October

(pic via kangster's Flickr)

Long lost mea culpa:  Back when Carla Bozulich (myspace) released the first record attributed to her Evangelista (myspace) project, Hello, Voyager, I dashed off mention of its availability and noted it was quite a lot like Bozulich's last solo album, Evangelista.  When I said that each record ended in an extended, immolative sermon, a commenter called me on it and accused me of not actually listening to the records.  Which wasn't true, but he was right:  Evangelista concludes with a twelve-minute tripping-over-instrument testimony to Love.  Now, Voyager wraps with a hushed, lovely plea; the track I'd thought had come at the end is instead in the middle. 

Not a tragic mistake, but it was one easily checked and I did not go back and do so.  I share that commenter's exasperation with the casual wrongness of All the Internet and am embarrassed it concerned an artist for whom I have so much respect.

(I can't even find the damned comment now.  Though I'm the type that will manufacture guilt for myself, I'm pretty sure it exists.)

No excuse, but for me that middle track overwhelms the rest of that earlier record.  "Baby, That's the Creeps" is awesome.  Not the gnattish way everything on the Internet is "awesome."  Awesome in the block-out-the-sun don't-look-directly-at-it-or-it-will-smite-you-you-unworthy-little-motherfucker way.  Alpha and Omega, light and dark, wound and scar.

Carla Bozulich - Baby, That's the Creeps (Live at The Vanguard, San Francisco, 8-22-06)(mp3)

And rather than pull out the studio album, I prefer to haunt the legal internet archive of live recordings and listen to Bozulich pull this off on stage.

Doesn't always work, thank goodness for that.  The clunkier lines come to the fore, audience distractions squash the spell, the whole thing feels like a contrived performance piece.  Flopping about in menstrual chocolate syrup, etc.  It's like demanding God to your tent.  You can read the lines all funny on purpose, it takes something special to make it speak in tongues.

But Bozulich is so willing to work things under her skin that you're often given raw access to urge, confusion, despair.  Everything holy and human and hellish about these pulpit pulping deathbed electric chair razor blade rubber room confession panic sessions goes way beyond commitment.  You prick when she keeps asking, "Can you feel it?" because good Jesus how could you not?  All the rest of your music is just a plastic tub full of soft toys.

Carla Bozulich's Evangelista has a new record out next week.  It is called Prince of Truth.  I haven't heard it yet, I am not going to pretend that I have.

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"i love the question about what album do i want to record---but i don't know. i love to feel whatever's moving between my toes when i walk outdoors in the dark... i want to sooth people and i want to cut them too----so they can see that we all bleed the same and it's not the end of the world----yet. i want to hear people yelling back at me. i find myself saying things more and more each night (i tour all the time) that might incite a fucking reaction----wake up some indignance on either side of the spectrum----be insulted by me or against the world that sewed your fucking mouth shut. tell me to fuck off cuz i called myself and you a mother fucking faggot. let me lull you. look at someone straight in the eyes-----how bout that--- how hard is that? really hard. it's hard for me, too, i swear. really hard. but i'm so strong. you are so strong. get tossed around in love and the lack of it the lost stomped down vicious control----society's brute grasp on the balls of every inclination to reach out. to pry your heart out of your own fucking hands and throw it up in the air for ANYONE to catch. to yell. in public. we can't show ourselves. we could get arrested just for standing on a corner and yelling 'someone come and fuck me please before i completely forget what it feels like to open myself up to something other than my own caged thoughts.' we're fucked in the balls we're ripped in the sewn up cunt by the boundaries of just exactly how strange it is cool to be. how uncool it is to be strange. fuck me. now. goddamn it. the word is love. we used to call it punk rock."

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Bonus.

Carla Bozulich - Pissing (Low Cover - Live at The Vanguard, San Francisco, 8-22-06)(mp3)

Alan Sparhawk -- who sometimes takes a more contemplated path to the same destinations -- might not have realized he was writing this for Bozulich.  Her studio version appears on that same record.  A more recent performance allows Evangelista's bowed strings to get sweet/sharp toward the end.  But I love this old one, from that same show .  The gasps at the outset, the quiet way she yodels up an octave just after the two minute mark, how determined the whole thing is.

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Also next week:  Light in the Attic reissues Betty Davis' third album, Nasty Gal, and releases for the first time her lost album, 1976's Is it Love or Desire?

The answer is Yes.

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 Help keep this guy's wife from getting deported.

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"Sorry to have kept you waiting. I was too careful."

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'Bill Anderson wrote and recorded "Too Country" about that. "Too country?" That's what he was asking the VJs and the people involved in New Country. How can you get too country when you've been traditional country all your career and had big success? Then you call a radio station to get your song played and they say "it's too country!" Bill Anderson wrote a masterpiece; he told it like it was. They were changing their format to make bigger bucks off of the children-the young people, you know. That's all they cater to anymore. The radio don't play traditional country music like it used to be.'

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"How are you today, Mr. Mitchum?"

"Worse."

(2nd video)

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"Yeah, right, I thought, when told it had been hyped as another Waltz With Bashir. Actually, Maoz's recollection of his wartime experience, set entirely inside a tank heading north on the first day of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, should be compared to No Exit, as directed by Sam Fuller.

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I have started actively dreading the Wild Things movie.

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'In the span of a decade, the Rams' offense has morphed from the "Greatest Show on Turf" into what a Washington Post columnist declared after Sunday's 9-7 loss to the Redskins is the "Most Miserable Mass on Grass."'

tags: carla bozulich  betty davis  

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