Sunday, February 19, 2006

Bonnie Prince Billy and Tortoise - The Brave and The Bold



Bonny Prince Billy and Tortoise
The Brave and The Bold
[Overcoat/Domino, 2006]

When two of your musical heroes decide to get together, it can be a mixed blessing. Surely, the complex arrangements and instrumental dexterity of Chicago’s Tortoise could provide nothing but solid support for our bonnie Will Oldham. At first you might assume the band’s muscular tone to be somewhat antithetical to Oldham’s skeletally strained vocal delivery, and yet each serves to emphasize the strengths of the other. Plus, the dynamic of a strong band and a barely-there voice serves as an ironic undertext to the proceedings. The Brave and The Bold collects ten covers from such diverse acts as Elton John, the Minutemen, Devo, Bruce Springsteen, and Don Williams. Springsteen’s ‘Thunder Road’ is transformed from the agit-anthem of the original to a 70s-style prog masterpiece lifted from a long-lost rock opera. The group’s take on Elton’s ‘Daniel’ is equally revelatory, as the classic saccharine end-of-the-night torchsong loses the sing-songiness of Elton’s version in favour of an aural depiction of the drink and smoke-filled atmosphere which must have constituted the reality of the song’s lyrics – all this while still retaining the objective humour of the original. While not a groundbreaking album by any means, The Brave and The Bold is a perfect meeting of indie minds who were smart enough not to try and perfect a masterpiece. They just got together and played the songs which appealed to them, and we’re the better for it.

MP3: Bonnie Prince Billy and Tortoise, "Cravo É Canela"

Audion - Suckfish



Audion
Suckfish
[Spectral Sound, 2005]

Sometimes, all you want to do is dance it all away. Detroit’s Matthew Dear greatly understands this desire, and over the past few years and under a variety of aliases he has appealed to the masses with his take on tech-house beats. Unlike the patient and endearingly produced techno that permeates his namesake vocal work, under alias Audion Dear spins a very dirty and hormone-fuelled sixty minutes. Album opener ‘Vegetables’ sets the tone for Suckfish with an insistent and dirty mechanical crunk that permeates the track, giving it a feel that’s half 1990 Detroit and half 2005 Berlin back alley. ‘Your Place or Mine’ lays down funky, sex-dripping disco beats over its course (for some reason this song screams Rainer Werner Fassbinder to me).

Dear ably leads to the first album highlight ‘Titty Fuck’, which layers electro-style synth stabs over a rampant microhouse soundfloor. Several tracks like ‘T.B.’ and ‘Uvular’ provide more subtle ass-grooving experiences, maybe akin to the cross-room flirtations that precede any overt bumps in the night. Each leads straight into a barn-burner of a track, proving that a slow, tantric rise will beat fireworks every time. And that climax does come with the bass-sweep march of ‘Kisses’, the solid disco thump of ‘The Pong’, and the two-step squelch of ‘Just Fucking’ which will ensure that your party will indeed be started. It all makes you want to drop ecstasy and dance it up like 1997 all over again, this time with the carnal knowledge that comes with full-on adulthood.

MP3: Audion, "Just Fucking"

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

feeling my way around itaewon



our first full day off after the esl camp in korea, and we had celebrated the previous night by, of course, drinking excessively. i was wearing contacts, and the exceptionally dry atmosphere left them decently attached to my eyeballs, despite my regular use of drops -- regular up to the point where i stopped caring / noticing the problem. regardless, fun was had and by the end of the night my eyes ended up in their proper sockets, so to speak.

i woke up the next day completely blind and in an exceptional amount of pain. i couldn't keep my eyes either closed or shut. after three hours of trying to sleep it off into the afternoon, i decided to venture out to the clinic and see (now that there is a certain distance of then and now, it's easy to use such a terrible pun) what was what. since i was completely blind, i had to make the trek by feel. somehow i managed to cross the street, touching brick, stone, and other inhabitants of this dismal American borough of Seoul. when i got the other side, some US military police stopped me and asked why i was so drunk at such an early part of the day ("you must be a fucking Canadian" one said!). i explained my situation and they pointed out that the clinic on my side of the street was closed for renovations, so i had to make my way up the street a half kilometre to another one. fun times.

feeling one's way up the main street in Itaewon is in fact the only way to travel this strip, even if you are graced with vision. every small street vendor that you pass grabs you and brings you closer to their somewhat stunted paychecks. i now know what calvin klein socks feel like. how each item in a line of gucci purses supplely enters your palm only to slip into the next design, arresting you for a second of desire amassed and rejected. the fact that almost everything you see is a bootleg, a facsimile made by hands other than armani's. all of the luggage and tourist items are displayed in order to trip up any passer-by who doesn't give even a second to evaluate their worth, which under my fingers seemed for the most part quite adequate. there is a certain presence of tactile response, a knowledge of where you came from and where you are going, atom by atom from birth unto death. above anything else i learned that the body only knows time within relative immanence. everything is given time by bodily experience, and from this sense of "everything" taken altogether comes the gesture toward transcendence. meaning is precisely this interception of sense into consciousness while trying to avoid the scars of time: an impossible procedure. the blind-for-a-day are given meaning in a pure sense, without referent. no, it says, immortality does not come that cheap; welcome back to present day reality. at this instant the body returns upon itself, and either you allow the non-corporeal to maintain its distance like a prayer, or you let it fold in upon both itself and you.

with this manifest realization, i was able to pick up what was, when i was finally able to see it two days later, a pretty sweet shirt by feeling the design on the front. aesthetics are an interesting consideration when you lose a sense. by what criteria should we really judge things? referentiality is our only recourse. so what then of aesthetics and universality? what then is beautiful beyond that which simply brings relief to the suffering of a particular individual? it was precisely at this moment of purchase that i decided true happiness would only come about if i created something back at my hotel. with such limited options as i had available to myself, i knew that such a creation would be me and a camera, solitary in solidarity. hopefully the resultant video doesn't linger too long as anything of importance, as in my mind it was merely a distraction and one which served it's fitful purpose. if i learned anything from this birthing, it is that isolation -- true isolation -- breeds incontinence. truth be told, i like this space of incontinence. it is one of freedom despite harsh criticism from both within and without; minima moralia.



i made it to the clinic only to find out that many of Itaewon's public services -- in the sense that i have come to understand the meaning of public -- close for random three-hour sessions, sporadically throughout the day. presently i was out of luck, so i decided to try and get back home and knock myself out with soju after fucking around with my attempts at an important visual. on the way, i'm not sure how, i managed to get to the atm in the subway (thank you random australian man who read to me my atm info. up to that point, i was thinking that i might get fucked over by someone stealing cash or my pin). a quick mission of happiness, and some food for my sojourn at the love motel.

being vegetarian and blind in korea is a double misunderstanding. multiply by ten when you add a certain lack of ability with the korean language. obviously i was not allowed to touch the food which interested me. as a consequence, i had to trust my limited korean vocabulary for this pursuit of culinary justice. at one kitchen, i tasted crab and got sick immediately. this led to the exchange of some verbal abuse on the part of those serving me my food. weird. it seemed pretty straight-forward to me. annio golgi, annio mul golgi: no meat, no seafood. then i try to explain no dairy and no eggs. all good, despite my hang'-'glish barbarisms. good, except for the fact that many korean kitchens do not assume things like crab, pork, chicken, etc, to be meat in the traditional sense, and sometimes after explaining that you will not eat a single animal product you still get random animal legs sticking out of your meal in a "decorative" fashion.

nightmare.

the only thing i knew with confidence that i could consume was bi bim bap, a multi-disciplinary salad with rice that sometimes comes with an egg or meat on top but is traditionally vegan. cooking your own food in korea is my recommendation though, unless you really really like bi bim bap, as in three times a day like-alicious.

on this day i had to resort to pictographs in order to get my meal requirements across. this process led me into seven different kitchens, after six different arguments. when fighting blind, the fury of presence is removed from you, as is the hatred which comes from knowing your opposition. it is at once the most heartless and unsatisfying thing you can do. provocation requires a willingness to stare into the eyes of an opponent and convince them of the absolute assurity of your position by strength of metabolism alone. when you go blind, your body language changes, becomes unpredictable. in the end i starved a fair amount, as there was no way for me to express my desires to korean chefs without staring them in the face. blind, fidgety, and half-drunk, i was looked upon as a miser and a cheat, and was given little respect from any food vendor that i found.



at this point, i was so blinded by pain and fuzzy-wrecked-eyedness that i was getting myself around my touch and touch alone -- with occasional barely-peeled eyes telling me of unfocussed shapes and hazy occurences. i now know what most buildings in Itaewon feel like, and some of the people as well. this could have quite easily led me down dark paths, and every bar in my vicinity catered to such a lack of willpower against vice.

i dragged myself home, and was accosted by several prostitutes who i think were balkan. they sounded cute and obviously knew how to endear themselves, but their practised voices were very raspy and tired. i could hear the wheeze of the mattress with every sentence they uttered; articulations seemed determinately cut short by their boredom and the cold wind which passed over their lips. they offered to me everything they didn't really have: presence and a certain emotional tangeability, bought cheaply each half-hour. luckily for them i don't believe in ghosts which i can't see, and so there was no animosity as i left them alone on the street with nothing exchanged between us.

one thing i really liked about my hotel room was the sheer containment it provided. there was no way to excuse the fact that a body needed space. life and breath were taken for granted here in the love motel. this was a region of unforgiven corpses and daily transcience, and my foreign-ness was no exception. time becomes irresolute in such places. the day passed a lot more quickly than i imagined it would upon first waking, in pain and somewhat desperate.

another four hours of listening to music and trying to sleep off my pain. i tried to avoid having my eyes burn when they were either closed OR open. it was a continual and transcendent buzz which elevated my body beyond itself to a relative absolution with the walls, the floor, other people outside my little vacuum. the annihilation of it all was a sweet relief from the immediacy of sensation -- the dry heat from the floor heaters -- pipes under the whole floor which keep the room nice and toasty and also dry the air the fuck out -- made me try another walk into the street. since it was now after supper, the prostitutes were out in full force. no nudity in the public here, unlike North America. the little strip right in front of our love motel is an expanded barracks for GIs picking up hookers and taking them to places like the motel where we have been staying. naked girls left in small dirty rooms after they are used. i thought at first that these little daily mantras of money-then-sex / sex-and-then-money were obscene, a realization of the "love you long time" scene in Full Metal Jacket. i tried everything in my power to save myself from it all. it was crass and i was moralizing, but i took pride in being a judge over these people and their situation. it was liberating, and i wanted the imposition of freedom's distant horizons.

i was starting to see to the horizon, but in fuzzy, half-formed shapes. a young korean girl in a hospital mask came up to me and asked me for a date. she walked in a daze up the street. quick quick quick, then slowly falling to a pause. for a few seconds, my eyes cleared enough that i could make out her face, which was quite beautiful and sad. her english was pretty good, at least the words which weren't drowned out by the blood i saw on the inside of her mask. i asked her why she needed a date from some random guy on the street when she could be winning guys all over the place back at high school or whatever. the only thing which i could see in entire clarity that day -- perhaps the thing which stands out most clearly from the whole trip -- was how her eyes lit up as she pulled her entire mask off her face and told me that she wasn't allowed in school anymore. i could see that she had been beaten up, and was indeed still bleeding from her lip and nose.i wanted to find three hundred thousand won and give it to her just to stay inside for one night. immediately i fell despondent, as this was a malignant thought, one breeding disease. she laughed a little and said, you aren't a GI, you are with a happier face. i realized that my desire to help this girl was precisely her problem. everyone helped her with money, as time was very expensive for her. she was never going to be this young again. she wanted some time back to herself, and that would not come from a foreignor's won. i almost dropped to her feet when she smiled again through the blood around her mouth, then replaced her hospital mask before leaving up the street.

later in my hotel: a camera, a blind photographer, and no subject. i think it was the careless and yet absolute manner in which she placed the mask around her wounds, as though it were not a cover but an interface. i was frozen. precisely because i didn't know her. i could never know her yet could think of nothing else but her immediacy -- she could have founded a temple with that grace. and here i was unable to create even a simple monument of a gesture.



i decided to try some sightless drinking in public to see if i could at least find some conversation. one of the bars next to our love motel was supposedly "Canadian", so i went inside. they did have some presque-canadian whiskey and beer on tap, but i didn't recognize any of it. export only, it seems. regardless of the friendly labels on the beer, my tarsand spirits as well as two British girls who came into the bar soon after i did convinced me to go in the whiskey direction. worst. shit. ever. i only had two drinks, and since the girls weren't exactly masters of conversation except "so are all Canadian boys as funny as you?" and "We are sharing a hostel, want to bring down our rent a bit?" there was nothing but refusal on my mind. i was holding the hand of one of the girls who insisted that it be held, and so i thought: that's right girls. i'm in so much pain that i want to gouge out my retinas with a spoon and fling them down the street, and yet i'd love to go back to your boozy hostel for so much sex and crying. nice try, but that won't get my mind off things. and so it was a terse goodbye as i decided to get the hell out of there.

there's this thing about south korea where public drunkenness is not only completely accepted, but it's thoroughly encouraged if you are a guy. touching every wall and door to find my way back to my room allowed me to bump into five old men who were so thoroughly intoxicated that I had to them get back to their feet and moving in the proper direction. blind leading the blind. one guy even gave me what i later saw was 5,000 won to help him up the stairs to his place. thankfully he asked nothing else. another 45 minutes of walking on my fingers and i was home. it was 9 pm. i drank the last bottle of soju i had in my room in under three minutes and missed a good deal of the remainder of the pain behind my eyeballs.



i tend to like contacts to function as portals to the living world, not as coins allowing passage through the underworld.