Caught in the Carousel

Caught in the Carousel's Year's Best for 2009

Rick Moody
Author, Musician (Wingdale Community Singers)
www.myspace.com/thewingdalecommunitysingers

Rick Moody

Thirteen Things

"Slim Slow Slider," by Van Morrison, Astral Weeks Live At the Hollywood Bowl (Listen to the Lion Records)

I'm not always sure how I feel about the artists-reprising-an-entire-album phenomenon. It might be just another way to oppress people with their back catalogue in order to inhibit growth. If ever there were an album, though, and an artist who needs to revisit it occasionally, it's Astral Weeks, and Van Morrison. Morrison is preternaturally productive, these days, releasing things in consecutive years without fail, more so than anyone from his era, unless you include Neil Young. Unfortunately, not all of these releases are noteworthy for their level of commitment. In fact, as a lyricist, he would only once again manage the lucidity and drama of Astral Weeks—on Veedon Fleece. There was every reason to believe that this live rendering would be workmanlike, and diverting, if not always inspired, as Morrison has resisted feeling cornered by expectations at every turn. I am most moved by him when he is at his least conventional (A Common One, e.g., or Veedon Fleece, or St. Dominic's Preview), when he's most transcendentalist, and there are a couple of tracks on here when, indeed, he rises up from the obligation to play old songs, and accomplishes that ineffable something, "Slim Slow Slider" being the best of these. He was always an impulsive guitar player, less schooled than passionate, and on this track he bangs away on his acoustic like only it can redeem. The original "Slim Slow Slider" was one of the few tracks on the album to lean heavily on a minor chord, and it was still and sad, recalling some of the terrain of the singer's earlier track "T.B. Sheets," though with an even darker hue, but here "Slim Slow Slider" is made oddly redemptive, featuring a long improvised section in which the narrator tries to sing his way out of grief. He almost gets there.

Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy, Sun Ra and His Arkestra (Evidence)

I didn't get it at first, the Sun Ra thing. Or maybe I kept trying to like the more earnest jazz players, like Bill Evans, or Gerry Mulligan, or Chet Baker, or Joe Pass, which I guess means mostly white jazz, and I failed to see the humor in a lot of jazz, in Sun Ra's case, in anyone else's case. (I liked early seventies Miles Davis, and that was about it.) But then I was trying to like the sort of antic eighties incarnation of Sun Ra, which is a certain historical moment in his development. The matter rested there for a while, notwithstanding the artist's passing. And then a few years ago I was out west trying to work on a novel, and I went to a great used music store in Tucson, and picked up this one, backed with Art Forms for Dimensions Tomorrow, and for a change I totally got it, the heavy reliance on tribal percussion, with strange period effects, echo and reverb. It's a beautiful, strange album, totally singular, but also recognizably of Sun Ra's output. When I got this one under my belt I was suddenly a lot better at understanding Space Is the Place and other similar efforts as well. I suppose I needed the really experimental impulse first, and the more conventional and more ballad-oriented and standard-oriented opuses made more sense to me thereafter. The same was the case with Rashaan Roland Kirk, by the way. And Mingus. Now I love all of them. And Bill Evans doesn't sound too earnest anymore either. Not to mention Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, etc.

Songs to Grow On for Mother and Child, Woody Guthrie (Folkways)

Given to me on the occasion of the birth of my child, along with many, many other albums of children's music. In the abstract, I could think of nothing I wanted less than children's music. I would subject Raffi to some Bush-era enhanced interrogation if I could. Nevertheless, I put on this Guthrie album, and I was moved from the first moments, as, in fact, was my daughter. It's the simplicity (sometimes it's just voice, or maybe some foot tapping, nothing more), the directness, the absolute lack of premeditation or guile, and the very strange view of childhood and parenting suggested herein, that make this the work of a great artist.

Stay the Same Never Change, a film by Laurel Nakadate

Cinema in the U.S. of A. is dead, and it's dead because the multinational entertainment providers want it that way. As a result (see below), the given-up-for-dead medium of television is where all the action is these days, at least if you are not ten years old and think that Pixar is the ne plus ultra of creativity. Many filmmakers of merit, therefore, are going the art route, by which I mean the gallery and museum route, and Nakadate is one such example. I think she got her start at Yale in the graduate program in fine arts, where she was a photographer. Her earlier videos are arresting, and organized around ritual and silence and around subjects who are in exile from the cinematic lens, people who look like people, and who behave like people, not like celebutantes from Beverly Hills. The film I'm plugging here is hard to see—you can't get hold of a copy easily—but it's more than worth the effort. The results, in terms of love for the neglected, and voice to the voiceless, distantly recalls Korine's Gummo, but with less violence and less cynicism, or perhaps Miranda July's shorter works, for attention to the surrealism of private ritual. When one of the teenage female protagonists here makes her own boyfriend doll and lies down with him, it's more illuminating of the postmodern now than anything we've seen on a screen in years.

Prodigal Sons, a film by Kimberley Reed

I don't want to give away too much about this documentary, which is soon going to get a little limited theatrical release (in early 2010) before showing on the IFC channel, but it has to do, in part, with two brothers, one adopted, one not, going back to their twentieth high school reunion (the adopted one got left back a year, so that two are in the same class), except that the one brother never finished school and got in a motorcycle accident, after which some important parts of his brain were removed, and the other brother, the high school football quarterback and class valedictorian, became a woman. The drama of all this is much more than thus thumbnail suggests. Definitely among the very best documentaries I've seen in years.

N.Y. No Wave: The Ultimate East Village 80's Soundtrack (Ze Records)

Ze Records is back somewhat, doing some of what they did during my college years, or at least resting on their laurels, and this sampler of their quirky set of interests supervenes on the hard to get No New York, which was anyway a less democratic helping of similar tendencies. The No Wave period bloomed quickly and disappeared here in my hometown, and though it seemed to leave no real mark, a lot of what came later (Sonic Youth, most notably) would have been impossible without it. Some of this music (Teenage Jesus and the Jerks) was not inviting for me back in the day, but now it sounds energetic and uncompromising and, god forbid, kind of fun.

The Quick and the Dead, by Joy Williams (Grove Press)

This is on the list because hipsters don't read enough. This is one of the very greatest contemporary fiction writers, and this is among her very greatest books. Read more. And not just Cormac McCarthy. If you don't, you're just giving away your cultural acreage to a system that would have you doped and unable to challenge it, to mount a significant defense against its rhetorical and ideological malfeasances. It's books and ideas that make you ready for the revolution. Free your mind and your ass will follow.

Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, by Theodor Adorno (Verso)

Another book, this one incredibly difficult, really, but more than rewarding if you read it in small morsels, which it is happy to allow you to do, as it's composed in fragments. Adorno was a music critic, in addition to being a philosopher, and even in translation his prose sounds like the prose of someone taken up with the questions of modern music. Pinning down Adorno's positions is folly (although he seems to have a lot of difficulty with Freud), but that doesn't really matter. What matters is the sound of his prose, and the incredible delicacy of the way metaphor works in this book. He's a melancholic, and one who describes his abject despair in loving detail. Few writers since have gotten close.

"Oh My God Charlie Darwin," by the Low Anthem, Oh My God Charlie Darwin (Nonesuch)

A novelist friend of mine, Adam Braver, who teaches in Rhode Island sent me this album. I believe the band are graduates of the very same university that spawned me. I was skeptical, on this basis, just as I was skeptical of another band of similar renown, Deer Tick, but I loved and admired this first track on the Low Anthem album. It's got it all, I think, great harmonies, a great and unusual lyric, and an unsuspected reverence. It is hushed and beautiful. I wish I could report that I liked the entire album as well, but I almost never like whole albums these days. This song is magical, remarkably mature, and it augurs great things for these performers.

Friday Night Lights, the television series (Universal Studios)

The Sopranos is ancient history, The Wire had its time and is now consigned to classrooms where it will be taught for the next two hundred years, Battlestar Galactica is esoteric because of its speculative/sci-fi topography. That leaves Friday Night Lights as the best show on television, and not because it's about football. It's good despite the fact that it's about football. Great women characters! Especially the coach's wife! And plausible human situations! People who always seem to have mixed feelings about one another! Losers! The left behind! People who don't get it all together, just like the people you know in real life!

A Crimson Grail, Rhys Chatham (Table of Elements)

In the Rhys Chatham versus Glenn Branca turf war, which is not far from the Glass versus Reich turf war, Chatham is the affable and less obtuse one, or so it seems from the outside. I agree that it's disappointing that the two of them seem resigned to making ever larger ensembles, a battle that Rhys seems to have won for the moment by getting four hundred electric guitarists to play this piece. The idiom is frankly minimalist, which means that it sounds quite a bit like Reich in spots, or perhaps like La Monte Young's brass pieces. The tonality of it is disappointing if you are a fan of, e.g., Chatham's Guitar Trio Is My Life!, which squalls more interestingly. But if you leave aside these quibbles, this is the most beautiful, most seductive, most unforgettable piece of modern composition made in years. Played in a church in Paris, because no other setting would do it justice, and the resonance of the space makes the recording even better. The only disappointment, really, is the crowd noise, which breaks the spell some, but how else to record the thing? Is there a venue that could hold this many players otherwise? Chatham continues, despite his inconstant output, to be one of the very greatest of modern composers.

Skip James, Hard Time Killin' Floor (Yazoo)

There are many Skip James "albums" these days, though he never really made such a thing himself. This is an anthology of his very early recordings both on guitar and piano. To my way of thinking, he is the finest guitar player who ever lived, and one of the most affecting singers too. James leaves the blue in the blues. Whereas a lot of acoustic blues traffics in the idiom but is indirect about summoning the despair, James is all about the despair. When he says hard time, he means hard time. When he says killin' floor, he means killin' floor.

Robin Williamson, The Iron Stone (ECM)

Most fans of the Incredible String Band can't be bothered to search out the solo material by its participants, excepting maybe Mike Herron's first solo album, or perhaps one of those Robin Williamson and His Merry Men albums from the mid-seventies. This album is recent (what heresy), and in it Williamson recreates some of what made him great, which is to say an improvised surface, and a sense that everyone is involved in co-creating the result. Maybe his voice is not what it was (he has fallen from tenor to baritone), maybe he's even less rock and folk-oriented than he was back in the day. But he maintains a sure sense of great poetry and of the uncanny material that the folkloric can still summon up in us. This album actually gives me the chills in spots, it's so possessed of the vanished world and its arcana.