1. and 2. Mats Gustafsson and Christian Marclay, In Hindsight (Vinyl Factory) and Okkyung Lee and Christian Marclay, Amalgam (Northern Spy) Marclay’s work has been so powerfully visual over the last few years—his 24-hour film The Clock, the comic-book inspired Actions aka Onomatopoeia paintings, his sidewalk animations videos—that you can forget he started out as a turntablist in New York art-punk clubs in the early 1980s, sometimes running eight records at a time. These live recordings from two shows at Café Oto in London with the saxophonist Mats Gustafsson (2013) and the cellist Okkyung Lee (2014) are proof Marclay hasn’t lost a step. He’s invented new moves, because he has to.
Gustafsson’s sound is so big and harsh it feels as if he’s shoved Marclay off the stage; with the music chasing the STOMP FOOM FWHAM ZWEE NOOOOHS BLECH words of the *Actions *paintings (collaged on the sonically blank back side of the *In Hindsight *12"), it can take a while to realize that the echo in the music is Marclay scratching his way into the saxophone. With Lee, the excitement again comes when you can’t tell the musicians apart—when Lee separates her own tone at the end of a movement, the pleasure is like the absolutely satisfied relief you feel when a solo ends and the singer takes back the song. What could be a voice could also be a needle drag, a sample, or even the cello itself; you don’t want to decide. This is less of a tour de force than the show with Gustafsson, and far richer: much longer, meandering, teasing out holes and hollows in the cave the musicians seem to be building inside the club they’re playing. On side two, as Lee makes an almost industrial noise—now it’s she who’s scratching, Marclay keeping her time—you could be listening to the Rolling Stones’ “Goin’ Home”: the momentum is that fierce, that free. The music seems to have dropped from a low sky, as if Marclay and Lee caught it and ran, got lost, slowed down, and stopped.
Okkyung Lee & Christian Marclay: "Amalgam" (via Bandcamp)
3. Passengers____, directed by Morten Tyldum (Columbia) On a 5,000-passenger spaceship on a 120-year voyage to colonize a planet (Earth having become, among other things, “overpriced”), Chris Pratt wakes up in his hibernation pod. He doesn’t think much about why no one else is waking up, follows computer directions to his cabin, changes into regular clothes, and in the bathroom the piped-in music is playing “Like a Rolling Stone.” It sounds tinny and small, with the band inaudible; it sounds like a folk song, a 78 from the 1920s or the ’30s, with the vocal never sounding more hillbilly, but the muscular rhythmic lifts in the melody are still there, and they still give that complete and subtle thrill. Pratt isn’t really listening, but he catches that; possessed by a spirit of confidence, even bravado, with an unstressed but unmistakable change in the way he carries himself, he steps out of the door and into the plot.
4. Arrival____, directed by Denis Villeneuve (Paramount) The alien ships descend around the globe, apparently at random: the best explanation anyone can come up with is that wherever they landed, Sheena Easton once had a hit.
5. A. O. Scott and Manohla Dargis, “Big Statements from Smaller Films,” The New York Times (January 8) One of the Times’ faux critical conversations, which usually seem like a lazy alternative to actually composing something (he writes a statement, emails it, she writes a statement, emails it back)—but with the piece focusing mostly on race, racism, and “unexamined assumptions,” in this case not at all. If *Moonlight *and *The Birth of a Nation *and *Barbershop: The Next Cut *are films about race, Scott asks, why aren’t Manchester by the Sea and *La La Land *and Sully—and by the way, why does *La La Land *feature “a white pianist as the savior of jazz and a black musician as its corrupter”? Nothing about Elvis’s birthday, though.
6. Sleater-Kinney, Live in Paris (Sub Pop) “Start Together,” “Jumpers,” “Dig Me Out,” and especially “Turn It On” seem to leap off the stage, but it’s the last number, the light, breezy “Modern Girl,” that makes it all stick. When Carrie Brownstein exhales the line that keeps coming up like someone coming up for air—My whole life—you can hear a whole life. You can hear tiredness, regret, dissatisfaction: a thin sigh of wanting more. Next, in a fan’s world, Covers Live—this band has always been a jukebox. Start with “Rockin’ in the Free World,” go to “White Rabbit,” “Tommy Gun,” “The Promised Land,” “Fortunate Son,” “More Than a Feeling” (from their first recording session, in 1994), end with “Faith,” which along with “Rebel Rebel” closed their San Francisco show on New Year’s Eve—or whatever funeral they cover next, because they’re fans before they’re anything else.
7. Brokeback, Illinois River Valley Blues (Thrill Jockey) Tortoise bassist Doug McCombs has always been more relaxed, more unconcerned, with his instrumental Brokeback side project (vocals by Amalea Tshilds are noted, but the credit ought to read “texture”), and Tortoise is a pretty relaxed and unconcerned band. This starts slowly and it ends that way, a fantasy soundtrack for Once Upon a Time in the West, a western Quentin Tarantino hasn’t made yet, or one of the forthcoming episodes of “Twin Peaks,” or even a Tarnation album without Paula Frazer. It’s music as weather when there really isn’t anything else to talk about. It’s impossible to pick one song over another; if it’s “Cairo Levee” today it’ll be “Spanish Venus” tomorrow. If you’re certain McCombs has found what he’s looking for with “Andalusia, IL,” with “Night Falls on Chillicothe” you hope he never will.
8. Pete Wells, “Making Way for the Tried and True at Cut by Wolfgang Puck,” The New York Times (December 20) On entering: “It’s how you’d imagine a sexy downtown bar if you’d never been downtown, gone to a bar or had sex.”
9. Why Jack White Has So Much Money (College Football Playoff National Championship, Alabama v. Clemson, ESPN, January 9) Because a snatch of a martial-anthem trumpets-and-tubas version of “Seven Nation Army” is used between every pause, between plays, at time outs, with what sounds like an instant of the real thing to introduce every commentary, to signal every commercial. In the course of a single game, hundreds of times.
10. Bob Dylan, “Once Upon a Time,” in Tony Bennett Celebrates 90: The Best Is Yet to Come (NBC, December 20) After Lady Gaga, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, k.d. lang, and nearly countless more, it was the last performance before Bennett’s solo final: a no-happy-ending song recorded by Bennett in 1962. There were notes Dylan couldn’t hit—as the song was written, but not as he thought it through, felt it out, sang it. He used the mike stand as a kind of mast, or harpoon: shifting it from one side to the other, moving it higher or lower, he dramatized all the unknown directions a song beginning *Once upon a time *might take. He made the song interesting, unsettled—“He made it about America,” said one person watching.
