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

[niemandsrose.livejournal.com]

Speaking of nostalgia, it's that time of year again: the time of year when I pop in my copy of El Records' The World in Winter. Your lovely song "Little Lord Obedience" has always reminded me very much of Betholt Brecht's songs, like "Surabaya Johnny", or the ones in "Man Is Man".

So, yes, question: Were you in a Brecht-y phase at the time you wrote it?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh, very much so. I think Brecht and Weill are my favourite songwriting team ever (sorry, Stephin and Merritt)!

[zenmonkeykstop.livejournal.com]

I'm going to be visiting NY for the first time this weekend - any celebrity recommendations?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Eldridge and Broome, Dumpling House, five dumplings for a dollar!

[bluerosesgirl.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much! Will give this a listen as I try to get the music from Man Who Fell To Earth out of my head.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Actually, there's a wonderful scene in the film where Newton's in his limo and can somehow see hillbillies in the past, who can somehow also see him, and run and point as his "spacecraft" as it passes. Some of that sense of sci-fi folk fuelled my documentary, and my folk direction (it's in "Littles Apples" on Folktronic). It's that sense that we're scifi to hillbillies, and hillbillies are scifi to us.

[noaei-xanadu.livejournal.com]

A limo, because the subways are kaput.

[zenmonkeykstop.livejournal.com]

Already ordered!

[noaei-xanadu.livejournal.com]

Please come back to New York ASAP.
Anything "cool" about this city is either dead or dying, under the glut of Bedford trust funds and the "awesomeness" of the Misshapes scene.
I'm convinced AIDS began the slaughter, and 9/11 buried it.

But yeah, I'm just a young college student that came from the hillbilly land of Mississippi, expecting real ideas and instead was told "let's do lots of drugs and listen to bad "electroclash" (Trademarked!) music".

[noaei-xanadu.livejournal.com]

Can you take me to the airport please?!

haha

I had to walk from the Village to home in Brooklyn. At 4am. 15 degrees. I'm insanely jealous of your car transportation.

(I did get a nice view crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, though. Highly recommend that for your visit).

[zenmonkeykstop.livejournal.com]

I'm joking - once we're in from the airpenvironmentally-friendly train, it's shank's mare all the way. Luckily we're apartment-borrowing in the West Village, so there's a lot of interesting stuff within a 2 mile radius.

[zenmonkeykstop.livejournal.com]

cf. "Gernsback Continuum"

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

As someone who travels between those two planets, I think they mutually view each other as campy horror flicks.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Luckily with technology, we have options. I think we might actually see a "weirdo diaspora" form as the costs of living rise in urban centers like New York: they'll serve as marketplaces for creativity, but they may not necessarily serve as creativity hotbeds.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I'm making a donation for the unlikelist of hats.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I like the interview with the fellow who speaks about Fisherspooner and how those who arrive in New York from more provincial areas have a vision of what glamor or cosmpolitanism is, find that the reality does not meet their expectations, so wind up resolving to forge ahead with their original notion of what glamor is, anyway.

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

Listen to this man -- he wrote the very manual.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Other themes that resonated:

-"Giving honor to the ridiculous"
-the avoidance of easy, ironic in-jokes
-Is culture still moving from fakely authentic to authentically fake in 2005? (All that black in New York might suggest otherwise.)
-Folk art by way of technology

Some of this quite close to home. Great interviews.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

...I nearly choked on my pesto when Casey said he didn't think they looked or sounded like Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

[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.

[(Anonymous)]

Great ! Always a pleasure to read.
I always look forward to your current and future plans and observations (or past in this case).
After Osaka and New York, where to?
It has been a couple years since I have seen you perform (SF.. . Bottom of the Hill).
I will be in Takamatsu City (and Osaka occasionally) in June for a couple, few, months.. . years(?). It would be great to see a show !
J.(ustin)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

After Osaka and New York, where to?

Back to Berlin, for some of the reasons Whimsy discusses here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/lord_whimsy/96568.html) re: cost of living.

[tassellrealm.livejournal.com]

"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."

A gold ring is sometimes used in allegories about mans state of bondage after the fall from his original hyperdimensional God-like edenic state.

Perhaps the selling of the monogrammed gold ring is a suggestion that the condition of TJN's survival on Earth is that he must of his own volition, chain himself to matter - also, and this is important - the woman behind the counter stresses that it is NOT a pawn shop, and once he's sold it, he can't have it back.

Although the tale of TJN may not be taken as a strict fall allegory (he's not human, he's from another planet), the message is bleak - the chances of getting off here are slim or none (and the intentions unjust).

The film also has interesting things to suggest about Englishness, the state of being English, and the state of being English in America.

I've only been to America once, (I was in L.A./Hollywood - I starred in an ad for West Cigarettes - I was Mr West Cigarettes in Germany for 3 years) as I recall: the relationship with the land, the environment and the people, the flavour was unmistakably reminiscent of the TJN landing in Haneyville.

There are curious speculations from some FOM theorists that TFOM was actually a mass psycho-physical event that occured in the Northern Isle of Hyperborea (Great Britain, apparently) zillions of years ago. Some of the images, ideas and currents in TMWFTE carry a dim correspondence with some of these speculations.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh my God, you've been commenting on Click Opera for a while, but I've only just realised you're the Jake Tassell I know from Fortress Europe etc! Hello!

[peripherus-max.livejournal.com]

Ah! THE complete and total classic of Momus rarities... thank you for posting this, Nick. I am proud to say that I was one of the few that bought an original CD-R from your website's "TeePee" back in the day. I still wish I would have gotten one of those black "Analog Baroque" T-shirts... the ones with the TRS-80-style computer on the front.

Whatever became of the "Superheroes" compilation CD on AmPatch?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It basically ran up against Larry T (http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y296/imomus/deitchparty.jpg)'s "Electroclash" compilation and Larry won.

[ddf.livejournal.com]

A really excellent set of interviews. Thank you for posting it.