THE CANDYMAN IS ON THE PROWL

R.I.P. J.D. Salinger, courtesy of the Internets

Avatard

You Can't Unring A Bell

2009, that cruel fucking bastard of a year, took away so many talented musicians from us (as well as a few untalented ones). Sadly, its unquenchable bloodlust couldn't be contained and in its final days it claimed the life of an unsung hero of post-punk and rock music: Mr. Rowland S. Howard.

Howard, who died on December 30 after a struggle with liver cancer, played in The Birthday Party and Crime & The City Solution, and formed These Immortal Souls. That latter group recorded a phenomenal cover of Tom Waits' "You Can't Unring A Bell" (which is where this post's title comes from). The video below for "Marry Me" is a great example of the theatrical, gloomy style of the band.



Nick Cave, his former bandmate in The Birthday Party, had this to say:

"This is very sad news. Rowland was Australia's most unique, gifted and uncompromising guitarist. He was also a good friend. He will be missed by many."

Mick Harvey, another cohort from The Birthday Party and a frequent collaborator over the subsequent years, offered these saddening comments regarding his departed friend:

Sometimes people are ready to go because they have been sick for a long time, but Rowland really wanted to live," he told The Age. "Things were going well for him outside of his health and he wanted to take advantage of that, and he was very disappointed that he wasn't well enough to do so.

R.I.P. Rowland.

HAPPY 40th ANNIVERSARY, ALTAMONT!

That's right: the Altamont Speedway Free Festival happened 40 years ago today. To mark this grim anniversary, here are two pieces of worthwhile reading.

First: read 'Aquarius Wept', Ralph Gleason's August 1970 piece for Esquire. An excerpt:

The media was set to see Altamont in a sunny light, a sort of reprise of Woodstock's good vibes. But good vibes were scarce on Saturday, December 6. Bill Thompson, manager of the Jefferson Airplane, and Chet Helms, of the Family Dog, described Altamont — the motorcycle racetrack and Demolition Derby site — as a permanent holding ground for tense vibrations. One of the underground weeklies pointed out that the moon was in Scorpio and it was a heavy day! The Stones arrived by helicopter and walked, flanked by their mysterious New York musicians guards, through the crowd, when a long-haired youth ran at Jagger screaming, "I'm gonna kill you! I hate you!" He slugged Jagger in the face. Jagger wasn't hurt, only bruised; but it was an ill omen for the day. The truth was that the kind of time one had at Altamont depended upon where one sat. If you got there early and sat down near the stage, you saw the concentration of Hell's Angels, saw them beating people, and had a nasty feeling from the beginning.

Second: read music critic Robert Christgau's brilliant 1972 piece on The Rolling Stones. An excerpt:

In the year or so after Altamont--the end of 1969, all of 1970, and into 1971--I almost stopped listening to the Stones, and whenever I did, the contradictions welled up in me. Admittedly, my reaction was uncommonly intense, and most of those who shared it had always dug the Stones as symbols, not as a rock and roll group. Their response to Altamont was comparably abstract.As Mick Jagger told an interviewer recently: "Of course some people wanted to say Altamont was the end of an era. People like that are fashion writers. Perhaps it was the end of their era, the end of their naïveté. I would have thought it ended long before Altamont." Yet one must suspect an artist as subtle as Jagger of being disingenuous here, as if he were ever anything else. Writers focus on Altamont not because it brought on the end of an era but because it provided such a complex metaphor for the way an era ended...

AP30.2

Two years ago, I started a little self-indulgent series of blog posts called "AP30: Al Pacino in 30 Days." The rationale:

Starting on Black Friday, I will begin a thirty day exploration of Al Pacino's movies. This does not mean that each day will require a Pacino film, nor does it mean that I will somehow cram all of his films into this time period. The order in which I view these will not be chronological, but rather arbitrary and tied to my ever-changing moods and whims. Though I expect such established cinematic classics as Scarface and The Godfather to be part of it, I aim to include less-known features (The Local Stigmatic), cult films (The Devil's Advocate) and outright flops (S1m0ne) where Pacino has a starring or significant central role. As this experiment would be foolish and stunted otherwise, movies I've seen previously as well as those that are new to me will be viewed.

Ultimately, I ended up watching and blogging about the following flicks:

-Carlito's Way ("Mi barrio ya no existe.")

-Cruising (Force The Truth)

-Glengarry GlenRoss (Always Be Closing)

-Heat (A Fucking Owl)

-Looking For Richard ("My kingdom for a horse.")

-Sea Of Love ("What're you looking for?")

-Serpico / The Insider (Pacino As Whistleblower)

I had a great time playing film critic, and so I'm doing it again. Between Black Friday and December 22, I will watch and blog about several Pacino films. Hopefully, you will read them and share your thoughts. I've also extended invites to some guest writers, so we'll see who takes the bait and shares with the group. Any requests?

Rock in.

I don't know exactly what makes me like this photo of the (current? former?) girlfriend of Mötley Crue guitarist, Mick Mars. I'm sure as hell not shelling out £3,000-5,000 for it.

Like Kingdom Come

One of the best commercials I've seen in some time, thanks in part to the inclusion of an instrumental cover of Depeche Mode's "I Feel You."

A Hipster Epiphany

As part of a lengthy blog post about his ill-treatment by security guards at Saturday's Vice Magazine Halloween Party, Titus Andronicus frontman Patrick Stickles has his microcosmic Siddhartha Gautama moment under the night skies of Williamsburg.

We are being choked and beaten and sexually assaulted, and all the while, my peers dance and snort cheap coke and photograph each other for the hundreth time. I scoff at it all now from atop my high horse, but I was there too, because I am poor and when people want give me money to play my guitar, I can't ever say no.

Kids, we are blowing it. Everything they say about us is true.

"A crying woman is a scheming woman."

A horror flick masquerading as art house cinema, Lars von Trier's "Antichrist" succeeds where Neil LaBute's "The Wicker Man", an art house film artlessly propped up as Hollywood fare, so gravely failed. It is well worth comparing these two movies, considering frequent accusations of misogyny against their directors. With a markedly wooden Nicolas Cage as its leading man, "The Wicker Man" built suspense like a good mystery should, yet fizzled out thanks to an overwrought (and over-thought) plot stuffed with Wiccan mysticism and over-the-top misandry. "Antichrist", bolstered by a far more talented male lead in Willem DaFoe, drinks from a similar well of influence, yet leads viewers to its shocking, violent, and vulgar third act without forcing its slowly revealed thesis down the audience's collective throat.

That much-discussed third act is preceded by three fantastic others, each pushing forward the storyline of a couple caught in the throes of grief. The film's elegantly stylized slow-motion prologue begins with passion and ends in tragedy, a child's death that occurs seemingly at the point of his parents' coital climax. We are next brought to the child's funeral, where his mother, the talented Charlotte Gainsbourg, collapses and suffers great emotional pain. DaFoe, with a somewhat aloof affect, attempts to care for his wife as best he can, which is ultimately to both of their detriments. A therapist, DaFoe breaks one of the most basic tenets of his field by treating Gainsbourg as his patient. Relentless in his newfound role, he is almost numb to his wife's charges of arrogance for thinking he is somehow best suited to cure her, though barely able to withstand her inappropriate and unsettlingly aggressive sexual advances. When Gainsbourg engages in a form of self-harm, comparatively mild in the context of what is yet to come, DaFoe grows frustrated enough to change locales to Eden, an isolated cabin in the middle of nowhere. This is the place where, as an as-yet unseen character reveals, "chaos reigns."

What follows is a procession of events both plausible and supernatural, fueled in part by emotionally daunting therapeutic exercises and the weight of a failing marriage. Mood swings can explain some of these, but certainly not all. Something more sinister is at work here in these woods; something that at least one--and maybe both--parties were privy to prior to arriving. The plentiful amount of graphic sex that occurs throughout the film could be dismissed as gratuitous--that is, until the unexpected first of a series of savage acts involving the flesh. Indeed, were DaFoe and Gainsbourg's genitals not so flagrantly displayed throughout, these next scenes would be downright preposterous. In context, however, their nudity makes sense, even as things edge towards familiar terrain covered by the "Saw" and "Hostel" franchises. Actually, torture porn is perhaps the best description for "Antichrist", and I can only hope that fans of that horror subgenre will come around to this film when it is eventually released on DVD. Though seemingly sluggish in its approach, the final twenty-or-so minutes would satiate the escalating bloodlust of moviegoers growing weary of and desensitized to Jigsaw's latest contraptions.

This leads back to the question of misogyny. I'd make the case that "Antichrist" and "The Wicker Man", respectively, serve as responses to the longstanding charges levied at their directors by feminists and film critics alike. The difference is that von Trier does so by revealing evil as something natural and inherent, while LaBute poorly portrays the banality of evil with his "difficult" women. When DaFoe despairs, one empathizes with him; when Cage does, you can't help but laugh.