Repercussion (1982)

So back when we used to sit around asking questions like this, we asked each other which of the first two dB's album was better. A certain number of stalwarts, and almost everybody new to the band, stumped for the debut, but a lot of people including me eventually came to favor Repercussion most. It's all still a bit cold, but more experienced and hence more thoughtful and interesting. Most of the songs still feel ultimately worked out inside someone's head, but they were starting to take chances, some of them coming off very nicely: the horns on "Living a Lie," for example, a traditional enough soul-style outfit courtesy Graham Parker's Rumour, but with virtually all hint of the blues removed (or ultra-refined at best), which somehow gives it a vaguely unnerving feel of stepping gingerly through worrisome places. It's all at once familiar and strange, with a formal tension that effectively endures even as one comes to know it. Another example: all the various levels and depths of the production in "Ask for Jill," which includes the usual sparkling harmonies, various phase-shiftings and echoes, and a brief one-sided phone conversation. Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey are caught here finding their voices in parallel, and it's exciting to hear their moments captured with such clarity. There's Holsapple spinning gold out of self-pity on "We Were Happy There"—an early influence on Matthew Sweet among its many virtues, and more of that to come. An early version of his greatest hit, "Amplifier," is here too (more trouble with women: "An amplifier's just wood and wire / And wire and wood don't do any good / When your heart is blazing like a wildfire / And all you got to show for it's an amplifier"). By the same token "Happenstance" is one of Stamey's finest, with terrific singalong moments, even as it goes quickly and restlessly through its motions, from a lonesome turn with crickets to brisk drum fills and all its on-the-button harmonies. And there's evidence the collaboration was going to be fruitful too, as on "Storm Warning" or "Neverland," two Holsapple songs all decked out in Stamey finery. They are also two of the best songs here, cohesive and potent, jettisoning a too-usual bent toward the tentative. If it was a harbinger of what was to come, and it wasn't, it looked like there was going to be a lot to look forward to in coming years.

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

USA, 88 minutes
Directors: Orson Welles, Fred Fleck, Robert Wise
Writers: Booth Tarkington, Orson Welles, Jack Moss, Joseph Cotten
Photography: Stanley Cortez, Jack MacKenzie, Orson Welles
Music: Bernard Herrmann, Roy Webb
Editors: Robert Wise, Jack Moss, Mark Robson
Cast: Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Agnes Moorhead, Tim Holt, Anne Baxter, Ray Collins, Richard Bennett, Erskine Sanford, Donald Dillaway, Orson Welles

I found myself surprisingly put in mind of F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby the last time I looked at The Magnificent Ambersons. It's not just the similar title constructions—in the case of Ambersons the adjective appears mostly offered with at least irony, if not sarcasm, unlike the intermeshed and more complex layers of meaning intended for Gatsby. The Magnificent Ambersons is based on Booth Tarkington, of course, so as with not just Gatsby but also Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, and many others it also consorts in a certain ideal of the turn-of-the-20th-century Midwestern American idyll, rendered more caustically by H.L. Mencken as the "booboisie." I also thought the lovely overboiled language of Welles's voiceover narration occasionally strayed into Fitzgeraldian realms. And of course there's a number of incidental touch-points in their parallel stories of lifelong love for a woman cruelly denied.

But the paradox is that whereas The Great Gatsby may arguably be a very nearly perfect work of art, The Magnificent Ambersons is famously only the smoking hulk of whatever it might have been. It's known at least as much for being the movie "they took away" from Welles and wrecked as anything else. Here's what Wikipedia has on what happened and specifically what was lost. Look at the movie, read it, and weep. That's how things work around here apparently. RKO execs slashed away some 40 minutes of footage from Welles's early cut and reshot the ending. They monkeyed with everything—the story, the music, the photography. They say a copy of that early cut was shipped to Welles in Brazil, where he was already at work on his next project, but it has since never turned up. The cut footage moldered for a time in a vault but eventually was destroyed to make room for more important things to store there, perhaps Oscars®.

Suburbs, "Chemistry Set" (1978)

(listen)

I think the Suburbs are now not so known outside of the Twin Cities of Minnesota. They flared up in the early '80s as a lively DOR act (dance-oriented rock, we were calling it), earned the distinction of a couple of Christgau reviews (an A- and a B-), and tried to find a way to wallow into the mainstream the weird pastiche that animated them of a supper-club Bryan Ferry (in the person of dapper pianist and tux-wearer Chan Poling) welded at the hip to a streaming-sweat Iggy Pop (in the person of Blaine John "Beej" Chaney, who often appeared in need of diapering). Eventually they were lost in the mid-'80s hoopla of Prince, the Replacements, and all that. Interestingly (or not) the Suburbs hailed from the suburbs where I grew up, in and around Hopkins and Minnetonka, west of Minneapolis. I went to high school with guitarist Bruce Allen (who died in 2009) and bassist Michael Halliday. Chan and Beej and I think drummer Hugo Klaers went to high school in another school district an easy bike ride from where I grew up. The nine-song 7-inch EP that climaxes with "Chemistry Set," The Suburbs, was the first-ever release by the indie label Twin/Tone in 1978. It was the band's showstopper for a long time, primitive, bone-headed, roaring simplicity, in all of 1:11. "I'm into chemistry and that's about it" is the lyric. Repeat as directed. Lazy blogger takes the easy way out of making and posting a YouTube of the song, found now on an excellent 2003 compilation, Chemistry Set, along with more of their greats, surprisingly many of which actually still are great (and some of which we will be getting to by and by). Instead, this time, I found a video from their performance at the Minneapolis M-80 festival in September 1979. Two points: 1) the lyric as noted above (it's not always intelligible in this version), and 2) ... I was there.

Rachel Getting Married (2008)

#38: Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme, 2008)

In my entire list, this may be the one title of which I am least confident, simply because it's the most recent. It's filmed self-consciously much like a documentary, heavy on the handheld camera and the strange jerks and sweeps of a restless pan-and-zoom—although the framing is often deliberate and surprising and perfect. It also has the feel of an Altman picture, with characters and overlapping dialogue cascading and swirling in and out of a lurching procession of scenes, until sometimes it seems the only way to cope is simply to give in to the sensory overload and let the threads pull you as they will.

Rachel Getting Married goes directly to the source of most modern dysfunctional family movies, 1980's Ordinary People, and liberally borrows basic elements: the upper-middle-class family, the Cold Mother (here done to a tee by Debra Winger), the death of a child/sibling in the past, and the general ineptitude of all in communicating openly with one another. Anne Hathaway's performance, which is functionally the center and point of the picture, occasionally feels studied but is indeed impressive. For the most part she simply disappears into the cringe-inducing Kym, the troubled self-centered sister who seems bent on spending her life in a revolving door between drugs, jail, and rehab. It's probably a little overwritten, but I think overall it's one of the most believable renditions of 12-step experience I've seen yet.

No Country for Old Men (2005)

For better or worse, I saw the movie first, so it's hard to get some things out of my head, such as Javier Bordem's haircut. Book and movie are two different things, but both are basically worthy, I think (on first impressions), and with a good deal of overlap. At first it read to me much like a kind of Elmore Leonard novel transposed to West Texas/Texas desert, and certainly that's how the movie plays. But McCarthy has a good deal more going on, particularly with the greater focus on Sheriff Bell. His interior monologues are the centerpiece of the book and I'm not sure how much they made it into the movie at all. Still, Anton Chigurh is so monumentally evil that he vies for attention with (and/or distracts from) that. As McCarthy Satan analogues go, I think I still prefer Judge Holden. They are both self-consciously superhuman, and while I like the spooky effect (such as Chigurh's preferred mode of homicide) I'm not sure how much I buy it. More convincing to me on the case that evil is abroad on the land, and it's winning, are those ruminations by Sheriff Bell, for example on the well-known survey of school problems then and now (keeping in mind that "now" in this novel is quite deliberately 1980), e.g., chewing gum vs. rape, which closes on this passage, reporting a discussion with a woman he and his wife meet at a conference: "She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: I dont like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I don't think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. The way I see it goin I dont have much doubt but what she'll be able to have an abortion. I'm goin to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she'll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation." On some level, I know—snap!—that's just too easy. But on some level I know I don't have much response to it either, even as one who favors abortion and euthanasia as lesser evils. Similarly, the Chigurh character seems too easy as a monster. At the same time McCarthy, via Sheriff Bell, understands the more profound complexity here as well, namely why drugs are such a powerful draw (and taboo), which is the root of all this evil drug trafficking in the first place. The money is there simply because the appeal of the drugs is there first. The money and the violence and all of it.

In case it's not at the library.

Stands for Decibels (1981)

There never was much about the dB's in the way of commercial appeal, but somehow they bore the mantle of a good deal of cachet at one point—does anyone else remember "Hoboken pop" and its various figures, such as the Bongos or the Individuals?—enough so that this became, for a vanishingly short period, an album to be prized and envied, another shiny object spun out of New York New Wave. Indeed there is something surprisingly self-contained and almost calculated about the project, the formal manner in which the band appeared to have chosen to work with the three-minute pop song, which they pushed and pulled on in any number of interesting and suggestive directions. The collaboration was among a quartet of Winston-Salem natives/New York transplants. Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey ultimately owned most of the responsibilities for the songwriting, together and individually. I have to say it feels a bit of an odd matchup now, with Holsapple likely supplying most of the hooks and melodies and Stamey most of the kinds of things that made the music unusual and, sometimes, most interesting. Closer to Bowie and Eno than Lennon and McCartney, but maybe closest of all to figures lurking in Stamey's background, Alex Chilton and Chris Bell, or Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, maybe even Lou Reed and John Cale—formal collaborations within which one can't help noticing a great divide and no little tension between the principals, even if it's unconscious. A lot of the essays at The Pop Song served up here in the dB's debut communicate a sense of having been approached so cerebrally as to carry with them a vaguely unpleasant whiff of suffocation even as the songs go merrily unspooling by. I think the hope was that the most interesting and promising aspects of it would develop. A year or two later a Beatles impersonator from Detroit, Marshall Crenshaw, would sail effortlessly beyond anything in the way of pop music we ever got from Holsapple and Stamey—it became clear they were trying too hard. There were still numerous reasons to be encouraged. They had an obvious, instinctive respect for the capabilities of a studio—the sound is bracingly clean, a glittering surface across which skid all manner of audio: adenoidal adolescent yelping, fine chording, keyboard accents, patches of atmospheric space defined within a space that generously encloses all of it with room to spare. It sounds full of promise. If there was no reason to expect them to be great, there was also no reason to think they wouldn't be.

The Squid and the Whale (2005)

USA, 81 minutes
Director/writer: Noah Baumbach
Photography: Robert D. Yeoman
Music: Britta Phillips, Dean Wareham, Pink Floyd
Editor: Tim Streeto
Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Owen Kline, Anna Paquin, Halley Feiffer, William Baldwin

I'm not entirely sure where to start with Noah Baumbach's breakthrough picture—it's fair to call it his breakthrough picture, isn't it? Anyway, the coming-of-age story won a load of attention at film festivals and in various indie circles at the time, even getting an Oscar nomination for its screenplay. It's self-consciously small and personal, laced with autobiographical elements, recounting the breakdown of a mid-'80s family living in Brooklyn. They are self-styled intellectuals, with various talents for and pretensions to the New York literary life of the time.

The period detail is one of the best points, lightly but expertly touching on various academic preoccupations (and/or pretensions) I had forgotten, which surprised me even as I recognized them. Billed as a comedy, it's of course more relentlessly observational comedy of manners than barrel-of-monkeys laff fest, charting the heartbreaking attempts of its characters to connect; even just a little dignity would do. It can be heartlessly depressing, and often hard to watch.

R.E.M., "So. Central Rain (I'm Sorry)" (1984)

(listen)

From the chronicles-of-taste files: Back when I was instinctively resistant to R.E.M.—around the time of Murmur, though I did like both the original "Radio Free Europe" single and the EP that followed, "Chronic Town"—a concerned friend wanted badly to swoon as much for Reckoning as he had for Murmur, and he wanted me agreeing with him too. So he sat me down for a listening session. This "I'm Sorry" song did the trick, leaping right off the album, one of the earliest and still best examples of Stipe letting loose with that semi-professional lunge thing he does, hitting and holding and soaring on a quavery big note, purely for its emotional high, with the band churning on well beneath him on the surface of the planet. I wouldn't be surprised if real fans considered this a little suspect, lurking in realms of the dread sellout, or at least unseemly emotional openness. For a bunch of mumbling introverts so determinedly guarded and even gnomic about their intentions, as only befits alt-indie heroics naturally, when they get after a song such as this it's pretty clear what a bunch of wallowing sentimentalists with dollar signs on their eyeballs they could be. I count that as a good thing myself. This song is about one thing and one thing only: the impossibly beautiful hook swelling out of the chorus on the plaintive "I'm sorry," which necessitated the parenthetical in the title (later dropped, evidently) as this was also the first single from the album, and even managed, way back in 1984, to crack the Billboard 100, peaking at #85. I don't believe I ever heard it on the radio even once. But I heard it a lot on my copy of the album, which I picked up soon after the scene detailed above. I've come around on Murmur finally too—consider it definitely superior to Reckoning now. But it's been a crooked road. I'm sorry.

Grace of My Heart (1996)

#39: Grace of My Heart (Allison Anders, 1996)

Of all the many musicals that populate my list, this is probably the most conventional in terms of the classic Hollywood approach perfected in Singin' in the Rain (which Steven covered so well yesterday): viz., just a bunch of crazy kids trying to make it in showbiz. It takes that premise and mixes it up with what is for me a nigh irresistible wantonness trafficking in rock mythology. Grace of My Heart focuses on one of my favorite places and times in rock history, the New York Brill Building pop factories of the early '60s, telling the story of one Edna Buxton (later rechristened Denise Waverly by her manager), an heir to a Pittsburgh fortune who's dying to become a singer while everyone around her is more interested in her talents as a songwriter.

The songs here are uniformly pitch-perfect mimicry of the girl groups and bubblegum and soul acts and folk-rockers of the eras it touches on, and rooted deeply in the movements of the movie's narrative. All by themselves they are worth it. It's never showy about its inventiveness in this regard, but every last bit of music is carefully and lovingly done, and all of it sounds and feels authentic. The cast that director/screenwriter Anders assembles to deliver it is notably terrific as well: the underrated Illeana Douglas in perhaps her best role, Matt Dillon, Eric Stoltz, John Turturro, Bridget Fonda (as Shelley Fabares with a twist), and more.

Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (2005)

I became aware of this thanks to almost insistent Amazon recommendations, based I suspect on my appreciation for Joan Didion, expressed outright and in some of my shopping and buying habits. Didion has championed it via both blurbs and extensive reference to it in a piece she did on Lakewood, California, one of the early American suburbs. As author D.J.Waldie argues, Lakewood is not a typical suburb, nor particularly middle-class, as those concepts have come to be understood. It is laid out on a giant grid, rather than the tangled circles and cul-de-sacs we associate with suburbs now—"garden" suburbs, Waldie calls them. And upper-middle-class has become the ideal of middle-class now, whereas Lakewood almost by definition is working-class, intended for the most part to house workers at corporations with large defense contracts. Lakewood is made of 17,500 houses, based on a handful of variations of design, each with 1,100 square feet of floor space sitting on 100' x 50' lots. A giant shopping mall sits at the center of it, with groceries and dry-cleaning and similar businesses calculatedly distributed to be within walking distance of all. Waldie was born and raised there and still lived there at the time he wrote this book—probably still lives there now. A poet, an academic, and a city councilman, he is almost mannered in his devotion to the place: "my city" or "my suburb," he says, rarely if ever calling it by name. It's a memoir to the extent that we learn some of the facts of his life, his parents' lives and deaths most notably, and some of his own interests and preoccupations. But there's not much of that, and the general tone seems to be rather self-consciously impersonal, focusing mostly on factoids about the place, which can indeed be rather startling: the business deals that went into making it happen, information about how 17,500 houses are built and sold and occupied within a matter of a few years, issues such as access to water. It's compulsively readable, composed of 316 numbered passages—chapters, I suppose, though many are only a single sentence and none are much longer than a page. I think it probably means more to people familiar with living in Lakewood, or places like it. I grew up in a (garden) suburb myself, and didn't much connect with it, although the strange scope of it does ultimately tend toward a kind of irresistible interest.

In case it's not at the library.