Montage

Krukowski and Yang with their Galaxie 500 bandmate in 1988, and a still from Yang’s film, Fortune rukowski amon K ang and D aomi Y f N esy o esy t cour bands like and Joy respectively. They dropped out to give their sures”—like a movie star dying young, of- Division. “When we started, it was the be- full attention to the band. fers Yang, with mystique intact. ginning of , before it got codified Four years and three albums after it be- Afterward, the couple, based in Cam- by major record labels,” Yang says. “And it gan, the Boston-based Galaxie 500, a pio- bridge, fanned out artistically. They be- was an irresponsible thing to do—there neering influence on “’s” dreamy gan performing as Damon & Naomi. They wasn’t any way you were going to make sound, broke up abruptly in 1991, when launched their press, Exact Change, reviv- any money. It wasn’t the popular form of Wareham left on the cusp of a major-label ing out-of-print books focused on “Surreal- the day; it was what the freaks did.” At deal and what might have been main- ism, Dadaism, Pataphysics, and other nine- the time, both Krukowski and Yang were stream stardom. “That was the path we teenth and twentieth century avant-garde in graduate school at Harvard, studying were tentatively considering,” Krukowski art movements,” including works by Louis comparative literature and architecture, says, but “it fell apart amid all the pres- Aragon, Guillaume Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein—“basically,” Yang says, “books Da- mon was reading in Widener Library and c hapter & verse couldn’t go buy his own copy.…We wanted to make these available to people.” Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words Meanwhile, Yang moved into filmmak- ing. “All of a sudden it was like being hit Dan Jacobson asks if anyone can pro- d’heure,” and Cartouche’s remark is by lightning,” she says. “It’s a wonderful vide definitive attribution for the as- quoted verbatim in Antoine Servan’s Le thing to discover, in mid life, something sertion, “From the music they love, you Soldat citoyen (1780). that you never thought you would do, and shall know the texture of men’s souls.” to find this passion for it. It’s like, in a used That line, he writes, is quoted in the “My Little Papaya Tree” (January- bookstore, finding a whole other section.” 1949 movie The Passionate Friends, where February). Michael Saxton wrote, “Try She’s directed music videos for other art- the character played by Trevor Howard Googling ‘and a mynah bird in a papaya ists, and in February 2015 released Fortune, states, “I copied it out a book of Gals- tree’ to get a Hawaiian version of ‘The a gorgeous and evocative 30-minute silent- worthy’s to impress you.” Twelve Days of Christmas.’ I heard this film study of filial grief, laid over an origi- long ago on The Midnight Special, WFMT, nal Damon & Naomi soundtrack. With a “a bad 15 minutes at the end” Chicago.” According to a 1979 article by visual sensibility not unlike her musical (January-February). Laurence Senelick Michael Scott-Blair of the Copley News one, Yang’s videos are stylish and emotive, replied: “The quotation seems to be a lit- Service, quoting UCLA folklorist Joan full of metaphorical possibilities. eral if awkward translation of the French Perkal, the list runs: 12 televisions, 11 For Krukowski, who’s published two catchphrase un mauvais quart d’heure. missionaries, 10 cans of beer, nine pounds volumes of prose poems, a consuming in- The notorious highwayman Cartouche of poi, eight ukeleles, seven shrimps a- terest is the digital shift that upended the (1693-1721) is supposed to have re- swimming, six hula lessons, five big fat creative worlds he and Yang inhabit: mu- marked, after he was sentenced to be pigs, four flower leis, three dry squid, two sic and publishing. A fellow this year at broken on the wheel, “A mauvais quart coconuts, and….” Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & d’heure is soon over!” It became prover- Society, he is at work on a book of essays bial very quickly. In his Systeme de la na- Send inquiries and answers to “Chapter on that topic. The book’s discussion, he ture (1770), Baron d’Holbach extended and Verse,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware says, reaches beyond the much-lamented it to the axiom that “Most criminals en- Street, Cambridge 02138, or via e-mail economic fallout for musicians when lis- visage death as merely un mauvais quart to [email protected]. teners stopped buying albums and began streaming music online—though it covers

56 March - April 2016