STUFFS & THINGS & THINGS & STUFF (STTS-025)
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Perfect Sound Forever magazine, On the Wire Radio (and many other deep internet rabbitholes), Chocolate Monk, Warmer Milks, SST Video, Minutemen YouTube parade
I’ve been reading the film criticism of Jonathan Rosenbaum since the 1990s, mostly in actual print issues of the Chicago Reader picked up for free whenever I was visiting the city, and of course after I moved to Chicago for good in 2001. He resigned as the Reader’s resident film critic in 2008, after 21 years in that position, but he’s back in the current issue as the subject of a nice life-spanning interview by Joshua Minsoo Kim (of the Tone Glow newsletter), in part to promote a new anthology of his work that I’ll definitely be adding to my tsundoku piles, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: A Jonathan Rosenbaum Reader. Reading this interview really drove home how much of an inspiration and guidepost this guy’s writing has been to me. He primarily writes about film and I primarily write about music, but his approach is directly applicable to any art form, I would think, because it’s very phenomenological, in that you can write thousands of meaningful pages just to answer two simple questions: one, what are these works of art (phenomena) I’m experiencing? And two, how can I describe them, and the ways they make me think and feel, to you? Here are a few Rosenbaum quotes from the interview I find most applicable to this practice:
“Is the job of a critic to say that a film is good or bad? I would argue today that it’s meaningless to say that something is good or bad unless you say it’s good or bad for what or for whom. To assume something more general is to assume that everyone has the same taste or should have the same taste, which is crazy! It’s so obvious that a film that is good for me may be bad for you, and that your reasons for disliking it are just as legitimate as my reasons for liking it.”
“I want people to think for themselves. It’s a strong belief of mine that film critics should not have the first or last word on any film. I think that what they do is a social function—they’re intervening and improving the level of discussion. It’s not about telling people what to think.”
“This is maybe controversial, but I consider myself an artist. This is something that would be impossible if I wrote for the mainstream. When that happens, it’s the mainstream venues that define, label, and classify you. If you’re a niche writer like I am, you can brand yourself.”
“I tend to think that I use the opinions and observations of other people more than most critics do. In other words, I feel that part of my job is to steer people in the right direction, which includes leading people to other writers.”
“I write in order to discover what I think rather than to express what I think. It’s a little bit like improvising.”
And speaking of music criticism, a new Perfect Sound Forever internet magazine just dropped. Right now I’m on the Ari Up interview and also enjoyed the new-bio-excerpt deep-dive into Dolphy’s Out to Lunch LP. But I’m still not even finished with the Archie Patterson (EUROCK zine) interview from the previous issue. Always at least a few fascinating articles/interviews/thinkpieces/nuggets/etc in every single issue over at P.S.F., shout out to founder/editor Jason Gross. (Also gotta mention my appreciation for the resolute Web 1.0-ness of it all. Exact same template in 2024 as it was in 1996 or whatever.) (Oh hey, it started in 1993.)
And by the way, I just want to pause here in amazement at all the deep rabbitholes of music one keeps finding on the internet, just in the archived radio show category alone. There’s the On the Wire radio program by Steve Barker and friends, which you can peep dozens of hours of at otwradio.blogspot.com, where they not only get into stuff like Claire Rousay and the Jeff Parket ETA IVtet but of course all of Barker’s deep reggae knowledge that he’s written about in his column for The Wire for many years, like for example the October 27th 2024 episode in which Barker brings us “A third reggae dub riddim version n ting special in a row ….. we have too many great tunes to leave laying around for another couple of weeks, starting with the incredible cumbia version of Jonathan Richman’s ‘Egyptian Reggae’ itself derived from ‘None Shall Escape the Judgement’, a 1973 tune from Earl Zero, following that one of my favourite dubs of all time King Tubby’s ‘Whispering Dub' from the Skatalites 1975 comeback album, recognisable to all Top of the Pops fans from the 1975 hit version of the song by Don Estelle and Windsor Davies of ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’, a comedy no longer repeated for obvious reasons.” And that’s just to introduce three songs, which take up not even 15 minutes out of one single 3-hour episode out of hundreds dating back to an Ian Curtis interview from Februrary 1980! (Also funny that today I learned Steve Barker of On the Wire radio and Steve Barrow of The Rough Guide to Reggae are in fact NOT the same person, but can you blame me? They’re both British, into reggae, and their names are literally 9/11ths the same!) There’s also Radio Dies Screaming (formerly Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio, from our fave serial rebrander Jay Hinman), where I’ve barely even started the killer “Los Angeles Punk 1977-1982” special, let alone the “60s French Yé-Yé Pop Edition,” or any of the other hundred or so hours he’s got posted over there, and I get a similar pleasantly overwhelmed feeling (more like surfing than drowning) when I peep Mosurock’s Heathen Disco show over on Mixcloud (Arthur Russell right into Idea Fire Company back on the 5th of July, nice) or Conklin’s The Trailhead show and Ambient Audiophile newsletter, or Erika Elizabeth and co. on MRR Radio, still going strong even if the print magazine isn’t anymore, or Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood Basement show which I haven’t actually even dipped my toe into yet, and maybe never will, but if I do I’ll probably start with this episode (update: I did listen to the Luke Stewart interview, which was very good and had several excellent tracks interspersed. I especially liked one by Stewart’s Silt Trio).
Not to mention learning about Midwestern (?) 70s/80s tax-scam funk on the “Cost of Yes” episode of the Dogpatch podcast with Dante Carfagna and Jon Kirby, where every episode is its own deep rabbithole, in this case getting as far down as the draggy post-Sly mumble-funk of “Sticks and Shorty (Comin’ at Cha!)” by the one and only Sticks and Shorty (Carfagna calls it “rote” but I think it slaps and especially love the vocals), or the dramatic purple psychedelic R&B of “Passionate Affection” by Double Trouble (not available on YouTube), or, going even deeper into the Dogpatch for another episode I can’t now locate that focuses on lost tracks from the CDBaby.com era (?) wherein I discover the still rather shockingly fresh 1986 genre-hybrid that is “Bonnie and Clyde” by one (and done?) Greg Mason, or, in yet another episode focusing on (mostly) 70s/80s music that the co-hosts find to be predictive of then-imminent Chicago house and Detroit techno, there’s deep Patrick Cowley instrumental remixes of Sylvester tracks and/or Delia Derbyshire stacking sick polyrhythmic loops up back in 1963. And, speaking of Chicago house rabbitholes, there’s always always always gridface.com/ron-hardy-playlists for a major one . . . and don’t even get me started on the grandaddy of all archives archive.org, okay, get me started, with just one single nugget, h/t to Conklin’s aforementioned Ambient Audiophile newsletter: a band called Ace Bandage, live at Greenpoint Gallery on March 22, 2024. Turns out a soulful non-hippie/non-granola post-punk jam-band from Brooklyn was just what I was looking for. I would not have guessed. In addition to their own ambling originals, they not only cover Pink Floyd, the Buzzcocks, Welch-era Fleetwood Mac, Black Sabbath, and “Spooky” by Classics IV/A.R.S. . . . but the Sabbath cover is from Sabotage! I mean, that’s the internet for you. To think, someday it will all go away, but if you or I are around when it does, promise me you’ll remember . . . and that you’ll help me to remember . . . THE MUSIC.
I mean, I can’t even get to this 38-minute episode of the Inside No. 9 podcast series on the Foxy Digitalis website that highlights the long time Blastifave Chocolate Monk label, let alone any of the new releases on the label itself. At least I got to spend a day or two with a few of them that one time last (?) spring (?). And, postscript time, poking around further on the Digitalis site quickly brought me to this archived Warmer Milks interview from 2006. Memory lane, man. RIP Lee Jackson. Blastitude even gets mentioned a couple times, having also conducted and published an interview with Milks-man Mikey earlier that same year. I’d like to take this moment to also hype the 2LP reissue on the Sophomore Lounge label of Warmer Milks’ Soft Walks CD from 2008. Not only do I love the album, I also wrote the liner notes for the reissue and the Lounge let me go long. I’m a little proud, that’s all.
Dug a couple old SST catalog inserts out of a copy of Sonic Youth’s (frankly rather terrible) 1988 “Master=Dik” b/w “Beat on the Brat” 12” EP (although the Sonny Sharrock/George Benson jokes on side B somehow still make me laugh). “We’re here to blast your concept” reads one of the headers, hell yeah, and it was fun to dig into the pages and find a forgotten “SST Video” section (“please specify VHS or Beta”) that lists a release called Corndogs featuring “two and one-half hours of never before seen Minutemen video.” I was shocked and disappointed to go on YouTube and not find a complete upload of the whole thing, but then quickly realized there’s already much more than 2.5 hours of Minutemen footage uploaded to YouTube and that I shouldn’t be complaining. To wit: