Seven Steps to Classier French!

I stopped finding French particularly romantic after I started to study it, but it remains an undeniably classy language. The Russians knew it, the English knew it, Nietzsche knew it. I’m still only an advanced student of French, but I’ve learned to appreciate languages on a level beyond their communicative powers - sounds, economies, histories, obscure internal logics - and I know few linguistic pleasures greater than a well-wrought French phrase. (Latin poetry is also apparently marvelous.)

Not everyone who reads this blog speaks French or studies French or even wants to study French. For those that are interested, however, I had a real French person read these over, and even though she didn’t quite understand why I’d want to compile such a list in the first place, she assured me that each entry is ‘fancy but not quite pretentious.’ (Although, if you’re like me, you don’t mind erring on the side of pretense.) This isn’t ne…point or passé simple or eusse and company. (Someday I’ll find out what tense that is). It’s just a few tips for language lovers from a fellow student.

Ce sont. This is actually just proper French, but it reeks of class. It’s easy to forget that ‘c’est is the contraction ‘ce + est,’ and a phrase’s noun and verb must, of course, agree. In spoken French, you can get away with answering the question, ‘C’est quoi ce bruit?‘ with ‘C’est les voisins,’ but it’s cool and correct to respond, ‘Ce sont les voisins.’

C’est moi qui… This is another instance of simply speaking proper French. It seems funny at first, but one should say, ‘C’est moi qui vais au cinema tous les jours,’ although you’ll often hear, ‘C’est moi qui va au cinema tous les jours.’ Most French people ignore this (and will deny it if you point it out to them), no French person that knows better can account for it, and even resident grammar expert, Chris, is at a loss. In English, we would never say, ‘It is I who don’t like to eat broccoli,’ or would we?

Certes. Even when you’re not the one talking, conversation demands a variety of responses for your contributions, however minor, to appear enthusiastic. I often find myself nodding, ‘Oui.. Oui.. Mm. Oui oui oui,’ when a few strategic adverbs (tout à fait, justement) can make the whole exchange feel much more natural. Certes (’of course,’ ‘certainly’) is somewhat literary, but it’s preferable to ‘Je suis d’accord,’ and it serves as a firm and courteous start to your rejoinder: ‘Certes, pourtant…‘

Quoique. Peppering your speech with adverbs is handsome, but conjunctions are the backbone of intelligent discourse. There are dozens. I find par contre, d’ailleurs and pourtant to be among the most effective - toutefois if you’re looking to impress. Dictionaries will often translate them all interchangeably, but mastering their subtle differences is a delicious, geeky challenge. ‘Quoique’ is the newest addition to my repertoire. It indicates a quick reconsideration (’although’) but with an almost mischievous tone: ‘Nous ne devons pas nous moquer de lui - quoique, il est un peu bête.’

Regagner. I use this more often than I should, but moderate usage will buy you a first-class ticket to classville. It just means, ‘to return to’; ‘J’ai regagné Tulsa hier soir,’ is the same as ‘Je suis retourné à Tulsa hier soir,’ although it’s less ponderous than verbs like retourner and revenir because it isn’t followed by the preposition ‘à’. (If you have to use retourner, you can keep it classy with a hot pronoun: ‘J’y suis retourné hier soir.’)

S’avérer que. What an underrated verb phrase. It means ‘it turned out that,’ and, once learned, it will prove so handy that you’ll have to be careful not to abuse it. ‘Je voulais tellement voir Inland Empire, mais il s’est avéré qu’il ne passait qu’Eraserhead.’

Il est, elle est. This is pure class. I saved it for last. One of the charming features of Latinate and Germanic languages that English (thankfully) misses out on is the arcane gender assignments to nouns. When speaking French, you can always use ‘C’est‘ to indicate an object; it’s common and correct. But if you know the gender of the noun to which you’re referring, always opt for ‘il‘ or ‘elle.’ Even if your subject is obvious, it suggests a more intimate, knowing connection. I first learned to appreciate this after tasting a bottle of wine with my friend, Judith, who speaks an elegant, Parisian French. ‘Qu’est-ce que t’en penses?’ I asked, always deferring final gustatory judgment to the French. ‘Hmm…’ she intoned. ‘Il est bon.’

And he was.

The Critical Subtext: What Do Reviews Really Tell Us?

Why so critical?

What should a critic accomplish in a review? For the mass culture art forms (film and music, then literature and theatre and occasionally the visual arts) reviews are mainly read to determine whether or not the work in question is ‘worth the bother.’ Should we see the film or not? Should we buy the album or not?

Beyond this essential question, the critic can also elucidate the work. He can put the work in artistic and historical context, point out its subtle technical flaws and challenges, entertain, sermonize, show off. But when he analytically targets the work of art in question, the critic’s statement can only do two things: describe and critique. In the sentence, ‘The film is long, too long,’ the critic accomplishes both. One is merely descriptive, the other is a normative evaluation; ‘it is this way’ versus ‘it would be better if it were another way.’ (I’ve adopted much of this from this from the introduction to Monroe Beardsley’s classic, Aesthetics.)

To demonstrate how this works in practice, I’ve taken apart David Denby’s recent review of The Dark Knight. I just saw the film last night. I might share my thoughts about it later, but it’s important to recognize that I needn’t have seen the film in question to analyze a review of it. I’m not interested in Denby’s impression of the film. I’m only interested in the mechanics and ramifications of his critique. This is an exercise in meta-criticism.

I chose David Denby because he is a respected film critic, and also because his reviews are straightforward (if not as populist as Roger Ebert’s). Denby’s tastes are rarely compatible with my own, but he’s a clear-headed, unpretentious writer and film scholar, and his reviews stay focused on their subjects. (His colleague, Anthony Lane, tends to abuse reviews as demonstrations of his erudition.) The text is plain and his critiques of the film clear, but let’s examine what some of his judgments actually entail. We’ll try to reveal the critical subtext and find out how it might serve us.

* * *

‘Past Shock,’ by David Denby

In the new Batman film, “The Dark Knight,” many things go boom. Cars explode, jails and hospitals are blown up, bombs are put in people’s mouths and sewn into their stomachs. There’s a chase scene in which cars pile up and climb over other cars, and a truck gets lassoed by Batman (his one neat trick) and tumbles through the air like a diver doing a back flip. Men crash through windows of glass-walled office buildings, and there are many fights that employ the devastating martial-arts system known as the Keysi Fighting Method. Christian Bale, who plays Bruce Wayne (and Batman), spent months training under the masters of the ferocious and delicate K.F.M.

So far, Denby has described the film and its action aesthetic. Now he’s ready for his first critique:

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you a thing about it, because the combat is photographed close up, in semidarkness, and cut at the speed of a fifteen-second commercial. Instead of enjoying the formalized beauty of a fighting discipline, we see a lot of flailing movement and bodies hitting the floor like grain sacks.

He finds this aspect of the film ‘unfortunate.’ We assume that Denby would prefer (for himself, for the viewer, for the director) that aspects of the film be ‘fortunate’ - in the ideal world, all art would be perfectly edifying. When a critic deems an aspect of a work of art unfortunate, if his opinion is to be of any use (for philosophers, artists and curious viewers), he must also provide the reader with a ‘fortunate’ alternative. The critic is saying, in effect: ‘The film is this way and thus it is not good. Had it been this other way, it would have been good.’ We’ll consider the validity of this formulation at the end of the article, but for the moment we will attempt to interpret every critique Denby offers to fit this X = Not Good, If Y = Good model.

Now, given Denby’s critique, we can deduce that Denby believes that it would have been a better choice to photograph the combat from a distance (not close up), in brighter light (not in semidarkness), and edited less frenetically. Were the director to make those changes, the viewer would then be able to enjoy the formalized beauty of a fighting discipline and this aspect of the film would be rendered ‘fortunate.’ We will consider that the first direct aesthetic proposition, P1.

Denby has specifically criticized the framing, lighting and editing. Now he addresses the sound:

All this ruckus is accompanied by pounding thuds on the soundtrack, with two veteran Hollywood composers (Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard) providing additional bass-heavy stomps in every scene, even when nothing is going on. At times, the movie sounds like two excited mattresses making love in an echo chamber.

His critique is subtle. The words ‘ruckus,’ ‘pounding,’ ‘thud’ and ’stomp’ are crass, negative words. The phrase ‘even when nothing is going on’ suggests extraneousness. The ridiculous image that follows confirms his dislike for the film’s sonic design. But a critique without an alternative is useless to us. We could assume that Denby would prefer the opposite, but to be charitable meta-critics, we have to minimize conjecture.

He continues by alluding to the cinematic legacy of Batman, a common critical maneuver (especially when the critic perceives the source material or past interpretations as more dignified or tasteful):

In brief, Warner Bros. has continued to drain the poetry, fantasy, and comedy out of Tim Burton’s original conception for “Batman” (1989), completing the job of coarsening the material into hyperviolent summer action spectacle.

The poetry, fantasy and comedy of the first Batman are which are less salient in this installment. We now have our second aesthetic proposition, albeit a vague one: P2: poetry, fantasy and comedy are positive qualities;The Dark Knight is inferior because it lacks them. We find another, truncated critique here: there is something unsavory about hyperviolent, spectacular action films released during the Summer months. Again, because Denby doesn’t explicitly describe the alternative, we can’t interpret it as a rule and it remains only a suggestion.

Now Denby takes a brief break from the aesthetic and appeals to the corporal effects of the film:

Yet “The Dark Knight” is hardly routine—it has a kicky sadism in scene after scene, which keeps you on edge and sends you out onto the street with post-movie stress disorder.

This section is difficult to parse. We assume that a Denby prefers films not to be ‘routine’ (especially because it follows the conjunctive adverb ‘yet,’ which works to distinguish this clause from its negative precedent.) However, the desirability of the film’s ‘kicky sadism’ and its consequent ‘PMSD’ is obscure. He continues with a string of murky adjectives:

And it has one startling and artful element: the sinister and frightening performance of the late Heath Ledger as the psychopathic murderer the Joker. That part of the movie is upsetting to watch, and, in retrospect, both painful and stirring to think about.

Ledger’s performance is ’startling,’ ’sinister,’ ‘frightening,’ ‘upsetting’ and ‘painful’ - but also ‘artful’ and ’stirring.’ Denby will return to this, but first he has to give practical information like plot summary and personnel. Any review that appears in a non-academic publication has to include these details at some point:

“The Dark Knight,” which was directed by Christopher Nolan (who also made “Batman Begins”) and written by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, is devoted to perversity. Bruce Wayne, attempting to bring order to Gotham City, has instead provoked the thugs. The mob is running rampant, and they’ve infiltrated the police department. The Joker, who doesn’t care for money and wants only the power to sow chaos, intimidates everyone, including the gangsters. Wayne and the noble Lieutenant Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) decide to get behind the new D.A., Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), and set him up as Gotham’s crime-fighting hero. Batman even thinks of retiring. But the Joker won’t let him; he needs him, as someone to play with. An anarchist by philosophy, the Joker uses terrorist methods (bombs, bombs, bombs), and he has an enormous advantage over the principled Batman—he’s ruthless. So the Joker taunts and giggles, and Batman can only extend his wings.

Now Denby returns to the critique:

It’s a workable dramatic conflict, but only half the team can act it.

He tepidly compliments the plot as ‘workable…but,’ its potential is compromised by the performance of the actors. We can’t derive an aesthetic proposition yet, but Denby has begun to isolate the weak aspects of the film.

Christian Bale has been effective in some films, but he’s a placid Bruce Wayne, a swank gent in Armani suits, with every hair in place. He’s more urgent as Batman, but he delivers all his lines in a hoarse voice, with an unvarying inflection. It’s a dogged but uninteresting performance, upstaged by the great Ledger, who shambles and slides into a room, bending his knees and twisting his neck and suddenly surging into someone’s face like a deep-sea creature coming up for air.

Bale has been ‘effective’ elsewhere, and although his performance in The Dark Knight is ‘dogged,’ it is, ultimately, ‘uninteresting.’ Unfortunately, the word ‘interesting’ has so long been used as a substitute for more precise words that it’s almost completely lost its meaning. Calling something ‘interesting’ in an intelligent review is useless and I don’t know why professional critics continue to say it. However, we can deduce an aesthetic proposition from this section, although a very specific one: P3: an actor playing Batman should not speak his lines hoarsely or monotonously. The film would be improved, then, if Bale could re-shoot his scenes with more euphonious diversity.

Denby now returns to Ledger’s performance:

Ledger has a fright wig of ragged hair; thick, running gobs of white makeup; scarlet lips; and dark-shadowed eyes. He’s part freaky clown, part Alice Cooper the morning after, and all actor. He’s mesmerizing in every scene. His voice is not sludgy and slow, as it was in “Brokeback Mountain.” It’s a little higher and faster, but with odd, devastating pauses and saturnine shades of mockery. At times, I was reminded of Marlon Brando at his most feline and insinuating. When Ledger wields a knife, he is thoroughly terrifying (do not, despite the PG-13 rating, bring the children), and, as you’re watching him, you can’t help wondering—in a response that admittedly lies outside film criticism—how badly he messed himself up in order to play the role this way. His performance is a heroic, unsettling final act: this young actor looked into the abyss.

There is no critique here. Explaining why an aspect of a work of art is praiseworthy is a different pursuit than explaining why it’s bad and how it could have been good. Still, it’s worth examining how Denby expresses his approval. Ledger’s voice is ‘odd’ and ‘devastating’. His performance overall is worthy of Brando, ‘mesmerizing,’ ‘terrifying,’ ‘heroic,’ ‘unsettling’ and, in a good way, abysmal. Again, if the critic doesn’t compare these good qualities with bad ones, we can’t learn much, and we can’t just assume the opposite attributes are negative; a disillusioning, encouraging, cowardly, and reassuring performance by a young actor with his eyes towards the heavens could presumably also be good.

Parts of “The Dark Knight” were shot with IMAX cameras, and if you see the movie on one of those enormously tall screens you will feel, as Batman swoops down from a building at night, as if you were falling into a canyon. It’s a giddy thrill—bring Dramamine.

The ‘giddy thrill’ sounds fun, but does it contradict the ‘post-movie stress disorder’ mentioned earlier? Either way, this passage is more visceral than aesthetic.

The rest of the movie, photographed by Wally Pfister, is sharp and clear, with shots of Gotham (i.e., Chicago) in glistening night splendor, and plentiful use of vast modernist interiors with slab floors.

The opening paragraph critiqued the photography of the fight scenes, so we’ll incorporate this passage into our first proposition and add ’sharp’ and ‘clear’ to P1’s roster. Adherence to those guidelines allows us to admire scenes like a ‘glistening night splendor,’ a phrase as lovely as the image it denotes.

Everything Denby has said so far leads to this kernel of judgment:

Yet I can’t rate “The Dark Knight” as an outstanding piece of craftsmanship.

Then the levee breaks:

“Batman Begins” was grim and methodical, and this movie is grim and jammed together.

P4: If a film is grim, is it better to be ‘methodical’ than ‘jammed together’.

The narrative isn’t shaped coherently to bring out contrasts and build toward a satisfying climax. “The Dark Knight” is constant climax; it’s always in a frenzy, and it goes on forever.

P5: Film narratives should be shaped coherently to bring out contrasts and, P6: build towards satisfying climaxes.

Nothing is prepared for, and people show up and disappear without explanation; characters are eliminated with a casual nod.

P7: In a film, things demand preparation and there should be explanations for people who appear and disappear.

There are episodes that are expensively meaningless (a Hong Kong vignette, for instance), while crucial scenes are truncated at their most interesting point—such as the moment in which the disfigured Joker confronts a newly disfigured Harvey Dent (a visual sick joke) and turns him into a vicious killer.

P8: If a part of a film is expensive, it should be meaningful. P9: Crucial scenes should not be truncated at their most interesting point.

The thunderous violence and the music jack the audience up. But all that screw-tightening tension isn’t necessarily fun.

This takes a bit of effort, but: P10: If a film succeeds in arousing tension in an audience, it is preferable that if the experience be fun.

“The Dark Knight” has been made in a time of terror, but it’s not fighting terror; it’s embracing and unleashing it—while making sure, with proper calculation, to set up the next installment of the corporate franchise.

These last two critiques are more ethical and commercial than aesthetic - they’re also half-baked and irritating - so I’ll only partialy include them. P#: If a film is made in a time of terror, it is the film’s duty to fight the terror, not embrace and unleash it. P$: There is something dubious about leaving a film’s ending open to a sequel if the film is part of a corporate franchise.

* * *

We are left with ten aesthetic propositions. Here they are again, slightly enhanced to underline their normative suggestion:

P1: A combat scene should be filmed clearly and sharply. The lighting, composition and montage should all accent the formalized beauty of a fighting discipline.
P2: Poetry, fantasy and comedy are positive qualities in a film. (The more they are present, the better?)
P3: An actor portraying Batman should not speak his lines hoarsely or monotonously. Variety is preferable.
P4: If a film is grim, is it better for the film to be ‘methodical’ than ‘jammed together’.
P5: Film narratives should be shaped coherently to bring out contrast.
P6: Film narratives build towards satisfying climaxes, not climax constantly.
P7: Characters, themes and objects (’[...]thing[s]‘) in a film should all be there for a reason and that reason should be made clear. If they then disappear from the story, that disappearance should also be explained.
P8: If a part of a film is expensive, it should be meaningful.
P9: Crucial scenes should not be truncated at their most interesting point.
P10: If a film succeeds in arousing tension in an audience, it is preferable that if the experience be fun.

(I also counted five similes: tumbles through the air like a diver doing a back flip, bodies hitting the floor like grain sacks, like two excited mattresses making love in an echo chamber, like a deep-sea creature coming up for air, and as if you were falling into a canyon. They have little to do with the critical subtext, but they stand out as one of the few creative freedoms critics are allowed in their reviews.)

Now that we’ve extracted these propositions, what can we learn from them? The first thing that strikes me is how fundamentally Aristotelian they are: I imagine that you learn P5, P6, P7, and P9 on your first day of film school (and P8 soon after, I hope). Although, Aristotle would have catharsis (P10) lead to enlightenment, not just enjoyment.

Seeing these platitudes denuded, what does it serve for Denby to repeat them? Does he do it for the viewer’s sake? Do we forget these essential (narrative) maxims every time we see a film and need to be reminded? Does he think that the Bros. Nolan would disagree? Or is Denby just pointing out that, regardless of what the director intended, he failed? In a way, Denby proclaims certain rules and condemns Nolan for defying them. Is this the critic’s duty?

Propositions 1, 3, and 4 are more subjective, and I agree with them wholeheartedly. (P2 is too vague.) More so than the other propositions, these are matters of taste. And I think Denby, in these instances, exhibits great taste. They are intelligent, valid critiques of the film. I can attest that Bale’s wearisome rasp (P3) was one of its most glaring shortcomings, and the fight scenes were difficult to appreciate. Who couldn’t agree with P1 after being exposed to the spare, sublime swordplay of Yoji Yamada’s Twilight Samurai (’02)? Or the grim, methodical glory of Zodiac (’07) compared to its grim but gaudy contemporaries? Again: matters of taste. But what are critics but the arbiters and champions of an era’s preference?

My project here wasn’t to critique the critique. I wanted to expose the critical subtext, to find out what we can do with it and uncover its unspoken (but inevitable) conclusion. We critique things all the time: food, weather, lovers. Our comments might seem mundane and spontaneous and contradictory, but they reveal our deep visions of how the world should be.

If I were more rigorous, I could dissect all the other reviews of The Dark Knight. Would their propositions align? I’ve fever dreamed a philosophical project that would probably strike my professors as mad. It’s sort of an aesthetic alchemy. What if we were to collect the critical writings of fifty major film critics since the inception of film criticism and dissect each of their reviews? At what sort of consensus would we arrive? What sort of ‘truth’? And what would we do with the results? Give them to artists? Would it help them to make better art? One of the contradictions I see in criticism is the critic’s insinuation that there are certain qualities which, if fulfilled, would produce an excellent work of art. What if Nolan could remake The Dark Knight to following Denby’s specifications and to Denby’s satisfaction? What if all filmmakers could? The exceptional would become the routine, but the routine would be elevated to steady excellence.

Perhaps such an epic project would give us some insight into the obscure atoms of good art. But how would we handle the result? No wonder artists see critics as a threat: art will only be safe as long as it remains a mystery.

Feast Balearic

Here are five of the top twenty-five Balearic records ever (according to the DJ History message board). I chose these because the music and videos are both kicking. Most of the other tracks are also on Youtube.

Coming up on KLB: what film reviews actually tell us, an interview with Sebastian (or possibly a picture of the severed finger he promised to send me if the interview doesn’t arrive before tonight) and some thoughts on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Although, don’t expect me to be too punctual; staying up until 9:30 in the morning playing Secret of Mana on my Super Nintendo emulator has subjugated all other obligations in my life. I can’t decide whether that’s Balearic or not.

Art of Noise, ‘Moments in Love’

Donna Summer, ‘State of Independence’

Chris Rea, ‘Josephine’

Carly Simon, ‘Why’ [Loud. Be careful if you're wearing headphones.]

William Pitt, ‘City Lights’

What I Dig You Dig Too: The Best Music of 2008 So Far

I meant to post this a few weeks ago when it was something like halfway through the year. I can’t seem to write today (everything.. sounds.. so weird!) but I need to go to the library and I wanted to get this up before the weekend.

Rating systems are bogus in general, but here’s what mine is supposed to mean:

Four stars go to unabashedly awesome albums. I highly recommend them no matter kind of music you usually listen to. Three star albums could have four stars, but there’s something ineffably inferior about them. Sometimes, for example, I can’t decide whether I’m more enthusiastic about the music or the idea of the music. Albums with two stars are pretty damn good, but they just don’t seem right among the albums in the tier above them. (This group will change most radically by the end of the year.) One star goes to decent albums. I can see why someone else would get excited about them and I appreciate them on that level, but they’re not my thing. Broken Records appeal to me very little.

The most important thing to remember is that I’m not very familiar with all of these albums. I’ve listened to the Air France EP a few dozen times, but I could only make it through that Fuck Buttons record twice. I’ll continue to listen to these albums and my opinions of them will change.

My big music discovery of 2008 is DJ podcasts. I never realized how great they were. Once you’re exposed, it’s tough to listen to anything else. Check out the Beats in Space (especially Balearic Mike) and Fabric podcasts. Mixes can frustrate possessive neurotics like myself - you can’t have the individual tracks to play later and often the artists aren’t even identified - but they’re worth the discomfort.

I also made a mix! I tried to keep off music that was ubiquitous this season. Vampire Weekend and Hercules and Love Affair didn’t make the cut, but Sebastien Tellier did because few Americans followed Eurovision and Lil’ Wayne is on there because no one else this year dedicated a whole song to Amelie Poulain. Lindstrøm’s tracks are too epic. No Age didn’t make for smooth transitions and, HEY, Times New Viking: your album is mastered way too loud!

As always, I put some thought into the sequencing, so listen to it in the suggested order if you want the full experience. You can find the track list in the comments section. Enjoy! And let me know if I’ve been missing out on something good from this year.

Click here to download Krapp’s Last Blog’s 2008 (So Far) mix.

Four Stars

Air France, No Way Down EP
Atlas Sound, Let the Blind Lead…/Orange Ohms Glow EP
Deerhunter, Microcastle [Unreleased]
Lindstrøm, Where You Go I Go Too [Unreleased]
Hercules & Love Affair, Hercules & Love Affair
Paavoharju, Laulu Laakson Kukista
Vampire Weekend, Vampire Weekend
Sebastien Tellier, Sexuality
Studio, Yearbook 2 [Remix Collection]
M83, Saturdays = Youth
Windsurf, Windsurf EP
Animal Collective, Water Curses EP

Three Stars

High Places, 03/07 - 09/07
Boris, Smile
No Age, Nouns
Black Mountain, In the Future
Alex Moulton, Exodus (Please look at this cover art!)
Quiet Village, Silent Movie
Beach House, Devotion
Kelley Polar, I Need You to Hold On
Low Motion Disco, Love Love Love [Vinyl]

Two Stars

Portishead, Third
Sorcerer, White Magic
The Fall, Imperial Wax Solvent
Times New Viking, Rip It Off
Lil’ Wayne, Tha Carter III
Nick Cave, Dig Lazarus Dig!
Crystal Castles, Crystal Castles
Cut Copy, In Ghost Colors
The Dodos, Visiter
MGMT, Oracular Spectactular
Syclops, I’ve Got My Eye On You/Where’s Jason K?
Aeroplane, Whispers [Vinyl]

One Star

Erykah Badu, New Amerykah: Part One
Spiritualized, Songs in A & E
Dominique Leone, Dominique Leone
Nomo, Ghost Rock
El Guincho, Alegranza
Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Lie Down in the Light
Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes/Sun Giant EP

Broken Records

Fuck Buttons, Street Horrssing
Magnetic Fields, Distortion
Shearwater, Rook
Wolf Parade, At Mount Zoomer
Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago

Collections and Reissues

Dennis Wilson, Pacific Ocean Blue
Steinski, What Does It All Mean?
Space Oddities: Rare European Library Grooves

Still Want To Hear: Discodromo, Bun B, Matmos, Harvey Milk, Destroyer

Upcoming: Deerhoof, Stereolab, Fiery Furnaces, The Game, Brian Wilson, Young Jeezy, Of Montreal

Skee ballers

(First saw this on Betablog. Oh how I have blog envy. And nostalgia.)

Blondie - Parallel Lines (1978)

I was overjoyed to see a reissue of Blondie’s Parallel Lines reviewed on Pitchfork last Friday. It’s always welcome when PF cries classic on an unsung (by some) album. My delight is partially due to my canon obsession - a fresh round of reviews lets me calibrate my impression of the consensus - but I mainly appreciate reissues for letting me rediscover albums that I haven’t listened to in years. So, I’ve been rocking out to Parallel Lines all weekend.

The opening tracks, ‘Hanging on the Telephone‘ and ‘One Way Or Another,’ leave me a little cold these days. They’re the album’s two most recognized cuts outside of its pièce de résistance (in the U.S., at least), so it might be a case of overexposure. Chris Stein (guitarist, songwriter, Debbie Harry boy toy) and crew are rarely less than inspired, but Harry’s vocals sound misplaced here. Her range is remarkable, but I find her least convincing in her more aggressive performances, which might explain why Blondie’s best work came after they streamlined their punk roots. I might also be biased after hearing the original Nerves version. (If you like that, check out their perfect, punchy ‘When You Find Out‘.)

‘One Way’ suffers from the same shortcoming: the band’s in top form, but Harry can’t quite ‘own’ it. She wrote the track with the group’s bassist, Nigel Harrison, but it sounds more like a cover, like they took an unsettling, sinister love song and tried to spruce it up with crackerjack pipes and a playful, hearty sass. The song’s spiraling conclusion almost makes it work. Despite these flaws, however, compared with the other less than stellar tracks on the album, at least these two are distinctive.

The first sublime cut on the album is ‘Picture This.’ It’s an ideal, three-minute, thirty-two-bar pop song: bouncy, bittersweet, killer hook. The crescendo of ‘If it weren’t for your job at the garage if you could only-o-oh-whoa!‘ is always surprising; it’s one of my favorite moments in music. The sequencing on the Parallel Lines sometimes presents problems, but ‘Picture This’ works perfectly as the introduction to the album’s most puzzling moment.

When Scott Plagenhoef compares ‘Fade Away and Radiate,’ to the artier rock of Roxy Music, with its spacious grooves, sailing riffs and cryptic lines like ‘Oh, baby, I hear you spend nighttime, wrapped like candy, in a blue, blue neon glow,’ he must mean ramblers like ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache.’ (A King Crimson reference might also have been in order - that’s Robert Fripp you hear on guitar.) The conclusion, especially, sounds like a deep Brian Eno cut. ‘Fade Away’ is like nothing else on the album, or any of their albums. Blondie’s talents and tastes were diverse, and if only their fame following Parallel Lines‘ release hadn’t introduced a few artistic constraints, they’d have had more liberty to incorporate their ‘out’ influences.

The next five-song suite begins with the excellent ‘Pretty Baby,’ which lays girl group motifs (spoken interludes, adolescent love) over a driving rock beat. ‘You… you with the comb. You look okay, in every way.’ ‘I Know But I Don’t Know‘ has some monstrous riffs - everyone’s in the pocket here, really - but I think duet vocals are a misstep in general. ‘11:59‘ has a nice restrained urgency and two rousing church organ solos that sound lifted from The Simpsons’ ‘In the Garden of Eden, Baby’ (keyboardist Jimmy Destri wrote the song, natch). Jack Lee of the Nerves also penned ‘Will Anything Happen?‘ but, as far as I know, never recorded it. Blondie’s performance is adequate (especially the brass-happy Clem Burke), but you can’t help wanting to hear a version by a more worked up, threadbare outfit like, well, The Nerves. Harry’s vocals also lack charisma. ‘Sunday Girl,’ however, shows her at her coquettish best, keeping the lyrics’ summertime sweetness palatable with her voluptuous nonchalance. (They also recorded a French version: ‘Depeche-toi, depeche-toi et attends!’)

This sequence of goods to greats makes way for sacred beast of the album, one of the undeniable peaks of pop music. ‘Heart of Glass‘ has few equals and fewer superiors. Critical Darwinists will discover soon enough what proportion of what elements comprises a perfect pop song. Whatever the formula, Blondie seem to have hit it, but the contributions of at least one member of the ‘Glass’ team have long been underestimated.

Blondie were inspired songwriters and talented musicians, but the success of ‘Heart of Glass’ (and Parallel Lines) can be largely attributed to producer Mike Chapman. If you ever wondered about the extent or power of a producer’s influence, compare the album version (actually the 12″ single, which on subsequent pressings replaced the shorter, less club-friendly cut) with the pre-studio version, ‘Once I Had a Love (The Disco Song)‘. Chapman subjugated all to the mighty synthesizer. He relegated the raucous guitar line to mere ornament, vacuum-sealed the high-hat, and tranquilized Harry, giving her a detached, iconic sexuality that elevated what started out as ‘a goof, a take-off on the upscale nightlife favored outside of Blondie’s LES home turf‘ into a decadent pop mega-hit.

I shouldn’t give Chapman all the credit; the band obviously met him halfway, and they wrote the songs, after all. When listening closely to this album, though, one marvels at the density and detail, the inconspicuous touches (a subtle bass climb, an extraneous but charming synthesizer flourish) buried in these ostensibly no-frills tracks.

Unfortunately, I must now issue a fatwā on the head of the party responsible for the transition from ‘Heart of Glass’ to ‘I’m Gonna Love You Too.’ It’s the most jarring sequencing error ever. Some poor track had to follow ‘Heart of Glass,’ but this Grease knock-off would have been better off wallowing in the vaults. At least they thought to end the album with the underrated ‘Just Go Away.’ Harry’s soaring vocalese over a Stein-Destri jam is one of the album’s highlights.

Plagenhoef sees the album as landing, ‘a few years before MTV and the second British Invasion codified and popularized the look and sound of 1980s new wave [and its] ringing guitar pop has entered our collective consciousness through compilations… ads, film trailers, and TV shows rather than the album’s ubiquity.’ It’s a astute remark, even if I can only think of few artists whose sound has entered our collective consciousness via albums alone, and, except for Radiohead, they’re all jazz musicians. The point is that Parallel Lines, one of the most enduring products of the New York scene (alongside The Ramones’ debut, Television’s Marquee Moon, Richard Hell’s Blank Generation and the Eno-curated No New York), deserves to be as ubiquitous as, is the equal of, any (good) Case Logic staple, from Led Zeppelin’s IV to Thriller.

Blondie might have been one of the supreme singles bands, but don’t let that distract you from the quality of their albums, especially this one.