"So each day I pass judgment and sentence myself to remain among the living. Condemned to live, I must then ceaselessly create reasons for living. The judgment is not so severe, nor the task so difficult, as we imagine. We have only to be open to the world and it will pour its riches at our feet." -- William Barrett
Unflagging: Rebecca Cole (keyboards, backing vocals), Carrie Brownstein (vocals, guitar), Mary Timony (vocals, guitar), and Janet Weiss (drums, backing vocals), the women behind Wild Flag.
This year belonged to women and Girls -- and no, I do not mean Adele and Lady Gaga. Actually I spent rather little time listening to those two; there seemed no need, half the country was doing it for me. Nonetheless, as I compiled my list of the best new records I heard over the last year, the bulk were made by women.
I wonder what the late rock critic Paul Nelson, the subject of what the New York Times calls a "quirky pastiche of biography and anthology" by Kevin Avery, would make of this state of affairs. To quote from the Sunday review by David Hadju:
He subscribed, both in his writing and in his life, to the macho outcast myths of noir movies and pulp fiction, and he seemed blind to the importance of the great female artists nearly absent in his writing, like Joni Mitchell and Aretha Franklin. Nelson loathed the music of Patti Smith.
Unfortunate.
Anyway. I'm a sucker for annual wrap-ups of any kind, especially where music is concerned, because there's so much content and so little consensus. In any given year, there are a handful of artists that will appear scattered throughout the best-ofs from mainstream publications such as Rolling Stone and Spin, The New York Times, the guys from Sound Opinions or Bob Boilen and His Earnest Band of Granola-Eaters at NPR, but generally they all seem to be fishing in different ponds. (As is true for most music outlets.)
Nonetheless, I've either bought, burned or heard a lot of albums from these sources, and been both pleased and disappointed.
Here's what I listened to the most this year.
1. Wild Flag. A "debut effort," but only in the most literal sense of the word. It would be closer to the truth to call this the first album by a supergroup of seasoned professionals, or at least it would if the very word "supergroup" didn't usually suggest a huge ego contest between a lot of cock-rockers, each striving to be Dominant Male Monkey. By contrast, Wild Flag, made up of the remnants of Sleater-Kinney and a handful of other bands, meld together with near seamless perfection. There's no jockeying for position; everyone does their job and everyone shines. You can tell how easy and free they feel in each other's presence. If there's a theme here, it's about how four women found a near perfect groove, because this album throbs from first track to last. When Carrie Brownstein sings "Sound is the blood between me and you" on the opening cut, "Romance," she could be addressing her bandmates or listeners or both. Their sound is simply more durable than anything I've heard this year. I haven't tired of them yet. I'm listening to them as I write this. Great band.
2. tune-yArDs, whokill. "What's THAT about? What's THAT about?" Merrill Garbus asks on this wonderfully crazy record, and to date no one's really been able to provide a good answer. Garbus, the ukelele shredder with the drum machine and the two guys on saxophone and one on bass, created a uniquely odd, off-kilter sound that draws in rock, hip-hop, scratching, tape loops, African rhythms and lots of other strange audio techniques I don't know the names for. Reminded me of Beck's Odelay in some spots, and Public Enemy in others. I got this record for free and liked it so much I bought the earlier ones, Bird-Brains and Bird Droppings, and was overjoyed to find that I had downloaded a SXSW performance as well. A record that sounds like nothing else; a barbaric yawp that is anything but barbaric to hear.
3. P.J. Harvey, Let England Shake. She's never made a bad album: just great and good ones. I'm inclined to say this is a great album, although I'm really not sure. God knows I played it enough, and while it doesn't immediately feel as revealing as one of those records that came from deep within her, the way you hear on masterpieces like Dry, Four-Track Demos or Uh Huh Her, it's still compelling after dozens of listens. She's trying to broaden her range, eschewing the personal (usually a perfectly bottomless well of inspiration) for the classically political, historical, important, dare I say classical: in this song-cycle steeped in WWI Britain and 21st Century Iraq she seems to be channeling the ghosts of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. She writes and sings eloquently of young men charging headlong into battle -- splashing in the "fountain of death" -- of war orphans, of a destroyed landscape; she makes Goya-esque sketches of dismembered bodies. In a way, it's not that much of a departure, because she's always had a natural fascination for violence and physical (and often sexual) destruction. Here, the failing, plundered woman's body seems to be England; she's watching it being destroyed from within.
4. Paul Simon, So Beautiful or So What. There's life in the old man yet, and he came back in a strong way with this record, which recalls the spiritual intensity of his earlier records. It's all about fate and faith. Songs reflect on the past and the future, and whether there's a happy ending up ahead. Is faith a delusion or a comfort? Angels, prayers, the afterlife, blessings, sacred light; there's a lot here for a secular humanist Jew to chew upon. Simon, never one for obviousness, polishes the irony down to a faint shadow. There's a tension to it. Everyone in it seems to be on the verge of something -- waiting for Christmas Day, waiting to see God, waiting perhaps for medical results. Is the title a question, or a categorization of the mysteries of living?
5. St. Vincent -- Strange Mercy Annie Clark of St. Vincent is a soft, sweet and beautiful woman you absolutely do not want to fuck with. On Marry Me and Actor, she established her persona: a woman equal parts defiant and self-defeating, unwilling to put up with a man's bullshit but at the same time a little leery of her own toughness. She has no use for illusions, yours or hers, and she shoots them down with a weird, deadpan humor. ("Marry me, John, you won't know that I'm gone.") The woman (or shall I say the woman in her songs) has issues, and you can feel it in the tension between her sweet, calm, rational voice and the sudden angry swoops of her guitar. There's this very subtle sense of danger to the persona in her songs. It seems a little unstable. Like P.J. Harvey, this year she delivered a record rather different from its predecessors: more electronic, sonic and strange. She raises the stakes, and the record gains in drama and personality what it loses in, say, easy accessibility.
6.Dum Dum Girls – He Gets Me High and Only in Dreams. This was a good year for these romantic retro hipsters, whom I've been mad about ever since their 2010 debut I Will Be. This year they delivered a first class EP -- which offers a stunning take on the Smiths' "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" -- and on their ambitious long-awaited (I waited a long time, anyway) second full-length record they delivered a dreamy record that was almost as good as their first. They also delivered the sweetest rock ballad of the year: "Coming Down." I got to see them in Charlotte over the spring at the Milestone; they were great, although I suspect I was the biggest fan there. They deserve to be huge. Go-Gos huge. Gaga huge.
7. Art Brut – Brilliant! Tragic!. There just isn't that much humor in rock and roll, is there? It's a genre that encourages self-examination and revolt and rage, but not self-effacement, not poking fun at yourself. That's why the fourth and best album by Art Brut was such a happy relief. It punctures the pomposities of players and listeners, lovers and losers, and it's never really mean so much as it is poignantly witty. There's one song called "Clever Clever Jazz" about a guy who likes to believe his lousy little band is, actually, over people's heads. There's another about a heavy metal kid whose idol is Axl Rose. In another, a singer can't quite make out why he's lost his girlfriend to someone who is less funny than he is. This song ("Bad Comedian") includes the one line I heard this year that made me laugh out loud: "How can you bear to hold his hand?/ I bet he signs his name in comic sans." And there are a lot more lines just as good.
8. Girls -- Father Son and Holy Ghost. Girls is two guys,Christopher Owens and Chet White, and girls, mostly, is their subject, although they aren't afraid to indulge their spiritual side either. There's lots of wanting and not getting, or getting and losing. It's all very sincere stuff -- baby-this and baby-that -- but it's rarely awkward. There's lots of high-school diary hoping and moping that might come off as just corny if the music wasn't so varied from song to song (and often within songs). There's something almost retro about it; it's heavy on hooks and refrains, and seems to draw from the Kinks, the Beach Boys, Neil Young (especially on "Vomit") and lots of radio-friendly hits from the 1970s -- a rich blend of nostalgic irony and wistful, heart-on-the-sleeve melancholy.
9. Gillian Welch, The Harrow and the Harvest Gillian Welch's voice is as clear and direct as her songs, all of which on this record bring to mind some woodcuts from the Middle Ages on the brevity of life and the certainly of death. The stories she tells are sad but not saddening: they are rich, evocative slices of life.
10. Kurt Vile, Smoke Rings Round My Halo.First of all, what's with the name? Was he born with it, or is it an homage to the great German composer of The Threepenny Opera, Kurt Weill, whose name in his native country is pronounced KÜRT VĪL? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this guy, but I like him immensely. He's a witty folkie, sort of what The Tallest Man on Earth might be if he didn't take himself so seriously. I haven't, as they say at the grad school, completely unpacked this album, but I liked it so much I got one of his earlier ones, too. Yes, these are lame comments to end my list with, but the fact is I like Kurt Vile's records and I just haven't paid that much attention to his lyrics.
Big, huge, loving, warm and probably inappropriate consoling hugs to these more-than-honorable mentions: Yuck; Wilco, The Whole Love; Washed Out, Within and Without; The Black Keys, El Camino; Thurston Moore, Demolished Thoughts.
Thanks for the sounds: Explosions in the Sky, Take Care, Take Care, Take Care; Sonic Youth, Simon Werner a Disparu
Bones to Pick:
Fucked Up, David Comes to Life. I heard this monster largely on the advice of assorted critics, who were swept up and away by its sheer zen arcadian chutzpah: it's a rock opera, a fervent dramatic monologue, a dirge, a jeremiad, an epic novel not so much sung as screamed, and an unstoppable hurly-burly that rolls over you like a Sherman tank. If you can bear to follow the lyrics, at the center is a story of working-class anomie, love, death, leftism, bomb-making and postmodern storytelling, but you may be more concerned with whether lead vocalist Damian Abraham will fall over from exhaustion, as all the overwrought romantic keening takes its toll on his wrecked rasping voice. Ambitious, tuneful, forceful, overbearing, wearisome. But at least I stayed awake, which is more than I can say for the following.
Bon Iver, Bon Iver. What do people see in this record? In list after list after list, it hovers threateningly at or near the top slot, which I suppose I should regard as a reassuring suggestion that the national attention span is not as limited as I thought. Maybe it's my attention span that needs work, because by track 3 I've usually been bored into a coma. But, in all honesty, For Emma and Blood Bank have never been at the top of my playlist either. I don't get him.
The Decemberists, The King is Dead. Shake me, wake me, when it's over.
Radiohead, The King of Limbs. Tried. Failed.
Still Not Quite Getting It: Deer Tick, Divine Providence; Death Cab for Cutie, Codes and Keys; My Morning Jacket, Circuital.
Boy, did I ever not read that much fiction this year!
Most of what I read this year was what I reviewed for a variety of different publications, and those books for whatever reason just happened to be non-fiction.
I did read a massive, ambitious novel by John Sayles, A Moment in the Sun, but it wasn't all that good. By way of reviewing Kenneth Slawenski's okay biography, I re-read J.D. Salinger, which holds up well, but that doesn't count. Also, there were the collected English translations of Vladimir Sorokin, of which the best was The Day of the Oprichnik, a fine dystopian ass-kicking toward any country that would elect Vladimir Putin.
Anyway, here's my Top Ten, so to speak, heavily skewed toward non-fiction, with links to my original reviews.
The Golden Bowl by Henry James. James in his later years is a famously hard nut to crack; the prose gets denser, the sentences get longer, the thoughts thornier -- and the payoff is richer, more symphonic. It's a different artist who wrote this book than the one who wrote Washington Square; still a great storyteller, but one more attentive to acute psychological details, with an abiding sense of the big picture and how everyone fits in it. I don't agree with William James. I don't want the old Henry back.
Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin. This has to be one of the most purely entertaining, page-turning biographies I've ever read -- a perfect marriage between a brilliant writer and a literary genius who gave her an awful lot to write about. Dickens was the total opposite of a writer who spends all day at his desk (although to be sure he parked there for many long stretches.) Dickens from a young age was one of the most famous men of his day, and as lively a character as anyone he ever invented, not to mention a busy one: besides being the greatest novelist of the 19th Century, he was a magazine editor, actor, caring philanthropist -- one of the best parts is when he opens a home for reformed prostitutes -- and a man who always took care of his friends. He also had a bit of a nasty, bitter side, which came out when he divorced his faithful wife for a young actress. Tomalin writes beautifully and elegantly. I cannot imagine her great subject being in any way disappointed.
Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. Another great biography that pulls off that trick that defeats so many: marshaling a wealth of research into the service of the story. The book is nearly 1,000 pages (with so many footnotes that it required its own website) but it brought to mind other great examples, like Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Ellman's James Joyce -- books where, at the end, you feel you know the subject personally, or at least as well as you can. Criticized in some quarters for being too tough on it's subject; I on the other hand found it, if anything, a little too defensive at times, a little too protective. Captures Van Gogh in all of his madness, genius, and genuinely moving despair.
Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcuts. No, six Depression-era books told entirely in images aren't exactly what we normally think of as novels, but they are perfectly riveting stories and social documents by a great American artist.
Lights Out in Wonderland. The best novel DBC Pierre has ever written -- quite the surprise, because his previous two don't suggest he has a good novel in him. A book-length suicide note and an international adventure about the decline of the West.
Examined Lives by James Miller. A well-done survey of the great minds, from Socrates to Nietzsche, that reasonably asks just how well these august gentlemen practiced what they preached, and finds that a lot of them fell wide of the mark. Miller isn't a snarky, snotty debunker; he's often sympathetic to the fact that wisdom often involves risk. This is one of those books, like William Barrett's Irrational Man, that make you want to drop everything and spend the rest of your life reading all the great philosophers. Shrewd and intelligent.
MetaMaus. Art Spiegelmann returns to his masterpiece, lifts the hood, and shows how he pieced it altogether and made it run. Indescribably fascinating.
Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark by Brian Kellow. I'm not sure if I overpraised or under-praised this book; it's a straightforward biography that may fall under the category of "deceptively simple." I read it compulsively, but Kael is one of those figures in my pantheon (others include Vladimir Nabokov, Luis Bunuel, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal) whom I simply like reading about, above and beyond whatever their achievements are. I could listen to stories about her all day and this book has plenty -- and I loved reading all the reactions the book received from people who knew her. The next book offers a superb portrait as well, and one a little more finely-etched.
Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York by James Wolcott. Superb memoir of life in the Rotten Apple in the 1970s, as Wolcott roams through high culture and low. Wolcott could almost be talking about himself when he describes the way Kael’s writing style bopped and danced: “ She wanted the writing to read like one long exhalation that would seize the reader from the opening gunshot and then drop him off at the curb after a dizzy ride.”
Everyone who knew Kael, it seems, has written about her, and Wolcott delivers a great store of memories: her legendary disputes with New Yorker editor William Shawn, her deadly response when George C. Scott’s rep asked for her take on his latest movie (“Tell him to bury it”), her awkward, hilarious defense of Roman Polanski against his statutory rape charge (“It’s not as if he could physically hurt those girls…He’s quite tiny and slight…”), her stunned response to Renata Adler’s 8,000-word bitch-slap in the New York Review of Books. (“She’s trying to take away my language,” Kael tells Wolcott, “to make me so self-conscious that every time I ask a rhetorical question or do something jazzy I’ll catch myself and worry, `Is this something everyone will jump on?’”) Wolcott makes his own mark as a critic, burning writers (“Oh, I was such a scamp,” he writes, recalling how he trashed a Pete Hamill thriller) but also making important discoveries. One was named Patti Smith, the punk priestess who knew she would make it big, setting the stage for Madonna and Lady Gaga, bearing “the crowned awareness that to become a true star is to act like a star from the moment of self-conception and let the world play catch-up.” Wonderful.
Just noticed this, after looking at a year-end wrap-up of celebrity deaths: Anna Massey. British actress, died in July. Fans of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom will recall her as Helen, the gawky good girl who is a little too trusting of Mark, the title psychopath. Also starred in Hitchcock's Frenzy. Daughter of Raymond Massey, a Powell regular. (See A Matter of Life and Death, a.k.a. Stairway to Heaven.)
He was the most elegant man; he looked the country gentleman. But he was a demon director; he got exactly what he wanted and he never accepted anything that was false. He was intimidating, but he was very observant. That was good, because the more observant the director the better the performance you give. That was a particularly marked learning experience. Peeping Tom was panned beyond belief when it opened, but it’s now become this cult movie. When it was released it wasn’t that long after the Ealing comedies, which were very cosy. Well, Peeping Tom wasn’t cosy; it was very ugly, although it was very well made and had great psychological depth. The film hasn’t changed; it’s people’s perception of it that has changed.
It's a terrific Minneapolis-based literary publication, whose pages I joined this month, with a piece on Vladimir Sorokin. My little essay is not on-line, but here's the table of contents.
I spent a week reading Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith's Van Gogh: The Life(reviewed here), and though it's nearly 1,000 pages I was very rarely bored. Reminded me of other terrific biographies, like Robert Caro's three books and counting on LBJ -- the forthcoming volume of which I'll be reviewing for The Millions -- and Claire Tomalin's recent book on Charles Dickens. Every page of the book really moves, and the art criticism struck me as very astute and interesting.
I had a great conversation with Greg Smith yesterday. I'll be publishing the interview in about month (in the issue preceding Naifeh and Smith's Jan. 20, 2012 lecture at the Columbia Museum of Art), and I will likely post more chunks of the interview here, in the land of unlimited space.
Also, here's my piece on MetaMaus, Art Spiegelman's superb re-visit to his masterpiece, which supplements the reader with a motherlode of information on how a family history becomes a classic tale of survival and guilt.
And I'm constantly tempted by Hulu or Netflix to watch or re-watch all the movies that brought about all this impassioned critical writing in the first place. The other night I watched Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine, the story of two boys in post-war Italy who are corrupted by the system of justice into turning on each other, with tragic consequences. Reminded me a lot of Bunuel's later film, Los Olvidados, especially the ending.
Agee and Kael were both beside themselves ecstatic about it. I thought it was a very good film, if not as moving as De Sica's The Bicycle Thief or Umberto D (that poor old man calling for his dog is an immortal movie memory.) It's a powerful slice of pure Italian Neo Realism, and it has a strong sense of authenticity to it. When it first came out, there was probably nothing like it; it was so unvarnished and raw, yet a little too familiar as well. (Neither Agee or Kael seemed to have noticed or cared that the authority figures were just stereotypes.) At the time, it must have looked like pure cinema.
_
Here is a film that grabs the attention from the start and won't let it go: Les Enfants Terribles, Jean Cocteau's adaptation of his 1929 novel, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. It's a lustrous work of Surrealist decadence, filmed in rich, romantic, dreamy black and white; parts of the movie definitely have the texture of a dream. Poetic and and Poe-esque.
The title characters are a teenage brother and sister who live in a dark, seedy mansion with a dying mother. The relationship of Paul (Edouard Dermithe, a kind of vacant-eyed blonde male model) and Elisabeth (Nicole Stephane, a kind of boyish sprite, a teenaged Ariel) is just this side of incestuous -- actually, closer to the other side, as they are so intimate with each other that it's impossible to imagine that they haven't explored each other sexually (and they aren't afraid to bathe together either). But sex isn't really the point with these two, although it's not beside the point either; they are, as Cocteau says on the voice-over narration, unembarrassed about being naked in front of each other because they are two halves of the same body. One cannot exist without the other, and therein lies the story.
Paul is laid up for weeks after getting hit by a snowball, hurled by his friend Dargelos, who is the kind of good-looking young rebel who can get away with anything, and someone to whom Paul is rather intensely attracted. It's a deliberately absurd plot element, and the movie acknowledges it: what kind of snowball knocks you out? Did it have a rock in it? Maybe. No matter. The movie blithely accepts the irrationality and moves on. Paul, now bedridden by the nefarious snowball, is nursed and doted on by Elisabeth, with their activities primarily restricted to the messy bedroom they share together. Here they alternately fight and cuddle, like some married couple, and collect items for their treasure chest: pictures, items, scraps of no significance to anyone but themselves. Eventually, they bring other people into their world, Paul's friend Gerard (Jacques Bernard), Elisabeth's friend Agathe (Renee Cosima, who bears a striking resemblance to Dargelos) and Elisabeth's eventual husband Michael (Melvyn Martin) -- anterior relationships that have an ultimately disastrous effect on the union of Paul and Elisabeth.
The Surrealists, almost to a person, hated Cocteau. They thought he was a fake and a wannabe and a little too close to the artistic establishment they were trying to dismantle. Also, they hated his uber-ridiculous debut film The Blood of the Poet, rightly dismissing it as a pallid imitation of Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou. That, anyway, is how Cocteau stood in the 1920s. I'm not sure what they thought of him some 30 years later, after The Beauty and the Beast, Orpheus, and Les Enfants Terribles (where his stylistic influences are pretty obvious). He had become very much his own Surrealist, even if he never received a stamp of approval from Andre Breton, and you can see touches of it throughout this film, from the sculpture with a mustache (an homage to Duchamp?) to the Lautreamontesque treasure chest of strange objects.
This film about people creating their own strange world does in fact create a lush and sordid world of its own.
The Babysitter (1969) is the kind of pulpy, nasty teen nonsense that made the perfect date movie for horny young couples who managed to borrow the car for a few hours. Pretty lousy, for the most part, but it has that very tonic mix of the sleazy and the awkward. The script is just atrociously funny, real Ed Wood-level stuff, almost certainly written by an over-the-hill square with a mostly pornographic take on all that free-loving hippie stuff. The kind of person who thought, "I wonder what young people do they do at those dances? I know! They take all their clothes! It's a pagan festival!" The acting is deliriously ludicrous; the crazy generation gap conversation that George (the lamentable George E. Carey) and Candy (the fetching yet empty-headed Patricia Wymer) share while eating a taco is just priceless. Pretty much begs for the MST3K treatment, although it's probably more fun to watch it with friends and just do it yourself.
This week, we honor the 160th Birthday of Herman Melville's singular American novel about the prep-school football hero who became the role model to to a generation of young men. And who could forget his little Scottish Terrier, Queequeg?
Click here for more takes on this delightful, whimsical, classic account of sporting youth...
[Herman] Cain will not be our next president. Even without the sexual harassment scandal, he has neither the necessary funds nor the establishment clout. Plus he is profoundly unprepared for the job. But his strong appeal to a large sector of the American electorate is worth considering precisely because it reveals the strange state of populist politics in this moment of economic crisis and anti-government fervor.
Just watched the latest episode and the rhythm was really off. It was very conventionally, self-consciously jokey, as if it was timed to a laugh track. Scenes might just as well have ended with a flashing sign that said "You can laugh now." I've been patient with the new season so far, but it's becoming clear that the people behind the scenes are just trying too hard.
As brilliant as Steve Carell was as Michael Scott, I actually kind of looked forward to seeing him leave just to see how the show would rise to the challenge -- the way "Cheers" did, when Coach was replaced by Woody and Diane was replaced by Rebecca. In both cases, the show adapted perfectly, and found a way to make the change work in its favor. With The Office, though, I think you're seeing a lot of confusion. They don't know what to do. Should the show center around the new boss, Andy (Ed Helms), or around the CEO, Robert California, played by James Spader? Do you replace Michael's brand of uncomfortableness with Andy's? Do you let Robert California's domineering not-so-passive aggression set the tone?
I'll remain faithful to the end, but I gotta be honest: I'm smelling flop-sweat.
Just downloaded Water for Elephants from iTunes. It froze after about one minute. I restarted the computer, and the movie completely vanished. I spent 30 minutes trying to find it, but it's nowhere to be found. All this for a movie I didn't want to watch, which is beside the point, because she did.
Lou Reed's Berlin is one of the saddest albums in the entire history of rock and roll. It's a brilliant and morbid tale of a doomed couple. The songs touch on a lot of heavy subject matter (or at least it was considered that way back then, back when people actually used words like "heavy") -- drug addiction, abuse, prostitution, suicide, and the breakup of a family -- but the dominant note is heartbreak. It's about the singer watching his girlfriend, Caroline, kill herself, coming closer to the end with every song.
People hated it when it first came out in 1973. It's a bum trip, to quote a line from the album, and there's nothing remotely subtle about it. Reed just lays it out there, offers you no distance. He rubs your nose in the sheer pain of it all.
Parts of it are pure poetry, such as "Carolina Says II," which perfectly captures the sheer numbness of someone who has to stay high to kill her pain. In this song, Caroline is referred to as "Alaska," which brings to mind both the snowy whiteness of her dope and her own coldness:
She put her fist through the window pane
It was such a funny feeling
It's so cold in Alaska
it's so cold in Alaska
It's so cold in Alaska
The record reaches a high point of sensational morbidity with "The Kids," where Caroline's children are taken away by the authorities. Reed took no chances when it came to making sure the song brought tears to the eyes of his audience: as the orchestra swells with melancholy, we hear actual piercing cries of children screaming Mommy.
It's a record you have to be in the right mood to listen to, because it's a classic downer.
I listened to it again this evening after hearing a recent Sound Opinions podcast, which featured a great interview with the producer, Bob Ezrin -- who describes just how he recorded those horrible, gut-wrenching, pain-wracked cries of wailing children.
He brought a tape recorder home -- and told one of his young children it was time for bed. He was a toddler; of course he wailed. Then he played a game with his two kids: pretend Mommy is behind this door, and she can't hear you. The kids banged on the door, screamed "Mommy!" at the top of their lungs.
He was laughing as he told the story and I laughed as I heard it.
The first thing it brought to mind was a story the film director Lukas Moodysson told about the making of Lilja 4Ever, which includes a very hard-to-sit-through rape scene, where the victim muffles her screams by burying her face in a pillow.
Except that she wasn't screaming. She was laughing hysterically. She was a young actress on a set in a studio, naked and sprawled on a bed, trying not to laugh during a scene that, at the time, as it was being rehearsed, just seemed absurd.
Another reminder of the enormous difference between what we hear or see and the circumstances under which it was created.
Anyway ... hearing that podcast drove me back to listening to Berlin again, for the first time in maybe a year or two. Ezrin downplayed its effect a little, said that what seemed bold then probably seems tame today, but it didn't, because it's not about the subject matter. It's about the mood, the feeling, the vibe. It's as fascinating and as alienating and frightening as ever.
