Jun. 30th, 2006

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or:

An Album of Albums



David Byrne, last month, wrote about the nostalgia for record packaging -- vinyl 33rpm LPs in particular, but even now CD covers and booklets -- as an absurd fetishization of a form of packaging generally supervised, if not created, by businessmen at a corporate level, designed solely as an advertising billboard to sell the product inside. No connection to the music. He sees greater possibilities in the future of bundled "packaging" with digitally-downloaded musical media in terms of a creative or artistic "statement" to be made by the creator of the work.

I see his point, and yet . . .

The album cover as it existed created a point in time that denoted a point in space, that is, created-encoded a "chapter stop," starting a new scene in a new location with a new soundtrack, to be easily accessed by the remote control of memory. An album cover brings back not just the music it contains, but -- sometimes even without the direct association of the music -- the place, time, and sense-memory of the important events that the album cover was present for.

Pull out an album . . . let's see . . . let's say . . . this one, here, Orchestra Luna. Had it a long time. Many things happened to me with this piece of cardboard present. What comes up first, looking at this cover? Mind flicks. Chapters skip back. Play is pressed.

Chapter 112: Boarding School. Dorm Room. First Girlfriend. 1984. Album on table. Cover face down, lyric sheet/sleeve covering half of it at an 45-degree angle. Table by stereo. Side 2 plays. Girl and I on her bed, kissing. 40-watt bulb bounces light off red bedspead, making orange glow across white walls. Trashcan in door as required by school rules for boy/girl "visitation." Door must be open at least six inches. Girls in the hallway giggle as they pass. Door to stairwell slamming open and shut, girls' voices echoing up and down the stairs. The guitar solo on "Doris Dreams" triangulates with the bounce of the light moving across the record jacket, shaking as the table the lamp is on shakes, the taste of her mouth, with the slam of the door and attendant echo, the feel of her sweater, with the smell of incense, all senses at once brought back . . .

Other record covers, other places, other times, real again, able to be replayed with the immediate aid of the physical object that contained songs -- air molecules pushed into certain discrete orders. The songs may bring back the feelings, that is, the EMOTIONS, but the object brings back the landscape, the feelings, that is, the SENSATIONS.

Long Playing Albums were called "albums" because the first multiple sets of 78rpm shellacs came in packaging like photo albums, to be opened and paged through. The packaging changed with the technology but the obsolete name lived on. Or maybe it wasn't so obsolete, and the record cover became, in conjuction with the music, a kind of photo album, a memory book. Pleaces we've been, captured.

"Do you remember that time we last visited Electric Warrior, dear?"

"Wasn't that right after we travelled through Are You Experienced? on our way to Trout Mask Replica? It was 1992, and we were doing that show at Soho Rep."

"Yes, when we were hanging out with Michael and Jesse and Angela and Rebecca and Bill and George and the rest of that group almost every night. The Blue and Gold. The Tile Bar. Phebe's. Nevermind."

"The place on Mulberry. Angela. That Leonard Cohen album she played. 'Camarillo Brillo'."

"Then it was all living in Into the Woods for the next year, writing that play with David on 10th Street."


I don't know that digital "packaging," confined to screen and un-"holdable," really, will have the same associative powers -- CDs never seemed to have quite the same power in that way as LPs (is it really just size?), but they still were an object that denoted a mark in space-time.

Below, 99 record covers that could be a life. That could be my life. That may have been a Summer, a Year, a Decade, Just One (Very Important) Day or Night, a Theatre, a Lover, a Friend or Friends, a One-Night-Stand, an Obsession, an Apartment, or My Whole Life In and Of Themselves. Some are albums I've owned as long as I can remember. Some are albums I've never owned, but I couldn't find a better image for that artist and this one is as good/iconic as any. For some artists, I could have put up 2, 5, even 20 albums that meant just as much to me, but I limited myself to one (artists who were the creative force behind a band, and then as a solo artist, got special dispensation). There are maybe 4-6 albums as important, or even more, as any here to me, but I couldn't get any kind of representative image for them, unfortunately. Still, I look at these and think, this is me, this is my life.

And I look and I wonder, what is this life?


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What does your life in music packaging look like?
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can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all."

Last year, I created a play called NECROPOLIS 1&2: World Gone Wrong/Worth Gun Willed, or, for simplicity's sake, World Gone Wrong. It was a metaphoric nightmare portrait of contemporary America through the collaged words of film noir (1941-1958) and neo-noir (1959-present) with those of the current Administration (2000-present). As film noir was, often, in its original form, a dark leftist commentary on the USA in which it was created (HUAC and blacklisting hit prime creators of noir harder than those in any other film genre of the time), I felt the form was appropriate for the present day.

I was certainly very familiar with noir for years before making this show, and had seen dozens,, but had to do even more research to create it, and watched a couple hundred more. The play wound up using quotes from 167 films (originally 193 before cuts had to be made to the script). Lucas Krech has asked for advice on noirs to watch for a current project, and, as a result of having done this play in any case, I get asked all the time for noir recommendations.

So, here's a document that previously just went to my cast and the press, my list of the 75 "Essential Noirs" (really, of course, my favorites, for the most part, though there are some on here that I recognize as important, even if I don't like them as much as everyone else), broken down into my own system of periods and categories, followed by a shorter list of the 26 "Best of the Best."

Now, even a quick glance over these lists makes me realize that my tastes have changed somewhat even within the past year, and I've seen at least a dozen noirs since then, a couple of which probably belong on here. Also, a large number of noirs have been newly released on video in the past year, and I have about 35 I haven't seen lined up on my Netflix queue right now, so who knows what I'll find there. But . . . I'm not going to start revising this all now. These lists are as good a place to start as any. Enjoy . . .




CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF “IAN’S ESSENTIAL NOIR FILMS”:


CLASSIC NOIR: TILTING TOWARDS COLLAPSE (IN FOUR PARTS)



PART ONE: BAD DECISIONS -- CRACKS APPEAR IN THE WAY THINGS “SHOULD” BE:


The Maltese Falcon
(1941, John Huston)
The Seventh Victim (1943, Mark Robson)
Laura (1944, Otto Preminger)
Double Indemnity (1944, Billy Wilder)
Phantom Lady (1944, Robert Siodmak)
Mildred Pierce (1945, Michael Curtiz)
Scarlet Street (1945, Fritz Lang)
Murder, My Sweet (1945, Edward Dmytryk)
Gilda (1946, Charles Vidor)
The Big Sleep (1946, Howard Hawks)
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946, Lewis Milestone)
The Killers (1946, Robert Siodmak)
Nocturne (1946, Edwin L. Marin)
Detour (1946, Edgar G. Ulmer)


PART TWO: A BASICALLY GOOD WORLD -- ORDER ATTEMPTS TO REGAIN CONTROL:


Brute Force
(1947, Jules Dassin)
Out of the Past (1947, Jacques Tourneur)
T-Men (1947, Anthony Mann)
The Big Clock (1948, John Farrow)
The Lady from Shanghai (1948, Orson Welles)
The Naked City (1948, Jules Dassin)


PART THREE: NO DICE -- MORALITY BECOMES RELATIVE:


Force of Evil
(1948, Abraham Polonsky)
Raw Deal (1948, Anthony Mann)
Criss Cross (1949, Robert Siodmak)
Gun Crazy (1949, Joseph H. Lewis)
The Set-Up (1949, Robert Wise)
Thieves’ Highway (1949, Jules Dassin)
The Asphalt Jungle (1949, John Huston)


PART FOUR: HYSTERIA, INSANITY, AND BLIND CHANCE THE NOIR FUCKING LOSES ITS SHIT:


Sunset Blvd.
(1950, Billy Wilder)
D.O.A. (1950, Rudolph Maté)
Night and the City (1950, Jules Dassin)
Cry Danger (1951, Robert Parrish)
Kansas City Confidential (1952, Phil Karlson)
Pickup on South Street (1953, Samuel Fuller)
The Big Heat (1953, Fritz Lang)
The Big Combo (1955, Joseph H. Lewis)
Kiss Me Deadly (1955, Robert Aldrich)
The Killing (1956, Stanley Kubrick)
Touch of Evil (1958, Orson Welles)



NEW WAVE NOIR: EXPRESSIONISM AND COLLAGE


Shoot the Piano Player
(1960, François Truffaut)
Shock Corridor (1963, Samuel Fuller)
High and Low (1963, Akira Kurosawa)
Band of Outsiders (1964, Jean-Luc Godard)
The Killers (1964, Don Siegel)
The Naked Kiss (1964, Samuel Fuller)
Alphaville (1965, Jean-Luc Godard)
Mickey One (1965, Arthur Penn)
Pierrot le Fou (1965, Jean-Luc Godard)
Point Blank (1967, John Boorman)
Performance (1967, Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg)



POST-IDEALIST NOIR: INTERNAL DETECTIVES


Hickey & Boggs
(1972, Robert Culp)
The Long Goodbye (1973, Robert Altman)
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974, Sam Peckinpah)
Chinatown (1974, Roman Polanski)
The Driver (1978, Walter Hill)
Bad Timing (1980, Nicolas Roeg)
Cutter’s Way (1981, Ivan Passer)
Blow Out (1981, Brian DePalma)



SURFACE NOIR: THE FORM IS THE FUNCTION


Body Heat
(1981, Lawrence Kasdan)
Thief (1981, Michael Mann)
Blade Runner (1983, Ridley Scott)
To Live and Die in L.A. (1985, William Friedkin)
Blue Velvet (1986, David Lynch)
Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987, Norman Mailer)
Dead Again (1991, Kenneth Branagh)
Basic Instinct (1992, Paul Verhoeven)
Romeo Is Bleeding (1994, Peter Medak)



INTERNAL/EXTERNAL NOIR: OUTSIDERS AND PROBLEMS OF PERCEPTION


Bound
(1996, The Wachowski Brothers)
Jackie Brown (1997, Quentin Tarantino)
Lost Highway (1997, David Lynch)
Dark City (1998, Alex Proyas)
The Big Lebowski (1998, Joel Coen)
The Limey (1999, Steven Soderbergh)
Memento (2000, Christopher Nolan)
The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001, Joel Coen)
Mulholland Dr. (2002, David Lynch)


THE BEST OF THE BEST
:


Double Indemnity (1944, Billy Wilder)
The Big Sleep (1946, Howard Hawks)
Detour (1946, Edgar G. Ulmer)
Out of the Past (1947, Jacques Tourneur)
T-Men (1947, Anthony Mann)
The Lady from Shanghai (1948, Orson Welles)
Force of Evil (1948, Abraham Polonsky)
Raw Deal (1948, Anthony Mann)
The Set-Up (1949, Robert Wise)
Gun Crazy (1949, Joseph H. Lewis)
Sunset Blvd. (1950, Billy Wilder)
D.O.A. (1950, Rudolph Maté)
The Big Heat (1953, Fritz Lang)
The Big Combo (1955, Joseph H. Lewis)
Kiss Me Deadly (1955, Robert Aldrich)
Touch of Evil (1958, Orson Welles)
The Killers (1964, Don Siegel)
Point Blank (1967, John Boorman)
The Long Goodbye (1973, Robert Altman)
Chinatown (1974, Roman Polanski)
Bad Timing (1980, Nicolas Roeg)
To Live and Die in L.A. (1985, William Friedkin)
Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987, Norman Mailer)
Lost Highway (1997, David Lynch)
The Big Lebowski (1998, Joel Coen)
Mulholland Dr. (2002, David Lynch)




For those who want to descend more into the nightmare world of noir, as well as the sometimes nightmarish world of geeky noirheads, the prime place to go is THE BLACKBOARD, where we all congregate to discuss, argue, and theorize on this beautiful, painful American genre.

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