Good and Bad #3: ECM, Drive My Car, Vanya on 42nd Street, Terror Twilight
Adam Rothbarth asks: Can two seemingly opposite things be true?
If I was stranded on a desert island with one record label, it might be ECM (Edition of Contemporary Music), which consistently and intrepidly releases some of the most interesting—and in some cases bizarre—classical, jazz, and experimental music. It’s a treasure. From Vijay Iyer’s catalogue (Break Stuff is one of my favorite contemporary jazz albums) to Paul Motian’s myriad avant-garde jazz recordings (I Have the Room Above Her with Joe Lovano and Bill Frisell is a masterpiece in mood) to most of Keith Jarrett’s work, and so much more, I love exploring ECM’s deep archives. It’s an important institution and one whose new releases are constantly refreshing, even when they’re too challenging or weird for me to get into immediately.
I have Covid. It’s been pretty rough, physically and mentally, but it’s given me time to slow down and catch up on some television, film, and music. Last night, I took a bath while listening to the beautiful Keith Jarrett and Charlie Haden album Last Dance. This morning, I listened to him play Bach’s violin sonatas with Michelle Makarski. I’m also really enjoying Mark Turner’s new album Return from the Stars and Tigran Hamasyan’s shimmering, meditative Atmosphères right now. When I go down an ECM hole, I just continue falling. It’s great.
Also during my illness I finally watched Drive My Car (2021) and followed it up with Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street (1994). Drive My Car is brilliant—I really loved the film, and that’s without knowing much about Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, the play that’s being rehearsed throughout it. Drive My Car, it seemed to me, is about many things: coming to terms with the dualities and deep alienation of life today, exploring the ways art and life inform each other, and contemplating the role of grief in our approach to aesthetic reproduction (and the reflexive effect production has on our grasp of ourselves).
Yūsuke Kafuku, whose wife had died tragically two years earlier, was a ghost of a man. At one point, it felt like the film could end up being about how he and his driver heal each other, which is of course an important part, though cliche it is not. While directing a production of Uncle Vanya, Kafuku struggles with casting the roles, and despite his obsession with the part of Vanya, which he rehearses daily and for hours, he distributes it to a much younger actor (who happened to have been in love with Kafuku’s wife). The casting allows Kafuku to become closer to the actor and to understand his infatuation with Kafuku’s now dead spouse, but it also creates a dissonance where Kafuku needs to reconcile himself with a role he is clearly preoccupied with. What struck me most about Drive My Car is how elegantly it demonstrates that multiple truths can exist about one thing. A car can have two drivers; a mother can have multiple identities; a daughter can feel both love and hate towards a parent; a role can suit two actors; a woman can love her husband and also cheat on him; a man can identify with a role but also not embody it; a man can have two working eyes, even if one is much weaker than the other.
After watching Drive My Car, I decided I needed to see the play, so I watched Vanya on 42nd Street, which really struck me as a work of genius. The film takes as its basis a years-long workshop of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya by André Gregory, Wallace Shawn, Julianne Moore, and some other great figures; towards the end of their study (which was never supposed to see the light of day), they decided to allow around 20-25 audience members a night, mostly family and friends. By the end of the short run, they’d let French director Louis Malle film a performance. On one level, the film offers an intimate, meta reading of a theater masterpiece to a nearly-closed house (in this sense, Malle’s film kind of reminds me of last year’s A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle, a Coltrane performance from ‘65 that wasn’t really supposed to be recorded and released); on another level, it’s an interesting meditation on the nature of the artistic process and the role of spontaneity and improvisation in live performances. Though their Vanya was drastically different night to night as they read it casually for years, when they decided to film it, they had to create a sort of definitive version. In a way, a play’s performance is like a jazz song—the frame is concrete, but what’s done inside of it can never be the same twice. I won’t go into all the problems with that comparison, but it’s not lost on me that it’s in many ways an extremely bad analogy. The following paragraph forms the question in another way.
The seminal ‘90s rock band Pavement’s new reissue of Terror Twilight (1999) is really great—it sounds incredible digitally, and I’m excited to pick up the vinyl edition soon. I’m looking forward to going through it. I think Terror Twilight, which is their final record, is a super underrated album. I love the pathos on it, and the cohesiveness to the sound, how erratic it can be, but also how dazzlingly consonant. For this release, the band reconstructed the album in producer Nigel Godrich’s original suggested track order; it’s weird after listening to the “Spit on a Stranger”-opening version of Terror Twilight for god knows how long, but honestly I think I prefer this edition. It opens with some of the more challenging songs, which gives easier tracks like “Folk Jam” and “Major Leagues” a very different feel and context. Is there a “real” version? Are either of them “official,” or neither? There are clearly issues in the fact that the songs are interchangeable, that the record can be heard in different orders, but that we’re also supposed to take the album as some sort of whole; it’s a deeper and more fundamental formal problem with popular music. Both versions, I think, can be authentic, because there is no real whole here—it’s not possible; in the Chekhov play or a film, however, no one part could be substituted for another. You could never switch the second and third act, nor could you even subtract a single line of dialogue. Uncle Vanya is a total work in a way that a pop album or a jazz song can never really be. In any case, I appreciate the chance to hear Terror Twilight differently. How often do we get that opportunity?