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One of the few Belgian bands playing at an international level (although as an aside I’d say there are more than we have international writers) is Arsenal, a duo of producers consisting of Hendrik Willemyns and John Roan. Their last album Lotuk has been really great.
Hendrik Willemyns apparently also is an avid reader and has just turned out Paper trails, a series of six documentaries on classic books, the exotic places figuring as their backdrops, and the places where they were written. ‘Paper trails’ is of course an accounting term, but here refers not only to these places leaving traces in books, but equally to books tracing tracks in people’s lives. We saw the first installment last night on the greatest television channel on the planet, Canvas, Belgian national television channel 2 if you will – Tender is the Night by Scott Fitzgerald.
The other five installments (still to come) are:
George Orwell – Burmese days
Haruki Murakami – Norwegian Wood
Roberto Bolaño – The Savage Detectives
Stanislaw Lem – Solaris
Chinua Achebe – Things Fall Apart
(If it’s a measure for my own reading: I have done three out of six…)
Now the selection is very good, and so was yesterday’s first installment, beautiful imagery, well-researched, and with enough space left for the imagination of the viewers to fill in.
Grant Hart made a cameo too (walking the pavement in front of Fitzgerald’s birthplace), the former drummer of Hüsker Dü (talk about a great band), naturally since he was born in St.-Paul, Minnesota (just like Fitzgerald), and since he sang on Lotuk (and thus had already acquainted Willemyns before).
Many years ago my nights were tender too, my ear glued to Radio Campus (a radio station located just across the Belgian-French border and hosted by Université de Lille Nord de France), to hear for the first time the new songs from Hüsker Dü’s then new album, New Day Rising.
2010/42
Paul Bowles: Een man moet niet te veel moslim zijn (202p.)
By Paul Bowles (the great American existentialist) I have read The Sheltering Sky, The Spider’s House, and Let It Come Down, three equally brilliant novels out of which I couldn’t pick a winner. I’m only missing Up Above the World as Bowles wrote four novels in total.
Besides novels, Bowles wrote short stories, poetry, letters, travelogues, autobiographies, and translated (specifically noteworthy are his translations of stories from the oral tradition of native Moroccan storytellers – Paul Bowles lived 53 of his 88 years in Tangier, Morocco). Bowles also composed music, chamber music, stage music, an opera (Yerma), and was a pioneer in the field of North African ethnomusicology with his field recordings of traditional Moroccan music for the US Library of Congress. In short, a life well led.
Een man moet niet te veel moslim zijn was originally published as Their Heads are Green and Their Hands are Blue, and is a travelogue mainly but not exclusively consisting of Bowles’ travels in Morocco, searching for recordable folk music. Een man moet niet te veel moslim zijn isn’t of the same order as his novels, but any Bowles can be picked up at random for a great read. One of my favorite writers.
2010/40
Anthony Kiedis: Scar Tissue (465p.)
I did one on Kurt Cobain, and one on Jeff Buckley, and I should say rock biographies are a blast to read. I have always liked the Peppers, even though I prefer John Frusciante’s solo albums.
Out of the 465 pages, about 200 deal with the ascent of RHCP, 200 deal with Anthony’s recurring drug addiction, and another 65 deal with his many dalliances with the ladies. I read it in a little over two days, which I guess says it all – a page-turner.
We were in Belgium when Tony showed up with a fat, sweaty, boisterous Belgian fellow who bounded through my door speaking Flemish. He was an osteopath. I was thinking, “Jeez, yet another quack who’s not gonna be able to do anything.” He examined me, had me stand and walk around, and then told me to get on the bed. This big bowling ball of a fellow went to work on me. He lifted my leg and put all his weight on it, and POP!, my whole back snapped into place in one fell swoop. It was like going from being a broken toy to being a brand-new one. It turned out I had dislocated my sacrum.
With Moon the Loon on drums, the prodigy John Entwistle on bass, and the genius Pete Townshend on guitar (Daltrey sang), The Who were (and to a lesser extent are) one of the greatest bands in the history of rock ‘n’ roll, rarely matched in pound for pound musicianship, and with their mod rock they paved the way for both hard rock and punk rock. Of The Who, Eddie Vedder once said: “The one thing that disgusts me about The Who is the way they smashed through every door in the uncharted hallway of rock ‘n’ roll without leaving much more than some debris for the rest of us to lay claim to.”
Maybe the sixties ended in 67, on the 18th of June to be precise, when The Who performed at the Monterey Pop festival, sharing the bill with luminary bands of the day like The Mamas & the Papas, Scott McKenzie, and The Grateful Dead, and giving the hippies a run for their money. Nothing was ever going to be the same again. The Tet Offensive began half a year later. Pictures speak louder than words.
2010/36
Nelson Algren: A Walk on the Wild Side (346p. in a mint first American print)
I’m running a bit of a Lou Reed theme lately. Reed was once approached to distill a musical out of Nelson Algren’s A Walk on the Wild Side, the project got canned, but he still got a song out of it all right.
Fuck, how much fun reading can be, and the bewilderment at discovering yet another author, a special one at that, off the chart even in a space so huge as is the space of the language English.
There’s three parts in the book. In the first part, Dove Linkhorn (the protagonist) rides the Santa Fe railway across Texas (as a hobo), in the second he spends his time in a New Orleans brothel, in the third in a New Orleans jail (all under Hoover in the 30s). The pimps and the whores, the hoodlums and the downtrodden – the world of Nelson Algren.
Advanced English reading, smack dab right in the middle of America’s South.
Awesome.
One of my favorite album covers is the one below, by the Cosmic Psychos, for their Go the Hack album. I took an instant liking to it many years ago, when I first saw it lying around in Ieper’s infamous Vort’n Vis café (Belgium), because it is the perfect expression of their music, straightforward and honest workman’s pub rock. The Cosmic Psychos have been called the Australian Ramones. I still listen to them occasionally.
The first song of the album – turn up the volume.
2010/35
Hubert Selby Jr.: Last Exit to Brooklyn (304p. in the first American edition, fifth print)
The Smiths (the best band of the 80s?) named their classic 1986 album The Queen is Dead after a short story by Hubert Selby Jr., which first appeared in a few literary magazines, and then became the second chapter in Selby Jr.’s debut novel Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964). Last Exit to Brooklyn is Lou Reed’s favorite book and that’s how I found out about it, in a rockumentary on the making of Transformer. Another champion (and musician) of Selby Jr.’s craft has been Henry Rollins (Black Flag).
Hubert Selby Jr. wrote in a language of the street, forsaking all convention (for instance using slashes instead of apostrophes because it allowed him to type faster), and in Last Exit to Brooklyn offers an uncompromising glimpse into Brooklyn’s lower class in the 50s, brusquely painting scenes of domestic violence, drug use, and transvestitism, the most notorious scene being the gang rape (after a night of heavy drinking) of the young prostitute Tralala.
An American cult classic.
…they continued to fuck her as she lay unconscious on the seat in the lot and soon they tired of the dead piece and the daisychain brokeup and they went back to Willies the Greeks and the base and the kids who were watching and waiting to take turn took out their disappointment on Tralala and tore her clothes to small scraps put out a few cigarettes on her nipples pissed on her jerkedoff on her jammed a broomstick up her snatch then bored they left her lying amongst the broken bottles rusty cans and rubble of the lot and Jack and Fred and Ruthy and Annie stumbled into a cab still laughing and they leaned toward the window as they passed the lot and got a good look at Tralala lying naked covered with blood urine and semen and a small blot forming on the seat between her legs as blood seeped from her crotch and…
After seeing Bono’s flabby ass on television (clad in leather), I said to myself, “why not doing something really cool?”, and booked the lady and me two tickets for Midlake, on the 20th of November in Liège (Belgium). That great band from Texas.
We rode out, three svelte riders, cherry-picking the area’s best singletrack bits, and at the end of the ride coming on to a bluff, a promontory overlooking the broad swale where is held every year the Dranouter folkfestival, which we visited later in the day, and which turned out to be a ghastly concoction of rampant commercialism shoulder to shoulder with various alternative practices, and where most importantly good music was hard to come by, lost amidst the rubble of a politically correct amusement park.
I had seen The Tindersticks already more than 15 years ago in the magnificent setting that is Ieper’s Saint-Martin’s cathedral, accompanied by a group of 20 female violinists, when they were at the peak of their career. dEUS was OK, including the affectations of Tom Barman.
I guess I’ll stick to smaller venues going forward. If there’s one band I like to see for the moment, it’d be Midlake, whose The Courage of Others has been my favorite album for a while now, all thrillers and no fillers, and exuding a consistent atmosphere, that of fall, fall in the Great Smoky Mountains maybe, mist swirling among the treetops, mist taking hold of the hearts of men.
One day I went out with the ARVN on an operation in the rice paddies above Vinh Long, forty terrified Vietnamese troops and five Americans, all packed into three Hueys that dropped us up to our hips in paddy muck. I had never been in a rice paddy before. We spread out and moved toward the marshy swale that led to the jungle. We were still twenty feet from the first cover, a low paddy wall, when we took fire from the treeline. It was probably the working half of a crossfire that had somehow gone wrong. It caught one of the ARVN in the head, and he dropped back into the water and disappeared. We made it to the wall with two casualties. There was no way of stopping their fire, no room to send in a flanking party, so gunships were called and we crouched behind the wall and waited. There was a lot of fire coming from the trees, but we were all right as long as we kept down. And I was thinking, Oh man, so this is a rice paddy, yes, wow! when I suddenly heard an electric guitar shooting right up in my ear and a mean, rapturous black voice singing, coaxing, “Now c’mon baby, stop actin’ so crazy,” and when I got it all together I turned to see a grinning black corporal hunched over a cassette recorder. “Might’s well,” he said. “We ain’ goin’ nowhere till them gunships come.” That’s the story of the first time I ever heard Jimi Hendrix…
(Michael Herr in Dispatches)
