In case it's not at the library.
Detail:
Calypso (1979)
Showing posts with label 1979. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1979. Show all posts
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Calypso (1979)
In case it's not at the library.
Talking Heads' Fear of Music (2012)
Jonathan Lethem is one of my favorite writers and Fear of Music is one of my favorite albums—of all, ever, not just of Talking Heads albums. So this was practically guaranteed to impress and it did not disappoint. For what it's worth it's also the first book I've read, beyond browsing in bookstores, in the still-growing 33⅓ series. The series matches one writer to one album (based on a curated volunteer system, it appears). Lethem is good, a really fine novelist (Motherless Brooklyn is a particular favorite), and this shows how casually excellent he can be as a rock critic too. Well, 2003's Fortress of Solitude had already made that quite evident. But I really love the way he goes at it, bearing down so hard. And this should be instructive too—for me and for all of us! Hours and hours of intense listening and gathering up of scraps of notes and thoughts went into this. It is as much a labor of love as anything I know. I think he might even like Fear of Music more than me, and I have always been that crank in my circles. Lethem attacks the whole by theme and each song individually, exploring a taxonomy of "types": Talking Heads versus David Byrne albums, text, concept LP, science fiction, Asperger's artifact, in terms of the paranoiac, etc. It's an album you can go quite deep with and he is here to prove it. I don't agree with him on many particulars—he calls "Electric Guitar" rather than "I Zimbra" the weakest track (one of my theories for why it's such an underrated album relates to kicking off with the one song that doesn't belong). And he often seems to be missing the humor I perceive as pervasive. But he brings a tremendous, even daunting level of insight to the album, the music, and the band, picking up on all kinds of things I had missed before or never exactly put together. Lethem makes a beautiful argument for why "Life During Wartime" and "Memories Can't Wait" are titled appropriately for the album's naming schema, as opposed to "War" and "Memories," which might seem more apt at first. Admittedly, we might be going into the deep weeds here. I love it when he talks about the "disco ambulance" of "Cities"—that is nigh perfect. He locates a critical center of gravity on the album in "Cities" and "Life During Wartime," side by side, nearly direct inversions of one another, each furiously name-checking city names and worried about the future, albeit in very different ways. "Memories Can't Wait," Lethem says, implodes them both, proceeding out of themes first established in "Mind." It's altogether quite a trip, much like the album. Recommended.
In case it's not at the library.
Alien (1979)
Director: Ridley Scott
Writers: Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett
Photography: Derek Vanlint
Music: Jerry Goldsmith
Editors: David Crowther, Terry Rawlings, Peter Weatherley
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto, Jones
Every time I come back to Alien I am somehow surprised all over again by how good it is—setting aside the first time I saw it and the trauma it caused me, and could well cause you too if you happen to have never seen it. It's a very scary movie, first and foremost, grimly determined to be exactly that. But once past that, with all the shocks and surprises it delivers about the reproductive and survival processes of the terrifying alien monster—"alien" in every sense of the word—the sheer elegance of how this picture is put together shines: savvy in conception, heavy on production design, with a uniformly excellent cast, a tight focus on a single predicament across confined spaces, and with utterly no mercy. It's equal parts great science fiction and great horror, and it is full of twists and turns, some of which I'm going to talk about, so spoiler alert.
It starts with the gleaming spaceships of 2001 and Star Wars and adds rust and office politics. The spaceship in Alien is more on the order of a river barge, with battered and well-used industrial workstations. It's just a corporate freighter mostly empty of life except for the crew of seven, two of whom, blue-collar working stiffs, bicker with the others about their compensation and other grievances. The humdrum ongoing mission (toting materials from one place to another around the known universe) is interrupted when the crew is wakened from deep traveling sleep for a visit to a planet from which a distress signal has been detected. Everyone inside and outside of the movie has a bad feeling about responding to it, the usual starting point for a horror movie. You know how it goes: Don't spend the night in that house. Don't spread out in the woods to look for your missing friend. And whatever you do, don't answer that distress signal.
But they do. And they find amazing things. For a time it's almost hard to sympathize with their impulse to leave. A contingent of three of them discover a spaceship and inside it a giant fossilized alien life-form of some kind. The images are simple, powerful, and effective. At about that time the people back on the shuttle have figured out that the signal they are responding to is less an SOS and more "a warning of some kind." Nice touch, that—and this movie is full of them. Then one of the crew, Kane (John Hurt), stumbles on a cavern full of mysterious, leathery egg-shaped objects. At that point the basic structure for the rest of the movie is engaged, built around the alien's gestational processes and species survival tactics, a whole lot of biology summed for convenience as follows: 1) Egg. 2) Face hugger. 3) Chest burster. 4) The ball-peen, over-toothed alien proper. Each one of these phases stands in as an unbearable ratcheting up of tension.
Take the egg—no, take the whole planet. It's extremely inhospitable, dark, rocky, with howling dust storms and God knows what else. It's dark. The look and feel of the planet and everything on it, including the alien, is the work of H.R. Giger, who nearly as much as director Ridley Scott is responsible for the gnawing sense of unease that Alien stokes and worries constantly. The landscapes and forms created by Giger are deeply unsettling, with swooping, curving, organic, sexualized, heavy-metal shapes and surfaces, at once ancient feeling and, yes, alien. Darkness is never far away in this movie. Kane, wandering in the field of eggs, has to use a dim flashlight to make out what he can, and soon enough we have entered Phase 2, as something flesh-colored that looks like a small manta ray with finger-like appendages on either side leaps out of an egg and attaches itself to Kane's face. See above.
Now they've got real problems. The sense of danger and malevolence never lets up, and to the movie's credit neither does the credibility. There is never anything to laugh at in this movie. When they take Kane back to the ship and attempt to use surgical tools to remove the object from his face, they find out the object contains an acidic fluid that is so corrosive it threatens to burn all the way to the hull of the ship and through. It just seems to fit, and so does everything that follows, which, I'm sure it's needless to say, only gets worse from there.
Alien is so single-minded about making things continually worse that the earliest cuts lasted upwards of three hours. I'll be grateful for the small favor of the edits. Even at just under two hours it sometimes feels like it's over-milking some of its scenarios. Near the end, for example, there is a scene that involves not one but two 30-second countdowns by shipboard computers, as Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) races around trying to wrap things up. I mean literally: "30, 29, 28, 27 ... " This is plainly blunt force manipulation, forcing us to agonize with even the most banal moments. One of the hardest scenes to watch is of one of the grunts, Brett (Harry Dean Stanton), wandering the ship by himself trying to coax a cat (Jones) to come along with him to safety. I believe it lasts approximately an hour.
That reminds me how good the cast is here, all of them, because another angle in to what makes Alien work so well is that none of these people particularly like one another (it turns out they have good reason, of course), and the ensemble is perfect at working this constant undertow of rippling tension. It's Sigourney Weaver's first movie and she's already a natural, science fiction, horror, or otherwise, easily assuming the mantle of the star and ultimately bringing home the movie—the whole franchise, really. Stanton, Veronica Cartwright, Ian Holm, John Hurt, Yaphet Kotto, Tom Skerritt—each is fine and collectively they are solid. But practically everything about Alien is solid, and that's ultimately what makes it so good. The cast is excellent at what they do, but they are just a small part of it—production design, screenplay, music, photography, all chip in and all are impressive. Chances are Alien will scare the hell out of you, but what the heck, YOLO.
One more note: It happens I just saw the recent documentary Jodorowsky's Dune the other night, and as reported there its principals included Alien co-screenwriter Dan O'Bannon and production design man H.R. Giger. The energy behind Alien thus has some extraordinary deep roots I only knew of slightly before from the DVD extras. Now I know a little more. It's a great picture. O'Bannon has one of the best stories in it, and Giger's amazing feats of imagination are only affirmed there, and then some. Alien benefited from the seething welter of ideas and energy that came of that project, it's much easier to see now, and that energy came from two very powerful sources: Alejandro Jodorowsky, the hallucinatory gonzo madman film director spearheading the vision, and comics artist Moebius (Jean Giraud), who implemented the vision, providing storyboards enough to fill two volumes bigger than old-school phonebooks. I'm not saying Dune would have been the better movie, but if Alien is leftovers, it very well could have been a real fine banquet. We'll never know—but we do have Alien.
Detail:
Alien (1979)
The Amityville Horror (1979)
Director: Stuart Rosenberg
Writers: Sandor Stern, Jay Anson, George Lutz, Kathy Lutz
Photography: Fred J. Koenekamp
Music: Lalo Schifrin
Editor: Robert Brown
Cast: James Brolin, Margot Kidder, Rod Steiger, Don Stroud, Murray Hamilton, Amy Wright, Michael Sacks, Helen Shaver, Val Avery, James Dukas
As it happens, I came to The Amityville Horror very late—actually well after the 2005 remake (which I have not seen). At a garage sale in 2007 I found a box set with the original and first two sequels, plus a couple of documentary episodes from the History Channel on the house in Amityville, George and Kathy Lutz, Jay Anson, and related matters. The woman at the garage sale told me the TV documentaries were more scary and creepy than any of the movies. Because I am slow about everything, it was another couple years before I actually got around to looking at the flagship production, so let's say 30 years after the fact.
The Amityville Horror was about what I expected, except somehow it did get under my skin. On a conscious level, sitting on my couch in the dark of a fall evening, I kept remarking to myself what an extremely annoying movie it was, but when the phone rang and I jumped I realized—the movie had scared me. Director Stuart Rosenberg (Cool Hand Luke, The Pope of Greenwich Village) and crew do it the old-fashioned big-money Exorcist way, which is very much its model: by dynamics. Slow down the action to a crawl. Then speed it up. Show a tender moment. Interrupt it with mortal peril. Make everything very quiet. Then loud. Mix and match with provocative elements: People standing with their backs to dark windows. Blood. Swinging axes. Insects and other vermin. The dog interested in something in the basement. A woo-woo friend trying to be helpful. Children in danger. A kitchen sink. Religious iconography, ceremonies, and belief systems (or fragments thereof) as needed—Roman Catholic, of course.
It thus becomes a straightforward problem of rhythm and pacing, assembling and burnishing the elements, but it's not fair to reduce it to that. It's a straightforward problem, after all, that every movie has to solve, and if The Amityville Horror succeeds on terms it sets for itself I think I'd look a little silly complaining about it. So I don't. But I resent it a little, and don't mind looking silly for that. For some reason, I don't even recall how it came into my possession now, I read the original book by Jay Anson some 20 years ago, which also gave me something of a bad scare, but in a slightly different way.
The intent of the book (which one of the History Channel shows pointedly refers to as "a novel") is obviously to make your eyes pop out and your socks roll up and down your ankles as you read. By masquerading as nonfiction, it slyly finds a wedge in to further anxiety, much as, say, the documentary about The Exorcist is nearly as insidiously disturbing as the very disturbing Exorcist, because the idea that these are things that actually happened is enough to torque events described into some infinitely more unpleasant place psychologically. There's a clip of Anson himself on a TV talk show masterfully using this technique, talking about how people he'd given the manuscript to review were subsequently involved in auto accidents, mysterious fires, etc. Well played, Mr. Anson, etc., except then we learn, oh ha ha, that Anson himself died within the year at the age of 58 of a heart attack. Doesn't really look like a heart attack candidate either.
For the record, no, I don't think powerful demonic forces are at work. I think strange things happen, and the Amityville franchise has been able to profit handsomely from an oddly generous share of them. All the talk of Indian burial grounds and flies thriving in the dead of winter and a priest barked at in an empty room may be pure fiction (the priest story at least may have some substance). But the mysterious mass murder that happened in the house in 1974, little more than a year before the Lutz family acquired it and moved in, is as real as teardrops. Oldest boy in that family gets up in the middle of the night (3:15, to be specific), murders his parents, murders his two brothers, murders his two sisters. Nobody hears the rifle shots. No evidence anyone in the family moved from their beds. All of them lying on their stomachs, face down.
A great backdrop for great evil, of course. No Indian burial grounds need apply. But the movie appears unable to help itself on some level, it is even more ridiculous than the book (and though it scared me the book is very ridiculous), introducing the ever-popular dread portal to hell in the basement idea, for example. It is balls to the walls about hitting the extremes. Put Margot Kidder, as Kathy Lutz, in pigtails so she looks like Mary Ann from Gilligan's Island. Make priests the victims of incredible accidents. Raise the sound level high on flies buzzing (incidentally prompting a meditation on how the noun we have made of the lovely verb is actually one of the most repulsive creatures on the planet, no offense, you-who-will-inherit-the-earth). Cold spots in the house. Unexplainable foul moods. Rocking chairs that rock themselves. What now, Father Delaney in a coma? Kathy Lutz wakes up screaming: "She was shot in the head!"
Hey, I'm really not giving much away. This is just from the first half. In addition to the dynamics ploy (which means you can't brace for a lot of it even forewarned), it is also classic throw-everything-you've-got-at-it filmmaking, Hollywood style. Some of these things inevitably are going to stick to your walls. A favorite scene of mine occurs late, has nothing to do with anything, but raises my anxiety sky high. Once again Kathy Lutz is besieged. Her phone is mysteriously not working, again, and she desperately needs to reach someone. A disheveled man we have never seen appears at the back door, scratching. "Hello," he says when Kathy opens the door. "Everybody wanted to come over to welcome you to the neighborhood." Then he shows her he is carrying a six-pack of beer. Something distracts her and when she returns to the door he is gone. We never see him again.
It's the inexplicability of much of this, in scenes like that, that makes The Amityville Horror work. Who was that guy at the door? Why did Jay Anson die? Why didn't the sound of the rifle fire—six shots!—appear to wake anyone? But you see I am talking about elements that belong in the narrative frame, or are associated with the book—background, incidental information. The foreground events in this movie are all too often quite explicable: forces of demonic possession are strong, see? An exorcism is likely called for. But foolish modernists and followers of Vatican II won't hear of it. That is a portal to hell in the basement, man. That kind of thing. Mechanical fantasy points, which drag things down for me. The Amityville Horror is worth seeing once, because somehow it could well find a way to get you. After that, or in the sequels, there is only more of all too explicable Hollywood same.
Detail:
The Amityville Horror (1979)
Rust Never Sleeps (1979)
How are you supposed to settle on one favorite Neil Young album? I asked four friends—Phil Dellio, Steven Rubio, Jack Thompson, and Scott Woods—to help me with this imponderable, asking specifically for their thoughts on the one I have landed on, Rust Never Sleeps. For me, it could have equally been After the Gold Rush or Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (and there's a good handful much loved right behind those three, and literally dozens of scattered songs beyond that), except I did not experience them in real time—I resisted Young until Rust Never Sleeps made it impossible for me any longer. I've got a couple of quick points to make, and then Phil, Steven, Jack, and Scott weigh in. Many thanks to them!
First, a prevailing motif of Rust Never Sleeps is time, for which rust serves as metaphor. Most (not all) of its preoccupations touch on time in one way or another. It's as if punk-rock wakened Young to its passing and the necessity to find a place within that stream. But this goes beyond a simple name-checking of Elvis Presley ("the King") and Johnny Rotten or (not a simple matter at all) finding a way to make the guitars sound like the future. In some discontinuous way I still don't exactly understand, Young appears to enter time and history itself. "Powderfinger" feels like one of the most authentic Civil War stories I've ever encountered. All the business in "Pocahontas" does not feel fanciful but somehow lived, directly experienced—even though it is obviously fanciful. And the extraordinary verse from "Thrasher" that Jack and Scott quote below, "Where the eagle glides ascending," etc., with its "ancient river," its "timeless gorge of changes," its "sleeplessness," is crazy but feels full of wisdom beyond its surface, wisdom about what I will just go ahead and call the eternal verities.
Second point: I think there's something subtly compelling as well about the fact that these songs are all actually live performances, though Rust otherwise eschews every single convention of the live album—virtually no crowd noise, for example, let alone onstage between-song banter. But I feel (or project) the edge of live performance, the way his voice feels like it is inside a giant room when most of the instruments fall away from it. That outrageous guitar tone, especially in the album closer "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)" feels like some equivalent of pitching off the stage and going crowd-surfing. "We're going to distort / filter / fuck-up these guitars and amplifiers," it says by implication, to a crowd that might well have been expecting songs from Comes a Time. "See if you can support it." It's pure courage on a level, putting himself out there so nakedly with these strange powerful songs, and doing it in front of a few thousand people.
Phil Dellio
A couple of summers ago, I ran a Neil Young poll on the ILX message board. Sixty-six ballots were submitted in total, including outside-the-board lists I solicited from Jeff, Scott, and Steven, all of whom donned Road Eye costumes and participated secretly. "Powderfinger" ended up taking the #1 spot, which, I think it's fair to say, was a major surprise to almost everyone; the general assumption going in was that "Cortez the Killer" would win handily. "Powderfinger" wasn't on my own list of 40, but I had to check back to be sure, so it must be in the neighborhood of my 40th favorite Neil song. My #40 actually was a Rust song, "Pocahontas," but it was the only Rust song on there. (Jeff, Scott, and Steven had shorter lists but more Rust—three for Jeff, including "Powderfinger" at #1, four for Scott, two for Steven.)
I sometimes start bookkeeping when I'm not sure if I have anything to say about something ... Rust Never Sleeps was very important to me when it came out in July of 1979. I'd seen the album previewed at Maple Leaf Gardens the previous fall, my three or four year obsession with Neil was at its peak, and it was the summer between high school and university; my belated discovery of punk was also underway by a few months, and that fit into the story too. Rust's arrival was an event (Decade had been an event too), and my connection with it was intense—and yet, within two or three years I stopped playing it, and tonight was probably the first time I've taken it off the shelf in 15 or 20 years. (Seeing as that break would have been around the time of Trans and Everybody's Rockin', it'd probably be more accurate to say I pretty much stopped playing Neil altogether within two or three years.) When I eventually found my way back to Neil in the early '90s, the details of which I've already recounted too often, Rust Never Sleeps wasn't part of that, just the early albums through to Zuma. For me, rather than being the culmination of that period, Rust had now detached itself from the rest of those '70s albums—it was an overplayed classic-rock white elephant, in the same state of limbo as Who's Next, another high-school favorite I'd cut loose. Which obviously wasn't fair: the album was intended as a rebuke (or at least a cautionary warning) to the white elephants of its day, and its only overplayed songs are "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)" and its acoustic partner. "Powderfinger" gets a little radio airplay—not much.
Re-listening to Rust tonight—I hardly ever put my half-remembered recollections to the test, so I'm really going all out here, Jeff—it has indeed lost something for me. There's nothing wrong with it, it just doesn't take me back in the way that After the Gold Rush and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere still can. I don't know—there was so much other music that came into my life at that time, maybe Rust, after that initial intensity, irreparably got crowded out. "Sedan Delivery" and "Welfare Mothers" both sound kind of flat to me now, and they're the funniest and liveliest songs on the album. There's a sigh in "Powderfinger" that I still find very moving, and I'm glad I listed "Pocahontas"—let me amend that previous sentence, it's "Pocahontas" that's the funniest song on Rust, also the prettiest. And that's about it. I'm simply not able to hear "Hey Hey, My My" anymore, as complex and ingenious as it is. It's as dead for me as "Satisfaction" is.
(An odd moment that did take me back: three little pops in "Thrasher" from all the play I used to give the album, still there 35 years later.)
[See also Phil's great roundup of Neil Young covers.]
Steven Rubio
Not sure if this will be much help to you, since my experience with Rust Never Sleeps is pretty standard.
I'm old enough to have been around for Buffalo Springfield, and once they split, Neil Young was far and away my favorite solo artist ... you might say my only favorite from that band. And he was more than a favorite to me ... Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere got played on a regular basis at my house, and I could "sing" along with the guitar solos from "Cowgirl" and "River" by heart. After that were high points (in my world) like After the Gold Rush, Tonight's the Night, and Zuma, low points (Journey Through the Past ... even I drew the line at a 97-minute version of "Words"), middle points (I loved maybe half of American Stars and Bars), and not-yet-discovered (I didn't come to Time Fades Away for a few years).
All of which is to say that Young was an icon of mine. But then came 1977, and for me, punk changed everything. Most of my 60s favorites were either long gone or mostly irrelevant, and Bruce Springsteen, while he is my all-time favorite, has always existed outside of my normal taste preferences. Comes a Time was a lovely album, much better than Harvest, but it was so quiet next to The Clash et al.
So, when Rust Never Sleeps came out, explicitly acknowledging punk, I fell in love the way I had with Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Looking back, I don't think as highly of it ... I never really understood songs like "Powderfinger", preferring noisier glop like "Welfare Mothers". But "Hey Hey, My My" still resonates.
What capped off my feelings about Rust Never Sleeps is that I saw Young in concert for the first time, which had been a long time coming. (I'd seen CSNY once.) As it happened, the show I attended was the one used for the Rust Never Sleeps movie, which means whenever I want to relive the show, I can just pop the DVD into the player. It's hard for me to separate the album Rust Never Sleeps from the concert I saw, which had silly staging but which was even better than the album because it also included "Like a Hurricane".
Nothing he did after Rust Never Sleeps hit me as hard. And in 2013, if I were listing my favorite Neil Young albums, it would be in a tie for second behind Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.
Jack Thompson
Rust Never Sleeps was my first Neil album proper. By that I mean it was the first one I bought for myself. I'd heard a lot of a friend's copy of Decade, barreling down I-5 to and from college the previous year, but that was close to all the Neil I knew at the time. So Rust's importance to me first and foremost was biographical. I'd probably read a X-gau review before I made the purchase and was vaguely aware of real or imagined battle lines being drawn up by veterans in the music industry for and against (Iggy Pop, Townsend vs. the Eagles, The Rolling Stone) punk rock and knew which side I was on. I remember the album cover when I first spied it in Everybody's Records; Neil in tennis shoes and all-white, his Tom Verlaine haircut, the gigantic red and blue speakers and microphone dwarfing the band. I bought the whole my-my-hey-hey American tragic-comic mythmongering hook, line, and sinker, really: what a cocky counter-punch to punk, was my reaction. The clang-clang go the metal guitar sonics were primitive and painterly. The dinosaur stomping tempos when the music rocked; the elegiac and resolute lilt to the slow ones. If I was aware at the time that all I've mentioned so far was a crudely obvious effort by Young to stay relevant during the early excitement of punk rock revolution I'm sure I considered it all bold and even righteous. Yay punk rock! And, even now, I must say, I think one of the most striking things about Rust is really how little musically is conceded to trendy sounds. The punk ruckus might have kicked him out of slumber but he doesn't dive into the mosh pit. I mean, this isn't like the Stones or Blondie doing disco records. Neil just plugs-in his feedback amp and plays traveling songs from Mars. It was like some of Marcus's old, weird America turns up in 1979. (In fact, there must be a Marcus chapter about the setting in "Powderfinger" alone somewhere, right?) The alienated Americana struck something deep in me as well, being only 19 years-old, just starting out, it felt like a bridge between my past and future. I was trying to catch an hour on the sun too, wanted to sleep with Pocahontas to find out how she felt, I wanted shelter from the powder and the finger, and I was most certainly wonderin' a lot about what the fuck to do. The druggy, hippy-dippiness set against mythic landscapes of existential quandary and wanderlust was some of the highest art I knew in those days.
Where the eagle glides ascending
There's an ancient river bending
Down the timeless gorge of changes
Where sleeplessness awaits.
I searched out my companions,
Who were lost in crystal canyons
When the aimless blade of science
Slashed the pearly gates.
Today? Images of eagles (ascending or descending) are near as bad as images of the American flag. Sophomoric? Probably. Bad poetry? Probably, I wouldn't know. Pulpy? Sure. And certainly not as deep as the lyrics pretend to be, but imagery of timeless gorges and crystal canyons with 19th century God-is-dead alienation still works for me; like a psychedelic movie western.
In retrospect, I'm ready to admit Neil has made prettier music, that there are probably only three songs on Rust worthy of the eponymous Decade collection, and I like Everybody Knows, After the Gold Rush, Tonight's the Night, side two of On The Beach, and "Like a Hurricane" at least as well, but I identified with Rust like no other Neil album before or since. Not that I'm claiming this is of any great significance to me or you either. It would actually have been far more accurate of my life at the time to say that I hadn't decided it was better to burn out than fade away at all but almost exactly the opposite. And, even in that, my identification with Rust was kind of self-righteous, helping me in my efforts to leave some of my past behind. But I really was wonderin' what to do and, most of all, like Neil, wanted to get away, to sail away, gotta get away.
Rust Never Sleeps is a record for road trips, two-lane blacktop rolling on forever, from the sun-bleached morning into the dark, spectral, night.
Scott Woods
My favourite song on Rust Never Sleeps is the quiet, gorgeous, ironically (or should I say duplicitously?) titled "Thrasher," and though I often claim I'm not a lyrics guy, the imagery here is remarkably suggestive. Back in the mid-'80s I was talking about the song once with a fellow Neil enthusiast I worked with at the college paper (he was a few years older than me, and a major stoner), and I still recall his recitation of the line, "When the aimless blade of science/slashed the pearly gates." He was shouting the line at me, his eyes bugging out, declaring, "that's just unbelievably brilliant!" I couldn't—and I still don't—disagree. Equally remarkable, and no less evocative for Neil fans of a certain vintage, though, is the line about "that great Grand Canyon rescue episode," which I've never heard as anything but a reference to the epic three-part "Grand Canyon or Bust" episode of "The Brady Bunch" that aired in 1971. As described in IMDb, "Mike tells all the kids not to go exploring on their own as they don't know the terrain. But the family hits its second crisis of the trip when Bobby and Cindy go missing. Unknown to the rest of the family, Bobby and Cindy were intrigued by an Indian boy they spotted…" Okay, fine, I'm sure rock star Neil had better things to do in 1971 than watch drawn-out episodes of Mike & Carol's kin (then again, a lot of crazy shit can happen on a tour bus, as Neil himself can surely attest) but if you bring the almost-as-lovely "Pocahontas" into the frame here as well—might there not be at least a hint of thematic consistency at work?
So there was that with Rust Never Sleeps—intriguing characters (Marlon Brando, Pocahontas, Johnny Rotten, and an unnamed Martian in possession of some terrific weed), starring in fragments of stories put across in ways I'd never heard before in pop music—it all seemed so plain-spoken and grounded in a way that felt both unfamiliar and exciting. (I should mention here that I really only started to think about Neil Young in the early '80s. Rust and Decade reached me in tandem after being tipped off by something I read in The Globe and Mail about Neil being one of the original punks. So, a couple forgotten '70s radio hits aside, I really had no prior idea of what he was capable of.)
There was also music, of course, and though song for song I might prefer side one's acoustic slowburns (save "Sail Away," the kind of freewheeling-folkie Neil I've never been partial towards), I still get a kick out of side two's electrified meltdowns, and I wish I had better command of the language at my disposal to burrow into and adequately describe the guitar sound of the "Hey Hey" finale. Years of FM overplay later, I still find it entirely rousing (in a way I don't find "Rockin' in the Free World" at all so), in no small part because it has the most insane guitar blare I've heard. Pretty sure I wasn't alone during the mid-80s "pigfuck" days when I'd think of "Hey Hey" as a kind of litmus test for how far any of the pre-grungers—from Dinosaur Jr. to Squirrel Bait, et al.—could take it; some worthwhile attempts here and there, but truthfully, it stands untouched. But hey hey, my my—just because I can't get there, perhaps you (Jeff), or someone else that's part of this festschrift, can. You certainly have my blessing to try.
Detail:
Rust Never Sleeps (1979)
Buzzcocks, "Everybody's Happy Nowadays" (1979)
Well, this is an old favorite just because I owned the single before making the smart move and latching onto the band's masterpiece album, Singles Going Steady (A-sides and B-sides, arguably the only way to do a punk-rock album). It's thus a sentimental favorite but I think anyone would have to agree. "Everybody's Happy Nowadays" is still a beaut—it's the slashing guitars that make it, which are so nimble and quick and yet so suddenly heavy, pushed to the forefront when the backing vocals cut in. David Gedge, for one, was an evident student. They are like blasts of gently scrubbing steel wool to the brain, abrasive yet cleansing in the full-out sprint of this song. Pete Shelley's vocal traces a relentlessly hooked-up melody, made to pogo to yet so much more, operating at precision levels of popcraft, chiming notes and fat chords and ratatat snare. When the space opens for it Shelley's nervous yelping, "but I know it's OK OK," makes the point perfectly. Of course this is no song about happiness, even if it sounds that way, but rather one of jeering anxiety, with built-in propulsive release courtesy those slashing guitars, which suddenly elevate and relieve and go full circle to the song's fundamentals. Manchester's finest, I don't care what anyone says, the Buzzcocks would have been stars in any era, and they should have been bigger stars in the late '70s. The art is all over it—this is the punk-rock that willfully eschews politics—and they are so good at assembling pop music out of 2 guitars bass drums that one is practically humbled by it. At the same time "Everybody's Happy Nowadays" is so generous there's only occasion for the joy of it, and playing again.
Manhattan (1979)
Director: Woody Allen
Writers: Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman
Photography: Gordon Willis
Music: George Gershwin
Editor: Susan E. Morse
Cast: Woody Allen, Mariel Hemingway, Diane Keaton, Michael Murphy, Meryl Streep, Anne Byrne Hoffman, Bella Abzug, Wallace Shawn, Michael O'Donoghue
I was once pleased to call Manhattan my favorite movie, prized above all others, desert island selection (never mind how you play those), etc. By the early '90s and the time of the Woody Allen / Mia Farrow tabloid spectacle I was more interested in forgetting it. In the event of the movie question, I quietly started calling another movie my favorite—City Lights, which has distinctive affinities—and didn't even bother to look at Manhattan again for a very long time.
It's the Tracy character and narrative thread causing the problems, of course, with the awkward (and unmistakable) overtones of predatory sex. I don't actually believe Woody Allen is a pedophile, or anything other than a somewhat boorish and clueless person. I also don't think it's enough to say that his personal life doesn't matter, only the work does. That's a sensible approach and one that mostly works with, say, Roman Polanski. But looking at Manhattan again closely underscores how determinedly Woody Allen interjects himself, on a very personal basis, into the center of his pictures.
Start with the opening sequence, which has claims on a place as one of the greatest movie openings ever. The magnificent climax to George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" plays, and a montage of Gordon Willis's stunning black and white photography unfolds. I have a note to myself asking if this is Willis's greatest movie, and I mean it, though his credits elsewise are boggling (notably the whole Godfather franchise). Long shots of the New York skyline. Skyscrapers. Street scenes. Central Park. New York in winter. New York in spring. An unbelievable shot of Yankee Stadium with a passing train. And then fireworks. It is an amazing, brilliant tone poem, setting the mood perfectly for a love song to a city.
But just ahead of this beautiful mess sits Woody Allen (as Isaac) with his stammering patter and stand-up comic instincts, making cheap gags: "Chapter One. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat.... Oh, I love this.... New York was his town, and it always would be."
That's what struck me most. I was impressed all over again with the photography and music in Manhattan, and by other points as well, such as the complexities and mechanics of the story. It's a narrative worked out well, much better than Allen usually does. Diane Keaton (as Mary) is solid as a rock, as always (especially when working with Allen)—watch how good she is at phone calls. So is Mariel Hemingway (as Tracy)—and for that matter, the Tracy thread is not written to be particularly flattering to Allen. It actually comes with a good deal of sophistication and insight.
But the furshlugginer Woody Allen gags! They do not stop! Here he is early, discussing his own self-declared most profound question of courage: "That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it." Talking with his best friend: "When it comes to relationships with women, I'm the winner of the August Strindberg award." In a fight with an ex-wife (played by Meryl Streep in a delicious turn): "My analyst tried to warn me, but you were so beautiful I got another analyst." Running for shelter with Mary from a sudden storm: "Come on, it's an electrical storm! Do you want to end up in an ashtray?" Discussing Tracy with friends: "I'm 42 and she's 17. I'm older than her father. Can you believe that? I'm dating a girl wherein I can beat up her father." On the way home from a date with Mary: "You look so beautiful I can hardly keep my eye on the meter."
Yes, I understand this is like complaining that Alfred Hitchcock movies are too suspenseful. It was this constant stream of gags as much as anything that appealed to me about Woody Allen movies in the first place, and for a long time. But Manhattan always was something different—far more ambitious, and, indeed, capable of realizing its ambitions. It is an absolutely gorgeous film. There is the famous opening, and nearly as well known a scene in a darkened planetarium museum space with Isaac and Mary getting to know one another, with brilliant use of black space and lines of white to define features, such as Mary's profile. Even small throwaway scenes, such as apartment interiors, are staged and shot memorably.
The story is blithe and chattery but intricately conceived, with a perfect impossible situation at the center of it in the characters of Isaac and Tracy, a story that actually plays out beautifully across the arc of the movie, and doesn't ever really cheat. It is an impossible situation. Isaac knows it and always knows it. Tracy doesn't begin to glean it until the very end. It is likely doomed, but there is still hope. It's a resolution for me on the order of Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby, with practically every point in harmony and believable and tied up neat as a bow. That's remarkable for anyone, but especially for Woody Allen.
So one forgives the instinct for gags, perhaps feeling sad noticing again as they come and come and come. But what are you going to do? One of the problems with classic comedy films—this is equally true for me with City Lights now, by the way—is that the magic of the comedy and the laughs can become thin and less predictable, even as stronger elements survive unblemished. I could speculate about the execrable Interiors from just the year before, which was suffocatingly parched of humor, let alone gags. Perhaps Allen felt constrained to bring that element back in.
Or perhaps, almost certainly we know now, it's the only way Woody Allen knows to play anything. So that's how he plays Isaac. Honestly, can you think of anyone else who could have? None of my complaints means he didn't create a stone masterpiece in Manhattan. When all is said and done, and for all my painfully enumerated difficulties with Woody Allen, this remains one of my very favorite movies.
Top 10 of 1979
During my time in the desert vis a vis Manhattan I claimed Apocalypse Now as my favorite of the year, and it is indeed a worthy effort. I don't hesitate to recommend the longer Redux version, though I like to have a copy of the original around too. The first time I saw the Richard Pryor movie is the hardest I have ever laughed anywhere, I believe, and Alien rounds out a very strong first four. After that it's rock 'n' roll movies, plus Cronenberg and Tarkovsky. Final tally: stupendously excellent year (hovering under: The Marriage of Maria Braun, The China Syndrome, Being There, The Black Stallion, Nosferatu the Vampyre).
1. Manhattan
2. Apocalypse Now
3. Richard Pryor: Live in Concert
4. Alien
5. Hair
6. Quadrophenia
7. Rock 'n' Roll High School
8. Stalker
9. The Brood
10. Breaking Away
Didn't like so much: All That Jazz, Kramer vs. Kramer, Mad Max, Quintet, The Tin Drum
Gaps: Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens, Best Boy, Life of Brian, 1941, Real Life
Detail:
Manhattan (1979)
Pretenders, "Precious" (1979)
You will notice that one of the great album openers of all time (to one of the great album sides of all time) actually starts with a spot of in-studio chipmunk chatter in the periphery. That only makes it greater. Every detail about this simply makes it greater. It's just a little rock 'n' roll song of three and a half minutes, but it somehow moves with great natural force like a gleaming streamlined bullet train at night, massive, traveling a great distance, capable of tremendous speed. It throbs with potency, swaggers and slinks about the cloistered space of sound it creates. It stops, pops, shifts about. It works up skintight grooves and bursts them at will with showers of sparking, churning sound. The band is locked in place. Songwriter / singer Chrissie Hynde makes her mocking points, couched in an ocean of sexuality, every fiber posing a familiar proposition, one thing alone on the mind of this song: "I was feeling kind of ethereal 'cos I'm precious / I had my eye on your imperial you're so precious ... Made me wanna, made me wanna, you made me make it / Oh, you're so mean." Such a great first impression, such a great way to start. It sets the tone for an album that will explore more of the nuances and repercussions of the liaisons, locates the emotional origins in Cleveland, and explodes when moved to do so, among other things showing off one of the most delicious toss-away declarations of "fuck off" to be heard anywhere ever. It's so fun when new artists are this good, and it still sounds new to these ears even allowing that it is nearly 35 years old now.
Detail:
Pretenders, "Precious" (1979)
Wave (1979)
Detail:
Wave (1979)
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