Vincent Gallo.... C/D?

That would have been genius.

One of the most enjoyable nights of my life -- seeing a screening of Beyond at UCLA when it was still officially out of circulation, back in 1991. A huge number of old punk band folks and scenesters showed up -- chatted with one of the guys in the Droogs for a while -- and the panel was Meyer, Ebert and a good chunk of the actors, including the guy who played Z-man! Allegedly he had been ashamed of the film/angry with Meyer for years, but he was there and the conversation was all good fun. What's her name who played the lead Carrie Nation was wonderfully wry and witty (and is actually British! pretty good American accent in the film).

if Medved says it is a bad film then it must be good.

These days, Medved thinks anything and everything is a bad film that isn't pure fluff that celebrates a specifically monothiestic god.

aww yeah

http://members.aol.com/anakrid/photos13.jpg

In an interview with the online film publication indieWIRE, independent filmmaker, actor, photographer, painter, model, and composer Vincent Gallo said, "[T]he best interview of Vincent Gallo was done by Vincent Gallo. The best articles about Vincent Gallo were written by Vincent Gallo, the best acting performance of Vincent Gallo was directed and edited by Vincent Gallo from a screenplay written by Vincent Gallo; even the best photographs of Vincent Gallo were taken by Vincent Gallo. So you see, this is painful for me."

Listening to Vincent Gallo's Recordings of Music for Film, it's easy to see what he means. These experimental, reticent musings, culled together from his various movie scores (including Buffalo 66, The Way It Is, Downtown 81), are best taken as a personal experience from their creator. The only alternative is a direct emotional response from the individual listener. Everything else is bullshit analysis in lieu of pure feeling.

Gallo provides ample liner notes describing his experiences with the underground. Though he writes elegantly and pointedly about his artistic flourishes, his dogged passion to the medium, and indifference (or dislike) toward industry practice, it's best to save those reflections until after hearing the sounds as an egotistical listener. Divorce them from the movies they accompany, and they stand on their own as fleeting tone poems running a minute or two each. It's good to let the blues, the romance, the yearnings of Gallo wash over you. Try to believe the songs were written for your own introspection.

1. Her Smell Theme. The lonely strumming sounds become distracted by smoky drifts of another theme, as one guy in his apartment has wafts of perfume or sweat in his heartfelt recollections.

2. The Girl of Her Dreams. Discordant notes pile up, trying to get somewhere, forming a cluttered pattern. Underneath is a deep, low hum. Damned if I can't get it straight, but damned if I won't try.

3. A Brown Lung Hollering. The heart is too big for the chest and rattles against the ribcage, as striking sounds and saxophone foghorns erupt.

4. The Way It Is Waltz. A piano accepts circumstance and hopes for something more. It's atypical Gallo, and it's easy to imagine thoughts about some girl. And it must be raining.

5. Glad to Be Unhappy. A teasing little smile of a song has notes flickering away like a wry chuckle.

6. Brown Storm Poem. More waves of dread come creep, creep, creeping in.

7. Good Bye Sadness, Hello Death. Ah, shimmering epiphanies! Here's a song Martin Scorsese might have used in The Last Temptation of Christ, a full minute of wholeness.

8. Brown Daisies. The tune plays low, with its eyes looking at its feet as it walks down the street. It doesn't look where it's going, coasting on an instinctive rhythm and pace.

9. And a Colored Sky Colored Gray. A touch of blues guitar, sitting on the dock of the bay when it's overcast and a little cold outside. The clouds don't roll away, but they've merged into a deep bed for all your doubts to linger on.

10. Fishing For Some Friends. Friends are good, and sometimes absent. Let's take a more literal attack, though, and say the song is about a hunter stalking its prey -- only the guy is a doofy fisherman whose bait and tackle box rattles around as he struggles with his line.

11. Six Laughs One Happy. It's the lone triangle sound in this chamber expression piece that stands out for me and says "Bing! Bing!" Talk about your bright-eyed, perky individual in a room full of groaning hangovers. I don't know whether to embrace it or brush it away.

12. Sunny and Cloudy. Music to march to? A heartbeat and a clarion call go about their business side by side. Another day's work lies ahead.

13. No More Papa Mama. There are a few instruments at work here, but it's all about one guy playing alone on the guitar. Liken it to the guy camped out on the bench in Grand Central Station as busy, busy people are a gigantic blur around him. Yeah, he's moved out. And now what the hell is he supposed to do? Think, think, think.

14. Fatty and Skinny. Thick notes and thin notes -- I suppose they co-exist, though they don't interact. They only become more entrenched.

15. Her Smell Theme (reprise). Still that perfume... and all those bittersweet romantic thoughts and feelings have grown lucid, richer, and more vivid.

16. Lonely Boy. "Show a face from my childhood days," a voice sings. It sounds like an old recording of girlish, nostalgic charms (in fact, it's Gallo's vocal). "Now and then I start to cry," the voice pines, and it's really too bad. Romantics, prepare to be crushed under the weight of your own intense desire.

17. A Falling Down Billy Brown. So it goes, as it were. But you don't have to be happy about it. Those bastards...

18. Drowning in Brown. Let's all go to a midnight disco club, and maybe there'll be swinging trouble there.

19. A Somewhere Place. More nostalgic romanticism, but there's something so endearing about the small squeaks of the guitar that come before each lovely chord.

20. A Wet Cleaner. As Dennis Hopper advised Christian Slater in True Romance, "Just slow it down, maaaan!"

21. Sixteen Seconds Happy. Why is it that we associate happiness with wind chimes? But yes, it's tranquil.

22. With Smiles & Smiles & Smiles. There is no visual or verbal association for this tune. It's music for glazing your eyes over, which is not necessarily a bad thing. You want to find the closest couch or beanbag and sink into it, hearing stuff like this. The abrupt climax is slightly unnerving, and appropriate. Where did that vibe go?

23. A Cold and Gray Summer Day. The opening notes are left to linger in the air. This meditation on melancholy is obsessive, reflexive, subjective, compulsive, repetitive, hauntingly bleak, and startlingly beautiful.

24. Brown 69. It's a song with personality, and there's enough mystery about that person that you'd like to get to know them better. But does mystery preserve attraction? And is that a reason to return to Brown 69? The slow, sloping, downbeat rhythms have a meandering, quiet man's attractiveness.

25. Dum Beet. The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long. By the time you've adjusted your vision to the flashing lights, it's already gone.

26. Me and Her. Melodious complications that feel like the opening of a heartfelt ballad, and purposefully never get there. Keep up those defenses.

27. Ass Fucker. Experiments in sounds culminate in a festering nightmare. It ain't gentle, but it's quick.

28. Ass Fucker (reprise). "No, please! Please!" Hey, come back here! I'm not finished with you yet! (Or is he simply fixing the rusty carburetor?)

29. I Think the Sun is Coming Out Now. Some bleary-eyed optimism at the end of the tunnel, shaken and a little crazed but perhaps the better for having suffered through it. Then the music slowly fades away into nothing.

If you're anxious for to shine
In the high aesthetic line
As a man of culture rare,
You must get up all the germs
Of the transcendental terms
And plant them ev'rywhere.
You must lie upon the daisies
 And discourse in novel phrases
Of your complicated state of mind;
The meaning doesn't matter
If it's only idle chatter
 Of a transcendental kind.
And ev'ryone will say,
As you walk your mystic way,
"If this young man expresses himself
 In terms too deep for me,
Why, what a very singularly deep young man
This deep young man must be!"

I know you're not referring to me and it's presumptuous (and foolish) to jump back into this now, but it's not so much a question that I take Gallo seriously (which I don't) as it is a fact that I sure as hell don't take Ebert seriously. His crack about French movies in that last column, as modestly amusing as it might be, is really stupid. When you've got a target like Gallo, why the hell resort to bashing French movies?

ER: "You, sir, are drunk."
WC: "And you, madam, are ugly, but at least tomorrow I'll be sober."

i think "buffalo 66" was interesting enough to presume that gallo is not simply some huckster or charlatan as some seem to suggest.

I think he's an excellent enthusiast.

*shameless nostalgia-masturbation session over*

it's here:
http://www.observer.com/pages/story.asp?ID=7480

As for the curse on his colon, what I actually said was that I put an unremovable black magic curse on his prostate, which will enlarge into a large cancerous ball by the fall

Better sacrifice another goat, dude. Your last one sucked.

McGee on music: How Vincent Gallo taught me to love Yes

The pop-culture polymath has used his spectacular tastes to introduce people to much-maligned musical genres. But if only he could get around to releasing his own recordings

Vincent Gallo is one of the few modern renaissance men. He boasts a long list of achievements and I can add another: Gallo is the only person who could persuade me to get into the prog-rock band Yes.

Every time I play Tales from Topographic Oceans, I have to laugh at myself and ask: "Am I really listening to Yes?" The band were a joke back in 1977, associated with creepy basement dwellers who read fantasy novels while watching VHS tapes of Rick Emerson stabbing his keyboard with Nazi daggers. I'd always sided with punk rock's reaction against 17-minute songs, so it took the musical wisdom of Gallo to show me the error of my ways. He's proved you can be both a Yes fan and a Ramones fan (kudos to Gallo for getting Johnny Ramone a film role in Stranded and for being godfather to Chris Squire's child).

Gallo's musical opinions are always spot on. For a start, he's gone on record to say he prefers Journey's Don't Stop Believing to Radiohead's OK Computer. Need more evidence? Just look at the tracklisting for the Brown Bunny soundtrack … it's genius! The critically misunderstood film shows Gallo as a man of spectacular musical tastes. Brown Bunny is the answer film to Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop and stars Gallo as anti-hero Bud Clay as he goes on an existential search through America to the sounds of Gordon Lightfoot, Jackson C Frank and John Frusciante. Amazing. On the soundtrack to his masterpiece Buffalo 66, Gallo repays his debt of influence to prog rock and includes great and original covers of King Crimson and Yes. I still remember being shocked at how much I enjoyed the soundtrack. Gallo vanquished my own musical prejudices towards the era of musical excess. I was curious enough to get Tales from Topographic Oceans, and had to admit he was right – it's a classic album.

The facts show that if something was happening in New York in the late 70s and early 80s, Gallo was at the epicentre of it. At 16 he moved there and started a no wave band with Jean-Michel Basquiat. Gallo was heavily into the downtown art scene, playing with the Bush Tetras and Lydia Lunch, and was a regular at Manhattan's Mudd Club. Hip-hop? Gallo was there, starting his own rap act Trouble Deuce, and as Prince Vince he appeared on the shortlived, iconic and utterly street Graffiti Rock. Twenty years later and he's making appearances with Rick Rubin in Jay-Z's 99 Problems and rapping with RZA. The man is a pop-culture zeitgeist.

Despite all this, Gallo's own recorded musical output has been curiously limited. Sure, there are treats out there for people willing to spend outrageous amounts of money, but he has only had two wide releases on Warp: When, a cool number inflected with the spirit of Moondog, and Music for Films and Recordings, a compilation of Gallo's previous scores and cinematic offerings, twisted and bent into shape for general release. This is somewhat frustrating. Gallo is sitting on a mountain of unrecorded material; even in the mid 90s, when I heard talk of him signing to Sony and recording with Bunny member Lucas Haas, prog-rock producer Eddie Offord (producer of Tales from Topographic Oceans), Beastie Boy Adam Horowitz and DNA member Tim Wright, I was excited – but nothing happened. And again he recorded in 2005 with Sean Lennon and Jim O'Rourke, but has this project been released? No.

Gallo sparked my musical curiosity when he announced his new improvisational project RRIICCEE, featuring a rotating lineup (Eric Erlandsen of Hole was a founder member). The band's musical manifesto is to create tours only featuring improvisation, to dispense with the recording-industry model and be true to the music. Yet again, no records appear to be forthcoming. Is he refusing to release his recordings out of spite (as he did with his artwork)? Or is he too preoccupied with other projects? I don't know. But I'd like to hear more from the man who helped me understand the complicated and majestic beauty of Yes.

ugh