Month: June 2022

Posted on

FOR LOVE OF IMABELLE (aka A RAGE IN HARLEM) by Chester Himes

Chester Himes
For Love of Imabelle
1957 (1971 reprint, Dell Publishing Co.)

I’m convinced that most crime fiction stories could be re-written as comedies with little to no change to the plot. Both forms find their meat in irony, bad judgement, mismatched lovers, human weakness, and people who go to extremes to get out of trouble. Perhaps most obvious though is that both crime and comedy often involve an unholy mix of two types of characters: idiots and villains.

Put an idiot and a villain together and a powder keg can result. Maybe the villain manipulates the idiot. Maybe the idiot takes on the villain despite being outclassed in craftiness. Maybe the villain IS an idiot, but he’s still smarter than this other lowlife. What happens next might be funny. Or deadly. Or both.

That’s my theory, at least. Don’t test me too hard on it. I haven’t been thinking on it for twenty years. In fact, I didn’t think about it much at all until I read this brilliant, sleazy, violent, and often laugh-out-loud pulp novel from Chester Himes. It’s all about dangerous men, one shady woman, a city full of predators, and one hopeless fool at the center of it all.

Continue reading “FOR LOVE OF IMABELLE (aka A RAGE IN HARLEM) by Chester Himes”

Posted on

Robert Pollard-Mania! #87: EAT

Robert Pollard
Eat
2003, Rockathon Records

I’m curious to know when Robert Pollard figured out that he was a serious collage artist. If you’ve looked at nearly any record he’s ever put out, you’ve seen his work (the TVT albums are among the few exceptions) and you’ve seen it evolve.

The earliest Guided by Voices LPs have collage elements. Found clippings are a part of albums such as Devil Between My Toes and Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia, but the compositions are primitive and the images tend to come off as truly random. They look like old punk rock show flyers. That’s a part of their charm, but as GBV got more famous, Pollard stepped up his art game.

By Bee Thousand he was playing with empty space, ultra-bright colors, and asymmetry. Throw in the lyric sheet on which each song is attached to a simple and memorable piece of imagery and the result is iconic and it doesn’t age almost thirty years later. If the rough, lo-fi music bothers someone, the artwork alone might persuade them to give it another chance. It both offsets and deepens the mystery.

Nine years later in 2003, Pollard launched an art magazine dedicated solely to his own work. He called it Eat and, as of this writing, there are seventeen issues of it, with more to come.

Collage art dominates most of them. Lots of poetry shows up in the early volumes. The presentation would get fancier over time (the latest issues of Eat are basically softcover books; they’re heavy with a thick spine). A few later installments come packaged with a 7″ record. Then there’s the oddball issue that’s all short, wry prose pieces by Pollard, telling stories from his past.

Eat is a full-color, psychedelic happening. It’s a place for the REAL deep-diggers. And it starts here.

Continue reading “Robert Pollard-Mania! #87: EAT”

Posted on

Frank Black-O-Rama! #17: (PIXIES) COMPLETE ‘B’ SIDES

Pixies
Complete ‘B’ Sides
2001, 4AD

I have a special respect for bands who put out good B-sides.

In fact, some days (every other Tuesday and the odd Sunday) I’d even say that the mark of a great band is the coolness of their throwaway tracks. The stuff that didn’t make the album. The stuff that they have laying around. The stuff that they cough up when the record company needs them to simply fill up some space.

B-sides are one of those fascinating aberrations of the old music industry. Ever since records started being pressed and sold, they’ve had two sides and even if one side was a surefire hit, you had to put something, anything, on the other side or you looked like an asshole. B-sides were space-fillers, but they were also sometimes a way to “share the wealth”.

For example, let’s say it’s 1961 and a group records a great song that the radio is sure to love. What about the B-side? Well, in many cases, the producer would hack out a goofy instrumental that nobody would ever care about (sometimes not even involving the A-side’s performers). The result was that if the A-side became a hit and sold a bajillion copies, the credited writer of the B-side benefited from that, too. in terms of royalties. They got a free ride into some big money. (See the likes of Phil Spector and Kazenetz-Katz, who were particularly brazen about it.)

That’s the seedy side of it all, but there are other sides. Like any good record, there’s always another side.

Continue reading “Frank Black-O-Rama! #17: (PIXIES) COMPLETE ‘B’ SIDES”

Posted on

Robert Pollard-Mania! #86: HARDCORE UFOS: REVELATIONS, EPIPHANIES AND FAST FOOD IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE

Guided by Voices
Hardcore UFOs: Revelations, Epiphanies and Fast Food in the Western Hemisphere
2003, Matador Records

Around 2001, a rumor blew in the wind that a new Guided by Voices box set was in the works from John Fahey’s Revenant Records. To my memory, the plan was to collect the elusive and out-of-print mid-90s 7″ EPs in one place (finally!) with some mysterious extras. Revenant had just made a big splash with a lavish 5-CD Captain Beefheart rarities set, Grow Fins, along with a vibrant catalog of lovingly reissued old blues, folk, and jazz. The prospect of them working with GBV and maybe presenting them in the context of weird Americana was exciting.

That box set never happened, but another box did happen on Matador Records a few years later. Were the Revenant rumors true? I don’t know, but I do wonder if Hardcore UFOs ascended from its ashes.

It’s a six-ring circus celebration of Guided by Voices, partly from a Matador perspective. It’s NOT a collection of the old EPs (that were released by a variety of labels, which makes gathering them in one place complicated legally), but it does neatly collect many non-album moments and a lot more.

In the big picture though, the five CDs, one DVD, and great liner notes of Hardcore UFOs take their own unique shot at telling one of the oddest success stories in American indie rock.

Continue reading “Robert Pollard-Mania! #86: HARDCORE UFOS: REVELATIONS, EPIPHANIES AND FAST FOOD IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE”