All posts by keithpille

Art Is My Middle Name

Art History, Essays, Linkage
pictured: the artist

…is a free newsletter I’m starting as a birthday gift to myself. Each installment will be a short-to-medium thought about art, working with a very broad definition of art: visual arts, comics, movies, music, literature, god knows what else; and covering both appreciating art, art history, art theory, making art, all that. Sometimes focusing on individual works of art or artists; sometimes wandering all over the place. I can’t promise structure or high-quality copy-editing, but I can promise fun (and a bare minimum of one post a month). And although I hope this’ll still be fun and interesting for my pals from the world of academic art history, I want to aim this more at people who like to appreciate art and culture but haven’t spent a bunch of time in seminars talking theory.

SO SIGN UP OVER AT SUBSTACK! I’m in the process of working through my mountain of ideas for posts, and I’ll start sending them out once there’s a moderately-sized pool of subscribers.

QUICK NOTE IN APRIL 2020: I’ve added a separate page for this project, which includes a full index of all of the newsletters so far. Check it out!

SOME TOPIC IDEAS THAT MIGHT MAKE IT INTO THE NEWSLETTER:

  • Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard vs. Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women on telling the story of the Abstract Expressionists
  • Pablo Picasso, Asshole
  • What do people mean when they jabber about Postmodernism?
  • So let’s talk about ugly condo buildings
  • You’re probably qualified to say that you have refined taste
  • Kehinde Wiley makes Jacques-Louis David retroactively worthwhile
  • Disney is choking the life out of our culture
  • So let’s talk about auteurist comics
  • Lynda Barry’s Making Comics is a godsend
  • David Bowie’s big final accidental performance art piece

AGAINST DAD ROCK

Essays, Music, , , ,

I hate Dad Rock. Not the music, at least not categorically; I love it and hate it at more or less the same rate that I love and hate all of the other imaginary categories of music. No, it’s the term I hate.

You’ve heard the term, right? Basically means safe, nonthreatening rock (mostly) that appeals mostly to people over 35-ish. When I first heard the term, it meant the “classic rock” that my generation’s boomer parents were always listening to: Pink Floyd, Steely Dan, the Beatles, the Stones, Van Morrison, you know the drill. As Gen X has gotten gray and paunchy, I’ve started hearing Wilco, the New Pornographers, and the Mountain Goats get put into the file.

Some of that is music I like, a lot of it is music I hate, but the label bugs me either way. Part of it is the specific choice of modifier: “dad.” I don’t have kids, I’m not going to have kids, and I’m irked at the intrusion of child-having status as a qualifier in a situation where it doesn’t apply. But really, that’s not the problem; again, it’s not really the music that I love that’s getting the label (I was a Wilco superfan when I was younger, but I drifted away from them around 2007; coincidentally, around the time they started getting labeled as dad rock).

Continue reading AGAINST DAD ROCK →

Welfare Music

Music, Wave That Flag

Disc 2 Track 1

In 1994, Brian Henneman (probably) could have joined Wilco as it phoenixed it way out of the ashes of Uncle Tupelo. He chose not to (assuming it was actually a viable choice), and why not? His own band was really taking off.

The Brooklyn Side sounds exactly like what it is: a natural continuation of The Bottle Rockets, but with more budget to spend on studio time and better gear. Recorded at Coyote Recording Studio in Brooklyn (the album’s title appears to come from the climactic line of “Sunday Sports,” but there’s kind of a chicken-and-egg question lurking here) in 1994, Brooklyn catches the band in the same form as their first album, just a bit more polished and better produced. The collection of demos on the combined reissue makes it sound like many of the songs come from the same creative burst that populated the first album.

Continue reading Welfare Music →

FRANKLIN, CHARLES SCHULZ’S ACCIDENTAL TOKEN

Art History, Comics, Essays, History

It always hurts to talk about when one of your heroes fails, but that’s what I’m out to do here. Charles Schulz is one of the great figures in comics; Charles Schulz sometimes fell on his ass. He did here. Acting with well-documented good intentions, he tried to do a good thing, and slid into what could most charitably be called mixed success. By introducing Franklin, a black character, into his immensely popular comic strip Peanuts, Charles Schulz wanted to harness his cultural power and use it to send a positive social message about racial harmony. He explicitly wanted to integrate his strip in a way that wasn’t demeaning or insulting. Thirty years later, though, Franklin was considered one of the prime exemplars of tokenism, a perception that has only grown as time has continued to pass.

Peanuts in 1968 was a cultural juggernaut, appearing in well over 2500 newspapers. In an era when newspaper comics carried a cultural weight nearly unimaginable today, Schulz was at the very top of the profession, giving him one of the most visible platforms in the country to trumpet any message he chose.

For the most part, Schulz avoided politics in the strip, instead examining emotional and existential humor.

Jan. 7, 1972
Continue reading FRANKLIN, CHARLES SCHULZ’S ACCIDENTAL TOKEN →

The 2020 Birds of the World Printable Calendar

Uncategorized

Last October, I inadvertently participated in Inktober by drawing a bunch of funny birds, like the ruby-throated hoverbro or the barre chord owl. Then the drawings sat in my sketchbook, unused and forgotten. Until! Until a friend asked me to make her a calendar, and I remembered that I had a buttload of drawings just sitting around doing nothing. A little bit of photoshop fussing, et voila:

I combined the calendar into a single PDF, printable on regular office 8.5×11″ paper. Feel free to download, print, and let your boss contribute 13 sheets of paper towards making your cube more fun in 2020!

Click (or maybe right-click and save as; find what works in your browser!) to download the Keith Pille 2020 Birds of the World Calendar. Or cut out the middleman and go to https://keithpille.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/bird-calendar.pdf

Interlude: A.M. (Wilco)

Music, Wave That Flag

Disc x Tracks 1-13

To make one logistical element clear: I haven’t been able to nail down the order of events in 1994 involving the recording of Wilco’s A.M. and the Bottle Rockets’ The Brooklyn Side. I know they both happened in 1994, and I know that the A.M. sessions ran roughly from June through August, and that the Brooklyn Side sessions happened some time that year; could have been before, could have been after. I’m choosing to wedge A.M. in between the first two Bottle Rockets albums, but that might not be accurate, and certainly doesn’t reflect the release order.

Anyway: for Bottle Rockets fans, A.M. represents a portal to an alternate universe that briefly opened in 1994. Uncle Tupelo had broken up, with most of the 1994 lineup of the band staying clustered around Jeff Tweedy. To get the new enterprise off the ground, Tweedy reached out to his friend and former almost-bandmate Henneman to play lead guitar on Wilco’s first effort as the band found its feet. Henneman stepped in and left his mark all over the record.

Continue reading Interlude: A.M. (Wilco) →

TOM CLANCY AND THE DUBIOUS COMFORT OF BOOMER DADS

Essays, Thoughts, ,

I’ve had a rough year. I had two dogs die, my house has needed some expensive repairs, and my habit of closely following the news has turned into daily exposure to toxic waste. We all crave simple comforts in difficult times, and I’ve fallen back into an old habit: when I’m in the mood to read comforting trash, I reach for Tom Clancy. And after the current bender, I think we should talk about him a little.

Uh, Dad, you’re not mad, are you?

Right now, through time and space, I can hear the question you’re asking yourself: why do I care about the work of some hack writer of right-wing airport trash who’s been dead for a decade? And that’s a good question, one I’ve been wrestling with inside my head for a while now. I have a few solid answers: first, because the work of said dead right-wing hack writer really does provide a perfect encapsulation of one of the dominant forces in our dyspeptic, sliding-through-disasters-towards-even-greater-disasters political system, and to understand that is to understand another corner of the current ongoing shitshow. Tom Clancy’s books are by, of, and for Boomer Dads, and if understanding the mind of the Boomer Dad isn’t sufficient to understanding what the hell is happening in this country, I think it’s at least necessary.

Continue reading TOM CLANCY AND THE DUBIOUS COMFORT OF BOOMER DADS →

Lonely Cowboy

Music, Wave That Flag

Disc 1 Track 13

If The Bottle Rockets sags on its back half, it at least ends on a strong, if depressing, note. “The Lonely Cowboy” is the Rockets in full short-stories-about-small-towns mode, a character study about a man who feels like he’s living in the wrong time. There’s an almost rider-on-horseback swagger to the song, but that can’t really hide the crushing desperation of phrases like

Sometimes he goes down to the local theatre
And watches pale riders on the movie screen
At times it seems so unbearable and unfair
He just falls apart at the seams

This is strong stuff. It’s a rare Bottle Rockets song written by other members of the band (Ortmann and Parr), but it fits in seamlessly with the rest of the band’s work, and Henneman fully inhabits the character he’s singing about. If the Rockets’ small-town mopers can drag sometimes, this one works really well because it’s so specific; we’re hearing details about the suffering and interior life of a particular, well-drawn person, and that makes all the difference (contrast this with the universal dreariness of songs that just focus at the town or even regional level and say “this sucks”). No instrumental pyrotechnics on this one, no flashy drums or guitars, just raw competence that conveys weariness without being wearisome. A damn good end to a damn good album.

The combined version of The Bottle Rockets and The Brooklyn Side currently available on Spotify contains some bonus tracks, but I’ll be setting those aside for this project, since they’re mostly demos of songs that have already been covered or will eventually be covered. So that’s it for The Bottle Rockets. But it’s not time for The Brooklyn Side quite yet; first, watch for a longer entry about another high-profile Henneman project that was going down at about the same time.

Hey Moon

Music, Wave That Flag

Disc 1 Track 12

A light country song, so close to being disposable that I nearly forgot to do an entry for it. Henneman’s lovelorn narrator addresses the moon on the subject of the end of a relationship; they guy from “Got What I Wanted” had a few drinks and went outside to talk to the moon.

The instrumentation is crisp and the harmonies are nice, but this is fundamentally just the Bottle Rockets in “unusually good bar band” mode. A very nice John Keane pedal steel part is pretty much the only special thing here.

The Very Last Time

Music, Wave That Flag

Disc 1 Track 11

Going back to listen to the song for this piece, I was surprised how fast and produced it is. Not that, in an absolute sense, it’s very much of either; but the version of it that exists in my memory is just Henneman’s voice and guitar creeping along at a carefully-controlled tension-inducing glacial pace. Those are the parts that stick with the memory, at least for me. The surrounding material that enables the effect just got edited away.

Continue reading The Very Last Time →