Beulah, "If We Can Land a Man on the Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart" (1999)

(listen)

I was briefly infatuated at about the turn of the century by Beulah, a San Francisco-based band that specialized in pop tunesmithery, swimming the waters of a nearly twee alt/indie sound. They had some kind of connection to Olivia Tremor Control and the Apples in Stereo and some others. I was drawn to this song in the first place for its silly, wordy title, which I found on a CMJ anthology. It's not surprising that more than a decade on this would find a place in the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (which I loved, for those keeping score at home). For better or worse, I have found Beulah to be a bit of an acquired taste, reason for suspicion as always. When I hear this song again after a while my first reaction is surprise and concern at how unfocused and dithering and precious it seems, and then I wonder if I really like it after all. But listening more rewards the effort. If I persevere and make a habit of it I find all kinds of clever surprises and pleasing little musical/production stunts disclosing themselves as it insinuates itself. It roams at will through musical ambience, like the backgrounds of running scenes in cartoons, rotating rapidly from one to the next, picking up the tempo and building out the arrangement with tiny flourishes: sawing fiddle, wukka-wukka guitar, French horn, feints at power chords (it's guitar-driven after all), a rinky-dinky tinkly piano hamming it up, and that clarion vocal of Miles Kurosky, who sounds long steeped in all the white-boyish traditions from Paul McCartney to Pete Ham to Ira Kaplan. Suddenly it's the loveliest thing you ever heard.

Last Tango in Paris (1972)

#46: Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)

I told Phil and Steven I wouldn't be mentioning Pauline Kael, but it's almost impossible to talk about Last Tango in Paris without acknowledging her larger-than-life review, which hit papers weeks before the film arrived on screens—as I recall, with an already infrequent X rating. "This must be the most powerfully erotic movie ever made," she declared, arguing it has "altered the face of an art form." The first time I saw it, barely of age, it sailed over my head and I came away thinking it was much ado about nothing, except for the Gato Barbieri soundtrack, which I purchased immediately and played constantly. Somehow, years later, I got talked into seeing it again and that time it blew me down. And that has pretty much been the pattern since. I hate it and I love it. I love it and I hate it.

There are a lot of things to call Last Tango—"maddening" and "pretentious" come quickly to mind—but I really don't think one of them is "erotic" (though Kael certainly got its ambitions right). The depictions of sex are copious and elaborate, but they're not intended to be appealing, and they aren't. Instead, it's the strange, churning chemistry drawing the two central characters into one another's orbits that counts most—Marlon Brando's middle-aged lost man so emotionally splayed it is like viewing a psychic X-ray, and Maria Schneider's youthful woman such an objectified cipher it's easy to lose track of her (but don't, in the long run she's the more interesting character). Their headlong affair is the mystery at the center of this. Many scenes are built around Brando's improvs, many of which misfire. But when they're good, as in a scene that involves the viewing of a dead body, they are unforgettable.

And I Don't Want to Live This Life (1983)

Deborah Spungen's memoir of the 20 years or so that her daughter Nancy walked this planet remains engaging, compulsively readable, fascinating, funny, and wrenching. Nancy, who you will recall was found murdered in New York's Chelsea Hotel in October 1978, likely at the hand of her boyfriend Sid Vicious, existed somewhere along the spectrum between problem child and demon seed, at least according to Deborah, and personally I don't see any cause to doubt the veracity of that. I know others have questioned her motives here, saying she is trying to make the case that it wasn't her fault. But if even a quarter of what she reports is true—and again, I see no reason to doubt it—I don't know how anyone else could have coped with it any better. Sometimes some kids are not manageable. Nancy came out of the womb a troubled child, with health complications after a difficult birth, and all her life was a handful. Did I say "a handful"? That doesn't come close. She threw tantrums of titanic proportions, destroyed her parents' belongings before she was 10, was finished with public school when she was 11. It's a startling and believable fleshing out of the background of the young woman we call came to know briefly in the late '70s, and it really rings true to me. It's a harrowing story, but Deborah skillfully makes it entertaining, gripping, and moving. There's a great chapter that details a visit when Nancy brought home Sid to meet her parents. Deborah, who believes Sid murdered her daughter, and is clearly revolted by him, nonetheless outlines the complexity of her feelings for him, acknowledging the connection they shared in both loving Nancy, helplessly. The title of the book comes from a poem Sid wrote after Nancy's death and shared in a letter to Deborah. There are also endless fascinating details about Nancy, such as the origins of her interest in music, the original cast recording of the score for Hair, which she played so much they needed to buy her a second copy. It's a sad story, and a long one too, even given how young she died. Deborah Spungen's memoir is a great story well told.

In case it's not at the library.

Still Crazy After All These Years (1975)

I confuse the Paul Simon who appears on this album with the Paul Simon who appeared in Annie Hall, the self-assured and eternally deeply relaxed savant so plainly in love with his own image in the mirror, Narcissus style. I'm not sure Paul Simon's third album in approximately as many years following the demise of Simon & Garfunkel ever adds up to more than the sum of its pieces, even if I know and honesty requires me to acknowledge that for sure it has some really sweet pieces, starting with the reunion single with Garfunkel, "My Little Town." It's another one of those albums I used to like a good deal more than I do now—maybe there's a mood I need to get myself into to get the most out of these Paul Simon solos. Call it "wistful for the '70s" and it doesn't come over me that often, certainly not on command. Things you need to know: This remains a slick production all through with strings and backing vocals and horns busting in as the feeling dictates. Of course, we could all do a lot less with the overweening and ultimately toxic smug of "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover." Yeah, hop on the bus, Gus—it belongs in a time capsule for the era but it doesn't mean we ever have to like it (in spite of, yes I admit even this, the coy mannerisms that make it occasionally charming). My favorite now is "Gone at Last" because I love the way Phoebe Snow's voice comes welling out of the mix and takes possession of it, and she sounds so good. Approximately at her very peak here, she sounds it every bit. One thing you can say about Paul Simon is that he is always quick to identify talent (particularly when traveling overseas, though there's not so much of that here)—for better or worse, that includes recognizing his own, at such tiresome length and with all the preening ego gestures that inevitably follow. Do I recommend this to anyone born after the year of its release or who has somehow perhaps never heard any of it? That's a harder question. I have a feeling this could well be a case of "you had to be there."

The White Ribbon (2009)

Das weiße Band: Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte, Germany/Austria/France/Italy, 144 minutes
Director/writer: Michael Haneke
Photography: Christian Berger
Editor: Monika Willi
Cast: Christian Friedel, Ernst Jacobi, Leonie Benesch, Ulrich Tukur, Ursina Lardi, Fion Mutert, Burghart Klaußner, Steffi Kühnert, Maria-Victoria, Leonard Proxauf, Josef Bierbichler, Gabriela Maria Schmeide, Janina Fautz, Enno Trebs, Theo Trebs, Rainer Bock, Roxane Duran, Susanne Lothar

It's not so surprising that veteran director and writer Michael Haneke has erected a scene and setting for The White Ribbon that is rich with allusion and evocative suggestion. That's pretty much business as usual for him, hefting oversize significance out of the quotidian with a surprising and deceptive lack of effort, as seen in such earlier pictures as Funny Games, The Piano Teacher, or especially Cache. What's surprising is where he appears inclined to take it here, spinning a story that is equal parts Village of the Damned and the whole of Ingmar Bergman's oeuvre, a stark, spooky, demon-seed tale, never settling into anything certain, forcing us instead to take the pieces and attempt to put them together ourselves into anything larger.

In a small farming village in Germany shortly before World War I something is terribly wrong. The doctor suffers an accident when the horse he is riding takes a fall as the result of tripping on a wire strung between two posts of a gate. A worker's wife dies in accident; her death leads to her family's ruin. The baron's son is kidnapped and brutally caned and left hanging upside down with his pants at his ankles. A barn burns to the ground. These events are oppressively sinister, individually and taken together. They seem slightly more than accidents, but no one happens to know any such monsters so no one has any idea who to blame. The fragile emotional ecosystem of the villagers, among their various classes and interrelations, begins to rot under the suspicion.

Echo & the Bunnymen, "Rescue" (1980)

(listen)

There may or may not be a story about a beatbox behind the odd name of this late-'70s Liverpool postpunk outfit but it was certainly a name that was good at winning them attention. On the basis of it alone, an old friend of mine was all over the early singles—"Rescue" was their second—and then the Crocodiles album. I went along for the ride and became a fan myself. Singer Ian McCullough was a bit of a student of Jim Morrison and the band drew on various arch '60s garage-band gestures in service of mostly New Wave aesthetics; and they were all pretty much willing to let things fly out as they would. "Rescue" works like the best of their stuff, with spooky overtones and bent-over rhythms and moments of stark if incoherent drama; ladled from a crock two and three minutes at a time it sounds and feels like it has been simmering on the fire for hours. Sometimes I think I might like another song from the album a little more, "Villiers Terrace" maybe, or "The Pictures on My Wall," but the good news and the bad is that there's a sameyness to much of what Echo & the Bunnymen were about. They had a sound. They made great albums (Porcupine is my favorite), but essentially each arrives with its own undifferentiated blobbiness, a pleasurable wallow for a week or two at a time. But "Rescue" is not any less transcendent in its way than Fontella Bass's own classic plea for one—it truly remains the best of early Echo & the Bunnymen, lifting with a sing-songy style, a deceptively offbeat rhythm, and a spare, noisy arrangement, taking one head-first into the kind of places only found otherwise in carnival fun houses, and you can sing along with the chorus too. Or chant, if you prefer.

Another Woman (1988)

#47: Another Woman (Woody Allen, 1988)

I gave up on Woody Allen about 10 years ago, finally willing to admit, every time I sat down in the dark of a theater and the trailers ended and the clarinet music started and that same old white font on that same old black screen appeared, that I was dying just a little. I don't think I could possibly articulate the terms of his appeal any better than the second half of the Andrew O'Hehir piece from 1998 that I'm linking to below. However shabbily and however self-involved he is in going about it, Woody Allen even still represents a sensibility (arguably middlebrow, arguably overprivileged) that prizes wit, intelligence, and all their cultural standard-bearers above nearly everything else, a value that seems perfectly valid to me.

I can't speak well to the compulsion I had to see Another Woman again and again, but I'm willing to argue it's the best of his "serious" movies, though it rarely gets its due. Preoccupied and enamored and all decked out with 20th century signifiers of modernism—Brecht and Klimt and Rilke and Satie and above all Chekhov—the screenplay about a politely failing marriage moves with astonishing confidence from straightforward narrative into flashbacks and fantasies and back again, looping in and around and back across time, practically tying itself in knots, but always with preternatural clarity and textured by production design elements straight out of a theatrical staging. It's all in the service of a somewhat trite theme—getting in touch with one's feelings, probably the appeal for me if I'm going to be honest about it—but that doesn't stop the cast from hammering it to the ceiling. Gena Rowlands is tremendous, as she always is, and Ian Holm, Gene Hackman, and Mia Farrow are more than adequate too. Cinematographer Sven Nykvist paints the picture in an impossibly warm glow. Maybe best of all, at this point in things? No aging Woody Allen onscreen to clutter up the proceedings. 

"I realize that you've been hurt, and if I've done anything wrong I am sorry. Forgive me. I accept your condemnation."

Andrew O'Hehir, "Yucky Woody/How Woody Became My Dad"

Phil #47: Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963) (scroll down)
Steven #47: My Family/Mi Familia (Gregory Nava, 1995)

Mystery Train (1975)

It had actually been a good long time since I looked at this when I brought it along with me recently on a cross-country train trip (ha ha, get it?), where I was really struck—chagrined, even—by what a profound influence it has had on me (and dozens if not hundreds of other music journalists, professional and wannabe alike). That whole stream-of-consciousness game of associations around favored artists and American cultural landmarks, taking a freewheeling intuitive style into one's points, along with some tendency to overstate the personal impact for effect, has all been absorbed almost entirely by me, for better or worse, not to mention various highly specific points of pungent observation, such as the one about Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Phillips and pentecostal religion and rock 'n' roll and heaven and hell and salvation. They are Greil Marcus's ideas, not mine. I have just chosen to live in that world. Over the years the artists he focuses on and lionizes here in his first outing have come to seem more eccentric than fundamentally central. Indeed, I think it would be easy enough to pick and choose one's own favorites and make the cases for their various places in the cultural mainstream at large. For myself alone, I can think of Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, the Velvet Underground, Jonathan Richman, Iggy Pop, and Big Star off the top of my head. There's a place for Brits too, of course—the Beatles and Stones, David Bowie, Ray Davies, Mott the Hoople, the Pet Shop Boys. After all this time it looks like the only real naturals that Marcus picked were Robert Johnson and Elvis Presley. Harmonica Frank, the Band, Sly Stone, and Randy Newman are variously significant but second-tier or even more minor. It's a good thing that with the Elvis piece Marcus knocks the ball not just out of the park but out of the entire county in which the stadium sits, wrapping his arms as thoroughly around basically one album, The Sun Sessions, as perhaps anyone has done anywhere. All the warm-up exercises that precede it are rewarded, in the "Presliad"; this enables Marcus to roam even more freely and wantonly among his personal whims. One derives a particularly pleasurable sensation from the extensive "Notes and Discographies," an appendix but fully a third of my tome, of someone thriving and relishing the opportunity to read books and play music and turn ideas around in his head all day. That's when it's most fun. Marcus was the first and in many ways isolated yet certainly among the best at making his own choices and going for it. Perhaps most profoundly and thrilling, Marcus points to an electrifying way here to think about these things, tying together Moby-Dick and The Pilgrim's Progress and Ralph Waldo Emerson and the invention of a nation and all this rock 'n' roll racket, and he communicates his passion and the excitement of making the connections with almost irresistible infectiousness. Some of his most basic assumptions, made in his late 20s when he wrote the first edition of this book (I am writing from the edition I own, the 2nd, though Mystery Train, as of 2008, is now in its 5th), seem to me highly suspect, most notably perhaps that commonalities of taste create genuine community. It is actually my experience that paradoxically the opposite is true—we may all love Yo La Tengo at the show, say, but we do not necessarily love one another, even in the moment. Those I groove with side by side are not necessarily my friends—and conversely, many of the most important people in my life have always had questionable taste when it comes to things like music and movies and art. But this and other complaints are nits on the face of the accomplishment here. Greil Marcus has done some great work and in many ways the best of it starts right here.

In case it's not at the library.

Paul Simon (1972)

I don't like this as much as I once did, but it's still pretty good. There has always been something of the stink of guilty pleasure about Paul Simon for me, which extends backwards into Simon & Garfunkel as well, although that turns out to be an act I have found over the years that is actually quite well-regarded in various surprising quarters. The cultural imperialism shtick for which Paul Simon is known nowadays was there from the first seconds of this (nearly) first solo album from way back in 1972. "Mother and Child Reunion" is reggae all cleaned up and decked out for the Los Angeles record producers' ball. Simon gets cute by claiming the lyrics are based on satori-like inspirations of a chicken-and-egg dish he was served in a Chinese restaurant. Be that as it may, the song, and eventually the whole album, is a seductive ambush, with a neat and tidy internal drive like a motor, and melodies that make you feel good just to hear and sing with. I think, in fact, that might be ultimately Paul Simon's most redeeming feature, forever the youth camp counselor who pulls out his acoustic guitar on the overnights and gets everybody singing crazy and silly with him. Paul Simon writes good songs, there I said it, and damn the smug. Paul Simon proceeds mostly by stealth and soft footsteps, recorded low and with the instrumentation there for the inflections as much as anything. It gets reasonably lively at the beginning of each vinyl side—the aforementioned "Mother and Child Reunion" and "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard"—but then falls directly into lulls of mood. That mood has appealed to me quite a bit in a few intense periods—there have been times when turning to this album on a daily basis has felt like turning on the power. There's something at once so composed and so coiled and yet so tentative about it all, musical to its bones with the friendly melodies and intriguing arrangements and nice blues touches, short and to the point at under 35 minutes yet indulgent with self-pity, and capable of maintaining a mood that endures past the playing time and insidiously calls you back to itself once again. Thus, perhaps, a bit narrow. But perfect for those times one finds oneself fitting snug into the confines of the frame.

The 400 Blows (1959)

Les quatre cents coups, France, 99 minutes
Director: Francois Truffaut
Writers: Francois Truffaut, Marcel Moussy
Photography: Henri Decae
Music: Jean Constantin
Editor: Marie-Josephe Yoyotte
Cast: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Claire Maurier, Albert Remy, Guy Decomble, Georges Flament, Patrick Auffay, Daniel Couturier

Back when there was such a thing as Tower Records, I was wont to use Christmas week as a time to go gather up my disappointing purchases of the previous year and haul them into outlets of the record store chain to exchange as unwanted gifts, in which case, because of the holiday spirit upon the air, I could take away products of equal value. A pretty good deal all round for all of us, I thought. One year the booty included a VHS copy of The 400 Blows, which I had acquired via some movie club deal conducted through the mails—the retail value scanned in at $80! I was so excited. I roamed the aisles wantonly gobbling up titles in a kind of drunken daze from my windfall.

I must have got four or five replacement movies out of that single copy of The 400 Blows, but you know what I'm going to say next. In the fullness of time I have come to realize that the lot of them together couldn't possibly be worth this sturdy, brief, delicate landmark of French New Wave cinema. When it came to Francois Truffaut for me it always seemed to be Jules and Jim, over and over, until I hate to think how many times I've seen it, but not The 400 Blows. And the truth is that The 400 Blows was a bit lost on me the first time—it seemed almost simplistic, quite evidently low-budget, stripped to bare bones and stark tones, lyrical yet disconcertingly homely too, with an odd, sudden ending. It didn't seem to amount to much. But if that is your first experience too I urge you to look again. Give The 400 Blows one more chance.