House of Pleasures (L'Apollonide: Souvenirs de la maison close)

We were in the mood for a movie and this was playing at the Bijou, so we saw it:  House of Pleasures is the title it was playing under here (L'Apollonide: Souvenirs de la maison close is the original title).

Mrs. Sgt. T and I, discussing it on the way home, decided that it was about 60% a movie with serious artistic aims, and 40% the kind of softcore Europorn that an adolescent boy in the '80s would have stayed up late to try to catch on Cinemax. 

The 40% I won't bore you with - we're old enough and mature enough to take that for what it's worth, which isn't quite nothing.  The 60% is worth mentioning:  beautiful sets and art direction, fine acting and writing, and some quite effective formal experimentation.  Reviews all mention the use of late 20th century pop in the soundtrack, but it's much less intrusive here than in, say, a Baz Luhrmann film.  They also all mention the splitscreen photography - sometimes the screen is divided into quadrants - but what they don't mention is that this doesn't feel gimmicky at all, but rather quite effective in an almost documentary way, telescoping a lot of information about how this kind of business is run into a short time.

The Tanuki and his Mrs. can't be quite objective about this film, however, because both of us are specialists in traditional Japanese culture, with a particular interest in Edo pleasure district culture.  And it was astonishing how familiar the world of l'Apollonide felt to the world of the Yoshiwara.  Same kinds of financial arrangements between the girls and their owners, same kind of decorative and architectural strategies employed to make the interior of the brothel feel like a fantasy world, some of the same narrative tropes used to explore the world.  Not all:  the kind of jealousy that drives Sakuran, for instance, isn't really part of this film. 

Anyway, I know nothing at all about turn-of-the-century French brothel culture, so I have no idea if Bonello's film is true to it, or if he's adopting geisha stereotypes (he cleverly works in geisha imagery in one scene, but it's authentic enough to the great days of japonisme that I'm not sure if it means he's drawing a parallel, or just that his characters are).  But it worked.  And the fact that we've spent years working through our issues with this kind of milieu probably explains how easy it was for us to connect with the 60%, whereas many viewers might see only the 40%.

The Who: A Quick One (While He's Away)

So, another observation that was made the other day in that conversation about the Who is that their real heirs, the sector of rock where you can most see their influence, was prog, and since prog was very quickly discredited, there aren't as many musicians out there sticking up for the Who as you might expect.  This one I stand by.

That is, I don't think the Who's formal ambitions, their artistic aspirations, are necessarily the most satisfying thing about them, but I do think that they constitute the Who's most important legacy to 20th century music.  If you take rock seriously as music (rather than as a vehicle for street poetry or as a manifestation of social phenomena), it's because the Who did it first.

And some of their operatic stuff I do find incredibly satisfying.  Quadrophenia has some fatal flaws (maybe I'll write about them another time), but Tommy is everything it's cracked up to be (maybe I'll write about it another time, too).

But my favorites are their first two rock operas, neither of which is long enough to merit the name in retrospect, but each of which was billed as such at the time.  The first was "A Quick One (While He's Away)," and it's the more important of the two.  In fact I think it's one of the Who's most impressive songs of any persuasion, and quite the best integrated of their ambitious works.  At nine minutes it's not a second too long, taking the listener on a musical and lyrical journey in which each stage proceeds naturally but inventively from the last.  It's not just a medley of short bits (which is, be honest, what Tommy feels like much of the time), but a truly through-composed piece.  And it rocks.  And it has great jokes ("cello cello cello cello").  And, in true Who fashion, it's either as cheap and trashy ("we have a remedy," heh heh) or as spiritually deep as you want it to be (the ending must be one of the most grace-filled moments in popular song:  "you are forgiven").

The other is "Rael," which, at less than six minutes, really is too short to merit consideration in this category.  But it does move, if very quickly, through a number of movements, and it does tell a story in musical form.  And it does have that bittersweet ending, with the listener knowing the hero has been bitterly betrayed, with his contracted saviors deserting him, and wondering if it matters, if he needs saving, or not.

What's most fun about it, of course, is that it contains a passage that they'd later recycle and expand as "Underture" on Tommy.  It's probably more effective here, but that might just be because, if you come to "Rael" having familiarized yourself with the later work, you can't help but feel a thrill as that noble bassline wells up, as that guitar shakes its regal mane.

Having noted that, of course we have to mention the other musical bit of Tommy that shows up in those last few months before they made that album, which is in the song "Glow Girl."  The song itself doesn't have anything much to do with Tommy, but then the plane goes down and suddenly, "it's a girl, Mrs. Walker, it's a girl."  It gives me goosebumps every time.

The Who: "Daily Records" and other late masterpieces

So I was talking to some friends yesterday and said something about the Who that I don't really believe.  I said, apropos of a discussion we'd been having about artists who remain active past their prime, that the Who were one band who really should have hung it up after their classic lineup was no longer viable.  I.e., after Keith Moon bit it.

And I do believe that, I guess, but only with one big honking caveat.  Which is that I think their initial post-Moon run (as distinct from their many and endless later reunions, none of which I have any use for) had enough good and, more importantly, interesting music to make an argument that staying together was the right thing to do. 

I'm talking specifically here about the two post-Moon studio albums:  Face Dances and It's Hard.  Which, when taken together with Pete Townshend's two contemporary solo records, Empty Glass and All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, make a conceptual and musical whole that I find just as satisfying as any other period in the 'Oo's history. 

See, what happened was that Pete was hitting middle age right at the moment when Moon died.  The rise of punk and the death of Moon and the inevitable indignities that your body and mind visit upon you when you approach 40 all combined to give him, on the evidence of the lyrics at least, one hell of a righteous midlife crisis.  And he could still write, to paraphrase a lyric from "You Better You Bet," write a razor line - and, as the song says, Daltrey could still sing it, and Entwistle could still play it.  In other words, he still had most of one of the supplest rock bands in the world at his disposal.  So why not stay together, at least long enough to explore the crashing waves of self-doubt that would inevitably attend upon the decision to stay together?

In short I see the decision to stay together, but hedge his bets by releasing his two best (and most Who-ish) solo albums at the same time, as a decision (perhaps not realized at the time) to end the Who with some of the most intensely ironic gestures of their career.  Yes, the man who'd written "I hope I die before I get old" was now writing about getting old, and he appreciated the irony, thank you very much.  Again, I don't have much use for either Pete's or the erstwhile Who's later stuff, but not because they hung on too long:  I just think somehow that Pete lost it in the mid '80s.  But he still had it up through '82.

And so he gives us beautiful, bittersweet bombs like "Daily Records."  The musical setting alone should have shut up any detractors:  it was the Who at their cod-classical best, bomping and chirping in Gilbert and Sullivan drag.  Tight and silly and uplifting and muscly all at once:  classic Who, this is.  And the lyric:  a guy who still feels like he knows the score trying to cope with the fact that the younger generation, his own kids, think he's old-fashioned.  It's an immutable law of the world that once you pass 35, teenagers are going to think you're an old fogey, and this is true even if you're Pete fucking Townshend:  and you may know that they're just snotty teens and don't know their heads from their asses, but you also know (and they know) that it doesn't matter, because they're young, and so they win.  The end.  And so the best you can do is denounce them cleverly, elegantly, but in the end weakly, in song:  "When you are eleven, the whole world's out to lunch."  Brilliant line.  

And he gives us a more somber, introspective take on the same theme (of course part of the brilliant complexity of this last period of Who history is how Pete amps up the already well-established tension between his own lead vocals and Daltrey's, introspection versus extroversion, and stretches it out over whole albums set in dialogue against each other) in "Slit Skirts."  If the speaker in "Daily Records" or "You Better You Bet" was content to assert that he still had the goods, the speaker here is facing up to the dark truth that he doesn't:  "Slit skirts - Jeannie never wears those slit skirts / And I don't ever wear no ripped shirts / Can't pretend that growing older never hurts / Knee pants - Jeannie never wears no knee pants / We have to be so drunk to try a new dance / So afraid of every new romance."

Even the art is great.  Look at the cover of It's Hard.  Now remember that this is the band that built their careers on an album about pinball.  Now catch the look on Pete's face.

Happy New Year.

The Who: Live At Leeds

Everything good you've heard about Live At Leeds is true;  everything bad you've heard is a lie.  It's essential.

Essential, but oddly enough, I think pretty much any version would do.  I haven't sprung for the recent 4-disc Leeds'n'Hull binge, and I probably won't.  I never got the old 2-disc "complete" Leeds, either.  I find that the 1995 expanded 1-disc set is brilliant, but even then, the tracks I always go back to were (mostly) on the original vinyl.

And they're mostly the covers.  "Young Man Blues," which - if hard flexed cord-tight muscle had a sound, it would be it.  It's a perfect example of how the Who could punch you in the face harder than any metal or punk group could.  It's not about volume so much as it is about rhythm and attitude.  (Love the sonic ambiance on this record, too:  you can just feel the cavernous space of the hall, the draft coming in through the doors, the heat of the spotlights.)

And "Shakin' All Over," which proves that, well, maybe it is about volume as much as it is about rhythm and attitude, but only if volume is made not by turning the amps up to 10, but by pounding your instruments as hard as you can.  Like, Entwistle mashes his bass strings so hard that his notes have the percussive power of a piano.  His fingers are hammers. 

And throughout - to continue the muscle idea - the instrumentalists play with the suppleness and unity of a single limb, bones muscle and sinew all working together.  Not mechanically, but biologically - the Who's sound, live, was incredibly human.

Asabuki Mariko: KikoTowa

This is the book that shared the 144th A-Prize with Nishimura Kenta's Kueki ressha:  KikoTowa きことわ by Asabuki Mariko 朝吹真理子.  Why do I do this funny thing with the capitals in the romaji?  Because the book comes complete with its predetermined foreign-language title, in small print on the cover:  Kiko et Towa.  That is, the two main characters' names, Kiko and Towako, have been combined into one cutesy noun:  they are, collectively, KikoTowa.

That's never made explicit in the book, actually, but thematically that's certainly part of it:  Towako especially keeps having dreams or half-dreams in which she sees her hair and Kiko's merging into one, connecting them.  Symbolically the frontier between them is constantly threatening to dissolve, allowing their identities to merge.

So, the book is about two women who were friends as children, twenty-five years before.  Towako grew up and still lives in Hayama, a beach-town south of Tokyo known as a retreat for the wealthy;  Kiko's family owns a summer house there and used to visit every year.  Towako and Kiko were constant companions every summer, and then Kiko's mother died and they stopped visiting Hayama.  Now, 25 years on, Kiko comes back down to oversee the dismantling of the house - they're selling it.  Kiko and Towako are reunited and share their memories of childhood.

Is all that really happens in this book.  It's uneventful, to say the least.  Which is not in itself a damning circumstance:  there's a lot of potential there for poetic reveries on aging, on summer beach-resorts, on girlhood and womanhood.  And Asabuki tries - her language leaves me cold, but I can imagine how many others might find it evocative.

But somehow the whole thing falls flat for me.  Just now, writing what I did about the motif of identity-merging, and the setting, and Hayama (nice place:  I've been there), I felt a glimmer of interest.  Like, I might want to read that book.  But in fact I have read it, and it's... Well, it made me feel like I did when I was reading the last two Ishiguro books I read:  like maybe this whole literature thing just isn't for me.  Like maybe I don't even like books.

I think part of the problem might be that the thing just needed an editor.  It goes on far too long.  At 141 pages in hardback, it's on the long end for an A-Prize story, but more importantly I think that all the length makes problems out of what would have been non-issues, or even strengths, in a shorter work.  Nothing happens:  fine, this is J-lit, we expect that.  But it's easier to deal with nothing happening for 20 or 40 pages than for 140.  Dreamlike time-confusion, carefully constructed wispy poetical atmosphere, interplay between reminiscence and right-now:  all of this is easier to sustain in a short story than a novel.  And if the author is determined to draw this out over a longer work, than it needs (I think) some sort of deeper structure to hold it up - some kind of subtext (I didn't detect much in this book), or a variation in tone, some sort of darkness or tension or something.

Then again, I never got past the first 114 pages of Proust, either.

Suetsugu Yuki: Chihayafuru (2007-present)

Another one that I'm the last in the neighborhood to read.  Mrs. Sgt. T got hooked on this, and before I could get around to reading it, our copies of it started making the rounds of our friends.  I finally got my greasy littles on it a couple of weeks ago.

The title is Chihayafuru ちはやふる, which pretty much defines the concept of untranslatable title.  It's a "pillow-word," one of those lexemes that Japanese poetry has been dragging along as a patrimony since time, literally, immemorial - long enough that scholars have been unable to agree on exactly what they originally meant.  Poets tend to use them more for impact and decoration than sense, although since pillow words tend to be associated (in the manner of the poetic epithets in other traditions) with particular words or classes of objects, they do have certain vague connotations.  "Chihayafuru" (also pronounced "chihayaburu") tends to get used with "god."  In some contexts I tend to translate it as "almighty," for obvious reasons, but that wouldn't work so well here, for a couple of reasons.  First, because its use here is meant to conjure up dim memories (the farther out of high school you are, the dimmer, chances are) of a very, very famous poem in which this is the first line;  and, second, because the main character's name is Chihaya.  Untranslatable.

It's a comic about karuta:  a card-matching game involving the poems of the famous 13th century anthology A Hundred Poets, One Poem Each (Hyakunin isshu).  "Famous" is an understatement:  Japanese kids are expected to memorize this in high school.  The game depends on having it memorized.  You kneel down front of a bunch of cards on which are written the second halves of the poems and somebody reads out the first lines.  You try to be the first person to grab the right second-half card.  And so on.  Most people play it a few times during Japanese classes in school, and maybe at New Year's.  But, as most people probably don't know until they encounter this manga, there's a competitive karuta scene.  That's where this story is set.

It's a little hard to classify. The art (flowers and lens flares everywhere) and the (after a brief prologue) high-school setting, complete with Young Love stories, mark it as a shōjo manga.  The venue where it appears, however, is Be Love, a mag ostensibly aimed at adult women.  And the way it depicts the competitive karuta play lifts extensively and knowingly from sports comics - not by any means exclusively a male genre, to be sure, but enough so that at one point one of the characters makes the meta remark that "some people say this is a boys' comic".

That's a lot of the fun of it.  The main character, Chihaya, is a figure of amusement precisely because here she is, model-pretty (it's a major plot point), with a hobby that most people would probably consider fairly feminine (classical poetry being rather flowery), but she approaches it with all the killer instinct and athleticism of yer typical jock.

And that's pretty much all there is to say about the comic.  It's enjoyable - I've stuck with it through 14 volumes (well, I'm waiting to get my hands on the 14th) so far.  Not particularly deep, but clever and well crafted.  Attractive secondary characters, introduced at almost a fast enough clip to keep the old ones from getting stale.  Well-drawn, dynamic game-play sequences, dragged out to impossible lengths (a single tournament can comprise a whole volume of the manga, and spill over into the next).  A background story arc (a love triangle between childhood karuta buddies) that provides occasional tears amidst the laughter (well, "tears" - I don't think the love triangle is working more than gesturally).

Fun.

The amazing Charlatans

If you loiter in the perceptive doorways of San Francisco psychedelic rock for any length of time you'll run across mention of the Charlatans - like a half-torn away scrap of a concert poster on an alley wall, they hover there, so faint and faded that it takes real effort to make them out, but so eye-catching that you can't quite look away.

Well I'm here to tell you, my friends, that the Charlatans are eminently worth checking out.  Yes it's true that if you go by what's available on silver disc or empty-three they're still more ghost than flesh and blood, more rumor than documented fackshual hiss-tow-ree, but what a ghost! and what a rumor!

I won't run down their story here.  It can be read up on elsewhere on the web, as written down by those more knowledgeable than I.  I'm just going to talk about the music.

There are only two Charlatans discs that you can get.  Only two that exist.  The first is called The Amazing Charlatans:  it's an archival release from 1996 that picks up, evidently complete, the various demo and single sessions that the Charlatans did between their founding and their one-and-only album.  These sessions consist of:  an August 1965 demo session for Autumn Records;  aborted sessions for an album for Kama Sutra Records in early 1966 (only a lone single was ever released);  a demo session at Golden State Recorders in July 1967;  and an early 1968 demo session at Pacific High Recorders.

This disc documents the classic line-up of the Charlatans:  George Hunter, Mike Wilhelm, Mike Ferguson, Dan Hicks, and Richard Olsen.  Actually that's what the disc claims, but in fact the 1968 demo already sees Ferguson replaced on piano by Patrick Gogerty and Hicks replaced in the drum seat (he moved to guitar) by Terry Wilson, so in fact the disc documents (a) the classic lineup and (b) an underdocumented transitional lineup on the way to (c) the lineup that made the Charlatans' one-and-only album.

That album constitutes the other disc, the other piece of music you can get your hands on, under the Charlatans name.  They finally made their debut album, their vinyl bow, in 1969 with an eponymous album that documents lineup (c), which was Wilhelm, Olsen, Wilson, and Darrell DeVore.  Not the classic lineup, in fact only 50% the classic lineup, and this fact among others has led to the record's dismissal as a Pale Shadow of the Charlatans That Were, a ghost, a rumor, et cetera.

And yes, friends, it is true that the Charlatans as documented on the archival disc are a much more iron-clad and diesel-fueled motive force than the quartet that tried to bring that force to bear in 1969.  Which is to say that the Amazing disc is, taken in toto, almost enough to make you believe that the ghost is flesh and blood, that the rumor is proved - and in places on this disc, the music's corporeality is beyond dispute.

The Charlatans' finest moment comes from the 1967 demo sessions:  a six and a half minute long take on the traditional "Alabama Bound."  If you do nothing else today, listen to this track.  Loud.  It is a perfect six and a half minutes of music.  Take it apart and you'll find that each component is a microcosm of perfection unto itself.  Dan Hicks's drum part, as powerfully driving and elegantly controlled as the snap of the reins on a team of horses pulling a stagecoach across the desert.  Mike Ferguson's piano part, conjuring images of cool dark saloon melancholy while billows of dust pass by in the sunstruck street.  Richard Olsen's bass, commanding, thundering, and yet unobtrusive, standing glowering in the alley framing everything with its gaze but never filling the emptiness.  The same can be said for the vocal harmonies:  they're ghostly,  they're - roughhewn doesn't begin to do them justice - they're the voices of a parcel of ranch-hands, half-drunk, looking for trouble, but lacking a leader, and this very leaderlessness, this centerlessness, is, again, the key to the track:  the track is full of music, but also of a vast, echoing emptiness, as wide open as the West itself.  And clattering around in this emptiness you have Mike Wilhelm's guitar, alternating between Byrdsy jangle and real C&W leather-and-brass twang, and the coup de grace, George Hunter's psychedelic autoharp.  It's like the little Appalachian accent that reminds you what the cowboy did before he came West.

Put it all together and you have a macrocosm of perfection for us all:  a record more visual than cinema, more aromatic than smellovision, and incidentally a perfect little essay on what it was about the Charlatans that inspired the San Francisco groups, and what it was about the San Francisco groups that tantalized the rest of the hip world.  Viz., a vision that encompassed frontiers both geographical and pyschological, musical and lyrical, contemporaneous and archaic, stylistic and substantive and transsubstantiational, a sound that at its least evoked and at its best realized that vision, and oh yeah, you can dance to it too.  If you're not bopping along to that ending vamp, if you're not feeling the pound of the hoofbeats and the rattle of the stage, the rush of the audience and the swing of delight (to cop a phrase), well, you probably haven't read this far.

They never equaled this record.  The Kama Sutra sessions contain a short early take of "Alabama Bound" that hints at where they'd later take it, and the 1969 album contains a nearly note-for-note remake of the 1967 version that nevertheless manages to sink the ship.

But there are quite a few tracks scattered between the two discs that are almost as good as that, and that, my friends, is not nothing.  To start at the end, the 1969 album has a lengthy take on "Wabash Cannonball" that's quite worthwhile, a shotgun wedding of Chuck Berry and Maybelle Carter.  That guitar is played by Mike Wilhelm, and the guitar isn't even as impressive as his voice, which is as raw and brawny and drawling and sleepy-eyed a piece of rawhide as punk ever chewed on before Tony Kinman came along.

Wilhelm also sang what should have been, but wasn't, the band's debut single in 1966, Buffy St. Marie's "Codine."  You're beginning to get the picture now, I think:  this band could slug it out with the best of 'em.  It's just a crime that they never quite made it into the ring.

A couple more arguments.  I wish I could link you to one of guest vocalist Lynne Hughes's two outings with the band, "Devil Got My Man" and "Sidetrack."  They were recorded during the Kama Sutra sessions and feature the band playing very convincing blues behind a female belter even more stone-faced than Signe and almost as powerfully sexual as Janis.  What ever happened to her?

And of course we have to mention Dan Hicks's stuff.  He'd go on to greater fame as, well, Dan Hicks, but he was a pretty good Charlatan, too.  Check out "I Got Mine."  Heh.