TOULOUSE: NEW POINTS NEW LINES

As far as I know, Boston hasn’t added any new subway lines since the last time I rode them in ’87, and Chicago can’t say much more for itself beyond the mere re-designation of right-of-way traintracks that have existed since at least the 1950s. Any change here as far as CTA commuters were concerned happened at the level of Machine money and “urban planning”; getting from A to B now afforded a change of scenery, but the travel times and destinations remained the same. Maybe these “New Lines” are the same ghostly rails that Toulouse are riding here: connecting the Situationist dots in a novel way that plots fresh vectors on a long-yellowing map, lost in some graying university’s stacks, visited by melancholy people with cars and yellowing city stickers.

As far as “New Points,” this CD is even more bereft. The record revisits points not only touched on with the first LP (albeit in a somewhat more developed form now), but also hammered in by the ceaseless Frankfurt School treatises these folks must have been exposed to at the Habermas-friendly college they attended during the last unfashionably American decade. Not to mention the crucial ‘points’ made on the ghost album Josef K were too embarrassed to release specifically because it was so unbelievably good (an equally predominant text at the time among cultural Anglophiles, like Toulouse).

But to extend the metaphor into Euclidean retardedness, the plane that transects these old points and old lines is what makes this a pretty fucking good album. One New Point: prescient production by Rhode Island’s winner of the annual Johnny Ramone lookalike contest, Dave Auchenbach. One New Line: the vector that took them away from the bloodless soup in which the band coalesced in the first place - the University of Chicago - and Chicago at large, where they met one J. Niimi, who proceeded to ruin their first LP with his Northside-cred-for-rent. This ambling vector terminates at (or comes full circle to) Beantown, where they meet fellow displaced East Coast aesthetes, and the band becomes a lifestyle by choice. Now it’s political, motherfucker! The problem is that they now rock, too. There are worse problems for a band to have.

The disaster only hinted at by this album is absolutely fulfilled and transcended by any one of their amazing shows, a petting zoo in suburban Scotland ca. 1982. The essence you are left to take home with you for posterity is worth much more than the equivalent amount which you would have spent on a used copy of this CD (if this CD was ever even available new). So, then, which is more valuable: art, material, or entertainment? Don’t ask me: I’m neither from Chicago nor Frankfurt (or Boston, Christ in Heaven).

My suggestion is to hedge your bets. Cash the paycheck from your oppressive temp job, buy the album for your girlfriend (who actually wears stockings in this day and age, and is also a temp), and pose dirty quandaries to her during sex (while the Toulouse album is blasting in the background, of course): “The problem of leisure? (pant) What to do for pleasure?” You wake up broke, filthy, and horny, but satisfyingly unfulfilled.



posted at 1:09 AM