Collections: Chuck Klosterman IV

Featuring the articles:  Bending Spoons with Britney Spears, Mysterious Days, Crazy Things Seem Normal, Normal Things Seem Crazy, Viva Morrissey!, The Amazing McNugget Diet/McDiculous, The Karl Marx of the Hardwood, That ‘70s Cruise, In the Beginning, There Was Zoso/Not a Whole Lotta Love, Band on the Couch, Garage Days Unvisited, Something Wicked This Way Comes, No More Knives, Ghost Story, Local Clairvoyants Split Over Future, The Stranger, Dude Rocks Like a Lady, Untitled Geezer Profile, The Ratt Trap/How Real is Real/The Tenth Beatle/Here’s “Johnny”, To Be Scene, or Not to Be Seen

And the essays:  Nemesis, Advancement, I Do Not Hate the Olympics, Three Stories Involving Pants, Don’t Look Back in Anger, Not Guilty, Cultural Betrayal, Monogamy, Certain Bands You Probably Like, Pirates, Robots, Super People, Television, Singularity

And the story:  You Tell Me

Chuck Klosterman made his name as a first-rate pop culture writer with the heavy metal-themed memoir Fargo Rock City (2001), but has since divided his time between writing articles for magazines such as Spin and Esquire and publishing the occasional piece of fiction like the novel Downtown Owl (2008).  Most of Klosterman’s best nonfiction pieces appear in his best-selling essay collections Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (2003) and Eating the Dinosaur (2009).  The rest are grouped together in Chuck Klosterman IV:  A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas (2006).  Though the title is ostensibly a jokey reference to Led Zeppelin’s fourth album (technically untitled but commonly referred to as Led Zeppelin IV), Chuck Klosterman IV feels less like a watershed moment than it does a set of B-sides and outtakes.

That isn’t to say that IV is a waste of anybody’s time.  The tone throughout is breezy and fun, and though many of the pieces don’t transcend their origins as magazine articles, it’s hard to deny that Klosterman is better at writing about pop culture than just about anybody.  IV’s best articles tend to either emphasize Klosterman’s relative distance from the people he is supposed to be profiling or use their subjects to make a deeper and more general statement about our culture.  The opening piece about Britney Spears is a surprisingly engaging example of the former, as Klosterman is flustered by Spears’ apparently sincere obliviousness to the Madonna/whore complex that she nonetheless aggressively exploited in her rise to fame.  A eulogy for Johnny Carson is a fine example of Klosterman using his ostensible subject to speak more generally to cultural phenomena, as he somehow turns an obituary into a persuasive argument that the plethora of choices that we are offered in our society makes us “consciously happier, but unconsciously sadder.”  More often, the articles are well-written and engaging but ultimately disposable, as is the case with some fairly standard pieces about thoroughly-covered bands like Radiohead and The White Stripes.  A number of the snarkier essays are funny and will provide a great deal of amusement for music geeks (a list of the “ten most accurately rated artists in rock history” is a highlight), but they tend not to get beyond a surface level of entertainment.

The most interesting pieces in IV are not necessarily the best.  A 1995 story about Fargo’s local rock scene (written when Klosterman was 23) is amusingly earnest and clumsy in comparison to Klosterman’s current, mature style, and feels like the germ of what would ultimately develop into Fargo Rock City.  IV concludes with what would’ve been the opening 34 pages of a never-finished novella entitled You Tell Me, the fictional story of a sexually frustrated small town movie critic (written at a time when Klosterman was in real life a small town movie critic who may have also been sexually frustrated, but who probably did not have an apparently suicidal woman land on his car, as happens to the protagonist of the story).   These diversions are interesting and provide some unique glimpses into Klosterman’s writing style.  But like too much of IV, they feel inessential, suggesting that another of the book’s subtitles should’ve been For Fans Only.

Collections: El-P - Collecting the Kid

Featuring the tracks:  Death of Buck 50, Jukie Skate Rock, Post Mortem Use Me 2, Feel Like a Ghost, Time is Running Out, Telemundo (Bombing Theme), Slow Sex (Love Theme), Constellation (Remix), The Dance, The Day After Yesterday, Oxycontin, and Sunrise Over Bklyn

Though El-P’s Definitive Jux record label is no longer in business, recent releases by artists in the label’s orbit serve as reminders of Def Jux’s legacy of carefully constructed, wildly ambitious, and gorgeously packaged albums.  El-P’s own Cancer 4 Cure album is as densely detailed and spellbindingly surreal as anything the producer/rapper has ever done, and Killer Mike’s R.A.P. Music, produced in its entirety by El-P, is even better.  Cancer 4 Cure and R.A.P. Music were both clearly conceived of as albums rather vehicles for singles, making them anomalies in both their genre and in the ITunes age in general. 

Still, like any ambitious perfectionist with experimental tendencies, El-P has produced a lot of ephemera that doesn’t fit on any of his solo albums or those of his associates.  His series of weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamix mixes feel randomly constructed even by the loose standards of hip hop mixtapes, with demo-ish outtakes brushing shoulders with unused beats, remixes, studio chatter, and selected moments from other people’s songs.  (The third volume, which is basically a suite of hip hop instrumentals, is the exception to the rule, and the only one that feels like a proper album).  2004’s Collecting the Kid falls somewhere in between El-P’s “for hardcore fans only” mixtapes and his essential solo albums.  There are several songs here that El-P fans won’t want to be without, but they are frustratingly mixed in with tracks that devotees will already own as well as a handful of filler cuts that probably didn’t need to see the light of day (or that are better appreciated in other contexts).

The bulk of the compilation’s tracks are moody instrumentals, many of which come from El-P’s score for the little-seen 2002 film Bomb the System.  El-P’s Bomb the System work shares many of the same qualities as RZA’s exhilarating score for Ghost Dog:  the Way of the Samurai (1999), with the lurching funk of “The Day After Yesterday” standing out in particular as one of El-P’s finest beats.  Collecting the Kid is bookended by rare efforts outside the hip hop genre.  “Death of Buck 50” is a creepy, percussion-free bit of ambient synth music that would make Brian Eno or Aphex Twin proud, while “Sunrise Over Bklyn” is a lovely collaboration with the experimental jazz musicians from the Blue Series Continuum.  That said, the latter track’s inclusion on this collection is somewhat puzzling, since it also appeared on El-P’s full-length jazz fusion album High Water, which was released at right around the same time as Collecting the Kid.  Though “Sunrise Over Bklyn” is one of the highlights of that album, it seems like an odd choice to represent El-P’s jazz work here, since it is one of the tracks from High Water where the producer’s input is least evident (he seems to have mostly provided some mood-enhancing background synthesizer squeals).  “Get Modal,” a more precise fusion of hip hop and jazz, might have been a better representative track from High Water, though again, including anything from that contemporaneous album on Collecting the Kid seems weirdly unnecessary. 

It’s tempting to say that El-P should have simply released his instrumentals from Bomb the System and left the rest of the tracks here on the cutting room floor, but that would leave a few worthwhile songs stranded.  The remix of “Constellation Funk” turns the least-compelling track from El-P’s Fantastic Damage (2002) into an eerie, mind-bending slice of mutant R&B with vocals by Stephanie Vezina.  “Constellation” is a model of creative remixing, retaining the best properties of the original track while transforming it into something completely different.  Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the instrumental remix of Mr. Lif’s “Post Mortem,” which hews so close to El-P’s original beat that its inclusion here seems utterly pointless. 

There is surprisingly little rapping on Collecting the Kid, and it is disappointing to look at the liner notes and see that the only Def Jux artist besides El-P to make any vocal appearances here is Camu Tao, perhaps the least talented MC from the label’s impressive roster.  Shockingly, Camu’s appearances actually provide two of the best moments on the compilation, and they suggest that his talent may simply never have been properly framed in album format before his untimely 2008 death.  “Jukie Skate Rock” is a fun play on old-school dance-rap, while “Oxycontin” is a disconcertingly operatic piece of feel-bad storytelling with unhinged warbling from Camu.  “Oxycontin” was originally conceived of as the first part of a Def Jux “rap opera” that would tell the story of a relationship falling apart because of drug addiction; part two, a duet between El-P and Cage, appeared on one of the Def Jux Presents compilations, but apparently this promising concept never went any further.  Thankfully collections like Collecting the Kid exist to ensure that lost gems like “Oxycontin” have a home, even if they are unfortunately surrounded by too many half-formed songs or tracks that are already available in better contexts.

Collections: Jan Svankmajer - The Ossuary and Other Tales

Featuring the short films:  The Last Trick, Johann Sebastian Bach, Historia Naturae, The Garden, Don Juan, The Ossuary, Castle of Otranto, Manly Games, and Darkness Light Darkness

As a survey of its titular artist’s work, Kino Films’ 2006 DVD Jan Svankmajer – The Ossuary and Other Tales leaves something to be desired.  How Kino selected the nine shorts that comprise the set is something of a mystery.  If the DVD was meant to collect Svankmajer’s earliest, hardest to find work, then why does it jump chronologically from 1970’s The Ossuary to 1977’s Castle of Otranto, while leaving out seminal early pieces like Jabberwocky (1971)?  And why does the collection feature Darkness Light Darkness (1989), one of the Czech animator’s most famous and readily accessible works?  Clearly The Ossuary and Other Tales is not designed to be a “best of” collection, since this wouldn’t explain the presence of such “for hardcore fans only” films as Johann Sebastian Bach (1965) and 1968’s The Garden (a live action short so dull that I’ve completely forgotten its contents less than a week after watching it).  The Ossuary and Other Tales doesn’t seem to have been designed with any particular viewer in mind.  Serious Svankmajer fans will complain about the absence of many important and/or obscure films, novices may be turned off by the relative crudity of some of the earlier pieces, and casual fans hoping to gain some perspective about Svankmajer’s growth as an auteur will be confounded by the seemingly random selection of shorts represented. 

In fairness, Svankmajer’s versatility, as well as the wildly inconsistent quality of his short films, makes the idea of a truly satisfying “representative” collection of his works unlikely.  His art seems to have grown in fits and starts. The dazzlingly edited and wittily structured Historia Naturae (1967) feels much more mature (and much more technically advanced) than the slapdash mixture of black-and-white mockumentary footage and collage animation of Castle of Otranto, even though the latter film was made a full decade later.  In other cases, Svankmajer’s growth as an artist is visually evident.  In the context of this DVD, Svankmajer’s first film, a grotesque puppet play called The Last Trick (1964) feels like a mere warm-up for the inventively choreographed Don Juan (1970), which feels far more cinematic despite using many of the same filmed puppetry techniques.  Though the famous Romantic tale of Don Juan is somewhat of an odd fit for Svankmajer’s brand of menacing surrealism, the director clearly had a lot of fun staging it, and a multi-story puppet fight in which the clashing of swords provides the percussion for the background score is a technical tour de force. 

Though Svankmajer is primarily known as an animator (in fact, I’ve already labeled him as such), that is a fairly narrow descriptor of the director’s bag of tricks.  Svankmajer is really more of a collage artist, incorporating stray bits of live-action footage, claymation, puppetry, stop-motion animation, primitive Melies-style visual effects, and just about anything else he can get his hands on.  The Czech’s unpredictable eclecticism puts him more in line with fellow Balkan director Dusan Makavejev than with traditional animators like Walt Disney or Hayao Miyazaki. 

The jarring information overload of Svankmajer’s visual style can be overwhelming in a good way, as in Historia Naturae, where the rapid-fire flipbook style look at different classes of animal represented in every visual format imaginable is frequently exhilarating, and musically and humorously contrasted with slow, recurring shots of a human slowly raising a spoonful of food to their mouth.  (The morbidly funny conclusion finds the human replaced by a skeleton, as man is reduced to the same consumable state as the other species represented throughout the rest of the film).  Occasionally that same style can feel oppressive.  While Manly Games (1988) is a striking and memorable parody of European soccer mania (and the accompanying violence of hooliganism), the series of shots of claymation soccer players getting their heads destroyed in the goriest ways imaginable eventually becomes tiresome, making the clever finale (in which a live action TV viewer’s flat is overrun with sentient paper cut-out athletes) feel more like a welcome relief rather than the brilliant punchline that it ought to be.

One of the most memorable and sophisticated films on this DVD actually features no animation whatsoever.  The Ossuary could actually be classified as a documentary, albeit a highly experimental and unconventional one.  Svankmajer’s dispassionate, appropriately grimy footage of a horrifying death chamber, where enormous piles of bones have been artfully arranged into sculptures, is contrasted with the disembodied voice of a tour guide who seems entirely too proud of the monetary value of this weird alternate universe museum.  The guide’s fetishistic worship of the bones, combined with her paranoid insistence that no one touch anything, lest they face a heavy fine, is like something out of Kafka, but Svankmajer’s unpredictable editing patterns assure that The Ossuary could not be mistaken for the work of any other artist.  Even though The Ossuary and Other Tales is not particularly well thought-out as a collection, it undeniably features a great deal of innovative and memorable works of art.