On Saturday afternoon, while the rest of the family napped after a morning of running errands (while dodging gaggles of moronic and mouthy emerald-clad revelers), I stepped back out into the fray once again in search of an item I could not put my hand to, in this instance the DVD of Michael Winterbottom’s 2011 film, “The Trip,” starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.
Time was when I could just walk a few blocks to any number of cool, hip shops to procure myself a copy of a hard-to-find movie (one of my favorite destinations being Cinema Classics in the West Village, which shuttered in 2010). Nowadays, though, independent (let alone knowledgeable) video shops are as rare as similarly-inclined music and book shops. I’d already hit up the predictable chains like Barnes & Noble, but they had nothing for me (although they had piles upon piles of copies of Ben Stiller’s “Tower Heist” and Adam Sandler’s “Jack and Jill”). Now that the weekend had arrived, I had a bit more time to widen my search.
I hit the jackpot in my first stop, that being Kim's on First Avenue. While prizing "The Trip" from the Winterbottom section (what's not to love about a DVD shop that divvies up its fare by director?), I heard the strangely familiar and endearingly stentorian strains of vintage Sonic Youth bludgeoning the air-space from above. It made me smile.
I've written about Sonic Youth here several times on this weblog before (annoyingly, some of the videos attached to those posts are no longer working), which is somewhat odd, as I always feel obligated to point out that I've never been their biggest fan. That's probably because shortly after I got into them, they just got kinda dull. I continued to respect Sonic Youth, but from about Dirty onward, I kinda lost interest. I liked them better when they messier and ruder and louder, from, say, Bad Moon Rising through Daydream Nation (although, yes, Goo had its moments). Along the way, they sort of lost their sense of menace, which I found to be a tragic loss.
In any case, the recording I heard while in Kim's was from a bootleg called Hold That Tiger, recorded in Chicago in 1987. Right after this trek through the sprawling "Expressway to Yr. Skull," the band plugs into an anarchic spate of sloppy Ramones covers, re-asserting their NYC roots. It's awesome and highly recommended.
On the back of the frankly shocking news that Kim and Thurston are divorcing, Sonic Youth is going on some sort of extended hiatus. Will they ever resume duties? I wouldn't hold my breath, but regardless, this is the Sonic Youth I'll choose to remember. Crank it way up. While you're listening to this, by the way, why not peruse these awesome live pics of the band snapped around the same era of its recording?
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