i dream in super eight

Hi everyone. Foster Park, here. Very honored to be guest-blogging on idreaminsupereight.

You know the feeling: a song you’ve always loved from way back when floats up somewhere in your gray matter and demands to be heard. This is how youtube has changed things, I suppose, because you might have just come out of the most stultifying status meeting of your whole life, and there you are, headphones on, a search engine click away from redemption. Not too strong a word, because now your hair is standing on end and your eyes are welling as the chorus comes around for the second time and yes, it’s every bit as good as you remember it. Ladies and gentlemen, the coolest rabbit in rock n roll.

Bonus track, proto-shoegazer stuff, also from New Zealand’s excellent Flying Nun label.

I’m about half way through Eve’s Hollywood and you know how I said she seemed like a crazy/cool aunt? I want to amend “crazy” because the voice here is actually really sane. Sane and dazzling — which is hard to beat. Babitz can be superficial and thoughtful and funny pretty much at the same time. It makes sense that she once posed nude playing chess with Marcel Duchamp. She’s sometimes vain but her vanity has an irony to it, which makes it likable and real. And while she’s not at all self-serious, she takes her self seriously enough to avoid excessive self-deprecation. Not that self-deprecation is a bad thing, but it often reads as narcissism and false modesty. You know, that tone of “Oh, I’m such a loser… And yet I managed to parlay my loserdom into a 300 page book all about myself!”So, here she is on weight-loss:

“The privileges of beauty,” Jean Cocteau said, “are enormous.” I have this pasted to my icebox and thought of adding, “so don’t you be,” but that would be sacrilegious, touching up Cocteau with my diet strategies.

On being single, she reveals that her secret ambition, if she ever gets out of Hollywood, is to be a spinster and live in a stone house in Ojai with orange trees and a goat. And you believe her. Because she makes it sound appealing, rather than trying to convince anybody that it’s an exercise in self-empowerment.While she’s breezy about things, she’s not invulnerable. She’s not too-cool-for-school. Well, actually, she sort of is too cool for school, but you’ll see what I mean. There’s a chapter where the character elliptically talks about her experience at Hollywood High in the late ’50s, the differences between an ingenue, a neighborhood belle, and a sorority girl — and which kind of girl she is:

Even today I am sometimes nearly heartbroken not to be invited to something, so you can imagine how the prospect of sororities looked to me at the age of 14 . . . the only way out of it was not to be there, and I was not schizophrenic enough not to be there while I actually physically was there, so I removed myself physically and lied. I gave a fake address and went to a peaceful residential school called Marshall High. . . ” (It works for a year, and then she reluctantly attends Hollywood High).

She follows this bit of information with a reference to the movie Death Takes a Holiday (later remade as the Brad Pitt vehicle Meet Joe Black). Death disguises himself as a prince to “take a few days off, leave his kingdom, and come to visit Life in order to discover why people cling to it so much and what Love is.” At a party thrown by a wealthy family, the neighborhood belle flirts with him “until she looks into his eyes, see death, shrieks and flees. She is too practical to love Death, even though he is so beautiful.” In contrast, the daughter of the house “is such an ingenue that she decides she sees beyond what is in his eyes and to prove her love, she insists on following Death into his kingdom and abandoning her fiance who is a nice guy.” Discussing this movie with friends, Eve notes:

Only I remember the neighborhood belle who fled from the patio. She was a kind of brazen girl; she flirted and insinuated shamelessly. But flirting with disaster is the not the same as courting it like the ingenue did or not noticing it like the sorority girls. The sorority girls have no place in their souls for the unknown. . . The neighborhood belle is all I’ll ever be. Knowing where disaster lies and getting as far away as possible from it.

Eve’s Hollywood was Babitz’s first book. She’s gone on to write several more, which I’m really looking forward to reading.

I just got this book out of the library — Eve’s Hollywood by Eve Babitz — and I’m already in love with it. And I haven’t even made it much beyond the eight page dedication.Babitz, a writer and artist “known for her collages” according to the backflap author bio, seems like the crazy/cool aunt you never had but wish you did. The aunt whose beautiful youth was full of dreams and excess. Who is as observant of life as she is enchanted by it. Published in 1974, her “confessional novel” chronicles the adventures of a young woman growing up in Los Angeles and does so in a tone that manages to be loopy, arch, enthusiastic and withering — sometimes all in the same sentence or two.Even her introductory note evinces a dotty yet straightforward and persuasive confidence, ostensibly clearing up some minor grammatical points, but really serving to dismiss and dispatch the kind of reader who just isn’t going to be up for this trip:

I want to tell you a little about myself. I am really an artist, not a writer. So, I like the way Arabic numbers look un-written out on a page. When I say someone is 15 years old, I like the way 15 looks. I like the way 9 million looks and I hate the way nine million looks. 9 seems like more a number to me.

Also, I believe that places should be capitalized. North, South, East and West are all places as far as I’m concerned… West, especially, is a serious place that should ALWAYS be capitalized. It also sounds more adventurous to go West than to go west.

Since this is my book and since the advent of James Joyce, why don’t we let me have my way? It’s such a small thing, and just think, I could be James Joyce writing in latin all the time and stuff.

Why not let her have her way? But wait — I want to go back to what may possibly be the best dedication ever. First and “mainly,” the book is dedicated to Sol and Mae, her parents. But the list of dedicatees goes on (and on) to include, among a host of some notable names and places, the following:– The Didion-Dunnes for having to be who I’m not– Eggs Benedict at the Beverly Wilshire– the purple mountains’ majesty above the fruited plain– Frank O’Hara’s “LUNCH Poems”– Dr. Boyd Cooper, gynecologist extraordinaire– sour cream– time immemorial and the suspension of disbelief– Saturday– the one whose wife would get furious if I so much as put his initials in– Desbutol, Ritilin, Obertrol and any other speed. It wasn’t that I didn’t love you, it was that is was too hard.You know what I love about as much as this book? The New York Public Library. For having this out-of-print masterpiece and for having such a great hold/pick-up system. Thanks, NYPL!I’m sure there will be a lot more to come with this. . .Sidenote: Why can’t people publish confessional novels — somewhat fictionalized memoirs — nowadays? Why is it more preferable for publishers to fishily market something as a non-fiction account and then for everyone involved to act hurt and disappointed when it turns out to be fabricated? Why not just admit it from the start? There’s a difference between fact and truth and regardless of the facts, Eve’s Hollywood certainly feels true.

So the Oxford American dusted off this footage of Big Star shot by Chris Bell and bassist Andy Hummel — and someone put it up on youtube! The thing speaks for itself but I’ll just say I like being in that ultra-brown living room. Yeah 1970s color desaturation!

And okay, this other video is weird and distracting (killer sheep? yoga chicken?) but it was the only rendition I could find of the gorgeous Kim Deal and Tanya Donelly take on “You and Your Sister.” Sometime around 1999 and the advent of Napster, this song was played over and over in the office I worked in. I guess it was the kind of office where you could just as easily pretend to be in your bedroom with a set of headphones and a broken heart? I thought it was the saddest/sweetest love song. Until I heard Chris Bell’s original, which is somehow sweeter and even more sad.

Have you heard “I Dreamed We Fell Apart” by Memphis (Stars’ Torquil Campbell’s other group)? I keep hitting repeat when it comes up on the iPod, not just for the languid, shimmering, atmospheric counterbalance it offers to subway noise but specifically for the wash of guitar and non-lyrical vocal sounds in the middle of the track. (I can’t find it online — sorry!) It instantly takes me back to being 10 years old, sitting in front of the TV on a rainy Sunday afternoon and being transfixed by this commercial for Nestle Alpine White chocolate.

In my memory, the singer was female (and there is another version, apparently sung by Sophie B. Hawkins ) but this one has the imagery I recall (raining almonds) and the soaring “ooaaahhh!!” at 19 seconds in. Or maybe I saw both and my mind, unable to process the existence of TWO snowy, synthesized odes to white chocolate, combined them.

I can’t believe I’m writing this, but I actually kind of share the sentiments of a youtube commenter:

“OMG!!!!! I have been wanting to see and hear this commercial for SO MANY YEARS!!!!!!This is amazing. I love this commercial!!!! The music is haunting and I have been singing it in my head for over 20 years and here it is in front of me!!! THANK YOU!”

Carlene’s interview with Liz Phair is great! One quote (of many) that struck me is this:

I can think of getting kicked out of the [Chicago club] Rainbo for being a loudmouth, but I can also remember being shy. I was trying on a lot of different roles; I didn’t know who I was. I was trying to break out of the suburbs, and when I did break out, I don’t think I took my whole self with me—I think I played a role of being too cool and hip. At that stage, right before the record, I was trying to figure out who I was going to be as a person…do you remember that time in your twenties?

Who doesn’t? It’s funny — the Liz Phair of this interview and the Liz Phair who penned the New York Times review of Dean Wareham’s memoir totally win me over. Unexpectedly. Maybe I never thought of her as a particularly sympathetic figure before because my impression of her was pretty much limited to her image in the media and I never felt compelled or interested enough to dig beyond that.

Exile in Guyville is one of those indisputable things — it just is and you can’t really imagine it not existing. Yeah, I rocked out to 6″1 and I know the words to Fuck and Run, but I never felt like those songs saved my life. Probably because in the early ’90s I was too busy identifying with Morrissey to do much fucking and/or running.

I’ve liked Liz Phair songs in the near-obligatory way that I’ve admired Joan Didion’s old essays. (Didion’s screenplays are another story — love ‘em. A Star is Born will always have a special place in my heart — though so does cholesterol plaque). The smarts and the dazzling toughness reel me in, but not quite all the way. With Didion, I think it’s the coolness of her tone. With Phair, I want to say it’s vanity. Like you can feel there’s almost always a mirror around. And the whole exhibitionism-as-a-defense-mechanism thing.

I can’t think about Liz Phair without thinking of PJ Harvey, and wonder at the differences between being an exhibitionist and being an entertainer and being an artist. How PJ Harvey seems more interested in making music than in defining/explaining/defending herself. How she gets away with that.

Next time you’re feeling down, watch this. It’s like a Journey video, but better because you’re laughing with, not just at. I think the only thing that might make this funnier is if Jerri Blank were somehow around then and wandered on stage.

(Yeah, I went to the gym again).

Sunday morning, I caught the last 10 minutes of “Like It Is,” a locally-produced, African-American community affairs program that barely registers on the WABC-7 web site when you search for it. It’s often pre-empted for sports and seems perennially in danger of being cancelled, apparently because it’s good. By the time I tuned in, host Gil Noble and his guests — Les Payne of Newsday, Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, and investigative reporter Greg Palast — were discussing journalism, its failures and its future. The fairly high level of discourse was one of those reminders that public discourse can still have, you know, levels. Noble, in closing, thanked his guests for a “nutritious conversation” and somehow it carried none of the self-congratulatory overtones you get on NPR.

Towards the end of program, Noble asked the roundtable what advice they would give to young journalists. While the Internet was optimistically praised as a medium for voices that would otherwise be silenced, not surprisingly, the outlook for journalism as a profession — as a public service you can perform for a living wage — wasn’t rosy. The message: Get a degree in economics or medicine or some other field and then write from that base of knowledge and experience. You’re gonna need some way to financially support yourself in order to avoid the kind of careerism that produces complacent, press-release rewriting. Which is, to a great extent, all there’s a market for at a time when the media is largely funded by and beholden to corporate interests.

Journalism has probably always been a compromised profession. (Read Dawn Powell’s satirical novel “A Time to Be Born,” published in 1942, for a damning/fun look at the cynicism and hypocrisy driving the media back then). As much as the press has been democracy’s conscience, sensationalism and sheer omission have always trumped efforts to speak truth to power. It’s hard to believe, though, that it hasn’t gotten worse. And I haven’t even watched the Wire’s final-season treatment of the subject. All right, I’m going to stop now because this post is starting to make me feel like one of those white people who like stuff.

Watched Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman last weekend and loved it for being one of those movies that sets a tone and a mood you want to live in for a while.

Mazursky, here at least, is a director who likes people — both the characters in his movie and the audience watching it. He trusts them to be complex, intelligent creatures who can feel conflicting things and hold more than one idea in their heads at a time. He gives us a movie that’s adult in its comprehension of the world and its take on relationships, in the way it’s both light and serious, clear-eyed but still hopeful. Frankly, it makes the neurotic highs and lows of Annie Hall (an obvious peer and a movie I like because of its sentimentality) look stunted and limited in emotional scope.

Phrases like “groundbreaking when it came out” — in the Netflix summary — make it sound dated and I figured I might be watching it mostly for shots of pre-retailed Soho and cool seventies clothes. While it’s satisfying on both these counts (Jill Clayburgh, I’ll take your winter coat and boots!), the only noticeably dated aspect seemed to be the score. Okay, so maybe it’s not realistic that Jill Clayburgh’s divorcee would meet Alan Bates’s available artist as she does. But watching them get together feels real and also refreshing. Especially these days, when the message of so much of the crap that passes for a cultural conversation about women and love is that the key to everything is to find a husband before your sell-by date. (I think what I find almost more offensive and dumb than likening a woman to a carton of milk and idealizing marriage as a cure-all is the assumption that there is, in fact, a key to everything).

Roger Ebert in 1978 wrote:

An Unmarried Woman is such a good picture not because it states vast truths about men and women but because it finds that there are none; its heroine and, maybe the rest of us, are in a muddle most of the time, and depend more than we’d want to admit on old friendships, white wine, and quiet desperation to get us through. Having established that point, Mazursky then goes on to provide hope—or Alan Bates, anyway. And he does it in a movie so firmly in control of its language, its body movement, its personal interplays, its most fleeting facial expressions (remember the daughter’s dubious little sniff?) that we’re touched by real human sensibilities here.

Next up in the queue is Blume in Love. Mazursky-mania!

My favorite thing about the gym is the Cardio Theater and my favorite thing about that may just be the ’80s video channel. Not only was I reminded of that decade’s predilection for putting decorative glass blocks in walls (c.f. Stevie Nicks’s “Stand Back”), but I’ve been treated to repeated viewings of the awesome video for Howard Jones’s “Everlasting Love.” Mummies! But not just mummies — yuppie mummies carrying briefcases, putting on boxer shorts, sharing a Waldorf salad, playing raquetball, and eating soft serve. Also nice is when Howard uses the top of a sarcophagus for a bongo. What really makes the thing kind of joyful and great is that he looks like he’s about to laugh the whole time.

P.S. This is for you, “Charles.”