Saved albums reviews
That pointless facbook albums challenge. I decided to keep the posts here. Part 2:
I think this is number one.
L’Arc~en~Ciel- DUNE. I found this CD, the original Japanese pressing, by "chance" in a used bin at Amoeba Records in L.A. It changed my life. Many people think of Japan as the future, but for me it is the forever present, past, and in fact all the tenses, yet when there I am awash with feelings of powerful nostalgia for a distant past. That is the feeling I get from this, my favorite album by my favorite of all the great rock bands on the earth, that happened to have existed in Japan. Nostalgia is not the most correct term, it's a memory of something that once stirred powerfully, a magnificent fire that propelled you forward to make something greater than yourself- it was 1991 through 1993, that period. I knew that time and that age. Hyde is the doppleganger and the other side of life for me, the splintered clone with the fame ticket and the accompanying manner that great talents possess, maybe also tainted by that knowledge of the dark fountain. In 93 L'arc was not at the summit of being the top rock act in JP, and the first album has the feel of embodying styles and VK costumes, but steeped in knowledge of the rock world outside JP; for me it's a similar sheen to concurrent developments in Britain with Ride and My Bloody Valentine, but transported by unique melodies and gossamer lyric codes intoning melancholy and yearning glints of silver that seem to coast over immense dark waves. Tides pushing and retreating into the past and raging back, a little more understood with each new experience. I didn't always have a solid grasp of Japanese, and still don't haha so there was an element where the words had to be a feeling more than what they meant, but Hyde's lyrics are always that side of obscure. (If you've read my other write ups you know I love lyrics that are shades and tones more than literal data, and who really listens to lyrics word for word? it's part of the symphonic weft for me.)There was a recollection of turmoil for the band, they have survived with a sparkly if not heroic image, but the drugs and broken band mates faded into the inner folds. The first song on Dune, Shutting from the Sky- the lines put down by former guitarist Hiro, will always call up that primordial desire to express, and make the world give you what you define of it, because it threatens to suffocate you if you don't. I love all of L'arc's albums (Real especially), I love everything Haido-san does, but this one has a special flamey sunspot in my life. If ever I become a god this album will forever exist in my archive of human treasured memories. It singes with passion, sultry in minor key insinuations, but an attack on the world no less fierce for being languidly elegant in its design. Perhaps I am already describing how I react to the sound this album calls out, a faulty human voice conditioned and burdened with the sound of the gods. Be Destined.
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Laundry is taking longer than I thought. Oh well, I should finish my Miguel's Favorite Albums, day 21 or so. I am almost at the end with just 2 left! It's actually been really difficult to articulate what swarming feelings and memories are packed into my thoughts about these. I would rather never reveal anything to be honest. But I started it so I have to finish. Jerry Goldsmith's EXPLORERS. I have already incl. 2 other scores by him, he was just the best. My spiritual mentor and role model of all artistic things. For this 1985 Joe Dante film he left the gritty slashing slicing penetrating gaze of his 60s-70s work behind and went for a soaring full blown adventure, very much of the 80s, that big, flowing, overblown but heartfelt sound that resonated in the minds and souls of so many who came out of that era. I don't know where that optimism and wonder actually went, if you look at what many of those people have become! For whatever reason aliens were deemed a big part of that culture. It's ingrained. Anyway Explorers was about three kids with big dreams of space flight who are gifted with ET tech to build a handmade craft to meet with what turn out to be ET kids on a ship. Dante had the perfect balance of off the wall humor and seriousness and whimsy plus cynicism and somehow Goldsmith came to be the sound of Dante's universe as deeply as Williams was Spielberg's. Since Jerry passed, none of Dante's films have even worked. I always loved this score. It cut straight to the dreams. That feeling for expansive horizons out of the frame, just past the mundane limits we tend to be stuck with. The circular melodies are strong and big, there is a compassion and sympathy around them, and for the protagonists, an understanding. Jerry always had a way of dramatizing the bleed-through of the supernatural or irreal by messing with the tonality, shifting into an impressionist-to-atonal register and playing both worlds against each other. Action and movement is pushed with Jerry's typical Bartokian rhythmic momentum. But it's the soaring emotions and bittersweet feel for things that have to be let go of, that just make it a beautiful piece of music. The actors in the film had rough lives certainly. The meta info seems to deepen it all.
Day 20 Miguel’s favorite albums. Dont worry I’ll stop the spam soon. Basil Poledouris was the greatest. What a magnificent talent and soul. I miss him every day. Conan the Barbarian was his masterpiece and my favorite vinyl lp, played so many times not a note is not committed and burned inexorably into the brain penetrating to the unconscious inner furnace where the most basic desire to express burns through all of your life. For his friend, the great writer-director John Milius, Poledouris blasted his epic sensibilities with power and great love. The world of conan, from robert howard’s channelings, is the time of human strains dumped on earth to fight for survival under the serpents, the clash of biologies and civilisations, and empathy vs expediency. The movie was about a tribal captive seeking vengeance against the guru of a snake cult, who learns the value of compassion and love, then is forced to kill the serpent head anyway. Milius was good at that, we know revenge is bad, but then the hero has to fight for it anyway. People used to be able to write free of studio fornulas sometimes. I loved the film totally and while others see 1982 as the year of blade runner, the plight of the clones, i saw it as the year of CTB, a movie about rebellion against the entire order of the universe. Basil wrote in a sweeping Morricone meets Rozsa style with pastiche ancient sounding modalities and gutsy themes (he based his melodies on what a human voice could actually sing out) that come fom the deepest understanding.What is there to live for. Even when conan loses his valkyrie and has nothing to exist for she appears transdimensionally and kicks him to prove himself, to himself. Its a magnificent film and the most perfect of film scores for me. As with his previous Milius score for Big Wednesday, Basil could write for fundamental existential priorities and had an understanding of the physcal life, whether it was surfing or martial arts (The Touch, from 2002) or actual warriors. Very few composers could do that, you have to have contact with actions that expand your horizons. This score always brings one back to what is important. Why do you live.
Miguel's favorite albums day 19! I only have three more to go not that anyone is clamoring to know what they are. Not that I care. Sometimes people are here and then later they are gone. Who really cares unless they fulfill your requirements. Howard Shore's most perplexing and provocative score for David Cronenberg was this 1991 hybrid with Ornette Coleman. The dirgey juggernaut of a distressed psyche careening steadfastly into the sunken depths is the London Philharmonic part, the western classicism which Shore called the colonization of Morocco, the location in which the protagonist tries to bury his conscious reality and indulge his hidden desires. Coleman represents the schizophrenic hallucinatory exigencies of the colonized. I dont think this has much to do with Burroughs' novel, but the movie is interesting to me for what it tries to rationalise into an easily palatable explanation for the chaotic revelations Burroughs blabbed about in every piece he wrote. In the movie the protagonist falls into addiction and flight from his gayness and manages to kill his wife, then in his drug rationalization viewpoint, he is encouraged by a hustler and a reptilian to flee his crimes to 'interzone' where he gets into all sorts of psychotic sexualised metaphors and whatever. TBH I thought the movie was weak. The book even with its explosion of points of veiw and lack of planar story logic, was nevertheless straightforward in what it was about- a repressed agent for cia or oss or something is enticed to go full bore into the darkness of the agency's bidding and in his attempts to deal with his complicity he raves about the reptilians in charge of the human sex trafficking underworld and the total perverted sexualised world of the elite players and government stooges, through the lenses of the narrator's multiple personae and drug obsessions. The movie refuses any of that and it is just some junkie's metaphors and coy distancing technique of not treating anything as real but just as more metaphors. Bollocks. I am usually in favor of Cronenbergs' films but this was out of his comfort zone and it had nothing to do with depicting sexual acts but fear of stating what the book was about. The score- if its supposed to be the unconscious breaking out against structure, ornette's bebop and freeform razoring of form against the classical 12 tone architecture, then it's a fascinating conflict work that is very unique in film music. If Shore politically correctly sees the jazz part as representing the colonized victims of the western exploiters, it also is the sound of the repressed, fuel for all the above. Coleman just improvised to picture and the performance created more layers, sometimes beyond conceptualization to be explained by anyone. I see it as layers and compartments as the interzone themes edge towards "annexia" and a permanent Dissociative Identity Disorder is transitioned into hidden compartments of the mind by the jazzy parts, as the compartmentalized self exists as both the self-rationalising writer bill, and the cold blooded mk ultra assassin answering to the reptilian underground and its high priest (benway). Cronenberg is too hip to state it like that, but he wasn't Kubrick.
Day 18 part 2 of miguel's favorite albums. James Wong's score for Tsui Hark's Wong Fei Hong. If you know the martial world then you know the wong fei hong title song quickly became a hilarious cliche used on every single possible demo on the planet, everywhere, and it has since lost it's power, allure, charm, interest, in fact it's pretty much the chinese kung fu equivalent of the titanic song playing over the p.a. at walmart. But once upon a time. It had power. When Tsui Hark revived the martial genre from the aesthetic death throes of shaw brothers exploitation and attempted to restore it to the elegant dramatic ambitions of the King Hu wu xia era but with new stunt techniques and the nuclear weapon of Li lien Jie at the center of it, it captured a generation of us enthralled with something that powered up out of a deep unconscious recognition. HK action cinema of the late 80s through 1994 was one of the great explosions of cinema creativity that established Tsui Hark, John Woo, Ringo Lam (plus action directors Yuen Kwai and Yuen Woo Ping who threw it all away in 2003 haha) and created custom vehicles for Jet Li and Michele Yeoh and Donnie Yen, and gave Jackie at times a bigger playset, and nothing before or since in wushu films has reached those beautiful dizzying heights. This score used a traditional tune the general's something or other and planted it in the center of the ethos of the main character, performed by Jet as a vulnerable human demigod, full of inner foibles but projecting unshakable integrity for doing the right things, always. The compromised anti hero of bruce was gone. The films were outstanding ballets of power and grace and inspiration, that lived inside us. The best track on the score is the ladder fight cue, that begins with a low brass call setting up a spaghetti western vibe but hits with the fei hong theme in cascading sheets of color building in intensity. I never listen to this now but it lodged permanently in the soul.
Miguel's favorite albums day 17! Planet of the Apes OST (1968) by Jerry Goldsmith. JG was the best composer who ever lived. I find that the closer a work is to me, the harder it is to share anything about it. The original Apes score was one of the most brilliant scores in the cinema, a milestone composition whose legacy still traces through the long running film series. To establish a connection to the world thrown inside out with Apes in charge of civilization Jerry wrote in 12 tone dodecaphony and stark modernism. He threw in his workaholic passion for chasing after danger and ideals in innovative forms, mirroring the protagonist's quest for self-reckoning that isn't even known until the end. The soundscapes were as alien sounding as anyone could comprehend in 1968, scintillating razor sharp tones and colors and jolting rhythms propelling a story of loss and coming to terms with new realities. There is quite a lot of Stravinsky/Bartok but opened out with drama and empathy in ways neither predecessor was able to access as artists. It's the specific intervals and space around notes, the silences and the searing string passages, and the chattering brass, and the unique percussion, just creates a feeling that lasts in my head forever. The late 60s were full of experimental film scores expanding the limits sonically and aesthetically and emotionally. Jerry was intense, and his incisive comprehension and rendering of ideas accompanying first person point of view empathy with a slight remove of intellectual contemplation stuck with me for all of my life. I miss Jerry every day.
Miguel's favorite albums day 16! I am not as close to John Williams but he is certainly one of the most significant composers in film and also in American music. Somehow given his proximity to the most famous films and film series in history, Williams has essentially been at the epicenter of our culture. I love them all but they sort of go on whether I am on board with them or not. Star Wars, Harry Potter. Nice, not in my personal cosmology. CE3K is though. No other movie ever triggered me as deeply. Even seeing it again last year in the reissue it was exhilarating and full of blank spots I filled in with stuff in my own life. The score was so empathetic with Roy, picked by the Them to be a contactee in the mortal 3D walking around normal world. Thematically Williams's Ravelian tonal base brings out the wistfulness and the yearning for simpler experiences than the egoistic and stressful clashes based in petty dramas and mundane boring 70s life, then the visitors come in and bring an overpowering posttonal sensory overload, upending the entire world. The mystery, the hammering dies irae, and the atonal de-stabilization mirrors Roy's obsessive channeling and fears he is losing it. Williams craftiness is always both sophisticated and simple. Out of modern atonality he distils the 5 tones the visitors use to communicate with, and builds a beautiful vision of harmonic utopia and infinite expansive horizons, all grounded very poignantly in Roy's wisftful letting go of one world for another. I'm not even sure that makes sense but that's how it plays for me. I love the score because establishing a tonal emotional base makes you part of it and the dramatic technique combined with the director's cinematic gifts throws you into it all. So much empathy and compassion. So entertaining and wonderful. 1977 was in the middle of JW's outpouring of fully mature greatness starting with Jaws through Black Sunday, Star Wars, The Fury, and Superman the Movie. I consider CE3k to be Williams' masterpiece.
Miguel's favorite album covers day 16! I think. I love Duran Duran. However, and sadly, I am not especially interested in the nostalgia-happy early 1980s singles that made them famous. I honestly don't care about the top 40 songs Hungry Like the Wolf or The Reflex. I do love the entire album Rio from 1982 though, but it's the wildly melodic and rhythmic authority that draws me in, and Simon's weird lyrics that are always ineffably catchy but incomprehensible. I wouldnt want a Simon le bon lyric that was totally intelligible, ever. Rhythmic authority- it's J taylor's bass that comes out of chic/bowie world but travels a unique line that I wouldnt really compare to anyone else. I always thought DD was actually post punk not the postpunk monikered later. Fast forward to when they are old farts. The lyrics now have a magisterial poignance speaking to hard lives and glitzy elegance to soothe it over with. Ronson's production on this 2010 work is insanely catchy and bigger, almost a parody of the 1981-1983 style DD but all scorched down with real feelings and new ideas. Has a Russian sound for some reason. One of the best things about dd over 4 decades is the sense of each album launching a new sound and adventure, and I like this the best out of all of them. If you bothered to read any of these write ups (thanks!) you will see I am often attracted to artists capable of writing about self reflection and even self recrimination. Anyone can push fantasies. DD pushes fantasies that can't escape the truth. "I'm not alone, being followed
Someone always watching what we do
Never alone, but I'm in the shadows
I dream things I don't want you to know"
[Note- this was typed before I knew Lebon and Rhodes were friends of Epstein. That changes everything.]
Miguel's Favorite album covers day 15! Spartacus. Alex North was maybe the most advanced and articulate composer - perhaps the most eloquent- to have graced American cinema. It was a curious time from the 1950s until the middle 70s. Movies were allowed to have full blown sophisticated symphonic scores, most often as wallpaper but occasionally as artistic expression of the highest order. North -having broken into film with his coruscating work for A Streetcar Named Desire- utilized a 20th Century modern language that was shoulder to shoulder with Prokofiev and Bartok and Penderecki and also jazz influences like duke ellington, but fully his own invention. Shattering dissonance and piercingly beautiful melodic interpretations of the most intimate human feelings within the scope of huge historic tableaux or the inner chambers of psychological foibles were the places in film that he excelled at. High strings and winds were often the carriers of a transparent sound unlike any other composer's and his architecture was complex in depth and emotive resonance. Spartacus was his masterpiece, for which he amassed orchestral forces worthy of epic canvassing yet he chose an intimate focus for Kubrick's political uprising story (a slave rebels and driven by his love for a woman and what he has to lose plus his entire people under Roman rule, inspires a revolt that is ultimately tragic in consequences but inspiring in the heart- being a giant Hollywood film). Barbarous and massive sounds for the might of Rome are established with the opening track in a complex fugal arrangement of clashing ideas shattering into irresolution perhaps symbolising the inevitable crash of the empire, but the thematic cells later are developed through the characterisations of the central figures (Crassus, Grachus, Spartacus) at fatal odds with each other, embodying North's style of personal focus within a huge scope. The central themes prove to be the love theme for Varinia that is easily one of the most heartrending statements in all of cinema, the score's wellspring of emotion and strength- and then the uprising theme, Spartacus' indomitable forward momentum and folk-like nucleus create North's biggest statement in a score blasting with statements. It's continuously fascinating how North could limn the subtlest of psychology with a few bars and simple rising or falling tones in an obsessive pattern, where the orchestrational color hints at unspoken or implied events such as the oysters or snails cue. North's comprehension of human beings was unerring and piercingly precise. I think it played to his ideals of course, of egalitarianism and labor rights, the rights of common people to assert their basic rights. The architecture is amazingly complicated and I'm sure there were criticisms it was too much for wide audiences to ingest or even comprehend, but I think the feeling was communicated to any one, whether subliminally or just in the avalanche of experiences. I am not a Kirk Douglas fan ( what a horrid individual in real life) nor is this Kubrick's personality at it's best, though the chiseled intellect stamps Spartacus as the 2nd most intelligent of all the Hollywood epics popular in that era (Lean's Lawrence of Arabia remains the greatest). North wrote a famously rejected score for Kubrick's 2001 but I think Kubrick just didn't respect him and the film needed a detached collection of random pieces to distance it. I have always loved North's Spartacus, and it's barbaric syncopations and fire consuming blasts of violence and the tenderest of human feelings emblazon it permanently to memory as perhaps the greatest of film scores.
Miguel's favorite albums day 13. Was supposed to be yesterday but I was lazy. Vamps is Hyde's second side project. I love his guitarist k.a.z.. I often prefer Vamps' leaner rock attack than L'arc. Many dweebs complain this last album is too American. Maybe. It had to fit with the US rock acts they toured with (Sixx AM and Shitzig I mean Danzig.) Its just a matter of a few chord changes and eigo lyrics. Los Angeles seeps into the rhythms and the attitude reaching the guitar strings. And the words. It's like when you move there and you adopt the flat cynical speaking style and your eyes become slitty and something seems to have gone. The reptile cortex spins out tall tales and you question who you are or you succumb. "Stuck inside of a digital prison
We're unlocking our own code
We'll get their virus out of our system
They can never digitalize our soul"- Funny. I see so many acts from Japan go Hollywood and lose their identity. (ahem Miyavi, pal with terry richardson and jolie's witchy koolaid). I like Vamps last album because it's full of self identity questions and also rocks, bigger and leaner. RDJ's pals should hire them to write songs for their Knight of Cups/The Crow/Song to Song/John Wick/russian mob type movies. Has that tender but aggressive existentiallish nuance. I think Underworld is Vamps best. Fuck You, anime dweeb. I just made all this up out of boredom. How will anyone trust me if I do that all the time.
I think this is number one.
L’Arc~en~Ciel- DUNE. I found this CD, the original Japanese pressing, by "chance" in a used bin at Amoeba Records in L.A. It changed my life. Many people think of Japan as the future, but for me it is the forever present, past, and in fact all the tenses, yet when there I am awash with feelings of powerful nostalgia for a distant past. That is the feeling I get from this, my favorite album by my favorite of all the great rock bands on the earth, that happened to have existed in Japan. Nostalgia is not the most correct term, it's a memory of something that once stirred powerfully, a magnificent fire that propelled you forward to make something greater than yourself- it was 1991 through 1993, that period. I knew that time and that age. Hyde is the doppleganger and the other side of life for me, the splintered clone with the fame ticket and the accompanying manner that great talents possess, maybe also tainted by that knowledge of the dark fountain. In 93 L'arc was not at the summit of being the top rock act in JP, and the first album has the feel of embodying styles and VK costumes, but steeped in knowledge of the rock world outside JP; for me it's a similar sheen to concurrent developments in Britain with Ride and My Bloody Valentine, but transported by unique melodies and gossamer lyric codes intoning melancholy and yearning glints of silver that seem to coast over immense dark waves. Tides pushing and retreating into the past and raging back, a little more understood with each new experience. I didn't always have a solid grasp of Japanese, and still don't haha so there was an element where the words had to be a feeling more than what they meant, but Hyde's lyrics are always that side of obscure. (If you've read my other write ups you know I love lyrics that are shades and tones more than literal data, and who really listens to lyrics word for word? it's part of the symphonic weft for me.)There was a recollection of turmoil for the band, they have survived with a sparkly if not heroic image, but the drugs and broken band mates faded into the inner folds. The first song on Dune, Shutting from the Sky- the lines put down by former guitarist Hiro, will always call up that primordial desire to express, and make the world give you what you define of it, because it threatens to suffocate you if you don't. I love all of L'arc's albums (Real especially), I love everything Haido-san does, but this one has a special flamey sunspot in my life. If ever I become a god this album will forever exist in my archive of human treasured memories. It singes with passion, sultry in minor key insinuations, but an attack on the world no less fierce for being languidly elegant in its design. Perhaps I am already describing how I react to the sound this album calls out, a faulty human voice conditioned and burdened with the sound of the gods. Be Destined.
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Laundry is taking longer than I thought. Oh well, I should finish my Miguel's Favorite Albums, day 21 or so. I am almost at the end with just 2 left! It's actually been really difficult to articulate what swarming feelings and memories are packed into my thoughts about these. I would rather never reveal anything to be honest. But I started it so I have to finish. Jerry Goldsmith's EXPLORERS. I have already incl. 2 other scores by him, he was just the best. My spiritual mentor and role model of all artistic things. For this 1985 Joe Dante film he left the gritty slashing slicing penetrating gaze of his 60s-70s work behind and went for a soaring full blown adventure, very much of the 80s, that big, flowing, overblown but heartfelt sound that resonated in the minds and souls of so many who came out of that era. I don't know where that optimism and wonder actually went, if you look at what many of those people have become! For whatever reason aliens were deemed a big part of that culture. It's ingrained. Anyway Explorers was about three kids with big dreams of space flight who are gifted with ET tech to build a handmade craft to meet with what turn out to be ET kids on a ship. Dante had the perfect balance of off the wall humor and seriousness and whimsy plus cynicism and somehow Goldsmith came to be the sound of Dante's universe as deeply as Williams was Spielberg's. Since Jerry passed, none of Dante's films have even worked. I always loved this score. It cut straight to the dreams. That feeling for expansive horizons out of the frame, just past the mundane limits we tend to be stuck with. The circular melodies are strong and big, there is a compassion and sympathy around them, and for the protagonists, an understanding. Jerry always had a way of dramatizing the bleed-through of the supernatural or irreal by messing with the tonality, shifting into an impressionist-to-atonal register and playing both worlds against each other. Action and movement is pushed with Jerry's typical Bartokian rhythmic momentum. But it's the soaring emotions and bittersweet feel for things that have to be let go of, that just make it a beautiful piece of music. The actors in the film had rough lives certainly. The meta info seems to deepen it all.
Day 20 Miguel’s favorite albums. Dont worry I’ll stop the spam soon. Basil Poledouris was the greatest. What a magnificent talent and soul. I miss him every day. Conan the Barbarian was his masterpiece and my favorite vinyl lp, played so many times not a note is not committed and burned inexorably into the brain penetrating to the unconscious inner furnace where the most basic desire to express burns through all of your life. For his friend, the great writer-director John Milius, Poledouris blasted his epic sensibilities with power and great love. The world of conan, from robert howard’s channelings, is the time of human strains dumped on earth to fight for survival under the serpents, the clash of biologies and civilisations, and empathy vs expediency. The movie was about a tribal captive seeking vengeance against the guru of a snake cult, who learns the value of compassion and love, then is forced to kill the serpent head anyway. Milius was good at that, we know revenge is bad, but then the hero has to fight for it anyway. People used to be able to write free of studio fornulas sometimes. I loved the film totally and while others see 1982 as the year of blade runner, the plight of the clones, i saw it as the year of CTB, a movie about rebellion against the entire order of the universe. Basil wrote in a sweeping Morricone meets Rozsa style with pastiche ancient sounding modalities and gutsy themes (he based his melodies on what a human voice could actually sing out) that come fom the deepest understanding.What is there to live for. Even when conan loses his valkyrie and has nothing to exist for she appears transdimensionally and kicks him to prove himself, to himself. Its a magnificent film and the most perfect of film scores for me. As with his previous Milius score for Big Wednesday, Basil could write for fundamental existential priorities and had an understanding of the physcal life, whether it was surfing or martial arts (The Touch, from 2002) or actual warriors. Very few composers could do that, you have to have contact with actions that expand your horizons. This score always brings one back to what is important. Why do you live.
Miguel's favorite albums day 19! I only have three more to go not that anyone is clamoring to know what they are. Not that I care. Sometimes people are here and then later they are gone. Who really cares unless they fulfill your requirements. Howard Shore's most perplexing and provocative score for David Cronenberg was this 1991 hybrid with Ornette Coleman. The dirgey juggernaut of a distressed psyche careening steadfastly into the sunken depths is the London Philharmonic part, the western classicism which Shore called the colonization of Morocco, the location in which the protagonist tries to bury his conscious reality and indulge his hidden desires. Coleman represents the schizophrenic hallucinatory exigencies of the colonized. I dont think this has much to do with Burroughs' novel, but the movie is interesting to me for what it tries to rationalise into an easily palatable explanation for the chaotic revelations Burroughs blabbed about in every piece he wrote. In the movie the protagonist falls into addiction and flight from his gayness and manages to kill his wife, then in his drug rationalization viewpoint, he is encouraged by a hustler and a reptilian to flee his crimes to 'interzone' where he gets into all sorts of psychotic sexualised metaphors and whatever. TBH I thought the movie was weak. The book even with its explosion of points of veiw and lack of planar story logic, was nevertheless straightforward in what it was about- a repressed agent for cia or oss or something is enticed to go full bore into the darkness of the agency's bidding and in his attempts to deal with his complicity he raves about the reptilians in charge of the human sex trafficking underworld and the total perverted sexualised world of the elite players and government stooges, through the lenses of the narrator's multiple personae and drug obsessions. The movie refuses any of that and it is just some junkie's metaphors and coy distancing technique of not treating anything as real but just as more metaphors. Bollocks. I am usually in favor of Cronenbergs' films but this was out of his comfort zone and it had nothing to do with depicting sexual acts but fear of stating what the book was about. The score- if its supposed to be the unconscious breaking out against structure, ornette's bebop and freeform razoring of form against the classical 12 tone architecture, then it's a fascinating conflict work that is very unique in film music. If Shore politically correctly sees the jazz part as representing the colonized victims of the western exploiters, it also is the sound of the repressed, fuel for all the above. Coleman just improvised to picture and the performance created more layers, sometimes beyond conceptualization to be explained by anyone. I see it as layers and compartments as the interzone themes edge towards "annexia" and a permanent Dissociative Identity Disorder is transitioned into hidden compartments of the mind by the jazzy parts, as the compartmentalized self exists as both the self-rationalising writer bill, and the cold blooded mk ultra assassin answering to the reptilian underground and its high priest (benway). Cronenberg is too hip to state it like that, but he wasn't Kubrick.
Day 18 part 2 of miguel's favorite albums. James Wong's score for Tsui Hark's Wong Fei Hong. If you know the martial world then you know the wong fei hong title song quickly became a hilarious cliche used on every single possible demo on the planet, everywhere, and it has since lost it's power, allure, charm, interest, in fact it's pretty much the chinese kung fu equivalent of the titanic song playing over the p.a. at walmart. But once upon a time. It had power. When Tsui Hark revived the martial genre from the aesthetic death throes of shaw brothers exploitation and attempted to restore it to the elegant dramatic ambitions of the King Hu wu xia era but with new stunt techniques and the nuclear weapon of Li lien Jie at the center of it, it captured a generation of us enthralled with something that powered up out of a deep unconscious recognition. HK action cinema of the late 80s through 1994 was one of the great explosions of cinema creativity that established Tsui Hark, John Woo, Ringo Lam (plus action directors Yuen Kwai and Yuen Woo Ping who threw it all away in 2003 haha) and created custom vehicles for Jet Li and Michele Yeoh and Donnie Yen, and gave Jackie at times a bigger playset, and nothing before or since in wushu films has reached those beautiful dizzying heights. This score used a traditional tune the general's something or other and planted it in the center of the ethos of the main character, performed by Jet as a vulnerable human demigod, full of inner foibles but projecting unshakable integrity for doing the right things, always. The compromised anti hero of bruce was gone. The films were outstanding ballets of power and grace and inspiration, that lived inside us. The best track on the score is the ladder fight cue, that begins with a low brass call setting up a spaghetti western vibe but hits with the fei hong theme in cascading sheets of color building in intensity. I never listen to this now but it lodged permanently in the soul.
Miguel's favorite albums day 17! Planet of the Apes OST (1968) by Jerry Goldsmith. JG was the best composer who ever lived. I find that the closer a work is to me, the harder it is to share anything about it. The original Apes score was one of the most brilliant scores in the cinema, a milestone composition whose legacy still traces through the long running film series. To establish a connection to the world thrown inside out with Apes in charge of civilization Jerry wrote in 12 tone dodecaphony and stark modernism. He threw in his workaholic passion for chasing after danger and ideals in innovative forms, mirroring the protagonist's quest for self-reckoning that isn't even known until the end. The soundscapes were as alien sounding as anyone could comprehend in 1968, scintillating razor sharp tones and colors and jolting rhythms propelling a story of loss and coming to terms with new realities. There is quite a lot of Stravinsky/Bartok but opened out with drama and empathy in ways neither predecessor was able to access as artists. It's the specific intervals and space around notes, the silences and the searing string passages, and the chattering brass, and the unique percussion, just creates a feeling that lasts in my head forever. The late 60s were full of experimental film scores expanding the limits sonically and aesthetically and emotionally. Jerry was intense, and his incisive comprehension and rendering of ideas accompanying first person point of view empathy with a slight remove of intellectual contemplation stuck with me for all of my life. I miss Jerry every day.
Miguel's favorite albums day 16! I am not as close to John Williams but he is certainly one of the most significant composers in film and also in American music. Somehow given his proximity to the most famous films and film series in history, Williams has essentially been at the epicenter of our culture. I love them all but they sort of go on whether I am on board with them or not. Star Wars, Harry Potter. Nice, not in my personal cosmology. CE3K is though. No other movie ever triggered me as deeply. Even seeing it again last year in the reissue it was exhilarating and full of blank spots I filled in with stuff in my own life. The score was so empathetic with Roy, picked by the Them to be a contactee in the mortal 3D walking around normal world. Thematically Williams's Ravelian tonal base brings out the wistfulness and the yearning for simpler experiences than the egoistic and stressful clashes based in petty dramas and mundane boring 70s life, then the visitors come in and bring an overpowering posttonal sensory overload, upending the entire world. The mystery, the hammering dies irae, and the atonal de-stabilization mirrors Roy's obsessive channeling and fears he is losing it. Williams craftiness is always both sophisticated and simple. Out of modern atonality he distils the 5 tones the visitors use to communicate with, and builds a beautiful vision of harmonic utopia and infinite expansive horizons, all grounded very poignantly in Roy's wisftful letting go of one world for another. I'm not even sure that makes sense but that's how it plays for me. I love the score because establishing a tonal emotional base makes you part of it and the dramatic technique combined with the director's cinematic gifts throws you into it all. So much empathy and compassion. So entertaining and wonderful. 1977 was in the middle of JW's outpouring of fully mature greatness starting with Jaws through Black Sunday, Star Wars, The Fury, and Superman the Movie. I consider CE3k to be Williams' masterpiece.
Miguel's favorite album covers day 16! I think. I love Duran Duran. However, and sadly, I am not especially interested in the nostalgia-happy early 1980s singles that made them famous. I honestly don't care about the top 40 songs Hungry Like the Wolf or The Reflex. I do love the entire album Rio from 1982 though, but it's the wildly melodic and rhythmic authority that draws me in, and Simon's weird lyrics that are always ineffably catchy but incomprehensible. I wouldnt want a Simon le bon lyric that was totally intelligible, ever. Rhythmic authority- it's J taylor's bass that comes out of chic/bowie world but travels a unique line that I wouldnt really compare to anyone else. I always thought DD was actually post punk not the postpunk monikered later. Fast forward to when they are old farts. The lyrics now have a magisterial poignance speaking to hard lives and glitzy elegance to soothe it over with. Ronson's production on this 2010 work is insanely catchy and bigger, almost a parody of the 1981-1983 style DD but all scorched down with real feelings and new ideas. Has a Russian sound for some reason. One of the best things about dd over 4 decades is the sense of each album launching a new sound and adventure, and I like this the best out of all of them. If you bothered to read any of these write ups (thanks!) you will see I am often attracted to artists capable of writing about self reflection and even self recrimination. Anyone can push fantasies. DD pushes fantasies that can't escape the truth. "I'm not alone, being followed
Someone always watching what we do
Never alone, but I'm in the shadows
I dream things I don't want you to know"
[Note- this was typed before I knew Lebon and Rhodes were friends of Epstein. That changes everything.]
Miguel's Favorite album covers day 15! Spartacus. Alex North was maybe the most advanced and articulate composer - perhaps the most eloquent- to have graced American cinema. It was a curious time from the 1950s until the middle 70s. Movies were allowed to have full blown sophisticated symphonic scores, most often as wallpaper but occasionally as artistic expression of the highest order. North -having broken into film with his coruscating work for A Streetcar Named Desire- utilized a 20th Century modern language that was shoulder to shoulder with Prokofiev and Bartok and Penderecki and also jazz influences like duke ellington, but fully his own invention. Shattering dissonance and piercingly beautiful melodic interpretations of the most intimate human feelings within the scope of huge historic tableaux or the inner chambers of psychological foibles were the places in film that he excelled at. High strings and winds were often the carriers of a transparent sound unlike any other composer's and his architecture was complex in depth and emotive resonance. Spartacus was his masterpiece, for which he amassed orchestral forces worthy of epic canvassing yet he chose an intimate focus for Kubrick's political uprising story (a slave rebels and driven by his love for a woman and what he has to lose plus his entire people under Roman rule, inspires a revolt that is ultimately tragic in consequences but inspiring in the heart- being a giant Hollywood film). Barbarous and massive sounds for the might of Rome are established with the opening track in a complex fugal arrangement of clashing ideas shattering into irresolution perhaps symbolising the inevitable crash of the empire, but the thematic cells later are developed through the characterisations of the central figures (Crassus, Grachus, Spartacus) at fatal odds with each other, embodying North's style of personal focus within a huge scope. The central themes prove to be the love theme for Varinia that is easily one of the most heartrending statements in all of cinema, the score's wellspring of emotion and strength- and then the uprising theme, Spartacus' indomitable forward momentum and folk-like nucleus create North's biggest statement in a score blasting with statements. It's continuously fascinating how North could limn the subtlest of psychology with a few bars and simple rising or falling tones in an obsessive pattern, where the orchestrational color hints at unspoken or implied events such as the oysters or snails cue. North's comprehension of human beings was unerring and piercingly precise. I think it played to his ideals of course, of egalitarianism and labor rights, the rights of common people to assert their basic rights. The architecture is amazingly complicated and I'm sure there were criticisms it was too much for wide audiences to ingest or even comprehend, but I think the feeling was communicated to any one, whether subliminally or just in the avalanche of experiences. I am not a Kirk Douglas fan ( what a horrid individual in real life) nor is this Kubrick's personality at it's best, though the chiseled intellect stamps Spartacus as the 2nd most intelligent of all the Hollywood epics popular in that era (Lean's Lawrence of Arabia remains the greatest). North wrote a famously rejected score for Kubrick's 2001 but I think Kubrick just didn't respect him and the film needed a detached collection of random pieces to distance it. I have always loved North's Spartacus, and it's barbaric syncopations and fire consuming blasts of violence and the tenderest of human feelings emblazon it permanently to memory as perhaps the greatest of film scores.
Miguel's favorite albums day 13. Was supposed to be yesterday but I was lazy. Vamps is Hyde's second side project. I love his guitarist k.a.z.. I often prefer Vamps' leaner rock attack than L'arc. Many dweebs complain this last album is too American. Maybe. It had to fit with the US rock acts they toured with (Sixx AM and Shitzig I mean Danzig.) Its just a matter of a few chord changes and eigo lyrics. Los Angeles seeps into the rhythms and the attitude reaching the guitar strings. And the words. It's like when you move there and you adopt the flat cynical speaking style and your eyes become slitty and something seems to have gone. The reptile cortex spins out tall tales and you question who you are or you succumb. "Stuck inside of a digital prison
We're unlocking our own code
We'll get their virus out of our system
They can never digitalize our soul"- Funny. I see so many acts from Japan go Hollywood and lose their identity. (ahem Miyavi, pal with terry richardson and jolie's witchy koolaid). I like Vamps last album because it's full of self identity questions and also rocks, bigger and leaner. RDJ's pals should hire them to write songs for their Knight of Cups/The Crow/Song to Song/John Wick/russian mob type movies. Has that tender but aggressive existentiallish nuance. I think Underworld is Vamps best. Fuck You, anime dweeb. I just made all this up out of boredom. How will anyone trust me if I do that all the time.