Author: andrea Page 14 of 71

By now you’ve probably heard that pioneering No Wave trio Ut has reformed and will be touring the East Coast in November.

Their mini-tour starts at Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room, where musician David Grubbs and art historian Branden Joseph have organized Theoretical Music: No Wave, New Music, and the New York Art Scene, 1978-1983, a three-day event examining the intersections as well as the failed encounters of art, music, and cinema in downtown Manhattan.

The festival starts on November 3 with a rare screening of James Nares’ No Wave epic, Rome ’78.November 4 features an evening of panel discussions among some of the most notable figures to emerge from the art, music, and film scenes of the time.

The festival concludes on November 5 with a concert performance headlined by the first New York appearance in years by Ut.

Co-organizer David Grubbs was gracious enough to answer a few questions about the festival —and his enduring interest in No Wave.

How would you define No Wave? Art form? Anti-art form? Movement?
The upcoming event that Branden Joseph and I have organized takes it as a starting point that most of the folks interested in the subject are pretty familiar with the canonical history of No Wave via No New York, via bands adjacent to but beyond the boundaries of No New York, and via Thurston Moore and Byron Coley’s No Wave Post-Punk Underground 1979-1980 and/or Marc Masters’ No Wave.

Not to be too slippery about it, but defining or trying to articulate an essence of No Wave is not what this event is about. Instead, the impetus is more to get a sense of what has been obscured by reliance on a too-quick, too-thumbnailish of a grouping of these various activities under the heading “No Wave.” That’s why we’re excited to be showing James Nares’ films and to be talking about points of contact between music and visual art as well as between tetchy postpunk, post-Cagean new music, and dance music.

What first drew you to the No Wave scene? Why do you think it’s still compelling?
Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. DNA. Mars. I heard recordings of these groups (I was a teenager in Kentucky) just as the last of them was about to implode (DNA), and they, along with Throbbing Gristle, seemed to me to be the ones who made good on punk’s promise to flatten, to obliterate rock music. All three of those groups still sound positively glorious.

No Wave drew its considerable power from NYC’s near-total desolation. Do you think it could have happened anywhere other than New York? Could it happen now?
Year after year, it becomes a more demanding thought experiment to try to imagine Downtown as a desolate place. I mean, I suppose it can feel culturally desolate nowadays, but it’s hard to remember what it felt like for me, coming to New York in the mid-’80s to play at places like CBGBs…

How much did No Wave help explode the sanctity of the gallery space? How fundamentally did they shift established attitudes about how (and where) to make art? (This might be a better question for Branden.)
Ooh, you’re getting ahead of the game! Come to the panel discussions on November 4.

Glenn O’Brien once quipped that No Wave was a “Gong Show for geniuses.” What are some of your favorite No Wave moments —could be music, film, performance, etc.
That is such a marvelous description. What to add? Ikue Mori’s drumming. The sound-signature of Mars. The psychotic laughing jags in John Lurie’s film Men in Orbit.

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Theoretical Music at Issue Project Room
Ut | News & Tour Dates

Ut, “Bedouin” (Live in London, 1983)

PHOTO: SALLY YOUNG OF UT, 2010 | PHOTO BY CHRISTOPHER SHORT

Silence is a rhythm too.

(Ari, you went too soon. You will be missed.)

I’ve always thought of Jim Jarmusch as the original poet of slacker ennui. Stranger than Paradise(1984) set a template for a slew of mumblecore copycats who followed in that film’s wake. (And, like the Energizer bunny, they’re still going.)

And yet, Jarmusch’s vision doesn’t neatly conform to cliché: his debut, Permanent Vacation (1980), sets a ghostly tone that would echo throughout later films like Dead Man (1995), Ghost Dog (1999) and The Limits of Control (2009), all of which follow an enigmatic drifter through an increasingly chaotic world.

Permanent Vacation is really two films in one: a ghostly tone poem about the collapse of civilization, and a dreary day (or two) in the life of an erstwhile beatnik with romantic delusions. Although the two coexist, and occasionally intertwine, neither adds up to a cohesive narrative. For moments at a time, however, the film makes good on its nihilistic title by becoming a post-apocalyptic horror film.

Jarmusch’s themes dovetail with those of No Wave cinema, but the film is in no way confrontational. Gently and almost dreamily, it drifts along, content to let the eerie and often chilling imagery speak for itself. It’s an odd tack to take, but the restraint pays off: an unshakeable end-times vibe clings to every shot.

Jarmusch and cinematographer Tom DeCillo use long, slow pans and wide-angle establishing shots of deep shadows and looming, hollow buildings to depict a landscape ravaged by —war? Poverty? Indifference? Bureaucracy? All of the above?

Our unreliable narrator for this 70-minute tour is Aloysious Christopher Parker. Known as Allie to his friends (although it’s not clear he has any), he dresses like a hepcat, listens to bepop and mumbles like a proto-hipster.

Effectively an orphan (his father is dead and his mother, institutionalized), Parker resists social ties, preferring instead to skitter sideways through life.

He’s got a girlfriend (sort of), but treats her with blasé disdain. (In a passive-aggressive display of payback, she mutilates and defaces the copy of Maldoror that he gracelessly gives her.)

This is not, however, a film of interiors (or interiority). Allie cannot be contained, and he spends most of the film on the streets, in a kind of waking dream.

The raw, apocalypse-now vibe of the film meshes with the work of Nan Goldin, one of Jarmusch’s peers and a fellow documenter of the night owls, artsy weirdos and freaks who populated the Manhattan’s crumbling lower echelons.

Goldin made her name with The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a filmic slideshow that debuted at the Mudd Club in 1979. Goldin documented her tribe in what amounted to a family album set to music. She effortlessly captured the vulnerabilities of those (including herself) who thought themselves invincible. The initial euphoria of the scene gradually sank into hazy intoxication and then despair.

Permanent Vacation charts a similar trajectory, but Jarmusch —a Surrealist and dreamer— gives us a hopeful ending, something that Goldin’s all-too-real subjects don’t always find.

Goldin’s slide show closed with the haunting Velvet Underground song “After Hours.” In her plainspoken voice, Mo Tucker sums up the transcendent emptiness: “And if you close the door/The night could last forever/Leave the sunshine out/And say hello to never.”

The Lounge Lizards, “Bob the Bob” (from Downtown 81)

The Velvet Underground, “After Hours”

STILLS FROM JARMUSCH’S PERMANENT VACATION. CINEMATOGRAPHER: TOM DICILLO