Fakeways: Manhattan Folk

[imomus]

At the beginning of Nicolas Roeg's film The Man Who Fell To Earth space alien (and Englishman) Thomas Jerome Newton goes to a pawnbroker's shop to sell a gold ring -- his engagement ring, he tells the old lady who gives him $10 for it. As he leaves the shop we see that he has a string in his pocket with about a hundred rings hanging from it. This (and patents) is how he'll finance himself on Earth, a planet that values gold as much as his own planet values water. Desperately poor when I first arrived in New York City in early 2000, I had a similar scheme; I sold silver disks to Other Music.

The disks were homeburned copies of an audio documentary I'd made about the Manhattan and Williamsburg music, theater and art scene as I found it in early spring of 2000. And today I want to offer it to you for the first time for download as an mp3. The documentary is called Fakeways: Manhattan Folk. It fed me in my early months in New York (I was working on my "Folktronic" album at the time), gave me a chance to capture whatever memes were flying about, and finally aired on WFMU. It's been unavailable for a few years, but I thought now might be a good time to pull it out of the time capsule. Enough time has passed to give the scene I'm surveying a historical quality (Casey Spooner claimed in a recent Pitchfork interview that "apparently there's an electroclash renaissance happening in the UK").



Fakeways is also an interesting document in its own right, a snapshot of New York creatives (Casey Spooner, Cindy Green, Ford Wright, Stephin Merritt, Brian Degraw) finding the Nietzschean superbeing within themselves. Some of them would later translate ambivalent celebrations of mainstream entertainment values into actual mainstream success. Merritt was already well on the way, by the time I spoke to him here, to selling 150,000 copies of 69 Love Songs. The same Fischerspooner album that you could buy as an indie release in 2000 at Other Music was re-released in 2002 by UK dance label Ministry, who flew the band about on Concorde and reputedly paid them a £2 million advance. They're now on Capitol, and their follow-up album Odyssey got respectful reviews, but made nobody's Top 10 lists and nobody's Top 40. But in "Fakeways" everything is still up for grabs, and talk is of legendary Starbucks appearances and early days in Chicago underground theater venues.

Christmas is always a good time for nostalgia, so enjoy this trip back to 2000!

Fakeways: Manhattan Folk (32.7MB mono mp3 file, 71 mins), full tracklisting here.

The documentary is free, but if you feel like it you can

and help me pay overdue royalties to some of the artists I signed to my American Patchwork label in further attempts to be Alan Lomax.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's very interesting to hear his reaction to the gay question too. I think all the males you hear in this documentary are gay (apart from me and the robot), and one way of summarizing it is "straight man goes around asking gay men whether what they're doing is kitsch or camp".

I think it's interesting that Casey Spooner went on to collaborate on a song ("We Need A War" on Oddyssey) with Susan Sontag, author of "Notes on Camp" and coiner of my favourite description of rock and roll: "aggressive normality". Aggressive normality is, in some sense, the condition of true mainstream success, and something nobody here could ever be dull enough to muster, or simulate, in their work. (Simulate in the way that, for instance, Queen's Freddy Mercury did in his similarly Nietszchean songs, "We Are The Champions", "We Will Rock You", "Flash", etc etc).

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Yes, the gay factor had occurred to me as well. Not to paint with too broad a brush, but here's tonight's pet theory: straight men seem to concern themselves mainly with irony (thus projecting a sort of contempt, thereby distancing themselves from the object at hand), while gay men seem to gravitate more towards camp, (which, as anyone who has read Sontag's essay might recall, tends to exalt or celebrate raw kitsch, often heightening its excesses). I suppose the source of this schism might lie with an identification with being "the other."

I myself do not identify too much with either irony or camp. I think the Frieze article (http://www.frieze.com/feature_single.asp?f=1058) that you'd kindly brought to my attention this summer best defined the sensibility at work--neither ironic/hetero, but not camp/gay. New aestheic genders are quite handy--can't have too many of them.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Aggressive normality even intrudes on the gastronomic: I was mercilessly--mercilessly!--derided this week by friends for not wishing to join them for beer and sausages at a Polish restaurant. Apparently, not everyone shares our taste for jellyfish.