Recommendations for reading, listening and watching from Full Stop editors.
Apocalypse by Bill Callahan
I got Bill Callahan’s latest album Apocalypse shortly after it was released in early April of this year and it has remained on the near-constant end of “heavy rotation” ever since. In fact, aside from minor obsessive flings with Robyn and my current, newfound love for Mickey Newbury, Callahan’s album is maybe the only one I have really connected with in past months. Largely because it sets such a high bar.
A seven track song cycle, Apocalypse is assured, cohesive, and relatively upbeat considering Callahan’s penchant for beautifully dour stuff. It’s filled with immediate standouts like “Drover,” “America!,” and “Riding for the Feeling,” but subsequent spins prove the rest of the cuts to be anything but support or filler.
Lyrically, Callahan is at his impressionistic best. To quote Ben Ratliff’s profile of Callahan, Apocalypse’s lyrics “form a bestiary: cattle, hog, bee and buffalo are all here, as well as the phrase “work’s calving increments and love’s coltish punch.” It works the phrase “my apocalypse” into the fourth and seventh songs, which are the first and last tracks of the album’s second side in its vinyl version. Its last lyric, sung twice and meaningfully, is “DC 450”: the catalog number of the album, released last week on the label Drag City.”
In a forty minute run time, Callahan manages to trace a sort of spiritual transition from the despair and need of the album opener “Drover” to the quiet hope of its last track “One Fine Morning.” In between is a stretch of beautifully orchestrated Americana, with buzzed out, fuzzed out electric guitars, snare brushes, and not a little flute.
It’s the best left-of-the-dial country album that’s been released in years and it’s in the spirit of the best the genre has offered. Tho he’s been putting out great stuff at a mean rate for close to 20 years, this is the album that convinced me that he’s the one carrying on the legacy of Cash, Kristofferson, Young and co. Fingers crossed for more in this ilk as soon as possible.
— Jesse Montgomery, Managing Editor
Wright Thompson
Over the past decade or so, there’s been a lot of talk about how connected the world’s becoming. I’m not an expert on the matter, but what I can say from my limited experience traveling abroad is that if there are two things that link us together they are 1. Common humanity (bla bla bla) and 2. We are a planet absolutely crazy for sports (In fact, as I write this I am arguing with an 8 year old about the value of a pair of late 2nd round picks in last week’s NBA Draft).
I don’t know of anyone – American or otherwise – that writes about what it is to be a fan quite like Wright Thompson. Whether it’s writing about the Cricket World Cup, Harvey Updyke (an Alabama fan who poisoned a pair of trees that had stood for 130 years on the campus of that university’s rival, Auburn), or post-Lebron Cleveland, Thompson stares into the madness without blinking. And man, he can write a fucking sentence – his work recalls Mailer’s sports journalism and a whole host of powerful, funny as hell Southern writers, as well as some younger folks, most notably Wells Tower. Thompson is a Senior Writer for ESPN and recently joined Grantland as a contributor — drop what you are doing right now and read his superb piece on Elaine’s, the Upper East Side literary hangout that recently shut its doors for good. Even if you’re not interested in sports (shame on you), he’s worth a read: you won’t read any long form sports journalism as good as his.
— Alex Shephard, Editor in Chief
Ingmar Bergman’s Persona
I was deeply impressed when I finally watched, quite recently, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. With its broken mirrors and fractured identities, its power play of speech and silence, it’s a horror film about psychoanalysis—a kind of avant-garde horror, perhaps, but no less susceptible to horror’s irrational and sometimes incoherent suggestive quality. The conceit is this: when a famous actress (Liv Ullman) withdraws from her family and career into an inflexible silence, she is given the care of a young nurse (Bibi Andersson) and sent to a seaside resort to recover. It doesn’t take long for the nurse to become the patient, filling their affectionate, intimate silences with stories of her emotional disturbances, until the secret life of the subconscious begins to take over. Pauline Kael, in her review of Persona when it came out in 1966, called the sequence when Bibi Andersson recalls a transgressive and unforgettable sexual experience “one of the rare, truly erotic sequences on film.” The entire film achieves that raw, transfixing power.
Interestingly, Kael ultimately criticized Persona for what she saw as its absence of “a structure of meanings by which an interpretation can be validated.” The plurality of meanings in Persona is the form its sly, skillful integrity takes—it seems like it was conceived more as ballet than narrative, more as a set of exquisite still photographs than as a moving picture, and it enacts the same kind of mystifying wordlessness as the actress whose artificial silence brings on her nurse’s breakdown. Yet the way Persona is commonly read is enough to make you think that its affect is little more than the hypocritical postmodern moralizing Kael wrote about so brilliantly and hilariously in her polemic “Fantasies of the Art House Audience.” Susan Sontag called Persona a grand metaphor for fracturing of the authentic self, the inability to speak truth in the face of horror or to regard the pain of others. Even Bergman cited the film as an expression of his crisis of artistic authenticity. All this serious murmuring about the one true, authentic self (even its absence or dissolution) sounds pretty fishy to me, especially in the face of a film that systematically overturns any single interpretation. It can’t be both: it can’t both announce the absence of truth and fetishize the true self. Well, it can—that’s Alain Resnais’ fraud in Hiroshima Mon Amour, a spectacular feat of mystification that came out in France seven years before Persona and dupes audiences into reading aestheticized pain as intellectual depth. Bergman is not Resnais, but nor is he a philosopher like Godard, who could express philosophical ideas with such playful effortlessness they were indistinguishable from the spellbinding velocity of his filmmaking. The power of Persona lies with its exquisite images and the naked force of its performances, both of which shake you to the core. There is no moral here about the instability or inauthenticity of the self—watch the film instead for its stark, immaculate aesthetic, dream logic, and erotic force.
–Amanda Shubert, Features Editor
Breaking Bad
I apologize if you’ve been told this before: watch Breaking Bad. There is no more finely acted, written, or directed a show on television. In fact, the experience of this drama far surpasses any new film or program (non-Malick, obvi) I’ve seen in the past ten years, so let me say this: Breaking Bad is the best use of sound and image in recent memory. Vince Gilligan, who helped develop all the good episodes of The X-Files, takes us to Albuquerque, NM, where Walter White (Bryan Cranston, formerly the oblivious and outstanding Hal on Malcolm in The Middle) must use his chemical expertise (he’s a high school teacher) to produce and sell crystal-meth. He does this in an attempt to provide financial security for his son and pregnant wife after he is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Dark, right? Not even- it’s pitch black. Walt descends into a world of border-killings, drug cartels, money laundering (helped by the surprisingly versatile Bob Odenkirk), and Faustian imbalance, which touches upon most things despicable in our huge, dry, southwest. Of course, it’s fictional and sensational. But so was The Wire (ask any critic who wrote about The Wire‘s realism whether they’d really walked the streets of West Baltimore). But still, these two programs resonate as realistic because of their frankness in the lengths they go to actually make us question our war on drugs, how we value labor and public service, and where we are heading as a nation. Because the stakes of drug trafficking firmly places our protagonists outside of the status quo, because our heroes are criminals, we are forced to ask- if playing by the rules only gets you so far, why bother? Breaking Bad is about the failed American Dream and the new one being forged in a land without water, reason, or economy. Meth is king and a schoolteacher its ambassador.
Aaron Paul, Walter’s meth-addicted sidekick, is without equal among young american actors, and its fucking fantastic to see Giancarlo Esposito, formerly of the late-great Homicide, totally own the role of a stoic meth-kingpin.
Season 4 starts on July 17th on AMC. Season 1-3 are out on DVD. WATCH!
— Max Rivlin-Nadler, Reviews Editor
Learning about Queen Victoria (on Wikipedia)
— Nika Knight, Interviews Editor
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