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Yoshi Sodeoka’s work explores processes of fracturing and degeneration. His videos and photographic images reformat and disrupt the familiar creating highly stylized new images. In this piece, video footage of The Beatles and Rolling Stones performing ‘Let It Be’ and ‘Let It Bleed’ respectively are re-arranged and spliced to create a simultaneously rigid and chaotic new work.
If you grew up almost anywhere in America in the staggeringly ignorant days of being a teenager before the internet and were at all interested in bands beyond the regular MTV rotation, what you probably used to do was, get out a pen and paper and send away to the indie record labels for catalogues being sure to include a self addressed stamped envelope.
Many, many weeks later the catalogue would arrive. It was never too big, often Xeroxed or a simple single b/w sheet. Maybe there were a handful of bands you already knew and some that seemed larger than life just because you kept seeing them there in these catalogues or mentioned in interviews. In reality maybe a hundred kids cared about most of these but, in those days, there were no ‘friend counts” or page views and they were mysterious, mythological and known only by what you could figure out from reviews and articles in imported mags from England or the one time you saw that video on 120 minutes at 1 a.m. already dreading the Monday morning alarm clock. And so, you’d read and re-read the catalogue studying the blurb and the picture and the song titles and band names and eventually you’d check the boxes to the record you already knew you wanted taking a chance on two or three other singles you knew next to nothing about and then send it back and begin the wait by the postbox for your records to arrive.
It’s so strangely archaic now; it was so insular and personal. There was no immediacy or rush because you were alone in your development and nobody you knew had heard or seen these records and the anticipation was yours and yours alone. From SST I grew old waiting on Screaming Trees, Sub Pop made me grey waiting for Superfuzz and Bigmuff, Drag City made me hold out for months for Pavement’s first 10′, while Merge let me waste away awaiting Superchunk. I’ve long since forgotten the abysmal failures, the waste of wax singles from absolutely terrible bands but the good ones were prized scalps. It was a time when ‘I knew them first’ status was remarkably inclusive, measured in years not weeks. It was brutal and absurd. No doubt the kids are now more than all right being able to glom the entire history of The Fall or some such in a night grabbing the back-catalogue via wikipedia and few clicks. And the price we pay is of course that blog life has made everything passé three weeks from release. But those of us old enough to remember, do have a certain right to bemoan the miles we walked barefoot and the dues the youth of today take for granted if only because it stunk and we earned it.
The relevance of all this is that a few weeks ago I gave up a Sunday trying to track down The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart debut on vinyl. I went to no less than four NY shops looking for it only to find everywhere was sold out. ‘We’ll have more in next week,’ they all said. ‘Ridiculous,’ I thought annoyed at having to wait for it. And thus, impatient and either forgetting exactly how long mail-order used to take or made wonderfully nostalgic by the few TPOPAH mp3’s I already had to go on, I went home and straight to the Slumberland records site to order it. I hadn’t even thought of doing such an absurd thing since high school and I immediately regretted the decision.
The weeks went by, and I was reminded of the above memories, and then Pitchfork gave the album a huge review and totally like stole any shot I might have at ‘I knew ‘em foist,’ status but now you know what? I totally don’t even care. It arrived today and so, I’m happy to report that indie labels have become far more responsible and prompt in the years since I was made to suffer. A scant few weeks after I ordered it, we’re listening to it on, what to god I hope is, one of the last truly cold nights of this winter.
This record is so brilliantly Vaselines and Jesus & Mary Chain and Shop Assistants and any number of sounds I would have truly flipped on in junior high and high school that it’s almost as if it’s a long forgotten mail-order only just arrived. Not that it’s dated or purely nostalgic, because there is certainly a something new about it all if for no other reason than it’s re-contextualizing of those sounds. But their name says it all. The songs are great, classic ‘Left of the Dial’ hits sounding tinged with melancholia and the hope that maybe this week the new girl will show up in your class, be given the seat next to yours. Romantic titles, love obsessed and innocent, single string solos washed in fuzz, it’s maybe the perfect way to wait out these last heartsick, dark days of winter.
In desperate need of finding a singer for the school’s big music show just a couple of days away, three Japanese teenagers recruit a Korean exchange student to front their newly formed cover band. With a stillness and pacing alien to any American movie about high school kids, 2007’s Linda, Linda, Linda is a near perfect slice of teenage life. As they set about practicing, and practicing and practicing, the girls bond around the common purpose and modest goal of having a good show. They work themselves to the bone, get a pep talk from the Ramones in the Budokan, and nearly blow it all when the rains come. It’s awkward and sweet and an amazingly honest account of what it’s like being in a garage band.
In this the final scene of Linda Linda Linda, the girls get their moment of glory at the big show. It’s so heroically good you’ll get goose bumps.
Join The Profesionals. Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (1981)
“we don’t put out.”
Cult film Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains stars a 16 year old Diane Lane and a 13 year old Laura Dern as would be punk icons out on a rain soaked tour. Also staring Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols and Clash bassist Paul Simonon, the film gets enough right in it’s portrait of underground bands to overlook the dated bits. The Shags-like sound of the stains seems an indie phenomenon some 20 years ahead of its time. Filmed with a dirty loose feel that goes well with a cynical and sarcastic anti-establishment view of the ‘biz’, this ultra-cool film was once abandoned to late night tv and the midnight movie circuit but has just been released on DVD. Rumor has it this is the film that gave the White Stripes‘ their name.
LEAVE IT TO THE AMATEURS. BOYS AND GIRLS, THE LESS THAN ADEQUATE SHAGGS. (1969)
BLESS.
Set to the watery strains of a backward voice and orchestra, a boarding school rebellion ends with this short-breath of a scene where, ”in a storm of burst pillows, a boy flips onto a chair being carried in a slow motion procession of anarchic students.
Jean Vigo’s 1933 film Zero For Conduct might be the first truly great movie about teenage angst. In it, the cruel and absurd demands of teachers are upended while the youth band in solidarity. But Vigo’s dreamlike war of feathers and tin cans were apparently too much for the French establishment who banned the film until 1945 for it’s anti-authoritarian message.
The French censors may have had cause to be so jumpy, the nineteen-thirties were of course an extremely volatile period in Europe, as a world economic crisis deepened, there was a real sense that the established order was collapsing. Fascism and communism had been battling violently to seize power from weakened democracies and monarchies since the end of the First World War. In Berlin, Rome and Madrid, this battle was won by the Fascists as Europe began to arm itself for an even more destructive conflict.
But Vigo isn’t interested in the justifications of any power structure. In his view, all authority is inherently corruptible and abusive and his youthful allegiance is to the those who are trapped beneath the larger systems of imposed discipline. After all, it’s the boys in his film hoisting their flag above the school who would soon fight and die on the nightmarish battlefields of World War II.
Together with his 1934 masterpiece L’Atalante, Vigo made his reputation as one of cinema’s transcendent artists. Both films are elegant, unsentimental and effortlessly simple.
The son of a militant radical murdered in prison, Vigo was tubercular from childhood and his life was lived under it’s shadow. His films were unsuccessful, butchered by inept studio bosses, nearly lost and soon after finishing L’Atalante, he died a tragically young 29.
