Throwback Thursday: The Pixies Reunion on Film

From loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies; © MVD Visual

Editor's Note: This week has been a busy one on the academic front, so I've been lax in updating the ol' blog. But this week also saw the release of the first album by legendary alternative rock band the Pixies since 1991's Trompe le Monde, so fortunately I was able to dig up just the thing for Throwback Thursday. I wrote this piece in 2006, when new material was still emerging from the Pixies' first reunion in 2004. Incidentally, I caught them on that tour, at the State Theater in Detroit, and it was fantastic. Also, that was ten years ago. Jesus Christ, I'm old. Anyway, here's my Pixies review. It's very mid-2000s, both in its somewhat snarky tone and in its reference to, Good Lord, MySpace. But what do you do. I'll probably be back next week with a review of the new Pixies record. Probably. In the meantime, enjoy! - Z.H.

In an era when mystery was almost as important to the development of a great alternative rock act as guitar or drums, the Pixies were quite possibly the most mysterious of them all. Armed with inscrutable lyrics about Surrealist cinema and Nimrod's Sons, an arty visual aesthetic that precluded group photos on the album covers, and a stage presence that boiled down to standing stock still and playing as viscerally as possible, they were a truly enigmatic force, more like a coven of obscure European avant-gardists than a mere Bostonian rock band. Even today, elements of their all-too-brief epoch remain shrouded in mystery: things like the precise motivations behind their breakup in 1992, or the much-whispered-about sexual tension between bassist Kim Deal and lead songwriter/vocalist Charles "Black Francis" Thompson. There's still a sense that we'll never really get to know the Pixies, and if anything, that makes them all the more enticing.

It also goes a long way toward explaining why their reunion in 2004 came as such a surprise: engimas don't get back together for sold-out world tours, they don't conduct extensive interviews, and they certainly don't release upwards of half a dozen CDs and videos within a two-year period to document their return to the concert stage. But the Pixies did. And so you'll have to excuse my kneejerk reaction to the first couple minutes of their new DVD, Live at the Paradise in Boston, which is something along the lines of, "This is the most surreal thing I've ever fucking seen." There they are, the mythical Pixies, in all their glory, playing what might be their last intimate club date as a band together. And what do they do? Stroll onstage, shuffle around a little bit, and then tear into… "La La Love You?"

Throwback Thursday Bonus: Double Indemnity

© Paramount Pictures Corporation

Editor's Note: Yeah, I already posted a Throwback Thursday piece today, but then I was reminded that Billy Wilder's classic film noir, Double Indemnity, is 70 years old today. As an occasional film scholar and an avid fan of all things noir, I felt I would be remiss if I were to let that milestone pass without acknowledging it in some way. So here's a piece I wrote in 2006 as a review for the film's then-most recent reissue on DVD. Keep in mind that this piece is itself almost a decade old now, written while I was still an undergraduate (and it shows). But it's a decent little piece of juvenilia all the same. I've cut it down a bit to remove all references to the specific DVD edition, which means there also won't be any discussion of the miserable 1973 made-for-TV remake. And that's just as well; I wouldn't want to make Mr. Wilder spin in his grave on today of all days. So anyway, happy birthday, Double Indemnity... you cold, bleak son of a bitch. - Z.H.

No discussion of film noir is complete without Billy Wilder's 1944 masterpiece Double Indemnity. Not because it was the first; the beginnings of the genre go back to John Huston's The Maltese Falcon in 1941, if not even earlier, to a brief mini-tradition of American B-films stemming roughly from the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s. But what does make Double Indemnity so historically significant is its placement as one of the first truly influential films noir, and certainly the most pronounced execution of that style's essential narrative and visual elements to date. Double Indemnity's release in 1944 puts it ahead of the crop of 1945 films that caused French critics to originally coin the phrase "film noir"; its success, netting seven Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, paved the way for a new period of credibility in the genre, allowing for a brilliant, if short-lived run of similarly-themed films in the post-war era.

Throwback Thursday: Prince's "Black Sweat"

© NPG Records

Editor's Note: I have been writing about music off and on (mostly off) for almost ten years now. A lot of the stuff I've written has been lost because I was dumb about preserving my work offline. A lot of it is scattered around now-defunct blogs that I'd just as soon not draw any attention to, because they're terrible. But some of it I still think is worth reading, so every once in a while I will throw it onto Dystopian Dance Party with minor revisions. I will do this on Thursdays, because the Internet has officially deemed Thursday the day to share old stuff nobody else cares about. This week, to tie in to all the Prince coverage we've been doing, I'm sharing a review of another Prince single from way back in 2006. - Z.H.

In the summer of 2004, I saw Prince on two of his stops at the Palace of Auburn Hills (now DTE Energy Music Theatre) in metro Detroit. He was touring in support of his much-vaunted "comeback" album, Musicology, and the setlist was tooled to match that record's mood: heavy on hits, often in medley form, with few idiosyncrasies and a "family-friendly" veneer on even the notorious '80s material. Hence when performing "I Feel For You," Prince changed the words "it's mainly a physical thing" to "it's mainly a spiritual thing," while "D.M.S.R."'s 1982 instruction to "work your body like a whore" was replaced with the more modest "work it like you want some more." And it was good, for what it was; the man is pushing 50, after all, and after all those rumors about door-to-door Witnessing, it’s a wonder we got to hear nuggets like "Automatic" and "Let’s Work" in the first place. I mean, what were you expecting? Assless pants?

But on the second night, something strange happened. Prince was midway through a fiery blues guitar solo in "The Question of U" when he threw his axe to the ground. Then, suddenly, he was on the ground too, crawling slowly toward the fallen guitar like he'd just stepped out of the video for "When Doves Cry." Time seemed to stop. Would he stand up? Or would he start humping things? In short, were we about to witness the return of the "old" Prince, the sexy Prince, the Prince all of us in the audience really wished was in Auburn Hills that evening? I had a mental image of the Kid's impish grin as he grinded the hell out of "Darling Nikki" in Purple Rain, stripped to the waist and dripping with sweat. For a moment I saw Jehovah himself, the lips beneath his gray beard curled with shock, his eyes covered piously against the sacrilege to come. It was a surreal, intense, thrilling moment…and then, it was over. Prince stood back up. He finished his show with consummately performed, if safe, renditions of hits like "Kiss" and oldies like Sam & Dave's "Soul Man." He came back with an encore of Musicology's sweet, gorgeous--but hardly Dirty Mind-ed--"Call My Name." And he left, his last show in the Detroit area concluded and not another flash of the Prince we once loved. It was good…for what it was.