Comments at Other Sites: Ad Astra by James Gray

One of the few blogs I visit regularly is Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon, the irregularly updated blog named after a Flaming Lips song maintained by the Welsh science fiction writer Alastair Reynolds.

Back in October, he'd posted a review of the recent Brad Pitt vehicle Ad Astra, with particular attention paid to what he felt was the lousy science. Reynolds used to work for the European Space Agency, so he'd know one way or the other.

I'd been keen to see the movie--until I read his review. After having done so, it became more of a back burner thing. But I try to get to my back burner, too, and last night I finally saw Ad Astra. And I liked it quite a bit.

Because I'd never forgotten Reynold's review, I thought I'd go back to his site and comment on his review. Here's that comment:

A bit late but having finally seen it, the only thing I could think of was your excellent science-based review. The first review I read had talked about Applebee's on the moon, and I was like, kewl! But then after reading your review, I dropped the movie down a notch from 'buy when out on DVD', to 'watch when available to stream for free'.

Because I'm not a physicist, but unless persuaded to drop it for a little bit, I have an interest in, you know, the way the world really works.

But last night my gal and I found out that contrary to their ad we'd seen, Amazon was still getting six bucks for Motherless Brooklyn, but, hey, there's Ad Astra for free, and at least it will look good.

As you note, the movie immediately grabs you with the nonsensical tower/telescope, and, man, those struts don't look like fullerene to me--plus, anyway, you can make it out of steel and just put it in low orbit.

So not a good start, but sometime in the middle of movie, during another of Brad Pitt's talkovers, I thought to myself, said it to my gal, sheesh, that sounds like Willard from Apocalypse Now. Pitt--McBride--didn't say, I'd never seen a man so broken, but he might as well have. And it became clear to me as I watched from there, this movie is a conscious tribute to Coppola's masterpiece. Tommy Lee Jones was Kurtz, the best and the brightest destroyed from within, gone totally insane, and Roy's travels from the Moon to Mars, to the Mad Monkey station (!), to Neptune, mirror the travels of the gunboat up the river, progressively more atavistic, progressively more removed from the world of rationality.

Look at it that way, and suddenly the film becomes quite good, cognizant of the human issues it raises and of how film as art has dealt with these things before.

The details of Coppola's Vietnam gunboat voyage are to be sure more authentic than those of Roy McBride's segmented ellipses in Ad Astra. And Coppola's movie wasn't afraid of a dark ending, where Gray's had a sort of unbelievable reconciliation, but regardless, AA was in many ways a pretty great film. The fact that the science kind of sucked (and all the points you raise are valid, as you know better than I) doesn't take it from better than average to below average; it takes it from fully great to very good. It's a damn shame they (for example) had the main character swimming through the rings of Neptune somehow celestially guided, because this film had classic within its reach, had they just done the research.

Godspeed You Black Emperor! - "Blaise Bailey Finnegan III" from the EP Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada

A lot going on here.

Now, I'm left wing, but I'm not as left-wing as these Godspeed assholes. And they're radicals, but it may be that they're not as radical as plain-old Blaise Bailey Finnegan III.

Or are they?

This song is delicious because the hipper-than-thou underground rock band, who record people and situations, and like some kind of fucking underground Sacha Baron Cohen, insert these recordings as ironic commentary into their lyrical and otherwise instrumental music, were punked *big time* here.

Whoever this street dude was, whether he's really a courtroom anarchist, or just playing a part for the hipster assholes sticking the mike in his face, whether he owns eight high-power firearms, or none, he wasn't named Blaise Bailey, and he sure as fuck didn't write this 'Virus' poem he recites, 'cause all that, it turns out, was slump-period Iron Maiden.

And you know, Godspeed are up on multinational weapons manufacturers, and they're current on the deep internal rot of the American State, but it became clear they're not so up-to-date on 90's arena metal.

There's always someone smarter than you, you know?

It's good to keep that in mind as you position yourself on the political lectern.

Spotify Playlist - The Best of Neil Young Since the Rust Projects

Heard "No Hidden Path" off Chrome Dreams II yesterday, with that monster monster riff, so I googled the song to read about if anyone else grooves on that riff as much as I do, and that brought me to an old post on Thrasher's Wheat, which led me to an old post on Rolling Stone, asking which was Neil's best post-70's track, which led me to make this playlist, and at least today, I think the answer is indeed "No Hidden Path."

(via https://open.spotify.com/playlist/68SH0cm1nHhECyfDHwKcye?si=Lxcy7etPSOe_zEH5RE1QEw)

While I'm pretty much familiar with everything Young did between Buffalo Springfield and Live Rust, I *am* more patchy on the stuff since. I've never heard Greendale (though I saw a show off its tour), and I've never heard any Promise of the Real stuff. I've never heard Silver and Gold or Fork in the Road or Are You Passionate?.

But still, I think this is a representative--and very very strong--playlist.

The Rolling Stones - "You Can't Always Get What You Want" From the album Let it Bleed

So: I'm like 11 years old, maybe 12, and my buddy Greg invites me to his sister's wedding. Like, alright, sure.

So my mother drops me off at Greg's house, and then the idea is to gain transport to the wedding in Greg's cooler older brother's car. He had a Charger or a Challenger or something, with a Hurst shifter, Edelbrock intakes and an aftermarket stereo.

So, success. I'm assigned to David's car--even if David thinks I'm a brat. But I'm like the pumpkins in Linus' pumpkin patch, I so sincerely want to be cool. I'm like Beavis and Butthead, in love with the concept of Todd, cooler than they'll ever be, but definitely something they can aspire to.

So David starts 'er up, and we're off. Over the rumble of the engine, Zeta4, the cool rock station, drops "You Can't Always Get What You Want," all chorale and shit, and, remember, I'm 11 years old or something, and I haven't heard it ever before, but that doesn't keep me from complaining, there from the white buttontuck back seat, about this sappy shit playing through the speakers. And David turns around, forgets the road for a second, this is *important*, looks me straight in the eye, and says sternly, "Just listen to it!"

And I shut up, you bet your ass, and I listened.

But I never did stop thinking that the song was a sappy piece of shit. 4o years later, and I still think I sussed the fucking thing out in its first 20 seconds, and that it was David, not I, who hadn't heard.

The Stones were probably in the middle of the biggest roll any rock 'n' roll band has ever had, when they recorded "YCAGWYW," but so what? It's a fucking misfire, a dud. Thought so in 1976, and I think it now.

Hot Tuna - “New Song (For The Morning)“
From the album Hot Tuna
(May 1970)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

Not for the first time, but I heard this uplifting little fingerpicked blues shortly after the sun came up a couple days after my father died, right when I had just started getting used to the idea.

And now, though this song ain’t about the relationship of a man to his father, and though it ain’t really something my father would have liked in the first place, and though he sure as hell wasn’t perfect, everytime I hear "New Song” now, I think about my old man, and get a little misty-eyed.

And I guess that’s alright, it feels kind of good.

    #Time goes on and I get older What am I gonna do

Eno/Cale

Eno/Cale
Wrong Way Up
Opal Records

Back when it was new--and I was 25 years old--I eagerly purchased this compact disc. Oh, it was a time, man. The CD was packaged in--get this (if you can: most people today I would assume don't know what it had been)--a longbox. A theft deterrent then, and a music geek collectible now. Funny the way things transform, sometimes.

So. It being that time, I didn't know as much about Brian Eno or John Cale then as I do now, but I still knew Here Come the Warm Jets and White Light/White Heat. And because those records had been great, I expected Wrong Way Up to be pretty awesome.

Did I know then that the 3-1/2-minute revolution called "Sky Saw" featured Cale? Or that there was a cult album named June 1, 1974 that featured them both?

Not sure. Wise now, was I wise then?

Anyway, the excitement before the purchase turned into disappointment afterwards. This album, it did not rock, it bore no traces of Warm Jets or White Heat, and it wasn't weird at all, and I sold it and I forgot about it as quickly as possible.

Lately though, nearly 30 years later, thinner of hair, and wiser of the music, man, I've been on an Eno jag, and I came across a review of the album on Pitchfork that suggested the album, synthpop though it was, achieved nothing less than brilliance in its rather conflicted creation.

Hell, I hadn't even known that the artists hadn't gotten along. . . . So I figured, what *had* I known, in my judgement 30 years ago? I'd been only 25, and had probably been a little bit um, over-influenced, by hardcore punk. My tastes are more sophisticated now! I could like an album that maybe wasn't so manic. Really I could. And shit, everything I've been doing for the last month was all about what a fucking genius Eno was. . . Maybe I'd been hasty in my dismissal of WWU back then, simply because it didn't sound like "Third Uncle," or "I Heard Her Call My Name." 'Cause hell, on reflection, thinking about it in 2019, in the midst of a Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno freakout, neither does "Luftschloss."

Goddamn, then, let's try it again, I thought. So last week, I bought a CD copy off Discogs. Received it yesterday, listened to it on the way into work this morning, and ... it's unabashedly awful.

It's lame, predictable, and without a trace of the genius which otherwise marks both men's work. You're tempted to say a few things, although you should probably resist the urges. You're tempted to say that it was a case of men outside the times attempting foolishly to sound like them, but that's wrong. 1990 had no great rush of synthpop albums.

1990 was about Jane's Addiction; Jane's Addiction, and Happy Mondays and Sonic Youth's major label debut. Nobody was making synthpop. That these two major artists felt like going there, I don't know, it's odd, it's strange, it's fucked up.

You're also tempted to say, maybe, if you're not that familiar with the facts, that this was the work of giants who had exhausted their creative energies prior to its making, young lions become old farts. But, of course, that's ridiculous. Five years after this mistake of a record, Eno would record Nerve Net, which showed him as able as his youngself to stretch things out. And if you want pop, shit, Eno made Another Day on Earth in 2005, as he was approaching 60, and that is a brilliant, quirky, intelligent pop record, even if it's not as much like M83 as I might prefer.

Wrong Way Up is a detour into mediocrity. Definite, and puzzling, that is.

It all goes to show many things, perhaps most importantly--and I swear I'm not looking to trash Pitchfork specifically here--that if an artist known for making good things makes something crappy, there will always--always--be somebody around to tell people that, fuck the facts, it is in fact pretty good.

There's also the reminder given that I had the suss of the thing down back in 1990. I like to think of myself as smarter now, wiser if you have to go there, and I was prepared to second-guess myself, and take a lesson from it too, but at least in this case, me and the version of myself that existed three decades ago are smack dab in agreement. There's a stolidity about that I find appealing, but maybe, just maybe, there's also a disappointing inability to evolve.

Funny the way things don't transform, sometimes.