Shopping for records at Value Village Boutique: Caveat emptor, plus how NOT to price things at a thrift store

Image: an actual fistful of records from Vancouver's new Value Village Boutique, which opened last Thursday. The Velvets reissue with the sticker was priced at $69.99 (you can buy the same edition new from Red Cat for $46.99). It Came from Canada Vol. 2 was $23.99, and gave me some pause (Discogs median $21.67, but it would be more with shipping, so I had to think about it. Do I have Deja Voodoo doing "Three Men One Coffin?" How much do I feel the need to own a Zamboni Drivers song?). In the end, the one I bought is the red one, by The Milkshakes, AKA Thee Milkshakes, an early Billy Childish band. It starts on Discogs for $7.50, but with shipping would be $40 CAD. I like Billy Childish, and they only wanted $18.99, pretty much exactly what I would pay for it at Red Cat, so what the heck. It amuses me to buy Billy Childish from Value Village. 

Apparently it was Alexander Pope who warned that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. 

I doubt he was thinking of thrift stores. While I doubt very much the knowledge imparted below will help thrift stores price their vinyl at a more reasonable rate, it might just save some of the readers from being abused, because -- as exciting as the vinyl selection at the new Value Village Boutique (on Granville near Nelson) might be, the pricing is something to be wary about, especially given that there are no exchanges, once you buy the record, and absolutely no apparent concern for condition; records very visibly wrecked were being sold at entirely unreasonable collectors' prices. So caveat emptor!  

For someone who knows a bit about records, thrift store prices are often ambitious to the point of hilarity, and none worse than at the most famous "for profit" thrift store, the one that barely donates any of its proceeds to charity -- which has been described as an "ethical nightmare," in fact -- Value Village. Before I talk about them, however, let's talk about thrift stores in general, while leaving aside the question of charity. My personal preference there, if I want my money to go somewhere worthy, is hospice or hospital thrift stores, which are also often the most reasonably priced; SPCA and Wildlife-themed thrift stores come in second; religious thrift stores are somewhat more distasteful, as they seem a bit more, I dunno, colonialist -- buying "Bibles for Missions" is not a priority for me, compared to respite for the dying or ill. But there are no thrift stores I eschew because I prefer one charitable cause over another. I'll still shop at Value Village, even though I find their pretext of being a charitable organization quite misleading/ offensive. But if the price is right...

...but therein lies the rub. More often than not, thrift stores fall into one of the following categories, especially in regard their pricing of books and records:

1. They don't know anything, they know they don't know anything, and they price everything accordingly, with an eye towards bulk sales. 

This is my favourite type of thrift store; it is definitely NOT the Value Village model. A few obviously deluxe items aside, almost all books, CDs, DVDs and records at such stores -- Wildlife Rescue in Vancouver is an example; the Salvation Army, in most locations, is another -- are a dollar or two. If what you want is a deal, there's no better experience. I snagged Jerry Jerry and the Sons of Rhythm Orchestra's stellar "Christian libertarian surf punk" debut, Road Gore: The Band that Drank Too Much at a Salvation Army for $2.99 once. You can't beat that. You might even feel a bit guilty, especially since I would have paid $20 for it happily, but what was I gonna do, pass it up because it was underpriced? 

Of course, you have to go fairly often to such stores, and be there when they unload the good stuff, because they're pretty competitive and deals tend to get hoovered up immediately, but if there is one such store in your neighbourhood, diligence is a small price to pay for, uh, the prices you'll pay, if you see what I mean. 

Image: Powerslave by Iron Maiden, priced (in used shape with "no exchange") at $44.99 at the new VV Boutique; you can buy it new for $32.99 at London Drugs. Hm, which of those is the better deal?

2. Alas, the vastly more commonplace thrift store experience, especially when it comes to Value Village, is where they don't know anything, but they think they know something, and they price the wrong things quite high, while (often) letting anything actually valuable go for a song. 

Best as I can figure, the current extremity of pricing that one sees in the secondhand vinyl market directly correlates to the death of David Bowie. There are plenty of David Bowie albums available on vinyl, you understand. Before he died, you could get most used Bowie records for $15-20; even since he died, you can get most of his catalogue, new or used, for a reasonable price, if you shop at a store that actually specializes in records and take some time to do your homework. To pick a record I saw yesterday at the new location of the Value Village Boutique on Granville, Station to Station, you can order a brand new copy of it at Red Cat, on vinyl, for $34.99 (London Drugs, who do a decent job of stocking some new vinyl, but tend to be on the higher end in their new pricing, do not stock this particular title, but the Bowies they do have on vinyl are mostly $39.99). By that logic, if a used store that actually specializes in records were to try to sell it, a reasonable price might be $25 or less, depending on the condition. A first pressing might go for a bit more, but not everyone cares about such things; in many cases, recent pressings have thicker vinyl and improved sound quality, so between a used first pressing and a recent reissue I generally tend to the latter. 

But yesterday at the Value Village Boutique, the record was selling used for $39.99. Was it an early pressing? Probably not; they don't generally seem to pay attention to such things, that I can see. Was it in pristine shape? I did not check, because I was already out of the game as soon as I saw that it was priced for more than a new record, but even if it WERE in good shape before it was put on their shelf, they affix their stickers to the inside of the record, where there is no lamination, so even if it WAS in pristine shape, the act of removing the sticker will likely tear the cover, so it won't be pristine pretty quickly. Probably there were more than a few scuffs and surface noise too. 

But no matter what else we might say, a record should not cost more at a thrift store than it does at a record store. But thrift store or record store, when Bowie died, suddenly dealers everywhere marked his used records up, corresponding, I presume, to a huge sudden demand for his classic material on vinyl. Weirder, customers must be playing ball with it, because it has become the norm in pricing such items: I bet some kid will buy that Station to Station and think he's gotten a great deal, a real investment; he probably won't even have a turntable to play it on. It's not about that, it's about bragging rights: "Wow, look, ma, I got Bowie's Station to Station for only $40!"

That's nice, dear.  

Of course, there were always two bands that have always been subject to this sort of ambition and greed, the Beatles and Pink Floyd, but with Bowie's passing, some sort of chain reaction happened, and suddenly dozens of other artists (the Stones, Bob Dylan, Led Zep, Leonard Cohen, etc) are getting marked up beyond what's reasonable, especially at VVs. It's the low hanging fruit of the vinyl world: if it is from a famous artist from the 60s or early 70s, Value Village are probably pricing it for more than you would pay for for at Neptoon or Red Cat or Audiopile or Zulu, and irrespective of condition, are quite likely charging more than the record sells for new, with "no exchange" if you're not happy with it. 

I like stores like this, however, don't get me wrong. A store that has a battered, ringworn, seam-split, and generally well-used copy of Pink Floyd's The Wall priced at $50, when you can buy it brand new for that price, might also price a genuinely scarce underground item, say (vastly more interesting to me) for $20 or less. If you want to know if you can get a good deal at a thrift store, in fact, seeing how they price Pink Floyd or David Bowie is usually a reliable index of whether it is worth your time. Is there a (warped, scratched) copy of Dark Side of the Moon with the corners of the cover having been eaten by rats, mould stains on the gatefold, a gouge the size of Commercial Drive on side B, and a $40 pricetag? That probably means that they have no clue what they're doing, are too overwhelmed with greed to actually do research, and/or think their clients are the same, so you'll do just fine as long as you avoid the common stuff, which is all they KNOW they can mark up. It's the stuff they've never even heard of that you can get for pennies. 

...And an added bonus is that if you see a thrift store that is exhibiting this sort of greedy and unreasonable behaviour in their pricing, you feel no guilt at all in taking advantage of them by buying the underpriced stuff. 

Of course, the really dumb thrift stores are the ones that overprice the Elvis, or worse, have some Barbra Streisand record marked up to $15 when you can get it at every other thrift store for fifty cents... but it's the same general principle. Many Value Villages are like this, when you ask to see the "collector's vinyl" behind the counter: "Yeah, right, Bachman Turner Overdrive for $29.99, good luck with that." But the new Value Village Boutique actually HAS desirable records; they actually HAVE Pink Floyd and Bob Dylan and Led Zep and Leonard Cohen and so forth on their shelves. They seem to have been hoarding the good stuff from every donation center with this grand opening in mind. Their Elvis might be overpriced, too, but I didn't check.  

Actual condition of a copy of the Beatles' Revolver, priced at $44.99 at the Value Village Boutique. This was a monaural pressing. Mono is the way the record was meant to sound, so this copy would be worth a fair bit more than $44.99 if it were in actually playable shape. Trashed like this, I wouldn't pay a dollar for it. They had a stereo copy, too, priced exactly the same, but I didn't check the condition. My favourite listing for a copy of the mono pressing on Discogs at the moment includes in the item description, "Record is truly marked up. It looks like some people wrote their names just directly on the grooves. Might play. Cover top & bottom seams mostly split, spine full split. Names written in marker, general yellowing. Cleaned with ultra and vacuum system." They are asking $7, but since there are 782 copies of it in mono for sale on Discogs at the moment, even $7 seems ambitious. $44.99 seems like someone was smokin' somethin'. "Might play," indeed.

This brings us to the most rare scenario in the world of thrift store record pricing. 

3. They actually know what they're doing. You should NEVER assume thrift store pricing is being done by someone who has their finger on the pulse of the value of the items they are stickering, but occasionally it does happen. I went into an SPCA thrift store in Victoria the other week, weirdly located in a strip mall, and was very startled: their vinyl was priced pretty much exactly as a real record store would price it. The junk was a buck, but they had lots of rather cool rock and such -- especially lots of Nirvana-related material --  priced for around the same thing that you'd find at nearby stores like Ditch or Supreme Echo. Of course, that's not why people go to thrift stores -- people go to thrift stores because they want a deal, not to pay the same price they'd be paying at a real record store -- but if they actually had had a record I would have bought at Ditch or Supreme Echo, I would have bought it happily from them, too. There would have been no deal, but no guilt either. I flipped through their stock and chatted with the owner, complimented him, and nodded a few times at seeing the prices he was asking; I would have done nothing differently. I also probably won't go back, but it was impressive to see a thrift store being run like a collector's shop, WITHOUT a bunch of predictably greedy, stupid mistakes; he probably does okay by the SPCA on his vinyl sales, compared to other locations (which tend to be more reasonable). 

But Value Village is not that kind of thrift store. The new location, as I say, has some vastly ambitious pricing. The millenials I could see poking around the vinyl section appeared to be excited just to see bands they recognized the names of. At one point, I overheard someone in all sincerity exclaim, "Look, it's a record by the Eagles!" while I was flipping through a different section. Really? A record by the Eagles! Well, that must be worth a whole LOT... Further, they seemed to be taking the pricing on good faith. Maybe their excitement is rooted in some sort of ignorant greedy speculation, too, like they're prospectors panning for gold, who can't tell the fool's gold from the real stuff any more than the seller can...? Maybe the exorbitant prices somehow validate their greed, lock buyer and seller in a little orgiastic fool's gold celebration, while the real prospectors go on about their business, unimpressed...?

My takeaway for millenials, I guess. is to JUST GO TO A GODDAMN RECORD STORE. You might be surprised to discover that that forty or fifty dollar copy of Nebraska you're thinking of buying at VV costs ten or twenty dollars less, in better condition, at a real store (one that guarantees their product, so if there is a warp or scratch or skip you didn't spot, you can bring the record back).  You might also want to check what the lowest-priced copy is on Discogs or eBay, or, if you are afraid on missing out on the sale ("what if I leave it, go to a store, and they don't have it, then I come back and it's GONE?" just PHONE a record store and ask if they have it, and how much it sells for. Neptoon, Red Cat, Zulu, and Audiopile are all reasonable. You might save yourself some money! 

By far my favourite find which I did not buy (but only because I already have it) was Mine Would Be the Sun, by the Suitesixteen, fronted by BUM's Rob Nesbitt, who I'm eventually going to write something major about; I have a long history with Nesbitt and find him a fascinating person, one of the smartest, most articulate people I've interviewed. And while Green Day-esque power pop is not, in fact, my go-to, musically, these days, I have a ton of respect for this record, which is an amazingly detailed, meticulously assembled labour of love on Rob's part, a  double album inspired in part by the Who's Quadrophenia, written about his first love, whom he met when he was a student at the same damn junior high school that I went to out in Maple Ridge (I knew him, back when). In a stroke of stunningly awful bad luck, Rob released the album just before COVID. He was never able to properly tour it, has not played a live show since the lockdown, and is basically sitting on boxes of it, not sure what to do with it this many years down the road. Record collectors with an interest in local music might want to snag it -- it's kind of a one-of-a-kind album that the collectors of the future will no doubt discover and find fascinating -- though if you're on the island, or are planning a trip, I would recommend LOOKING ROB UP and BUYING IT DIRECT FROM HIM, because the copy at Value Village costs the same damn price as he's charging (well, $59.99 vs. $60; it's a penny cheaper at VV). 

If you're on the mainland, mind you, well, at least you'll save on shipping.  

There were a few records I might have bought if the prices were a bit more realistic. The Cure's The Walk was something like $30; I might have played $15 or even $20, because you don't see it around very often (and it has a cool cover), but it only has six songs on it, and the two I like most, I already have on a Cure anthology. The English Beat's album with "Mirror in the Bathroom" on it kind of appealed to me, too, but I cannot for the life of me figure out why they were asking $39.99. It wasn't signed, didn't seem to be a particularly desirable pressing, wasn't sealed, believe it was just your standard North American "English Beat" version (not "the Beat," which would denote the UK pressing). A comparable copy costs $11 on Discogs (plus shipping, of course). I have no doubt that if I spent an hour, phoning around, I could get the record for $20 or less at a store; I would have happily paid $10 at a thrift store, but no more.  

After spending an hour or so there on Thursday, and another hour or so there yesterday, the stuff I finally did buy, besides the Milkshakes, is pictured below.  

The Holy Modal Rounders double album was $16.99, in really nice shape. I have reissues of both the albums it compiles already, but not the two pages of liner notes in the gatefold, plus I've always had a fondness for this Fantasy twofer, which a) was how I was first introduced to the band by BC musician Matt Rogalsky, and which b) makes the name of the band seem like they're Someone You Oughta Know, with which valuation I abundantly agree. Robert Christgau is a big fan of the Rounders, and especially of the surviving half of this duo-form version, one Peter Stampfel (who was also in the Fugs; you know the really screechy background vocal on "CIA Man," or the lead vocalist on the Rounders' "If You Want to Be a Bird," on the Easy Rider soundtrack? That's Peter). I've interviewed Peter a few times. He's still playing shows (age 84!) and working on new material; he's a bit of a musical hero of mine. And to be clear: I did not buy this to flip it, or because I thought it was worth a whole lot of money, above what they were charging (I'd be lucky to get my own money back, were I to attempt to sell it, but no matter, because I'm not going to). I bought it because I love the music on it, know the record, and do not have it. And because the price was, unlike almost everything else at the VV boutique, exactly right for what a thrift store should be charging for such a thing. $16.99? Done.

As for B.A.D., it was $18.99, which seems a bit much, but I have been looking for this since I found out how deeply involved Joe Strummer was in the project. I've only listened to it one time through but I think I like it better than Cut the Crap and maybe even Earthquake Weather (though it will take some time and repeated spinnings to know; so far so good, tho'). In my years of B.A.D. snobbery, I overlooked completely that Joe co-wrote five songs and produced the album; he might even do a backup vocal here and there? I guess I'm late to this party, because no store I've looked for it at has had it. But the condition was right, and now I can stop looking for it, even if $18.99 seemed a bit high. 

The Buffy Sainte-Marie albums were a bit stranger, in that they were quite reasonably priced at $5.99 and $7.99, they seem like I *could* possibly flip them, for trade at least, if I decide I want to. Really, it all comes down to the scratch on one side of the "best of" twofer. Hard to tell if it will affect play. It's pretty ugly-looking, but that's not always a determiner; sometimes you have to spin the record to see. But "Universal Soldier" is on the album -- my favourite song by her, of the ones I know -- and not on the bad side, and I don't actually have a copy of that song in my collection; so in the worst case, I've bought myself a Buffy Sainte-Marie album. And I do like her! And $7.99 is about the right price for a double record with a big scratch on one side, so what the heck. 

In sum: it's not impossible to find a good deal at the new Value Village, just difficult. I hope that time and experience teach them that if they're pricing damaged product for more than it can be bought for new, it won't pay off in the long term; that they have to consider condition when it comes to vinyl; and that they should at least check what the Discogs median is, or what completed eBay auctions have the album going for,  before they stick a pricetag on it (maybe with glue not likely to tear the cover?). In the meantime, in the interests of making sure that message gets through, if you're shopping there, be careful, eh? At the very least, CHECK THE CONDITION, because they didn't. If it actually looks playable, go to Discogs, find the album you are considering, make sure you're looking at the vinyl version (not the CD), and then look at the median price -- the average that it actually has sold for. For that Big Audio Dynamite, the median is $5.73, while the high is $26 or so. You might guess that a record store would charge $20 at best for an album like that, but more reasonably might let it go for $10 or $15. Paying any more than that is a bit dim, unless you personally have looked for it in half a dozen record stores and have not seen it, which is exactly the case with me and this record. 

Be aware, though: chances are whatever you are buying is overpriced, and since you won't be able to exchange it, examine it very carefully, eh?

Happy shopping!

Meat Puppets' Camp Songs (live): Moon Meh, Turds Yay! Plus Marty Robbins, Up on the Sun, and more!

So if you follow the Meat Puppets on their website, if (like me), you peek in there every now and then to see if anything is happening, you'd have no idea that a new live album of 1990's Meat Puppets recordings, Camp Songs, recently came out. If you follow them on Facebook, you're okay. Observation 1: the Meat Puppets are not updating their website much.

Good to know! (I have now followed them on Facebook). 

Also, if you bought the album for their cover of "Blue Moon of Kentucky," listed on the back, you might be kind of annoyed. Because it's not on there. Apparently by way of compensation, they're giving that song away (or, well, it's a name-your-price situation) on their bandcamp. Luckily, "Blue Moon of Kentucky," fun as it is, was not a make-or-break song for me, anyhow.

On the other hand, if you DIDN'T buy Camp Songs -- if you saw it at the store and walked away in a petulant huff because they did not have "Blinded by Turds" on it -- a hilarious, rude, under-appreciated song by Canadian-born folksinger Oscar Brand, which appeared on an old Meat Puppets performance DVD under a different title ("Wonderful Song"), and which perfectly fits the album's apparent mandate of playful, goodtime cover songs, well, rush back to the store and buy the album forthwith, because IN FACT, "Blinded by Turds" is on it, where "Blue Moon of Kentucky" was s'posed to be. I actually bought it without closely perusing the tracklist, then thought, "Oh, maybe 'Blinded by Turds' is on it," flipped it over outside Neptoon and felt sad that it was not there, then got it home, slit the shrink, and did a happy little dance to see that it is in fact, the first song on side 2. (I didn't even notice the absence of "Blue Moon of Kentucky" til I saw them post about it on Facebook).

Observation 3 (not particularly Pups-centric): I guess that's just the kind of music fan I am: Moon meh, Turds yay. Love the vocal echo that kicks in when the lady sticks her ass out the window; Geoffrey Chaucer would approve. 

But Observation 4: This album is (maybe) not an attempt to attract "new" fans so much. It's pretty bare bones, all-round: there's no download card, no liner notes, exactly one photo of the band on the back, an error in the track listing... maybe it's just a budgetary issue, but presentation-wise, this album is showing up for the job interview in a jean jacket. It appears to be assembled for fans who have been file-sharing Meat Puppets shows for 20+ years, who are going, HOLY FUCK NOW I HAVE THESE SONGS ON VINYL!!!! It's like (maybe) a thank you for the faithful? Noobs need not apply. You won't understand, noob. Go buy that Taylor Swift album over there, or something. That's what you really want, right? (Apparently). 

Which is fine. Those of us on the Pups train have been here for awhile and we don't need them bells-and-whistles. But the fact is, I bought my first Meat Puppets album, Up on the Sun, BECAUSE of the terrific cover painting! (This album is subject to a recent re-release, as well, note). That was in 1985, the year of its release; I was 17, shopping at Odyssey Imports, and given to the odd blind buy. What's this? Cool cover, cool band name, it's on SST... maybe I'll like it? 

Boy, did I. It didn't immediately make sense to me, but it inspired the curiosity to listen again and again. Nearly 40 years later and I still love it. 

But if Up on the Sun (and Huevos, another favourite, not reissued as of yet, but I have hopes) have some of the greatest cover paintings ever (both by bandleader Curt Kirkwood), the cover art on Camp Songs -- though designed by drummer Derrick Bostrom -- is really no big deal at all. It's not a BAD cover, but, like, it's MOSTLY WORDS. The cartoon racoons are cute and all, but, like, no one goes "Hey, I'm going to buy this record, it has racoons on the cover!" 

(Well, maybe Doc Corbin Dart does, who knows. Does Doc Dart buy records, even? Hope he's doin' all right out there... but I digress.)

This is a marvelous live album. It kicks off with "Walking Boss," which is deeply associated with the Pups, appearing on their first album; while the band was recording much more musically sophisticated and polished material by 1991 (the year of this performance and of Forbidden Places), live, the song is quite in keeping with the rough, raw-and-ready feel of their 1982 debut; it could be from a show ten years earlier. BTW a "walking boss" is kind of a foreman, and the song -- a traditional -- was first recorded by Clarence Ashley (or so I believe), also known for a very early recording of "The Cuckoo." 

That track is followed by a spacy, swirly cover of "Amazing Grace" (a great song I've had enough of, generally, but which has been insufficiently psychedelicized in its prior history, so that's nice; who says "Amazing Grace" can't involve swirling patterns in the carpet, attaining dimensionality and rising up into the air? THIS IS A MOMENT OF GRACE, TOO, innit?). "I Saw the Light" is pretty straightforward and also amply-covered (hell, even ANTiSEEN do it), but it lends itself to psychedelic interp, here involving mostly blustery burbling vocal effects and a fall-apart weirdo ending. With or without these acid-soaked interpolations, it's one of the greatest moments in Hank Williams body of work, so anyone can cover it anytime and that will make me happy, I think ("I Saw the Light">"Amazing Grace," by me; who knew?). Meanwhile, the next track, "El Paso City" is a Marty Robbins tune I don't know (and want to read the lyrics to, because I can't follow the story as delivered by Curt without a lyric sheet). This is not the "El Paso" that was Robbins biggest hit, but (apparently) a later meta-level reinterpretation of the song, which actually begins with a present day narrator remembering the song "El Paso" as he flies over Texas. What? 

I'm going to have to spend more time on this one. I did not realize that Marty Robbins went meta. 

What's interesting here (Observation 5? Am I keeping correct count?) is that the band would choose to represent THREE Marty Robbins songs but only ONE Hank Williams one. That's kind of piquant, eh? (And while it involves stepping out of sequence, the other two Robbins tunes are "White Sport Coat" and, best of all, "Big Iron" -- some Vancouver fans will know this from seeing Petunia and the Vipers cover it, though I'm a big fan of the album it's on, and it was the standout track on the back cover before I realized that "Blinded by Turds" is actually present). 

I am going to abandon the track-by-track approach now (I can hear my wife stirring), save for noting that "The Wayward Wind" is the song on the album that is already the most like a Meat Puppets song, and that this has got to be my favourite interpretation ever of (Butthole Surfers guitarist) Paul Leary's (unfortunately autobiographical) "The Adventures of Pee-Pee the Sailor" at least done by someone other than Paul Leary himself. It thus beats out the previous recording of the song by the Pups (whose Too High to Die was produced by Leary) and the one by the Bad Livers. Those are both great, but the live energy of the delivery on Camp Songs cannot be beat. 

Incidentally, Leary explained about "Pee Pee," when I interviewed him for Big Takeover a few years ago, that it was "a real self-reflective song: we did a lot of partying and drinking and carrying on back then, and in the back of my mind was always, 'Where does this lead? Am I gonna end up sleeping in the gutter, peeing my pants?' That’s kind of where that song came from." Ouch! 

There are a few other songs on the album but I don't have much to say about'em, anyway.

And as for winning friends and influencing people, if the cover art for Camp Songs is not likely to attract a lot of new ears, there's a pretty cool animated video for "Up on the Sun" that just came out that's just wonderful (watch it on acid at your peril). Bostrom seems to be the artist at hand, this time, too. I've always been under the impression that most people have a very poor understanding of what "psychedelic" means in art. This video is a fine corrective: THIS is the kind of imagery that a trippin' young man, stuck in the suburbs, might see behind his eyelids when listening to Up on the Sun (but don't ask me how I know), though it also reminds me at times a bit of the paintings a friend used to do to represent the experience of his migraines. Given the shifts between images, one wonders how much of this was accomplished digitally, and how much of it was based on individual paintings Bostrom did? It must have taken hundreds of hours, no...?

So what are the Pups going to do next? I love that they have put Up on the Sun out before II (II is over-represented; it's a great album, but just because it got a well-deserved boost from Kurt Cobain doesn't mean that it's the best thing they ever did. The best thing the Meat Puppets ever did is to BE THE MEAT PUPPETS, but the best album they ever released was probably Up on the Sun. Though Huevos and Too High to Die (their most successful "mainstreaming" attempt) and the under-sung Rise to Your Knees are all way up there, for me, too. 

Here is what I would love to see happen, once II is out there (besides a new Meat Puppets album, of course; there is always room for that). 

1. Vinyl reissues of Too High to Die and Forbidden Places. They're just too darn expensive and hard to find. Hope that there aren't rights issues. Of the many things that happened post-"the year punk broke" to dig into the underground and turn it into topsoil, Too High to Die is by far my favourite. If I were to pick my top 10 albums of the 1990s, this is up there with Eight Way Santa, and well above any of the other comparable discs of its kind by Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, Mudhoney, or, well, Nirvana. I still listen to all those bands, but Too High to Die, especially, is a favourite-rock-album-of-all-time, by me (though I have not always been so appreciative; see below).

2. A first time vinyl release of 2007's Rise to Your Knees. This is the one that I reviewed at the time in Nerve Magazine by riffing on Zabriskie Point. The full review went unpublished, as I recall. I write less like a rock critic, now (thank god -- I actually softened this a bit, because it was just a bit too prickish) and have warmed up a lot to the Pups more polished efforts -- apparently I wrote this at a low ebb in my enthusiasm for Too High to Die -- but the review in full read:

Meat Puppets

Rise to Your Knees (Anodyne)

In the name of love for what is great, let’s be ruthless, shall we? The Meat Puppets, before now, in their whole sizeable catalogue, have put out two AND ONLY TWO great albums, Meat Puppets II and Up On the Sun, on which their entire importance hinges (I’d be prepared to concede Meat Puppets I has greatness in it, for all its sludgy singular sputter, but, uh, great meals generally have to be cooked, and it ain’t, so I leave it off the list). Yes, there are other moments in their back catalogue that I am fond of. I’d be willing to concede in a minute that “Forbidden Places” or “Evil Love” or “Look at the Rain” or “Liquefied” or “Not Swimming Ground” or so forth are damn good rock songs, if the competition is Nickelback or, say, your standard advertising jingle; but if you compare them to Meat Puppets II and Up On the Sun (and mebbe Meat Puppets I), you’ve got (on the one hand, like) great vital people’s culture, raw and authentic and heartfelt and worthy of the attention of a 22^nd century Harry Smith; and then on the other hand, you’ve got some stuff that mighta shoulda coulda been on FM radio, almost, or, say, the Left of the Dial compilation. Which you’re free to like or not, and sometimes I do, but in the long view, it's not epochal, not the stuff that makes you LOVE a band. If it weren’t for mebbe I and cert. II and Up, I wouldn’t LOVE the Pups, probably. Whether it hurts to admit it or not, most of the Pups later discs are, face it, TAINTED BY THE MARKETPLACE, period. They are Ain’t Love Grant compared to Wild Gift – or, sigh, Three Way Tie (for Last) compared to Double Nickels; they ain’t toxic, but they ain’t that great, either. Judged by recorded document alone, it’s the gargantuan undisputable greatness of their second two albums that, up til now, have made the band worth noticing at all.

Now: my great joy that Cris Kirkwood has cleaned up and reunited with his brother PROBABLY biases me, dig? I’m a sentimental schlub at heart, and I don’t 100% trust my own judgment on this’un: BUT it sure does seem like the reunited (if Bostromless) Pups, having actually LEARNED FROM EXPERIENCE – a joyous but impossibly painful thing, as anyone who has “risen to their knees” will affirm - have taken similar stock of the situation, decided they really don’t give a fuck about that ever-promised commercial breakthrough that never quite happened, blown a whole bunch of shit out their asses and, revitalized and rejuvenated and ten pounds lighter and grateful as hell that they can make music again, have recorded a third (or fourth, if you count I) great album, perhaps as good as or (yes, I’m willing to say it) maybe even better than those others. The album is Huevos-direct (no endless fuckin’ around with songs to polish’em up), but with better sound and better songs; the lyrics have that epic Blakean quality that sometimes taps so deep it makes you wanna weep (“you’re the grass, you’re the trees/ you’re the thing that makes the wind/ you’re the roots of the sky [?], you’re an island”; and there are other songs about spitting into the wind and such that seem to put more on their sleeves than their crypto-mystical lyrical tendencies normally allow for, which may account for the slightly melancholy tone of much of this disc; the solos are spacy psyched-out desert-scorched journeys; and the general feel is like somethin’ you might hear comin’ out of Mescalito’s ghetto blaster as he dances around a cactus with his genitals out, kinda like the strange prehistoric bird ref’d in Zabriskie Point, soaring through the canyons o’ yr. soul. I bought it (only $11.99!), and I stuck it in my Discman, and I listened to nothin’ else for four whole days; when I finally gave it a breather, it was to put in a different Pups disc for the purposes of taking stock, and now I’m goin’ back to Rise and being staggered all over again. The Meat Puppets have, as they sing, taken the “stupid stars” from their eyes, and, doors of perception righteously cleansed, are staring out at you with this album, completely open and accessible and THEMSELVES, man, makin’ music from their cacti-fed souls. Whether the world is brave enough to meet their gaze remains to be seen, but I sure hope so, because I LOVE THIS ALBUM, full stop. I am so happy. It is better than anything you were expecting, and maybe even better than anything you were hoping for.

It’d be a happy irony if THIS were their breakthrough, eh? 

(...It wasn't).  

3. A vinyl reissue of Huevos (not as hard to find but I don't have it). 

4. A vinyl (re?)issue of Live in Montana, because I don't have that one, either, not in any format. Ditto Rat Farm, which came out in a period of peak productivity that just exhausted me: "Jeezus, guys, I still haven't caught up with Lollipop! (I'm ready, now). 

5. A tour! Can Cris get into Canada? Is it too expensive? I really, really want the Meat Puppets to play Vancouver. I've never seen them live! (I considered it when they opened for Soundgarden but I just didn't have the resources or the stamina. Sure shoulda done it. Ah well: at least I have Camp Songs). What are the odds that the Meat Puppets would play a venue like the Rickshaw? 

Goddamn, that would be perfect.

Highway 61 Re-Imagined: Steve Dawson's Bob Dylan-themed extravaganza

Besides the obvious (covers of Bob Dylan songs led by various local and visiting heavy-hitters), I did not know fully what to expect of the Bob Dylan-themed event (not a tribute - "re-imagining") that took place over the last two nights in West Vancouver. At no point in the description was there any suggestion that songs other than the nine on Highway 61 Revisited would be performed; with a start time of 7:30 (which might have been doors, as there was no distinction between doors and concert start time that I saw) and a listed end time of 9:30, it seemed like we might get maybe an hour and a half of music, probably with ample changeover between acts, since several artists would perform -- the list on the website mentioned "Barney Bentall, Jim Byrnes, Joachim Cooder, Maya de Vitry, Ndidi Onukwulu, Dawn Pemberton, Suzie Ungerleider, Alvin Youngblood Hart, John Boutté" and others, which also included a backing band, featuring, according to the program, Dawson himself on a variety of guitars, Jeremy Holmes on bass, Darrel Havers on organ/ keys, Chris Gestrin on piano/ keys, Tristan Paxton on mandolin (though I somehow never did spot one of those during the night), Liam McDonald on percussion, Brian Harding on trombone, Dominic Conway on sax, Jerry Cook on sax, and Maya de Vitry not just singing Dylan songs of her own but supporting others on both violin and acoustic guitar. Dawson himself would sing a couple of songs, too (in terms of Highway 61 Revisited, it ended up he picked the album's title track, explaining that, for reasons unclear, he'd been reluctant, and tried to "pawn it off" on others, none of whom wanted it; he ended up doing an arrangement that reminded me more of Dave Alvin's roadhouse blues approach than Bob Dylan's zippy original. Dawson would also do "Don't Think Twice It's Alright" but more on that second set below). He also assigned specific songs to specific people, re-organized the order in which the songs were preformed, and acted as MC through the night. 

I mean, it sounded potentially phenomonal, and Highway 61 is certainly among my favourite  Bob Dylan albums (I can't weigh it against The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan -- note, Steve, that that's the source of "Don't Think Twice It's Alright" -- or Bringing It All Back Home, but those are the other contenders). Also, I'd seen a few of the artists gathered perform at the last folk fest, many as part of an expansive Dawson-led take on the Grateful Dead's American Beauty (I reviewed the whole fest here). But $65 for maybe an hour and a half of music, covering, it seemed, one album's worth of songs? ...And what was this Kay Meek Centre, anyway? (First time I've gone; turns out it was lovely, somewhat akin to the Centre for Performing Arts, though a bit smaller, but I had no sense what to imagine). 

Without being obnoxious, I would suggest that the people who write the event descriptions might take heed of the ways in which they almost lost me. In fact, the event, while indeed starting close to 7:30, lasted til after 11, an hour and a half past the posted end time, and not only did we get a song each from all ten bandleaders in the first set (plus a cheat from Ungerleider, who did "one of the best hate songs ever," "Positively 4th Street," since ten bandleaders cannot do one song each off a nine-song album), we also got ample added treats, beyond what was described: an instrumental opening (a vaguely Hawaiian take on "Like a Rolling Stone," which would be returned to at the end of the first set for a stellar performance from Jim Byrnes, putting his hand to his ear to get the audience to join in with a roar of "How does it feel"); a full second set, longer and slightly more relaxed than the first, with each of the ten leaders choosing their own Dylan favourite from across his career (lucky for them no one had picked "Neighborhood Bully," given current events), and a closing let's-get-everyone-up-on-stage singalong rave up of "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35," informally often called "Everybody Must Get Stoned," with different vocalists passing the mic and plenty of enthusiastic audience participation (tho' the only haze in the air was dry ice, I must report. I just opt for edibles, these days, myself, given the tongue cancer experience). And while I was very impressed by the size, sound, seating, and overall presentation of the room, I do have a couple of caveats for going to shows at the Kay Meek, especially that, if you plan to catch transit, figure out the bus situation before you go! West Van is not on the same transit system; some of their signage is quite uninformative; and after twenty minutes wandering around to bus stops that proclaimed they were going to Queens (?), I ended up just breaking down and taking a taxi back to the Skytrain.

But the evening was fantastic, far, far beyond what was described in terms of quantity, and wayyy up there in terms of quality, too. I'm not going to do a song-by-song review, but highlights included:

1. Discovering that Barney Bentall is actually fucking amazing. (Note, there will be no consistent attempt below to continue this bolded numbered list format, though there were many other highlights; Bentall just seems to deserve it). Like Blue Rodeo or those slick 80s Robbie Robertson solo albums that I ignored, Barney Bentall had never, ever seemed cool or intriguing to me. I don't know what songs of his I might know but any I did hear in my time as an assholish youth were on the radio or Much Music some decades ago, during which time I was likely plunged in hardcore punk (82-87), noise rock and grunge (87-92) or, even loftier and more aggro, free jazz (92-96). Whether I was spending my evenings blasting the Dead Kennedys, TAD, or Albert Ayler when his best known albums came out, I cannot exactly say, but at the time, Bentall's music seemed like milk-and-unsalted-crackers by comparison, which impression I never bothered to redress, so it lingered; I recall walking by a free concert he gave a few years ago in Maple Ridge, while I was living there, and barely even slowing down to investigate, once I realized who was playing. That's the sort of asshole music snob I can be (sorry, Mr. Bentall!). 

Front row L-to-R: Suzie, Jim Byrnes, John Boutté, Maya De Vitri (just behind her), Barney Bentall, Alvin in denim, and Steve Dawson in action! All photos by me, such as they are. 

But Barney Bentall, last night, did something that EVEN BOB DYLAN NO LONGER DOES, as far as I know: he offered a complete version of "Desolation Row," with not a verse (that I noticed) omitted. The one-and-only-time I caught Dylan, in Saitama, Japan some 23 years ago, he trimmed that song to a mere five minutes or so. I forget which verses he cut, but I remember being quite choked up about it at the time, railing against the disappearance of Casanova or Quasimodo or Dr. Filth or whoever-it-was-that-got-the-axe. There's not a lyric in that 11-minute masterpiece that I would see dispensed with, since even the most off-the-cuff-seeming couplet in it can reach out and clobber you with its richness (last night's clobbering came via "Praise be to Nero's Neptune/ The Titanic sails at dawn/ And everybody's shouting/ "Which Side Are You On?", the apparently routine omission of which from Dylan's sets gets talked about here). Just getting the lyrics right on a three minute Dylan cover can be daunting (and there were plenty of glitches last night, some of which were kind of entertaining to contemplate in and of themselves; I'm pretty sure the towering bluesman and apparent snake aficionado Alvin Youngblood Hart, whether by accident or design, replaced "blanket" with "bucket" in the first couple of verses of "From a Buick 6," as in, "If I go down dying, she's bound to put a bucket on my bed," which transposition brought to mind the times I have brought my wife, when sick in bed, a trash pail to barf in. Which married folks among us are unfamiliar with this intimacy?). And if three minutes are a challenge, getting the lyrics right on an eleven minute Dylan cover written with maximal poetic complexity would be sheer masochism, and I felt sorry, at the start of the night, for whatever poor sucker drew it. Even Steve Dawson, who served as the main MC for the evening, commented in introducing it that there were a LOT of lyrics to be presented that evening. Surely no one song of Dylan's could be more intimidating than "Desolation Row" (I think "Brownsville Girl" may be longer, but it's at least a straightforward narrative).  

Bentall, though, didn't seem to break a sweat, demonstrating that true virtuosity can present as effortlessness. And he sang it more beautifully than Dylan ever could; in fact, what was most interesting about his voice during the song was that, gorgeously clear and emotive, it sounded nothing much like Dylan's all, whereas his later reading of "Jokerman" (the evening's second-most demanding lyrical smorgasbord, with Dawn Pemberton on backup vocals) had him offer the most Dylanesque vocal of the night, every bit as close-your-eyes-and-imagine-Bob as Daniel Romano's, though it was the Infidels arrangement he offered, not the Plugz. 

Again: impressive indeed. 

And understand, I'm one of those people whose lips move during concerts, whose engagement with the lyrics is almost always the paramount thing of being there, so having someone alter a word can completely distract me (did Maya de Vitry change "warned" to "wanted" in "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry?" Who does she think she is, Peter, Paul and Mary?).

(I jest, and must note that any distress she caused anal-ol'-me there was completely forgiven during her gorgeous reading of "If Not for You," which she dedicated to her departed grandmother -- who didn't even like Bob Dylan, she quipped -- "but I think she'd like this one." I had mentioned De Vitry in that folk fest review, as well; she's on the list of people I will see again at some point, if I can. She's apparently attending a memorial today for her grandmother, in fact, who passed on October 2nd, so we should count ourselves lucky we got to see her at all). 

All that said, Bentall did get the lyrics wrong twice, but it was actually quite funny to see him realizing while singing that he'd transposed "think" and "look" in "you would not think to look at him," making an entertaining garble of it: "You would not look to think at him," like you're a telepath with his eyes closed trying to beam a thought into someone else's head, or something (he also got a "to" and a "from" wrong in the line about sending mail "from" desolation row, but realized this on the fly and fixed himself, weirdly adding the correct preposition, so we got a "to from;" maybe if there's a live recording, they can just edit the "to" out?). 

Of course, if I were to try to recite all of "Desolation Row," I couldn't do it. I mention all this from the safety and comfort of an audience position. I may know where Dr. Filth keeps his world, and what his sexless patients are trying to do with it, but could I deliver a flawless reading of the whole song, or even any three verses in sequence? Hell no. But, put it this way, Bentall got 654 out of 657 words right, which, turned into a grade, would be 99.54 percent. That's beyond an A+, and like I say, it is more than Bob even attempts! 

Anyhow, Bentall was the biggest surprise of the evening, the man who did the most with the most, as it were. I spent some time yesterday staring at one of his CDs and thinking, "Jeez, should I buy this, now?" I didn't, but I'm closer than I've ever been! (I did buy and spin a Steve Dawson album, though). 

It's hard to pick the other standouts. Ndidi Onukwulu got my vote for the best dressed performer of the night, in her colourful, African-cum-tropical pants, and gave a potent introduction to her second-set pick about colonization, without naming any names or specifying any world situations (because, y'know, "Neighborhood Bully" gives a pretty clear index of what side of the Titanic Bob is on, on one relevant front, not that that was necessarily the colonial relationship she had on her mind; I have a love/ hate relationship with that song, which on the one hand is surely the most punchy, fun, English-language defense of Israel ever penned, while dishonestly eliding American arm sales to the same. Obsolete weapons my ass, Bob! But I digress). As the music swelled up, I was trying to guess what this announced anti-colonial song would be, and thought those first chords were announcing an under-sung masterpiece, "Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)," off an under-sung album, Street Legal, which in anticipation and excitement, I was halfway through interpreting as an anticolonial item in my head, before Onukwulu actually started to sing. It kind of does work as such, but I had never contemplated it from this angle before, so even though I was mistaken, it was a productive mistake. Instead of "Senor," she went a bit more for the jugular, with "Masters of War." A great song, which I don't think I've seen anyone cover locally since I saw DOA do it at a post-9/11 anti-war rally involving Noam Chomsky, Jack Layton, Svend Robinson and many others. To be honest, I think I kind of preferred her "Ballad of a Thin Man," earlier in the evening, which she delivered with a somewhat mischievous smile and glittering eyes, but then, I generally prefer Dylan's more abstracted lyrics to his direct and confrontational ones; her delivery was great on both, though. 

Also, Dawn Pemberton gave a rocking reading of "Tombstone Blues" that reminded me of seeing Mavis Staples (whom Dylan once allegedly proposed to) at the Centre several jazzfests ago. She then later blew the doors off with a soulful "Tangled Up in Blue," which was the most daring interpretation of the night, and worked a charm. By way of introducing it, she explained that there was speculation that the lyrics were about a "brief, torrid, complicated affair" ("the best kind," she added) that Dylan supposedly had with Joni Mitchell, which story I had never heard before. I hope she includes it in her regular set, because she owned that song; I've got to catch one of her full-on concerts, because she impresses the hell out of me whenever I see her at events like this. Someday, Ms. Pemberton, I promise. If I were continuing the conceit of the bolded, numbered list, Dawn Pemberton would get #2 for "Tangled Up in Blue." 

#3 would be Suzie Ungerleider's second song of the night, a haunting, acoustic variant on the Billy the Kid theme (the one that begins with the image of guns across the river preparing to pound you. Bob spins a few variants of the song on that album and I don't expect anyone to be able to tell which one I mean by the title; I mean, I couldn't peg it, myself). It was probably the deepest dive of the night, or at least the one I least expected, which Ungerleider intro'd by a story about how it fit the landscapes of a Northern European tour she undertook with Dawson, which, she said, were deeply relevant because there are "lots of cowboys over there." (Ha!). Another person to add to the list of people I need to someday see. 

I think it was Ungerleider who joked about waiting for Dawson to tune his "sewing machine," a lap guitar that he played standing. He joked back that it tuning was an issue when you had nineteen guitars to choose from, but I only counted six up there, of the ones he was playing, anyhow. Maybe there were thirteen more in the wings?

But if Suzie takes bronze, it must be said that, honestly, the list becomes an impossible thing, because everything was fantastic, really. There were no "bucket moments" in Hart's second song, "Just Like a Woman" (though there was an unexplicable postshot at the "once great" David Lee Roth in his intro, which Dawson quibbled with, saying "he's still great." Not sure where that was coming from, and what was that about the snakes in his backyard, anyhow? I contemplated asking him to show me, as he had apparently been showing Dawson his snake pics earlier in the evening... By the by, David Lee Roth had unexpectedly manifested between sets with the DJ's playing "Big Bad Bill is Sweet William Now," which was fun to hear, which may be how he got into Hart's head). 

One of the livelist performers of the night, New Orleans' John Boutté -- who I gather from IMDB sings the Treme theme; Erika and I have been watching that, so that was a fun overlap -- told a story in his second set about how event organizers at a past show had wanted him to sing Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Going to Come," to which he replied, "How old is that song? Nothing's changed! No, I'm going to do this one," which turned out to be a New Orleansy reading of "Blowing in the Wind." Boutté actually seemed to do a complete costume change for that second song (his first had been "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues"), and demonstrated that a tambourine can be played skillfully, even though it usually isn't. He was a slick, stylish, expressive and enthusiastic performer who I did not know before last night. Would see him again, too, tho'...! 

Meantime, the funniest story of the evening was offered by Ry Cooder's son, Joachim, who told a tale about the time a disheveled and somewhat lost Bob Dylan came to his dad's house to get help figuring out a Sleepy John Estes guitar part, after which one of Cooder's skeptical neighbours came over to ask, "Was that homeless guy bothering you?" (There were plenty of other occasions for the audience to laugh last night, but no story I heard was funnier or better-received). He also had -- as I remarked to him afterwards, when I asked what the heck he'd been playing -- "the instrument of the evening," which turned out to be a large electric kalimba, pictured above. I think of kalimbas as hand-held thumb pianos; Cooder's sat across his lap and was the size of a small keyboard (note that he and Dawson were the only people who used chairs. Even Jim Byrnes, who uses canes to walk, stood for his performances). Played virtuosically, Cooder's kalimba created an otherworldly, undersea ambience for the songs he did ("Queen Jane Approximately" and... shit, what else did he do? I have no recollection at all, and I didn't jot it down. Sorry, Joachim! I blame the edibles!) 

Anyhow, before I went to the event -- with the intervention and encouragement of one Judith Beeman; thanks, Jude! -- I was skeptical that I'd get my money's worth. In the end, I bought a Steve Dawson album, got him to sign it, and forked out for cabfare to Burrard Station, because the bus situation was proving dire and it was cold and wet and I had vinyl in my backpack. And yet I still felt, given how great and fulsome the night was, I was getting a hell of a steal. Foolish to have been concerned! The $65 pricetag was, in fact, a steal. Who knew?

By the by, Steve, I'm the guy with the speech impediment who promised you future press. I'm good for that, if it seems useful. One word of advice, though: the Stetson, red shirt, and black hat made you look like you were in the RCMP. I'm not sure that was intended? 

But thanks to you and -- what was the co-arrangers' name, Fiona Black? -- for a memorable and beautiful evening. (Weird how few people under fifty seemed to be in the audience. I am not used to feeling like I am on the younger end of an audience. Do millennials not dig Dylan? They need to fix that, if so). 

I wonder what next year's album will be... 

(Ndidi's cool pants are visible at centre stage!). 

Christopher Nolan revisited: Oppenheimer is great

I did not rush to see Oppenheimer, in part because I found all the Barbie cross-marketing somewhat distasteful (I can see why the Japanese, in particular, took exception to it), but also because I have almost always had mixed feelings about Christopher Nolan. 

I enjoyed the hell out of Memento, some 23 years ago. Until recently, it was the only Nolan film I returned to three or four times, the only film that I came away from convinced of its greatness. I remember reading former Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum's dismissal of the film and being stunned. A capsule review on his website notes that "it exemplifies what the English mean when they call something too clever by half," which is one of those jaw-dropping lines in a review that focus your attention and make you wonder what movie the critic in question has seen -- is it the same one you did? He continues that it's "a fascinating and gripping but also rather heartless and mean-spirited tale... [it's] more a puzzle than a meaningful story." I recall -- maybe in one of his books? I've read a couple -- his being even more thorough about its ultimate emptiness. I thought it unfair, like he resented the work that the film demanded if you wanted to take something from it; that kind of reaction I associate with the sort of middlebrow/ middleclass/ middle aged jobbo film reviewer, the sort of reviewer (I won't name names but maybe all of us can think of a couple local ones who fit this bill) who almost never seem to want to think about the films they review beyond the question of whether they were entertained, like that is the be-all and end-all of cinema; not to enlighten or enrich but simply to facilitate someone shoveling popcorn into their hole. It seemed unworthy of a relatively highbrow writer like Rosenbaum, almost lazy; more to the point, I had liked the film and felt bruised and defensive. Surely Memento offers plenty to contemplate, if you accept the formal challenges; complaining that it took too much work to negotiate them, or refusing to do that work because he did not believe there was anything there to justify it, seemed a puzzling approach for a critic as intelligent and thoughtful as Rosenbaum, especially when the film seemed so rich to me...  

Somehow, though, Rosenbaum's point of view came to capture my reaction to Nolan as a whole. Tenet was the most egregious example: it seemed to have nothing on its mind but its gamey structure. I watched it and emerged a) understanding it would take a great deal of work to really make sense of what I'd seen, but also that b) there was no sense of a valuable act of meaning-making at hand, no sense of a reward offered for doing the work. "Clearly I would have to think about this and re-watch it to get anything out of it, but is there anything there worth getting?" 

I mean, if you think there's a prize at the bottom, you might eat a whole box of Cracker Jacks, but at some point as a kid, you discover the prizes aren't commensurate with the effort required. It was just plain easier to dismiss the whole thing, an empty spectacle -- a what-he-said about that other Nolan film: "too clever by half." 

If I came away with a decisive shrug-and-meh, Tenet somehow didn't annoy me as much as some of Nolan's other films. Inception also felt irritatingly gamey, while incorporating elements of plagiarism (of Neuromancer; it owes more to the plot of that book than even The Matrix) and doing, I thought, an injustice to the richness of the human dream-world (I remember writing at the time I first saw it of how annoying it was that there were so many guns in it, since at that point, I had never once seen or used a gun in a dream, that I could recall. I did have a gun dream a couple of years ago, in fact, long after seeing the film; but at the time, I kind of felt sorry for anyone whose dreamlife was so shallow that Inception spoke to it. Bear in mind, I regularly dream of shopping for books and records, so that's sayin' something...).

Interstellar pissed me off even more, because unlike Inception, I found a huge chunk of it really engaging. The first half suckered me in completely, made me wonder if I'd have to re-evaluate Nolan, who, by that point, I realized I had issues with. As I recall, watching it, I had this flicker of apprehension that some bit of business early in the film was setting up a twist at the end of it; "It better not be going there," I thought. But that flicker aside, I was hooked in quite deeply by the story, right up until the end, whereupon EXACTLY the dumb twist I worried would be coming arrived with a flourish -- exactly the sort of stupid bullshit I had anticipated and feared. Whereupon I got annoyed with myself for having fallen for the thing, and annoyed with Nolan for having put so much care and craft into essentially what was an empty puzzle (further quoting Rosenbaum, from the Memento capsule: "it reminds me of how Edmund Wilson compared reading a mystery to eagerly unpacking a box of excelsior, only to find a few rusty nails at the bottom." Exactly!).

I never got around to Dunkirk, but I still managed, despite having come to think of Nolan as VASTLY OVERRATED, to see every one of his films besides. I liked Following, but don't remember it. I was struck by how annoyingly broad Al Pacino's performance was in Insomnia on first viewing, but revisiting it recently thought it was actually a pretty good film, if you got over that one thing (with the exception of Glengarry Glen Ross, there is not much Pacino's post-70s output that I've seen that impressed me, though I had loved all that came before; it almost always feels like he's phoning in the same performance, the same style, like he just rolls out of bed, glances at the script, and does himself, in film after film. I didn't even like him in Heat). The Batman trilogy definitely is well-made, but the way that Nolan used current events seemed at best positively amoral, with the first film seeming to be "about" 9/11, the second the War on Terror, and the third on the Occupy movement. Again, Nolan didn't seem to have anything valuable to say, and in the case of the second film in particular -- which I wrote a pretty hostile review of at the time -- I was actually offended at how he would presume to probe some fairly raw, open wounds, when all he really had to offer was another fucking superhero movie (I said at the time that it was "a dull, relentless, 'one-ordeal-after-the-other' celebration of NOTHING, a boring, grim, nihilistic burp of sloth, cynicism and despair"). Maybe someday, at a remove from the headlines, I will revisit the film and find it fascinating, an insight into how Americans processed their guilt over Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib and enhanced interrogation, but I still doubt I will be impressed with Nolan for having made it; it felt more like a cash-in than a commentary, like he was presuming to touch on these very important issues in the service of utter crap, as if as an artist, he thought the work of art was somehow more important than the ideas, issues, experiences, and lessons that it channeled... 

About the only film of Nolan's I kind of was amused by after Following and Memento was The Prestige. It's at least honest about not having much to offer besides a fun game for its audiences. I wanted to like Bowie as Tesla more than I did, since I love the IDEA of Bowie as Tesla a fair bit more than I enjoyed Bowie's actual performance; but otherwise, I was quite entertained. I have no problem with games in cinema, per se, with silly period pieces that employ tricks and twists, as long as they aren't plagiarized from William Gibson or arriving with an air of being utterly convinced of their own importance, their apparent sense of which is vastly out of step by any trace of the same that you can see. (Insomnia also doesn't have much bombast going for it; it's on Netflix, if you don't recall it). 

I wonder if Rosenbaum liked Oppenheimer? Charles Mudede did not, but his is the only review I've actually read. While I would, when they were more active, hungrily read whatever certain critics, like Ebert or Rosenbaum or Kael, for example, said about films I liked, there aren't many active, "name" critics whose film writing I am curious about these days. I enjoyed what Adrian Mack used to do for the Straight. I like MaryAnn Johanson at Flick Filosopher, though I've fallen out of the habit of going to her site, maybe because I feel guilty about not forking over $$$ (I rarely pay for content online). I'm usually curious to read Armond White, because though I seldom agree with him, I often am at least given things to think about, and there are usually a few sentences that are fun in-and-of-themselves to read, in his reviews. But these days, criticism works in a rather different way; sometimes before but more often after I see a film, I'll scroll through Rotten Tomatoes, read a few lines here and a few lines there, and while I do sometimes go to read the full review, I seldom find any one critic whose take on a film is interesting enough that I go back to see what else they've written about other movies. The days of the celebrity film critic, film critic as "writer," seem to be drawing to a close, replaced by an online world where everyone's a critic, even me. Occasionally I might find my own views on a film validated by the reviews I find, but seldom do I find them enriched. (Feel free to let me know if there are critics I'm missing out on).  

Maybe when I'm done here I'll go see if Rosenbaum stepped out of his sort-of-retirement to reflect on Oppenheimer? 

I loved it, though, I must say. Mudede found it "boring." I found it gripping. It is so briskly paced that you have to really focus to keep up -- it requires some work to watch, is kind of jam-packed with ideas and details, such that I was surprised, when I peeked discreetly at my cell phone at one point to see how far into the film we were, thinking we must surely be at the halfway mark, that we were less than an hour in (it's three hours long; when you get to the Trinity explosion, you're only half-way, with much of the "story" of the film -- not the story of Oppenheimer, but the drama, the conflict that the film turns around -- only kicking into place after this point). But -- compelled to check the time though I may have been -- I was never remotely bored. It deals with history I know very little about, in fact -- vastly less than Mudede, anyhow; perhaps if you come to the film from a place of knowing, having at least read American Prometheus, say -- I have not -- you'll find the movie shallow, wanting. Certainly, even if you do get involved in its storytelling, like pretty much every film Nolan has made, ever, it won't be all that easy to sum up what its saying about its subject matter once it ends. 

Unlike pretty much every movie he's made since Memento, though, there's a sense that there is a WHOLE LOT to be gotten from thinking about the film. It's not so inspiring that I'll go buy American Prometheus and dig in, but I know a bookstore owner -- Tim Carson -- and have chatted about it with him, and know that the demand for that book (or anything about Oppenheimer) is at an all-time high as a result of the film. It leaves you hungry to know more, perhaps to see it again. It's idea-rich, intellectually demanding, has a ton of character detail (and has a ton of fine performances in it, some from actors I have not seen for years and barely recognized, like Tom Conti; every moment he was on screen, I was going, "I know who that is..." but when the credits rolled, I sat back in my chair: Tom Conti!). 

There's not much else I can actually say about the film, but do go see it. About the only caveat I have: see it somewhere that has comfortable seats. I caught it at the Hollywood Three in Maple Ridge, which is fine for a movie that's less than two hours long, but by the end of Oppenheimer, my arse, back, and legs were requiring some pretty fancy positioning to keep my body's complaints at bay. 

I would suggest seeing it on an empty bladder, as well (and seeing it in a cinema; it deserves it. Not sure it requires IMAX-level viewing, however).

Maybe I've had Nolan wrong? Maybe my dismissals of the majority of his films have been as unfair as I thought Rosenbaum's were, re: Memento? (At the very least, I guess I now have to see Dunkirk). 

Oppenheimer is the best thing I've seen in the cinema in quite some time. What was the phrase... something about thumbs...?

Love the little doofus

So kitten is on the floor rolling around, jousting with the chair and table legs, as he does, and I get down on my knees and say hello to him. He stops, stares up at me, as I peek over the chair back, then within a second, leaps onto the seat, reaches up and PUNCHES ME IN THE EYE! Baff! 

I mean, it's a kitten punch, so it doesn't hurt, but it's funny as hell. I open my cellphone camera but by this point he's beat a retreat, staring at me from atop a little table we keep under the big table ("the kitten table.")

I love the little doofus. 

As for blogging, I'm done for awhile, I think. Wiped out, plus I'm transcribing John Armstrong for the next Big Takeover, listening to Current 93 and the Legendary Pink Dots (enjoying both more than I expected), planning to go the Steve Dawson Bob Dylan thing tomorrow at Kay Meek (also happening tonight), but I'm feeling a bit worn out on writing about local stuff. 

Life's not bad, but I got nothing much for y'all. A couple big things brewing for early November. 

Note: those of you who do not like the Israeli treatment of Palestinians -- a reasonable point of view -- should still think twice about casting your lots in support of Hamas. The one does not require the other. People wanting an interesting perspective on all this might do well to go to Youtube to watch Israeli filmmaker Avi Mograbi's potent documentary Avenge But One of My Two Eyes. I love that the filmmaker himself has uploaded it. 

Meantime, stay safe. 

To the Unknowns out there

 Just a word of explanation.

There is a commenter on this blog whose comments I no longer want to read, let alone publish. They are kind of abusive at times and dealing with them can have an unsettling effect. I've blocked this person on Facebook, but it's not so simple here. Blogger allows us at most to screen comments, but to screen them, you have to read them. I don't want to read any more of this person's comments. You can disallow anonymous comments, but Google will still ascribe people the identity of "unknown," and still submit them for your consideration, which doesn't really achieve the desired end. 

Anyhow, asking this person to stop doesn't seem to have an effect (80% of these comments are about how I need to be on Ozempic; I've told this person multiple times that I do not want to receive any sort of diet/ medical advice from them, but they're very persistent and insistent and somehow unable to process this information). 

The net result: if I see comments coming from someone identified as "unknown," I simply won't be reading them. You'll have to have some sort of identity that Google recognizes if you want to interact with me here. I realize that this person is not the only "unknown" who sometimes comments, but since there is no other way to screen him out, this is my only option. 

Note: it doesn't matter if you put your name in the message, because that would require me to read the message to see it; if your comment reads "unknown" as an identity -- if Google does not recognize you -- I simply won't be reading it. 

A wee rant re: urinals

I am all for gender-neutral washrooms. Have you heard Ivan Coyote's TED Talk on the topic? Gender nonconformists need to pee too. Toilet segregation should end: "Kewpie dolls and urine stalls," right?

Another interesting thing online about gender neutral washrooms is in ContraPoints piece on JK Rowling, I think. It's movie-length, be warned! Sorry not to find the exact passage, but it's very entertaining overall, if you can make the time to watch the whole thing. The chunk that really caught my imagination deals with the hysteria over men in dresses being allowed in the ladies room, whereas in fact historically the people who have suffered the most from gender-policing toilet discrimination are masculine-presenting women (is the term "dyke" still considered acceptable? I remember listening to the Animal Slaves having fun with the word, eavesdropping onto Rachel and Ross and Elizabeth and maybe one or two others creating off-the-cuff Dr. Seuss-style rhymes on the theme of, "I like dykes." I've mostly encountered it as a reclaimed word. But I'm out of date, maybe?). 

I mean, no one wants Norman Bates in the stall next to them, but such representations also (as ContraPoints also discusses) tie into a hysterically extreme, transphobic reaction to trans identity (ditto Silence of the Lambs and Dressed to Kill). Avoiding gender neutrality in washroom design because of stereotypes from horror movies... it just doesn't make sense. I get why some women feel nervous, but there's a greater good to consider. 

And I am fine on pronoun change, while we're at it. I find it mildly hilarious that Jordan Peterson has been ordered to receive therapy for his online behaviour. It's interesting to see someone so determined to be on the wrong side of history.  I don't want to be on the wrong side of history, myself, one of the sorry, angry-seeming people clinging to "the old ways." The old gods are cruel, savage, worth avoiding: Jordan Peterson should read less scripture and more HP Lovecraft.

All the same, what the hell is wrong with having urinals in gender neutral washrooms? I mean, I have seen tampon dispensers in them (in the gender neutral washrooms, not in urinals, that is). I personally do not use them. But I don't mind if there are facilities in the, uh, facilities that I need not avail myself of. Yet a couple of places, remodeling or in the process of remodeling to have gender neutral cans, are going with the all-toilet-stall/ no-urinals-nohow way of doing things. 

I have some thoughts about urinals and their seeming forthcoming demise. I do not think my fear for their future is related to patriarchal indoctrination or castration anxiety (or transphobia). I mean: 

1. Urinals waste vastly less water when you flush, compared to toilets. 

2. Regardless of issues of gender, they are better designed to capture the urine of people who stand than toilets. They are ideally designed for those moments when your spray shoots off at an angle or drips or splashes back or otherwise behaves unpredictably. Toilets actually require better aim; it requires vastly less precision to piss on a wall, which is closer to what a urinal looks like, than to piss in a bucket, which is closer to a toilet. This is why it is in everyone's interest if men raise the seat, or turn on the light when they pee (they wouldn't have to, if it were a urinal they were dealing with). It's also why it is better all round that men have a place to pee where there are no points for accuracy, because...

3. ...there are a LOT OF MEN out there whose aim is for shit and who have no desire to assume responsibility for this. This seems sadly universal, a feature of male behaviour, though there may be other psychological, class, age or cultural elements at work in some cases, too: some types of men seem less inclined to raise the seat, lower it when they leave, and wipe up when they miss. Young unmarried  men from wealthy male-dominant societies, perhaps, are a demographic you do not want ahead of you in the line to use the toilet, if there is to be no urinal provided.  

Whatever demographic features we target, there are some men's rooms I have tried to use, in places that have gotten rid of urinals, that have reliably and consistently been GENEROUSLY SPRAYED IN YELLOW. Not all, but some of them, there's a "stall of yellow horror" factor: you open the door with great trepidation, step carefully, cover your fingers in toilet paper before lifting the seat... 

As an older, married man from a reasonably gender-egalitarian society who has used his share of public washrooms, I have been civilized into checking that I haven't missed a drop, and wiping up after myself if I have done so. I don't dig it -- and not wanting to wipe such things up is one reason I like urinals: I don't want to pass the buck onto the person behind me. Especially if I'm married to her, but not only if. 

But one thing I like even less than wiping up my own pee is wiping up OTHER PEOPLE's. Male pee, female pee, gender-neutral pee -- it's all the same to me; I don't want it on my fingers. 

I mean, women know whereof I am speaking, right? Especially ones married to men? Surely it is better all round for EVERYONE if men pee in urinals, so as not to paint the whole stall? Men may not be stalking women in toilets in any great numbers -- that is a transphobic slur, a horror movie cliche that we probably can lay to rest -- but they're PISSING ALL OVER THE PLACE.

If I can just ignore the tampon dispenser in the corner, can't we also leave the urinals in gender neutral washrooms? I mean, if you're remodeling your washrooms to be gender neutral, do you really have to take the urinals out? 

Barring that, could we start installing paper towel dispensers and stocking gender neutral toilets with desanitizers?

Possibly a mop?

End rant. PS, Contrapoints has some fun stuff on Jordan Peterson, too. 

Coronavirus 4: No More Test Kits

Conclusion: the coronavirus test kits in our apartment are either very well hidden or we never replenished them after Erika's last go-round with the virus. 

Awakened by the usual 6am kitten/ bladder conspiracy, I've spent an hour (mostly) quietly searching the apartment for them to no avail. Behind the toilet paper stash in the bathroom cabinet, which required removal of about ten individual rolls, which I stacked next to the kitten (who was "helping"), I found a single package with the white placardy-thing (y'know, the thing that the drop goes in), a wrapped swab, and a receptacle for the swab. After re-stacking the toilet paper rolls, I got up off the floor and eagerly took my findings out to the kitchen table to test before breakfast, to realize that the medium, the key ingredient, whatever that is, was absent. No juice for the swab means no test for me. 

I don't know what any of this shit is really called, apparently (besides the swab). 

Ah well, it's a coronavirus of SOME kind, no question there. Let's get on with breakfast: Special K in almond milk and instant coffee.  I have much to do, much to think on. 

Finish John Armstrong article.

Do prep for John Otway and Art Bergmann interviews. 

Think about prep for Clearcut, screening in November at the Cinematheque.

...find a mag for that other thing... 

But apparently the first mandate is to recover from this bug, whatever it might be. Might actually have to rest a bit. Maybe I can re-watch Night of the Hunter?

Y'know -- here's a heresy -- I love Charles Laughton as an actor, but that is a film I have yet to really have "click" with me. I just don't quite feel like I know how to enjoy it correctly, like maybe there's a failure in how I'm approaching it. I understand why people are interested in it, there's nothing quite like it, but there are a few films out there where you come away wondering if you've missed something, or brought the wrong expectations to the table, or... 

Erika doesn't really go for the black and white so much, but I should try that film on her, maybe. She enjoyed Sunset Boulevard. First classic that hit with her in awhile. 

I look over to the kitchen table and see the cat is digging into my leftover almond milk. He's sneezed a couple of times this morning. Maybe he's caught this, too. I have a sore throat, bleary eyes, a stuffy nose. No fever that I can detect. Will I be over it before I have to go back to work?

We'll see. This will be my second full day of symptoms, though I was noticing things when I got in from Art. I suspect by tomorrow morning I will know a bit more about what to expect.

And I'll know where the test kits are.