Five Historically and Personally Important Albums/Recordings of Popular People’s Musics We At ANTHROPOTECH Rate Deleteriously Undervalued

We Move Together, Sea Ensemble

When Author graduated from graduate school with high honours and retuned to his home town, he moved in with a lovely and fun woman a few years older than he who had never thought it made sense to go to no goddamn university and had instead been busy promoting shows, managing records stores, and playing music with the kinds of people who defecate in the kitchenware sometimes for laughs in dilapidated living spaces more or less run like arts collectives. This woman did a lot of this in the city of Vancouver, where she invariably hooked up and shacked up with a popular local rock and roll Lothario who ended up sleeping on the sly with most of our lovely heroine’s pretty and/or insecure and/or available girlfriends. A local artist of comix in that august coastal city once made her up as a Jessica Harper in Suspiria! Some will chalk it up as “posterity,” though today We have perfectly reasonable friends also who would call that behaviour “stalking.” Author assures you they never made that comix picture. Author and this woman lived in Calgary, and mostly the situation was such that they mostly had to work to scrape by and became recreationally inclined to mostly blow off steam solo and together. Mostly it was Author who posed for the Polaroids, some of these slightly blue. Author was mostly working or wasted, but was otherwise not focused on music, unfortunately in his dissipated ruin more inclined to toil inconsolably at poems, short stories, and pugnacious essays incomprehensible and/or vile to most. Still, our beautiful hero and heroine did sometimes make informal music together and liked the idea of a project called Cancer Panties, the whole very-fine-bourbon-inspired principle in the name a nod both to David Cronenberg’s original 1970 Crimes of the Future and Tim Burton’s idiotic but not dismissible 1989 version of Batman, which We believe involves a Crimewave of Tainted Cosmetics. Author and Lady always together for their almost exemplary but ultimately too-rocky years of co-bundled ardour said they believed the ultimate expression of collaborative romantic love transmuted into musical alchemy was Sea Ensemble, the Ensemble that is just a couple named Don and Zusaan, or at least that’s be the case on We Move Together, which Author and Lady listened to ceremonially and regularly on compact disk, of which they owned you’d imagine many thousands, but which had originally been released by the legendary ESP on vinyl LP in 1974, the year Duke Ellington died. Also recalled of this period: a simpatico fanaticism between our wired and racked common-laws of yore for Olympia, Washington’s Beat Happening. Especially the 1985 debut. Probably also Black Candy.         

99¢, Santigold

Author has regularly succeeded in escaping and then escaping back to Calgary serially these past many years. He’s single, God knows, but he very much likes to carry on and fraternize and/or consort, most especially with talkative females, though in this respect he is not ever pushy, understood likewise by all sensible persons actually witness to his maybe-a-little-wonky workaday conduct to not at all be notably prepossessing or insistent or coercive. It’s a fact that’s he’s sometimes directly praised on this account. Whatever. He likes pop music, and he especially likes pop music made by attractive and lasciviously creative women. Author told Aya that he believes both that 99¢ by the undeniably-striking Santigold is the finest pop album he has ever heard and that he thinks he has to be, solipsist (if not all-out narcissist) that he sometimes is, the only person on earth who chalks it that way. It is of note, avers Aya, that Author is also hugely enamoured of both Neneh Cherry and Robyn, and that the whole pulsing intercomplex of this twine of twain is very heavily cast-over with elements drawing from the Caribbean, Scandinavia, and the very scary Occult city of London, England. Author attended the Satigold show when she brought her 99¢ rodeo to Calgary, and he’s pretty sure it’s the Star herself who asked that “Mind Your Own Business” by Delta 5, a fave of all of us here at ANTHROPOTECH, be pumped through Flames Central as house music in advance of her set. It was very, very dope, says Author to Aya. Author also asks Aya to ask Santigold to what extent the whole show—choreography, costumery, grocery store props and big-screen video segments—was consciously inspired by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Goran’s 1972 film Tout va bien. [The Calgary Flames are the preeminent local sports franchise and an extremely over-cutesy brand. Flames Central in now mercifully called The Palace Theatre again.]            

 

Diamonds in the Rough, John Prine

Our man Lloyd here, dunkin’ his dang donut like a rube, may just be a glorified rent-a-cop from Moose Jaw, S'katchewan, but it’s our foremost insistence that when the cops are ultimately more revamped than defunded: this, sir, be your wheelman. Lloyd absolutely insists that the hella-imagistic and modernist-poetry-lapidary Diamonds in the Rough is fuck rights at the top of the pops there with the best of Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, and Townes Van Zandt, and bugger all to hell and gum anyhow, Nate, ‘cause nobody is gonna raise thunder anywhere in range if you got any one of these dead-or-alive genius geezers on hand ticklin’ ‘hind your ear and waitin’ ‘round to die. “Sour Grapes.” “Talkin’ John Garfield Blues.” That’s there the shakes, and you said it, Sunny! Coney Island ain’t no more no kind of San Francisco North Bay State of Mind, Larry, and Chicago—well, she’s the pits. Coney Island means you go down with your waivers and die a dog’s death out there on them rocks. Lloyd's positively flummoxed that Penny just scooped a new compact disk of this humbling solvent-huffing Skid Row drunkard's masterpiece in a near-abandoned shopping mall for $5.95.   

Fire Escape, Sunburned Hand of the Man w/ Kieran Hebden    

And here We At ANTHROPOTECH Finally Resolve to “Just Embed a Good Chunk.”

Passion, Shepp-Marre Quintet

Author escapes with his: a) life; b) that handsome feather in his natty peacockin' cap—

Que la bête [humaine] meure Pt. 2

 And there is such a thing as too much trouble.

- Elaine May

A lot of the problems endemic to Late Capitalism are surely endemic to mercantile commerce well in advance of there even being Standard Operating Procedure Capitalism. People try to make deals. Other guy comes along and he slaps you with a glove, which may or may not mean pistols at dawn, you understand? 

When seaports arrive, the inlanders modify their practices. Swedish King Charles the First has a hell of a time in Russia. Strategy and salted earth. Napoleon lost Russia without once suffering a decisive loss on the battlefield. Of the Emperor’s foray into the wastes of the Caucasus, Count de Ségur has the following to report: “Napoleon’s genius, seeking to transcend time, climate, and distance, had as it were got lost in space” [although this is a translation]. Once known euphemistically as the "breadbasket of Europe [or the Soviet Bloc]," the Eastern part of the Ukraine—the Donbas region, including its Dontesk and Luhansk territories—was called in February of this year by the Washington Post, "an industrial powerhouse."     

Wiazemsky in Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar [augmented]

Horses poison the wellwater.

Artillery strafes the tesselations.

In the film AU HASARD BALTHAZAR, Wiazemsky pensively declaims: “It’s not money
I need, but a friend who can help me learn to run away” [although that’s as the subtitling has it, and Wiazemsky is playing a character named Marie who has not ever once had a single properly good day.]

Simone Simon. My God, what is there to say? In HELIOGABALUS OR, THE CROWNED ANARCHIST, the Prototype Roman Emperor adopts, as Antonin Artaud has it, "the costume of another country" and "in wearing women's clothing, adorning oneself with jewels, pearls, feathers, coral, and talismans: what was anarchic from the Roman viewpoint was [...] fidelity to an order [...,] decorum fallen from the heaven thither reascended by all available means" [I've diced it up, and it's already passaged through the translation of Alexis Lykiard]. Simone Simon does not want to go to heaven. She is, we argue, one of these who thither reascend. Jewish, she becomes full-on resident of The Hollywood about three years before the Second World War starts, effectively an exile, no? According to Sandy Flitterman-Lewis at the Jewish Women's Archive, Simon spent parts of her childhood in Marseilles and Madagascar, later living in any number of notable localités du continent, enjoying her moveable feast. Simone Simon retires from the cinema in the late 50s, but returns to the screen for a curtain call, you could say, appearing in Michel Deville's LA FEMME EN BLEU in '72. In his booklet essay accompanying the Criterion DVD release of Jean Renoir's La bête humaine [spine# 324], Geoffrey O'Brien, calling the film one "in which the natural world and the power of technology are wedded through the closely coordinated labor [sic]—effected through glances and sign-language—of two men," argues that the historical contingencies relevant to the production of Renoir's film, both consciously and unconsciously determine its trajectory, thus mobilizing a "consoling bit of theatricality—even if its just a silly performer performing a silly song—into the heart of an annihilating melodrama." Almost parenthetically (!), O'Brien asserts of Simone Simon that she plays "a femme fatale as fragile as she is irresistible." A man with a furnace of a brain who believed that women have mysterious powers he only faintly understood or could ever understand, pioneering horror producer Val Lewton hired Simon for Cat People because he was phobic of her in some sense, both excited and repelled. Kent Jones's feature-length Martin Scorsese-narrated doc accompanying the Criterion Blu-ray for Cat People [spine# 833] contains a bit of overtalk in which Matry says Cat People is about "the mood that stays with you...the sounds; the images." Somewhere Lewton's widow Ruth says her man believed Simone was an actual cat! “Val hated cats! Oh gosh, I remember once, I was in bed and he was writing—he used to like to write late in the night. There was a catfight outside, and the next thing I knew, he was up at the foot of my bed, nervous and frightened. He was very unhappy about cats. I think it stemmed from an old folk tale he remembered in Russia—that cats were peculiar creatures that you couldn’t trust.” Director Jacques Tourneur is quoted in the doc designating Cat People "an A picture made in B time."

BLACK LEOPARD

TORTUGA

It probably seemed natural to ace bemonocl'd Teuton Fritz Lang to adapt Jean Renoir's adaptation of Émile Zola's La Bête humaine for American producer Lewis J. Rachmil. It surely isn't the lone factor here that the screenplay comes care of the extremely fine writer Alfred Hayes [we cannot recommend strongly enough his novel The End of Me, available from New York Review books!]. Lang had already adapted Renoir's La chienne, about the murder of a prostitute, as Scarlet Street in '45. In a discussion of Human Desire accompanying the Eureka: Masters of Cinema Blu-ray release of Human Desire [spine# 197], scholar Tony Rayns argues that Lang's version of a small component part of the Zola novel Renoir focused on in order to make use of the "sophisticated European" movie star Jean Gabin, a luggisgh hunk not afraid of representing "enormous psychopathic mental difficulties," is the path-correcting moral version of the story, hoped palatable for the American fly-over people. If 19th century readers of Zola might have been inclined to imagine women, ethnic minorities, or sexual freaks "the human beasts" mayhaps indicted in the novel's title, Zola might not have been terribly disposed to disabuse them of the idea. It wasn't the case with respect to how Renoir saw thing nor as pertains to Lang, though the German also has his own typeset. The beast is machine-that-eats-people industriality. Murder is hypocrisy and covetousness, unless it is also a means of disabuse. All the workers are basically good individual souls, but they's caught in the wringer, alas...or betimes...or both. Lang doesn't believe in "conventional morality," as Rayns sees it, and this is largely why Gloria Grahame replaces Simone Simon [as she must!]. Grahame was a free spirit and exemplary scandal-rag fodder from the get-go. Married to director Nicholas Ray, she married the man's son subsequently, having begun consorting with him amorously before he was of legal age. She was on more than one occasion accused of assaulting other actresses. I continue to believe it a credit to the goodwill of society at large that Gloria was able to go on making her enticing mistakes until she died in 1981 at the age of fifty-five.              

James Benning, PLACE, neugerriemschneider, Berlin, Nov. 19, 2021

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