for a Salem, MA radio station who discovers a mysterious record by a band simply called "The Lords." The record has a strange effect on her and brings about strange hallucinations of a sacrilegious nature.

Once that's been established, nothing else really happens.

But, I'm not disappointed. At 90 minutes, and with a low budget, the tone is consistent: messed up. Let's say someone took Rosemary's Baby (1968, Roman Polanski) and decided to eliminate all of the plot except for the part about a coven abducting a young woman for a satanic ritual, and try to stretch out that ending and make it into its own spinoff. Because that's what The Lords of Salem is. The urban alienation is there, but Zombie doesn't know how to craft characters. His turf is exploitation though, so I'm not faulting him--I enjoy his stereotypes because at least they're markedly his own (even if I am a little over that Tarantino/Smith/Cody style of pop-naturalistic dialogue that has nothing to do with the plot.)

I admire the brazen quality of this sideshow, but I really can't stand all of the sequences that are imaginary in the first half seamlessly blending into those in the second half. I mean, this movie really doesn't commit itself to much aside from the aforementioned imagery.

So, I'd recommend this to anyone who's up for naked women, goats, chanting, and bizarre pagan fun. What little there is here works for me.

The music is excellent overall, especially the "Lords" drone metal track played several times throughout the movie--I got a kick out of its heaviness.

--Dregs

The Adventures of Alvin & Lance

In the summer of 2012, after severe forest fires ravaged the rural town of Bastrop, TX, David Gordon Green snuck under the radar of the press and quickly got together with his cinematographer on every-film-he's-ever-done Tim Orr to film a loosely and spontaneously captured comedy with Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch in the burnt and overcast backdrop of Bastrop State Park.

 

Green has crafted Prince Avalanche (2013, David Gordon Green) as a simple, short, camping trip/men at (road) work ballad about loss, survival, and rebuilding. The opening title card places the narrative in Bastrop, 1988, after the wake of a devastating forest fire. A dark, sombre undertone constantly supports a minimalist and bleak menagerie of odd Texas wildlife, with virtually no signs of civilization, except one---

--The road

Alvin (Paul Rudd) and Lance (Emile Hirsch) are assigned the task of painting and placing signs along an 8 mile stretch of highway, and they are always moving, fighting, laughing, or getting drunk on that same blacktop.

So here's the twist:

Green takes these two distinct male characters and constantly pinpoints details about their contrasting characters in wide stretching intimate forest vistas--and almost every few minutes this becomes classically, essentially archetypal broad comedy that feels fresh and sincerely sweet, with a hefty resolution right where you'd expect it--the end. Yet, David Wingo & Explosions in the Sky have created a prog rock spacey fun concoction that continuously makes the film something else. The film becomes a score-propelled, shiny, bright, electronic, somewhat 80s new wave ironied adventure that never lags. Additionally, Orr's constant slow-as-molasses zooms cut together in a way that turn this trip practically into a music video. This reminds me of David Fincher's collaborations with Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross because like Explosions in the Sky, Reznor & Ross were already in a band, and also because the music is post rock electronic stuff that is wall to wall and dominant, as opposed to the only other director I can think of who uses that kind of music--Michael Mann; but, Mann uses his cues traditionally in an emotionally underscoring way, unlike Fincher and Green, who show real balls with their sonic experimentations.

The film's themes are etched out by a woman named Joyce, who first appears to Alvin in a trance. (After Lance leaves into town for the weekend and Alvin decompresses, reality becomes subjective.) Joyce's significance in the plot isn't worth mentioning in detail because it's up to the individual viewer to find their own response. However, it is reasonable to say that the film has a kindness that never approaches cruelty, as if it chooses to keep looking until it desperately finds what it needs to survive with a will to love and build.

Paul Rudd works marvels within the role of uptight, anally retentive nerdy outdoorsman against a frequently brilliant Emile Hirsch as shallow, woman-crazy, but really too sweet for his own good underneath all the vanity dude.

And if I would say the film had a centerpiece, it's the drunken montage. Green made a serious comedy that's actually hilarious--rare.

--Dregs

Why Punk Rock is not Bullshit

Why Punk Rock is not Bullshit

This is for Mike Watt.

Some things I learned from punk rock. (Note: I am not saying that these are the only things I learned, or that punk is the only place to learn them. Both of those things would be stupid and false. But I did learn these things there, and if you think they aren't worth learning, then I do not think we have much to say to one another.)

I can choose. I can choose what I will and will not participate in. I can choose to assert some modicum of individuality via my dress, body modifications, and deportment, even while playing a part in a capitalist economy I neither like, nor respect, nor view as a good thing. I can choose to avoid debt, to avoid fossil fuels, to avoid eating animals. I can choose to make art because I enjoy it, even while I know that this activity will never be economically or even socially productive in any meaningful way. I can choose to support the efforts and endeavors of my friends and others in my community precisely because they are my friends or are in my community, even when the efforts and endeavors are by some measures lacking. (Note: that I will watch my friends play in a basement doesn't mean I won't go to the opera; I can, and will, and do, enjoy the art of my friends on my walls and regular trips to SF MOMA. Not all choices are exclusions or rejections.) I can shop at places owned locally and enjoy it more than going to the suburbs to hit up Target or Tower. That I can choose means I have the responsibility to choose. Not choosing is a choice.

Just because it's popular doesn't mean it's good. Just because somebody you love made it doesn't mean it's good. Sometimes there are things that are more important than whether or not something is good. You can ask for something better; you pretty much have to.

No matter who you are, thinking for yourself seems to be a pretty good idea. Generosity is a very very important value.

I can do stuff. I can go camping. I can ride my bike from Vancouver to Portland, from Portland to San Francisco. I can cook. I can play in bands. I can write and publish zines. I can send my poems off to other people who might publish them. I can meet my heroes and have excellent conversations with them. I can ask famous people for help with what I'm working on and get it, even as, essentially, nobody. I can go up to bands after they play and tell them how much their work has meant to me for how long, and most of the time, they'll be really cool about it and they and I will feel good about the interaction.

I can be a curious person and learn things by talking to people. For some reason, a lot of punks tend to be knowledgeable about history in particular. I can privilege an aesthetic that uses appropriation and commentary as large parts of its practice. I can criticize and attempt to revolutionize any/every aspect of my culture, starting with the things and people that are closest to me. I can be friends with people who are dramatically unlike me in any given way. My viewpoint is frequently wrong and I have a hell of a lot to learn, often from deeply unexpected sources. Cleaning up after yourself is almost always appropriate. Humor is a great way to make serious points. Going new places is one of the most fun things anybody can do, and it isn't that hard to do, if you make half an effort.

Most of life is about accumulation of capital. Most of life is about accumulation of spectacle. By default, I am alienated from almost everything important (my food, my fucking, my work, my fun). I can fight this alienation with real effort: analysis, criticism, and action. Direct action gets the goods. It is fun to sing with your friends. It is fun to make things with your friends. It is fun to yell "fuck you" at bullies. Churches and city halls and police stations and schools and businesses are places where a lot of bullies are, and in fact are structures and institutions that are themselves bullies. Don't be a bully.

There are always outcasts, even among the outcasts. This is pretty fucked up. There are limits to the degree to which DIY is a good thing. These limits may not always be where you expect them to be. Most of what most people like is fucking stupid and shitty and should be at least ignored, and probably should be rejected and attacked. TV is a waste of time. Pretty much everything that requires a TV is a waste of time. Sometimes it is okay to waste time, but it needs to be a real decision, not a default. "It needs to be a real decision, not a default" is true of just about everything. Drugs and alcohol are not really rebellious. Sometimes they can be a lot of fun, though. But sometimes they turn you into things you hate. Some rich kids are rad. A little nihilism can be really powerful; harming yourself or others is usually not okay. Punk is best viewed as one tendency of essentially leftist social critique and action, not as a bunch of records by bands. If punks get old enough and stay punk, they turn into hippies. Most don't do this; most just "outgrow" it. In America, punk is generally thought of as a phase. This isn't true everywhere.

Everybody deserves to have a voice. If you say things that give evidence that you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, you should be told to shut up. It is not everybody's job to educate the ignorant; it is, however, really valuable when you can use patient explaining to bring somebody around to a greater understanding. Picking fights is sometimes absolutely necessary.There are many worse things in the world than being pretentious.

Most of the greatest song titles in Western music are by punk bands. Of these, probably better than half were by the Minutemen and Dillinger Four. It is cool to write songs about all the topics there are, not just sex and romance. Folk music can be really great. Some of the best art is made almost by accident. Here are a couple examples of "as much sense as punk ever made". They're both from the Dillinger Four. I could adduce more examples.

It's like picking up the pieces is a daily chore
Thinking of your time card forms a habit
Watching rick folks on T.V.'s like picking a sore
Fuck it all, they can have it
And now I'm loaded like a gun again
Like a plague of locusts heaven sent
Just a ball of dissension with a death perception
I won't sweat the definition of content
They said "better safe than sorry" and "look out for #1" I heard "only play the cards you're shown"
Fuck what they say
It doesn't matter anyway
Only in your grave are you alone
Like grown men staring with little boy's eyes
And actresses speaking with conviction
These people should demand a Pulitzer prize
For various works of fiction
"Judge a book by its cover" And "keep one eye on your back"
I heard "only play the cards you're shown"
I say fuck what they say
It doesn't matter anyway
Only in your grave are you alone
So many people with so much to show
Rotting away in their own little holes
One can only wonder why
I'll celebrate my home
But know that I'm not alone
Only fools are "along for the ride"
In thinking of the size
Of the world that's right outside
Please don't waste it trying to hide

This isn't what we want
This isn't what we need
This is what we can afford
Celebrate this sorry state
With anecdotes of what you hate
And try to take comfort in the fact that you're not alone This isn't you
It's just what you do
Don't mistake the irony of calling it a "living"
If you feel like no one
If you feel like nothing
You've only been taking what they're giving

--Fat

The Bitter Pill

Steven Soderbergh says he is retiring from making movies. If so, he's gone out in peak fashion.

The best thing going for Side Effects (2013, Steven Soderbergh) is Scott Z. Burns's whip-smart script. Burns proves to have mastered a delicate balance between positive and negative charged genre blending; yet, the protagonist and antagonist are also balanced along a similar +/- structure; and, this foundation is a very strong mix in the hands of Soderbergh.

Rooney Mara plays Emily Taylor, a mousy, modestly-attired social climber sociopath who freely and carelessly manipulates state and government institutions both legal and medical, deviously and deceptively plying her lethal black widow schemes in service of her own survival. Emily murders her husband and lies her way out of it like a pro. This cynical modern epic crime narrative is the negative charge.

Jude Law plays Dr. Jonathan Banks, an upper-class professional who earnestly tries to treat Emily, a young woman suffering from clinical depression. This is the medical drama narrative that initially cloaks the crime plot. But, ultimately it returns. By the end of the film, Banks or Emily wins--but, that doesn't mean that this hybrid settles on taking sides; because, both are so well balanced.

This is one of the rare instances of the protagonist being all bad (Emily) and the antagonist being all good (Banks).  Furthermore, the reason the hybrid genre characteristic is worth commenting on is because this isn't a twist at the end of the second act--Emily revealed as a faker--due to the fact that Emily may or may not actually be a victim of circumstances and depression and misdiagnoses, as she's initially introduced to be. In a disturbingly modern way, Rooney Mara looks realistically like one of those recent young cute female murderers who the cable tabloid news networks saturate the media with.

Mara's performance is the other standout of the film. She's now part of some kind of elite group, having now worked with David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh and Terrence Malick. Those three have been the top-rank Hollywood big-budget, quality filmmaking triumvirate for the past decade and a half. We get a lot of Rooney Mara and Side Effects is a vehicle for her brooding explosive sculptured cypher of beauty. And she screams a might deal fierce, which is still unsettling.

Soderbergh is on his best behavior camera wise. It's like one of the most subdued films he's delivered in the past twenty years--probably somewhere between The Girlfriend Experience (2009) and The Informant! (2009). But his stylized interiors, with the fluttery business of artificial lighting in NYC, and subtle variants within warm and cool sources, are impressively and carefully crafted.

Side Effects lacks an emotional punch. But, Soderbergh, in only 100 minutes, puts us in an emotional choke hold, and keeps us there. The moral is a cautionary tale about what can happen when a common everyday anybody can try to get away with crime at some of the highest stakes imaginable; and this target's success is that it's been brought to the screen in a compact, efficiently executed, sleek and right out of yesterday's headlines panache by Soderbergh, entrenched in his own style, as it should be.

--Dregs

Fat's best HEAVY TUNES of 2012

"An Echo From the Hosts That Profess Infinitum", Shabazz Palaces, Black Up
I spent a lot of the year writing and riding bikes to this record. This song always made me stop to pay attention to its amazing haze-sway backing track: swirling vocals, some intensely melodic percussion, and great beats. My girlfriend says I'm too hard on Sasha Frere-Jones, so let me give credit: it was him who turned me on to this excellent record. Thanks, chief.

"Australasia", Pelican, Australasia
Pelican has meant a lot to me for a long time, and they were, bizarrely, essentially the only band I'd ever really bootlegged. When I heard that Hydra Head was going the way of all flesh, I knew that it was in part my fault, so I took my credit card to the liquor store to the Internet and attempted to atone for my sins by spending quite a bit of money. This song is Pelican at their best: no band not named Iron Maiden gets more mileage out of Sweet Victor Parts (TM Al Burian); no band not named Hawkwind does more with dreamy drone parts.

"Hey Jane", Spiritualized, Sweet Heart Sweet Light
Probably the least inspired album I've bought—even Dirty Work had cocaine and Keef/Mick's desire to punch each other—but this was one song I liked whenever it came on. Spiritualized is evidently completely out of ideas, but this one song they didn't phone in, and not-phoned-in Spiritualized is something I can't not like.

"kicking", "Fat Waves", Torche, Meanderthal
I saw Torche with Big Business, and at the time, their high-gloss candy metal (alternating with deep sludge) left me cold. But "kicking" has better hooks than any guitar song since 1984, and "Fat Waves" isn't far behind. I reached for this record more times than almost any other—it's beyond perfect for getting shit done around the house—despite getting it very late in the year.

"ecce homo", Titus Andronicus, Local Business
It's all downhill after this opener, but this was my song of the year, and it wasn't a particularly close race. The rest of the album is a good Clash record, more Give 'Em Enough Rope's hit-what-you-aim-for than, say, Combat Rock's peaks and valleys or London Calling's thrilling sprawl and reach, but this one song is the kind of epic the Clash never managed, an unhurried lope across the band's previous (monumental) achievements and a sweeping gesture forward. The next album will be a California album, it will be called Manifest Destiny, and it will be epoch-defining. Book it.

"Year of the Pig", Fucked Up, Year of the Pig ep
Took me a while to warm up to this tune, but no song was better for running or for riding my bike across town. Originally, I thought "man, the drummer does the same thing for like 18 minutes, meh" but after I made it through the hypnotic drone sections a couple times and let the record overwhelm me somatically, I was more like "MAN, THE DRUMMER DOES THE SAME THING FOR LIKE 18 MINUTES, AWESOME!". It's a song that requires some effort: it's only good if you keep your attention-payer on. It's a song that rewards that effort hugely.

"In Every Dream Home a Heartache", Roxy Music, Viva!
Could really have been any song off of this record, 2012's token album that made my girlfriend ask "what the fuck is this shit" during one of the coked-up metal-disco moments with extra-theatrical vocal vibrato. But something about Roxy Music really works for me a lot of the time (SPOILER: it is Phil Manzanera) and Viva! was my default "time to go to bed, but I don't want anything fucking mellow on because that shit's for sell-out olds" record.

"tracking the dog", Screaming Blue Messiahs, Peel Sessions

"Holiday Head", Screaming Blue Messiahs, Gun-Shy

"Destroyer", Screaming Blue Messiahs, Live at the BBC
I've loved this band pretty much consistently from the time Totally Religious came out. Back then, I loved that album's weirdo echo-chamber drum sound and 10-million-stacked-guitar-noises production, really liked half of the previous record Bikini Red's weirdo everything-in-an-echo-chamber-one-loud-ass-guitar-track sound, and didn't see a whole lot in Gun-Shy's too-much-drum, zero-guitar mix. Trouser Press rated those in reverse order, and that was the only interaction I've ever had with another human about the band Screaming Blue Messiahs. All I know now is that I like all three, and probably agree now that I am old and tired that Gun-Shy is their best, though if they'd ever recorded a live-to-tape album like the Peel Session I bought from Green Noise Records in Portland all those years ago, that would be one of my favorite records of all time. Their BBC Live record is close, but not quite as great. But everything they did makes me exceptionally happy, and I can make it through terrible 80s production values if I have to...

"dethink to survive", mclusky, mclusky Does Dallas
I heard about mclusky via CopyRanter and I owe Mark Duffy a large bottle of brown liquor for the reference. It immediately became a massive favorite of the Clear the Crease crew. Smart and savage: what's not to like? Well, they did break up. So there won't be any more HEAVY TUNES from mclusky. Funnily enough, though, three (!) years ago, my friend Abe tried to sell me on Future of the Left, the band that formed from mclusky's ashes, and I didn't get it; until last night. 2013's HEAVY TUNES of the year will include Future of the Left's "Arming Eritrea" and "Land of My Formers" plus probably around a half a dozen others. Extra bonus: Falco is a really good writer, not just a really good songwriter. Try his tour diary, excellent hit piece on a shit song, and follow his swell twitter. And, for the love of fuck, spend some money on this band's brilliant music and spare them "the hollow anger of the ignored and jealous".

"hurry on sundown", Hawkwind, Some Comp a Friend of a Friend Made
I've always loved this song, and spent a couple years mostly listening to the excellent Oregon band Nudity's version, but this year was all about listening to the Hawkwind version multiple times in a row, singing along every single time.

"man the ramparts", Botch, We Are the Romans
Because sometimes you can't live your best life without spiky, off-kilter metallic hardcore. Wish it hadn't taken me 10 years to catch up to this record.

"oscillation", The Men, Open Your Heart
Untouchably great drone-groove, somewhere in between "hurry on sundown" and "year of the pig", this record pleased me every time I put it on. Less intense and transcendent than Leave Home, Open Your Heart was more varied—and maybe more easy to forget about. But the band's a keeper, and so's this record, and this song will be a staple for a long, long time.

"the nights of wine and roses", Japandroids, Celebration Rock
2012: year of Japandroids. Despite its obvious greatness, I didn't reach for this album all that often. But live, no songs meant more to me than this band's in 2012. I picked this tune pretty much at random: some nights I loved it the most, some nights I loved "younger us" the most, some nights "restless nights turn to restless years" was the lyric that hurt the most... Of course the real best song off the record is "the house that heaven built", the "anything, anything" of 2012, but like "anything, anything", I can't actually listen to the song all that often (because I don't like crying).

"rana", Pitchfork, Eucalyptus
Too much of this record sounds like hyper-caffinated early R.E.M., but (a) that's not a bad thing by any stretch and (b) some of the record sounds like this, which is as good as indie rock ever got.

It also bears mentioning that the releases from Negative Fun dominated the last couple months of my listening. Great stuff. Full disclosure: I got these records for free and was paid to write about them, but I would have been listening to them and loving them regardless. You will be hearing a lot from She Rides, Dripping Slits, and Red Hex in 2013—and so will I!

be prepared: Shellac, 22oct2011, New Parish

No easy way to say this: Shellac were as potent a collision of tight and rocking as I've ever seen. Flawless stop-starts, underrated melodies, hammy yet satisfying showmanship (glossed by Noodles as "guy's got a taste for drama, no?") and an unparalleled ability to sell previously unheard songs. Every bit as good as the best NoMeansNo shows I've seen, which means: as good a show as I have ever seen.

Track list:

Canada
the watch song
Gary*
steady as she goes
compliant*
my black ass
he came in you*
a minute
squirrel song
bikes (on the wall)*
copper
prayer to god
killers
dog & pony show
the end of radio
o my brothers*
boycott
crow

*new tune (name approximated/estimated)

Shellac: a synchronic appreciation

A feature of my life to date that truly deserves the appelation so sadly fucked is that most of the great lessons of/in life I've absorbed have come via...song lyrics. A feature of my life to date that truly deserves the appelation seriously, dude, you're a pile of crap is that the bulk of those lyric lessons have been penned by lyricists like Gibby Haynes & Steve Albini. Normally I wouldn't kick--wisdom's where you find it--but Albini's first recorded lyrics included bons mot like

I've never hung a darkie, even a big one
I've never seen an Indian on a horse

So...you know...a little defensive.

now I got an engine
a big perverted engine
that runs on strength of will

do you get the same jokes as me?
do you get the jokes the same as me?

wrote him a letter
said I'll never come home
he never sent it
but he wrote it again and again
stacked up to the ceiling
then another stack
he burned them all winter
for heat

Shellac: a diachronic appreciation

Every Shellac release I own is a sun-like locus of memories, with planet-anecdotes orbiting. I frequently forget how much I like this band. I always forget to put them on, but whenever shuffle finds them, my moment improves. I won't miss them live, either.

Singles & At Action Park

A dipshit, I missed the initial singles at the time--a bigger dipshit, I now own multiple identical copies of them, in case of...needing...multiple...copies of the same 7"--and had to be turned on to At Action Park by some buddies. I bought my own copy with a copy of Big Black's Songs About Fucking the same day, put them on a cassette, and spent most of a year listening to little else. To this day, I remember the warehouses I'd walk by on the way to work, headphones on, boots thumping over the three miles no matter the weather, from cold forcing breath to congeal to ice in my beard to diagonal thunderstorms, to arid Denver heat, 1996 grinding away under the weight of my failures, herky-jerky stabs at adulthood and art, violent spasms toward attempts to be a good person, at long last, warehouses and train tracks trudging by morning after morning as I'd walk to work.

The singles--Uranus, with the impeccable "Doris" and "Wingwalker", and A Pictorial History of the Rude Gesture, with top-5-favorite-song-of-all-time "the rambler song" and whatever else is on it--I had a special relationship with from the beginning. Instantly I knew I didn't actually want to play them that often: they're special, and need to be reserved for those times a man truly needs a piece of art capable of frank absolution. One year, probably 1996 or 1997, I drunkenly called my friends who'd turned me on to Shellac and left a message along the lines of

Hey...guys...just...thinking about friends...and a cigar...a good cigar now and again...

For whatever reason, the best way I could think of to communicate my love for my friends was quoting Steve Albini lyrics from "the billiard player song". I think I've come a long way.

1000 Hurts

Somehow, in that largely pre-Internet age, everybody I knew knew the new Shellac was going to drop. I think I preordered it from Jackpot on Hawthorne in Portland, but fucked up and didn't get in on the first batch, so had to wait for the second. When 1000 Hurts arrived, everybody--everybody--was listening to it. You couldn't set foot on campus without hearing (somebody talk about) "prayer to god". I wore it out. Probably we all did.

Terraform

Comparatively, Terraform was a massive disappointment. The two longest songs were static exercises, 12 minutes and 7 minutes of difficult-to-play and difficult-to-listen-to slow technicalisms that please no record owner. I told people often that, minus those two songs, it would have been a phenomenal EP, and I took immense pleasure from the frankly poppy put-down "copper", savage riff showcase and Albini standby diss track "Canada" and ventriloquism hatchet job "mouthpiece". At a time when my consumption of new music had essentially flatlined, this platter was a piss-poor lifeline into productive consumption; but I still listened to it a lot, and it still taught me who the amazing Cheley Bonestall is/was.

Excellent Italian Greyhound

Then...nothing. For years, nothing. They played a pair of memorable shows in Portland, including a couple new songs, and shot their mouths off about "yeah, the new album exists, and we'll release it when we feel like it." Eventually, they felt like it. As a product, Excellent Italian Greyhound skews 'way closer to Terraform than to At Action Park, but still includes a handful of my favorite Shellac songs, which means it still includes a handful of my favorite songs.

I put it on the jukebox at the bar I worked at, and took infinite comfort in those depressed years from stompers like "be prepared" and the second-best bass solo ever, in "boycott". At the shows, their long, slow, methodical versions of "the end of radio" taught me what they'd been up to with the disappointing numbers on Terraform: a platform for performativity, a framework for stringing an audience along and compelling maximal attention to minimal information, demanding total focus in case the band/song changes. It works beautifully live--"the end of radio" has happied me every time I've heard it played--and nearly reverses my opinion on the real estate it occupies on wax.