Fear Fun, the album by “Father John Misty” that I’ve been raving about to everyone who I’ve had a conversation with about music, on this blog—and in the pages of this month’s PAPER magazine—since last fall, is finally out on Sub Pop Records. The “Father John Misty” moniker is a deliberately curious pseudonym for Josh Tillman, better known as the former drummer for Seattle-based folk rockers, Fleet Foxes.
“Misty,” he told me, “is a horny, drunk, shamanic drifter character offering you a cup of his home-brewed ayahuasca tea.”
Trying to describe music in words is like doing a sketch of a novel, but in a nutshell, here’s what you get with Fear Fun: Blenderize Physical Graffiti, Roy Orbison, Waylon Jennings, Nilsson, Loudon Wainwright III, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and the Rollings Stones with Hermann Hesse, Charles Bukowski and Richard Brautigan. That’s what it tastes like.
Fear Fun is a striking, often inscrutable obelisk of a album, a multi-layered work with clever, sardonic “literary” lyrics. It’s something that deserves to be listened to all the way through, as if you’re reading a novel or watching a film. Fear Fun has a dramatic arc and a certain resolution of tension by the end. The album was produced by the amazing Jonathan Wilson and engineered by Phil Ek on analog tape, so it sounds great. It’s a unique piece of art to unleash on an OCD world carrying iPods, but one that can be enjoyed in that context, too.
If this sounds intriguing—and I hope that it would—you can order Fear Fun via Amazon or pick it up at your local record emporium. There’s even a limited edition pink vinyl version. The amazing cover painting is by talented New York-based painter, Dimitri Drjuchin.
As we arrive at Tillman’s Econoline van parked a few blocks away [to smoke a joint], he explains his decision to release Fear Fun under the name Father John Misty, as opposed to J. Tillman, the moniker under which he’s released his previous solo albums. “In my mind, this J. Tillman person is a far more romanticized, fictionalized person to the world than this ridiculous name, Father John Misty,” he says. He goes on to explain how he felt distanced and trapped by his songwriting persona as he matured in his personal life.
“I wanted to bring my conversational voice and my musical voice in to alignment. The ridiculous name is about satisfying this morbid sense of humor I have that says ‘Maybe the most honest thing you can do is to just call yourself something stupid and say something real.’”
The name Father John Misty is partly a reference to cocaine, as in “Misty Mountain Hop,” and partly a reference to Tillman’s life-long exploration of religion and spirituality, which started with his evangelical upbringing in the suburbs of Washington D.C. Out of despair, Tillman considered becoming a pastor for a brief time during his youth. “I wasn’t good at sports. I wasn’t good at school. I didn’t see anything outside of Christian jobs,” he says. After becoming unglued from religion in his teens, “I was so angry and terrified that I’d been raised that way that, at some point, my number one mission became to make as big of a joke out it as I could.”
Father John Misty performs tomorrow, May 4th at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles
As if there weren’t already enough cinematic goodness in Austin, Alamo Drafthouse has just announced a mini-festival of restored classic films from Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation. Here’s the good news:
Mondo & Alamo Drafthouse have partnered with The Film Foundation, Martin Scorsese’s film preservation organization, for a very special screening & poster series of eight classic films this May & June at the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz in Austin, TX with beautifully restored 35mm prints. The Film Foundation is the leading non-profit organization dedicated to film preservation and has worked with the nation’s archives to save over 560 titles. The foundation provides public access to the restorations and educates future generations about film language and history.
The Film Foundation and its partners have provided pristine 35mm prints for King Kong, The Night of the Hunter, The Old Dark House, Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, Rashomon, Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, The Unholy Three and Film. The films will also get the Mondo treatment with an original, stunning work of art available for sale at each of the screenings
The posters by Mondo Tees are quite beautiful, with King Kong (artist: Laurent Durieux) and Shadow Of A Doubt (Alan Hynes) being my favorites so far. For info on tickets for the screenings and to purchase posters visit The Alamo Drafthouse’s website.
Argentinian garage rockers Capsula are in heavy rotation on the interstellar radio station in my brain. I’m digging their Iggy/Bowie/Velvet Underground vibe big time.
Currently residing in Spain, Capsula are Martin Guevara on guitar and vocals, Coni Duchess on bass and drummer Ignacio Villarejo. They’re about to embark on a tour of the States and their first three albums are scheduled to be released in re-mastered form on May 17th. Check out their website for more info.
Here’s “Hit N’ Miss” from Capsula’s album In The Land Of Silver Souls. Play it loud! And stick around for the interview.
Japanese clothing / novelty online shop Black Store is selling this fun air freshener with the Mona Lisa pictured chillin’ in a weed crop, holding a doobie.
I kinda like these not-your -average, run-of-the-mill one-piece swimsuits by Etsy shop thePussPuss. According to the write-up, they’re “Made in the EU with love using top quality fabric from Italy.”
Jimi Hendrix at the 1968 Miami Pop Festival by Linda McCartney
On Friday September 18, 1970, Frank Reynolds announced:
“The Jimi Hendrix Experience is over. The acid rock musician died today in a London hospital, apparently from an overdose of drugs. During his short career, Hendrix flailed his electric guitar into some of the most unusual sounds of an unusual music. A report now from ABC’s Gregory Jackson.”
Interesting to note that the footage shot by ABC of The Jimi Hendrix Experience onstage at the Miami Pop Festival in May of 1968, seen here, apparently only shows up in this news report. It’s considered one of the “holy grails” by Hendrix bootleg collectors.
According to a fan who diligently tried to track the footage down, it’s been listed as “lost” in the ABC archives since 1973, along with a host of other unseen footage that the network shot of Hendrix, perhaps even some of the legendary Electric Ladyland sessions. Tragic!
It was announced in a press conference yesterday that US Marshals have crossed another name off the “America’s Most Wanted” list, a man known variously as “Bobby Thompson,” “Anderson Yazzie” and “Ronnie Brittain,” who is accused of creating a fake veterans charity that funneled money to state and national Republican candidates, including President George Bush, Senator John McCain and House Speaker John Boehner
U.S. Marshals captured “Thompson” late Monday evening in Portland, OR. outside of Biddy McGraw’s Irish Pub with a backpack full of cash and fake IDs. Authorities say that they still don’t know what their captive’s real name is—he signed the booking sheet at the jail with an “X”—and the former fugitive is refusing to talk. Investigators tracked “Thompson” across eight states before he was apprehended. 99% of the $100 million is unaccounted for.
Between the early 2000s and 2010, a man using the alias “Bobby Thompson” collected millions from unsuspecting donors for the charity U.S. Navy Veterans Association (USNVA), which claimed to provide support for members of the U.S. Armed Forces. Officials believe that very little, if any, of the money was ever used as intended, according to the U.S. Marshal Service.
To help legitimize his charity, Thompson allegedly donated part of the ill-gotten funds to Republican candidates like former President George W. Bush, former Republican presidential candidate John McCain and House Speaker John Boehner.
Republican Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli reportedly personally pleaded with Thompson for donations and received $55,000 for his effort, making Thompson Cuccinelli’s second-largest donor. Cuccinelli was eventually forced to turn over the tainted money to veterans support groups.
Over the years, Thompson also attended the 2008 Republican National Convention and numerous fundraisers. The Roanoke Times obtained photos of Thompson posing with Bush, Boehner and McCain — as well as Rep. Adam Putnam (R-FL), former Bush adviser Karl Rove and former Republican New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Thompson fled in 2010 after learning of a criminal investigation in several states. He was later charged with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution, identity theft, fraud and money laundering.
“Thompson” is currently being held in the Multnomah County Jail and is expected to be extradited shortly to Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where he was first indicted.
Below, an ABC News story about the scam from last Fall:
There are certain things about Japanese pop culture that are simply inexplicable to my western mind. This is one of them.
As children happily frolic in the grass, a balding man with a grimace for a smile sings and dances while dressed in a girl’s school uniform. It’s all sorts of creepy.
A must-see interview with Stiv Bators which aired in March of 1986 on Cleveland’s longest running cable music show, VidMag Television.
Danny Reed of Syl Sylvain & the Teardrops is the interviewer and his casual and open style results in something less like an interview and more like a chat between two friends. As an ex-Catholic boy, I am particularly empathetic with Bator and Reed’s Catholic school recollections.
Stiv is very candid, sexually explicit, politically incorrect and totally entertaining - a close-up look at one of punk rock’s sweetest bad boys.
Video kicks off with about 45 seconds of silent footage of The Lords Of The New Church before getting into the interview.
This is where Anna Magnani broke away from 2 German soldiers, ran and threw herself down on the streets. The man is explaining the making of a film, rather than some historical event. It comes at the start of a short documentary on Italian Neo-Realism, from 1973. She even hurt her knee, he adds almost proudly. A woman’s voice joins in, Aldo Fabrizi was there too. It’s almost religious, a celluloid Stations of the Cross, there should be nuns selling small statuettes of movie cameras, and T-shirts with Magnani’s face miraculously transposed onto 100% cotton.
The man and the woman were recalling scenes from Roberto Rosselini’s film Rome, Open City, when it was filmed in their neighborhood. Rossellini along with Vittorio De Sica were pioneers of Neo Realism. Their films brought a dynamism in form, that was countered by the self-reflection of their content that put Italian cinema at the center of the post-war world. Here was launched the careers of Rossellini, Fellini, Pasolini, Bertolucci, Visconti, Zavattini and De Sica, who described the post war years as a beautiful time - “Beautiful for artists, but ugly for Italians.”
Right after the war, passions were so strong right after the War that they really pushed us, they forced towards this kind of film truth. And this truth was transfigured by poetry, and lyricism. It was because of if its lyricism that Neo-Realism so captured the world. Because there was poetry in our reality.
Films like De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, Rosselini’s Rome, Open City, and Visconti’s Ossessione presented a new and dynamic way of presenting the world, which went on to influence movements such as Nouvelle Vague and directors as different as Martin Scorsese and Derek Jarman. Neo Realist films dealt with difficulties faced everyday by the working class; stories were rooted in the reality of a war ruined Italy; there were no simplistic morality tales, issues were complex, and often open-ended; actors mixed with non-actors; stylistically the films were loose, fluid, often documentary-like. However, their content did not please some Italians, who thought Neo-Realism only highlighted the bad things about Italy, which they feared might make Italians seem to be just thieves and bums.
This was not how the directors like Bernardo Bertolucci saw it:
“Realism doesn’t mean showing real things, but showing how things really are. It was this definition by Brecht that critically challenged Italian Neo-Realism. Not Rossilini though. Rossilini is the only one in Neo-Realism who didn’t just show us things, didn’t just try to be a realist, but gave us an idea of things. He wasn’t interested in the appearance of things, but in the idea behind the things. Even the idea behind the idea.”
“The most important characteristic, and the most important innovation, of what is called neorealism, it seems to me, is to have realised that the necessity of the story was only an unconscious way of disguising a human defeat, and that the kind of imagination it involved was simply a technique of superimposing dead formulas over living social facts. Now it has been perceived that reality is hugely rich, that to be able to look directly at it is enough; and that the artist’s task is not to make people moved or indignant at metaphorical situations, but to make them reflect (and, if you like, to be moved and indignant too) on what they and others are doing, on the real things, exactly as they are.”
For Pier Paolo Pasolini Neo-Realism was intensely political:
“It stood for the first act of critical, political consciousness that Italy had experienced. Italy up to that point had no history, no unified history as a nation, only a history as many divided little peoples, divided little countries, and with a great gap between north and south. And then the last 20 years have been a history of Fascism - the history of an aberrational unity. It was only with the Resistance that Italian history began.
“First of all, Neo-Realism meant the rediscovery of Italy. A first look at Italy without rhetoric, without lies, and there was a sense of pleasure in the self-discovery, even pleasure in denouncing one’s own short-comings, this was common to everything.
“The other common quality was its Marxist character. All Neo-Realist works were founded on the idea that the future would be better, or else [there would be] revolution.”
These quotes are taken form the documentary Neo Realism (1973) which can be viewed here, and contains interviews with De Sica, Fellini, Pasolini, and Bertolucci, amongst others.
Trailers for Pasolini’s ‘Accattone’ and Rossellini’s ‘The Bicycle Thief’, after the jump…
