Van Dyke Parks – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 159

El Banquete Magnético (2011) by Cristina Francov.

• Did Vertigo Introduce Computer Graphics to Cinema? asks Tom McCormack. He means Saul Bass’s title sequence which mostly uses still harmonographs but also features some animated moments by John Whitney.

• Temple of the Vanities by Thomas Jorion. “Pictured here are political monuments and munitions depots, hulking concrete forms that marked the edges of empires.” Related: Paintings by Minoru Nomata.

• Musical reminiscences: Matt Domino on the Small Faces’ psychedelic magnum opus Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake, and Richard Metzger on the sombre splendours of Tuxedomoon.

Harrison is best known as one of the restless fathers of modern SF, but to my mind he is among the most brilliant novelists writing today, with regard to whom the question of genre is an irrelevance. To read his work is to encounter fiction doing what fiction must: carrying out the kinds of thinking and expression that would be possible in no other form. I pass through his novels feeling a mixture of wonder, calmness and disturbance; I end them brain-jarred and unsettled. Metaphysical echoes persist for days afterwards. It feels as if I have had a strabismus induced, causing illusions that slowly resolve into insights.

Robert Macfarlane on M. John Harrison and the reissue of Climbers.

• Divine Machinery: An Interview with Paul Jebanasam. Arvo Pärt, Cormac McCarthy and Algernon Blackwood are folded into his new album, Rites.

• Autostraddle shows the evolution of twelve queer book cover designs. As is often the case in cover design, latest isn’t always best.

• “My Definition Of Hell? It’s Other People, At The Cinema!” Anne Billson on the very thing that finished me as a cinema-goer.

• “London in the 1830s was a truly weird and terrifying place.” Spring-Heeled Jack, The Terror of London.

• At Scientific American: The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens.

• Van Dyke Parks: “I was victimised by Brian Wilson’s buffoonery.”

• Colour film of London in 1927.

• Abandonedography

• Social Dead Zone

• Tuxedomoon: Tritone (Musica Diablo) (1980) | Desire (1981) | Incubus (Blue Suit) (1981)

Ry Cooder & The Moula Banda Rhythm Aces: Let’s Have A Ball

Someone told me once they didn’t like Ry Cooder, a sentiment I’d place in the same category as saying you don’t like, say, chocolate: as an attitude it’s within the bounds of possibility but it requires a considerable effort of sympathetic imagination to appreciate. Let’s Have A Ball is a 90-minute Ry Cooder concert film by the great documentary filmmaker Les Blank, better known for Burden of Dreams (1982), his chronicle of the trials of Werner Herzog and company during the making of Fitzcarraldo. Burden of Dreams is that rare thing among “making of” films, a documentary that’s as fascinating as the film whose production it depicts.

Let’s Have A Ball catches Ry Cooder and his band playing at the Catalyst in Santa Cruz, California, on March 25th, 1987 during their Get Rhythm tour. I’d seen this when it was broadcast on Channel 4 in 1988 but don’t have it on tape so thanks go to the Metafilter people for drawing attention to the entire concert at YouTube. The film was screened in Europe and elsewhere but not in the US, and for now remains unavailable in any official capacity for unspecified reasons; Les Blank’s site says Cooder doesn’t want it released. This is surprising since it’s a fantastic concert film, the sound quality and performances are easily as good as anything on his live albums. In addition to great renditions of Cooder’s back catalogue you get to see several of his regular collaborators in action, not least Van Dyke Parks playing some typically idiosyncratic piano. The high spot is a 16-minute version of Down In Hollywood where everyone, singers included, gets to show off their solo prowess.

The band:
Ry Cooder: guitar, vocals
Jim Keltner: drums
Van Dyke Parks: keyboards
Jorge Calderon: bass
Flaco Jiménez: accordion
Miguel Cruiz: percussion
Steve Douglas: sax
George Bohannon: trombone
Singers: Bobby King, tenor; Terry Evans, baritone; Arnold McCuller, tenor; Willie Green Jr, bass

The songs:
Let’s Have A Ball
Jesus On The Mainline
How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live?
Jesus Hits Like The Atom Bomb
Down In Mississippi
Maria Elena
Just A Little Bit
The Very Thing That Makes You Rich (Makes Me Poor)
Crazy About An Automobile
Chain Gang
Down In Hollywood
Good Night Irene

Previously on { feuilleton }
• My Name Is Buddy by Ry Cooder

Weekend links 113

Wunderkammer (2011) by Emma Leonard.

As someone who was eight years old at the time of the Apollo moon landing, I remember calculating that I would be thirty-nine in the magic year 2000 and wondering what the world would be like. Did I expect I would be living in such a world of wonders? Of course. Everyone did. Do I feel cheated now? It seemed unlikely that I’d live to see all the things I was reading about in science fiction, but it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t see any of them.

A quote from Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit, an essay by David Graeber. Related: Another World: David Graeber interviewed by Michelle Kuo at Artforum.

• Constellation, a series of portraits by Kumi Yamashita: “This body of work consists of three simple materials that, when combined, produce the portraits: a wooden panel painted a solid white, thousands of small galvanized nails, and a single, unbroken, common sewing thread.”

• Nicole Rudick at The Paris Review on the history of psychedelic art. Related: The psychedelic art and design of Keiichi Tanaami. Also Manifesting the Mind: Footprints of the Shaman, a two-hour documentary about psychedelic drugs.

• Already mentioned here, The Lost Tapes, a 3-CD collection of previously unreleased recording by the mighty Can, is out on Monday. There’s a preview of ten of the tracks here.

• “I can’t think of anybody who would have a good word to say for centipedes…” Duncan Fallowell (a Can associate for many years) interviewed William Burroughs in 1982.

• Herb Lubalin: American Graphic Designer and the Herb Lubalin Study Center’s Flickr sets.

• Strange Flowers goes to the movies with everyone’s favourite Bavarian king, Ludwig II.

• The Sphinx’s Riddle: The Art of Leonor Fini at the Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco.

• More Teutonica: A Spacemusic Primer by Dave Maier.

• Van Dyke Parks: return of a musical maverick.

• Forty Posters for Forty Years at Pentagram.

• Donovan’s Colours (1968) by Van Dyke Parks | Sailin’ Shoes (1972) by Van Dyke Parks | Clang Of The Yankee Reaper (1975) by Van Dyke Parks.

My Name Is Buddy by Ry Cooder

Ry Cooder rules. New album out today sees Ry accompanied by Mike & Pete Seeger, Roland White, Van Dyke Parks, Paddy Moloney, Flaco Jiménez, Stefon Harris, Joachim Cooder and Jon Hassell. Cover drawing and interior illustrations by Vincent Valdez.

On My Name Is Buddy, Ry Cooder revisits, in a new set of original material, the sound and feeling of the “dust bowl songs” he first explored more than three decades ago on such groundbreaking albums as his self-titled 1970 debut and 1971’s Into The Purple Valley. In fact, he’s joined by old friends like pianist Van Dyke Parks and drummer Jim Keltner who were with him at the start of his extraordinary, ultimately globe-spanning musical odyssey, which has yielded him six Grammy Awards to date, several more nominations, and perennial acclaim. My Name Is Buddy is also a journey, a phantasmagorical rendering in music, words and pictures of the travels of three unlikely cohorts—Buddy Red Cat, Lefty Mouse and Reverend Tom Toad—as they meander through the west “in the days of labor, big bosses, farm failures, strikes, company cops, sundown towns, hobos and trains…the America of yesteryear.” For this allegorical tale, Cooder marshals all his remarkable skills as a producer, arranger, songwriter, soundtrack composer and musicologist. (The Christian Science Monitor recently dubbed him “a modern-day Alan Lomax.”) My Name Is Buddy recalls Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory—that is, if it had been enacted by the articulate animal characters of Walt Kelly’s classic comic Pogo. Cooder conjures up the dark shadows of an earlier time to wryly comment on the political and social issues of the present. As back-story to his songs, Cooder has written short stories for each one and they’re accompanied by evocative illustrations from noted San Antonio-based painter and muralist Vincent Valdez, all of which are included in a specially designed package.