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A memorable book review on the (lamentably dormant) Strange Words website, titled "Charles Platt, Fun Interviewer" warns us about the Wired scribe's published conversations with famous science fiction writers, Dream Makers (Vols. I and II): that they are full of "creepy voyeurism," and that "Platt seems hell-bent on exposure, rather than the context of a writer's life." I just read my first Platt interview, with A.E. Van Vogt, and boy, they weren't kidding. Van Vogt comes off as a wacko, bore, and self-diagnosing Dianetics disciple, which he was, perhaps, but his fiction is really Out There and he deserves better treatment.
Van Vogt was one of editor John W. Campbell's "Big Three" writers, along with Arthur Clarke and Robert Heinlein. While the latter authors specialized in "hard" sf, Van Vogt was the visionary, specializing in tales of superhuman races and bizarre, alien logic systems. The basic plot of the movie Alien came from Van Vogt's story "The Black Destroyer," incorporated into the novel Voyage of the Space Beagle (after Darwin's HMS Beagle), a larger epic that, 16 years before Captain Kirk, told of a starship Seeking Out New Life and New Civilizations in the galaxies. The chapter where the catlike, tentacled horror is taken aboard the ship is here, and worth a read. Yes, it's pulpy, but it moves at a furious clip, introducing the players and political tensions on the vessel without letting up on the chills for a moment--even during a scene of explosive action. (It does everything but tell you what "Nexialism" is.) Van Vogt describes learning to write from intensive, obsessive study of a single how-to book, and the prescriptions for narrative economy and drive can really be felt in this passage.
Before Platt pulls out the big hatchet, he quotes Van Vogt talking about his own writing "system":
"In science fiction you have to have a little bit of a 'hang-up' in each sentence. Let's suppose, for example: The hero looks up toward the door." Van Vogt gestures toward the sunlit screen door of his living room, leading out onto the veranda. "He hears a sound over there. And something comes in. It looks like a man wearing a cloak. You don't quite know what's going on. Then, you realize this is not a human being. This creature or this being, whoever it is, has a sort of manlike shape. And this creature reaches into what now looks like a fold of its skin. It draws out a gleaming metal object. It points it at you. Is this a weapon? It looks like a weapon, but you don't know that for sure. It's a 'hang-up,' you see. The author furnishes the information, but each sentence in itself has a little 'hang-up' in it."
As he has been talking, almost hypnotically, with an eerie gleam in his eye, he has created such a mood of menace that, for a moment, the California sunshine seems less bright and the dreamlike description is nibbling at the edges of reality. He would say, perhaps, that this is through the power of his system, but I think it has more to do with the power of his personality and his intuitively shrewd choice of words and images. A system on its own is dull and mechanical, without inspiration to fuel it.
Panel from Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Vol. 4) - Hand-(re)drawn on Wacom tablet
As promised, here's the 2-Step Garage Mini-Mix: [.mp3 removed]. By way of background, this music combines the trickier rhythms, vocal science, and hiphop atmospherics (e.g., sped-up scratching) of drum & bass with the party vibe and divas of UK garage (a house variant). You may recall Ishkur (now in V.2!) called 2-Step "so fucking boring," complaining about its "idiotic" basslines and all the guest popstars. He's right about the guests: usually an electronic dance producer jumps the shark when vocals are added (see Swayzak, Chemical Bros.). But the basslines kind of crack me up. They make me think of the original intent of the Roland TB303, which was to be a kind of automated "bass genie" for pubrockers. The three tracks in this mix are light on vocals, guest or otherwise, and heavier on the atmospherics. All are "classic" 2-Step, meaning about 4 years old: "Scrappy" by Wookie, "True VIP" by Youngstar, and "Romantic Call" by DJ Deller. Any help with what the singer's saying in the last (after the lines "I'm on a romantic call/Talking to my baby down at the yard") would be greatly appreciated.
To the extent Mel Gibson's ego, I mean, faith, is forcing us to think about The Christ right now, you could do worse than looking at ionarts' rundown of the art historical Jesus (like, seeing Gibson's movie). Something I learned about Matthias Grünewald's beautiful, take-no-prisoners altarpiece:
That work was made for a hospital run by an order of monks whose mission was to serve people who were in terrible pain, especially those who had lost limbs. The fact that Jesus chose to die in one of the most painful ways possible, it was thought, is a consolation to a person in pain. In that sense, there is no particular reason, either religious or artistic, to sugarcoat the details of what Jesus suffered.
Below, a new .gif from my Animation Log.
Cintra Wilson's report on the Oscars is super-catty as always but worth a read (Salon subscriber-only text liberated here).
Janet Jackson ruined tits for everyone, so the vast majority of dresses were strictly Mormon prom. Even Elvis Costello wore a plain black jacket, for The Christ’s sake. Nobody even had interesting new plastic surgery, apart from Joan Rivers, whose face looks like it was gnawed out of marzipan by the savages of Easter Island, and Angelina’s Billy Bob-shaped laser scar.Damn. Don't ever make this woman mad at you. Her takedown of Seabiscuit (among other nominees) is more abstractly brutal, but still great:
"Seabiscuit" was a stink-pony – superclean schlock from nose to bumper. Spare me the sight of quaint, depression-era crowd scenes that look like they’ve been swaddled in tweeds by J. Crew, surging in rapture to majestic life-insurance violin orchestrations. That shit was strictly for Burl Ives, Pepperidge Farm and creamy ranch dressing.
Some very cool, probably uncharacteristic tracks by Mundo, a drum & bass/2-step DJ from Dallas: "Music - The Question" [.mp3 removed] and "Carjack" [.mp3 removed]. Fished these from the "out of town" bin at Breakbeat Science a few years ago and have tried unsuccessfully to contact Mundo by email a number of times to say how much I liked them. (In other words, the tracks are posted as a fan tribute and will be removed if anyone's pissed.) I'd say they're atypical for Breakbeat and Mundo both, in that they're not hard shell drum and bass. Minimal and funky in its own dirgelike way, "Music - The Question" is Greg Hawkesian/John Carpenteroid electro with eerie church organ sostenuto, old-school beats, and a nice rolling reverb on the cymbals. Oh, yeah, and the mundanest sample imaginable, of some spry Victorian carnie dude saying "Music...to delight those who would have melody or be amused"--over and over and over. "Carjack" has the same creepy organ and insistent slapping beat, but with echoey psych guitar stabs and about 2 1/2 minutes into it, trebly amen-style breakbeats (with a lovely microsecond of truncated sped up vocal going "meh-" at the end of each loop). This music is basic, original, category-resistant.
The Young Turds were a Washington, DC punk-era band with a vision, heart, garage rock sincerity, noir-ish humor, and about an LP's worth of tunes never committed to vinyl (with one exception). Emerging in Fairfax County, Virginia in the late '70s, they played many dates there as well as in DC proper, sharing the stage with better-known groups of the time. Their song "Murder One" (.mp3 below) appeared on the seminal compilation 30 Seconds Over DC (Limp Records, 1978) along with such giants as the Slickee Boys, White Boy, Da Moronics, and 1/2 Japanese. They also shared a bill with District legends the Bad Brains, at a Yippee-sponsored "Smoke-In" on the Washington Mall. By late 1980 they were gone; eventually they morphed into other bands (see below) but the "Turd thing" was unique.
A reviewer at the time called them a "zoned-out Roxy Music" but their sound really has more in common with Cleveland bands such as the Electric Eels, albeit not as extreme or angsty. At least one member, sax player Kevin Landes, had some music theory and you can hear it in songs like "One Mad Act" and "Hold at All Costs." What sounds today like a Klezmer influence was most likely unconscious. Whatever ambitions the group had to rise above three-chord rock, their sound is very raw and home-schooled, like so many of the groups of that DIY era. Landes and his brother Kerry had a Rodgers & Hart-style songwriting collaboration going back to their childhoods (or perhaps Siegel & Shuster, as manifested in comic book-themed tunes they occasionally still played as adults, such as "Gorilla Boss"). This collaboration spilled over into the Turds' songwriting. "One Mad Act" dramatizes the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, partly in tribute to the Landes's father, who had a voluminous basement library of Lincolnabilia.
Three of the songs below are covers. The one by the King is obvious, but you might not know that "Green Slime" is the theme of the 60s sci-fi film of the same name, or that "Tapeworm of Love" ("eating my heart out over you") is by Brute Force, a quirky singer/songwriter the Landeses were fond of. Many of the songs were about murder and violence, as befitted the end of the '70s, an era of social turbulence and malaise that continued until President Reagan brought Morning back to America in the '80s, or so the story goes. Kerry Landes's murky singing style made the lyrics difficult to understand but occasional snatches ("teenage boy with a deranged mind/cruising for burgers is not hard to find") give you a pretty good idea what's going on.
Below is a selection of .mp3s. Except for "Murder One," from the Limp compilation, the songs were ripped from a cassette of a reel-to-reel master, originally recorded in a bandmember's friend's basement studio. A few minor blemishes can be heard on the ancient cassette tape.
"Green Slime" [2:09 min. - 2.9 MB]
"Berserker" [2:55 min. - 4.2 MB]
"Hold at All Costs" [3:59 min. - 5.8 MB]
"Tapeworm of Love" [2:38 min. - 3.7 MB]
"One Mad Act" [5:16 min. - 7.5 MB]
"Burn1ng Love" [2:21 min. - 3.3 MB]
"Vigilante" [5:12 min. - 7.5 MB]
"Murder One" [3:09 min. - 4.5 MB]
Personnel are Kevin Landes (saxophone), Steve Walker (rhythm guitar), Kerry Landes (vocals), Paul Ragan (lead guitar), Tim Carter (bass), and Tom Payne (sensible drums). The Turds dissolved sometime in 1980, but various members continued playing in DC bands. Carter, Landes, and Walker formed The French Are From Hell (still active) after one of them (Carter?) saw an appalling documentary about the ostensible Gallic taste for munching live birds, and Carter, Payne, and Walker were mainstays of the Assbeaters, fronted by singer, novelist, and zine-producer Mark Mellon, which survived until fairly recently (.mp3s of taped material to follow). The text of this post is being published as a separate tribute page--hopefully I can get some photos and other information and will add to it and post updates here.
UPDATE: Some photos of bandmembers have been added.
UPDATE 2: I just noticed the links to the .mp3s in this post and on the tribute page weren't working. They have been fixed now.
UPDATE 3: Two song titles were corrected after I found my notes off the tape case.
UPDATE 4: Re-recorded all the .mp3s at higher volume and a 192 kbps streaming rate instead of 128 kbps.
UPDATE 5, Oct. 2010: The ending of "Vigilante" had annoying dropouts in one channel. I did my best to fix it--the panning still goes a little haywire but the volume is more uniform in both channels.