Take Five: Thankful for art and artists
I followed Gastr Del Sol down the more challenging path 30 years ago, and that has made all the difference Follow me for some 'bad' painting, guitar solos, poetry and power pop
“Take Five” is posted each Friday, and offers five things I spent some time with over the course of the previous week. No criticism, no in-depth analysis, just a few things I think you might be interested in checking out. When the spirit moves me, I’ll post other things at other times.
It’s a big week for you, loyal My Impression Now reader, as you get two posts in a short week. After Tuesday’s look at U2’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, we return for our usual Friday “Take Five.” I hope you’ll take some of that extra time you have this holiday weekend to pick up a bit of what I’m laying down. Let me know in the comments if you do.
1. Gastr Del Sol — Mirror Repair
Thirty years ago this month, when I was just a wee lad a couple of years out of college, I bought a CD that started me down a very fruitful path. Mirror Repair was a new EP from the band Gastr Del Sol. I didn’t know much about the group other than that one member had been in the teen punk band Squirrel Bait (if you haven’t heard their “Sun God,” click this link and come back after you’ve listened) and that they earned good reviews from magazines I read. I had long been listening to things outside the mainstream, and felt ready to push a bit beyond typical songcraft. The EP is relatively short — about 20 minutes — and features rather minimalist avant-garde music. It’s not particularly challenging or noisy — certainly not when compared to what I listen to these days — but it was certainly different from what I was hearing at the time. David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke would go on to take over a rather large portion of my music collection as I followed their various musical peregrinations together, alone, or with others. Exploring the family tree of their careers led me to other artists, and those artists led me to others, and soon I was challenging myself in a way I hadn’t previously. In some ways, “Eight Corners” is the starting point for so much of my musical taste.
2. Albert Oehlen’s ‘bad’ paintings
The cover of Mirror Repair, which played a big part in the initial appeal, is an untitled painting by Albert Oehlen. When this disc was released in 1994, there wasn’t an easy way to find out more about Oehlen, and it wasn’t until this week that it dawned on me that I could explore his work. The German painter, now 70, still works and has created a vast body of work, much of it of a piece with this ’90s painting. At his page at the Gagosian gallery website, he is described as being “perhaps best known for his embrace of ‘bad’ painting. Alongside his many rules, he allows a certain awkwardness or ugliness to enter his work, introducing unsettling gestures, crudely drawn figures, visceral smears of artificial pigments, bold hues, and flesh tones.” I can see that in the painting used on the cover, though I would certainly not use “bad” as much as “chaotic.” It’s a perfect image for the music within, and other pieces of his would also make great album covers. I do hope either Grubbs or O’Rourke purchased their painting back in 1994, because Oehlen’s pieces now sell for the low to mid seven figures. At the very least, perhaps I could afford a book of his new paintings (seen above). I’m intrigued, and now that I know the name I definitely will explore further.
3. Television — Marquee Moons
Film critic Ty Burr has offered a wonderful holiday gift for fans of the band Television, its guitarist Tom Verlaine, or of rock guitar in general. He took the guitar solos from 50 bootleg recordings of Television performing its seminal song, “Marquee Moon,” and created a six-and-a-half hour supercut featuring every note. Verlaine is one of the most inventive guitarists to spring from the ’70s punk movement or otherwise, and as these sprawling solos attest, his creativity was near limitless. Though each solo is based on the same song structure, the same chords, each is different. Over the course of four decades, it seems Verlaine never played it the same way twice. Burr has a piece well worth reading about the project on his website where he explains why he did his and why anyone should care. I’ll admit I haven’t heard more than a few of the solos, choosing to skip around from era to era rather than sit and digest it in whole, but I’ll also admit I spent more time with this on in the background at work this week than I expected. Television was an amazing band, and its debut, Marquee Moon, is one of my favorite albums. Sometimes a band records a song and then plays it that way until the end, other times the recording is one point in a long continuum, and it just happened to sound that way on that day. Television is among the latter, always looking forward, and Burr’s exercise in excess exemplifies this perfectly.
4. Elizabeth Willis - Liontaming in America
One problem with programming a book festival is that you often create a schedule that greatly appeals to you, and then find yourself unable to steal more than a moment away from everything to actually sit and experience what you created. Such was the case with Elizabeth Willis, who read at the Iowa City Book Festival last month from her new poetry collection, Liontaming in America. I never made it there to see it, only hearing after the fact about this wonderful reading I had missed. The book was longlisted for the National Book Award, and based on what I have finally had the chance to read thus far, will certainly make many ‘best of” lists as the end of the year approaches. I don’t usually write about things until I have finished them, but this book is so extraordinary that I couldn’t help myself. From the opening poem, “The End,” which grabbed me with lines like —
Where, in what shadow of a
footprint, did greed start to
sound like the whisper of your
special god?
— I was hooked, and have sped through. I expect to read it twice in quick succession, once to take it in and then again to make careful note of certain lines and phrases and explore the way they are stitched together. It is a sprawling collection of verse and prose poetry that touches on family history, feminism, Mormonism, filmmaking, and the vast tapestry of American history. “I’m not speaking for you, I’m speaking to you, America,” she writes in that opening poem, and we would do well to listen.
5. Small Square — “Otherwhile”
Increasingly, if I am spending money on music, I’m doing so on Bandcamp. The bands and artists I follow are usually those left-of-the-dial acts that aren’t on big record labels (or any label at all in some cases) and it’s either the only way to get their music or the best way to offer some financial support. Sometimes my acquisitions outpace the time I have to listen, and things can sit in a folder or on the shelf for a while before I get around to giving something a full spin. Such was the case with the self-titled album from the Small Square. The band is Velvet Crush bassist/vocalist Paul Chastain and drummer John Richardson (who played with many great power pop acts, not the least of which was the late Tommy Keene). Chastain, based in Japan, records guitar, bass and vocals, and Richardson adds drums from Wisconsin. The result sounds like what you would expect — incredibly accomplished power pop from two of the best to do it. I bought this album, reissued in 2023, several months ago, but finally got around to listening to it this week. Any song would do as a sample, but the rocker “Otherwhile” caught my ear as I sat down to write this, so that’s what you get. This could be a great Velvet Crush single from the early ’90s with that soaring chorus, and it’s a bit of nostalgia I’m ready to embrace.