Album of the Month: THE LONG GOODBYE by Pere Ubu

The other night, I could not fall asleep and decided to listen to a record until my mind switched off. I flicked through my phone and the album that I chose (possibly accidentally but possibly not) was the new album by Pere Ubu. Normally, I would expect a drop-off at some point in the middle of song number five, but this time I had to listen until the end. Because for thirty-eight minutes after 4 a.m., The Long Goodbye sounded like the album of the year. And, as it happened, I would not fall asleep until the break of dawn.  

Pere Ubu are not a band I listen to a lot. I do consider myself a big fan of Dub Housing and especially The Modern Dance (plus, their first two singles were phenomenal), but even with those albums... I'm just not in the habit of pulling them out too often. When I do that, however, and they click - they click like nothing else in the world.

For instance, on the night I was describing earlier, the insane synths made perfect sense, and there was not a sound sweeter, or more bizarre, than the sound of David Thomas pronouncing 'Los Angeles'. In fact, the sound of The Long Goodbye is absolutely gorgeous in its sheer synths-drenched weirdness. There is not much guitar but the bursts in "What I Heard On The Pop Radio" or the perfectly titled "Flicking Cigarettes At The Sun" are brilliant. 

The Long Goodbye could of course turn out to be Pere Ubu's last album. In fact, it was meant as such, and only later did it transpire that David Thomas's fortunes changed and his health started to improve. This is promising because even though The Long Goodbye would be a great swan song for the band (and there is a band, and their contributions are sporadic but meaningful), I sincerely hope Thomas could do it all over again. Because no one else can make music this awkward, and this effortless. 

This is my album of the month, easily, and yet I'm not sure I can safely recommend this to a casual listener or even a reader of this blog. The Long Goodbye is seriously left-field stuff that sounds like a particularly deranged film noir, or a novel by Jim Thompson (who is referenced in "Fortunate Son"), an album that matches the cover picture perfectly. Having said all that, there is no guarantee that this stuff will not click. 

And I do wish that upon you. Because when Pere Ubu clicks, well, it is a curse, a trap, and an absolute privilege.  

My Cultural Lowlights: MARY CASSATT

These days, when you walk through the wonderful selection of Impressionist paintings in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., you are bound to notice a dozen or so works by Mary Cassatt. I say a dozen, but you will end up thinking there is a good hundred of them. They will jump at you from behind a striking view of Paris captured by Pissarro or they will glare at you from under the newspaper of Cézanne's father or they will, in all honesty, bring you back to earth after the beautiful reverie of staring at Woman with a Parasol. 

I think there is an elephant in the room here, and the elephant is done with crude brush strokes: Mary Cassatt's paintings are simply not that good. 

The most offensive thing about them is that they look like copies, not original works. Degas is all over these paintings, but, really, they are influenced by any number of Impressionists. They are not second-rate as the technique is there and the colours have that rough, rich quality to them. Rather, I would argue that Mary Cassatt's works look second-hand. They look like someone had already done that particular scene, and done it better. 

Besides, it is hard to look past those faces. The two ladies from The Loge (1882) are off. There is no mystery about the eyes, no personality to the facial features. They look plain, and that is one crime Impressionist artists could never commit. I am almost reminded of a scene from The Man Who Wasn't There where a piano teacher has this to say about the playing of a young and promising girl: "She plays too polite". Which is also true for Mary Cassatt. She painted too polite, too safe, and at times it feels that the best her paintings could amount to was a faithful homage. After all, Monet's "The Artist's Garden at Vétheuil" is hanging right across the room.

Now obviously there is another elephant in the room here, and this elephant is even bigger and it has to do with why Mary Cassatt is there in the first place, on those huge white walls, alongside Renoirs and van Goghs and Sisleys. But this elephant I would rather not touch, or it might explode into a million dots that would not assemble into anything quite as beautiful as a painting by Georges Seurat. 

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The one thing I dislike about airports is that all the diversity you have been admiring up to that point is reduced to dull randomness. 

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Travelling, like everything else in life, is all about the morning. 

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I think I would not enjoy the image of a surfer catching the wave quite so much if they did not fall at the end of it.

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It took California to fall in love with The Lovin' Spoonful like never before. "Coconut Grove", "Daydream", "Didn't Want To Have To Do It"... It's the perfect convergence of the music and the setting that you just wouldn't encounter in everyday life. 

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"Beauty is pain", said an American girl on a Coaster train to Encinitas. "Pain is beauty", said her boyfriend, pensively, seconds later. 

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I had never felt as foolish abroad as when I lost my wallet in San Diego and fifteen minutes later a guy in a record store found it in a 'New Arrivals' section and returned it to me saying "Here it is, bro". He said that in such a laidback, West Coast manner that I realised how stupid it was - feeling stressed and nervous about such minor issues as losing all of your money.

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Seal-watching, an activity as calm and absorbing as drinking Malbec at the end of an exhausting day.

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People who say D.C. is not worth it are either fools or bald-faced liars. D.C. would be worth it even if the only thing it had was Claude Monet's "Woman with a Parasol". Which remains, and always will be, the greatest painting of all time.

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There is an air of cool, detached superiority about people who live in a capital that doesn't also happen to be the country's biggest, and most exuberant, city.

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You need New York City to get your ideas but you need Washington D.C. to write them down. I believe I know why Christopher Hitchens chose the capital.

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In our Brooklyn apartment: a telescope, a wooden wine case from Girard winery, a maneki-neko, a map of the Moon, a Johnny Cash box set, journals and notebooks of Susan Sontag, an Impressionist painting, antique armchairs from the 19th century and God knows what else. Really, you can't put Brooklyn in a sentence. 

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If a severe power outage in downtown Manhattan means that Konrad Paszkudzki plays the piano in a dim room lit by candles, and afterwards we catch an equally intimate Birdland set of the legendary Freddy Cole, then, Christ, I'm all for it.

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Mezzrow Jazz Club in Greenwich Village could be the first place in my life where I did not give a damn about the quality of Old-Fashioned. Not with that piano, trombone, voice.

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There is a beautiful Alice in Wonderland sculpture in Central Park, and there is this little boy sitting on one of the mushrooms. Camera at the ready, his babysitter is telling him to hide the plastic bottle behind the mouse, but the boy keeps fumbling and the crowd by the sculpture keeps growing bigger and bigger. Phone-wielding people do not want this boy in their picture are they are becoming restless. There is one woman in particular who is about to burst with all that righteous indignation. The scene drags on and on, with the babysitter giving instructions, with the boy sitting on the mushroom, with the crowd seething. I wish this could go on forever. I'm sure Lewis Carroll would wish that, too.

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The 1912 Brooklyn, as described by Betty Smith, is the 2019 Brooklyn I'm seeing today. They are walking the same dogs. They are singing the same songs. The only difference is they won't give you a penny for pinching your cheek. Or will they?..

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New York City is like an intense girlfriend.  

My Cultural Highlights: WHITE

If at some point in your adolescence you were not fascinated by socialist ideas, you wasted your youth. 

At sixteen, I read a lengthy interview with Oliver Stone in some British magazine. He was travelling around Central America during that period, visiting countries like Guatemala and Cuba. This particular interview was him enchanted by the 'Freedom Island' and its unfading leader, Fidel Castro. What struck me then was that I was under the spell of his words about Castro and socialism and yet I never really cared for his filmmaking (except for Salvador, ironically). 

More than that. A little later I was having a conversation about Soviet socialism with an American acquaintance, and somehow we got to the subject of Oliver Stone and The Doors. I said I did not like the film but I liked the man. This was bullshit, of course, as my opinion was based on my brief fascination with people like Leon Trotsky as well as the Oliver Stone interview in a British magazine. The American said, "It's interesting... You like Oliver Stone but you don't like the film". Which was basically him saying, "My dear man, you are making no sense". 

And - emphatically - I was not. Years later, I would be disappointed with Oliver Stone as an artist (Alexander was hammy filmmaking at its worst) and as a socialist (which in Stone's world presupposes sycophantic admiration for corrupt dictators). But the feeling stuck: you can dislike the art but fall in love with the artist.       

I do not dislike the art of Bret Easton Ellis. I loved American Psycho and I loved The Rules of Attraction (the latter a great deal more than the former), but I could never get into any of his other books, scripts and (do I even need to bring this up?) attempts at directing. And yet somehow I have always loved the man and could listen to him talk for hours on that great podcast of his where he speaks about movies and SJWs and has this incredible ability to formulate a question with a million words and then get a brief reply from a guest. His thoughts are incisive and articulate and his interviews with people like Mark Z. Danielewski and Quentin Tarantino are fascinating. In fact, these opinions and these interviews rival the best pages from his greatest books. 

So it was an easy decision, in that very German and very orderly bookstore in Bonn, to choose his first collection of non-fiction called White (but of course) over the latest novel by Ian McEwan. 

And it is a great book. The title alone is a stroke of genius and will no doubt provoke all the right people. You could call these people whatever you want, but the term that Bret Easton Ellis uses is 'snowflakes'. Snowflakes, or social justice warriors, are those thin-skinned hypocrites who are thrashed with special gusto in the book as well as on the B.E.E. podcast. In White, Ellis recounts several stories of him being attacked for his opinions (Trump, #MeToo) on Twitter and elsewhere. In times less hysterical than ours, these opinions would raise no hackles at all, but in this day and age one word in feeble support of Donald Trump or Kevin Spacey means you will be eaten alive. It is infuriating and yet it leads to a set of thrilling stories. In fact, Ellis's views on Trump and post-2016 America are perfectly reasonable and so are his views on the hapless Democrats who have resorted to the same tactics they decry and have thus been 'Trumped'. And remember: this is all coming from someone whose most famous novel was so prescient in predicting Trump and even had him as one of its (unlikable) characters. 

The book is full of Ellis's thoughts on the aesthetics of movies, his fickle friendships and his great heroes, his struggles and successes as a writer and a journalist (his first New Yorker assignment is a particularly good story) as well as his rumination on identity politics and the perils of having it all in one click. He is not scathing or dismissive of younger generation (his boyfriend happens to be a millennial), but he is concerned about so many of them turning into a faceless army of snowflake warriors who have a very skewed idea of justice and who do not understand the key principle underlying the freedom of speech: "Laugh at everything or you will end up laughing at nothing".

Скетчи про Минск. Уличные музыканты.

В Минске всегда были уличные музыканты. Так, я помню длинноволосого молодого человека, что сидел на скамейке недалеко от университета и играл "Exit Music (For a Film)". Играл с таким искренним надрывом, что хотелось переслушать тот проклятый альбом и наконец его полюбить. Еще я помню мужчину с растрепанными седыми волосами, который стоял на ступеньках подземного перехода и играл ветреные дилановские мелодии на своих десяти губных гармошках (однажды я купил у него одну из них). Я часто думаю о том, где теперь эти двое, и смогли бы они найти себя на улицах другого Минска. Мне кажется, нет.

Потому что Минск и правда другой. Том Вулф назвал 70-е годы прошлого века я-десятилетием, но если это так, то 70-е годы наступили здесь только теперь. И вот на каждом углу стоит человек со скрипкой, саксофоном или гитарой. Я никогда не видел в Минске такого количества уличных музыкантов. Порой это здорово, порой они оживляют город в самых неожиданных местах, но порой создается ощущение, что любой человек, который идет перед тобой, может в один момент сбросить с себя пальто и начать играть на флейте. Так часто я ощущаю себя персонажем рассказа Уилла Селфа, где каждый человек в городе почему-то решает, что может написать роман.

При этом рядом происходит одна и та же комедия: перед музыкантом стоит человек и в безумном пьяном угаре танцует что-то необъяснимое. Это троллинг. Это плата за я-десятилетие. 

Так что я снова запомню двух из них. Безумного человека в спортивных штанах, со свистком, который уже целую вечность стоит рядом с выходом из метро и свистит бесконечную трель. (Правда, недавно он потерял свисток и теперь отбивает свой дьявольский ритм на бубне.) И еще я запомню того мужчину, что стоит в подземном переходе на улице Богдановича и играет на аккордеоне одну и ту же мелодию из дурацкого французского фильма. Эта мелодия никогда не меняется и, заканчивая очередной раунд, он начинает все сначала. Что за причина скрывается за потребностью стоять там изо дня в день и играть все это? 

Мне кажется, эти двое из другого десятилетия, они играют без какой бы то ни было причины, и потому вот их я и запомню.