Peanut Butter Words and Ha-ha Breath

¡NOTICIAS!

2006-06-21T18:22:00.000-04:00

¡PBW se está moviendo a una nueva dirección! Mira, and update your links, please. Flying the Sty-flag in perpetuity / XO, PBW. For now, we'll be light on pictures in the archives, but I'll get it worked out over time.

An Ode To RobMac

2006-06-20T16:38:00.000-04:00

I solved my technical problems, but because beloved RobMac answered so promptly, here's some pulp squeezed in his honor:

Today I wear flip-flops, Robbie
But no man can wear flip-flops like you do
Name a man
Who hedges freckle-faced grace and rippling masculinity
Robbie Roadshow
Undisputed Trampion of Elizabeth City's backwoods

"I felt so good, I couldn’t feel a thing": Striking Revelations From Somewhere Near the Bottom of the Human Shitpile

2006-06-20T13:39:00.000-04:00

(The Nominally Irish) Donnard Fahen: A PBW Level-Up In the Raw, Free World of Custom Jpegging

The other night Alfred and I were in the midst of a long phone conversation about Steely Dan's Gaucho when I looked down at my desk and noticed some flecks of blood on a CD. A mortal with mortal concerns, I'm always tempted to wonder where blood came from when I see it, especially when I see it on my desk. I looked at my hand and I had somehow gouged some portion out of my middle finger; it was covered in blood, which was streaming into my palm.

“Alfred, I'm sorry, but my phone is dying and I somehow cut myself and am bleeding everywhere.”

I only later realized how poetically appropriate the incident was—in the midst of mining strong feelings about the strikingly affect-less Gaucho, I actually wasn’t even registering enough to notice I was physically hurt. (Not surprisingly, the last time I had cut myself and not noticed was when I was on psychedelics a few years ago; when I noticed, I couldn’t do anything but just stare at the blood—the very legitimate side, I think, of Frank Kogan’s concern that psychedelics turn you into an Instant Aesthete. [The not-feeling feeling was also a significant swoop in my fading, regrettable waltz with a certain narcotic.])

Anyway, this past week, I’ve been more or less consumed with Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Ladies Man and re-consumed by Steely Dan’s Gaucho (an album that actually seems more complicated and enthralling every time I hear it, rather than less). Listening to both back-to-back, I realized two things, one quickly and one slowly: one, I have a very broad soft spot for Hilarious Jewish Assholes (Cohen and Death of a Ladies Man producer Phil Spector, Lou Reed, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen). Two, and this took a little while longer, I realized that both Gaucho and Death of a Ladies Man are records that really want to fuck with a listener’s emotional make-up and challenge what place emotions have in music—sounds huge, I know; bear with me.

Death of a Ladies Man is constantly indulging in schlocky barroom bullshit—corny backing singers, sax solos, and pulpy, swooning melodies. Spector’s production drenches the mix in phasers and short echo; your cigarettes are gone, you are likely face down, you are definitely sweating. It’s pretty appropriate, actually. It’s a unique perversion of the romantic grandiosity/purity that Spector achieved with the Ronettes, or what I see as the apex of “romantic” Spector, The Paris Sisters’ “I Love How You Love Me.” There’s something sonically about those Spector records—the cavernous wall of sound—that left room for getting lost, just like you get lost in love; it’s not altogether different then Loveless in how it strikes me: if capital-R Romanticism is some smoke about introspection, the apex of romance is succumbing to something held apart from you; it’s getting lost in the cave of “I Love How You Love Me” or under the covers of Loveless.

What Cohen deals with on Death of a Ladies Man is the painful transition of coming out of the cave and seeing the light. The dumb, thumb-in-the-ass country shine of “Fingerprints,” though my least favorite song on the record, is also the album’s preposition: Cohen loses his fingerprints on a woman’s hair, and instead of lamenting it in a cold, Canadian bedroom, he plays it like it’s the cheapest regret in the world. On “Paper Thin Hotel,” he confesses/repents/finds salvation over the closest thing the album gets to a hackneyed “amen” break: “A heavy burden lifted from my soul / I learned that love was out of my control.” So what’s the function of the schlock? Well, it’s irony, it’s distance. Cohen almost seems too ashamed to admit the fact that he can’t control love; it’s the death of the ladies man. The ladies man, paradoxically unfettered by love and yet constantly messing around on a fundamentally emotional scene, can’t ever really believe his feelings. Is he in love? Well, on “Paper Thin Hotel” he is, but he immediately writes it off, too pained by hearing howling orgasms through the walls. But the astounding, essential “Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On” is the kind of advice that comes equipped with a drunken punch in the shoulder and not just a back-pat; Cohen growls it like his life depends on it. Because it basically does. The dick needs to be milked. It’s a compulsion. But not a particularly romantic one.

What really gets me, or really complicates things, is that he accepts the circularities his own emotional ambiguity; on the title track, he says “I guess you go for nothing if you really want to go that far.” He plays it like he’s sitting in the crook of the moon cooing into a concert hall—it’s like a Disney movie. Over the saccharine music, there’s the sense that what Cohen’s saying is that, like on “Fingerprints,” the part of the ladies man only deludes you into thinking you can control your feelings. “If you really want to go that far,” if you really want to be the ladies man, you have to be prepared to erase yourself, to lose yourself to emotion. The tension, inherent in the idea and supplemented by the music’s alternation between boozy indifference and over-the-top earnestness, is what makes Death of a Ladies Man such a fascinating listen.

That epigram—“I guess you go for nothing if you really want to go that far”—could just as easily be applied to Gaucho. In 1980, Walter Becker told Musician: “Donald and I followed a certain line of thinking to its logical conclusion, and then perhaps slightly beyond—that was what we realized when we'd finished Gaucho: it was not as much fun...It wasn't fun at all, really.” The exhaustingly slick Gaucho really does, in a sense “go for nothing”; it tries to go beyond feeling. But where Cohen’s efforts at shrugging off his emotions ultimately sends him back to a storm of them, Gaucho whites out; it just breaks at a void. And what constantly gets me about the album is that it somehow comes back around; somehow, in its utterly exacting lack of feeling, it could break your heart if you weren’t careful.

I don’t want to give too much away, because I’ll have an On Second Thought on the album going up next week on Stylus. But I guess my revised boiled-down reaction is to say that while it’s sterilized to the point of making the hellish scenes underneath its slick veneer pretty inaccessible, it still reaches for them; it reaches actively through Fagen’s grotesque delivery and passively through the, well, the horror of feeling numb. (It’s somewhat uncanny like that, which is why I posted it as the crowning jewel on my dog show exercise.) It’s like trying to watch a terrible event transpire and not get emotional about it; you end up completely breaking apart, harder than you would have had you accepted the process of being affected. (Interestingly, and I won’t talk about this at length, I finally watched Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions last night, which was a really fucking fascinating complication of all these ideas. I highly recommend it if you haven’t seen it.)

I’ve gone through a lot of personal shit in the last six months, which I’ve done an OK job of keeping off here (ha, like none of you have noticed the hailstorm of anecdotes and birth of the now-standard PBW Confession. We grow, we learn). Gaucho finally clicked with me at the onset of winter, the beginning of a low point that lasted until about a month ago. I started coming up again. So I’ve graduated to the mess of Death of a Ladies Man. When I talked to Alfred, I hadn’t listened to Gaucho in months; revisiting it was nightmarish. When I heard the album, when I saw the blood in my hand, I realized that the feeling of not feeling, experiencing the great grey powers of Gaucho, the drugs, the abstractions of horror movies and Philip K. Dick (had to quit those, too), were some of the most ridiculously intense and complicated emotions I’ve had in my entire life.

(Housecleaning)

2006-06-14T11:18:00.000-04:00

(Found: notes for one abandoned post about the Silver Jews.

"Remember when your bag got stolen in Argentina and American Water was in it and you thought 'At least I may have successfully exported American Water'?"

"Remember the day that Bright Flight came out and you spent all day listening to it on the train tracks and later you said -- you were especially taken with the innate hilarity of vomiting around this time -- 'this could only get better if someone threw up,' at which point, Joe immediately threw up?")

Categorically Unavailable, Bejar

2006-06-13T09:27:00.000-04:00

Pitchfork's Destroyer interview today taps plenty of nails, even if it's faith that'll hold the house together in the end. (Funny, then, that Bejar characterizes Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane has having "a mystic element and a sustained tone of catharsis"--something I'd ascribe to Bejar's own stuff [right down to the Cantorial vocal vibes of Rubies] even if that catharsis would require some modding/light redefinition.)

Anyway, the best part of the conversation has to be

Pitchfork: Why do you think more musicians don't write about being musicians? Recently, self-reflexive rock music seems to be all the rage, but it seems fairly logical that musicians would be interested in talking about making music.

DB: Most musicians don't write about being a musician cause most musicians aren't writers. I also don't think that it is a worthy subject in and of itself. Really good musicians don't think of "self-reflection" in those terms. I can't really comment on all that, since I'm not really a musician.

Anyway, the staying power of these themes seems unproven. They seem like a good springboard to other concerns, at best.

So, writers are not the same as musicians (in fact, they're exclusive). Just like Eno said he wasn't a musician or Warhol messed with what it meant to be an artist.

And like Warhol, Bejar worms his way out of the question entirely by basically saying that he's not only a bad musician, but he's no musician at all, making any answer he might give on the question of reflexivity in music totally pointless.

All of that could be relatively expected from Bejar, but the last line -- "They seem like a springboard to other concerns, at best" -- is getting me right now.

Bejar unknowingly jumps in on the critique will eat itself pile, but, like his fan Carl, he knows that this stuff isn't an end in and of itself, but damned if he's going to say -- or whether he even knows -- where all of it could go.

2006-06-12T11:42:00.000-04:00

(gnirb I lla si)

Kate H. scared me because she was a girl and I was 13 and Nikki told me that she had wanted to fuck me and I thought we were too young but I sort of wanted to anyway but I didn't, after all. But god, did I ever want to; we'd sit crosslegged on the carpet or kiss listening to Exile in Guyville and Whip-Smart and maybe she'd be my "Flower" and I her "Johnny Sunshine" or some messily half-assed approximation of either (I don't think she had any idea how bad these albums could wreck a 13-year-old boy). Years later, my mom and I were in the car and she abruptly said "I remember Kate; I remember how I'd come pick you up at her house and your shirt would be buttoned wrong." When she said that, I remembered how I thought t-shirts were pretty uncool back then (though I had a nice Minor Threat one, despite my utter un-sXe-ness) -- I remembered how I thought that Lame Collared Shirts were especially rebellious and cool for a fucked-up teenager to wear. Maturity and adolescence swapped spit and groped with eyes shut tight. So it was incest, I guess. Which is how you make babies with gnarled hearts and tiny hands.

We had also listened to Sonic Youth together, who I didn't think were as cool as Liz Phair, but I'm told that girls develop faster than boys. Rather Ripped has put Kate back in my mind for the first time in years. At the time, I thought our whole relationship was tragically complicated (in a lot of ways, it was: she had drastically low self-image made manifest in eating disorders; I was extremely moody, flunking out of school, huffing constantly, and getting in horrible fights with my stepfather. The point is that we could’ve been supportive of each other, but instead, we just decided to cuddle in the same hole).

It was like my favorite SY album, EVOL: needlessly abstract and bloody, High Passion (“Green Light,” “Shadow of a Doubt”) with a destructive remainder (“Expressway to Yr Skull,” “Tom Violence”). Rather Ripped is helping me do what I’ve been trying to do with that stretch of time for the past 10 years: accept my fumbling history of determined lust and idiocy, but, you know, with respect for the fact that that’s what being young is. And now I even get to laugh a little. Which is to say – or for Alfred to say – that “RR is music recorded by adults who've experienced and thought through the merely received notions of passion (or High Passion, as you call it) that dotted those early albums.” (And the remainder of all this messing around, importantly, is some idea of cool, subdued freedom - "Jams Run Free" or "Do You Believe in Rapture?," the latter of which I desperately want to be made into a full-fledged disco song.)

But “maturity” would be the wrong way to put it, because it’s more complicated than that. It’s like how I felt about The Sunset Tree: it’s the album that somehow connects most naturally and honestly with the mess of their past experience, but there’s no way they could’ve made it until now; somehow they farther they step away, the clearer their subject gets. But it loses things, too. “Sleepin’ Around” is the cool, bloodless wisdom of the cuckold years after the betrayal, but no previous Sonic Youth album would ever dare host a girl who screwed around in the first place. And anyway, like I said to Alfred, when your girlfriend is fucking someone else, you are not thinking about feelings being "green lights" or any of that shit. Infidelity is for terrestrials. Kate could’ve been on EVOL but it would’ve given her a free pass for all the laughable angst and self-helplessness; she wouldn’t be on RR in her full, fucked-up teenage glory, either. And still, in the space between, there she is.

Alfred Soto, PBW Pundit

2006-06-09T17:08:00.001-04:00

me: well, but what I am saying is that the pulled pork story/talking in anecdotes was sort of a way for me to start pulling out of the all theory all the time rhetoric
Alfred: I'm tempted to record your pulled-pork statement for posterity's sake
me: haha why?
Alfred: reread what you just wrote
me: pull pull pull
?
Alfred: david hume, walter pater, coleridge, wilde - these aestheticians suck cuz they couldn't eat pulled pork and fried chicken
Sent at 5:01 PM on Friday
me: I was trying to humanize myself a little
HUMEanize
rofl
Alfred: oh god
you WILDE and crazy guy

2006-06-08T10:00:00.000-04:00

Pulled pork sandwiches at Blue Ridge Pig are delicious and well-worth the drive out route 250 to get. Several trips ago I swore quietly under the sun that I'll never eat pulled pork anywhere else but Blue Ridge Pig I'll never I won't. It was a dumb promise and one that probably kept me from eating delicious pulled pork sandwiches elsewhere. But I was out to dinner with my friend Annie a month or so ago, feeling good (having not seen Annie in two years, realizing she was still a wonderful person, her telling me she thought I’d look good in suspenders), so I ordered a pulled pork sandwich. And it was pretty good. Later I went back to the same place and ordered something different. It, too, was pretty good though maybe not as good as the pulled pork. But, you know, pretty good.

So while I respect Simon’s opinion on the eating/listening analogy, the suggestion that “going to the same restaurant and ordering the same entrée you know you like almost guarantees 100 percent satisfaction; going to different restaurants with different cuisines each time and trying the most unfamiliar dish on each menu is going to produce much more mixed results” seems to completely bypass the point.

Yes, it’s true: I have experienced 100% satisfaction from only ordering Orange Flavor Chicken at a wide variety of Asian-American takeout establishments over the past 13 years of my life. But if we’re trailing what the value of open-mindedness in the critic is (or being open-minded at all), it seems like you’ve got to go the extra mile and then imagine what a wreck I’d be as a food critic. I drink black coffee by the bucket. I used to smoke. In college, I carried around Tuong Ot everywhere I went; I’m sure it absolutely ruined my mouth (public apology for those kissed), but it made dormitory food acceptable (more accurately, it annihilated it). The first time I met my friend Hannah, she said “Mike, you know, you seem like a real white rice kind of guy.”

I never developed an ability to judge food. I’ll eat it. Sometimes I explore and sometimes I don’t. The important thing is that when I do explore, I might not always enjoy it, but the sheer confidence of my exploration is sometimes enough to make me feel like I’m just getting more out of my experience as a sentient being with reasonable reflexes, proper bowel control, and all my limbs. Disorientation can reinforce my boundaries, it can strengthen my resolve; every time I eat steak I remember how much I love good fried chicken. Can’t force that feeling the other way. So after eating steak, which might not be the most pleasurable eating experience for me, I can return to fried chicken; after a coke I can return to egg cream. Sometimes I want to have a coke though. I try not to think about that too much, like when I just want to hear "Crimson and Clover" (over and over) to the exclusion of anything else.

But would I ever proclaim that fried chicken was better than steak? No. That’d be dumb, and while I have little taste for steak, I have less taste for being dumb.

____

So, something about judgment:

Robert Christgau invokes David Hume in his take on Sonic Youth in the Voice this week:

“ When Murray Street came out in 2002, non-old Amy Phillips notoriously asserted in this very newspaper that since Sonic Youth hadn't made a good album since (1995's) Washing Machine, they should break up already. Who's to say her opinion isn't worth as much as mine? Me? Well, yeah. One concept the non-old have trouble getting their minds around is the difference between taste and judgment. It's fine not to like almost anything, except maybe Al Green. That's taste, yours to do with as you please, critical deployment included. By comparison, judgment requires serious psychological calisthenics. But the fact that objectivity only comes naturally in math doesn't mean it can't be approximated in art.”

And I invoked him, albeit kinda unfairly and obtusely and in the wild – albeit rich – heat of passion a couple weeks ago here. The essay that I and Christgau and any Aesthetics course are referring to is 1757’s On The Standard of Taste. Because it’s very fucking good. And while the impetus (and how Christgau employs it) is to differentiate between having a taste for something and having the ability to judge it, it’s not the only trick it turns. Sorry to do this, but:

“But though there be naturally a wide difference in point of delicacy between one person and another, nothing tends further to encrease and improve this talent, than practice in a particular art, and the frequent survey or contemplation of a particular species of beauty. When objects of any kind are first presented to the eye or imagination, the sentiment, which attends them, is obscure and confused; and the mind is, in a great measure, incapable of pronouncing concerning their merits or defects. The taste cannot perceive the several excellences of the performance; much less distinguish the particular character of each excellency, and ascertain its quality and degree. If it pronounce the whole in general to be beautiful or deformed, it is the utmost that can be expected; and even this judgment, a person, so unpracticed, will be apt to deliver with great hesitation and reserve. But allow him to acquire experience in those objects, his feeling becomes more exact and nice: He not only perceives the beauties and defects of each part, but marks the distinguishing species of each quality, and assigns it suitable praise or blame. A clear and distinct sentiment attends him through the whole survey of the objects; and he discerns that very degree and kind of approbation or displeasure, which each part is naturally fitted to produce. The mist dissipates, which seemed formerly to hang over the object: the organ acquires greater perfection in its operations; and can pronounce, without danger of mistake, concerning the merits of every performance. In a word, the same address and dexterity, which practice gives to the execution of any work, is also acquired by the same means in the judging of it.”

There are assumptions here: that beauty exists, that there’s beauty and non-beauty. That there’s good and there’s bad; that saying Art A is better than Art B would be as impossible as calling a “pond as extensive as the ocean.” And that to discern all these things, what we really need is practice. We need to think and we need to listen. Somewhere, I believe all that, because I bother to criticize at all. And I criticize because I want to understand music, not because I’m always looking for pleasure – though it’s great to find and share that feeling. There’s no way I can hold it against the “average listener” for not wanting to listen to twenty Soft Boys rarities, even though I have a hard time believing that you could possibly be truly alive if you’ve never heard the guitar break in “Hear My Brane.” And there’s no food critic that could make me stop eating Orange Flavor Chicken. Which is a little daring, I guess, because unlike listening to the Soft Boys, Orange Flavor Chicken will eventually make me fat. So will a $50 cut of steak. Music will not make you fat. It might make you dumber or smarter, but only if you even bother to really think about it. Which again, most people don't.

___

So, something about taste:

The verb “policing” came into play in Simon’s post. What immediately registered in my mind was reading Eve Sedgwick – I think, can’t remember, sorry – talking about how we “police” our sexual desires to keep ourselves fitting into our social roles. What’s interesting about the open-mindedness issue is that it’s an inversion: you police yourself to keep your desires as free and open as possible. But it’s just another identity, when you get down to it. So we’re like kittens on ice or something, it’s horrible, how do we stop sliding? Or it’s like that great Weekly World News headline: DOGCATCHER IS A DOG! Recursive, self-destructive. Anyone that has had something put where they preferred it not to be will understand: after all that, some people like to fucking fuck in a boring, regular fashion. And that’s just fine. You can’t make a window or a libertarian out of everyone.

___

Simon: “There is no evidence that people who listen to lots of genres have more enjoyment of music.” And there’s no proof that they couldn’t be experiencing more pleasure by branching out more. And there’s no proof for or against the possibility that the mere experience of branching out might make them feel better and more attuned to what they love. There are lines. And maybe Carl’s Celine Dion project is too much. I'm not sure. But I’ll let him be the guinea pig, frankly.

I think the point here is to keep all these things in the back of our mind. We've all got our mouths open and think we're talking. But yeah, we're gnawing on ourselves a little here. As a critic, I absolutely think we have to test the limits of our tastes because it will likely help to improve our judgment in the end. Christgau’s piece—is it judgment or taste? Couldn’t say for sure, but there's some part of me that just believes him. What do I know? I'm just a guy who likes Sonic Youth and pulled pork. Maybe I can entertain you with stories of how I like Sonic Youth and pulled pork for a few minutes. Maybe I'll make you think. Get off my cloud.

Fan Letter #2

2006-06-05T16:04:00.000-04:00

Dear Mister Tom Russell,

I got to thinking the other day that I want you to kick my ass because sometimes I'm dumb and there's not a body around smart enough to kick my ass.

Because once a year I get stuck like a fly on honey to some record all hot with honesty and simplicity and last year it was the Hold Steady's Separation Sunday and this year it's your Love and Fear. I got a broken heart and what's worse is that all the pieces are ugly and I can't find them where they went to the other time this happened. And I even sort of got to talk to Dr. Ali about you and I don't even bother talking to Dr. Ali about her but Dr. Ali wouldn't kick my ass even if I asked him to because he says he only gets paid to "make observations."

So I listen to you and it's the next best thing to you kicking my ass because every time you tell the truth (and you tell it an awful lot), it's like someone's got my pinky in a nutcracker. And you do it straight and old and a little country, but like Tom Petty or Bruce Springsteen or some other White Guy. But I think you mean it more or maybe you mean it less because I think it's easier to be smart about a feeling that's gone than one you're all tied up in right then, I think.

And so I like my cum-cum disco and dubstep and wild Brazilian music but I will give some of my feeling over and call to you because I only have got you and her to give my feeling to and only one of you's likely to answer anymore.

With Respect

The Sensitive Side of PBW, Wearing Denim in the Shade

Oh, The _____

2006-06-04T23:30:00.001-04:00

The NY Times gets "heady" about horror, or something. It's the same impetus as the Sunn article from last week, really, just more apalling. Broken down: horror is fundamentally - necessarily? - irreputable, because it appeals to instinct over intellect (seriously?). Horror is "nonaspirational." After that, it's basically a book review.

I've spent a lot of mental energy thinking about horror, but just because I have the propensity to think about and spew those thoughts doesn't mean that I go through a different emotional experience than the "teenagers, slackers and fatalists" that don't think about it. I'm just more concerned with acknowledging those emotions, trying to parse out where they're coming from and trying to figure out what they mean. The article comes about a half-step short of "love the band, hate the fans."

Other things I am looking forward to hearing the NY Times' definitively and logico-philosophically relegate to the chambers of the Dirty, Classless, Undereducated Betwetters and Halfwits that I identify with by way of my Psychically Retarded and Unrealistic Concerns:

Lower Tier:

- psychedelic drugs
- pornography
- dancing

Upper Tier:

- sex without procreation
- subculture, generally speaking

Sunno))) Is No)))t Exactly Like Minimalist Sculpture, pt. 1

2006-06-01T15:27:00.000-04:00

Pandit Pran Nath: Sunn No)))

'Scuse; I am flying by the assseat of my facepants etc. this morning.

In case you missed the "Huge Friggin' Sunno))) Piece in NYT Magazine", go give a read, because it's important, and I say that without a smirk. I spent a good part of the weekend listening to drone/minimal/stuffed animal enthusiast Charlemagne Palestine and his sometime Kirana vocal teacher, Pandit Pran Nath (who I’ll post more about within the next few days). In between, I was giving Sunn's Black One some more listens, but to no great gains.

Okay, so it's great that Sunn0))) are getting more coverage. It would be dumb to act like a guard dog at the gates (of what? Purity? Integrity? Not sure, but someone’s barking).

Of course, it's the kind of coverage they're getting that is making people prickly: the art references; the "metal for smart people" tack (are metal fans supposed to rejoice? Feel the growing pains of their collective IQ surging, what with the addition of cosmopolitan and well-educated NYT mag readers? Offensive!). It's definitely the whiff of what Frank Kogan talks about with the PBS-ization of rock music; how placing Sunno))) in a certain light/context—contemporary art, in this case—makes it "important," "relevant" or worse, "worthy" (of time and dollars, I guess).

Well, I'm divided on the PBS debate really; I mean, I think that the primary design of anyone that cares enough to write about music is to, roughly speaking, get other people to recognize its value in the world—by listening, supporting, learning about, etc. So in the process, maybe Sunno))) gets vaulted into the more rarified world of minimalist sculpture, but maybe minimalist sculpture gets brought down from its pedestal, just a little bit. A great equalization.

____

I've actually always loved the art/music division and comparison, and though it's way too big of a topic to tackle here, I think it's important to take note of and flesh out. (I did it a couple times, once with Gang Gang Dance, more recently—and a little sarcastically—with Scott Walker, and I've got the same things in my head for The Pipettes (more to come on that).)

Actually, my biggest problem with the Sunno))) article is the comparisons they make. The sculptor Banks Violette says:

For me, what Steve and Greg are doing bears comparison to Donald Judd's work, particularly his boxes of the 60's and 70's. Their sound is serial, repetitive, plays off of mass and is as much a physiological phenomenon as an acoustic one. It stops being an aesthetic experience and becomes a body experience. There are exact, direct parallels there.

Here’s my issue with the Judd (or Robert Smithson) comparison(s) [take a look at the links]: In their work, the viewer/participant is essentially the active part of the experience; your space is disrupted, but only when you’re moving through it. This experience doesn’t seem to square at all with the idea of Sunn’s physical/oppressive/endurance approach, which is constantly not only referenced, but upheld as something distinctive, impressive and crucial to their sound. Sure, it’s “monolithic,” but it’s a monolith that moves, or at least expands, squeezing air out of the room, challenging the listener’s physical presence by just BEING there (again, different from the Judd, which is more passive—you can occupy the same room with it and not necessarily feel its power until you approach it).

Sunno))) does remind me a little of something like Bruce Nauman’s Green Light Corridor because to experience it at all, you have to walk through it (which is physically demanding). The “squeeze” aspect is crucial, I think; it makes the experience aggressive and present rather than just passive/contemplative (which is basically how I feel about Judd, at least up until the point that you decide to, you know, walk around the sculpture).

Anyway, this is only the tip of these ideas; the article also, and seemingly accidentally, ties together ideas of minimalism/minimalist sculpture/obstruction to the durational/hypnotic/drone aesthetic when, of course, they’re different. Or at least seperable. Think about the article: it's not just the fact that Sunno))) are so goddamn loud, it's that they happen for an hour. And while I could take the canny formal approach of making this post another 2000 words long, I'll save some for the next few days.

Wrinkles

2006-05-30T15:51:00.000-04:00

"French Way" by Crown Heights Affair is ridiculous and great and I urge you to drop the baby in your arms to go listen to it.

A synopsis: single funk groove, vamped for four minutes and 13 seconds. A chorus of "Do it, do it the French way" alternating with wordless vocal coos, interrupted periodically for the group to take turns reciting commercial tag lines. All reasonably bonkers until the last: "Mary's BEEEEEEEEEP, and we helped." Mindfuck challenge of the day dares you to consider what verb both

A) Connotes helping

and

B) Ought to be censored

Why I Try To Be Open-Minded

2006-05-24T15:10:00.000-04:00

Peas, Pod: The Lovey Lovesick Lovers

I guess one of the virtues of being open-minded is realizing that the qualities that you value in a certain kind of music might actually be present in another kind of music. Maybe there were qualities that you liked in music that you were only half-satisfying until you heard something else, i.e. some appreciation of “freedom” in noise rock before you heard free jazz. (The fact that keeps on laughing: Anthony Braxton reportedly flipped his shit when he finally heard Wolf Eyes.) Now, there are reasons to qualify this statement – the obvious one being that it could easily route right back ‘round to sentiments like “I like music that is important, dude” – i.e. the superweird crit-fear of valorizing, say, hip-hop for the same reasons as someone valorized Dylan 30 years ago (socially conscious, poetic, whatever). But first—

I’m intrigued by music that gets its mileage out of emotional disconnection. My favorite indie rock band was always Pavement most likely because they so obviously gave a shit but always tried to be too shy or cool to do so; consider their unrepentant sloppiness, Malkmus’ reportedly impenetrable lyrics, their self-effacing monikers, etc. Their emotional unwillingness was probably the same reason I basically ended up hating the raw nerves of Lou Barlow (no matter how hard I tried), and more or less loved Kim Gordon (though liking Kim was probably infinitely complicated by the fact that SY were overtly urban and much more performative about their romance – that’s not even mentioning the fact that Kim Gordon is a woman and I was, when I first started listening to them, a 13-year-old Boy from the suburbs). So even though I really liked all of Malkmus’ frizzy poetics, my favorite Pavement line was always the one in “Gold Soundz” where he said “So drunk in the August sun, and you’re the kind of girl I like / Because you’re empty, and I’m empty, and you can never quarantine the past.” I liked the line because it sounded like a clean-cut lie when he sang it; I unthinkingly said the same kinds of things to a girl much later on (only realizing it recently), showing my abundance of emotion by trying simply to shrug it off. So, in a sense, my value of emotional disconnection was intensely personal.

When I heard Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” I had a similar experience. Donna Summer didn’t pretend to be cool, she sort of pretended to be hot. And she was hot. But she was more like Kim Gordon, in that sense: sounding so unbelievably passionate that you, well, didn’t exactly believe her. It was a farce (or not!) that would fuck with me, because I never thought that Kim could possibly feel the way she felt in a song like “Shadow of a Doubt,” nor did I think Donna Summer was actually feeling the love she purported to (or, as Frank Kogan said, "If she felt love, it wasn't for me"). I mean, they were feeling something really intense, but they were putting on something different; it made the emotional tenor of the music complicated. Like Steven Malkmus. And later, I found out, like Steely Dan’s Gaucho or when RZA cries on “I Can’t Go To Sleep” or Mannie Fresh or the Mountain Goats or Kiki & Herb (who, I should point out, covered the Mountain Goats on their last album – yeah, the one that hit me like a tennis racket across the face, that one). I’m not saying that “Gold Soundz” and “I Feel Love” are the same. That would be stupid. What I am saying is that my tendencies to listen for and fundamentally value emotional disconnect (or whatever you want to call it) is what ended up allowing me to like “I Feel Love” on the same level as “Gold Soundz.” And I only listened to “I Feel Love” because I was feeling open-minded and curious about disco, and it’s a pillar of the genre.

And I guess I find that quality of emotional disconnection fundamentally interesting and I do value it and I won’t ever apologize for that. It probably has something to do with the reach to identify with emotions in music and having it thwarted (or at least made sticky) by music that isn’t emotionally one-dimensional, or music whose performance somehow mucks up feelings that the lyrical content might belie.

I mean, I think that there’s nothing terribly wrong with “rockism” other than the fact that it’s totally uninteresting. It ignores humor, it ignores nuance in performance, it ignores the satisfaction of rhythm (I always thought that the “disco sucks” thing was a) limp and b) totally different than “techno sucks” because disco used real instruments); it ignores a lot of what makes music wonderful or rich. And I’m not afraid to use those words because "not giving a shit" is passé, but again, that’s a sentiment I’d like to differentiate from “giving a shit for hollow reasons.” Which is why I want to think of Scott Walker’s humor or Mannie Fresh’s self-deprecation or the fact that Fela had a harem. These facets make the stories deeper, more resonant. And I wouldn’t have been privy to any of it unless I had been open-minded about the things I listen to.

Aperitif for Thought

2006-05-23T17:14:00.001-04:00

WORD IS BORN

What is music journalism?

I guess it’s something like: “Sodden Leaves are a tropically-flavored electro-pop quartet from Staffordston that are really hotting up the college charts… Now here’s some dance music with real emotion.”

I am not allowed to pass judgment on the state of the entire Staffordston pop scene, its questionable ties to bocce gambling rings, the general relevance of bocce, or whether or not “hotting up the college charts” is a worthwhile thing to do (what with the stupidly obvious ass-backwardness of the entire Stafforston – fuck, the whole Quinton Province – aesthetic). I am allowed to say “dance music with real emotion” because one of the members unearthed a long-dormant case of bipolar disorder while programming a sequencer for one of the b-sides (says the press kit). Anyway, nobody in Staffordston has ever seen over the barbed walls at the Quinton Province limits, so “tropically-flavored” is a modified adjective that will best resonate with their knowledge of the Grössel Starfruit Yogurt Squirt (the jeeeeesisss, they call it), an immensely popular local kumquat-flavored shooter.

All I’m saying is that if I did, for example, say by way of a mystical, gut hunch that these Staffordston bands are spending a lot of time trying to look directly into their own assholes while the bands in Greater Kirschischirshire are absolutely slaying right now, someone will write to the Staffordston Herald SuperSaver and say “You are a closed-minded jerk, and I disinherit any passion I might have had for your writing.” And you might retort,

“But I’m from Staffordston; I mean, I love that scene. I care about it. Which is why I have an opinion and not a series of harmless, eggwhite facts.

And let’s be honest like David Hume once was – let’s not call a pond a lake. I mean, the whole project of trying to be catholically open-minded has mutated into a sick, limbless child of cultural studies. We’re taxed here, told to sublimate our own tastes and relish in the Technicolor panoply of the present; the strobing, rootless orgy of the now. I am drowning in an undifferentiated sa of difference. Who are you to tell me I’m not allowed to like what I like, or more regularly, that I should like something that I don’t? Sure, I am a window. But I’m a stained glass window. I have teal tits, fuschia freckles; I have a big purple splotch where my heart should be. So when the light of the world shines through me, I distort it, but I can make something beautiful nevertheless; I can make my own interpretation, my own opinion of the light. I am a critic.”

And then you pass out, high on the fumes of your own prose. But you got the chance to be you. And I, me.

It seems to be something that humans are struggling with. I mean, I should be gentle about this, but I remember having talks with friends who were really disappointed with how passive say, the New York Times was about certain political issues. And then someone says “well, that’s just journalism, isn’t it? Unbiased? Unblinking?” And so

What is music criticism?

I guess it’s the guys that Frank Kogan quotes, the ones writing in to metal magazines saying that “Poison have faggy poodle ‘dos and no balls, and if they did have even the most miniscule, pine nut-sized balls, Metallica would mercilessly wield the divine hammer with which to smash them” (in their dudely, hairyknuckled fingers, no doubt).

What is THE MAGICKAL SPACE BETWEEN?

Tune in tomorrow and find out.

So To Share With You May 18th

2006-05-18T10:18:00.000-04:00

The Mountain Goats' "Waving at You" is a song about a guy getting through his ex's birthday; more accurately, it's about a guy almost buying her a birthday gift and then realizing she's not in his life anymore. So today's "Waving at You" day at PBW, and a pretty amazing one so far:

James: "When you hit the ground, the last thing you need is a shovel."

The Guy in the Deli: "We all go through ups and downs, you know? But listen, elevator shoes--uplifting, right? Elevator shoes."

The Bus Driver: "Hey, I've got magic pants."

Also, I guess I missed PBW's 1st Anniversary. Dear May, leave something left of me for June. With Fondness and Regards, mp.

On Isms and Onanism

2006-05-17T11:28:00.001-04:00

Dear THE INTERNET: Make the ideas stop. Sorry for the "numerals," I just have a bunch of stuff I want to puke up, & I'm going to serve it in slightly different flutes.

I.

Every time I go to post about what the whole Merritt/Rockism/other provacatively-titled Slate articles/Hopper/S F/J hootenanny, some other musk enters the room; I choke in wonder, etc.

By way: I went to an n+1-sponsored discussion on the state of literature last night. Literature's not exactly my world, but the concerns were general enough to resonate with issues, ahem, outside of literature; interestingly, actually, one guy mentioned music criticism as some last bastion of true appreciation through a kind of considered, empassioned fandom.

Of course, it was a completely misguided characterization, as the SlateDebates have made absolutely obvious. Music critism, or like, Music Criticism on the level of Ideas or Philosophizing or Theorizing or Characterizing (whatever you want, as long as it's in caps) seems basically irrelevant to the general music-listening populace, something Frank Kogan laments in Real Punks Don't Wear Black. I'm always disappointed (and sometimes surprised) by what readers on Stylus--a free outlet for music writing--gravitate towards. I can tell you pretty certainly that it's not "idea" pieces; readers rarely seem to want to think about music as a set of abstractions or social conditions (they'd rather just live those conditions without consideration). And in a sense, what I take to be the really wonderful, heroic, brave gesture on the part of people like Chuck Eddy or Frank Kogan to divorce the intellectual from the academic seems to bother people even more; lit-crits have the decency to know their tiny fucking place in the world, whereas these guys are, what, intellectual missionaries? Martyrs? Lost causes?

I recently asked a friend for advice about writing for a certain music magazine, to which he responded, in part, that the watchwords are "lucid" and "accessible," which I basically (and probably appropriately) see as code for keep your ideas to yourself. Because really, these debates aren't doing anyone any good. It was inspiring to read someone like Jeff Chang basically throw up his hands on the whole thing; in a sense, it's all one can do--let the useless parts die without dignity.

II.

Of course though, there's gotta be something of consequence in here.

And of course, it's how we're dealing with who we and what we're looking for when we listen to music--the most interesting questions of all. Actually, the best thing a girl said last night at this lit panel was "you guys are talking an awful lot about writing, but you're not really talking at all about reading." It's why the toughest, most unresolved questions surrounding this whole thing are absolutely NOT dummy dum dum dums like "what is rockism?" and "is it good or bad?" but "why are we concerned with it?" What kind of fears and insecurities lead us to actually--hold on--formulate some grand scheme in which making certain value judgements about art and music is Bad or Wrong? Aren't those like, totally dated concepts?

III.

Okay, some specific comments I was interested in dealing with:

Pitchfork-er and ILM-er Nitsuh Abebe had snappy things to say about Merritt:

"Why are we concerned that a middle-class white person might have tastes that align with middle-class white idioms? Why is this any different than pointing out that Jay-Z grew up in a Brooklyn project and has tastes that come from a particular hip-hop idiom and culture? I mean, to put it bluntly, I feel like white people often try to make themselves neutral, to kind of run down their own particular experience and culture as non-experience and non-culture -- often (maybe) out of fear that admitting they have a culture means further dominating everyone else's, further oppressing everyone else's. They want to step out of the game and act as neutral parties observing everyone else's culture. But that's even worse, because it puts them in an even more dominant position, and a patronizing and untruthful one, too."

Cultural studies, welcome. It's the same thing academics talk about with regard to race theory and in gender studies with regard to "straight" or "normal": the position of dominance can only really stay dominant by going invisible. The problem I'm having is that it presumes some sort of logic for all these things--that there's actually some line between your statistical identity and these artistic "idioms." While there's something in that idea, I guess the issue I'm having is that creating a logic like that seems to only re-erect boundaries between people and what they would reasonably be listening to.

In an equally frustrating statement, Carl Wilson said, that an exclusive alignment with those "idioms" that Nitsuh talks about "may well indicate a sense of distance from and perhaps a lack of curiosity about black experience."

So now we have a good handle on what the black experience is? And the white one, too? I mean, does my interest in Fela Kuti mean I'm interested in the black experience? It's a hell of a lot different than the Cam'ron one. Is it an interest in the African one? The experience of rhythmic music? My passion for the history of Nigeria? My desire to appropriate and colonialize the radical funk of natives? Fuck if I know, but I think it's really dangerous to say that Merritt doesn't care about the black experience because he doesn't like hip-hop--it's just reductive. Do I not care about the white experience because I didn't get through the entirety of the new Taking Back Sunday or Thursday or Saves the Day albums?

Furthermore, when I am listening to Fela, where am I belonging? Am I a joint-rolling anthropology professor canoodling students? A laid-back guy who just digs on grooves? Racist? Of course not; I'm none of these. To say that I'm any one of them is only to belittle my appreciation to the music. But then, I can't say something like, "Well, I like Fela because his music is raw; I like the collective frenzy of it, I like the trance-like purity of it, I like the primal passions" because that sounds racist to people, even if it's the same goddamn reasons I love Animal Collective or taking a long bicycle ride or sex. We're stuck in a rut of self-policing; it feels like the reasons that we're freely allowed to like music are rapidly dwindling.

IV.

Also, there's a split between UNDERSTANDING and APPRECIATING. As critics, I do think we should have an understanding of what is out there. When I self-consciously exploded the range of the music I listened to, it wasn't in an effort to broaden my tastes so much as figure out what they truly were and how I functioned as a listener to a lot of different musics. Of course, I do like a lot more different kinds of music than I used to, and that's wonderful. The creepy thing is that the Liberal Critic will tell that it's okay to not like everything, but if you don't like something, you run the risk of getting called out for being narrow-minded. Someone will think that no, you just don't understand it, because if you really did, you'd obviously take a liking to it. Sasha asks: "Do we expect critics to have an unusually catholic range of hearing?". I honestly think that the answer, for most people, is Yes.

V.

There's something sad and creepy about it that Simon touches on in a recent post:

"This sort of primitive and quaint (and naff) rockism is very much an adolescent attitude, really (whereas the pop-ist sensibilty has always struck me as a post-adolescent reaction against the opinions/tastes formed during sixth form/high school and university years. Unfortunately the reaction often takes the form of a dis-intensification--adolescence is nothing if not a time of urgency and intense emotional investments, whereas in the phase of post-adolescent young adulthood (which lasts until late thirties or beyond these days) that dimension to musical cathexis usually disappears, especially as the onset of relative affluence encourages a music-as-smorgasbord eclecticism."

One of the reasons I love the Animal Collective is that they sorta dare you to; their music is wilfully adolescent. It's excited. It's tumultuous. All of these characteristics are unfashionable in listeners, I think. Which is why, if you have the same response to, say, the Marit Larsen record, you can be a poptomist, but liking the Animal Collective is somehow a statement because they're Indie and stand for something (or something). I don't feel green when I listen to them, I feel happy. But I think there's a sense in which being excited is really frowned upon; like the critical detachment necessary to try to understand something is dependent on a kind of anhedonia--"If I get too excited, I won't be able to say anything about it, because my excitement is impressionistic and not cogent, and that's not criticism, it's fandom."

I find this very sad.

I don't know where I'm going with all this, but I do know that recently, my Catholic hearing has slid over for my adolescent appreciation, and it makes me fucking delighted. My friend Andy asked what I had been listening to--"The Soft Boys and the Minutemen," I answered, to which he said "Wow, it's like 19-year-old Mike Powell all over again." And I didn't realize the gravity of that until now; the Soft Boys do make me excited, and while I might want to spread the love to interested parties, I don't feel like my love is of any particular critical consequence. But it's important to who I am as a listener and my understanding of what I look for in music; in a way, it's reactionary. I want to remember what it feels like to really give a shit. It's why I listened for a long time without ever writing a word--words, what are they doing here? I think I'm going to work on a questionnaire about this.

So,

Down with -isms for right now. Let's ask what matters. After the talk last night, my friend Brandon, who works for Basic Books, gave me a copy of Terry Eagleton's After Theory. Page 21, ahem:

"We need to imagine new forms of belonging, which in our kind of world are bound to be multiple rather than monolithic. Some of these forms will have something of the intimacy of tribal or community relations, while others will be more abstract, mediated and indirect. There is no single ideal size of society to belong to, no Cinderella's slipper of a space. The ideal size of community used to be known as the nation-state, but even some nationalists no longer see this as the only desirable terrain."

Imagine away. From the comfort of an armchair. Somewhere else, people are actually trying. Let's not forget our responsibility to what we care about, okay?

2006-05-10T23:17:00.001-04:00

X

Burial: Messing Your Brain on the Google Image Search Good-Like

I'm awoken from a rather unexpected dormancy on the blog to talk about the Burial album, which seems to be warming the loins of the hauntology crowd lately.

Burial, more than any other album in the hauntology scheme, is about time. K-Punk suggested that "Burial is haunted by what once was, what could have been, and - most keeningly - what could still happen." My own personal difficulty connecting with the rave/'ardkore/2-step/dubstep/the British dance underground has actually enhanced that response rather than dampened it. K-Punk also used the word "elegy"; my experience is like being at a stranger's funeral--a mourning without roots, an experience that actually has plenty more to do with your present than a past you never actually had.

So then, "elegy" almost seems improper becuase even if the experience conceptually relies on the past, that past can never make itself fully manifest or understood (otherwise it wouldn't haunt). So, like in Ariel Pink's 60s pop specters or Ghost Box's library music collage, we get a heavy referent for the music we're hearing, but one that always flickers at the horizons or has just left the room.

Burial, though, is the most vivid of the "hauntology" releases precisely because time becomes acute, rather than smeared or fucked-with (not to mention the urgency and presence of RHYTHM). When I saw Digital Mystikz some months back, I remember thinking about the obvious draw of reggae imagery/rhetoric for the dubstep crowd--doomsaying. You don't have to look much past the fact that "dread" is a compliment to realize that a lot of reggae's darkest glory comes from its fear that the world is always sliding further into dystopia, and it's a feeling that dubstep's frantic drum vortexes seem keen on making really goddamn explicit. (Incidentally Burial is being released on Hyperdub, whose founder, Kode 9, very appropriately covered "Ghost Town"--chew on it).

So Burial, in feeling tender or afraid or just generally preoccupied with both the past and the future, seems much more straightforward and readily affecting than some of the other things that have come into the hauntology mix. And the really off-putting thing about it is how mellow it makes entropy sound; there's very little agitation and the music is rebelliously imprecise at times (Burial apparently doesn't use a sequencer, another interesting factor in the "reanimation" aspect of sample culture--he's not interested in squaring all this audio away perfectly). Off-putting upon off-putting: the future's going to be completely rotted out. And we're going to feel just cool about it.

So it's redundant to say it's a sad album, because you could've guessed that; honestly, despite their obvious differences, I bet you could hoof it from Luomo's Vocalcity to the future sound of London in Burial; both albums derive their emotional resonance from their ability to draw emotions into view but remain detached from them. Yearning vocals roam in darkness because Burial ultimately leaves searchlights off; glints come from unknown, improbable sources. Really, one of the most forcefully lonely albums I've heard in a while.

Last Dance for the Bleeding Hearts, Etc.

2006-05-08T11:53:00.000-04:00

Simultaneously the easiest and hardest thing I've ever had to write, save an obituary. Sorry for getting High Fidelity on you all, but it has to happen sometime.

***

So, the new dance is Me, Teenager. I don't have Real Punks Don't Wear Black handy, but there's a part where he talks about how black music is more about control (James Brown, dancing/Detroit, maybe even the reigns Ayler gets on chaos), while white music is ostensibly about the loss of control (he acknowledges the generalization, but is thinking about stuff like punk or moshing and not necessarily "Spanish Fly"-style fingerworks). I saw Lightning Bolt last night; it wasn't the most on show I've seen by them. It was, however, insanely loud and glorious enough to make me forget everything stowed away in the link at the top of this post (for an hour or so).

Fat guys have a tendency to move horizontally rather than vertically in pits, which makes it really hard for someone of my stature (6'1", about 160) to survive, despite my workout regimen; I got tossed around a lot. Then again, surrender is part of, if not the impetus for the entire experience to begin with. Also, tying your shoes in pits: scary. It all reminded me, as my friends sat on the sidelines straight drankin', that it's really wonderful to get into a pile full of strangers, flail around, and tap into the oceanic via colliding tributaries of hairsweat and heaving dampness(es). And despite my weird pretense that these types of crowds (the ones that want to freak the fuck out sans dance diagram) can be really volatile, I only end up having glorious, smiling experiences. Sure, noize dudes and longhairs aplenty, but also lots of small asian girls, and more than a few guys holding their glasses in their hand above the crowd while they flipped out. A playpen for the plenty cautious, really. I left remembering all the good parts of 17.

2006-05-04T11:25:00.000-04:00

Something I wanted to point out the other day to Nick Southall, whose article on Stylus this week has given me the biggest surge of Sty-pride (TM) I've had in a while:

Monitor choice is also interesting. Quite deliberately Eno has chosen his own hi-fi system to be of average quality so that he can check-out his studio tapes on the sort of system most people will actually be listening to the final product on. Monitors, therefore, will follow the same philosophy.

"The monitors that I've most often found appealing to me are Lockwood's with Tannoy Reds. I find that a lot of the newer monitors with horns and whatever are very exciting to listen to but are also very tiring when you have to monitor on them for ten hours a day." (From an otherwise-mysterious 1975 piece called Eno: This studio is a musical instrument, which you can find here.)

The last time I had an "indulgent" hi-fi experience was actually in college with Another Green World; I just finished my last class, and I celebrated by lying on my back with a Bass in my hand, staring at the sun; I was wearing headphones and had set up speakers in the corner of the room. It was ridiculous, but memorable, I guess.

Anyway. Interesting that he uses the word tiring--the idea that the "quality" music listening experience is more difficult on the ears after a while. I know what he means from personal experience mixing bands that I've been in; I always find that the music revealed itself better to me while in the car the next day, just playing it on my factory system. Of course, there's that old "culture industry" argument that the steady stream of "thoughtless" experience is actually more work for your brain, the "worn grooves of association" or whatever they were hammering on.

Geeta responded in part by talking about bursts of J-Pop v. the experience of getting into songs that wind on longer and longer. Well, it was interesting, I was talking to Simon the other night about wanting to go to some of the Derek Bailey shows at The Stone and I'm sort of realizing my own small rebellion to the ambient iPod issue--I want to hear music made by people in space. It could be short, it could be long, but it has to be alive. I saw We Jam Econo--the Minutemen documentary--last night, and had sick desires to join that fray. Sick because that fray is gone now (spacey old Watt driving around in his van saying approx. that "it's ridiculous because it was so hard to be in a band then; now it's so easy and so few people do it"); the uncompressed, undiluted experience is sort of charming, a relic, documentary-able, etc. Feeling hopeless in all this, really.

Hot or Not: Brains

2006-05-02T11:43:00.000-04:00

: o

: /

I realized late last night that for this blog to be honest, I can't really avoid talking about books and movies. I've done it before, but with hesitation. Shake it off.

Dawn of the Dead was not my favorite in the quadrilogy; I expected it to be, which might sound weird, but I just did. Zombies take refuge in a shopping mall/last humans standing raid said mall while fending off zombies/fresh meat for the agonizing first day of cultural studies class in college all over again, ugh ugh ugh, all zombie-consumer/Trader Joe's squawking aside. Good heckling all around though; self-conscious talk about our hot slices of chicken parm pizza from Carmine's during the guts-eating scene, Tex Beta's jungle fever jokes and zombie lust monologues. And so, instead of that great, great, great feeling of zombie dread, I felt light and silly, carried on the bubbles of Canada Dry. Which isn't what I exactly what I hope to get from these films, but later on in the evening, I longed for it. To wit:

So I have a zombie thing and probably some issues with basic existential saddles like bodies and humanity and right, that's me up there on the banner, and yes, my zombie-girl was there that night, and okay, we won't talk about that (I finally called a therapist!). But for whatever, reason, I felt compelled to go home after Dawn... and watch Claire Denis' ultra-bare cannibal/sex meditation Trouble Every Day, which has fundamentally questioned my abstract appreciation of, well, the pretty suffocating eroticism of blood, etc. It seems beside the point to talk about the tender nexus of disgust, fascination, and shock, because it's so obvious in the contract of the movie; it's not exactly something you'd like, talk about a lot with people. (An aside: fondly remembering a hilarious interaction about 5 years ago when I met a girl and she was drunk and told me to read Bataille's The Story of the Eye; a week later, I did, and told her that I liked it, and thanks. She had no recollection of recommending it to me and blushed a great shade of red.)

The juxtaposition between Trouble and Dawn... was probably important for me--the dead stare of Romero's slapstick v. Denis' explicit linkage of MOUTH to FLESH to SNACK to DESIRE to CONSUME (a tired ring encircling an essay with the word "abject" repeated enough to make it totally meaningless). The film made it seem so absolutely real that the theme lost its metaphorical power. I remembered how my dad used to say "I'm gonna eat you up with a great big spoon"; I thought again about phrases like "you look good enough to eat" or whatever utterly insane things we thoughtlessly say to express affection. Those are interesting; Trouble Every Day isn't, exactly. But it is affecting. After it was over, the sound of my own breathing practically made me vomit.

Mom, I am working things out all on my own!

First/Last Ever Wednesday Wrrrap-Up!

2006-04-26T23:04:00.001-04:00

Also, Espers Finally Sound Sort of Like Espers Instead of that Lukewarm Grey Water That Made Their First Record All Soggy

Alfred put me to the Empire Burlesque test. I did not like taking that test very much. Disco Dylan was more Dylan than Disco, whereas Ugly Dylan was more Ugly than Dylan (Dylan is already kind of ugly). Alfred's right about "When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky;" it's cool. But more than just reminding you of how insurmountably funny misplaced synth-horn farts are or how long 7 1/2 minutes really feels, it reminds you that while his shades & blazer getup never changed, the times did. (Regional humor for Alfred.)

Speaking of ha-ha songs that titularly employ inclement weather, the okay-to-boring Gnarls Barkley album has a song called "Storm Coming," and it sounds like when you go to the circus with your parents and feel ashamed to be alive when the flailingly uptempo lion introduction music comes on. It also rips off Stone Temple Pilots' "Sex Type Thing" ("Here I come I come I come I come") but don't tell Cee-Lo that because it doesn't sound like he knows. "Crazy" is great and fuck you yes I am reading more Philip K. Dick and I don't care what anyone says about dumb costumes (check), I am fully in support of a #1 single about being shredded to pieces by paranoia.

In that respect, they've somehow outdone Scott Walker at his own game, or at least street hockey to The Drift's ice; Walker's sense of humor deflates to an empty room. Well, he's in the corner punching a side of beef with a contact mic on it, but whatever. I like it, but Tilt came out 11 years ago; I can keep my pants on for a little while with this one.

Let's Talk

2006-04-24T15:23:00.000-04:00

I couldn't ever get into Bob Dylan. Dunno why. In my effort to try to explore critically embarrassing and often psychically liberating bruises in the careers of Famous Musicians (Leonard Cohen's Death of a Ladies Man, The Eagles' The Long Run), I listened to Street Legal last week. The back cover makes him look like Alice Cooper. I thought heroin was slimming, but Karl assured me that quasi-Renaissance leisure wear lends a look of gravity (well, just, "he's not fat. just his shirt"). The only song I really like is "Is Your Love in Vain?," which is horror-rock, in a sense. I guess it's a thorn for Dylan lovers because it's not poetically nuanced enough or something; it's also one of the most wrong-headed and classically selfish sentiments I've ever heard, but he sings it with grotesque conviction (Karl said "I don't want to ever hear that song again"; I couldn't stop thinking about it). It's like he threw up all the worst love letters I write; it's like those ads--"If smoking did to your outside what it did to your insides, would you still do it?"

(This is Going to Drive Me Nuts)

2006-04-21T09:01:00.000-04:00

(Okay, I have this weird story in my head about Tommy James making the cricket sounds in "I Think We're Alone Now" by rubbing his beard on the microphone while playing live; I think it's weird because I can't verify it anywhere and I can't even find a picture of Tommy James with a beard.)

Takin' It To The Trough

2006-04-19T12:03:00.001-04:00

I've got dots and they need connecting, okay, come on, topics-style:

K-punk on youth, boredom, and the pursuit of pleasure

(Simon's response and sashay into food)

Geeta on Eno and food

That article in the new Harper's about Christianity/America/Thoreau

and probably-not-so-coincidentally talking with the Movie Night crew about the eroticism of food over, wtf, Branded to Kill

***

Food is a necessity, and in that respect it's part of a routine; it’s moot.

Of course, the culture surrounding food is both external and superfluous, at least from a biological standpoint: eating together, preparing food together (and all requisite "simple living" nu-zen rhetoric), buying free-range/whole-food/fair trade/whatever. These are ethical and social gestures, depending.

I don't see the cooking metaphors in Geeta/Eno's writing as being a part of a culture/pleasure dichotomy like Simon seems to (unless I'm misunderstanding him); I see it as an art/life dichotomy.

Sure, it’s a pretty clichéd dichotomy, but think about it: Eno talks about faster, cheaper, more portable, whatever; he manages to reflect his approach to art in his approach to "life" (both the necessity of food, the culture of cooking, and the extension of his own personal style of cooking). I always thought the artlessness/non-musicianship of Eno was kind of pretentious in practice, but in theory, liberating: the point wasn't "just think, anyone can do this (spice here, spice there/let's patch A through B and see what happens)" but more "there is no this to speak of that can be reasonably separated from just kinda existing." The radicalism of Eno’s food metaphors isn’t the precious yawn it produces in our consciousness and approach to music, but the fact that associating MUSIC with FOOD completely shakes the concept of how it fits into life: it becomes a necessity. How we approach it is up for experimentation and discussion; that we do isn’t. Which also explains, at least for me, the quasi-anorexia of dudes like Bobby Gillespie (Simon’s reference): real skyscraping sublime rock n’ roll feeling has nothing to do with necessity or daily life -— it’s all transcendence.

With all due respect to Geeta, she sort of nails the tendency for “culture” to treat these things like they were fucked up and ghastly: “My guess is that his path to lifelong weirdness…” Why exactly is it weird? We grow up thinking that attitudes like the ones that Eno has to food/music are fundamentally starched, inaccessible, and “arty” rather than actually permeable, fluid, and full of possibility. Marx thought art was a necessity; so did Thoreau. But making that argument now -— “take time with the things you do, make it healthy, be thorough, make creativity a part of daily life, immerse yourself, etc.” -— you just play into one of two societal boxes: arty (to the exclusion of the day-to-day) or you’re in some tier of Simple Living, whether it’s waiting in line at the Trader Joe’s (certain types of shopping have spiritual value, you know) or you’re like my friends Brandon and Hannah, who, despite being Brooklyn residents, fight the good fight by cultivating cooking herbs in their living room (Eno’s gardening & cooking metaphors tied into one literally “creative” rebellion).

I’m deeply turned on by all this, but made most cosmically supple by K-punk’s assertion that

“On this account, 'boring' is not opposed to 'interesting'. To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, MTV and fast food, to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand.”

This is basically what I wrote in my college thesis, which is a corny thing to reference, but the ideas still fascinate me. It was about Andy Warhol’s screen tests, which were basically what they sound like they would be —- 3-4 minute shots of a person keeping still, trying not to blink, showing their face for the screen. Warhol was actually a lot like Brian Eno, (a-)theoretically speaking. He didn’t care if you walked out on the films and came back in later. It wasn’t that important. The films just happened. ****, his 24-hour epic, is basically a psycho-conceptual joke: you think you’re supposed to ATTEND to it like ART, so you SIT THERE and get FRUSTRATED. You keep your expectations high—because art it supposed to take you out of life, not get all up in it—you don’t bliss out, you don’t get bored. Because the opposite of boredom isn’t interest, it’s distraction.

Being truly bored is being enough at peace with something to let its structured meaning slip out of your mind: music-as-entertainment as opposed to wallpaper, cooking as a directed way to make food rather than a way to relax; product and pleasure remains the primary object. It’s when this happens that similarities open up -— the similarities like Eno’s cooking/production approach, or watching clouds pass into bunnies (no longer clouds), or just staring into Warhol’s face until you’re completely outside both the film and your own head. You’re no longer acting with it in an oppositional what-can-I-get-from-you kind of way, but something much more shadowy and difficult to articulate.

(As an aside, I know that Talking Heads and Warhol etc. were avowedly about finding wonder in “banality,” but phrasing it as such is sort of structurally inaccurate or at least playing into the dominant lexicon to begin with -— it’s only banal because of the way we treat it; they wanted to make the “boring” stuff in life the space in which we can fundamentally open our minds.)

Frank Kogan’s praised Richard Meltzer for talking about Absolutely Live by the Doors in terms of food. Meltzer:

“"TV-Guide Pizza" (staple remover optional) to go with "Who Do You Love?" ("Dump the liquid grease all over [the pizza] and stick it back in the oven until it reaches desired crispyhood. And you can stick the staple remover on there too if you go for that. Yum-yum.”

And Kogan’s point is that you’d learn more about the album from his metaphor than any straight description, that it creates a context. Well, it’s a fast-food context and a backhanded pan -— no effort, no real satisfaction, a hack-job. The aural equivalent of a TV dinner. In “The Disco Tex Essay,” he calls contextual surprise in music “free lunch.”

While fast-food is weird in my expansion of K-punk’s context—it’s totally woven into daily life, but excises all of the “art/life” aspects of food -— you could also make the argument that it’s just fucking bad for you, I guess.

Paradise: Impossible?

2006-04-17T15:52:00.001-04:00

Take Me Out of My Zip Code: Single Again

I was listening to Teena Marie's "Shangri-La" from Emerald City and instead of indulging in my usual speculative philosopher-style hack-work by wondering aloud about what songs called "Shangri-La" have in common, I decided to actually tackle scientific method by wondering aloud about what songs called "Shangri-La" have in common and then listening to a shit-ton of them. My only conclusion is that most of them are boring and nothing like how I imagine paradise, which shouldn't surprise me except that "Heaven" by the Talking Heads is an Eternal song and I thought that maybe because seeing the cover of Belinda Carlisle's Heaven is a Place on Earth when I was about five was the first time I had a boy-girl thing that someone could've nailed "Shangri-La" or at least sort of smeared it.

As of right now, Teena Marie has the best version of "Shangri-La" I can find (and it's not all that amazing or even the best song on Emerald City), though if the Kinks version had more syncopations it might win. I used to like it a lot, but I've been sorta tired of Ray Davies lately. The Nightmares in Wax (not on) is pretty good too, it's like no wave except the tunelessness seems more accidental. I can't decide what the worst one is. Right now, I think it's Gift Culture's, not because I take total offense at the idea that paradise sounds like lite pan-Asian trip-hop, but because it's all synth portamento, which is sort of like someone trying to forcefeed you a bowl full of parsley while telling you it's salad.

Billy Idol's is really terrible too, but it's actually not the worst song on Cyberpunk. That distinction goes to the crap techno cover of VU's "Heroin," remarkable only for the greatest perceived-time to actual-time ratio in any song I can think of (and not because of the song's imagined bulletproof vests/dumb guardian shrieks of "heresy" and not even because of idea, which, if you think about it for a split second, is actually a pretty good one). The ratio is either 9 or 10, which makes the experience long enough to listen to "Keeper of the Mountain" by the Flatlanders at least 21 more times or "I Wanna Dance Wit 'Choo" by Disco Tex at least 13 more, which are lowball figures, because I've diregarded the time-flies-when-you're-having-fun factor out of pity. Quantify your love, it's spring.

O is None and a Circle and a Hole and It's Whole

2006-04-04T11:02:00.000-04:00

I suffer from ventriloquism. Whenever I'm personal here, it seems to be about self-doubt--which I don't mind, I just hope it doesn't become a full-on schtick.

Anyhow, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, besides admittedly dethroning Hotel Rwanda for Most Times I Wanted to Bawl My Fucking Eyes Out at a Movie But Couldn't Because I Was in Public, is, if nothing else, a portrait of single-mindedness. Tragic single-mindedness, sure; psychosis or fanatacism, even, but a condition not without dignity.

What I sorta envy about Johnston is what I doubt about myself: conviction. I've always been fascinated by the determination of belief because I tend to want to believe in everything, to let everyone sit at the table. I can't live without the noise, but I can't sleep either. When the belief seems right, well, that's wonderful; even when it seems wrong to me--neo-imperialism, The Darkness--I'm fascinated by someone's ability to tune out the hums around them enough to hear the psychic glint of a single sound. (Even cranky Lewis Lapham at Harpers, who seems to have written the same intro essay for the last four months, took the most recent issue to dissent from the prescribed, politically correct "plurality of voices" in the wake of the Mohammed cartoon debacle. Even if Lapham uses the platform to try to find a bearing against relativism, there's nothing to brace him and say he isn't just reinforcing it.)

I know there's a difference between believing in something and suffering from mental illness (though insanity is just extreme self-absorption I guess), and the last thing I want to do is fetishize Johnston's manic depression or the speculations of his LSD-burn. Still, it's hard to ignore the power of Johnston's single-mindedness when he broke into a house and frightened an elderly woman into actually jumping out of a fucking window because he was shouting at her about the presence of demons.

While Johnston's music seems best appreciated in bursts (Beta dares you to make it through a whole album), there are definitely isolated moments of brilliance, which were well-excercised in the film. While I guess most people know "Casper the Friendly Ghost" or "Speeding Motorcycle" because of Yo La Tengo or Harmony Korine, "Don't Let The Sun Go Down on Your Grievances" is, in my view, what makes Johnston special. Religious, albeit sidewardly; a religion of self--"Do yourself a favor, become your own savior"--self-reliant to a fault, uncharitable, almost martyrly; it's a tiny spot of light only if you believe the world is dark. Which, for Johnston, it wasn't really; he had people to help and support him, but nothing took precedence over what happened in his head. Johnston recorded the song in his first "studio," which utilized his brother's workout benches as tables for a portable cassette recorder and his chord organ; exercise, exorcism, Johnston's career was filled with long, existential puns. Still, if a pun splits the meaning of something, Johnston only wanted one for everything--his own--which, if frightening at times, is enviable; you could see him as a sinking ship or just a guy who wants a swim--god in the eye of the beholder.

Mas

2006-03-31T09:38:00.000-05:00

I don't have a lot to say, but I will direct you to me on Moondog. It's supposed to hit 72 today. 72. Get out your Fairport Convention and Boney M albums, it's Spring!

Backseat Eternally: Time

2006-03-29T13:02:00.001-05:00

Chubby, Loose, and Kind of Nuts: Lyzyrd Skyzyrd

Right before a rousing, heckle-strewn viewing of Cassavetes's's Shadows, the Colin Farrell Cinema Appreciation Society was treated to the video for "Rapture Riders," Go Home Productions's unsettling mash-up of Blondie's "Rapture" and The Doors's (damn, a lot of s-word plurals today!) "Riders on the Storm."

00:28 Oh no

00:59 Ha ha

01:40 Oh no, ha, that tickles!

02:18 Didn't Lester Bangs write somewhere that a man's appreciation for Debbie Harry comes from a deep, impossible desire to murder her?

04:49 Ha - no, please

Well, since it's obvious that nothing is sacred/anything goes/time and context are meaningless vacuums i.e. I won't waste my energy deconstructing anything; instead, I thought I'd just, you know, reconstruct the studio time Deborah Harry and Jim Morrison would've spent together through the beautiful words they've left behind over the years.

D: “I saw you on the corner…”

J: “Hello, I love you.”

D: “Once I had a love and it was divine.”

J: “Can you find me soft asylum / I can't make it anymore.”

D: “Oh…”

J: “Let me sleep all night in your soul kitchen / Warm my mind near your gentle stove”

D: “Oh, no.”

J: “Please believe me / The river told me / Very softly / Want you to hold me, ooo.”

D: …

J: “Tell you 'bout the world that we'll invent / Wanton world without lament.”

D: “Dreaming is free.”

J: “Let me slide in your tender sunken sea.”

D: “The tide is high.”

J: “Blood in the streets runs a river of sadness / Blood in the streets it's up to my thigh.”

D: “Just go away”

J: “Touch me, babe.”

D: “I’m always touched by your presence, dear.”

J: “Get on out there on your hands and knees, baby / Crawl all over me.”

D: “Too dull, your senses.”

J: “I’m a back door man.”

D: “It's 11:59, and I want to stay alive.”

J: “No one here gets out alive, now / You get yours, baby / I'll get mine.”

D: …

J: …

D: …

J: “Ride the snake.”

D: “Yuck!”

J: “It will be / An easy ride, yeah”

D: “No…”

J: “Ride, c’mon.”

D: …

J: “Riders on the storm.”

Breaking News Smothered in Breaking News

2006-03-23T09:29:00.001-05:00

I found my voice! It's in my first Stycast of 2006.

¡Nueva!

Me sounding kind of legless about Silver Jews live in PopMatters; also, can you find the grievous error I made regarding the history of African music in my second Voice piece? Fun! Embarrassing! Hugely so, actually!

O! Me, Flower Wilting in Crack'd City Street

2006-03-22T13:24:00.000-05:00

Guy Debord Takes You to Tits Project

Andy Warhol's Dance Diagram (Foxtrot)

Since returning from the tree-drunk half-time of VA, I've been under spells: Donald Fagen's Morph the Cat, Ghostface's Fishscale, Moondog's The Viking of 6th Avenue, and Seconds's's's Kratitude. All totally different, all fundamentally functioning as dreams of urban experience.

Ghostface is a psychogeographer extraordinaire; Supreme Clientele's lyric "Bung bung bung, your bell went rung rung rung / Staple-Land's where the ambulance don't come" is still an astounding threat because he tosses you in a place outside of jurisdiction - Clammyhands giggle nervously at streets with funny names - and lets trouble find your scent. Of course, at least part of it is Rap Fantasia; Fishscale's "The Champ" cuddles his verbal erections: "This is architect music."

He masters his cityscape even when messing around, shitting himself with juvenalia on the "Heart Street Directions" skit: "the next block is Clit Boulevard - but you gotta be careful, it's kinda wet down there - you goin' past Guts now, that should take you to Tits Project; my man Balls be around there somewhere. The Heart is around there somewhere." Yeah, it's dumb, but it also reminds you how commanding he is about locales; being able to smell and fear his sense of place is disorienting because you know his boulevards bubbled up in the same cauldron as his erogenous language-as-sound rhetoric and fruit-spiels - the dynamic nonsense that helps set him apart. Still, even if it comes out as part fantasy, Fishscale's premise of city-as-secret is thoroughly alluring; SFJ's Tarantino comparison is well-worn, but reminds you of something important - the double-nuance of pulp: cheap, sensational, but just as much a part of the fruit as the juice.

If Fishscale is city-as-secret, the Moondog compilation The Viking of 6th Avenue is a fantasy by necessity. Moondog was a blind street musician; as I said in another post, the gobsmacking poignancy of his music is that he somehow manages to paint Midtown perfectly through Loony-tuned jazz brut even though he never actually saw it. Of course, it's a "pre-internet" portrait - a tag I've grown fond of as a catchall for the experience of say, open-air saxophone and city drift that seems totally lacking in my ultramodern & disaffected experience of New York. So it, like Ghostface, is its own escape music; a completely different city and somehow on the same blocks; Moondog turned the NYSE into a Native American battleground and skyscraper stories into heads on stacked totem poles in a way both intimate and accurate - it's still uncanny that his senses were abbreviated.

Kratitude is a new album by Seconds, a neo-no wave band that oddly betrays some of no wave's most well-defined characteristics: presence and dynamics. Seconds make super-cyclic and ostensibly minimal punk; in fact, they're sort of like an early Sonic Youth/garage version of Liars, whose Drum's Not Dead smokes with the same hypno-chanting schtick. Which is fine; what compels me about both these albums isn't that they're all that good, but that they're such a specific reaction to the city. In fact, the onesheet for Seconds talks about minimalism - Steve Reich "It's Gonna Rain"-style; the revelation-by-repetition scheme. Both bands use repetition as a way to try to scale back to prehistory, probably because the city is so goddamn fast and confusing - the first track on Kratitude is actually a vocal round consisting of "Slowly moving slowly moving faster moving faster" - loopy, disorienting. The urban escape of fetishizing Early Tymes seems present in Excepter and Animal Collective, too; strangely, this resonates with Moondog's restoration of the city to a distant past, though younger bands seem to be doing this in a much more destructive/deconstructive way. Seconds and Liars fall short of scrambling circuits because they drive the neopromitive experience underground, where the freaky stuff is always a go; AC is the closest to bringing the aesthetic to success, but my cavemen friends tell me that the word around the obelisk is that they're going MOR.

Never as MOR as Fagen, who plays just what you'd expect - the slick, detached, mind's eye approach to the city. What got me about Morph the Cat immediately was the title track: a cloud of smoke in the guise of a kitty renders New York euphoric, like if the "plume" in DeLillo's White Noise was gigglegas with the scent of freshly-baked cookies. What gets presented - and mirrored in Fagen's impossibly exact music - is the paradoxical threat of calm; a mass numbing in the guise of playfulness, the capitulation of all kindsa modern horrors that Fagen would wryly twitch his lip at. So maybe Seconds and Liars had to go underground after all. If his portraits of The Masses are unnerving, think about the protaginist in "Security Joan," standing on the verge of getting it on with the woman waving the metal-detector wand over his trembling pre-flight body. If it's funny, it's also crushingly sad: no lover at home - a home that he spends enough time outside of to make a chance encounter with a sterile uniform worth it (not to mention the ha-ha soft dominant/submissive power dynamic of their encounter); the guy's always between flights, stimulated by the most banal encounters. I actually thought of Scott Walker's "Time Operator," a song about a man talking to a telephone operator that actually represents "Security Joan"'s modern alienation even better: "Time Operator / Take the time to take the time to come over here / We got so much in common / Seems it's hard for us to sleep with all the razzle dazzle in the street." It's straight Walter Benjamin: we're too buried under the rhythm of the city to make connections with people (think about your commute); Fagen and Walker's cynical capitulation is in trying to have phone sex with a city employee or a quickie with an airline attendant.

In the end, what's funny about all these approaches - Ghost's secret city, Moondog's serene metro-toons, Seconds/Liars neoprimitive resistance and Fagen's suffocating calm - is that they all envision places that don't exist but seem equally and thrillingly real. If Fagen is closest to truth, he's also the most fucking daffy of in the bunch; Ghost has said crazy stuff before, but he never needed a large, formless cat made of smoke to argue his point.

Croak or Hoot Under the Influence of Pan

2006-03-20T13:37:00.000-05:00

It's somewhat crushing, prophetic, helpful, painful that I start reading Frank Kogan's Real Punks Don't Wear Black on the fourth night after seeing Silver Jews three shows in a row. On the back flap, Chuck Eddy has some quote about how Kogan's triumph is proposing the challenge to not think about one's own life when listening to music knowing that the challenge is impossible; Kogan's essay on the Kingston Trio makes his attempts at non-identificatory listening abundantly clear. Almost.

Silver Jews were the easiest band in the world to fall in love with because we shared all kinds of qualities, either real or desired (at 17, maybe 21, can't remember): quietly self-effacing, observant, relaxed, bittersweet. Unrealistic. Mopey. Take solace in small moments; small as big. Kogan says that he only took acid twice because it turned him into an aesthete, and god forbid; it's a fate I've been trying to escape for as long as I could crane to navelgaze.

Why, I'm not exactly sure. I think I'm having a voice crisis; how do you balance presenting a conversation about music and still be critical? Do I like things I don't like as I kneel down to open-mindedness? Where do I splinter? In a sense, the more I challenge the way I think, the better I know myself; what I know is a mass of questions and neurotic second-guessings.

Not at Silver Jews, which again, is a good and a bad thing. It's not a matter of policing one's self, really, but rather being honest with your powers to reason. Which lately, has gotten me far away from just about everything; funny that David Berman finally got the nerve to play "Pretty Eyes": "Everybody wants perspective from a hill / But everybody's wants can't make it past the window sill." Which is why I can manage to write this now and not sound like a Charles Ives song, two marching bands passing each other on a New England street.

When I try to hear my voice, I never know what I'll find; when I read the words on the page they never seem like mine. And for some theoretical once-you-surrender-to-the-written-word-you-are-another-animal excuse, but a real banshee-on-the-lecturn issue. All the sudden I'm in the audience. Call out in a cave and see if it's really an echo; you might figure out what's confusing me. You might just think I'm crazy, too; I guess it's possible?

EDIT: PBW attains record speeds chasing its own tail.

Notes on the State of Virginia

2006-03-14T11:56:00.000-05:00

1. Vacation; sorry.

2. Did you realize that the Violent Femmes recorded the first Pixies song in 1985? It's called "Never Tell" and it's on Hallowed Ground.

3. In Charlottesville, Virginia, people don't *listen to music* like I do, per se. I mean, you go to a show if it's happening, because it's happening. And it doesn't even matter if it's particularly great or not. And when there isn't a show on, it's pretty easy to be content with the sound of birds and wind chimes.

4. 4 days worth of hours, 10 days worth of meals and 14 days worth of alcohol.

5. Circle was a band from Finland who had The Rock trapped in a large, tiled bathroom and were helpless to do anything but search for it in pitch darkness, occasionally squeezing something harmless and irrelevant they mistook for The Rock. Cul de Sac; godspeed your half-formed ruminations.

6. I have fallen under Small Town Charm again; needlessly romantic about spending a week in a place that I know has all kinds of bad molasses moments, a group of people sometimes seemingly weighed down by Straight Loungin', getting drunk and riding bicycles around. I shower less and sweat more, go figure.

6a. I know that a lot of this hinges on going to see Silver Jews on Thursday (and again on Friday and Saturday in New York); seeing one of my favorite bands - or at least the men responsible for 1998's American Water, my favorite record - is weird because so much seems riding on it - they've played about 10 shows in as many years and my personal life has been a little wily lately.

6b. Right now, I'm a two minute walk from the train tracks that I first listened to Bright Flight on, and about 12 more to the dorm that I used to play American Water in what seemed like every day; another 7 or 8 minute walk would get me to Twin Sycamores, where we used to play The Natural Bridge all the time because we felt too tough to cry without it. Another 60 or so miles and you're at the Natural Bridge itself, where I once got drunk and played mini golf at before witnessing a reading of part of the Book of Genesis set against a light show on the rock.

7. When I'm here, I tend to surrender to a part of me I don't see often enough - the one that doesn't feel in a rush, the one that doesn't feel particularly afraid of life's floor model, the one without a certain kind of cosmic noise that New York fills me with. I try not to second guess it too much, because I know it won't stay quiet for long enough.

8. A dude dressed as a werewolf shredding psychobilly tunes at a narrow burrito establishment: welcome back.

"Holdin' On Like a Hubcap in the Fast Lane": A Dictionary For Curing Hella Seasonal Depression (N thru Zed)

2006-03-08T09:51:00.000-05:00

Letting the Good Times Roll (Away From You Like a Ball from an Infant): Lou Reed Meta-rocking a vintage Jangles the Junkie Tee

(If you missed the first half yesterday, scroll down; much like a real dictionary, this does *not* have to be read in order. Day 2: Things get better! Worse!)

N is for "Not Tonight" by Mannie Pendergroff, aka Mannie Fresh:

"Hey everybody, I wanna explain and express myself / Sometime in a young man's life, you know, you wanna find a woman and make her your wife / You don't just wanna be fuckin' up in the club, sometimes you're lookin' for love, y'know? See what I'm sayin? And after the break, I'm gonna explain myself, but Oooooh, not tonight - I just wanna fuck you right." Because the world needs greazy comedy ballads to remind us what a humorless cesspool Romance is.

O is for "One Hit" by the Knife, a 6/8 electro shuffle about domestic violence with a clumsy reference to The Godfather, female vocals pitchshifted to imitate Scott Walker trying rather desperately to climb out of a pool of mud and a grotesque sing-song vocal howling from Disney's enchanted forest, which incidentally, is an impenetrable thicket of insects. Currently battling Sway's "Pretty Ugly Husband" for Most Upsetting Spousal Abuse Song of 2006.

P is for Pornolizer.com, for turning part of my Gaucho post into “I've been spanking to Gaucho a lot more lately and I'll be damned if it isn't one of the most interesting, funny, and complicated enters I think I've ever heard. In this scheme, I will, of course, not be felched.” From now on, this will be my auto-edit tool for anybody else’s writing.

Q is for "Quito" by The Mountain Goats, because J0hn Darn1elle probably never wrote a more concise, hopeful and bittersweetly redemptive song, which is like saying it's a hot day in hell or this is the nicest private beach I've been to all financial quarter.

R is for R.I.P., unfortunately. Ali Farka Toure, Ray Barretto, and Ivor Cutler – all in the last couple weeks. I’m most familiar with Ali Farka’s stuff, but I distinctly remember when I first heard Cutler’s “Jam” – which is well worth seeking out, or you can get an idea of his humor here – and I’m fairly new to Barretto, but I’ve been listening to his solo stuff and the Soul Jazz Nu Yorica compilations a LOT lately, and am absolutely certain that the world would benefit from listening to more 60s salsa.

S is for Searching for Steely Dan, a novel about a disillusioned writer who gets dumped by his wife and begins a hopeless search for Steely Dan. How the hell could I possibly accentuate both the implicit and explicit comedy of that premise?

T is for “Together” by Ray Barretto, one of the few idealistic civil rights/people-come-together songs whose message and motor is so irresistible that it makes me wish I had a conga to beat until I bruised my palms and bled rainbows out of my eyes. I silently frown at my dad for spending 1970 playing 22-minute covers of “Cinnamon Girl” in a dorm room.

U is for “Unicorn” by Panash; come for the Pepe Bradock connection, stay for a clumsy toy-house beat, a bassline that lopes like the speaker is gargling a broken hum, and huge middle section where wisps of melodic noise keep getting cut out and distorted abruptly, like two second strobes of MBV’s Loveless jazz blasting through the void. The “psych-house” tag was a really suspicious promise, but this track’s hooks are in my brain for serious.

V is for V/VM's Sick Love, because nothing says Valentine's Day like getting drunk on a roughshod dinghy and throwing your dramamine overboard to the sound of Throbbing Gristle screwed + chopped.

W is for “Wait” by Lou Reed. I found Lou most entertaining as Jangles the Junkie in Enfeebled Reflections on ‘American Graffiti’, where “Wait” is one of the highlights. A few years ago – college daze – I went to a party, got dangerously drunk, and proceeded to use the host house’s bathroom as my own private meditation chamber. I was wearing sunglasses and a long t-shirt with the words “I am insightful thinker” – a compliment I had been paid that morning by my sterile Literature TA – scrawled awkwardly in Sharpie across my stomach. Whenever anyone banged on the door, I shouted “get the fuck away, I’m Lou Reed.” In the morning, I awoke and walked out into the living room to find a chubby guy with dreadlocks watching television. He looked up and said “Hey look it’s Lou Reed.” I always figured the disgusting, half-assed Caddy fin 50s rock of “Wait” was basically what polluted me into being proud of that moment.

X is for I am resourceful but not that resourceful and I don't really like either X or Xibit and don't feel like XTC; I guess X is Xian forgiveness for my mortal shortcomings. Or the Xi'an province, home of the Big Goose Pagoda. Either way.

Y is for "You'll Never Get to Heaven (If You Break My Heart)" by the Stylistics, because girl, you are going to burn in hell for breaking up with me and there's nobody better to tell you than a bunch of well-dressed castrati from Philadelphia.

Z is for the theme from Zombi by Fabio Frizzi, because no matter how much I want to feel t0t411y 4we50m3 about life, dread pwns happiness on the existential richness scale, no count no question.

Yeah!

And because I'm forcing a new phase of universal acceptance, a very hearty hello to the two people that have come from the MSN search results for girls getting fucked by dogs, where this blog humbly and bewilderingly appears.

"Holdin' On Like a Hubcap in the Fast Lane": A Dictionary For Curing Hella Seasonal Depression (A thru M)

2006-03-07T11:31:00.000-05:00

It's a Metaphor: Minotaurs

A is for "American Music" by the Violent Femmes, wherein lead Femme Gordon Gano figured out how to trick a fumbling tryst between Tom Petty and Phil Spector that ends in a rave-up, sound like woe actually is him and still more cheery-charming than Jonathan Richman or unapologetically fucked up than Spiritualized. Like a huge party in a chapel where all the mistakes you’ve ever made get wasted and tousle your hair but don't exactly forgive you.

B is for “Blue Nile” by Alice Coltrane for when you can’t afford mushrooms and don’t feel like putting on your sarong but wouldn’t mind the full Hippie Jazz Entropical Vacation package where Pharoah Sanders paddles you through a dark, verdant corridor to a whoosh-waterfall of a harp solo with just enough augmented chords to rip the pants off Debussy and rub him down with scented oil while he’s nodded out cross-legged on a hooked rug yeah.

C is for Candi Staton’s “I’d Rather Be an Old Man’s Sweetheart”, a gutting piece of soul music that makes having sex with geriatrics sound deeply comfortable and disconcertingly alluring.

D is for Destroyer’s “Thief”, a set of lyrics I’d tattoo on my back if someone put up the money for it or at least let me bite down on their forearm when I feel the words “You take back the curse but the girl just gets every rip-off artist to paint a picture / Of a world at war / When the world was not at war,” be it a need borne of pain or because I didn’t want the body artist to see me crying softly into my chest hair.

E is for E-40’s “The Slap”; I saw E-40 host MTV2's Sucka Free Countdown the other day, and in one segment, Ghostface showed up on a video screen and asked E-40 how he comes up with all his great slang; E-40 responded with 20 seconds of flashy, affirmative nonsense.

So, well, sort of like

THE NORTH STAR: How do you shine so nice?

A SMALL, DISTANT STAR: So okay there are like these things called Giant Molecular Clouds and

or

COW: How do you get your milk so sweet?

GOAT: Baaaaa

F is for Frank Kogan, because I never really cared for reading “music criticism” up until a year or so ago and now I feel like I’ve got some catching up to do, because I’m totally intrigued by the well-studied alien approach. I’m really excited for Real Punks Don’t Wear Black to arrive.

G is for Gilberto Gil and Os Mutantes performing "Domingo No Parque" on TV. It’s not just because the coda makes me deliriously happy and thoroughly inspired, but because it’s interesting to be reminded that Tropicalia wasn’t a) off the radar or b) universally accepted – the audience noise is pretty constant, and the tone of the response is pretty mixed. Not sure where this is from, but then again, that’s the rootless joy of YouTube for you, isn’t it. Also, Os Mutantes: really silly-looking.

H is for Harry Nilsson’s “The Most Beautiful World in the World”, a song that implicitly mocks The Jungle Book using the same colonial islander-folk vibe of “Coconut” or later “Kokomo,” but then breaks into an extended world :: woman metaphor over a schlocky orchestral passage, spotlight and all. Moral is, breasts – touch them, if you can, because we’re just on a long shimmy to the grave.

I is for “I Want to See The Bright Lights Tonight” by Richard and Linda Thompson. PBW wanders into Cheers on Friday afternoon and finally sees the appeal – good-old-tymes, straight backslappin’ and yukkin’ it up in sepia; also, briefly surrender to what people see in the sagging anachro-folk-rock of The Band.

J is for “Jealous Guy” as performed by Donny Hathaway, because I like Bryan Ferry better than John Lennon, but I’m wringing out the sad sacks in favor of the self-possessed for right now. Hathaway’s meaty staccato maximizes every saloon syncopation “Benny and the Jets”-style; the unambiguous confidence in his voice spanks every idealization of the Trembling Patriarchal Sissy and sends them back to their rooms.

K is for Kano’s “Mic Check (Remix)” not because I was all that thrilled with his Beats and Bars mixtape or even this song, but because his justification/evidence for being crazy and fucked up is that he’s a minotaur.

L is for Lil’ Wayne’s “Tha Mobb”. I still basically consider myself a casual rap listener, and I really don’t know if the way I hear this stuff is at all similar to the way other people do, but what I really find amazing about Tha Carter II’s opening – save the fact that at 5:20 and no chorus, it’s obviously an expository flex – is Wayne’s scorched-earth tableau of jungle survivalism. If I cringe when he says “And the beat keep cryin’ and I’m’a keep beatin’ her,” I get serious goosebumps when he moans “I’m hungry like I didn’t eat/I want it like I didn’t see a meal before 17” and I usually go bliss-blank when he hits blockbuster shamanism: “I’m in the sky when the thunder’s cryin”; he steals from bears, compares himself to a shark, gorilla, and a tiger, loses the beat and gains the power of invincibility: “Start ‘em ignite ‘em I walk through fire / Watch the flames start multiplyin.’” I know that buying into CGI anim/animalism morph jobs is its own trap, but it’s a lot more interesting than jewelry or his basketball metaphors.

M is for “Misen Gymnastics” by Oorutaichi, which ostensibly imagines the Talking Heads’ “I Zimbra” as the soundtrack to an anime orgy of jungle mutants. I got a copy of Yori Yoyo, language barrier and all, and it’s got some wonderful moments. Not sure how space disco it is, and it doesn’t really help alleviate the “wacky Japan” stereotype, but it definitely fits in with the neo-tribal naïf/cartoon aesthetic I fall for pretty easily.

(Please check back later today or tomorrow for the thrilling "N thru Zed" portion, which will include specious obituaries, me cautiously proclaiming my love for 60s NY salsa, and a humorous anecdote about a time I slept in someone's bathroom, totally uninvited.)

A Half-Baked Cake: Year Zero (a)

2006-03-02T20:09:00.000-05:00

The old future fear is at my ankles again. At Simon's postpunk panel the other night, Orange Juice's Steve Daly asserted that their passion for Chic was partially because they sounded like they were from a distant era and James Chance quipped that today's socioeconomic climate basically prohibits the kind of "rock & dole" (to use Vivien Goldman's phrase) insurance that cushioned the radicalism of 80s musicians. Sum: a reiteration of the Year Zero myth, either the chicken or the egg for aforementioned ripping up, starting again.

I often joke with my girlfriend that I'd be much more entertained (but fare much worse) in the world if we had a societal apocalypse; funny that Slick Contrarian Chance bitterly suggested that it would be the only thing to prime us for anything new. The humor was there and it was black, but there was something nostalgic in his words; nostalgia is part retreat, but it's also part tenderness, and weirdly enough, it was one of the most bittersweet things I'd heard anyone say in a while.

So what does the present think of the future now? A while back I was fixated on the John Coltrane/Sun Ra/Funkadelic --> Detroit techno idea of futurism and final frontiers; Space is the Place because it's half as shitty as things are here. But do we have that anymore? Do we want it? Funny that the most salient expression of a desire for newness is actually forced regression; combine the scorched-earth imagery of Chance's assertion with the idiot rumble of say Mars or DNA and mix in a bit of the communo-idealism of those space jazz fantasies, and you've got some sort of building blocks for the nu-primitivism trend. Freak-folk, not so much; I only half-buy what they're saying anyhow, and I'm more inclined to lump Animal Collective in with later Boredoms/Voordoms -- big-hearted cavemen in hoodies with digial processing racks, fetishizing the barely lingual/cavepainting shennanigans of B.C. as cautiously as the idealistic quartz & circutry signs of the future.

Weirdly enough, the gaping hole in AC/Boredoms and in older Year Zero iterations (or at least the attempts at time-erasure), is the present. I had actually thought about this before in terms of ELO (who seem funny in this context), but it's really the same kind of deal: present sucks; past seems pretty good and the unknown future is at least promising, so conflate the latter two and you have a new, seemingly unfeasible present. Even the phrase "rip it up and start again" and the whole notion of "starting over" at least half-suggests to me that you're doomed to go pick up some of the old signifiers on the way (Devo saying that they wanted to make "outerspace caveman" music is pretty blatant, if you ask me).

What I can say for sure is that NASA beat Sun Ra to space and all we've got now is earth; the iconography of nature - from Black Dice's Beaches and Canyons to endless Wolf ____ or "Animal" _____ bands (and even a zombie fetish, really) seems to all point to a surrender of the fact that the future actually already happened sometime around 1980, when Chance/Devo/PiL/etc. shamed space dreams by making something twice as potent as laserbeams, and now we can't even get the peace and quiet to make clanging rocks sound like a beginning of anything.

Not sure just where to go with this because the present inspires me in really ambiguous ways (is panamorous resignation a sign of inspiration? har) - at least half-evidenced by the fact that Chance's depiction of early 80s NYC put the yearn in me more than anything else.

Who am I kidding; I'm listening to Merle Haggard reissues and drinking coffee, I am not the 2020 man.

(Addendum: I'd be totally irresponsible to *not acknowledge* the fact that AC are white and from rural Maryland, while Sun Ra did his most famous work in Chicago and Philadelphia; Funkadelic were from Detroit -- i.e. AC's escapism is a bit flimsier when you think about the fact that they're not exactly pulling free from the jaws of racism or poverty or urban blight or anything. I don't see many parallels on the disenfranchised front.)

Slipp'd Back Under The Mattress

2006-02-27T15:14:00.000-05:00

Kinda the Point This Time: Ariel Pink

Ariel Pink: terrible live act. Terrible at being alive - surprise! Now I will remind you that it's not the point, just like I hear it's not the point to listen to Sonny Rollins or Lightning Bolt or Anthony Robbins on CD.

The weird thing about Nick's take is that I suspect we're vaguely yin/yang about it, acknowledging similar concepts in different ways. The Ariel Pink-as-idiot-savant is totally hollow, though probably what a lot of people basically think about him. Still, the Ariel Pink-as-artiste/con has its own complications, namely that he's been doing this for years with next-to-no audience. While he's not actually "backwoods" or a "madman," his ambition and tenacity is a sorta tragic existential blooper; if his comic jones is selling out shows and putting on bad performances, ours is relishing in the fact that he ostensibly loves embarrassing himself (and skipping his show next time around).

The pornstar comparison that Nick suggested was sort of exactly what I was thinking when I left the show, because like porn, Ariel relies on the distancing powers of his medium to actually exist (again, ghosts); it's why we have additional, crucial concepts like "stripper." I don't think he even had to play the haggard version that night, but on other levels, it makes sense. Ariel's nothing without his rouge, because that's all he is - cut him, he bleeds makeup; seeing him au naturale is a psychically chalky experience.

Of course it's a schtick; that's never been in doubt to me. Still, any schtick can produce a real reaction via concept or not. Ten minutes before I left, I was blathering on about how Ariel Pink is like Vito Acconci's Seedbed, where he lay under a ramp in the middle of the gallery and masturbated while talking about the people that were actually in the gallery, who could hear him but couldn't see him. And we know that all good ghosts are heard and not seen Seriously, who wants a long-haired Italian guy standing in front of you fantasizing aloud and masturbating?

Unclassics 2

2006-02-24T08:07:00.000-05:00

A Pacifier for PBW: Robert Ashley, 1975, Straight Abstractin'

(Dear MP, so as to never betray the titular Breath)

UNCLASSICS 2: Robert Ashley, Private Parts

"When he is alone, he forgets sometimes to walk; he just moves."

For me, the early 90s will always be about two things: perennially chapped lips and the Blizzard of Mortality (just came up with that). I was a neurotic child, but it was only then - in the midst of the very earliest strains of adolescence - that I experienced the humorous psychic upgrade of being able to actually conceptualize my own obsessiveness in addition to being it. If you get my meaning. Point is, I thought about death constantly and just assumed that everyone else did, too; someone did me an unfortunate injustice by actually pointing out that No Mike, you are just obsessively morbid. (Thanks, Mom!) Anyway, the holy men didn't help, but Samuel Beckett eventually did; I don't have any of those books I got at that weird shop with the Egyptian figures outside anymore, and eventually, I heard Private Parts.

Ashley's legacy with "pop" (read here: non-classical) listeners is probably "Automatic Writing," seven minutes of which was excerpted for the OHM early electronic music compilation. It's an amazing piece of music; what I personally always loved about it was its unsettling nearness: close mic'd manipulated vocals that sound like spit hitting a fryer, or the mixed blessing of a salamander's tail tickling your ear. I'll talk about sex another day.

Private Parts, whose two 20something-minute-long pieces bookend Ashley's "television opera" Perfect Lives is none of that, and it's also none of what I take to be the relative tedium of his other operas. Mom used to give me meditation tapes during the Bliz. of Mort., but I'd turn them off (they were lame); "the light" and "pyramids" are actually pretty stressful, it turns out.

Private Parts IS a meditation record though, insofar as offers an experience that doesn't combat thought - a dumb goal, if you ask me - but one that takes thought at a manageable speed, with reigns. Just Ashley's passive, conversational monotone slipping in and out of rhythm with polite tablas, the absolutely intoxicating shlock of "Blue" Gene Tyranny's new age parlor-room piano rolls and the wash of synth strings. The crux: thinking happens too fast - or, too fast for us to record - the regularity of conceptual lilypads and leapfrogging is a mixed blessing. Private Parts is a stream of consciousness narrative screwed to a crawl; you get each idea, one by one, in illogical succession. Sensibly, then, it provides equal room for the abstract - "I am a city of habits" - and the mundane - "the sculptor has made the horse look stupid"; sometimes they embrace in clumsy eurekas: "the camera is obsessed with what it sees: the park, the ragged edge; nothing moves except the edge / the edge moves; it's as if there is no other place."

If Private Parts is ever dull - which it isn't, to me - it's because it seems to stretch for Placid Yogic Meaning and the faux-poeticism of monolithic statements; still, Ashley slips enough humanity into the narrative to remind you that hell yeah, this is just earth, and it's always at least mildly funny, and it's boring, and it's wonderful; the main character in "The Park" sitting on his hotel bed, drinking whiskey from a plastic glass: "he thought to himself, if I were from the big town, I'd be calm and debonair; the big town doesn't send its riff raff out."

Lou Reed's asinine motivational epigram - "between thought and expression lasts a lifetime" - never seemed more accurate, more accidentally meaningful. Private Parts is important to me because it's a meditation record that never leaves the ground; the words are soothing and linear; each tiny space between thoughts is protracted in time. Ashley even acknowledges it: "Thus they came to make a great division between that which was impermenant and that which was permanent... On the permanent side of this great division of reality is a notion they referred to as 'space,' and by that term, they meant nether conceptual space or space as given by our senses. They meant connections. They decided that such space is irreducible and not transitory, and that it exists as long as one is alive. They wondered, naturally, what becomes of it."

Me with Private Parts, 10 years old, finally calm, stroking my chubby chin:

"His idea is that death always takes one by surprise. Always. There is no way to prepare. He imagines absolute awareness on the other side; he wonders, as we all do, how it comes to you that you are dead. We were distracted by the fluid right edge."

2006-02-21T21:46:00.000-05:00

Steely Dan at the precise moment that they became slightly repulsed and deeply, distantly amused by even their own existence

I've been listening to Gaucho a lot more lately and I'll be damned if it isn't one of the most interesting, funny, and complicated records I think I've ever heard. In this scheme, I will, of course, not be damned.

("The Dan" is really one of the worst band nicknames ever.) In service of "The Dan"'s greatness and in an effort to make them more "accessible" i.e. marketable to that coveted Under 35 and Earnestly Thoughtless demographic, I am pitching a concept to Rockstar Games (makers of the Grand Theft Auto series) for a Gaucho video game.

Bullet points include:

- Walter Becker is late for a session and boy, is Gary Katz angry! You have to find Becker in his hotel suite - which is ample - before MCA goes over budget on the hired session musicians; the MCA DollarClock in the upper-left hand corner will tell you exactly how much Becker's mischievious antics are costing the label. After five minutes, Becker starts blowing coke and the DollarClock accelerates exponentially. Is he under those magazines? Behind that shower curtain? On the move? Upon losing, an A&R man pats your balls with the back of his hand and buys you a Greyhound ticket back to Cincinnati. Becker sniggers.

- A "rhythm"-based section (a la Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero) wherein you discover an extremely tired and dejected Mark Knopfler alone in the studio, having just heard the final mix of "Time Out of Mind" and realizing that several hours of slaving under the fickle whims of Becker and Fagen were reduced to about seven seconds of bright guitar squiggle. You have to copy all of the "licks" rejected for the album; if you succeed, Fagen calls a car service for Knopfler, who sobs softly and erratically bleats "You know what? I like the ECM catalog! Yeah, the whole fuckin' thing! Not just Keith Jarrett!" Fagen looks away.

Willie Nelson: Gay Enough?

2006-02-20T15:01:00.000-05:00

UP YOURS, YOU STRAIGHT BASTARDS: WILLIE NELSON AND ANOTHER HETEROSEXUAL MAN

How about them gay cowboys, etc. Radicalism is passe and all, but doesn't this sound sort of like Christmas? Wait, I guess what I meant was, I didn't realize that it was every gay man's dream to be a straight woman. Wait, I guess what I meant was, at least you could have tried to put some gloss on 25-year-old rhetoric. Elsewhere: "Mỹ Lai, Maybe," a vaguely anti-war song Willie dug up from 1969 and "Syncopation Is Alright (In Moderate Doses)" a 1979 attempt to traverse the disco crowd. I want to be happier - gayer, even - about this, but softball just isn't that fun.

Apotheosis, Finale

2006-02-17T17:46:00.000-05:00

Steely Dan, Gaucho :: AIBO

All the annoyances and charms of earthly faults excised! Something so exact as to be completely alienating, something whose mimicry of life is precise to the point of totally missing the mark! In missing the mark, it shoots right to a vacant lot in your fucked-up bog of emotions that you never realized existed and takes a lifetime lease.

Wherein The Question of "Who Let The Dogs Out?" is Once Again Tastelessly Referenced but Not Answered

2006-02-15T15:11:00.001-05:00

44 TERRIERS AND I'M STARTING TO THINK SOMEONE GOT ROBBED

I don't celebrate Valentine's Day for about a hundred obvious, boring anticapitalist complaints about the commodification of love and so forth, but this year, it went thoroughly and especially ingored because it was Day 2 of the 130th Annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. Fellas (and ladies), you need a lady or maybe a fella that understands you, and my beloved knows that if there's one thing I like more than coffee or saunas (or her), it's looking at dogs. They're just better than people. Because we've bred them that way.

Anyhow, I thought that in the spirit of Dog Awesomery, obvious, etc (be a good sport and look at the pictures to get in the mood):

U2, How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb :: Golden Retriever

Last night I was actually at the dog show, and you have no idea how much idiot noise was made for this pup. Lowest common denominator. People in the stands who are obviously as blindly emotional and uncritical of dogs as I am blurting Oh yeah the golden, that's a great dog, wow. Just think of this exchange:

Oh what kind of music do you listen to
Oh I dunno like rock music
Oh like what
I dunno, that new U2 is great

and sub out "music do you listen to" for "animals that you like" and "rock music" for "dogs" and "U2" for "golden retriever" and you know what I'm getting at. Like U2, Golden Retrievers are just pretty good, and so omnipresent that you often forget that they exist.

Girls Aloud, Chemistry :: Pekingese

When you first look at it you think "oh well sure, it's no wonder young girls love this," but then you keep looking at it and you start thinking this dog is fucking insane looking how does it fit together? After that, you maintain a queasy, self-conscious love for it, but one ultimately governed by a hybrid of awe and repulsion.

Ariel Pink :: Dandie Dinmont Terrier

It looks and moves as if it were enveloped by stale air or has some rare pulmonary disease. My first thought was that it was actually a Trojan Horse for alien life forms; a dog that someone would make if it were trying to somehow infiltrate and destroy the whole idea of Dogs, period. It creeped the hell out of me and I couldn't take my eyes off it.

The Arctic Monkeys, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not :: Old English Sheepdog

There's definitely something good here, but it's hard to really figure out what it is because you're a little distracted by all the fluff surrounding it, aren't you.

Cat Power, The Greatest :: French Bulldog

Great quasi-hip MOR stuff for people who are afraid to admit how stinkingly MOR they are. Also, you can't walk six blocks in North Brooklyn or Lower Manhattan without seeing it.

The Go! Team, Thunder, Lightning, Strike :: Welsh Corgi

Announcers on dog shows often say things like What personality! BOY, now that's a big dog in a little package! Well, yeah. Also, Corgis have a kind of nice, fat body but tiny lil' legs, so they don't really go anywhere.

No-Neck Blues Band, Qvaris :: Lhasa Apso

Mystical, long haired, seemingly wise, vaguely disgusting.

M.I.A., Arular :: Pharoah Hound

This dog is great: sleek, beautiful, and somewhat exotic. Nobody owns them.

Honey, That Frosting is Improbable

2006-02-12T13:59:00.000-05:00

Snow sprinkles outside still; I spent the morning huddled on the couch catching up on work, breaking to watch a video of PiL on American Bandstand. I could strut and flex whatever metaphorical muscles I had (delts, mostly), but nothing goes so far as simply watching Lydon forcibly shove unsuspecting ladies onto the stage, not smiling but hardly able to contain his glee; he doesn't bother to mime performance, and neither does the rest of the band. "Careering" finds fun people smiling happy fun dance what?

Trying to find some information about the event, I stumbled on collective musings on when American Bandstand proverbially jumped the shark; one man, heart broken:

"This was much like the curtain being drawn back on the Great OZ. At the same time I was on the floor gasping for breath with laughter, I also felt a deep sense of betrayal. Dick Clark had lied to me!! To us all!! From that moment forward AB became a sad joke to me."

Firstly, two exclamation points is always weird. Had to say. Hoo. Anyway, it's a great comment because it suggests a time when stuff like PiL was actually slithering around the mainstream in an antagonistic (at least interesting and entertaining) way, when seeing something like that would've actually fucked with an unsuspecting audience rather than simply stroking the "experimental" set; see also the odd paradox that music like this can't really get any POP defamation-scramble going because there is no comparable event nowadays to PiL on American Bandstand and it's almost impossible to imagine one. (Incidental charm in comment - laughing hysterically while feeling betrayed: rare feeling, good feeling.) Now I guess the hopefuls are supposed to be content with a separate piece/peace, the suggestion of a cosmic head pat, sweet-ass remasters and message board discussion (I often feel like I'm huddled at a fire under the Great Bridge of the Universe with hobos eating dirt and developing sores). Anyway, yeah, it is inspiring to see this. Slap me out of my coma when Janet's other tit slips out of her corset or Kanye starts defaming lesser apostles.

On another note, whoever did the inappropriately upbeat soundtrack to The Last House on the Left is almost enviably sick; like The Benny Hill Show but, y'know, over 17-year-old girls being raped, forced to piss themselves and hit each other while they sob in terror by some convicts that basically look like The Strokes.

Lame, But

2006-02-10T12:12:00.000-05:00

The last few days have been more work and movies than music (The Kingdom, TV Party: The Documentary, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was fucking fantastic), but I wanted to at least come here to let "everyone" know that:

You can stream the new Destroyer album here.

You can stream the new Tom Ze album here.

I've been writing about both of them and I'm really excited about both of them. Both. Yes. Friday!

(Groan)

2006-02-07T13:42:00.000-05:00

K-punk, alive, went and drew zombies to the window, which is fine, but me - zombie me of this spot’s banner - wasn't to sit still long. Simon brought a rifle from the basement, but I wouldn't mind letting our blank friends in for a sit, to, you know, pick their brains. See, K-punk’s suggestion – “What Pop lacks now is the capacity for nihilation, for producing new potentials through the negation of what already exists” – rang a big bell in my Warhol house; go ahead and look at Elvis up there, repeated and decentralized, each one an imitation of the other with no original in sight. Warhol broke Elvis’ uniqueness by serializing his being – no essence there. Zombies, too, are mimetic: the infected feasts on the flesh of something living in order to, a la their conceptual cousin the vampire, turn the other being not into itself, but something *like* itself that functions in the same way.

What's interesting isn’t the mere metatphor of the zombie, but rather who gets to lay claim to coveted undead status. Fuck Bret Michaels, who might be animatronic or built ground-up from plasticine, it’s consumers that strike me more as zombie-types these days. Simon talks about download fever and overconsumption; in 1982, I slid out and have been an omnivore ever since. At first, downloading was a way for me to delve into marginalia of favorite bands; over time, it became a street for me to stalk, gnawing at everything that twitched in the corner of my eye.

Part of the issue is perhaps a misguided obedience to the idea of eclecticism. For whatever we say about “rockism” or whatever, I think most people still tend to associate the idea – which is supposed to be about the discourse around music rather than the music itself, I guess – with “rock.” The word, fer chrissakes; get a new one or something. Point being, Simon’s gone into “you can still talk about hip-hop like a rockist” rhetoric, which, while not exactly shocking, does remind us that eclecticism is not the opposite of K-punk’s nihilation scheme, per se. If anything, one goes to blow a smoke veil in front of the other – having more kinds of music suggests to us that there is healthy competition, when really, music just seems more delicately and thoroughly segregated.
(The impression of some difference – the imperfections of Warhol’s silkscreen technique, the subtle variations of color, the suggestion of a zombie’s individuality from the physical resemblance to their pre-undead source material – could remind me of pop’s slim pickins and the confusion between superficial diversity and true negation.)

The thing about Warhol was that he meant well. You know the whole possession trope – “Oh shit, that’s my song” – well, Warhol wanted that too, talking in The Philosophy about playing a record enough to literally empty it of meaning and become a repository for one’s individuality, memories, etc. Warhol wanted this stuff to just get more similar, to get played not into death but into undeath where they could live again as a-conscious placeholders. I’m not advocating that method of consumerism per se, but it does seem to repeat the zombie propagation plan – take something and empty it of itself; make it you.

I’m not sure exactly what kind of hope to have in this other than to cast it in a weird quasi-historical capitulation: the most ironic, inverted aspect of Warhol’s zombie pop vision was that he made his crusade for mimesis/viral repetition/homogeneity into his signature trope, which was brilliant and marginally evil – part of what makes him such an interesting character, really. Still, that ideal’s gone dead; we’re post-possible in making zombies inspiring figures, really.

--

To get out of the space of the theoretical for a few wooden words:

Who the fuck listens to “pop” anymore besides wanks like me/you that are self-conscious enough to use the word? Ask my 13-year-old sister if she listens to pop. Duh, she listens to rock (Greenday) or hip-hop (Black-Eyed Peas); she listens to country (Willie Nelson), but I doubt she’d say “I listen to pop music.” Of course, we’ve got the Pop and the pop(ular) divide to deal with here, one that seems to only have increased as genres spawn indefinitely and we’re all told to respect everything – totally “separate but equal” in some sense. If ABC still exists, it’s through the hyper-critical/self-consciousness of – gasp – Art Brut or through the “enlightened” production fetishists that enshrine Richard X or – ha-ha-ha, Jazze Pha.

I realize this goes in a different direction than the “retro” aspect of what Mark & Simon were talking about, but I think it’s important to lay some sort of responsibility somewhere other than the bands themselves – the Arctic Monkeys don’t have hundreds of thousands of co-workers/proud aunts/girlfriends, they have fans, and they’re hungry for something, anything.

PBW Hit Current Channels

2006-02-05T15:43:00.001-05:00

A hair past 23 years, my first heave-ho. Hopefully more in the future; we'll see if I can "hack it."

New York City: > Art?

2006-01-31T14:07:00.000-05:00

Can you guess which writer of this blog is subject to rather unpleasant mood swings at any given moment?

If you said me, you're correct!

I pulled the last post because it bored me, because sometimes I bore myself, because I Love Music bores me with their endless wheezing about when Pazz & Jop is going to go up so they can respond by posting even more hilarious gifs and cross-referencing past-dated debates about M.I.A. and slagging people who are optimistic about the world.

Anyway, I felt buried last night until I finally decided to see Deerhoof, who grows in my mind with each encounter. A reputable lover of the band gave me some playful criticism earlier that day: "ha i can't believe you go to these shows if you hate the band so much." It's not that I hate The Runners Four, it's that I reached a point where I wasn't really getting it and lost interest in figuring it out. Still, something got me up off the couch to see the show, and night's end, I was glad I had. I especially enjoyed Martha Colburn's films, so much so that I went home and wrote an email to her over her website before actually taking my shoes off. Like Deerhoof, I'd rather meet them halfway than risk them losing something coming over to me, a sentiment the crowd apparently didn't share. Muse on downsides of popularity. Lament the embarrassment of idiocy. Shut up.

Colburn's films, in their best moments, did what the band's music can do to me: rub this weird spot at the base of my skull where insurmountable fear gathers with memories of childhood reflections on sex and death (I sought help as a kid; it didn't help). Saying things are "uncanny" seems like a tired trope, but I think it's in part because either A) so many people are reluctant to even face the shades of those emotions or B) nobody knows how to talk about them because it's difficult to do it without sounding like an ass. Suffice it to say that seeing "Mexuality," a handpainted series of lucha libre wrestlers growing breasts and lactating, animated cocks springing forth from between photographs of female legs, and pinups turning into skeletons activated the same fluidity of feeling and conceptualization that doesn't reflect the wonder of fantasy so much as the frightening aspects of it - when you don't know any better, the shadows of your understanding are more easily filled by fear than comfort. Deerhoof are excellent performers; while I actually liked the material from The Runners Four more last night than I ever have on record, I couldn't help but get the feeling that the band had somehow turned 2D while I was inhaling. "The Last Trumpeter Swan," the 8-minute dirge on Reveille, was the best thing I heard all night, because I got so lost that I hardly noticed the girls brushing past me to get some air during what I guess was "the boring part." The tech guys couldn't figure out how to light them during the song - it's not obvious - everything turned that great crepuscular blue; at the height of noise, I didn't know what I heard, really. Couldn't shut my mouth, hold a thought.

Steel Cage

2006-01-25T22:16:00.000-05:00

Indefinitely: Charlemagne Palestine

I am sort of bored of hearing about Jay-Z and Cam'ron. Sorry, I would've found more links, but those pretty much cover it really. Anyway, I got to thinking, yeah, beef is sorely missing from the wondrous outre world. So yeah. EXCLUSIVES.

PRURIENT slams WHITEHOUSE in massive lathe cut dis. Dis mostly unintelligible over pulsing sheets of noise, but I think he picks on their sunglasses and then there's something about paunch and then a lot of screaming about infectious disease and whatnot.

JOANNA NEWSOM rips VASHTI BUNYAN in live performance. Newsom's harpstrings got real tight when someone shouted for "Just Another Diamond Day" at a show Friday night, to which she grumbled politely about Bunyan being washed up. Bunyan fired back early Sunday morning by having a cup of tea with her son and brushing a horse.

JHONN BALANCE and DAVID TIBET. Before Balance's death, he and the Current 93 totem had been having intense quarrels about the occult. Deeply frustrated, Tibet showed up to Balance's home under the shroud of night and released an upset fox onto his yard; the fox howled briefly and Tibet warbled "NIIIIIIGHHHT;" the fox trotted away with indifference. The 3" CD will be released on Durtro Jnana in March with a limited screenprinted canvas sleeve to fund central air conditioning for Threshold House and to appease the spirits.

CHARLEMAGNE PALESTINE battles LA MONTE YOUNG. Both composers played eigth notes on grand pianos for four hours before the exhausted Young threw up on the keys and wiped his mouth with his kercheif; Palestine played for six more hours and then saw god.

Faceless, Nameless

2006-01-24T15:25:00.002-05:00

I've been listening to the Various Production stuff lately, which is stylistically all over the map - from folky drone and sampling weirdness to chilly, subdued club stuff - but pretty intriguing. They're doing a DJ set on BBC's The Breezeblock tonight, which is archived and readily PBW-endorsed if with a bit of mystery & confusion, if for nothing else than to hear Mary Anne Hobbs say things like "aww, that is rough" and "like a gorgeous shimmering mirage on the fire escapes of the underground" in her hazy phone-sex diction. Anglophilia in heat over here.

Unclassics 1/Stray Notes

2006-01-23T17:35:00.000-05:00

PBW now with more dogs dope and ghosts than ever. But really. "Have you heard about this house? How we idolize, theorize, syllogize, in the dark, in the heart," etc. Well, that's where the hauntology riffage will happen from now on, as the dorks begin to crawl on ceilings and frighten others.

This might be a tired idea - and one that could last for only a handful of posts - but I figured I would make an attempt at sharing albums that have either 1. not gotten a fair shake or 2. I love and nobody else does but I love them so deal with it, okay? The name is pinched from a Morgan Geist compilation of rare disco, but it sounds a lot better than PBW's Unsung Heroes or PBW In Tha Vault or some other allstar trash. On with.

UNCLASSICS 1: Julee Cruise, Floating into the Night

"When you told your secret name, I burst in flame and burned, I'm floating."

David Lynch's movies have never been puzzles to me as much as they've been about a kind of nonsense; the performances he's wrung from actors always attain a kind of forced affect that often exposes the arbitrariness of our own feelings and reactions to the world (just think of the disjointed hypermasculinity of Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet; his "daddy wants to fuck" rhetoric, silly "well-dressed man" disguise, and the erratic way he heads his gang of equally archetypal creeps). Hearing Julee Cruise's "The Mysteries of Love" in that movie provided something of a revelation to me: a love song that was earnest to the point of sounding alien, like someone writing what they think a love lyric should sound like, but instead coming out with a series of unsympathetic non-sequiturs. In full: "Sometimes a wind blows and you and I float in love, and kiss forever in a darkness/And the mysteries of love come clear and dance in light, in you, in me, and show that we are Love;" a slight breath over supple analog synths and all flags flying for heaven, buff on the pillow of a cloud, etc. All that and a wave of angels in soft focus. Desire in italics. So forth.

Anyway, Cruise wasn't even supposed to sing; at the time, she was a talent scout for Lynch's composer Angelo Badalamenti. When Badalamenti heard her voice - a wispy, bloodless sigh, sexy and seemingly without emotion - she was drafted to perform "Mysteries of Love." Eventually, the collaboration between the two (and Lynch, who wrote the lyrics) produced Floating into the Night, a full album of surreal pre-rock slink, doo-wop balladry, shifty golden age nocturnes like "Sleepwalking," and even cool jazz, all heard through the fog of a faux-new-age unconscious. Cue Sherilyn Fenn as absent Audrey Horne in Twin Peaks putting on the jukebox, swaying like a hung body, moaning: "God, I love this music; isn't it too dreamy?" That messed me up some, yeh.

It's impossible to ignore what makes this album creepy, but it's also an evasive element of certain music that I adore but have a difficult time putting my finger on. In Floating, the extended ache of a thousand slowdances thwarted by the ruler-distance etiquette of the 50s finally capitulates like wild in a muted underground; the kids didn't want to just kiss, they wanted to claw at each other in shadows totally beyond reason; they don't want to have fun when they fuck so much as feel like they transcend the murk of the idiot lovesickness that they don't know what to do with. Cruise wraps the girl-next-door fantasy in impenetrable mystery and weirdness, conjuring a teenage affect that at times seems incredibly real, but just as often completely contrived in its extremes. It's a dangerous balance, one that almost insults the depth of our emotions by clumsily playacting them, but in the process, Floating opens up a new, absent kind of romanticism where we're rubbed anonymous, blank, and in turn, more poised for passion than before.

Never To Forget You, Cuddles

2006-01-18T14:59:00.000-05:00

I was lying in bed last night making headway on dreaming the dreams I do (hint: mostly about dogs, the kind I think I'd get and the kind I'd ideally get if their temperment didn't concern me so), and I thought, Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished, duh. Now, I wouldn't say it's prime hauntology, but it'd be foolish not to give my favorite band a shot at the matter, wouldn't it? Now, it wasn't for nothing that Animal Collective brought Ariel Pink into their fold, I don't think. Spirit, especially, bears certain resonances with this idea being bandied about: ghostliness as a life of contradiction (present and absent). The title itself is great temporal-existential fuckery: two iterations of the same idea/phenomenon (absence) in the language of the present ("they're gone") and past ("they've vanished") in one sentence. The cover - sketched apparitions in a kind of purgatory - also germane. From the opening strains, we get Avey Tare's voice, obscured and degraded, taken by a gust of noise and that incredibly spooky jogged vocal sample, which has always sounded to me like something caught in a net, a kind of existential glitch. Think of Twin Peaks briefly: "one chants out between two worlds." Throughout the record, the strange mixing job makes it sound like you're somehow outside of the proper scope, outside of the right angle at which to hear the album; it's a slipped disc.

Then of course there's April, who "tells her mother 'I am not afraid of dying in the bathtub'" and later one-ups Bill Murray by actually making it with a ghost: "April and the phantom, they were just like lovers, always sneaking kisses for the weekend." The end of the album-closer "Alvin Row" comes the real chill, a sample of a child exclaiming: "Oh that's funny, my voice didn't come back to me! I'll try it again: Hello? Hello? Oh my goodness! Now my singing voice is gone my singing voice is gone my singing voice is gone my singing voice is gone my singing voice is" and then an abrupt silence. Sampling as seance to raise the faded impression of a child trying to catch his own aural shadow. Think that five times fast. Of course, there's also the whole experience of Campfire Songs, but I don't think it's quite as defensible, or I haven't figured out how to explain it yet. Maybe it's just my better judgment: you've got other things to worry about, right?

Related breaking news in the "Things That Abruptly Made Me Very Melancholy" department: "Later that night, Ariel calls me at home to tell me he has finally deciphered the message we saw painted on his window. It says, 'Ariel I love you, do you really exist?' When he dialed the number, no one answered."

A Brief Public Service Announcement

2006-01-18T13:47:00.000-05:00

My dear friend Julia is working on an Interesting Project. If you know anyone that looks like these people, please visit her here and let her know.

Nobody Gets Out of Here Until This Gets Settled

2006-01-16T21:28:00.000-05:00

This is Not Factrix, a Ghost, or Dr. Giggles; It's a Pup We Met On Top Of the Pyramids at Teotihuacan

Hooray for finally getting ahold of Fatrix's Artifact to encounter "Phantom Pain" amidst thoughts of ghosts and ghost limbs in particular. (It's fantastic, by the way, like Suicide crawling through tar cut with cough syrup minus the 1950's/Wolf Eyes' more spare dirges minus the machismo.)

It has been reported that as many as 80% of amputees experience the ghost limb phenomenon: an arm where an arm once was; even stranger, a watch or bracelet; disturbingly, pains.

I guess it seemed most applicable to dub, a genre where each iteration is essentially an amputee. Maybe it gives dub its haunted quality: gritty remnants, spaces, and passages under erasure all representing a grand ache for their former appendages. Keith Hudson was a dentist after all, and Lee Perry once characterized dub as "the ghost in me coming out." Poor Ken Boothe, his guts all over the floor. There was that horror movie, Dr. Giggles, which was also the name of a bong that this kid I knew in high school had. Once I accidentally cut myself whilst stoned and felt nothing. Wild times in the operating room. Studio real kinda cloudy. Anyway.

Along with the The Focus Group, it approaches coveted hybrid monster status: ghost (spectral, shifting, between worlds), zombies (undead/resurrected; that's another road entirely, though), and Frankensteins. Do amputated limbs miss their old bodies? Do samples miss their homes? Maybe I'm freaked out not because I'm hearing ghosts, but because I'm disturbed by the suggestion of profound loneliness; loose elements drifting in dub space purgatory, or even Ariel Pink's decay. Come to think, Ariel's The Doldrums first caught me because it was deeply melancholy without sounding like a 2D depresso in need of a fucking nap and a good go kart ride.

Fruitful Detours

2006-01-15T17:38:00.000-05:00

Beta-dazzle on Jack Nitzsche. Get the YSIs while they’re hot; it’s a beautiful thing (writing-wise, song-wise). Man’s music gets the closest to my booze-pulse as anything could – exceptionally grand, teetering, wild, woozy embrace; I was also delighted to read the bit about death in “Earth Angel,” because I ruminated on the same feeling in doo-wop a month or so ago (still, The Orioles’ “It’s Too Soon To Know” trumps the Penguins by about five good dreams and a handful of pills, if you ask me). Always thought it was me being a gloomy perv; maybe it is, but at least it’s me being a gloomy perv in the presence of a hero.

I am on to some new things that I will share soon enough.

Disclosure: Emotional, Messy

2006-01-13T11:01:00.000-05:00

While we're talking about ghosts.

Dear Sarah, Who Would Have Turned 24 This Month,

Belle and Sebastian recorded If You're Feeling Sinister live; it's the first time in quite a while that I've been able to listen to these songs and keep composure. Before I eulogized you, we listened to "The Stars of Track and Field." You should've seen Elisabeth cry. You should have seen your family cry.

When the embolus loosed in your body, you died instantly. I started the new depression diet: bourbon, academic excellence, chocolate, and nightmares. A few times I woke up in the middle of the night, screaming and covered in sweat. It was a trip.

I remember how much we liked these songs; I don't think it was because we were cuddly outcasts, but more because we were optomistic cynics - "thought there was love in everything and everyone, you're so naive." I liked kidding myself, did you?

I wasn't in love with you; I idealize women too often to truly respect them (I think you knew that). I don't think you loved me either. Actually, it's funny, I remember being so excited you told me you had fallen in love, but it was only a couple of weeks before you went.

It wasn't easy, by the way. You were probably my best friend.

This is still one of the more misunderstood records I've ever heard. We never danced alone or sewed diaries or any of that nonsense. I wanted to be rough like Murdoch's characters: erratic, abrasive romantics.

I didn't cry at your funeral because I'm too self-conscious - I saved it for later. I kept this record though; when Murdoch says "I always cry at endings" I know what he means: you have to know it's the end, it has to come as a part of a grand story. Tidy narratives. Your story was wonderful, but it was too short.

"Falling against the lonely tenement that set my mind to wander into the windows of my lovers, they never know unless I write," so I do. So know.

Sincerely yours,

mp

Big Think: Tracks and Traces, Absences and Ideals

2006-01-11T12:47:00.008-05:00

The last couple days I've been caught in the web of the Focus Group's Hey Let Loose Your Love (which I finally ordered from Ghost Box after Simon Reynolds' piece in Frieze on the subject). I use the term "caught in the web" not only to indulge my flailing tendency to be poetic, but for metaphorical significance; it's had me thinking about a series of things I hadn't thought about in years, a new star in a conceptual constellation.

The Focus Group sound is a collage; my first thought was that it was like a daydream that the first Books album - which I still enjoy pretty well - might have if it dozed off after half a joint on Saturday evening. Either that, or if you excised all of the song elements of Broadcast and wove the intros and outros into a gauze. Musique concrete for technicolor woodlands. Voices pass in and out, disembodied sounds strobe in a kind of decentered, contingent way; no primacy, no vows, no golden bands; drift.

What really took me about the record was the notion of absence. The album suggests songs at every step, but it never delivers any; still, cognitively, it feels like I'm always chasing something bigger than I hear, following the proverbial thread through the labyrinth. It's thrilling, not disappointing; Woebot called them a "portal", and I'd have to agree, but it's a portal in perpetual collapse. Resistance to crossing over into a full flesh sound world makes the experience doubly psychedelic; reality and unreality flicker in the same space, the tactile and intangible constantly fade into one another.

Ariel Pink's House Arrest (to be reissued later this month by Paw Tracks) is plucking the same strings. I think there are two roads you can take with him: one is that his sound is solely that of a degraded ideal; you can hear the song he meant to create in some Porcelain Heaven, but now it's too far gone to recognize, and you're left with the process of an aural crumble. The other approach - which I do think is a different concept - is that his sound is a mold, a footprint, a negative, a series of suggestions that function independent of the ideal (the thoughts I'm having with Hey Let Loose Your Love). I used to think Ariel's thing was about degradation, but after three records, I realize that the wavering otherworldliness is the starting point of his aesthetic, not the sum of his decay. Similarly, I drag out Basinski's Disintegration Loops, itself a process. Sure, each iteration of each loop bears on the Alpha loop, the ideal, but as they proliferate, they begin to function with a kind of independence, creating, like Ariel or Ghost Box, a series of apparitional doors and uncrossable bridges into something unreal.

Am I making any sense?

I post the picture at the top as a kind of guide to my thoughts. A Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage collaboration. A record of a process, sure. Still, with the car passed, the tracks become the tires, they're no longer a record of something having transpired, but something unto themselves. In the back of your mind, the ideal flickers (headlights, exhaust); ahead of you is a void, but between, you're left with a kind of tremulous, uncertain enchantment.

The fall out is The Caretaker's new release on V/Vm test, available for free here. It's the tail end between this Feeling I'm Having and total abstraction; from the caverns and whispers, you eventually hear the distant echoes of "Greensleeves," a kind of reminder of the real world shining some kind of light down a dark hole. It's quite beautiful, actually. Ready for a megamix?

No, I am not on mushrooms right now, but the prospect is intriguing.

--

Former and further on Ghost Box:

K-Punk (commentary and Big, Sumptuous Pictures of the Lovely album covers)

Simon Reynolds on GB, blog-style

Patrick McNally in Stylus on The Focus Group/Eric Zann

Trotting Back into Blogistan With About Six Feathers in My Beanie

2006-01-09T01:37:00.000-05:00

It's going to be a couple days before I get rolling again, but in the spirit of getting back on proverbial tracks, here I am.

A Brief Musical Diary of Mexico City (Prosaic Marshmallows by One P.B. Words)

1. We get drunk in an empty bar much too early; they play a Lupillo Rivera concert on a gigantic television set hung high above the floor. Tuba players in norteño bands must have enormous, beautiful lungs.

2. The streets are strewn with organ grinders cranking with a hopeful diligence; an accomplice runs around with a hat to collect change for the songs. The boxes wheeze, the pipes must be bent; all the tunes are warped. We go back to the room and listen to Ariel Pink's House Arrest, which makes more sense each time.

3. There is a fantastic synth-pop song on the television called "Don," by a group named Miranda. I can't follow all the lyrics, but I can pick up on the fact that the singer announces the guitar solo; the self-referentiality of it sadly reminds me again that D. Boon is dead. I listen to Minutemen EPs on my iPod in the dark; "I Felt Like a Gringo" seems comforting for the first time, even though I still hold them responsible for the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

4. It's funny, I don't hear nearly as much music as I would've expected to. The most music I hear is on the subway. Lots of bootlegs, all for around the equivalent of a dollar. I find myself tempted, but realize after a day that you could easily come home with five or six CDs in an afternoon; most of them would end up having either "If You're Going to San Francisco" or some overwrought Mexican crooner spilling his voicebox onto a plastic bandstand.

I bought some CDs, which I'll write about in the next few days (I think every Duranguense CD had a scorpion somewhere on the cover, yikes).

Do you all read books? I read:

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by Danilo Kis, twice. Beautiful, spare fictional biographies about people trapped under the fog of communism; the strains of the stories run through one another like frayed threads or veins running to an invisible heart, which is to say, it does a weird thing to one's being and I suggest you read it, but not unless you can take and appreciate a good helping of The Bleak.

Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms. Much more lavish than In Cold Blood, but I'm not sure I liked it as much. Some parts are bliss, some of it gets really belabored and directionless; I have a feeling that some of my negative reactions have to do with the fact that the dreamier prose feels almost archetypal now, like something they teach you in grade school, i.e. hard to take with a fresh mind.

Most of Music is the Weapon of the Future, a book of the history of African music. This is a book of the history of African music. There aren't many. Typos, clumsy prose and all, it's a wonderful thing if not ideal.

I also climbed pyramids and ate a ridiculous amount of sandwiches. Back in the saddle.

Happy new year. (And oh yeah oops don't forget to kill yr fckn idols or chop off your pinkie and whatnot.)

Ducksinnarow

2005-12-29T00:47:00.000-05:00

THAT'S TLAHUIZCALPANTECUHTLI TO YOU

Yes, I confess, there are things I hide (ha!): very early on Friday morning, I will be going to Mexico City for eight days to chase the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl. This, then, will be my last post of 2005. I'll be back on the 8th; don't forget about me. When I started this blog in May, I was cross-legged in my bedroom, and now it's December; I'm sitting on a couch in my living room. I don't know who reads this save the few commenters and the occasional email exchange, but let me try to gracefully extract myself from the jaws of sentimentality and just say: I appreciate that you're here.

I was going to waste this space for more Dave Berman exegesis; I'm going to wait until seeing two Silver Jews shows in March. Don't recoil yet. Anyway, I'm going to do some loose ends work now; consider this a list of a few things I may not have attended to enough this year for whatever reason.

Music is the Weapon, a 1982 film about Fela Kuti

There are plenty of phenomenal things to hear in Fela's catalog, but what you don't hear are the sounds of his mother being thrown out of a window by the Nigerian police, the depth of the wounds he incurred at the hands of government thugs, and the fact that this was a man who attempted to harness power through music - a tacky or cliched gesture in the relative security/privileged caution of "the west," but a well-worked dream in a country ravaged by corruption and in deep political upheaval. For a man with so many scars, he had a fucking sense of humor: I learn later that the album Expensive Shit is a reference to when police planted a joint on Fela and he swallowed it; he was arrested until they could examine his feces. Brothers in bars, his prison mates offered their own waste as proxy; a rebel, leader, and a magician. Incredible.

Konono No. 1 at Joe's Pub/Amadou & Mariam at Joe's Pub/XTC, Black Sea

Got to see both "hot" "new" African bands this year, which was thrilling. Konono didn't sound as good whistling through the wall of 50 people eating plates of expensive brisket and not dancing, but it was great to witness such uninterrupted intensity, songs halting without warning, mid-pant, furious. It took me a little while to get over the pure shock of hearing Congotronics 1 and the residual guilt/uncertainty about the project of exporting such a sound, but in retrospect, it's really one of the most interesting, well-defined things I had heard this year. (Incidentally, and more on this later, but Congotronics 2 has been quite good to me so far, too.) Amadou & Mariam were charming as all hell; Amadou's playing is the only thing I've heard this year that made me want to pick up the guitar again after a long haitus except for "No Language In Our Lungs" by XTC, a song I had rediscovered after years of half-appreciating Black Sea, an album so ridiculously top-loaded that they could've made it three songs long and I still would've paid $15 for it.

Crazy Titch, "Singalong"

Honestly, if they sold grime records here, I'd buy them. (I did order Kano's Home Sweet Home from Amazon UK. Worth it, obv.) Until then I scour, I scavenge; I pick the bones where they lay. It's not an honorable life, but it's mine. Still, if I abstained, I wouldn't have heard "Singalong." I should say that I realize that this isn't necessarily time capsule grime at any phase, but there is something maddeningly indelibe about it. Okay, let's get past the fact that CRAZY TITCH SHOUTS LIKE THE DAY CARE CENTER IS ON FIRE (a style that Dom Passantino from Stylus has cripplingly referred to as "market trader," which I thought was hilarious). What makes the song is the backdrop: frilly string samples bouncing along on a beat that rocks like a Bar Mitzvah, clarinets winding like garden snakes up your arm. Produced by a team named Imp Batch for fuck's sake. Crazy Titch doesn't do the faux-regal chinstroking rogue thing like Prince Paul sometimes did, but "Singalong" masters the kind of music I've always felt Americans were barred from making: the nipple-squeezing composure of schmaltz matched with cartoonishly unhinged vitriol, like Felix the cat swinging a mace; the fact that the whole thing is a rally for a gang chorus annihilates everything from Oi to campfire rounds.

Dave Queen's piece on the Eagles box set in the Seattle Weekly, Nick Sylvester's riff on S F-J.

I guess it's natural to love what you aren't. I probably got more enjoyment out of reading (and rereading) these pieces than any other music criticism this year (though Nick's is more critic criticism, whoa). Both guys play an insider's game, but one I'm willing to follow up to a certain point, that point being the point at which I develop hilarity-induced stomach pains and require cool towels and mineral water in order to calm myself down.

Like Tons of Feeling

2005-12-28T09:40:00.000-05:00

My year end thoughts at Stylus, mostly dealing with amnesia, hero worship, and bourbon. I watched all of Freaks & Geeks last week too; it shows. Good year, ready for another.

Clipse en Español/Obligatory Destroyer Gush

2005-12-26T18:06:00.000-05:00

I wish this article had been better than it is. After trying to trudge through Rising Up and Rising Down unsuccessfully, I've had this deep ugly pit in my stomach that says William Vollman is playing the part of the alien whose weird brand of naif-libertarianism has made more excuses than answers. And shit, I watched The Man Who Fell to Earth last week, and Vollman's not it.

Still, after all the ponderous nights and anxiety I got out of coke rap this year, I'm excited by the subject of narco corridos: drugslinger legends played out in song.

This article on the BBC was a lot better and more informative, particularly the near-perfect resonance of marketing's rhetoric:

"Mariluz Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for LA-based Fonovisa Records, which represents Los Tigres and several other narco corrido stars, said: 'They are not glamorising the drug dealers' lives, they are simply telling a story. They are not promoting it.'"

Endless return!

Somehow, it makes me both more queasy and more excited that this is such a vibrant trend elsewhere; I wonder if we'll get Pusha on some Los Tigres Del Norte tracks until Hell Hath No Fury finally shows up.

--

Also, it's tough to hold back the flood of feeling with regards to Zoilus' ruminations on Destroyer's Rubies; I'm reviewing it for Stylus in February, and it seems gross to spoil it all here. I will say that I'm largely in accordance with the post, though I can't help but adding a few things. I think Bejar has fully problematized himself: the relatively straightforward "musicality" of the record belies a kind of coming to terms with formal cliches; he actually sounds like he's making indie rock and not MIDI-theatre or conceptual rock*, but his lyrics sound more polarized than ever, bumping bitterness against redemption in the same verse.

(*I'm invested enough to think that This Night's exaggerated looseness is there for a reason and that Streehawk: A Seduction is purposely and purposefully sloppy and one-dimensional, especially after the relatively composed and smoothed-out arrangements of Destroyer's Rubies.)

In the end, I think it's a more optimistic record, but only if you buy Bejar's criticisms that "A life in art and a life of mimicry" are the same thing. When you get down to it, it's plain Warholian - Bejar's gesture of originality being a partial rejection of the concept's primacy to begin with - but OH NO! I can't dork out for long on that without posting my undergraduate thesis, which would surely be a hoot.

(Also, if you thought this post on Destroyer was too concise, allusive, and clinical, here are my earlier thoughts on the record from a couple weeks ago; like most things infantile, they're ill-informed, brutish, expressive, and expansive.)

"I Live in Sweat but I Dream Light Years"

2005-12-23T18:47:00.000-05:00

I'm a white kid with a tinny-sounding guitar plagued with a restless mind and a firm belief in the street art of intellect. I am listening to Black Sea and didn't even realize that it's the vicennial of mighty D. Boon's passing; in 1985, I was futzing around fingerpainting on my walls and trying to figure out how long I could keep my daipers on before my parents made me hit the john like the other kids. There was other stuff on my mind, like space. My idols are either dead or dread-locked, literally or metaphorically. More guitar solos Carlos, I'm feeling tender tonight. (Thanks for the tip, Ian.)

We All Want To Love Big

2005-12-21T12:20:00.000-05:00

Brad Shoup and I both have pieces on evil ol' TOKENISM up at Stylus today. Please read! Please comment! The robust democracy of the internet is a privilege, not a right!

2005-12-20T12:22:00.000-05:00

I couldn't resist posting a picture of Coil's The Ape of Naples; I have never been so utterly compelled to stare at a record cover for quite so long. My girlfriend found the reaction completely predictable. I'm surprised at how much I like the record, being a casual-but-interested-enough-fan to attempt to familiarize myself with A Guide for Beginners, A Guide for Finishers, Horse Rotovator, and whatever the digi-nocturne record with "Batwings" was. It's strange listening to a posthumous record that doesn't really sound like a cash-in; perhaps I just like to think that people that manage estates of guys like Jhonn Balance aren't ogling accounts books and wondering how to extract the last dollar from marginally gnostic weirdos and repressed pervs that dig Coil's abject meditations. At any rate, the extended prayer of "Cold Cell" is prescient to a point that edges so deeply into eerie it's almost hard to take (though I have to say that while this version of the songs fits better on the record, I prefer the more stately 6-minute version on A Guide for Finishers). This post is also partially in tribute to the fact that I never knew I had been waiting for a song like "Fire of the Mind" for so long. The kind of record that would cause your mother to suggest you "get some air" if she caught you listening to it on a visit home.

Powerless to Resist

2005-12-20T00:13:00.000-05:00

People liked the first batch
Since we are all prostitues;
A few more haikus

--

VA, RWD The Mixtape, Vol. 1

Give the elderly
Heart failure twice as fast as
Devo chased with meth

--

M.I.A., Arular

Malcolm McLaren
Somewhere reading Pazz & Jop
Laughing heartily

--

Sunn o))), Black One

Hey I found your tape
Of the fan through a fuzz box
Screwed and chopped

--

Fall, Fall Heads Roll

Is anyone else
Starting to wonder if he
Might be immortal?

or

Repetition re
petition repetition
Repetition re

--

Excepter, Throne, Self Destruction, and Sunbomber

I won't be sure if
This is spooky or stupid
Until I come down

--

Paavoharju, Yhä Hämärää

The lyrics might mean
"Save us from these fuckin' woods."
Shame it's in Finnish.

--

I am done for now
Let's just piss these syllables
Off this rail right here

Friday Zenith, Three Flowers

2005-12-16T00:26:00.000-05:00

ACID IN EACH BUD, TOM ZE

1. I almost didn't know that Tom Ze had a new record out, and I wouldn't have known if it hadn't been for S F/J. It won't grace the unforgiving ears of North America for a little while (Luaka Bop, eventually), but The Internet has helped me out for the time being. Honestly, I was only half-crazy about Fabrication Defect, but after four or five listenes, I can honestly say I'm really digging Estudando o Pagode. Ze gets tossed off as a hungover Tropicalist; he was undoubtedly a part of the Tropicalia movement, but I've always felt that not only did he stretch a lot farther musically than the other likely suspects (Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Os Mutantes, early Milton Nascimento, etc.), but that his career trajectory has left him in an avant-lonely realm after a lot of his compatriots veered off into more MOR territory at the dawn of the 70's/Tropicalia's metamorphosis into "MPB". I mean, I got to see Caetano in Buenos Aires last year; the theater was packed with 50-year old women singing along to their husbands; while my girlfriend was in Brazil, she asked people about Tom Ze, and they snapped with contempt. It makes sense; while Tropicalia's idiosyncracies got smoothed out, Ze retained the quirks that had always made him a tough fit anyway: the meshing of several consonant harmonic elements to form an overall dissonance, the incisive wordplay (which is diminished a little by having to sit in front of the speakers with a lyric, sheet, but I'm willing); stumbling onto the feeling of everything about to giggle-burst, but not sure whether the pinata's filled with candy or daggers, i.e. something wicked lurking there. At least something suspect. Not sure yet. Will be more soon. And seriously, someone tell Beck to hang it the fuck up or get a new gig; Estudando isn't what Guero could/should've been, but if you're going to make rough-edged postmodern, latin-flavored music, let's keep it out of Urban Outfitters. Grrr.

2. In other tangentially excting news, I've done three Stycasts in the past week or so, which helps explain the slightly meek postage around here. Go listen! More Cambodian pop! A stunted obituary/tribute to Richard Pryor! More hott psychedelic microhouse! John Fahey brushes his fingers on steel strings and immediately, I weep!

3. Confession: I have listened to Joanna Newsom's The Milk-Eyed Mender once a day since Thanksgiving. The album took a bad rap for being precious, but I think that there's a lot revealed here lyrically, a lot of great, intense lines hidden in the elfin warrior voice:

Bitter romance! "Even when you touch my face, you know your place."

The dark curse of Spartan aesthetes! "But what's it mean when suddenly we're spent, tell me true? Ambition came and reared its head and went far from you/Even mollusks have weddings, though solemn and leaden, but you dirge for the dead and take no jam on your bread/Just a supper of salt and a waltz through your empty bed."

The walloping cleverness of synaesthetes! "And the signifieds butt heads with the signifiers/And we all fall down slack-jawed to marvel at words/When across the sky sheet the impossible birds/In the steady alliterate movement homewards."

Durable loves blossom slowly.

Formality Regained

2005-12-14T10:56:00.000-05:00

Sorry, I have spent
The morning writing haikus
About some records

--

Vitalic, OK Cowboy

Do you like cocaine?
Tonight, let's fuck and crash cars
Even shy kids relate

--

Antony and the Johnsons, I am a Bird Now

Model man-child for
earnest, tender-hearted naifs
Fetch me my kerchief

--

Half Man Half Biscuit, Auchtung Bono

Is the gap between
England and America
Only an ocean?

--

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.
Wait, that's the name of the band?
Ohhhh, this will be fun.

--

Kanye West, Late Registration

Only once a year
To be socially conscious
Let's make this count, guys

--

Kate Bush, Aerial

A bit new age, yeah
Still gives me an erection
Some loves never die

--

Robyn, Robyn

Because Girls Aloud
Are so last year and Annie
Was only half-good

--

Devendra Banhart, Cripple Crow

If this is a voice
Of our lost generation
We are fucked, people

--

Slim Thug, Already Platinum

He rhymes "boss" with "house"!
Have you ever drank codeine?
Very nice, really

--

Wolf Parade, Apologies to the Queen Mary

There are not enough
Syllables here to express
My distaste for this

or

"Indie" can be spelled
Two ways; there is only one
Spelling for "boring"

--

New Pornographers, Twin Cinema

At least they're better
Than the Decemberists, damn.
No, really, that's all.

--

Decemberists, Whatever Album the Decemberists Released this Year

Come on guys, wake up
Loosen your goddamn corsets
Get drunk or something

--

Bloodlet Your Blues Bleat Style

2005-12-12T12:51:00.000-05:00

I COULD QUOTE ANYTHING BY DESTROYER HERE AND IT WOULD RING YOUR HEAD AND HEART LIKE THE GODDAMN LIBERTY BELL

Destroyer, a.k.a. A Real Lookin' Future Bible Hero, a.k.a the guy in the New Pornographers who doesn't get enough attention because his songs have too much flair, allusion, and mystery, not to mention that he's hardly cute and has neither A) red hair nor B) red hair and breasts is releasing a new album, Rubies on February 21st.

I could wile out for an uninterrupted hour about Destroyer (if you toss six fingers of Jameson into the mix, up that to about 2.5 hours, including time spent getting up and down from desks, climbing fences, breaking windows, shouting unintelligibly, shaking your shoulders, and crying), so I'm going to keep this a little on the short side. Guy's one of my favorite songwriters ever; clever for miles but with about two tons of care. I'm fond of distance (I confessed to my brother on the train yesterday that defamiliarization was the best skill I've ever learned in life), and Bejar's lyrics often push right on into these open wounds I never got around to dressing: why do we listen to music, how do we create music, etc. Granted, the post-Momus New Victorian Chile element has been stepped up progressively since his first recordings, but it makes a ton of sense: Bejar's in the cheap seats with binoculars, the OED, and just about every pop/rock record I've ever heard, pinching phrases here and there just to mess with the trainspotters, crossing his legs with an analyst's cool, and telling us just what's going on on the ground. Sure, this makes him an easy target for people shouting about how he's too precious or intellectual or whatever, but there's a visceral element to him too; he's so steeped in music as a listener/fan that at times it seems like he's fighting off the desire to just immerse himself. Choice lyric, from 2001's painfully underrated Streethawk: A Seduction: "When signs become impure again, the crowd doesn't know where or when/to let it all hang out, BLOODLET YOURSELF STREET STYLE." Come on! Anyone with half an ear to rock's confused state should shake like a washing machine at that line.

Anyway, I could go on, but I won't. Rubies sounds great so far, and a departure from the MIDI phantasies/Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time vibe of Your Blues and back to the sloppy rock of past triumphs, but carries itself much more delicately not to mention independently (of Bowie, etc.) than Streethawk or the sprawl of This Night. More in February, but suffice it to say that I had an almost involuntary consummation of this intense relationship when I realized the first track was not only nine minutes long but is actually self-referential at several points. I'll be in the dark with a few protein shakes and a blanket to keep warm until I can make some sense of this.

EDIT: Your meager reward! Download "European Oils" from Music Cherry. Love & love & love some more.

Tha Year In Turgid Moral/Aesthetic Confession

2005-12-08T10:03:00.000-05:00

A couple of nights ago I had something of a revelation while talking to Todd B. about notes I had been making for a girl group article on Stylus (watch out J. C-L, I haven't forgotten) about the way I weave morality into the music I hear. I've loved music as something of a savior since I was a kid; I've always seen it as something of a potential source of salvation or transendence. It sounds grand, but it's sort of true. Why else, I wondered, would I so passionately prop up things I thought were just and good in the world: the cosmically kinky, the cryptically romantic with a touch of hard-assed melancholia, and the rawly earnest/earnestly raw? It's not everything, but it's about 85% of me.

I want to palm the nut without art or nuance; I want to crack the nut without remorse. I watch Scarface and like it fine, but why did it take me so long to realize that enjoying We Got it 4 Cheap is basically the same thing? Am I dense? Do I really have that much faith in music? Why does music polarize me on moral grounds before I can always let the art of it seep in?

It might be that I secretly really love people, and music's got inherent community down like no other medium. Take mixtapes; while I've had friends that copy out poems for other people, it's got nothing on the feeling you get throwing a friend's comp. in the stereo and having it blow you away and you being able to feverishly call the person, tenuously gripping the phone and muttering "YES," riding the warm highs of discovery. When a great song comes on in the car, at the club, in the living room, everyone drools "YES" in unison. People don't high-five when they finally get to see Nude Descending a Staircase; while art and cinema transpose themselves into the idea of "community" in interesting ways, I still think that music is as readily a collective experience as they come.

Now what I'm getting around to is that it's hard for me to imagine two friends bonding over Clipse (or whomever); I still can't play the stuff in the car for my girlfriend, who still winces a little at the occasional jets of misogyny or homophobia that pollute even the most incisive, intelligent hip-hop. Maybe it's that when I hear something as music, it doesn't have the safe distance that the printed page or celluloid or most of visual art's "object" status and therefore I feel as if it's actually so deep within me that I shake with dissonance when I feel something that isn't right to me, morally speaking.

Still, I'm coming around to it all, I'm dropping some of my moral pretenses in order to try to see what other people see in things I would otherwise find immediately conflicting. Really though, I'm not sure if that's something I want, or dare I say I should do; I mean, is it misguided to think that music could have some kind of moral redemption in it? When politics betray the polis, when love feels backhanded, when the world feels so damn cold sometimes, is it naive of me to think that this thing we do - this music thing - shouldn't mirror the depravity so much of the world as to try to counteract it or at least provide us with some relief? Savagery doesn't seem voluntary (show my hand, it's full of Hobbes & Beckett), but art is, and that's why I'm gagging on the issue.

Sometimes I'm dazzled by my utter humorlessness.

Topical, if Referential

2005-12-07T11:34:00.000-05:00

James Hong in 1986 basically playing what John Carpenter looks like in 2005

The ever-elusive Erick Bieritz has a Stycast on John Carpenter up today, which is a little uncanny given the last post's reference to The Thing. It's always tough to get into the Classic Burns Monotone reading other people's scripts (which always look prettier when you make the leap to mentally retranslating the words onto the printed page), but whatever. I was never Totally Wild about Carpenter's music, but I think this is a pretty good selection, even if he witholds the "Escape from New York" theme until the end. When it comes to horror soundtracks, I always enjoyed the primal synth-crust of Fabio Frizzi more; perhaps I'll have to do a little mining for another similarly-themed Stycast. A little disappointed by the omission of Carpenter's steamy perm-rock version of "Big Trouble In Little China" performed with his blazered pals in the Coupe DeVilles; a minor flaw, overall.

Stock Taking and Raking Muck

2005-12-05T09:51:00.000-05:00

Let's get simple. Took a few days, watched The Thing, The Brood, and a slew of Jacques Cousteau Odyssey episodes (underwater picnics, even); crafted heartfelt indie pop, hit the town with visiting friends, ran straight into a pole like a cartoon character and busted my face open, took a good long nap, and re-joined the fray.

Did you read the address of this site?

2005 REVELATIONS + TREATS:

Doo-wop. Jaysus. The ballads more than the bangers, but still, pound-for pound a form that I'd have a hard time getting sick of. I remember reading that Brian Eno called it "martian music" but I didn't get that until recently. I know that I'm wont to project all kinds of nonsense in order to prop up my bonkers musical continua; I got whiffs not only of of other persistent loves (Cocteaus, Animal Collective), but also of throbbing ghost sex bottled up deep in the vocal flutters and bedroom-eye subtlety. Slinking auras move closer but never break the field; in doo-wop I heard fleets of phantoms jangling bodies without letting it out through the hips. Dead can dance, but keep a ruler between you. Triple hot and for spirits only. When I want you I just call for you; it sounds like setting a bird free after stuffing its beak with stars. I'm still tasting the cream of the classics, but still, I think that of all hearts I'm juggling, this is one that won't break for a while.

Moondog. Louis Hardin, Viking outfit and wacky street performance aside, so accurately crafted the feeling I get walking around New York that it's uncanny. The music looks backward and forward: for every shred of "primal" rhythmic takka takka you get, you also have to swim through pentatonia, patchwork modern classical, stretches of speech, and other otherearthlies. It does the distant future/past blend well, but it's more akin to the mystical/innate vibe I get in Sun Ra: incredibly avant-garde music that isn't so much concerned with breaking down new boundaries so much as it is taking the time to go back and re-explore older avenues unapologetically forgotten before they were pushed as far as they could go. What you get is the sound of horses clopping in time with your feet, frogs croaking on Madison Avenue, the cartoon bustle of the city translated into some cheery ruckus; you look up at office buildings long enough to turn them into trees. Psychogeography in action.

Ariel Pink. I knew about him in 2004, but by the time the year closed, I had only heard The Doldrums and Worn Copy; since, I've heard Scared Famous, FF, House Arrest and some other odds and ends found on slsk. I know, he's been called a charlatan, a piss-take, a sham, even a harlequin baby, but seriously, really give yourself a good steep in one of these and just tell me you don't feel swept with a rare melancholy that begs gently to be revisited. I could talk for a long time about where he takes me, but it doesn't seem to be the point. The point is that with every song the degradation becomes clearer; even the jaunty ones are starting to add up for me. It's the world on wholesale rot, up all night and stumbling through its best efforts with a tank scraped empty. I used to feel like I was getting a glimpse into a nightmare, but the longer I spend with him, the more it just feels like an alternate reality. Not even alternate so much; you know those subway ads that say things like "if Hepatitis C attacked your outsides like it did your insides, you'd look like a Cronenberg still, too"? Well, it's sort of like that, except with the secret surge of feeling you get from life's careless squalor amplified to pornographic levels and showing up like boils on your belly. If you can't dig any of this with your slacks on, try quitting showering for a few days, putting on some dirty socks, turning the heat in your house way up, huffing some household cleaner, and masturbating to soap operas with the volume off (just another day around here).

I'm being a windbag. More reflections soon.

Kh-'mere

2005-12-01T11:27:00.000-05:00

Best Sears portrait ever taken, hands down.

If you've stuck with me for more than a day, you might realize that

A) I'm a little omnivorous and

B) I don't stay in one place for long

Right!

Chhom Nimol is the singer of Dengue Fever, an L.A.-area band that plays a kind of patchwork South Asian psychedelia; if you've ever heard Cambodian Cassette Archives, any of the Cambodian Rocks comps or just imagined Nuggets in Khmer with a bunch of miscommunicated flair, then you'll have an idea what they sound like. Anyway, I'm not sure that Escape from Dragon House is really a *great* record; the Sublime Frequencies Radio Phnom Penh comp, while much different in character, is probably a slightly more enjoyable Cambodian-related psych-ish release form this year (though it's also a lot more varied than Dengue Fever and has that archival allure). Still, my song of the moment is "Sni Bong," which can be listened to here. The band's sound is a little anemic/Guitar Center-y, which, compared to the unusual production/archival mystique/lo-fi charm of the Cambodian rock comps, leaves something to be desired. But DAMN, the chorus is like a thousand high school garage bands gleefully steeped in sloppy swamp-disco getting hoisted out of the bog by one of the most hypnotic vocals I've heard in a while.

This Is Also Sort of About Lil Wayne

2005-11-30T09:44:00.000-05:00

Another Stycast. I only post it here because I realized that we talk about Cat Power after Edith Frost but not Edith Frost after Cat Power, or really even Cat Power after Cat Power. Also, Edith Frost was in the "hot" Stycast and Lil Wayne wasn't. Also, "The Rain" was. Also Brad Shoup was a perfect gentleman, totally unpretentious, and good conversation, making a sturdy case for Texas being the land of plentiful, easygoing soft-focus fraternizing (though it is a big state, I know). Alright, the point is, I'm sorry for dissing B.B. King.

Peaks Lick Sky Like Flame Lick Sky

2005-11-30T00:24:00.000-05:00

I'm obviously about the farthest thing from a mainstream hip-hop expert; really, I'm basically just getting wet on the whole genre. Still, and as weird as this may seem, hearing Lil Wayne on The Mind of Mannie Fresh early this year made me feel like I had been missing something, and it's at that point that I really started trying to pay better attention. I just wasn't comprehensively interested in the genre, frankly. I dunno, it might be because the scene seemed to lack sensitive creeps, it might just have been that I realized what a sensitive creep I was when I listened to it.

Either way, sitting here listening to Tha Carter II on a tile floor with some very flammable anaesthetic close at hand, it's hard to ignore the promethean feats of Weezy, who, while not sure whether he wants to be a fireman or the fire thief, is caught compellingly in-between. Let me level with you (that's what I do): this album is goth. Goth-gangsta. Now, Augustus Welby Pugin was a gothic architect; I remember looking at scans of his notebooks and thinking the peaks, the peaks, the peaks, how high the peaks only to be told later that they were supposed to represent a kind of reach towards heaven. Most of Tha Carter II follows the same ascension dreams (heat rises), flames all running around big beats and minor-key choirs drifting up like dutch smoke (but no Mannie Fresh, wah, get over it). Pinky & Brain finally get wheels, Weezy's grownsed old & big enough to chase the world-domination daydreams out of a waterlogged New Orleans, a pale horse rider, solo w/guns. Forget the fire imagery, the loneliness is fucking freezing at times, very Army of One; Wayne whispers: "what up Pa, what up Pac, Pun, what up Big, what up Soulja, as the streets get colder I get Chilier, what up Left Eye, what up Aliyah." Now, puns on bandmates of dead people is kinda opportunistic and name-checking famous corpses seems a little specious, but when Wayne scavenges it sounds thrilling: "allergic to winter" in a city where nothing stays buried, and everyone knows ghosts make things cold. Oh you didn't know that? Sorry. He tells us he's hungry and he sounds like it (I eat a lot in wintertime, too); there's only so long you can suckle the teat of youth before passing the milk on to someone else.

A couple very good exceptions. "Receipt" is a Ghostface love letter written on sandpaper with Kanye drizzle, that puppy-love nostalgia/"Tears of a Clown" machismo: "It's kinda hard sayin' this shit to your face, so I do it over snares and bass," which is practically Neutral Milk Hotel for a guy who, about 30 minutes earlier, actually chants "get money/fuck bitches." Whatever, mom always said that men are complicated (sigh). Even though it sounds like MOR talent show funk, "Shooter" whips the cold, fragile ass of anything that Adam Levine guested on this year by about eight Abercrombie & Fitch sweatshirts and your mom saying "wow, this is funky" before Wayne starts cussing a whole lot (which he apologized for earlier on in the album, I think he just forgot about it by the end).

Plus, does nobody else just love this guy's voice?

The State of Pop Music in 2005

2005-11-28T19:53:00.000-05:00

Mike: wait, sorry to interrupt again, but do you not like "hate it or love it"?

todd.burns: i don't think i've heard it.

Mike: it is very smooth

but not like loggins smooth

god, why does mike jones ruin everything?

sorry, now I'm just complaining

todd.burns: i gotta go to bed.

sorry.

Our Fragile Erections

2005-11-27T14:07:00.000-05:00

Hey, can everybody just shut up for like, five seconds?

Did everything not piss me off this year? Have we swapped the unspoken Christianity of our warmblooded wills to prosthletize for canned snark (hath the shark been jumped, or were we on the other side to begin with)? Fuck, everywhere I turn it's like I can't find the love, be it buried in the humps or humorous master-whipping. I'm trying to put together a list of singles for the year and I feel sapped, disinterested, and wholly un-excited about the state of Us (are we here?). I'm with Villalobos, even if he could use a shower and a nap (it's almost December; throw in some hot cocoa and a blanket and I think I'm hurdling towards universals here). Really, Got Purp Vol. 2 is fine, but Charlemagne Palestine's Strumming Music is a fucking rainbow (thanks Beta-Tor). In Philadelphia I found a little rock & roll, cheaper pints, and an empty bowling alley. Blah blah.

Who am I kidding, though?

TOP THREE ALBUMS I FIND BASICALLY RIDICULOUS EVEN THOUGH IT SEEMS SORT OF COOL TO APPRECIATE THEM:

David Banner, Certified

Anthony, "Crossroads" really is one of the most pathetic, embarrassing songs of the year, without a doubt. Thanks for setting slide guitars alongside thick beatz; critics will claim you unknowingly captured the robust spirit of the post-Katrina south when you actually constructed the aural equivalent of Kid Rock on Sunday morning masturbating to a pin-up of Robert Johnson while checking out the Scott Stapp solo disc. Still, Banner's got a heart, which seems like a lot more than most people run on these days.

EDIT: DEAR DAVID BANNER AND ALL DAVID BANNER FANS (FANCLUB MEMBERS OR NOT): I RESPECT DAVID BANNER; I RESPECT THE BREADTH AND DEPTH OF DAVID BANNER'S PRODUCTION SKILL, SENTIMENT, AND INTELLIGENCE; I WAS JUST FEELING FIESTY. BUT "CROSSROADS" IS STILL TERRIBLE.

Devendra Banhart, Cripple Crow

If I got divine word that in fact, this guy is really the protest singer for our time, I would steal a car, point it at the East River, snort a mound of heroin, and put a cinder block on the gas pedal. No redemptive or conciliatory words. Next!

Sufjan Stevens, Illinois

So far, this guy is shaping up to be the most consistently precious and thorougly overestimated American musician of the last several decades. Dear NPR, please keep my Steve Reich out of my Harry Partch out of my Brother Danielson out of my Jim O'Rourke out of my overextended, overlong, and generally pretentious song titles.

MOST OVERRATED ALBUM OF 2005 ACCORDING TO SEVERAL NUMBER CRUNCHING EXERCISES AS PERFORMED BY THE HA-HA BREATH:

Deerhoof, The Runners Four

I don't hate this album, it's just like, kinda boring. Is this going to be one of those things where in three years I'm going to have to call up all of my friends who liked this album but cowered under the bitter sorcery of my rhetoric and apologize? Maybe. Maybe we just let our expectations overshadow the reality of the whole thing.

ALBUMS THAT JERKED THE LARGEST VOLUME OF TEARS FROM MY OTHERWISE INCREDIBLY CALLOUS SPIRIT:

Hold Steady, Separation Sunday (by a rather wide margin)

THE BLOG THAT WHEN IT STARTED I WAS LIKE "WHATEVER" BUT I ACTUALLY RESPECT THE HELL OUT OF AND REALLY ENJOY:

Tom Breihan's Status Ain't Hood. It's not weird, it's not hilarious, and it's not gimmicky at all; it is honest, engaged, consistent, and pretty informative.

NUMBER OF TIMES I LISTENED TO HEAVEN OR LAS VEGAS BY THE COCTEAU TWINS WHILST UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF ANY NUMBER OF DIFFERENT SUBSTANCES:

A really startling amount, actually.

Say it with me:

Though futures are silver and futures are gold, the glow of the present can never be sold.

Sunday, away!

Joy-Wake

2005-11-22T11:22:00.001-05:00

Nick S. issues forth gusts from the windows of the Piff Hut. Honestly, I know what he's saying, but still, you can't control the audience. The band does feel a little tamer, but still remarkably effective. Sitting here listening to the Brand Fucking New issue of Lullabies to Violane, I think my Cocteau Twins reference was even more prescient; sub-space gets clicked again in dark swathes, and at their best, what was Animal Collective the other night if not a bunch of New Age Steppers? Sure, "We Tigers" and "The Other Jamz That Kind of Sound like 'We Tigers'" were great, and I don't get tired of the screaming thing, but I was into the MIDNIGHT of their set, the violet streaks of Graceland and the echos of Big Youth or I. Roy (honestly, Avey Tare live always reminds me of Jamaican deejay culture more than anything). But that's my mindspace; I'm always up for a challenge, and while I think AC are getting to be more of a comfort food than a magic mushroom, I think it's just as much a testament to the havoc that they may have wreaked on my brain as anything else.

(Revision/Return/Remix) Where We're Going We Don't Need Roads

2005-11-19T13:18:00.000-05:00

ONCE MORE INTO THE BLUE

So I had a long post about getting back on the Animal Collective Live Carousel for the seventh (eighth? can't remember) time, but really, all my thoughts got lost in sub-space. Now, if you don't remember sub-space, it's the part of Super Mario Brothers 2 that you get to if you take the potion; it's essentially a negative image of the normal landscape except that A) it's unpopulated and B) you find things there that you can't find in the normal world. Forehead-smacking drug trip reference, okay. Still, I remember being a kid and wondering why you couldn't stay in sub-space longer and wishing that you could.

Animal Collective flips the sub-space switch in my brain; last night, all bathed in purple, I saw the band as better bros with nightglow sherpas like the Cocteau Twins than perennial Halloweiners Excepter (who also seared my brain in their own neo-dread way). I had gone in thinking about Jess Harvell's thing, which, like mine, talks about humanism, though I've mostly been stuck on Nick Catucci's phrase "radically sincere."

I had already stumbled on as much during and after talking to Antony back in January. While I'm not sure both groups are taking the same path, I think they're holding on to a similar Idea. A sold out crowd at Webster Hall - at least twice as big of a crowd as any of their other shows I've been to - and the band still had the faith and guts to devote more than half its set to brand-new material. (For those that haven't seen them, this is the norm, but I was pretty sure they'd bow to expectations in the wake of publicity-jizz; instead, the audience got an extra-viscous, screwed "Grass" that reminded me that it's a goddamn reggae song after all, a capella astral travelling on "Good Lovin' Outside," and a couple other songs from Sung Tongs and Feels whose tempo and energy belied a weird reluctance to perform them after they'd already been loosed on the world.)

And here's my riff.

I realized after reading Nick's post and thinking about what might be AC's "shortcomings" that I had almost completely thought about Simon's love of the almighty Movement. Now, this is exactly what Antony and I had really talked about; whether or not these bands were a bunch of stars forming a constellation, shining however independently of one another. The thing I realized that I hadn't really thought about before, is that you'll hear AC's name in conjunction with Antony (at least there in that particular conversation); you'll hear them with Ariel Pink and Devendra and Excepter, but you'll never hear anyone talk about Devendra and Excepter without AC. I think it's a testament to their staying power, a strange glue in a non-existent model. The band is always walking that line between the chummy/elfin/"soph-hop" types and the hardass city kids looking for a new head on the totem pole, i.e. the mystic taint of Excepter or NNCK or (stunted Wire references to ill-fated terminology). And funnily enough, the more they exist as a bridge between all these bands, the more they seem to define their individual worth, to be following a different feeling rather than simply mummifying a jumbled, well-publicized but only halfway articulated old one.

What I do know is that the band means a lot to me, and it's not because of anything deep, dark, and personal so much as it's just a reflection on my perception that, as always, what the world still needs now is more of that unapologetic positivity, however gnarled, moonlit, and googly-eyed; these guys carry it by the bucketful, from sub-space to treetops and back again.

I Know My Lovers By the Height of My Flame

2005-11-18T09:30:00.000-05:00

Mummer-Saint Andi always responds to me by email and never in the comments box, which is fine, but it always means that I have to drag his tempered, charged considerations over to this blog afterwards; I always get a little wince when Andi writes, the "I can't believe I didn't think/say/realize that beforehand, I can't believe I wasn't honest" wince.

A couple things:

He's probably right about "pillowy drama-nerd indie-rock" not being the best kind of poetry; in my fever/fervor, I probably overlooked the fact that while the phrase has its heart in the right place, it's ultimately squandered language; it doesn't build itself into something effective. I'm not picking on anyone specifically, just the general trend to overuse the hyper-hyphenated style without trimming the fat. When it works, it feels like a writer crammed 1,000 words into 200 (sorcery! vertical stripes! corsets!); when it doesn't work, it feels like the writer jogged into the room while being chased by a small bear, typed hurriedly without sitting down, and then was prematurely dragged away, screaming "QWERTY" and clutching faintly-considered cliches in his/her strained fingers. I'm for hyphens; MF Gill said once that my writing was really "dense," and I take that as a compliment. I want to be like a delicious fucking eclair: in your haste and excitement, you wolf it down and then realize that you're completely full and riding untold waves of narcotic sweetness. I think this is the proper metaphor; I'll have to abstract on it a bit.

Anyway, Plumber-Caster of Nets Andi gets on to better things:

"when i come across phrases like "Crampsian swamp-gurgle", i usually just ignore them, read right past them; or, i might remember the part about the Cramps, but ignore the part about the gurgle, because it's not clear EXACTLY what is meant, EXACTLY how and where the music gurgles, and what is description if not some fairly precise measure of the world."

This is where all the computer colors in my brain really started flickering. I wrote a long-ish paper in college for an Aesthetics philosophy course on the question of ineffability in music, phrased as a yes/no situation. In my mind there are a couple courses: first, there's the effability of our emotional experience i.e. this is exactly what I feel when I listen to music, my true emotions articulable in words; secondly, there's the re-creation/imitation of the music listener's dazzling sensorium, i.e. by the power of my words can I recreate the kind of emotional charges I get from listening to the music without necessarily describing the music per se. Of course, both of these things presuppose our emotional stimulation as the primary objective, which it isn't always. In the interest of feeling though, let's sidestep facts/"journalism"/background stories for a little bit.

I could chew on a book about this subject, but my ultimate conclusion is that in either case, you're relying on language, which isn't a science; it's practical but fallible. Example: for some minds "weak grooves" would be a potent enough phrase to use effectively; for others, "flaccid, a-syncrhonous polyrhythms" is more resonant and therefore more effective in conveying a sense of the music. We're not of one mind. I mean, when I say "sublime," you're activating you're long chain of thoughts and experiences and I'm sailing through mine and they're not always the same. So sure, "swamp-gurgle" might not do a lot for you. The word "gurgle" might be a pale pink fizzy to you, for me it might be a nauseating purple-green. So sure, we're getting back into the pre-verbal fireworks of synaesthesia, what else did you expect? Either way, I think the goal is to try to do either of these things but preferably the latter; I think it's to a writer's great sensitivity that they can "get" an album's feel, though that puts me firmly on the side of advocating artists from the get-go, something that not everybody's out to do (and I respect that, for sure). Blather blather, blah blah, let's get on with it. Like the new banner? Things are slowly getting finer & silkier, though I think it could use a gentle tweaking (what doesn't?). Adley did it; maybe once either he or Dania start getting laid regularly again, they'll update the blog.

Kings of Memphis

2005-11-16T10:30:00.000-05:00

Just got done listening to Three 6 Mafia's Most Known Hits. I'm sure the hard-cores will have complaints about the lack of earlier & more underground stuff, but I think it has just as much to do with the sheer volume of Three 6 material. Suits me just fine. As a very late comer to hip-hop, it is rather amazing to think about the fact that some of these tracks are nearly 10 years old and somehow fresher, chillier, and more effective than plenty of their imitators. Bonus Dualdisc material: an entire DVD of Crunchy Blac making absolutely no sense.

You Speak the Jive So I Don't Have To

2005-11-14T14:51:00.000-05:00

G. Stein, Author of How To See the World Anew in Less Than 200 Pages

I love poetry and think synesthesia is tops, but when I read The Observer's delicate veuyerism on blogspeak as linked by Sasha Frere-Jones, I can't say a lot of concerns I've been having lately about writing didn't get all fizzy-bubbly in my spirit. Okay, so you have Oxen in the Sun from Ulysses; the entire history of the English language capitulated in one breathtaking chapter. If you haven't read it, read it, but point is that it ends in a hailstorm of indecipherables. Joyce's prediction that the climax of speech would come in a diarrhetic flush of gnarled slang is frightening and also exciting; I remember the chapter not as pessemistic, but inspiringly primal, emotive, thunderous, and thrilling. I slip into my own trips of rainbowic language, but I think there's a crucial difference that The Observer is overlooking that frankly, upsets me. I'm not into not making sense. I'm into making sense, even if it's non-traditional sense. Sense is sometimes found in little corners. I do love Ulysses, I probably love Tender Buttons even more. And what's between Gertrude Stein and Lester Bangs if not an effort to RESONATE rather than EXCLUDE, which is to say:

Tom Breihan using phrases like "Pillowy drama-nerd indie-rock" and "Crampsian swamp-gurgle" are attempts ot be inclusive (the only pretense being cursory knowledge of the Cramps); but still, in getting abstract, he attempts to let words loose, to fire them off in hopes that they'll ricochet off our hearts, pierce Wernicke's soft spot, and get our little C-fibers a-tremblin'. Just sayin'. I'm not a huge Lester Bangs fan; I should say that I liked him a lot when I was about 17, but the verbal machine gun in crowded room of crystal thing wore thin, especially after getting bogged down in the non-truth of SPEED-TRUTH - ostensibly Bangs's trade.

So right. There's a line between poetry, which often "makes sense" by building new models of sense, by locating sense within feeling or blurring the boundaries between the two, and the dreaded JARGON, which thwarts our understanding. Still, it all comes down to this awful struggle (for me), the whole "do your vibrant and incindiery words really belong in your 'journalism' or should they stay in your lil' octavo notebooks?" Optimus Crank Sick Nick Southy of Stylus recently tossed out the dreaded bait of the critic as failed novelist on the Stylus staff message board, which I don't think is entirely true, but I think seems more true to me after reading this Observer thing, which basically ENCOURAGES the flashy wailings of critics over, hmm, tricky, sense. All's I'm saying is that you sometimes understand me when I'm being opaque; I like the rearranging of terms and obviously love the vividness of language. I have no problem with Flowery Criticism. I have no problem with Poetry. I have no problem with your notebooks. I do have a problem with getting cast as Slang Jockeys; it's not what I want to be. Part of it relies on the open-mindedness of the reader, of course. But even the most open of minds can slip beneath the heavy shadow of jargon. Congrats turbochoads, your efforts have carried you into the cuddly elite. Fight the good fight for sense however you make it, but don't forget: we have loves and we need to make them known. Right?

Starstroked

2005-11-14T12:21:00.000-05:00

Kelley Polar, like I could rep any harder for your velvety melancholia this November.

AUTOEROTICISM

2005-11-11T18:21:00.000-05:00

BIG YOUTH: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MIKE, HOW YOU FEEL?

ME: I FEEL GOOD, BIG YOUTH. ALL OF MY FRIENDS ARE COMING OVER AND WE'RE GOING TO BE DRESSED UP LIKE ZOMBIES AND MY WALL IS COVERED IN FAKE BLOOD AND GORE AND WE'RE GOING TO TALK AND MOAN AND PARTY.

BIG YOUTH: TOULA SALAMANA ZOMILINA WALADALLY, AS I WOUL' SAY.

ME: BIG YOUTH, YOU ARE AWESOME!

BIG YOUTH: HUAAAAAAEH! TELL YA!

An Itcher in the Ol' Ticker

2005-11-08T10:54:00.000-05:00

WE ARE THE KEYMASTERS

AND WE, WE ARE THE GATEKEEPERS

So I've been holding my tongue for a hell of a long time on this one but tongue be held no longer, behold:

For several weeks, I would sit and listen to little else than My Chemical Romance's "Helena" for hours on end, and I could not for the life of me figure out why. I would YSI it to friends and say ANALYZE THIS and they would just respond in the blankest of prose, something like "I feel like I don't even know you sometimes." I'd say, "it is the sound of two teenagers who look exactly the same, textbook androgynes of the early post-punk 21st century groping each other by the blue light of the television, fucking each other's bullet belts right off in suburbs across the country, it is brutally Honest and True and I might Love it, this past I never had." Usually they were gone by this point, but I still had "Helena." And alone with her I realized something, right at the end of the bridge: "when both our cars collide."

One day I snapped, realizing it wasn't anything short of the feeling behind my beloved Shangri-Las (esp. "Leader of the Pack); the same mountains of grotesque drama, the same cartoonish, uncanny, and morbid fixation on DEATH and ENDING; the same hopelessly myopic and hence thrice as intense passions, those heart-vomiting Teenage Feeling. Now I'm a man of questionable tendencies in psychogeographic/conceptual urban planning; you might not want to walk these bridges with me, but I'm going to build a few. I still love Kim Gordon circa EVOL (in my own riddled misogyny, "Shadow of a Doubt" is still one of the most cripplingly sexy songs ever, I guess I've just always liked my blowjob queens to be ghosts anyway). There's something in the mess of "Helena," and "Helena" specifically, that cries out to me as a return to some age-old form, the throbbing desires of youth not to die per se, but to feel the charge of death as something important; lest we be reminded that the Smiths are yet to come and still too intellectual, and Wallace Stevens (or at least on "Sunday Morning") has the feeling, but with fucking tongs (insurance is a tough sell with corn syrup blood on one's hands). Whew. I needed to get this stuff off my chest before moving into something a little bigger, with thoughts drifting into the world of One Kiss Can Lead to Another, which I recently purchased, and Justin Cober-Lake's great-duh pre-surgery probe of the girl-group myth, more than a little resonant with Maureen Dowd's recent plaintive, addled lamentations about the current state of feminism in a perceived culture of gender relations regression. Coincidence? FUCK NO, AS USUAL.

IF YOU ARE SCARED YOU ARE NOT FREE

2005-11-07T14:54:00.000-05:00

Right now he is actually staring right into your soul, shearing the dead flesh of hatred, fear, and civilization from your weary body, and also blowing hell of saxophone notes in one genius stroke.

I've been thrillingly fickle lately, as anyone who reads this blog might be able to gather, and while I slowly settle, I find I'm emerging into new areas of comfort. After seven or so months of speculation, I have decided that I can prove by science, fire, and feeling that "Hounds of Love" is one of the best songs ever, especially after seeing the video; I have also realized the depths of both head and heart occasionally lurk in dance music, especially the labyrinths of Villalobos and the New Red Earth of Booka Shade's "Mandarine Girl."

Still, I was completely shocked to arbitrarily check out Karma by Pharoah Sanders this morning and find that not only is it rather astounding, but I feel actually stripped of anything coherent to say about it other than "go find it and listen as soon as you can, you will hardly be disappointed." I've skirted jazz in a "canonical" way for a long time: in high school, Ayler and Mingus hit together with Trout Mask Replica, three explorations in the blues uprooted and twisted into new, clean things out of a deep hunger. I couldn't ever find anything to really truly love in heart-squall of Arthur Doyle or the head-squall of Anthony Braxton (except for the unaccompanied stuff); somehow Karma is hitting in between, like some hydra-monster of A) what I was "supposed" to get out of Coltrane B) the ecstacy of collective expressivity and C) the line between the avant-garde (which ought to test you) and the deep roots (which ought to comfort). At the intersection is the ol' spiritual, the rosier shades of the uncanny. At least, I think so right now, which is enough for me; my friend Kate had a dream of large hands above New York City that we were all afraid of. I feel that dream a little lately, but the flaring honks of Ra on Karma are pulling me through to somewhere better and beyond.

Hug-Torn, Bedazzled

2005-11-02T11:43:00.000-05:00

Gnash your terrible teeth, squint your weary eyes, feel the thunderquake of love; if you haven't heard "How Can I Love You If You Won't Lie Down" by Silver Jews you're a damn fool and an untrusting compatriot for not seeking it out when I done told you to, but not all is lost: there is a video available on the Drag City website. Cut the jabber, find the feeling, enjoy one of the best songs you'll hear all year, thank you.

Done Gone Haunted Myself

2005-11-01T13:25:00.000-05:00

It has been a long time since last post and with good reason; it's also with good reason that a new post finally comes today. My write brain has been moving away from music lately, partially because of music overload compounded by a fact that I don't often talk about, i.e. that my day job involves listening to so much music that I feel entitled to a little burnout here and there. Still, I'm not falling away into other interests, just feeling like I was getting too involved in non-life living, like my obsessions have given way to existential diminishing marginal returns.

Why do I post now? As life so often has it, two reasons converged. Last night I skipped regular Halloween festivities to see the ever-wondrous Mountain Goats at the Knitting Factory with an old friend. Having seen him/them several times now, the bar is always high, but I can confidently say that it was the best show I had seen by him yet. What really got me— me sitting all up in that chair, unshaven, tired, and uncertain— was the amount of "real" "experience" John Darnielle seems to have had in a life. For a while I thought of him as a vampire of humanity's most destructive, fragile impulses, uncannily attuned to the tiniest, most heart-withering tragedies. The Sunset Tree, with the whole "autobiography" tack, really shook that feeling up, that deep seated impression of Darnielle as a guy who used to write songs after simply pulling out a map and staring at the names of countries and towns (I read this somewhere, forgive me for forgetting where). No, last night he donned a priest's robe; "Dance Music" was prefaced with the words "this is a song about God's plan for all of us," to which the crowd laughed and Darnielle in turned silenced by saying "no, really." He talked about being locked in a room for an entire summer listening to the Birthday Party. At one point he said "This song is about all of my friends in Portland, most of who are probably dead." He paused. "They liked speed a lot. You say 'Tina, your teeth don't look so good and you look too thin.' And Tina says 'I'm fine, don't worry.' And you say 'Tina, you are not fine.'"

Now, I won't do any soulseeking, but I will say that I cry at every Mountain Goats show I've ever been to; I could have just come from eating a plate of veal, bench-pressing, and snorting a small mound of cocaine, and I'd still cry, he just wrecks me like that. This was the moment that I said "Yes, fuck yes, I don't want to spend time on the sidelines; I want to be a wallflower but I want the walls smeared with blood and the room filled with spirits. Relishing in my already hermetic tendencies is killing my youth." So it was a silly moment, of course, but it stuck.

Today, the ever-inspiring Justin Cober-Lake had a really compelling article up at Stylus. Go there now and read it. Really. It fucked me up a little, which is a testament to its quality and depth of thought and not an expression of fear or confusion.

I should say that I loved this piece; I loved it because I disagreed. Sure, I was reminded of this time that I had a breakdown in a large rare bookstore and ran out, completely shaken to the core. I told a friend that "there are just too many books; what is the world going to do with so many books?" to which he comfortingly said "you just find your corner and you paint it." Or something to that effect. Justin says you have to hang on to something, to do something. He's absolutely right, but I think I preemptively felt like I knew what that thing was. Furthermore, while I think there's a certain sense that one should embrace what they naturally gravitate towards, there is such a thing as not living up to one's potential. Not that this is what Justin is doing. Hear me clearly: I'm constantly amazed by his work ethic; he writes more than I do and in more places, and I didn't just become a father. I'm also not saying "yeah music is dumb I'm off to save the world." I am saying that I'm fed up with the nasty side of all this, the side that makes me unwittingly/willingly well-versed in things I don't care about, forsaking time I could spend on things I really am interested in. Part of it is my feeling about being comprehensive, i.e. it's my tendency, thorough = good. Still, I've come to some juncture where I feel like I know more about contemporary southern hip-hop than contemporary Japanese dance, and not for lack of interest in the latter, but because of a categorically overwhelming interest in music in general.

Part of the reason I've been absent from this blog was as a result of all this stuff: making little shifts in life, how I spend my time, how I hone my energies. Try to read the paper, try to be good about listening to the BBC World Service, because I figure out a shitload more about myself listening to that than the new Dominik Eulberg mix, no matter how good some of it is. Had to get out and get to Long Island and feel the cold of a ghost. Had to crane to hear "The Tennessee Waltz." Thought about the stories I never finished and finished a couple. Started more. Felt moral, felt ethical. Felt a number of things and came here to say them.

Forgive me, I haven't been myself lately, but I suspect I will be soon.

Role Playing/C&W Treatise 3

2005-10-11T09:53:00.000-04:00

I’m adjusting my posture and hence my strike zone because of some comments that shouldn’t been curveballs but somehow were. Feelings, people, are like belches: ugly, but you feel better when you let them out.

Back to the question at hand, Dear Friend Andy writes:

“the problem with the judicial analogy is that judges are given a law -- of God, or of Government, or of the People -- on which to base their judgments. it is a matter of reasoning, not of taste or fashion, and not of emotional sympathy or antipathy. there is no law to art (even though the worst and most influential critics try to instill one periodicially), so there can be no judges.”

A few things, I guess. The law is the law, milky poof; cast it in one light & we kill, cast it in another we save, you know? Laws are not like math equations & frankly, much more like art in that respect. The point was to express the struggle in being judicious, meaning balancing a duty to being even-handed in interpretation of laws with some innate sense of right; not a code of ethics or aesthetics that transcend the issues at hand, but ones that can reasonably & logically guide you to conclusions on err, issues, in this case art.

Now, morality is obviously incredibly tricky. Re: Gretchen Wilson; she’s not a terrible challenge morally, and while I’m not like, really into drunk driving, I can appreciate the chummy tone of “All Jacked Up” while I chafe at the balladry of “Politically Uncorrect.” Seriously, half of her album is like AC/DC to me.

I’d like to pivot away from Oldham—for who my final word is simply that I’m troubled by my propensity for reason above all, i.e. I can explain why I think Gretchen Wilson is “appealing” or, shit, “relevant,” but Oldham seems more of a beloved mystery. Call me “not-me,” a perpetual betrayer of self, but I always have a difficult time liking things that I can’t reason my appreciation for. It’s a bit contradictory, but I think in time I’ll get these issues sorted out.

From one side of the unknown to the other; from where I leave the blue collar behind for the popped, I had an interesting conversation with Nick S. that seems to have stroked budding formulations on the morality of coke-rap (though this could obviously spread to encompass a lot of issues within the genre). Obviously, it’s a tough balance. We Got it 4 Cheap, Vol. 2 makes me uneasy because Clipse does sound truly fucking villainous, not to mention often dazzling; of course, I can bask in those huddled, nasty feelings and drop jaws at the Nietzschean ethics of the Black Card Era, a strangling anti-humanism and still feel like it’s otherworldy, some dark dream.

My friend James, who lives in a largely Trinidadian area of Brooklyn, was told by one of his neighbors that crime absolutely skyrocketed after the release of Scarface. Of course, books could be written about the movie/hip-hop/the drug dealer’s experience in America; books have been written on mimetic response (and if nothing else, the gross-sounding but seemingly still true aphorism about imitation & flattery). What’s getting me right now is the moral defense of hip-hop that says “it’s all just an act” balanced with the idea of authenticity. If we think that Clipse play coke-dealers through their verse, would they really move us? I’m not sure; I haven’t yet parsed out whether these are wild imaginations or vivid autobiographical snippets. I’m tending to think it’s the latter, and if it’s not, I can’t understand why we’d talk about their words as such. If we’re getting on to some horrible kind of moral relativism, I’m drawn to the fact that we can explain questionable morals in rap as role-playing, but in country, we don’t. Do we? I mean, I don’t see “Politically Uncorrect” or “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” (for that matter) as some sort of character exercise, do you?

Oldham as Vital Repository/C&W Treatise 2

2005-09-29T10:44:00.000-04:00

Big up to all the tender-hearted on this one, which finds me giggling and lost amongst righteous guitars.

When I wrote on All Jacked Up the other day, I realized that it was something of a betrayal. I've had grander, less conclusive things on my mind (it helped to be visited by some form of soul-hallucination at the MoMA this weekend). Since childhood I've thought of becoming a judge. Neurotically even-handed and generally dissatisfied with anything that seems smaller than the proverbial big picture, I was compelled by the grave worldliness that judgeship implied to me. Still, I'm plagued by the fact that I do have a tastes and tendencies. We're creatures of many moods, but in my perceived self I do still prefer scotch to vodka & soda, I still prefer yellow and gray to red and black, and I think part of me still prefers Will Oldham to Gretchen Wilson.

One day after hearing All Jacked Up, the coffeeshop guys were being their eBay-drunk selves, furiously auctioning a box of rare Oldham discs to princely figures in the Netherlands or spoiled Japanese adolescents. I realized then, as I had realized so many times in the past, that there's something about Will Oldham that just does skirt the country thing for me. Now I'm sure someone like Chuck Eddy (with all due respect and then some, seriously) would call Oldham an unconvincing halfbreed, but for me, 18 and frequently drinking, Palace was a sort of revelation to me. Sure, I was coming from liking similarly spare stuff (in this case, both Low and Silver Jews seem relevant), but it was when Oldham began to smooth out the edges and touch his bleakness with some warmth that I realized "hey, country music." George Jones came next, and heavy. His songs were funny, like Oldham's (which didn't have country punch lines, but did have a kind of naughty, pansexual undercurrent that tickled me); they were both on the heartfelt side, they both went well with bourbon, and they were both essentially sad musicians. At the time, Oldham seemed like the slacker apex of Jones's glow as a barstool catatonic and hopeless romantic.

So when I heard All Jacked Up I realized that yeah, I totally relish in forehead-slapping lyrical hooks like "I'm one Bud wiser than I was a minute ago;" that there's a David Hume in me that can respect the hell out of Gretchen Wilson and praise her for making another well written and well-performed album (beat that, Most Music Made in 2005), but that if you knocked on my coffin, you'd still probably find Lost Blues sticking out of my jacket.

The judge in me bangs hard up against this last point. When I listen to contemporary hip-hop, I have to shelve the moralist in me for the style-hound (often enough to take note); when I listen to country, I can revere the formalism of it and try not to bristle too hard at some of the politics. Still, in what some might call pandering (and what many commenters on Stylus basically have) I've managed to open up some of my tastes and the notion of craft as robust expression of spirit. These issues plague me a little and it's hard to know how much this straw can bend, but it's a refreshing type of self-searching, most of the time. At any rate, I'm sure this will be revised and continue for quite a while, but consider this a second installment.

Secrets, oooh/C&W Treatise 1

2005-09-26T12:51:00.000-04:00

I'm not taking this the guilty pleasures route, I just realized I had been holding something back, which is antithetical to this whole Peanut Butter Words fun trap.

Contemporary country music as current interest.

I would say that anything could've sparked this post, but it'd be a lie (since I haven't done it until now); what catalyzed me was watching two Gretchen Wilson specials on CMT whilst blissed-out on a house sitting couch.

From these eyes country music's calm waters make it especially susceptible to transgression. Granted, this comes within the obvious context/trappings of the genre itself: the chafing politics (both personal and beyond) of midwestern & southern neoconservatism (& just plain old conservatism). While country predates most current forms of popular music, they're pretty slow on getting the rebel figures out, and when they do, they're big on personality but sort of low on broader-context radicalism. In a way, it's refreshing, the social/sociological strictures on the genre throw things into much better contrast, but I can't help but feeling like it also reminds me (with my own personal politics) what a repressed scene it is. This context is obvious to the point of unspoken, which seems less true of hip-hop (another genre where you can also quickly get into some morally ambivalent role playing for the sake of context, e.g. violence & misogyny as fabric of the cultural curtain).

This all seems narrow and tidy for me, A Resident of New York City, but I know there's a pop magnitude to the fact that she resonates with so many people. I have to admit that it's a pleasant irony and point of allure that Wilson milked success out of being completely anti-pop, exuding some evil mirror version of the glazed curls/trim + pretty soft-focus of femme country singers like Faith Hill (whose recent "Mississippi Girl" sounds eerily like a bid at down-home cred in the wake of Wilson's "Redneck Woman"). Wilson's whole popped blue collar/proud to be a redneck/Kmart shopper thing is especially interesting when contrasted with pop's other house of the authenticity trope, hip-hop. I'm told that that's more complicated than I make it out to be, but hopefully in time I'll come up with some Part 2 to this, most likely tomorrow when I go get All Jacked Up.

The Marginally Huge Sugar Ray Diary Project

2005-09-21T15:28:00.000-04:00

Rising to the challenge of Anthony Miccio, in part because I respect him (not at least for rolling around with us mutts when he could've probably been sniffing more nuanced crit-ass at CMJ), but also because I'm into doing the New Thing Thing. For example, I went to visit my father and we ordered Chinese food from the place we've ordered from for about the last 15 years. Instead of ordering orange chicken with brown rice again, I inquired about the Chinatown-direct seasonal vegetables. The woman listed three vegetables and I asked her to repeat the third, whose name I didn't get. Turns out I not only didn't get the name, I really didn't get the name, it was a culinary-lingual chameleon. I ordered it. That's me getting into the new & out of my fears.

Anyway, Miccio designed a Sugar Ray mix. Having only heard two of their songs in my life, I figured I was utterly ripe for this exercise. Here's me bursting with juice in real time, no backsies:

“Answer The Phone”

I have heard this song before, and I really kind of like it. In 8th grade, I was jumping on a trampoline listening to Blink 182’s Cheshire Cat and my Dad’s vinyl of Singles Going Steady, and this is basically that mixed with some awesomely shameless lyrics about fucking you wayyy before that was “cute” for pop-punk to do (prob. not until the late 90’s, at least). I LIKE IT WHEN HE SHOUTS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SONG BECAUSE IT IS TOTALLY UNNECESSARY.

[NOTE: No idea that this song came out in the 00's. So I guess the shameless lyrics about fucking you were timely.]

“Fly”

So this is one of the songs I knew I heard, and it’s great. When Todd Burns and I met Rich Juzwiak, he said something that really got me about the idea of dated-ness, something like “I think it’s a really tall order expect something to be timeless,” basically praising a song for being completely of its era. “Fly” is top-down 90’s, almost unbearably so. I only realize now that it’s also what Sublime cashed in on with “What I Got” (which was heresy to me, having seen the first-ever Warped Tour after 7th grade and buying 40 Oz. To Freedom on cassette).

[NOTE: My esteemed colleague A. Unterberger has since informed me that "Fly" actually came after "What I Got." Still, same vein, and in that case "Fly" just flips from the inspiration to a much better revision of "What I Got."]

“Someday”

Whoa, this song is kicking the lazy thing around more, didn’t realize this was the MO for Sugar Ray. I kinda get it now. It’s a get drunk to kill the hangover thing. I once heard a story about a girl from high school that was going down on a guy in the dark and someone started screwing her and she couldn’t see who it was but she just kinda went with it; this song is what she was feeling, I suspect. I am getting high on frosted tips and alienation.

“Under the Sun”

It’s kind of appropriate that the “nostalgia” song hits when I’ve been flooded with murky early-mid 90’s memories listening the past few tracks. This song is great, if for no other reason than that Mark McGrath basically admits that he couldn’t care less in that “I wish we could rewind & get back to when the words had meaning” bit (i.e. now that we finally have voices, words are nothing, revelry in clever self-negation). This band gets seedier by the minute, or maybe I’m feeling saucy.

“Every Morning”

The other song I knew I know, this song is just coasting through infidelity on rollerskates. I kind of get the frat-pop/shell necklace/casual sex vibe. The “she always rights my wrongs” bit is kind of sweet, but he’s already pretty much wiggled himself into a million beds by now.

“Mean Machine”

So this is kind of their “Little Deuce Coupe,” except that it’s faux-metal. Good for variety, stupid in pretty much all other cases.

“Falls Apart”

So this is the we’re actually serious ballad song & it’s really pretty, actually. Still, McGrath’s proved to be such an utterly squirmy & careless cad in the last 6 songs that I don’t know why anyone would take his word at this point. Still, going on the unstated but obvious world is stupid/experience is its own amnesiac/pedal to the fun aura, they’re totally winning me over by making a mockery of earnestness (as I read deeper).

“Waiting”

Two ballads in a row. Again, knowing that when McGrath says “I should fix my hair” he means frosting & spiking the tips, his utter dip-shitedness is absolutely confirmed. I just realized that they’re a kind of well-scrubbed more marketable musical version of Charles Bukowski, I think.

“When It’s Over”

I know this song too. The production & arrangement is much cooler than I remember though, definitely the most interesting on this list yet. This is the one song I can really take to heart, actually, even though he’s more of an asshole than ever, see “when it’s over, can I still come over? / when it’s over, is it really over?” This guy kills me!

“Ours”

He’s sort of rapping. He says “hella banging.” I like how he spares the French trois for “three” to fit the rhyme. This is the weird ominous fallout of all the careless romance, I guess. If I were with him I’d say “dude, you got played” or something like that, then chortle loudly & order him a shot of 151 and a Miller Lite on me.

“Abracadabra”

This is better than the original. They’ve added “experimental textures” and “rich sonic tapestries” or they just started fucking around and wanted to show you how little they care.

“Chasin’ You Around”

I have stepped into this world and now this world has horns.

“Party For Two”

Like it would take more than three monosyllabic words to get this guy to screw Shania Twain, especially over a honky-tonkin’ dance-pop beat! Still, his feigned restraint in the spoken intro is awesome. Picture me, 30 years from now, overweight & sweating, dancing up on some woman with dyed blonde hair and a gaudy crucifix in a dingy bar with a Tequiza in my hand belching sweet nothings into the shoulder of her white cotton blouse. Right on.

“Heaven”

Obviously, the title has about a lifetime to live up to. It’s kind of messing with me, actually, switching back and forth between cuddly indie pop, an 80’s power ballad, and the sperm-doused hypoglycemia of the chorus. Ultimately meh.

“Rivers”

Call it a closer. I’m powerless. Sugar Ray & Weezer?

Now, this is interesting, actually. Sugar Ray seem like the kind of guys who wouldn’t necessarily beat up Weezer in high school, but they wouldn’t even recognize that they’re actually into exactly the same shit: 70’s & 80’s pop-rock & metal, and a sense of irony that peels back to only reveal reverence. At the graduation party, these guys got drunk together and sang “Mr. Blue Skies” or something.

EPILOGUE:

Sugar Ray understands things that not enough bands do: the glory of anonymity (the song titles, holy shit), the fluidity and pointlessness of our personal lives (however privileged that viewpoint is to even begin to have), and the cute hilarity of insincere, youthful bullshit.

One Year Later, Clarity

2005-09-19T15:56:00.000-04:00

I wasn't really an Arcade Fire fan to begin with, but this shows me that even their best song is "Fantastic Voyage" spliced with the outro of "Five Years." Though the performance is pretty lackluster, it brings a much-needed element of humor to the whole shtick, a fey cabaret hope; I can hear the hum of David Bowie's self-satisfied relevance again, and this time is seems pricelessly ambivalent.

Also, in the 10 Years Later, Clarity/what I do all day at work (listen to music) department, Soundgarden's Superunknown is, unsurprisingly, not as shreddingly & shudderingly awesome as I believed it to be when I was 12, but comfortingly, my favorite stretch is still "Limo Wreck"/"The Day I Tried To Live." "Nasty jams" indeed; hearing this album actually contorts my hands into the position in which I used to hold my Super Nintendo controller.

Monday's Pall

2005-09-19T09:31:00.000-04:00

Start with a Friday, where while all the other Kool Kidz were CMJing, I was stuck in a damp cube with people I had never met (in addition to a few that I had), a pile of beer, and endless karaoke. Miccio's "This Woman's Work" was definitely my pick for highlight, though I was proud of myself (the beer) for cutting loose the id in time to perform the Platters' "My Prayer" whilst writhing on the table and trying to wedge myself behind the large television screen.

Still, I'm a little uninspired & disenchanted with the response to Cripple Crow, especially now that's it hit AOW at Stylus. It's a disappointing, largely boring record that makes me want to crawl back into summers with Oh Me, Oh My.... Come to think, it's been a meh year in avant-hipsterism all 'round (aside from Feels), which has turned me in a million different directions. Still, I even got a little yawny last night listening to Southern Smoke 21 & Trap or Die, but I still do like the impression I get that Jeezy's voice is like heavy cream to Lil' Wayne's skim, though Wayne's sense of humor waxes Jeezy's any day, IMO. Still, coke-rap beats crack-rap; I'm getting straight bored with the WWF/Fox News bombast of most Dipset tracks (and the Juelz Santana song with the whistle is really shitty, thanks). New tricks, anyone?

I digress, but I also confess: all this music makes me want to ride my bicycle, whittle wood, & get back into watching movies, streaming the BBC World Service, and writing love letters.

Dip Down + Beautiful Shit

2005-09-14T09:58:00.000-04:00

The word "koyebi" in Lingala means "to hear" and "to feel." While I could simmer and come apart with bliss in the metaphorical implications of this fact, I'll keep that to myself. I'm told that this is actually the case in most Bantu languages; now that's what I call embedded values.

Moving up the coast a litte bit but sticking on the same continent, Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate released their collaboration, In the Heart of the Moon yesterday. Toure, the blues-influenced Malian guitarist, takes a comfortable backseat to Diabate's virtuosity on the Kora, a 21-stringed African folk harp that sounds like more brittle, less mystical version of the sitar. Get in, sprawl; it bubbles and whirls around like loose boats on a midnight sound or cream blots on a black sky, v. beautiful, really. I'm thinking about writing on it, but ironically, the more I try to learn about African music, the more I feel like a dilettante.

Speaking of things that I probably will attend to though, it looks like No New York is finally getting a US CD release on November 15. I was always meh on that comp., especially in the wake of the James Chance catalog getting recently reissued, and the DNA single-disc retrospective last year (still my favorite band of that scene). Still, I can't help but get a kick out of the fact that Steve Albini once claimed "Flip Your Face" as his favorite song of all time, psssssh.

Detour

2005-09-08T10:07:00.000-04:00

Beta currently hosting the Luomo Black Dice remix, trap it while the yousendit lasts. Steam prism->pre-cog grumbles->shroomy somnambulism. "Best psych-house track ever," maybe; "treat it like a window not a door," though. Sadly, it reminds me that Broken Ear Record is a chore of an album that needs a good spanking.

Home of the Brave/Shots Called

2005-09-04T09:14:00.000-04:00

I keep this space to write about music, for whatever it's worth. While plenty of other things cross my mind, I see the peanut butter words as an excercise of sorts.

What I want to say about Kanye West is this: in spite of his messianic aspirations, the grandeur of his ego, and the prickly spectacle that can be made of live television, I can't think of a better and more honorable way to exercise one's fame.

Kanye wasn't flexing some weak, sexed-up Vote or Die agenda. I could only read the tension in his face and stumble in his rhetoric as an expression of his fear in attempting to seize his moment in front of millions; any cooled comments of "soundbyte" are forgetting that things like these coups (if you will) aren't pristine or graceful. Stutter in his step, sure, but no fumble.

There's something overwhelmingly uncool about letting our pop culture tingle mix with our interests as Human Beings of the World; that's not going to change, i.e. American culture has developed way beyond political consciousness as hip, sad and misled as that fact is. In that light (and others, of course) Kanye is a transgressor and hopefully a catalyst. If our entertainers are going to be socially conscious, we want them to be predictable and relaxed about it, where Kanye was sizzling, confused, and passionate. (Note: Conor Oberst, I'm not sure about you yet.)

There's no place in my heart that can possibly fault him taking a detour from the routinized rhetoric of tragedy (i.e. distress->sympathy->comfort->relief) to speak his mind. More than that, he blatantly fucked the expectations of our well-scrubbed celebrities to be politically neutered, especially in a situation where there's some consensus to be "patriotically" unified in our opinion of the event (like say, 9/11).

On an unusually personal and eventually related note, I remember being in college and feeling so bitter and confused on first hearing Richard Pryor's "Bicentennial Nigger" that I wept; I remember writing a paper about The Last Poets'
"Niggers are Scared of Revolution" and feeling embarrassed about shreds of liberal guilt. Now I realize that I was only stalled by these constructs (being white & in college), that what got me in those pieces was tangled but honest, speaking to a backlog of murky bad feelings and collective uncertainty about race relations (the irrevocability of the slavery era, the sublimation of racism from legislated to viral).

The difference here is that The Last Poets' whole shtick was explicitly politicized, as was Pryor's (to a certain extent and in a different direction). Kanye's been walking this line of being socially conscious & has made some missteps, for sure. I'm not hoping he's going to become a radical (his charges were definitely and astoundingly not radical). What makes him compelling is his public admission of guilt mixed with disgust and sadness. I'm not going to solve any problems on this blog, for sure, but I did think his gesture was significant and beautiful because of its lack of resolution; what better expression could I have asked for?

Doubleouble

2005-08-21T16:59:00.001-04:00

I’m prepping for autumn, probably, feeling all in between things. Nothing’s wiggled too much between the ears besides Feels and Gaucho, but neither come as a surprise. I think I’m burning myself out on listening to music. What do you do when this happens? I suppose I’ll turn the tide back to movies or literature or something else to consume in its place; such is my tendency. I sort of listen to music all the time at work, so doing it as a free time thing has become weirdly taxing. I’ve become most happy just listening to whatever they play at the coffeeshop up the street, and even have come to like dealing with the nerd-dick record collector dude that works there. The other day, a conversation went like this:

Me: Hey, what is this?

Him: (Pause) The Minutemen.

Me: Oh yeah, I mean, I didn’t think it could be anything else, but I’ve never heard this track.

Him: Actually, it’s not the Minutemen.

Me: Really?

Him: No, it is.

//

The other night, Burns and I went over to Tonic and saw Stars Like Fleas, the best band to effortlessly combine ramshackle 90’s-era indie-Americana, Albert Ayler, pastoral Talk Talk, and freq.-bleating that I’ve heard, maybe ever. It was kind of nice to go see a show with a bunch of bands for whom I had no real expectations. Panicsville was good, like a computer gargling with loose gravel in a hailstorm for about 30 minutes. Flying was like Ben Folds Five & The Microphones One Night Only Performing: A Medley Version of the Best of Ben Folds Five and The Microphones. Very oddly straddling a Kpunk/pianoman vibe. Open call to all ramshackle indie-pop bands: make more noise, clang more, fall apart more often, be more like Flying. Mark Morgan, the guitar player from Sightings, played a breathless 15 minute set, during which he showed us about 1000 ghosts screaming to be let out of his guitar amplifier (obv. He refused to let them out, but he did let them come right up to the glass). Really captivating, though not as captivating as his dumbshit friend in the striped shirt and Bobby Briggs 'do sucking on a bottle of Stella and bleating about the bad batch of heroin circling around the city. Totally one of those guys ruined by his first experience with Big Black, a neo-grotesque fetish dude with black jeans and lots of hair gel who makes his dates watch grainy hardass shit like Tetsuo: Iron Man and likes heroin because it’s fuckin’ dirty dude, not because it’s fun.

(Update on the coffesshop: record-jerk came over and showed me a new homemade lamp they got for the shop and said “do you want me to turn it on for you? We’re gonna hang a bunch from the ceiling tomorrow morning.” Ahh, Sunday. I can be so paranoid.)

Knight Errant, In Sweatshorts

2005-08-17T17:10:00.000-04:00

Gosh, it's been like, a foreverlong time since I've been baited by the breath. Too busy, too little sunlight, air conditioning. Spent Saturday night choking down Kitten Gurgles chased with a double shot of Gaucho, which needs some grand exhumation, perhaps partially on my part.

I should've mentioned this a month ago when I read it, but Franklin Bruno's 33 1/3 book on Armed Forces was very good. It's one of those instances in which the criticism and interpretive work on a record actually enrich it, rather than either degrade it or stand alone in self-satisfaction. I was only reminded because I got my Amazon UK package today, containing a legit copy of the Kano album (which was great to hear again), a UK-only edition of Yeats (for Dad), and Simon Reynolds's Rip It Up and Start Again, a massive tome on post-punk. I would've waited for the US version, but when I met him for the Stycast a few weeks ago, he helpfully informed me that it would be trimmed considerably before making it over here. The publisher's got to be out his motherfuckin' mind to think that there aren't millions of seething Americans dying to read a 500+ page book on a lot of ne'er popular and now defunct leftist British bands. In other news, Laguna Beach is on television.

I can't want to get all saucy with this place (make the bed, trim the turkey) once the shitstorm lets up a bit. Stay tuned for pounds of lace and lots of opium smoke, I promise.

Lowercase Creatures So Hot Right Now

2005-08-12T13:10:00.000-04:00

Friday again. This isn't my place for personal updates, but I will say that I'm exceptionally happy to be hosting Donald and Smittles this evening. Two of my best friends from down Virginia way, their lives are best summed up by a love encompassing Classics (the Greek & Latin kind), the sport of golf, and AC/DC. In short, they know how to relax in real time.

Here's the new off-the-cuff Friday flow-change. Young Jeezy's "Go Crazy" remix kinda makes me a little bit; there's something exceptionally druggy about the horn sample all folding over on itself, a slo-mo instant replay for a few cycles before capitulating in its own origin, holy hip-hop Moebius strip syndrome I love it. In other glories, I returned to the Robyn album to be reminded of the Petri dish funk of "Konichiwa Bitches," and the gauzy square-wave sock-hop underpinning the call-and-response between Robyn and the Intergalactic Spacecraft Flight Attendant. Thanks for that, too.

And the new Animal Collective album. More thoughts will come in time, because now I'm still too, you know, to say anything coherent about it.

For Fear That Music Be the Only Thing To Cross Our Fragile Hearts

2005-08-09T15:50:00.000-04:00

We also get married and have babies. Robust and sincere congratulations to the newly-wedded J.T. Ramsay and the newly-paternal Justin Cober-Lake. Between the colic and the bliss, don't forget to write.

Faith Regained and Moisture Lost in Monday Midnight Shakedown

2005-08-09T09:41:00.000-04:00

After a day of plunging toilets and chasing wasps in a rainjacket, I had a short nap and got to see Amadou & Mariam at Joe's Pub. Maybe I was tired, maybe I was enchanted, but I felt like there were hundreds of Chinese dragons coarsing beneath the city streets; we were strange hold-outs from some undiscovered apocalyplse. Magic. My parents were still young, living in the village, and throwing eggs at late night disco revelers when Television was peaking, but I felt like Amadou's guitar work made up for anything I might have missed. Fender Stratocaster, your touch is familiar, your seduction unkind and irresistable. When played well, I soak in your tone torrent. One couple shouted pretty much all of the lyrics, which was especially impressive since a) they're written in French and b) the album was released in the states last week. xdedicatedx. The hand drum guy was pretty wily, but no big intrusion. White people had fun. Black people, too. I spotted one of those awesomely cozy thuggish guys dressed in a red t-shirt and a Phillies hat sucking on a cherry Charms pop sitting next to some guy that probably was an anthropology professor that lights up a joint at the table after a dinner party with his students. Also, the drummer reminded me that muscular French men with ponytails have the fucking groove on lockdown. She was kind of egg-shaped and he twirled like a fire dancer. Last night, a blind couple from Mali saved my life, etc. In other news, a big Welcome Home! to the snakehead fish.

2 MUCH MUSIC

2005-08-05T09:33:00.000-04:00

Normally, I don't use this space to talk about stuff I do on Stylus. It'd be a bit like a high school fanzine hosting an ad for a small local paper, i.e. don't bother, but still, in this instance I feel compelled. I'm involved in 2 Stycasts today, one with pretty nice guy/pretty funny guy Sasha Frere-Jones, and one with Todd Burns and Allstonian/Stylus fellow Michael F. Gill, both of which can be found on the Stycast page. With Sasha, I stumble through my hazy love for Keren Ann and my concerns about U.K. hip-hop. On the other, I totally slay Burns and Gill with Julee Cruise, which, goddamn, I can't even talk about without getting all frazzled, deep-like. They both turned out pretty well, I think.

Yesterday, I futzed around tweaking a 90's pop mix for two of my closest friends (who I've known for over 10 years, pre-testicle drop), and I got totally choked up on Boyz II Men's "It's So Hard To Say Goodbye To Yesterday." So human!