Plus ça change

The flags American astronauts planted on the Moon are still standing, and they are probably white, which means they're like a Jasper Johns.

I saw the first Moon landing live on television, on a 12" black and white portable when I was five years old. I was allowed to stay up late to watch it because my older brother and his friend were babysitting: they fell asleep, I stayed up for it. I was crazy for space travel, and a bad sleeper.

This week I've been listening to the Purity Ring album Shrines c/- of a good friend who bought the vinyl and gifted me the free digital download that came with it: big ups. This is what friends are for. My listening habits are becoming increasingly Canadian. Megan James has one of Those Voices, and Corin Roddick is working in the sweet spot of melody and hip-hop that gave us Portishead, The Sneaker Pimps and Stateless before them. Like the Sneaker Pimps circa Becoming X, this is Purity Ring's moment.

Here's the band talking to GQ:

The intersection between that type of music [Soulja Boy], and what you guys are doing is fascinating. And it's different in how intimate it seems. Is it true that Megan draws most of the songwriting from a bunch of diaries she's kept since childhood?

James: Yeah, often I'll play the piano and just write songs straight from the diaries. But I never intended for what's happened to happen. Corin had asked me if I wanted to sing over what he was making. It wasn't that weird to do it. I'll write something down and a lot of the time whatever I've written down happens to fit perfectly over his melodies.

GQ: Is it weird to relive this old personal stuff?

Megan James: No, but I haven't really used anything that is that old. It's kind of the same thing as performing a song that's no longer new. I'm still emotional about it somewhat. I mean, I'm writing a journal and I never expected people to be singing those words, to be on stage and have people singing my journal entries back to me.

Shrines has a beautiful, treated sound: it's a delicate, modern, electronic product. Under the Radar popped the big question to Megan James and received the quintessentially Canadian answer:

How does the Purity Ring sound translate live?

We've found a few ways to translate it well. Corin's built a bunch of lanterns that surround him and he hits them with sticks and they light up and also trigger the melody which is really nice.

Read the full interview here.

Something about this kind of band always grabs me. As I wrote about the Sneaker Pimps in 2003:

The Sneaker Pimps' 'Low Five', from the Splinter LP has great songs but it still fails to grab me like Becoming X, the only album to feature singer / songwriter Kelli Dayton. In the usual sad and confusing chain of events that befalls only albums you love and never the ones you can do without, the Muse Lounge's copy of Becoming X disappeared-- not the original available in Marbecks, as I discovered to my cost, but the limited edition featuring Nellee Hooper's phat version of '6 Underground' (from The Saint), Line of Flight's whirly girl version of 'Spin Spin Sugar', and more.

In 1998 after the success of Becoming X Dayton was asked to leave the Sneaker Pimps, an expression of frustration, perhaps, from the male founders of a band that went on to be defined by its female vocals. I saw her perform a duet with Marc Almond on Later with Jools Holland and she wasn't so great; more recently she teamed up with Bootsy Collins for a single that wasn't so great either. But in the Sneaker Pimps she was more than perfect: she and the band worked in the same key or something, and became a sum greater than their parts. I guess they'll never get back together but the fantasy is tantalising: their dysfunction made them the trip-hop Fleetwood Mac.

Dayton now records under the name Kelli Ali and has a new LP called Tigermouth which doesn't seem to be out yet. She recorded with Marilyn Manson ("We had a great time but when we got the track back it was like 'oh!'") and practises kung fu.

A diary of crossed lines

Donald Rumsfeld has a memoir out. Early reviews say it dodges the questions and shunts responsibility until the very end, so in that respect it sounds true to the politician. Writes Lyric Winik:

Yet detractors and supporters alike say that on a personal level Don Rumsfeld is warm, funny, and generous. He is not a petty gossip, like Henry Kissinger.

Is anyone a petty gossip like Henry Kissinger? From The Final Days by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein:

Nixon was often on the phone with Kissinger for fifteen minutes or longer. The President was repetitive, sometimes taking minutes to come to a point.. Kissinger occasionally came out of his office after such calls. 'Who was taking that?' he would ask. One of the four women stationed in the small outer office would raise her hand. 'Wasn't that the worst thing you ever heard in your life?' Kissinger would ask. [p. 191]

... Kissinger seemed singularly obsessed with his own prestige and image. If he had long list of telephone messages, he would often call back Nancy Maginnes first, then Governor Rockefeller, then movie stars and celebrities and then the President... He assigned his aides the distasteful job of heading off negative stories and lodging complaints about those that made it into print. The job was especially difficult because the offending stories were often true; Kissinger himself was, at times, the unwitting source. He let information slip as he courted Washington's most influential journalists. [pp. 193-194]

If you have some long afternoons to kill I (once more) recommend Bradley Graham's By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld (Public Affairs, 804pp). The day I lugged that puppy out of the bookstore was the day I admitted my obsession. Now offline, here's an original Muse Lounge entry on Rumsfeld, fighting and so on:

Hitting others

Boxing doesn't seem real anymore. The fighters are real and their punches break bones but the bouts that Don King books and is paid for are so strategic and limited that the outcome surprises nobody except for the chumps who place their bets. For newcomers to the sport, Don is the guy with a Bride of Frankenstein hair-do grinning at the camera and waving the little American flags like a puppeteer trying to cheer up a sick child.

Sunday's middleweight title bout between French challenger Morrade Hakkar and American incumbent Bernard Hopkins was promoted as a Rocky III-style metaphor for national tensions during the current Iraqi conflict. Hakkar literally skipped and ran around the ring for the entire first round until the veangeful champion closed in and whupped him. And so the crowds did cheer.

But the better metaphor, grimly, was to be found in the bout New Zealanders were watching before that, when our own David Tua went up for the second time against Hasim Rahman. If hanging off the other guy like a woozy lover and sandbagging him to an unsatisfying draw is boxing, Rahman is a world beater. Tua was less frustrated by his opponent's long arms than he was by Lennox Lewis's. Clearly exhausted from throwing big blows, he still produced surprising volleys late in the game to try and break Rahman's saggy dominance, but never quite succeeded.

The two great learning moments came in round six, when Tua connected a humdinger and Rahman looked goosed (Tua was still too tired to close) and in the last round when Rahman raised his arms and declared himself the winner about 15 seconds before the final bell. You don't do that to boys from South Auckland, and Tua lashed out at Rahman like he was going to kill him. Really and properly.

As a casual observer I haven't seen that sort of blood anger in Tua before; the last time it surfaced in a Don King bout, it was in Mike Tyson. A pissed-off and disrespected Tua is a truly shit-scary prospect: how long will he be allowed to remain the nice guy? For his career's sake, not long, Don King must be hoping; but personally I hope Tua stays the patently good-natured fellow he seems to be.

Likewise the war, which we all hoped would be savagely rapid but also do kind of nice things for people, whether they be shoeless Iraqi conscripts or Dick Cheney's pals at cocktail hour. Now however, about ten days in, matters are taking more familiar shape, and the war of liberation has become a fight more or less like the others we have known, read about or watched: a slow slog compromised by surprising nastiness, with a predetermined but unsatisfying result looming, and a guy everyone pays but nobody likes waving the flag.

And once again - the boxing metaphor stretched to nanofilament width here - the fools are the ones watching and laying their bets. Viewers are not happy to find out what those great looking weapons really get up to, and they are shocked to see that women and children are dying. I'm cynical about these reactions insofar as the reverse implication is that young or middle-aged men dying is somehow by the by. Practically nobody signs up to die. (Even some of the 9/11 hijackers didn't know suicide was part of the deal.)

Now we're in the thick of a recognisably war-shaped war the press can get down to the fundamentals of who's shot what, and apportioning blame. The Iraq conflict is a self-declared battle of technology: not a proving ground, but a living, killing strategy based on new ideas like unmanned drones and software that anticipates the food, fuel and ordnance needs of a sprawling, highly ambulatory fighting force.

It is a mantra of battle to never advance beyond your supply lines. Logistics are as dangerous as the other guy, as Custer and Rommel both found out. Rather than ignoring the supply-line maxim, the strategy for fighting in Iraq is actually based on refuting it, calling as it does on 150,000 troops (less than half used to mop up the shell-shocked enemy in Kuwait) to move very, very quickly around the Iraqis, isolate them and pick them off during or after the entry into Baghdad.

Although the theory is now associated with Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, it's been around a while. It's been called things like "21st century" and "modern" warfare, and seems, broadly, to be a logical response to the popular history of Vietnam where a superior but traditional armed force was successfully resisted by more mobile guerrilla-style fighters.

Whether or not it works is in the future tense. But we are already hearing an echo of Vietnam in Washington. The media are tut-tutting and spokespersons are clearing their throats in order to speak up about what the strategy ought to have been. There's a sense that Rumsfeld is being set up, and you can see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice.

In a recent (March 30) CNN-broadcast press conference Rumsfeld defended the strategy and attacked the press for the way they were reporting the war. Around the same time there was an announcement that the U.S. would be sending an additional 100,000 troops to Iraq.

Insisting on confidence, attacking the press, and escalation: it's a one-two-three combination. Although Rumsfeld's situation is different, the mood of the fight reminds me of Robert McNamara, another moderniser of military strategy later hung out to dry.

-- Muse Lounge, Mar 31, 2003

The Unattributed X-Men

Lazy Sunday afternoon. Whacked. Wrote too many words this week. Will probably write too many next week as well but for now I'm at the crossroads.

After posting about Brian Clemens' talk at the special screening of 'A Touch Of Brimstone' it was ironic to see that very episode of The Avengers cited as a source for the new movie X-Men: First Class. As Harry Knowles noted in an interview with the movie's producer Bryan Singer:

With January Jones and Kevin Bacon playing Emma Frost and Sebastian Shaw - we will be getting the HELLFIRE CLUB. I commented that the HELLFIRE CLUB has always felt like something that it would be wrong to modernize, as it felt as though it were something specific to the swinging Hefner era of the 60s... and Bryan said that's exactly why they're making use of the HELLFIRE CLUB... the dress and the costumes associated with that glorious period of the X-MEN... belong in the 60s.

Because I don't read comics anymore I turned wide-eyed to the online version of everyone's nerdy older brother, Wikipedia, and asked it if that fictional "1960s" Hellfire Club was connected to one infiltrated by Steed and Emma (Peel). It is. So now Marvel comics writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne's tip o' the hat to Brian Clemens and The Avengers writer Philip Levene - themselves inspired by earlier facts and legends (here's a recent book on it) - has now become Marvel's intellectual property, and will make them lots of money.

At Clemens' talk he waved away Lara Croft and similar modern female action characters with the comment that they were all Emma Peel - all Avengers girls. That, in his mind, was that. He sounded almost weary about it.

The influence of the writers' original creations put me in mind of what Brian Eno said about The Velvet Underground in an interview with Mary Harron in 1976:

Punk (Mary Harron): You said once that music, or any other cultural form, wasn't a straight line of development, that the most interesting things were often the ones people didn't notice at the time...

Eno: I think there are a lot of things like that. Well, the Velvet Underground was an example. When they came out very very few people were interested in them, whatever they claim now... And for a certainty I knew that they were going to become one of the most interesting groups, y'know, and that there would be a time when it wouldn't be the Beatles up there and the all these other groups down there, it would be a question of attempting to assess the relative values of the Beatles and the Velvet Underground as equals. And this is just beginning to happen now.

I think that there are certain artists who speak to other artists more than a public, alright? So they go through two stages. They are received by other artists and then diffused, right? Now unfortunately there isn't a very efficient royalty system for dealing with this situation.

Copying, lifting, diffusing: it's how art works, and discovering those sources is part of it. The IMDB listing for X-Men: First Class credits six people with the screenplay, but not the strip artists, and not writer Philip Levene, born 1926.

Addendum: X2: X-Men United reviewed in 2003:

The screening of X2: X-Men United we saw last week was dimmer than it ought to have been. There wasn't much detail in the dark tones of the image and the white highlights were distinctly grey. Sitting in the back row of the Hoyts Village Force cinema, I mentally kept reaching for the remote so I could adjust the contrast.

It cost $18 each to book our "smart seats" over the phone and another $8 for the privilege of parking in our own city. That's a lot of money if you plan on making phone calls during the movie. Three-quarters of the way through the shiny, sexy, action-packed sequel - specifically, when Yuriko Oyama revealed her own adamantine claws, became Lady Deathstryke and started beating the crap out of Wolverine - the sweaty chap beside me yanked out his mobile and started texting. He was offended when I glanced over at his very bright cell phone screen because this is like private stuff, dude, but I figured it was an open venue and his calls were therefore in the public domain.

And there was no need to fidget. X2 is a pretty good movie. It's hardly Knife in the Water, but Wolverine's talons click and snap as if referencing Polanski's knife-tapping game, and the story is gallant and satisfying, and everyone's jumping around to telegraph significant moments and maintain your attention at maximum warp.

Nearly all the frames - even the close ups of the actors - have been digitally enhanced or constructed. The dominance of digital effects nowadays mean that sets and camera angles are dictated by computer nerds instead of production designers, lighting technicians and cinematographers, with the result that movies don't look like movies any more: they look like designer storyboards or games (or, like The Phantom Menace, children's Bible illustrations). This put me off cinema for a long time - it's the visual equivalent of eating too much sugar - but it suits something like X-Men. The effect of the digital cut and paste (the softened edges, the flattened backgrounds, the superreal focus) becomes the film's visual style. It looks like a comic book but it works. Either the director has got it right, or we as viewers have finally succumbed to the idea of every shot in a film being kinda funky.

X-2 is in the modern tradition of sequels that take a sidestep from the original in order to develop the characters and end on a dissatisfying "to be continued" note, in this case Jean Grey disappearing into yellow light to be reborn as Phoenix in the inevitable X-3. The direction is a little stiff: when Anna Paquin crash-lands a jet and slumps over the controls it's unclear whether the moment is intended to be impassioned or humorous. Hugh Jackman has a whale of a time as Wolverine, killing many people and often. Mystique gets to do a lot more in this one: hacking keyboards and faking it as nearly every other character. At one point she even appears as Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, spiking a prison guard with iron to effect a terrific jail break. There's a great moment when she and Magneto (Ian McKellan) are sniggering in the back seat like the bad kids in class: mutants as ADD over-achievers, bored with their surroundings.

The people in front of us - three guys and a girl in their twenties - were laughing and whooping and cheering through the whole thing. I enjoyed their enjoyment, and it reminded me why I will always go and see franchise blockbusters. Even the trailer for The Hulk looked tiresomely impressive.

Why so many comic books have become important and entertaining to us would take more space and time to unpack than is available [here]. Maybe it's because po-faced adolescent tales take themselves seriously in an era when other genres are winking at their audience. It may also have something to do with women like Halle Berry and Famke Janssen wearing really very tight, shiny clothes. It's the style, as critic Max Kozloff said angrily of Pop art, of "gum-chewers, bobby-soxers and, worse, delinquents."

--- Muse Lounge, May 7, 2003

Smokin'

There has been some debate in the Muse Lounge about the new anti-smoking laws. Basically Gretchen and Cedric still smoke like chimneys and none of the bar staff are going to be telling them to put it out. Recreational drugs tend to find their way into the Muse Lounge regardless of external fashions for or against. This permissive attitude is a natural product of the Hooves' European heritage and has caused problems in the past, most famously with the Lounge's accountant, Hugo Galvis. Cedric himself hired Hugo to work on the business's books after a two-day night on the town in the early 90s. Tellingly, even after 48 hours of socialising and hijinks the older Cedric remained unaware that Hugo came from San Cristobel let alone spoke not one word of English. "The time we spend together, she had flown by," Hugo told translators. "The old man - he see a little of himself in me, I think, with the fire in the eyes." In another piece of bad news, Hugo's luck with numbers has turned out to be inversely proportional to his success with the ladies, resulting in the Inland Revenue imposing full tax audits on the Muse Lounge following the break-ups of his first and second marriages. His third - to controversial Italian women's hockey star Annamaria Raffo - has seemed to take, however, and projections for the second half of 2003 are looking good, delivered as always in Hugo's crabbed handwriting on chunks of plasterboard borrowed from the painters and workmen permanently renovating the couple's ninth-floor Herne Bay apartment. "Annamarie, she is life to me," Hugo explained, wiping the sweat from his face. "Aiyee - see how my face burns? Hayfever all the time from your stinking Pacific island - hayfever! I leave you all one day!" His departure however has been delayed by inquiries from various United States agencies and a late night telephone caller identifying himself only as "El pez grande".

– Apr 19, 2003

Gretchen Hooves interview part I

Gretchen Hooves has become quite the recluse in her later years, choosing only to appear on certain club nights, so it is with no little excitement that I welcome the news that she has agreed to be interviewed by me as part of our small collected history of the Muse Lounge. An accomplished flautist in her early teens, Gretchen first met her future husband and creative partner, Cedric Hooves while they were both attending art school in the late 1950s. From there, romance and exciting business was to follow. I go to meet Gretchen in the early afternoon at the Muse Lounge. She appears a long green gown and with one of her now trademark paisley head scarves and joins me for a mai tai and a little conversation.

JANWILLEM DORIN: Tell me about your work at the Delft College of Arts and Sciences. What were you reading there?

GRETCHEN HOOVES: I was working in the field of interpretative ceramics, which was a very progressive school of ceramics in Delft. It's difficult work because you are pushing the materials to their limit. It's also very labour intensive because the completed structures are fragile and need to be rushed into the kiln quickly before their finer points start to sag. The masters of interpretative ceramics actually work with the kiln door open, the fire burning right at their shoulder, the hands of the flames actually waiting to accept the completed ceramic form as it passes from the hands of the master. This is a very exciting thing to see - very emotional, although obviously not for beginners as there are many dangers. It was certainly not an acceptable working environment for a young girl like myself.

JWD: Why was that?

GH: [laughs] The official reason was that because we girls were all wearing our hair very long then, in the bohemian style, that there was some concern that it would catch fire.

JWD: But you wore safety equipment, working with the kilns like that, surely.

GH: Oh, but of course. There was a big hood that you wore with a face plate - a very heavy thing, my goodness, with shoulder pads that would catch on your clothes. I don't know how many sweaters I ruined putting it on and taking it off. But no, of course, safety was not the reason at all. Although the field of ceramics has attracted many women - some of the greatest ceramics designers in the Netherlands have been women - the field of interpretative ceramics was very male dominated, like the Beats - they didn't like women. We were ornaments to them, a little, I think.

JWD: And yet you were attracting to what sounds like a difficult and perhaps dangerous working method.

GH: It wasn't too difficult. As long as one worked honestly, and with feeling - that was the main thing. We all got very muddy of course, because you work with a very wet clay, especially for the last stage of a work, but that was part of the fun, I think. There was a system of mechanical arms for lifting the finished pieces into the furnace, so that made that part of the job easier.

JWD: So the machines freed you to work.

GH: They did the lifting, yes, although they didn't do the thinking for you of course. We called them robot arms but really they were a system of pulleys and weights with only rudimentary electronic component to record and repeat movements. The switches were sound operated. When your piece was finished you would step back and clap your gloves over your head - because the safety hood muffled your normal speech - and the pulley arms would lower and pick up your wet sculpture and lift it into the furnace. We girls of course, thought this was fantastic.

JWD: And of course, the sound switch -

GH: Yes! The sound switch was always breaking down. The mechanism was very crude technology. The person who could fix it was Cedric. He was quite the audiophile even back then.

JWD: Was that significant?

GH: At the time it was very brave. There was a lot of union opposition to this sort of automation. People felt it would cost jobs in the ceramics industry if the furnace blasting process was controlled by machines. It's a big industry in the Netherlands - interpretative ceramics was very far to the left of that of course, but there was concern that these very bourgeois concepts and experiments would leech into the lifeblood of the industry and poison it for others.

-- Janwillem Dorin
Jazz Dispatch March 2002
(First reproduced | Mar 29, 2003)

Mike W Hall interview

For almost 25 years now Mike W. Hall has been supplying tropical fish to the glitterati of Auckland. Here today in this interview he speaks with Jazz Dispatch editor Janwillem Dorin about his personalised work for the Muse Lounge before and after its move to the Whyte Tower.

JANWILLEM DORIN: How long have you been dealing with fish?

MIKE W. HALL: My father imported tropical fish in the 60s. He and my mother were naturalists - nudists, actually - and he himself was very active in promoting bio-filtration to New Zealand breeders and fish enthusiasts.

JD: By bio-filtration, you mean using plants to clean the tank water.

MH: Yes. It creates a more natural environment for the fish and of course it doesn't waste power. My father despised undergravel filters - I remember accompanying him on a protest march once outside one of the major tropical fish dealers. He and his friends were campaigning for better pet environments in general and the machine filter suppliers were getting pretty annoyed. It was a close thing actually. Anyway, I took over the business after my father retired and it looks like my son will be running it too, someday. He has a real knack.

JD: You of course are very well known for your work with the fish tanks at the Muse Lounge, both at its first and second venues...

MH: That's right. I had met Gretchen at a nudist beach near Opotoki and we had a long conversation about tropical fish. She had been standing out waist-deep in the water bending over trying to spot tropical fish through her swimming goggles, and of course she hadn't seen any, and she was very disappointed. I remember her hair was up in these sort of plaits and her eyes were red - I thought from crying but it was just the seawater. I had to explain to her that New Zealand isn't a tropical country - she was surprised by that, I think Cedric had misrepresented it to her slightly when they came out here.

JD: So Gretchen was the tropical fish enthusiast of the two of them?

MH: They were both keen on it, if I remember rightly. I checked out the club when I was back in Auckland - it was very hard to find then, in a very odd place - and Gretchen introduced me to Cedric. He was a little slurred, from the drinking and everything - I mean, I don't know what else was going on there, I'm a pretty straight arrow. Anyway, I said I dealt in tropical fish and he was immediately very excited about it, and said he wanted to turn all the walls into fish tanks.

JD: For the first venue?

MH: Yes, that's it. We didn't do that of course, because the weight alone would have gone through the floor. But we set up the big tank by the lift entrance with mostly anabantids. We needed a good community fish and that was a good place to start. We had Dwarf Gourami and some bubble nesters -

JD: But then came the second venue.

MH: Yeah, yeah, and that's when Cedric went for a grander scheme, with the big oval windows and the uplighting and the big tanks surrounding the couches at the north end - three giant walls of tank with the water and the fish.

JD: And the girl?

MH: Yes. Yeah, Tania - she was in the tank on some nights.

JD: Swimming and performing for the guests with the music and so forth.

MH: I don't know how it came about. It certainly wasn't my idea because the perspiration off a human body alone is raising the urea levels in the water, let alone the vibration. And a large body - anything larger than a fish, I mean - is stirring up the temperature layers that naturally settle around the plants in the tank, and that's not good. Apart from that the tank size worked well. Bio-filtration really comes into its own in the larger tanks because it works with the natural currents and movement of the fish.

JD: How did Tania actually get into the tank?

MH: I think she fell in.

JD: Really? She was intoxicated?

MH: Oh, probably. She slipped - she had these very high platforms on one night and she was leaning on the tank talking to someone and she leaned back a little further and she just... slid under. The water was very warm. We ran the tanks at about 27 degrees to support the fish's immune systems. Tania, of course, thought we kept them like that just for her.

Janwillem Dorin
Jazz Dispatch 1997
translated by Kirsty Widdell

(First reproduced | Dec 06, 2002)

Jazz Dispatch #1

The original Muse Lounge was opened in downtown Auckland in 1968 by a young couple from Antwerp, Cedric and Gretchen Hooves. Cedric Hooves was a qualified architect; Gretchen trained as a flautist and worked briefly as a photographic model before settling on a career in interior design. The newlyweds emigrated to New Zealand in 1967 to set up a business importing the latest European furniture, leasing commercial premises on Fanshawe Street to display their wares.

This new underground showroom, however, soon became better known as a place where writers, artists and musicians would gather to socialise with other members of Auckland's bohemian community. Together these loud and sometimes overly colourful crowds would smoke weed and listen to jazz into the small hours as they discussed the outre concepts of the day.

It was Gretchen who named these gatherings the Muse Lounge after the experimental fusion combo led by legendary drummer and vibes man Trip Checker. A jazz buff since childhood, Gretchen had followed the Muse Lounge since their first performances in Paris and Montreal. When the Muse Lounge proper opened a few blocks away on the corner of Wolfe and Albert Streets in 1970, Checker himself joined the house players for a fifteen minute improv set that included versions of 'Blue Skies / de Gier' and 'Gretchen's Hat', a fierce 7/4 workout dedicated to the young Mrs Hooves.

The property boom in Auckland's central business district saw the Muse Lounge move up to split-level premises in the Whyte Tower and a limited licence in 1976, but the ambience and the decor, famously, remain. For over thirty years the sculpted oval lobby of the Muse Lounge has been the first stop for young people, tourists and those in the know. Drop in any time after sunset and you'll find interesting people of all ages scattered across the bubble chairs and curving white couches. Cedric, grey haired in his kimono, still likes to drop into the sound booth and personally tweak the levels. Gretchen likes to take a seat by the bar where she can smoke and watch the crowd. All sorts of bands play there now but the place still has that twilight vibe. The girls smile and the boys tap their feet. Talk in the Muse Lounge makes music you hear nowhere else.

-- Janwillem Dorin, Jazz Dispatch / June 1999

Trip Checker interview (excerpt)

Leaning back in a patterned brown and orange booth of 246, the new space age arcade of Auckland City, New Zealand, Trip Checker enjoys a prawn cocktail and one of the latest drip percolator style coffees as the shoppers stroll beneath us on the ground floor. A week has passed since his discharge from Auckland Hospital: always bony and unshaven, the gentleman drummer is a little paler than usual. But he has kindly consented to keep the agreed appointment with Jazz Dispatch where we are keen to discuss his latest commercial forays plus rumours of a possible Muse Lounge reunion.

TRIP CHECKER: Is that thing on?

JANWILLEM DORIN: Yes I believe so. In 1969, you -

CHECKER: It's so damn small.

JD: It's one of the latest Japanese products.

CHECKER: And the mike picks up everything I'm saying?

JD: Yes. I was wondering if we could -

CHECKER: I'm hip.

JD: - if we could talk a little about Montreal.

CHECKER: That's a great town.

JD: Yeah?

CHECKER: It's a sweet gig. Yeah, I mean... we'd all meet up there, not in a planned way, you understand, but we'd meet up there see - I'd say to Clive [Janitor] and Elmore [Holdall] "see you at Montree." That was what we called it.

JD: Montree was your name for Montreal.

CHECKER: Swinging. [indistinct] So we'd be hanging around the tent. There were several tents, actually but the main tent you... [indistinct] ...the desk, right? And one of us would say - Elmore, usually, he'd say "let's do a gig." And we just would.

JD: With no rehearsal.

CHECKER: No, no. No rehearsal. Rehearsal's for squares, man! Rehearsal, I mean, hey, like we're not at school, you know? We're not like in class, this is not a class, man. You have to be there. You have to be there.

JD: But you had some sort of tonal framework, I understand -

CHECKER: No framework.

JD: Nothing? You had a scale worked out or something.

CHECKER: We had nothing, man. Nada.

JD: You just went in there?

CHECKER: You got it.

JD: And what if things didn't go as planned?

CHECKER: How could they? We didn't have any plans.

JD: I mean, what if things went wrong?

CHECKER: Then they went wrong. It's like life, you know? Why should Montree be any different?

JD: I think the danger is that the audience could think you were being indulgent.

CHECKER: We were always being indulgent. The only reason anyone ever heard us in the first place is because we decided to indulge ourselves by becoming a band. Everyone's indulging themselves. This interview's indulging you, I'm indulging myself by talking, you're indulging yourself by listening -

JD: Yes -

CHECKER: I mean, it's all indulgent, you know? We're all indulgent.

JD: OK. So, moving along -

CHECKER: I mean just moving along is indulgent. You dig?

Janwillem Dorin
Jazz Dispatch, 1974
Translated from the original by Kirsty Widdell
(First reproduced | Dec 02, 2002)

The size of thoughts

Ang Lee's Hulk is all about size: the size of atoms and cells; DNA and man; man and his dreams; man and the monster. The director telegraphs this by chopping between shots of mossy rock and entire deserts, literally finding the earth in a grain of sand. Oliver Stone pulled a similar trick in Nixon (1995) by cutting between footage of multiplying cancer cells and bombs dropping on Vietnam, but the visual analogy unbalanced the film: by making his point about life, death and a generation's political and military creep (sic) in two shots, Stone wrapped things up too early.

Arriving as it has within months of the Gulf War, the green monster raging unchallenged in the desert risks being similarly reduced. Hulk really does signpost it, smashing out of a huge American "Victory" flag. But the connection between the rampaging monster and the monster of war is no more specific than that between the radioactive Godzilla and the themes of post-war industrialised Japan. Hulk is a good old monster movie, even if deconstructionists might be distracted the unstoppable man-child who swells and hardens when provoked by men but shrinks to a limp heap when confronted by the woman he loves... in San Francisco. The alabaster Jennifer Connolly tames the jade Eric Bana a couple of times, reinforcing a beauty and the beast theme. The movie borrows images from King Kong (when he is hunted down). The mutant dogs – which should be fierce – hark back to the sad test lab Labradors of The Fly II. The hell hounds are a result of animal experiments by Banner's father (Nick Nolte). In films, cruelty to animals usually signals a lack of empathy that will trip a director up somewhere down the line (e.g. Guy Ritchie). Audiences around the world were non-plussed by the sight of dead humans in Starship Troopers (1997) but booed a dog's death. There are a lot of (variable) reasons for this but it mostly has something to do with a sense of fair play and not whaling on the dumb innocent which - whoops - Hulk is mostly about.

Such fundamental inhumanities prevent Hulk ever really leaving the ground. (Although he skips good, the squadron of animators assigned to the running sequences win the day.) It's the paradox of monster movies that no matter who or what they destroy, audiences want the big (read: little) guy to prevail. I suspect the man in suit Godzilla (1954) works because it looks fake: the audience knows Godzilla isn't really getting hurt. Man in suit Godzilla also has a nice smile - just like the T-rex in Jurassic Park (1993) - which shows that he is enjoying himself. It will be interesting to see how Peter Jackson handles it in King Kong. In the original (and subsequent remakes) the ape is adbucted, exploited, hunted down and killed. It's a miserable fate for any animal, and the love of a tiny woman is no consolation. The tiny woman in Hulk is Jennifer Connelly, A Scientist. While Eric Bana is pumped up digitally, Jennifer has morphed by simply not eating. 

Bana's comedy chops show when he's playing the nerd: he always seems to be on the point of making a joke. And there are some other actors in the movie who play characters who chase the Hulk and some guy who oversteps the mark and gets killed and so on. The usual suspects.

The movie ends with the now-standard Marvel / DC showdown between two large computer-generated animations. "They're absorbing ambient energy!" Jennifer gasps, introducing a fascinating concept too late in the movie. What were she and her colleagues scientists of, exactly? They seem to be studying everything on their iMacs: frogs! gamma rays! stuff! -- the world-in-the-grain-of-sand thing again. The original Hulk comics kept it simple: mild guy / bombarded with gamma rays / becomes monster. The stories were about Newtonian cause and effect, and it's no coincidence therefore that the best parts of the film are those when the Hulk hits things and they break. He's digital, as are most of the things he fights: the visceral made real by computer technicians. It's the ultimate revenge of the nerd.

(Muse Lounge, 2003)

The Not Girl

Daniel Clowes has observed that female teenagers are licensed to be emotional in a way that other people aren't. He made this point extremely well in an interview which my friend Ian found in a remaindered magazine, kept, and forwarded to me by surface mail. In turn I read it, noted the passage, tore the interview out and filed it for future reference. I have no idea where it is now. But trust me: he said it, and he was on the money.

The teenage leads in Ghost World are the main reason the eight-issue spin-off eclipsed its parent, Like A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. Although the lives of Enid Coleslaw (an anagram of "Daniel Clowes") and Becky Doppelmeyer are emotional and scattered they were always rendered as calm by the artist's nerveless line and shadow, glumly heroic as they stared slightly to the side of the reader's eyeline. Clowes' drawing style captures details with the sleepy clarity of someone only just waking up to the world he has always known. He's hypnotised by suburbia: bored but unable to take his eyes off it.

The movie version of Ghost World (2001) is pretty fine although it's more gentle, obviously. Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) form the passive links between the many characters. In the same way that their eventual friend Seymour (Steve Buscemi) hoards kitsch memorabilia, the girls and others collect relationships for interest rather than their true value. Even Enid's father (Bob Balaban) asks his girlfriend to move in because she's around the house most of the time anyway.

The movie is far from godless: huge neon signs and franchise outlets surround the girls in almost every shot, the power of their commercial presence mocking pretensions such as books, music and art. Blues Hammer, an all white college blues band, sing idiotic songs about picking cotton; Roberta, Enid's summer school art teacher, promotes the vocabulary of early 20th century art to help her students, who go on to say nothing with it.

Clowes said Hollywood studios considered the project arty but it's an easily understood tale of the suburbs and thwarted romanticism - not unlike Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused. Clowes has a working process I really understand. Here he is talking about it:

Usually, after I finish an issue, I sit and do nothing for about a week. I usually plan to take a month off, and then after about five days, I can't stand it any more and I have to get back to work. I have nothing to do and I'm just sitting there all day. I usually have a notebook of ideas that I collect. As I'm working on one issue, I'm sort of thinking about ideas for the next. So I sit down with this giant notebook of ideas, and I cross out all the really stupid ones that seemed brilliant at 4 in the morning 3 months ago and now don't make any sense. Then I take all the decent ones and I try and see if there's any thematic unity to all of them. I tend to write two or three stories at once, and then often I'll realize that two of them are very similar and I can put them together and combine them into something. There's generally some sort of magical process by which they all come together at some point. Then I try to sketch out the entire thing in skeleton in some sort of vague plot line. Then I sit down and draw it page by page and do the writing as I go along. I usually write about two pages in advance - actual dialogue and things like that. I try to keep it relatively spontaneous, without too much advance thought.

You can read more of the interview here.

(Muse Lounge, Apr 09, 2003)