Beck: Married.

Am I detecting a trend? Is Conor Oberst going to be soon seen with Joey Lauren Adams? Rivers Cuomo and Michelle Burke?

WAIT WAIT WAIT ASSHAT ADAMS BE DATING AIR-RAID FRESHMAN BITCHES POSEY!?!?! The world is not right.

God, this is a weird, weird trend.

Whatever happened to that guy?

No, actually it's "all in all is all we are..."

But any way...

Do we know the day they got married?

Marissa and Giovanni Ribisi's mother is Gay Ribisi, who is a very powerful casting agent in Hollywood (and also a powerful person in the Church) -- she is credited a lot of the time with breaking the careers of Jason Lee, Erika Christianson, Juliette Lewis, Marisol Nichols, Danny Masterson, and a bunch of other young Scientologists.

Every month or so, the Celebrity Center (which is totally for real) hosts a free acting workshop where some young hot Scientologist actor gives a lecture about how Scientology helped them break into the industry.

Anyways, it's interesting that Beck sort of refuses to acknowledge that he's a Scientologist in interviews... he always talks his way around the question. But this seals the deal on it, I think (not to mention the numerous pics of him hanging out with Scientologist musicians like Isaac Hayes and Chick Corea).

Yuck.

he's cool! he writes weird sci-fi and stuff!

No, but she was in Love and a .45, which had a cameo from Wiley Wiggins, so she's connected to D&C in a Kevin Bacon sort of way.

I was at U of Texas when D&C came out. I used to see Wiggens hanging out on the Drag across from campus and at shows at Liberty Lunch a lot.

About 4 years after that I had received some Scientology counseling on the subject of study, subjects, words, etc. I didn't realize how much having misunderstood words was stopping me or not allowing me to have interest in certain subjects or to even study my own field more. After that I sat down and wrote an entire script with my best friend in one month. A year and a half later we were shooting the script I wrote. Scientology works! Without it, I don't know where I'd be.

So her friend and her went on a 1 month scientology binge and wrote a script? I'd love to see that movie, I bet it's fucking crazy.

(mockery mode)

What do people have against scientology, anyway? It's the wave of
the future! Oh sure, they occasionally lock someone in a closet
for a few days. But that's not so bad; and it was the only way
for her to get CLEAR. Can't you see?

You never even read _Dianetics_, did you? DID YOU? Mock not
that which you do not understand, simples.

Battle for the Souls of Celebrities!

i used to like him a lot...but he really is full of it..

Not anymore?

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/beck-says-he-is-not-a-scientologist-1257357

Interesting. Not married and not a scientologist

New York Times interview/top 10 piece notes:

8. McNally Jackson Bookstore, New York “I don’t really have a church, but if I had a church it would probably be a bookstore. It’s small, but it’s so well-curated that you want to read everything in there. To me it represents that kind of independent bookstore that I grew up with, that I would just waste away hours in.”

.....

9. Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” “I was really drawn to it at a young age when I first saw it in my early 20s, at the Prado in Madrid, when I was on tour. The technique of it is just incredible. Part of me was marveling at how this thing survived. And how did somebody make something so crazy and get away with it, at a time when there were so much censorship and intolerance? And what about all the works we’ll never know about, that were even crazier than this one?”

10. Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music” “I read about it for years. It was mentioned in books over and over as a big influence on a lot of the ’60s generation; I think Dylan got a hold of it early and learned every song on it. A lot of the themes of his great work are in that collection. I finally got a copy of it in my early 20s, on cassette. Music comes and goes, but it’s sort of this bedrock. It’s a mixture of blues and country that contains the musical DNA of our American identity. And it’s coming at the dawn of recording, so it’s this document of our musical identity before it becomes commercialized and self-conscious. It’s highly original and eccentric. It’s the most American thing.”

3. Federico Fellini’s “Juliet of the Spirits” “As a young child, I was not left with a babysitter; I got taken to the movies. There were a lot of repertory theaters that just played old films, and we’d go a lot. A lot of them were subtitled and fairly adult, but for whatever reason I just adapted to them from a young age. They weren’t necessarily entertainment as I would understand it. This was not ‘Cannonball Run’ or ‘Gremlins.' I remember seeing ‘Juliet of the Spirits’ when I was 14 or 15, and it just represented a world that I wanted to go be a part of. It’s indefinable. I’m glad it exists.”

4. The Philosopher’s Path; Kyoto, Japan “Whenever I’m in Japan, I have to go there and do a walk. It’s near the Silver Temple, at the top of this steep street full of shops, and there’s a stream, or a little river, surrounded by cherry blossom trees. When some of the blossoms are in bloom they’re just raining down like pink confetti, going into the water, floating down the stream. I always get a great surge of happiness when I go there. I got to work with David Bowie once, and he traveled a lot to Kyoto. We had a conversation about that place. However you want to put it, there’s an energy there, a presence.”

5. “Illuminations” by Arthur Rimbaud “That was a big book for me as a kid. I know it’s a big book for Patti Smith — he’s sort of a patron saint for her, and I think for myself, too. It’s a very mysterious book. Sort of a Bible from another universe, and written by a teenager. I feel like a lot of things that I love have some sort of trace or root back to that book. It was never celebrated in his lifetime, and it’s this manual of unfiltered artistic impulse that doesn’t fit in with its time. It’s that sort of creativity where you’re not writing it to seem relevant, but almost as something for the future.”

6. Preservation Hall, New Orleans “It’s this little tiny room with a courtyard behind it, and every night there’s some kind of music going on — traditional Dixieland, local bands, cabaret. It’s got so much history coming out of the walls. You don’t really see that often in America. It’s a miracle that it still exists and that nobody’s tampered with it or tried to update it or commercialize it or something.”

7. “Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema” Boxed Set “I had this one year where I decided to watch all his films. For me it was this incredible education on the process of evolving as an artist. You would go through three or four films that were interesting, but not really definitive. Sometimes there were misfires, curiosities, experiments — and then, an absolute masterpiece would emerge. It’s sort of like Bob Dylan or Picasso, one of those great artists where there are the masterpieces and there’s all this interstitial work, but you go through it and you get a sense of what it takes to be an artist that goes deep into the heart of things. I walked away thinking that he was the Shakespeare of film. Somebody that just really encompasses the whole human experience.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/arts/music/beck-favorites.html

1. Silvertone 1448 Guitar “It’s a cheap guitar from the Sears catalog, basically made out of particle board. It’s not considered remotely in the pantheon of great instruments; it’s sort of looked down upon by real musicians. I think I bought it for about $60. Now I have dozens of incredible, classic guitars, but I keep going back to this one that’s supposedly not so good. It barely stays in tune. But it just has this sort of rickety sound — beautifully hellacious, but also a little broken and tender. I’ve recorded so many of my albums with it. I’ve been playing it my entire career.”

2. “Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley” by Peter Guralnick “I tell musicians to read it because it’s such a fascinating, almost forensic account of the early years of Elvis. It does a fantastic job of humanizing him and taking you through a day-to-day view of his life and how an all-American but highly unusual story of an artist comes together and collides with pop culture. It has an almost biblical quality to it. It just feels like American myth.”

Ok dude 🤙

Interesting. Not married and not a scientologist

his ¢lam-arranged marriage ended a couple of years ago, it was reasonable to assume that he would no longer be a member again p much immediately

obv having spent all his life apart from the years he made interesting records either under or very very adjacent to their auspices, he is still a giant weirdo

pretty amazing, tho, how there has been *no* talk about his new album on ILM. i went looking and found nothing.

it's not bad. not amazing, but not bad.

idk, seems like a relatively small weirdo

New album is very samey. Beck wallpaper. I had it playing just now and thought Spotify was somehow repeating the same song. Sonically it's uninteresting and safe. Some horrible autotune.

played the new album once. Was not weird enough.

yeah the record doesnt really offer much to talk about. i remember looking for some beck thing on youtube when the beck poll was running and discovering that beck had released a new single with pharell that week, and thinking 'wow ten years ago this would have been extremely exciting news'

Not enough greasy biker sex funk.

midnite vultures 20 years old this week btw

I dunno, I like it. I love the vintage synth palette and think it's a nice twist on the same lyrical ground as he covered on Sea Change. It's definitely better than either of the two most recent widely-acclaimed records.

Keep seeing this and thinking his new album is called “Married”

he doesn't do the interesting stuff on his albums anymore, does he? they're all these weird side projects and the albums are all, here are some more tasteful and pleasant songs to listen to

This week's New Yorker profile felt like liner notes, not in a good way. With Pharrell's involvement (co-producing/co-writing half the songs), I'm listening to this and end up comparing it to Blond, again, not in a good way.

New record is b o r i n g as they’ve all been for me since Midnite Vs.
Maybe the life change will bring out some interesting stuff. I’ll always listen to what he does next

New one is pleasant but not great

Beck in that long Amanda P profile in the New Yorker

There was a point where I was, like, ‘Is this over?’ ” he said. “But I wake up with songs going. Melodies, harmonies, a bass line. It’s like there’s a radio station playing in my head all the time.” Maybe, I said, the only point of art is to make the thing that you most want to exist in the world. He thought about it for a moment. “I don’t know if I’ve done that yet,” he said.

thought this line in the nyer profile was accurate w/r/t the sound of his last couple LPs: the sorts of hulking anthems that are discernible over the din of the beer tent at giant outdoor festivals

For all the premium that Beck seems to place on keeping up with the sounds of the times, I'm more amazed than ever that he still hasnt released a capital-c Country album - seems like that would be a license to print money.

there's a story on Pitchfork that he thinks he lost a double album of Hank Williams covers in the UMG fire... among other things, maybe.

https://pitchfork.com/news/beck-says-full-unreleased-albums-were-probably-destroyed-in-universal-warehouse-fire/?

Update: In an Instagram post, Beck said that “Since the time of that interview we have found out that my losses in the fire were minimal”

haha lots to look forward to then

Beck's Bootleg Series!

Went driving around in the woods with my family on a camping trip for Thanksgiving. I've been off Beck for a while, but I put on One Foot In The Grave. Man, that's a great album. Force Field is the track that I never gave enough attention to until now. Would love more music from his glory days.

Are the expanded editions of the good albums worth picking up?

Just wanted to echo everybody’s take on the last album: pleasantly generic and inessential. There’s much worse out there but I’d never thought back in 93 we’d describe him that way

Are the expanded editions of the good albums worth picking up?

― Cow_Art, Saturday, November 30, 2019 9:09 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Absogoddamnlutely. I honestly prefer some of the supplemental songs to the original material on the expanded Odelay.

Cow_Art, did you listen to the expanded edition of One Foot in the Grave? If not, I'd say that's essential since it includes basically a whole other album's worth of outtakes from those sessions

I haven't listened to a Beck album in its entirety since Sea Change (and then only once, I think), and nothing that anyone has said about his subsequent material has given me cause to regret that decision. I'm cool with pretending he hung it up at the turn of the century.

the last thing I enjoyed was his cover of Skip Spence's "Oar", which is funny cuz I have no use for the original

I mean afaic his unimpeachable '90s material earned him the right to drift into a career of musical somnambulism if he so chose. It's just been disappointing to see. A waste, if you will.

xp ha - i remember getting that Oar tribute comp and loving a lot of the tracks, then tracking down Oar and being pretty let down

I'd heard Oar before but outside of a few clever lines (the weighted down/waited down couplets, for example) I found it actively irritating. Skip seemed like mostly a creep/sad figure as well, which also contributed to my not finding it a pleasant listen.

But Beck's version morphs it into a totally different thing

The Oar tribute record brings me back to the halcyon days of HEAR Music.