In his latest blog post, director Tom DiCillo reports this disheartening news about his new film, which opened last week: “Delirious has just been pulled from its two original screens in NY and and moved to a different single theater. The same thing has happened in LA.”
Using his shoestring advertising budget as a theme and a launching pad, DiCillo produced a series of amusing YouTube videos that, in retrospect, are probably more sadly prophetic than they are funny. Delirious is a gem of a movie that deserves to be seen.
DiCillo’s dilemma, as is every artist’s, remains just that: finding a way to get his work in front of his intended audience.
I don’t think I’ve come across a single better track from swinging 60’s France than “Fallait pas écraser la queue du chatâ€Â by CLOTHILDE, a beautiful, complex, uplifting baroque pop masterpiece. I heard it being played at a French bakery last year and I actually asked for the manager to compliment him on his excellent choice in customer ambiance-setting. CLOTHILDE released a mere two EPs, but as I’m coming to find out, several of her eight wonderful songs (they’re ALL fantastic) were re-sung in different languages for other European markets. Such is the case for “Fallait pas écraser la queue du chatâ€Â, which I’m posting for you here in its original form and again as “Sopresa!â€Â, a Spanish-language version of the same tune, with a quicker fade-out toward the end. You judge which is the sexier language– I know who I’m voting for. If you’re like me the first time I heard this song, you’ll be playing it five or six times straight, telling everyone you know about Clothilde, carving her name in your arm, stalking her on the Internet, and naming your firstborn son after her. Thanks again to JA for turning me onto her way back then.
The desire to blog about the cruise has been replaced by the NEED to post my thoughts on this show. Why don’t you watch some YouTube?
Now, I can’t honestly say that Slacker Cats is funny or notably clever, but I watched it. A full hour. Perhaps I was a tad amazed at the crude nature of the show, it being on ABC Family and all (with Wal-Mart spots). It’s Heathcliff (the cartoon), South Park, and Ordinary People (there was a funeral scene) all rolled into one!!
You know, it had moments. I hope it succeeds (it won’t). I’m behind anything cat-related. Most dogs are pests.
Nearly three years ago the first official PRIMITIVE CALCULATORS CD came out, packed with a crateful of lost extras (live tracks, home recordings) that in many ways outshone their officially-released stuff. I love it when that happens. Here’s a meta-meta-meta post, one that references both a 4/20/05 post I did on the band, and then a 1/23/04 post I did as well:
“…Taking the lazy man’s approach to review-writing this time in order to herald the release of the official PRIMITIVE CALCULATORS CD. A year+ ago I reviewed a CD-R that had their live album + debut 45 on it — this one takes out the 45, but adds an incredible batch of unreleased bonus tracks that are leagues better than their official stuff. In particular, a piercing indutrio-punker called “Glitter Kids” from 1979 rules the roost here, & sounds like everything you wished THE SCREAMERS had been, with a cranked-up metronome keeping time over scattershot guitars and screeching keyboard blips. Moreover, there’s this hot, metallic, shards-of-sound number called “Casualty Ward” (1977!!) that approximates the URINALS’ “U” and SPK’s “Mekano” in barely over a minute. You’ll flip. Here’s what I said last year about the live album:
“….Among the lost artifacts of the late 1970s Australian underground that are now beginning to surface are recordings from Sydney’s PRIMITIVE CALCULATORS, a polyrhythm- and experimentation-heavy synth-attack outfit who probably tilted closer to their outré countrymen SPK and the SLUGFUCKERS than to similar combos in the UK and US. After being wowed by their berserk “Pumping Ugly Muscleâ€Â on the Australian post-punk CD “Can’t Stop Itâ€Â, I then had the fortune to become privy to a CD-R containing their debut 45 from 1979, “I Can’t Stop It / Do That Danceâ€Â, as well as tracks from their 1979 live album (recorded supporting the BOYS NEXT DOOR, aka the nascent BIRTHDAY PARTY). The whole package is decidedly not for the faint of ear; there are not a few moments where the band’s funky, African-influenced slop-rock breaks down into a maelstrom of raw electronic chaos and pure gibbering idiocy. And yet it’s not so messy that you couldn’t stack it next to New York’s leading “no waveâ€Â of the day and have it compare quite favorably. A little bravery, patience, and love of well-crafted, ultra-savage electronics will go a long way here. Aficionados of early industrial racket, the aforementioned no wave, or those still bitter over what PiL should have been should check out the Calculators….”
That sentiment has now been multiplied by the discovery of these lost tracks, with the aforementioned caveat and strong warning of bravery & patience. The live album is still not an easy nor consistently pleasurable listen, but the outstanding bonus crap certainly makes up for it…..â€Â
Or, of course, what you call the dog days. Supposedly ruled by Sirius, the dog star, which is strong in the sky at this time of year. But whatever you call them, they’re days not exactly filled with excitement around here. Nervous tension, yes, but excitement? Nope.
Still, one has to do this and that, and so here are three extremely silly things I noticed in recent peregrenations around hip! edgy! Berlin.
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Like that huge poster on the building they’re renovating on Rosenthaler Platz, which gets sold to one advertiser or another for a while. Current occupant is Coca-Cola, and the part of the ad I see, doubtless having something to do with some download scheme or another (I think they’ve got something going with iTunes, actually), and it screams “Music on the Coke Side of Life!”
You can tell this is an ad aimed at younger folks, of course. The rest of us who lived through the ’70s have had quite enough of music on the coke side of life. Every time I pass that thing I think “What, do you want to chain me to a chair and make me listen to David Crosby albums?”
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Rosenthaler Platz, the derelict building across from the Coke billboard, which once housed a Beate Uhse and then part of Sony’s ill-considered street-art cooptation, sprouted some ghostly inhabitants a few weeks back:
But I guess they wanted privacy, because the last time I walked past, the place looked like this:
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One of my weirder international moments came one night in the ’80s in London, as some friends and I were passing through Soho, and they — all British — stopped and pointed. “Wow, look at that!” I saw a very well preserved ’52 Mercury. “Cool car,” I said, and they all gave me a weird look. “It had Texas number plates!” someone said. Well, I’d just come from Texas the night before, so that didn’t even register: most all the cars in Texas have Texas license plates.
Still, it was a valuable lesson in paying attention to where you are, which is why I did a double-take while waiting for the light yesterday at Friedrichstr. and Unter den Linden. A genuine Ford Crown Victoria with New York Police Department markings, a visibar on top, and what looked, in the seconds it took to turn the corner, like two of NYPD’s finest in the front seat.
Turns out it lives here and you can rent it for special occasions. Like, I dunno, arresting your ex or something.
Not that they have a monopoly on this. There’s a more generic, Blues-Brothers-y, black-and-white for rent at Sage Cars, who have a lot on Brunnenstr. I pass often. They’ve also got a yellow Checker cab, which brings back memories of the Checker Metropolitan I once had. But that’s another post.
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Advertising in this country has always made me a little crazy, but then, it’s not aimed at me. That’s been driven home by the creepiest ad campaign I’ve seen in a while, BVG’s “Augenblicke” posters. As you can see from the website, it’s sort of a lonely-hearts thing, where you submit the story and they illustrate it. The artist is so bad that the posters attract attention to themselves, actually, so while whether he/she’s capable of actually rendering a human visage so someone would recognize it is questionable, it might (shudder) accidentally work.
Ah, well, it’s better to look out the window anyway, right?
One of the great under-the-floorboard artifacts of the late 70s flowering of UK bedroom post-punk is this four-song EP from Camden’s STEPPING TALK. Low-key and aimless to a fault, it illustrates perfectly that special rainy, damp, cold leftist/labour D.I.Y. sound that encapsulates barely-pre-Thatcher Britain in 1979. As I understand it, the band were drinking pals with the early SCRITTI POLITTI, with whom they share that shambling, agitprop-infused approach. The “Alice in Sunderlandâ€Â EP employed the two-concurrent vocals trick popular at the time, where one guy sings and a girl tells a totally unrelated story on top of him. Weird horns float in, out & around a thumping but lackadaisically-played bass. The excellent “Common Problemsâ€Â sounds as if the band, attempting but failing to play in unison for most of the song, had a piece of carpet pulled from under them midway through & scrambled to keep playing in spite of it. The form and construction of these little set pieces owe something to jazz, but more likely there were a very deliberate attempt to pull off something jazz-like by playing particular instruments in sequences exactly backward of what one would expect from the rock music of the day. The instrumental “John’s Turtlesâ€Â is the most experimental of the bunch, and sounds like a strange & frightening tribute to some peculiar British-created white man’s dub. It’s a really cool period piece from an era in which it seemed like 20 of these warped, provincial slices of indie vinyl came out every week in the UK and US.
Yesterday, Tom DiCillo kindly reviewed my review of his terrific new film Delirious. Check out “gracias” in the Comments section.
In doing so, he inadvertently addressed a question I raise again and again in my book: beyond providing a guide for the consumer, does criticism in any way serve the artist?
DiCillo’s response echoes what Jackson Browne told me about Paul Nelson’s writing: “it made me feel that I was being received, that I was being heard, by people who really got it.”
My first cruise post. Many more will follow. Get ready to BUST A GUT!!! We’ve dove some possible bad things. I will entertain you (my readers) with anecdotes that will destroy your minds!!!! Stay tuned!!!
Hello yeah, it’s been awhile. I’d like to turn you onto an extant combo from the UK called THE BRISTOLS. Sure, I’d heard of them as well and always figured they were one of many HEADCOATS knockoffs playing marginal if catchy garage rock. (I believed this beause a Headcoat, one Bruce Brand, was also a Bristol). It was only when I was turned onto lead singer Fabienne Delsol’s excellent solo spy-girl surfbeat record from this past year, “No Time For Sorrows” that I decided to dig further, and hot dog, this is probably my favorite no-longer-new band of the hour. Here, don’t let me tell you about them, let’s hear what their label has to say:
They released two full length albums on Damaged Goods and three singles.They released their first single on Hangman’s Daughter in 1994 followed by a split single with Japans Thee Michelle Gun Elephant a year later on Vinyl Japan. Then they released two singles and albums on Damaged Goods before calling it a day in 2003.
After the split Fabienne Delsol has gone solo and released one album so far, ‘No Time For Sorrows’ (produced by Liam Watson at Toe Rag) and is currently working on her follow up due for release in 2007.
THE BRISTOLS’ music is exuberant, simple as hell, fuzzed-out and stripped-down girl pop, the kind that makes a ye ye fan like myself swoon. Check out these two killers from their back catalog, and then order yourself up the new compilation of their stuff that recently came out.
