I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: BECK-Stereopathic Soulmanure (1994).

Depending on who you believe, this was Beck’s first or second or even third album.  Certainly it was recorded earlier than the other records but who knows what the actual release date was, or if it even matters (it doesn’t).  This album plays like a demo tape of home recordings of a talented folksinger who doesn’t want to be labelled as a folk singer ans is experimenting with all kinds of other sounds, including tape manipulation, home recording and utter noise (there’s a Sonic Youth sound connection here, before they ever did anything together).

But anyway, that’s got nothing to do with this album.  My version has 23 listed tracks and two bonus tracks.  And since I’ve no intention of doing a track by track analysis of the album, I’m going to group some tracks together.

There are a few styles of music on the record.  There are about a half-dozen noise/nonsense tracks–distorted guitar, distorted voices, sometimes sheer noise–like the “bonus” track which is some ten minutes of just nonsense.  There are about a half a dozen tracks that are basically just talk–old home recordings from when he was a kid, and other spoken tracks.  There are even a few tracks from a guy named Ken who is apparently an older guy singing what sounds like hobo songs (which I suspect Beck does not play on at all).

There are also a number of different instruments which (I assume) Beck is playing. He plays banjo very well, there’s an accordion track, and of course guitar.

What sets this apart from being a simple nonsense album is that there are nearly a dozen “real” songs.  There are a couple of well sung country tracks, with a slide guitar. There’s also some anti-folk, rap and live numbers.  These are fleshed out, proper songs–musically complete.  It’s in the lyrics that you can hear Beck fighting the folk/country pigeonhole.  He has three songs that are more or less rapping (like “Loser”).  There’s a couple of songs that were recorded live (in a club with half a dozen people), and are mostly silly.  And then there’s a series of anti-folk songs.  These are pretty traditional sounding songs, but with layers of noise or weirdness that keeps them from being traditional folk.  Like “Satan Gave me a Taco” which is complete song but is obviously quite silly.  And yet, Johnny Cash covered the song “Rowboat” on one of his Americana albums.

None of the recordings sound more than lo-fi, but the good songs all sound good.   It honestly sounds like a guy trying desperately to show off what he can do–and hoping desperately to get accepted by just about any genre.  Except that he clearly has his own identity (as varied as it may be).  This record is certainly not for everybody (as suggested by the incredibly low sales), but if you like Beck’s early experimental stuff, there’s enough really good stuff here that’s worth checking out.

[READ: March 9, 2014] Tintin: The Art of Hergé

Sarah bought me this book for our tenth anniversary (which is “tin”, get it?).  We’ve both enjoyed Tintin over the years, more as an icon than as a collection of stories (which I believe she has not read and which I’ve read about 1/3 of).  The Spielberg film and subsequent video game are both really cool too.  This book is an amazing look at Hergé as an artist and at the Hergé museum, which looks amazing.

When Sarah and I were in Belgium, we went to an animation museum which featured Hergé heavily.  Since it was a decade ago, I actually thought that this book was about that museum, but no, the Musée Hergé opened in 2009 and was designed by French architect Christian de Portzamparc.  The first chapter of the book is dedicated to the Museum, and do de Portzamparc’s designs and execution in the spirit of Tintin.  And I have to say the building looks amazing.  The facade alone is beautiful, and his explorations light and dark and shape look really awesome.

The second chapter looks at the young Georges Remi (with an awesome picture of him as a young boy with luxuriously long hair).  The text in these two chapters is the longest as they have the most to say.  As the book proceeds, the text diminishes to make way for all kinds of unpublished pictures from the artist himself.

Chapter Three talks about the Tintin cast and about some of his other comics (yes he did other works that Tintin).  Like Quick & Flupke, which looks a lot like Tintin but seems more comical (the original cartoons are printed without translation).  Chapters Four and Five look at Hergé’s inspirations.  We learn who inspired the creation of many of the characters (often times it is a specific individual) and we get a little summary about many of them.  But there’s also information about what inspired him to draw certain pictures and even to go to certain places.  It’s an amazing insight into the kind of things that Hergé saw and decided to emulate (often in staggering detail).  It’s also funny to see a scene from movies (like The Marx Brothers and other American films) that he tried (and succeeded) in replicating in his own way.

Chapter Six looks at the fame that Tintin (and to a lesser extent Hergé has experienced–including parades, monuments and of course a gorgeous museum).  Chapter Seven talks about all of the 24 books and gives a little blurb as to their availability and updated nature (Hergé revisited many of these books during his life time, changing ideas that were no longer relevant and then adding color to the originally black and white book).

This book is just chock full of sketches and marginal drawings, original storyboards and panels and a lot of panels with no words added in yet.  In addition to the unfinished pages there are tons of completed drawings as well, showing Tintin and Snowy in all of their glory.

Michael Farr translated this book from the French (aside, as I said, from the actual cartoons) and it is informative and easy to read.  This book is certainly a good one for devoted fans of Hergé because of all of the unpublished works–although the text itself is pretty light and won’t reveal anything new or scandalous (it was put out by the museum after all).  But it’s perfect for novice Hergé and Tintin fans because this really gives a lot of context and explanation for the cult of Tintin and lets you know just how seriously Hergé took these adventures.

While I’d always sort of enjoyed Tintin, this book made me really appreciate what a great artist Hergé was.  Not that the comics themselves aren’t great, but somehow seeing the sketches and the details and the amazing precision he put into his work made me appreciate the relatively simple-looking drawings of the final production even more.

I really enjoyed reading this and will certainly reference it a lot when sketching people and cars.  Oh and Clark said he loves the red and white checkerboard pattern on the edges of the pages–which are indeed very cool.