'Low' & 'Station To Station'

It's interesting listening to the 1,001 records I must listen to before I die and going through an artist's almost entire catalog, or at least a large portion of the music that they released.

This thrill is amplified if A) I don't know the artist very well or B) if he/she/it had various phases throughout a long career.

David Bowie fits this mold perfectly as never having the opportunity (or desire) to delve into his intensely varied and long catalog. I think Low and Station to Station are really neat records, maybe two of my favorite from Bowie's catalog, and I think they come at an interesting time in Bowie's career.

Station to Station was released in 1976 long after his Ziggy Stardust days and right after he released Young Americans, a soul record, which got him an invitation to perform on Soul Train, which sort of makes my eyes roll back in my head and causes seizures in my body.

Essentially, the 1980s started for Bowie as he got into Kraut rock along with synthesizers and cocaine. Whatever state his drug use was before, it skyrocketed during this time as he overdosed a number of times and come off in public as scatterbrained and ... well, a guy high on cocaine.

Station to Station also revealed his newest persona, the "Thin White Duke." Dressed in a dapper fashion, the Duke seems like an ordinary guy considering Bowie's pervious incarnations. Instead, he was a sort of of a representation of Nazism. The touring supporting the album put Bowie in hot water due to some hot opinions about Fascism, getting caught with Nazi paraphernalia and a photo which shows Bowie allegededly giving the Nazi salute.

Naturally, he moves to Switzerland and does an insane amount of drugs and does a lot of art. The next year he decides to clean things up and move to West Berlin. This sparked Bowie's Berlin Trilogy including the first album Low, another synth-inspired record, mostly known for its lyrical minimalism. Cited early on as a sales flop, it wound up selling a ton of records, even more than Station to Station.

You can't say that David Bowie didn't live life to its fullest.

'The Saragossa Manuscript'

I don't have a lot to say about this movie outside of the fact that it's extremely bizarre and and extremely long.

Running 182 minutes for a plot that wanders and skips to and fro is not an easy passage of time. It takes work and a certain dedication.

It entails a soldier during the Napoleonic Wars finding a book, the Saragossa Manuscript, that details the doings of his grandfather, also a soldier. While the film works as a sort of flashback to his grandfather's time, it also includes our hero interacting with a series of eccentric and odd characters from a sort of shaman to two Moorish princesses, who claim to be cousins and who also seduce him.

Or so we think. Whilst it is intimated that these people and scenes are real, the soldier regularly winds up waking up beneath some gallows.

I thought the movie would end with everyone realizing that the soldier is indeed dead, which might be the "truth" or the movie reality. And the people he encounters during the present are just ghosts or perhaps those helping the soul reach peace.

'Zabriskie Point'

An orgy. In the desert. With college girls.

Why isn't this film in college curriculum? In museums? Whole websites should be dedicated to that five-minute scene!

Orgy!!!!

'Duck Rock'

Malcolm McLaren is a pretty interesting guy even if his album seems pretty spare to me. Duck Rock supposedly exposed the British to hip-hop.

Duck Rock does have elements of hip-hop, but if it was really the catalyst for the genre breaking overseas, than so be it. It's nothing special: A veritable mish-mash of genres and world music set to a beat. It has no identity and that's it's major issue.

McLaren was an art school drop-out eventually becoming a bit of a tastemaker in London in the late-1970s when he managed the preeminent punk band, The Sex Pistols and most notably establishing the style aesthetic for the New York Dolls (who, if nothing else, are stylish) and the Pistols themselves. He was responsible for procuring their lead man, Johnny Rotten, and ushering in the band's wide-reaching influence and its look.

In his late 30s, I guess he got a wild hair and decided to do Duck Rock. Through the years, until he died in 2010, he was seemingly active doing quite a bit especially riding the coattails of Duck Rock and doing hip-hop albums and comps.

'Let's Get Killed'

Some time in the mid- to late-1980s, a 17-year-old Irish kid named David Holmes went to New York from his native Belfast.

He roamed around the city, the Bronx and Central Park and recorded the sounds of the Big Apple. He also recorded conversations he had with strangers, including the underbelly of 1980s New York City like pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers.

At one point, he and his companions were chased in the South Bronx as others attempted to steal his recording equipment. This incident and the resulting recordings inspired his breakthrough record, Let's Get Killed.

Sprinkled through the techno, trip hop and drum 'n' bass are the samples taken from the city and those conversations.

'Melody A.M.'

Röyksopp's origins go back to the early 1990s when Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland were 12- and 13-year-old kids interested in electronic music in a burgeoning Norwegian music scene.
 
Yet, you can point to one moment that turned their lives and musical careers on their ears: That’s when Geico, an American insurance company, used “Remind me” from Röyksopp's debut album, Melody A.M., for a commercial featuring a caveman on a moving sidewalk at an airport.
 
Is it better to burn out, fade away or get paid?

'Tom Tom Club'

Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz were bassist and drummer, respectively, of The Talking Heads and were married in 1977.

A few years after, they undertook a side project called the Tom Tom Club, named for the Jamaican club that they used for practice space. Frantz and Weymouth are the only constant members of the band as it serves as a swinging door of musicians and producers.

Weymouth, teamed with famed guitarist and producer Adrian Belew and two of her sisters, Laura and Lani, to produce one of the best debut records from any band, this eponymous album, and one of the greatest dance records ever. It proved to be my summer record ... 21 years after it was released.

'An Artist Of The Floating World'

Kaz Ishiguro's second novel is set after World War II in Japan when Ono begins to reflect on his life as an aging father and grandfather.

There's a series of mixed feelings on how he lived his life although it was always his to live. During World War II, Ono broke away from his master and got into right-wing politics (does right-wing politics mean the same thing in every culture?) and did propaganda posters in addition to an informant.

Reading Reinaldo Arenas' memoir Before Night Falls and talks about all the writers and good friends that became traitors to freedom and informants for Fidel Castro's communist government in Cuba.

By my count, there's two reasons why you'd become an informant: You're looking to spare your life or the life of a loved one or you're an asshole, who generally hates freedom.

No matter what you may feel -- whether one side is right or the other is horribly wrong -- the idea of preventing one or the other to have an opinion is a rejection of freedom, a concept many people agree is a good thing.

'The Tin Drum'

Director Volker Schlöndorff looks like Bryan Cranston's Walter White from Breaking Bad.

Fun story: In 1997, a court in Oklahoma ruled that The Tin Drum was child pornography.

Law enforcement went to every store and confiscated every copy. They even intimidated movie rental stories to give up the addresses of those who had rented the film so they could go to the house and confiscate those copies.

Unfortunately, the judge had seen scenes (probably the young boy eating the sherbet from the girl's navel among other things) out of context. Lawsuits ensued and it was eventually overturned and all copies were returned. And, as it turns out, the confiscations were ruled unconstitutional. All this over a film about facsim and Nazis.

America.

'Black Sunday'

Black Sunday refers to a number of things: The death of NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt, the day the Denver International Airport Automated Guideway Transit System failed, the opening of Disneyland, the day the Colony Shale Oil Project was dissolved, the 1984 Super Bowl, a pair of fires in Australia and a day at Bondi Beach in Australia when a giant wave hit and killed five bathers.

 

In this instance, however, we refer to the 1960 Italian horror film, which was also titled Revenge of the Vampire and The Mask of Satan depending on which country you saw it in.

For a long time, it was heavily censored or banned altogether for its graphic blood and violence. Just shows how numb I am to it all because I just thought I was watching a pretty ordinary horror film of the time.

Except this movie is way creeper and an awesome addition to the “vampire in film” narrative. 

The film is apparently based on Nic Gogol’s story Viy as is the Russian film Vij so it makes me want to read it because neither movie is very much like the other.