something about a 2019 album, “What Life” by Club Night

First thing every morning—but especially Monday morning—I hear the bus flatulate to a stop 30 feet outside my bedroom, and I know the world is back at it. And through my window I watch garbage trucks collect piled trash behind the restaurants and bars and dump glass bottles, sucked empty, into breakage. The workers use bins, bags, and boxes to gavage-feed the truck until it pulls away, stuffed stupid, the engine howling hollow wind.

Listening to the brilliant album What Life makes me feel alive—like I want to catch every bus and all the garbage is a celebration. Club Night released What Life in April 2019, but I heard it only recently. The music often sounds high-spirited but contains multitudes. The songs convey spontaneity, as if Club Night is experimenting with changes and rhythms, but the band’s idiosyncrasies are masterful and the musical sum captures a contagious, noisy energy of hooks and melody.

What Life opens with “Path”—the drummer counts off 16 beats as the bass guitar insists on the note, then the drum rolls through fills while the guitar strings pull off and hammer on, wheedling notes, and the vocal—charged and high—cries out to all and sundry. The lack of inhibition speaks volumes. The music sweeps through emotions—joy, restlessness, righteousness, desperation. Even the quieter moments carry energy.

Club Night takes all the noise of daily life and filters it into music. What Life feels a little like the perspective grief can give you.

“Cough” opens with a brief mellow passage, then the restless drumming and guitar figure in. The song segues into a faster heartbeat. The vocal swallows water, as if drowning under reverb and the mix, but its expressiveness and pitched cry allow it to pierce the bonds of the surface.

The bass guitar starts “Cherry” with a head-nodding pulse. Then guitar harmonics ping a melody. Tumbling drum fills hold the momentum, and the volume grows, the rhythm quickens, the angles sharpen until the song drops into a nice and easy playout.

Club Night’s blend of fragility and ferocious animation reaches near-perfection on “Trance.” Take just the moment of one lyric: “I let out a howl so unspeakable.” Josh Bertram’s vocal starts as a hoarse, tortured scream, then slides into his melodical caterwaul. The song has incarnations, taking on different rhythms and paces. The vocal pierces, the guitar phases, the drums roll to a bass alive with inspiration. At 3:00, the song hits a triumphant coda.

And within an album full of highlights, the best among them is the last song, “Thousands.” I probably will play this song from time to time the rest of my life. I love it for the crescendo at 3:30—the snare drum starts cracking, the feedback sings, synthesized skies whistle as they fall—and then it all resolves with the lyrics, “What if we wanted more? Not waking up to the taste of bad news again. I dare not ever ask though I bawl at the splintered sunlight alone… What if we wanted more? Are you happy with the life that you chose?”

Club Night’s frontman, Josh Bertram, was previously in Our Brother the Native. What Life, and Club Night’s previous EP, Hell Ya, are far less experimental than Our Brother the Native and sound more like early Animal Collective and maybe Mae Shi. What Life captures something—a time, a storm of influences and events, maybe. But what if we wanted more?

 

 

something about the film, “Joker”

In the movie "Joker," Arthur Fleck ekes out a miserable living as a party clown in Gotham City, 1981. Crime is up, unemployment is up, and poverty is up. Violent events lead Arthur to become a folk hero in a rapidly intensifying class struggle. The movie is an unofficial imagining of the origin story for the Batman villain, the Joker.

The New Yorker published a piece titled “'Joker' Is a Viewing Experience of Rare, Numbing Emptiness,” which says the following:

“Joker” is an intensely racialized movie, a drama awash in racial iconography that is so prevalent in the film, so provocative, and so unexamined as to be bewildering. What it seems to be saying is utterly incoherent, beyond the suggestion that Arthur, who is mentally ill, becomes violent after being assaulted by a group of people of color—and he suffers callous behavior from one black woman, and believes that he’s being ignored by another, and reacts with jubilation at the idea of being a glamorous white star amid a supporting cast of cheerful black laborers. But, unlike the public discourse around the Central Park Five, and unlike the case of Bernhard Goetz, and unlike the world, the discourse in “Joker” and the thought processes of Arthur Fleck are utterly devoid of any racial or social specificity.

I do not know what this means or how the film would be different if the racial iconography were more examined or if the movie had more racial or social specificity. I agree that “Joker” does not reinforce a politically left-leaning perspective on race, but I do not see how that makes the movie bad. I think the movie is good.

“Joker” is a sick person’s fantasy about meeting real-world conditions that allow the fantasy to become reality. Arthur thought he was a victim.

I used to think that my life was a tragedy, but now I realize, it's a fucking comedy.

He was nice to people, but they responded with indifference or cruelty. He discovered the power of revenge and began leading a class war.

What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash? You get what you fuckin' deserve!

Arthur's story and dialog gradually allude to a populist and class-oriented politics, which can be manipulated by demagogues and made dangerous. But this movie dwells in the origins of the discontent that allows a populace to accept demagoguery and then turn dangerous and to fascism. Arthur, during a serendipitous turn as a guest on a late-night talk show, asks his celebrity host, Murray:

Have you seen what it's like out there, Murray? Do you ever actually leave the studio? Everybody just yells and screams at each other. Nobody's civil anymore. Nobody thinks what it's like to be the other guy. You think men like Thomas Wayne ever think what it's like to be someone like me? To be somebody but themselves? They don't. They think that we'll just sit there and take it, like good little boys! That we won't werewolf and go wild!

Notes:

• "Joker" was released in 2019, was directed and produced by Todd Phillips, who co-wrote the screenplay with Scott Silver. The film stars Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker.
• I do not know if the concept started out as such, but I drew lines to Trump’s political rise leading into the 2016 election.
• The New Yorker also published a formal review of “Joker,” which was also critical. That review is fine.
• "All I Have Are Negative Thoughts."

an obvious point about Judge Judy

Here is a conversation piece, "Justice Served: A Conversation Between RuPaul and Judge Judy."

I did my first interview for 60 Minutes 26 years ago, and Morley Safer said to me, “What direction do you think it’s all going in, and will it get any better?” And I said to him, “It’s going to get worse. A lot worse.” It’s like what you said before—you watch my program because there’s linear thinking. But there is an element of dumbing down that has been embraced by others, which suggests to me that these rules of civilization are being dulled.

This so-called conversation has a few interesting parts, but this statement stood out to me. The whole civility discussion. When she was a real judge working in New York City's child welfare system, Judith Sheindlin was accused of being insensitive. Real Judge Judy was trying to scold and scare lazy social workers, addict parents, and wayward kids into doing what she thought was right. But it was only going to get worse, so she took her chance to cash in.

The people in Judge Judy's TV courtroom have histories and circumstances that figure into why they are fuck-ups getting sued for $2000 in back rent and $750 for caving in their landlord's car windshield with a brick. Real Judge Judy and the law cannot factor in any of that. The fact that the plaintiffs and defendants are mostly all fuck-ups is part of the formula to the show's appeal.