Clip from a mockumentary about how Africans view white culture in Austria, a land where “no black man has ever stepped foot.” Does anyone know what this is from? It reminds me of the brilliant retro comedy series, Look Around You created by Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz. I’d love to see the entire thing, this clip is but a cruel tease! (Reminds me of Martin Mull’s mid-80s HBO series, The History of White People in America. I will never forget the scene with Fred Willard as a clueless white man (his forte, obviously) barbecuing in his backyard wearing an apron with a cartoon hot dog asking “What Do You Want on Yours?”)

 
What with John Waters seemingly everywhere these days (Salon, the NYT, Fresh Air) as he promotes his new book, Role Models, I thought it’d be a fine time to revisit one of his former film muses, Edith Massey.

Along with Divine, Mink Stole, David Lochary and Mary Vivian Pearce, Massey was a stock player in the Dreamlander universe, and a key contributer to that trilogy of Waters films I and many others consider particularly essential: Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living.

Watching those three films growing up (and watching them, and watching them), Massey always struck me as being infinitely stranger than larger-than-life drag queen, Divine.  Maybe it was because I somehow grasped that “drag” was, by definition, “performative,” and thus safer than the whacked-out maternalism that Massey so artlessly channeled.  In fact, whereas Divine’s acting method might be described as quotation-marks-within-quotation-marks, Massey seemingly acted without the cushion of any marks whatsoever—quotation or otherwise.

Massey’s life after Waters was perhaps no odder than her life before it, and its trajectory has an arc straight out of Dickens: from orphanage to reform school, from freight train rider to brothel madam, and then, as these things sometimes go, to Hollywood.

Some of this ground is covered in the ‘74 documentary on her life: Love Letter To Edie (you can watch a clip from that film here).  The below interview from the early 80’s is also amusing:

 
Of course, no Massey entry would be complete without the infamous “Egg Man” moment from Pink Flamingos.  That follows below:

 
After a battle with cancer and diabetes, Massey passed away in Venice, California, in 1984.  That was 2 years after Massey and her band, called, naturally, Edie and the Eggs, released the below Rodney on the Roq staple, Punks, Get Off The Grass:

 
I was thrilled to read Vaughan Bell’s short essay at Slate about Milton Rokeach’s rarely encountered 1964 book, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti. It’s one of my all time favorite books, but alas, one that no one else I’ve ever met has heard of or read. It’s nearly impossible to find for a reasonable price. The Three Christs of Ypsilanti is a psychiatric case study by Rokeach, a detailing of his experiment with a trio of schizophrenic patients at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The three men—who each harbored the delusional belief that he was Jesus Christ returned—were forced to live with each other in a mental hospital to see if their beliefs could be challenged enough to effect a break-through in at least one of them.

But it wasn’t that simple, as Rokeach found out. Bell writes:

But the book makes for starkly uncomfortable reading as it recounts how the researchers blithely and unethically manipulated the lives of Leon, Joseph, and Clyde in the service of academic curiosity. In one of the most bizarre sections, the researchers begin colluding with the men’s delusions in a deceptive attempt to change their beliefs from within their own frame of reference. The youngest patient, Leon, starts receiving letters from the character he believes to be his wife, “Madame Yeti Woman,” in which she professes her love and suggests minor changes to his routine. Then Joseph, a French Canadian native, starts receiving faked letters from the hospital boss advising certain changes in routine that might benefit his recovery. Despite an initially engaging correspondence, both the delusional spouse and the illusory boss begin to challenge the Christs’ beliefs more than is comfortable, and contact is quickly broken off.

In fact, very little seems to shift the identities of the self-appointed Messiahs. They debate, argue, at one point come to blows, but show few signs that their beliefs have become any less intense. Only Leon seems to waver, eventually asking to be addressed as “Dr Righteous Idealed Dung” instead of his previous moniker of “Dr Domino dominorum et Rex rexarum, Simplis Christianus Puer Mentalis Doctor, reincarnation of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.” Rokeach interprets this more as an attempt to avoid conflict than a reflection of any genuine identity change. The Christs explain one another’s claims to divinity in predictably idiosyncratic ways: Clyde, an elderly gentleman, declares that his companions are, in fact, dead, and that it is the “machines” inside them that produce their false claims, while the other two explain the contradiction by noting that their companions are “crazy” or “duped” or that they don’t really mean what they say.

In hindsight, the Three Christs study looks less like a promising experiment than the absurd plan of a psychologist who suffered the triumph of passion over good sense. The men’s delusions barely shifted over the two years, and from an academic perspective, Rokeach did not make any grand discoveries concerning the psychology of identity and belief. Instead, his conclusions revolve around the personal lives of three particular (and particularly unfortunate) men. He falls back—rather meekly, perhaps—on the Freudian suggestion that their delusions were sparked by confusion over sexual identity, and attempts to end on a flourish by noting that we all “seek ways to live with one another in peace,” even in the face of the most fundamental disagreements. As for the ethics of the study, Rokeach eventually realized its manipulative nature and apologized in an afterword to the 1984 edition: “I really had no right, even in the name of science, to play God and interfere round the clock with their daily lives.”

There’s another piece I found mentioning the book that’s worth bringing in here, too, because it uses the Three Christs of Ypsilanti as a microcosm of how the world’s major religions all believe they have the one truth and worship the one true god. A guy named Steve Bhaerman who writes a humor column under the pen name “Swami Beyondananda” at a New Age website called InnerSelf had a profound insight about the book, seeing the three messianically-challenged protagonists as stand-ins for the world’s big three religions, each under the delusion that their “truth” is the true truth and it’s the other guy’s religion that is superstitious bullshit:

I hadn’t thought about that book for years, until I was reminded of it by two seemingly unrelated news items. The first involved the Middle East peace process, which recently has been neither peaceful nor much of a process. A huge seemingly unresolvable dispute involves Jerusalem, which houses the sacred sites of three major religions. Someone had the enlightening suggestion that Jerusalem be ruled by God. Of course, the next question was, whose God?

The other news item was about the Catholic church declaring that for all intents and purposes, IT alone is the one sure way to heaven—and perhaps more important, the only certain way to avoid hell. A friend of mine who owns a marketing business (and incidentally grew up Catholic) says, “I can only dream of having such an unbeatable marketing premise. Buy my product, go to heaven. Buy the other guy’s, go to hell.” Not to single out the Catholics, though. Fundamentalists of every stripe play out a dyslexic version of that childhood taunt, “My dog’s better than your dog.” Except that “my God’s better than your God” has caused millions of deaths and oceans of tears.

And that’s when it occurred to me that the three major religious systems are like the Three Christs of Ypsilanti. Each lives in a delusional system that it alone is the One True Path. And now, God has placed them all in a therapy group to see if they can accommodate one another.

Brilliant. If you are interested, some parts of The Three Christ of Ypsilanti can be read online here.

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (InnerSelf)

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus: In the late 1950s, three men who identified as the Son of God were forced to live together in a mental hospital. What happened? (Slate)

 
It’s hard to overstate the effect upon our psyches of things we’re exposed to when we are young and impressionable. For better or worse, these things stay with us forever and if we’re lucky these things are also of enduring quality and mystery. Such is the case with myself and the little known band Monitor, whose sole 7” single I chanced upon at Slipped Disc record store in Sepulveda, CA around 1980. I was already at this time quite the ardent Devo fan and I could tell they too had vaguely similar aesthetics, especially in Steve Thompsen’s virtuoso synth manglings. So enchanted was I with this lil’ slab o’ vinyl that I tracked them down and started hanging around with them and sneaking into all of their shows. That I soon found out they attended the same high school as I, 10 years earlier, only deepened my affection for them. As it happened they were just preparing to release their one and only self-titled LP which while retaining its electronic foundations revealed a darker, more psychedelic sound. And then, rather suddenly it was over. Drummer Keith Mitchell went on to fame with Mazzy Star, guitarist Michael Uhlenkott formed The Romans, Steve Thompsen eventually joined LAFMS improv trio Solid Eye and bassist (and major early crush object for yours truly) Laurie O’Connell disappeared into Northern Californian suburban family life. There are periodic rumors of re-issues and even a book documenting their fleeting existence, but for now all that remains are the handful of recordings and this one live clip from New Wave Theatre, which as far as I can tell was their very last performance together.
 

The biggest stock market crash in history and Greece falls apart, shaking the core illusions that prop up the US and EU…. Sweet fuck what a week.

In the US we have the ultrablack humor of seeing how illusory our “system” really is; the Zeitgeisters of the world have been bonkering on for years about how the fact our system is based on greenbacks “magically” produced by the Fed makes our economy an illusion. Well, yes, but if anything, Wednesday showed how understated they were being: the entire global economy, apparently, can be brought down by somebody’s finger missing the “m” on their keyboard and hitting the “b” instead. Magic tricks indeed. Meanwhile, in the EU, the continued disintegration of Greece is calling the series of bluffs that underpin the stability of the European Union like it’s 1968 all over again but without the clothes.

It all feels like a big joke that people are tired of perpetuating. “Let’s play hypercapitalism” is getting a bit old from the looks of how people are reacting to it. It’s been old for generations but now the promised payouts seem to be hardly worth the pretense; why stay at the table when all you’re likely to win is the new Usher album and maybe, if you work really hard, a good three years at some point in your life where you can pretend you’re living the house-cars-kids American Dream before they fire you and take all their toys back and leave you with the bill?

Yes, I propose that what we’re seeing is people calling the bluff. It’s less a failure of a system that we all know was broken anyway and more a lurch towards something better, towards simpler living and a refocus on the really important parts of being alive – like building a soul instead of more mini-malls. (I may or may not have crunched the detailed astrological math on the stock market crashing in order to back up this statement. That shit’s for hippies anyway.)

So welcome again to 2010, the year of vomiting up as much as we can of the last 2000 years of this utter bullshit patriarchal woman-hating child-hating life-hating nature-hating nonsense. You’ll want an empty stomach when you’re coming up at the party anyway, so have a few glasses of water and here’s hoping you have somebody to hold your forehead while you yak.

In the meantime, watch this small masterpiece from German death diva Billie Ray Martin (via Loki23). It’ll make you feel much better.

Debbie Harry by Andy Warhol
 
How can it be that we haven’t yet covered Blondie on this blog? What a tragic oversight! One that I must redress immediately…

I absolutely loved Blondie when I was a kid, after discovering them on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert when I would have been about ten. I recall being transfixed by how beautiful Debbie Harry was and thinking how cool she dressed. I had never seen a girl who looked like this before… and I was quite impressed. Debbie Harry made a strong impression on my young mind that a keen and idiosyncratic fashion sense most probably signaled a female creature of high intelligence (nearly, but not always, true). I was a fan from that moment on, believe me when I tell you…

The first Blondie song I heard on that day was In The Sun. I danced and pogoed around my grandparent’s living room in my socks, sliding on the floor as I did so. Watch the clip below. It was an exhilarating thing to see something like this back then. I was a kid very attuned to rock music—the way most ten-year-olds today are into SpongeBob SquarePants—and Blondie was a real sit up and pay attention change of pace from Foghat, Uriah Heap and REO Speedwagon, the groups normally seen on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert.
 

 
Completely aside from the insanely sassy gorgeousness of Debbie Harry, Blondie really stood apart musically from everything else that was going on at the time. Their songs were catchy, upbeat and fun. Despite their CBGBs pedigree, they really were never punks. There was a knowing calculation behind their persona, a campy, cabaret vision of ‘60s girl groups and Farfisa-infused garage pop.

For my money, the greatest artistic statement made by the band is 1980’s Autoamerican, an album reviewed poorly when it came out and that has never really been properly re-evaluated by either critics or audiences.

Autoamerican has aged very, very well. It doesn’t sound like anything else other than Blondie and so is a bit timeless in that sense. The opening track, Europa, a brooding modernist instrumental that dissolves into a spoken word rant from Harry extolling the virtues of cars. It’s an amazing song and a cool way to open the collection. The album contains both The Tide is High (originally a late ‘60s rocksteady hit in Jamaica for the Paragons and U-Roy—I bow to their genetic coolness for knowing about this song then) and Rapture, the song that, more than any other piece of music introduced the world to the concept of what rap music was. It’s a masterpiece of pop. I listened to it three times today—quite loud—and the skill, charm and verbal dexterity with which Debbie Harry casually rattles off her dada-hipster rhymes still astonishes 30 years later. It’s got a groove as funky as one written by James Brown, Prince or George Clinton, a feat almost no other white group can lay claim to.
 

 
My favorite moment on Autoamerican is T-Birds, a soaring piece of road music featuring angelic backing vocals courtesy of Flo and Eddie. If you’ve never heard Autoamerican before—and you call yourself a music fan—get your hands on it and give it a chance. Truly Autoamerican is one of the great lost albums of the New Wave era.
 
Bonus clip: Blondie do a cover of Goldfinger on German television’s Musikladen show: in 1977:
 

Apparently somewhere between thirty seconds to a minute after the opening weekend numbers for Avatar came in, the entirety of Western civilization decided to go 3D, and wholesale convert our malls and living rooms into one gigantic Disneyland of the Damned, like a Michael Bay Transformer changing state from “obnoxious and expensive” into “obnoxious, expensive, and three centimeters from your face.” Not only has Hollywood made 3D nigh-on mandatory for its big releases (presumably to combat file sharing), but 3D televisions are slated to begin rolling out this summer, despite health concerns (apparently they can cause vertigo, seizures and a host of other shocks to our woefully non-3D-adjusted systems). Perhaps it’s Michael Jackson’s revenge from beyond the grave, for barely noticing when he pioneered the technology with Captain EO back in the dark ages of 1986, or 24 BA (Before Avatar) in Hollywood years.

And now, the Internet. Intel Labs’ Sean Koehl recently predicted that the Internet will “go three-dimensional” within five to ten years—the company is currently hard at work developing the technology, touting its potential use for teleconferencing, among other business applications.

But… but. You know as well as I do that that’s not what it’s actually going to be used for.

If Koehl’s timeline bears out, somewhere between 2015 and 2020—right as Web 3.0, the Semantic Web and Augmented Reality are coming to maturity—we can expect:

Porn. I imagine the nearly-bankrupt porn industry will be all over this so quickly that they’ll just about be able to create an entire virtual reality pocket porniverse which the Global Otaku Diaspora will likely declare permanent residence in and which the rest of the world’s population will likely spend a good chunk of their waking hours in. Expect bedroom and office doors locked.

A constant, endless assault of cats. You will be like a cat lady for all the cats in the whole world, who will be all up in your face, all the time. Guess what’s in your inbox this morning? It’s another 3D video of somebody’s cat. And now it’s in your lap.

A running, inescapable feed of status updates from your friends—imagine the hovering, 3D heads of your online acquaintances popping up when you least expect them to constantly update you as to what they’re having for dinner, how much they hated Robert Pattinson’s directorial debut, or sending you a link to a 3D video of their cat being confused by their 3D computer. The thought of constantly being bothered by twelve-second video clips of the holographic heads of everybody I’ve ever exchanged two words with or been cc’d on an e-mail from, all of whose comments are bound to be equally aggravating and pointless, is enough to prompt a pre-emptive desert homestead. Are we all doomed to become like Jimmy Stewart in a doozie, with all those heads swimming around ours, all the time? Combined with augmented reality, three-dimensional Internet is going to be f___cking unavoidable. And so will everybody you know.

And good god… do we really want a three-dimensional version of Chatroulette? Do we really want to be able to see all of us, all the time, in shuddering, sickening three dimensions? Are we ready for the Slob Singularity, when everybody on the Internet can have the experience of staring directly at everybody else on the Internet; when all of our Doritos-greased faces see each other as one Being; when we all become One All-Slouching, All-Trolling, All-Wanking Consciousness?

I hope we are. Because that’s what’s coming. In glorious 3D.

(Watch Captain EO, It Is the Future: The Horrible, SAN-Depleting Future)

 
A difficult and turbulent mix of 7” singles from my collection for the sake of your aural edutainment.
 
Portsmouth Sinfonia - Also Sprach Zarathustra Op. 31 (excerpt)
Annie Anxiety - Cyanide Tears
Jimmy Smack - Untitled
Keith Rowe - Scratch Music
Joe Colley/Crawl Unit - Clay Sound
Princess Tinymeat - A Bun in the Oven
Eazy Teeth - Her Blade
The Flying Lizards - All Guitars
Minimal Man - She Was A Visitor
Stefan Weisser (Zev) - Poextensions
Sun City Girls - Eye Mohini
Project 197 - Plastic Straws
Jimmy Smack - Untitled
Caroliner - The Cooking Stove Beast
Johnny Ace - Pledging My Love
 

  Man Can Now Be Boxed And Bunched by brad laner
 

 

 
Recorded at a moment in time when the young Mr. Rotten was routinely getting his head kicked in by skinheads and hassled by the police, this is probably my single favorite bit of punk rock audio ephemera (actually, it’s a tie with the infamous Slits college radio interview, but that’s another blog post…). What am I talking about? A guest appearance by Johnny Rotten on the Capital Radio program of deep-voiced DJ Tommy Vance. Rotten/Lydon was invited to play records from his own collection and talk about them. He comes across as whip-smart, honest and refreshingly free from much—if any—social programing and religious brainwashing. He discusses the Sex Pistols, Malcolm McClaren (he calls him the fifth member of the band), being educated in a Catholic school he despised and his passionate love of music. There’s no put-on here or any hint of the deliberate obnoxiousness of later years.

Where did you go to school?

[sighs] This poxy Roman Catholic thing. All they done was teach me religion. Didn’t give a damn about your education though. That’s not important is it? Just as long as you go out being a priest.

Which you haven’t become.

Well no. That kind of forcing ideas on you like when you don’t want to know is bound to get the opposite reaction. They don’t let you work it out for yourselves. They tell you you should like it. And that’s why I hate schools. You’re not given a choice. It’s not free.

It’s an inevitable question, and a corny question, but can you think of any better system of educating people?

No I can’t [laugh], I just know that one’s not right. I wouldn’t dare, it’s out of my depth, I have nothing to do with that side of things. I haven’t been to university and studied all the right attitudes, so I don’t know. No I haven’t.

[fades in Doctor Alimantado - ‘Born For A Purpose ‘]

This is it, ‘Born For A Purpose’, right? Now this record, just after I got my brains kicked out, I went home and I played it and there’s a verse which goes, ‘If you have no reason for living, don’t determine my life’. Because the same thing happened to him. He got run over because he was a dread. Very true.

The music he plays is a revelation.  Can, some rare soul, Tim Buckley, Peter Hammill (he accuses Bowie of copping the Van Der Graaf Generator front man’s moves), Captain Beefheart (he plays The Blimp!), Nico, John Cale and of course, lots of reggae. When Rotten plays the dub B-side by Culture (the track with the lopping bass, barking dogs, crying babies and blaring car horns) you can hear the blueprint for the PiL sound that would come along just a few months later.

It must be said that for a 20-year-old he’s got astonishingly good taste in music. This really is an incredible thing to listen to. For the musical education alone, it’s great, but listening to the thoughts of this controversial, brilliant young man at the height of powers is a sublime pleasure. It even contains the radio commercials from the broadcast.

A transcript of the interview and a track listing can be found here and the links to the audio files are here.
 

 
SHORT POST: Hey, down there at the bottom, The Phantom Tollbooth movie.  Animated by Chuck Jones, it’s long out of print, it’s got pretty colors, give it a look!

LONG POST: What with last week’s Kraken re-releasing, I’m reminded once again of the perils of adaptation, and how meddling with the stories we cherish as children is, in most cases, a doomed proposition. 

Not so much because movies, regardless of their “faithfulness,” never fully capture the scope and detail of the books they’re sometimes based on (Dune, Harry Potter), or that the sheer act of turning words into images, states of mind into dialogue, necessitates a sacrifice of some kind when jumping from interior-minded Literature to exterior-bodied Film (The Hours, Atonement).

All those notions are valid, sure, but they presuppose something that rarely gets mentioned in the great Book vs. Movie debate: that despite the slippery slope we call Language, there’s such a thing as a universally experienced book to hold against a universally experienced movie in the first place.

In other words, when male friend X tells me, “Well, I liked Atonement, but it wasn’t nearly as good as McEwan’s book,” I’m always left thinking, “That’s great, but who am I to gauge your private experience of McEwan’s book?”

In fact, maybe my private experience of McEwan’s Atonement not only kicks ass over X’s private experience of it in terms of analytical sophistication, but the “good” things he found in it are the same things I found both “trite” and “manipulative?”

Okay, now I have never read Atonement (hey, I saw the movie!) but I have read, on numerous occasions, Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth.

It’s also, along with Disney’s Song of The South, the first film I remember seeing in theaters.  Directed by Chuck Jones, with a screenplay by Jones and Sam Rosen, The Phantom Tollbooth totally blew my then-puny kid gaskets.  I remember stumbling out of the theater declaring it the best film (out of the total four, maybe) I’d ever seen.  It was certainly the best film I’d ever seen starring The Munsters’ Butch Patrick.
 

 
I haven’t seen Tollbooth since, and it remains out of print, but, thanks to Vimeo (see above, below), I recently took some time to revisit it.  And now…well, let’s just say Jones’s imagining of Milo’s adventures in the Doldrums and beyond no longer constitutes what I consider the best film I’ve ever seen.  In fact, it’s now maybe the opposite of that.

But why, though? Why, exactly, does Jones’s version compare so woefully to the beloved Juster book?  Well, it’s not just the crude animation and unsophisticated storytelling.  It’s something that leads back to the above-mentioned perils of adaptation and my own private experience of the book—a few pages of it, anyway.  Jones mangles a particular sequence I found—and still find—incredibly resonant: Milo’s conducting of the sunrise. 

The shorthand goes like this (for those of you with the book handy, it’s Chapter 11, Dischord and Dyne): during his quest to save Rhyme and Reason, Milo meets Chroma the Great, the conductor responsible for all the colors in the world.  The beauty of trees and sunsets, of sunshine and fireworks, all stem from the movement of Chroma’s hands and the thousands of musicians playing silently around him.

Wanting to let Chroma sleep in a bit, Milo takes the next morning’s sunrise shift.  One by one the musicians come to life: piccolo players summon the day’s first rays, cellists make the hills glow red.  Milo’s overjoyed, “because they were all playing for him, and just the way they should.”

Joy turns to terror, though, when Milo’s musicians start playing louder and faster, the colors of the world becoming “more brilliant than he thought possible.”  Milo tries to keep up, but soon the sky’s changing from blue to tan and then to red.  Flowers turn black.  “Nothing was the color it should have been, and yet, the more he tried to straighten things out, the worse they became.”

Or, to use another metaphor, one plate in the air.  Then two plates.  Soon dozens of plates.  All moving in harmony.  And then they start crashing down around you.  In all of literature, I can’t recall a more compact or accurate description of the creative process.  Or its possible dangers.

And while I’m pretty sure my kid mind didn’t grasp its meaning then, I’ve been returning to that passage ever since.  Because that’s what metaphors do.  The better ones, anyway.  They hit you in the gut before you know how or why they’re useful. 

If we’re lucky, we recognize it, maybe in the moment, maybe years later.  Is it any wonder then that the book-to-movie process can be so fraught?  One adaptor’s trash might very well be another reader’s treasure.

Which brings us to the version of this scene as imagined by Chuck Jones.  It’s in Part II, 19 or so minutes in.  As per the book, Milo meets Chroma, sends him to bed, and prepares to conduct the sunrise.  And this is where things veer off course.  Way the fuck off course.

Before those piccolos have a chance to breathe, celestial activities start going to hell, denying Milo – and the viewers – a single moment of pleasure.  Not only does this rob Juster’s sequence of its poetry, but Jones turns the creative process into all danger, no joy whatsoever. 

It gets worse from there.  As the world unravels, Juster restores order by having Milo drop his hands, signaling the musicians to stop.  What does Jones have Milo do?  He has him retreat.  Flee the scene.  Act cowardly in the face of the forces he’s unleashed.  Now, I ask you: what kind of metaphor for the creative process is that?!  Not one I’d ever expose a child to, that’s for sure. 

Jones’s Tollbooth might fail me now as a metaphor for the creative process, but it does say something about growing up, growing older…

If that process can be boiled down to the saying goodbye to everything we hold dear, maybe it’s a relief that some of those things we hold most dear aren’t worth holding on to so tightly in the first place.

 
The next three installments (Tender Prey, The Good Son, Henry’s Dream) in Mute’s superbly remastered Nick Cave series came out yesterday and I’m pleased to report that they’re done to the extremely high standards established by the first batch. Each 2-disc set comes with a remastered stereo CD and a DVD-A with a choice of DTS or Dobly 5:1 surround mixes, as well as a PCM stereo version. There are ample B-sides, music videos and each set features the continuing, multi-part documentary by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard called Do You Love Me (Like I Love You) chronicling the recording of each album.

They sound fucking amazing. Tender Prey sounds especially good, with the surround versions offering total immersion in the Bad Seeds awe-inspiring swagger. Every Nick Cave album is an audiophile’s dream, but the Bad Seeds become a locomotive force of nature when experienced in these new surround versions. They sound so good, so like you’re right there in the studio with them, that it’s nothing short of exhilarating to listen to these albums at a high volume. When City of Refuge kicks in, it’s like being hit by an enraged Mack truck. My neighbors probably hate me.

The Good Son, one of my personal favorites, also unfolds remarkably in the airier surround mix. You can really hear how delicately the piano keys are being struck in The Ship Song and how hard the the xylophone is being pounded in The Weeping Song. The strings sound great and the drums really snap. It’s a great musical experience, nothing more, nothing less. These are albums that were meant to be listened to as complete song cycles and that’s how I consumed them. I highly recommend watching the docs before sinking into the album. Taken this way, it really builds anticipation for the music. The music does not disappoint.

In conclusion, now that there are seven of these sets, I’ve been listening to a lot of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds lately. I’ve owned these albums for years, I bought them when they originally came out, but as is typical, I’d listen to each for a while, then put it away, a year later the next one comes out, I’d listen to that one for a while, then I’d shelve it, etc, etc. With a solo career going back 26 years at this point, to hear all of them again, so masterfully refurbished, and so fresh sounding, I’m struck by the fact that only Nick Cave, of all of the major artists to emerge during the 1980s, has the back catalog to really deserve this kind of respect and archival treatment. Truly, Cave should be seen as one of the all time great artists of the rock era and these sets make a convincing case for that, indeed.

I’ll say it one more time: Mute really do the finest reissues of any label I can think of. You’d have to go to the recent Neil Young Archives Vol. 1 (reviewed by me here) to find an equivalent to what they’re doing here (Depeche Mode got the same treatment a few years back). Each set is a fantastic consumer value. As the compact disc format dies, Mute are still giving punters an actual reason to return to the record store. Good for their business and good for the fans, too.
 

h+ magazine just published a significantly re-written, revised and expanded version of my essay “Lady Gaga and the Dead-Planet Grotesque,” updated for the “Telephone” video.

If David Bowie’s chameleonic posturing prefigured the hypertext web, Gaga may be the first version of a human being we have seen capable of thriving in the era of the social web. She is shiny, clickable, and malleable in the face of endless attention fragmentation. She is an adaptive strategy. Without any solid or “real” self, her identity becomes whatever it needs to be, immune to the toxic shock of the incoming century, fully geared up to party in the ruins. Is it any wonder that she’s provoked the response she has, both adulation and hatred? She’s the first non-boring thing to happen in pop music for almost fifteen years.

Consider Lady Gaga in prison in the beginning of her new video. That’s all of us, “held captive” in the modern condition — but Gaga is the Magician, able to transform any situation to her will. Five minutes in and she’s reassembled her outfit from chains and cigarettes and is wrapping herself around the girls in the prison yard. The other people in prison are already listening to her songs on her branded Lady Gaga headphone… she set the context before she even arrived. Though she may be in prison, she already rules the world. This is what adaptation to the 21st century looks like. The brand “Gaga” can be reassembled from anything, even in a vacuum, even from trash, just as we must learn to do with our own masks of self…

(h+: Lady Gaga and the Dead-Planet Grotesque)

(Lady Gaga: The Fame Monster)

 
Die Tödliche Doris (The Deadly er, Doris) were a bloody-mindedly brilliant 80’s German post-punk band/ performance art concern, part of the self-styled Geniale Dilletanten movement (along with Einstürzende Neubauten and Malaria!) if you will. As a seemingly central tenet, manipulation of expectations is the rule, extending most fantastically to their 1984 release “Chöre & Soli” which consists not of conventionally playable records but rather a set of 8 miniature colored plastic discs and dedicated player. The sound content is limited to mere seconds per side, as befits the original use of the devices: the internal voice boxes of “talking” dolls. Needless to say these things are now rare as hen’s teeth. Anyone have a spare ?
 

Thanks to Soft Skull Press for sending me an advance paperback copy of Daniel Radosh’s “Rapture Ready: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture.” This book is righteously demented—true to the title, it’s a voyage through the bizarre world of Christian pop culture, in a time where it is essentially one more underground scene, a pocket pop universe just like juggalos or furries (though slightly bigger—as Radosh points out, this stuff totals up to a $7 billion a year industry). Radosh takes us on a voyage through the cult of Left Behind, Christian rock, and the rest of the American Christian scene. Along the way we get some serious gems like “BibleZine” (!!!), bumper stickers reading “Any Sex that can Put You in Hell ISN’T SAFE” and Jay Bakker (Jim and Tammy’s son), who runs his own punk rock church.

I mean, reading this, it’s like… this is the alternate universe version of Dangerous Minds’ readers, like we went into a wormhole and came out with goatees and freshly baptized.

There are some absolutely jaw-droppingly great snippets of “Christian” lore from the book. For instance, Radosh includes a depiction of the Rapture from one of the “Left Behind” books:

“[M]en and women soldiers and horses seemed to explode where they stood. It was as if the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and skin… Their innards and entrails gushed to the desert floor, and as those around them turned to run, they too were slain, their blood pooling and rising in the unforgiving brightness of the glory of Christ.

Gloria in excelsis Deo, motherfucker.

Awesome. Or try this one, from a Christian joke book Radosh finds:

One women’s libber started out a speech: “Where would you men be without us women?” A guy in the back shouted, “In the Garden of Eden!”

I gotta remember that one to impress the ladies with.

Anyway, excellent, hilarious, disturbing, sobering book. I imagine it would make a great read alongside Jeff Sharlet’s “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power” for a look at where the Christian right is, both in politics and in culture at large, at this moment. (Interview with author below!)

(Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture)

 
A lovely and unlovely mix for the weekend from me to you.

  To Blast Away The Fungus In Your Ears  by brad laner
 
Runzelstirn and Gurgelstock- Bei Abwesenheit Jeglicher Genussempfindungen (excerpt)

Wolfgang Dauner/ Etcetera - Lady Blue

ID Company - Bum Bum

Pedro Santos - Sem Sombra

Chrome - TV As Eyes

Fleetwood Mac - Albatross

Jon Anderson - Transic Tö

Angel Rada - Upsadesa

Yoko Ono/ Plastic Ono Band - Paper Shoes

Taj Mahal Travellers - July 15,1972 part 3 (excerpt)

Matching Mole w/ Brian Eno - Gloria Gloom

Brian Eno w/ Brad Laner - Faraway Suns

 
I recently acquired *cough, from Demonoid, cough* a quadraphonic version (i.e. 4-channel) of The Worst of Jefferson AIrplane and their Volunteers set in 4-channel audio as well. Originally released during the heyday of Quad (which was approximately 1974 to 1976) on 8-track and reel to reel tapes (for the more discerning audiophile) these rarely heard versions of some of the Airplane’s best-loved songs are phenomenal. As a very hardcore fan of the band since I was a kid, I really got off on hearing something new in the music I was already so very, very familiar with. On Volunteers, three—count ‘em—three songs are totally different from the album versions. Not different mixes, but substantially different versions which would have been lost to history due to the outdated format. (Although they were included on the excellent Jefferson Airplane Loves You box set, these tracks sound way better in their original quadraphonic glory, not bounced down to stereo. Hey Fredrick has a completely different lead vocal, Volunteers is totally different, I think it was even recorded on a different day from the original, and The Farm is also a lot different).

But the best song of all to hear in Quad was Lather. It sounds fantastic and there is an incredibly cool Philip Glass-style ostinato that Grace Slick is doing on the piano that has never been clear and audible in any version of this song I’ve ever heard before (and lord knows the JA catalog has been released in as many crappy permutations as their RCA label mate, Elvis’s catalog, has). It’s always been there, you just couldn’t hear it like this.

It’s fascinating for me to see the (rapid) flowering of an audiophile underground in Bit Torrent land. Anonymous professional and amateur audio engineers are buying up the original Quad tapes from the 70s on Ebay, restoring and refurbishing their old quadraphonic gear and then transferring these old tapes to Pro Tools, and then into DVD ISO files that you can burn with Toast. The ones made from the reel to reel tapes are by far the best, but even the ones made from 8-tracks are still pretty cool to hear, even in a lower fidelity.

Why doesn’t the music industry (specifically a label like Shout Factory, who would do the best job) look into what people are obviously quite interested in on the torrent trackers—especially the Russian ones— and get some ideas of what they still might actually purchase on disc (i.e. multi-channel versions of classic rock albums). A few of the original Quad mixes have actually been put out on DVD-A or SACD, such as Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells (amazing) as well as Black Sabbath’s Paranoid (also amazing). For the most part, however, they only see the light of day on torrent trackers via these inspired hobbyists.

But back to the Jefferson Airplane. Below is an odd lip-sync’d performance of Lather from the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Who else would on television then would have let Grace Slick get away with this?!?!
 

Thanks to Top Shelf for sending me this veritable holy grail of comics: Eddie Campbell’s “Alec” omnibus, which collects the lifetime autobiographical output of the Australia-based comic artist.

Eddie Campbell is known elsewhere as the artist on Alan Moore’s “From Hell,” as well as his own “Bacchus” series among other works. His sketchbook-y style is instantly recognizable to anybody who has encountered him. But for my money, his autobiographical comics—collected here—are his best work. I’ve been a massive fan since I discovered his comics as a teenager.

The work collected here covers much of Campbell’s life, centering on his tender, often hilarious looks at life, art, fatherhood, Australia and everything else that crosses his path. This is a life well-documented and examined in comics form, a great contribution to not only the field of comics, but also of the art of the memoir itself.

At 638 pages, this is a massively substantial work—in all senses. The book collects nine previously published “Alec” graphic novels, and adds a tenth, unique work, also titled “The Years Have Pants,” to the end. This is great stuff—“The Dance of Lifey Death” is a particular favorite, and has been since I bought it from Mr. Campbell himself at his booth at the San Diego Comic Con about ten years ago or so. That’s an incredibly touching vignette on life, time and sex that you won’t find paralleled anywhere else in the comics medium.

Campbell’s work has a certain “life directly documented on the page, through a wise and funny filter” quality to it that is absent from a lot of autobiographical comics work. This is the work of a mature, fully realized artist, the work of a grown man who has raised a family and been through the trials and tribulations of life and documented them with a sly grin and twinkle in the eye. That’s a quality that’s rare in autobiographical comics (or comics at all)—a lot of artists working in the field seem to filter their experiences through aloof irony or a kind of pretended, forced perspective. Consequently, they often feel alienated from their work—and alienate the reader. Not so with Eddie Campbell. Reading “Alec” is like spending a day drinking with a cool uncle and getting some much-needed insight on life.

Can’t recommend this one enough. A major achievement in many fields.

(ALEC: The Years Have Pants (A Life-Size Omnibus))

(Also check out this interview with Mr. Campbell by Brian Heater at the excellent Daily Cross Hatch comic blog.)

 
Whenever the discussion of a “favorite” movie comes up, my eyes glaze over. I’ve seen so many films that when pressed, exactly none of them stand out as a particular favorite. Not one. But when the favorite album question gets asked, Nick Cave’s first post-Birthday Party solo outing, From Her to Eternity comes immediately to mind.

To say that this album was a significant soundtrack to my ill-spent youth is a bit of an understatement. I listened to this record obsessively. I was a huge Birthday Party fan, but From Her to Eternity absolutely captivated my imagination. It was the most intelligent, most literate, most criminally insane rock music I’d ever heard, a quantum leap past everything else that was happening at the time. At the tail end of the post punk era, when once great bands—like the Psychedelic Furs, PiL and Ultravox to name but three—had lost their mojos in disheartening ways, Nick Cave became the standard bearer of intellectual cool in my late teen years. Talk about a dangerous mind, I thought Nick Cave was the baddest motherfucker alive.

True story: For the better part of 1983 and all of 1984, I lived in the south London neighborhood of Brixton. Today it’s a trendy area, but then it was anything but gentrified, its residents consisting of mostly poor West Indian immigrants, dreadlocked rastas and a small subset of squatters and junkies from all across the globe. I loved it there. One night I was exiting the Brixton tube station with my friend Sam when we were accosted by none other than Nick Cave, looking very much worse for wear, who politely asked us if we could direct him to where he could find some smack, please. (In truth, Cave didn’t ask “us,” he asked Sam, who looked all gothy and weird while I looked like what I was, a preppy, 18-year old American kid. He wasn’t addressing me at all, I was just standing there.)

Sam kindly pretended not to know who Cave was—oh we knew—just shook his head no and kept going. When we walked up the stairs and out of the station, he turned to me and said “That’s the second time he’s asked me that.”

I have always prided myself on my ability to be at the right place at the right time…

Cut to 1986. CDs had been on the market for a couple of years, but at that time it was still all stuff like Billy Joel, Tina Turner and Phil Collins that got released on the format. I was stomping around New York City with a Sony Walkman clamped to my ears and I was slowly beginning to understand the concept of hi-fidelity audio. I was curious about CDs, but there wasn’t that much there to lure me in just yet. Finally things I cared about started slowly trickling in, but it wasn’t until Kicking Against the Pricks, Nick Cave and the Bad Seed’s third outing, an all covers collection, came out, that I decided to bite the bullet and buy a CD player (which used to cost $500!). If Kicking Against the Pricks on CD could sound even better than it did on the cassette version I’d been listening to, then sign me up.

The first 3 CDs I bought were Kicking Against the Pricks, Nancy Sinatra’s The Hit Years comp and the first Psychedelic Furs album. Later that day, eager to hear more of this newfangled digital audio, I bought Marc Almond’s Mother Fist and Her Five Daughters, Julian Cope’s World Shut Your Mouth and John Zorn’s Morricone tribute, The Big Gundown.

Cut to December 2009. Since about 2002 I had been buying multi-channel SACD and DVD-A audio discs, but since I had only a stereo system—a really good one, I should add—I was just able to listen to the two channel versions of some of my favorite classic albums, but never the 5:1 mixes. Once again it was hearing that the Nick Cave catalog was coming out, remastered and in 5:1 that caused me to get antsy about upgrading the audio gear to a surround system. I’d managed to keep a lid on my once unparalleled ability to buy massive amounts of CDs for a good 3-4 years now and my lovely, but financially cautious wife, agreed to loosen the pursestrings for a major refurbishment of the home entertainment electronics.

Since it would be ridiculous for me to “review” an album I’ve already told you at the outset is probably my top, top favorite record, I’ll spare you the middle-aged fanboy rhapsodizing and instead concentrate (mostly) on the matter of the “Okay, I already own this CD, do I need to buy it again?” equation. In my case, in the past, I have purchased the album, the audio cassette and the CD of From Her to Eternity. The CD has always sounded amazing, how much better could it get?

Mute Records has been redoing certain major artists’ back catalogs (Depeche Mode, Can, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) with significant sonic upgrades in recent years. They do a consistently great job and these audiophile editions are quite good value for the consumer, especially ones with the high end audio systems to fully appreciate what’s on offer. It’s these consumers who are, let’s face it, just about the only dependable audience left anymore for the purchase of actual discs and it’s good business for Mute to cater to them. Aside from the new King Crimson releases (which sound amazing), Mute’s refurbishment of the Nick Cave catalog is one of the few major efforts in the audiophile arena, at least for pop music, this year or last. Jazz and classical see quite a few SACD, DTS and DVD-A releases each year, but the rock and pop category fewer and fewer. The pop marketplace seems largely to have abandoned the space. Even the Stones and Dylan SACDs have been replaced now with standard “red book” CDs. Considering that the Stones SACDs can rarely be found for less than $80 these days, used, it shows, once again, how short-sighted most of the record industry is. Then again it is the record industry, isn’t it? Visionary business practices are hardly what we’ve come to expect.

Which is what makes the Mute Nick Cave reissues all the more worth savoring. To answer the question posed above, are they worth buying even if you already own them on CD, the answer is a strong yes. They did a fine, fine job on these reissues, each one a 2 disc set, consisting of the album on a regular CD to play in the car or rip to iTunes, and a DVD with fantastic multi-channel versions of the album, in both Dolby 5:1 and DTS. As objects, they’re quite sweet to unwrap. Each of the albums comes in an ultra glossy gatefold sleeve with intelligent liner notes by Amy Hanson and graphics faithful to the original releases, but better. There is a multi-part documentary spread out over the span of the catalog called Do You Love Me Like I Love You directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard. Key members of Cave’s orbit, well-known fans and writers—everyone but Cave himself (and Anita Lane)—are interrogated under harsh lighting not unlike a forensics video. Watching this film before listening to the music really whet my appetite to hear it afresh.

For an album that had always sounded so amazing, no matter what format, the improvement in sound quality would have to go some way, by my own personal subjective standards, to move the needle much on my jaded audiophile reviewer’s scale. When I got to the choice of which surround mode to listen in, I chose the Dolby 5:1 because it generally sounds better to me than DTS. 

Simply put, the immersive aural experience of the multi-channel version of From Her to Eternity—supervised by Mick Harvey from the original recordings by Flood—blew my doors off. To stand inside the violent maelstrom of sound that is the Bad Seeds, with Blixa Bargeld’s anarchic slide guitar in that speaker, the skull-cracking thwap of the drums coming from behind, the rumble of Barry Adamson’s bass in the subwoofer, and hear it like you were in the studio with them, is something awesome and fearful to behold. The album is heavily percussive—whether the drums, piano, vibes or the guitars—there is a lot of banging on this record. If anyone knows how to record percussion, it’s Flood (who subsequently worked with U2 and Depeche Mode). The extra channels of audio give even more room ambiance and “air” around the various instruments. Far greater nuance is achieved here than would be possible in a stereo mix. The album is rife with moments where a sonic crack appears in the proceedings, and something crawls into your ear for a split second before scurrying off into the floorboards. Listening to From Her to Eternity in multi-channel caused me to think of the way Stockhausen often used a moment of dissonance to capture listener’s attention, although I doubt he was an influence here.

The real test came for me with the final song, A Box for Black Paul. An enigmatic narrative about the final resting place for a Baudelaire-esque character, when someone asks ‘what’s your favorite song?’ this one, like the album it’s from, comes in at my #1 spot. It’s the final tour de force on an album consisting of one wildly uncompromising tour de force after another. I stood in the middle of the room, in the multi-channel “sweet spot,” as it were, and listened. A Box for Black Paul is not a piece of music that anyone could listen to casually. It was stunning, exquisite. The sustain on Cave’s piano and the close-mike recording of his vocals truly sounded like you were in the room with him during the performance. By the time its nearly ten minutes long running time had elapsed, I was limp, exhausted and exhilarated.

And that brings me to my final point about the new version of From Her to Eternity and why it is worth acquiring this edition even if you already own the admittedly already great sounding earlier CD. Although I stated at the outset of this essay that it was the first thing that came to mind when someone asked me what my favorite album was, it’s not something that, after 26 years, I pull out and listen to all that much. By offering the consumer such a rich package, the documentary, the extra tracks, the substantial liner notes, it achieves what releases of this sort should achieve, and that is to say, it allows the deep fan the chance to really immerse themselves in the music again and to hear it with fresh ears, like the first time they heard it. I must have played this album 30 times all the way through since I got it and when you can hear new things in music that is meaningful to you personally, this is a fun, great thing and actually worth supporting with your hard earned dough. I find it pretty difficult to get a hard-on for buying a regular CD anymore—I don’t care who it’s by—but I do find myself actually returning to the record stores and Amazon these days to look for multi-channel releases. If the record industry gets smart and starts to look at Mute’s quality repackaging of its major artists back catalogs as a model to emmulate, maybe just maybe, they’ll coax more middle-aged rock snobs like myself back into the record stores. I wouldn’t bet on that happening or anything (!) but Mute should be singled out and commended for actually giving music fans a real value for their money.

In the coming weeks I’ll be discussing the rest of last year’s Nick Cave releases leading up to the releases of Tender Prey, The Good Son and Henry’s Dream by Mute this spring.
 

 
A wonderful essay—I think it’s one of his finest—from our super smart friend, Charles Hugh Smith, over at his Of Two Minds blog:

I am optimistic about the future because the status quo is doomed and better options abound.

One of the characteristics readers seem to like about oftwominds.com is that fundamentally I am an optimist about the future, even as I trace out the inevitability of the status quo’s devolution and implosion.

The two are inextricably bound in a yin-yang, electron/proton field: I am hopeful for the very reason that the status quo is doomed. Instead of being terrified of its devolution, I say “good riddance.” We all know it is unsustainable, rapacious and based on an interlocking net of lies; why should we mourn the passing of debt-serfdom and the dominance of interlocking webs of deceit, corruption and exploitation?

I am optimistic for the reasons laid out in Survival+: voluntary, transparent, non-privileged parallel organizations and productive structures are self-assembling under the leadership-by-example of The Remnant. Once 20% of the populace is permanently unemployed and permanently lost to the consumerist corporatocracy/Savior State status quo, then the Pareto principle suggests The Remant’s influence will grow rapidly.

Many people expect some sort of rapid implosion of social order into violent chaos. While anything is possible, my research into the devolution of the Roman Empire persuaded me that the Roman Empire remains the best available the model for our future: a slow decline and unwinding of Empire and the Savior State.

Why might it be slow? As I have explained at length in Survival+, various feedback loops are actively resisting collapse. History is not a vector so much as a slowly orbiting mass of complex feedback loops.

Devolution is not a chaotic mob of armed thugs rampaging. Such a concentration is relatively easy to control or simply liquidate by force. The State excels at violence and control, so rampaging mobs would be the State’s preferred “domestic enemy.”

Devolution is this: half the toilets in the Chemistry building no longer work, and they aren’t being fixed nor will they be fixed. The city/county/state can’t print money, and as the public unions demand higher taxes to fund their Protected Fiefdoms, then the compliant State and its parallel shadow structures of privilege will comply, raising junk fees and taxes on the dwindling class of still-productive citizenry.

This feedback loop has a consequence the Status Quo fails to understand: rather than toil ever longer to pay exploitative taxes, the productive can choose to opt out. As I have ceaselessly explained here, the Protected Fiefdoms of the Savior State simply cannot grasp that entrepreneurs and small business owners have a choice: they do not have to work long hours and endure hardships just to support the Savior State and its numerous Protected Fiefdoms. They can simply call it quits, close the doors and opt for a simpler lifestyle which generates no taxes and much less stress.

Many people moan that the U.S. is becoming a “Third World country.” I say, good; life is better in a well-ordered Third World country than in a debt-serf Empire. Not all Third World countries are equal; those hobbled by corruption, dictatorship, poor infrastructure and education, etc. are truly wretched. But those “developing nations” with lesser shares of these burdens can actually be better places to live than crumbling empires based on killing commutes, endlessly higher debts and a mindlessly self-destructive culture seeking ever-higher doses of self-medication.

Maintaining or improving the infrastructure of the U.S. requires a mere slice of the GDP. Maintaining or improving sewage, water, rail/transport electrical and Internet systems requires very little money compared to the trillions squandered on Empire, bailing out various Financial/Power Elites and the 70% of the GDP squandered on “consumerist paradise.”

Were priorities to be re-ordered, a Third World GDP would be more than adequate to fund a functioning, efficient infrastructure. The money wasted on Empire and sickcare alone could rebuild the entire nation’s critical infrastructure.

No one is forcing us to be debt-serfs. That is a voluntary choice. Nobody has to work two jobs to pay the bloated mortgage on a house which is high in cost due to large-scale financial manipulations by the Savior State to benefit various financial Elites. Nobody has to agree to buy a bloated house and take on a bloated mortgage, or pay $3,000 per month for a crummy studio apartment in Manhattan to toil for a parasitic financial corporation.

Interestingly, much of the Counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s was founded on the understanding that a “Third World country” lifestyle was inherently more humane and worthy than the commuter-debt-serf model of Empire.

The Counterculture was voluntary and incremental. You could pick and choose which parts of it to join. You could be a “straight” and buy your food at the co-op. It existed in parallel with the status quo, which quickly co-opted whatever features gained widespread appeal. (“Natural” products appeared as if by magic on the shelves of supermarkets.)

Nobody has to change agribusiness dependence on growing corn and producing high-fructose corn syrup to inject in essentially every packaged and fast food; as the Savior State founders, its subsidies of agribusiness will decline, rendering growing corn for sugar unprofitable. Those pursuing that model of “farming” will either go bankrupt or they will pursue some other model of growing food that is not mandated by subsidies for Protected Fiefdoms.

When people become ill from self-destructive diets and lifestyles, and the Savior State no longer pays for sickcare treatments of these lifestyle ills, then they will choose other lifestyles. Choice isn’t capitalist or “free market;” it is human. We all have choices, and when the trade-offs and subsidies and incentives change, so will the choices.

When opting out of the work-harder-to-pay-more-taxes rat race becomes recognized not as “failure” but as freedom and blessed relief, then more people will opt out to do something else with their lives.

Read more of Why I am Optimistic at www.oftwominds.com

 
I’m not someone who tends to read much fiction. Ever. As in never. I read a novel once every… fifteen years. I prefer documentaries to narrative films as well. I need to devour information—lots of it—and fiction just doesn’t offer me the sustenance I require. I’m not saying novels are bad things, they just aren’t for sir.

Recently I started listening to audiobooks in the car during my daily commute in Los Angeles. I especially enjoyed the audio version of SuperFreakonomics read by Stephen J. Dubner because 1) it’s a wonderful, thought provoking book, a genre unto itself even and 2) Dubner’s delivery is incredibly engaging as he reads his and Steven Levitt’s well-constructed prose. He really knows how to hit his script perfectly and charmingly animates the book’s clever ideas. Listening to an author read their own words, especially when the writing style is somewhat idiosyncratic, is for me a real pleasure.

Post-SuperFreakonomics, I had no immediate plans for my drive-time entertainment, but this problem was solved by the audiobook of Nick Cave’s novel, The Death of Bunny Munro arriving in the post, thoughtfully sent to me by Iain Forsythe, co-producer (along with Jane Pollard) of the set. The novel is read by the author over 7 CDs, accompanied by a moody (and effective) score by Cave and Warren Ellis. There is also a DVD.

For a guy who claims to hate fiction, it took me all of about ten minutes to become completely engrossed in The Death of Bunny Munro. Admittedly, I’m quite well-disposed towards Nick Cave to begin with, and come to think of it, one of the last novels I did read was his And The Ass Saw the Angel. But I had no expectations, and not much foreknowledge of what the new book was about. I think this was a good thing, but I doubt that anything I write here will spoil anything for anyone.
 

 
The Death of Bunny Munro is one of the most profane novels ever written. It makes Celine or Henry Miller seem timid in comparison. The title character, an immoral, middle-aged, door to door beauty products salesman and unrelenting lothario, drives his wife to suicide as the book opens. Upon finding her corpse, the first thought that pops into Bunny’s head is that her tits looked nice. Bunny, a character devoid of any redeeming qualities, scoops up his sweet nine-year old son and goes on a road trip to Hell. It’s all downhill from there as we witness his flailing flameout.

Read in Cave’s distinctive mellow bellow, his prose comes richly to life. Cave is a performer as much as he is a writer, of course, and his performance of his own novel is remarkable. The musical soundtrack, which at first I thought “slight,” is a grower and I came to love it. My interest never flagged for a second of its nearly eight hour running time. It’s really well-produced, with some sort of spatial 3-D recording technique that makes Cave’s voice feel like it’s in the center of your skull, and inventive sound effects.

What occurred to me as I enjoyed the audiobook of The Death of Bunny Munro so very much was the notion that the plain old book version is a lesser experience when compared to the audiobook. When an audiobook is done this well, inevitably the text-only version will come to be seen as the script of the audiobook. Of course not every author is a performer the caliber of the great Nick Cave, but as the audiobook form matures, why would the consumer choose to forgo the music and intimate storyteller aspect of authors reading their own work?

A word about the packaging: The UK version is a beautiful object, with the top photograph, taken by Polly Borland printed on a waxy, sturdy box that feels like a luxury item. The American version sucks. The idiot who chose to go with the packaging they used for the US version should get an award for shitty design (or else fired). The British version you would keep and display on your shelf even if you had no intention of devoting another 8 hours of your life to it for a repeat listen, the US version you’d just pass on to someone when you’re done like it’s disposable.

Nick Cave on his monstrous, funny Bunny Munro (Los Angeles Times)