Music Arcades: John Zorn: Spillane

I have fond memories of the film version of Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me, Deadly. I saw it on TV one Sunday in the summer of 1990. Or, at least, I saw the first half. During the second half I was distracted, against my will (at first) but in the best possible way. I just remember a nuclear explosion, glimpsed in peripheral vision over a naked shoulder, and thinking WTF?!?

Some years later I read the book. Talk about hard-boiled. That Spillane and his protagonist: unreconstructed and unrepentant sociopaths with hair-trigger tempers and attitudes to women that the term "old-fashioned" would flatter considerably. In the sleeve notes [is sleevenotes one word or two? I'm inconsistent], Zorn said he researched Spillane's work in great detail while composing the 'blocks' of the title track.

Three minutes and twenty seconds into this 1989 South Bank Show profile of Sonic Youth, Thurston says, "If you were smart, you would do something on this fellow, John Zorn, he's interesting," holding a copy of the Spillane CD to camera.

I imagine I felt slightly smug, having owned the CD for a year or so already — discovered through an NME feature on Zorn or something similar. There were only a few of his CDs around in those days — I got it around the same time as News for Lulu and The Big Gundown — and this one was the most widely available.

I listened to it a lot back then, but never got past the point of finding it interesting to finding it fun. Well, that's not quite fair: I can hear it striving to be fun, following the patterns of fun, being funny. But it's so athletic and clever, then your response is first to those features, and the fun is secondary. Hmmm, I guess I could say something about my favourite Tom Phillips works or my favourite Greenaway films or my favourite Steve Reich albums, but I find the fun more accessible there. Perhaps it's that I find them more elegant.

The sleeve notes include a section on Carl Stalling. It would have been handy if I'd remembered this when writing about Stalling's CD, but here is an excerpt now:

Cartoon music is a very strong influence in the way I put together the disparate elements of my pieces. To me, that's one of the biggest compositional problems. It's something all artists have to deal with, whether they're working on the canvas or on screen. Stravinsky and Carl Stalling… were successful at that. Their mastery of block structure completely changed the way I see the world… [Stalling's music is] the great American avant-garde music of the 1940s. At that time, neither Cage nor Harry Partch came close to what Stalling was doing.

I have another album that is rooted in the spirit of Raymond Chandler. I think I like it better.