#034 - Raising Arizona (1987)
Hello and welcome to my weblog. This time around I watched Raising Arizona (1987).
One of my favorite songs is “Commandante” by the Mountain Goats but specifically a particular recording of it played live with a full touring band. For the first decade or so of the band’s existence, the Mountain Goats was mostly just John Darnielle, who would release songs across several small, independent labels, often as singles or included in compilations, which means that it’s nearly impossible to find the original physical media of some of his best songs of that era. In an introduction to the song “Attention All Pickpockets” at a show at Farm Sanctuary on June 17th, 2007, he explained:
"This is like indie 101: do stuff that defeats your own purpose. Reflexively, routinely, make it part of your own deal that like you do things that everyone would say “Oh, that song should probably go on the album, that’s a good song.” NO, FUCK YOU IT’S A B-SIDE and it’s only available in Belgium and I’ll never play it again. “Yeah but it sounds like the A-side from the single from the album.” NO, NO IT’S A B-SIDE, in fact I’m not gonna release it at all. Not releasing it at all. We’ll put something live on the B-side."
Commandante was the last track on the B-side of Devil in the Shortwave, which was only released as a limited pressing vinyl EP. About 13 years ago, it was briefly available on the iTunes store and then delisted. Last year, it was finally added to Bandcamp. For several years, the only digital version of the album version of the song was an mp3 of a vinyl rip uploaded by someone whose turntable’s timing was off. This resulted in a recording that was half a step higher which made the already fast song even faster and it made John’s voice sound much younger; for a long time, the chords for the song were tabbed out in G# instead of G because of this. The top video search result for me on Google at time of writing is still this pitched-up version.
Commandante is a punchy, raucous love song; it’s a litany of promises saying “here are all the ways that I am going to do better”. A common theme in Mountain Goats songs, especially those of this era, is a narrator who thinks they can run away from their problems. I’ve always found this song incredibly endearing in a way that I don’t find most of the songs in the “Going to” cycle, which is a series of over fifty songs—many unreleased—about running away, where the leaving from is framed as going to somewhere else. Commandante was one of the first Mountain Goats songs I had ever heard, despite the rarity of the album version, because themountaingoats.net had an mp3 of a live version from the January 27th, 1999 show at the Cat’s Cradle. That version is no longer on themountaingoats.net (as far as I can tell) but it is on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVzP5SK7i84
Every live recording that I can find online of Commandante now is percussion-less, either because it was from a period before the band toured with a drummer, was recorded during a solo appearance, or included as part of a solo set in the middle of a full band set. But it has been performed with a full band at least once. The specific recording, my favorite recording, used to be located at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SduD_W9TTEs but the video has since been taken down. I remember that the recording was captured at the Douglas Fir Lounge in Portland, OR. In the recording, as the band gets ready to play the song, they realize that the drummer, Jon Wurster, has never actually heard the song before so they have to teach it to him quickly. I don’t know if this was because the song was a request or they just didn’t have time to practice it before the tour. Jon Wurster’s Wikipedia page notes that he joined the band for a west coast tour in 2007 before formally joining the band after recording Heretic Pride later that year; based on this and setlist data online, I think this version of the song was recorded at the March 3rd, 2007 show in Portland. In this live version of the song, or at least in my memory of it, they played it much slower than normal and John’s singing sounds more relaxed, the guitar isn’t frantic as the drums can fill much of the space it was previously trying to occupy. The singing and the lyrics read as more sincere, more of a genuine promise and less of an idle threat. I recently put out a call for drum-backed versions of the song on the Mountain Goats subreddit but I suspect that I’ll never hear this version of the song again.
This past year for Christmas, my friend Kelsey made everyone in our close friend group a friendship bracelet with a different phrase from a collective list of potential band names that now has hundreds if not thousands of entries. At first, I was very jealous of the one she made for Riley that said HORSE MONEY but I quickly understood why she’d picked the name she chose for me and it felt nice to be recognized in that way. My friendship bracelet reads SHELF STABLE. I think it’s apt; I play the long game, the long con. It takes me a long time to make big decisions, sometimes to my detriment. I am not typically impulsive. My favorite jokes are callbacks, ones where the punchline comes weeks, months, years later. The things I make for art or fun or whatever tend to take a very long time from conception through execution; some of that is due to a limited attention span but a lot of time I need things to sit on the back burner a while. Two art projects I would like to complete this summer, a zine about the history of a shipping label and a map of the world as projected on a flattened v6 geodesic sphere, have both been in the works for over a year now. I need to be sure, I need to be deliberate. I am, in other words, a coward.
But two years ago I did a silly, impulsive thing and decided that I was going to watch every single Nic Cage film from scratch. I had not even looked up how many there were when I announced it and set this newsletter up. I think now that I made this a newsletter because I felt that watching every Nicholas Cage movie would be a form of performance and that a performance needs the possibility of an audience. Plus it could be a chance to work on the strength of my writing, a desire born out of a fear not that poetics is incapable of change, or effecting change, but that it would be possible if I didn’t wield it so clumsily. I imagine the legend of Demosthenes, who would fill his mouth with pebbles and speak to the ocean to practice his oratory. I guess in that metaphor you, dear reader, are the ocean: powerful, beautiful, containing unknown depths, always thinking about the moon.
When I started this project, there was no doubt in my mind that I would still be working on this two years later, though I might have thought I’d have finished a few more movies by now. But I do now have serious doubts about my ability to complete this project. Not because I think I’ll give up but because I fear that some Nic Cage movies will disappear before I get a chance to watch them. Many of his post-recession films were straight-to-streaming dreck whose licenses may lapse and never get renewed or that might just get deleted by the rights-holder rather than continue to try to license out and pay out residuals on a minor flop.
There’s a popular conception of the internet as a sort of permanent record that has never been true and feels less true every day. The online record of my other newsletter, Tennessee Adoxographic, was taken offline last month as Intuit shuttered Tinyletter and now it only exists in a handful of email inboxes. Last year, I bought a brand new clothes dryer with a QR code decal for the installation instructions and the link embedded in the QR code was already broken. The internet isn’t a library or an archive; it’s a seasonal storefront window and they’re already dressing the mannequins with next season’s styles.
For the moment, I’ve watched all of the Nicholas Cage movies that are on streaming platforms that I have logins for (and I loathe the idea of signing up for more), so I am going back to the big stack of DVDs I bought last year. I started watching Raising Arizona two weeks ago and quickly found myself crying uncontrollably for reasons only tangentially related to what was happening on my television. Crises and heartbreaks of my own invention. I picked it up again a week later and got a little further in before it happened again. I think I just see too much of myself in hopeful idiots who can't get out of their own way.
Every Coen Brothers’ movie is basically an opera about cowboys: an over the top telling of stoic Americans—people unfit for their time—and their absurd and tragic circumstances. This is why dads love the Coen Brothers: they make unambiguous westerns. O Brother, Where Art Thou could be a sequel to Raising Arizona or maybe it’s a retelling: a man gets out of prison and tries to keep his family together, facing trials from legal, extralegal, natural, and supernatural forces. All the characters from all their films display an affected mix of erudition and folksy charm, speaking in a combination of the local cant and the high language of courtiers. They’re all just simple country lawyers. I catch myself trying to talk this way, affecting the hay in the corner of the mouth, but I could never be a cowboy—not really—because every cattle drive ends at the gates of the abattoir.
In Raising Arizona, Nic Cage plays H.I. McDunnough, an uncomplicated man who discovered his calling in robbing convenience stores but who has tried to curb this impulse after marrying Holly Hunter’s Edwina (Ed for short). Upon discovering that they cannot have a child of their own and that H.I.’s criminal record makes them ineligible for adoption, they decide to kidnap a baby from a local furniture outlet store millionaire who just had quintuplets and raise him as their own. Almost as soon as they get the baby home, H.I. and Ed find themselves threatened on all sides by H.I.’s past associates, current boss at the shop where he drills holes in sheet metal all day, the police, an evil bounty hunter who H.I. has premonitions of in his nightmares, and their own worst impulses.
Looking back now, I think this used to be my dad’s favorite movie when I was a child.
One of my other favorite songs is “Milky Way Spin” (or sometimes just “Milky Way”) by the band Big Kitty from the album Florence. It’s a beautiful love song with a throaty accordion and big crunchy drums real high in the mix that always makes me cry whenever I get to see Big Kitty play it live. You can hear it here https://bigkitty.bandcamp.com/album/florence or here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aItW6uuzMb0 or on Spotify or wherever. And even if all of those options disappear, I picked the album up on vinyl a few years back from a small record store in Red Bank, TN. Not everything has to be difficult.
“I’m gonna plant root vegetables out in the backyard and come summer, I am going to treat you right”,
kit
P.S. if you have that March 3rd, 2007 Mountain Goats bootleg tape, HIT ME UP